by Tracy Deonn
I may not know my own ancestors, but after seeing Mary and Louisa and Cecilia, all I want is to show him that he’s not the only one with power in his veins.
“Nick was right,” I say in a low voice I barely recognize. “Merlins are monsters. You are a monster.”
His eyes widen, and his lips press into a thin, angry line—but I don’t find out what horrid thing he might spout next because he doesn’t get a chance to respond at all.
A crashing in the woods pulls our attention. A low howl. A high, piercing bark, then another that echoes against the closed-in courtyard.
Sel scowls. “What did you do? Call in reinforcements?”
I hiss, “I didn’t do anything, you asshole!” Like him, my eyes are glued to the graveyard.
We don’t have to wait long.
Three nightmares appear out of the woods and jump onto the stone wall. Three enormous foxes, green aether drifting up like steam off their scaly backs.
These are true Shadowborn. No construct. No illusion.
Sel’s hound dissolves until it’s nothing but silver dust.
“Cedny uffern!” Sel hisses. He slides backward into a fighting stance. “Call them off, uchel! If you kill me, you’ll never get close to Nicholas. All your efforts will be for naught.”
“They’re not mine!” I snap.
The partial-corp creatures leap down to the courtyard as one, covering the ten-foot distance easily. The foxes yip and snarl, chittering as they stalk toward us on long legs, their hairless, ratlike tails whipping behind them.
“I said call them off!”
“I didn’t do this!”
“Briana—”
“Please, Sel!”
His jaw clenches as he stares me down, fresh doubt at my plea warring with the fury in his eyes. A flash of blue-white aether, and then Sel is murmuring while aether streams rapidly into his hands. It collects into spinning globes in his palms. Then the globes expand and elongate until they form two long staffs that harden into shimmering crystalline weapons, dense and heavy.
Instead of retreating, the foxes snap their jaws eagerly at the sight.
“What are they doing?” I breathe, but Sel’s eyes are only for the demons.
Suddenly, all three hellfoxes release bloodcurdling screams, the sound bouncing in the courtyard and droning on and on until I cover my ears in pain. Then I see that it’s not a scream at all.
It’s a call.
I know the Shadowborn use aether to grow solid, but I’ve never seen it happen before now. The aether from Sel’s weapons unravels and flows in the air toward their open mouths like a stream spilling into a lake. He gasps, squeezing each staff in a fist, but it’s no use. His weapons dissolve before our eyes until he’s holding nothing but air between his fingers. The foxes flicker, but the silver-blue aether he called turns green when it reaches them. Sel is already calling another batch of aether, but the foxes scream once more and take it before he can form anything in his palms. He roars, cursing as they take his power from him, siphoning it as fast as he can call it.
The sharp burn of his casting fills the air. The foxes take it all and use it to grow larger, stronger. Aether swells from within their bodies, bloating them outward until there’s the sound of splitting skin. Dark green, foul-smelling ichor oozes out of the openings, turning my stomach. Sel begins calling a third batch of aether to make a weapon against them—but they’ll be corporeal soon, and visible to any passing Onceborn.
“Stop!” I shout. “They’re just using it to go corp!”
I didn’t need to yell; he’d figured it out too, and realized his efforts would be futile. His face turns feral with frustration, and he growls at the creatures with canines bared.
In my vision, the world trembles, but it’s not the world that is shaking, boiling, rising. It’s me.
Time slows, and I see the prowling foxes with new eyes. Their outstretched claws and rows of teeth, their eyes gleaming with bloodlust. Everything about my perception of them—sight, smell, sound—is suddenly crisper, brighter. Their cracked-lava skin is in high definition, every shift and ripple of their muscles clear beneath the surface. I can taste their sour, rotten aether bodies, the smell thick at the back of my throat. A rumbling growl is coming from one, I know, because I hear the air building to produce it, deep in its chest.
“What the hell is that?” Sel’s voice breaks my focus, and the world speeds back up.
