Legendborn

by Tracy Deonn

  “Maybe you’d know if you got high,” Sel says dryly.

  I suppress the urge to smack him. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to touch him, but maybe a kick will do. I inhale and turn back to the page, trying to ignore the prickling sensation of his gaze. “The first one is easy. That’s a piano, and the music building isn’t far.”

  “Ah,” Sel says in a noncommittal tone. I ignore him and start jogging west, thankful that I’d thrown on exercise leggings and sneakers. He keeps up with me easily, his feet practically floating over the ground, silent as the dead.

  After a few minutes, I fold. “Why?” My breath comes out in short puffs.

  “Why what, Briana?” His voice is so even, he could be standing still.

  “You know what.”

  “I told you, I’m keeping an eye on you, mystery girl.”

  “Because you think I’m a demon?”

  “Are you saying you’re not?”

  His response pulls a frustrated sound from my chest. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black? Aren’t you the Shadowborn here?”

  His hand moves faster than my eyes can follow. He grabs my arm with hot, strong fingers, jerking me to a halt. “I don’t know what you think you know or what you’ve been taught. But I am not born of shadows.” Sel’s cheek twitches. “Planting an uchel demon in our ranks disguised as a naive Onceborn is a perfect way to sow discord, but it won’t work with me.”

  I pull my arm from his grasp. “Why bother planting an uchel when your paranoia sows discord just fine on its own?” I stomp away from him, tamping down my frustration before it turns into something I can’t control.

  I reach the music building, Hill Hall, a few minutes later and find it empty. I’m surprised there aren’t other Pages surrounding it; it was an easy riddle. Low-hanging fruit, really. I can’t tell if I should feel pleased with myself or worried.

  Sel steps up beside me as my fingers wrap around the door handle, and I leap at least a foot in the air. I hadn’t heard him move at all.

  “Jesus!” I screech.

  His eyes cut to mine, annoyance flashing across his brow, quick like a shooting star. “Why so jumpy, Briana? Nervous about something?”

  “Nervous” feels like Nick’s and my word now. Our inside joke. My temper flares. “You have threatened to kill me! Also, why are you so damn quiet?”

  “It’s not in my control”—he narrows his eyes—“as you now know.”

  Oh. “Right. Demon feet.” A thought occurs to me. “You know my feet make sound, don’t you?”

  He studies me languidly. “Goruchels are said to be a consummate mimics, when it facilitates their human ruse.”

  I roll my eyes. The door creaks long and loud when I open it, and slams shut behind us when we step into the building’s rotunda. I hold up my phone, flashlight app on, and shine it on the directory on the wall beside us. “Piano rooms, basement level.”

  My footsteps echo on the wood floor, and the blue-white of my flashlight swings back and forth to find the stairs. “Why aren’t these buildings locked at night?”

  Sel answers from just a foot behind me. “Administration is aware of tonight’s event.”

  “They just let the Legendborn get away with everything, don’t they?”

  Sel draws up beside me. “How do you know they aren’t Order members themselves?”

  Down the stairs in the basement, there’s a long hallway of identical piano rooms, each holding an upright and a chair. “Don’t suppose you could use, like, a secret hand signal or something and point me to which room I need?”

  “I only created the objects. The others hid them. I have no idea which room you need.” He flashes a satisfied smile. I glower back.

  We go through four rooms in silence. I lift up the lids of the pianos, bend down to search under them and their matching benches. In each, the air is stale, and Sel stands much too close for comfort. Sel’s presence, even in the expansive hallway, makes every space feel too small, too tight.

  In the very last room on the left, I see it. A plain stone mug shimmers sea-foam blue in the darkness underneath the back leg of a piano. I don’t bother hiding the joyous sound that escapes me when I rush to grab it. Sel leans on the doorjamb, watching me.

  I examine the mug in my hand. Its light pulses in a slow rhythm. “Why does it go in and out like that?”

  “Aether is an active element. I’m holding its shape in place.” He turns and walks down the hall. “You’ve spent twenty minutes looking for one object. Better hurry if you don’t want to end up in the bottom two.”

