The hunted, p.27
The Hunted, page 27
He stepped closer to me. “If you infiltrate my memories like that again, little witch, your traitor friends in the castle will start meeting fates worse than death,” he spat.
The shadows reached for me, and an otherworldly icy cold infiltrated my body. I shivered, my teeth chattering as I hugged my arms across my chest.
I was, of course, still in that stupid, lacy black satin slip. “I didn’t—” I faltered, still disoriented and confused. I frowned, remembering where my body was.
It was next to Daelon, in Wren’s healing circle. I must’ve dozed off exhausting my already depleted power trying to heal him.
Trying to expel the poison Lucius had planted into his neck like a demented vampire.
The sadness in my heart was quick to match Lucius’s rage. I lit up his icy shadows with fire, a light so bright it reflected in Lucius’s golden crown.
He leapt back, my power affecting him just as his did me.
We glared at each other as the baby blue warred with the midnight black in the sky above us, battling for supremacy just as we did.
Lucius cursed. “It’s our connection. Bond. Whatever.”
“We don’t have a bond!” I screamed at him. “If you’re trying to play mind games with me—to feign the sympathetic villain—I’m telling you right now it won’t work. That Lucius is dead. You aren’t him. You—”
“Couldn’t agree more,” he spat, interrupting me. His eyes flashed through so many different emotions, and his energy was too enshrined in shadows for me to understand how he was truly feeling, just like always.
Then, just as I wished I knew what he felt, something shifted.
I tasted shame on my tongue. Embarrassment. Wonder. Longing. Curiosity. Confusion. And a feeling so strong I couldn’t put it into words—like an internal war, an unrelenting torment that couldn’t be overcome, a darkness so suffocating that Lucius was forced to beg for just a trickle of light, just a fraction of what he heard in that song—
My reading was cut off when Lucius impaled an icy black curse into my chest.
I stumbled backward, gasping for air as I clutched my heart. My vision turned to inky splotches as my throat closed up.
I thought I heard Lucius apologize as the world faded to nothingness, but it was merely a choked whisper, words spoken just as low as his clandestine conversations with the mother he killed.
“Áine?” Daelon whispered.
I jolted awake, where I lay facing him on a blanket in Wren’s healing tree circle. “How are you feeling?” My voice came out breathless, so I steadied myself in the flecks of gold in his dark brown irises.
“I feel fine,” he answered. “This wave of sickness has passed.”
But the poison was still there. I bit back tears, my heart breaking in two. Every time I tried to neutralize it, the poison produced another violent wave, just as it had for the Icieran healers.
The air smelled fresh and dewy, springtime rolling over the land with a gentle breeze. Dusk arrived and bathed us in a pink and gold glow. The energetic hues of love. The fiery, descending orange sun, however, was the color of scorn and fight. I drew the flames into myself, heating the sadness and desperation until they had transformed into a determined anger that burned clean.
I flinched when a second pair of arms wrapped around me from behind. Daelon’s lips turned up, though his eyes flashed danger.
“Hi, Chosen One,” Ali’s voice was at my ear. “I’ve decided to forgive you for being scary and snappy earlier.”
“How very generous of you,” I muttered.
Mer sighed, and I felt her energy nearby as a third hand reached past Alejandro to rub my arm. Skye settled in on the other side of Daelon, but he knew that the terms of their bromance did not include spooning rights. He left a bit of space and kept his hands to himself.
“Come on, Prair-bear, join the cuddle puddle,” Ali said. He kept his tone light, but his energy couldn’t lie.
We don’t suffer alone. We only suffer together, Meredith had said when I first arrived.
Prairie sighed, just as touch averse as Daelon. But she lay down at Skye’s back, and she met his hand when he reached it over his hip and gave it a squeeze.
As long as Daelon was in pain, so were all of our new friends.
