Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  “My devotion was faultless. I lived for her command.” Her shoulders slumped. “She summoned me to kill her enemies. I turned them all to dust.”

  “You killed everyone?”

  “I …” She touched her forehead with trembling fingertips. “You do not understand.”

  Anger boiled away the numbness. “How can I understand the killing of thousands of people?!”

  Shaianna recoiled from my words. “I followed her commands.”

  “You didn’t need to kill him,” I said, drifting toward Fallford’s body. Her presence felt too loud behind me, too close. “You don’t have to kill. You’re powerful, more powerful than I know. This—” Twisting to look at her, I saw the truth. The laughing woman was the mask she wore. The real her was the nightmare. “You are wrong.”

  Her pulse fluttered in her neck. “I do not know any other way.”

  I rested my hand on the fallen rifle. “Someone needs to stop you.” A pressure was building inside, threatening to break me apart. I had to do something, I could stop her.

  “What I am, it is not something that can be stopped, thief.”

  I stood, rifle loose in my hand, and lifted my chin. “You lied. At Agatha’s, that was you. At Calwyton, you set the blaze that destroyed the village.”

  “The mages—” She backed toward the window.

  I strode forward. “You’re everything the mages said you were. They’re trying to stop you. They aren’t the monsters. You are.” I’d been wrong about everything and looking at it all from the wrong side. How could I have been so blind? My grip tightened on the rifle. "I have to know … I have to be sure.”

  She searched my eyes for something her face betrayed as hope, but the truth had dashed any hope I’d harbored. There was good in her—I had seen it—but there was also a darkness so deep she had no hope of escaping it. I wanted to help her, and I would have, had I not believed it too late.

  “In the spire …” I swallowed and delayed. Once I asked, she would answer, and I’d know my fears. The truth in the lies. “The images on the parchment, the art on the tomb walls, the statues, the dearmad—the dragon. You told me you needed the Eye to make yourself whole.” And here, now, the truth would come out, and the answer could change everything. “You used me. You are my nightmare.”

  She closed her eyes. I raised the rifle, nestled the stock against my shoulder and hooked my finger over the trigger. I could end it now. Everything she had done, the bodies left in her wake, more would follow. My aim wavered. But a small hope remained. A hope that the flicker of light in her might prevail.

  “I am the last of my kind,” she whispered, and when she opened her eyes, they sparkled in my sights, as deep and rich as the Dragon’s Eye.

  I’d brought her to life, just as the mages had said. She wouldn’t stop. I wasn’t even sure a rifle could stop her—not now she had taken the Eye’s power.

  “But I am no longer like them,” she said. “Here, in this city, in this time with you, I am changed. The dearmad were revered and with good reason. We commanded the skies as protectors, defenders, and weapons of destruction. None existed who cared for more than duty or commands, but I do … I care...” She took a single step forward but stilled when I backed away. “I care when I should not. You, a thief, showed me how to feel. And now I am something else entirely—two creatures in one soul. I do not want to do these things. But it is in my nature to follow her commands.”

  “Those commands are long dead and buried with your queen. Arach is gone. There’s no reason to continue your crusade. Shaianna, leave Brea. Go somewhere you’ll never be found. Duty is just the whispers of the dead. Can’t you see that?”

  “I am sorry. So sorry. I wish I had a choice. But I do not.” Turning, she exposed her back and headed for the window.

  The trigger gave a little under my finger. I drew in a breath, held it. I knew what I should do, but no matter the intention, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.

  She rested a boot on the sill and paused. “Kill me, thief, and you kill yourself.”

  The bond. If I shot her, I’d feel it too. Would it kill me?

  In my hesitation, she dropped from the window and was gone.

