Hollow: Isa Fae paranormal romance (Fallen Sorcery Book 2)

by Steffanie Holmes

  The stones were dwarfed by the structure immediately behind them. Lady Aisling Greymouth – the first witch in their family, for whom Aisling was named – built her ornate mausoleum in the center of the small plot. It was an above-ground structure, decorated in the gothic style Lady Greymouth had so favored, with flowing vines and winged cherubs dancing around the marble arches flanking the twin iron doors. Inside, she and the other twelve members of the original family coven were buried, watching over their descendants for eternity.

  When Aisling was younger, their family would meet at the grave every year on All Souls Day. Grandmother June would throw open the doors to the mausoleum, and they would perform a short ritual and offer up flowers and wine as gifts to honor Lady Greymouth and the family. They had continued the ritual for as long as they could after the house was brought into the fae realm, but now the door was frozen shut, the mausoleum half-buried under a pile of snow. The final winter was closing in.

  After some maneuvering and chipping away at the ice on the step, Aisling finally got the stone to stand straight. Shoving her hands deep into her pockets, she stood back and admired her work. Bethany’s stone was simple, for Aisling was not much of an artist with a chisel. She’d pulled up one of the paving stones from outside the greenhouse, and managed to carve her sister’s name, and the words “In Loving Memory.” She would have loved to have added some Rolling Stones lyrics – Bethany’s favorite band – but she ran out of space and patience.

  It took Aisling all day to dig the grave in the ice. She broke up the dirt with an ice pick, then dug it out with a shovel. By the time she had a decent-sized hole, her back ached and her hands were cut and broken. Luckily, the cold wind had kept her sister’s body well-preserved beneath the linen tablecloth Aisling was using as a shroud. When Aisling rolled her body into the grave, Bethany’s corpse felt stiff. She didn’t smell, and no insects or carrion animals had come to eat her.

  There’s only one kind of carrion beast who survives in Scitis, Aisling thought, as she stared out over the low garden wall, down on the city below. White spires cloaked with ice and snow pierced the empty sky. Blinking lantern lights glinted between the buildings, their light casting a pale glow across the white city. The distant bell tower of the university chimed the hour.

  A wave of nausea flowed through her body. All those fae living in that city, using the energy they drained from the world without a second thought. They were the ones who stole her life, who took her and Bethany’s chance for a future. I hate them.

  Aisling allowed herself one final tear. A single, solitary drop of water for the sister who had been taken from her.

  And then it was time to get back to work.

  2

  Niall

  Niall bent over the body of the witch, and yanked his arrow from her back. Blood spurted from the wound, a few drops sprinkling over Niall's boots. He knew, inwardly, that such a thing should upset him, but he was too experienced at killing now to allow a little blood to unnerve him.

  He reached down and checked the witch’s wristband – less than eighty units of atern remaining. That paltry amount was hardly even worth worrying about, but Niall tagged the body for removal anyway. The fae kept every witch carcass they could find. They used the bodies in the laboratory for their experiments, hoping to one day crack the formula for easy transferral of magic between fae and witch.

  Glancing around the shop, Niall searched for the items he needed. The aura could sometimes be difficult to see, especially with so much junk crowded together. He squinted into a dark corner, where several carved walking sticks had been stacked alongside some old shovels and farm implements – the metal components now caked with rust. He caught the blue glimmer of an aura near the back of the pile, and pulled out a beautifully-polished stick, its handle inlaid with a shimmering moonstone. When he held it up to the window, it thrummed in his fingers, giving off its own energy. In the light, the aura was much clearer – a blue shimmer extending down the length of the shaft.

  “Here.” He tossed the stick to Odiana. “Take this outside.”

