Page 77 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

“I expected this to be more of a challenge.” Her voice echoed down the cavern, bouncing off the stone, growing louder and more distorted until it sounded like it was coming from all around us. “It took more work to kill your parents, and all they had was a shack in the woods!”

Damien’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I startled. He gave me a gentle, sad smile, and tugged me into a hug. It felt off, somehow, and it wasn’t until he’d pulled away and stepped into the center of the room that I realized why. I’d expected the muffled clonk of breastplate against breastplate, but Damien had taken his off. It lay abandoned on the ground.

Then I saw the polished wooden spike of the vampire dagger in his hand.

The world slowed and tunneled as the pieces fell into place. I didn’t have time to call out. Didn’t have time to stop him. With agonizing clarity, I watched Damien raise the stake and plunge it into his chest. Far up above us, Morgana’s wings flickered in and out of existence as the man she’d stolen them from began to die.

Damien slumped to his knees, face turned upward. Morgana let out a scream of rage and pain as she fell, plummeting faster and faster, streaking down toward the cavern floor like a comet. She slammed into the obsidian surface with a sickening crunch.

Damien Sterling—Damien Argent—had had a short, brutal life—one built on revenge and the lies it took for him to reach it. Later, I would hope that it brought him comfort to be with his sister as he took his last breath.

But when Damien died, his eyes weren’t on me. They were on the crumpled body of the woman who had murdered his parents. He looked down at Morgana’s mangled form and smiled, blood trickling from his mouth.

Damien Argent, the vampire who’d tortured me, who’d helped me escape, who had been my brother in a time I couldn’t remember, fell to the floor and did not get up again.

27

GABRIEL

For an agonizingly long moment, the cavern was still, the only movement the ragged heaving of Evangeline’s chest as she panted, wide-eyed and distraught. There was an answering spasm of pain within me. I could feel the grief and confusion roiling inside of her, along with her desperate attempts to push it down. I knew the feeling all too well, and I wished desperately that I could have spared her that pain. I tried to send her calm thoughts, although I doubted they would help. This was something she would have to push through herself.

Damien lay still on the glossy obsidian floor, his hand still wrapped around the hilt of the marlinspike dagger. Someday, I would respect his sacrifice more than I would loathe the pain he’d caused Evangeline, but not today.

Morgana lay in a crumpled heap near Damien’s body, neck bent at an unnatural angle. I had the foolish hope that the fall had somehow been enough to kill her, but then her form began to flicker, spasming talons and horns and tails as she drew on more of her stolen magic and pushed herself up onto her hands. Evangeline was still frozen, not even looking at the witch.

Time. Evangeline needed time, and I could win it for her. I had to keep Morgana distracted until Evangeline got her bearings. My physical attacks had barely done anything to the ancient witch. She fought dirty, using powers stolen over the centuries. I couldn’t hold back; I needed to use all the tools at my disposal. I surged forward and threw myself onto Morgana, slamming her back down onto the floor, and did the only thing I could think to do. If she was going to use her power, so would I.

No wonder she had chosen this place as her lair—Morgana’s mind was just as cold and alien. The severe beauty and wickedly sharp edges must have called to her. She had barriers up, not walls, but a twisting, intricate maze. She was too dazed to keep them up, and I was too strong for her to stop me. I crashed through them recklessly, and in the center, the whirlpool of her memories dragged me under.

The world had felt small back then. Small and grubby. The days infuriatingly boring. Mucking out the pigs. Splitting the skulls of the animals the others hunted, and using the brains to tan the hides. Gathering stinging nettles to dry and beat and spin into yarn.

Back in those days, giants still roamed the hills. One day, when she was just a girl out gathering cockles on the beach, she saw a giant through mists, striding across the cliffs above on feet the size of her entire village. It was as chalk white as the cliffs themselves, strong and untamable as the ocean waves. Never had she seen anything so beautiful. She had felt longing then, so fierce and overpowering it had scared her. She envied that giant so strongly that she was nearly sick with it. The little knife she used for foraging seemed pathetically small, even though it was too big for her hand.

Something about seeing that giant changed her. When she was very small, she had been cautious, always listening more than she spoke. After seeing the giant, she became a disobedient child. She answered back, asked too many questions. One of the village elders raised a hand to her for talking too freely about the fair folk, and that night, the thatch of his hut burned. He’d burned with it. The villagers thought a spark must’ve flown up from one of the clay oil lamps, but she knew better. She had done that.

Her mother had known it, too. After that, she looked differently at the girl, always watching. One by one, the other villagers started to watch her as well. The girl wasn’t right, they said. Fae-touched. Her magic grew, as did her control over it. The constraints of her tiny, pathetic village chafed more and more, and she hid that fact less and less. Then one year after her blood had started to answer the call of the moon each month, there was a snap of cold. The crops failed. The wild plants withered. The animals they hunted were lean and hungry, and so were the animals who hunted them. The people of the village decided their gods wanted an offering. They dressed the girl in her finest clothes, bedecked her with jewelry, and used their strongest rope to bind her hands.

When they pushed her off the cliff, she was calm. The ocean was an old friend of hers. When she hit the water, it parted for her, welcomed her, pulled the rope from her thin wrists. She kicked her way to the surface, walked back to her village, and burned it to the ground.

When the witches found her, she was still watching the flames. They’d mostly died down by then, but the oily smoke was still rising. The girl’s dress had dried stiff with seawater, her dark hair a wild tangle. The witches were clean and beautiful and huge—not in body but in spirit. When they saw her, they knew her to be one of their own. When they asked the girl her name, she bared her teeth in a feral smile.

Morigena, she told them. Sea-born.

When the witches left, she left with them. They traveled together to faraway places she had never even dreamed of, leaving her tiny, rain-soaked isle far behind. There was a whole world out there, full of forests and mountains and deserts. She wanted it all. Not to have, but to take it apart and see how it worked. There was something to be learned from everything if you were patient enough to dissect it properly.

Morigena grew tall and slender and severely beautiful. Powerful. The witches taught her what they knew, but she thirsted for more. Together, they pushed magic further and further, finding its limits, and breaking them over and over. They found more witches as they traveled, full of power they didn’t understand, desperate to escape their tiny lives. They recognized themselves in Morigena, and she herself in them. And so, they became her sisters.

The older witches began to grow old and bent, their magic fading. They became small in Morigena’s eyes. Some of them had begun to look at her the way her mother had. She would not allow herself to become like them, she decided. She would only ever grow more powerful, more beautiful.

The experiments weren’t her idea. All the younger witches saw what was happening to the old ones, and none of them liked it. Surely there was a better way. There had to be.

The first experiment failed. Then the second. The third, the twelfth, the hundredth. Her sisters began to lose hope, but Morigena never did. She knew what she was capable of, even if none of the others did. At least with the wand they could reclaim the power the rituals consumed.

She stopped keeping track of how many rituals they had tried. For this one, they’d rounded up an entire group—everyone who’d been in the slipshod Gallic trading post. The humans moaned and begged in their traveler’s pidgins and native tongues from distant lands. Then the potion took effect, and the spell flowed over them. One by one, they went limp, their eyes blank.

“Another experiment gone wrong,” one of her sisters said.

Morigena gripped the wand and stepped forward, ready to write this off as another stumbling block, but then the things that were no longer human began to stir. When Morigena raised her wand, the stupid creatures bolted, driven by blind, animal panic.

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