A Shadow's Tale

by Jennifer Hanlon

  ‘I wouldn’t get too many ideas, Shad, since that’s your brother.’ I rolled my eyes at her, shaking my head. Yeah, he was good-looking, but after the fiasco with Jamie, I was definitely not looking for a man in my life. I swear, even though I’d only just met her, Amarath was going to be the death of me. I turned my gaze back to the fight as the fighter I now knew to be Vrael thrust his sword through the chest of his opponent. I felt my eyes widen. It had been a duel to the death?! My astonishment at that, however, was nothing compared to the shock as I watched the defeated man look down at the blade protruding grotesquely from his ribs and laugh. He laughed and pulled the weapon out, handing it back to Vrael, saying something to his in a strange, harsh language that I couldn’t understand, a language so feral and growling as to be intimidating. The language of the dead. It made my fangs ache just to hear it. Shaeman, his eyes fixed on his twin, whistled low under his breath. In the middle of the crowd complimenting him on his fight, Vrael stiffened, alert. His eyes scanned the streets, looking for the source of the noise.

  Someone grabbed me from behind, yelling out in that language. I scrabbled at the arm around my neck as my hood was yanked down. My claws cut deep gashes in my captor’s flesh, but they didn’t seem to even notice. A hand grabbed my hair, pulling my head to one side to expose my neck. I heard yells of surprise and indignation as Amarath and Shaeman were given the same treatment. Vrael spoke, his voice commanding and authoritarian as he strode towards us, displaying the same graceful, dangerous lope as his brother had, sheathing the sword in a scabbard on his hip, a shirt hanging over his shoulder. He was pale, paler than his twin, but shared the same silver hair and eyes, although his hair, instead of being cropped short like Shaeman, had been left to grow long to his shoulder blades and swept into an elegant queue. The villagers were restless, that much was obvious. The man holding Amarath snarled at Vrael before raking his teeth down Amarath’s neck. Black blood immediately welled in the two grooves left by his fangs. Shaeman roared in fury, tearing himself out of his captor’s grasp, lunging towards me. Amarath dealt her own captor a nasty head-butt, probably breaking his nose, before she leapt for Vrael. Shaeman’s fingers dug into my arm a split second before he teleported.

  I found myself face down in a pile of dirt. Why was it that the norm for being teleported by someone else seemed to invariably end up with me landing on my face? Shaking my head, I got to my feet, brushing myself off, trying to convince myself that the trip to the DOTD had not been all that traumatic and that all four of us were not going to need therapy for the rest of our lives. Shaeman appeared at my side, carefully turning me away from something. I tried to look back over my shoulder. Shaeman snorted quietly as he put his hand over my eyes, preventing me from seeing anything.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You really don’t want to see this.’ He was right. From the glimpse I saw, I really didn’t want to know about or see Vrael sucking at Amarath’s neck. It was an image I was sure I would carry for the rest of my life, and not one I really wanted to. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to think about it. Shaeman chuckled under his breath.

  ‘Not particularly nice, is it? But then again, Vrael has to get the venom out of Amarath’s system before it starts converting her into a vampire like him.’

  ‘Vrael’s a vampire?’

  ‘They don’t call it the dimension of the dead for nothing. They’re all vampires there. Well, Vrael wasn’t when he was sent there, but they fixed that for him.’

  ‘But he’s out in sunlight…I thought vampires couldn’t do that.’

  ‘Full bloods can’t. Vrael’s only a half. His demonic blood wouldn’t allow vampirism to take over any more than that. He can go out in sunlight, cast a reflection and eat garlic. I’m not sure I’ll let him do that last one though. I don’t think I could stand the smell of it hanging around.’

  ‘It is done. You may now look,’ came Vrael’s velvet tones. Amarath was getting to her feet, one hand on her neck, wobbling somewhat but intact. That’s what counts.

  Over the next month, we built our house. It should have taken longer than that, and would have if the construction workers had been human. But we weren’t human. We had magic and strength on our side. We built it in that clearing, using wood from the trees, occasionally pulled through the forest by Merlas if we couldn’t do it ourselves and stone drawn out by magic from the deep undergrowth. Shaeman even figured out how to make serviceable cement from the river, with water, sand and silt, (I suspect heavy amounts of magic). We even managed a full round of vulnerable periods. Unfortunately, that turned Vrael into a full vampire. We ended up burying him for the duration of the vulnerable period to prevent him from turning into a pile of ash. I learnt a lot about my siblings in that time spent working with them, building a sort of family dynamic between us. A strange one certainly, but it was ours. We were putting the finishing touches to the structure of the house when he started to look at me strangely. I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I didn’t really fancy becoming a vampire’s chew toy, even if he was my brother (okay, half brother). Shaeman noticed it and threw him a vial of blood from the collection we had all chipped in to create. Vrael shook his head, throwing it back at him, Shaeman catching it in a coordination born of throwing things at each other over the last month.

  ‘What’s up, Vrae?’ Amarath asked, walking over, wiping her hands on her cloak.

