Raven Song: Shifters Bewitched #4

by Tasha Black

  In a few minutes, I was murmuring over the last of it. Breathing her skin together without leaving a mark was delicate work.

  “Are you nearly finished?” she asked. “We shouldn’t stay here any longer than we have to.”

  “Just making sure there’s no scar,” I told her, shivers of green sparks emitting from my fingertips.

  “No,” she said. “I want the scar.”

  “You what?” I asked.

  “It’s part of my story now,” she said, scrambling out of my arms.

  She stood and I saw the small pink pucker of a scar disappear as she pulled her robes back together over it.

  “Thank you,” she told me softly.

  I cleared my throat, again overcome at having pleased her. “Midday is approaching,” I said. “We need to keep moving.”

  She nodded once, and I followed her up the stairs.

  I was beginning to think I would follow her anywhere. Strangely, the thought was more comforting than worrisome.

  18

  The Raven King

  Once I made us small again, Anya’s ravens carried us swiftly, but we had lost precious time to her injury. As we followed the currents over hill and dale, I fretted about my girl.

  She hadn’t wanted to share her new self-knowledge with her friends today. I noticed it when she chose to say I would figure it out instead of telling them she was one of my kind.

  It was natural that she didn’t want to stop for explanations when we were in a rush to stop the Order. But it was hard not to wonder what other reasons she might have to not want to share.

  Was she wishing for a shifter mate, like her friends had?

  I shuddered at the thought. Surely not. Anya was nothing if not loyal, and she would never have let me touch her last night if she had feelings for another.

  Was she afraid of being sent away from school? Headmistress Hart already knew Anya’s secret, but perhaps Anya didn’t realize that yet.

  Or maybe the intrepid headmistress would shelter Anya while her secret was safe, but would have to eject her once the news was out.

  Of course, I had no intention of leaving her at the school.

  But I had not yet voiced those desires to Anya herself.

  The women on this side of the veil had more choice in their lives than they had the last time I had been here. What if she wished to resist my demand?

  What if she tried to send me back across the veil without her?

  These thoughts haunted me, even as I urged my steed to shoot through the clouds to reach our destination faster.

  But the sun was too high in the sky when we spotted Primrose’s towers below us.

  Calvin and Hobbes rocketed down toward the open windows of the East Wing Tower and skidded across the smooth pine floors.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. If the wards were up, they hadn’t stopped us from getting in. But I suspected we’d made it with no time to spare.

  “Holy hell,” a deep male voice yelled out.

  “Is that…?” a woman asked.

  I slid off Hobbes and lifted myself to my usual size in a heartbeat, scanning the room to see who was there.

  “It’s you,” I breathed in relief, looking around to find all of Anya’s friends and their guardian mates.

  Once Anya had dismounted, I brought her back to her full size as well.

  “Are you okay?” Bella asked Anya, looking at the blood on Anya’s robes.

  “Fine,” Anya said. “It was nothing.”

  It hadn’t been nothing, but I didn’t correct her. I was noticing how little she liked being the center of attention.

  “Did you find them?” Cori asked.

  “No,” Anya shook her head sadly. “And we don’t have time to search for a needle in a haystack.”

  “We’re not just giving up,” Bella said.

  “Of course not,” Anya told her fiercely. “We will never give up on Primrose.”

  Her passion made her more beautiful than ever, and I wanted nothing more than to hold her. But we had a problem to solve.

  “So what’s the plan?” Reed asked, rather practically for a shifter, I thought.

  “We have to go the other way,” Anya told him.

  There was silence in the room. I wondered if I was the only one who knew instantly what she meant.

  “We have to find the missing piece of my sword,” I agreed. “And use that to find the Order and their broken blade.”

  She smiled at me and nodded.

  “But where do we look for that?” Luke demanded. “Hasn’t the Order been searching for it for generations?”

  “Those idiots couldn’t find a fish in a bowl of water,” I told him dismissively.

  “Where do we start?” Cori asked.

  The others all turned to me, and though I was tempted to lord my knowledge over the ignorant shifters, I restrained myself. There was no time.

  “The blade will have tried to hide itself to wait for me,” I told them. “It won’t have gone far from its other part. And it will attract and strengthen any bond to the fae.”

  “So what are we looking for?” Kendall asked.

  “It would be someplace secure and protected,” I told her. “A place where it would be difficult to come across it by accident. The natural growth around it would be enhanced, and there would be a feeling of otherworldliness to it for your kind, a sense of reverence and peace.”

  “Cori,” Reed breathed.

  We all turned to him as one.

  “The tree on the bluff, remember?” he realized out loud.

  “Should I remember?” she asked.

  His eyes widened slightly, and a look of guilt went across his face. “I’m sorry, Cori, of course not. But we went there to find the winter raven feather. That’s where we found Calvin and Hobbes, in the nest.”

  “I remember this story,” Cori said. “You had to jump across a ravine to get to it, right?”

  “You definitely can’t go there by accident,” he agreed, smiling at her as if his heart would burst with love. “And the tree was huge. Plus the winter ravens were there.”

