17. Cress
“And that is how I became the powercore of Moongrove Library.”
Braza was seated on the ground by my head as I came to and jolted upright with a twinge in my shoulders. I didn’t know who I was for a minute, confused to see my teenaged dimensional face rendered in black and purple energy looking back at me.
Empathy flooded my eyes in the next moment. “My god, you weren’t even my age when you died,” I said.
She handed me the clothes I’d shed so she could mark my back, and I put them on, letting the fabric absorb my tears. Her life was already fading some, becoming a stream that flowed together separately from my own memories. I knew I would have a difficult time for a while reminding myself that I was not Braza and had never lived the life of an orphan turned almost-princess of Soiluire.
I was still Cress, an orphan turned librarian-celestial witch hybrid. I had a whole coven of good friends, all waiting for me to finish up here. Plus an adopted sister, Carly, who I was still worried about.
Braza had a best friend and sister named Ravai…Phaeron’s daughter. He hadn’t breathed a word of her or Keshora, but I’d seen how much he’d adored them. At one point, he’d doted on Braza the exact same way. Now I saw what she meant, what she feared, and why she had gone to such lengths to set me up to save him.
If we all survived this, then I would have to privately confront my feelings about seeing his former life. I was supposed to be his mate, to replace both Keshora and Morgana, but now I knew them by their accomplishments and Phaeron’s love for them. It gave his slow burn interest in me a completely different view. How did I even compare? How often did I come short in his eyes?
“I have continued to exist for several human lifetimes. It is not so bad,” she answered, taking me out of my whirling thoughts.
“Stuck in one place. Never resting,” I sighed, looking around at her inner chamber with new eyes. Existing seemed unpleasant at best.
“The last Guardian of Moongrove Library was able to take me out of the library’s bounds,” she said with an edge of hope to her tone.
“Then I will, too,” I promised, offering her a hand up. She took it and stood, giving me a winged hug. I realized she was melting into my form, surrounding me in flames of black and purple shadows.
Power surged between us as the tether snapped into place. I threw my head back and screamed out a shadowborn’s howl, exhilarated. The pulse of energy was unmistakable, and I felt for myself how those who could sense dimensional power would catch notice of us immediately.
We emerged from the powercore holding a sword in our dominant hand and Wren’s staff in the other. The light from the tool did not damage our shadows or make them retract, as I’d seen happen with my light and Phaeron’s darkness. We…no,I had to remind myself that I was still in charge. I was one coherent whole, part celestial witch, part librarian, and part shadowborn, with light and darkness swirling between my staff and sword at my will.
“Cress, tell me that’s still you, kid,” Madigan said. Arrayed around the chamber was a crew of her, Orthus, Geo, áine, and most of my coven.
“It is me,” I said in a two-toned voice, mine layered with Braza’s. “Plus Braza et…” I hesitated before plucking her title out of my memories. She was the second prince’s adopted daughter, which made her the… “Sudairae.”
“Sounds like Big P’s last name,” Ben commented. He had his big daggers out but a bandolier of the smaller ones for throwing at the ready over his torso.
“Title,” I corrected. “Tell you about it later. It’s…a lot.”
Braza’s shadows contracted over my skin. I felt her awareness that hundreds of monsters were converging on the library. Some had two feet, an extra bad sign for us.
An alarm blared on Madigan’s phone at the same time. “Incoming,” she announced.
Bianca lifted her crossbow. Its loaded bolt was coated with glowing maroon. Orthus raised his hand and started manifesting sharped crystal spikes from seemingly nowhere, and Madigan lifted her gauntleted fist to take control of them with a muttered spell. They circled over her head with slow gravity.
The fae tossed a few extra to Geo, who absorbed and reformed them with all of his quartz into a large mace to match his massive crystal shield.
“Close your eyes a moment,” Braza said in my head, using my focus and hers to comb the upper levels of the library to detect Phaeron. She knew he would enter as shadowy vapor and take the most direct route to us, solidifying in a rush to catch us off guard.
And that’s exactly what he did. Her reflexes caught the strike of his sword before I even opened my eyes again. My heart threatened to stop before kicking into three times the speed. That was indeed Phaeron bearing down on me in full shadowborn form and everyone else reacting around us with shouts and fired spells.
He had one sword, the talons of his opposite hand extended into long and deadly points. It was the traditional shadowborn fighting style, to have one hand empty to weave shadows while an opponent was distracted with swordplay. But where was his other sword? He had the dexterity to fight with two and fight with his shadows at the same time.
