Shadow Hunter (Court of Life and Death Book 2)

by Melody Rose

  “Tawney, you can ask for anything.” I shook my head, wondering what she could want from me.

  “Will you please tell me what this says?”

  I blinked before my face contorted in confusion. “What?” I looked down and opened the journal. There wasn’t a word of English on the page, or any other language I knew of. Once again, this was the language I almost thought could be Latin. Oli’s dagger from Minerva, the doors to the Seers’ rooms, now Alless’s log. “You can’t read this?”

  Tawney shook her head. “This is an ancient fae language. It hasn’t been spoken commonly since the time when ancient magic was still widely practiced.”

  I looked at Kalian, but he shook his head. “I was never taught it. But someone must know.”

  “Can’t you read it?” the Seer asked.

  I frowned and looked down at the words. The letters were similar to English letters, the way Latin was, but there were just enough line variations that it was obviously a separate alphabet. Even if the letters were English, the words definitely were not. I squinted in thought at the text in Alless’s handwriting, remembering the dagger and when I’d seen the imprint on it for the first time. It reminded me of the night I met Daath and Syrion at the nightclub when the reaper had tried to kill me. Before he attacked, he chanted something in ancient Greek, a language I’d never spoken nor studied, but I could still decipher the dialect.

  A sudden spark of familiarity began to light in my mind. The day I’d spoken to Alless, she told me I’d lived many lives as different people, different creatures, at different times. I hadn’t spent any time yet sifting through those memories, but a certain one slowly emerged in my mind. I remembered being a young girl, but not human, going over these characters with someone who looked like an adult but not old enough to be my mom. I remembered her being my big sister, helping teach me how to read these letters and speak the language.

  I flipped back to inside the front cover of the old leather book, and the words before me quickly felt familiar, like hearing an old lullaby from childhood that I’d forgotten. The sounds, the meanings, and the words all flooded back into my mind in a wave of clarity and understanding.

  “This is for Tawney,” I read the cover out loud. “I don’t know how long it will take to reach her. Keep it out of the archives and out of the library, only amongst Seers.”

  Tawney’s hand flew up to cover her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes.

  I flipped to a page near the middle of the journal that was blank, and I paused. It hit me how young Alless truly must have been when Minerva killed her. I turned back to the earlier pages until I found one she’d written on.

  “… the Unseelie Queen will start sabotaging the balance with the help of agents in every realm until she can trap Death and Life and expand her power. It is for this reason the Universe has created the third and final member of the cycle, Spirit. Spirit, unlike Death and Life, will be mortal and will be reborn after every passing. Spirit will have the strength, the power, and the motivation to stop the Unseelie Queen and restore the balance to the realms. As Death has power over souls once they pass and Life has power over them before they are born, Spirit will rule over all who live, whether that be on Earth, in Gora, the realm of the ogres, or here in the realm of the fae. All living souls will be subject…”

  I paused as I read. To hear Alless speak these things to me was overwhelming on its own and reading it was just as much to deal with. I looked up, and Tawney was crying, but there was a smile on her face. I glanced at my companions, and Kalian, Daath, and Syrion all stared at me in shock as I translated the text before their eyes.

  “Myrcedes,” Kalian breathed softly. “How can you-”

  “It was a past life,” Syrion blinked. “Wasn’t it?”

  I smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Now I can prove that I’m telling the truth. Being able to read a dead language in here should help, right?”

  “No one will doubt you,” Daath smiled, coming over to wrap his arms around me victoriously. After a moment, Tawney’s small, bright voice trembled through the air one more time.

  “Can you tell me one final thing?”

  “Of course,” I smiled, turning to her.

  She looked around the hall and gestured to the doors, which had the old language burned into them along with the images. “What do these mean?”

  I stepped closer to the door and leaned in. The image was of a man with wings sitting at a table with a single chair and a large stack of food in front of him. “The words describe the picture and the prophecy around it. This was a faerie who used to hoard wealth. He was rich but died lonely.”

