A Shadow's Tale

by Jennifer Hanlon

  ‘I’m not here to fight you,’ he said, ‘I am Sither. Sither Moonspike, last Shapeshifter standing of the Yul tribe. I was just passing by and I overheard that you were embarking on some sort of…journey.’

  Bart relaxed enough to put his claws away. ‘I’m Bart, this is Shadow.’ Sither inclined his head gracefully towards me. I returned the gesture, sheathing my sword again but keeping my hand on its hilt. I couldn’t sense anything hostile coming from the newcomer, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t turn evil.

  ‘I have a few talents in warfare that may be useful to you both, if you will allow me to accompany you.’

  ‘Shadow?’ Bart asked in an undertone.

  ‘I can’t sense anything bad coming off him. Chances are he’ll be harmless enough towards us.’ I took care to keep my voice low, unsure of how good Sither’s hearing was.

  Bart nodded and started walking again, Sither and I following quietly.

  Concrete pavements soon gave way to dense woodland as we approached the foot of the mountain. We continued onwards, a strange trio of a shape shifter-turned-demon, a demon and an unknown. Bart stopped, listening carefully. I cast a glance at him, sensing worry cascading off him in waves.

  ‘Shadow, Sither…I think we have company.’

  I drew both my swords, brow furrowed in concentration and concern. I knew I was in no state to fight. Nor was Bart. I couldn’t even morph! Sither was the only chance we had of getting out of the fight alive. I closed my eyes, trying to sense our attackers. All I heard was the blood pounding in my ears. All I smelled was earth, blood and shifter. All I could feel was Bart’s agitation and worry. The wind ruffled the Kraferr’s fur, bringing with it the sharp tang that promised rain. I tightened my grip on my sword, ignoring the pain that lanced through my damaged heart. Nature settled. Not a leaf rustled. I slashed at something not more than a shadow. Claws ripped at my arm. Shallow gashes leaked tiny droplets if blood. I strained my ears to hear more, hear better, hear past the unnatural silence.

  There!

  I swung my sword at neck height. It met with a satisfying flesh-and-bone resistance. A body thudded to the ground. I threw my sword at another attacker, listening out for the crunch as it hit its target, drawing my other blade and preparing myself.

  ‘Slay the One and his allies!’

  My temper snapped. Anger boiled through my mind. Magic surged through my muscles, begging to be used. I shouted out in Demonic. Black energy poured from my hands. I didn’t care about losing control now. Not while Bart was in mortal danger. Sither could handle himself. Bart was still injured. He had been injured while defending me.

  A handful of heartbeats later, the Outlaw Kraferrs lay dead in pools of blood around us. I fell to one knee, my arms around my ribs. Goddess, it hurt to breathe. My secondary heart was beating so fast. Bart crouched next to me.

  ‘Shadow, you shouldn’t have done that. You need to rest!’

  I gritted my teeth. Rest? Now? Forget it! The monkey boys might have back up. ‘I’m fine,’ I muttered, pushing myself to my feet. The sudden movement proved to be too much. I collapsed onto the ground again. I couldn’t hear anything through the frantic beating of my secondary heart. The magical wave had taken more energy than I had realised. A secondary heart is just that – secondary. It could run my body for a matter of about two weeks, as long as the demon doesn’t do anything too strenuous, ample time for the primary heart to recover and take over full duty once more. After the exertion of the battle, I guessed I had a handful of days at most.

  I expected to hit hard, unforgiving ground. Instead, someone caught me before I could, cradling me carefully in their arms.

  ‘I told you, you need rest. So just relax,’ ordered Bart. I felt like arguing back, but didn’t. He was trying to help. I felt his claw rest on the pulse point on my neck. His hand then moved close to my wounded heart. I hissed in pain, pushing his hand away. He wasn’t trained! He didn’t know what to do! But he maintained his hand close to the injury.

  ‘Let me try, Shad.’

  Grudgingly, I let him.

  When Vrael and I heal someone, we use magic to fuse together the fibres of the muscle and reconnect the cells. This becomes harder and harder the deeper we go into an organism, and becomes more difficult the older the wound gets as the magic has to interfere with the natural healing process. Bart was finding this out the hard way. Slowly, the depths of the wound began to close enough to staunch the bleeding before he was forced to stop by the toll the magic was taking on his strength.

