Institute of the Shadow Fae Box Set

by C. N. Crawford

  I crossed to the fireplace, where a lidded pot hung. It smelled stronger here. I pulled the copper lid off the pot, and an acrid smell hit me—burnt, rotten meat. I couldn’t even tell what it had been originally, but it was now a charred mess, and it looked as if it had been left there for weeks. I retched.

  So they had been about to eat dinner, and then they’d just disappeared, letting the food char? How was this possible?

  I rushed out of the house, into the cool night air. “Ruadan!” I called out. I wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore. Now, I was certain my parents were gone from Eden.

  Ruadan flitted over to me in a whirlwind of shadow magic.

  A few houses down, Aenor and Cora crossed out of a home. Aenor shrugged.

  “There’s no one here,” said Ruadan. “Anywhere in Eden.”

  “We just found a load of half-eaten, rotten food and clothes left out,” said Cora.

  “Everywhere, it looks like the people who lived here just disappeared, mid-dinner.”

  I shook my head. “How is this possible? The worlds were locked. Only a seneschal like Ruadan could open them.”

  “Or….” Ruadan’s dark magic lashed the air around him. “Or a god. It’s the gods’ power that we drew on to create the locked worlds. A god could toy with it now.” Ruadan traced his fingertips through the air, and shimmering night magic followed in the wake of his stroke. “Perhaps Nyxobas toyed with this world.”

  “The night magic…” said Cora. “Why would Nyxobas open this world?”

  “Godsdamn it!” I started pacing. “This is one of the favors that Nyxobas is doing for Baleros. We think that Baleros gave him a soul cage. A magic ring.”

  “A soul cage,” Aenor repeated. “You could have mentioned we were up against someone with a soul cage before we came in here.”

  Ruadan met my gaze steadily, and I could feel the rage curling off him like smoke. “The gods only care about one thing.”

  “Souls,” Cora finished his thought. “And the gods always win.”

  Ruadan swore under his breath.

  I threaded my fingers through my hair. Anger flooded me. “What if Baleros found a way to….” What if he’d killed everyone? I could hardly finish the thought. I was pacing furiously now, my mind racing. “No,” I reassured myself, “Baleros wouldn’t kill them. All those fae lives. Too wasteful.” I was muttering to myself now, desperately trying to read into Baleros’s thought processes. “No, that would be a waste. He’s not a sadist just for fun, he finds a way to use people, doesn’t he? Leverage, slavery … living creatures have intrinsic value as long as he can use them….”

  “Are you okay?” Aenor was looking at me with concern.

  “I’m just trying to figure out what Baleros has done with my parents.” I heaved a sigh. “And everyone else. I don’t suppose you know any tracking spells?”

  Aenor cocked her hip. “Yes, but I need something from the person, like a fingernail or a—”

  “A feather?” I pulled the feather from my father’s wing out of my pocket. It glinted silver in the moonlight.

  “Exactly,” said Aenor. “We’ll need a few more things for the spell.”

  “Blood from a succubus,” added Cora. “Ashes from a phoenix.”

  “And I’ll have to burn the feather as part of the spell,” said Aenor.

  “I’ve got a strand of hair from my mum as well.” My gaze darted between them defensively. “What? I missed them.”

  “They’ll do, but we want to get out of this world before using them,” said Ruadan. “I’ll open the portal, and we can return to their bone shop.”

  Good. I didn’t like it here anymore, and I couldn’t escape the eerie feeling that I was being watched, that the primal part of my brain was warning me that something was amiss.

  Ruadan backed away from us, then summoned his violet magic. His body glowed with gold.

  I frowned at him. His gold and violet magic whipped the air around him, and the World Key glowed so brightly on his chest that it was beaming through his black shirt. Tension rippled off him, and violet magic crackled over the earth by his feet. Shadow magic, I thought.

  I shivered. “Something wrong?” Normally, he’d just rip open a hole between the worlds without a second thought.

  He opened his eyes, and shadows slid through them. “Yes. The portal isn’t opening.”

  Chapter 121

  Dread coiled around my heart.

