Chapter 26
Quinn
The lemonade cut through the worst of the heat, the perfect mix of sweet and sour as it slid down my throat, but it left my mouth sticky. I swallowed, looking around at the three sorcerers who’d offered it to me.
Ivan had stuck close to his wife, who’d introduced herself as Jenny. The older woman—the apparent matriarch over this small community—was Victoria. A few other figures had emerged from the buildings to listen in on our conversation, but they hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves.
I still didn’t feel exactly welcome in their midst. I clutched the strap of my messenger bag with my free hand, fretting briefly that my vest was showing under my shirt and they’d wonder about my weird fashion choices, as if that was what really mattered.
“Is this normal?” I found myself saying, thinking of my donor’s family with their house in the Florida wilderness. “All of you living off in the middle of nowhere together? Doesn’t it get kind of lonely?”
Victoria shrugged. “We have other properties in other places, in cities and towns or at least closer to them. This spot was meant for when we’re harnessing a new demon and making sure they’re fully under control, or simply to gather the extended family together. But with recent events… We’ve felt it’s better to stay here where we can be more sure of our safety for a while.”
“Where are you from?” Jenny asked, watching me curiously. I wondered if she’d ever met a sorcerer who didn’t understand their powers before me.
It seemed unwise to mention my actual home state in case these people had heard about all the chaos shadowkind had been creating over there. “California,” I said instead, which was at least true of where I’d most immediately come from. “Near L.A.”
Victoria hummed to herself. “I don’t know of any major established families operating around that city, but there are a lot more small-time practitioners who don’t mingle much with the community. Although I wouldn’t have expected you to have trouble with an emerging power you hadn’t meant to call on if your parents weren’t particularly skilled.” Her eyes narrowed.
“Is it about skill?” I asked quickly. “From the things they wrote, it sounded like it’s something that just… wakes up in you and almost tells you how to use it. Which sounds really weird. And I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
“There are strategies for getting more in touch with the power,” Ivan put in. “Meditation and that sort of thing. And also…” He paused.
I focused on him, hiding my eagerness. The other sorcerer had already mentioned meditation to me, but maybe this group knew something more. “Also?”
He glanced at his mother, and Victoria gave a short laugh as if amused that he was deferring to her. She gave me a thin smile. “You do understand exactly what it is that we do, don’t you?”
“You… you get control over the monsters that can come out of the shadows,” I said. “You can tell them what to do, and they have to do it. Make them use their supernatural powers for your benefit and things like that.”
“That’s the gist of it. Well, this won’t matter until you’re confident enough to fully harness one of those monsters. And many practitioners dismiss this aspect because they feel it’s abasing ourselves when we should hold ourselves much higher than the creatures we command. But we’ve always found, and I know other families who feel similarly, that you can wield your power much more effectively the better you’ve familiarized yourself with the demon.”
I held my eyebrows from rising. “Familiarize yourself how?”
She waved a hand carelessly as if it didn’t matter much. “Oh, however makes you feel you’re developing a better understanding of them. When I’ve taken on a new subject, I’ll spend hours in our training room with it, giving it free rein other than making sure it doesn’t harm me, watching its behavior. Ivan takes his on hunts and shares the meal with them. Jenny likes to draw and paint hers. There’s a sort of closeness that can develop that seems to bring forth more of the power.”
Huh. I hadn’t tried communing with the creatures Rollick had brought around. But then, neither he nor I had known there’d be any point in trying. The first sorcerer hadn’t mentioned that strategy. “So that just works for the one creature you’re studying, right?”
“That’s where you’ll see the greatest effect,” Ivan said, his tone getting more enthusiastic. “But we’ve found that making those sort of connections makes it easier to control others as well. Partly because you need less effort to keep the ones you’ve developed a deeper understanding of under your control so you have more energy to expend elsewhere, but I think also because you understand monstrousness in general better.”
“I’m not so sure about the last part,” Jenny said, giving him a teasing nudge of her elbow before meeting my eyes again. “It definitely helps just in freeing up energy, though.”
Interesting, even if it wasn’t advice I ever expected to put into practice. “Thank you,” I said, riffling through my thoughts for the next question I’d want to ask. “Is there any?—”
Victoria stiffened so abruptly that my mouth snapped shut around the words I’d been going to say. Her head jerked around, her gaze darting across the terrain beyond the settlement, around where I’d parked the jeep. I swiveled, following her gaze.
The landscape was draped in shadows cast by the tall cliff to the west. I couldn’t make anything out, but Victoria had obviously sensed something.
“Into the houses,” she shouted abruptly. “Everyone, now. Call whatever creatures you can to our protection.”