I blink and look down. I’ve taken two steps toward the foxes without even realizing I’ve moved. My hands are outstretched at my sides—and bright crimson flames stream from my fingertips. A short scream escapes me, then a whimper. I shake my hands to try to toss the flames away. “I don’t, I don’t—”
The hellfoxes don’t wait for me to explain. The one on the far left is already moving, dashing for me at breakneck speed. I dodge at the last minute, and it collides into the wall. While it recovers, another screeches, braces for a leap—
Strong arms grab me around the waist and pull both my feet off the ground. The graveyard, the ground, the trees fly by in a dizzying blur of colors, and then I’m released. The world goes hazy, dark…
“Datgelaf, dadrithiaf… datgelaf, dadrithiaf…”
The ground beneath my face comes into focus. My stomach feels like it’s somewhere up near my lungs. My fingers curl in the dirt—the red mage flame is gone. “Ughh…,” I moan, rising to my knees. I couldn’t have been out for more than a minute.
“You’re welcome,” Sel grumbles, before returning to his chant. “Datgelaf, dadrithiaf…” He stands beside me, his fingers and hands contorting in the air over the massive roots of an oak tree. I look up to find that we’re on McCorkle Place, the northernmost quad. Maybe a ten-minute walk from the graveyard. “Datgelaf—”
A hellfox scream rends the night air.
“Oh God.” I use the tree to stand. “They’re coming.”
“I’m aware.”
Another scream, louder this time. “They’re getting closer!”
“I have ears!”
“We’ve got to run.” I take a halting step, but the world is still adjusting itself after Sel’s snatch-and-grab.
“No,” he says, “we’ve got to hide.” There’s a whoosh of air, and low, translucent double doors appear over the tree’s roots. Sel yanks his hand backward, and one of the doors opens, revealing a dark bottomless pit below. “Get in.”
“I’m not going down there!”
Without a word, he wraps an arm around my middle and lifts me up, tossing me down into the gloom. I land ass-first, pain shooting up my spine. At least the dirt floor is six or seven feet below ground level instead of the unfathomable descent into nothingness I’d imagined. Sel drops down beside me and lands like a cat—silent and light. He yanks down again, and the door slams shut, plunging us into darkness.
30
“WHAT THE F—”
“Shut up.”
“Why—”
One of Sel’s hands shoves me back against a dirt wall and the other claps down over my mouth. Hard. When I make a muffled noise, that hand presses even harder. “Shh!”
A loud snuffling noise reaches us from no more than two feet above my head. I suck in a breath, heart pounding so loud that I’m certain Sel can hear it. The question is, can the hellfox above us? I pray that it can’t, because if Sel has chosen to hide rather than fight, it means he doesn’t think he can beat these creatures. The other two foxes join the first. We freeze in the darkness while the three demons try to sniff us out. Their paws are silent, but the weight of their aether bodies sends soil showering down over my hair, down the back of my T-shirt. I shut my eyes and let the pebbles rain over my cheeks and Sel’s fingers, still covering my mouth. What if they start digging? My mind races, questions coming faster. Do they know the hidden door is here? Can they sense the aether that hid it, just like Sel can sense the aether that makes them solid? Wait. Why didn’t Sel notice the foxes approaching in the first place?
I must mak
e some sound, or maybe my breathing changes against his knuckles, because he leans against me as if in warning. My eyes snap open—and meet his glowing yellow ones in the dark. Definitely a warning. One I can read clear as day: Don’t. Move.
After a minute, the sounds of their snouts grow distant as the hellfoxes move on. Sel waits a beat for good measure, then a second, and releases me. He snaps his fingers, and a small blue flame appears over his palm, illuminating the cave he’s put us in. No, not a cave. A tunnel.
“Let’s move.” He walks forward, the blue mage flame casting eerie shadows against wide exposed roots, crumbling dirt walls, and ancient beams holding the earth up above us.
“Did you just cast a tunnel?”
He doesn’t wait for me to follow, so I have to clamber after him to keep up.
“I revealed a tunnel. The tree trunk is the illusion, and an old one. The founders knew that the university would need to be a public front, so they dug tunnels for easy movement and caves for storage before the campus was built.”
