The queen has turned back to her son. She’s preparing to take over the spell. The key is spinning wildly. Not cooperating still, it seems, and for once I don’t loathe that object that’s pretty much made my life a living hell—at least it seems to be trying as hard as I am to thwart the evil in the room.
Time to take it back.
I run.
The queen spins to face me, and I swing low. Too low—she manages to leap and avoid it, and as I turn to follow up I’m met with a hastily-summoned explosion of blue magic. I curl so quickly to avoid it that I nearly trip.
As I regain my balance, I remember that I’m capable of my own explosions.
Electricity courses through my arm without much conscious thought. It snakes its way around my hand, leaps onto the blade and crackles to a brighter, more powerful shade of blue. I clench my fingers as tightly as possible, and then I swing with every ounce of strength I can muster.
And she hits my attack back at me, like it’s a freaking baseball and she’s been saving that homerun just for me.
I drop to my knees, narrowly avoiding it.
It looked like she hit it with her bare hands. Most likely she hit it with a stronger counterspell and then threw that spell back at me—I saw Soren do something similar during one of our practices, though not with as much power or finesse.
I dig in my heels and pretend this is just another practice session, and I heave another attack at her.
She hits it back harder this time.
The electricity strikes my shoulder and sends a paralyzing shockwave through me, causing my blade to shake out of my hand. I grab my arm, grit my teeth, and try to fight through the pain and the buzzing in my bones so I can drop to my knees and reach for my weapon.
Soren moves faster. He pounces on the sword, and we both end up on one knee at the same time, facing each other. He draws the sword slowly out of my reach.
“Give it back to me. The sword. The key. Soren, please. Think about what you’re doing!”
He stands, staring down at me with an infuriating combination of pity and indifference. Two versions of him, both fighting for dominance. I wish I knew what sort of spells his mother used. What’s real, and what’s magic, and what the hell I’m supposed to do about any of it.
Behind him, just off the edge of the bridge, dust is falling.
Showering down in the same way it did when we opened the portal to Canath. Through that dust I can see glimpses of blue sky and swaying trees. Visions of Earth. The portal to home is almost open; it’s massive, but still unstable-looking. The queen stands in front of it, body and the key in her hand silhouetted by the bright blue light filtering in behind her.
Was it true what she said?
That I could control that key easily?
If I could channel its power, finish opening that portal and make it steady…
Could I somehow shove myself and all my friends through it, and then close it again before the evil got through? I know how to absorb the key into my body. I’ve done it enough with Elric, and I think I could do it by myself now. And I think it would close the portal.
If I’m wrong, I’m dead.
If I’m right, I still might end up dead.
Crappy odds—but hell, since when have my odds of survival not been crappy?
I stretch out my hand, and I narrow my gaze on the key. I summon every bit of instability and chaos and uncertainty I have to the forefront of my mind, basically begging the key to help. Can you not tell I need help?
It falls from the queen’s hands.
Every bit of strength I have left is focused on summoning it, calling it closer to me. She tries to snatch it again, but energy pulses through it at her touch, causing her to draw back sharply. I feel as if she touched me in the same instant she touched the key, and my breath catches in my throat at the sensation.
“Stop what you’re doing,” she warns, “Or you will regret it.”
“No,” I manage to gasp out, focusing harder. I want to run forward to scoop up the key, but I’m afraid to let my concentration break.
She can’t touch the key, I realize, as long as I keep my will—my chaos— bound to it.
Just a little closer now.
Ten feet.
Five feet.
Three feet—
I’m so focused on bringing it close enough to safely scoop it into my hands that I don’t see what her hands are doing. I don’t see the wall of fire she’s conjuring until the light is too bright, the heat too intense, and it’s all moving too fast for me to get out of the way.
But Soren sees it.
And maybe it reminds him of that night when he conjured up a fake firewall to rescue me. Or maybe it reminds him of that more recent night, when we laid beside each other in the real firelight, and I pressed my hand to his skin and I told him he was stupid and he told me that I didn’t owe him anything, because I was all he had left.
I don’t know.
I don’t know why this fire wakes him up.
But as I grab for the key, he grabs me, and his body folds over mine and protects me from that heat, that magic, that cutting light. I feel his body sinking inward as it sears through him. I smell him burning—his hair, his skin, his clothes. The blistering, the bleeding, the painful gasping; it’s all a million times more real and made so much worse by my far-too-powerful senses.
The Dusk Queen screams.
The Anima turn at her voice, and they stare as if waiting for their next command.
Everything else seems to stop with them.
The key lies still, scorched black and still five feet away from me.
The dust no longer falls.
Earth no longer flickers in the wide, unstable portal.
Soren is no longer moving.
I crumple to the ground and pull his blistered and broken body more fully into my lap. “No. No…! I already owed you! It wasn’t your turn to do something stupid for me, you idiot. Wake up! Now!”
