The Shadows and Sorcery Collection

by Heather Marie Adkins

  In the time it took the ravager to disentangle its long limbs and stand, Dajia got a firmer grip on her circle. When the creature returned, even angrier than before, she was ready for it.

  She didn’t feel the claws or the fists anymore. She felt nothing but Ghost’s soft presence on her knees and her mother’s trembling hand on her shoulder, offering her strength.

  She’d begun to smile, thinking them safe, when something changed. An alien presence gently probed her circle. Hesitant. Testing.

  In an instant, the presence ripped her power from her grasp.

  Dajia’s circle weakened, and sparks flew beneath the ravager’s claws. She could feel the creature’s hot breath on her face, its razor-sharp talons raking her insides. Dajia reached for her magick, but it was depleted to a point of no return. Her brief moment of safety shattered, and the circle slipped through her grasp.

  As the rose tint began to crumble away, Myra screamed. Dajia clutched Ghost and braced herself for pain.

  The ravager disappeared, flung back from the women by a dark-clothed, masked regulator. The broad man whipped his sword in an elegant arc, decapitating the ravager. It happened so fast, with a brutal beauty that made Dajia’s breath catch in her throat.

  Dajia let go of the vestiges of her circle and threw her father’s wand behind her back, but not before the regulator’s shrewd, pale green gaze traced over it.

  His muffled voice asked, “You okay?”

  Dajia glanced at her mother—whose age-lined eyes were beyond terrified—and back to the regulator. She nodded.

  The regulator hefted his sword and raced back up the stairs.

  In the silence following his departure, Ghost walked over to the dead ravager and sniffed it curiously. Then she trotted upstairs.

  Dajia and her mother leaned against one another in stunned silence. Dajia breathed deeply, her heart racing as if she’d gone for a hard sprint.

  “He… he saw your circle,” her mother whispered.

  “But he left.”

  “He’ll be back. They know now. You’re not safe. We have to hide you.” Myra’s hysteria increased in the volume of her voice.

  “Mom. Relax.” Dajia gripped her mother’s shoulders and caught her eye. “There is more at stake right now in Sector 14 than a witch casting protection against the ravagers. For all he knows, I’m Recorded and was simply visiting you.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Shh. Come on.” Dajia stood, offering her a hand. Despite her depleted stores, she felt okay. Elated to be alive, for sure. Luck had been on their side.

  Upstairs, Ghost was curled into a soft, tortie-colored ball on the couch cushions, sound asleep. Dajia smiled at the innocence of it, somewhat heartened by the cat’s nonchalance, as if she knew innately that all was well.

  Dajia walked straight for the front door and opened it. A scorched message on the wood read 2 ALIVE, CLEARED, still smoking from the magick that had etched the words. She stepped outside, shivering against the frigid wind. Regulators swarmed M Street, carrying bodies from houses and laying them in the middle of the road, where another regulator waited to cleave their heads from their bodies. Dajia jumped at the metallic clank of his sword on concrete.

  “So they won’t come back as monsters.”

  Dajia glanced over her shoulder at the sound of her mother’s voice. “That’s true? Not a scary bedtime story?”

  “It’s an infection. Even the touch of ravager blood can turn a human.” Her mother shuddered. “Come back inside. Let them work.”

  “You go back inside. Get warm. I’m going to check on our neighbors.”

  Her mother sighed. “You’re bound to see things you can’t unsee.”

  Dajia kissed her cheek. “I’ll take my chances.”

  The scorched message on the next-door neighbors’ front door indicated 3 DEAD. Dajia paused on their lawn, thinking of Mrs. Corning’s kind smile and Mr. Corning’s obsession with hydrangea bushes. Their son was only ten.

  Dajia walked on.

  3 DEAD.

  5 DEAD.

  2 DEAD.

  EMPTY, CLEARED.

  Finally, she found 4 ALIVE, CLEARED.

  She didn’t know this family other than by sight. An older couple and their two teenage children lived in the small split-level. Dajia had seen the father in the white overalls worn by the wallkeepers, and the teens both went to Dajia’s high school, but were younger than her eleventh- and twelfth-year students. A girl and a boy, one light-haired, one dark.