  “If Baleros can get a god to open a world…” said Ruadan in a voice that chilled me.

  “He can close it, too,” Aenor finished his sentence. “Like a prison.”

  I clenched my fists so tight my fingernails pierced my palm.

  “Stand back,” said Ruadan.

  I beckoned to the two witches. “Let’s get far away from him. His magic is powerful.”

  As we walked away, Ruadan shadow-leapt across the green. Not far from the temple, his body glowed brightly with shadow magic and the gold of the World Key on his chest.

  Then, a wave of magic erupted from his body, tearing along the earth and ripping up grass on the green. The force of it knocked me hard to the ground, and I grunted, rolling over. I coughed at the dirt clouding the air. I rose, dusting myself off. By my side, Aenor helped up Cora, muttering angrily as she did. Dirt and particles of leaves and glass clouded the air.

  “Please tell me that opened the portal,” I said, coughing into my arm.

  “It did not open the portal,” was Ruadan’s somber response.

  As the dust cleared, I could see magic crackling over the ripped-up soil and roots, but the ground was still closed over. I coughed into my arm again.

  “Since Nyxobas used shadow magic to seal this,” said Ruadan, “my own shadow magic is only adding to the shield. I think I just made it stronger.”

  “So we are just trapped here now,” said Aenor.

  Cora’s pinkish hair snaked around her head, electrified by the shadow magic in the air. “Not to be a jerk, but this is what I meant when I said the gods always win. We live in their world, we play by their rules, and they don’t give a single divine fuck about us. They always win, and we always lose.”

  “You’re a right ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Trust me on this.”

  “What about the one we came through? Will that still be open?”

  Ruadan shook his head. “I can’t feel it anymore. I think it closed up after we came through here.”

  “Let’s check,” said Aenor, already taking off, her pale blue hair trailing behind her tiny body.

  I clenched my fists as I hurried after her. “So what is happening now? Baleros has a god doing his bidding permanently? He won’t even need the World Key with that sort of power. He can just have Nyxobas do the work for him.”

  Ruadan shook his head as he stalked toward the forest’s edge. “No. In return for thousands of souls, Nyxobas will do a favor or two for him. For a short time. He won’t give him a World Key, and he won’t be permanently doing his bidding. Baleros wants to be able to open the worlds in order to harvest his armies, right?”

  I nodded. “So he started with this world, because….” I bit my lip. “Well I don’t know, exactly, but it must be linked to my father. We know Baleros is obsessed with spreading plague. My father could do it if he feels enough emotional pain.” Panic clawed at my heart. “What if Baleros wants to kill my mum, or torture her until my dad breaks? What if he—”

  Ruadan touched my arm, brushing his knuckles over my bicep. His calming magic snaked over my body like a balm. “We don’t know exactly what Baleros is thinking, and we may not figure it out until we find him. We have to take this one step at a time. The next step is getting out of here. Then we find your father using the tracking spell. We’ll get through this.”

  “Right. Right.” I wrung my hands. “One step at a time.”

  “Baleros has made one mistake,” said Ruadan. “He’s playing two gods against each other, making promise
s to both Nyxobas and Emerazel. I’m not sure how it will end, but it probably won’t go well for him. You cannot serve two masters.”

  We walked in gloomy silence, slipping beyond the line of creaking oaks until we reached the forest portal—or, at least, the mossy soil where it had been. My stomach fell.

  “Gone,” said Ruadan. He traced his fingertips thorough the air, and violet shadow magic shimmered. Then, his pale eyes shifted to the two fae witches. “What gods do you serve?”

  Aenor cocked her head. “What does that matter?”

  That’s when the feeling returned to me—the eyes on my back, watching us. Ruadan sensed it too, and he whirled, drawing his sword.

  “You feel that, too?” I whispered, drawing my own sword. “The eyes watching us?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I thought no one was here,” Aenor said in a hushed voice. Blue magic swirled and crackled down her arm.

  Ruadan nodded back to the forest’s edge, signaling that we should move toward it. We walked quietly, looking all around us for the source of the threat. I tried to scent what we might be dealing with, but I only smelled the electrical scent of shadow magic among the forest’s usual smells.