“They dug all these to get around more easily?”
“These are fail-safes. Escape routes. The original Merlins warded them to mask aether so that Shadowborn cannot follow, even above ground.”
I tug my phone out of my pocket, but there’s no cell signal. The battery’s half-dead, so I could use the flashlight, but why drain it when Sel’s lighting the way plenty himself? “Why are we here and not the Lodge? You could have run us back there—”
He stops and fixes me with a glare. “I don’t know why those things attacked us or where they came from, and neither, it seems, do you. I’m not going to lead them right to Nicholas, even with the Lodge’s wards in place. If they’re anything like the hounds, they’ve caught our scent and will be on the hunt for us and no one else. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Why didn’t you sense them?”
His eyes drop and he keeps walking, pulling the only light source with him. “I’m not sure.” Something in his voice sounds off, like he’s holding back an answer he doesn’t want to say out loud.
“How did they steal your aether?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does that mean you’ve never seen a hellfox before?”
He turns around abruptly, and I almost stumble into him. “What are you?”
“I—”
“The truth,” he demands. “How did you generate that aether at your fingertips?”
I blink. “I didn’t generate anything—”
He regards me through narrow eyes. “This explains why you distracted me that night at the Quarry when I was hunting the isel. I detected a flare of your aether, then incorrectly assumed my senses had led me astray.” He leans closer with his flame fingers and points at my chest with his other hand. “But just a few minutes ago you were cooking aether like a furnace, right here.”
“Back off!” I push his hand away and cross my arms over my chest. The scent of even Sel’s small casting is filling the tunnel and clinging to my nose.
“You don’t know how to navigate these tunnels, and even if you could, you can’t open any of the doors to the surface,” he says, raising a brow, “so you may as well be honest. How did you do that?”
I want desperately to stomp off, but he’s right. I have no idea where to go. He watches me come to this conclusion as if dealing with a small, stubborn child who wants to protest their way out of bedtime. I resent everything about his face, from his ridiculous hair to his cambion eyes to the irritating smirk tugging at the side of his goddamn mouth. “I don’t know.” I can hear the petulance in my own voice, and I hate that, too.
Sel narrows his golden eyes to calculating slits while he inspects my face. A beat passes. “You’re telling the truth, at least about what you are and where your power comes from.”
“Yes! I am!” That much is true. I don’t know what I am and neither does Patricia. That I know about root, that my mother was a practitioner—I’ll never tell him those things.
His face takes on a considering expression. “My mother was a Merlin and an aether scholar. She studied demonology, Gate aether, runes, ancient texts, you name it. I was a precocious child, so I often snuck into her office to read her gramarye and those of Merlins before us.”
I grit my teeth, unnerved that he has brought up his own mother. Can he see that I was thinking about mine? “Is this story going somewhere?”
Sel ignores me. “With that upbringing, I, more than most, understand that our magic, if you will, is at its core and in its very fundamentals, a type of physics.” He extends his arm in the dim light. The tattoo claiming most of his forearm is a bold black circle divided by five lines into five equal segments. “Earth, air, water, fire, and aether, or what medieval alchemists called ‘quintessence.’ Every Merlin is taught that aether cannot be created or destroyed, only infused into a body or manipulated into temporary mass. So”—he looks directly into my eyes—“how is it that you, Briana Matthews, defy every law of aether that thousands of Merlins have followed for the past fifteen centuries?”
I stare back, scared of what he’s saying but refusing to show him that. “Maybe the Order doesn’t know everything about magic in the world.”
He hums and steps back. “There are a lot of things the Order does not know.” He walks ahead again without adding a word to that enigmatic comment, and I have no choice but to follow.
The deeper we go, the more the scent of rotting things overwhelms me. I tug my T-shirt up over my nose for relief, then pull it down again because it’s freezing here.
After a while I ask him the question that needs to be asked. “Are you going to turn me over to the Regents?”
He answers without looking back. “I haven’t decided. Why are you really joining our Order?”