With the last words, she was already racing toward one of the buildings, Jenny and Ivan right behind her. The other sorcerers darted off toward their own homes. I hurried after the three I’d talked to, but as I reached the door, Victoria spun around, motioning her son and daughter-in-law past her.
“You brought them with you,” she hissed. “They followed you here. How else could they have found us right now?”
“What? I?—”
Then the first shadowkind beasts lunged out of the shadows at the edges of the courtyard. As the monsters charged toward us, Victoria slammed the door in my face. The other doors had already banged shut all around me.
My stomach flipped over. I couldn’t tell her that the monsters who’d been killing sorcerers had already been close to finding her before I’d ever come here, or I’d have to explain how I knew that, and I didn’t think knowing I was chummy with some other monsters would endear me to her either.
There was no point in running toward the jeep. I’d have to push through a horde of shadowkind to get there, and they didn’t look at all friendly. My heart thudding, I shoved myself around the side of the house. The lemonade glass slipped from my hand and shattered on the ground, but I didn’t have time to think about that.
A shovel was leaning against a shed around the back. I dashed to it and grabbed it, knowing it wouldn’t give me much protection but that it might at least buy me a minute or two in fending the creatures off. The shed itself was locked, so I braced my back against it, brandishing the shovel with one hand and groping in my pocket. Would the larger steak knife or the smaller silver blade offer more protection? I had no idea.
Had my monstrous men seen the coming onslaught? Were they on their way to get me out of here, or was I completely on my own?
How the hell was I getting out of this if they couldn’t make it to me?
I clenched my jaw even as my pulse thundered past my ears. I wasn’t going to be a useless mortal. I’d fend for myself as long as I could. I dug the silver pen-dagger out of my pocket and held it and the shovel ready.
The monsters that’d surged into the courtyard hardly seemed to notice me back by the shed, though. Hinges squealed and doors groaned as they hurtled themselves at the entrances to the houses. I flinched at the resounding crashes as one and another door fell. Someone inside one of the homes screamed.
Shit. I didn’t want to see another family murdered. But I wasn’t even sure I could defend myself, let alone the sorcerers who’d left me to my own devices.
A few smaller creatures veered my way. One that was shaped like an armored greyhound sped toward me with teeth gnashing.
As it reached me, I swung the shovel at its head and sent it flying across the dusty ground. Another beast leapt at my elbow, I whipped around to bash it away—and brawny arms with the feel of sun-warmed granite wrapped around me from behind.
“I’ve got you,” Crag said in the deeper, gravelly rumble of his gargoyle voice. It was the most welcome sound I’d ever heard in my life.
I leaned into him, dropping the shovel and letting him take my weight. He hefted me against his chest, pushed off the ground?—
And a bright green blur of motion launched itself at us from around the side of the building.
Crag yanked himself around before I could fully comprehend what was happening. His body lurched, and the grunt that jolted out of him told me he’d been hurt by whatever had hit him. It’d almost looked like?—
“Lance!” he roared, and I choked on my own spit. How could the dragon shifter be attacking him—us. He would never?—
The gargoyle jerked and growled, striking out with one arm while the other held me close. The answering snarl was far too familiar. A chill rippled through me as I remembered Torrent’s remark about how it’d be easier for the sorcerers to bring Lance under their control because he’d been affected by that kind of magic before.
Easier for them… and easier for the shadowkind beings now wielding sorcerous magic too?
“Lance!” I cried out in an echo of Crag’s protest, as if my voice would be able to penetrate the spell.
Crag tried to lift off the ground again, only to stumble with a ragged breath. When I looked up, I saw his smoky blood streaming off him like when the beasts had attacked us in the sky before. More shrieks and ragged shouts were carrying from the buildings near us, but all I could focus on was my wounded gargoyle and my dragon shifter turned rabid.
A sob caught in my throat. This couldn’t be happening. Was there anything I could do to stop it?
Crag staggered, nearly dropping me. As my feet hit the ground, I clutched his neck to make it easier for him to sweep me up again if he could. Then a sinewy appendage whipped past us with a fleshy smack.
Torrent had emerged from the shadows to fight alongside us. Crag pushed closer to the shed, turning around enough that I made out Lance in his dragon form snapping and raking his claws across the tentacles Torrent had flung at him. The other man had even transformed his arms so he could maneuver four tentacles at once while two continued holding his legs steady.
One lithe appendage smacked the dragon shifter into the ground, but Lance rolled and sprang back to his feet in an instant, nimble as ever. A burst of flame erupted from his lips, and Torrent flicked one tentacle to the side before it was totally charred. The burgundy skin bubbled with a fresh burn.
