Chapter 7
Quinn
I’d worn every piece of clothing I’d brought with me, and still I was shivering as I crouched in the dimness just beyond the enclave’s sprawling house. The chill of the high altitude had deepened with the night, even though the sun didn’t quite go all the way down at this time of year. It was past eleven o’clock now, but a hazy golden glow still gleamed at the edges of the sky. It felt more like mid-evening than the middle of the night.
It wasn’t enough sun to warm things up. My face was prickling in the cool air. I tugged the collar of my windbreaker up over my mouth and let my warm breath flow over my cheeks with the exhale. At least it was dark enough that I shouldn’t be easy to spot, but not so dark that I had to worry about tripping over things I couldn’t see.
I could have waited tucked into my bed, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall outside. But I’d been worried that I might drift off and miss the sounds of the rite beginning if I was more comfortable, and it would have been harder to sneak through the building itself if many of the sorcerers were bustling around.
Staking out a spot in the nearby wilderness had seemed like the best strategy. I just hoped they hurried up with the whole ceremony thing. I’d rather not witness it as an ice cube.
A distant rumble made me perk up. To my surprise, it sounded as if it was coming from off in the distance rather than from the building to my right. I squinted through the trees. The gleam of headlights came into view, and moments later a van pulled into the parking area under the lowest deck. I heard the thump of the doors but couldn’t see what was going on down there from my perch.
Had they brought something special for the rite that had to be organized at the last minute? What would that be? It’d sounded like the novice sorcerer had already picked out his first shadowkind slave. I had no idea what else might be involved in the process.
Maybe this meant they were almost ready to begin.
I adjusted my position cautiously, stretching my legs. My backpack shifted against my shoulders. I didn’t have much in it now that all my clothes were on me, but I hadn’t felt comfortable leaving my pills, phone, or first aid kit inside the enclave while I embarked on this mission.
If anything went wrong, I might need to make a hasty run for it. There’d be no chance to duck back into my bedroom and collect my things.
Finally, the soft creak of the building’s double doors reached my ears. A rustling of footsteps followed. I peered through the dim light and watched a cluster of robed figures crossing the deck to the packed earth path in front of it—and then veering to the right, farther away from me.
I wasn’t sure if their course was to my advantage or not. I wasn’t going to have to scramble to get out of their way, but I’d need to hoof it to make sure I kept track of them rather than losing them in the semi-night.
Setting my feet carefully the way I’d learned in my not-always-legal urban explorations, I clambered farther up on the forested hillside and circled around the top of the building, picking out the moving figures when they came into view. They’d come around the building and now were heading upward like I had, along a path I couldn’t make out from my current position.
Good. Less distance for me to close.
I slowed down, slinking from tree to tree, my ears pricked for their footsteps. No one spoke. I poked my head out over a narrow but obvious path between the trees just as the last of the cluster vanished around a bend farther up the hillside.
I followed the direction of the path through the trees alongside it so I still had some shelter. It was slow-going, both to make sure I stayed unnoticed and because of the steepness of the slope. Within minutes, I was sweating despite the chill in the air. Give me a set of skyscraper stairs over a mountainside any day.
A flare of firelight up ahead warned me to slow down even more. I crept onward, eyeing the dancing flame of the torch someone had mounted on a post. Creeping to the side where its glow shouldn’t reach me, I knelt down a few feet from the edge of what I could now see was a clearing.
The cleared area was a rare section of the mountainside that was nearly level, about twenty feet across and roughly round. Nine torches blazed at even intervals around the border. They gave off a pungent smoke with an acrid scent that tickled my nose even though I was keeping my distance.
The cluster of robed figures had stopped in the middle of the clearing. It was hard to count them because they kept moving around and they were all wearing matching cloaks, but I decided there were ten. One of them eased back his hood, and I recognized the new initiate. His face was even paler than before but set in a mask of determination. He held his chin high.
The other figures had started murmuring some kind of chant. The initiate closed his eyes and swayed with the rhythm of their words. The eerie melody made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I didn’t understand the words any more than I did the sorcerous commands that directed my magic, but they resonated with power.
One of the sorcerers handed a couple of two-pronged metal blades to the guy. Then all the surrounding figures drew back to stand beneath the torches, still chanting. With the space around the guy cleared, I could now see that one of those shadowkind carrier boxes sat on the ground near his feet.
Well, that was fairly self-explanatory. But what was he going to do with those weird knives? He was just standing there on his own now, still swaying, his lips now moving in unison with the chant, though I got the impression he wasn’t actually making any sound.
Abruptly, the chanting fell away. Somehow its absence felt twice as unsettling as the racket they’d been making before.
The wind warbled through the branches overhead. The initiate raised his hands, each clutched around one of the double-pronged blades, toward the violet sky overhead. A shudder ran through his slim body.
He dropped to his knees in front of the carrier box and unlatched it. Then he thrust both of his hands, still gripping the blades, through the large opening in one violent movement.