  Without any regard for the beauty of the craftsmanship, Odiana dropped the wooden stick into the wheelbarrow they had brought into the shop, now stacked high with other objects. Odiana was a Quaesitor – a scientist who didn’t much care for beautiful objects. To her, real beauty was in the orbit of a planet, the reaction of chemicals, the perfection of a mathematical equation. This fact was, in itself, odd, for a fae of Odiana’s beauty – ice-white hair, porcelain skin, cheekbones that could carve up a man, eyes like faceted crystal – normally had few aspirations beyond securing a rich husband. But Odiana had dedicated her life to a very different cause.

  “I’ll take these to the wagon,” she said in her breathy voice. “You hunt for more imbued junk.” Niall often teased Odiana that she pronounced every syllable as though she were whispering in a lover’s ear. The fae were sexual beings, capable of fierce seductions when the mood so took them, but Odiana was a walking erotic manifestation. Even the way she pushed the wheelbarrow through the door of the shop had men across the street turning their heads toward her.

  A few minutes later she returned, the wheelbarrow now empty. Niall handed her a battered toaster and a small carved wooden duck. Odiana held the bird up to the light. “This thing?” she asked, her pretty nose wrinkling in confusion.

  “Oh yeah, it’s humming with magic. I’d say at least twelve-hundred units.”

  Odiana wrinkled her nose. “It’s ugly. I’ll never understand what would possess a witch to deposit their atern into such mundane objects.”

  “I think it’s clever,” Niall said. “If you were a witch, and fae broke into your house to take your magic, the last place they’d expect you to hide it was in a hideous duck.”

  “Not so clever.” Odiana grinned, as she tossed the duck into the empty wheelbarrow. It clattered against the metal. “We have you.”

  “The witches didn’t exactly know about my abilities when they did this.” Niall was one of the only fae in Scitis who could see the aura of an object or person who held atern. To him, the whole world glowed with different shades of shimmering blue.

  “All the better for us.” Odiana grinned her enchanting smile. “Maybe one day soon I’ll actually be able to get the magic from all this junk, and your love for dusty old human crap will be justified.”

  Niall punched her playfully in the arm. Like most fae friendships, theirs was built on a foundation of competitiveness, and seasoned liberally with insults. But when they worked together, like today, things seemed to go smoothly.

  Quaesitors like Odiana needed people like Niall in order to continue their research. Niall was a Venator – a special regiment of warriors employed by the Conclave of the Magister, responsible for locating atern to supply the needs of the Scitis faction. In the past, that meant traveling through the void into the human world and extracting the atern that dwelled within the lifeforms there – from plants and animals and humans. Atern gave the fae their power, and a constant supply was needed to keep the realm running and their dominance intact.

  But when human countries aimed their nuclear weapons at each other and started firing, the fae saw their source of power being destroyed before their eyes. At first, the factions picked sides in the war and battled against each other to retain possession over the charred remains of Earth. Then, they split off from each other entirely to manage the collection and distribution of atern in their own ways. As the magic dwindled, and sources for atern became scarcer, the whole fae realm was thrust deeper into endless winter. Niall's father had talked fondly of his childhood days chasing his siblings through the lush meadows and dense forests of Scitis, and he remembered well the year the ice crept down from the mountains and never retreated. All Niall had ever known was snow and cold.

  Each fae faction controlled a different geographical area, and each court contained different fairies with their own unique magic. As is typical of fae, the factions rarely got on. But as t
he battles on Earth drew to a close, in a last-ditch effort to rescue their source of atern, all sixteen fae factions banded together to channel their magic into the void, opening the rift between their world and Earth, and pulling through every remaining life form, every tiny atern factory to be sucked dry to drive away the endless winter.

  What the fae didn’t foresee was that the void would kill most of the remaining humans, and bore through only those whose atern was strongest – the witches. Now all that remained of the human race, these magical workers were the only fresh source of atern for the fae, but their magic was notoriously difficult to extract. Dead or alive, witches were a priceless commodity. In Scitis, it was the job of the Venators to hunt them out.

