Blazing the Trail: The Dragon Diaries

by Deborah Cooke

  What was this spell for?

  Was there something I didn’t know?

  I moved closer, even without any urging from Skuld. The sphere they were creating with their spell became bigger and brighter. It was a golden globe, expanding in the air over their heads. Like a balloon. It looked more solid by the minute, like it was made of orange glass. And as their chant became a song, I saw shapes form within the sphere.

  Human shapes.

  Silvery human shapes.

  ShadowEaters! I took a step backward, feeling like I was going to puke. The Mages had invoked these beings at that last ceremony, to feed them the shadows of their sacrificial victims. They’d creeped me out then, and didn’t give a better impression this time around. There was something ominous and awesome about their presence, like they were visiting from another realm.

  The thing was, the Mages had invoked the ShadowEaters last fall using the NightBlade. How could apprentice Mages do this summoning? Kohana had the NightBlade, wherever he was.

  There was, though, a full moon shining down on the scene, which had been part of the deal during our big battle in the fall. And there was no mistaking those shapes.

  Or my dread at the sight of them.

  The shapes in the globe became more substantial.

  And more numerous.

  So numerous that they strained at the constraints of the spell bubble, elbowing each other for space. Jostling and shoving. There was something aggressive about them this time, and I wasn’t glad to see that change.

  All the same, I didn’t want to blink and risk missing anything.

  As the guys chanted their spell, the ShadowEaters started to brighten. The orange light of the spell seemed to fill them, making their shapes luminescent, radiant with pulsing orange spell light.

  This could not be good.

  The guys were staring upward, rapt at the results of their spell, even as they were fortifying it. The sphere became so crowded with shapes that it bulged. I saw fists and feet and elbows as the ShadowEaters tried to fight their way loose of the orb’s constraint. The sphere looked to be stretched thin and I worried that it would burst. They struggled with more force. The guys sang louder. My heart pounded.…

  Then Adrian threw his hands up and shouted, “Be with us, O exalted ones!”

  With a flash, the globe shattered into a thousand shards of gold. Hundreds of ShadowEaters leapt to the earth with purpose. Now they looked like menacing shadows, dark silhouettes with no features.

  Except for their gleaming golden eyes. Their eyes were filled with spell light. They were silent but terrifying.

  Adrian had time to laugh at his victory. “I told you we could do it!” he crowed to Trevor. “We made the Invocation of Destruction!” He turned to high-five Trevor, jubilant in his success.

  But the ShadowEaters fell on the third guy like a pack of vultures. He screamed as they pulled him away from Trevor and Adrian, but there were so many of them that he couldn’t fight them off. They snatched him and surrounded him and held him down. I saw their teeth flash as they bit and snapped.

  When they retreated just seconds later, smacking their lips, he had collapsed on the ground. And he had no shadow.

  I would have seen it in the light of that moon. They’d devoured it.

  When ShadowEaters ate a shifter’s shadow, the shifter died. It was like the shifter ceased to exist, because he or she couldn’t cast a shadow—or because in eating the shadow, the ShadowEaters stole the shifter’s abilities.

  Did it work the same way for apprentice Mages?

  I took a deep breath, using my keen Pyr sense of hearing to check his vitals.

  He wasn’t breathing. And he had no pulse.

  They’d killed him.

  Without the NightBlade cutting his shadow free, without him being a shifter.

  This was new—and horrible.

  The ShadowEaters swirled around the two apprentice Mages like leaves dancing in a gusty fall wind, looking hungry and predatory.

  “Holy shit,” Trevor whispered. “What the fuck is happening?” Adrian was flipping through the book in a panic. Obviously, they hadn’t invoked the particular destruction they’d anticipated.

  The ShadowEaters pressed closer around the pair, and I heard Trevor squeal like a girl; then the ShadowEaters swept into the sky. They soared like a golden tide, as if they’d been freed from some kind of captivity, a thought that didn’t fill me with delight.

  High above us, they disappeared into the night.

