Chapter 35 #2
Her free hand slid over Reeve’s, where he held the reins, a silent command. As instructed, he stopped their horse, and the soft sound of its hooves crunching into packed snow fell away.
Magic, she reminded herself, was merely the will of the mind.
With an exaggerated sigh, she tossed her head back against Reeve and looked up at the white canopy above them. It was terrifyingly serene. So soft and beautiful, but so deadly in its frozen nature. She let her eyes drift closed.
Mordred. How could she jump to Mordred without a connection, a shared memory?
She thought of their first meeting, when she confessed the fate her brother faced as a wolf.
Then, how his coat was smeared red from the blood of all those men he and his wolves slaughtered.
She could still smell the metallic sting in the air—
Her eyes shot open, and she straightened.
Perhaps she didn’t need another’s memories to find Mordred; he was in her memories.
They shared paths of the mind. Her eyes drifted closed once more as she brought herself back to her interpreted memory.
Her skin prickled, and she clung to that metallic taste in the air, breathing it in fully as the feeling of Reeve behind her, and the saddle beneath her dripped away into nothing.
She allowed her mind to fall into the memory of his bared teeth and the sounds of flesh ripping.
Her vision flashed with a burst of bright colors and shifted into a long room at Castle Morana. Abraxas and Mal sat at a wide table, their voices hushed. Maeve’s heart jolted at the sight of her cousin. He’d lost weight, but he was alive.
She wanted to call out to him, ask him to verify his safety, to tell her where Zimsy was, if she was alright, but the only sound that made it out was a high-pitched whine.
At last, Maeve realized she wasn’t observing them through her own body.
She looked down, taking in the bright white mass of fur.
Her attention shot back to Abraxas and Mal.
Neither of them looked her way, or rather, neither of them looked Mordred’s way.
She yanked herself out of the wolf’s mind, knowing she didn’t need to risk giving herself away. Like moving through a current of water, she slid back into the bright white forest on Heims, back into Reeve’s gentle hold.
She did it. She did it with ease. The possibilities were endless for where she could jump, who she could see. She could jump to Zimsy!
If she’d ever acted faster, she couldn’t remember a time.
She didn’t slowly dip into her memories with Zimsy.
No. She let the world fall out from beneath her and plunged herself into endless falling darkness.
Memories and time spiraled around her, twisting her body in every direction and way.
She pulled, no, sucked them all towards her until she was drenched in the feeling of her ally, her best friend.
The sound of her laugh, the smell of her cooking, the color of her eyes bled into the darkness, replaced with an infinite warmth of sisterhood that sat deep in Maeve’s chest. Irreplaceable and unmistakable.
She twisted her body, perfectly timed as her feet slammed into solid matter.
At the same time, her eyes opened, and before her was a vast expanse of earth.
Long dead and dark, blurred and fuzzy. Violent winds assaulted her at once.
She could barely open Zimsy’s eyes to take in her surroundings, but she got enough of a look to understand.
Zimsy’s vision faltered beneath Maeve’s intrusion. Maeve looked down, Zimsy’s body barely strong enough to obey the motion, where she lay on rocky terrain. Her bones were still exposed, her skin torn. But, confirmed by the small rise and fall of her chest, she was alive.
“Zimsy,” she said, forcing the words out of the Elf’s mouth. Her voice was raw, cracked, and barely audible. “I am coming.”
She yanked herself back to the forest at Heims, twisting her torso and looking up at Reeve, triumph blown wide across her features. “He’s at Morana,” she said with certainty. “And Zimsy is on the Dark Planet.”
Reeve’s face was completely unreadable. She couldn’t tell if his shock held praise or terror. Maybe it was both. The sound of Eryx’s fast approaching horse flooded her ears.
“What did you just say?” he asked tensely.
Reeve held Maeve’s stare for a moment more, then the light of a Portal reflected on his face. “Go,” he said to Eryx, who didn’t need to be told. The man was already hurtling towards a Portal Reeve made for him.
“I’m going too,” said Maeve, but Eryx was already through the Portal, and Reeve’s hold on her tightened fractionally.
She glared up at him.
“You found her, Maeve. Let Eryx get her to the waters in Aterna, and she will be waiting for you when we return.”
