Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  "That went well," Roisin mused.

  Emeline stiffened. "Magics we did not know about were used against us."

  "It turns out there's a lot of magic the Sun Guard doesn't know about. Or has forgotten. I don't believe the Sun Guard was founded by mortals. Not anymore."

  "Excuse me?" Emeline's brows shot up, her fingers laced together. Even Roisin was looking at me like I'd just swallowed a live frog.

  "The being that exists in the Trial of Flame was leashed there by magics far beyond the reach of human mortals."

  "Witches, then," Roisin said, "like Maeve."

  "Not exactly." I closed my eyes, struggling to gather all the disparate thoughts and experiences that had been thrust upon me over the last couple of days.

  I wouldn't tell them about my own writings, about Claudette's hazel eyes and the small, poisoned truths a younger Ragnar had once dropped into my ears. Such things would give them enough leeway to avoid believing me. And I needed them to believe me, for the magics that guided our order—our blood—were open to manipulation by someone with the right abilities.

  "Sorceresses. Beings like the Venefica, who may possess mortal bodies but have immortal souls that can be transferred from one body to the next."

  "I would argue we simple humans have immortal souls, too," Emeline said.

  "That I don't know. If you do, then they're not like this. I can't explain things, not as clearly as I'd like. These magics are so old... so... central to what it is to exist, that our words and definitions fall down around us. But the thing down there, in the Trial, is an entity like the shadow being which I saw emerge onto the streets of London. No mere witch could tame such a thing, let alone bind it to their purposes."

  "I am not mere." Maeve said from the other side of the closed door.

  Roisin grimaced and shook her head, letting her curls fall in such a way that they hid her smile. Emeline's knuckles went white as her interlaced fingers tightened.

  "Maeve. Join us, won't you? I'll have another chair brought in."

  Even invited, Maeve barged in, layers of skirts swirling around her ankles as she paced. "I don't need to sit. But I would like to know what in the sweet summer skies Mags here is getting at."

  My head pounded, but I pressed on. "The Sun Guard was founded by sorceresses, its core tenants and rituals established by magics older and stronger than any we've dealt with before."

  "Why?" Emeline's nose wrinkled. "Why would sorceresses care what happened to mortals at the hands of nightwalkers?"

  "They didn't. Not at first. Because at the time nightwalkers did not exist."

  A cold beach soaked in blood, a mortal man cowering in the heart of a phalanx, his singular being worth more than all those who surrounded him. But what had his blood smelled of, then? It hadn't just been mortal. Magic, so hard to discern beneath the stench of the Trial itself, clung to him.

  I shook my head. "We were once one race. I think... I think we were few, solitary. I don't know. I can't be sure. But we were found, and we were reforged to serve their needs, though I cannot know why or how. Those of us who were not remade to serve the sun, drifted over to the service of the night. To Luna and her primal sense of immediacy."

  "Someone, or some order, made the nightwalkers what they are?" Maeve asked. She stopped pacing, staring out the window at a bland smear of grey as if the sky would part and deliver answers.

  "Yes. I believe so. And if so, then they must have something akin to our oath—rules they cannot break, orders that must be obeyed if the right lips speak them."

  "This is insanity," Emeline said, shaking her head. "I understand that you have been through an ordeal, but there have always been sunstriders and nightwalkers, as long as there has been humanity. The alliance of sunstrider and humanity is eternal."

  "Then why does the Trial of Flame exist?" I stood, faster than thought, my hands finding the lip of the desk to brace myself against as I leaned, throwing my shadow over Emeline. "It does not test the oath, Emeline, it forges the oath in a person who does not already have it. That place is no trial, it is a crucible. If the sunstrider oath is instant, and eternal, then why the need to make something that should already exist?"

  Roisin cleared her throat, gently.

  I retracted my claws from the wood of Emeline's desk and forced myself to sit.

  Emeline breathed again.

  "I don't know," Emeline admitted. "The oath comes with the turning. I can only say that it was always such, but that back then the people in charge needed stronger assurances."