“Focus on him. Do not worry about anything else,” Braza instructed. We pivoted to avoid a slice of sharpened shadows aimed to hit our back. We…I raised my left hand and blasted Phaeron with a Lux spell from the sun staff. I held the concentrated rays of sunlight out at him for a few seconds.
His talons dispelled away from the light, as did the other sneak attack he’d been manipulating from the shadows. But even as the exposed skin on his arm darkened, he didn’t make a sound, not even a hiss of pain.
I struck, and he parried, the two of us engaging in a deadly dance between the fired spells and projectiles of my allies. Braza helped me find the steps to match him, her strength reinforcing my arms. Phaeron struck without an ounce of mercy. Our weapons rang with each impact, the force rattling my sword so hard it threatened to jump out of my grip.
Phaeron fought with supernatural grace to keep up with me while avoiding more than the graze of bolts and crystal spikes. My weapon grazed his shadows and skin superficially, all made possible by the pressure we put on him at multiple angles.
I noted Geo’s obsidian form closing in, shield raised, and parried another strike from Phaeron, straining as I tried to hold him steady for my gargoyle protector’s charge. Suddenly, Phaeron grabbed me with tendrils of shadow, and I was hit with the vertigo of being wrenched to a different location.
For a couple precious seconds, I reeled and wavered on my feet. Thorn-studded shadows wrapped around my legs, sinking into my skin to anchor me in place. “Fuck,” I muttered. A quick cast of Lux rid me of them, but the deep punctures remained, and wet rivulets dripped down my legs.
“I will take care of it,” Braza said, urging me to keep my attention on Phaeron. Her shadows flowed into the wounds, soothing and cool.
He’d taken me as far from the powercore chamber as he could carry me. The foyer of this level, with its waiting area full of chairs. I lifted one with an inexpert grab of shadows and held its legs out to keep Phaeron at bay. It caught the swing of his sword, the fabric parting like butter and the frame snapping quickly.
I flung the ruined thing at him. It clipped his shoulder, throwing off the rhythm of his footwork for a moment. Meanwhile, Braza used the telepathy of her powercore side to inform our allies of where we’d gone.
“Phaeron, stop. I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.
He didn’t spare any acknowledgment. He seemed an unstoppable, untiring force, while I felt the first hints of soreness and strain in my body even with Braza helping me keep up. I focused on blocking, parrying, and thrusting as darkness writhed around our feet, thrashing between his will and Braza’s.
I backed into a chair and hopped up onto its cushion, spreading my wings of shadows and flapping. I put my weight behind the next strike downward. Fuchsia blood sprayed from a cut around his shoulder, quickly covered by shadows before I could determine where exactly I’d gotten him.
White shadows flicked up the side of his arm. The next thing I knew, I was landing with my ankle twisting on the unexpected arrival of stairs. I stumbled, barely catching myself on a guardrail before I could tumble down the flight we’d appeared on. Again, we hadn’t gone far, but his shadowborn control was slightly stronger than Braza’s. At this rate, he’d inch me up to the surface, where Myuna’s monsters would help subdue me.
I lifted the staff, prepared to blast him with light. Anticipating the move, he shot out a lasso of shadow, which whipped around my left wrist and wrenched me to the side. It solidified and tightened mercilessly until the sun staff clattered down the stairs.
I flexed my free hand, growing shadowy talons over my fingers. Lunging at him, I moved to position myself further up the stairs than he was, taking a sharp graze on my side as he exploited the opening in my guard. Pain flared over my torso.
“Submit,” hissed a voice from Phaeron’s mouth, unexpectedly feminine and awful.
I bared shadowy fangs and shouted with Braza, “Never!”
I landed a kick to the center of his chest, and he fell backward, landing at the bottom of the stairs next to the staff, his limbs briefly still and splayed like a discarded doll. The way he stood was also disconcerting, heaving upward like a puppeteer hadn’t mastered the motion of lifting with the legs first.
I used his own trick to grab him in my shadows and carry him back into the foyer, where my allies were rushing past. Ben reacted quickest and turned, launching himself at Phaeron’s tail. I heard the brittle snap of bone.
“Such insolence,” snapped what had to be Myuna, using Phaeron as her mouthpiece. He acknowledged another fighter for the first time in throwing Ben off and impaling him against a wall with an inky black spike.
I wanted to shout for him, but Braza suppressed me. “Focus. He gave us an advantage,” she said. Phaeron was off-balance when he turned his attention back to us and lunged.
Within a blink, he was slammed by a blur of crystal and obsidian. “Remember yourself,” Geo gritted out.
Phaeron’s momentum sent him crashing into a couple chairs and toppling in a boneless heap. This time, he recovered by turning into vapor and materializing again over my left shoulder. His shadowy claws cut through my back, forming several long lines of agony.