Maeve opened her mouth to speak, but Reeve spoke first, his voice so bare and unmasked, the thread between them tightened.
“I need you here.”
“No,” she said, her voice stern. “I want to go to her.”
Reeve's eyes were devastatingly soft. His head lowered until his forehead touched down at the crown of her head. With closed eyes, he begged her. “Please, Maeve. I need you here.”
The absence of a command for her to stay or expected obedience was more infuriating than if he’d forced her. Because the soft torment in his voice was so filled with need, she quieted.
Reeve inhaled shakily and lifted his head. Their eyes only met for a moment before Drystan’s voice broke their silence.
“We are surrounded.”
Maeve turned, facing forward in the saddle once more as wolves, all sizes and coats, stepped from behind trees and bushes, from shadows of low-hanging foliage.
But her eyes were captured by one, the largest of them all, who stalked down a small clearing towards them.
He stopped just a few yards from her as Reeve became uncharacteristically tense behind her.
She didn’t look back at him as he took yet another steadying breath.
Her gaze was fixed on the solid black wolf with blazing blue eyes before her.
The Alpha. With a chain and a ring around his neck, just as Mal had said. Her eyes locked on the jewel. Her hands tingled, and her shoulders slackened. Her lips parted at the deep sapphire stone set in the band that was not unfamiliar to her.
It was not possible!
She swung her leg around the saddle, ripping Reeve’s fingers from her front, and dropped to the snowy ground with a soft crunch. He did not attempt to stop her.
“I have seen you in my dreams,” she began with a shaking voice, stepping towards the creature. “It cannot be.”
He was massive. The widest among them, and with a towering height that nearly put him eye to eye with Maeve.
He stepped towards her, finishing the gap between them, his paws silent atop the snow.
He lowered his head until his forehead and Maeve’s were one.
A spark of Magic, barely more than a swift whisper, fluttered through her.
It was known. It was like hers.
Like Arianna’s.
Like her father’s.
“It can’t be,” she repeated.
A small whine slipped from the wolf’s throat. His mental shields slipped open, a silent and bursting invitation for her to see.
And it was all there.
Their childhood.
Antony smiled down at her in the foyer of Sinclair Estates before leaving for his first year at Vaukore.
“Don’t frown like that,” he said with a chuckle. “I have agreed to meet you in London for tea once a month.”
The memory shifted.
Antony and Alphard stood on the lawn in sunglasses, drinks in their hands, as the summer sun beat down on them. Alphard teased Maeve about how bad her game of bocce was. Antony’s arm swung around her neck, pulling her into a loose chokehold.
“Careful, Al,” said Antony with pride, “she’s more venomous than she looks.”
Maeve remembered that day, too. It was the first day of summer, and Antony had just turned fourteen.
The lawn glittered against the sunlight and shifted into a darkened bedroom.
Antony’s bedroom, based on all the sports magazines sprawled across his bed. They were strictly a secret mother couldn’t know about. She hated that Antony loved American sports.
He was maybe twelve, holding up his palm, casting light so he could look through the magazines. Maeve slept soundly next to him.
Another memory flashed across her mind. And another. Each tender and full of life and joy, memories Maeve herself cherished, and proof that the wolf before her was unquestionably Antony Sinclair.
When she withdrew from his mind, her cheeks were slick with tears. His snout sat along her shoulder, tucked inwards and cradling her head, and her arms were wrapped tightly around his broad frame. She lowered her own mental shields for him, and his voice was like a swelling chord in a symphony.
Maeve.
Her fingers twisted into his soft fur. Antony’s nose brushed against her neck.
How how how? she asked.
Steel ripped inside her, crumbling beneath the weight of his heartbeat, his Magic, and the impossible reality that he was alive. She’d felt it before, the gut-wrenching tear of Magic as a false reality shattered. She knew this one was hers as soon as it began to rip through her.
The truth, something unexplained in her Magic that had been gnawing at her for years, begged for acknowledgment.
It wasn’t just the false memory of Antony’s death that tapped against her mind.
It was something more. Something that until she’d purged herself of her Dread Magic, she hadn’t realized stood separately.
She pressed down on the thought as her own memories surrounding Antony flooded her mind, toppling over her lies and contorting what was new and what was old.
