Light and Shadow

by Patti Larsen

  Hard not to. Especially when I could barely keep the grin of affection off my face. Liam dashed around the room as if he didn’t know where to start, hands running over the carvings, entire body quivering in excitement. When he turned to me, his eyes glowed with Sidhe magic and his smile so wide his white teeth caught the light from above.

  “This is amazing!” He went back to his studies, whispering to himself while Galleytrot stayed close. I almost told the big dog to back off and let Liam have his space only to bite my tongue. Liam was important, very, very important, to a lot of people. Um, to the whole world, actually. As Keeper of the Gate in Wilding Springs, only he was able to answer the knock when the Sidhe came calling. Which made Galleytrot, a hound of the same Sidhe, uber protective.

  Fair enough. And Liam had to be used to him by now, not even tripping over the massive black galoot as my friend wound his way around and around the room, starting first in the middle of the wall only to swear at himself and crouch-walk his way again only this time focused on the bottom, near the floor.

  I sighed and set Sassafras on the altar pedestal in the center of the room, looking around, now a little bummed since I couldn’t read any of the words myself. The apprehension of meeting up with Gram’s ghosts was banished in favor of boredom.

  Charlotte prowled endlessly, as though restless. But when I asked her what was wrong, she just shook her head and growled before beginning her pacing again. I felt calm, more calm than I had in a long time, and even Sassafras acted like this was no big deal so I let the weregirl have her nervous explorations and hopped up to join my demon cat on the stone.

  “This is definitely maji,” Liam said, spinning toward me. “Do you feel the energy?”

  I shrugged, picking at a hangnail on my thumb. “So?” I looked around a moment before sighing. “There’s nothing here.” The pull forcing me to pile my friends into the van was now gone as if it never existed. Curious, yes. But unless the source of that pull made herself—I was now positive this Iepa was manipulating us in some way—known, we’d wasted our trip.

  Liam laughed, shook his head. “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll show you something that will blow your beautiful mind.”

  I flushed at the compliment, but he was already at it again, moving faster this time, whispers turning to mutters as he circled and circled. By the time he stopped again, he was straining, hand above him, touching the stones, unable to reach any further.

  “Amazing.” Liam’s awe-struck tone took my attention from where I played catch-a-paw with Sassafras. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

  I drew a breath, a sarcastic snark on my lips, only to let it out in a puff of irritation. “Do tell.”

  Liam hugged himself. “This is the history of everything,” he said.

  The what? “What do you mean, everything?” I turned where I sat, eyes roving over the stones he’d been studying the better part of three hours.

  “I mean, everything.” He pointed at the floor, to a stone with an irregular shape, right by the entry door. “The birth of the Universe,” he said, hand traveling along as he spun, “the creation of suns, planets, nebulae.” His arm raised, finger still showing us the way. “The fabric of all life, all planes, the creation of the divides between them. At the hands of the maji.”

  I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, but most religions had their creation theories. Why wouldn’t the maji be any different? The idea they actually created everything sounded pretty ludicrous. But Liam was on a roll so I didn’t shoot him down. Not directly.

  “Cool,” I said. “Now what?”

  He frowned at me before rushing to my side, lifting me from the pedestal and setting me on my feet in front of him. I was a little breathless from the contact, how his power buzzed with energy, but he didn’t give me a chance to stop him as he pulled me toward the wall opposite the doorway. He stopped and pointed.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “But you have to trust me.”

  Galleytrot growled softly while Charlotte rumbled her own distress.

  “Will it put us in danger?” I met Liam’s eyes, only to see his desperate need for me to believe in him shining from the depths.

  “No,” he said. Paused. “I don’t think so.”

  Before the two overly protective canines could put a kibosh on the idea, Sassafras wormed his way between Liam and me.

  “Not like we haven’t faced a little danger before,” he said. “This feels important, Syd.”

