City of Shadows

by D. D. Miers

  “We’re very serious,” Ronen interjected. “And as Aedan told you, we wouldn’t have harmed him. The familiar relationship goes both way; it’s a symbiotic joining of a human and a Fae into a bond. Each takes a vow to protect each other.”

  I shook my head again before I leaned back down to cover up my brother’s face. It pained me to do so, but it felt wrong to leave him exposed like that. “Why should I help any of you?” I didn’t think that bond crap deserved my attention. It had to be a crock of bull.

  “Because you’re the only one who can.”

  “I don’t care! You knocked me out, kidnapped me, interrogated me, have my brother’s dead body here, and now you think I’m going to help you? You’re insane. The both of you.”

  “Look,” Aedan said, nearly pleading now for me to listen. “If the darkness rises—”

  “Wait, wait.” My hands flew up. “If? You mean to tell me there’s no definite about it?”

  Aedan straightened, his arms threaded in front of his chest. “Certainty is a rare luxury in this world, Sloane. Living in the Outlands, you should know that better than anyone.”

  “Here’s what you’re not getting. I just wanted my brother back, okay? That’s all I’ve wanted since I left the Outlands. I wanted to find Killion—alive. And here he is—dead. Did any of you protect him? Because it doesn’t seem like it, so why would it be any different for me?”

  They stood still, stunned into silence, even the brute Ronen.

  “That’s what I thought. Now, please get my things so I can go.”

  “Wait…” Again, Aedan attempted to reason with me. “We’ll give you your weapons, but before you decide, at least meet with the regent.”

  “The what?”

  “Our leader.”

  The sigh that escaped me could not have been any heavier. I just wanted to go home and mourn, scream, do anything but be there. But even I knew I couldn’t travel the forests of Sonola without my weapons. I had to get my things back. If I had to go meet some stupid Fae to do so more quickly, I would. “I want my things first.”

  “I’ll go on ahead,” Ronen announced as he slipped out the open door and left me alone with Aedan.

  His eyes fell on me, the curiosity and sadness dancing across their depths sent me bursting out the door ahead of him.

  “My things,” I demanded.

  “As you wish.”

  He vanished around the next corner, leaving me a moment alone to look back to where Killion lay on the stone slab. Even though I’d seen him with my own eyes, I still wasn’t certain it had sunk in. Hell, I still expected to hear his voice come cracking around the corner, laughing at how absurd their stories sounded. Fae familiar! Ha! He never would have worked with the Fae.

  “Sloane.”

  My head cracked against the doorjamb with how far back I’d jumped. It was only Aedan, but I’d been so wrapped up in my own thoughts I hadn’t seen him approach with my weapons in his arms.

  “A little warning next time?” The back of my head throbbed, and though I knew it would be short-lived, I couldn’t help but rub it.

  Aedan smiled, a quirk that irritated me greatly as I snatched my daggers and crossbow and stuck them into their respective sheaths and holster. Last, I grabbed my bag, the same one I’d shoved my belongings into so haphazardly. Somewhere along the way, I must’ve lost my bedroll, but I supposed I’d had worse losses.

  “There were a couple of other things I thought you might want as well.”

  “What?” What could he have possibly had beyond the body of my brother that I’d want?

  “Some things of Killion’s.”

  That was enough to draw my attention, even if I thought it absurd to believe there’d be anything I wasn’t expecting. “His hunting gear?”

  “Yes, but there’s more. Come with me.”

  I followed, curiosity and angst holding me in a tight grip. I knew Killion better than anyone, so why had I never heard any of this? Why had he kept such a great secret from me, if indeed he had? How was it that they knew his name and had his things?

  Either the story ran much deeper than I realized, or it was all an elaborate hoax, which seemed less likely by the minute.

  I wrung my hands when Aedan asked me to wait in the vacancy of the corridor. It was there I stood, leaning against the wall, when a young woman walked past, her eyes trained entirely on me. She looked too innocent, too naive to be among these people, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she somehow already knew me. The moment I decided to shout after her, Aedan jutted into the hall in front of me.