  Unlike his fellow soldiers, Niall didn’t hunt in the wasteland of Nihil, nor torture witches to give up their supplies. He had his special power, inherited from his father and known only to a few key people within the Conclave and the Quaesitor sect. So far, no other faction had discovered what Niall’s father had learned – that the witches who had come from the human realm could hide their magic, or at least traces of it, inside objects they’d brought with them into the fae world. Niall could see that stored magic, and his sole responsibility was to hunt out these magical items before the other factions caught on.

  He’d been watching the tiny shop of human artifacts on the outskirts of the city for weeks, waiting for the proof he needed. The owner – a witch who was permitted to live within the city as long as she submitted to a regular extraction of her atern – had been on Niall’s radar for some time, as her atern readings seemed to be decreasing much quicker than her extraction records would indicate. Yesterday, Niall had been spying on her, when he saw her pick up a small necklace from a cabinet, and clasp it in her palm. Her eyes closed, the witch swayed gently, and the numbers on her wristband wound down.

  With that kind of evidence, the witch didn’t get a trial. Niall went back to the Conclave with his story, and they assigned Odiana to accompany him on one final extraction. Niall put an arrow in the witch’s back through the window, and now he was inside her shop, pawing through decades of carefully collected artifacts from the broken Earth, searching for his own gold.

  As he tore the door off a wooden display cabinet and pawed through the trinket boxes and spice jars inside, a small object in the far corner caught his eye. The tiny pill box had a lid inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its edges shimmering under the strength of its aura. There must be 800 atern in this thing. Niall picked up the box between his thumb and forefinger, admiring the way it thrummed against his touch. Immediately, his mind went to a person, trapped in a cell, and what this box might mean to him.

  “Found anything else?” Odiana called out behind him.

  His heart pounding, Niall shoved the box into the deep pocket of his hunting coat.

  “That’s it,” he told Odiana, brushing his hands on his green trousers. He kept his voice steady, in control, and hoped she wouldn’t notice his shaking hands. “Contact Aedan and let him know there is a body for storage.”

  “He’s already on his way.” Odiana grinned. “Let’s wait outside.”

  Niall followed her to the wagon, the box in his pocket dragging like a lead weight. The street was deserted, fresh snow from the night covering the ground, its surface puckered only by their retreating bootprints. It was early in the day, and most of the Fae were still sleeping. The only people shuffling in the streets were witches doing the shopping for their masters, and a few fae stumbling from the door of the Aternum den, where they had spent most of the night turning their precious atern into a potent hallucinogenic drug.

  The tall horse-drawn wagon waited for them at the end of the street. Niall had parked it there to avoid the witch’s suspicion. Because atern powered every facet of fae society, magic was required in order to operate machines and technology. Scitis had always employed a policy of magical austerity, which meant that they eschewed automobiles and other tech in order to conserve and stockpile huge reserves of atern. This had meant they were in a much better position than many other factions when Earth was destroyed, but it also meant living in a pseudo-medieval society that was the scorn of other fae. Only the university had access to twenty-first century technology.

  Odiana gestured to Niall, who cupped his hands to create a step for her to climb on board. Odiana was used to getting her way with the flip of a hand or the raise of a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.

  Niall climbed up beside her, settling into the seat to wait for Aedan’s team. The box brushed against his thigh, and his heart pounded against his chest. You shouldn’t have done that. You’re effectively stealing from the faction, by keeping for yourself what could benefit many.

  It’s no use. Niall shook his head as his heart rate slowed to normal again. I don’t feel a single stab of guilt over it. I need it more than anyone right now, and any self-respecting fae would do the same. Actually, that’s only half true. Most self-respecting fae would keep the box for themselves, whereas I want it for—

  “—and I think we’re very close,” Odiana was saying.

  “Huh?” Niall was still thinking about the box in his pocket.

  “I said, we’re close to finding a way to extract the magic held inside these items.” Odiana held up the wooden duck and waved it around. “My team have had a bit of a breakthrough. Didn’t I tell you about it?”