She sniffled. “I remember now, just barely,” she said, looking back at Reeve, who had dismounted his horse, her grip on Antony remaining steadfast. “You were there. What did you do?”
“I only did what your father asked of me, Maeve,” he said. “I owed him a debt. He called it in.”
“What did you do?” she repeated forcefully, as more confusion flooded her mind.
“Before I tell you—”
Maeve’s chin lowered, and she released Antony, turning towards Reeve fully. Electric Magic surged down her arm, spiraling into a deadly ball of energy at her fingertips. “Stop! Just answer!”
Reeve barreled over her words with his own.
“Come and look.”
Maeve hesitated. He nodded encouragingly.
“My shields are down. I will show you everything.”
“I can’t,” she said, her voice shaking as reality continued to split inside her. “It’s too much.”
The lightning, ready to strike at her fingertips, dissipated. She groaned and ran her hands over her face.
She can slip through minds.
She is learning to move through minds without jumping. Shadow’s words.
Shadow Magic is deceit so natural that when faced with it, I cannot tell if reality is my own. Reeve’s words.
The fear that had become increasingly prevalent in her mind for longer than she wanted to admit, the Magic tracing unapologetically just beneath her skin, forced its way to the forefront of her mind, begging at last to be acknowledged.
“It is not me that is special. I am merely part Shadow Magic. Aren’t I?”
Magic shattered between her and Reeve, sparking across the snow in a single beam, and echoing across the forest like two boulders colliding. He heaved a painfully relieved sigh and fell to his knees, shaking, as though he’d just been flogged.
“The Magic holding your tongue is broken,” she remarked, confirming at last, Reeve had known all along what she was.
Reeve pushed up, his hands buried in the snow, and looked at her. He spoke with such urgency that she was certain she missed half of every other word he uttered.
“That horrible day, I showed you that with your Shadow Magic, you could alter memories. I showed you that power, and per your father’s command, you did exactly as he told you.
You didn’t hesitate to not only use it on yourself, not just your family, but the entire reality surrounding Antony.
Just as he told you to do. Everyone but me.
And I kept this burdensome secret because that is the job of a Sentinel. ”
Maeve’s knees sank into the snow. The act was silent. Her ears simply rejected the sound. She had been altering reality long before Mal.
“I wanted so badly for it to not be true,” she said in defeat.
Antony pressed closer to her, a low whine building in his throat at her distress. The sound wasn’t comforting. It was merely a reminder of all the things she still hadn’t sorted out in her head: did Antony choose this? Or did she force it upon him like she’d forced reality to alter the last time?
“Shadow,” she repeated. “Shadow Magic runs in my veins.”
A nauseating numbness slipped across her arms, around her stomach, and down her legs, holding her immobile. No thoughts ran through her mind except that one word. Over and over.
Shadow.
She disregarded the discovery that her beloved father had known, kept it from her, and encouraged her to erase the truth from all their minds.
Shadow.
That Reeve had known what she was.
Shadow.
That Antony was alive.
Shadow.
That her mother must have been—
Shadow.
She was. . .of Shadow Magic.
“I am like that horrible creature?” Her question slipped out as it trailed across her mind.
She hadn’t realized Antony retreated and Reeve kneeled before her until his knuckle tucked under her chin, bringing her gaze from the icy snow—
. . . the color of her hair, her skin, her nails, her lips. . .
—and gently pulled her eyes to his own.
Reeve was solemn. Knightly. Sincere. “You are nothing like her.”
Maeve’s jaw tightened as fear rippled through her. “Not yet.”
Reeve pushed her chin up further, a darker, more regal light in his eyes. “Not ever.”
Her mind was on fire, overloaded with information.
She shook her head, desperation in her eyes as she said.
“What’s rippling across my mind where you are concerned is.
. .” She couldn’t finish the thought. She sucked in sharply.
“I don’t understand.” His fingers slid to one cheek, his other hand raised, and he cupped her face gently.
She leaned into one of his warm palms. Tears of confusion, denial, anxiety, and devastation poured from the corners of her eyes. “What am I seeing, Reeve?”
And then her vision flooded as Reeve poured his memories into her mind.