  Weird. “Did you just say I should purposely do something that might be stupid?” Who stole my cat and put this imposter in his place?

  Sassafras shuddered, licking one paw a few strokes before settling again. “I’m just… I feel like there’s something more here we need to know.”

  I opened my power, all of it, from demon to witch to Sidhe to vampire and drew a breath, closing my eyes. Felt around. Let the combined magicks I controlled wander around the room. Only to be led back here, to this wall. Something pulsed inside it, beckoning to me. The pull I’d first felt earlier, in Liam’s cavern, bringing us all here, was focused in these stones. Anything able to penetrate the wards of the Sidhe to reach me had to be powerful. The cavern itself was protected by the most earth magic I’d ever come across, not to mention its own little shift in planes, making it close to impossible for normal magic to penetrate. I’d only ever felt anything reach through when something catastrophic was happening. And yet this embedded magic was so soft now, so subtle, it took searching to find it.

  I let my eyes drift open, six stones glowing softly in my vision as I did, the illumination fading from them as I blinked and let the light in. I squinted and was able to see again, just barely. Without thinking, I did as Charlotte had done, pressing each of the stones. Only the ones I touched didn’t depress, but began to glow, the same iridescent light I’d seen in my dream shining from them, until all six shone with happy power.

  The intensity of the light grew as Liam took my hand and led me back, away from the wall, toward the center of the chamber. Charlotte clung close, snuffling the air, quivering while Galleytrot chuffed and licked his chops over and over again. Sassafras was the only calm one of the three, though his tail wrapped around my ankle, one front paw resting on the toe of my shoe.

  “Here.” Liam pointed to the altar and the words etched there. “This one. It means enter.”

  I didn’t need him to tell me what word to touch, or its meaning. Now that the light glowed from the stones across the room I could feel it to my bones, what I was meant to do, supposed to do. This was my fate, my destiny and it called me from deep inside the earth as surely as if it had a voice, a heart, a soul.

  But Liam was wrong. The word didn’t mean enter. Not quite.

  It meant Come.

  The moment I touched it, it began its own glow, the energy rippling upward from my finger tips and through my arm, all the way to my heart and the vampire core hiding there.

  She cried out as the light reached her, but not in pain.

  In joy.

  “I knew it,” Liam said as the floor began to sink, silent this time, flickers of the same multi-colored magic flowing as a spiral staircase was revealed. “You have the power of the maji.”

  Like I needed another kind of magic to worry about.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Liam was gone like a shot down the stairs, yet again leaving us to follow. But this time he was slowed by the writing on the walls of the narrow flight, twisting back and forth from one side to another, cries of joy and exclamation bursting from him, kind of like this:

  “Mesopotamia! Holy, can’t be, how cool is—Egypt! The pyramids are what? Now I have to go to—Greece. Yes, of course. Of course! Why didn’t I guess that might be the—Rome? No, really? All of Rome? How did they control the flow of—”

  He stopped below me, hand hovering over the wall, and when he turned to face me there was so much sadness in his eyes I descended to share his step and
hug him while he shook.

  “So sad,” he whispered. “The Dark Ages.”

  Ouch. Not a great time for those with magic. “The Inquisition?” All witches knew about the Spanish Inquisition, their unholy need to eradicate all of us from the face of the earth, only to ultimately fail because we were simply too smart for them.

  “It wasn’t what we thought,” Liam said, fingers stroking the etchings as the others crowded in to listen. “The Inquisition was run by sorcerers who claimed to serve the Church, but who had their own agenda.”

  “They missed us, at least,” I said, squeezing his arm. “Though innocent women were killed in our place.”

  Liam’s head hung a moment before he shook it. “Witches weren’t the real target,” he said, voice breaking. “They were hunting maji.”

  Um. What?

  “Not pure maji,” he said, “but their descendants. Look, it’s all here.” I wished I could read what he translated for myself. “The innocent women and men who died were the sons and daughters of powerful maji creators, gone while their blood lines carried on.” He paused. “The sorcerers were too late, though, to catch everyone. The pureblood maji’s children had already spread far and wide.”

