5. Chapter 5
5
T he second the words left her lips, Rebecca realized she should have put a bit more thought—or at the very least more tact—into her warning.
The quivering tension keeping Maxwell’s stonily unreadable expression intact snapped when her warning fully sank in. Silver light blazed behind them before he leaned toward her, his lips peeling back in a snarl. “And what, exactly, will I see and hear?”
Whoops.
She stared him down, hoping she hadn’t just sent him over the edge of composure and off the cliff into nothing but animal instinct.
“Honestly, it could be any number of things,” she replied through gritted teeth, fighting to keep her voice down. “All of which you most likely won’t enjoy or even approve of. Hence my attempt to cover all the possibilities with a blanket statement like that.”
A violent snort burst out of him, not in amusement or annoyance but like the snort of an angry bull ready to charge. “You realize none of that instills any measure of confidence.”
“Like I said…” Rebecca grabbed his hand one more time to give his fingers another squeeze—meant to reassure them both—either because of or despite another tingling zap of electric energy racing up her arm at the contact. “I just need you to trust me on this.”
“It’s time ,” Rowan called in a sing-song voice before shifting around on his knees to face them. His grin remained, but it looked a little more forced and unnatural now that all the necessary preparations had apparently been made.
Rebecca held Maxwell’s gaze until he let out another heavy sigh and dipped his head, silently agreeing to her terms.
Then she managed—with a level of difficulty impossible to ignore—to slip her fingers out of his before she left him standing there on his own.
And she took her place beside Rowan at the other wiggle of a chalk line drawn onto the floor beside him. She lowered herself to both knees, sat back on her heels, and waited for the Blackmoon Elf to begin the ritual she had never imagined in hundreds of years she would ever have agreed to perform.
Though Maxwell’s footsteps made no sound across the floor as he backed toward the trailer door, the pain of increasing distance between them tugged on Rebecca like a hook caught through her back, yanking her toward the shifter before fading again when he finally stopped.
She fought against the sensation as best she could and focused on her breathing. Nothing but calm and steady concentration for what they were about to do next. Anything else might jeopardize the entire spell.
Rowan pointed at a bundle of dry herbs resting in its specified location within the greater exterior casting circle surrounding them, and the tiniest spark erupting at the center of the bundle. The trailer quickly filled with light, hazy blue-gray tendrils of smoke and the pungently sweet odor that transported Rebecca back home—to the past, to her buried memories—faster than she could name what it was he’d set to burn.
That scent—here, in a man-made trailer abandoned in the woods beside an unused bridge outside Chicago, on Earth —stoked a swelling rage of resentment that had lain dormant inside her for too long. She shoved it right back down again the instant she recognized it for what it was.
Those herbs had come straight from the Xahar’áhsh, no doubt about it. Maybe even cut from the Lashir’i themselves before Rowan’s deployment to find her in this world.
Fiti’iní.
That was it. A sacred leaf that should never have been here in the first place. He was already towing the line, wasn’t he?
After only a few seconds of breathing in the spiraling smoke, unable to avoid it, her head started to spin. Not in the dizzying, nauseating way of her childhood and adolescence but in a light, playful way that almost promised a pleasurable experience.
She hated it.
By the third time she actively reminded herself that she was here , with Maxwell standing guard behind her, and not kneeling in the grass at the center of the Lashir’i Ruins or one of their smothering garden temples, she recognized the soft, melodic chanting of Rowan’s voice and realized he’d been chanting for quite some time.
Not that time would remain much of a constant or dependable measurement now that their ritual had begun.
The words were a seamless intermingling of old Xaharí and ancient elven—a tongue from before the age of the Bloodshadow Clan and the rise of Agn’a Tha’ros.
Words she hadn’t heard in centuries but recognized and remembered, nonetheless.
Words that raised goosebumps across her flesh, made her want to leap off the floor and run right out of this building, hauling Maxwell along with her, and all Blue Hells take the consequences.
But she stayed where she was, forcing herself to follow her own breath, shoving back the rise of shame and rage and hatred for everything that came next.
The kind of hatred felt and truly understood only by those aware enough to realize they’d been wrongly imprisoned and strong enough to remember their captors were and always had been the ones responsible for it.
She had to withstand the urge to run again—to leave all this behind the way she already had once before when fleeing from the Bloodshadow Court the first time. It was the only way for any of them to get out alive, and if not completely unaffected, then at least as unscathed as possible.
Rebecca fought to remember that this was merely a spell. A powerful one with equally powerful implications, but a spell, nonetheless. Not real life. Not her current reality. Not a forced submission and return to Xahar’áhsh through the Gateway or by any other means.
No matter what happened next, there would still be two entire worlds between her and the results on the other side of this completed spell.
Suddenly, two entire worlds still didn’t feel like anywhere close to far enough.
It hardly registered when Rowan used each of his macabre spell reagents to set the tone, doing who knew what with them, because Rebecca simply couldn’t follow. But once he set the last item down again, returning it to its precise place within the casting circle, Rebecca knew the moment had come.
Through the smoke and the pause in Rowan’s chanting in two ancient tongues, the power of the magic invoked by the ritual he led descended upon them, filling not only the larger casting circle around them and all their supplies but the entire trailer as well.
