by Tracy Deonn
My jaw almost hits the dirt floor.
“Thought as much. In short, right now I have far greater concerns than the ‘mystery of you,’ not the least of which is the likely imminence of Camlann. Such concerns also include the truly active threats to both Nicholas’s life and the chapter I am Oathbound to protect.” The type of threats that I will be punished for—painfully—if I don’t pursue them. He doesn’t add that next bit, but I hear it anyway, remembering what Lord Davis said about Sel’s Kingsmage Oath burning a hole through his throat.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head, “I just can’t get over the fact that you have definitely, definitely made violent threats on my life and now you’re just… not.”
“Don’t think for a second that I didn’t mean those violent threats, because I absolutely did. Still do, to be quite honest, should you force my hand. At the moment, however, I’m reconsidering how I described you,” he murmurs, climbing gracefully over the small hill. “I should have called you both silly and self-centered.”
I’m fuming, but I follow behind him in silence. I don’t want to give him any more verbal ammunition.
* * *
Sel seems to know where he’s going, because we stop at a small round cave about ten minutes later and he points up at an opening between the petrified beams. “This door will bring us to the surface on the far side of campus. There’s an illusioned lockbox of metal weapons in the woods if the foxes have found us somehow, but they’d have to possess more than the average demon’s sense of smell to track us here. I’ll go first, give the clear, and then I’ll pull you up.”
I nod and watch as he begins murmuring again. The Welsh sounds similar to the sounds of the swyns William says when he’s healing. Sel’s fingers create shapes in the air above our heads; then, in a reverse of the last time, he punches up with an open palm. A door above bangs open.
Sel crouches, leaps the vertical equivalent of twice his own height, and then lands on the grass beside the door. After a moment, he whispers that we’re clear and reaches down to pull me to the surface.
We emerge right where Sel said we would: a low stone wall marking the campus perimeter and beyond that, the thick forests that belong to the town of Chapel Hill. Sel’s back is turned to the base of the wide oak we’ve emerged from, twisting his palms to hide its aether door again, when the hairs on the nape of my neck rise in warning.
When Sel shouts, “Get down!” my body doesn’t argue. I throw myself to the ground in time to see a hellfox sailing overhead, its skull colliding with the side of the mighty oak with a loud, ground-shaking crack.
While it recovers, a second fox screeches, tackling Sel. It’s heavy paws and weight knock him to the ground. Like with the uchel, Sel and the fox are tumbling, rolling on the grass in a blur of black clothes and smoky-green scales.
Sel must glance my way, because he shouts in warning just as the third fox lunges toward where I’ve landed on the ground. His warning gives me just enough time to roll. Jaws snap by my right ear—where my face had been a split second earlier.
There’s an awful tearing sound, and a high-pitched yowl cuts the air.
Sel tore something off his opponent.
The fox beside me runs to its brethren’s aid, and then Sel is screaming, trying to wrestle both at once without calling any aether.
He needs weapons.
I scramble to my feet, jump over the wall, and sprint toward the woods and the illusioned lockbox. Between one blink and the next, a hellfox appears in front of me. Its head is split open in the middle, glowing-green aether oozing from the jagged crack: the fox that hit the tree.
I stumble. Trip over my own feet. My back hits the ground. Hard. The breath is knocked out of me.
I’m writhing in the grass, choking for air, my brain screaming for it, but I can’t scream. Not even when the hellfox lowers its head, pinning me with beady black eyes—and leaps.
It’s going to land claws out. Right on top of me.
I’m going to die.
I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for its heavy weight and razor-sharp teeth. In a desperate, untrained move, I swing one fist up in a wild punch.
There’s a howling scream, a deep squelching sound, a hot, burning weight on my chest, then blackness swells up to take me.
* * *
Something hot and thick is pulsing rapidly against my fingers.
I open my eyes, but I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing or feeling. My brain spins up, knits images together bit by bit:
I am alive.
