by G. Bailey
“I had a guide. That’s all you need to know.” He sits down on the log I climbed over. “Now sit down and hold my hand. We need a shit ton of dark magic to call a wisp.”
“Why do you think this will even work?” I ask, sitting on the log but not taking his hand. “What if they try to kill us? I don’t know about you but I’d rather not die today.”
“Trust me on this, and if they try to kill us, you better run,” he suggests with a sly smirk. “Are you scared, Vina?”
“Of course not,” I snap, grabbing his hand tightly. “I’m just questioning your intelligence.”
It only makes him laugh as he starts drawing a complicated sketch in the air between us. At the start, I only feel trickles of dark magic, but as soon as the spell is done, it’s like a vacuum sucks every ounce of dark magic from my core, and I suspect Jonah feels the same, if the groan he lets out is any indication. I hold onto his hand and it feels like a lifeline until the spell works and we both gasp for air.
Silver light burns my eyes as I look up to the wisp floating in the air. It hovers for a long moment before it floats away and Jonah all but knocks me to the side as he jumps up to follow it.
Crawling off the log, I chase after them through the forest for what feels like ages until we reach a small river running beneath a stone bridge. The wisp stops in the middle of the bridge and then disappears from sight. Jonah waits for me at the start of the bridge but he doesn’t take a step onto it. The bridge is low and dark underneath with ivy crawling all over it. The river all but trickles below and it might be safer to get our feet wet than test the strength of the rotting stone of the bridge.
“You have to be kidding me,” Jonah grumbles, sounding a mixture of disappointed and horrified.
“What is it?” I ask.
“This is a darkness troll bridge. Not just any troll either.” He turns and glares at the bridge like it’s a living thing. “They must have chosen this because no one in their right mind would go in there as a team.”
Confused, I cross my arms and look between Jonah and the bridge. “Well, what do we need to do?”
“You don’t want to know,” he growls and glances at the ground, whispering under his breath. “Why does it have to be her?”
“Come on, it can’t be that bad,” I say, tilting my head at him. “Just tell me what I need to do.”
“All right then. The darkness trolls find clothes offensive according to the book I read on them, and only when you strip off can you walk into the darkness below the bridge and take the prize,” he explains. “If you wear clothes, you never leave the darkness and they’ll eat your soul up for supper.”
“I bet the prize is a clue,” I grumble, unfolding my arms and placing my hands on my hips. “Because you’re right, it is a good place to hide one and no one in their right mind would look for a clue in this place. But I doubt the wisp is wrong. The clue must be hiding in there.”
Pitch’s anger pulsing through my veins is as good a confirmation as any.
“Yeah,” Jonah sighs, messing his hair again. “We both don’t have to do it. I can get the clue for us.”
I shake my head. “I don’t trust you not to tell me the clue once you find it.”
“Well, fuck you, I don’t trust you either. Fine, fuck, we need to go in together.” He shrugs his cloak off his shoulders and starts to undo the buttons on his shirt. “Don’t you dare look.”
“Same goes for you, but the difference is, I don’t want to look,” I snap, unclipping my own cloak. I let it puddle around my ankles, followed by my shirt, and then I kick my shoes off. I feel more nervous by the second as I strip off my bra, and the cold air makes everything a little too perky. My knee-high socks and panties are last and I leave them on the pile before I cover myself up with my hands and look at Jonah. His back is to me, leaving me no choice but to run my eyes over the corded muscles and a strange tattoo of two wings and a symbol in the middle of them. It looks familiar. Of course, I have no self-control and I gulp as I eye up his firm ass. Why are the bad guys always so hot?
“You’re looking,” he grumbles without glancing over, though his usually scornful voice is filled with something I don’t expect.
Desire.
“You know what, Jonah? I’m not even sorry. You can look at my ass too, if you like,” I tease as I walk towards the water. I hear his mixture of curse words as I tiptoe into the freezing water, cringing with every step.