“Are we…” I swallowed, the tears I’d been holding back finally springing to my eyes. “Are we Icieran?” I asked. My power, this ancient magick that was forged and sustained by community, ignited at my words. I saw its brilliance in Ali’s arm draped around me, in the gold specs of Daelon’s eyes, in Prairie and Skye’s auras behind him.
“For as long as you want to be,” Mer replied, and we were all illuminated.
Chapter 2
A few days passed, their march as slow as a funeral procession. I stood in Prairie’s guest bedroom, half looking in the mirror and half looking at nothing at all.
My power had never been stronger.
It had also never been so violent and difficult to control.
I couldn’t rely on Daelon to tame these turbulent waves or anchor me back down to earth, not when he needed all his energy to fight this unrelenting curse. He just had to hold on and fight Lucius’s hex until I found a way to heal him. I was the healer of the entire world; this was what I was made for.
I’d already beaten death once. I would do it again, no matter what it took—because I would not watch my soulmate die. Not when he’d barely had time to live, to be free, to make his slain parents proud and rebuild his scorched village.
Nor would I give Lucius what he wanted. I would not let him force me into that decision. Because with Daelon’s life on the line, I no longer felt like the world’s healer. I felt like a harbinger of destruction, a hurricane on a collision course, everything vengeful and chaotic that ruled above witch notions of morality and balance.
And it was that realization that terrified me. I wondered now if this had been what Wren saw in my soul all along.
I snapped out of my spinning thoughts at the sound of Daelon calling my name.
I didn’t pack anything into my lightweight satchel but water and a snack. I knew the Coven of the Aurora Aurea would have everything we needed.
Including warriors. That was what I read from the island with the towering volcano I’d seen when I followed my intuition to send a burst of light as a signal to Cyrus. There was an ancient fighting magick there that quilted the earth like vines of red and orange flames.
Cyrus really was a knight in shining armor, on an island full of them. I knew they would help us liberate the dungeons and defeat Lucius’s men, another set of allies put on our path at the exact right time by the Universe, the Great Goddess, the Goddess of Witches and all things divine.
“You ready?” Daelon asked. There was no mark of sickness in his features, not since that last wave I’d provoked with my healing attempts. The poison lay dormant like a predator camouflaged and poised to attack again without a moment’s notice.
But I remembered what Lucius said, his words rooted too deeply to forget them for too long.
I give him a month or two before he loses his body. His mind could go much sooner.
Daelon faltered as I stared at him. “I can’t have you looking at me like that every time you see me.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry.” I reached for his hand. “I won’t. I promise.” The urge to wallow in helplessness and fear bubbled up, but I buried it with an easy swiftness.
“I believe in you, Áine. Not in him. Just as I always have.” He pulled me to him, and I had to fight off tears for the hundredth time today. He tucked my head under his chin, his fingers trailing down my back. “We will win. In all ways, including this one. And I feel fine when you all aren’t trying to heal me. Like now, I’m totally fine. I can’t feel anything wrong with me.”
I could see it, though, when I pulled back. Just the faintest tinge of shadowy black like a film over his shield. The poison itself had an aura, a magickal imprint of madness and death. I almost wished I couldn’t detect it at all, that it was hidden behind his shield like the rest of him—where I could ignore it and pretend it didn’t exist.
I swallowed down the taste of metal and decay.
“How are you feeling?” Daelon asked, brushing his knuckle across my cheek.
“I’m afraid that our new coven doesn’t fully trust me. Or at least the group that saw me talking to Lucius,” I said.
Daelon frowned. “That would be ridiculous. You were sick, and you were protecting Charlie. Just like you protected the entire coven by lending all of your power for the ritual and to close up the portal.”
The portal that Prairie’s sister Emerson might’ve gone through. The portal with beasts from another world that were attracted to my light. I still didn’t quite understand the trees’ and Winnie’s premonitions about Iciera as an intersection between worlds, nor did I think it was particularly relevant to us right now. From what I could understand, Iciera’s place between dimensions was unsustainable. Its liminality made it a hub for the weird and the otherworldly, which was yet another reason the land would be safer without my presence. It would also be safer when it returned to its rightful place in Aradia—when all land was once again free and untainted by the Shadow King’s evil.