  "No. We were one. We were only vampire." And you drove us apart.

  "Sacrilege," Emeline said the word in measured tones, not with the usual hysteria that would accompany such an accusation. It was merely a fact to her: what I said ran against the core faith of the Sun Guard. What I said was dangerous to be spoken outside this room.

  "No, no," Maeve said, moving again as if she'd been shaken into action, her hands fluttering faster than her thoughts. "I know you hate it, Emeline, but if she's right... Then there's another oath. A nightwalker oath, something that leashed them but allowed them to access greater power during the night. We could use it, just like the Venefica used the oubliette magic against us."

  "We have more pressing concerns. While you were gone, Magdalene, we learned of an infestation of ghouls in a local park. Their brazen display is punching holes in the already thin fabric of The Accord. We've heard of two more souls lost to shadow just last night. I appreciate you've been through a lot, and what you experienced in the Trial needs to be sorted through, but in the meantime we have a being like the ancient creature you faced intruding upon the streets of London, drawn by too much nightwalker strength."

  "Then I will winnow their numbers. But I will not let this go, Emeline. If we find the source of their oath, and the rules it entails, we can put a stop to... To all of this."

  "And how are you going to discover their secret rules?" Emeline shouted, making us all jump. "We have a whole fucking library full of the history and mythos surrounding our order and I can't even figure out why this card is so sun-cursed important." She picked up the warning card and crushed it in her fist.

  "I'm going to ask one," I said, a calmness unlike any other washing over me.

  "No. You cannot just... talk to him. I understand your past, but being in the room with him will drive you both to battle and you're not strong enough to win that confrontation. Not yet. I forbid it."

  She did not know. She could not know.

  For all my talk of oaths, mine was broken.

  "Try to stop me," I said, and left them to their bickering.

  Fourteen: And I Shall Lead

  Mr. Pips's black and white fur stood out against the electric blue of my borrowed motorcycle jacket. Why DeShawn had thought such a color was a good idea when he owned a tuxedo cat, I had no idea. Maybe having a cat left you indifferent to that kind of thing.

  Despite the fuzz, I was grateful for his loaner until I could get a new one. I wasn't so grateful for the stares that met me as I walked into the Sun Guard's temporary situation room—a thrown-together mess of folding chairs and tables crammed into the library of the Durfort-Civrac estate.

  "Mags!" Seamus's head popped up over the top of a monitor. He'd grown pale and gaunt, but the grin that split his face pumped life back into tired features. "Emeline said you were coming, but we didn't really believe it."

  I arched one brow. "You didn't believe your leader?"

  "I mean, she's just my boss." Seamus's eyes glittered as he shot me a wink. "Job's a job."

  "Please." Talia hurried over to him, her tablet clutched in both hands. "Performative cynicism is so last year."

  Her knuckles were white, her sclera shot with a red roadmap of veins, but the scent of her body beneath the single spray of magnolia perfume she wore was hale and bright. I closed my eyes a moment, savoring that scent, even though Talia would probably call me a creep for doing so. The last time I'd seen her, her hands had been sliced b
y the knife she'd stabbed her childhood friend with, her eyes an empty mask. I would allow myself this indulgence.

  "I bow to you on all things fashion," Seamus said, gesturing grandly as he dipped into a bow so defunct of style I couldn't begin to describe it.

  "Your ratty old hoodie says otherwise." She set the tablet on the table next to him and gestured me over. I obeyed.

  "Mags, we've got you leading point on the sunstriders infiltrating the park. It's a narrow strip of woods, some scrap of woodland trust conservation left as a green barrier between two housing developments. The area is quiet at night, which is why it caught our attention. The locals have all but boarded up their windows out of fear. We don't have a strict count, but it looks like a crèche of two dozen ghouls have set up shop there."

  She flipped the tablet around as I approached, pinch-zooming in on a strip of too-bright green on the map. A single path cut through the narrow woods, guiding people straight through at the longest point. "The terrain is rocky. I scraped up a bunch of old pictures from people posting vacation photos on Instagram. Seamus?"

