Shadow's Messenger: An Aileen Travers Novel

by T. A. White

  I edged forward in my chains, searching for a more comfortable position.

  “Why not just challenge Brax directly?” I asked.

  “He’s too strong. He’s one of the strongest alphas of the last two centuries. Even if I won, I would never have been able to hold the pack. He has too many loyal followers. He has them eating out of his hand. Anyone who won that challenge would be dead by the next day. They would have issued challenge after challenge until I was tired and made a mistake. No, I needed to weaken the entire pack. Sow fear and dissention until they were ripe for the plucking.”

  “Probably didn’t hurt that your chosen weapon wouldn’t have been strong enough when he first woke up.”

  Victor gave me a sidelong look. “Yes, that was a consideration. The creature was much weaker than legends had indicated. He needed a few kills and to consume the flesh of humans before his power could grow enough to where he could carry out my wishes.”

  I was surprised he’d admitted that much with the draugr sitting so close. The draugr might have been a tool for Victor’s master plan, but he wasn’t a mindless tool.

  “I have to thank you, though. Your presence has been an unexpected bonus.” He crouched in front of me. “I had planned to start a war between the werewolves and the vampires, thin the herd if you will, with a few murders on each side. Each would blame the other, and in the ensuing chaos I would take control, making sure that any who might oppose me were killed in the fight.”

  “Boy, you must have been pissed when that didn’t take effect,” I said. The pain was getting worse.

  “Thanks to you. Franklin’s death should have jumpstarted things. I even made sure to time it when the vampire’s enforcer was close so he could take the blame. Then you blundered into things and ruined everything. No matter though, we’re back on track now. After we stage your death at the hands of Brax, the vampires will blame the wolves and seek revenge. Even if Brax knows I’m behind this, he’ll fall in the ensuing war, and if he doesn’t, my friend over there will finish him off.”

  My laugh was ragged and wet, like one of my ribs had punctured a lung.

  “You’re an idiot if you think anyone will avenge me. I’m nobody. I have no clan or family. The vampires didn’t even know I existed until a few days ago. This won’t even be a blip on their radar.”

  “Their yearlings are precious to them. They won’t care about your affiliations. They’ll avenge you simply because you’re one of them.” He shrugged. “Even if they don’t, I’ll find some other way to jump start the war.”

  I took that to mean he planned to kill me either way. So comforting.

  “And the witch? Angela? What’s her role in all this?”

  He gave a negligent shrug. “She helped me secure the draugr’s treasure and then use them to control him. That and a few spells were her sole contribution. It’ll be nice to kill her after all this is over. She’s a nice fuck, but her whining and clinginess is annoying. Perhaps I’ll kill her while fucking her. Send her off with a good memory.”

  “Such a charmer,” I gritted out. Why wasn’t my body healing itself? The pain should be getting better not worse.

  “Don’t worry. This’ll be over for you soon enough.” He walked back towards the stairs, pausing at the bottom. “See that window. Dawn is just around the corner. I’m sure you can feel it. All you fang heads can.”

  I searched inside. Sure enough. I felt that great ball of fire lurking just out of reach, sending electricity humming along my nerve endings.

  “Sun won’t kill me,” I said.

  Sondra had said it wouldn’t. Maybe give me a few burns and put me out for the count, but not kill me.

  “Is that what you think?” He smirked. “Judging by the fact you haven’t begun healing, I’d guess your last meal was quite a few hours ago. Your youth and injuries will make the next few hours excruciatingly painful. I’d put your chances of survival at about fifty percent.” He shrugged. “Maybe less.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Victor headed up the stairs, leaving the draugr staring down at me with hungry eyes. There was no use in appealing to him. His eyes were glassy as if he’d sunk into his mind and acceded control to his instincts. His body was still moving but nobody was home.

  I didn’t want to believe Victor. Sondra had seemed much less concerned about the dangers of the sun for my kind. I hadn’t gotten the feeling she was lying, whereas Victor seemed to have made a practice of deceiving everyone close to him. On the other hand, Sondra may not have counted on me being this hungry or injured.

  Who to believe?

  A few hours would answer that question.

  “Shit.”

  I jerked against my chains and whined at the sharp stabbing pain in my ribs. They weren’t budging, and my skin was beginning to tingle and itch where the chains were, even though cloth protected my skin from direct contact.

  Silver. I’d bet my few remaining hours on it.

  I settled back, resting my head on the cold concrete. The window was at the top of the wall. It would be hours before direct sunlight even approached me. I wouldn’t be in real danger until midafternoon, when the sun was strongest and the angle was just right.

  The only mercy is that I’d probably sleep through my incineration. Thank god for small favors.

  Maybe if I could just edge over a few inches, it would be enough to take me away from the danger zone. It was a better plan than just lying here waiting for my impending doom.

  Focusing on something helped stem some of the despair beginning to overwhelm me.

  Alright, Aileen, focus on the things you can still do and then do them. No wallowing in the possibility of death.

  Pep talk finished, I shifted my weight and scooted an inch closer to the wall. The pain in my side spread. Was internal bleeding a problem for vampires, or would my body eventually just reabsorb the blood?