  I saw the glow of their eyes shine longer, like nasty stars, until they winked out, as well. Where had they gone?

  “You have to stop them!” Trevor shouted at Adrian, and I heard his fear.

  “I don’t know how.” Adrian turned the pages of that book so fast that I thought they’d tear. He kept looking up, but the ShadowEaters were long gone from view. “It’ll take me ages to figure it out!”

  “We don’t have ages! They’re hungry and they’re here,” Trevor said, his horror echoing mine.

  The two looked at the fallen kid, then at each other. I could taste their terror.

  “I can’t fix it,” Adrian said quietly. He looked around, his eyes a bit wild. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

  Trevor swore. They stared at each other as a triumphant bellow echoed through the night. It came from above and sent shivers down my spine.

  They pivoted and fled from the garbage dump, racing into the street. I heard two car engines start and tires squeal.

  Did this mean that the apprentice Mages and the ShadowEaters weren’t allies anymore? Had Adrian messed up, or had the ShadowEaters wrested control of the ceremony to serve their own purposes?

  That was not an optimistic thought.

  Who or what would they eat next?

  I could only hope the ShadowEaters would feast on all the remaining Mages and apprentice Mages. They didn’t look like discerning eaters, but it still seemed like a long shot that they’d do our dirty work.

  Speaking of discerning eaters, Skuld was strolling toward the dead guy. He looked to be my age or maybe a year younger. She squatted down beside him, poked him, and then sniffed his corpse with satisfaction.

  I supposed that this was as fresh as dead got.

  “Wasted soul,” she said with a shake of her head. “Oh, well.” She sniffed again. “But a very nice liver.” She cast me a look. “Hungry?”

  I shook my head, unable to look away.

  I watched in horror as Skuld shifted shape right before my eyes. She hopped onto his chest in her raven form and ripped his flesh open with her beak. When she tore into his body cavity, presumably looking for that liver, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  I spun around and ran. I didn’t know where I was or whether I could get back to the real world, but wherever I ended up had to be better than this place.

  Chapter 2

  I woke up with a start, my heart leaping around my chest and my breath coming in anxious spurts. Even when I closed my eyes, I could see the ShadowEaters falling on that kid, surrounding him and killing him. It was just as horrible remembering it as witnessing it. He’d been swarmed and overcome.

  I had to think that he had been convenient. I had to think that they’d be more interested in continuing the Mage plan of eliminating all shifters than in snacking on their own kind.

  Come to think of it, every ceremony of the Mages seemed to involve a sacrifice. So, Adrian had called down the ShadowEaters and someone had to die to finish the ritual. The kid had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe the ShadowEaters had done all the feasting they needed to do.

  I had my doubts. I thought about the ShadowEaters leaping into the sky and disappearing. Like they’d run out of energy. Would they come after the shifters next?

  But wait. Skuld said she was about the future. Had this happened already or not?

  Was it going to happen—or was it just possible?

  That calmed me down a little bit. I pulled out my messenger and began tappi
ng madly. When we had interrupted the Mages’ ceremony in the fall, it had been held on the night of a full moon. I found a lunar calendar and checked the dates. The next full moon would be Wednesday, February 12.

  This week. My eyes fell on the clock in Meagan’s room and I saw that it was two forty-five in the morning. Technically it was Wednesday. Had my dream come true yet? I went to the window and looked out, unable to see any golden spell light in the winter sky beyond Meagan’s window.

  “Scared?” a guy asked from behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  My older brother, Sigmund, was sitting on the end of the bed, looking as scruffy and disreputable as he usually did. That would be my dead older brother, Sigmund. He appeared to me from time to time.

  He hadn’t been there when I woke up. I would have noticed that.

  I looked around the room, which looked perfectly normal as Meagan slept on her bed with the cat, King, curled up near her feet.

  Had my brother come to help or to complicate things? With Sigmund, you never knew. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m not really here, am I?” he asked, looking amused. “Being dead and all.” He held up one hand, and I could see right through it to the wallpaper on the wall behind him. He grinned.