  "Here," he said, and swiveled his monitor around for me to see a collage of faces strained with smiles, a rocky woodland visible over their shoulders. They were interspersed with pictures of red squirrels rooting through the deadfall, many with #savethered emblazoned below them.

  "The terrain is very uneven," Seamus said. "Most visitors stay to the central path, and the place isn't large enough to attract any serious trekkers. We think the ghouls are hiding out in some outcrops here..." He jabbed a finger at a higher-than-usual cluster of rocks, then shifted over to a tight copse of trees. "... and here."

  "Has the guard made contact with the ghouls?"

  "Yes." Julian approached me. I decided not to say anything as Roisin stood, abandoning her reading, and prowled over behind him. "Alec and I sought them out two days ago. We went at noon, hoping the nightwalker curse would be at a low point, and attempted to parley."

  He stared at Talia's tablet.

  "And?" I prompted, curious. Julian had some steel in him, but Alec was better suited to the library.

  "We were overwhelmed and run off."

  Roisin snorted. Julian jumped, spinning around to face her, then shifted aside a few steps to bring her into his peripheral vision. His cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

  "You were run off by a handful of ghouls in the middle of the day?" Roisin asked dubiously.

  "I am..." He trailed off, picked at his sleeve. "I was turned three years before the great sleep. Alec never worked in the field before, he was a researcher. We don't have your experience."

  Roisin flashed him a fanged smile. "Need the strength of your elders, do you?"

  "I never said we didn't need you or Shelley—"

  "Enough," I said, unable to keep the weariness from my voice. I turned slowly, meeting the golden gazes of all nine sunstriders left standing. Every last one, Roisin excepted, I'd saved from the grey crypt of Ragnar's hive. Every last one would have been dust, or worse, subjected to Ragnar's strange experiments, if I had not been set aside by Lucien. If I had not fought for them and carried them out on my own back.

  Every last one met my eye and did not flinch. Good. There was some steel in these pups yet.

  "Do you accept my leadership, as the elder of this coterie?"

  "We are too many to be a coterie," Hanna said quietly.

  "We are too few to divide. This is it, my family. This is all of us left standing on the whole of the world. All that's left to stand the guard against the night. Do you accept?"

  "Yes," Julian said without hesitation, the word urgent.

  "Yes," Eleanor echoed, she who had spoken up against my probation, and dropped to one knee, head bowed in supplication.

  One by one, the others followed, sinking to their knees. The mortals watched, eyes wide, as something shifted in the room. The tension of an oath, of a binding, crawled across my skin, intensifying as each knee touched the ground.

  My chest tightened. I hadn't meant to invoke the magic of our oath, but with each sunstrider turned supplicant I became aware of them in a new way, as if they were phantom limbs—an extension of myself that I could reach out and touch. Fear and anxiousness and excitement brushed against me like soap bubbles, outside of my mind but present—ready to be examined if I reached for them. I pushed them all away.

  Seamus and Talia watched with ever-widening eyes. Seamus crossed his arms over his chest, rubbing his arms with his hands as if he were trying to ward off a chill. The rest of the mortal staff shifted in their seats, fiddled with pens and pencils and styluses. Before her death, Adelia had hired these people to manage an order of sunstriders who slept an endless sleep. Difficult for them to face their monsters revived.

  But it was Emeline who led them now, and she stood in the entranceway, chin lifted, watching every sunstrider bend knee to me—and me alone. She must sense the thickening in the air. Even without a knack for magic, the presence of a binding was so heavy it made it hard to breathe.

  She met my eye, my leader, my commander, and in that exchange of glances she knew. Knew what I was, what I had become. For she was not a stupid woman, and understood that one bound by an oath could not bind others by the same leash.

  Emeline braced herself against the door frame, as if the transferring of the blood oath was a physical weight being lifted from her shoulders that left her unsteady. I bowed my head to her, hoping to assure her I meant to obey, regardless of that transfer. Her shoulders drew back. Lines I hadn't noticed before deepened into slashes around her lips.

