Chapter 10 At The Edges #2
The shadows around us might have been raised by Dark magic and have something Diabolical inside them, but they were still shadows. And that meant they were doorways for those of us who knew how to walk through them.
I dove into the nearest shadow as if it were a pool of water, letting it envelop me completely. The world turned inside out, cold and weightless, like being suspended in the space between heartbeats.
It wasn’t the smooth journey I was used to while shadow walking.
This darkness felt thicker, more resistant, like swimming through molasses.
The moon’s guiding thread was faint and harder to grasp.
Still, I pushed forward with desperate determination, following Zane’s heartbeat until I found him.
Reaching through the shadow trying to drink my mate, I grabbed my Zoodle and yanked him with me.
We burst back into reality behind Casimir, right where I’d been standing less than ten seconds ago, tumbling onto the ground in a tangle of limbs. My first real intentional use of combat teleportation. For a split second, pride swelled my chest. I’d done it. I’d saved him.
“That was Rule Number Four! And Five! And Twenty!” Casimir bellowed, slashing furiously at the shadows that were crowding forward.
Ignoring him, I scrambled to Zane, cupping his face in my palms.
“Zoodle? Okay?”
“Fang-tastic.” His gingerbread eyes were wide, shock and something like glee dancing across his face. “Ten out of ten, would get yanked by my wife’s shadow hands again.”
The shadow grew more erratic now, like sharks during a feeding frenzy. They seemed agitated by my interference, as if I’d broken some rule of their game.
As Casimir fussed at me, I looked for Koa and found him fighting with everything he had, but there were too many shadows around him now.
And worse, I could see what he couldn’t: The fire pit right behind him rippled, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a stone.
Something was waiting there to pull him under.
“Koko!” I called out, taking a step forward only to have Casimir’s arm block my path.
“Stay. Put.”
I ducked under his arm and dove back into the shadow he was fighting.
This time, the journey was excruciating.
The darkness clung to me like tar, fighting my passage every inch of the way.
The silver thread was a fading whisper, hardly enough to guide me, but I found Koa, his deep heartbeat a beacon, and wrapped myself around him and pulled, fighting against the resistance.
We tumbled out of the darkness beside the others, Koa landing with a grunt as I collapsed against him, my legs suddenly unable to support my weight.
“What the—” Koa started, then his eyes found mine, understanding dawning. “Seri, you shouldn’t—”
“Yell at her later,” Zane cut in, grabbing my arm to haul me up. “Right now, we need to move.”
“Wish my containment orbs weren’t all in the SUV.” Koa leapt to his feet. “Should have listened to the ?aumākua.”
As my boys fought, they brainstormed ideas to get us out of here, and I just tried to stay on my feet.
Each shadow walk had drained me more than I expected, like running a sprint while holding my breath.
My lungs burned, my vision swam at the edges, and the crawling sensation under my skin had turned to pins and needles.
The cost of walking through corrupted shadows.
Then the shadows converged into several roiling masses of darkness flowing toward us.
They darted in to attack the guys, who met the attack with battle cries and flashes of steel, but my eyes were on one shadow who’d stayed singular.
It crept across the ground, its form elongating into something with too many limbs, too many mouths.
It reached for Casimir’s ankle, tendrils of darkness wrapping around his boot.
“Simmy!” I croaked in warning.
He must have felt it because he pivoted and slashed downward, but it was too late. In a fraction of a second, the shadow wrapped itself around him and drew him into the nearest conjoined mass.
“NO.” My voice rolled out of me like the rumble of thunder.
And I slipped into the darkness one more time.
This journey was more falling than walking.
The shadows no longer felt like pathways, but like a maze of thorns, each second spent in them tearing something vital from me.
I couldn’t find the moon’s thread at all and navigated by instinct and desperate need alone until I found that indomitable spirit no shadow could dim.
Digging my fingers into it, I clung with all my might and hauled it along with me, more out of defiance than strength.
We crashed hard, Casimir rolling to shield me from impact. I’d returned us to Koa and Zane, who were now standing back-to-back, surrounded on all sides by a wall of shadows.
“Seri!”
Strong hands caught me, and suddenly I was cradled against Casimir’s chest, his heart thundering beneath my ear. My limbs dragged like they were made of stone, my breath came in shallow gasps, and his arm around me was the only thing keeping me upright.
“No more shadow travel! We’ll find another way out!”
“If Ko throws Seri over them, she can get herself out—”
“They’ll just stretch and catch her,” Casimir cut Zane off. “Besides, look at her! She can’t shadow walk anymore, and she’d never outrun them to the SUV.”
“We’re running out of options,” Koa rumbled.
“There’s always an option.” Casimir’s jaw clenched, his eyes scanning for any weakness, any opening. “Make a door. Now.”
“The fuck you think we’ve been trying to do?!” Zane boomed.
I want to go home.
The thought crystallized in my mind, sharp and clear despite the numbness hollowing me out from the inside.
“I’d like to go home now, please,” I whispered, just a puff of sound, but my mates heard.
Koa growled, Zane hissed, and Casimir tightened his arm around me as something in his eyes shifted from tactical assessment to raw determination.
“Efforting that. Stay with me, my love.”
Then something began to rise from the fire pit, something awful and wrong, and I knew we didn’t have time for him to find a solution. With the last bit of strength I had left, I did what I had to do.
Latching onto the moon’s glittering thread one more time, I clung to it and reached for Casimir, for Zane, for Koa.
Not their physical forms, but the bright sparks of their essences, the true nature of who they were beneath flesh and bone.
I gathered them close, wrapping myself around all three to keep them safe, and took a breath that felt like swallowing glass. Then I stepped into the closest shadow.
It clawed at me. Thin, grasping tendrils curled into my ribs, leeching warmth, strength, self, but I refused to give and pulled.
Shadow walking all four of us through Dark-corrupted shadows was like trying to drag the ocean through the eye of a needle.
Worse because this ocean fought back. The darkness closed over me like a tomb, heavy and absolute.
The demon cores didn’t just follow; they coiled around my arms and throat, sinking into my skin like ink bleeding into water.
They tried to tear my boys from my grasp, tried to yank them away from me.
No. They’re mine. You can’t have them.
Time and space stretched. My consciousness began to fragment, pieces of myself unraveling, pulled loose like yarn in an old sweater. I was everywhere and nowhere, too thin in some places and too thick in others.
I focused on Evermere. On the feeling of safety and belonging in every corner of our home.
The apple orchard. The library. The kitchen.
Zoodle singing to me. Koko reading to me.
Simmy lecturing me. It all coalesced into a lighthouse, and I swam toward it, sheltering my loves with the last of my strength.
For one terrible moment, I felt myself slipping under, weakening as the demon cores pulled at me. I had nothing left. They’d taken everything I had, wrung me out past empty into something less. I was losing them, losing myself—
Brumous, my heart whispered. Patient, loyal Brummy is waiting for you all to come home. You can’t disappoint him. Who will love him like you do?
All right, then. One last push. It would have to be enough. It was all I had left…
With a sound like tearing paper, we erupted out of the shadow realm. Above, the pergola full of green leaves. Beneath, cool flagstones. Around, the scent of apples ripening.
Evermere.
Thank the Goddess. Thank the Moon.
“Seri! Seri, where are you?!”
I tried to lift my head, wanting to see my monsters, but I couldn’t, couldn’t even shiver. The exhaustion was cell-deep, claiming its due, but its due was everything.
Never this bad. Never in all of Arabesque’s siphonings was I this empty.
Koa bellowing my name. Casimir cradling me. Zane screaming obscenities. Then blessed darkness, welcome and real.