  How durable were we anyway? I was really hoping we edged closer to indestructible than destructible.

  Otherwise, given how scrambled my insides felt, daylight would be the least of my concerns.

  I made it about a foot before coming up short. I twisted, looking behind me. A chain trailed from me like a metallic tail. I followed the path to where the links wrapped around an iron pipe. I wasn’t going anywhere unless I rolled back over there and somehow broke the pipe and wrestled the chain free.

  My head dropped. Just one thing after another.

  Exhaustion wrapped cottony arms around my thoughts. Sun must be coming up. My eyes drooped. So tired.

  The concrete was cool against my face. So comfortable. Maybe I’d just take a short nap. Yes, a nap would do me good. I could figure this out afterwards.

  A tree shaded path stretched before me. Miles and miles of it. The rounded stones embedded deep in the earth were covered in places by the greenest of moss. So green that it practically glowed. The trees were covered in moss too, creating a faery land of impossible colors.

  I walked along the stone path, my feet whispering over the ground. So pretty. I looked up at the bare branches above me. Their interlocking limbs swayed with the wind.

  “This reminds me of Ireland,” a cool voice said next to me.

  “It is Ireland,” I said with a small smile. “A part of it anyway.”

  “You’ve been?”

  I gave a wordless nod. Once. When I was young. Even ten years later, I saw those impossibly green trees in my dreams.

  “It’s taken me hours to wind my way through your psyche,” Aiden said. He was the Patriarch I’d met at the vamp club. The one who was a telepath. “You have quite the fortress set up. It’s good that I started infiltrating it the last time we met or you’d be in hotter water than you already are.”

  My feet took me off the path, the bushes and trees just magically parting to let me pass.

  There was a curse behind me and then crashing as Aidan chased after me, forcing his way past the vegetation that suddenly sprung up in his path.

  “Here now,
stop that. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I kept going. Where, I didn’t know. Just away.

  He was a minor buzzing irritant that my mind refused to focus on.

  “Stop that.” There was a buzzing sound. He cursed again.

  “Stop. Hey. I said stop,” he roared the last words.

  I wheeled to a stop, panting.

  I focused on him for the first time since I became aware I was walking down the path.

  “Aidan, what are you doing here?” I looked around. “Where is here?”

  He glared at me, his handsome face scraped and cut with welts swelling on his neck, cheek and hands. I gave him a puzzled onceover and then looked down at myself. My clothes gave no sign that I’d been traipsing through a heavily wooded forest moments before. My bare feet didn’t even have a speck of dirt on them, and I was surprisingly uninjured. Not even a cut.

  “Here is your mind.”

  “And what are you doing in my mind?”

  I looked around. Yes, I recognized this place. It was part of the forest I visualized when I was trying to shield my thoughts from mind readers. Except it was a little more jumbled and realistic than any image I’ve ever used.

  “Doing my best to save you.” He gave me a sour look. “Even if you keep attacking me while I do it.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “I’ve yet to attack you.”

  “Try again, sweetheart. You have internal defenses that have been giving me the runaround all day.”

  Internal defenses? I wanted to ask how that worked and if I could make them stronger. You never knew when you’d need a little help protecting your mind.

  “Think of them like an immune system. Everyone has them. It’s just that some are stronger than others. In your case, your defenses act like white cells that descend on suspected intruders and try to tear them apart.”

  That made sense. Sort of. My definition of plausibility had been stretched in recent years. Facing the impossible every day in the mirror had made the nay-sayer inside me keep her own council. I was just glad my internal defenses, as he put it, were good at keeping people out of my head.

  Still, it was a little difficult to believe we were having this conversation. More likely it was a dream conjured to give me comfort before my impending death.

  “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  He gave me a censorious stare. I liked that better than the slightly smoldering ones he’d leveled at me during our first meeting.

  “I told you. I’m here to save you.”

  “And how do you expect to do that from my mind. Last I checked I was chained down about to be burned alive. I may be a little slow, but I don’t see how you’re going to rescue me unless you have a teleportation ability.”

  He tapped his lips thoughtfully. “Are you in pain now?”

  I gave his question serious consideration, turning inward and assessing how I felt. Nothing seemed to be wrong. No heated skin or burning flesh. Distantly I felt an ache in my ribs, but not much else.

  I shook my head. “No, but would I even feel the sun burning me while I was unconscious?”

  During normal slumber, most people wake immediately at pain. When the sun rose for me, I was dead to the world. Nothing could wake me. At least nothing I’d encountered yet.

  “It’s hard to say. You’re young, which usually means the sun would make you insensible until it sets, but the drive to survive is a powerful thing. You might be aware of it on some level or even wake up as your body attempts to save itself.”

  Great. Not really good news. I would be forced to experience my death first hand rather than being unconscious for it. Burning to death was supposed to be a pretty terrible way to go.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Basement. Dirt floor. Furnace looks to be one of the older models. Probably about twenty years. I’d guess it was an older home. Definitely not a new build.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It’s not like they told me ‘you’re at 1032 Builder’s Drive’. I was unconscious when they dragged me in here so I didn’t see anything.”

