by Isla Frost
“What the hell is your problem?” I growled, shoving Klay’s shoulder with my boot so I could see his face for this exchange. Because I was damn well going to make sure we had an exchange now that he was at my mercy.
Klay stayed silent but gave me a glare worth a thousand words. He’d always been hard to pull into conversation, but this was ridiculous.
“I’m not letting you up until you explain yourself,” I said, readjusting the tip of my blade against his throat. Sure, it was dulled with goop, but it was still dangerous with enough pressure.
“I know words are hard for boys who haven’t grown into men yet, but go ahead and try.”
More hostile silence.
I was getting seriously fed up now. “What have I ever done to you? I thought we had a friendly competition going on.”
“That was before you had Malus magic!” Klay spat, more venom in that one sentence than I’d heard from him in the three grueling months at the academy.
“Magic I’m going to use against the Malus,” I pointed out.
“Ignorant idiot, you know nothing!” His face was twisted with hate. “You have no idea about the evil of the magic you wield. No idea what you’re up against.”
“And you do?”
“I’ve seen it,” he said as if this too was somehow my fault. “Seen it kill my parents right in front of me.”
Crap. But I was too angry at him not to ask, “Then how come it didn’t kill you?”
“Because”—he was forcing each word through gritted teeth—“a hollow frontline unit snatched me up before it reached me.”
Oh. Well that explained a lot. Why he’d been more familiar with the academy than the rest of us. Why he respected instead of despised the walkers. Why he never once complained or seemed angry about what they were putting us through.
I withdrew Gus and let Klay up. “I’m really sorry about your parents. But the walkers have been fighting the Malus for a hundred and fifty years. If they think they might need a gift like mine to turn the tide, who are you to decide otherwise?”
His only reply was a grunt. But he didn’t lunge at me when I released him, and I thought maybe, just maybe, his scowl softened a smidge.
Chapter Twenty
After weapons training, it was a relief to sit in a classroom and have to wield nothing more than my pen.
Even if I could feel Ellbereth’s eyes boring into my back.
Unfortunately, my reprieve lasted only until it was time for Grimwort’s Advanced Magic class.
The last thing I felt like doing was traipsing out to the forest and using my new magic. But to my guilty dismay, Theus and Lirielle were waiting on the lawn for me to do just that.
Theus gestured at the ethereal walker girl. “I invited Lirielle to join us today. I thought it might be wise after everyone’s reaction to your performance in the arena.”
Lirielle beamed at me. “Oh yes, that was brilliant.”
Either she didn’t grasp that I was now in more danger than at any other time since arriving at the academy or that fact had no bearing on her appreciation.
“Thank you,” I said to both of them, meaning the words. Except their presence meant I couldn’t crawl back to bed and just pretend I’d practiced my magic.
My brain scrambled for an alternative plan. One that wouldn’t risk another night in withdrawal. Should I stick to smaller prey? Those with weaker life forces? Or… I remembered the plant Cricklewood had carried into my makeshift prison cell. Had he thought I might be able to draw from that too? The Malus was undiscriminating in its victims.
“I thought I might experiment with botanical life force today.”
It wasn’t a complete cop-out. Now that I had a basic understanding of how my gift worked, it was sensible to learn whether I could draw from other sources.
Theus nodded in easy acceptance. “All right. But we should still go into the forest. Neither Millicent nor Glenn and Glennys will be happy if you put dead patches in the lawn or destroy their flower beds.”
Hard to argue with that.
So a few minutes later I was outside the academy grounds, staring at a small sapling like it might make a sudden move. I’d managed to isolate its faint light in my second sight, and that done, I cut into its slender trunk stem until sticky sap oozed to the surface. Sap was the lifeblood of a tree after all, right?
Well, this is a dangerous foe if I’ve ever seen one, Gus commented.
Perhaps I should’ve used my dagger, but I’d wanted to be ready in case we were attacked in the middle of my experiment.
“Shut up, I’m trying to concentrate.”
Luckily by now, Theus had grown used to me muttering to my sword, and chances were Lirielle wouldn’t think it strange in the first place.
I can see why you have so few friends.
“Still more friends than you.”
I’m rather constrained by the fact I can only speak with my wielder. What’s your excuse?
I growled. Gus snickered.
But the faint light of the sapling had not grown brighter since the cut.
I tried to draw on the energy anyway.
Tried and failed.
It wasn’t like the resistance I’d felt with the wolf monster. I just didn’t feel anything at all. Like I could not so much as touch the sapling’s life force. Let alone grasp it and merge it with my own.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I said in a louder voice so Theus and Lirielle would know I was talking to them. “But maybe I’ll try a carnivorous plant, just in case.”
I searched for a tree that glowed brighter than the rest. There were several varieties that were more sentient, more magical than others, and they were known for the way they hunted, dragging their hapless victims into the earth still breathing to nourish their roots. One of those would do nicely.
The trick would be conducting the experiment without the tree getting me first. I wished again for long-range weapon—or maybe a piece of string to attach to my dagger so I might drag it back after throwing it.
