The Covenant of Shadows Collection

by Kade Cook

  Rachael, please understand that this is not an easy decision and must be dealt with in the best interest of everyone involved, Ariah tries to reason.

  Knowing that she is completely stepping above her station in Fellowship order—and most likely disrespecting the Elders by speaking up—Rachael cannot help it. She just cannot believe that the decision makers of her realm are not more concerned.

  “Everyone involved?” Rachael quietly articulates, gritting her teeth and trying to gain some restraint on her emotions. “Elders, I know that you are all trying to figure this out diplomatically, but the reality is, Gabrian just took down three humans unknowingly and nearly left them for the Gargons to devour,” Rachael says, stating the obvious. “If I had not found her when I did, those people would have been as good as gone.”

  Ariah, a bit taken aback by Rachael’s boldness, makes it a point to remind her of her subordination. Rachael, that is quite enough!

  Ariah, she is right, Vaeda intervenes. If Rachael had not have been there, Gabrian may have stolen more of the human’s life force than could have been restored. Cimmerian’s and Ethan’s quick entrance kept things from getting worse and by sealing the ground, Cimmerian was able to contain the Darkness, not allowing the Gargons to steal the remaining life energy. But now that of course opens a whole new situation that I must contend with, namely Cimmerian, Vaeda admitted anxiously.

  Orroryn, who has been quietly listening in from the shadows of the dimly-lit kitchen, speaks in a hushed tone as to not alert Gabrian of his presence. “Never mind Cimmerian, he is of no concern. Did the humans recover? That loss will cause more of a disruption than anything else.”

  Ethan was able to restore most of their energy, Vaeda informs him. He took them aside and placed them on the benches nearby. He compelled them to believe that they were tired and in need of a rest thereafter eliminating the memory of seeing Gabrian or collapsing to the ground. Luckily, it was an isolated group of people, no witnesses.

  “We were lucky this time,” Orroryn reminds them. “I think the youngling is right. It is time to bring Gabrian into the light and hopefully guide her into understanding. The alternative could be catastrophic,” he says in a hushed tone, letting the words spill out across his folded hands as they press tightly against the straight drawn line of his lips. His sea-green eyes are attentive and still, like the calming before a storm.

  Realizing that she is spending way too much time making the coffee, Rachael interrupts the conversation. “I have been gone too long. I need to get back to her before she gets suspicious of anything.”

  Rachael releases her grip on the spoon, dropping it on the counter. She grabs the mug from the cupboard and heads toward the living room where Gabrian is still seated. She reaches out and hands her the large cup of steaming coffee which she willingly accepts. Still half-frozen and soaking wet from the sudden shower of rain on the walk home, she welcomes the warmth, and wraps her hands carefully around it.

  “How are you doing? Are you okay?”

  Is she crazy asking me that? Gabrian thinks. After walking home in total silence with Rachael, she is not sure what to say or how even to begin a rational conversation without sounding completely insane.

  “What do you think, Rach? No, I am not okay!” she snaps at Rachael and stares in disbelief of her indifference. “In what world would I even remotely be okay?”

  Rachael seems so calm and reserved that she is making me a bit uneasy, Gabrian contemplates. Why is she not freaking out like I am? Did she not see what I did?

  Rachael sits down beside her and places her hand on Gabrian’s shoulder, giving her a look of sympathy.

  “I do not want your sympathy, Rachael. I just want to know what the heck is going on.”

  Gabrian desperately tries to tell herself that she should not be so harsh with Rachael. She has been her best friend and sole confidant for a long time. She has always been there for her, never faltering. But this particular circumstance calls for a bit more bite than bark.

  “I know things must be a bit confusing for you,” Rachael says, her eyes shimmer from the tears welling up in them while her lips purse together—dipping in the corners as she mourns for her friend and watches her fumble helplessly—now drowning of ignorance in her own life.