I didn’t understand what was happening until he drew his arms back out and straightened up. A wiry-haired, hissing creature was writhing in his grasp, skewered between the two weapons that had dug into its flesh. Its shadowy blood was wisping up from those puncture points.
A jolt of horror socked me in the gut. What was he going to do with the little beast? He’d speared it like it was a cob of corn he was about to dig into.
I had no idea how accurate that comparison would prove to be until a few moments later. The guy held up the flailing, bleeding creature and called out into the night, “Now I become one with the creatures I will rule. I will take their essence into me and make it my own.”
With the last words, he rammed the blades in twice as deep, twisting them with the same movement. The shadowkind creature screeched, but its voice faltered, its struggles weakening.
The initiate pulled it right to his face and closed his mouth over one of the wounds.
My stomach lurched, nearly propelling my meager dinner up my throat. He was making some kind of dinner of the creature, sucking in the smoke that poured off its body in audible gulps, inhaling more with each heave of breath. He sounded like some kind of beast himself, tearing into its food after weeks of starvation.
As I watched, he mashed the increasingly limp body right up against his face as if he could absorb even more of the smoky blood right through his skin.
I couldn’t help it—I doubled over and gagged as quietly as I could manage. Thankfully the savage noises the initiate was releasing and the lingering squeaks of the dying creature drowned out what I couldn’t muffle with my hand over my mouth.
As my thoughts spun and more nausea bubbled up through my chest, it occurred to me that this awful “rite” made a sick kind of sense. The villainous shadowkind duo was taking the power of sorcery into themselves by consuming the most vital organs of the practitioners. Based on what I was seeing now, those sorcerers—or their relatives, somewhere far down the line—had activated their sorcery at least in part by consuming the shadowkind they exerted control over.
The cycle had come full circle in the most gruesome possible way.
I was so focused on the initiate in his horrible act and suppressing my reaction to it that I didn’t notice the other figures appearing at the edge of the clearing until the guy glanced over at them. Two more robed figures had stepped into view, with a few other people I couldn’t clearly see gathered with them, shoulders slumped, one of them small enough that it must have been a child.
The creature the guy had killed had all but disintegrated into his hands. Dark veins crawled across his face beneath his skin as if the shadowy blood had infected him with a disease. He turned his head, and I saw his eyes had gone totally black, even the whites consumed with darkness.
He tossed the scraps that remained of the creature away and lunged toward the newcomers as if he were an animal himself.
Which maybe was the point. The sorcerers along the edge of the clearing took up their chant again, their voices rising louder, and the newer arrivals shoved one of the hunched figures into the clearing.
It was a woman, not much older than me, wearing nothing but a white nightgown that fell to her knees. She stared at the guy charging toward her and let out a shriek.
My body tensed, a cry of warning snagged in my throat. It was too late anyway. As she stumbled away on her bare feet, he tackled her.
His fingernails dug into her skin; he clamped his teeth around her throat. There was a crack as a bone broke, and then a sickening tearing sound. The woman’s scream cut off in a wet gurgle.
The guy raised his head and shook it, spraying blood from the chunk of throat caught in his mouth. He spat it out and snarled a few words I didn’t recognize, but some part of me, maybe the sorcerer energies pumping through my own veins, thrummed with a growing sense of recognition even as I held back the urge to vomit.
He has taken the beast into him, and now he is one with it. He is letting the monstrous energies move through him to gain the deepest possible understanding of the fiends he’ll bind to his will. To control monsters, you must become a monster.
That was the gist of what the chant said, I was abruptly sure. The sorcerers were urging him on, cheering for him to let loose this savagery and fully absorb the energies he’d consumed.
Because this was all they believed the shadowkind were. Monsters, wild beasts, interested in nothing more than senseless killing. How could they spend so much time around them and not realize there was so much more to the beings they enslaved?
And what had the sorcerers’ human victims done to deserve being dragged into these awful rites? Even now, they were propelling a girl who couldn’t have been older than nine or ten out from the trees.
My body tensed, my pulse pounding so loud it nearly drowned out the chant. The guy who was now barely a man whirled on the girl, bloody teeth bared. She spun with a sob and dashed toward the nearest sorcerer, but the robed woman flung her away.
Oh, God. How could they? How could any kind of magic possibly be worth acting like this?
The initiate was already bearing down on her. And while the sorcerers around me might have been willing to watch this scene with nothing but approval, I couldn’t just stand by.
As the guy leapt at the girl, a cry of protest I couldn’t restrain burst from my throat. My legs threw me forward without consulting the rest of me, with a desperate urge to wrench that poor kid away from her terrible fate.
The chanting stopped. One of the sorcerers sprang at me and caught my arm, just as the initiate smashed the little girl’s skull into the rocky ground with a crunch of her skull. A sob of my own snagged in my throat, and I found every face around the clearing had turned toward me.