Emerald Darkness

by Cannon, Sarra

  If my father was truly involved in some way, I had to be sure before I gave it over to Harper to deal with.

  I didn’t like the idea of her making decisions about how to handle my own father. This was my problem to deal with for now, and I’d tell her only if it became completely necessary.

  As soon as I could, I would find Aerden alone and ask him again about the key. If whatever he had to say led me back to my father’s castle, then I would start making preparations to leave and join Andros and the Resistance once again.

  Until It Was Too Late

  I grabbed a few supplies from my room and started up the stairs to the third floor.

  “Where are you going?” Lea asked.

  “I’m using the Hall of Doorways.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. “There’s a reason we haven’t been using those doors, Harper.”

  “I know, but if Cypress and the other gates are under attack, we don’t have any time to lose. It’s a four-hour drive to Cypress,” I said, hating that I was wasting my time arguing with her instead of already through to Eloise’s house. “If something has happened to them, the Order probably already knows we’re heading that way, anyway. Using the doors isn’t going to change that.”

  “Right now, we don’t know anything,” she said. “Trust me when I say that the element of surprise can often be one of the only advantages you have in battle. Never give that up unless you have to.”

  “What other choice do we have? We can’t sit in a car for four hours and hope they’re okay,” I said, my cheeks flushed. “They could die while we’re on the highway. These people are my family.”

  “I get that,” she said. “But you have to think of the big picture, here. If you use those doors, the Order will most likely know instantly that we’re there. If they have an entire army sitting there in Cypress, we’re both dead. Or worse. Is that what you want?”

  I closed my eyes and pressed my hand against the wall. My head was throbbing. I was starting to regret asking her to come with me.

  “No, but I don’t want my friends to die, either.”

  “They may already be dead,” she said.

  My jaw tensed and I stared her down. How could she be so cold? Sometimes she could seem so heartless.

  “They’re not dead,” I said. “I would know if they were. I can still feel their demon. He’s a part of me, remember?”

  She nodded. “Okay, so hold onto that,” she said. “Use that as your guide right now. If he’s still alive, that means Eloise is still alive, too.”

  I listened, and maybe part of me knew she was right. I was the one who had made the rule about not using the Hall of Doorways for our travels, but this was an emergency. How else would we get there?

  “We’ll fly,” I said, pushing past her and running down the stairs. “They can track us later, but they won’t be able to sense us coming.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  I opened the front door of Brighton Manor and shifted to smoke, flying high into the air like a bird. I found the current above the clouds and pushed my demon form as hard as I ever had, crossing miles in seconds.

  When we reached Cypress, I was exhausted, but determined to find Eloise. Lea and I reformed a few blocks away from the Prima’s house in a dark alleyway downtown.

  The darkness was absolute, coating us in shadow. I pulled my black hoodie over my head and peered around the corner toward the deserted street.

  I counted to ten, my eyes searching for any sign of movement. The rattle of a plastic bag caught on a tree limb. A black cat slinking into the alley down the street. The flutter of bird wings above my head.

  But it was completely silent and still. There was no movement at all on the street. Not a single car or person or animal in sight.

  Lea touched my arm, and I jumped, gasping and then clutching my chest.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” I said.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said. “Something’s not right here. Did you notice when we were flying that there were no birds up there? Nothing.”

  I shook my head. “I guess I was only thinking about getting here,” I said. “Eloise’s house is just a few blocks away. Let’s go there first.”

  With no sign of human face or footstep, I shifted and darted across the street, my heart racing until we’d reached the safety of the next shadowed place.

  Lea was right. There was no movement or noise along the next street either. I hadn’t stopped to check what time it was, but even though it was late, something about the stillness of this town weighed on me. Not one car drove along the streets of this place. Lights were on in a few houses, but no shadows moved past the windows. There was no movement anywhere.

  Something definitely wasn’t right.

  Fear welled inside me like a stone, growing heavier with each step we took toward the Prima’s house.

  I rested my palms against the rough bark of the oak tree behind her home, watching. A single light burned on the front porch, but the windows were dark. What was going on in this town?

  I glanced toward Lea, who was standing beside a tree a few steps back. I jerked my head toward the house and she nodded. We both shifted and reformed in the shadows near the back porch.

  I wrapped the edge of my black cloak around my hand and tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself enough to feel the life of the earth beneath me. Sometimes it was a challenge to be half-human, half-demon, because the powers worked differently in each world. Learning to switch between them had taken practice, and when I was upset or worried, it took longer for me to connect to the core of my magic.

  After what felt like an eternity, I finally felt the tingle of energy rush along my skin. I focused on the lock inside the house, using my mind to turn it upward. When I heard it click, I opened the back door and slipped inside.

  It opened easily, the murmur of a groan coming from the hinges.

  “Eloise?” I whispered.

