10. Cress
Before the purge was underway, I joined the other librarian witches in the powercore chamber to commune with Braza. She spoke with all of us mentally as we went one by one to place our hands within her jelly-like sphere to take in her magic.
“I’ve already begun the extermination protocol on containment rooms with inanimate objects and the weakest creatures. Approximately a third of the occupied rooms will not need your attention.”
“Where should we start, then?” Leona asked. She’d gone first to take Braza’s magic and had stood there a long time, teeth gritted as she absorbed more and more while purple mist swirled around her.
“There is a mated pair of doskalo that are imprisoned in separate rooms on floor negative twenty-nine. They are attacking the runic seals with everything in them as we speak.”
Next to me, Jonah muttered, “Fuck. I remember bringing those two in.”
“My best estimate is that one will breach by midday. It will help its mate escape too, and then we have a serious problem,” Braza said, projecting a feeling in my head. It was like I took in her urgency and concern as if it were my own.
Leona finally had enough and stepped back from the powercore, panting. Jonah motioned for Aurora to go up next. “What is a doskalo?” I asked him.
“Imagine a dog with the worst mange you’ve ever seen. Then picture it standing on two legs and being eight feet tall, with acidic saliva and a taste for human flesh.”
“No thanks,” I said under my breath.
Leona picked up where he left off. “They hunt in packs made up of a mated pair and their juvenile kids. They reproduce like crazy if left unchecked and go berserk if separated from their partner. I should’ve guessed the doskalos would be our first big challenge.”
I went up to Braza last, still picking up on Leona whispering to Jonah and Aurora, “We’ll see if the coven of kids Mad Ash left us can keep up.”
Braza fed me a surge of power. “I wish to witness the experimenting Wren tries with your magic. You two may use my chamber this evening,” she said to me privately.
“Thank you,” I thought back to her.
A feeling like the caress of cool fingers drifted across my hand. I wondered if Braza would take her full humanoid form with others in the room, but she soon traced the circular pattern that marked my left wrist. It was Phaeron’s mark of protection, a bit of magic that connected us. Hope thundered through my heart as she channeled her power into it rather than me.
The last time she’d utilized this trick, I’d been too new to my magic to realize what she was doing. But now I felt the electric current and the way it flowed from me into him, a single bright line of energy extending out to him that resonated with a feeling of shock when it connected.
Phaeron’s voice filled my head like Braza’s did, in the alien syllables and hisses of their native language. I had an overwhelmed smile, tears pricking the corner of my eyes. His deep, smooth voice was unchanged. Even if he spoke with clipped urgency, it was still him.
“I have not yet given Cress a boon to understand the language of Soiluire. She is with us as well,” Braza said to him. Her power waned, like the dimming of a light, until our connection was a filament of spider silk.
“Cress?” he breathed, as faint as a whisper from one room over. “I had hoped you would escape.”
“Not without you,” I answered in my head.
He laughed, and goosebumps erupted over my body in discomfort. It was off-tune, a scrape of sandpaper rather than the velvet I would expect. “What manner of the Void is this? A reflection of my mate to haunt me?”
Braza’s presence nudged aside my own. “No tricks, my prince. Ask us anything for proof.”
She pushed me from the powercore physically, through a bank of purple smoke that swirled around me and eddied around Leona’s concerned self as she approached. The connection persisted, a tense strand at the back of my thoughts. “You must’ve been quite depleted,” the head librarian said.
At the same time, Phaeron transitioned back to their home language, and Braza replied. I couldn’t focus on them and the woman in front of me at the same time, so I gave my head a stern shake. “Yeah, something like that,” I said vaguely.
We went to retrieve my coven and a handful of Crystal fae who’d recently arrived alongside a nervous-looking verdant witch nurse. They were our support from Madigan and the only staff member the hospital could spare if something went wrong. The fae had armed themselves from the silver weapons we had left, and the leftovers were packed up and in transit back to our allies.
We started the process of descending to the second-lowest level of the library while Leona outlined our strategy. Considering the weight of the fae’s crystal armor and Geo’s stone form, we would use the elevator in shifts to floor negative twenty-eight. From there, we would take the stairs to our destination.
My three cat familiars would scout things out first, along with Ben’s ferret, Flit. Dimensional creatures of all kinds tended to overlook small furry companions, making them the perfect little spies.