  I stuff the mug in my bag and jog to catch up to him, curious in spite of myself. “You’re holding all forty objects together? Right now?”

  Sel rakes his fingers through his hair and sighs impatiently. “I created them all at once, but I can sense them at a distance and reinforce them if this lasts more than a couple of hours.”

  “Wait, what?” I stop in the hallway. “You can cast aether remotely?”

  “Yes.” He pivots on his heel. “Are you coming?”

  I shake my head, trying to imagine the effort of keeping up with forty anythings, much less forty castings—and that’s not even mentioning his hellhounds. I don’t know what it feels like to cast, but what he’s done tonight sounds impressive. Impossible. Both.

  “You’re burning moonlight.” He stares at me incredulously. “Or do you want to interrogate me and forfeit instead?”

  I catch up with him again, and we run through the building for the exit.

  * * *

  I work through five more items on the list without much trouble—and without any sight of a hound. The only one that catches me off guard is the one about the books. To reach the “floor with no books in sight,” I’d had to find the extremely well-hidden door to the roof on the eighth floor of the library.

  I’m not particularly fond of heights.

  And it took me twenty minutes to find the jewelry box inside a vent pipe.

  Sel, on the other hand, had kept himself occupied by walking on the four-inch-wide raised brick perimeter of the roof, perfectly balanced. While whistling.

  I keep waiting for him to jump, grab, or try to kill me again, but he seems content to watch me struggle with riddles and run from one end of the campus to the other. It’s unnerving. I’ve never spent any amount of time with him that wasn’t filled with threats, mesmers, or intimidation.

  Once we’re back outside, I check my bag: the jewelry box; the mug from the piano; a flashlight from the fountain in front of the graduate school building; a very hard-to-spot tiny metal key that had been wedged between a pair of bricks on the journalism building; and a candle that had been tucked in the crook of a statue’s arms.

  I look up to find Sel studying me again, as if he’s waiting for me to turn demon by accident.

  “Where are the hounds?” I ask, and he shrugs.

  “I created them, but I gave them a little push to make them more independent. I felt one earlier near the Campus Y, but it didn’t catch your scent.”

  “Oh, lovely,” I drawl. “Were you going to warn me a bloodthirsty hellhound was nearby?”

  He scoffs. “Why would I do that?”

  I groan and look down at the list for another clue. “ ‘I was the first and my rest is the oldest, let there be no debate.’ ” I pull my cheek between my teeth.

  Sel, perched on one of the many low stone walls around campus, watches me with hooded eyes as I puzzle through the riddle. I’m certain he’s been figuring out the riddles before I do and enjoying not telling me the answers.

  I check my watch. I have an hour left, we’re in the middle of the campus, and there’s no use walking until I figure out where to go.

  I pace back and forth and Sel’s eyes, glittering in the darkness, follow my steps. “ ‘I was the first and my rest is the oldest, let there be no debate.’ Just my luck this is some sort of uber obscure medieval crap.”

  A hoarse bark of laughter escapes Sel, and we both
blink in shock at the genuine, uncontrolled sound. The sound of someone who’s not used to laughing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him express anything other than carefully aimed barbs, seething irritation, or dry sarcasm. He must see the thought on my face, because his expression goes stony in a heartbeat. Like he’s flipped a switch inside.

  I walk to the edge of the wall down a few feet from Sel and look out over the campus. I start at my left, my eyes following the line of buildings in front of us: the low dining hall, the towering library breaking the skyline, and the Bell Tower striking three thirty.

  My eyes track back to the left of the Bell Tower. “ ‘I was the first and my rest is the oldest, let there be no debate.’ ”

  “While it’s quite poetic, it’s not a cantrip, Matthews.” Sel saunters over, shadows clinging to his gliding shape. “Repetition will not make its meaning clearer.”

  “Shut up.” His left eye twitches in silent reproach.

  I have a feeling I know where the next object is, but I’m not quite ready to go there. It feels too soon. But what choice do I have?

  I sigh and gesture for him to follow. “Come on.”

  * * *

  The first was a young DiPhi boy buried in the late 1700s.

