The Cardkeeper Chronicles: Books 1-5 (Complete Collection)

by A. C. Nicholls

  Dalton stared me down, studying me. In time, he grunted and walked around the two beds, looking down at his wounded brothers. He reached out and touched the forehead of one of them, but I still couldn’t see the brothers’ faces under their hoods. “The Elders are dying,” he said without emotion. “Victor’s power continues to grow, and with it, so could you.”

  Die? I felt uneasy, imagining a version of the Vault where the Elders didn’t stand as three. Although I’d had no personal attachment to the two who lay dying, it seemed terrible that their deaths should be taken so lightly.

  I shifted uncomfortably. “What do you want from me?”

  “I would like…” Dalton took a second, choosing his words with care. “I would like to send my brothers into a single magicard, and bestow that card unto you.”

  “Oh,” Link said, climbing into my pocket.

  You’re damn right, ‘oh’. The Elders’ power could barely be contained by each of them, but now I was being asked to submit to both? I supposed that if I was going to defeat Victor, this would be the only way. But that didn’t necessarily mean I could handle it. “You truly believe I can sustain it?”

  “I believe you can.”

  “Can’t you just–”

  “They are dying, Lady Keira,” Dalton snapped, cutting me off. “Their bodies will pass before long, and we need to move quickly if we are to do this. All I need is your approval, and your commitment to the security of the Vault.”

  Giving my blessing sounded easy, but it wasn’t. Not at all. If I took the card and faced Victor, I would essentially be signing a contract to state that I would get the job done, because if I didn’t, and I died in action, that son of a bitch could take the new magicard from my corpse. Then, he would be entirely unstoppable.

  The hardest decision I’d ever had to make stared me straight in the face. I felt Link rummaging around in my pocket, but even he was too smart to voice his thoughts. Unfortunately, the way I saw it, I had no choice but to accept. “I’ll do it.”

  Dalton gave a curt nod, and produced an empty magicard from inside his robe. He held it out between the bodies and stepped back, while the card remained suspended in mid-air. It began to glow and vibrate. The bodies of the Elders exploded in a bright light as the souls were sucked up into the card, faster than a speeding train.

  I felt the wind rush past me, but it wasn’t the wind of the sky – the souls flew so violently into the magicard, roaring and hissing at a deafening volume. It sounded like a million pages turning at once, folding and flapping around me.

  The noise suddenly stopped. The bodies had vanished, and their faces appeared in the image of the card. The light in the center began to dim, and Dalton stepped forward to take it, tears moistening his eyes. “Handle it well, Lady Keira.”

  Hesitant at first, I held out a hand to take the card. It was hot to the touch, pleasantly warming up my palm. But I instantly felt the weight of the power inside. The raw intensity of the Elders’ souls slipped into my own, feeding knowledge into my brain. Extreme kindness enveloped me… but it wasn’t just that. There was something else I couldn’t quite decipher. Was it… a burden? No… a responsibility, perhaps. Whatever it was, it filled the holes of my life, as though I suddenly understood the importance of my existence.

  “You now have everything you require,” Dalton said.

  I flinched as he reached out to take the Ice card, which floated at head-height beside me. I hadn’t even noticed it leave my pocket – it must have abandoned me when it sensed the presence of the Elders’ power.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  Dalton’s eyes narrowed on me, and they gleamed with seriousness. “Go now, I beg. Take the magicard with you, and stop Victor Kronin…” He turned, and I noticed his hands shaking by his sides, one clutching the Ice card and the other balled into a frail, wrinkled fist. “Stop him, before it’s too late.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Link was on the other side of the abandoned warehouse, setting up a row of empty tin cans. They were almost as tall as he was, and I grinned as I watched him raise them above his head, thinking how much it looked like a low-budget production of Hercules.

  “Are you ready?” he yelled across the distance.

  “Just as soon as you get out of the way, yeah.”

