A Dark Inheritance

by Cora May

  Donlarr was returning then, with something in his hands. Brin couldn’t make out exactly what it was. Each item was far too blurry around the edges. All she could really tell was that it was a bunch of pointy shaped, gold-colored things.

  He carried them to the entrance of the portal, now facing Brin. The army rotated to face him.

  The hooded figure moved again then, herself turning toward the portal as well. She did not turn in the same hypnotic rhythm of the army, though. She turned seemingly at her own pace. She didn’t go through the portal, either, like Brin half expected her to. She began to twist and turn the portal with her hands instead, never quite touching it, but it responded to her pulls anyway.

  When she stepped away, the army stepped up.

  “Go and take out the enemy,” Donlarr told them in a loud, commanding voice. “Do not stop ’til you have killed. Show no mercy. Clear out the Realm of Light so that there are vacancies for us to fill. Go with speed, go with determination. Go now!”

  One by one, the small army began to step forward, pausing just in front of the portal to take one of the shiny objects from Donlarr before plunging through the portal without even seeming to think twice about it. Brin certainly had never stepped through a portal with such gusto. They were on a mission, that much was clear. They were there to serve their master, no matter what it meant.

  And, evidently, it meant murder.

  As each one stepped through, Donlarr’s pile of shiny things got smaller and smaller. Once each of the students had stepped through, he was left with a very small number of them—only three. Those must have been for the missing students. He put two of them down on the ground and began swinging the last one back and forth, carelessly. It whipped through the air, whistling a melody as it did.

  “Be careful with that thing,” the hooded figure said, flinching back as she did. “It doesn’t just kill your kind.”

  “Have some faith in me,” Donlarr said with amusement in his voice.

  The figure was annoyed but didn’t say a word. She didn’t stop watching Donlarr as he swung the object, though. That’s when Brin understood what it was. It was a weapon. It looked like it could have been a dagger—small, but not tiny. He had just given nine students a shiny dagger and sent them through a portal.

  Why had the students gone so willingly?

  The figure suddenly spun around, facing the entrance of the cave. She got still and quiet, and very, very focused. She was listening for something, Bin realized. She must have heard something. Donlarr kept twirling around his dagger, like nothing in this world could bother him—Brin was glad she never met him in human form. She couldn’t stand people like that.

  “Did you hear that?” the figure asked after a long moment of listening. She sounded paranoid, but she also sounded like she was trying to hide her paranoia. It came off as a big insecurity instead. That was probably why Donlarr answered first with a laugh.

  “It’s just the leaves in the wind, my dear,” he cooed at her, never losing the rhythm of his swinging dagger.

  “But there is no wind here,” she told him, “nor are there any leaves. Mock me if you will, but I heard something.”

  “I probably will mock you,” Donlarr said uncaringly. “Just give me a moment to think of something good.”

  “You’re an ass.”

  “I’m an Anam Dorcha. What did you expect?”

  The figure had no response for that. She just looked away, back toward the entrance. Brin couldn’t see her face clearly, but she was sure there was a look of annoyance painted on it.

  “What did you send them for this time?” she asked Donlarr, never looking away from the spot she had trained her eyes.

  “Just the regular,” he told her. “There’s not enough moonlight tonight for the whole thing yet. What about the Reaper?”

  “I don’t know if I can get him to die,” she said. “He’s sick. So sick. I feel like at any moment he should keel over, but for some reason, he never does.”

  “Ah, the price of immortality.”

  “Everyone has to be able to die sometime,” she assured him. “It’ll be over soon enough, I’m sure of it.”

  “It better be,” he said. It seemed like something he should care about, yet he was still swinging around his dagger like he was bored. “None of this will work if he is around to correct it all.”

  “Even if he is still somehow able to live through this,” she told him, finally looking away from the opening, “he can barely sit up in bed, much less walk around and make himself a portal to get from place to place. He’s been knocked incapacitated and rendered useless at best. It shouldn’t be long before he starts to deteriorate.”

  Donlarr had nothing to say to that. Instead, he just nodded his head and waited for the next topic to be brought up.

  “What is taking them so long?” the figure demanded. “They’ve never been gone this long before.”

  “What are you talking about?” he told her as she glanced around nervously. “They’ve barely been out a few moments. Be patient.”

  “There’s something different about today,” she insisted.

  “Just relax,” he said. The annoyance was clear in his voice.

  “I think I need to be back at the castle,” the figure said. “Something is—”

  She didn’t get to finish that sentence.

