The Shadows and Sorcery Collection

by Heather Marie Adkins

  Yulian held the bone sword as if it were fragile—or as if it were a sanctified relic of the man he had once loved. Both went hand in hand, really. “This is magnificent, Gadreel. Drakoi would be so proud.”

  “Well, I only have your word on that, so hopefully you’re correct.” What I didn’t say was how hard it had been to chisel a human bone into a dagger—not physically hard, but mentally. Knowing that once, long ago, that unassuming bone had carried the weight of a good man.

  I had enough levels of guilt without adding Drakoi to the list.

  “I need one more thing from you, if you can.” Yulian slid a blank sheet of paper and a pen my way. “You’ve been inside the Kremlin, yes?”

  I accepted the pencil he held out for me. “Ages ago.”

  “Wonderful. I need an approximation of the watchtower from above. An aerial view of the layout, so to speak. Do you think that’s something you can do?”

  “Sure. As long as it’s just an approximation. I can’t promise it will be true to life. I wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind last time to make note.”

  “You’ll simply need to be prepared to analyze the results of the charm on the spot while you’re inside the watchtower.” Yulian struck a match and lit the tall white candle on the altar. The flame flickered in the cold air but steadied into a gentle glow that illuminated the snowflakes falling around us.

  I conjured an image of the Kremlin in my mind. I had a leg up on the situation, considering how many years I’d made a hobby of haunting the Square. I had walked around the place enough to have a decent idea of its outer shape. And if we were being honest, I had been inside the Kremlin. Granted, I’d been looking through red goggles of sheer fury, but I remembered my route to Belias’s chambers—and the route I took when she freed me.

  Putting pencil to paper, I traced an outline of the shape I recalled, marking easily the main entrance, as well as the side gates. The queen’s chambers had been deep beneath the watchtower and well away from weapons or assistance of any sort. It was a miracle I’d walked away with my life intact. I was only alive because Belias wanted me to be.

  And if we actually succeeded in killing her—damn. Talk about irony.

  After I passed him my crude sketch, Yulian nodded approvingly. “Yes, that will do well.”

  He spread the map over the empty table and transferred the flickering white candle to the center of the map. In the twilight of the evening, the lone flame did little to illuminate my drawing.

  “Dominika, I need water,” Yulian said, looking away from the map to where she stalked the broken wall. “Can you scoop some snow from the ledge and go melt it over the fire in the hall?”

  “We let the fire burn out,” I said.

  Yulian snapped his fingers. “Blast. I’ll need you to rekindle it, child.” He held out a copper bowl and gave Dom a beardy grin.

  “Of course,” Dom obliged. She took the metal bowl from his hand and scooped a mound of snow with it, then disappeared into the cathedral.

  We listened to her boots fading on the stairs as Yulian rearranged his altar. I was content to watch him break chunks of incense and organize a small army of bowls, until he spoke.

  “I sent Dom away because I wanted to talk to you,” Yulian said softly, his eyes and hands on his magical tools.

  “If it’s about this morning, what happened was one hundred percent consensual.”

  Yulian chuckled. “You still have much to learn about my girl. If she hadn’t consented fully to your advances, this morning would have been a far different experience. Likely involving severed limbs and blood.”

  “That’s comforting,” I deadpanned.

  “No, this isn’t about last night. Or I suppose in a roundabout way, it could be. I don’t know what your intentions are for my daughter. It isn’t my business. She is a grown woman, after all, and we’re both well aware she can take care of herself.”

  I touched my temple. “I’m short a few brain cells thanks to how well she can ‘take care of herself.’”

  “Ah, well. As I said before, if she felt you needed to be unconscious…”

  “I think it might have been some kind of revenge for how I abandoned you, but yeah. Let’s go with Dom knows best.”

  Yulian laughed his full-bellied Santa Claus chortle. When he calmed, he removed his crescent moon-shaped spectacles to polish the melted snowflakes away. When he looked at me unobscured by the glasses, I realized his eyes had faded to an even paler shade.