  Ruadan sniffed the air again, and a low growl rumbled from his chest. The air grew colder around us. Glacial, even, and icy mist frosted in front of my face.

  A growing sense of dread tightened my gut. We were trapped in Eden, and the one thing I knew for certain was that Baleros wanted Ruadan dead so he could rip the skin off his chest.

  Baleros had trapped us here to die.

  A flicker of movement caught my eye, and my fingers tightened on the hilt of my sword. We paused within the shadows of the forest’s edge.

  Across the clearing, near the rows of houses, a creature crawled out of one of the homes. He crept low to the ground with elongated movements. He looked vaguely human, except his body was emaciated, ribs sticking out, and his fingers were long and sharply pointed. His face had a slightly elongated, skeletal snout, and ivory antlers jutted from his head.

  “What the hells?” I breathed.

  “Shadow demons,” Ruadan whispered. So that’s why we couldn’t smell them—they just smelled like all the other shadow magic around here.

  More pale, gray eyes appeared from the shadows—dozens of them, and my legs started to shake with anticipation. The demons howled; a lonely, desolate sound that opened a pit in my stomach.

  This was what I was made for—killing. This was where I felt comfortable. My wings tingled at my shoulder blades, and a dark smile curled my lips. Come at me, you animals.

  As they started to run for us, I broke into a sprint to meet them, my sword ready.

  I’ll bury all of you in the earth. I’ll rip your hearts from your bodies.

  Magic flashed around me as Cora and Aenor began hurling their spells, blue and green igniting the air around us. When the magic struck the demons, they screamed—the sound was disturbingly human, agonized.

  I reached the nearest demon, and I swung for him. I struck him through the neck, severing his spine. Battle fury surged in my bones, and I whirled.

  Pivot, strike, carve.

  I was moving fast enough that I kept them off me with the tip of my blade, swinging it in controlled arcs around me.

  I glanced at Ruadan. His movements were breathtaking. Never was his divine nature more apparent than when he was fighting. Me? Not so graceful. I grunted, sweating, snarling—half animal. But I was delivering just as much death.

  I scanned the surroundings. More gray eyes closing in on us. An army of them. My pulse roared.

  So we were trapped in a locked world with an entire bloody legion of bestial demons hells-bent on killing us.

  Bloodlust charged my body, increasing my speed as I fought them. But they were moving fast, too. A demon’s claws raked at my back, drawing blood. They were all around me now, closing in. Another claw pierced my flesh, and it sparked something in me—a wild hunger. I wanted to taste blood.

  A demon hand grabbed me from behind, claws digging into my throat.

  “Grmmel margrr numen,” one of them whispered in my ear. A demon tongue.

  I grabbed him by the arm and flipped him over my shoulder, slamming him down on the earth. Then, I drove my sword through his neck.

  Now, the world around me started to seem a little indistinct, the edges hazy. Still, I fought to keep my focus. I swung again, trying to keep up my speed. My swings were a little off now. What was happening to me?

  Sparks danced before my eyes, and with each swing of the sword, silver trailed through the air.

  This was not good.

  I saw a gap in the demons around me, and I frantically cut my way through it, trying to fight my way out. I made a break for it and started sprinting. I was fighting to keep up my speed, but some kind of toxin seemed to be poisoning me.

  Poison in the demons’ claws.

  I didn’t make it far before they cornered me, isolating me from the others. I couldn’t see Ruadan anymore, or the flashes of blue and green magic from the two witches.

  As I tried to make my retreat, I realized I’d ended up near the rows of houses—only the buildings looked different now, like they were made of bone.

  To my horror, the demons’ faces began to shift. They were no longer the skeletal, elongated snouts of beasts—they were transforming into fae faces. Distinctly familiar faces that made my heart wither.

  Chapter 122

  Dozens of Baleroses surrounded me, smirking at me while I stumbled away from them. Now, the air smelled of roses, that sickeningly sweet smell.

  “Losing control, are you?” said one of the demons, an infuriating smile curling his lips.

  I staggered closer to him, swinging for him with my sword. I missed.