  The truth coiled its way around my heart and choked my rising fear and distrust at her actions, and my own. Fallford lay dead, and none would believe I had tried to save him. I had to leave, and this time, there was only one place I belonged: inside the Inner Circle.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  With dusk came city-wide panic. City guards piled into the streets, and I took to the rooftops, rifle slung over my back and my dagger safely tucked away. Fallford’s murder, and likely my subsequent blame, would hopefully be lost in the confusion. If not, then it was just another reason to leave Brea. The opinions of the likes of Tiber didn’t matter to me. The only person I regretted who wouldn’t know the truth was Molly. She had shown me a kindness that now twisted in my gut like a knife. Just another regret. I had plenty of those.

  I returned to the spire—the source—not entirely sure what I expected to find. Shaianna was too clever to let herself be found inside, and with the meager gloom of torchlight as a guide, I knew within a few steps she wasn’t inside. Rats were the spire’s only occupants now. The guards no longer stood sentry at the passage opening. I stepped out onto the cobbled street and walked alone through the blanket of mist muffling all signs of life. The windows I passed were lit from inside. The Inner Circle slept, unaware of the chaos unfolding outside their high walls.

  I reached Anuska’s quarters as the city bells struck three in the morning and broke in with a quick elbow-jab to the window glass.

  Considering the scene in the spire, Anuska was a heavy magic user, but not yet turned mage. She had likely survived Shaianna’s attack in the spire and healed herself. I needed to know if what I had learned about the mages, Arach, and The Shadow was true. Anuska was perhaps the last person alive who could confirm it—if she would hear me out without attempting to drive her sword through my chest or burn me alive.

  She wasn’t inside her quarters. Orange gaslight bled in through the grimy windows, illuminating the mess of papers on Anuska’s desk. She would return in the morning, and I would be waiting. I rummaged through stacks of reports, searched drawers, and found references to more instances of magic users and more burnings. How could she watch people burn, knowing she too was one of them?

  I pulled a chair into a corner, wedged my boot on a low bookshelf, propped the rifle on my knee, and aimed it at the door. I was done asking. Done with riddles, and myths, and lies, and with people believing I was the fool.

  Eventually, sunlight poured in through the window. Tiredness was tugging at my wits, when she finally opened the door. The civilian clothing fooled me for a few seconds, but her stature and stance were unmistakably Anuska.

  I cocked the rifle, enjoying the mechanical click and her subsequent alarm. She froze.

  “Vance? How did you—?” She spotted the broken window.

  “I have been beaten, lied to, cursed, attacked by wargs, stalked, attacked by mages, almost buried alive in a tomb, and nearly burned at the stake. I’ve seen the insides of those I called friends steaming in the snow. Creatures I didn’t know existed until a few months ago are hunting me. I’ve been told our history is a lie and seen for myself that magic is real.” My heart beat faster, but my voice remained steady. “I’ve seen forgotten treasures and find myself enamored with the most dangerous one of all.”

  She waited, hand resting on the door handle, her attention focused entirely on the rifle cocked and ready to end her life at the twitch of my finger.

  “You, Anuska, are going to tell me everything you know, or I will shoot you dead. Don’t think for one second I won’t. You’re burning innocent people alive. My killing you is the only thing in my life that makes any sense.”

  “We burn them as a mercy,” she said with all the confidence in the world. “To turn mage is torture. We free them of the madness.
”

  “Are they aware you’re saving them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’d know all about magic, seeing as you practice it?”

  “Vance, she’s lied to you.”

  “So have you.”

  “She’s not what you think.”

  “I know.” Although it hurt to admit it. “The mages—” I wet my lips. “You’re trying to stop Shaianna?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mages are killing innocent people.”

  “An unfortunate necessity, but nothing when compared to the damage she will inflict upon us and our city.” Her hard officer’s face softened when she said, “You are not a bad man, Vance. Just a confused one.”

  I swallowed my heated anger at her condescension. “There was nothing confusing about you trying to kill me. You made that exceedingly clear.”

  Anuska shifted inside a few steps but stilled when I brought the rifle up. She lifted her hands. “The mark … it appears on all mages before they turn. It is the stain of magic.”

