by Laney McMann
"I can't exactly ask around the castle about Max's welfare, Te—Layla. Sorry, your eyes are really throwing me." He rubbed his forehead, and glanced away again, picking up one of the swords. "I wish they would go back to normal. It's like looking at two people at once."
"You think?" I snapped. "I can't even look in the mirror."
"Are you ... seeing okay?" He turned to face me, sword hilt in hand. "I mean, it looks kind of ... painful." He cringed. Good 'ol Justice, always making me feel better about myself.
"Yes, I can see. And could you stop saying I look like two people at once? It makes me feel like a ... a reanimated dead person from thousands of years ago."
"You kind of are."
I eyed him. With both eyes.
"Right. Sorry. Look, I don't know what to think about the Max situation anymore. Elethan isn't exactly trustworthy. But if MacCoinnich's body is gone, we can only assume the worst."
"I can't believe you left the castle grounds to dig into some old tombs, and they just let you back in."
"What else was I supposed to do? I had to check. And I didn't ask for permission to leave. So, yes, getting back in was a small challenge, but it turns out that if you pace outside the Underworld's gate covered in grave dirt long enough, the Fomore guards kind of get annoyed." He smirked, his blue eyes twinkling in Justice's typical devilish way. "They like it even less when you yell while pacing." He twirled the sword in his hands. "The King wouldn't want to be seen breaching your grandmother's demands, though, so I made a few threats to the guards—after the fire storm you created earlier, it wasn't hard to scare them. They let me back in."
I stared, picturing him pacing back and forth, yelling. Probably in gargoyle form.
"Ryan's here, too, somewhere, by the way. I caught a glimpse of him as I was being escorted back up to your room."
"Ryan?" My eyes narrowed. "Torn apart, hates me, Ryan from REBELLION?"
"Do you know another Ryan? Believe me, he doesn't want a run in with me unguarded. The Fomore may have a real battle on their hands." Justice heaved a breath. "He's ... Max's trainer. Ryan is." He laughed, a full body chuckle. "And I would pay good money to see Max's face when he finds out, if he hasn't already. I doubt Ryan will survive one day. Max will kill him."
"I ..." My head was shaking back and forth. "I know you don't want to believe it, but Max is one of them now—I doubt he'll care Ryan is here." I hated to continue repeating it, affirming that Max had gone over to the shadows, but the knowledge kept spilling out of my mouth anyway.
"We can agree to disagree on that." Justice gave a tight lipped, flat smile. "I'm yours, by the way. Trainer. Officially." He set the sword back against the stone wall. "It was either me or Sam, and there was no way in hell—"
I had my arms around him again, grave dirt and all. "Thank you. For everything. I'll never be able to say it enough."
Justice patted the top of my head like I was a pet dog. "Like you could rid of me if you wanted to. I'm sworn, remember?"
"If this is just you doing your job—"
Justice put a hand over my mouth, and for a second I wanted to gag. "It's been a couple of hours." He eyed me. "A couple of hours since I left and came back, and you're already jumping to the wrong conclusion?" He let go, glancing toward his feet. "Where else in the world should I be? Besides the fact that your grandmother would kill me if I left you ... you're all I know."
I hugged him again, tears welling. "Sometimes you can be a really good guy, you know that?"
"Yeah. I know. Can we stop it with the groping me now? We have work to do."
With a grin that I probably should've felt was wrong considering the circumstances we were in, I backed up and glanced at all the weapons. "Where do we start?'
*****
"So, this one is a mace. You know that. Or you should." Justice lifted a weapon that resembled a club or a really large hammer. It had a huge steel head dotted with protruding spikes. He heaved it over his shoulder with a grunt. "I seriously doubt you'll want to use one of these. They're stupid-heavy and almost impossible to aim with any accuracy." He chucked it back against the wall with a loud thud that shook the stone floor and grabbed a sword. "This is a longsword." He held it up, balancing it on two fingers, seeming to inspect the blade. "The issue with this is that it's way longer than you are tall." He popped it up in the air and caught it by the hilt. "So the likeliness of you wielding it without accidentally cutting off one of your own legs is slim." He tossed it into a pile with a bunch of other rusty swords.