  The darkness answered back with a silence so complete, it deafened me. Usually houses had a sound. The buzz of a refrigerator or the whirring of the air conditioning. There was nothing here but silence. Goose bumps broke out along my arms.

  Careful of each footfall, I continued deeper into the house. My shoulders ached with tension. Every muscle in my body was on alert, ready to flee or fight.

  I had just been in this house hours ago, but it felt like weeks after what we’d been through. Had my visit here somehow put her in more danger? Had someone followed me?

  And why would all six of the stones have gone off at once? No one but the group living in Brighton Manor knew the identities of those who had agreed to join our cause. How would the Order have known to coordinate an attack on just those six gates? Unless someone in our group had betrayed us.

  My body went cold.

  Betrayal was something I’d grown all too familiar with in my lifetime. It was my fatal flaw, and I never saw it coming until it was too late. People I considered great friends and allies had turned their backs on me when I needed them most. But the thought of someone inside the Demon Liberation Movement giving us up to the Order? The thought chilled me to the bone.

  I pushed it all away, focusing only on finding my friends and figuring out what the hell happened. Part of me prayed the stones had somehow malfunctioned. Maybe they had been damaged in the attack, and I would find Eloise and her daughters sleeping safely upstairs.

  As I passed through the kitchen, I could picture her there with me last night, handing me the gift of her wedding veil.

  Please, let them be okay.

  I moved faster, my footsteps a whisper on the carpeted staircase.

  I reached Eloise’s bedroom at the top of the stairs first. The door was open, and the light was off. I stepped inside and called her name again.

  “Eloise,” I whispered. I took a deep breath and hoped that when I flipped on the light, she wo
uld simply sit up, rub her eyes, and ask what in the world I was doing here so late.

  My hands trembled as I reached for the light switch.

  I flicked it up, but Eloise was not in her bed. The covers were rustled, as if she’d been sleeping there moments before, but there was no other sign of her. I knew her husband was off on a business trip for a few more days, but where was she?

  “She’s not here,” I called down to Lea. She was still downstairs, staring at something in the living room. “Caroline’s room is down the hall.”

  I practically ran to my friend’s room, not bothering to call her name before I flipped on the light. Her room looked exactly the same. She was gone, but her bed wasn’t made. It was as if they’d been taken in their sleep.

  I passed Meredith’s room since she had gone away to college, and opened the final door—the guest room where Sophie was staying. Praying for answers, I pushed the door open.

  This room was not empty.

  Sitting in the center of the room was an iron cage exactly like the one I’d seen in my dream just a few nights earlier. I flipped the light on and rushed toward it. Sophie was sitting inside, her knees pulled up to her chest as she sobbed.

  When she lifted her face, she had scratches all down her cheeks. Blood had dried across her arms and legs, long gashes running from nearly head to toe.

  “Lea, in here,” I shouted. “Sophie, are you okay? I’m going to get you out of there.”

  “Harper?” she asked, reaching her hand forward as if to search the air. She touched an iron bar and wrapped her hand around it, pulling herself forward. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me, sweetheart,” I said, already fiddling with the lock. “I’m going to get this lock open. What happened? Where’s Eloise?”

  Sophie searched for my hand, as if she couldn’t see to tell exactly where I was. When I stared into her eyes, I noticed they were unfocused and bloodshot.

  I couldn’t open the lock with magic. I dropped it and sat back on the floor of the room, wanting to cry. We were being attacked on every side, and I still didn’t have the first clue what was going on or what their real plan was.

  “Sophie, you have to tell me where Eloise is,” I said.

  She began to sob again, leaning her head against the bars. “They’re gone,” she said. “They’re all gone.”

  “What do you mean they’re gone? Who took them?”

  “I couldn’t see,” she said through her tears. “They blinded me when they came in, and I still can’t see a thing. Help me, please. It hurts to be in here. I feel like I’m suffocating.”

  I stared at the cage, trying to figure out how I could get this girl out of there. The only other time I’d seen cages like this outside of my dreams was in the basement of Priestess Winter’s home, Winterhaven. She used them to turn human witches into hunters, and if I had to guess, I would say the suffocating feeling Sophie had was because the steel of these cages was enchanted with some kind of soul stone that slowly drained her power and life from her body.

  If we didn’t get her out of there soon, she would begin to turn into one of those awful things we had just faced in the Shadow World. I couldn’t let that happen to her.

  Then I remembered how I’d gotten my sister out of the cage when I’d found her inside.

  “Sophie, do you have any bobby pins? Or a pendant with some kind of sharp piece that would fit inside this lock?”

  She nodded and pointed to her dresser. I found an emerald scarab pendant in her jewelry box and used the sharp end to pick the lock. It clicked open and the girl fell out into my arms.

  Lea came running into the room and knelt down beside me. “There’s something else you need to see,” she whispered into my ear.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Harper…” Sophie’s voice drifted off and her eyes closed. She slumped over, her head falling against my chest.