  Dajia knocked lightly on the door and called, “Hello?”

  A moment passed, and the door opened. The father looked out, his gaze distracted as he fastened the buckles on his white overalls. He had short black hair and suntanned skin. Craters of age marked his eyes. His badge hung from a side pocket as if he were heading to work. “Yes?”

  “I live in 233. I saw…” Dajia indicated the door.

  The man followed her motion and gave a start. He ran his fingers over the letters, eyes watery. Pride mixed with relief on his weathered face.

  “Do you guys need anything?”

  He shook his head, still staring at the brand on his door. “I’m needed at the office. We have to fix the—” The man cut off and looked to the demolished wall.

  “Okay. Like I said, I’m in 233. My name is Dajia. Let us know if you need anything at all.”

  “Thank you.” The man finally looked at her, a brief smile touching his mouth. “I’m glad to see others survived.”

  After he closed the door, Dajia continued her journey down M Street. So many dead. This end of the block had been cleared, the bodies prone in the street but still intact. The regulators hadn’t come to decapitate them yet. Dajia tried not to stare at them: the blood, the unseeing eyes still wide with terror. The air hung eerily silent, hushed by night, the recent snowfall, and death.

  She found another home marked for survivors—2 ALIVE, CLEARED.—and knocked.

  A frazzled woman answered, holding an ice pack against her cheek. Blood had dried in rivulets down her freckled face, from a wound presumably hidden in her mass of red hair. “Yes?”

  “I’m Dajia. I live in 233.” Dajia pointed down the road, toward the breach and the bustle of the regulators’ clean-up. “I came to see if you needed help.”

  A small girl appeared at the woman’s hip. She couldn’t have been more than ten with wide brown eyes, creamy skin, and straight dark hair to her bottom. She stared curiously at Dajia with eyes too wise for her round, baby face.

  The mother sobbed once and clapped her free hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice muffled. “I’m just… God, I was so scared.”

  Dajia motioned inside. “Come on. I’ll help you clean that head wound up.”

  AFTER INTRODUCING HERSELF, ERIN PARKER sat in a chair at her kitchen table, the ice pack still on her cheek. Dajia followed her instructions, finding rubbing alcohol in a cabinet above the gently humming fridge and towels in a drawer beneath.

  Erin’s daughter, Hanna, watched silently from across the table as Dajia began to brush hair away from Erin’s wound. “How’d this happen?”

  “One broke in through the front window. I heard the crash, and of course I thought it was a burglar, God forbid.” Erin took a shaky breath. “I wish it had been. It… loped down the hallway. Fast, like a wolf. It hit me, and I fell into the frame of Hanna’s door. I kicked at it and crawled into her room, shutting the door.”

  Dajia dipped a rag in alcohol and poised to rub it over the gash. “Deep breath.”

  Erin sucked in air and grabbed the edge of the table.

  Dajia cleaned the wound as quickly as possible, hyper-aware of Erin’s discomfort. She moved on to clean up the woman’s face, asking, “What happened then?”

  “Hanna and I hid in the closet. It banged on the door a while and then left.”

  “It just left?” Dajia remembered the single-minded way the ravager had beat mercilessly against the door, and then against her ci
rcle. It smelled them. It hadn’t given up.

  A look passed between mother and daughter. “Yes. It left.”

  BY THE TIME THE SUN rose, illuminating the devastation on M Street, Dajia had found only six houses marked for survivors in all of Beat 3.

  She sank to the front step at home, resting her elbows on her knees as she watched the regulators incinerate the decapitated ravagers and human bodies. A regulator in a gas mask liberally sprayed accelerant on the dead, and another lit the body with their wand, waiting until every last inch was ash before moving on to the next.

  There was a wicked beauty in it, Dajia thought as she watched them work. Erasing the enemy completely, leaving nothing but the memories behind.