With a sigh, I tried to discern which amid the jumble of hazy, glowing roots beneath the soil belonged to my chosen target and edged closer, sword at the ready. Even with my second sight, trying to preempt the tree was going to be near impossible. There were too many roots to keep track of, and when the tree struck, it would do so swiftly. Attempting to monitor them all at once was making me dizzy.
Had that one just moved? Or—
“Somebody’s coming,” Lirielle announced, just as a root erupted from the earth and snaked around my ankle. I sliced it in half before it could drag me far, but the tree’s magic had already shifted the soil to bury my foot. I wrenched back, trying to free myself as another root came at me. I cut that one too, sending it recoiling, and tried to grasp the tree’s life force with my magic.
Nothing.
I slashed another two roots and yanked my foot harder. The earth released me and I fell backward, landing in an undignified heap on my butt.
Gus snickered.
I ignored him, brushed myself off, and moved to join Theus and Lirielle, who were staring into the forest toward whomever they’d determined was a greater threat.
Ellbereth? Her cronies? Some new enemy I’d made from my display in the arena? Klay?
We waited.
Then Fletcher emerged from the trees and I forgot to breathe.
Lirielle raised her sword.
“No, it’s okay,” I said quickly. “I know him. Could you um, give us some space, please?”
Theus gave me a sharp look but acquiesced. And then I walked on trembling, wooden legs to greet my childhood friend.
The boy next door, the one I’d laughed with, played with, gotten into trouble with. The golden-hearted gentle giant who’d always been there when I needed him. Until he’d stepped through that runegate to honor the Firstborn Agreement two years before I had and left a gaping hole in my life. One I’d hoped might be filled when I stepped through the runegate myself.
/> But that distant hope hadn’t eventuated. There’d been no sign of him or any other prior intake of firstborns. And then when Millicent had snuck me through her hallways in the middle of the night to catch a glimpse of him at last, he’d been a heartbreaking meld of the boy I’d remembered and an utter stranger.
“Nova.” My name across his lips was half statement, half question.
“Fletch?” My own voice was sort of squeaky. There was so much I wanted to say, to ask, to do, but I was all too aware of the distance between us. A few mere feet, and two years of the horrors he’d lived through on the war front.
My eyes raked over him, noting again the new muscles, the extra inch of height, the small scar above his right eye, the black hair that was longer than he used to keep it. But it was the lack of warmth in those dark brown eyes that made my heart ache.
He did not move to embrace me, so I refrained too, standing so close to the person I’d missed so much, with my arms hanging stiff and awkward at my sides.
“How… Are you all right?” I finally asked.
“I am alive,” he stated flatly. There was no sign of his good nature or the affection I associated with him.
But unlike the bleak dullness I’d spied in Millicent’s hallway, there was life in those eyes now. A wild, strange, perhaps desperate sort of life.
“Is it true?” he asked. “That you have magic capable of manipulating life force?”
I swallowed, uncertain of what he wanted to hear. Uncertain about the man—because he was a man now, not a boy—before me. Of what he would do if I gave him the wrong answer.
The only thing I knew for sure was that my wildcard gift had a way of polarizing people. Hate or hope. And I didn’t know which side Fletcher would fall on.
I must have stayed silent a long time, because he reached out then, his large hands wrapping around my stiff, awkward arms, and shook me. Gently, but with an impatience that was new.
“Tell me.”
My hand touched Gus’s hilt for reassurance. A tiny gesture that felt like a betrayal of everything we’d once shared. “It’s true,” I admitted, bracing myself for his reaction.
His eyes—his beloved brown eyes that were both so familiar and so foreign at the same time—lit.
Hope then.
“I always knew you were special,” he breathed, and for a moment I thought I glimpsed my old friend lurking deep inside the stranger. “When you graduate, I want you to join my unit. The Raptor unit. Promise me you’ll request it.”
My head spun, but I nodded. “I pr-promise.”
He squeezed my arms where he’d gripped them to shake me seconds earlier. “I must go. But, Nova, I’m so glad you’re here. That you made it through. Seeing you again is like glimpsing the sun after months of darkness.”
I swallowed, unshed tears stinging my eyes, and watched him until he disappeared.
That was the best part of my day.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ten days passed before Ellbereth struck.
I was fast asleep when it started. The first I knew of anything amiss was when something scuttled across my face.
Only semiconscious, I brushed it off. Then sat bolt upright, searching in the glow from the fireplace for whatever had woken me. If that had been a bug, it had been huge.
I spotted it when the thing darted over my sheets and jumped for my face again. A white spider the size of my palm.
I managed not to shriek. Barely. And swatted it away mid-leap.
This time I saw where it fell. And as I watched the eight-legged arachnid struggle to right itself, I realized two things.
One, it was faintly luminescent.
Two, it was made of paper.
When it came at me a third time, I caught it.
The spider unfolded itself in my hands. The crinkled but flat square of paper I was left with contained a note. And now I understood the reason for its luminescence. Ellbereth had considerately included that magical feature so I could read her demands without turning on a light.