  “Do you think?” Gabrian squawks at her. “Nothing makes sense to me, Rach, and everything seems to be just a bit out of control.” She stops rocking and gets up out of her fetal position then stares at Rachael with a pleading look. “I don’t do out of control! So right now, I am really grasping for some kind of rationality here.”

  Rachael reaches out and touches Gabrian’s hand, hoping to calm her down.

  “What is the last thing you remember before you saw me?”

  Taking a deep breath, and trying to compose herself so that she can attempt to recall her actions, Gabrian searches her memory but realizes she cannot actually recall much. At least nothing that can contribute to what took place in the park.

  “I…I remember talking to you on the phone and telling you that I was going to go for a run,” Gabrian starts and takes a moment to gather her scattered thoughts. “I remember entering the park and noticing all the people that were out tonight. I saw a couple sitting on a bench, and I remember wondering if I would ever find someone,” Gabrian admits sadly. “Then I saw…” She stops quickly debating whether or not she is going to let Rachael in on the secret of her unusual gift of seeing lights around people. She probably thinks I am insane now anyway, but I am not sure if I want to hand over the key to my white-padded room just yet.

  She considers her options.

  “You see what?” Rachael pushes her question.

  “Um…I see…” She stumbles for something to tell her friend but cannot. After that moment, everything becomes a blur of strange images that she cannot make heads or tale of. She decides to continue as best as she can.

  “Well, I see you.” Gabrian looks up at Rachael and confesses. “And I see people lying on the ground all around me.” The vision of the lifeless people hammers her immediately with an unnerving feeling, making her feel nauseated. Her free hand rushes upward, covering her mouth. “Oh, my word, the people, what happened to those people…why did we walk away and leave them like that?” She begins to rock again, holding her head in her hands.

  “You see me and the people…what is the next thing you can recall?” Rachael continues her inquiry without answering Gabrian’s concerns.

  Gabrian stops rocking immediately. Her brow twists, wrinkling the edges of her eyes, and she whirls her head to the side, glancing over at Rachael. Confused as to why she is not addressing her questions, suddenly she recalls something else.

  “Who was that tall woman in the park? The one that was shimmering and practically invisible?” She shakes her head in disbelief that those words actually came out of her mouth. “Was that real or are you about to tell me I am going crazy?”

  Rachael pauses, gets up from the couch, and heads for the kitchen.

  Gabrian has the sneaky suspicion that the reason she walked away is because she is doing that strange thing she did earlier—where she silently converses with the voices in her head.

  Watching Rachael fiddle around in the kitchen while making more coffee, Gabrian notices the colour of her aura continuously changes and swirls, different from her normal iridescent colour.

  “Because if I am going crazy…” Gabrian shouts out toward the kitchen where Rachael stands. “That would make my life a whole lot easier, and it would explain why I saw two men appear out of nowhere when you rushed me out of the park!”

  Waiting for a reaction, Rachael’s aurora borealis display of lights in the kitchen quickly stops shifting so violently. It becomes more stable, and Rachael turns around to face Gabrian.

  “You do not remember anything else…anything unusual that you might have seen or felt?” she asks more insistent like she knows something, but she is waiting for Gabrian to say it first.

  Is she kidding me?
Gabrian scoffs in disbelief. “Anything else?” Everything in her body urges her to tell Rachael about the energies. It aches for her to let out some of the crazy and share it with someone, even if they do not understand, just so that she does not have to bear it all alone. It is Rachael, she loves you, her mind tells her. She is your best friend. She will help you figure it out.

  Tell her! it screams.

  “I saw lights,” she exhales her words cautiously—unburdening herself from the crushing weight within them.

  “You saw lights?” Rachael slowly approaches Gabrian as she speaks. “What kind of lights, Gabrian?”

  “I saw lights around the people…I can see auras, okay? I saw them in the park. That is the last thing I remember before seeing you.” Gabrian curls her head down in defeat and buries her face in her forearms, waiting for Rachael to start laughing at her and reach for the phone to call the looney bin. But Rachael does not.