  They’d moved so quickly. Those awkward creatures, legs bent backwards, arms abnormally long—but in the space of twenty minutes, they’d annihilated nearly an entire beat before the regulators destroyed them. A frightening truth, to know it took so little time for the ravagers to destroy so much.

  Beyond the hole in the wall, the regent’s dome had begun to fade. It wasn’t usually visible, not unless he made it so. Dajia squinted into the darkness where the magick burned gold, enjoying the sight of his power sparking like live wires. The sight reminded her of her father.

  She stood and took a few steps forward, focusing on the breach. Something was different… Where the dome had failed, the magick was no longer gold.

  It burned pink.

  Dajia recalled the tentative, alien touch of someone else on her circle, inside her, and the slashing pain of her magick being ripped away.

  8

  Dajia

  “Dajia?” Her mother appeared in the hallway at the sound of Dajia’s boots crunching through debris on the hardwood floors. She let out an audible sigh of relief and wrapped her daughter in a tight embrace. “What did you find?”

  “Six households survived.”

  Mom gasped. “So few?”

  Hot tears pricked Dajia’s eyes. It felt so unfair for her to be alive, to breathe while so many others did not. She gestured to the broken front door, gaping open like a screaming mouth. “What are we going to do about that?”

  “A regulator came by and said they would be sending maintenance out to replace it.”

  “Did they say anything else?”

  Mom nodded. “He asked how we managed to survive.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That we hid really well.” Her mother smiled, the gesture falling short of her usual brightness. She looked tired. Older. Her graying hair fell haphazardly from a bun thinner than it had been five years ago.

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Of course not. But what proof does he have of anything else?”

  “Unless the man who saved us tells someone.”

  “We will hope he doesn’t.”

  THE HOUSE WAS WRECKED. ALL Dajia wished to do was spend the day cleaning it with her mother, staying close to the woman who had raised her. But the ancient television in the corner of the kitchen sputtered to life around six a.m., crackling with magick and a broadcast from the palace.

  Dajia carried her broom into the kitchen, abandoning her debris pile in the hallway. She sank into a chair at the table and stared at the screen as the heir regent came into view.

  Dajia had only seen the heir regent a couple of times. Despite the fact he would one day rule the sector, he had very little to do with the government’s day-to-day operations. He towered over a podium on the front lawn of the palace, his broad shoulders casting shadows, his short dark hair disheveled. A reddish substance, suspiciously like dried blood, stained his surreally handsome face.

  “Where’s the regent?” Dajia asked, glancing at her mother, who simply shook her head.

  The heir regent cleared his throat, glancing at the podium before he spoke into the microphone. “In the early hours of the morning, a wall fell in Beat 3. The beat was overcome with ravagers, and Sector 14 experienced a significant loss of life.”

  “His voice is shaky,” Dajia remarked.

  Her mother’s brow furrowed. “Really? I don’t hear it. He speaks well for such a young man.”

  “I doubt he’s that young, Mom. Older than me.”

  “The breach has been sealed,” the heir regent continued, voice echoing off the palace walls, “and the ravagers are now dead. Infection has been contained. We ask that you do not venture into Beat 3 today while the regulators and wallkeepers work at restoring the peace. Any who do shall be punished. Normal operations for Sector 14 will resume immediately. Thank you.”

  “Oh, dear. I guess that means for us, as well.” Dajia’s mother stood, rubbing her face vigorously. She tossed her dirty clean-up rag in the sink and peeled off her gloves. “We need to get ready for work.”

  As her mother walked away, Dajia stared at the television where the heir regent nodded at the crowd, waved, and turned to walk away. The screen went dark, but his image remained in front of her. His pale blue eyes, the color of deep ice beneath a frozen ocean, were burned into her thoughts.

  He’d been frightened. She’d read so much more between his scripted lines than she could have imagined. Something was wrong in Sector 14.

  DAJIA WALKED PAST THE MARKET, where bustling men and women in big coats and woolen caps set up their tents for the day. Laughter seemed unreal to her, especially alongside several empty tents whose owners would never again arrive to hock their wares.