  Dom had been right—he shouldn’t have communed with the ancestors again. At this rate, he’d be blind before we saved the Circle.

  He spoke again. “Gadreel, I need you to know that I don’t harbor any ill will toward you for your disappearance in the wake of the rift.”

  I nodded. “I meant no ill will.”

  “I am sad at all the time we lost together,” the old witch added. “Time we will never get back. But I understand. Catie was all I had left, too.”

  That stung deep and reminded me what a selfish, narcissistic ass I’d been. I couldn’t blame anybody but myself.

  “For so long, I had no one to care for,” Yulian went on. “Until Dominika showed up on my doorstep. Now, she is the sun around which my entire existence revolves.” He shone with pride and affection.

  “The feeling is mutual, clearly. She relents to your every request without debate. Meanwhile, in order to get her to listen to me, I need a strong constitution, firm grasp of my patience, and possibly a weapon or two.”

  Yulian shrugged nonchalantly. “No young girl should grow up in this world without the ability to say no and the means to defend her decisions.”

  “I would toast to that,” I agreed, my thoughts drifting to Gretchen. If my daughter had survived, what would she have become in this world? I wanted to believe she’d be like Dom. It was hard to get past the eternal memory of her as an innocent child kneeling in the chicken coop in a sunshine yellow dress.

  “I wouldn’t change the life I’ve had with her for anything,” Yulian said, mimicking my own thoughts. “These last twenty-some years have been the most fulfilling of my entire existence. But prior to me, Dominika lost so much.” He stood up straighter as if steeling himself, then caught my eye. “If something were to happen to me tonight, please be there for her. Don’t turn your back on her.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to you,” I argued.

  Sadness touched his pale eyes. “Gadreel… Please remember. Take care of my girl.”

  I stared at the old man, stunned into silence. Just last night, Dom and I had discussed his propensity for knowing things well before they happened.

  Could he know something about tonight?

  I opened my mouth to question him, but he smiled over my shoulder. “Ah, there she is! Bring me the bowl, love, and come join me for the ritual.” Yulian accepted the bowl and set it on the ground by his feet. He looked at me again. “You won’t forget?”

  I shook my head. “I won’t forget.”

  Dom glanced between us. “Forget what?”

  “Instructions for reading the charm,” Yulian said smoothly. “Come, child. Let’s cast our circle.”

  By the look on her face, I could tell she didn’t believe him, but she didn’t argue. She picked up her tools, and the two of them settled into their routine.

  I watched interestedly as they did their song and dance around the circle. But once Yulian started with the foreign language and waving his arms around, I zoned out.

  If I let myself think about what lay ahead, fear crept in, so I tried to think of anything else. Easier said than done when the seemingly impossible loomed over our night. We just had to get in and get out with the spellbook without being seen. Then we’d anoint the weapon, and I’d deal with Belias.

  Easy.

  Yulian drew my attention back to the spell as he tapped the candle’s burning wick to my sketch. I sucked in a breath, expecting the whole sheet to go up in flames.

  But it didn’t. The flame leapt from
the candle and danced across the page, leaving not even a hint of singe behind.

  I leaned forward to get a better look. “What’s it doing?”

  The flame glinted off Yulian’s glasses. “If the charm can find my family’s spellbook, the flame should indicate exactly where the book rests inside the watchtower.”

  “I thought magic couldn’t pass into the Kremlin?”

  “The magic isn’t inside the Kremlin. Not in any physical way. It’s more of an astral projection wherein the flame seeks the book’s essence.”

  “I have no idea what you just said, but it sounds cool.”

  Yulian chuckled. “Maybe if life had turned out differently, I would have taught you a thing or two.”

  Suddenly, the freestanding flame halted on the page and flared so bright I had to avert my gaze. Then it snaked into a square and extinguished, leaving a perfect square burn around the room where Yulian’s spellbook awaited us.

  A room directly adjacent to Belias’s personal quarters.