  That’s what Patricia said. And, thanks to Alice, I know DiPhi is the very old campus debating society. I desperately wish I’d asked Patricia to point out the grave marker during the day, because searching for it at night is like looking for a certain shade of blue in the ocean.

  The graveyard is poorly lit by intermittent lampposts, and the wide hedges and hills make it slow going. As apprehensive as I thought I might be, the graveyard actually feels… familiar to me now.

  Each time I check over my shoulder, Sel is there, a silent figure blending into the shadows in one moment, limned by golden light in the next. I think I hear him chuckle, but the sound is carried away on a gust that whips dirt and twigs into my face.

  “You’ve never seen me harm Nick, so why do you still think I’m Shadowborn?” I don’t know why I ask. Maybe because with me in the lead, I don’t have to look him in the face.

  “You’re immune to mesmer.”

  “Not true,” I retort, hiking up a particularly long hill.

  “Lies.” He doesn’t miss a beat. “You wield the Sight too easily for someone who has only recently received it. You Saw the isel at the Quarry.” That surprises me, but I don’t show it. He strides up the hill with frustrating ease, and when he reaches the top to look down at me and Nick’s coin on my chest, there’s casual contempt in his eyes. “And you have enthralled Nicholas.”

  I sputter, heat filling my cheeks, and tuck the necklace away. “What? Enthralled?! I—no—he—he… That’s…” Sel raises a black brow. A curious hawk, watching a frantic mouse skitter back and forth.

  He makes a soft, dismissive sound in the back of his throat. Not wanting to hear any more about Nick or any sort of thralling, I turn and walk down the hill to the next section of graves.

  “In addition, the timing of your appearance,” he begins, following behind me, “is too convenient. Demons are crossing through Gates at increasing rates at not only our chapter but also the others embedded in schools up the coast. It’s all but inevitable that the Table will be gathered, but Nicholas is vulnerable. Symbolic. If anything happens to him before Arthur calls and he claims his rightful title, the Order will go to chaos.”

  I walk the aisles, looking for the marker on the ground in the oldest section. “I thought you hated Nick.”

  Sel falls in step beside me. “Nicholas’s petty childhood concerns and daddy issues have never been of greater importance than the Order’s mission. He should have been preparing himself for the Call instead of whining about his duty.”

  I stop walking at that. “I don’t think his mother getting mesmered so severely that she doesn’t remember her own child is a ‘petty childhood concern.’ She only wanted to protect him.”

  “She tried to kidnap him.” He stares at me, his tone even and eyes opaque. “And the Line is Law.”

  I shake my head in disgust. “Unbelievable.”

  I step around him and continue down the aisle. I’m grateful that Sel at least stops talking, leaving me to look for the marker in silence. A flap of heavy wings interrupts my crunching steps as I walk over leaves and yellowed fescue, long dead from the heat of summer. I turn to point out the grave section to Sel, but he’s gone. The aisle behind me is empty.

  “Sel?” Stillness and wind are the only replies. Doubt drops into my stomach.

  A low growl behind me breaks the silence.

  I don’t turn back. I don’t need to.

  I run.

  29

  I’M AT A full-on sprint in seconds. Sel’s hellhound is fast; I can hear its heavy breaths behind me, closer and louder with every step. Hear its claws scraping over stone markers. I reach the section with the headstones, and I zig and zag around them, hoping that I’m nimbler than it is.

  I’ve never run this fast in my life, and it still doesn’t feel fast enough.

  “Reveal yourself, Briana!” Sel’s voice, taunting and amused, calls down from somewhere above me. I leap over a wall and a gravestone, then another headstone, racing toward the mausoleum section.

  I’m almost there. I can see the three low buildings facing inward and the courtyard in the middle. If I can get inside one of them… I push faster, will my legs to stretch farther. Sel’s voice keeps pace. He shouts down from a tree just over my shoulder. “Give up the ruse!”

  Just after I leap over a low stone wall, just when the courtyard is within reach, the hound decides it’s time to act. I hear a grunt, as if it’s launched its whole body into the air. I change course, trip over a low marker, and fly forward, skidding across the courtyard bricks on stomach and hands. The hound lands headfirst against a mausoleum. Its skull cracks against the marble wall.