  The last thing Dajia wanted to do was go to work and pretend everything was all right. Even blizzards couldn’t shut down the Sector 14 school system, so mass carnage didn’t either, apparently. She followed her usual detour on autopilot, passing the tall, wrought-iron fence that separated the human neighborhoods from the witches’. Sector 14’s Academy of Magical Sciences sat only two blocks away from the human high school where Dajia worked, but it may as well have been a world apart. She trailed a hand along the black bars of the fence and watched as laughing witch children rushed around the yard. Sullen teens lit cigarettes with their wands; elementary-aged children danced around snow mounds, cackling madly as the newly Wanded thirteen-year-olds lobbed magical snowballs at them.

  Twenty-four years old. A woman with a secure job and a good life. Yet, Dajia longed to join them; longed to live the life they’d been so fortunate to keep after the purge.

  Charlie waited outside the school building, shifting back and forth on flat shoes not suitable for the cold. Her blonde hair was tucked beneath a white woolen cap that shone like a beacon beneath the ashen sky. As soon as she spotted Dajia, she raced forward and embraced her. “You’re okay!”

  Dajia returned the hug, comforted by Charlie’s familiar lavender perfume and spindly arms. “I’m okay.”

  Charlie stepped back, squeezing Dajia’s shoulders. “Your mom?”

  “She’s okay, too.”

  “Thank God.” Charlie looped an arm through Dajia’s, and they proceeded into the building. “I’ve been having fits since they aired the news this morning. I couldn’t get here fast enough. I’ve been waiting half an hour. Have you seen Clark? He was here for a while before he had to leave for work. God, I wish cell phones still existed.”

  Dajia was used to Charlie’s rambling—it was a natural reaction for her when she felt excitement. Or fear, which wasn’t a common emotion in their world. Not until now.

  “I haven’t seen him. I’ll go straight to the docks at the end of the day,” Dajia promised.

  The main hall of the high school brimmed with youthful energy as the entire population of the student body counted down the minutes before first bell. After such a nightmarish night, Dajia took comfort in the familiar craziness—admonishing a freckle-faced kid for climbing the stairwell railing, separating a couple doing their best impression of lip-locked vacuum cleaners, accepting Charlie’s cheek-kiss at the door to her classroom, and then unlocking her own room.

  The door gently clicked shut behind her, cutting off all noise from the hall. She crossed to the windows an
d rolled up the blinds one by one, illuminating six rows of desks, five in each row. None of her four periods filled all available seats—yet another living proof of their failing population.

  In the silence of first period—one of her two free hours—Dajia couldn’t get images of the night before from her mind. She was exhausted and unfocused and drank an entire pot of breakroom coffee by herself.

  But when second period began and her familiar, smiling students strolled in with greetings for her, Dajia found herself settling into routine. She spent the morning with her two twelfth year classes discussing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, then broke at noon for a quick lunch with Charlie in the lounge, before she started the afternoon with her eleventh year students and Shakespeare.

  Not long after the start of her fifth hour, Dajia jumped as her classroom door flew open. Her heart stumbled, jerked, then paused. For a moment, she expected to see regulators burst into the room, like in her dream from the night before.

  But it wasn’t regulators who burst into the room. All eyes swiveled to see a breathless Charlie, her long blonde hair a halo around her flushed face.

  “Dajia. I need you.” She glanced at the kids. “It’s important.”

  Brow furrowed, Dajia addressed her class. “Keep your voices low and don’t burn the building down. I’ll be right back.”

  A hushed murmur of confusion followed Dajia out the door. Charlie walked quickly and silently, not even looking at Dajia as they crossed the quiet school building. Her best friend hummed with barely contained excitement and a trace of fear. Dajia’s fingertips tingled, like they had beneath the stars the evening before. Amazing how that was less than twenty-four hours ago.

  They entered the old wing, a dilapidated five hundred square feet now used for storage instead of learning. A thick coat of dust and disuse covered old, broken desks and boxes of office supplies. Charlie skirted a tower of warped boxes and looked at Dajia pointedly.

  On the other side, a red-faced teen looked up at their approach, exposing a dribble of blood coming from his split eyebrow.