  Vrael gestured towards me with one hand. ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘I’m what?!’

  ‘Pregnant,’ Vrael repeated, ‘I can smell the shift in your hormones.’

  ‘But…how?’

  Amarath whacked her head off her palm. ‘Oh, I’m such an idiot. Karthragan punched you in the stomach. That would have been enough if you weren’t blocking it.’

  ‘Whoa, slow down here, will someone explain, please?’ I pleaded.

  Vrael and Amarath glanced at each other before Amarath sighed heavily, rolling her eyes at the two boys. ‘All right, so it’s a girl topic. Wusses! Shad, in a magical sense, a child is a bonding of the essences of the parents. In creatures such as ourselves, who can use magic to bend the rules of solidity, putting any part of your body through the other person’s body constitutes a melding of the essences. The only way our bodies can cope with this is by focusing this on creating a child. You should have been taught to be able to counteract this, block it so that he couldn’t put his fist right through you. Unfortunately, you haven’t, and now you’re carrying Karthragan’s kid, which is wrong on so many levels.’

  ‘Not only that, but for demonesses, the pregnancy is swift, lasting five months at most. Judging by the smell of you, you have perhaps three, three and a half months to go,’ Vrael added.

  I ran a hand through my hair. ‘There wouldn’t happen to be some big book on ‘everything you need to know about being a demon’, would there?’

  ‘Nope, sorry,’ Amarath said cheerily. ‘Just us.’

  We managed to finish the house completely by the end of two more months. After a couple of disastrous attempts, we decided to rely on magic and not on electricity in the house. The smell of fried vampire is particularly insulting to keen noses. Unfortunately, I now resembled a beached whale. Vrael had started to get together various medical supplies, pinching what he needed from a nearby city as we had done to help us build the house. What we couldn’t make ourselves, we had to steal, doing so at night, teleporting into the shops so as not to set off any alarms. Most of my teleportation training was done on such outings. It also came to general consensus that once the twins were born, I would go into the city and try to find a job. After all, I was the only one with any kind of qualification that might be recognised in this dimension.

  I spent more and more time with Merlas, talking to her and occasionally flying. Vrael’s constant checks on me were starting to get on my nerves. Although he had studied medicine, (turns out even demons get ill, which is a little odd), he had never really had to apply it. He had learnt a lot of his healing knowle
dge from an old vampire in the Dimension of the Dead, and he had said himself that injuries and illness were, in a somewhat expected manner since they were all dead, rare. Somehow, I think he was more nervous about the whole thing than I was. At least until I went into labour. I was leaning against Merlas’s side when the contractions started. I hissed in pain, doubling over. Merlas nickered in concern before letting loose with an ear shattering neigh. Amarath popped her head out of a window to tell the doe to shut up when she noticed that I was curled up in the grass, sheltered under Merlas’s protective wing. All three of my siblings rushed out to help me back into the house.

  I don’t remember much of the birth. Vrael had me on a series of painkillers to help me get through. Merlas still grumbles that when she stuck her head through the window of the ground-floor room we had designated as a medical centre, I had grabbed onto her mane and refused to let go. I suppose it would explain why I had a handful of coarse black hair in my hand. Either way, thankfully, the birth went without a hitch. I had given birth to two healthy part demon girls. I held one of them carefully, feeding her with a formula Vrael had put together. For the moment, they were identical, black haired and blue eyed. I lay back, exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep. Amarath poked her head around the door before walking into the room and perching on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Have you thought up names for them?’ she asked, sitting next to me.

  ‘Yeah, Archangel Holly and Onyx Natalie,’ I said softly.

  ‘You miss them, don’t you?’

  Miss them? An understatement. I had lost my two best friends to Karthragan in the same way I had lost my mother. Every day without them was like living without a part of me. I couldn’t tell Amarath that. She didn’t understand friendship. She had never been taught what friends were. I needed to grieve for my friends, but I couldn’t allow myself to mourn them in the same way I had mourned Arellan. The clan was relying on me for some reason, believing that I was going to be able to defeat our father. To allow myself such grief would be to destroy what faith they had in me. But I couldn’t expect her to understand that. She understood duty, but not emotion. So to answer her question, I simply said, ‘Yeah, I miss them.’

  To her credit, she didn’t say anything else. We sat in silence for a moment before Amarath got to her feet, leaving in silence with the strangely fluid pace she used to compensate for her leg. I had once asked her what had happened to cause the constant pain she seemed to suffer, but her only response had been ‘something that happened a long time ago and far away’. I looked down at the two tiny bodies sleeping curled up next to me, smiling slightly before joining them in slumber.

