“Why are we here?” I asked, my voice echoing inside the dark chamber.
“I have something I need of you.”
“Need of me? You’re not gonna ask me to touch it again, are you?”
“You’re resisting? You know it’s harmless to you.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t affect me in its own way.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want you to do anything like that.”
“Then what is it?”
Draven paused, then turned his gaze on the stone. “We haven’t only lost prospects over the last couple of days,” he said, “Members of the Order have died. Good men and women. Now we need more good men and women to replace them.”
“Replace? I don’t understand.”
He looked at me, now. “It should be clear to you by now that you have advanced through your silver status and have achieved gold…”
I arched my eyebrows. “Actually, that wasn’t clear at all because nobody told me.”
“Consider this your official notice. You’ve graduated.”
Nodding was about the only celebration I was going to be allowed right now, so I nodded, offering myself a mental high-five. “Alright, well, that’s good news. So, I’m a gold prospect, now?”
“Yes, and that means you’ll be given more responsibilities within the fortress. It also means you’ll get to choose your path.”
“My path?”
“The Obsidian Order is more than just prospects and instructors. We have healers, scholars, scientists, enforcers, even clerics. It should be no surprise to you that we are in short supply of all of those…”
“I had noticed there’ve always been way more prospects than… well, any of you guys.”
“And you never questioned this? For someone who asks a lot of questions, I always thought you would.”
“I just thought people went on… away from here.”
“They do. There were other fortresses, other branches of the Order.”
I didn’t like the way he’d said were. “There aren’t anymore?”
Draven paused. “I’ve told you many times we are fighting two wars. Just because you have yet to be exposed properly to them doesn’t mean they haven’t been raging above your head. Most of our other fortresses have been reduced to rubble, many of the Order’s councilors have been killed. We are the only facility still training prospects, and we train so many to try and replenish the Order’s dwindling numbers. Now that you are a gold prospect, you will be able to decide what you want your specialty to be. Healer, fighter, thinker, the choice will be yours.”
“Wow, I never thought I’d be given much freedom to choose… well, anything around here.”
“Whatever path you decide to walk, I would like to ask you one thing.”
Frowning, I angled my head to the side. “A catch?”
“No. Not a catch.” Another pause. “In a few days, there will be a ceremony. You will be expected to choose your path, and you will be paired with a member of the Order. You will shadow that person, do what they do, live as they live, work as they work. You will learn from them, they will test you, and then they will decide whether you are fit to join their branch. Seline, you are the only person who can help me hunt down Valoel. When the time comes, I need you to choose me.”
A warm, fluttery sensation filled me. Nerves? I wasn’t sure. I swallowed. “You?” I asked. “Are you… sure?”
“I would not be asking if I wasn’t. You are already a formidable combatant, and with your skills, you would make an excellent enforcer of the Order. I don’t know what path you want to walk, and I won’t force you, but I will ask you to choose the path of enforcer.”
“What would I do as an enforcer?” I asked.
“You and I would hunt Valoel down and find out why there are fiends among the ranks of the Crimson Hunters. Ours would also be the task of defending the Order from attack and bringing in wayward supernaturals from our world for processing.”
Processing. He’d made it sound like they were being taken into custody… though I guessed they were. I shook my head. “Anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask this for a long time, and since it looks like I’ll be seeing more of them, I need to know.”
“Ask.”
“Where do fiends come from?”
Draven cocked an eyebrow. “Do you mean…” he trailed off.
“No, I’m not asking for the damn birds and the bees talk. Now, stop deflecting and answer the question.”
He took a deep breath in, then out. “They are Aevians, like us,” he said.
“I knew it.”
“If you knew, why did you ask?”
“Because I needed to have it confirmed. All this time I knew I could recognize some of the stuff the Crimson Hunter was saying, but it always sounded strange… what the hell happened to them?”
“They are known as the House of Ash. The fifth house.”
I shook my head. “The sixth house. I know about the House of Mist.”
“You do?”
“Yes, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I need to know more about the fiends.”
Draven shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “When the Principality shattered, the Aevian race split into groups that would later become the Houses. The four houses you know tried to piece our kingdom back together again, but we did so by fighting each other. The House of Mist withdrew from the politics and the war entirely. The House of Ash first made its appearance many years after the war had started. Many of the other Houses were tired of fighting, and when the fiends came, they came in force. No one knew how there were so many of them, no one understood where they’d learned such brutality, or what God they had chosen to pact with. All they wanted was to destroy.”
“Destroy what?”
“Everything. The Houses united, briefly, to fight them off. It was the closest we’d had to a complete kingdom in a very long time. Many of us were killed, but the fiends were beaten back. They withdrew into their caves beneath the ground, and from there they mounted attacks on the land beneath our floating cities. We were so busy resuming our own internal conflict we were blind to the suffering they were causing our land-dwelling neighbors.”
