by Jayne Hawke
Alchemy wasn't something I'd ever really looked into. I had my own witch magic, so there really wasn't much need. Alchemy was usually the arena of lower born fae and fae mixes. They had some magic, but not enough to weave the way witches and higher born fae did. From what I understood, alchemy wasn't that dissimilar to witch magic, but it was all potions and such. There was also some weird symbolic stuff going on.
I stepped into the alchemical supply store and immediately felt overwhelmed. The two-storey store was huge. The walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves, and long tables ran down the main body of the room forming aisles. Turning to my left, I began looking at the closest table. It was covered in dainty little dark glass bottles, each with a handwritten label on it.
Baby breath
Summer breeze
Sea breeze
Winter storm
I was getting the impression that I was in the air section. A quick glance at the very long list Elijah had given me for Nia's ingredients showed I needed a few things from there. The dark glass stopped me from being able to feel what was inside, which meant I had to look at each individual bottle. After five minutes I realised that the stoppers were colour coded. The stronger winds and breezes were black. The delicate bits like baby breath were pale blue. Those in between were various increasingly darker shades of grey and blue.
"Ok, so I'm looking for black stoppers," I muttered to myself.
I felt like an idiot and completely out of my depth. I knew where I stood when I walked into a magic store; everything was simple and familiar.
"Can I help you?" a bubbly blonde woman asked.
I grinned and held out the list.
"Gods yes, please! To say I'm lost is an understatement."
She laughed good naturedly and took the list from me. Slowly her eyebrows rose.
"This is quite the list."
"I'm running errands for a battle alchemist in exchange for a favour," I said.
It wasn't entirely true but enough to hopefully stop more awkward questions being asked. I should have realised that she'd piece together what was being made with all of those things. Too late now.
"Well, this is the air section, so we'll start there." The blonde picked up a large wicker basket. "
I tried to put aside my ego and listen as the woman told me a bit more about what exactly I was dealing with. The urge to get it over and done with so I could return to hunting down the elf grew with each item. Still, I tried to remain polite. There might come a time when a little alchemical knowledge could do me some good.
"I understand that witches use starlight. The closest alchemists can get to that is pieces of fallen stars, asteroids and the like. Of course, that's all very expensive. A small shard will start at five thousand." She held up a piece of black rock the size of my thumbnail. It sat in a hardened clear glass box and was wrapped in a complex security web. "This one, for example, is seven thousand. It will, however, provide the type of explosion that would level an entire city block."
"I'll take it," I said brightly.
That kind of fire power sounded like it could be useful, and surely Nia would be able to break it down into a bunch of smaller bombs. Either way, Kerry would be very pleased.
The blonde gave a stiff nod.
"Remind me, which alchemist did you say you were running errands for?"
I smiled.
"I didn't."
She blanched and began leading me through the aisles between the long tables towards the heavy counter at the back. A rack covered in brightly coloured gift cards caught my eye. Everything else about the store was so grounded and neutral in colour that the neon colours and splashes of vivid jewel tones stood out. I had no doubt that was the entire point.
"Can I see your permit?" Blondie asked.
"Permit?"
"Ingredients with this much fire power and ability to cause destruction require a permit from the lord. Your alchemist friend gave you theirs, didn't they?"
I very much doubted that Nia had any such permit. She didn't strike me as the type to deal with the fae, or even to think that far ahead in business terms.
"Oh, he must have forgotten, I'm sorry. How about I add ten percent onto the total fee, and we call it good?"
"Fifteen percent."
I gritted my teeth and reminded myself just how much that cursed lord was going to pay us once all of this was done.
Twenty-Eight
I handed Nia the very large bag full of alchemical stuff.
"Don't try and blow us up. I might not be a phoenix witch, but I promise I can still inflict a lot of pain."
She nodded.
"Of course, no, I wouldn't. I want to help you bring in the guy who's been killing those poor fae." She rummaged through the bag. "You got the really good stuff. You won't regret it."
Rex had covered the dining table in food. There were a variety of cakes, three types of sandwiches, roast potatoes, two sweet pies, one savoury pie, chicken wings, and a variety of other foods.
"What? I didn't know how long it would be until we had the kitchen again."
"Oh, pie!" Jess said.
"Nia's doing her alchemical thing so try and let her work," I said.
"Bombs?" Jess asked hopefully.
"Lots of bombs," I confirmed.
She let out an excited squee. This was going to end badly.
After an hour spent trying to find the cursed elf and failing, I decided it was a reasonable time to go for a run around the forest. Everything was starting to piss me off. Trying to find people who were hiding from us when all of my resources were working for the enemy was difficult and really annoying. It wasn't as though I'd shorted these people. I made sure to pay a fair price for all of the information I got, and I rarely broke their bones.
"Hold on, I'll join you," Elijah said from the doorway.
I paced around the small garden while Elijah pulled his shoes on. The sun would set soon. The shadows were already starting to elongate. Normal people wouldn't dare go into the fae forest after dark, but I really needed to let off some steam. A not-so-small part of me was hoping that a fae creature started some shit so I could punch them in the nose.
