Shadow Kin (45 page)
Authors: M.J. Scott
“You haven’t figured it out, then? The gift you have given me?” Lucius said. He reached toward me and I slashed instinctively with my dagger.
Lucius recoiled with a hiss.
My brain, fogged and stretched with adrenaline and shock and anger, finally realized what was wrong. He could see me. I could see him. I was shadowed.
The only way he could see me was if he was shadowed too.
Run.
This time I didn’t fight the impulse. I turned and fled, running as hard and fast as I could.
Lucius laughed. Then I heard his footsteps as he gave chase.
The sound of his feet echoed around me. Which made no sense. In the shadow, he should make no noise against the stones. In the shadow he was nothing that should be able to make a noise. Yet the echoes came, relentless. Pounding.
I ran faster, diving through walls and doors in my panic.
Run.
Run.
I didn’t know how he’d done it.
I just knew I had to get away.
He kept coming. I could feel him behind me, though I didn’t dare turn and look behind me.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t lose him as I made my way through the myriad tunnels of the warren.
“Shadow,” I heard Lucius’ voice come through the darkness toward me. “Why run? I can always find you now. You are
mine
, wraith.”
mine
, wraith.”
My stomach twisted and clenched, the urge to give up and let him just take me and end everything a nagging black demon in the back of my head. I could almost smell him, closing in on me, but maybe that was just the general stink of the Blood that permeated this place.
I ran, my heart pounding. Another pulse pounded just as fiercely between my legs, as if Simon had never touched me, as if the need had never eased at all. It burned bright and fierce as it had when Lucius had first fed me, ignited to full force by what had passed between us. It whispered in my brain. Whispered of what he could give me if I stopped.
I fought the urge to press my hands over my ears, block out that insidious whispering. It would do no good.
Run
.
.
Desperate, I turned again, heading for the outer walls. We were still many levels down, below the surface. But I might have an advantage if I could make my way into the dirt outside those walls. Lucius might be confused by the distracting sensation of fighting his way through the earth. It might slow him down.
So I pushed my way through the wall and into the darkness of the earth, clawing my way forward and up. Up to where the sun might be rising if I hadn’t completely lost track of time.
It was hard work. Hard and claustrophobic, with the weight of earth pressing against every part of me. I fought upward, throat and eyes and nose blocked and choking like a mole caught in an airless box, scrabbling desperately for air and life.
Below, I heard Lucius choking and sputtering too as he floundered behind me.
Up. Only up.
I pushed harder as the earth started to feel slightly warmer around me. There were roots of plants as well as earth and rock around me now. Nearly there.
I could just see the faintest of lights ahead. The beginnings of dawn filtering through the tiny gaps left by the plants above.
Up. Faster
.
.
I was nearly there when his hand closed around my ankle. I kicked violently, killing the scream that rose in my throat.
How was he touching me in the shadow?
I didn’t know whether he should be able to do or not. I’d never met another of my kind, didn’t know what happened when two beings interacted here.
Could he win? Pull me back down to him?
I kicked again, desperate. His fingers slipped and I fought my way upward a few more inches. Tantalizing scents of grass and sunshine wafted through the earth, telling me I was close.
So close.
The fingers came again, his nails raking at me, then finding a grip.
“You are mine,” he snarled from beneath me.
I kept pushing upward, alternately kicking and clawing to ascend.
My boot slipped off my foot and I made a last desperate lunge upward, breaking through the top layer of dirt with a coughing scream. I was moving fast enough that my whole body came free of the earth before the faint rays of early sun turned me solid again and I fell with a jolting thud to the ground.
There was another snarling cry from below and Lucius’ hand broke free of the earth next to me, pale and grasping, the rubies in his rings gleaming like blood turned to glass in the sunlight.
But, unlike with me, the sun didn’t just turn him solid. Him, it wanted to burn. There was a sizzling hiss and his skin started to blacken. I heard another screaming snarl and then his hand disappeared back underneath the earth, leaving me lying, panting and horrified, on the grass just beyond the outer walls of the mansion.
I ran without thinking. No keeping to shadows, no hiding. Instead I sought the protection of the sunlight as I ran. Only the light would stop Lucius from reclaiming me.
For now.
I was horribly aware that my respite wouldn’t last. The sky was lightening rapidly as the sun climbed. But inevitably, after sunrise, came sunset. Panic made my breath rasp and my heart pound in my ears.
Sunset.
Lucius could move freely in the darkness. He would find me.
So I ran. Not caring who saw me. Ran in heedless terror. Through sheer luck, no one challenged me on that headlong flight back out of Sorrow’s Hill. Luck held when I was able to hail an autocab once I hit Brightown, almost dragging the last of the disembarking passengers from the door in my eagerness to be inside.
I didn’t know where I was headed until the driver asked where I wanted to go, his expression somewhat scared as though he thought I might spring at him. God knows what I looked like. I managed to say “St. Giles,” through chattering teeth. I wrapped my arms around myself, chilled to the bone as the ’cab rattled into life. St. Giles. Simon.
Safety.
For a time. But even the thought of Simon couldn’t chase the chill away.
Lucius could shadow.
He had drunk my blood and now he could shadow.