“What do you think they saw, Áine?” Daelon asked, tilting my chin up. I could nearly feel the pull of his side of the soul bond, reaching for me and parsing through my muddled energy.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. I let out a breath, looking away from his intense eyes. “That I’m not who I’m supposed to be. That if I was forced to make a choice between you and Aradia, that I would pick you.”
Daelon shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. This time when I met his eyes, I matched their intensity and then some.
“And I fear that’s what they think of me because… they would be right.”
Daelon didn’t speak for several breaths. “You don’t mean that, Áine.”
My power stirred, and my heart pounded hard at my blasphemous admittance. “Would you not do the same?”
He lowered his hand from my face, and now it was his turn to avert his gaze.
“Exactly,” I said bitterly.
“You made me a promise,” he said, fear swimming in his eyes. “You said I would never see him take you from me.”
I swallowed, but the lump in my throat only grew.
“Either way, we’re doomed. Because if I choose Aradia and lose you, I’d be useless to this cause. I told you I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without you—that there’s no better world out there without you in it.”
“And if you choose me, he will never let you go. He will never let you liberate his cities and free the poor souls in his dungeons, to restore the realm and bring back balance before he destroys the entire universe.”
His words should have sobered me, but they didn’t. All I felt was the burnt taste of chaos, the beginnings of a storm that raged on and on.
“Then we can’t make it to that point,” I said.
“We need a third choice,” he agreed. The energy between us was palpable now, the scorch of the soul bond breaking through his shield and consuming me with warmth and certainty. “The impossible, remember? That’s what you’ve always been capable of, the magick you’ve always cast, and that’s what we will do again.”
“Together,” I said.
He stooped down, his lips nearly at mine. There had never been more intensity between us, devotion and understanding strong enough to brave any war.
“Together,” he said.
I met his lips in a frenzy, sucking the energy right from his skin before I could stop myself. I let the sweet taste of love and the tart taste of desire wash away all doubt, all pain, everything dark and cold and cursed. The essence I pulled from him reminded me that I was his, and he was mine, and there was no force in the universe strong enough to change that. His energy was everything sturdy and solid, like tall redwoods in a sacred forest, and it slid into my body like a cool autumn breeze tinged with smoky firewood. A flash of the cabin we first trained in passed through my mind’s eye, when everything was confusing and yet blissfully simple—and I clung to those moments I spent with him, alone and not yet touched by Lucius and his fucked-up games.
He tangled his hand in my hair and pulled me back. “Greedy little witch,” he scolded with a smirk. “No more.” He brushed his lips across my neck.
I paled. I shouldn’t have taken anything from him. Not with the poison still in his system—he needed every ounce of his strength and life force.
He raised his head. “It’s okay, Áine,” he said. “I’m okay.”
I nodded. “Do you want anything from me?” I asked.
“I want many things from you,” he said with a smirk. I clung to the normalcy of his boyish charm like a lifeline, the primal dominance in his gaze soothing all worry. “But not now, and certainly not your energy. You need all your strength to get us to the Coven of the Aurora Aurea.”
I wasn’t emotionally prepared for Ruth and Jesco’s send-off. The coven gathered in the field where we performed Ostara’s ritual, the High Priestess and High Priest rooted in the center of the crowd where they projected their voices with magick. Daelon and I were late, but the other witches immediately parted and ushered us forward to the front of the circle. We sat, and I clutched Daelon’s hand tightly as the swell of fear, grief, love, anger, and determination crested all around us. He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close, and I pressed my hand down into the earth to let the plant fibers send trickles of comfort and stability.
“Families are going to be separated. I myself have not been away from Jesco for longer than a week, not since we were handfasted over a century ago,” Ruth said shakily. Her hair was in a long braid, as silvery as her crescent moon headpiece and shawl wrapped around her shoulders.