Somewhere in the planning, Phaeron whispered my name, and I tuned out all the noise around me. He was still there, a desperate little voice over the many miles separating us. I echoed his name back, yearning for his presence and the night air scent of the shadows that clung to him.
“Tell me of my name for you so I might know you from the Void,” he urged.
“It’s bright soul. I don’t know if you picked it up from Braza or just decided to start calling me that because it’s literal,” I said.
“Cress… How I’ve desired to hear your voice again rather than the echoes of my own desires. Are you well? Wait. Do not tell me too much, for Myuna may compel it from my tongue.”
“I’m okay,” I said, a little puzzled. When we’d first met, he spoke like this…a touch old fashioned. Maybe I hadn’t questioned it enough when he’d picked up on modern lingo with ease.
Besides…why did it matter? He was in serious danger if Myuna was able to “compel” him to do anything. “Has she hurt you? How do we rescue you?”
“We are in a battle of endurance,” he said. I had the impression of his weary sigh. “I have slept not a wink since I last beheld your face. How long has it been?”
My brow furrowed with concern. “Three days.”
“Three days,” he echoed back. “Yet it feels like the trickle of minutes through time or a pair of eternities intertwined.”
“Are you okay?” I burst out. “Tell me what you need. Should I sneak into the audience chamber and grab you?”
“No!” he shouted.
I flinched, drawing Ben’s attention. I affected a carefree shrug and rubbed my arms like I’d caught a sudden chill.
“Stay as far away from Myuna as the pocket dimension permits. Give me your word that you will evade her, bright soul,” Phaeron continued with feverish intensity.
“I can’t do that…not while she has you.”
He chuffed with frustration, and I recognized the cadence of cursing in his first language before he switched back to English. “She is a hundred times more powerful than you, even in her much diminished state.”
Someone took a hold of my arm, and I jumped again. It was Ben, who squinted down at me. “We’re going,” he said, indicating where our coven was heading toward the elevator. “You good?”
“Talking to Phaeron,” I whispered, tapping my forehead.
“Uh huh,” he replied skeptically.
I followed with an annoyed scoff. “I think Myuna is torturing him. He doesn’t sound like himself.”
What he didn’t know was that, without an immediate reply from me, Phaeron was repeating my name a few times in a panic. “We’re going to save you. I don’t know how, but we will,” I promised him.
“Cress,” he said, but this time, he caressed my name. “Don’t. Your time should be occupied with finding an escape, not me. Do you not yet see the danger I pose to you? Myuna snatched control of me without effort. I crave to consume your soul every time I see it. I fear the desire will only grow worse with my exposure to her fell presence. You’ve bonded to two strong, stable men… Allow my act of love for you to be of sacrifice so you may live without fear of me losing control in the darkest corners of night.”
“Okay, Phaeron,” I replied pointedly as I got into the elevator with my coven and we started to descend into the pits of the library.
“Your agreement comes too readily,” he replied in a suspicious tone.
“Isn’t that what you want?” Tears pricked my eyes, and anger churned in my gut. “You should have come with us, you know. Instead, you gave up, and now you expect me to do the same. Well, I’m not! And I won’t promise you something that goes against my very being. No matter how much you shout at me in my head, you’re coming home with me. Hana saw that I would have a chance to save you in the future, and I will.”
For a long, terrible moment, he was silent. I worried our silk-strand connection had snapped somewhere in the middle from my raised voice.
“I did not give up.” He was far angrier than me, and I immediately wanted to duck away from the sharpness of his response. “I felt Myuna’s presence create a controlling tether between her and me. If I had gone with you, she may have been able to compel me from afar. Instead of languishing next to her, I could have delivered her the souls of everyone who escaped when I turned back. I ask in turn, is that what youwant?”
“Of course not,” I murmured. I was amongst the last to exit the elevator when it arrived on floor negative twenty-eight. Bella brushed against my ankles before disappearing into the library with my other two cats, Milo and Jin, while we waited for the elevator to retrieve Geo and the other librarian witches.
“Sometimes I forget you are a shortsighted mortal,” Phaeron scoffed. “The passion of youth with no bracing of sense.”
I gaped, then gritted my teeth. “Excuse me?” I demanded.
“There is no saving me!” he roared. “Do not court a fate worse than death trying!”