I nodded.
"Okay," Justice went on. "These are bolas ..." He reached for a pair of heavy-looking metal balls attached together by a thick chain. "All these are good for is unintentionally strangling yourself to death or accidentally knocking yourself unconscious." He threw them against the wall with the rest of the stuff and put his hands on his hips with a deep breath.
"Um ..." I gestured toward an axe.
"Battle axe. No way in hell are you learning to use that heavy ass thing in two days."
"Okay ... you kind of just told me none of the weapons are worth using." I lifted a brow, eyeing him, as he stood there in faded jeans and a dirty T-shirt, his short brown hair its usual disheveled mess.
"Yeah, they aren't worth a damn. Any of them." He shrugged. "Not for you, anyway. For me ..." He smiled toward the axe.
"So?" I held my hands to the sides, standing in the middle of the mat. "Are you going to teach me anything?"
"Nah. You don't need this type of weapons teaching. We need to do our training outside, and we need more space than this." He gestured toward the four walls of the room.
"More space to do what?"
"Layla, you need to use the strength you were born with. I've seen what you can do, remember?"
I took in a deep breath. "You mean turn into the Raven," I said in a flat tone, crossing my arms over my chest.
"No. That's not a talent you were born with, and I come with specific orders from your grandmother who forbids you to shift."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"I want you to do what you did the day Max was taken. I believe you were channeling Teine. It makes the most sense." He lifted a brow. "And you created quite a lot of damage when you demanded the King release Cara. Burned up the grounds, killed a couple guards ..."
"Oh ... god, I did, or she did kill them," I said mostly to myself. "I'd forgotten that."
"Forgotten?"
I glanced up at him, in slight shock. "It wasn't ... Justice, that wasn't me, not me as Layla. I didn't kill anyone. It was her, the other half of my soul or whatever. Teine did that."
"What do you mean?"
"It was similar to when the Raven takes over, it's me, but not me. I can see everything, feel it all, but I'm not really steering the ship. Teine was steering the ship when she burned everything at the gate."
He let out a low whistle. "Whoa. Why didn't you tell me that before?"
"I don't know. Because it's weird. And scary." I threw my arms up. "Someone else controlling what you do. It's hard to explain it to myself, much less anyone else. And I tried explaining to you what happened when the Raven takes over. Remember? After we were attacked by the Sluagh in the Wood. I told you I wasn't controlling the fire—I didn't know what the hell I was doing?" My voice pitched. "I still don't know, Justice, and now Teine, who I can feel inside of me the same way I feel the Raven, is burning stuff up. Setting Fomore guards on fire. And I have no idea how to stop it or control it!"
"Calm down." He had his arms around me in his awkward way. "Calm down. Sorry. We just need to come at this slow. Both of us."
"Right." I took in a ragged breath. "I'm sorry, too."
"Sounds like all we need to figure out is how to channel that power the way you did before. Just do what you did when Max was taken." He let me go and stepped back.
I rolled my eyes.
"After you stab Max with the Demon blade ..."
I winced. "What? You expect me to stab him?"<
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"Even the playing field, like I said before. His souls will merge, like yours did, and—"
"And ... what?" I shrilled. "Who's bringing him back to life?"
He averted his eyes.
"Justice, aren't you hearing me?"
"I hear you fine. After you stab Max, I think, the Coat of Arms is what will revive him. The same way the Morrigan revived you."
"You think?"
"Yes. If he has Demon blood in his veins ... like you have the Morrigan's blood in your veins, it should revive him, reawaken him the same way it did you."
"Should ..." My breaths came out in hits.
"Should. And then, I want you to turn into the phoenix and torch this place."
"The phoenix?" I asked in a flat tone, staring at him. "You want me to turn into a phoenix? Like that's normal."
"I don't care what it is." He shrugged in that arrogant way of his. "I saw what I saw when you burst into flames the day Max was taken, wings and all, and I want to see it again."
