Night Blessed

by Megan Blackwood

  He had bigger prey to seek tonight.

  The mist around our ankles thickened until I could not see my bare feet. Thorns of shadow absorbed the glittering diamonds of blood. Black, inky sections broke apart the mist, slices between this plane and some other—some other I had visited—and made my skin crawl with disgust.

  "Magdalene," Ragnar said my name with care, licking the still-gaping wound in his cheek. "You do not protest, do you?"

  I hesitated, waiting until I was certain Talia and Raina had made it back to the road. They would call for help, no matter how foolish that was. Talia would make some clandestine contact with Seamus, and then they'd put their heads together to figure out how to help me. How to extract a tired and wounded sunstrider, stranded from her powers in the middle of the night, from battle with one nightwalker, reduced, and another nightwalker, enhanced.

  Whatever their decision—begging DeShawn to forgive their transgressions, calling upon Roisin in secret—the result would be the same. Their help would arrive too late.

  For I did not want it.

  I lowered the barrel of the shotgun and held it at ease against my side. "Take back what is yours."

  He grinned, and his fangs were broken and jagged, yellowed in the cracks. "You would see me powerful? I knew you would come around."

  "I would see Lucien returned," I countered, finger resting against the trigger guard in silent warning.

  "Tell me, does your oath scream at you? Is your god yanking on your strings, demanding my head now while I am weak?" He spread his arms, inviting me nearer, while the shadows flickered in between the thickened mists. "Come now, Magdalene. You cannot have given up on killing me so soon?"

  "Heal yourself, Ragnar, and enjoy your health, for you will not survive the week. I swear it."

  He laughed, his head twisted all the way back, the shadows beginning to course towards him, to crawl up his legs and swarm over the coat that hid the aged ruin of his body. My poisoned shot made their work to repair him harder, and I took some pleasure in watching him strain, even as he smiled in triumph. Foolish creature. But maybe not so foolish as poor Sonia.

  "He comes." Ragnar hissed, the shadows engulfing his skin boiled with anticipation.

  I waited for the revulsion. For self-hatred to settle on my shoulders like a mantle and lock me in shame. My blood—my oath—should reject all of this. Should scream at me to spring forward, to take Ragnar back to ash while he struggled with the gold poison coursing through his veins.

  I felt nothing but a distant drumbeat in my body—not a heartbeat. The beat of a drum that calls lost souls to war. Maybe this was right. Maybe my oath saw the logic in reducing the power of the thing my Lucien had become. A foolish hope. The oath had never been so nuanced with its decisions before.

  Lucien was there. He coalesced out of the broken pieces of darkness, shards of shadow snapping together with audible clicks and creaks as the bits of his body forced themselves back into the physical plane. Where he went when he shattered... I could only imagine. A place like the void that hid my marble plinth, perhaps.

  His arms were too long, his legs bent the wrong way. His neck—pale and laced with black veins—tilted at an impossible angle, his shoulders rucked up on one side as if they were a crooked shelf. This world, this place of mortal flesh and too-short lives, rejected what he was. And every time he re-entered this world, it stretched him a little thinner.

  His head snapped back, jaw distending as he faced the moon, and he let loose with a blood-curdling howl, the sound of it like a thousand tiny nails scraped across my back. But I would not look away—I could not—for I had made this. And I would atone for us both.

  "Lucien," I said his name the way I always had, though it felt like spitting thorns. Smooth, loving, with all the adoration that hid in a walled-off chamber of my heart.

  He rippled, as if his name had dropped a stone into the pool of his body, and his head snapped around, gaze searching me out. When he found me, a shiver went through him, something in the stretched shape of his body solidifying, allowing him to look more human for just a breath. But those eyes. Those eyes were still voids of endless black.

  We should be killing each other. Everything in my blood, in his, should scream at us to lunge—to tear each other's throats out. And it had, just a few short days ago when I'd stumbled upon him in Raina's house.

  Maybe DeShawn was right. Maybe my oath had broken after all, and all I had left now was the steady beat of hidden war drums to guide me.