“You sound like you were there…”
“I wasn’t. This happened many hundreds of years ago.”
“Then, how do you know all this?”
“Those of us who have been able to remember enough to piece our history together have written book that are waiting to be read. As a gold prospect, you will have access to that section of the library. You will be able to learn about our world, what we’ve been able to cobble together, at least.”
“You’re telling me you’ve been sitting on all of this rich history this whole time?”
“The prospect trials are difficult—we don’t want our prospects learning too much before they’re ready to digest the information.”
Valoel’s words came rushing into the forefront of my mind like acid reflux. What if they were deliberately keeping us from unlocking our memories because they feared their prospects would become too powerful to control? It wasn’t an entirely crazy conspiracy theory, and I’d seen enough evidence now to know that it held water.
Draven wasn’t making things much better with the things he was saying.
I nodded. “Do I have to tell you now whether I’m going to pick you, or…?”
He shook his head. “Save it for the ceremony.”
Another pause hung between us, one which seemed to stretch forever. I wondered if he had all of a sudden started thinking about what happened in the forest back there. I had. Watching him now, in the dim light, my mind had drifted to that kiss we’d shared. Yeah, he’d been sucking a magic poison out of my system, but something had passed between us, too.
This probably wasn’t the time to bring it up, though. I’d look like an idiot if I did and he decided not to get into the conversation with me. Besides, this wasn’t exactly the most appropriate of se
ttings to bring up a kiss—especially one that was basically the equivalent of magic mouth-to-mouth.
“I should get back…” I said, perhaps sounding a little more sheepish than I’d have wanted.
Draven nodded. “Get some rest. You’ve earned it after everything that’s happened.”
I started walking away from him, then turned my head over my shoulder. “Hey,” I said, “I know you helped make my dagger…”
“How do you—”
“—not important, but I have something I wanted to ask of you, too.”
He angled his head to the side. “Ask?”
“You knew Valoel pretty well, right?”
“I did… at least, I did once.”
I pressed my lips into a hard line. “He called me sister… do you have any idea how he meant that?”
Draven straightened, inhaling deeply. “How he meant it?”
“You know, how some people probably call everyone brother, or sister. Or maybe he meant it as in, we’re both Aevians, so we’re part of a greater family… he strikes me as the kind of guy who would say something like that and mean it in that way.”
At least, I hoped he did.
I waited for a reply, but Draven only looked at me. Like ever, I could see my hair reflected in his eyes, a little sparkle of light against all that darkness. Draven exhaled and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t know why he would have said that… do you remember him from your past?”
“I don’t. I’ve been dreaming about my family, and I’ve never seen his face before; not even someone who looks close to him.”
“Try not to think about it. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Nodding, I decided to leave that topic alone. I also decided to leave the matter of our… kiss… unresolved. Undiscussed. Some things were better left alone. Other things deserved a little looking into, a little exploration.
The kiss wasn’t one of those things.
Sister, however, was.
WINGS OF SHADOW
The Obsidian Order
Book Three
By Katerina Martinez
The fiend had gotten the drop on me, and now his hand was around my throat.
It was dark where we were, the moon hidden behind a thick mantle of clouds in all the shades of an aged bruise. New York loomed in the distance, tall buildings sparkling against the night. Police sirens echoed through the cluster of old buildings I found myself in. A sickly, skinny dog barked from behind a fence.
We’d been tipped-off that Valoel had been spotted in the neighborhood, and I’d come to investigate the sighting. I was a gold prospect now, on my way to becoming one of the Obsidian Order’s enforcers. This was kind of my job. Still, I hadn’t expected to find fiends here—none of us had.
I struggled with the fiend, but he was a lot stronger than I was. Effortlessly, he picked me up and got me off my feet. The light from my hair touched his face, and I saw the anger in his eyes, his sharpened teeth, the swirling red marks on his ashen skin.
He didn’t know who I was, but he was about to kill me anyway.
Seline, Seline can you hear me?! Felice’s urgent voice beamed into my mind through the wing charm pinned to my collar. What’s going on?
“I’m having a tea party with the president,” I croaked, “What do you think?”
“Who are you talking to?” the fiend barked.
“Your dad. He wants to know if I’m DTF.”
He wrapped another hand around my neck and started squeezing my windpipe. I couldn’t speak now, so I also couldn’t do magic. But I didn’t need magic. I tensed my core, pulled my legs up around his torso, and drew my knife from its sheath in my boot.
With a quick motion, I jabbed the knife into his side and pulled it out again. The fiend groaned and let me go, but with my legs wrapped around him, I didn’t fall. Instead, I threw my other fist into his face, making the fiend stagger a few paces, and then I let myself fall.
I hit the ground on my back, hacking and coughing and clearing my throat. The fiend inspected the wound in his side. His hand came away bloody.
“I’m sorry, did that hurt?” I asked.
“You whore! How dare you?”