  “Gabrian, how long have you been seeing the auras?”

  Slowly lifting her head, Gabrian looks up and stares at Rachael with wide red eyes—blurry and filled with wetness. Her bottom lip trembles as relief washes over her in violent tremors, registering the seriousness resonating in Rachael’s low unruffled voice. Does she actually believe me and wants to help? Gabrian debates silently and sits back into the couch, relaxing just a bit.

  Gabrian breathes out a slow, weighted breath filled with traces of her building courage, hoping that in these few moments of serenity that Rachael knows something about auras. Better yet, she hopes that she can explain why Gabrian is capable of seeing them.

  Chapter Ten

  Unexpected Guests

  OVER THE NEXT couple hours, Gabrian tells Rachael about when she first started seeing the auras. Still guarded, she leaves out the incident in the kitchen with the demon smoke that came after her and the fact that the ends of her fingers like to periodically shoot out sparks unsure of how much more she can handle today.

  While retelling her account of what happened in the park, she tries to explain to Rachael how she not only sees the different colours of the auras but that she can feel the diverse energy levels of them as well.

  “It is like they all are different flavours of ice cream,” Gabrian explains. “The more energy an aura has, the more colour it exhibits and the more appetizing it becomes to me.” Gabrian’s pupils begin to dilate at the thought of the colours, and she has to reign herself in from noticing Rachael’s as she continues to explain. “It made me feel like I was starving and that I needed to get as close to those auras as I possibly could in order to stop the yearning.”

  She pauses for a moment and tries to recall what had happened next but nothing is clear. It all seems distorted and smeared like a chalk painting after the rain.

  “Everything felt like it slowed down all around me and then the auras changed,” Gabrian reveals. “They began fragmenting, then breaking off from the humans, and coming toward me. I felt alive and elated. Then the next thing I knew, someone was calling my name. I came to, and then, well, you know the rest.”

  Gabrian gets up off the couch and walks over to the window. Staring out across the city lights, she notices the faded pink and blue hue on the horizon. It is dawn. A few blocks over, she can see the entrance to the park. Tired and unsettled, Gabrian’s eyes well up at the memory of people lying lifeless on the ground because of her.

  A slight movement in her peripheral vision catches her attention—something black. Looking closer, she realizes it is a bird, a Raven. Gabrian recalls the recent events and figures it must be the same bird that scared the crap out of her yesterday. It looks at her and hops closer from the balcony’s edge. It tilts its head to the right and fluffs its feathers then tilts its head the other way as if it is trying to figure her out.

  “Dumb bird!” Gabrian grumbles, still angry with it for startling her. She turns her back to the window and slowly lowers herself onto the floor, placing her head on her knees while gently hugging her legs.

  Rachael watches Gabrian from across the room, still confused as to why she displays Borrower behaviours. Then Rachael realizes she has definitely been left out of the loop as to what her friend’s true heritage is. Rachael decides it is time the Elders step in and help her explain to her best friend that she is not going crazy. The only trouble with this is that the revelation of who she truly is may indeed cause her logically-wired friend to lose her mind.

  While Gabrian sits by the window, quietly lost in her thoughts for a few moments, Rachael takes advantage of the opportunity to speak with the Elders. She gets up from the couch and moves back into the kitchen, deciding to make some food for them while she reaches out to make contact again.

  As her eyes begin to shift from green to varying shades of blue, she swims within the mental channels and reaches out to find Vaeda and Ariah.

  I have been watching Gabrian for a while now, and she is displaying the aura of the Boragen. I realize that clearly I have not been informed properly of what is going on with her, Rachael scolds. The fact that she has an aura at all was a bit of a surprise, all things considered.

  We are sorry that you were not given all the details before embarking on this passage, Ariah apologizes to Rachael. But we felt that it was a necessary precaution.

  We felt that the less that you knew, the less chance there was that you would display any energies that might trigger any suspicions in her, Vaeda explains, backing up Ariah’s reasoning. We needed her to completely accept you so that you could stay close to her.

