Chapter 2
Torrent
It was always disorienting, being back in the shadow realm after a long time away. No color met my gaze, only a seemingly endless darkness, shifting between full blackness and dark grays with random currents. Nothing quite had a physical form—there was nothing exactly to touch or hold on to, although brushing too close to another being traveling through this space sent a prickle through my shadowy body. Only faint scents lingered in the wafting air, cool and almost mineral as if I were back in the cliffside cave I’d recently spent the night in.
How long had it been since I’d returned to what was technically my natural home? Years, definitely. Possibly more than a decade. Nearly all of my work for Rollick had required me to stay mortal side, and I had no interest in dropping in for a visit during my free time. Drifting through this dreary space and testing the quivers of energy that rippled through it was nowhere near as satisfying as a swim in the cool, vibrant depths of the ocean.
I’d have taken a swamp over this place.
As I prowled onward, I couldn’t help thinking that as much as most mortal beings feared us when they met us, we shadowkind had to be meant for their realm. Why else were there so many rifts to give us access to the benefits of their vibrant world with all the variety of sensations it had to offer—portals only we could slip through, that the mortals had no awareness of at all? Why else did we all shift so easily into physical forms when we had the chance to?
We were born of this place, born out of the endless shifting gloom, but I couldn’t believe it was all we were meant for. Whatever inexplicable powers called us into existence, they intended us to belong to the realm beyond the rifts as much as this one.
I just wished I’d understood how fully I could devote myself to that other world before I’d found myself forced back into this one. Maybe I could have convinced her—maybe I could have made her see…
I shook those thoughts aside and hurried onward, scuttling octopus-like with my now-ephemeral tentacles stroking through the darkness.
The others had to be around here somewhere. We’d all rushed toward the same rift, driven by the magic-laced command I could still feel humming through my body. But I hadn’t been able to say or do anything other than give in to that command, and both of my companions could move faster than me through the shadows of the mortal world. I’d lost my sense of them before I’d even hurtled through the rift.
A faint tremor rippled through the miasma that gave me a vaguely familiar impression. Was that Lance’s odd, erratic attitude rippling off of him? I propelled myself faster in the direction it seemed to have come from—and nearly collided with a hulking being nearly as big as I was and far sturdier.
I jerked to the side, and the other creature loomed, studying me with a menacing attention that weighed on me.
“Humph,” she said in a voice that reverberated into me alongside the energies swirling through the shadows. “Cripple. Stay out of my way.”
If I hadn’t been so set on my goal, I might have felt more than the brief flash of shame that hit me before I shook it away. Why should I give a fuck what this monstrous stranger thought of me anyway? My limbs worked well enough to accomplish the most important things.
“My apologies,” I said with just the slightest edge to my tone, and rushed on.
I passed a cluster of smaller beings scampering about in some kind of game of chase and a few higher shadowkind who were occupied with low rumbles of conversation. Then a hiss I recognized vibrated into my ears.
I dashed toward it, spotting a sinuous churning movement in the darkness up ahead in a shape that reminded me of the dragon shifter’s physical form.
He was whipping between a couple of other shadowkind whose animosity was already thrumming off them. Then his energetic voice reached my ears, sounding more frenzied than buoyant at the moment.
“Don’t you want to play a game? You think you’re pretty tough, but can you dodge my claws? I won’t go too hard on you.”
“Get out of my way, nuisance,” one of the shadowkind he was hassling growled, “or I’ll?—”
I sensed Lance moving to pounce and dove in with all the speed I could propel into my body. My tentacles swung out and lashed around the dragon shifter’s body, shadowy essence colliding with shadowy essence. Where we touched, I could grip him well enough to yank him back toward me—just as he could have scratched up the beings he was antagonizing if I hadn’t caught him.
Just as they could have pulverized him in retaliation.
We couldn’t die here in the shadow realm. The atmosphere of the place sustained our life energy in a way the mortal world couldn’t quite. But we could be battered to within an inch of death. Lance could have found himself pummeled to the point that he wouldn’t have moved for months.
Of course, maybe that’s what he’d been aiming for. He spun on me with another hiss and a swipe of a dragonish paw before he registered who I was. Then he froze, the guilt I’d sensed from him ever since our enemies had possessed his mind and forced him to fight us radiating off of him.
