Shadow Weaver Series, Book 1 Page 15

  Dar’s cool fingers weave through my hair as we hide from the pursuing guards between the shadows in the woods. If they still have Simone with them, we will not remain hidden for long.

  We must do something.

  Trust me, Dar whispers. When everyone else fails you, I am still here. Always.

  “I do trust you,” I whisper back. How can I not? I’ve been left with no one else.

  I was a fool. I should have told Lucas and his family about Dar from the moment I chose to confide in them. But I was scared they’d fear me.

  If they loved you, they would have forgiven you. They’d never have abandoned you. I always forgive you. You know that.

  I dodge between shadows, desperate to keep moving, even while I remain hidden.

  “What do you think we should do now, Dar? I’m terrified of being taken by those soldiers.” I’ve been holding that dread inside for days, letting it stew and coil until it has become a fearsome thing.

  There is only one thing we can do: perform the ritual.

  My breath stops. Of course, the ritual.

  The full blood moon is out, and you have all the ingredients in your bag. We must perform the ritual immediately. Then I can protect you from the guards.

  A sudden desperation seizes my legs, and I begin to run again, headlong through the woods, hoping to put as much distance between me and the pursuing soldiers as I possibly can. Just to give myself enough time to perform the ritual—and whatever that may entail—so Dar can protect us. She’ll know what to do.

  She had shape shifting magic when she was human. Perhaps that will come back with her true form. I may not trust her motives, but I have no reason to doubt that when she says she can protect us, she means it.

  I stop when I reach a small grove deep in the forest, then I empty the contents of the flour sack in the middle of the grass. The rose and the now rotten apple, the witch hazel and the flask of water, Miranda’s mortar and pestle, and of course the three candles I stole from the temple of the Cerelia Comet.

  “What must I do to perform the ritual?” Despite our situation, my blood fizzes with excitement. Tonight my best friend will be real again. My whole life, I have secretly harbored this wish, and now it will come true. We can put all these terrible lies behind us at last. Maybe if I can introduce Lucas and his family to Dar when she’s flesh and blood, they will understand and forgive me.

  My shadow transforms into a slow grin, a half-moon widening over the grass. Put the apple, the witch hazel, and the water into the mortar and grind it up into a paste.

  I do as she instructs, wrinkling my nose at the sickly sweet smell of the rotting apple.

  “What do I do with this?” I ask, picking up the rose. “Ouch!” I accidentally prick my thumb on one of the thorns. A large bead of blood drops into the bowl. “Oh, no, Dar, did I just ruin—”

  Perfect, she says. You did just what you were supposed to do. Now take three of the petals and crush them up in the bowl too.

  “Lucas’s mother really loved her rose garden,” I murmur, the vision of it turning to ash searing into the back of my brain.

  Well, it’s gone now, isn’t it? Dar says.

  Surprised by the venom in her voice, tears well in my eyes. Several drop into the bowl. “Dar, why—”

  Tears of regret are the second to last ingredient.

  Something hot and sticky and tight forms over my chest.

  “What is the last ingredient?”

  A hair from your head.

  “And that’s it?”

  Simply mix it all up and light the candles.

  “But why must a shadow weaver do it then?”

  After the mixture is complete and the candles lit, you must spread the paste over my shadow form. No one else but you can touch me. Then cocoon me in shadows.

  I give my shadow’s arm a squeeze and an encouraging smile that I don’t feel at all, then pluck a hair from my head. The pain only lasts for a second, but the prick in my finger still throbs from where the thorn dug in.

  I ignore it, my whole focus on the mixture and listening for sounds of pursuit coming from the woods. I know the soldiers are hunting me. It is only a matter of time until they find me.

  I light the candles with some matches I took, and then begin to cover Dar’s entire form with the mess of a paste. I pray I did it right.

  What happens if I messed it up? Put the ingredients together in the wrong order? What if we waited too long between collecting ingredients or not long enough?

  What will Dar look like when she’s fully human again?

  A thousand questions chase each other through my mind. But none of them will be answered until the ritual is complete.

  By the time I feel the ground beneath my knees throbbing with hoofbeats, I am almost done and my shadow is covered in the brown, goopy mess. I dab the last bit of the paste on the edge of Dar’s form and sit back to examine my work. Now instead of a shadow she looks like a creature fashioned from a strange smelling mud.

  Now, surround me with bands of your shadows.

  I pull the shadows from the nearest trees, wrapping them around Dar’s form like bandages until she’s covered head to toe.

  Dar laughs with glee in my head and begins to murmur.

  Witch hazel, harvested in darkness,

  Stolen fruit, rotten to the core…

  Dar’s form begins to bubble through the bands of shadows. Up from the mud a face takes shape, like a human stuck deep in the field finally breaking free. I gasp and scramble to my feet.

  Water, blessed by the full blood moon,

  Roses, pinched from a garden,

  Misbegotten candles, tears of regret, blood of a thief, and hair from a liar’s head,

  Come together under the full moon…

  “…and make me whole!”