  From the shadows harboring beside the refrigerator, Orroryn’s voice gently breaks the silence. “Our actions were not intended to be malicious or cruel, youngling,” his voice rumbles softly in Rachael’s ears. “We only wanted to protect you both.”

  Although Rachael has always melted at the sound of Orroryn’s voice, she raises her brow and shoots him an icy glare, perturbed about the lack of faith her Elders had in her and the fact Orroryn keeps calling her a ‘youngling.’ The people of the Vindere Fellowship may not continue as long physically as the other members of the Realm, but are equally aged with experience through numerous lives, and she is not nearly as young as he assumes.

  “Fine! Whatever,” Rachael snaps, twisting around to face Orroryn. Her eyes narrow and burn with irritation. Throwing her hands up in the air—flicking her wrists to the side—she declares her cease and desist of the matter. “This is way beyond my consolation abilities and what I can do for her. It is time for all of you to make your appearance, and I mean now. You need to try and straighten up this mess you made of her life.”

  Rachael goes back to cooking her toast before Gabrian decides to wander into the kitchen and witness her best friend talking to the shadows. She butters the toast, places it on the plates, and starts toward the living room, but stops quickly and makes one more request of the Elders.

  “And can you please use the door when you arrive?” she quizzically insists. “I am not sure how stable Gabrian is right now. If strangers start popping out of portals and emerging out of the shadows from the dark corners of her apartment, I think it may throw her over the edge.”

  Obliging, the Elders appear just outside Gabrian’s doorway in the hall. Vaeda exits the portal last after setting her Raven guide loose just outside the building.

  Rachael returns from the kitchen and serves the toast to the table. Gabrian raises her head and notices that Rachael’s aura has stopped swirling. It now is her normal light, calm iridescent colour. The other brighter auras are gone, and her eyes are her normal colour of green. She also notices that Rachael seems irritated all of a sudden and hopes she is not to blame for her mental state. Gabrian’s conscience has been constantly thinking about the people they left on the ground at the park and since Rachael already seems irritated anyway, she decides she might as well ask her about it again.

  She gets up off the floor and ambles to the table. Gabrian pulls the chair out that is in front of one of the plates of toast and sits down, taking a bite.
Swallowing it almost whole, she determines that she must be hungrier than she thought. Looking up periodically and gathering her nerve to speak, she stops eating and stares at Rachael who sips on her coffee—her eyes glancing over her shoulder at the door every few seconds.

  “Did I kill those people?” Gabrian blurts out without warning.

  Rachael jumps a bit at the sudden breach in silence and forcefully pushes down the coffee she has stored in her mouth. Quickly grabbing a napkin from the table, she wipes her lips and tries to register the question that has just been asked.

  “What?” Rachael chokes out. “No!” she continues. “Not really.”

  “Not really?” Gabrian’s voice strains as she tries to keep her emotions under control. She exhales a cackled breath as her head begins to bobble on her shoulders with confusion, and she leans back against the chair. Her hands quickly gather up her long dark hair and twists it chaotically into knots between her fingers at the back of her head. “How does someone not really kill someone? Either I did or I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t! Okay…you didn’t,” Rachael ensures her friend and begins to bite on her nails, eagerly awaiting her trio. “You might have though, if I had not found you in time, and if Vaeda had not stopped you.”

  “Who is Vaeda, and what exactly did she stop me from doing? I don’t understand how I did any of this.” Gabrian’s questions trigger her emotions, and she feels the prickly nettles of hysteria biting at the surface of her skin again. The tips of her fingers tingle, warming around the edges. She pulls her knees up close to her chest and holds them tight in an effort to find a source of comfort. “How could I have hurt them? I don’t remember even touching them.”

  There is a loud knock on the door.

  It is about time! Rachael complains silently.

  Mind your manners, youngling! Ariah reprimands her curtly in her mind’s voice, correcting Rachael’s attitude promptly.