  Liam turned and continued his descent, my witch light floating ahead of him and lighting his reading. I was a little startled to reach the bottom, stepping down onto ground level before passing under a curved entry and into another round stone chamber.

  The iridescent glow I’d noticed in the writings above us was stronger here, flooding the place as we crossed the threshold, shining from everywhere and from nowhere. The very rocks glittered with it, making it as bright as day, if daylight was equivalent to stepping into a complex rainbow.

  I let my witch light fade, looking around with awe, noting the threads of white, green, blue, brown, amber and red magic weaving themselves through the room. Liam was already studying and, for the first time, I worried he might hurt himself someday, rushing into a situation he couldn’t handle out of the desire for knowledge. It took me this long to see it, but I no longer doubted Galleytrot’s need to protect the absent-minded and driven O’Dane and, in fact, I was grateful to have him watch over my friend.

  “This is different,” Liam said, excited again. “The history is done. These are names.” He looked over his shoulder at me with a little frown. “Lists of names?”

  I joined him, touched the walls, though nothing glowed beneath my fingers. “What kind of names?”

  He ignored me another moment before letting out a heavy breath of air. “Families,” he whispered, reverential in his tone as he stepped back toward the middle of the room and the long, bed-like slab of stone resting there on a raised pedestal. I’d noted it when I’d first entered, along with the alcove-like seats placed at regular intervals around the chamber.

  “Chapter markers?” I raised one eyebrow at the thought, pointing at the alcoves and, though Liam couldn’t possibly have known where my mind went after that cryptic comment, he suddenly laughed.

  “Yes, of course, Syd. Brilliant.” He turned to the door again, began his sideways motion around the room. “These are family trees, the lineages of the maji. The ones they left behind.” I backed out of his way as he hurried past me. “With these, we can find every line of maji blood still here on this plane.”

  “To raise an army?” Galleytrot sank to his haunches. “For the war?”

  Liam paused, shoulders sagging. “I hope that’s not its purpose,” he said.

  I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest. “This feels like a record,” I said, “not some battle manifest.”

  Liam opened his mouth to say something only to freeze and gasp. When he looked up at me, he was grinning again.

  “The Hayle family,” he said. “Your blood line is here.”

  Sassy scampered to his side. “Who begins it?”

  “I couldn’t even start to tell you,” Liam said, looking up the wall. “The story reaches way back here,” he pointed to a line of text above his head, “mixed with this one,” another line, this time on the other side of an alcove, “and has many, many branches.”

  Liam’s hand fell to Sassy’s head, stroking his fur as the Persian stood up and placed his paws against the wall.

  “But it ends early,” Liam said. “With someone named Auburdeen?”

  “Auburdeen Thaddea Hayle,” Sassy said, voice cracking for a moment before he cleared his throat and returned to all fours. “Why does it end with her? She had children, obviously.”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said, fingers tracing the bare stone below my ancestor’s name. “It just stops.”

  “The record keeper must have passed on before he or she could find a replacement.” Galleytrot’s tongue lolled out, though his dark eyes were sad.

  “Makes sense,” I said, feeling a little sad myself, almost as if I knew my ancestor Auburdeen now that I stood here in the presence of her name etched in stone. Who was she and what was she like? I’d have to ask Sassafras. If he’d be willing to talk about it. I’d never been able to convince him to share any of his past with me before.

  Maybe this would change his mind.

  I turned from the wall, to look down at Sassafras, only to see a thin snake of red power coil around him and let go again. It drifted toward me even as a similar strand of blue flittered across Liam’s shoulder, a fluttering piece of green teasing the ends of Charlotte’s hair.

  “All the magicks,” Liam said. “The power of the creators.”