"I need to decide how to handle my contacts after this is done with," I said as Elijah walked up to me.
"Jess is all for kicking their asses."
"No surprises there. I don't think that beating the shit out of them is going to help anything in the long term. I refuse to start paying them more. Some of them are already truly extortionate."
We crossed the border into the fae forest, and the air chilled around us. It was livelier than I'd been expecting. Soft bird songs could be heard surrounding us. They weren't like normal earth birds which were all chirps and tweets. These were something smoother. It tickled my ears and almost reminded me of mermaid song. Trust the fae to have adorable little songbirds that lured people in. I couldn't say that I wanted to get into a fight with a flock of songbirds. They were small enough to be difficult to hit, and I bet that they had some impressive magic packed into those tiny bodies.
A hedgehog that wasn't quite a hedgehog scurried across the path in front of us. Its deep blue quills shivered at us in warning, making a rattling chittering sound. The little beast looked at us with blood-red eyes and bared needle-sharp teeth at us before ambling on its way. I swore that the creatures within the forest were getting meaner looking. Given that the forest was directly constructed by the lord and fit his whims, I had a feeling that was a bad thing. It could be a sign of his getting pissed off with how things were going in the territory. Given our current ties to him and the overall situation, I hoped that wasn't the case.
As the sun set at our back, long shadows were cast in front of us. They were going to be beautiful, but before they had time to be they vomited dark-robed men with no visible faces who immediately rushed Elijah and I on silent feet. Their movements were quick and certain, their forms drifting almost entirely out of existence when they touched the shadows. Their weapon
s were formed of shadow, the same method I used rather than the more perfected art of the jaguar guardians. They stepped from shadow to shadow, trying to keep us off balance while they made their rather haphazard advance and failing simply because they had to pause and concentrate to shadowstep.
“Keep them moving. This won’t take long,” I said to Elijah, pulling down shadow for armor and weapons.
It was nice to be able to get some use out of those abilities again. I’d had far too many high-risk encounters with one hand behind my back lately. Keeping secrets was dangerous work. I formed a katana from the first shadow and ninja-esque protection from the other, earning myself a smirk from my beloved. I stuck my tongue out and him and stepped back into a shadow behind me, instantly disappearing and reappearing on the far side of the clearing, lopping the head off a monk preparing for a much less impressive teleportation of his own. His body slowly tipped forward, blood as black as the shadow it fell in draining into the soil beneath.
Two monks appeared on either side of me, their weapons already poised to strike, and I reflexively stepped through the shadows again, coming out beside Elijah and making a long strike up the spine of a monk a fraction of a second before Elijah could land a killing blow of his own. I laughed at him, bouncing away as he huffed in frustration. I landed in a safe spot, taking a brief moment to survey the battle, and found the enemy entirely in disarray. Whatever they had expected to find here, I wasn’t it. Some of them were trying to advance on Elijah in a disorganized mass, others were sticking to their shadows and trying to follow my progress with the dogged determination of someone who is so utterly out of ideas that they’ve simply stopped thinking.
I made a series of shadowsteps, striking down a half dozen monks in sequence, the men dead in as many heartbeats. It was clear that they were used to relying on the shock of their – our - unheard-of abilities and the mobility afforded them by shadowstepping that their opponents couldn’t match. Facing another shadow caster, especially one with more control over shadow than them, they weren’t even on the level of mid-tier mercs.
With most of the battlefield cleared, I turned my attention back to Elijah to find him being overwhelmed by monks. His weapons couldn’t penetrate the shadow-formed robes. Where my shadow weapon went through them like soft cloth, his steel was running into the same problem that so many opponents had faced when fighting me – shadow just didn’t react the way natural armor would. It didn’t transfer energy to the wearer, it couldn’t be readily split with heavy blows. Without a magical way past it, his sword and his shifted wolf attributes were defensive at best, a hindrance at worst.
I made to shadowstep to his side and found I couldn’t. I tried to run to him and couldn’t move my legs. The shadows were holding me, perfectly gentle but immovable. It was like a nightmare, only without the tangled intangibility that makes that state survivable. Elijah was fighting well, adjusting his tactics to rely on grapples and throws, returning fully human and dropping his sword. I had none of my charms on me, and that meant the only magic I could rely on was what was around us. Life from the trees, earth from the ground, air from the breeze. I scrabbled at it all and found that my magical grasp ended with the shadows. Everything I touched seemed to be coated in a viscous film of it, the sensation of the magic indistinct and unreachable.
He sent the monks sprawling again and again, buying time, and I couldn’t help feeling like I was wasting that time. I was still perfectly calm, unnaturally serene like a man drowning in calm waters. I tried to get angry, to draw on my passions to give me strength, but there was nothing. I could only paw helplessly at the unreachable magic and stand perfectly still and placid while he died.