He’s a Merlin. I can’t trust him with the real answer, and doing so would go against everything Nick’s specifically warned me about.
“You must be thinking up a lie,” he muses, “because you’re taking too long for the truth.” He stops again and gives me an expectant look.
I pull together the best possible, truest answer I can and look him right in the eyes while I say it. “I asked Nick to help me join because I need to understand the things I’ve seen, and I need to know why I see them.”
“What does Nicholas think of your ability to generate aether?”
“I… he doesn’t know about that. It’s only happened once before. Randomly, the night of the initiation. I thought it might be a reaction to the Oath. I didn’t know…”
He searches my face for a moment; then his lips curl back in disgust. “You truly have no idea what you are, and Nicholas, ever the hero, offered to help you find out by bringing you into an ancient secret society for which you had no background knowledge or training?”
I shift under his gaze. “Well, no, I sort of… pushed him to sponsor me. It was more my idea than his.”
He looks completely appalled. “You’re both fools, then.” He grimaces. “And so am I for believing you could be anything other than a silly little Unanedig girl.” He whirls away and stalks down the dirt corridor, muttering under his breath.
My jaw drops. “I thought you just said I defy ‘every law of aether’!”
“I did”—he sneers over his shoulder—“but I’ve been watching you closely all week, and apparently you can defy our laws while still being a silly little Unanedig girl. Congratulations.”
It’s our first meeting at the Quarry cliffside all over again—as soon as he’d found the isel, he’d dismissed me wholesale, because if you’re not Sel’s prey, you’re not worth his time. “Aren’t you supposed to… to… investigate anomalies?” I say, hurrying behind him, half-indignant and half-relieved.
“I investigate threats. Whatever aether ability you have, you can’t control it. You can barely kill a hellboar construct without the assistance of the planet’s gravity.” He huffs a low laugh, like he’s been laughing at me about that trial ever since it happened.
I’m so confused by Sel’s comments—and by how much he’s actually talking to me—that I stop walking right then and there. Had I misjudged him? Had Nick? Or is Sel operating just as he always has—treating any and everyone as a threat until his own eyes and facts prove otherwise? Up until an hour ago I qualified, but now… I don’t? I don’t expect to be so insulted, but after all this time and all those menacing glares suggesting bodily harm, I absolutely am. I’m insulted and annoyed. How dare he—
“Are you going to stand there gawking in the dark?” Sel snaps his left fingers to produce a new mage flame, and rotates his other wrist to extinguish the first so he can use that hand to steady himself against a low support beam. I follow his gaze ahead where there’s a rise of dirt that we’ll need to climb over to pass. “Or is there something else you’d like to add?”
“But—but what about all that talk of enthralling Nick?” I sputter. “And me making a fool of him? And… and… how I don’t belong? Were you just saying all of that to be an ass?”
“Oh no, I meant every word. Because I thought you were Shadowborn, I hoped to provoke you into an emotional response—the more negative the better, as that’s what demons are drawn to, even within themselves. It worked, in a way, albeit not how I’d imagined.” He sighs and turns around, a bored expression on his face. “As for Nicholas, if you cause a problem or distract him from his path to the throne, I won’t hesitate to turn you in to the Regents and tell their Merlins exactly how to trigger you so they can throw you in a lab somewhere and investigate you for themselves.”
A chill runs through me at his words. Is that what would happen? Nick never said—
“If you continue through initiation as you are, you’ll undoubtedly fail the combat trial, which means I only need to wait a few weeks to be rid of you. Something tells me that with Nicholas’s obnoxiously earnest assistance, you’ll find some loophole out of your Page status and the chapter as a whole. Maybe he’ll use your non-Vassal background to call for an exception to lifelong membership, claiming you were a failed experiment. Or perhaps he’ll call in a favor with his father, who will grant it out of guilt and appreciation that his son has finally accepted his birthright. Then, when you leave us, you won’t break the Code of Secrecy to expose the Order since you genuinely care for Nicholas, and doing so would make our once and future king’s life that much harder, hindering our mission. Do I have the right of it?”