  My brow had fallen as he held out the flat of his palm in offering.

  “Where did you get that?” My voice sounded hollow, as if I’d seen a ghost, even more so than when they’d shown me Killion’s body.

  Draped across the flattened callouses on his palm lay a thin golden chain, from which hung a small charm. It was one I would have recognized anywhere. Snatching the chain, I held it up to get a closer look at it, and nearly cried.

  It had been almost a month since I’d last seen the necklace on Killion, with the tiny sliver of quartz that had always sparkled in the sun. Years ago, when I was barely old enough to get into mischief, I’d found the chain buried within the sand near the edge of a pond I’d been trying to build a sand castle beside. The castle had turned out like a nightmare, but the broken chain I’d found had been easily mended, and I picked the shiniest stone I could find for its centerpiece.

  The necklace was far from perfect; hewn by child’s hands and made with a shoddy gemstone. Yet, Killion had treasured it from the moment I’d presented it to him on his birthday and had worn it always. Until I’d seen him without it and he claimed the chain must have snapped when he was out hunting.

  “Where?” I whispered again into Aedan’s infuriating calm.

  “Right outside, on the training grounds. I only noticed it a few days ago, when it hit the sun just right.”

  “But…” I should have been grateful, but all I felt was upset that he’d spent time with my brother that should have been mine. “You knew it was Killion’s?”

  The softest of exhales slipped from his nostrils. “Yes. And if you want them, his throwing knives are in the armory. I can take you there after we’ve talked with the regent.”

  “His…what?” Never in my life had I seen Killion with such a weapon. It was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard. The more Aedan spoke of my brother, the more it seemed he described a stranger. A very familiar stranger. Was Killion truly two different people?

  No. I knew my brother.

  Aedan gave me no choice but to hurry after his lengthy strides. “He was quite skilled with them, and designed them himself.”

  “He never used throwing knives,” I defended. No one knew my brother better than I.

  “When you see the design he had engraved in them, you will not deny it.”

  I thought then of all the ways I could give in to the vexation that had hold of me. Maybe I could take the throwing knives and cut chunks of Aedan’s perfect hair from his head, or shove some of Killion’s artwork down Aedan’s throat so he’d shut up.

  There was simply no accepting that someone else could have known things about Killion that I hadn’t.

  “Regent?”

  My eyes snapped up to befall a room grander than the rest. The white of the walls was replaced with a stunning green that upon closer inspection seemed to be layer upon layer of fallen leaves sandwiched beneath a glossy sheen. A handful of people sat about the room, their silence deafening save for a single whimper across the room. A chair, larger than the rest, stood with its back to the door, shielding whomever sat within from sight.

  I could barely see a crown of golden hair over the chair’s sharp arch, but as my eyes drifted around the room, that was not what drew my hand in a tight clench about the hilt of my dagger.

  Fae.

  There were Fae in the room.

  I’d discovered they weren’t always entirely easy to spot, b
ut I’d still expected to have a certain sixth sense whenever they were near. Sure, most looked the same as humans, but their very presence couldn’t be denied. The only true physical difference was the slight point of their ears. More difficult to hide was their variances born from their intrinsic connection to nature.

  One man, whose eyes lifted curiously at my gawking stare, had a ribbon of deep blue that swirled down the side of his neck. From afar, it looked akin to a tattoo, but I knew better. The longer I stared, the more it shifted, until it shimmered like the waters of Falseon Lake. Then, there were his ears, pointed and—

  “Sloane.” It was a feminine voice, one drowning in loss and sorrow, that drew me in. The one who’d been facing away, their regent, was not a man but a woman, and tears streamed down her flawless skin. Flawless, save for the points of her ears under the crown of her upswept hair and the twist of a single vine that held it in place.