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured. He smiled slightly, standing up and holding out his hand. I took it, letting him help me to my feet. We looked out over the battlefield. Bart gagged, I guess disgusted by the sight of the remnants of the fight. I was used to the smells of battle. The sight of blood didn’t turn my stomach. Don’t get me wrong though. It’s not that death and killing don’t bother me, it’s that this was an exception. The outlaws wouldn’t have hesitated to kill us. We should not have had to hesitate to kill them. All that was left was for me to convince myself that it was self-defence.

  ‘Why were they after us? You said that they believe the necklace should remain undiscovered, but why the violence?’

  ‘The Outlaws used to be a group of Kraferrs who protected the Ones on their quest. But the Outlaws got scared that the Ones would ask a wrong question, which leads to the One’s death and moves the Kraferrs one step closer to extinction. Well, the idea of ‘protect by force’ kinda turned into ‘kill’.

  ‘I see.’ My eyes wandered over the corpses. I spotted my second sword embedded in the chest of a dead Kraferr. I pulled it out, trying to ignore the sound of shattered bone against the metal. I wiped the blade on the grass in an attempt to clean as much of the gore from it as possible. ‘It looks like the Kraferrs are another few specimens short then.’ My mind, unbidden, turned to my own species. The part demons. How we had been everywhere, in almost every dimension. Now only the Roth-Mercian clan was left. My clan. And it looked like the Kraferrs were going to follow the same path.

  ‘Yes,’ Bart spoke again, shaking me from my dark thoughts. ‘But it’s done now. Not much we can do about it.’

  ‘Hm.’

  I listened to Bart gagging again as he looked out over the bloodstained, corpse-strewn ground. I rolled my eyes, trying to block out the sound. But there was something more behind it. There was something else coming off him. I whipped around to face him as he fell to his knees, his hands around his ribs. I knelt next to him, holding his shoulders straight to try to alleviate his breathing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The…blood…’ He managed to gasp. ‘It’s interfering…with everything!’ He tried to get up again, but his legs gave way beneath him. I gritted my teeth. All the signs pointed to an imminent demonic possession. Not a good thing. I wracked my mind for a possible solution, for anything that could help him. The bracers! Digging into my pockets, I pulled out two long bracelets of metal. Shaeman had crafted them, working a length of thin, silver wire into the steel. I slid one over Bart’s wrist, pulling at the lacing to keep them tight against his fur.

  ‘I don’t normally use these,’ I explained, slipping the other one into place, ‘but I think this qualifies as an emergency. They have silver in them. It’ll help control the demon blood.’

  ‘Shadow,’ he started to say, lying back on the ground with a groan. ‘Thanks.’

  I sensed despair starting to well up inside him and swallowed hard. ‘It’s one of the few things I can do. After all, it’s my fault you’ve got this problem.’

  ‘Shad…’ His voice held a hint of a warning. I tensed, throwing all my senses onto high alert. ‘There was nothing else you could have done.’ Realising we weren’t going to be attacked, I relaxed slightly, keeping my head bowed. He started to try to get to his feet, but I pushed him back down again, one hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Calm down and relax for a bit. The silver should take effect soon, but you need to let it work, no
t get yourself all worked up.’

  Bart fell back again, grimacing slightly. I rolled my eyes discreetly, shifting my limbs into a more comfortable position. He turned his head to look at me.

  ‘Shad, does demonic magic cause any interference with other kinds? Like, will it change or block my Kraferric powers?’

  I looked down at my hands, which were absent-mindedly shredding blades of grass. ‘I don’t know, really. I don’t think there are any specific changes. I’m going on Vrael, though. He still needs blood, but sunlight won’t kill him, so I guess there are small changes that will happen. Shouldn’t be too drastic though.’

  He didn’t reply, seemingly lost in thought. I continued to shred the grass, trying to get my nose to focus on something other than the cloying smell of the Outlaw bodies starting to decompose. I could smell something, a scent that gradually grew stronger and stronger. The smell of vampire. And if my empathy wasn’t deceiving me, which it rarely does, a very pissed off vampire. I chewed my lip nervously. Yes, the trick with the mouse had been a very low blow and incredibly dishonourable thing to do, taking advantage of his blood-lust. Not only that, but he was going to blow a fuse over the fact that I had jeopardised my safety by playing him. That, and the heart injury. I didn’t know if vampires could have heart attacks, but he was certainly going to have kittens when he found out that I was hurt by a demon hunter on his watch.