Crag took in our surroundings and set me down. “Stay here,” he growled. “Call for me if any more come.” Then he leapt in to help Torrent subdue Lance.
He wasn’t quite fast enough. Just before he pounced, the dragon managed to clamp its jaws shut on the end of one of Torrent’s tentacles. The sinuous flesh ripped with a meaty sound that made my gut churn.
“No!” The protest burst from my mouth, and I was darting forward before I could think better of it. Torrent wobbled backward with smoke gushing from his mangled tentacle, Crag pummeled Lance into the ground, and the dragon shifter let out a screech as if the gargoyle was crushing his chest.
But it was still him. It was still Lance. It wasn’t his fault—they couldn’t kill him.
“Lance!” I shouted, my hands waving through the air like some kind of maniac. “Lance, it’s us. We’ve got you. Just—if you can just stop fighting?—”
I was maybe five feet away when the dragon somehow managed to squirm out from under Crag’s massive body. He threw himself straight at me, eyes searing and jaws snapping.
I teetered backward, and Crag hurtled between us with a roar. One thick, rock-like hand whipped toward me to shove me to the side and clocked me across the face.
I crashed to the ground, blood bursting from a split lip, pain radiating through my jaw and cheekbone. Crag pounded Lance with his other fist, ramming him in the opposite direction. He pinned the dragon shifter down, and Torrent rushed over as fast as his unsteady legs could carry him. He whipped one tentacle against the top of Lance’s skull, and the dragon finally sagged, temporarily knocked unconscious.
“We have to get out of here,” Torrent said roughly, twining another tentacle around my waist and yanking me to them. Crag flung Lance’s limp body over his shoulder, snatched me from Torrent, and sprang into the air as the tentacled man vanished into the shadows again.
I could barely think as the ground fell away beneath my feet and the wind gusted over my bruised face. The screams behind me had stopped—when had they petered out? I couldn’t hear anything now except faint snaps and snarls.
Crag dipped and bobbed in the air, obviously struggling, but before I’d gotten my thoughts totally straight, he was landing on a ledge partway up the nearest cliff. The yawning darkness of a narrow cave loomed beyond him. He set me down in a sitting position and then really looked at me for the first time since the fight had started.
Unmistakable horror flashed across his monstrous face. He shifted back into man-like form in a blink, kneeling beside me. “Quinn, I—I didn’t mean to?—”
“I know,” I said, and winced at the brush of my split lip against the upper one. I pressed the side of my hand to the wound and swayed to my feet. “I’ll be okay. You—he really went at you?—”
“It’ll heal,” Crag muttered, still looking agonized by my minor injury even as more smoke wavered up off his own back. Then Torrent reappeared behind us in the thicker darkness of the cave.
“We need to make sure Lance is restrained in case the effect of the sorcery hasn’t worn off when he comes to,” he said, his voice taut with strain. “Quinn, watch for any shadowkind coming this way. I don’t know if they noticed us leaving—they seemed… occupied.”
I whirled toward the mouth of the valley, backing into the shadows at the mouth of the cave as I did to reduce the chance of being seen. My messenger bag still hung from my back, and I clung to its strap across my chest with both hands. I’d lost my silver pen-dagger somewhere in the chaos, but it hadn’t helped much anyway.
The other shadowkind couldn’t sense me here, not with my vest on. That might be the only reason I was still alive. Lance had known about the magic I possessed, and those few minor beasties who’d come at me must have gotten it into their heads to attack any human who might interfere, but all the others had been focused on the sorcerers they could detect.
Most of the shadowkind from the attack must have merged back into the shadows. I couldn’t make out many moving bodies in the courtyard through the dimness of what was now approaching twilight. Light streaked over the darkened ground from a few windows on the houses, but no forms moved through that illumination either.
A sickly chill wrapped around me like a wet sheet. They were all dead. Victoria, Ivan, Jenny, their relatives whose names I’d never gotten. Even the little boy, Jonah. Slaughtered by those creatures.
I knew the men shuffling around in the cave behind me might not mourn them. They’d hardly been kind to me as soon as trouble had arrived, and they’d been a human sort of monsters to the shadowkind they’d enslaved. But I couldn’t shake the horror creeping through me.
They’d never be as monstrous as the actual monsters because they could simply never wield as much or as many different types of power. And now our opponents had merged the one human supernatural skill with all their innate abilities, to the point that they’d managed to control even Lance. I swallowed thickly.
Then something prickled through my senses, making me go perfectly still without understanding why. I peered through the valley for several seconds before the feeling became solid enough for me to focus on its source.