  His eyes unfocused as he turned inward, following me as I started walking. Now that I knew this place was an extension of me, I couldn’t believe I’d missed that fact before. The paths and scenes were all images I’d seen before, whether in person or in a photo.

  I concentrated, trying to turn the forest to spring. The light dipped and then the trees shifted, rustling their great branches and shedding leaves.

  There. A bud. I’d swear to it, and it hadn’t been there before. Looked like Aiden had been right. This place was something my mind had created.

  “Stop that,” he said querulously.

  “Why? It’s kind of cool. I can move things around to create any sort of place I want.”

  “Your mind created this, but it did it on a subconscious level. There is a reason why things look the way they do. You going about and mucking with it could do damage.”

  I stopped and looked around, noticing shadows that had not been there before and a slight blurriness to trees in the distance, as if I had a camera and a soft focus on them. Damage? To my mind, perhaps.

  Uneasily, I let the forest revert to its previous form.

  This place was more dangerous than it appeared at first glance.

  “We think you’re still near the cemetery,” he said after several minutes thought. “The wolves are searching, but it’s slow as they don’t know how many in their pack are part of this treachery so they only have a few Brax trusts with this search.”

  “He can add the rest. Victor is in this alone as far as I can tell. At least he hasn’t mentioned any wolves helping him. There’s a witch by the name of Angela, but he’s planning to kill her off tomorrow night.”

  “Do you know what his final game is?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing too original. Destabilize the pack or incite a war that ends with him as alpha of the werewolves. I get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if the rest of the supernatural community in Columbus tore itself apart as well, but I don’t think that’s his end goal.”

  “That’s not an insignificant undertaking.”

  I jerked one shoulder up, my feet silent as they glided over the forest floor. Aidan crunched along noisily beside me. “Story as old as time. Little man wants power and is willing to deceive, lie and murder to get it. I’ll admit using a reanimated corpse to do his dirty work is a new one. I’ll give him points for creativity in the implementation.”

  “You’re so young to be so cynical,” he murmured.

  One side of my mouth quirked. Not really. I didn’t consider myself cynical or even a realist. Most of the time my head was so high in the clouds that my feet barely touched the ground. Facts were facts, and the truth was that people wanted to stand on top whether or not they deserved to be there. It was only a bad thing when people were willing to do anything, including betray everything they were supposed to stand for, to get there.

  “Not that any of this matters,” I said. “If I don’t figure a way out of being chained to a pipe before the sun hits me this afternoon, I’ll be dead and won’t care who wins this little battle of yours.”

  He nodded, his face grim. It was nice that he was taking this as serious as he was. If nothing else, maybe he would take the information I’d given him and prevent Victor from reaching his goals.

  “When’s the last time you ate?”

  I thought back. It couldn’t be a good thing that I couldn’t remember. Was it last night when I woke up or before then? Usually I wasn’t this careless.

  “Maybe when I woke up last night or before I slept the night before. It’s kind of vague.”

  “That’s not enough. Not by half. You should be drinking blood three or four times a night. Preferably straight from the source.”

  That knowledge did nothing for me right this instant.

  “Well I didn’t,” I snapped defensively.

  “Your reserves will be critically low from what
essentially amounts to starvation. I’m guessing your healing is sluggish.”

  I gave a wordless nod.

  “You don’t make this easy.”

  Yes, because I asked to be taken hostage by a deranged werewolf.

  His mouth firmed as if he’d come to a decision.

  “You need a boost to your base power to counteract the lack of blood. It should be enough to allow you to survive the day.”

  I opened my mouth to ask how we would do that then paused, not liking the way he watched me. Avidly, like he was waiting to pounce.

  I stepped over a fallen log and kept walking, forcing myself to take my fear out of the equation to look at the situation objectively.

  Everything I’d heard about vampires said they weren’t known for their altruism. They weren’t the worst thing out there, but they weren’t boy scouts either. It would be in their character to take advantage if they could.

  As my mom would say, “beware of people baring gifts. There’s always a string attached.”

  “How would you suggest I get this power boost?” I asked, stopping to turn and watch him carefully.

  His eyes narrowed slightly in victory. I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking so closely.

  “I could give you a boost,” he said, smiling charmingly.

  It was a devil’s smile, smooth and slick and just waiting to lead me to the path of my own destruction.

  “At what cost?” I asked.

  His smile turned wide and laughing. “So suspicious already. The cost is minor I assure you.”

  Sure it was, right until it bit me in the ass.

  I tilted my head back. He had me over a barrel and knew it.

  Bastard. I leveled a stare at him, my expression saying I wasn’t buying his platitudes.

  He cocked his head and gave me another cocky grin. “I’ll need to intertwine my power with yours. It’s been known to have side effects.”

  My eyes narrowed. “What kind of side effects?”

  “Does it matter? You’re facing death if you don’t do this. Whatever reasons you have for refusing contact with us, they’ll be moot if you’re dead.”