"And how do you expect me to show it to you?" I asked. "I. Don't. Know. How. That. Happened! I wasn't controlling it. What aren't you understanding?"
"I know you weren't controlling it," he said in a calm tone. "But something was, and we need to figure out what that trigger was. Maybe it was Teine."
My head dropped, remembering something Max said to me months before. "Max told me my trigger was anger." I lifted my head, finding my mouth had a hard time saying Max's name out loud. "Anger and a little bit of fear."
Justice grinned. "Of course he would have figured that out early on."
I nodded, fighting back the choke in my throat. "Months ago, Max told me he wasn't afraid I would hurt him with my fire, only that I might hurt myself." I remembered him standing outside the castle entrance again. Those beautiful words speaking inside my head—not my words, but Teine's. Teine's words to the boy she loved—the boy she hadn't seen in millennia. The boy she'd lost. There had been no hate in Max's eyes as the words seemed to settle on his expression, no malice, or ill will, only concern, and shock. He had to have heard the different tone, my voice, but not mine. The different timbre and eloquent word placement. Maybe he'd even seen that my eyes weren't my own. Surely he'd seen. Known something was off, but still ... he hadn't done anything, just stared. He didn't care, not anymore.
"It'll be okay." Justice tilted his head into my sightline. "It will."
"How?" I fought back the tears. "How in the hell will it possibly be okay? I'm some ... freak of nature now with a messed up soul. I don't even know what the hell I am. My eyes are jacked. I can't even look at myself in the mirror. And Max is ... he's ..." Someone else.
"Listen," Justice said. "We're going to train like they want us to, and be the most well behaved prisoner-guests the Fomore have ever seen. Then you're going to face Max in the middle of that barren, dusty, snow dotted field they call an arena, and you are going to show everyone exactly who you are. All the parts of you. Exactly who you were born to be."
I glanced at my feet. That's what I was afraid of. Exactly who I was born to be. Whoever that was. "Justice ... I don't know who he is now, or if he ever really loved me—if all of it was fake, or if his feelings for me were just because of magical coercion, but either way, I don't want to hurt him." My head dropped into my hands, and the tears finally fell. The tears I'd been holding back with anger and shock and rage, but no amount of negative emotion could stop the reality, or the pain. "I don't know how to do this. Any of this. I don't know who I am."
Justice put his arm around me in a side hug and squeezed. "You're you. Still you. You just have to incorporate all the sides of you and let them in. You'll only be stronger for it. And I haven't figured it all out yet, but you have to trust me. The Demon Gods want a show, and we're going to give them one. Okay?" He squeezed me again. "We go in, we fight, we see the truth. Live or die, we see the truth. I promise."
I wiped my face, nodding into his filthy shirt.
"Now, we need to find somewhere to work on your skills where we can't be seen," he said, and I heard the grin come through his tone.
7
MAX
I didn't remember the first time I met Layla when I was a little boy. How old I was when they'd finally brought us together. If it was my Grandmother or Layla's father who'd introduced us as little kids. I had never even thought to ask. Layla had always just been there. In my life. I wasn't sure who said, 'hi,' first, or maybe who smiled at who first—all I really remembered was staring at her, and her staring back at me, neither of us looking away. Both of us standing frozen, and life falling into the background with a distant hum. As if the world had stopped spinning. Just for us.
I remembered not caring if it had. She'd seemed so familiar, and even as a little kid, I'd known she was special. Like something bigger than me, older than me, had taken over my emotions in a way I didn't understand. She just felt like ... home. I could have gazed into her eyes forever. Happy to stand in that powerless state for the rest of my life and never walk away.
*****
I stared as the fading gloom of daylight fell into night and cast ugly shadows across the ceiling in my bedroom. Reaching for the book underneath my bed, I found the same page I'd been on earlier, bookmarked with the broken glass vial. I reread the passage. "Upon the twenty-ninth day of the seventh month, the black moon shall rise, and the ashes must fall, as the White Raven flies. One day must pass, for the last to descend, merging the lost, unto which the reign will approach its end. On the thirty-first day, as Lilith comes, under the Crone's Waning Moon, undo what has been done."