  “She gave me that mark. I’ve seen magic, but I’ve no idea how to use it. The only urge I get from gems is to steal them.”

  She blinked rapidly. Moisture glistened in her hairline. “I believe you,” she said. “You left the Inner Circle too soon. Your only crime is ignorance. I see that has changed.”

  “Regrettably.”

  “I believed you were her tool. You worked with her, and you foiled the mage attack in Calwyton and every other attempt since.”

  I smiled, mostly at my own blissful ignorance. “I was surviving. I had no grand plan and no ulterior motives, besides getting rich.” I really had been her fool all along. “I have a weakness for beautiful things. I was hers, but where her shadow falls, death follows. I know that now.” I hoped I was doing the right thing, that I could somehow make up for my mistakes that would likely cost more lives than those lost on an ancient battlefield. “I want to help you stop her, Anuska.”

  “And how can I trust you?”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “Lower the gun.”

  “What guarantee do I have that you won’t try to stab and burn me at your first opportunity?”

  “Don’t give me a reason to.”

  “One last question, before we’re friends. What were you doing with the Eye in the spire?”

  “We hoped to lure her to us, using the Eye’s reservoir of magic, and loose the mages on her.”

  I’d seen Shaianna battle hundreds of mages. Those in the spire wouldn’t have been enough. Anuska and her associates would have died. “But the Eye was empty.”

  “Yes,” she replied grimly. “And you interrupted our casting.”

  “You were lucky to survive.”

  “Lucky? No, I used magic to heal … and drove another nail into my coffin.”

  “How so?”

  “I will tell you. I’ll even show you. But lower the gun, Vance, so we may move forward. We do not have much time. Every second we have, we borrow from her.”

  Anuska wasn’t to be trifled with. She’d already made several attempts on my life, and that wasn’t the best foundation on which to build a working relationship. But from her perspective, I’d been working with her enemy. The enemy of Brea. And here I was, a potential chink in Shaianna’s armor. Could a thief and High Guard collaborate for the sake of the thousands of lives at risk?

  I uncocked the rifle’s hammer and lowered the weapon. “Truce?”

  She strode forward, rolling up her right sleeve almost to her shoulder, and revealed, there on her upper bicep, the unmistakable mark of magic, the knot. Only hers was distorted as though it had been left to melt in the sun, and its intertwining tendrils reached outward, wrapping themselves around her arm, leaving the black, shriveled skin of the mages wherever it touched.

  I got to my feet and peered closer. I had a knot like that on my back? Would the infection spread through me?

  “You’re safe, unless you use magic,” Anuska murmured. “Magic poisons. The more I use, the more the mage in me grows. It will not be long before I am consumed by the hunger. I’ll forget who I am, forget my life and my duty, and I’ll become the monster you so rightly called us.”

  “Those you burn, they all have this knot?”

  “They all turn, without fail. My predecessors attempted to control it, to gather the mages and hide our secret, but more and more turned until the kindest thing we could do was kill them with honor. This is why magic is forbidden inside the Inner Circle and why we are told from birth that magic will poison us. It’s a disease. It sleeps inside us all. One day, you will hear its call and you will answer.”

  My sister had taken a knife to her heart to save her soul. Don’t make the wrong choices, brother.

  She hadn’t killed herself out of fear, but because she had known a death sentence already hung over her.

  “That day has not yet come for you. If you are lucky, it may never arrive. If we stop the Shadow, perhaps we can right some of our wrongs.”

  “Tell me everything you know of Shaianna.”

  We talked until the midday sun had warmed Anuska’s quarters. Anuska had initially asked questions, but then fell into an odd, pensive silence, listening as Shaianna’s crimes stacked up. The highwaymen, Calwyton, the tomb, Agatha’s, and finally Fallford.

  When I was done talking, my throat dry, Anuska moved to her bookshelves and ran her hand along the spines of the many titles. “You are key, Curtis. You have no idea the pivotal part you have played. Your presence has bought us time. You’re the reason she hasn’t yet embraced the truth of what she is. You gave her a reason to doubt.”