The fox is on top of me.
My face is not between its teeth, because its jaws hang slack.
Its front two legs are limp in the dirt on either side of my body.
My left arm is a mess of green ooze. It runs in thick rivers down my skin and into the grass.
My right shoulder is twisted painfully. Because my fist and forearm have disappeared up to the elbow inside the fox’s chest.
And that arm is covered in red flames.
There are screams. Mine.
My vision swims. I yank my hand back, but something catches my wrist—a sharp-ended broken rib. Vomit rises, burns at the back of my throat. The screams start again. I’m wailing as I try to extract my fist from another creature’s body. Green, viscous ichor spills down its stomach. I pull too hard, and that’s worse. Its wound pours onto my chest, putrid and rotting, while its tongue lolls to the side.
Angry chittering, and a hellfox scream rends the air, but I’m on my back, and the dead demon on my chest is so very heavy. I watch upside down as another fox runs toward me with frightening speed. I push at the carcass, grunting and panting.
But before it can reach me, the sharp, pointy end of a black metal spear pierces its throat.
The fox makes a gurgling sound and hits the ground. Sel appears at its side and pulls the spear out, then uses all his strength to slam his weapon through the creature’s skull. It stops moving. Sel leans heavily on the end of the staff, breathing hard.
My eyes burn. The carcass is steaming aether now. A raspy groan escapes me, and Sel’s head jerks up. He’s at my side in half a second, his hands going to the creature’s shoulders.
“The other one—” I say, searching frantically.
“Dead. Hold on.” His dark eyebrows draw together as he assesses the dead fox and me. “It can’t dust with something living inside it. I need to pull it off you.”
My eyes are watering now, and I can’t tell if it’s from the aether or tears. I think it’s both. I have to cough twice before I can speak, and even then my voice is hoarse from screaming. “I can’t get my hand out… I can’t…”
He kneels low until his head is level with mine, pushing up at the shoulder so he can see where I’m connected to the fox. This close I can see he’s bleeding from a deep bite to his collarbone, barely visible under the black T-shirt now sticking to the wound. His magic—cinnamon-whiskey-smoke—flows over my face. I am so thankful for his scent that I moan, inhaling again so that it masks the hellfox’s stench.
“The hole is the exact size of your fist. You’ve got to close your hand,” Sel murmurs. He heaves upward until the creature’s chest lifts off me, and I gasp at the immediate relief. “Close your hand.”
I don’t move. I want to, but I just… don’t. I whimper and shake my head.
Sel’s golden eyes find mine. “Close your hand, Bree.” His voice is shockingly soft. “I’ll do the rest.”
I hold his gaze for a moment. Whether it’s because of his oddly kind tone or the fact that he called me “Bree” for the first time, I nod and close my right hand, crying out as my fingernails scrape past the still-warm heart. Sel stands and pulls the fox by the shoulders until my flaming fist emerges from the steaming hole between its ribs. When my hand comes free, there’s a wet, sucking sound and a fresh blob of dark green ichor falls down between my legs. I crabwalk backward, bringing my shaking left hand to my mouth.
Sel drops the carcass, and a second after it
hits the ground, it explodes with a ripping sound into a fox-shaped cloud of green dust. Behind me, the other fox explodes too, like the aether has torn it open from the inside out.
The world is shaking again, and again I realize it’s me. Just me. I’m trembling uncontrollably. My pulse won’t slow down. My chest feels like it’s going to explode right along with the foxes.
I wrench over onto my hands and knees and vomit, heaving until burning bile eats at my throat and tongue.
Sel drops to his knees beside me. “You’re okay. They’re gone.”
They’re gone.
But I’m not okay.
I crawl away from the sick until I can twist to a seated position, resting my arms on bent knees. While I wipe my mouth with a clean bit of T-shirt, I watch Sel watching me.