  I reached for the red strand, let it slide over my palm. “This is blood magic.” Usually just thinking about the forbidden power made my stomach crawl. But standing there in the maji chamber, I had to wonder what all the fuss was about.

  “Were you right, Liam?” Sassafras’s voice was low, vibrating with wonder. “Did the sorcerers really find a way to prevent witches from using their magic?”

  I’d known my Sidhe friend was correct all along, had told me ages ago how witches, working for the church, cast power over all of our kind to prevent the use of blood magic. The geas was still in place and even just the thought of using what we now referred to as negative magic made my stomach churn. And yet, knowing what I did, that the lie created to stunt our power still existed, I hadn’t done anything about it, aside from tell Mom when she was in no position to act, still a prisoner of the Council. I had to talk to her about it.

  It suddenly felt very important.

  As I turned toward the door, the compulsion to speak to Mom growing more powerful as I considered what had been done to witches by the very sorcerers I now knew were the other side of this war I’d been warned about, my eyes settled on the slab and I paused.

  Approached without thought. Heard a whisper of a voice I recognized, the same one from my dream, pulling me closer, asking me to reach out and touch the stone as power flared—

  ***

  Chapter Seven

  —I’m in the dream again, watching the two armies face off, the ghostly specter of the maji woman hovering next to me. Only now the battle has engaged, power slashing between combatants, death and life coming together in a mix of screams and the discharge of opposing magicks.

  I want to help, reaching for them, but the maji holds me back.

  Iepa. I turn to her, see her face more clearly with contact, and know I’m right, it is she, the author of Liam’s book, who has brought us together, to this place, with purpose. I have to stop it.

  You will have your chance. Her voice is liquid in my mind, gentle and soft. I hope. But not in this moment, Sydlynn. This is but an image of what could be, a possible future. If we were to go elsewhere in this place, you would see far different outcomes than this one. And yet, the possibility of its coming to pass is enough to bring us worry.

  Us. I turn back to the battle, heart pounding. The maji.

  She doesn’t answer, just watches with me for a moment. This future is terrible, she sends. One which could mean the end to magic on your plane, spreading outward t
o others until it consumes the Universe.

  Then what do I have to do to stop it? My hands have clenched into angry fists at my sides, beating against my thighs over and over. I feel the impact, though barely, as though my body is far away.

  Be open, Iepa sends. And say yes to them when they come to you. Their safety is paramount.

  I’m about to ask her who she’s talking about when the image changes, a large, jagged cut appearing through the battle scene as though I’ve only been watching on a big-screen television. The two edges jerk aside, the stuff of the veil parting to show me what I need to see.

  Two kids run toward me, a girl, tall with dark hair, glasses, her hand clutching the boy beside her, shorter, younger, with the clearest, most intense blue eyes I’ve ever seen. They are in darkness, fleeing through trees, heading toward me, but never reaching the veil.

  The light and her shadow, Iepa sends. Remember.

  I lunge for them, the compulsion the maji has placed on me pushing me forward, the need to protect them so powerful I can barely catch my breath. My fingers brush the edge of the veil, almost, almost—

  “Syd.”

  I leaped back, away from Liam as he touched me, my hand lifting from the slab, the vision over, though my need to reach the kids hadn’t gone anywhere. I stared at the empty air above the pedestal, searching for a glimpse of the kids, some way to reach them, but they were gone.

  “Damn it.” I pulled free of Liam as he tried again, rubbing my hands together while they tingled, the iridescent magic of the maji still clinging to me. “I have to find them again.” I touched the slab with my fingertips, but nothing happened. It wasn’t until I pressed both palms to the plate I realized I’d lost whatever connection I’d had.

  Hard not to be angry at Liam for breaking it.

  “Syd, what’s wrong?” Sassafras hopped up on the slab and came to my side. I resisted the urge to lift him free of the stone, feeling as if his presence there was some kind of sacrilege. I really had to get my crap together. At least, from the way my friends were looking at me, I did.