  Chills run up and down my arms as I hear her voice out loud for the first time in the last line of the incantation. More of her shape rises from the ground, plumping and rounding and expanding, absorbing the shadows I wrapped around her into her new form. She almost looks like a maiden in a fairy tale, slumbering away for centuries under the earth.

  Or she would if it wasn’t for her murmuring lips. She repeats the words over and over, each refrain burning into my ears.

  This must be some dark magic she has had me do. My hands begin to shake, and without thinking I clutch the nearest shadows for comfort. Dar’s form moved with me before, but this time she remains stuck to the ground, her shape coalescing more with every second that passes.

  When she finally stops changing shapes and is just a girl coated in mud lying on the ground, she ceases her murmuring. Her fingers twitch, and I jump back a step. Then her eyes flare open, and she grins.

  It reminds me of an animal baring its teeth, not the happy smile I’d hoped to see.

  She wiggles her toes, then bends her arms and begins laughing. It isn’t the laugh I’ve heard in my head all these years. It is colder, thinner, no weight behind it.

  No mirth in it at all.

  Then she uses her arms and legs to crawl up to her feet. There’s something animalistic in the way she moves, like she is a hungry hunter on the prowl. I swallow hard. That isn’t true. She is a girl, just like me.

  Dar stands before me, covered in mud, gobs of the stinking mixture falling off her, revealing bits of skin and pieces of an old-fashioned dress. It may have once been white, but now it is gray and brown and beyond recovery. She is a little taller than me, and her hair seems to be brown, but that could also be the effect of the mud. Her eyes are flat, straight black with no whites at all. As though that was the one part of her that could not throw off the shadow form entirely.

  “Thank you, Emmeline,” Dar says, and it is the strangest thing to hear her voice, here, in the open where anyone passing by could hear her speak too. “You have done very
well, indeed.”

  I blink at her, uncertain what to do. Her body vibrates with an energy I never imagined she possessed.

  Finally, I find my words again. “Are you all right?”

  She laughs, then shakes her hair and body, and much of the mixture flies off in every direction. I wipe a speck of the gross stuff from my dress.

  “Now, sweet Emmeline,” Dar says, flashing me a feral grin. She begins to change before my eyes, slowly becoming less girl-like and more…something else. “I am ready to take my revenge.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Revenge?” Alarm fills me with a fever pitch. “What do you mean?”

  The awful figure who was once my friend approaches, ballooning in size before my eyes.

  “What—what are you?” I choke out.

  Dar laughs with a horrible cackle. “I am anything I choose to be.”

  I take a step back, unsure whether anything—even my shadows—can offer protection now. “What do you want from me?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “From you? Emmeline, you’ve already given me what I need.” She grins. “I have everything I require for my vengeance.”

  “On who?”

  She paces the grove in a circle around me. “My sister, Lady Aisling.”

  Terror holds me in its grip, rendering me unable to move in the face of this creature I’ve set loose. What happened to the girl I thought I was bringing back to life? Where has my best friend gone?

  “Oh, yes, I’ve known all along what she is. What she has done. Those children Lucas’s parents told you about? She took them after me. She stole them to use, to take their magic. Just like she stole mine.”

  Sickly understanding sinks in. “You lied.” It is hard to breathe, and I can barely get the words out. “What you told me about how you died. Was any of it true?”

  She shrugs. “Of sorts. I discovered I could change shapes at an early age. Aisling was always jealous of me. We were born on the same day. She didn’t figure out what her magic was until she was older. She’s a magic eater. She can call the talents of other people out and use it as her own. She devoured mine first, but she didn’t realize how tied it was to my very being. She took everything I was in the process, every shred of goodness and light in me, and left my soul floating in darkness.”

  Dar kicks a wayward branch so hard it strikes a nearby tree and splinters. I flinch. “But from those shadows I saw what she became. With every talent she stole, she grew more powerful, more ravenous. The second talent she took was from a child who could make plants grow. Somehow, she managed to combine that with her siphoning magic and…”

  Dar breaks off, and even the shadows flee from her and the terrible expression on her face.

  “She what?” I whisper.

  “She is greedy. And wants a steady stream of power. She transforms talented children into flowers, planting them in her Garden of Souls. They remain alive, ever blooming, and she can pluck some of their power away when she chooses. But sometimes the process doesn’t work, and it obliterates their minds instead. Those become shells and pawns, like that little girl Simone.”

  Horror claws up my throat, but I find I cannot scream. Cannot say a word.

  “She keeps them, all her pretty little children, in her renowned garden that all the nobles fawn over.” Dar scoffs. “They have no idea what the flowers really are. She has been living off their magic for one hundred years. Seeking out talented children, scouring the countryside, and harvesting any new ones as they are born. Your parents hated your magic and kept you secret as much as possible.” She stops her pacing, and I can’t quite tell whether she’s grinning or baring her teeth at me. “It was a happy circumstance for me when I found you. Finally, someone who could see me. Who could touch me after so many years in solitude. I knew you’d be the one to make me flesh again.”

  Her eyes glitter with a light I’ve never seen before, and it stings me to the core. She has been lying to me since the second I met her.

  “You were using me, all along. All those years?” Tears slide down my cheeks and I brush them away.

