Darkness Within

by Carli Castle

  That was all he really knew about them, mostly because he didn’t take much interest in plants unless he was going to use them for something. His mother said it was a waste he didn’t like them more, since he had a green thumb.

  Literally.

  Whenever Lucas was feeling particularly happy, he made things grow out of nowhere. His hands would turn green, and there had been times in which he’d even sprouted leaves out of his fingers. They went away, eventually, but it had been more than a shock the first time it happened and he couldn’t make it go away. That first time, his mother had tried to get him into gardening, but he’d lost interest quickly. She had been disappointed, probably because she was extremely good at taking care of plants, and enjoyed it, too.

  Since both his mother and father were into making potions, they both grew most of their own herbs. His mother was a brilliant potioneer and sold potions to shops all over the United Realms and to particular citizens right out of her apothecary, while his father was a renowned healer.

  The shuffling of other fairies coming to join the first one brought him back to the present.

  “What would happen if some fell on me,” he asked the girl, who was the obvious leader of the group. The others flocked around her and began grabbing pouches from her. They were all really small in stature, not more than five feet, though they were all of varying sizes and shapes. They were dressed similarly to each other and he wondered if that was customary, or just because it was a fashion thing. He’d never had the guts to ask one of them. Fairies were pretty feisty.

  “You’ll grow horns and likely turn yellow. It hurts, but it’s mostly just really sad to look at,” she responded and looked at the girls with a frown. “Calm down, there’s enough for everyone! Where in the world is Lana? Second week of work and that girl is nowhere in sight!”

  “Late again,” one of the other fairies said before she walked away.

  “Have a nice day,” he murmured, mostly to himself as he started walking away. He turned briefly as he began making his way through the trees, watching as a group of the fairies turned into their working size, which was no taller than the length of his hand, and sprouted see-through wings. They were throwing the shimmering dust onto the berry bushes as they talked among one another, which almost sounded like birds chirping. He turned back to pay attention to where he was going.

  He made his way deeper into the forest, seeing other shimmering wings everywhere he looked. If only he enjoyed his job as much as the fairies obviously enjoyed theirs, life would be a lot less boring. Maybe it had to do with the fact that they worked in groups and got to know each other well. Also, they tended to be similar in age, and that was also nice, since they could relate to each other. Or so he assumed.

  When he was about ready to teleport to Mount Blanche, which was where the council building was located, he stopped, his ear twitching a little.

  Something was not right.

  It was in the prickling of his skin, that crawl that went up his back, to his neck, and into his scalp. It was a dark feeling. He felt as if a physical weight had settled itself in his chest.

  Walking forward by instinct, he peered around the trees and saw nothing, but the feeling deep in his gut told him something was wrong. He didn’t know where it came from, and why he was so sure there was something wrong. He just knew it. There was a flash in his mind, quick and dark, and he took slow steps forward, heart hammering somewhere around his throat and ears.

  Then the smell hit him.

  That metallic, pungent, almost sweet smell of blood.

  The wave of nausea came as expected, but he held his breath for a moment before he actually started to feel faint, because… well, because he was a little squeamish. He didn’t like the smell, nor the sight of blood, and he was sure there was a large amount of it around that area.

  He breathed in through his mouth, going around a wide trunk of a tree. There was a slight breeze, but it wasn’t cold. It was strangely warm for the chill that hung in the air. The more he walked forward, the warmer it felt.

  He’d never been the brave one; he actually considered himself a huge coward in a sense, but he couldn’t just walk away pretending this feeling inside him was nothing.

  He wasn’t even moving very fast, but sweat was running down his back and beading on his upper lip and forehead. He could have been running a marathon, for the way his heart was hammering against his chest.

  He continued forward, silently begging some unseen power that he would just see a dead deer, or some other animal that had become the victim of a natural predator.

  But it wasn’t a dead deer. His heart dropped when he stepped around another large trunk and saw the very thing his gut had been telling him was there, but his head refused to believe.

  That morning he’d woken up complaining on how boring his life was, how he longed to do other things, find some excitement. And now, here he stood, wishing he could continue to complain about the ordinariness of his life. Instead, he was standing among hundreds of trees, looking down at a young woman lying in a pool of her own blood, her eyes staring straight into the leafy green above her, unseeing.

  Lucas stumbled back, spots dancing in front of his eyes. His head started spinning, round and round. Turning and stumbling over his own feet, his briefcase fell on the ground, bursting open and paper flying all over the place. He paid no attention to it as he pressed his hands on a trunk, bark biting into his skin, his eyes drawn to the young woman on the ground.

  His skin crawled as if a million bugs ran over it, and heart banging like tribal drums in his chest, he turned and teleported, just as he began to dry-heave at the strong smell of blood.

  As he appeared on Mount Blanche, blind and sick, he could think of nothing else but what he’d just seen. He wasn’t admiring the pristine, white beauty of the hill where the council building stood. Not the curious white bushes, or the patches of white grass, nor the tall trees that surrounded the area, with their fluttering white leaves that looked like fairy wings quivering in the wind.