  I described the other stories on the walls. Tawney informed me that these were the first-ever prophecies recorded by Seers in the fae realm, so that must have been why they were on the doors in the Seer tower and why all the images had faeries, a species of fae that used to be more common. They weren’t extinct, but their traits were all so recessive that there weren’t many anymore.

  “This is all quite riveting,” Daath cut in with a hint of sarcasm, though he became more genuine when I shot him a look, “but I believe we have a meeting to attend downstairs, Myrcedes.”

  “Right,” I nodded. I’d gotten so distracted and excited by all the new information running through my brain. I turned to Tawney. “Would you attend with us? I think it would be helpful to have you there to confirm everything about the journal.”

  She smiled warmly and bowed her head. “I would be honored, my Queen.”

  We made our way downstairs, which the elderly Seer did with ease and reckless abandon. She could see how concerned I was and laughed it off, saying she’d prophesied her death already, and it had nothing to do with falling down the stairs, so she was going to be fine. I glanced at Kalian as we neared the main floor. Bahz was nowhere in sight, but I didn’t trust him to just leave us alone.

  Kalian saw my concern, and even though he didn’t know what exactly was bothering me, he reached over and squeezed my hand, anyway. That didn’t really set me at ease, but it did help me relax just to know he was right beside me, where I could keep him safe.

  We returned to the room with the large doors where we’d come for Kalian’s trial. I hesitated before them, feeling a pit in my stomach. Was it common to get stage fright before announcing yourself as Queen of the Universe? I decided it was at least rational.

  Both Daath and Syrion walked behind me and put their hands on my shoulders, signaling to me that they had my back. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, nodded, and pushed open the doors.

  30

  Kalian

  When Myrcedes suggested calling a sort of town hall with the fae, I laughed at the suggestion of getting most of the realm’s residents together in the palace. Fae, in general, didn’t like to listen to anyone unless it was self-serving or absolutely required. For that very reason, the army was almost entirely Seelie; we were more agreeable than other fae as a general rule, and our life spans were so long that they could accommodate training. Training for the fae army was a five-hundred-year endeavor just to make sure any individual who joined was broken of any tricky or disrespectful behavior.

  I supposed everyone in the realm was so anxious to know what was to become of our world because when the small, purple-haired Queen pushed open the massive doors, the courtroom of the Jewel Palace was more packed with creatures than I had ever seen it before.

  Where over a month ago, the council sat to take away everything I’d known for thousands of years, Serriah now stood, waiting for us. The room had clearly been buzzing with commotion and confusion, but the second everyone saw the five of us at the door, they all fell silent. I followed the Queen and Kings along with Tawney as they walked down the center of the room toward the podium. If Myrcedes was nervous, you’d never know. She held her head high and looked as confident as I’d ever seen her. I smiled just a bit to myself at seeing that.

  It had been jarring at first to hear her say she was going to be Queen of the fae real
m. Of course, that’s not what she’d said, but that’s what I heard. I’d been loyal to one Queen for so long, and even though I’d betrayed her, it was hard to accept that an outsider to my people would be claiming power. I’d been foolish to think that for even a moment, however, when the one in power would be Myrcedes. From the day she met me, she’d been fair in every sense of the word. She’d been exhausting herself trying to improve the Earth as long as it had been hers to rule, and the fae realm would be lucky to finally have a ruler who cared for it so much.

  We made our way to the podium. Myrcedes took her place in the very center, flanked by Daath and Syrion. On the other side of the Kings stood Serriah and I, with Tawney next to me. In the very front row of the audience in the courtroom, Bahz and his soldiers stood. Each one had their arms crossed and a glare that could kill pointed straight in Myrcedes’ direction.

  The two remaining council members were also at the front of the audience. Serriah had explained in the past week how the other eight of the council members had sent in letters of resignation. Apparently, rumors spread about them as quickly as they had about Minerva’s death - suicide pact, robbing the treasury and fleeing to Earth, and some had even claimed the missing council members weren’t real and were puppets of the Unseelie Queen that simply ceased to exist without their puppet-master. But mostly, everyone was just jarred to suddenly feel like the realm had no leaders.