“Fucking wait, Vina!” He chases after me, stomping through the water.
I stop right before the unnatural darkness lingering under the bridge. My hands shake as I try not to be nervous, try not to worry about stepping into this place. My teeth are chattering from the cold.
“Your s-sister was a shadowborn. Was she turned on the same day as you?” I ask Jonah, not having a clue why I want to ask that right now. Maybe it’s because this is too similar, the water, the darkness, the guy leading me into it.
“I followed my sister everywhere as a kid. She was my role model. We made this fucked up promise that wherever she went, I had to follow. So when she jumped off a cliff near our home, I jumped next, thinking we would end up in the sea and swim to shore. But there was just dark magic in the sea and we both changed at the same time within it. I was seven and she was nine, and to this day I don’t know why she jumped.”
I’m surprised by his answer. I guess I never expected him to be so honest.
“Jonah,” I whisper his name as I close my eyes, feeling the pain he must have endured. “Did you end up in a foster home like me?”
“No, we had shadowborn family who took us in. Now enough questions. Are we going to do this or not?”
To my surprise, he takes my hand in his, and the warmth of his hand is comforting, almost making me forget about the darkness we’re about to step into.
Whatever I previously thought about Jonah Vincent before now is fading. In moments like this, he can be comforting. Maybe his coin has different sides, rather than just the asshole side I know.
“Ready?” I ask, taking a step forward, and Jonah steps with me. We’re both dragged into a thick cloud of darkness in seconds, one that doesn’t feel right as it smothers our shivering bodies. There are voices I can’t understand until a light appears right in front of me. The light changes its shape into three giants standing in front of a gold castle, with what looks like a forest of yellow leaves behind them. The images are there for only a few seconds before something hard thumps me in the chest and I go flying backwards, my hand slipping from Jonah’s. There’s a loud scream and a wave of ice-cold water crashing into my body, submerging me until I can no longer stay awake.
Corvina, it’s time to wake up.
Ambrose’s whisper just manages to reach my ears before the sun creeps ever so slowly over my features. I open my eyes and blink at the blinding fluorescent lights assaulting my vision. Whoever is opening the blinds right now, I am going to kill them.
“She’s awake,” Zander says, abandoning the blinds to hover over me.
“What the fuck happened back there?” Gage demands, and I open my mouth to speak, but then I hear Jonah and I realise he wasn’t talking to me.
“Hey, cut me some slack, I blacked out too,” he argues.
“You’re just lucky she made it back in one piece.”
Gage’s words send a shiver down my spine.
I look around at the four faces peering into my own, each displaying their own kind of unease. Pitch’s shadow is standing in front of the window, blissfully blocking out the sun for me. I can feel his rage and fear infusing with my own emotions.
I nod quickly and look around. In the bed next to me, Jonah is laid up with a bandage around his head. For once, he doesn’t glare at me and offers a sheepish smile.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, my voice cracking. “I need a drink.”
“I don’t think now is the time to get drunk,” Zander chides me.
“Of water, you idiot!” I muster all my strength to throw a pillow at him.
He catches it with a grin, and then asks softly, “How are you feeling?”
I think for a moment, scanning my body for any signs of injury. I don’t feel any pain apart from a splitting headache chipping away at my skull. I also don’t remember what happened. One minute, I was holding Jonah’s hand, looking at a gold palace guarded by giants, and the next…
“I’m all right. I’m alive.” I turn my head around to face Jonah, wincing at the bright lights. “What did happen back there?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Gage growls again, his eyes rooted on Jonah. He’s standing beside his bed, though I suspect more because he’s been interrogating Jonah more than anything. This is the first I’ve seen Gage since our kiss and he doesn’t appear eager to meet my gaze. “Professor Gale found the two of you unconscious next to a cursed bridge.”
“Cursed bridge?” I repeat slowly, glancing at Jonah and then to Zander. “It didn’t seem like it was cursed. It gave us the clue we needed—the clue Gale wanted everyone to find. But then something happened. It felt more like someone intervened and hexed us.”