  “You…” I stepped forward, farther into the room of Fae I despised so much. Yet, I couldn’t help it. There was something so familiar about the shimmer of her eyes. It reminded me of the deep green of the meadows. I’d seen it before, somewhere.

  Before she could speak again, I dropped my bag to the floor and rummaged deep within it, past the rolled shirts and clinking spoons. Down near the bottom, I felt it, the crumple of paper I’d shoved in there for safekeeping long ago.

  It was a drawing Killion had done. One that rivaled his others in the beauty of not only the subject, but also the simplicity of his choices. I unfurled the page, only to gasp at the similarity.

  There was no doubting it was her, from the sharp cut of her cheekbones to the pout of her lips. Most shocking was the exact hue Killion had chosen for the green of her eyes. Never did he work with color, save for those single vibrant sweeps.

  I fell into the capture of her gaze as my tears soon echoed her own. Killion had been here, he’d been a part of this world, and there was no way I could deny it now.

  7

  “Hello, Sloane.”

  The woman’s tears persisted, even as she offered me a faint smile. “I’m Caitrín, and I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”

  I was up on my feet, retreating toward the door before I even realized I’d left my pack behind. “You’re Fae. This…whatever this is, it’s not happening.” My voice cracked. “It can’t be.”

  “We aren’t evil. We aren’t all touched by the shadows.”

  “So you want me to believe Killion worked alongside you?” Heads nodded across the room, their certainty enough to draw me back to where my bag lay. It was a moment I never thought would happen in my life; me, shoving my brother’s artwork into my bag in a room full of Fae who weren’t trying to kill me. Though, I had to admit, they didn’t seem to have the same hollowness in their eyes as the guards who’d made attempts on my life had.

  “Killion…” Caitrín’s voice cracked in a way only true sorrow could force. “He had been working with us for several years.”

  Cracked voice and streaming tears aside, it was impossible for me not to feel something toward the woman. There was a weight about her, the same one I felt over the knowledge my brother’s lifeless body lay in a room beyond that door.

  I hated myself for feeling anything akin to sympathy toward her.

  I recalled when I had first discovered that drawing, the one of her. Killion’s eyes had lit up with the light of a thousand stars. When I prodded, he’d simply said he’d seen her face in a dream. Well, here was my brother’s dream, and she was Fae.

  “You loved him,” I stated, needing no answer to verify what I now knew to be truth.

  Her smile belied the sorrow that persisted in her weighted eyes. “And he loved me. Never will another replace the hole he has left behind.”

  I swallowed hard. As much as I wanted to run and never come back, it would have been a betrayal of my brother’s memory. “So, what…” Again, I looked across the room, still surprised by the mix of human and Fae faces watching me. Apparently, that familiar crap hadn’t been a lie after all. “What is this, exactly?”

  “We are an alliance of human and Fae. Years ago, we came together merely as a group of friends wishing to combat racial tensions. Now, we have grown in scope and size, and have turned our focus to combatting the darkness that threatens the lands, and us all. We seek to bring unity and put an end to this divide.”

  “The darkness?” It sounded like something from stories told around a campfire, rather than a legitimate threat.

  “Our knowledge of its exact origin is limited, as is the time when it first began to spread. However, it all stems from far outside the Outlands, and even farther from Inorah.”

  “And what about the rest of the Fae within Sonola Hollow? You can’t expect to mend a lifetime of hate and division.”

  “But we can. We need each other. This darkness has slowly tainted the Fae of Sonola. We didn’t always seek to rule over humanity. There was a time, long ago, when we were allies—friends even. Ever since the darkness began to seep in, it’s slowly corrupted us.”

  “Okay,” I drawled, uncertain what her point was. “What do I have to do with any of it?”

  Caitrín slid a curling piece of parchment, aged with time and dust, across the desk between us. “Here is Inorah.” Her nail tapped against one corner of the map, and then dragged slowly across hand-sculpted ridges of mountains and wandering floods of water. At the furthest corner, she stopped. “This is the entrance to the City of Shadows.”