A headache threatened to split my skull. “You know what? I really don’t need this right now,” I replied. “We’re about to face some mangy giant dog things, and I can’t have you distracting me.”
“Mangy…dog…” he repeated slowly.
“Doskalos,” I supplied.
“Fuck. Who is we?”
“I thought you didn’t want to know much of what I was doing,” I snarked. This was about the time I’d hang up on an argument or leave a text on read, but we were connected by magic Braza controlled, as I had no idea how to get his stirred-up presence out of my head. Not that I truly wanted to, even with our disagreement.
He sputtered. An accomplishment, really, in mind speech. “Fine. How many doskalos?”
As he started probing for the strategy we were using, I realized I’d missed almost all of the plan in favor of talking to him. We were creeping down the stairs to floor negative twenty-nine, and it was a little late to ask, wait, what are we doing? I hated being that person at school, let alone on the edge of a seriously dangerous situation.
So, I told Phaeron everything while we waited for the familiars to return. “The hallway is clear,” Jin reported. The small black cat was the first to come back and accepted a single pet down her back before she stepped out of my reach. She projected a feeling of fear to match the way she hunkered down. “You can hear them on the other side of the doors. The one at the end of the hall is much louder.”
I repeated her report aloud. The other librarians conferred briefly.
Meanwhile, Phaeron was giving me instructions on how to handle the doskalo pair. I wished again that he was here. “You must fight each of them separately, in their containment rooms. If one of them sees its mate bloodied or dead, it will go berserk. The good news is they’re not intelligent enough to realize you’ve already killed one if it does not see the body.”
Leona led the group into the hallway. The floor beneath my feet vibrated in time with a hard thud from the closest door to our right. A complicated array of librarian witch magic flickered with purple light over the threshold when the creature on the other side struck it again.
“Leave it. This one,” Leona announced, pointing her sword toward the containment room Jin had indicated was closer to breach status. The metal of the door was dented outward and creaked ominously when hit from within by something large and desperate.
Leona signaled to us, and the Crystal fae stepped forward with Geo, who raised his shield and flared his wings to make himself a solid wall of defense.
With a complicated sweep of her sword’s tip, Leona deactivated the array holding the metal together, and out tumbled a massive creature with patches of dirty brown hair and pinkish skin.
Its stench stung my nose and made my eyes water instantly. “It stinks,” I complained to Phaeron.
“Get it into its containment room,” he replied, level and calm compared to the panic-fueled adrenaline pumping through my veins.
The group bristled with spells and silver weapons as the doskalo lurched to its feet. It seemed like some middle evolution of a massive dog becoming a werewolf, with arms that dragged the ground and scraped along with unevenly sharpened claws. Opening its mouth wider than any living thing should, it roared in fury and lunged at the closest target, Geo. He clipped its jaw with his shield. Without sunlight, the crystal didn’t ring, only making a dull thud as Geo leveraged it to knock the doskalo’s head aside.
Behind us came an answering roar, muffled. I glanced over my shoulder. Shit, we were going to be fighting both of them very soon.
I also noted with relief that the creature might be dead before I got close enough to slash it with my sword. Geo and the fae created an effective semicircle that protected us from it, but it also only made small windows for Bianca’s crossbow bolts, Ben’s throwing daggers, and the shards of glittering light Jordan hurled from the tip of her staff. Each brush of silver drew a whine from the creature, who started to retreat back into its containment room from such a fierce onslaught.
Still, I cast Lux and inched closer. I wasn’t expecting the freed doskalo to yip in pain and raise its clawed hand. It was shielding its face from the light…my light. The blade of my sword glowed like an incandescent shard, far brighter than any Lux I’d cast before. I nearly blinded myself looking down at it in shock.
Leona was shouting, “Make way! Chase it the rest of the way into the containment room!”
She gestured at me, my friends parting to the sides. The doskalo, bleeding from several wounds smoking from silver exposure, backed away from the blade I waved at it, snapping its jaws wildly and tripping over itself to be as far away as possible. Its acidic saliva sizzled on the ground from it frothing at the mouth, pupils contracting to invisible points. Geo moved with me, shield raised and wings still partially spread, ready to leap ahead of me if I needed it.