I pulled my feet up on the seat, loath to leave them on the floor of the ’cab, feeling the grasp of his hand around my ankle once more. My bootless foot bled. Somewhere in my flight I had cut it and not even noticed. I still couldn’t feel it now. All I could feel was the fear.
By the time I reached the hospital, I was shivering in earnest, barely holding back tears. The sun was bright in the sky when I stepped across the Haven line, but I couldn’t feel the warmth. My skin crawled as I wondered if Lucius lurked below, underneath the earth. If he hunted me even now.
I ran across the marble, fleeing for the safety of the hospital and Simon. And as I ran, only one word filled my mind.
I crossed the threshold and burst into the main hall. Simon stood in the middle of the space, talking to one of the healers. At the crash of the doors behind me, he turned and saw me. He froze.
I brought myself to a halt and stood, shaking, before him, seeing the shock burst into his blue eyes. “Sunlight,” I managed to say before I fainted dead away.
I felt as though my heart had turned to stone as Lily sank onto the floor at my feet.
“Get me Bryony,” I yelled at the nearest orderly. I dropped to my knees, frantically searching her body. Was she hurt?
No blood. I couldn’t see any blood, other than from a shallow cut on her foot. Why in hell was her foot bare?
What had happened? Why had she come back? I scooped her into my arms and carried her to the nearest examination room, yelling for blankets and assistance. Her skin was icy, the cold unnatural somehow.
By the time Bryony arrived, I had Lily stripped—though her bare flesh didn’t yield any more clues—and wrapped in blankets, where she lay shivering even though she hadn’t regained consciousness.
Gods and suns.
She looked pale. Pale even for her. Small, somehow, under the gray blankets. I’d unpinned her hair to check for wounds, but even the mass of red didn’t bring any warmth to her skin.
“What happened?” Bryony asked. To her credit she didn’t say “What is she doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Frustration burned my throat. “I can’t see any wounds. Nothing’s broken. Nothing’s bruised. She just ran in here, said ‘sunlight,’ and collapsed.” I heard my voice rise and gritted my teeth. I needed to keep my head. Lily needed my help.
“Let me look at her,” Bryony said. “You’re too close to this. You’ll do her no good.” She elbowed past me and knelt leaned over the bed.
She laid a hand on Lily’s forehead, slipped the other beneath the blankets to rest over her heart, and stood there, eyes closing slowly as she went into a trance.
Stupid. I forced myself to stillness. I could’ve done that much. Instead I’d panicked, displaying no more sense than a first-year mage.
But she’d looked so . . . so helpless somehow.
I’d spent days convincing myself I wouldn’t see her again. Shutting down my feelings so I could keep walking and talking. The Fae had said no to our petition. That meant that Lucius would continue and that Lily would continue to belong to him.
I’d tried to accept it. I knew only too well what disasters could come from trying to rescue her if she didn’t want to be rescued. I didn’t want any deaths on my hands. People had paid the price for my actions before and I was done. But now she was back.
Why she was back was yet to be revealed.
Underneath the worry, another thought rose, unwelcome but unavoidable. She might have been sent back.
Or she might not.
Head warred with heart as I stared down at her, feeling sick. How could I trust her?
Bryony’s eyes opened and she pulled her hands away from Lily. “Shock,” she said briskly. “But I can’t sense any major injuries. Her foot is already healing. I’m going to wake her up.”
“No!” The protest made no medical sense, but once Lily was awake, then I’d have to deal with her. Work out what she was doing here. Work out if she could be trusted.
“Yes,” Bryony retorted in a decisive tone. “We need to know what happened, Simon. If she’s in shock, she’ll do better awake so we can get fluids and sugar into her, you know that.” She stared up at me for a second, waiting for another process. I folded my arms across my chest, set my teeth. Bryony knew what she was doing.
She moved her hands to either side of Lily’s head, thumbs resting on the pale skin of her temples, fingers splaying back around her skull. “Wake up.”
Lily’s eyes opened almost immediately. Then she bolted upright, looking around the room until her gaze found the window.
“The sun will set,” she said in a rush. “Simon, we need sunlight.”
“It’s early,” I said, trying to sound soothing even as I studied her face for any clue that she might be acting rather than genuinely terrified. “Sunset isn’t for hours.”
“You’re safe here,” Bryony added. “You’re back in St. Giles.”
Lily gave her a glare that should’ve burned her to ashes on the spot. Fair enough, when Bryony had done her best to throw her out of St. Giles previously.
“I need to speak to Simon alone.”
Bryony looked as though she was going to object, but I cut her off. “Thank you, Bryony, I’ll handle things from here.” My heart hammered at a thousand miles an hour and I felt the same way I did when my powers ran low. Shaky and drained. But I didn’t need the sun. I just needed to know why Lily had returned.
“I won’t be far away,” Bryony said in a cool tone. She cast one last inscrutable look at me, then swept out the door, her back indignantly straight.
“Sunlight,” Lily repeated. She’d pushed herself into the middle of the bed, clutching the blanket around her, shivering. “Can you call sunlight?”
There was a sunlamp on the table under the window. Most of the wards had them, an easy way for the sunmages to provide more light when it was needed for a surgery or other purposes. Without looking I set it alight, moved it closer to Lily so the light hit her skin.
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