His eyes trail over my head, my shoulders, my arms. “It’s fading.” I look down, and he’s right. The crimson light on my forearm and fist are dimming. The ichor caked on my knuckles breaks apart, cracking and crumbling between my fingers. After a moment, only a few black specks remain. “It… it’s acting like a shield,” Sel begins, his voice more filled with wonder than I’ve ever heard before. “Burning off the hellfox blood.”
He’s right. When the red glow goes, so does the rest of the liquid. I shake my head, disbelieving everything, everything that just happened to me.
Sel is in much the same boat, it seems. He stands up, his expression too confused to be accusatory. “What are you?” We stare at each other until we hear the shouts.
“Bree!”
“Sel!”
“Bree! Sel!”
I recognize the voices. Evan. Tor. “I found them!” Evan shouts.
I turn from my seated position to see the Squire jump over the wall and jog over to where we’re huddled together. A blond-haired figure streaks past him faster than the eye can track, and suddenly Tor is standing beside us.
Sel notices her speed too. “Are you—?”
“Awakened?” Evan finishes. “Yep. Tor went down about an hour ago. We took her back to the Lodge and called everyone in, but you two never showed up.”
“And you’re up and running already?”
“Accelerated metabolism, William thinks.” Tor grins, but then she notices what’s on the ground around us, sees me sitting there. “What the hell happened here?”
Evan notices the fading green piles too. “Is that Shadowborn dust?”
A new voice shouts to us from beyond the wall. “Did you find them?”
At the sound of Nick’s voice, Sel takes a step back, retreating. My eyes follow the movement, and Sel and I lock gazes. I watch his face shutter in real time from wonder and something I can only interpret as concern, to the grim neutrality of a soldier at war. And just like that, the Selwyn Kane from a few moments ago is buried under stone like a secret gone to the grave.
“Hey!” Nick jumps the wall and runs toward us, relief for both me and Sel plain on his face. Sarah follows close behind him. “Are you both okay? We didn’t know where the hell you were. Then Tor was Called, and—” Nick slows when he sees my bloodied arm. “No…” He’s at my side in a heartbeat. He reaches with gentle fingers for my left hand. When he rotates it, he hisses at the sight. The cuts are long and deep, running from elbow to wrist, and dirt and pebbles are sticking where my arm had pressed into the earth. I hadn’t noticed.
Tor curses under her breath, and she and Sarah share a brief look. I move to stand, but my knees aren’t cooperating. My entire body feels slow, heavy.
“I’m okay,” I rasp. Nick’s hand goes to my brow, his fingers pressing against my forehead, trailing down my neck and shoulder like touching me will give him the answers I can’t say out loud.
Evan toes at a pile of powder where one of the hellfoxes had dissolved. “There are three green piles. Sel’s hounds are blue.”
Nick leans around me to look at the pile himself. His blue eyes sharpen, and his jaw goes tight. “What happened here?”
No one looks at me. Everyone looks at Sel.
Selwyn Kane is an annoyed, slightly bored sorcerer for all that anyone can see. But I can see beneath that now. He’s nervous. Rattled. “Hellfoxes. Almost fully materialized.” He nods at the piles. “They stole the aether from my weapons. We went to ground, took the tunnels, but they found us somehow.”
Evan walks toward us, shaking his head. “But three? Working together in the same location at the same time? No Gate is big enough for three to pass at once. Where’d they come from?”
“They ambushed us at the graveyard.”
“Three Shadowborn ambushed you?” Evan frowns. “You can sense a non-corp imp half a mile away. How did these demons catch you off guard?”
There’s a crack in Sel’s facade. When he doesn’t answer right away, I feel Nick tense beside me. “How did they surprise you, Sel?” he asks his Kingsmage.
Sel meets Nick’s eyes, and I know then why he didn’t fully answer my question in the tunnels. “I was… distracted.”
Tor’s anxious glance between Sel and Nick, Evan’s uncharacteristic silence, and the subtle clench of the fingers holding mine are all the warning we get.
Nick stands to face his Kingsmage. “Distracted? By what?”