The goddess’ whisper came as no surprise. It was inchoate darkness, flashes of shadow and light, arhythmic and patternless but not without meaning. It reminded me of the shadowy megaminds whose occasional involvement in my life continued to be the strangest experiences I could imagine. Maybe she taught them to talk. For that matter, maybe they taught her. Where they pushed ideas through silent telepathy, she spoke in an unintelligible flow of visual noise that carried meaning the way a radio signal carries the greatest hits from the 80s, 90s, and today; it triggered the concept of meaning within the mind even without holding any meaning of its own, as if my brain was a receiver that my mind used to translate staccato darkness into meaningful dialect.
What she said was almost subconscious, as simple and potent as the knowledge of self. All she had to say was power. What she had, what she was, what she wanted, what she deserved, what she contained, what she offered, what she could take, and what she could give. My mate was in her power, and if I wanted him then I wanted her power. I got the message, but she hadn’t sent the one she thought she had. The message was power.
The power of shadows wasn’t what she was communicating, it was what she was literally saying, the medium and the message and the speaker. Just as a radio wave can be interpreted as signal or absorbed as energy, so could her message and herself. I gathered it as I would any magic, pressed it into a little ball in my hands, gently pressed it together with the shadow of the tree, the dark blood of the monks, the very flesh of the goddess herself. I continued to let her speak, continued to take on her message of power, continued to devour and devise, and by the time she realized that she had given me too much it was far, far too late.
I spread wide the magic of my dead coven and along the lattice of it I lay a demigoddess worth of shadow, more magic than I’d ever seen in one place, and when I let it go the shape it had formed was without name or limitation, an infinitely loyal creature of stunning intellect and strength existing in dimensions I couldn’t hope to understand. The shadow was power and power could make of itself what it wished. My lattice gave it room to be, independence from the terrible, greedy goddess that was all it had ever known, and its first act was to rend apart the monks attacking its new pack.
As it did, it obliterated the shadows of the trees, leaving the entire area blank, the absence of light where the trees stood between the sun and the ground no longer covered by shadow, merely by a ghostly dimness like a screen door. The area fell silent as the fight ended, the only sound my breath and Elijah’s. The birdsong slowly returned, but it sounded different now. No longer was it a gentle serenade meant to lure other creatures in, now it was a song of mourning and war. The goddess was gone, and I realized she’d never really been here. The woman I’d seen the night I was nearly sacrificed had been her. This had merely been a message conveyed in shadow. A message I had made into a weapon and a friend. A message she would regret for the rest of her life.
Elijah stared at it, and he was unafraid. It was speaking to him as the goddess spoke to me, and whatever it said was for him alone. I was jealous, overwhelmingly so, jealous that it shared a bond I couldn’t, jealous that I had made it and only seconds after it was born it already had secrets it would only share with him. I dismissed the thought, but it didn’t go away.
We walked inside in silence. There was nothing to say, nothing that could be put into words that wouldn’t seem trite and plain after what we had just witnessed. He followed me into the hall outside my bedroom, which I guess was now my old bedroom since we were sharing space now, where a full mirror stood. I turned on the light and saw that the shadow creature had it settled behind my head in something that wasn’t quite a disc. I could almost feel it thinking, being, could feel it acting and interacting with things on levels of existence that I could neither visit nor fathom. The halo I had gained was only the tiniest part of a massive being existing almost entirely on the shadow plane, one which rivaled even the megaminds.
I pushed my mind towards it the way I did towards other shadows and found its responses cogent if tentative. Its name was Infinity, and it would be there forever. I asked it to hide, and it slid up under my hair without disturbing a single lock. I turned my head and found that it was entirely invisible. I didn’t realize how worried I’d been about its bringing a witch hunt down on my head
when someone noticed that I had a new accessory that happened to be undeniable proof of the existence of shadow witches.
I turned to Elijah and smiled for the first time and he smiled back, looking relieved.
Twenty-Nine
"What happened?" Liam asked.
He was standing in the kitchen near Nia with half a doughnut in his hand.
"The goddess sent some shadow priests to find us.”
This day been a long time coming, but that didn't make me any happier about it. Knowing that the being who had saved my life and turned me into the hardened fighter that I was, was also my biggest enemy would never be something that sat well with me. How could it? Castor was in the back of my mind as I retrieved a healing potion for Elijah and a pixie dust brownie for myself. How involved was he in all of this? Exactly how much did he know?
"You killed them all, I assume," Rex said as he walked into the room.
He began rummaging around in the cupboard where we kept the cereal and baking things.
"Of course," I said.
Rex nodded.
"You're concerned what this means for the safety of the pack," Liam said.
I sighed. And there it was. She was a goddess; no security system was going to keep her out if she really wanted in. That was the problem, though, what exactly did she want? Yes, she'd sent those shadow priests after us, but she must have known what I was capable of. She must have known my limits, my skills and talents. They were nothing more than cannon fodder. We needed to know what was coming for us, what sat on the horizon. Only we had no way to do that, and you can't prepare for what you don't know.