  “Identify yourself,” a male voice said, and Lucas snapped his gaze to the knight that guarded the doors to the council. He and his partner looked at Lucas with narrowed eyes, but Lucas could only wonder how he had gotten to the top of the stairs. He didn’t remember moving after teleporting to the front of the building. Had he walked up? Ran? He was breathing like he’d been running, but he couldn’t recall.

  The two knights stepped forward.

  “Identify yourself, sir,” one of them said again, but Lucas could only stare at him, his brain failing to process what the man had just said. “Sir, please identify yourself.”

  His mind snapping into working mode, he peeled back the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his forearm. A tattoo, gold and big, of a half moon, half sun with a ring around it and three stars, appeared as if it was drawing itself from under his skin. As soon as the knights acknowledge his right to be there, it disappeared, and Lucas wasted no time as he pushed open the doors before they could open on their own, and nearly stumbled into the vast lobby.

  Callie, the pretty young receptionist he’d been flirting with for the months since she’d been hired, greeted him the same way she always did, with a wide smile and a toss of her shoulder length, blond hair, her hazel eyes warm. He was used to it, and normally he would have been flattered and awkwardly flirted right back, but at the moment she seemed blurred around the edges.

  “How are you today, Lucas,” she asked him in her husky voice.

  “Yeah, is Caleb around,” he asked. His abrupt manner made her smile slide right off her face.

  “Yes, he just walked into his office for a meeting with the High Priests,” she said, clearly using her empathic powers to sense his mood. He felt it like fingers reaching for his subconscious. He really wanted to be annoyed by her violating his privacy that way, but he couldn’t even care about that. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “I need to speak to my brother,” he said instead of answering her
question, continuing on to Caleb’s office at the end of the hall.

  When he got there, he didn’t stop to knock on the heavy, mahogany door, but opened it and entered.

  Caleb was standing in front of his desk, the four High Priests sitting on chairs across from him. There were three men and one woman, who was the leader of the four. They were the presiding members of the Grand Council, which took place somewhere between heaven and earth, as far as Lucas knew. They were all dressed in long, white robes that gleamed ever so slightly. There was a wide circle in the middle of the room, just beyond where they sat, and four spheres placed around the circle. The four spheres each represented one of the four elements, from which Esmeraldans drew magic—earth, water, air, and fire. The circle was glowing dimly. It was where the High Priests appeared when the spheres were used to summon them.

  Althea, the leader, stood from her chair, her face turning a little pink.

  “What insolence is this?” Her nostrils flared like an angry bull being waved a cape. Her hair, which was short, was dark blond, her eyes dark and currently flashing with condemnation at the intrusion. Lucas was pretty sure Althea hated him, but he didn’t really know why. She just carried a lot of animosity toward him from the moment he had begun working at the council, but at that moment, he didn’t care to address that issue at all. Finding a dead girl in the forest was urgent enough that he was pretty sure he would be forgiven the interference.

  Caleb had to know that if Lucas had interrupted so rudely, there was a reason of weight behind it.

  Caleb ignored the glare Althea threw at him, as if she was waiting for him to burn Lucas alive for his intrusion, and just looked at him, his whiskey colored eyes sharp. He looked stressed, and had lines under his eyes; he was tired. Being twenty years old and having served in the council for almost six years, Caleb was the youngest president the council had ever had.

  He was tall at six-feet-two-inches. His physique was strong, rather wiry, but that was because he was of the elven race, though he didn’t look like most elves around the islands. Instead of having completely black, or completely white skin, Caleb was tanned like he spent a lot of time outdoors. That was because Caleb was a mix between someone of one of the elven races—which were Dhara, land of the dark elves, and Meira, land of the light elves—and a sleeper human. Whether his biological mother or father had been the elf in question was the big mystery. Caleb didn’t know it, and neither did anyone else, because Caleb had been given away to an orphanage when he was born. As far as Lucas knew, Caleb was not interested in knowing anyway, since no one had ever claimed him until Lucas’ own father and mother unofficially adopted him when he was eight.

  “Lucas?” Caleb inquired, his voice calm as he continued to ignore Althea, who was now seething. Surely, she was waiting for Lucas to drop to his knees and kiss her feet, begging for forgiveness for his offense.

  She would be waiting for a very long time, if that was the case.

  “Caleb, surely you’re not going to condone this kind of insolent behavior,” Althea said, her voice much calmer than her demeanor suggested.

  “If it weren’t of importance, Lucas would have waited,” Caleb explained to her, making her ears turn a deep shade of red when he turned away from her and faced Lucas.

  “I wonder if you would be this lenient with someone who wasn’t kind of your brother,” she said nastily, but Caleb ignored her again. He was good at ignoring the jabs thrown at him by people that didn’t understand adoption. The man really had the patience of a saint, unlike Althea.