We have Ameline. Surrender yourself to us at the southwest edge of the lawn, alone and unarmed, and she will go free. Deviate from this in any way, and I’ll ensure you’ll never find her.
It was signed with Ellbereth’s name, and I wondered at her audacity until the paper flew out of my hands and into the fireplace.
Then my brain unstuck and I didn’t give a crap about the details of her evil scheme.
Ellbereth had Ameline.
I could see the truth of that claim by Ameline’s empty bed, and the weight of that knowledge sank cold fear deep into my bones.
Cold fear and hot anger.
I wanted to curse, to growl, to bellow my outrage. But I had to keep all my angst inside lest I wake Bryn. Because no matter what the note said, she wouldn’t stay behind if she knew what I was about to do.
Dear, sweet Ameline whose warmth had been there when I needed it on every one of my darkest days.
Had they hurt her?
How had they managed to snatch her? I didn’t believe for a second that Millicent would let them in. So she must have left our dorm, probably to visit the bathroom. I’d been banned from going alone—even in the middle of the night—but if Ellbereth and her cronies had been watching our door, they would’ve realized the same rule didn’t apply to my roommates.
So they’d worked it to their advantage. Outsmarted us.
Because it had never occurred to me Ellbereth would stoop so low as to go for my friends.
It should have.
But—
I hauled my butt out of bed. Quietly. Trying not to wake Bryn. There was no point beating myself up about the things I’d failed to foresee. I had to go. Had to surrender myself. Because there was no way I would ever let Ameline die in my place.
And then maybe after I’d done that, I’d figure out a way of rescuing myself too.
I swallowed past my constricted throat, pulled on my shoes, and slipped out of our dorm room, leaving Bryn and Gus and most of my hope behind.
When I reached the designated meet point, no one was visible. I searched optimistically with my second sight, but the thread that linked a hollow to their life force was almost impossible to spot unless I could use their physical forms as a guidepost.
The night was black with only the slimmest crescent of a moon. I had not dared to bring a lantern in case they decided it counted as a weapon and therefore a breach of their instructions. So I waited, shivering in the darkness.
A minute passed. Two.
“Come on, you bastards,” I muttered. “I’m alone and unarmed as ordered.”
I assumed one of Ellbereth’s gang was observing me from somewhere out there. And since walkers had better hearing than humans, I intended my words to carry.
Five more minutes passed before a figure emerged from the darkness. Wrapped as they were in a black cloak that blended with the gloom and hid their features, I didn’t see them until they were almost upon me. I also couldn’t see enough of their face to recognize the person inside.
It was probably designed to creep me out. Give them the power. But I was unafraid of the intangible, the imagined. The flesh and blood of the walkers and the very real devastation left by the Malus was nightmare enough.
The cloaked figure searched me for weapons. Thoroughly. It was just as well I’d resisted taking the dagger I routinely strapped beneath my pants leg, because they would’ve found it. They even had me remove my shoes and strip out of my cloak and uniform to put on a plain red sleeveless shift dress. The garment was not unlike a sack with a few extra holes cut in it.
Now I was freezing.
“Put this over your head,” the hooded figure said in a voice of velvet masculinity.
It was a black cloth bag. Creepy as hell. And somehow having me do it myself made me feel more powerless than if he’d shoved it over my face.
The darkness of the night turned utterly black.
There was no need to bind my hands or drag me along with
his magic. I was going willingly to the ritual that would render me dead or worthless. Since I couldn’t see a damn thing though, he did have to guide me.
“Take my arm,” he ordered.
And so in a parody of the gentlemanly gesture of the Before, he led me into the forest.
Though I was blind, my second sight lit up the world around me, and my bare feet relayed all sorts of information.
That was how I knew we were in the forest. The leaves squishy and damp beneath my toes. The life energy chaotic and bright. Plus I’d spent enough time there to be familiar with its sounds.
How easy it would’ve been for my escort to rid the world of me. To walk me into a terrant nest. Or the path of any predator and bind me for the few critical moments it would take for me to be devoured or torn apart.
They could claim I’d run away and fallen to the dangers of the wild. Everyone but my closest friends would believe it.
But Ellbereth, to her credit, really was trying to destroy my magic rather than me.
I wasn’t feeling generous with credit though. Not after they’d snatched my best friend. Even if Ameline was released unscathed, she must be terrified right now. Every minute it took me to get there was another minute of suffering for her.
It did not take many more minutes.
My “gentleman” guide warned me of steps ahead. They were steep and hewn from soil according to my toes, and we descended into… something. The air filtering through the cloth over my face smelled of earth and little else. At the bottom of the stairs, the ground leveled out, but it was still bare soil beneath my feet.
There were two life forces visible in my second sight that I thought might be associated with Ellbereth’s machinations. More than I expected to find given she and her friends were all hollows. The small griffin-shaped one must surely be Griff. The other, farther away and above us, was fuzzy but distinctly humanoid. A walker who hadn’t undergone the ritual? But that couldn’t be right… could it?
Someone’s fingers brushed the nape of my neck. I flinched, but they only removed the black bag.