I screamed. Braza’s voice in my head became white noise, and my hold on our tether faltered, making the shadows over my body flicker before they covered me again.
“He’ll remember this,” snarked Bianca. She bought me a few seconds to catch my bearings as a glowing bolt hit him with a dull thud.
“We’re not out of this yet,” Braza encouraged.
My back ached, and it felt like most of my body was now slicked with hot blood. Yet I still felt that she was right. Her shadows held together most of the damage, and I had the feeling she’d keep me going through much worse wounds. Power leaked into me from her powercore side, slowly knitting together the rips, scratches, and abrasions I’d sustained.
Phaeron’s shadowy maw was open in a soundless snarl. He leapt at me and swung his free arm around my neck. The vertigo returned through multiple jumps, though I now knew the feel of his magic wrapping around me and how to fight it, my eyes closing at the right moments to stave off the worst of the dizziness.
We landed on stairs, carpeting, and tile, grappling for control all the while. He slammed me into the ground for most of our reappearances. At this rate, I would be tenderized into submission, fractured and bruised too badly to fight back.
For one of our landings, I recognized we were in a containment room and could’ve closed a stasis spell around him…but didn’t. Myuna was controlling him somehow, but I was going to shake her out of him, even if it killed me and half of Braza.
As the pain mounted over my body, I started to realize that the death option was closer at hand than expected. I gained the upper hand during one reappearance and dug the edge of my sword into the shadows over his neck.
“Phaeron,” I breathed out desperately. “It’s me, Cress. Stop, Phaeron. Stop fighting me.”
“Oh no, pretty thing. He’s taking you straight to me,” Myuna purred. Well, it was supposed to be a smooth sound, but she had a voice like a cheese grater to my senses. “I’ll only wake him up when he can watch me consume you.” Shadows grasped and moved us to another location, and his muscular weight pinned my hips.
Braza noted the wording as we struggled. This time, I dragged him into shadows, still trying to drag him back toward my allies. I could practically feel the lightbulb moment she had.
“Tell me you have a good idea,” I said, struggling to raise my sword to block another blow from Phaeron’s. It felt like my whole body had been pummeled—I gasped for a decent breath. Under her shadows, I had to be black and blue.
“Do you trust me?” she replied.
“Down to my soul,” I answered. I’d been her, seen her true character. There was no doubt in me as she told me her idea and I seized on it, letting her turn my body into purple and black mist and head several levels upward to throw off Phaeron and Myuna.
We were close enough to the surface to hear the screeches, barks, and shouts from our allies. Dust shook from the ceiling from a surge of guardian witch power, followed by either Aaron or Ajax shouting commands. The part of me that was tethered to the powercore marked Phaeron’s position as he realized what we’d done and turned into vapor. He approached our location rapidly.
I lifted and circled my sword over my head, casting the rune for the strongest light-based spell I knew just as Phaeron appeared before me. His sword and claws bit into my body as my skin heated. I’d once likened Luminare to a ground-level firework, but that was before I tapped into my celestial side.
Light erupted from my body and weapon, which I angled under his chin. Against the glare of my magic, I witnessed Phaeron’s shadows blow away completely and saw his face. He wasliterally asleep, but his eyelids flipped open as he took the brunt of my spell head-on. For a split second, I admired the way his irises sparkled like cut gemstones before every inch of his exposed skin torched.
Phaeron stumbled back, screaming in agony and covering his face with similarly burned and blistered hands. His sword clattered to the ground, followed by his knees as he heaved an eerily inhuman howl and rocked back and forth. The first sounds he’d made since he arrived.
I let the tip of my sword hit the ground, desperately hoping we were done fighting.
The sounds of battle above us faded…or maybe muted from the force of his cries. “Shit, I’m so sorry,” I said. Though Braza and I still spoke together, that was wholly my own reaction.
He quieted and stole a look at me through his fingers. Those remarkable eyes I loved so much had pupils slitted like a cat’s, similar to what I’d seen in my memories. They were narrowed to the thinnest of slivers and he blinked rapidly.
“Brazita?”he asked with a hush of disbelief. She translated his foreign words through her shadows and into my ears as English. “Have I finally joined you on the other side?”
A monster released a piercing cry above us on cue, and more dust showered from the ceiling. Phaeron’s hands dropped from his burned face, and he fumbled for the hilt of his sword blindly, shaking his head with a clear wince. “Clearly there is no such mercy, as paradise would not have Myuna’s servants.”
He slid onto his feet, tail and weapon scraping the ground as he limped a step. “Phaeron, wait. You’re hurt,” I protested.