Jonah nods, touching his bandaged head. “Yeah, and the motherfuckers wanted us to drown.”
“Don’t fucking swear in a hospital,” Zander snaps, throwing the pillow at him that I threw. Jonah doesn’t manage to catch it and it whacks him on the head.
“Oi! I’m a sick individual over here. And it’s not a hospital. It’s a medical room on a budget.”
I giggle at his pouting expression and straighten up in the hospital bed. We seem to be the only ones in this budget ward. Where are Sage and Ronan? We left them in the library this morning before setting off into the forest. I glance up at the clock hanging above the door. It’s after six o’clock. That means we must have been knocked out for a good couple of hours. And I didn’t even get to hang out with Ambrose while I slept. At least, I don’t recall any of it, other than him telling me to wake up.
“Suppose you’re right,” Zander says, crossing his arms. “Who would want to hex you? Jonah, I can understand, but you? Also it’d take someone extremely powerful to knock you both out for so long.”
Jonah’s eyes are pressed on me, and I wonder if he knows something that I don’t. I certainly don’t remember seeing anyone follow us to the troll bridge.
The door opens and a petite girl in a black nurse’s uniform enters, carrying a tray of medication. She hands Jonah his first and then gives me a little cup. I eye it suspiciously.
“It’s just pain killers,” she explains, smiling softly, but she doesn’t make an attempt to move.
She waits until I’ve taken the pills before leaving. As soon as the door closes, I spit the tablets out, much to the disapproval of my visitors.
“What? I don’t take random pills from random people,” I tell them all, hiding them in my shirt pocket.
“I just did,” Jonah says, the blood draining from his face. “Do you think they’re secretly trying to drug us to harvest our organs?”
I burst out laughing, then wince, the effort sending a sharp stabbing pain into my side. “You never know,” I manage to say once I’ve caught my breath. “It’s why I refuse to take anything I haven’t bought myself.”
Zander and Gage exchange a disapproving glance.
Without even looking at me, Gage says, “I want you to rest here for the rest of the afternoon. The both of you.”
“Gage, I feel perfectly fi—”
“No buts. You took a severe blow to the back of your head. Just to be on the safe side, remain here at least until the doctor has been you, then you can do whatever you want once you’ve been discharged.”
I watch him storm towards the door, giving us not so much as a backward glance.
For some inexplicable reason, a panicked reaction assails me when he slams the door. The feeling must be written clearly on my face because Zander reaches over and gently brushes his thumb across my cheek.
“He’s just worried.” Gesturing to the door, he adds in a whisper, “I’ve never seen Gage scared before.”
I look up at him, my breath catching as I struggle not to lean into his hand. “What was he scared of?”
Zander’s eyes gleam with an almost envious lust. “Losing you.”
The second he says those words, Pitch’s shadow jumps into my body, momentarily seizing the air from my lungs.
“I was hexed,” I tell the guys, kicking the covers off and throwing my legs over the bed. I look firmly at Jonah. “We both were, and the crystals never protected us. They weren’t powerful enough.”
I look down at my own crystal. It’s slightly melted at the bottom, and when I peek inside my hospital gown, I can see a burn mark that’s exactly the same shape and size as the crystal. I watch him look upon the luscious canopy of trees outside, at the slightly dying leaves carrying on the wind, and that’s when I suddenly realize.
Zander doesn’t have a binding crystal. How have I never noticed that until now?
Every student and faculty in this academy possesses a crystal bound to their magic. We frequently have to douse them in water just to regenerate our powers. So far, all mine has given me is a burn mark.
“What if someone tried to hex this?” I say, lifting the crystal out for everyone to see.
Jonah checks his own, which he’s tied around his wrist like a bracelet. His doesn’t appear damaged. Only mine. The fact that nobody says anything speaks volumes. They all agree with me.