  Outside, there were definite noises. They were voices, Brin could make that out now, and, clearly, so could the hooded figure. She looked back and forth between Donlarr and the opening with wide eyes. It took her all of two seconds to decide before she went to the portal and, once again, waved her hands in front of it. She quickly stepped through, and then she was gone.

  Donlarr had stopped swinging the blade around. It took him an extra three seconds to decide before he went bounding after the figure—but it was too late for him. The portal closed up right in his face, as if it was rejecting him specifically.

  Brin had a sinking feeling that she should have gone through that portal when she had the chance, too. That surely went back to the castle, and it could have been her only opportunity to get there.

  She had no time to regret it, though—she wasn’t even sure she would have been able to stand up anyway. It would have shut on her face, too.

  Donlarr looked around, scrambling for something to do. He settled for, maddeningly, going back to swinging the blade. The visual he gave said nothing was bothering him, and he didn’t care about the noises his friend had heard, but the energy he put out told a different story. He was panicking.

  Three new figures stepped in through the opening. Each of them carried something gold and shiny, but this time of various shapes a lot different than Donlarr’s small dagger. Still, even through her fogged-up vision, Brin could identify them now as the same family of weapons that his dagger was from. She wondered what was so special about them. Were they Anam weapons? Did everything glow in this Realm?

  Anam weapons or not, it was clear that the figures in front of her were nothing more than human. That was a great comfort to her, as well as a great disappointment. If this was her rescue team, they didn’t stand a chance against an Anam like Donlarr. Not after what she had been through.

  “Brin!” one of the figures yelled.

  It was a female voice.

  It was high pitched, terrified, and relieved, all at once.

  It was Srilla.

  EPILOGUE

  A ddelai sat in the arms of her friend Viktor. He had come to her that night, despite the rules of the castle, and held her as she cried. She told him about the Anam Solas, and he kept from telling her about his own experience, though he had been just as aware of it all as she was. She told him about Brin, and how Chanta said she can communicate with her still. She told him everything that had happened the past few days as she blubbered away. He gently held her the entire time, shushing her when she got too emotional and kissing the top of her head when she started to drift away.

  Chanta was not in the room where she
should have been asleep, a fact that seemed to have slipped the minds of both the Anam Hunters. Chanta was in the basement still, Fenneck at her side. His mind was still racing with his borrowed mind reading, and he couldn’t get Douglass out of his head. Nor could he stop from hearing Chanta’s thoughts, too, and he moved to embrace her, to comfort her in this time. A relative of Donlarr. She could deny it no longer, despite the grief it gave her. Grief, and yet she did not understand the power it also brought to her. She did not understand how crucial she would be.

  Brinziel, too, would be a crucial player. She had valiantly chosen to stay in the Realm of Darkness. She had made friends, and those friends had escaped Sorenna’s grasp to save their human friend. Anam Dorcha, together with an exotic, they called her. Srilla and Anjelik, the only two who were brave enough to leave Sorenna, had slain Donlarr already.

  And yet, it wasn’t enough. Donlarr was only a small piece in this, a pawn in a bigger game. All the control he thought he had, all the power he thought he wielded. He was nothing but a vessel. At least the breeding would be stopped. No more Obsidian bearers would enter the world.

  Bas Sinistre coughed. It was another gross, phlegmy cough that echoed deep in his chest.

  Yes, Donlarr was gone. But he had not yet recovered the piece of his scythe that was missing, nor had he even the slightest guess at where it might be. These three girls, though, and the teams they were each putting together, would be the ones to locate it. He had the strongest faith in them, even as two of them sat blubbering away about their own discoveries that night. They needed a moment to adjust, he understood that.

  The weakest one of them all, the whore of the Realm of Darkness, she had already come to terms with her position. There had been no tears for her. She had never been granted the opportunity to cry, not where she was, not with the Anam that surrounded her. If she could get through it long enough to discover what she was meant to do, then so could her friends.

  These were the beings that would rescue the Reaper of Death.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cora May, now twenty-five, wrote her first book when she was fourteen years old. It was written on loose-leaf paper in a binder decorated in glittery stickers and would take its readers to the magical Realm of her imagination. Though it was never published, she has kept it in her closet, wrapped up in Ziplock bags and string. To this day, it serves as a reminder of her dream to become a best-selling author. A Dark Inheritance is the first book in her debut series, The Broken Scythe Series. But for Cora, it won’t end there. Follow her on Instagram @Author_Cora_May to keep up to date on all her works in progress.

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Glass Spider Publishing is an independent hybrid publisher located in Ogden, Utah. The company was founded in 2016 by writer Vince Font to help underrepresented authors get their books into circulation. For more information, visit www.glassspiderpublishing.com.