For the first time since I’d met her, Ruth lost her words. Her sobs were as fierce as everything else she did, racking through her features. Jesco’s composure crumbled soon after. He pulled her into his chest, and the mournful energy of the crowd reached its peak. They stayed like that for a moment, and I saw how brightly their bond glowed as it fused their auras together.
Ruth regained her strength, resuming her speech. “Jesco and I don’t have two different souls, bonded together.” She shook her head. “No. We share but one. And when he goes with our new friends to battle, I will be there too. As will all of us who stay. We will be here, lending our strength no matter the distance, preserving our home until our loved ones return.”
Ruth’s pain hit me like a tsunami, so hard and fast that it knocked the air from my lungs. Of course, Jesco needed to go, and she needed to stay. Each group needed a spiritual leader, and the land needed a scholar of Icieran ritual and magick. No one knew more about this land than Ruth. And we’d known from the beginning that Jesco was always going to take up arms and make his way to the front of any battle.
My eyes fell to their intertwined fingers and then back up to the slick wet of their slightly wrinkled cheeks. Jesco looked at Ruth like he was seeing the splendor of a sunrise for the very first time in a world that had only known darkness. Ruth’s aura reached out to his as she continued to speak, to arm her people with hope and faith in a path they could not see, and it melded with Jesco’s until it was indistinguishable. One singular soul, just as she had said.
I looked at Daelon, and I knew I couldn’t let what I was feeling show on my face. He met my eyes, and I showed him my unending love, my faith in our cottage by the sea. I hid the fear as thick as cruel poison, the crippling terror that I would lose half of my soul.
He kissed the side of my head. I tuned back into Ruth.
“Iciera’s soul can never be divisible. And as our new friends—no, our new family—has reminded me, nor can the soul of Aradia.” Ruth found my eyes, and I smiled. She offered just the slightest nod. The same tendril of unease was still floating around her aura in contradiction of her words, and I struggled not to let my smile dip into a frown. “Our souls are all one, born from the same spark of love that birthed the vastness of the cosmos. The idea of separateness has always been a challenge for mortals to overcome, ever since that primordial disconnection of oneness. We need our ego, our individuality, to live and make sense of our existence here in the lower realms. But we must never forget that it is illusory, a fabrication, a delusion. Underneath our egos is something nameless and formless, something that cannot be broken apart or possessed. In the end, when our bodies return to the land, that material is returned back to its oneness. But here and now, we are still one. When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. What we fear in others, we too fear in our own hearts.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I was instantly pulled to meet a pressing gaze across the circle.
Wren’s.
“Hatred will get us nowhere,” Ruth continued. “Recognizing oneness makes radical compassion inevitable, but it does not forbid violence. Nature can be violent when it needs to be in order to preserve balance. Just like witches and humans. The pull to celebrate the bloodshed of violent people will always be tempting—trust me, I’m right there with y’all—but we must always remember who we are, underneath this mortal dance of struggle and love and death and change. No one wins in war. Kill another and you kill yourself.”
I saw nods in the crowd, and an elder uttered a loud mm-hmm.
“That bein’ said. We have a right to be angry, and we have a right to be vengeful. There’s a soulless evil that has overtaken this land, an evil that would love nothing more than to destroy all that is good, all that is kind and loving and beautiful. It has obliterated countless souls, and it will seek to do the same to ours. The bodily vessel this evil has possessed must be destroyed, by any means necessary.”
I clenched a fist, my instinctive agreement creating a powerful gust of wind that rippled across the crowd in a burst of tropical, saltwater air. Countless supportive eyes found mine, auras flashing ethereal light all around. But then I remembered Lucius, clinging to the same song that birthed me and led me here to Iciera, crying in his mother’s arms. This vision came from the place below my ego, the nameless and formless. I took a psychic hammer and boarded that shit right back up.