  “It’s perfect,” Cori said.

  “Where is this place?” I asked Reed, impatient for action and not wanting to watch the gigantic bear shifter moon over his mate. “We’re going out again.”

  “The wards will definitely be up when you try to come back in,” Bella said.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Anya told her, breaking my heart a little by repeating her earlier words instead of shouting her identity to the hilltops. “Please tell us how to get there, Reed.”

  19

  Anya

  As we sailed out the window of the East Wing tower on the backs of the ravens once more, I smiled at the sound of my friends cheering.

  Things might be getting intense, and the Order was certainly dangerous, even threatening our entire way of life.

  But for now at least, I had friends, a home, and knowledge about myself that I was slowly coming to terms with.

  Whatever it might mean for my future at Primrose, there was finally an explanation of my powers that actually made sense. And I had someone else like me in my life, for now at least, even if he was unlike me in so many ways too.

  And think about last night…

  But I would not allow myself to think about last night. We had work to do. And after all, he was the Raven King, and probably used to being pleasured by as many women as he wanted around the clock.

  But he didn’t get pleasured…

  I felt my cheeks go warm at the thought and tried to focus instead on the wind and the sensation of flying.

  “Nearly there,” he called to me, his voice perfectly clear over the whistling wind, like he was right beside me. “I think I see it.”

  I looked in the direction he was pointing.

  Sure enough, we were approaching an emerald-green meadow with a stand of ultra-tall trees at its center, surrounded by a dark line of ravine. It wasn’t quite what I would call an island, since there
was no water surrounding it. But it was cut off from the surrounding land, as if a giant had sliced it away from the main chunk of the mountain, keeping its lush inhabitants sheltered from the rest of the world.

  As soon as Calvin dipped down toward the meadow, I could feel it, a shiver of magic, bright as a copper penny sparkling in slow motion as it sank into the depth of a fountain.

  This had to be it. The other half of the blade had to be here.

  We slid off our mounts, breathless.

  This time, when the king raised his hand to wash me in magic and I rose to my full height there was no sensation of wrongness. It felt like home.

  He opened his eyes. “It feels promising here,” he said.

  I nodded.

  Calvin and Hobbes cried out joyfully and circled the tall trees. I wondered if they remembered that this was where they were born, and where their parents had died.

  Tears prickled my eyes and I felt like a complete idiot. They were obviously happy here. I was the morose one, who was obsessed with birth families and mystery.

  “Are you all right?” the king asked.

  “Just wondering how much the boys remember about where they came from,” I said, surprising myself with my honesty.

  “Well, they seem pretty happy to me,” he said after a moment.

  We watched the snowy birds careen through the sky. They really did seem happy.

  “So the trees?” I asked at last.

  “Most likely,” he told me. “There’s flowering wisteria wrapped around one of the trunks, that feels like a sign.”

  We stepped through the lush grass toward the trees. I felt a prickle of anticipation in the air and instead of pushing it down, I reveled in it.

  I am fae.

  The thought was starting to sound more and more natural.

  The king strode ahead of me excitedly, heading right for the pale wisteria blossoms. The way the plant had wrapped itself around the trunk of the tree was almost loving. I could see why he felt it must mean something.

  But before he could reach the wisteria, there was a sudden rush of movement above us.

  I spun around to see something so horrifying it didn’t seem real.

  An enormous, scaled creature sailed through the air. It had the barrel-like trunk of a cow with huge leathery wings and a long slender snout emitting small puffs of noxious smoke. Its fearsome tail was bristling with six-inch spikes, and blood dripped from the edges of its scales, like the unhealthy gums of a giant with poor dental hygiene.

  On its back, a skeleton-warrior grinned and brandished a pulsing metal sword in one bony hand. The other arm clutched something to its hollow chest.

  “Anya,” the king called out in warning.

  But the dragon and his rider passed right over me, hovering directly over the Raven King for a moment.

  Something shimmered and fell over him like a blanket. The warrior had been clutching some kind of barbed net. The Raven King moaned in agony under its grip.

  The skeleton cackled as the metal mesh tightened around the king. He smacked the dragon’s flank with the flat of the sword.

  The dragon snorted out a black cloud of smoke and began flapping its wings as they moved away, dragging the king behind them in the metal netting.

  I ran after them, screaming, but the dragon only belched out a lick of flames that I had to duck to avoid.

  We had been ambushed. The Raven King was about to be taken from me, and I was helpless to stop it.

  No. I am not helpless.

  I pushed myself harder, the ravens circling in the air overhead, crying out.

  But when the dragon spit fire at me again and I had to roll out of the line of attack, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to help the king.

  In total despair, I closed my eyes and called on my magic.

  I placed my palms against the rough bark of the nearest of the giant trees, tears sliding down my cheeks as I begged it to hear my plea.

  “I need your help,” I murmured. “Please. We have to save the Raven King.”

  Nothing happened.