  “Hello,” Myrcedes nodded to the silent room. A wave of whispers rocked through the crowd, but none loud enough to interrupt or distract from her. They really were anxious for guidance. “Many of you don’t know me; some of you may remember me from the trial of General Kalian. Daath and Syrion announced me as their Queen.”

  A slight buzz spread throughout the room amongst those who were hearing this for the first time. To most of the realm, my trial had been inconsequential. The events there really only fed into the mill of rumors surrounding Minerva’s death.

  She spoke over the chatter. “I’m here to elaborate on that. My name is Myrcedes Kardia. I am the Queen of the Middle Worlds.”

  The buzz suddenly broke out into a swarm of commotion. Most of them knew what that meant and knew it included the fae realm. Suddenly, a human woman was coming in to say she was the Queen of not only the world of the fae but everywhere else, as well. I watched Myrcedes closely, but she seemed calm. Surely she’d expected this reaction, and she took it in stride. I admired her for that.

  Daath and Syrion seemed to tense up physically; Myrcedes gently put a hand on both of their backs, which paused their reaction, but the pair remained on edge. I shared their sentiment. While I understood the fear and sudden confusion about the future that the rest of the fae did, my main concern was Myrcedes.

  “The last thing I want is to become some kind of tyrant over the Middle Worlds,” she spoke with a calming, reassuring tone. “I don’t plan to do that. You know yourselves better than I do. You know what your world needs and how your people function. Unfortunately, with the sudden resignation of eight of the council members, there is no one qualified to rule as monarch; even if there was, we would risk them taking advantage of their power as Minerva did. So-”

  “This is all a fucking show.” My head whipped away from Myrcedes and toward the voice, which was coming from Bahz. He had stood from his seat and was sneering at us all. “You killed the real Queen. You come in and send some elven reaper to spy on us for you until we get so desperate you think we’ll just agree that you’re the new ruler?”

  I tried to silence the man I used to consider my closest friend in the army. “Bahz-”

  “Your disgraced General has been feeding you horse shit if you think the fae will stand for this kind of deposition-”

  “I can prove it!” Myrcedes shouted over him. As Bahz had been speaking, the hum of the crowd increased as everyone weighed what was being said. Before Minerva’s death, I was considered a lackey for her, but I was highly respected. Everyone knew me as honorable, loyal, and powerful. Now that I’d been banished, that same respect had fallen onto Bahz’s shoulders, earned or not. Even those who disliked Minerva had very little reason to believe Myrcedes over the Seelie Lieutenant.

  I watched her hold up the brown journal. “Tawney is one of your Seers, a fae whose life is dedicated to speaking the truth. I got this from her. This is the log of a Seer from thousands of years ago who wrote of my existence before I’d ever been born.”

  “Why do we trust that you didn’t write that moth-eaten piece of trash yourself?” Someone else from the audience, egged on by Bahz’s opposition to Myrcedes, stood up and shouted.

  I must have known better, but I could almost have sworn that I saw Tawney smile, like she’d been waiting for that question to be asked. Before Myrcedes could answer, the old fae Seer held up her hand. This didn’t silence the commotion of the room, but it brought it down to a significantly quieter lull.

  “My dear ones,” she spoke as loudly as she could for someone as old as she was. She was a xana, a small subset of fae that possessed strong magic but were known for their unwillingness to use it to save people. Xana lived longer than a lot of fae creatures, but their lifespans were still only about eight hundred years, though some made it to a thousand if they were lucky. Tawney was somewhere around seven hundred fifty or sixty, and she’d been a Seer for the fae for almost that long. Not all Seers were xana, but when one was, they were always trusted. That was certainly an asset to Myrcedes’ claim.