Something was coming. Something I couldn’t see but that made the energy embedded in my heart jump and stutter like never before. Instinctively, I pulled the vest tighter against my chest as if that could ensure nothing out there picked up on my reaction.
There was another shadowkind down there, one that had only just arrived. One powerful enough to set all my nerves jangling. It must have slipped into one of the houses, because all at once a huge silhouette formed by one of the windows, blotting out most of the light.
The massive shape bent down, and the fleshy tearing sound that followed was violent enough that my ears caught a trace of it even across that distance. Or maybe I only imagined I did, knowing what must be happening.
That was one of the ringleaders. One of the powerful shadowkind Rollick had warned me I might have to face was devouring the sorcerers’ organs and absorbing their powers, like it must have many before. A shiver passed through me, and I cringed deeper into the cave.
I couldn’t tell how quickly the being passed from building to building, but I never got the impression that it so much as looked our way. I hadn’t left anything behind except for the jeep, and maybe it would assume that’d belonged to the sorcerers living there. I didn’t think the shadowkind invaders had followed us, because then they’d have focused on capturing me, not killing everyone else. It’d just been horrible luck that they’d managed to track down the sorcerers’ settlement so soon after the attack on the hotel.
Or maybe this group had never been involved in that attack to begin with. The men had figured that there were at least two beings in charge. One could have gone to confront Rollick while the other continued searching for more sorcerers to snack on.
Just when I thought I couldn’t get queasier, a shrill weeping that I definitely wasn’t imagining split through the evening. I leaned forward again, my heart in my throat, squinting at the settlement.
A mostly human-shaped being, though not the huge one I’d seen in the houses, was dragging a small, squirming form out of one of the buildings. I swallowed thickly, my stomach heaving.
It was Jonah. I didn’t need to make out the details of his appearance to be able to tell from his size and his alternately sobbing and pleading voice. That was the house Jenny had sent him into.
The shadowkind attackers hadn’t killed him. They were taking him—carrying him away now as they hurried at a brisk lope up the road. What the?—
Rollick’s words came back to me. These fiends had wanted me because I was a human with sorcerer powers they could hope to influence, one who hadn’t already been taught to ward off the shadowkind. Were they planning on using that little boy the same way they’d hoped to use me?
Someone moved beside me. I startled in the instant before I realized it was Torrent. He stopped next to me and stared out over the valley.
“They’re leaving,” I said. The ominously large presence I’d sensed was fading away, and the few shadowkind still in physical form were scurrying back the way they’d come. “They took the little kid. I think—I think they’re going to try to make him their pet sorcerer like they wanted to do with me.”
Torrent’s mouth twisted. He reached for me as if automatically and then caught himself. I glanced over at him, and my chest hitched.
His hand. His right hand—the smallest two fingers were torn right off. The other two and the thumb were a mangled mess, distorted above the mashed mess of his palm. Even his wrist looked battered.
“You—” I stared with a fresh rush of anguish.
Torrent jerked his hand out of view. “It can’t be helped,” he said sharply. “I’ve made other accommodations. I can deal with this.”
Lance had done that. Lance had mutilated Torrent’s human-like body even more than it already was when he’d torn into his tentacle. Oh, God.
These men had come out here for me. They’d come out here to help me get answers, and now Lance’s mind had been stolen from him all over again, Crag had been forced to hurt both his friend and me to get us out of there, and Torrent had lost even more of his ability to interact with the mortal realm the way he’d used to.
And that poor little boy…
Tears welled up in my eyes. A wrenching but undeniable certainty filled me.
I’d thought I might be able to run away from this horrible situation. To let my problems rip each other apart, to ask some sorcerer expert to carve the power out of me. But every time I tried to escape, the people I cared about got hurt even more. I couldn’t let anyone else suffer on my behalf.
It was my battle too now, as much as I hated that. Which meant I had to face my enemies and fight, or I’d lose even more than I already had.
As that horrible revelation sank in, the faint thrum of an engine wavered through the valley. Torrent frowned, looking toward the road as I did. A dark car had just driven into view from between the cliffs. Even though we were both hidden by the shadows at the cave entrance, we both drew back a little farther, watching warily.
No beings attacked the car, but then, I hadn’t seen any hanging around for at least a few minutes now. It parked next to my jeep. The figure that got out was mostly lost in the thickening darkness, but something about it and its movements struck a chord of recognition in me.
I stared as that figure headed across the terrain, not toward the buildings but toward our mountain. He glanced at something in his hand. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing until he halted about twenty feet from the foot of the cliff and peered up at us with a wry tip of his head.
“Quite the mess you’ve managed to get yourselves into this time, my mutinists,” Rollick said.