  How someone with such a bad temper had such an important job, Lucas would never know. Then again, he had a spot in the council, so maybe whoever was making the decisions was just a moron.

  Lucas wasn’t the kind of person to anger easily, he’d learned to control his anger for fear of letting that fire power surface again, and nor was he confrontational at all. But right then, he turned to her and looked at her squarely in the face.

  “He isn’t kind of my brother, High Priestess, thank you very much. Also, I just found someone dead in the middle of the forest, so I thought that was pressing enough to interrupt any meeting,” Lucas told her, but he wasn’t even satisfied to see her face fall, the color draining away. He just wanted to get them to the girl and wait for her soul to come back and tell them who had done that to her.

  “Murder?” One of the men said. Lucas didn’t see which one.

  “Yes, as in blood everywhere.” Lucas made stabbing notions with his fist. Althea wrinkled her nose.

  “Where exactly did this happen,” Caleb asked, already writing a note, which Lucas assumed was for the palace, and went to open a window. He whistled and a raven flew to the windowsill. Caleb tied the letter to its leg and it flew off.

  “I think it’s pretty close to my house,” he responded.

  “You think?” Althea sneered.

  “Yes, I think, High Priestess. I was a bit worried about finding a young woman killed, not so much about calculating distances,” Lucas shot at her, fed up with her attitude toward him. Did she not understand the severity of the issue at hand? Someone had been killed!

  “Who,” Caleb asked, doing a grand job of patiently ignoring the sparks of anger between Althea and Lucas.

  “I have no idea. All I can tell you is that it’s a girl, possibly a fairy, but I’m not sure.” He remembered the fairy he met that morning, and how she was asking for someone. Could it be that missing fairy?

  A knock on the door had Caleb walking toward it and poking his head through. Lucas heard Callie’s muffled voice for a moment before Caleb closed the door again. There was a piece of paper in his hands, which he opened and read.

  “We are to see King Patrick as soon as we visit the scene.”

  All six of them walked outside and teleported straight to where Lucas had found the young woman. His heart still skipped a beat when they got there, because for a brief moment, he had hoped it had all been a figment of his imagination.

  Soon enough, there were many other people at the scene, investigators, knights, and forensic empaths. The High Priests left to wherever it was they went to, leaving the council to find out what had happened and report immediately.

  They waited and waited for the young woman’s soul to return for her declaration, but she never did. It usually happened within a couple of hours of the death, but now, it was the middle of the afternoon, and nothing.

  Lucas tried to stay back from the scene, and though the girl had just been taken away, his eyes were drawn to where she had been. There was blood, a lot of it, where her body had lain. He found himself wondering what kind of injury could make someone bleed like that.

  She had been so young, seventeen, the investigators had said.

  Lucas watched Caleb run his hands over his hair, which was a lot longer than their mother would have approved. It reached past his collar, wavy and dark, his pointy ears poking through its thickness.

  His brother looked run down, and who wouldn’t be? Esmeralda was a safe place, stuff like this didn’t happen. People didn’t appear murdered in the middle of a forest, thrown there like animals. Even when a crime was committed, if someone ended up dead, the culprit wouldn’t get far, because the soul of the deceased would appear and name them. It was the perfect criminal justice system.

  While he stood there, waiting for the moment when he could leave and wondering if he was ever going to get his briefcase back, Lucas realized the life he had wasn’t so dull after all. He had a job, he was alive, and he had a family, friends, and even his own home! Sure, he hadn’t been able to travel yet, but that didn’t have to be forever. He didn’t want to ever find the body of another innocent lying in a pool of their own blood as if they were nothing more than an animal.

  No one deserved to die that way, alone, probably scared. He turned away from the scene, ready to walk away. He couldn’t handle looking at it anymore, even if the body had already been taken away, and thought this was not the kind of excitement he had been ima
gining when he pictured what his life would be some day. Definitely not this.

  Chapter Two

  Lucas’s mind was fuzzy as he and Caleb teleported to the palace after they left the scene of the crime. He was exhausted, both mentally and physically. All he wanted was to go to bed and stay there for a week. Maybe longer.

  The girl had been identified as Lana Juren. She’d been seventeen and barely starting to work as a spring fairy. It was only her second week of work.

  It shouldn’t have been possible for it to get any harder, but knowing she was so young made it so. His heart felt heavy for her and her family, especially because there was no way to know who had killed her, or why. It was confusing that her soul hadn’t turned up to communicate with them. That never happened. No one was more interested in getting a murderer caught than the murdered.

  They had no answers for her family, which was probably the worst part about everything. And yet, they were on their way to meet her parents.

  To say he was dreading that was an understatement. He didn’t want to look at them face to face and tell them they had nothing. What if they were the kind of citizen that complained about his uselessness for the council? He would have to stand there and have absolutely no answers for them.

  And there he was, focusing on himself when he should be thinking about them. It was not his loss, it was theirs. If he had to face them, then he would, because no one was having a more difficult time than Lana’s family.