Undo what has been done. That passage could mean so many things, and I didn't know why it was bothering me so much. I rubbed my forehead, the usual headache remaining in the recesses. The old book my mother had left me held a hundred stories, riddles, sayings, and drawings, and I had no real way of knowing what mattered and what didn't.
A familiar scratching from the hall grated on my nerves, and a scraggly paw reached beneath the door. Shoving the book back under my bed, I pushed to my feet and tracked across the room. Layla's cat, Kaevnor, bounded from the threshold of the open door and onto my four poster bed in one leap.
"Why are you my constant shadow now?" I wanted to tell the cat to go find Layla, but the words wouldn't reach my lips.
Lying back down, she settled next to me on the blankets. I kept my ears open for even the slightest hint of a sound that shouldn't be there, wondering where they were keeping Layla, and desperately wanting to search every room in the castle until I found out. She wasn't okay, the King had been telling the truth about that, and everything in me told me to go to her, find her, get her the hell away from the Shadow Realm and everyone in it.
I couldn't shake the sight of the gash on her neck or the blood covering her clothes and hands. Not to mention her voice—or her eyes. Was she being treated for her injuries? Cared for? Being thrown and left to die in a Fomore prison cell myself only weeks before didn't leave me with the highest of hopes for her care. Maybe if I could find Justice—
I shook my head. Sam thought approaching Justice was out of the question. I didn't disagree with him. Still, the thought of Layla bleeding to death ...
I sat up and walked to the window. I had sneaked out of my chambers before. I could always feign sleepwalking if I ran into someone, and all I needed to do was check on her. Just a glimpse. Make sure she was upright and not bleeding out somewhere.
I remembered, word for word, one of the last real conversations we'd had. Like it had happened yesterday. The night I'd come back from the Fomore castle, before the Morrigan's will had infiltrated Layla's mind, and the Raven Ogham had appeared on the back of her neck. I'd tried to break up with her—like the idiot I was. As if it would've been a simple thing to just walk away from her. I'd replayed the conversation in my head a hundred times over in the last few days. I wished I could make it stop.
*****
"Layla ... this war—it'll never end," I'd told her. "Yo
u were right when you left before. Your mom was right. Our people hate each other."
"Our people?" She'd growled at me. "We have the same people!"
"Lay ... that came out wrong."
"Don't. Just—don't." She'd backed up a step, staring at me like I was insane. I remembered looking up the ceiling in her bedroom, thinking she was probably right. I had to have been insane to have gotten us both into the situation we were in.
"Remember when I told you, you were all I ever wanted?" I'd asked her, hoping she would understand. "All I would ever want? You are. That's just it. I love you too much to do this anymore. I'm the reason you're in danger. Me. How can I live with that? I never should have come back after you saw me—it was selfish and wrong. I promised to protect you. I gave my word."
She'd backed into the side the bed, heat rolling off of her in waves.
"I can stop this," I'd told her under my breath like it would lessen the blow. "I can make you safe. I can give you that. I can't—" My gaze swept over her shoulders, saw the Oghams standing out against her skin, and pain anchored itself in my heart. "I can't see you anymore. The Fomore will lay down their arms if I walk away from you." I'd whispered.
"Oh my god." Her words had rushed out in a gasp, the color draining from her beautiful face. "And you agreed."
"I'm going to. I have to." I'd nodded, feeling my eyes sting, wanting to make myself stop talking. Stop the utter crap spilling from my mouth. "Maybe it will break the curse."
"So, you're giving up then? Giving in?" She'd glared, and it was akin to her slapping me. "Letting them win."
"No, I am not giving up. I'm making the best decision I can out of the worst situation possible. You think I like this? You think it's not killing me? Are you kidding? It's taking every ounce of control I have to just stand here and not touch you." I'd held her stare fiercely, my heart pounding. "But if I can stop the curse ... if I can end it ... I will. I won't be forced to hurt you, Layla. Not like that. This could be the only way to end everything—to make it all stop."