He doesn’t reply, and the world feels reduced to just the two of us and the awful, crushing pain in my chest.
But on the outskirts of this world, I catch glimpses of several things happening in quick succession.
The queen is walking toward me.
Liam is sprinting toward her.
He hits her in the chest.
Carys tackles her knees a moment later. The force of my two best friends together is so great that the queen can’t shove them off. She grabs Liam by the ruff around his neck, and she tries to rip him from her, but she just ends up stumbling. Carys dives for her knees again. They tumble and growl and fight, a jumble of claws and flailing legs and elbows that rolls through the light that portal to Earth is suddenly radiating. They roll too quickly. Too recklessly. All the way across the bridge.
And then all three of them fall—
right
over
the
edge.
Chapter Twenty-One
I’m blind.
Blind with tears. Hoarse from shouting. My body is broken and covered in blood—most of it not mine— and nothing makes any sense.
Nothing, that is, except the key resting a few feet away.
When I look at it, I feel calm strength radiating through my bones.
I’m on my feet before I know it, cradling Soren’s lifeless body, supporting him with the strength of one arm while the other one reaches toward that key. I can’t explain how, but an instant later the object is in my hand. It pulses warmly and powerfully, and as I squeeze it that portal hovering just past the bridge’s edge begins to flicker again. Then it widens. Brightens. The blue of Earth’s sky has never looked more brilliant.
It feels like all of this takes forever. Like it’s been hours since my friends plummeted over the edge. But a little voice in the back of my head tells me that it’s been mere seconds.
Less, maybe.
There’s still time.
I sprint for the edge. For that portal. I clutch the key more tightly, and I pi
cture an explosion of that brilliant Earth sky, trying to will it to spill and stretch and overtake me. I want nothing except that sky and the dust falling through it, coating my skin as I’m pulled into another world, just like I was pulled into Canath.
Then it happens.
The portal’s edges sweep outward, expanding in every direction.
The dust kicks into a full blown storm, a shimmering twister prepared to suck me up and carry me away.
I jump from the bridge.
And as I fall into the sky, I hope and I pray that I’ve opened the door wide enough that it reaches my friends and carries all of us home.
Epilogue
I have never been so grateful for the sound of cricket song.
It sounds like a hot summer night in the south. Like a background chorus to my pack’s laughter and chatter during bonfire nights and birthday parties and hastily thrown-together cookouts.
It sounds like I’m home.
I’m also alone.
My arms are empty, and when I try to listen for voices, for breathing or nearby beating hearts…There’s nothing.
I want to move, but I ache too badly, and I’m too afraid that I won’t find anything even if I search.
A minute later, I hear footsteps. And then a half-panicked voice—
“Elle? Is that you?”
I can’t answer right away, because the sound of my mom’s voice makes my throat swell and my mind unable to think of anything except a desperate plea: please let this be real. No more illusions. I need her to be real.
She doesn’t wait for my answer before sprinting forward and dropping to her knees beside me.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you move?”
“I’m just a little sore.”
Her hand smooths the hair away from my sweaty face. I’m pretty sure she’s about to ask a million more questions, to take inventory of every inch of my skin and bone in my body. I manage to silence her by pressing my hand to hers.
“I’m fine, Mom. Really.”
My voice is quiet. Overcome with confusion. Pain. Relief. Fear.
Am I really fine?
What happened?
Where are the others?
What happens now?
The questions pound through my head. Then my mom wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her lap. A moment later my dad bursts into the clearing. He visibly sighs with relief before making his way over to us, and I promptly forget about every concern or question I ever had, and I just let myself be held for a bit.
I know there’s a point when most people consider themselves too old, or too cool or whatever, to be held by their parents.
But trust me: a few near-death experiences will make you remember why you enjoyed being held in the first place.
We stay in the embrace for a long time before I feel like I need to move away—not because I want to, but because those questions from before have started to eat their way back into my brain.
“The others…”
“Liam and Carys are nearby,” my mom says. “They were helping us look for you.”
My stomach feels like it does on a roller coaster after getting over the first big hill—like there’s more terror and twists and drops to come, but I least I can unclench and relax a bit.
For the record, I’m not a very big fan of roller coasters.
“And the queen?” I ask.
“Who?”
I stare at the ground, trying to decide if it’s good or bad news that they apparently haven’t seen her.
Did she make it across?
Is she gone, or simply hiding?
“It’s a long story,” I hedge.
“…You don’t have to tell us everything right away,” my mom says softly. “You should rest first.”
I nod. “But there was one more who should have crossed over. He…”
“We know.” My dad’s voice isn’t nearly as soft as mom’s.
“And?”
Mom clears her throat to cut off Dad’s reply, and she offers a hand to pull me to my feet. “And he’s going to be fine, we think. Your Aunt Katie stabilized him as best she could, and they’ve already loaded him up to transport him away from here.”
“Where is here, exactly?” I ask.