  "Stay," I said.

  His head whipped around, sensing threat, and when his gaze alighted on Ragnar it flashed silver enough to light up the mists. I brought a hand up to shield my eyes, trying to ignore the speeding beat of the drums inside me.

  Whether it was Luna or himself, panic rocked through Lucien's body. Some animal instinct buried deep within knew what was coming next—and I doubted Luna wanted her avatar reduced. He snarled, dropping to an aggressive crouch, those impossibly long claws sprouting from his fingers. My skin crawled as I forced myself to stand still. To let this happen. To let... To let Ragnar take from Lucien what I had done.

  "Easy, child," Ragnar spoke softly, as if to a startled horse, and stepped forward with one clawed hand out. "I do not mean to harm you, only to take away that which hurts. It's too much, isn't it? Luna's gift? Your body was not old enough, your mind not strong enough, to carry that which I had built over the centuries. "You should have never been burdened with that which is mine."

  Before Lucien could move, Ragnar's claws lashed out and grasped his throat, lifting him from his crouch so that Lucien's face, bloated and pale, hovered above Ragnar's—as if taking the place of the moon above him in the night sky.

  Every muscle in my body tensed, my hands itching to take up the shotgun and destroy the thing which tortured my Lucien, but I held perfectly still. Still as marble. To say that I had not known what was coming would be to lie to myself. Ragnar craved the return of his power—he would rip it from Lucien's raw and bleeding soul if he had to. And I... I had agreed to this.

  Lucien's many-jointed arms thrashed, clawing at the arm that pinned him to the sky, rending Ragnar's already corpse-like flesh into dripping ribbons, the bone of his forearm gleaming in the silver light. Ragnar held on, his jaw bulging as he flexed every ounce of power he had left.

  Ragnar's will rolled out like a wave, a concussion of power spreading from the focal point of his being, battering down Lucien's defenses—hammering at my own—demanding to be recognized as lord and master. Lucien let out a low moan, and his struggles ceased. But where his mind had been bent, the power that thrummed through him would not yet yield.

  Now the revulsion came to me, Luna's strength struggling for control of her puppet, her avatar. The drumbeat in my soul picked up with the intensity of rage, and I was sickened to discover that rage was born from indignity, not the presence of so much raw nightwalker power. It was Luna's rage, boiling and fierce, rejecting the control of her previous servant as she poured more strength into Lucien so that he could resist.

  Not enough. The bond between maker and child was too strong, carved in bone and sinew and written in blood, the oldest of magics. Lucien bucked and jerked under the force of the battle waged within him, but he made no more attempt to break free from Ragnar, who began a low and droning chant in a language I did not know, but had heard before on the Venefica's lips.

  The moon passed over the firmament, dipping toward the horizon as the mists and shadows thrashed against each other, darkness like black ink pouring down from Lucien's throat to Ragnar's arm. His black eyes drained, churned like whirlpools, turning slowly to pewter, to granite, and then to the silver natural of nightwalkers. Never in all my years had I ever thought I'd be pleased to see that color in my lover's eyes.

  Lucien shrank upon himself, his body shuddering as it lurched inward, the proportions that had strained at the seams in the world retreating, pushing back into the mortal vessel that carried his tortured soul.
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  A thrumming in the ground massaged the soles of my feet, old power awakening, drawn by this meeting of dark forces. Sonia, watching the horror of it all from far too close for my liking, groaned softly and took a halting step back. Her bodyguard, stony-faced, put a hand on her shoulder.

  Ragnar's face twisted, the ruined hole in his cheek shedding the gold poison in a single burst of blackened smoke. The flesh clawed across the armature of his skeleton, knitting itself together in incredible time. Too much. He was taking too much of Lucien's power, whittling down his strength.

  "Enough," I hissed. The shotgun was no good to me now, not with Lucien in Ragnar's grasp.

  He laughed. A low, melodic sound. "I shall teach this fledgling of mine to take from me."

  His grip tightened. Lucien thrashed, his claws growing in and out in spurts, his body jerking as he struggled to cling to any power at all.