  “I recognize how difficult it is to believe the Queen’s claim,” she continued. “But I can confirm what she says. This is the log of Alless, a Seer whom Minerva tried to erase from history after she foretold of the rise of Spirit. Before she had ever heard it, this Queen knew my name, because Alless’s soul spoke to her and revealed to her these secrets. Alless wrote in the ancient language, the one we have all seen, but so few of us remember. I’ve kept this log for more than seven hundred years and never understood a word of it. After I showed it to Spirit, however, she was able to read every word.”

  Tawney turned to smile at Myrcedes with pride. “She is a pure-hearted woman. She doesn’t seek to take advantage of us as the Unseelie Queen did-”

  “All this means is that she’s turned our own Seers against us for the promise of power,” Bahz glared, cutting the old woman off. Everyone in the room was shocked at his claim. It was practically common knowledge that Minerva had tried to persuade the Seers to manipulate people or their visions to suit her and that nothing she offered them worked. So why were so many of them nodding their heads as though the soldier had a point?

  Tawney began to defend herself. “I would never-”

  “I don’t believe she reads the ancient language, I don’t believe that she spoke to some dead Seer, and I don’t believe she’s meant to be our Queen!” he shouted. I turned to see Myrcedes breathing heavily as though she was trying to calm herself down, all the while slowly widening her feet below the podium as if she was preparing to get into a defensive stance. I frowned to myself. There was no way a fight would break out over this. People would just assume she was lying and move on, right?

  Daath and Syrion were shooting looks at all the audience members who seemed to voice dissent, but stayed silent. Myrcedes had made them promise to let her take care of everything if anyone tried to argue.

  “If you don’t believe me, I’ll prove it.” I finally heard the embodiment of Spirit’s voice ring through the room.

  “No one speaks that language anymore,” one of the younger soldiers with Bahz jumped up. He was an Unseelie with bright green eyes and dark brown hair, and I remembered him as having a penchant for trouble. If I remembered correctly, his name was Fie. “You could make up anything you wanted. There’s no way to confirm it.”

  “That’s not true,” Tawney began, but before she could continue, she was cut off once again.

  “Bullshit.” Bahz, the pale blonde Seelie that I’d trained with, been promoted alongside, and trusted with my life more times than I could
count, glared at the respected Seer along with the rest of us as he reached across his hip and pulled out his sword.

  Before I could even grasp what he might even try to do, Myrcedes had begun moving, almost like she’d expected this. I knew for a fact she had left her scythe at the Moonstone Castle, but as she jumped over the podium with her arm outstretched, it appeared in her hand the way the book had just materialized in Tawney’s. I saw Daath and Syrion pull out their own weapons as the rest of the soldiers drew theirs, but everyone froze when the sharp clang of metal rang through the hall.

  Upon being lunged at, Bahz had swung his sword quite recklessly. I knew exactly what kind of training he had received, and there was no method the fae army knew of to fight against a scythe effectively. As a weapon, it was less predictable than a sword because of the sharp curve of the blade, but regardless of that, it wasn’t used by anyone besides the reapers of Death. No one bothered training to fight against scythes. The lack of preparation against the weapon was almost a show of good faith to the King of Death, a promise that when their time came, they wouldn’t put up a fight. No one ever imagined they’d be fighting with the Queen of the Middle World, a reaper of Death herself, and defending their lives against a scythe in front of their entire kingdom.

  Myrcedes had every opening to do any number of things that would have ended Bahz and his resistance in a moment. He’d foolishly exposed his neck, his chest, and his gut when he swung against a scythe, but she didn’t take a chance to cut any of those. She held her scythe up high as he swung to catch his blade mid-air. The room stared at the two figures, frozen in a standstill. The first to move their weapon would set the other’s free while leaving themselves open to attack. What I found myself stuck on, though, was why Myrcedes hadn’t ended this fight before it began.

  The Queen pushed hard with her scythe, knocking her opponent’s blade even further from his center of gravity and throwing him off entirely. Bahz could have recovered easily enough except for the fact that he was standing up against a chair which caused him to trip backward. The whole show might have been hilarious if it weren’t for the collective gasp the room shared when the Seelie Lieutenant lost his grip on his weapon.