“I’ll take care of him,” I told the other beings, and dragged him farther away through the gloom.
“Torrent,” Lance said in a mournful tone. “She sent us away. She put that magic into us and made us go.” He squirmed out of my grasp with a violent twist, though still careful not to actually strike me with much force, and leapt wildly through the currents of shadow. “We can’t go back. The sorcery has its claws in my head. I can’t scratch it out. She wouldn’t—I never thought she would?—”
A sharp twinge ran through me, even more poignant than when I’d first found him picking fights and stirring up whatever trouble he could before I’d brought him on board under Rollick’s authority. Then, Lance had been distraught and unstable after his imprisonment by mortals he’d hated. Now one he’d cared about deeply had stolen his free will using the same sort of power. I couldn’t even imagine what was going on in his head right now.
“Hey,” I said, not trying to restrain him again but tucking one tentacle around him to try to settle down his restless prowling. “It was only one command. She didn’t fully enslave us. It’ll wear off. We just have to give it time.”
“How much time? It feels—it feels different than when this happened before. Both of them, with the other sorcerers and with the beasts who ate them. The magic is holding on so hard, like she knew how to squeeze every part of me into the shape she wanted…”
He thrashed to the side again, and I let him work out the wild energy he couldn’t seem to contain.
I hated to admit it, but I knew what he meant. I’d never had sorcery worked on me before, but Quinn’s command was still echoing through me as if it’d penetrated every particle of my existence.
She knew us. She understood us. That was why I’d fallen for her in so many ways… and I suspected it was also why she’d bent our wills so easily.
“It has to wear off,” I said, as much for my own reassurance as his. “Even shadowkind that are fully enslaved shake off the effects if the sorcerer leaves them to their own devices for too much time.”
Lance made a strangled growl low in his throat. “And then what? She doesn’t want us. She made us leave. She thinks I can’t protect her enough, that I don’t deserve to be with her.”
I swallowed thickly. “I don’t believe that’s what she was thinking at all. She wanted to protect us. Because of how much we matter to her.”
It was still difficult for me to wrap my head around that last part. Remembering the way she’d gazed at me as she’d told me she loved me brought a bittersweet ache into my chest that was laced with disbelief.
I’d known she’d cared about us a lot, that she felt a connection to us just as we did to her. Humans sometimes threw around those words far too lightly. But I’d been able to tell how much she meant them. How hard it’d been for her, knowing she was going to lose us, even if it was her own decision.
And she mustn’t have fully understood how much we cared about her either. Otherwise I couldn’t imagine she’d have banished us like this. I didn’t care if the villains we were up against chopped off every limb on my body—I’d still rather be at her side, savoring every moment I could have with her.
This separation, the uncertainty about what danger she might be facing even now, hurt more than the mangling of my hand under Lance’s fangs.
“We aren’t the ones who need protecting,” the dragon shifter was muttering, whipping his tail through the air with obvious agitation. “She’s the soft one. The mortal one. Our Quinn.” His next growl sounded mournful. “If those fiends get their maws on her…”
“She still has Rollick with her,” I reminded him. “He might have wanted to use her, but he’s been trying to use her against them. He’s not going to hand her over to the enemy.” I didn’t trust our former employer all that much, but the demon stood a better chance of keeping Quinn away from harm than any other shadowkind I could think of other than the three of us.
Although we were only two right now.
I dragged in a breath and tugged at Lance with my tentacle again. He let out a huff, but he’d stopped thrashing around quite so much. The energy resonating off him had settled to a faintly frantic hum rather than a total cacophony of distress.
“We need to find Crag,” I said. “He’ll want to fix this as much as we do. Then we’ll come up with a plan for how we can defeat those two brutes without being near Quinn, until we can get back to her. And for showing her that she doesn’t need to worry about keeping us safe.”
“Yes,” Lance muttered. “The gargoyle. Where did the stony one go? He flies so fast.”
“We’ll find him,” I said firmly. “We’ll find him, and we’ll set the rest of this situation right.”
Or I didn’t deserve the three words Quinn had offered me so emphatically.