  “The City of Shadows?” There was no stopping the smirk that lifted the edges of my lips. “Isn’t that merely a legend? A tale told to children to scare them into obedience?”

  “It isn’t.” A man stood at the wall’s edge, his skin settled with deep ridges of time, and his eyes dimmed like those who had faced death and come back from the brink of it. “I’ve been there. Just once, but it was enough. It is there the Dark Fae dwell, and it is from there their hatred drifts. If they are not stopped, I fear we will all succumb, one way or another.”

  Silence clung to every surface of the room as my eyes shifted about, before falling to the toes of my boots. It was hard enough to accept the death of my brother, but how could I accept that the oddities I’d begun to see for myself could be of such a large magnitude?

  “This darkness,” Caitrín explained, “it is akin to a curse. It mutates the animals in the wild into vicious beasts, and the dead… Had Killion’s body not been brought back here, he would have turned into something unrecognizable, into something he detested.”

  “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  Caitrín let the paper go, allowing it to furl loudly back into a tight coil. “It has everything to do with you. Someone must take your brother’s place alongside his Fae familiar.”

  I choked out an unbidden laugh. “I’m not certain what that is, but it doesn’t sound like something I’m okay with.”

  “It’s a connection, a bond if you will, between Fae, or in this case, a human and a Fae. It’s a necessity for the final ritual to win this war.”

  “So have someone else do it.”

  “They can’t.” It was Ronen who spoke, and his voice cut the murmurs and whispers into stark silence. The tap of his deliberate steps seemed to echo across the room, and I couldn’t help but wonder at the nervous downcast of several pairs of eyes.

  “Why can’t they?”

  “A Fae can only bind themselves once. The only exception to this is when the human they bonded with dies. If the soul of the dead is cleansed and released, the Fae may bond again.”

  My lips parted in protest, but lay halted by the sudden jut of his hand upward. Somehow, the man who had screamed in my face and tormented the truth out of me with a vile serum now had the floor, and the answers.

  “There is one stipulation. The Fae may only bond again with one who shares blood-ties with their lost counterpart.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “There’s no but about it, Sloane. Your brother ch
ose this. Why are you so resistant?”

  All at once, their gazes fell upon me in a chorus of demands. I had no argument against being heroic, and I couldn’t deny the idea of vengeance against the Dark Fae ticked me a little toward saying yes. So, why then did it feel like I was about to sell my soul to the devil?

  “Before we go any farther, at least let me meet this…Fae familiar you’d want me to bond with first.” Even saying it left a rancid taste in my mouth.

  “You’ve already met him,” Caitrín said with a smile that twisted my insides. “He’s standing right beside you.”

  Flooded with horror, I gawked at Ronen, who recoiled with the same level of disgust.

  “Not me, you idiot. I’m human.”

  In a hurry, he shoved me, turning me cleanly around to where Aedan’s sunset eyes danced with mirth. “Hello again, Sloane.”

  8

  “Oh, no. No, no, no.” I drew back and slammed immediately into a grumbling Ronen, who pushed me off like I was poison.

  “Oh, yes,” Ronen said. “Why else do you think pretty boy here was so nice to you?”

  “Because I’m not a bastard?” Aedan countered.

  My brow pinched tight. There was no explanation for the tricks my eyes were playing on me. He was the same man, the same one whose taut muscles pulled at the seams of his shirt when he moved. The same one who had infuriated me with his secret knowledge of my brother. His hair still fell perfectly beside the fire of his amber eyes I’d just thought to deem rare.

  Somehow though, amidst all of that, I had looked right past the subtle points of his ears, and the hint of forest green that lay beyond the cover of his collar.

  “You’re…Fae.” It was meant to come out as an inquiry, but my voice fell flat as my stomach plummeted. Would Killion be laughing at me now?

  “Yes, I am.”