  Roisin was the last to move, her body drifting of its own accord, right knee reaching for the ground, head bowing instinctively. I grabbed her arm and jerked her upright before her knee could touch stone. She blinked, shaking off the fugue state.

  Maeve barged through the door, almost knocking Emeline aside in her haste, palms held out in a warding gesture. "Who in the hells is casting spells down here? Witches as far as Ireland can smell that."

  The moment passed, shattered. The sunstriders shook themselves and stood, going back to their work. Emeline let go of the wall.

  "No one," I said to Maeve, and that was true enough. "Let's get to work."

  Despite the shattering of the moment, those bubbles yet floated, just outside the reach of my mind.

  Fifteen: Tip the Scales

  We left the machinery to the mortal members of the guard, cars circling the park in the hope of cutting off—or at least tracking—any escape routes. We sunstriders came on foot. Machines would get in our way, blur the line of what it was we came here to do. Though we wanted to take one or two ghouls alive for Padhi to attempt to heal, this was an extermination. A purge.

  The scales of the world had tipped. If we did not nudge them back, darker things would come for us all.

  That was what I told myself, a blanket of a lie wrapped around my shoulders, as I extended my claws and stepped onto the gravel path that shot through the heart of the park. Maybe in the future Padhi could cure these creatures, but we weren't there yet. I'd been updated that Padhi's first ghoul patient had died the previous night. While he struggled for a cure, the shadows on the streets of London thickened. Burgeoned. We needed time, room to breathe and organize. Time enough to puzzle out how to find our way of this mess Ragnar had left us in.

  "Closing," Roisin said into my earpiece, her voice crackling.

  She led a group of two sunstriders along the right-hand side of the park while Hanna led another two along the left-hand side. I came straight down the middle, three sunstriders at my back, a show of force the streets of London hadn't seen in hundreds of years.

  At the other side of the park, DeShawn and his freak squad waited with tranquilizers and nets, ready to mop up any who broke and ran. Those who fled would be the lucky ones, netted to see if Padhi's cure had any hope of working. The rest would fall to our claws and blades.

  No guns tonight. We didn't need reports of gunfire making their way to the
local constabulary, no matter how tight a hold DeShawn kept on things. The last thing we needed was mortal enforcement attempting to help.

  For this was what we were made to do. Humans would just get in the way.

  "Closing," Hanna echoed.

  "Entering," I said, and took that second step onto the path, letting the gravel crunch beneath my feet. The others followed with an obedience that made my skin crawl. I had the best nose of the bunch, so I said, "Clusters to the north and west, near to Roisin. Numbers uncertain. Stragglers to the east. Concentrate forces west."

  "Heard."

  "Heard."

  I did not like this pressure on me. I was a lone hunter, occasionally working with Roisin or Sebastian in the past. But numbers are numbers, and there was too much risk in trying to clear out so many ghouls single-handed.

  "Mags," Seamus cut in. I winced. As much as I appreciated his input, the other sunstriders weren't keen on letting the mortals take any part in our hunt. "We've got increased cellular activity in the park. They might be calling for aid."

  "So we've been seen."

  Alec, walking a pace behind me to the right, said, "Let's not keep them waiting."

  In the half-dark of nightfall his bookish tendencies smoothed away, the curious tilt of his head replaced with the forward jut of his chin as he sniffed the air for prey. I'd have much rather left him behind, where his talents were better suited to dredging through the old histories.

  Which was not fair. He was a sunstrider, same as I. They all were. And I could feel them, in the back of my mind, pulling on the chain of command, itching to spring into the trees and do what they were made for.

  I was tempted, for only a second, to call them back. To return us all to the estate and set them down with tea while I railed at Emeline for all the sins of the Sun Guard.

  But a hunter hunts. And soon my own blood was pumping hard at the scent of prey.

  "Center contact," I said, catching sight of an arm disappearing behind the narrow trunk of an alder.