  She never loved me at all, not like I loved her.

  I wrap my arms around my stomach, trying to hold in the sudden onslaught of suffocating hurt.

  A terrible grin swims over Dar’s face. “Oh yes. You have no idea how useful you were. My sister left me hollow, a lost soul clinging to this world fueled only by hate. I needed more negative emotions—ephemeral, delicious things—to keep me alive. You, so naive, so trusting, so desperate for kinship, made it easy.” She tilts her head at me, like an animal on the hunt. “Every lie you told, every trick and game we played, the hate your parents grew to feel for you, the fear of the servants—all of these things sustained me, emboldened me these last few years in a way nothing else had before.”

  In a brutal torrent, several mysterious events connect. Rose’s fatal accident, Tate’s coma, even Lucas’s nightmares and Miranda’s headaches—any time someone got close to me or threatened to separate us, something bad happened to them. Every single time.

  My legs fail me, and I sink to the ground in the middle of the grove. My parents. They feared me, but they pushed me away because of the things Dar had convinced me to do. And the things she did when I wasn’t looking. Every game and trick was a wedge between us until the gulf became too wide to bridge.

  Would my parents have loved me, been proud of me, if not for Dar whispering deceit in my ears?

  Dar glides closer. “Don’t cry, Emmeline. We can be together now. We can take our revenge on Lady Aisling together.”

  I shake my head, wishing I could shake her words out of my ears. “All I wanted to do was cure Tate and return home. Was that a lie too?”

  Dar laughs. “Why would I want to cure one of my sister’s minions? Tate is as bad as she is. Mark my words—if she gets her claws into you or your little friend Lucas, you’ll live to regret it. You’ll live a very long time, without hope, without the ability to move or scream. It will be a living hell as her plaything.”

  I straighten up, playing at the courage I wish I felt. “That isn’t going to happen. Lucas and his family are off to hide again, and now I know to hide too. I won’t let her take me. I can escape into the shadows. I’m safe.”

  Dar stares at me for a long moment, frighteningly still. “Foolish child. While Lady Aisling lives, no one with a talent is safe.”

  Fierce resolve fills me. “I won’t join you in revenge. For all I know this is just another trick. I have hurt enough people at your behest. Never again.”

  “Then you will regret it.” She pauses, her ears perking and transforming for a moment into ones that resemble a wolf. I gasp. She wasn’t lying about being a shape shifter at least.

  Then she smiles wickedly. “They’re here.”

  Before I can respond, she begins to shift into something new, something enormous.

  Something I actually recognize.

  Her favorite shape when we played games and startled unsuspecting servants, the same one we used on Kendra when she twisted her ankle: a gigantic, beastly monster. Her body expands, her face twists into a snout, and her hair becomes giant horns. Her arms elongate, muscles twining around them, ending in wicked, sharp talons. Her feet are clawed paws.

  I gape.

  When I hear what spurred this change—the approaching soldiers—she grins at me, her mouth now filled with row upon row of razor sharp teeth.

  “No,” I whisper. My voice transforms into a scream. “No!” She just laughs, but in her new form it sounds more like a howl.

  The soldiers appear, positioning their horses to surround us. Simone is nowhere in sight this time. They must have split up to cover more ground. The animals rear and whinny at Dar’s fearsome new appearance.

  “A shifter?” says one, and I recognize him as Alden, Tate’s nephew. “Haven’t seen of one of those in a
long time. Simone was right. My Lady will be very pleased to see you.”

  Dar growls. A soldier launches a net in her direction, but one flick of her claws slices it in half. I hold my breath.

  “Leave them alone,” I say, but I’m petrified that they will take me too. I don’t see this ending well for any of us.

  “Never,” she barks. “Remember, Emmeline? I promised to protect you.” Without warning she dives into them, sweeping the nearest off their horses. The animals flee, afraid they’ll be next, no doubt. She throws her head back and howls, her horns brushing against the upper limbs of the trees, then plunges back into the fray.

  She is a mass of fur and claws and speed. I can barely keep my eyes on her.

  Then someone grabs me from behind, throwing a net around me like I’m some kind of animal. “No! Help!” I twist around to see one of the soldiers with a frantic expression on his face.

  “I’ve got her, sir! I—”

  Dar yanks him off the ground and tosses him into the forest. I am so stunned by his sudden disappearance that I don’t even flinch when Dar slices the netting off me.

  “Run, Emmeline.” Her breath, hot and stale, hits me in the face.

  My heart flails in my chest, every beat fanning the flames of panic. Every nerve says to bolt, but I can’t let Dar hurt anyone else.

  I need help.

  I shudder, my stomach turning at the sight of Dar and the soldiers fighting. Then I finally do as Dar instructed: I run.

  I run from soldiers who’d hand me over to Lady Aisling, and I run from the monster who was my whole world.

  But most of all, I flee from the mess I’ve made.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Right now, the need to find Lucas and his family reverberates through every fiber of my body. He was right. His parents and friends were right.

  And I was so, so wrong.

  I’ll need his help to get Dar under control. I set her free, and it’s my responsibility to ensure she doesn’t hurt anyone else ever again.