He huffed and struggled on. “I cannot understand your human tongue.”Then, seeming to get frustrated with his body’s damage, he disappeared into shadowy vapor and headed straight for the combat above us.
Braza and I both rolled our eyes with exasperation. “That’s the prince I know,” she said before misting us up after him. She took care of telling my coven still rushing in our wake what’d happened and where to go.
In the meantime, I arrived to see our allies had been pushed back to the first floor stairwell. The sounds and spells were like arriving in the middle of a warzone, and disoriented, it took me longer than it should’ve to locate Phaeron slicing the nearest unnatural in half. He released a threatening roar and threw some of his own blood toward the monsters to gather their attention.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath, lurching into motion to protect his back when he was quickly overrun. This type of fighting felt too familiar. In another life, he and Braza had fought swarms of unnaturals under all kinds of circumstances and won. The creatures threw themselves at us, sensing easy prey and meeting a swift death because of it.
What felt like minutes later, the onslaught paused, monsters freezing and then pacing away from us. Soon they were in full retreat, leaving behind a gory mess. Myuna seemed to realize she was losing servants much faster than she’d corrupted them.
Phaeron turned to me, his head tilting and expression uncertain. “We must burn the remains. Myuna can still gather energy by eating what’s left behind,”he said in the foreign syllables of his language.
I repeated it out loud in a two-toned voice, drawing glances of surprise and distrust from the defenders who’d survived the onslaught. With a sigh, I released my tether with Braza, lamenting the lack of her power and support immediately. I wavered on my feet and felt my skin pull in multiple places as wounds in the process of healing reopened. “I said, we have to burn the remains.” A slur crept into my voice.
Grace was the first to react. “Hate to point it out, but we’re in a library,” she snarked.
“Well…we made this mess. Might as well clean it up.” The tired voice was clearly Aaron’s by his forced cheer. His more serious twin was already kicking glass shards into a pile.
“Cress?” Phaeron eyed me top to bottom, his brow knit in confusion. He clearly still knew my name but rolled the R and hissed the rest, making it harder to recognize. He…hadn’t realized it was me under Braza’s shadows?
Maybe he was just horrifically mixed up from his whole ordeal, torture from sleep to waking.
“And look who’s back with us.” Aaron, to my horror, came over to clap Phaeron on the shoulder. Phaeron winced and hissed in earnest. “Oh…damn, can I get a medic?” he called out.
Narrowing his new catlike eyes, the dimensional shook his head and gestured toward his ears. “I know. I see it now. How’d you get burned like that?” Ajax answered.
Phaeron seemed to give up and flicked out his tongue, which was now forked at the end. “He had a translation spell break,” I explained for him. I inched closer, staring at his mouth in fascination. He gazed back, catlike pupils resizing.
I put on an exaggerated grin, hoping he got the message. He bared his fangs back at me and…holy shit, he had a mouth full of sharp teeth, reminding me of a dog’s dentition. Now that I’d noticed, it was obvious that whatever the Void had done to him to make him more human had worn off, sharpening his features at unusual angles and making him that much more alien.
I remembered his many fangs from the haze of Braza’s memory, but it was more real to see it in person. His expression relaxed, and he dragged himself forward a limping step, cupping my cheek and jaw. I sighed out at the familiar rasp of his calluses and even the less familiar points of his more solid, curved claws following the pads of his fingers.
He didn’t speak, but he didn’t have to. He was clearly somewhere between affection, admiration, and disbelief. If he could, I think he’d kiss me, then tell me off for ignoring his every warning and saving him anyway.
When the “medic,” a verdant witch doctor still in his scrubs, arrived to tend to him, Phaeron cut a sideways glare before realizing why the man was interrupting our moment. He sighed out something and took my shoulder, pushing me toward the doctor.
“Wait, you first,” I protested, even though I was feeling increasingly lightheaded.
He held me in front of him stubbornly. “You first,” he echoed with effort.
The doctor began to heal the worst of my injuries with flashes of green and brown magic. “He will need to head to the hospital anyway,” he told me in an undertone. “Actually…wow, you should as well.”
I hadn’t heard a doctor say “wow” before about any illness or injury I’d taken to them. My whole body throbbed and stung with previously ignored hurts. I was going to have one hell of a full-self bruise if I didn’t do as this doctor said.
I turned to Phaeron and pointed to the light outside the now-windowless library. “Hospital,” I said slowly.
He frowned and shook his head, not understanding. I gestured between us, then pointed outside again.
“Allow me to assist. She wants to take you to a hospital, my prince,” Braza said, somehow speaking in both our languages at the same time.
Phaeron grunted. Nice to know that sound was just a universal man thing.