  By the time I scramble breathlessly to my feet, the hound has recovered, so that when I turn, I see it for the first time.

  Sel’s hound looks the same as the first hound I’d laid eyes on, but his is far, far bigger, and fully corporeal. It throws glowing silver aether off in waves. Details I’d missed before are clearer now, even in the dim light: its long snout with nostrils flared and tipped like a bat’s. Sel’s given it the Shadowborn’s heart-blood eyes, dark and impossibly red. I can’t look away; I can barely move for terror that when I do, it will strike.

  I edge one foot back, and my heel hits something hard, vertical, smooth. Another mausoleum. I know without looking that the door is out of reach. The only escape routes are between the corners of the buildings and the fourth, open side I’ve just come through—the side that the hound is now closing off with its massive body.

  It snarls and snaps its saliva-drenched jaws, in delight or fury, I don’t know. It lowers itself into a crouch, ears flicked forward. My heart accelerates into a full gallop, blood pounding in my ears. “Call it off, Sel!”

  Sel drops down silently beside his construct, landing in a crouch and rising with a satisfied smile. “Just as I thought. A coward and a liar both.”

  Sel’s hellhound pants at me, its mouth wide and open in a doglike grin. “Call it off!” I press my back into the wall.

  Sel crosses his arms over his chest, pleasure painted all over his face. “Once a true hellhound has the scent, it never gives up its prey. The only way to stop it is to kill it. As much as I despise those Shadowborn beasts, I find I’m much the same way. So I decided to give you two final options: reveal your true form, or kill me.”

  “You set me up!” Adrenaline and rage surge through my veins. “You planned to corner me here.”

  He groans, as if correcting a dense student. “Of course. I must admit, I was inspired by what you said yesterday in William’s infirmary. You were right—all of this cat and mouse is getting old.”

  I risk a step forward, but the hound snaps. I fall backward onto the bricks. “Why are you doing this?”

&nbs
p; “Because I’m tired, Briana, of your Shadowborn lies and the fun you must be having at our expense. Planting your brethren at our Oath, sending the serpent to take Nicholas under my nose, taking part in our trials.” With every slow step forward, his features turn more menacing and his eyes wilder until he looks more like his hellhound construct than himself. Looks more demon than human. “We both know you don’t care about our mission. I can see it in your face!”

  “That’s not true!” I scream.

  Sel’s expression is pained, annoyed. “More lies? Even now?” He kneels in front of me, his upper lip curling into a sneer. “I know you Saw the isel before taking the Oath. We both know the First Oath never took, that you sloughed off our sacred commitment like it was nothing. Like it was worthless to you, less valuable than dirt.”

  I tremble. How did he know? Did he see—

  He chuckles low at my confusion. “You think I don’t recognize my own casting or sense its absence?” He leans close to whisper in my ear. “I can feel them, Briana. The Oaths I’ve cast.” His eyes drift across my face and throat. “And I don’t feel any of me… on you.”

  “Get away from me!” I shove him hard with shaking hands, and he laughs, rocking back on his heels. I scramble to my feet, but his hound is right there, its slobbering jaws at my shoulder.

  Sel rises. “Nicholas needs to know who you are before he is called to the throne and you make a fool of him. William, Felicity, Russ, Sarah… They all seem to think you might actually belong with us, when we both know you don’t belong anywhere.”

  I feel myself shaking. And not just because of what Sel says about Nick or the others, but because of his last words.

  You don’t belong anywhere.

  After everything that’s happened to me, everything I’ve done to make it this far, to get this close to the truth of my mother’s murder, those words snap something inside me.

  My hands begin to flex at my sides, clenching and unclenching. The tips of my fingers feel like they could pop, like there’s a balloon beneath my skin that just wants to expand outward and explode. I look at Sel’s hound and think of breathing fire in the monster’s face and watching it burn, burn, burn. Laughing at its pain, because it’s so small next to mine. I see Sel. See his confidence in his ancient mission and his hunger to take me down.