“See? Saying stuff like that makes me wanna stab you again.”
The fiend roared, his wings stretched to full extension, and he charged at me. I flipped up to my feet again and prepared myself. He was a big target, those wings of his were huge and black, and his body was all thick chords of tight muscle. A hit or two and I’d go down. I knew that. But I was faster than him.
Or, at least, I hoped I was.
When he stepped into range, he kicked out with his foot, the tip of his boot searching for my stomach. I jumped to the side, easily dodging his attack, then I swung my knife at him in a wide arc. The knife bit into his arm, drawing a trail of blood that splattered to the floor, but he didn’t seem too upset by it.
He spun around on the spot, his fist cocked and ready to launch into my face. I ducked, and his fist instead went through my brilliant white hair. That was a close one, or at least it had been until he grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked me toward him.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I said, snarling at the fiend.
The fiend growled, flashing his sharpened teeth at me. He wound back his arm and splayed his fingers, showing me his razor-sharp claws. I clutched my dagger more tightly and aimed the tip into his ribs. I had a clear shot to his heart if I went underneath his ribcage.
That was what I was about to do, when the fiend stiffened. He sucked in a deep breath of air. Blood trickled from the sides of his mouth, and slowly, the life went out of his eyes. The business end of a longsword stuck out of the fiend’s chest. It was coated in blood that glistened against what little light there was.
The sword pulled back, the fiend fell to his knees. I managed to work his fingers out of my hair just before he toppled to the floor, limp and dead. Behind him stood Draven, his sword at his side, his long coat flapping against the wind. I could feel his powerful aura now, his magic. It pulsed out of him like the heat from a sun, only it hadn’t been there an instant ago.
I frowned at him. “I had that under control, you know,” I said.
“Did you?” he asked, angling his head to the side and cocking an eyebrow.
“Yes, I did. I also didn’t want to kill him, just in case he knew something.”
Draven looked at the fiend, his black eyes narrowing. “I didn’t think he’d die that quickly.”
I shook my head. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were out of town.”
“I was, but then Aaryn told me about the tip-off. I came as fast as I could.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not to engage Valoel on your own under any circumstances. You’ve proven yourself to be formidable, but we don’t know what kind of power he has.”
By the way, Draven’s there. Felice’s voice in my head was like having two brains, one lazier than the other.
“Thanks,” I said, “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Felice?” Draven asked.
“She says hi.”
No, I don’t.
“Anyway, as you can see, I’m not on my own. Felice is nearby providing recon. She’s not very good at it though.”
Hey, that fiend surprised us both.
“So did Draven, apparently.”
Draven sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. If I had to guess, he was probably tired of hearing me talk to myself. “Have you found anything?” he asked.
I nodded at the dead fiend. “That guy,” I said, then I looked around. This place was a slum; a poor, forgotten neighborhood on the outskirts of New York City. Why Valoel would’ve been sighted here, I didn’t know. I was starting to think this was all some kind of trap, like maybe the tip-off hadn’t been accurate. “I don’t know what else I’m looking for.”
“Maybe you’re not looking closely enough,” Draven said, gesturing across my shoulder with a nod.
Movement, six o’clock, Felice said.
I spun around on the spot. Someone had come running into view around a corner, only it wasn’t a fiend—it was a kid. She couldn’t have been more than a teenager. She had straight, black hair, pale skin, and a dirty face. Her clothes, if you could call them clothes, also looked tattered and ratty. She wasn’t wearing shoes, she had black sweat pants on tied at the waist with an extension cord, and a black t-shirt ripped up in places.
A set of manacles hung between her wrists. Was she someone’s prisoner?
She stared at me, wide-eyed and stunned. The girl had stopped next to an artificial creek, the greywater from a busted pipe flowing through cracks in the asphalt and concrete ground. A rat scurried about searching for things to eat. I probably wouldn’t have paid this girl too much attention, were it not for the fact that her magic aura slapped me across the face.
I stepped away from her, instinct repelling me, and stretched my hand out. “Hey,” I said, “What’s your name?”
The girl’s eyes flitted from me, to Draven, then back to me. A second later, she turned around and started running.
We’ve got a runner! Felice said.
I broke into a sprint to chase the girl. I didn’t know who she was, but she was brimming with magic. Someone with that kind of power shouldn’t be left to roam around the streets of New York alone. There was no telling what they could do.
Draven grabbed my shoulder as I started to move. “What are you doing?”
“Going after her!” I said, “Isn’t that what you would’ve done back in the day?”
“This feels like a trap, Seline,” he said, “I won’t allow us to fall into it.”
“And if it’s not a trap? What if that girl needs our help?”
“If she needed our help, she would’ve asked for it.”
She’s getting away, Felice said, I’m gonna try and stay with her.
I clenched my jaw. “Did you sense her power?” I asked.
The Obsidian Order Boxed Set Page 40