  She plucked a green leather-bound volume and set it down on her desk. “The dearmad—the forgotten ones—are loyal creatures.” She opened the book at a silver-and-golden illustration of a dragon, its open wings embracing a city of a thousand spires. “They will follow an order above all else. They have no mercy, and they do not discriminate.”

  The creature had been drawn with delicate pencil strokes, but there was nothing gentle about it. Like the dragon statues in the city square, it dominated the page. I had climbed over a stone version of the beast and prized the Eye from its socket. If the hastily sketched houses lining the foot of the illustration were to scale, then the statue in the tomb was an accurate representation, including its monumental size.

  “Once they take their true form, nothing can stop them. We’ve been trying to bring about an end to her since we learned of the cup’s discovery. The mages have an innate ability to track her down, but directing them with any accuracy is virtually impossible. They’re little more than rabid attack hounds. Though she should have been weak, she eluded us at every stage.”

  I hadn’t told Anuska how I had tasted water from Shaianna’s cup and “drunk of her fluids.” That spectacular moment cut too close to the painful truth—that I was responsible for the hundreds Shaianna had killed.

  “Everything indicates that she is ready, but she waits. We’d wondered why, until now. Until you.”

  “Why me?”

  “You speak of her as though she is like us. You said she danced with the village folk at the Calwyton festival, and other times, she has shown another side to her. A softer, gentler side. That is not how the dearmad are described”

  “Then she is different … and there’s hope?”

  “I suspect she may be torn between duty and empathy. It is something every soldier battles with.”

  “Then there is a chance she may forgo her duty?”

  Anuska’s sorrowful expression said what her words did not. “The Shadow will come as surely as the seasons change. She cannot fight her nature, but I think, perhaps, that her gentler side has spared us so far.”

  I dropped back into the seat and gritted my teeth. Shaianna had it in her to care, and love, and laugh. I had seen those things in her, things more precious than any gem. I would have stolen them if I could, taken those parts of her away, somewhere safe where she couldn’t h
urt others and others couldn’t hurt her. But I didn’t know how to fight her true nature and suspected all that good in her wasn’t enough to prevent the inevitable.

  “I’ve seen her true form,” I almost whispered. Speaking it made it real. “Well, something of it.”

  Anuska’s acknowledging frown was sharp with worry.

  I couldn’t explain what the beast in the spire had felt like, not in a way that would make sense. The illustration inside the book made it clear what we were up against, but it didn’t compare to seeing her.

  “How do you propose we fight her?” I asked. “She cuts through your mages when human. When she’s dearmad, she’ll eat them alive.”

  “I don’t know. We can’t use magic, as you said, and we can’t fight fire with fire. It only makes it worse.”

  “Guns.”

  “What?”

  “What weapons do you have?”

  “Rifles and two hundred Inner Circle guards.”

  “It’s not enough.” Perhaps, had I known what she was, had Anuska’s plan worked, we could have somehow trapped her in the spire when she was weak. But that time had passed.

  “There’s no record of any weaknesses.” Anuska slammed the book closed, sending a puff of dust glittering into the sunlight. “Our guns are nothing and our blades far worse.”

  “Then we need to think bigger. There are ships and freelance trading vessels at the docks. They have cannons. I know a man who might help.” Captain Tassen had seen the dearmad inside the spire. If he hadn’t already left Brea, and if I could find him, there was a chance he could rally the captains of vessels with ordnance. “If we can lure her out of the city, toward the docks, we could ambush her.”

  I was already on my feet, heading toward the door, when she called, “Vance?”

  I turned and looked at the woman who had tried to kill me, who had killed hundreds before me in the name of saving her people. The dagger dug into my back and the rifle hung heavy in my grip.

  “We are not the same,” she said.

  “No, we really aren’t.”

  “But I trust you will not run from this.”