  The truth was, I was frightened. I didn’t yet understand the magnitude of the power I held in the palms of my hands. It could have been anything from world destruction at the click of my fingers, to inhuman speed. All I had to go on was the tingling sensation in my arms, which indicated projectile capabilities. Hence, the tin can firing-range.

  Link ran quickly across the concrete and stopped under a warm ray of light that shone in from the hole in the roof. It looked like a spotlight, keeping the attention focused on him while he introduced the show. “All right, go ahead.”

  I closed my eyes at first, trying to arrange my thoughts in an order that made sense. No luck. There was no safe way to do this. No right or wrong, good or bad. There was only the deep end, and lucky old me got to jump right in head first.

  “Here goes.” I opened my eyes and willed a surge of magic to flow through me. The tingling sensation that had been present before developed into something else. My shoulders went numb. My joints ached. I glanced down to see a red light streaming through me, like a shining flashlight behind a bat’s wing.

  Link’s mouth hung wide open. He gawked and pointed, moving his lips, but no words came out. I wanted him to talk, to say anything that would make this… thing seem okay. I tried to find my voice, only to realize that I couldn’t talk either. My entire body seemed to act out on its own, until nothing else mattered. Nothing else truly existed. There was nothing but this extraordinary pain, tearing me apart as I did nothing to stop it.

  An intense whistling sound like a kettle roared through my ears until my teeth rattled. Pain slid through my arms, like a snake slithering across my bones. My shoulders seemed to recover as the sheer agony paused, lingering in my forearms like a deadly poison.

  “Let it out!” Link finally screamed. Urgency and desperation laced his voice.

  I tried all I could to make that happen. Controlling this thing was harder than I’d ever imagined. My arms glowed with the blinding red, as it slipped through my wrists, my hands, and finally, my fingers. All I could do was aim toward the cans and hope for the best.

  The light exploded in front of me, sounding like a laser rifle in an old Star Wars movie. Smoke hissed from my mouth. Ash poisoned my sense of taste. Ahead of me, at the far end of the warehouse, all ten tin cans exploded at once. Don’t ask me where they went – I had no idea. My mind was focused on the enormous hole in the ground where the blast had struck.

  Link shot up and scrambled across the floor, coming my way and waving his hands. He was shouting something at me, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It sounded like, ‘No trying!’ but that didn’t seem to make sense.

  I didn’t care, anyway. All I could do was try to endure the pain as my arms cooled down, the insufferable red light flowing back through my shoulders and residing in my chest like a bad case of food poisoning. I looked down at the searing heat, and then, as I caught sight of my feet, I finally understood Link’s words.

  “You’re flying!”

  He was right. Although the force of the shot seemed to have thrown me a few meters back toward the wall, I levitated off the ground. The light continued to shine a blinding red, and I could see it even through my jacket and jeans. With power like this, I might actually have been able to stop Victor the first time.

  “Shut it off now, Keira,” Link said from below.

  No chance. I needed to see how this thing worked. I wanted to know how much damage it could do. With the torturous pain still in my chest, I extended my arms and summoned more blasts, firing one after another into the far wall. Bricks burst and dust blew into a cloud, as a new hole appeared in their place.

  “Stop it!” Link shouted at me.

&
nbsp; Suddenly, I wanted to. I knew the explosive power of my new magic, even if the pain did increase more with each shot. I tried to switch it off, to stop shooting and to lower myself to the ground, but the light continued to grow. It was like a creature was eating me from the inside, gnawing at my organs and laughing in the face of my discomfort.

  “Focus!” Link yelled, running around in a panic.

  Again, I closed my eyes, wishing the pain away. I tried to remember how it felt when it had been in my shoulders, and held the thought there until the light began to fade. I felt myself gliding gently toward the ground as the burning sensation eased off, finally getting dimmer, dimmer, until…

  I hit the ground with a thud.