  True to my sense of smell, the silver-haired vampire strode across the grass with fury written all over his face, his bow and quiver slung across his back. I quickly dropped my gaze. Initiating a confrontation was not going to make this any easier.

  ‘Shadow Wolf Alexai Roth…’ he started, but I interrupted him before he could continue.

  ‘I know, it was really dirty trick to play on you and I’m really sorry I did it. I just had to get away from the clan for a while.’ Vrael’s expression softened slightly, but it didn’t last.

  ‘Why can I smell your blood?’

  Oh goddess…‘We, uh, ran into a demon hunter…’ Vrael was instantly next to me, his silver eyes boring into mine.

  ‘Are you hurt? Where?’

  I pushed him away gently. ‘I took a sword through my primary heart, but I’m fine as long as I don’t stress myself. Bart’s the one with the real problems, not me.’ Vrael turned to look at the Kraferr, who was starting to look a little unsettled under the vampire’s unwavering, scrutinising silver gaze. Vrael sniffed the air.

  ‘By all the gods above and below, Shadow, please tell me you did not…’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ I muttered, looking down at my shoes. ‘He was so close to dying from blood loss…’

  Vrael sighed, rubbing his temples as if he was starting to get a headache. ‘This breaches so many of the ancient protocols that it aches my mind to contemplate them.’

  ‘I know! I already said, I wasn’t thinking about protocol…’

  ‘What is done is done. Although I cannot understand one more thing. With your heart so grievously injured and Bart’s current conversion, who slew so many?’

  ‘We picked up a helper along the way,’ Bart chipped in. All three of us turned to look at Sither, who was roosting up in a tree. He looked, given the circumstances, impeccable. If I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t have thought that he had just fought such a bloody battle. I wondered how he had done it. I had been so focused on the Outlaws, I hadn’t even noticed how he fought. I don’t think I was even aware that he was there. Bart scratched the back of his neck.

  ‘Well, we should probably be getting on with the quest before the Outlaws send another party to attack us.’

  ‘No, Bart,’ Vrael snapped. ‘You require complete rest until your demonic conversion has had time to complete. Shadow and I must return home before word gets to the demon hunters that she is out and not heavily defended.’

  ‘Vrael,’ I growled before Bart could respond. ‘I said I’d help him in this quest. You know as well as I do that I need something to occupy my mind, or else I’ll go mad and surrender myself to Karthragan.’

  For a moment, I thought the vampire was going to argue back, but he sighed and shook his head. Defeat radiated off him, defeat and worry. He knew well enough that once I had set my mind firmly to something, it was easier to move a mountain than it was to make me change my mind.

  ‘As you wish, Shadow, although I will insist that you at least take the remainder of the night to rest yourselves before undertaking the next leg of your journey.’

  I glanced at Bart. ‘Sounds like a fair enough compromise to me.’ Bart nodded, lying back on the grass once more and staring at the stars. Vrael folded his long legs to sit down, pulling his longbow and quiver from his back. He took wooden shafts, arrow heads and black and red feathers from the quiver, setting about fletching his own arrows. I smiled faintly. Shaeman and Merlas both gave Vrael their moulted feathers for his fletching. It was a comforting thought, thinking about how well the clan worked together despite our demon sides. I gathered some wood, lighting a small fire to ward away the chill of the night. I curled up next to it, closing my eyes to rest, but sleep refused to come. I sighed irritably. My mind was too awake for anything more than waking nightmares as I imagined the horrors waiting for me in the darkness of the city streets and the future. I sat up, rubbing my eyes. I glanced at Bart, making sure he was okay, then at Vrael. The vampire smiled slightly at me, pulling something from his quiver and tossing it to me. I caught it with an ease born of building our house as a team. In my hand was a sharpening stone. I nodded gratefully at my half-brother, pulling out one sword and running the stone along the edges of the blade. Sharpening a sword, practising my moves, target practice with a bow, grooming Merlas, all repetitive actions that helped me calm myself.

  ‘Alexai, I do not believe that it is safe for us to remain here.’ Vrael spoke in demonic.

  I had to hold back a growl. Vrael knew perfectly well that I couldn’t stand being called by that name, which meant that he used it to make sure that he had my full attention. Glaring openly at my brother, I snapped back at him in the same language: ‘Don’t ever call me that!’