When the doskalo was back in its room, cowering down in a nest of sticks and rotting…I didn’t want to think about what the scraps of gray skin and fur might’ve been, Jonah stepped around me and cast the Inemos spell perfectly. I watched a wave of nearly invisible magic arc off his sword tip and hit the monster, freezing it into a new temporary stasis. With its muscles locked, Leona strode forward without fear and lopped its head off with a few brutal swings of her sword.
“Now the other one,” she said grimly, steering me by the shoulder out of the room before I could retch at the smell and sight of the dead unnatural in its messy nest.
“Cress?” Phaeron asked tentatively.
“It’s dead. I don’t think it was supposed to be that easy?” I asked. Like he’d know, several miles away.
He did seem bemused. “I shall wait for your business with both doskalos to conclude before pestering you further, however long or short a time it may be.”
The second doskalo died much like the first, leaving Ben and Bianca a little frustrated. “Put the spotlight away, I want a challenge,” Bianca muttered.
I would’ve apologized, but when I squeezed the hilt of my sword to dispel the Lux spell, I stumbled and held my forehead through a dizzy spell. It sank in just how much of my stored librarian witch magic it’d taken to power that spell. The hallway seemed much darker without the blinding magic.
I looked down at the blade, wondering if it were special in some way. Maybe it tripled the power of any spell cast through it. Lux was a basic spell, power level one. It should’ve never been powerful enough to strike such fear in monsters like those two doskalos.
“There are more creatures to put down,” Braza reminded us when Leona started my way, a question obviously poised on her tongue.
“Let’s talk about the magic later?” I suggested.
“Later,” the head librarian agreed.
When later came, it was after six hours of us facing down a handful of the unnaturals Braza deemed the most likely to break out of containment first. One would think those were the biggest, baddest creatures in the library, but Leona and Braza warned us of about a dozen more monsters still locked away that were deadly and unique. The kind of creatures strong enough to have titles and urban legends.
We’d handle them in the coming days. Tonight, I was the one under the microscope, and the ones doing the inspecting were Braza, Leona, Wren, and Phaeron still in my head. The head librarian had insisted on helping when I’d told her that we were experimenting with my magic.
“I’ve never seen a librarian with command of light like yours,” she said when we were in the private sanctum of the powercore.
“I have a theory,” Wren said. She’d come in carrying two staves—one was her old one, with the gold-plated sun at its top, and the other the scepter-sized one with silver crescent moons that she’d been casting with today. Without much preamble, she handed me the larger of the two.
The wood was warm and hummed beneath my fingertips. Unlike with Evening Guidance, which was sized and weighted for a man’s use, this one was clearly designed for someone shorter.
“Try one thing for me. Cast Lux with my staff,” she said, gesturing to it.
“Isn’t it super dangerous to use one affinity’s magic with another’s tool?” I asked.
“Just humor me,” she urged.
I looked up at the tip of the staff and shrugged to myself. The rays of the golden sun came to a point, which I used to form the midair X of the Lux spell by manipulating the staff with both hands.
The weapon erupted with light. I turned my face away, shutting my eyes tight. It felt like I’d cast a level-three spell, Luminare, which set off a wave of light like a ground-level firework. Slowly, I peeled one eyelid up to peek at it in my periphery, seeing that the staff still pulsed with light. I’d lit the centerpiece brightest of all, and its golden halo formed a circle on the ceiling.
The remaining librarian magic stored within me rapidly depleted. I’d never felt it suction out of me quite this fast before, but the fatigue that came with being completely emptied of a powercore’s magic had me squeezing the staff, fumbling with it to get it to stop glowing. The painful lurch of running dry happened first, the light fading as I struggled for my next breath past a spasm in my chest.
Wren steadied me with a hand on my shoulder, taking back the weight of the weapon while I recovered. “I think that proves it. You’re not just a librarian witch… You’re somehow two affinities in one. The light of a celestial affinity pushing out the shadows of your librarian affinity.”
“That’s not possible,” Leona said.
I pointed at my handbook, which flapped down into my waiting palm from where it was circling the ceiling. “All of my Darkmore hereditary power was stored in this,” I croaked, shaking the spine of the handbook. Its pages rattled with the motion.
“Hey!” it protested. “Careful. I’m sensitive.”