  I rocked her back and forth and her eyes fluttered open.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Sophie, did the people who came here say anything else to you? Did they say why they were here? Or where they were taking Eloise and her daughter?”

  “They said to give you this,” she said, her voice so soft, I had to struggle to hear her. She held a closed fist out toward me, and then opened her palm and showed me a small emerald. “I couldn’t see her, but the woman who was here told me you’d come. She said to give you a message.”

  I swallowed and took the jewel from Sophie’s hand. “What message?”

  She passed out before she could answer, but I didn’t need her to tell me. The moment I touched the jewel, my vision went black and a woman’s face appeared before me.

  “You took someone precious from me,” she said, her green eyes shining with light. “Now, I’m going to teach you what it feels like to have everyone and everything you love ripped from your life in the blink of an eye. My sister was powerful, but she was foolish. You won’t find me so easy to destroy.”

  She faded into the darkness and my sight returned. I dropped the emerald to the floor, my hands shaking uncontrollably.

  So far she had nearly destroyed my father’s castle, killed half of my guards, and kidnapped the only woman I’d ever thought of as a mother. Where would it end? And how would we all possibly survive it?

  What Kind Of Power

  I wanted to shake her. Harper could be so foolish sometimes.

  She’d just grabbed that stone like it was nothing, not even thinking about what it might do to her. It could have killed her on contact.

  She was always risking her life, thinking only of how to save her friends, and while that may have seemed heroic to everyone else, I wished she realized just how much putting her own life in danger affected our entire group. Without her, we never would have defeated Priestess Winter in the first place.

  If she got hurt or died now, there was no telling if we would be able to defeat the rest of the Order.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded and rubbed a hand across her forehead. She was cradling the injured human girl, checking to make sure she was still breathing. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “We need to get her to Angela as soon as we can. You had something else you wanted to show me first?”

  I glanced at the girl, trying to make sense of what I’d seen downstairs.

  “Come with me.”

  I held out a hand to help Harper stand. She lay the girl on a pillow and followed me down the stairs to the living room.

  “Look at the clock,” I said.

  She lifted her eyes to a clock on the wall above the fireplace. “What about it?”

  “Notice how none of the hands are moving?”

  She nodded. “Maybe it needs new batteries?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “When we first came in, I noticed the one in the kitchen wasn’t working, either.”

  “What are you getting at?” she asked, fatigue heavy in her voice.

  “You don’t think it’s weird that we saw no birds when we were flying? That when we came into town, not a single car was on the road? And now, all the clocks in this house are stuck at exactly three a.m., the most powerful time for a witch’s power in this world?”

  She took a deep breath and studied the clock again. “What does it mean?”

  “Don’t you notice how everything is completely quiet? No sound at all? I noticed it immediately, and I don’t think it’s just that this clock needs new batteries.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Harper said.

  “Follow me.” I walked to the front door and swung it open, looking both ways down the street.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Proof,” I said. “Come on.”

  She glanced back toward the stairs. “We can’t just leave her up there,” she said. “She’s injured.”

  “She’s sleeping. And right now, there are more important things at stake than the life of that one girl.”

&nb
sp; I walked down the street until I saw something in the neighbor’s yard that made my heart stop. “There,” I said, pointing to the cat.

  A black cat on the neighbor’s porch was frozen with one paw on the top step. I counted to ten, but the cat never moved.

  “What the hell is going on?” Harper asked, fear in her voice.

  I ran up the stairs of the house and pushed open the door.

  “Lea, you can’t just go walking into some stranger’s house in the middle of the night,” Harper called from a few steps behind me.

  “If I’m right, they’ll never know I was here.”

  I searched the house, pointed out another clock stopped at three on the dot. I ran up the stairs, Harper at my heels. In one of the bedrooms, I found a couple in their bed. I flicked on the lights and they didn’t move.

  The woman was sleeping on her side, but the man had been just about to get out of bed. Who knows, maybe he’d needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Or maybe he’d heard a strange noise. But he was motionless now, frozen in time, his eyes wide open and one foot on the floor.

  I walked in front of him and waved my hand up and down in front of his face.

  “Oh my God,” Harper said in a whisper, bringing her hand to her mouth. “They’re frozen.”

  She rushed out of the room and back down the stairs. I followed her and watched as she looked up in the sky and all around.

  “Look,” she said, pointing upward.

  Above us, a black crow was suspended, wings outstretched, unmoving.

  I turned in a circle, noticing all the clues we’d missed on our way into town. No wind was blowing. The trees were completely silent and unmoving. It was an unnatural stillness that was definitely no coincidence.

  “The world has completely stopped,” I said. “I think whoever did this froze time.”

  “That’s impossible,” Harper said. “Something like that would take an insane amount of power.”

  “Not if it’s just this one town,” I said. “A single witch could freeze time in a radius around her for several hours if she possessed the right abilities and conserved enough of her power.”