  26

  Dressed in the tithe robes we’d used to snare our willing humans the day before, Dom and I left St. Basil’s as the last of the market booths were closing up for the evening.

  I couldn’t recall a time I had ever been in the Square at this time of day. By dinnertime, I was often back in my cabin, cooking dinner and bundling up for the cold night ahead. Whereas the morning market bustled with anticipation, the evening market just seemed rundown—a deflated, weary atmosphere of silent people with an eternity of hardship on their shoulders.

  I spotted Neo and his wife chatting under their awning as they packed in for the night, and I turned my covered face away to hurry past. I had no doubt he’d noticed my absence—I rarely went a couple days without stopping in at his booth to catch up. If he saw me now, I’d have some explaining to do.

  Seeing a tithe enter the Kremlin after blooding hours wasn’t uncommon. Belias often summoned blood tithes to be used for her own sick pleasures, and they obeyed at the threat of their families being murdered for their insolence. So the occasional black-robed duo walking towards the watchtower didn’t set off any alarms.

  But instead of walking through the front gates, we veered off, around the building and away from the nymfa conducting business at the entrance.

  A shadowed alley ran between the watchtower and a line of shops, then ended at the edge of the Moskva River. The back side of the compound faced the river and was unguarded in a somewhat overly confident belief that no one would attempt to climb the wall from the frozen water.

  In Kremlin Circle, that was pretty much truth. Until now.

  I slid down the embankment first and hit the thick ice on my boots, giving a few experimental jumps to ensure it would hold my weight. Solid as a rock. I motioned to Dom, and she joined me, leaping gracefully to my side and skidding to a stop upright.

  “Show-off,” I whispered.

  She flashed me a grin from beneath her hood and took off in the direction of the Kremlin’s wall.

  The Moskva had been solid since the day Belias brought her special brand of frozen hell to earth. Water still flowed beneath several feet of marbled white and sapphire ice. Enterprising businessmen made a killing coring through the ice for fish, but it wasn’t an easy or quick job.

  I could admit the marbled river added a certain beauty to the drab Kremlin tundra, though I rarely stopped to admire it. I definitely didn’t have time to do that tonight.

  From the river’s edge, the wall surrounding the watchtower was a bit intimidating. Smooth concrete soared high above our heads with no visible handholds in sight. If we were anybody else, we wouldn’t have been prepared for the mountaineering necessary to get over the wall.

  But we weren’t anybody else, and Dom was a marvel. She brandished climbing gear from a pack inside her robe: sleeves for our boots with sharp pikes on the tips of the toes and climbing picks.

  We wouldn’t be leaving this wall as we’d found it. But if things went our way tonight, we wouldn’t be leaving anything about the Circle as we had found it.

  I slipped my boots into the sleeves and strapped them on, then did a test kick on the wall. The chink of rock breaking was loud in the snowy evening hush, so I paused, an ear turned to the watchtower. Several moments slipped by without a hint of alarm from the other side of the wall, so I heaved a pick into the stone and began to climb.

  There wasn’t anything quick about this method. Swing an axe, kick with one foot, swing the other axe, kick with the other boot. Half the time it took all my strength to dislodge my boots from the stone for the next step.

  With each swing of the axe, I expected an outcry. We had no protection from the super-human hearing of Belias’s nymphs. Despite the courtyard wall and the exterior wall of the building itself standing between us and the demons, I couldn’t be sure we were safe.

  Yulian had offered a sound-dampening spell, but we had no clue where the barrier for magic was. If the barrier extended to the outer wall, coming in with spells would have set off all the alarms. The only way to do this and survive was to be as low-key as possible.

  And if the demons came for us… Well, so be it.

  Surprisingly, I made it to the top of the wall unscathed, though I had a few near-misses at learning to fly. I managed to get my boots out of the stone and haul my ass on top of the wall, then gave Dom a boost for the last few feet. We crouched side by side in the eerie silence of the winter night and hurriedly removed our climbing spikes. Every nerve ending in my body was on alert, waiting for the sudden demon roar that would expose us.