  “I can see you.”

  He leaned back, completely at ease. “So, do you usually talk to dead people?”

  “Apparently, it happens sometimes.” I watched him with some suspicion. Sigmund usually turns up to tell me something, but he never just drops the news. It’s kind of irritating how I have to work it out of him. “What did you come to tell me?”

  He smiled and got up, stretching elaborately. “Just checking on you, sis.”

  “Why?”

  “Bad dream?” His eyes were glinting, as if he knew something I didn’t—which wasn’t exactly a long shot.

  Two could play this game. “What makes you ask?”

  “It’s a Wyvern thing, you know.” He bent and scratched King’s ears.

  Kincaid, that is. This cat shifter had adopted me in the fall, just as his pal—named Mozart by Meagan—had adopted Meagan. They were both vigilant sentinels in cat form, and good-looking—if enigmatic—guys in human form. They both seemed to prefer being cats. I’d only seen either of them as guys once, in that last fight with the Mages.

  Maybe they hated school.

  Maybe they’d run away from home.

  I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t seem to have human lives, like we Pyr do, but they weren’t telling.

  Even though I’m not much for cats, there was no shaking King. I’d thought he’d move on after that fight, but he’d stuck to me like glue.

  Never mind that he was a huge Maine coon in his cat form and had to weigh thirty pounds. He’s no more enamored of dragons than I am of cats, so we have a relationship based on mutual respect and mild animosity.

  Yes, I have been known to call him Fish Breath.

  Usually when I have a bad dream, I wake up to find him watching me.

  But he was out cold on the end of Meagan’s bed.

  King didn’t even move when Sigmund rubbed his ears. What was going on? Was this another, strangely realistic dream? The emergence of a new Wyvern power? Or was everything in some kind of flux?

  Come to think of it, where was Mozart? Usually he and King crashed together on Meagan’s bed.

  I spoke with caution. “Casting dreams is a Wyvern thing, from what I understand.”

  “So is having them. It’s the whole seeing-past-present-and-future-simultaneously trick.” Sigmund shot a glance at me. “You can’t do it yet, can you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mastering it drives some Wyverns crazy, you know, so I thought I’d check on you.”

  Great. That was not news I needed to hear.

  Sigmund arched a brow. “Feeling sane?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He grinned. “Other than talking to dead people in the middle of the night.”

  I smiled back. “Other than that.” Plus seeing ShadowEaters come to life, and talking to mythical beings who ate livers from corpses that were still warm. My platter of the strange and unusual was pretty full, and getting more so.

  I glanced at King again, amazed that he was comatose.

  In the blink of an eye, Sigmund disappeared, so quickly and surely that he might never have been there. King slept on, as did Meagan. The air hadn’t changed temperature, the way it sometimes does when ghosts make an appearance. I looked in and under the bed for a frog—that’s a typical joke of Sigmund’s—but there was nothing. Just me.

  But I had talked to my dead brother. I knew it.

  Even though it seemed like he could have been an illusion.

  Or a delusion.

  Evidence that this Wyvern could go crazy.

  You know I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

  I HAD TO FIGURE OUT the significance of what Skuld had shown me. It was like a riddle. Or a test. What were Adrian and Trevor going to do? (I’d decided to go with the assumption that the ritual I’d witnessed hadn’t happened yet.) I trolled through that ancient document that Meagan and Garrett had translated—safely stored on my messenger in English—and composed a list.

  I like lists.

  You’ll get used to it.

  SIX THINGS ABOUT MAGES

  1. Mages recruit humans with an innate musical ability. This power—called spellsinging—allows those gifted humans to enchant other humans with their music or their songs. (They naturally hold their audiences spellbound. Ha ha.) Not all born spellsingers choose to sign up for the Mage program. Meagan is a spellsinger and so is Jared. Both have passed on the invitation to use their powers for evil.