Sel swipes his tongue over his lower lip, a nervous gesture that looks unnatural on his face. “We haven’t seen a Shadowborn uprising in two hundred years. If you were planning one, what would you do? Use a scout to disable us first? Knock us off-balance? What better time to disrupt our ranks than initiation? What better opportunity to break the Table before it’s gathered than to take out our king before he is Called?”
“Thinking like a demon now, Sel?”
Sel growls in frustration. “It’s my job to think like a demon.”
Nick’s brow furrows as he makes the connections. “What does this have to do with Bree?”
Sel meets his gaze head-on. “That first uchel wanted you, Nick. It called for the Pendragon. How did it know where to find you? A goruchel need simply to pose as a Page—act as a mole—to uncover that information, and it’s only a matter of time before a mole exposes themselves.” Sel swallows, and a shadow passes through his eyes, but he doesn’t look away from his future king. I give him points for that. “I decided to accelerate the process.”
Nick takes a step toward his Kingsmage. When he speaks, his voice is deadly quiet. “What did you do?”
The muscle in Sel’s jaw twitches, but he holds Nick’s gaze.
Another step. “What did you do?”
Sel lifts his chin. “I could have called the hound off her at any moment—”
Using the momentum of his next step, Nick throws a fast, hard punch to Sel’s jaw. The hit knocks the sorcerer back into the same oak that stunned the fox. Nick must have put real power into his swing, because my ears ring with the crack of bone meeting bone. It all happens so fast—had to, to catch Sel off guard—that it takes a second for anyone else to react. Sarah yelps and Evan curses, but no one moves to step between them.
Sel is against the tree trunk, utterly still, his stunned expression warring with a visible urge to retaliate.
“Well, that wasn’t entirely fair, Nicholas,” he finally mutters. He pushes to standing and spits bright red blood onto the grass before dragging the back of his hand over his mouth. It leaves a crimson streak across his pale knuckles. “You know I can’t strike you in return.”
In a voice made of iron, Nick says, “Precisely.”
Sel’s eyes flash. His lips curl over bloodied teeth, then smooth over in the same breath. Fury, barely bottled.
My eyes dart between the two of them, king-to-be and his sworn protector. When they’d battled in the woods that first night, Sel had aimed for me, not Nick. The Kingsmage Oath means he can never intend to injure Nick without risking his own destruction, but it does nothing to prevent Nick from harming Sel. They’d grown up together with this power imbalance, but I’d never expect Nick to exploit it. Not like this…
Sel shrugs, li
ke Nick’s violence is no matter, but tension radiates from his shoulders, the raised veins of his neck. He chuckles—then winces, bringing a hand to his chin. “Hm. You don’t have Arthur’s strength yet, but I think you almost broke my jaw. Imagine the damage you’ll do once you’re Awakened.”
“Is this why you wanted to be with Bree tonight? To threaten my Page with your constructs?” Nick’s fists shake at his sides. “To defy me?”
The Kingsmage scowls and looks away, and I see where the anger is truly directed: at himself. He slipped up and his abilities failed him—just like Lord Davis suggested that night in the woods. And here is Lord Davis’s son, bearing witness to that failure and punishing him for it.
I feel the urge to stand and defend him, but what would I say? I’m not a mole. I’m not an uchel. I don’t know what I am, but I’m not a threat to Nick. And yet… there’s something in me that recognizes something in him.
“Stay away from her,” Nick orders, his voice low. “Excalibur or not, Called or not, if you try anything like this again…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but consequences hang in the air where we can all imagine them. Nick raises his chin. “Do you understand me, Kingsmage?”
“Yes.” Sel’s eyes darken until they go flat and unreadable. “My liege.”
Nick turns without another word and walks back to me. Everything about him is vibrating, with adrenaline or anger, I’m not sure, but when his eyes meet mine, they soften into the ocean I know. “Can you stand? We need to get you to William.”