  ‘Alexai…’

  I snarled, leaping to my feet. Vrael mirrored my actions. From within my mind, the tendrils of the demon’s influence grew and took hold as I struggled to keep on top of it. In front of me, Vrael’s eyes had turned red, splitting into four. Demonic possession. Now it was a show of strength. My vision became tinted by crimson. The smell of blood and death became as pleasing a smell as that of fresh air and mountain wind had been. I released my iron control over my magic, allowing it to erupt into a flaming aura. Vrael copied, his red magic bursting forth in what could have been considered an impressive show of pyrotechnics. Here and now, all that mattered was showing how strong we were. It was a fight. Anger began to consume me. Until I heard Bart’s voice calling my name.

  My magic flickered. I stamped down on my demon side, trying to regain control, to force its influence down. I gasped aloud with the effort. Vrael seized the opportunity. He leapt at me, attempting to make the first strike. I kicked out, managing to force him to divert his course briefly. His strength bolstered by his magic, his fist struck my chest. I felt my ribs crack. I fell back with a shout of pain. Bart jumped towards Vrael.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The Kraferr snarled. I gasped for breath. Vrael closed his eyes. I felt his anger ebb away as he calmed himself. I glanced over at the pair. Bart stood behind my brother, one arm round his neck, the other wielding its claws as if to gouge out Vrael’s eyes. I sat up slowly, cradling my ribs with one arm. Bart released Vrael, still watching him warily out of the corner of his eye as he crouched next to me.

  ‘He missed my heart,’ I assured him, sensing the concern radiating from him. ‘He must have broken a rib or two, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s still a broken rib. Come on,’ he gently pulled my arms away, laying his hand lightly over my splintered bones. I threw my head back and snarled silently to the
moon as they snapped back into place. Bart leant back on his heels. ‘You okay now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Yeah, I’m all right now. Thanks.’ I lay back, rolling onto my side so that my back was facing Bart. A hint of confusion wafted from him, but he didn’t ask. I was glad about that. I was so tired, so sore. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  I didn’t even notice that Vrael had gone. A wave of anger and confusion hit me like a herd of galloping pegusi. I bolted upright with a gasp. Vrael never felt emotions with such power, but they had undoubtedly come from him. Something was very, very wrong. I grabbed my swords, scrambling to my feet and running back towards the city, towards the epicentre of the emotions, trying to ignore the pain lancing through my chest with every breath I took. I arrived in a back alley on the outskirts of the city.

  ‘Vrael, take high ground!’ I shouted. The vampire, bow in hand, swung himself up onto a fire escape. I drew both my swords, preparing to fight. I faced my opponent. Sither and another, cloaked, figure. I sniffed the air. Kraferr. A female Kraferr whose smell was somewhat close to Bart’s. But now was not the time to ponder over the Kraferr’s scent. The emotions I was sensing from Sither were not good.

  ‘Why were you really with us, Sither?’ I growled, my eyes narrowed. I heard the subtle creaking of Vrael’s bow as he drew back the string. I barely noticed the Kraferr female slip away. Sither grinned at me. I didn’t like that. It didn’t bode well at all. Only an enemy who knew how to win would smile like that. My chest throbbed painfully as it reminded me that I was living on borrowed time until my heart healed. I couldn’t afford another injury!

  My fears were confirmed when Sither morphed. I cursed under my breath. I had forgotten he was a shifter. Shapeshifter were an increasingly rare shifter race, and damned strong in their ‘true’ forms. I had read scrolls about them back in Synairn. And Sither’s form did nothing to inspire confidence within my mind. A two metre tall Praying Mantis was not what I wanted to see. I tightened my grip on my swords, highly conscious that the hilts were starting to feel a little slippery. One of Vrael’s arrows appeared out of the corner of my eye. It broke in half as if hit one of the interlocking pieces of armour that formed the Praying Mantis’s exoskeleton. I brought both blades up to parry a blow from the giant bug’s bladed arms. The impact shook my arms down to the very bone. Goddess, he was strong. I ducked under another attack, swinging my sword in a short arc. I barely scratched his exoskeleton. Growling in frustration, I reluctantly gave ground, concentrating on keeping all my limbs attached to my body. I couldn’t see any weak points in his armour plating, nothing I could take advantage of. Another arrow narrowly missed me.