  I closed my eyes and reached out to the tree, felt the sun on its canopy and the soil beneath its roots. I pictured tender leaves unfurling, drying out, dropping, and budding anew.

  Please.

  I swore I could feel the movement of sap run faster through its branches.

  The Raven King calls upon you to serve him.

  There was a deep groan that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The earth beneath my feet shuddered.

  At first, I thought it was an earthquake, but then I realized it wasn’t the earth that was moving.

  It was the tree.

  Without thinking, I scrambled onto the lowest branch, clinging to the trunk as the world around me trembled.

  One by one, the tree unearthed its roots.

  I tried and to remain calm as it lurched forward, each root acting like a massive foot.

  Together, we moved across the meadow, picking up speed, until at last we had nearly reached the retreating dragon and its quarry. Somehow, the skeleton warrior and its beast hadn’t made it to the ravine yet.

  It only took me a second to see why. Calvin and Hobbes were busy distracting them. Taking turns, my intrepid boys were rocketing down to peck at the dragon’s eyes, and then spiraling off to the side before he could retaliate.

  As we approached, Hobbes dove in for another try at the dragon.

  But the skeleton warrior was ready this time, and lashed at my raven with its wicked sword.

  It hit Hobbes with the flat of the blade, like a baseball bat, knocking him out of the air. He hit the ground below with a sickening thud and didn’t move.

  For all his big personality and his daring actions, little Hobbes’s body weighed no more than a wet dish towel, and now it was crumbled on the wet grass.

  If the tree had not been carrying me, I would have fallen onto the ground with him, clutching his soft feathers to my chest.

  Instead I watched as the enraged arbor grabbed the Raven King in his mesh shroud from the dragon with one branch and smashed the dragon out of the air with another.

  The dragon let out a terrified scream and galloped down the meadow, launching itself airborne again as soon as it picked up enough speed. It circled back, considering another attack, but clearly thought better of it at the sight of the massive tree.

  I watched as they sailed out of sight. Then the king’s soft moan drew my attention back to my own party.

  “Please, put us down gently,” I asked the tree.

  It ceased its pursuit immediately and lowered us gently to the ground.

  “Thank you,” I told it, placing both palms against the trunk once more. “You may return to your home, or go wherever you like. Thank you for your service to the Raven King.”

  With a groan and an earth shuddering step, the tree took its leave of us.

  I began to pull the mesh blanket off the king. I was shocked to find that even though the metal was cold, it seemed to burn my flesh.

  I wrapped my robe around my hand and continued.

  Wherever that awful net had touched the king’s flesh, it left wounds in the pattern of the mesh behind.

  The king’s jaw clenched against the pain. I couldn’t imagine the fortitude it took for him to stay silent. I wanted to scream for him, to scream for us both.

  And somewhere in the lush wet grass, my Hobbes lay dying.

  Calvin sailed in circles above his fallen brother, shrieking out his grief the way I couldn’t bring myself to. If I let myself give in to that, I was afraid I might not come back.

  “Hobbes,” the king murmured when the net was completely off him.

  “He’ll be fine,” I lied.

  “He won’t,” the king rasped. “Bring him to me.”

  20

  Anya

  I wrenched my gaze from the king’s as I scrambled to my feet, rushing across the meadow to find poor Hobbes.

  I knew he was a bird, and I knew the king of the worl
d beyond the veil was infinitely more important.

  But Hobbes was like family to me. And knowing he was dying alone in the cold was too much to bear. I had to at least hold him close and comfort him in his final moments.

  I found him right away, crumpled, snow-white wings splayed flat on the grass.

  “Hobbes,” I murmured, scooping him up as tenderly as I could manage. The delicate thrum of his terrified heartbeat vibrated against my palms.

  “Stay with me a little while more,” I begged him.

  Above us, Calvin circled madly, crying out again and again for his brother.

  Bring him to me.

  The king’s words echoed in my ears, and I ran for him, uncertain whether I really thought he could help, or if I only wanted the comfort of his company.

  “Put him on my chest,” the king said the moment I was close enough to hear his throaty whisper.

  “Are you going to…?” The words stuck in my throat.

  “I have healing powers,” the king said. “But the iron weakened me greatly.”

  Wordlessly, I placed the pale feathered body on the king’s chest.

  The king closed his eyes, and his lips began to move.

  I watched in awe as Hobbes ruffled his feathers once and then settled.

  The king whispered on, and Hobbes lifted his head and blinked at me.

  My heart leapt in my chest.

  But I could see the king’s face had gone pale and drawn. Bruise-like purple circles had appeared beneath his eyes - eyes that were no longer pale electric blue, but a dull, flat gray.

  “Stop,” I said softly.

  But the king murmured on until Hobbes stretched his wings out fully, the mangled one good as new.

  In a single, beautiful movement, the raven lifted from the king’s chest and joined his brother in the sky.

  The two rocketed joyfully around the meadow, as if they knew how close they had come to losing one another. I had tears in my eyes watching them.

  But when I looked down at the king again, his face was ashen.