  2. Those spellsingers who do join the Mages become apprentices and are trained in the art of casting spells. Like Trevor. Mages have an appetite for shadows, and it seems to be an acquired taste—even apprentice Mages can bite shadows, as we learned in the fall when Jessica was captured.

  3. There are at least two levels of apprenticeship in Mage Land, and the ceremony to move from the lowest level to the next tier involves a sacrifice—presumably as well as some level of competence. Adrian must be more advanced, because he can do more things than Trevor—like voluntarily take on the shapes of all the shifter species eliminated by the Mages so far.

  4. Full Mages share a hive memory—or they did until last fall. Kohana and I burned this memory to oblivion, so the full Mages either died or became incoherent. Since then, we’ve had only apprentice Mages underfoot, and they’ve been twitchy, as if insecure about their future.

  5. The Mages had a plan to destroy all surviving shape shifters in order to assume their powers. They did this by cutting away their shadows in a ceremony that requires the NightBlade, a black knife. They invoked the ShadowEaters and offered the shadow of the victim as a sacrifice, which incidentally killed the victim, too. (Nice.)

  6. There is supposed to be some kind of bonus energy surge available to the Mages when all shifters are eliminated, which is why they were actively hunting we last four kinds. Details are sketchy.

  I looked over the list, tapping my fingers on the edge of my messenger. Essentially, each kind of surviving shifter has a new coming-of-age member with special powers. Kohana, the Thunderbird, calls us wildcards and says we’re important. Of course, he won’t say how. Derek, the wolf shifter, says his kind has a prophecy that we have to band together in a new pack and follow the dragon. As wildcard of his kind, he transferred to my school to make that alliance with me, the wildcard of my kind. Jessica, the jaguar shifter and wildcard, also transferred to our school and insists that the future is in the hands of the four of us.

  I initiated the alliance of wildcards—and, by extension, surviving shifter species—and led the fight in November. It seems to be working, even if Kohana is more of a wildcard than the other three of us put together.

  But what had actually happened in my dream? How had Adrian invoked the ShadowEaters witho
ut the NightBlade, or even any full Mages? What did it mean that they’d broken free? It didn’t seem as if that had been Adrian’s plan. Had he screwed up? Or had they taken charge?

  I realized I knew very little about ShadowEaters, and that this might not be ideal. I’d been thinking that without full Mages to invoke ShadowEaters and with the NightBlade safely in Kohana’s custody, they weren’t important.

  Time to think again.

  I STARED AT THE CEILING for hours, fretting, but must have finally fallen asleep.

  Because I woke up again suddenly to find Meagan’s room still dark.

  This time there was a large cat sitting on my chest, swatting my face with one paw.

  King.

  “There’s a litter box in this house, too,” I complained as I shoved him off my chest. I was cranky and tired and not interested in waking up to play catch the mousie. Predictably, I was covered in the hair he’d shed while harassing me. I’m convinced that he’s always shedding, to a greater or lesser degree, which I guess is the price of a luxurious coat. It also means that everything I own, most of which is black, has been garnished with cat hair.

  This does not work for me.

  King doesn’t appear to care.

  He didn’t care about what I said, either. He went to the door and waited, giving me a steady look. There’s something regal about him, and even in cat form he has a commanding presence.

  I got it. This was an order.

  “Something’s up,” I guessed. He gave a meow of epic proportions and paced from left to right in front of the closed doorway.

  Impatient for me to get a move on.

  “Go out in the hall. No peeking,” I instructed as I opened the door an increment. If a cat could grin, he did—but he did what I told him to do, as well. He slipped through the gap like a wraith. I knew he’d be waiting right outside. I could hear him pacing. I tugged on my jeans and a hoodie, then debated the merit of waking up Meagan.

  I decided to go alone and crept after King, wanting to be sure I didn’t wake the Jamesons. Once I left the bedroom, King made a beeline for the front door, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move. I winced as I turned the dead bolt, trying to do it as silently as possible, and he streaked out into the night at the first opportunity.