  The laughter of a dozen Baleroses rang around me. I was dizzy now, and the slave masters were toying with me.

  I fell back through a door, landing hard on a wood floor. Was I back in my parents’ house?

  A Baleros leapt for me—his face was that of my old master, but his hands sharpened into lethal claws. Metal clanged on wood, and I knew I’d lost my sword.

  Baleros smiled above me, controlled and lethal. “You were born evil, Liora, angel of death. Born to kill. Flowers wilt around you, grass turns to ash. Your breath is a toxin that poisons the earth. Sparrows fall from the sky and the trees turn to bone. You are an abomination on this earth; a festering, rotting monster, repugnant under your skin. You would kill your own kin.” Claws raked down the front of my chest, drawing blood. “You kill those you love.”

  I punched him hard, again and again in the jaw. He unleashed that scream again—the one that sounded half human, half beast. His clawed hands gripped my throat, squeezing, piercing the flesh.

  More poison.

  “A monster like you,” he whispered, “should stay in its cage.”

  Darkness slammed into me. I wanted blood, flesh, bones. I wanted to crush them into the earth.

  And I would.

  My voice came out choked. “A monster like me should stay in its cage.” Rage flared hot though my muscles, and I punched him hard in the face again, cracking his jaw, breaking bones. “But I got out.”

  Fury burned through my body—and with it, strength. I was a hurricane of vengeance, and my enemies were all around me.

  I punched him again, hard, and the creature fell off me. I snatched my sword off the floor. That dark, cold euphoria snaked through my body as I grabbed the hilt.

  The demons were right—I was born to kill.

  Flowers wilt before me.

  Bollocks. I needed some alcohol to stop myself from murdering my allies.

  Instinctively, my demonic attackers were already backing away as death magic started to snake off my body. My beautiful, dark wings erupted from my shoulder blades. As they did, I snatched the wine off my parents’ table, chugging it down, ignoring the sharp vinegary taste.

  I dropped the empty wine bottle and gripped my
sword with both hands.

  Despite my buzz, I felt steady on my feet as I moved around the room, slaughtering one demon after another. My sword cut through their spines, severing their lives instantly. I no longer felt dizzy or off-balance.

  Their deaths filled me with power, my body growing gloriously strong.

  I was a fomoire in my own way. Ruadan fed off heartbreak; I fed off death. And right now, I felt positively glowing.

  Pivot, strike, carve.

  Demon blood and gore stained my parents’ floor. In the back of my mind, I knew my mum would be furious. But I kept slaughtering, kept hammering them with my blade.

  I moved in a maelstrom of brutality until every creature—every freakish, Baleros-headed demon in my parents’ home—lay broken on the floor. I stood over them, catching my breath. It was at that point I realized the illusion had faded. They no longer looked like my old gladiator master—just ordinary freakish demons.

  In any case, my childhood home had become a mausoleum of my enemies. Right now, I liked it that way.

  Sword in hand, I crossed to the door and stalked outside.

  I will take more lives tonight. Their heads will rot on spikes. I will create a garden of death.

  Colored magic sparked in the air across Eden, electrifying it with blue and green, the air tinged with the scent of brine. My lips tasted of salt.

  Ecstasy lit me up as my wings lifted me into the air, moonlight washing over me as my flight carried me closer to the mob of demons. I dodged the sparks of blue and green magic as I flew. The demons had surrounded the fae witches.

  I’ll feed the soil with their blood.

  I angled my wings, flying lower. Blood dripped from my sword. I attacked from above, cutting through necks, their skulls. I’d fertilize this beautiful fae earth with the gore from their bodies.

  Fools sacrifice to the earthly gods. Death is the greatest power of them all. I landed on the soil and whirled into action. Break their bodies—feed the earth. All fall before me.

  As death power filled me, imbuing every muscle with strength, I became insatiable. I wanted to drive every living creature into the earth, crush each of them to dust. Around me, I no longer saw the demons’ faces, only their beating hearts. Life I needed to crush. Hearts that must stop. With every ruptured aorta, another wild thrill of power rippled through my chest.