  “No.” She probably had. Niall had been so distracted lately, he hardly heard anything people said to him. Even Odiana, with her voice like velvet, faded into the background, drowned out by his worry and guilt.

  Guilt. Who would have thought? Fae shouldn’t feel guilt. Anything a fae did, he or she did with complete malice of forethought. Niall had never experienced this constricting in his chest or the nauseous tumble of his stomach before, but his medical examination had come back clean, so what else could it be? He fingered the box again. A few more finds like this, and the guilty feeling will go away forever.

  Niall jerked his head up. Odiana was talking at him, and he wasn’t even listening. Niall removed his hand from his pocket, and focused on what she was saying.

  “—each item has an energy signature, a pattern the atern follows, looping over and over. But there are discrepancies between the patterns. Most people believe the discrepancy is the signature of the witch who left the magic. It’s a way of identifying your own objects. But that doesn’t explain why items you’ve found in possession of one single witch have different signatures.” She grinned. “I figured it out. It’s a seal, Niall. Like the magical equivalent of a combination lock to a safe.”

  “A what?”

  “A safe. Come on, I thought you were the expert in human artifacts. A safe is a box humans stored items in. They had a lock like a dial with a series of numbers on it. Only by dialing in the right numbers – the code – could the safe be opened.”

  “Oh, right. And you reckon the discrepancy thing is like a code?”

  “Yeah. All we have to do is crack the code, and the energy will be released.” Odiana grinned. “My first experiment was pretty promising. I managed to get a code match and extract two units from a penknife before the energy from my extraction ray disintegrated the knife. I need to try it on something with a lot more inherent power, but of course, the Conclave banned us from experimenting on the Hollow now without a permit, even though I’ve already matched the code and I can prove it works. I’m hoping to try another code match on this new horde we got today. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Niall wasn’t so sure. He didn’t really understand science the way Odiana did, but he did know magic, and he wondered what protections a witch might place on her objects in order to stop them from getting a “code match.” It couldn’t be as simple as all that, could it? Quaesitor scientists had been working on breaking this code for more than forty years. Surely they would have got that far by now? Or maybe Odiana was really just that brilliant. He wouldn’t put it past her.

  Niall didn’t want to express any of his conde
mnations to Odiana, so he just nodded.

  Aedan’s wagon rounded the corner. He waved to Odiana, and Niall watched in amusement as her face broke out in her widest, most alluring smile. She just couldn’t help herself.

  Odiana nodded toward the building. Aedan was so distracted by staring at her that he didn’t pull on the reins, and his wagon hurtled past at full speed. Such was the power of Odiana.

  Odiana laughed as Aedan’s face puffed up as he tried to right his careening vehicle. She leaned back in her seat and gazed out over the city. Niall mirrored her, staring across the rows of neat tenements and ancient university buildings.

  Medietes was the largest city in Scitis, home to the university and research facilities and the Conclave chambers. The skyline rose before Niall's eyes, foreboding spires of dark wood piercing the turbid sky, turned white by the unceasing blanket of snow, the streets lined with flickering lamps and piles of dirty ice. Behind the valley, Niall could see the outline of the Hollow high upon the hills, outlined with the black clouds that forever raged around it.

  The gothic-style mansion towered over the blackened fields and charred forest that surrounded it. Twin turrets flanked the main wing, high round windows glaring out like two beady eyes. A low porch shaded the front door, the broken stone arches like a row of sharpened fangs.

  A shiver ran through Niall’s body as he stared at that strange house. The Hollow was a place of mystery and superstition to the fae. It had been pulled through the void from the human realm fifty-one years ago, when the fae factions banded together to make one final assault on the human world. They had poured their magic into the void, but it had been too much, or not enough, and the void had collapsed. When the people of Scitis recovered from the shock, they noticed the house had simply appeared at the edge of the city, standing like a sentinel, straddling the two worlds – a terrifying specter that loomed over them, beguiling in its promise as a conduit of unlimited power.