  Nothing remained but the ringing in my ears, and the wailing of police sirens in the distance. I had no doubt that they were coming to assess the damage in the wall – it couldn’t have been the quietest this neighborhood had ever been. From outside, it must have sounded like a bomb-testing site.

  My bones ached as I pushed myself up from the ground and dusted myself off. Link stood beside me, staring up at me with a look of wonder. “What?” I snapped.

  “Just…” He shook his head, licked his lips.

  “I know, right?” I looked at my hands. “It felt… great, but I wish you could know how much that hurt. I mean, I don’t want you to ever have to feel that. I just wish you knew.”

  “But the power, Keira.”

  “The power is nothing if I can only take so much of it.” I wondered how much of it I would have to use before Victor Kronin would submit. How much of that agony I would need to suffer before he finally abandoned his murderous ambitions.

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Link came over, touched my boot as if testing a flaming stove burner, then stood on it while holding onto the leg of my pants for balance. “May I suggest that you take a new magicard? I’m sure Dalton wouldn’t take offense if you explained yourself.”

  I shook my head, deep in contemplation. “No other card would be strong enough.” It was true. Nothing would help me more than the Elders’ card, but if it caused too much grief to use it to its full potential, I would need extra help. I would need… “I have an idea.”

  Link looked up the height of my body. “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to call in a favor.”

  “From whom?”

  I stared at him, with eyes that said, ‘You know who.’

  “Oh, no.” He shook his head frantically. “Oh, no, no, no. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Listen to me – they will kill you. You understand me? They will tear you apart before you even get to the front door.”

  Although his case was strong, I didn’t have a whole lot of options left. Leaving Victor unopposed would result in global annihilation, and facing him alone was suicide. All I could do was ask for help from them, and pray to God that they wouldn’t kill me first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Link remained buried inside the deep pockets of my jacket, and it didn’t entirely surprise me. Even having taken his usual amount of cowardice into account, I thought he had every right to be afraid. I, too, was afraid, but unlike Link, I couldn’t stay away. I didn’t have that luxury.

  Night was setting in. The sun fell behind the horizon and left a tail of red in the cloudless sky. It would be dark soon. Which meant that I had to do this fast, get what I needed and then – somehow – find Victor Kronin.

  I swayed my arms as I walked, hoping it would disguise the trembling. I approached the front gates of the sewage plant, my nerves waging war with every step. The old feeling was there too, like I was being watched, stalked. Hunted, even. It was all I could do to keep my eyes wide-open, alert, as I pushed the button beside the gate.

  The speaker buzzed, like a vibration against metal, but no voice came from it. I opened my mouth to speak, not entirely sure what I would say, when the main door of the sewage plant flung open, smashing into the wall.

  “Jason,” I said in a wheeze, watching him storm toward me with a scowl. It dampened my spirits a little – I had expected him to be there in my hour of need, to stand beside me in what could be my final battle. To be my knight in shining fur. The look on his face, however, said ‘screw you’.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I–I need some help.”

  “Then you’re in the wrong place.”

  What the hell? I stared him down, thinking about the kiss. The man who had held me in his arms had vanished. The man who’d kissed me so electrically had become this stubborn, rude asshole. I understood why, and I didn’t want to get him into trouble, but this was bigger than him and me. For him, at least, it should have been about his brother’s death.

  “Let me speak to Lena.”

  His face creased up in confusion. “What?”

  “I need to talk to her. Let me through.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? You can’t be here.”

  “That’s my decision to–”

  My words lay suspended in mid-air as an enormous, beast-like dog dashed from inside the building. It crossed the graveled yard in seconds, hurling itself in our direction. It struck Jason with its huge claw, tossing him to one side like a rag doll as he hit the fence with a bone-crunching noise that sounded like eggs being thrown at a wall.

  I should have defended myself. Anyone else in my position would have used the Elders’ power to take a stand, but I needed to show something else; I had to be humble, despite the risk of making myself vulnerable.