Decades of undisturbed dust caked on in layers rippled across the peeling floor in an impossible breeze. The temperature in the air rose ten degrees in seconds. The loose papers left scattered elsewhere around the room rustled and crunched despite no weighted footsteps pressing across them.
The sweetness of the smoke intensified, taking on the expected sour stench Rebecca remembered only too well.
Behind her came the only sound from Maxwell since they’d begun—a sharp, jolting, barely concealed inhale through his teeth before he fell perfectly silent again.
He clearly felt it too, though whether it was due to their connection or because he was a rare shifter particularly attuned to changes in the magic of others, she had no idea. To her knowledge, a ritual like this had never before been performed in front of any other magical race but elves.
Clearly, the shifter’s presence here had little effect on the spell’s power and overall efficacy.
So far.
Another moment of stillness stretching across tensely waiting seconds. Once Rowan apparently thought the magic welling between them was ready, he fingered yet another spell reagent set around this smaller inner casting circle before drawing it into his lap.
The cadence of his chanting shifted—faster and more urgent despite the new softness in his voice. Far more like a whispered plea than the formal lulling cadence of the spell’s opening.
Rebecca fought the urge to sway on her knees to the rhythm of his whispers beneath the cloying, souring sweetness of the fiti’iní smoke.
The next thing she knew, he’d extended the item in his hand toward her—the coupling ribbon. A rope of thickly braided hair in myriad colors, from raven-black to tawny red-brown, to a dark, flaming-red like fire, then golden-brown, bright yellow-blonde, silver-gray, and white.
Elven hair. The threads of their ancestors woven together, generation after generation, weaving time and space together to converge upon this singular moment.
One end of the braided ribbon dangled over the edge of Rowan’s outstretched hand, and Rebecca’s fingers were called instantly toward it, stretching out, brushing against the feather-soft strands of every natural color. She fumbled to grab hold of that dangling end, as if her extremities had been disconnected from the core of her body and her own intentions to move, to execute her mind’s demands.
The soft, gentle clacking along the braided ribbon as she tried to grab it produced an unexpected, unasked-for memory—like the clacking of dozens of long, beaded strings as the temple priestess moved among her gathered worshippers beneath the same sour sweetness of smoking fiti’iní .
But those were never beads, she remembered. And neither were these.
These were teeth, strung around the braided blocks of hair, intricately carved to contain their purpose and joined by powerful bone relics of the elders from countless old-world clans.
Teeth, bone, hair. The dust of those who’d come before. Right here at her fingertips.
The knowledge was surprisingly sobering, stilling her spinning head enough for Rebecca to successfully grab hold of the ribbon’s loose end. The second she did, her strength instantly returned, flowing right back into her through her fingers.
The teeth and bones clacked again when Rowan lowered his end of the ribbon toward one thigh. The voracity of his whispered entreaty rose to new heights, though the soft and gentle imploring never did.
Her eyelids felt so heavy as she knelt with the hair and teeth and bones of ancestors clenched in one hand, and she was powerless to stop them from closing.
But when she opened them again, the coupling ribbon between them, connecting her hand to Rowan’s, had already begun to glow.
Softly at first, like an ember catching for the briefest moment on a patch of dry brush. This ember did not wink out.
This one grew.
A dark, whirling mercurial silver starting at the bit of braid between Rebecca’s fingers, inching its way toward the center of the rope, and shadowy pitch-black un-light creeping from Rowan’s end, enshrouding the ribbon in the black glow of his magic, as if hungry to consume whatever it touched next.
Bloodshadow magic and Blackmoon magic, bound together through the ribbon, siphoning out of each of them and spreading across the braid, as if racing each other toward the center.
When they met in the middle with a flash more felt than seen, all Rebecca’s senses previously dulled by the fiti’iní smoke returned to her in a sudden ecstatic rush, completely and all at once. She sucked in a sharp breath and fully opened her eyes, vibrating with the product of her and Rowan’s combined power the same way she had vibrated with it the night they’d saved Maxwell’s life.
Another breeze kicked up inside the trailer, shuffling old papers and crumbling leaves, dirt and discarded hot-dog wrappers from half an hour before. Tugging at Rebecca’s hair and the open collar of her light jacket. Howling through the cracks and tunnels of a world that did not exist around her now.
But it did exist elsewhere, across dimensions, within another realm. Another world.
Within her home.
She knew this energy well—her magic and his, each of them alone nearly opposing the other but insurmountably powerful when combined.
It felt the same as the night they’d healed Maxwell Hannigan, but it was not the same.
That night at the warehouse, she’d wanted Rowan’s help. The only thing she’d wanted more in that moment was for Maxwell to live.
But this?
This was not a request Rebecca had made. This was not what she wanted. This was not of her own making or in a product of her own desire.
She was willing to do this because it was better than any other possible alternative, but she wanted nothing to do with this spell or what it would achieve or the doors it would open again after she’d gone so far and accomplished so much to keep them locked up tight.
This was her last resort, but she was here, she was willing, and she was the Bloodshadow Heir.
Neither the magic nor this spell cared at all for her feelings about it.
For the sacrifice she was absolutely willing to make.
For Shade.