  This would not make him mortal. This would kill him for good.

  Before I could think, I lunged. Ragnar's other hand came out to meet me, but it was too late. I crashed into him, taking us all to the ground. Ragnar's grasp broke upon Lucien's neck and he went flying, rolling like a broken doll across the path of quartz. Sonia cried out in alarm.

  Ragnar's face loomed inches from mine, his breath hot with old blood as he snarled, lips curling back from fangs rebuilt and strong—but large, too large.

  He snapped at me and I lurched back, hitting my head on the ground. My claws were out, the shotgun lost, and I drove my fingers into his abdomen, snarling as they broke through his stomach, spilling vital liquids across my prone body.

  Ragnar reared back and roared, levering himself off my claws with a sucking sound as he battered my arms free of him. He was on his feet in a flash—too fast to follow—his coat thrown wide to reveal the dripping trails I'd carved through his torso.

  Teeth bared, he brought an arm back to swipe down at me and I rolled, quartz biting into my bare arms, until I came to a hard stop against one of the tall marble pillars. The cold of the stone was enough to startle even my chilled flesh, the sharp bite of primordial ice. Something else was at work here, another power in play we didn't understand—gods, did Ragnar ever bother to understand the powers he toyed with?

  Did I?

  I scrambled to my feet and backed away, ducking out of range of another swipe. Ragnar hissed in frustration, his animal rage receding as he focused in on the fight—on me. The hunched boulder of his shoulders slackened back, easy grace returning to him as Lucien's power went to work, smoothing out the deep lines of his face and erasing the sickly green that had been his pallor. Not that the alabaster white of nightwalker skin looked much better.

  "Your mistress leaves you," I hissed through my fangs—the only way to say anything at all with those things out—and tossed my head to indicate the moon drifting toward the horizon. Stall, I told myself. Just until daybreak, when my powers returned. Then I would be his match, and more.

  He hesitated, tracking the fall of the moon with his gaze. A brash man he was, but not stupid. He took a step back.

  "I have what I want," he said, as if to justify fleeing to himself.

  "Oh, Ragnar. But I am not yet done."

  I crouched to spring and hit a wall of shadow.

  Lucien, wrapped in darkness, collided with me as the moon dipped beneath the horizon, the sun still yet to rise. His power enfolded me and we... Broke. Shattered. Into a thousand tiny pieces of the night.

  Eighteen: Celestial Bodies

  Darkness was my world. Above and below, nothing but void—not shadow, for there was no light with which to cast one. Only emptiness, never-ending and all-encompassing. There was no 'up' in this place, no direction that could be mapped to any compass that worked on the back of the earth. There was only me, the void, and Lucien.

  His arms wrapped around me, the only reminder that I had a body at all, and through his sheer force of will I understood that we were moving—to where I knew not. We had fallen into a crack between the worlds and all my being should scream with terror, for this was so much more than the plane with my marble plinth. Here there was no cause to see the black web of the night coursing through my veins, for here endless darkness was a foregone conclusion. The battle of my mind was lost before I ever entered this place, and somehow I knew this place would always be here. Waiting for me.

  I screamed, I think. Or at least a part of me was screaming—body, soul—the aspects of what I was breaking down, the edges of myself blurring into endless nothing. Lucien's grip tightened, as if the strength of his arms alone could hold the parts of me that were flying away together. I didn't think so. This place was my end. Now, or later, I would be devoured here.

  My back struck stone. Lucien's arms cushioned me from the full force of impact. Just knowing there was something there—something solid—snapped me back into myself. I fitted back together, the seams of my body re-knitting to accommodate themselves in this plane where mortal lives were more valuable than all the magic the other planes could ever birth and why—why did I know that?

  I stretched my thoughts out, spiraled in all directions, trying to grasp the tail end of some arcane knowledge that, in the place of the void, had been a simple truth so self-evident I hadn't bothered to consider it at all. But now that the knowledge was leaving me, the understanding of what this world was, of why it was so important to protect—images of a cradle, of a flame...

