Page 78 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

Morigena almost respected them for that. She understood the determination to survive.

It was the closest she’d come to success so far, and she couldn’t let it slip through her fingers. She hunted down a few of the creatures and discovered they could heal quickly. They could be killed, but only with a stake through the heart. They were fast, strong, and some of them were even clever. They fed by drawing power from others, and Morigena liked that. She could use that.

She researched and studied and experimented. One by one, her sisters began to fall away—they rejected her vision, too weak to finish what they had started. She had been wrong to think they were the same all those years ago. They were just as small as those old crones, as her village. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need them.

Morigena learned how to feed on power. She started with the creatures she’d made, and when she took her magic back from them, she found she could move the way they did. She sprouted fangs the way they did. She was strong the way they were. The experiments didn’t stop there, of course. She found the wolf-coat men and the seal-women, the under-hill folk, and the water spirits. She took their claws and their strong lungs and their glamor and their way of twisting the tides.

She took their power.

It wasn’t perfect. When they died, she lost their strength. She could compensate for that, though. It was just a question of keeping plenty of thralls to draw from.

The years passed. The giants were killed, and their bones became the hills that men built their cities on top of. The fair folk became scarcer, leaving their forests to build pockets of splendor in lands they built themselves. Mud and thatch turned to brick and glass. Humans forgot the old ways. Some of them were foolish enough to invite witches into their courts, thinking they could be status symbols, willing to waste magic making charmed diversions at feasts and scrying on the foolish men of other courts. Little kings scrabbling for dominance, so unaware of what true power was.

Her name was Morgana now, and she knew better than to pass up such a gift. She took a position in a court, where she outlasted several kings. If anyone thought it was strange that so many of them died suddenly, she simply plucked those thoughts from their minds. She selected a king she liked—one who was happy to give her all the resources she wanted for her experiments.

Then one day she looked in the mirror and saw a monster. Beneath her beauty were myriad lowly creatures, all their fangs and claws and scales. She had lost something. She had wanted to find enough power to stay pure, and now she was tainted. She was nothing like that giant she had seen so many years ago.

One of Morgana’s sisters—the only one who still answered her letters—suggested that, if she was so horrified, she could simply stop taking on more power, and the twist of creatures under her skin would die off.

Morgana burned the letter. Foolish. What would the point of that be? No, there had to be a way to fix this without reducing herself back down to that sea-soaked girl who’d watched her village burn.

Her sister’s shortsightedness didn’t matter. Morgana would undo this and find a truer way. She just needed a little more magic, and then she could fix everything. She needed pure magic and knew exactly where to find it.

It turned out her rituals worked just as well on the witches she’d once called sisters as they did on anyone else. Witches lived a long time. Their power would stay with her for centuries as long as she had someone keep them alive. Their strength was almost enough. Morgana was so close. She just needed a little more magic.

Just a little more, and she’d be able to make things perfect.

I tried to pull myself back from Morgana’s mind. It grasped at me, hungry and frigid, trying to keep me in. I had been wrong before. The walls of her mind weren’t weakened, they had been built to crumble. A lure, a way for her to put up enough of a show of resistance that I would blunder forward without question.

Every part of Morgana had become used to stealing power, and her mind was no exception. It refused to let me go. The dark waters of Morgana’s memories tried to pull me deeper and deeper, sending cold tendrils of poison into my mind as I reached into hers. An icy slush penetrated my brain. It would be so easy to keep sinking. I could let go, let myself become part of something bigger, free myself from having to make choices. I could return to the comforting subservience I’d been raised to be used to. I could stop pretending I knew what I was doing.

In the freezing ocean of Morgana’s mind, I could no longer tell which way was up. I was suspended in the dark, numbing cold.

There was something there with me. Not an element of Morgana, but a ghost made up of animal, twisting rage and hunger, thrashing and snapping at nothing. It wanted to bite the whole world, but it couldn’t close its jaws around anything. I knew that anger. It had traveled with me, dormant but waiting, ever since I’d entered my father’s mind. A final piece of Roland’s fury that had hitched a ride in my mind, and now found a place much more suited to it.

Then light. A golden glow far in the distance, brilliant and strong even through the murkiness surrounding me. I knew that light, too.

The furious creature made up of everything that had driven my father through the world rose up beneath me. It had laid dormant in my mind, but now it was growing, twisting its coils through the frigid ocean of Morgana’s thoughts. It snapped and thrashed at the water, and Morgana’s pain echoed through our linked minds as if someone had struck a church bell I was trapped under.

I refused to bring my father’s monstrous rage with me, but I could use it as solid ground. The one final favor my father would grant me would be the ghost of his anger, and the ability to get away from it. I braced myself against the creature’s huge, frenzied body and launched myself upward, fighting through the clinging darkness toward Evangeline’s glow.

Her magic reached me like a hand plunged into the water to rescue a drowning man, and I surfaced, gasping for air. I was back in the cavern with Evangeline’s presence warm and safe at the back of my mind, helping me slough away Morgana’s poisonous grasp.

Morgana writhed, flickering with the shadows of a hundred different shapes and powers, a hundred different stolen lives.

But it wasn’t just her own intent making her writhe. I knew the expression on her face all too well. It was the look I’d seen on everyone whose mind had been savaged by Roland De Montclair. He was getting his revenge after all, I realized, as that scrap of him I’d left behind started to chew its way through her brain.

After delving so deeply into Morgana’s mind, my own body felt distant and alien to me. Regaining control was a challenge. The witch flailed beneath me, snarling and snapping up at me with teeth that changed every time she opened her mouth. I finally managed to get my limbs to obey me and scrambled away from her, springing to my feet just as she lunged up with a mouthful of teeth that belonged to the worst sort of deep-sea creature.

Evangeline stepped forward. Was she glowing, or was it just in my mind? Some aftereffect of the visions I’d been pulled into? No, no. It was real. The light caught and reflected on the oily edges of the rough obsidian walls, painting the dark cavern gold. I could feel her power burning within me, hot and glorious.

No wonder Morgana had wanted Evangeline’s power. Compared to her patchwork, wriggling magic, Evangeline was a monolithic presence. Huge and undeniable as a giant striding over the cliffs. She was everything Morgana had ever wanted to be, and she would be the one to destroy her.

28

EVANGELINE

Gabriel only had Morgana pinned for a handful of seconds, but the crashing darkness that tried to push through our connection had been overwhelming. It was enough to pull me out of my shock, though, and I held that darkness back, pouring every ounce of strength and light into him that I could spare.

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