“About seventy miles from home, I think? We’re on the edge of the Brushy Mountains. We ran because it was faster, but Vanessa and Katie followed in their cars. We can take Vanessa’s back to the house; you don’t look like you’re up for much running.”
“How did you know where to find me?” I ask as we make our way toward the car.
“Easy,” my dad says, drily. “A few hours ago, the Brushy Mountain Pack contacted us and told us strange things were happening in the skies here, that a possible mess was coming. And at this point we just assume that if there’s a giant mess anywhere, you’re probably involved in some way.” He shoots me a quick, tired grin to let me know he’s only teasing.
Although, let’s be real: he has a point.
I sigh. My mom wraps an arm around me and gives me a little squeeze, and I focus all of my strength on marching away from the scene of my latest mess.
Back at the house, my Aunt Katie and Vanessa both meet us at the front door, sweeping me into multiple bone-crushing hugs
“He’s stable, but asleep,” my Aunt Katie says before I even have a chance to ask about Soren.
I nod, numbly, but I stay on the porch. I want to see him. But I’m scared of what happens when he wakes up. The current moment feels suspended and safe, and I feel like as long as I don’t move into the house, I don’t have to move into the what comes next part of all this.
“Can we talk for just a minute?” Vanessa asks my parents. Her eyes are wide and anxious. Aunt Katie’s face—so strikingly similar to Carys’s—is much more reserved. But fear has a scent, and I can smell it faintly on her.
I hang back as they meander inside to a private sitting room. Nobody seems eager to draw me into the conversation. I don’t have to eavesdrop to know what they’re talking about, or why they aren’t eager for me to join them.
Soren is a Blackwood Sorcerer.
His father is going to want to get him back—he’s going to want him to answer for the things he’s done. For the time he’s spent with me. He’ll want to know what happened in Canath, and where do we even begin to untangle all of this?
And Soren said it himself when we first met: there’s a good chance that, thanks to all of this messy business, his father is going to want him dead.
I sit down on the porch steps, drawing my legs up against me and resting my chin on my knees. I sit there long enough that the sun has time to sink all the way behind the trees. The orange haze of dusk is a little too close to Canath’s twilight for comfort. I bury my face in my knees and try not to think about it. I try not to listen to the discussion going on just inside the house, either.
But that whole supernatural hearing thing makes that kind of impossible.
I hear my dad walk away from the increasingly-heated discussion first. I know he’s coming long before I see him, and by the time he steps onto the porch I’m already tense and prepared for an argument.
“If you kick him out I’m going with him,” I blurt out before he can say anything. “I mean…just so you know. He doesn’t have anyone else. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
He leans against the porch railing. For a long moment, he doesn’t reply, he just lightly raps his knuckles against that railing and lets me sit and think and fidget.
Then he finally says, “You are exactly like your mother. Have I ever told you that?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” my mother says from the doorway.
“Not a bad thing,” he replies. “I just feel like I’ve aged three hundred years since I met you, and Elle is on her way to doubling that number.”
“Then it’s a good thing werewolv
es have such unnaturally long life spans, isn’t it?” She offers him a bright smile, and eventually he gives in and returns it. “Anyway, you can go,” she says, shooing him away. “I’ll handle this.”
He rolls his eyes at her, but a hint of that crooked smile stays on his face as he heads inside.
“He would fight an entire world for you, you know,” my mom says, once he’s been gone for a minute or two. “But making you see reason about teenage boys is where he draws the line, I think.”
“I am seeing reason. And there’s nothing you need to ‘handle’, by the way.”
She fixes me with a withering look.
“I’m just saying,” I insist, “I’ve handled myself well enough the past few weeks.”
“Mmhm.”
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“Yes. And the only reason I haven’t punished you yet is because I’m too busy being grateful about that. But make no mistake, Eleanor—the things you’ve done will have consequences. And not just for you. And that boy—”
“Soren.”
“Soren. If Maric Blackwood discovers that we have his son here…”
She doesn’t need to finish her sentence. We both know the sort of trouble this could get us into—and yet I can’t seem to stop advocating for it.
“What if it was someone you cared about? What if it was dad?” I ramble. “And you know he loves you, and yeah, he did some stupid things, but lots of people have done stupid, cruel things to him, too, and you love him and so you don’t care what sort of mess is around him, or coming after him or whatever—you still want to be a part of it.”
She fidgets with the patch that covers her eye. Fixes a few strands of hair behind her ear. Stares at the ground for a long moment, and then finally says, “You love him?”
For some reason, the question surprises me. Maybe because I said the ‘L’ word without even thinking about it.
And my cheeks are burning and I really don’t want to have this conversation right now, but I can tell by the way Mom’s looking at me that there’s no backtracking at this point. At least her question is easy enough to answer.
“I jumped into a parallel universe for him.”
Silver and Shadow (The Canath Chronicles Book 2) Page 19