“We made the handbook into an artifact, separating the celestial magic of her family line from the librarian magic stored within her. Although, Cress has always had a soul unusually suffused with light,” Braza supplied.
“Bright soul, beacon in the night.” Though I felt that Phaeron was still connected by a silken thread, his responses were distracted whispers once night fell.
The handbook took flight from my palm once I released my hold on it. “It’s possible I’m leaking,” it said slowly.
It seemed all of us asked at the same time, “Leaking?”
It flew loop-de-loops over our heads, seemingly carefree. “Hehe! You didn’t think little ol’ me could hold the might of an entire storied witch line, plus all the secrets of the great Morgana Voidbinder herself?”
“Uh, yeah?” I said, incredulous.
“You have entirely too much faith in me, Cressie-poo! I’m flattered!”
My cheeks tinted when Leona raised an unimpressed brow. She had a normal, obedient copy of The Librarian Witch’s Handbook flapping behind her, unlike my malfunctioning one.
Braza hurried to pitch in, “Perhaps it is not the worst thing that her affinities are mixing. Cress was able to cast a spell stored on Evening Guidance, if the memories she shared were correct.”
“Not just any spell,” Wren muttered. “She cast Sun Surge without any preparation. Just picked up the staff, aimed, and fired.”
“I had help. My…an ancestor, showing me what to do and say.” I wished my ghostly mother would make a reappearance for this conversation. She’d been the one to lay her hands over mine and tell me how to unleash the power waiting to be used on the staff. That beam of concentrated light had been the miracle we’d needed at the time to turn the tide of battle.
Wren offered the sun staff back to me. “Imagine if you could do it on command, with your own knowledge and prep work. How much do you even know about celestial magic?” she asked.
“You all can make portals?” I ventured.
Her nostrils flared with a delicate snort. “That’s fair. It’s the most complicated and ritual-driven affinity. We have what are considered sub-affinities that we call alignments. At the beginning of each moon cycle, a trio of celestial witches link hands and align to the moon, the stars, or the sun. For the next month, they complete their rituals under the light of the celestial body they’re aligned to to draw its energies. Most celestial witches inherit an alignment to one of the three options, and sometimes, like in your case, it’s really obvious which one it is. Make sense so far?”
I nodded slowly, wondering where she was going with this.
“Sun Surge is the biggest, showiest spell someone with a sun alignment can cast. It’s a variable power level spell, depending on stored power. The freaking laser you cast a few days ago was probably power level five or six. Judging by how your magic seems to work…you’re clearly meant to be sun alignment. Maybe your mother was, too?”
Eris whispered out, “I was sun aligned, yes.” Her translucent form appeared from the shadows of the room, as perfect as ever in the dark evening gown she’d been wearing when she’d died, her brown hair styled in a fancy up do. When her gaze caught on me holding Wren’s sun staff, a wide, approving grin stretched her face.
“She was,” I confirmed. No one else in this room except Braza could see or hear Eris’s ghost, which could be awkward if I got into a seemingly one-sided conversation.
“And Ben’s mother?” Wren prompted.
I barely needed Eris to tell me she was star aligned. Her job had been reading star charts for infants before Eris’s murder, after all. I shared this information and then asked, “What’s your alignment?”
Wren rubbed her thumb over a curl in the design of the scepter-sized staff she held. “Up until now, stars. But the other night, I let go of it in the dark of night, like my…” She cleared her throat and took a moment to realign her train of thought. “I was never fully comfortable with the star alignment, but I was expected to excel at it with a family name like Starsurge. I would like a change, to experiment with the moon and her four faces. Let’s try the alignment ritual with you and Ben. You’re clearly the sun, and he can try the stars with his fancy staff.”
“It would be highly dangerous,” Leona interjected.
“Ben hasn’t had an ancestor give him magic,” I added, wishing the head librarian wasn’t here to dissuade us. It sounded like something worth a try during this desperate time. “I only have so much access to celestial magic because I’m the sole inheritor of an entire family line.”
Wren flashed a hint of a wicked smile. “There’s a trick he can use to ask.” Her blue eyes darted toward Leona for a moment, and she seemed to bite back on further comment. But I shared that glimmer of excitement she had—we would try the alignment ritual later, when we weren’t under the watchful eye of an older, disapproving witch.
Maybe this would lead to the kind of power boost I could leverage to save Phaeron.