Someone tried to kill me under that bridge, and they were doing it through my crystal. Unfortunately, I can’t take it off unless I reverse the binding spell, and I don’t know that spell yet. I wonder if the book Greyhorn gave me would have some information on that?
Tucking the crystal under my gown, I stand up from the bed, slightly woozy as I do so. Shit! This headache hurts. But I am not taking those organ-donor pills even if it kills me.
“Zander, do you know how to reverse a binding spell?” I ask him, placing my hand over the crystal.
He looks back at me, his eyebrows knitted together. “Yes, but it won’t work. Not so long as you have that mark on your neck.”
I touch the rose tattoo that’d been forced upon me when I arrived here. “That’s just a protection spell.”
Zander laughs, but there’s absolutely no mirth behind it or on his face. “That’s one name to call a tracker.”
“Tracker?” Pitch seethes, appearing out of my body again, this time in his male form. His skin is covered in burn marks from the person who tried to hex us. “And why would the academy need to implant trackers into their students?”
“I don’t know,” I answer him honestly, much to the guys’ confusion since they can’t see who I’m talking to. “But I’ll find out.”
“Find out what, shadow raven?” Jonah snorts. “It’s not like we can do anything about the marks, can we? They’re inked into us.”
“No,” Zander agrees, coming over to me. “But I can teach you how to block out its power. I can also teach you to prevent future hexes like this. I might not be able to erase what happened, but I can help. You just need to promise me you won’t tell a living soul.”
“Agreed. Now let’s do it!” I shout, marching over to the door.
“Uhh, Vina… You need to get dressed.”
Oh, yeah. The hospital gown.
“Then let’s do it once I get dressed! I’ll grab my clothes, and me, you, and Jonah are gonna learn how to counteract this shit.”
Pitch nods, smiling at me for the first time in a while. It makes my heart flutter in my chest. “That’s my girl.”
My girl… Gods, I love how that makes me feel inside.
“Someone is knocking on the door. You get it, Buzzie,” Sage groans, turning around in her bed.
I blin
k my eyes at the clock on the side table, seeing that it’s frigging one in the morning. Angrily, I chuck my bedsheets off and storm to the door, swinging it open. Jonah leans against the wall by the side of the door, his face far too cheerful for my liking.
“What the ever-loving fuck are you doing here, Jonah?” I shout in a whisper. “I was sleeping! You know that thing normal people do in the middle of the night?”
It’s been a few days since I’ve last seen him, but prior to that, I spent almost every night with him for a week solid once we left the infirmary. Zander stayed true to his word and we managed to block the tracker with a simple potion that apparently all Shadowborns apart from me and Jonah know about. The other counter hex has been more difficult and physically taxing. It’s hard to protect yourself from a dark and light force you know nothing about. Zander said we should be able to master it after a few more tries, but I just wanted some time alone. I wanted to hang out with my best friend after class and study the book Greyhorn gave me. So far, I have found nothing about the kind of hex that was cast that day at the bridge.
“You owe me and I’m here to collect,” Jonah states and then everything seems to pause as he drifts his eyes down me and back up. “Do you always answer the door wearing near to nothing?”
I glance down at my silk vest top, the material so thin you can see my nipples, and the tiny shorts that leave nothing to the imagination. Shit, I didn’t notice.
“You’ve seen me naked before, Jonah. Now, what do you want?”
“I need your necromancy magic, and don’t worry, I’ve got all the ingredients,” he says with a frown, gesturing to the backpack hanging off his shoulder. “Now put some clothes on and get out here.”
“Whatever. Give me five minutes,” I grumble, softly shutting the door in his face even though I want to slam it.
After pulling on some clothes, I glance at Sage as I slide my boots on. She’s completely passed out but I decide to leave a little note in case she wakes up and wonders where I’ve gone. I glance at the books piled next to her bed, every single one we’re both reading the heck out of to find out all we can about giants. I walk out of my room, joining Jonah, who walks by my side out of the corridor.