  As agreed, a week after the birth of Archangel and Onyx, I was in the city, looking for a job. I managed to find something pretty quickly, thank the goddess. A small, struggling florist shop. They dismissed my lack of qualification in the face of being able to communicate with people and arrange flowers into something pretty. I could do that. I even had the nose to be able to put together smells that complimented each other. I worked alongside a teenager, a girl who looked to be the same age as I appeared to be. She smelled a little strange though. Not quite human. She hid her strangeness well though, with a passion for flora so strong that the owner of the shop often deferred to her when it came to ordering the flowers. After a few days, I managed to feel enough at ease in the shop to ask her name. She smiled at me, and said her name was Alba Manticora.

  Archangel and Onyx were growing quickly and had thirst for knowledge that superseded my own and taking very much after their namesakes. Onyx had a passion for reading the dictionary and any other informative book she could find. Amarath often grumbled, as she dismantled prank after prank, what had possessed me to name a certain child ‘Archangel’. Thankfully, I escaped each day to go work, leaving them in Vrael’s care. This bewildered the part vampire. He had no idea how to handle children and often found that he had to call in backup from Amarath in order to control them. Each night, I came home to find Vrael in his animal form of a panther, submitting to having his ears and tail pulled by the over-inquisitive twins. His tail now has a permanent kink in it from being pulled out of shape, but he considers it to be minor compared to having no tail what so ever. Strangely enough, they behaved around Merlas. They never put a toe out of line. Soon, she became their primary babysitter, much to her dismay, to the point where she disappeared for the best part of three months. I wasn’t worried about her though. Merlas could fend for herself. Three years later, when the girls’ magic manifested a dark green, I started to see myself mirrored in them, in Archangel’s appearance, which mimicked mine almost perfectly, and Onyx’s joking despair on her sister’s part, not unlike the attitude I used to have with Holly. The only way to train them was to play, and I found myself playing games of tag in the forest to train them to teleport, always ending up breathless from laughter. It was as if I had found my best friends again.

  I often escaped from my family in the forest, to reminisce. I thought about Holly and Natalie, the shenanigans we had managed to get up to at the Academy and in its grounds. Somewhere in the forest of the Academy, there was a tree with the letters HB, NP, SR. Holly Bristol, Natalie Patterson and Shadow Roth, the trio that had sparked fear in the hearts of the most experienced of teachers. It was difficult letting them go. I wandered further into the forest than I usually did, lost in thought. Something rustled on the edge of the path. I stopped, looking around, trying to see what had moved. A twig snapped. I put a hand on the hilt of the sword Amarath had taught me to use. Crouching, half hidden by a tree, I watched as a creature of fantasy crept along the path. A manticore, if I remembered my mythological creatures class properly. I sniffed the air. The scent of the manticore was familiar. I nearly whacked my head off the tree. I must be stupid. Alba Manticora.

  ‘Alba?’ I asked softly, stepping towards the creature. It jumped, morphing back into a rather bewildered looking teenage girl. I smiled slightly. ‘I thought you smelled a little odd.’

  ‘Shadow? What’re you doin’ out here?’ she asked warily. I could sense her kicking herself mentally. I made a guess that it was because I’d spotted her. A lot of being a non-human rested on not being found out. It was the only way to stay alive, in one piece and preferably not in a cage.

  ‘I live around here,’ I said vaguely, holding out a hand to help her get to her feet. She coughed nervously, brushing herself off.

  ‘I guess you, uh, saw my transformation there, huh…’

  ‘Yeah, no worries though. I’m not going to rat on you.’ I felt relief coming off her in waves before she tensed, looking back the way she had come. Grabbing my hand, she started to sprint through the undergrowth, pulling me along behind her with surprising ease and strength. She didn’t answer when I asked her what the matter was until we had gone another mile into the forest where she stopped, breathing hard.

  ‘There are…people after me,’ she started to explain. I raised an eyebrow, prompting her to go on. ‘I sensed someone following me out of the city, but they didn’t reveal themselves until after I changed. I don’t know who they are.’

  Frowning, I scanned the forest around us, looking for any traces of these people. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I turned back to Alba, pointing east.

  ‘Look, if you go far enough that way, you’ll come across a house. Tell Amarath I sent you. Get out of the forest. I’ll follow behind masking our tracks.’

  Alba nodded, looking nervous, but followed my orders. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, looking for any movement. Nothing. I started to walk after Alba, taking care to hide any signs of our passing. I stopped as I heard something. Something thudded against my skull. I don’t remember even hitting the ground.

  When I came around again, my entire body throbbed as if I had been through a power surge. Fleeting memories were quickly banished from my mind, giving me no recollections whatsoever of what had happened since I had been knocked out. Looking around, I realised
I was in the hospital room of our house. Amarath, Vrael and Alba were watching me with worried expressions. However, their expressions weren’t the things concerning me. I was more concerned at the fact that Vrael had his arms around Alba protectively and was holding her close. Vrael and Alba? Okay, weird pairing there. I wondered how that had happened.

  ‘Shad?’ Amarath asked. ‘You back with us?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I grumbled, trying to sit up despite having the mother of all headaches. ‘Anyone care to enlighten me as to what the hell happened to make me feel like someone ran over me with a bus and then reversed again to make sure they did it right?’