  The watchtower spread before us, very few windows illuminated on this side of the building—which explained our ability to scale inside without harassment. The courtyard below was dimly lit by an orange street lamp but empty, the snow barely touched. The demons didn’t make a habit of hanging out in the backyard.

  Good for us. Bad for them.

  Dom shouldered her pack of supplies beneath her robe and signaled to move.

  Rather than attempting to pickax down the other side of the wall—which would cost us time in a highly visible area, were any demons to look outside—we hurried along the top of the wall to a copse of dead trees within arm’s reach. A little swinging, a little jumping, a few splinters for my trouble—and we were back on the ground.

  Tucking my hands inside my robes, I sprinted across the courtyard to the nearest door. Dom’s prowess came in handy for this part. While I was perfectly capable of breaking the shitty doorknob with my bare hand to gain us entrance, that wasn’t exactly the safest and quietest method. Dom had an uncanny knack for lock-picking. She demonstrated thoroughly just how good she was by getting us in within seconds.

  There was something to be said for having to scavenge for a living.

  A pitch-black hallway waited for us on the other side. I entered first, then stepped aside to allow Dom to pass before I swung the door shut. It sealed silently, blocking out the frigid wind. We stood for a moment in the darkness to allow our eyes to adjust and our fingers to defrost.

  Now came the hardest part—finding the library of stolen literature.

  And getting out alive.

  No use dallying.

  I nudged Dom’s arm, indicating she should follow me. I’d been here before, and even though it had been a long time, I remembered—vaguely—where Belias’s chambers were. If we aimed for that general direction, we’d find what we were looking for. Considering I’d busted my way through the front door last time, I had to readjust my orientation. I figured we couldn’t go wrong aiming central and down.

  The pitch-black hallway ended at a heavy metal door. I gently pressed the bar to open it and peeked into a well-lit hallway on the other side. Empty.

  I held up a finger to keep Dom still, then stuck my head through the crack in the door. Nobody coming from either direction.

  My heart pounded in my chest as I opened the door the rest of the way, and we emerged into the light. There weren’t even shadows here to hide us.
If anyone, human or demon, joined us in this passageway, we were sitting ducks.

  I walked quickly but silently, every sense on alert. I couldn’t imagine we would make it to our destination without notice. Granted, the demons didn’t always stay in the watchtower. Particularly the ice demons, who got their jollies off preying on humans in the streets.

  On petty thieves like Liliya.

  God, kid. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.

  I palmed the dagger at my hip to remind myself it was there. Dom had vetoed my bow—too large to hide beneath my robe and too conspicuous to carry in plain sight. As long as we walked the halls like we belonged here, maybe we would be safe. Just two tithe-bounds passing through without a demon escort.

  The problem, however, was that no matter how silent we remained or how stupid ice demons could be, the nymphs were the bigger danger. They could sense us, and they would know we didn’t belong.

  The hallway ended at an intersecting hall, and I took a right, heading deeper into the building. Little had changed since I’d come here fifty years before on a suicide mission, ready to take out as many demons as I could before they killed me. The walls were bile-yellow and the floors ancient, scratched hardwood that had seen better days. We passed dozens of closed doors, all of them identical, all of them marked with gashes and suspicious brown stains. The demons had turned the old building into their personal version of home—a hell on earth.

  This hall ended, opening into a giant atrium. I peered around the edge of the wall, sweeping the room for demons. All was silent and inanimate, not an undead thing in sight.

  I jogged across the atrium, Dom close at my heels. I didn’t like being so exposed—and I damn sure didn’t like this niggling feeling that this was too easy.

  Where were all the demons?

  We exited the other side of the atrium and took a wide stairwell headed down. My memory of this place hit even stronger—that antiseptic smell, the way the buzzing fluorescent lights tinged the walls green, the way the atmosphere shifted to a cave-like claustrophobia.