  No. The knowledge was gone, lost as the void, but waiting. Always waiting.

  Light—the low flickering of oil lamps—illuminated the space I was in now. Lucien lay on top of me, the full length of him—so much taller than I was, so much broader—pressing me against the stone floor. His hair, dark and curly, washed across my face in a gentle fan, and though he stank of nightwalker he carried with him that warm, musky scent of hay that forever and always would wrench my thoughts back to that first night I'd seen him, climbing a mountain with his fellow acolytes to commit himself to the monkhood. And, even though he was young among them, how he'd been the most serene of them all.

  There was a core in Lucien. A stability that, in my warmest dreams, I imagined mirrored the whole of the world. The way it should be. A gentle equilibrium. Something for him to cling to, against the dark desires of his nightwalker blood.

  He gasped. His body jerked as he came back to himself from whatever trance had allowed him to drag us through that place and he pushed back, rushing away from me in a crouch. I'd never wanted the weight of him to leave.

  Slowly, I pushed up on my elbows and shifted to a cross-legged position. Lucien huddled across the room, his back to the wall, his whole body perfectly still in that way that humans found so unnerving, but to our kind meant only patience. Waiting. His hair fell across his eyes, but not so much that I could not see the silvery gleam of them. He wore simple jeans and a t-shirt, much like me. How strange for us to sit together in modern clothes under gaslight.

  "What was that place?" I asked softly, keeping my hands on my knees so that I would not reach out to him.

  "A crack. A crack in the world." He brought his hands to his face and rubbed, pushing his hair back. The skin of his face clung to his bones—how long since he had fed?—but there was a primal energy in him that made him appear anything but frail. No matter what Ragnar had reclaimed, Lucien was too far gone to the power that had seized him. A fissure had formed in the powers that controlled his blood. Siphoning away Luna's strength had made room for something else—something darker—to seep in. He was changed, now. Forever reforged.

  "And where is this?"

  A smile broke across his face—a real one, a hint of the coy charm I'd known so well in him as a mortal. "A bolt hole of mine. Nowhere Ragnar knows of. We're safe here, for a time."

  The room snugged us tight, bare stone walls set with flickering black iron gas lamps painting streaks of soot against the walls. I looked around carefully, giving Lucien time to recover himself. This was a stolen place. A place carved out in a world that had
otherwise rejected him, a sliver of normalcy he'd claimed as his own. The furniture—a simple table, a single chair, a shelf packed with books and writings, a narrow cot to function as a bed—was all of a singular make, forged by Lucien's own hands, I was sure, in the plain styles that had been popular amongst the peasantry during his life as a mortal.

  Watching him through the corner of my eye, I stood and crossed to the shelf, placing my fingertips against a folio of his writings. He did not protest, and so I picked it up, leafing through the pages of his meticulous script.

  The bold ink had faded with age, but it was still readable. Notes on Ragnar, his habits, and the other members of his hive at the time of Lucien's making. The mind of a man trying to adjust to a new reality, to understand the players around him and what their motivations and machinations might be. The mind of a man trying to adjust to the loss of his mortality. To adjust to losing me.

  My throat caught over a small sketch of my face in profile, hair flowing out around me, tangled by the salty air of the sea, in what must have been the last moments he'd ever seen me. Not at the party, not swirling through the chaos of dance with all the other attendees. But on the beach, my hands extended, dripping my own blood into the salty waves as I'd called upon the Venefica to heal him. To fix what had broken in me. How bright I looked, rendered in his hand. How strong and vital, despite the agony shaking me to the core. Had I always appeared thus, to him? Was that internal flame a reflection of who—or what—I was?

  "You were conscious," I murmured, shutting away the image. Unable—or unwilling—to understand what it meant that while I called upon the sorceress, he lay awake, struggling back to life.

  "I was still mortal enough, when you drew the knife to make the call."

  There was no bitterness in his voice, though there should be. Why was he not angry with me? Why did I need him to be angry with me?

  "I didn't know."