  Still shaking, I raised my hands above my head in surrender.

  The beast – bigger than any werewolf I had ever seen, howled at me with a deep snarling sound. Drool flickered from its long incisors and I felt the hot stench of its breath against my cheeks.

  “I can stop Victor Kronin.” The words spewed out of me. I’d tried to spit them out in a frantic rush, before this creature mauled me. “But I need something from you.”

  The beast stopped, purring like a muscle car as it assessed me with those dark, monstrous eyes. It grunted, slammed its forepaw into the ground beneath it, scooping up a pile of gravel under its sharp claws. Slowly, it grew calmer, rotating the meat-and-muscle of its body to see Jason approaching us both. Then it turned back toward me, and began to shift into a human.

  It was a quick transformation – a matter of seconds – but it didn’t complete the process. By the end of it, I faced Lena, naked and caked in dirt, but with her claws still large and hairy at the ends of her human arms. If I didn’t know better, I would say she would come at me again in a heartbeat, only I wasn’t about to waste my power on her.

  “Speak,” Lena said, her eyes glowing ferociously.

  I took a breath, feeling my heart pound. “Victor attacked the Vault today, leaving nothing but destruction in his path. Because of that, I’ve been given new power – incredible power – but I still don’t feel like it will be enough. It could weaken him, but–”

  Lena growled as if ingesting me would ward off starvation. “You ask our help?”

  I hesitated, and then nodded.

  “Then ask it.”

  Jason crept closer, holding his shoulder as if he had suffered a terrible wound. There was no blood, but the attack he’d just taken must have hurt like hell. I stood waiting for him to join his leader, which made it all the more shocking when he stopped at my side, facing Lena and looking her dead in the eye.

  “You want Victor, you can still have him. That was my word and nothing has changed,” I told her. But she only half-listened – her eyes darting from me to Jason, from Jason to me, taking in the fact that he seemed willing to vouch for me. I must admit, even I was having a hard time accepting it. “Only I need help. If you could, I would like you to spare some of your wolves. I firmly believe that they can help aid my victory.”

  Lena grunted. “Why should I help a Cardkeeper?”

  “Because our own lives d
epend on it,” Jason intervened.

  I stood in shock, words hanging silently from my empty mouth.

  “Victor has the power to wipe us all out if we stand as individuals. Keira is true to her word,” he said, stepping closer toward his alpha. “If she says she can defeat Victor with our help, I’m inclined to believe her. And let’s face it; it takes a brave woman to look you in the eye and ask for your help, after everything that’s happened between our peoples.”

  Lena stared at me, sizing me up. Finally, her claws shrank down into human hands, and she folded them defensively across her bare chest. “If you’re so powerful, why do you need us?”

  “It’s too much,” I said, giving the short answer.

  “Too much is a good thing, dear.”

  “Not in this case, believe me.” I sighed audibly. “How about it?”

  All three of us stood in silence, birds flapping overhead as they headed to their nests. The sky darkened as I waited with bated breath for a reply. When it finally came, it wasn’t at all what I had hoped for.

  “We struck a deal,” Lena said. “We gave you the vampires’ location, and you were to bring us Victor Kronin. If you can’t stick to that, I have no reason to trust you.” She turned on her heel and walked back toward the main door of the sewage plant, snapping her fingers to summon Jason to her side.

  Jason looked at me with pleading, apologetic eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  I was, too. I’d never suspected that he would betray his brother by giving up on avenging his death. All I could do was nod, and watch him run back to his alpha. At least he had tried to defend me in the end. I appreciated that, and always would.

  The sky cracked in a sudden and unnatural thunder, lighting up the sky with a wave of bright purple. I spun around quickly to look back at Chicago. Where a plain, dark sky had been only moments ago, now there was a wide, fuchsia cloud. It swallowed up the tops of the penthouses, lurking over the city like it was ready to consume it. I squinted my eyes and looked harder, my heart hammering in my chest.