Eyes of midnight, p.1
Eyes of Midnight, page 1
Eyes of Midnight
Eyes of Midnight
an Inland Sea novel
Shanon L. Mayer
Shanon Mayer
Copyright © 2023 by Shanon L. Mayer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
First Printing, 2023
Cover design by JD&J Design
ISBN (Paperback): 9781958076033
ISBN (eBook): 9781958076040
Published by Shanon L. Mayer, Vancouver WA 98663
https://shanonlmayer.com
For everyone who helped to make Dragon Keep the magical place it is today. Thanks for everything.
Books by Shanon L. Mayer
Chronicles of the Chosen
Sphere of Power
Veil of Deception
Jen Rice novels
Captives and Prisoners
Festival of Souls
Inland Sea
Star of Darkness
Eyes of Midnight
1
“Hey Wendi, we’re running low on chupacabra blood again.” Crucian stepped around one of the low counters that were scattered throughout the shop. He bumped into a barrel of griffon feathers but caught it before completely overturning it, still managing to dump a handful of brown and gold feathers onto the floor in the process.
“Do we any have more in the storeroom downstairs?” Wendi called over to him, almost thirty feet in the air on a rickety ladder, holding onto the shelf in front of her for dear life. Much as Wendi liked Crucian, the guy couldn’t walk through the shop without crashing into something. Now, it looked like he was headed for the ladder she was standing on and the last thing she needed was to fall into the ever-brewing potions that Phemie tended to leave scattered everywhere.
Wendi was the owner of Dragon Trading, a store located in Dragon Keep in the Inland Empire which specialized in rare and difficult-to-obtain goods. She had opened the shop a few years before, mostly by accident. Not welcome in most towns she went to; she had been in need of a place that was private and out of the way and Dragon Keep had fit the bill perfectly. She bought the keep at a discount since it had been abandoned for almost fifty years, with the sole intention of remodeling it and living there.
Unfortunately, remodeling and maintaining a keep as large as hers had required a lot more money than she’d had available. She had spent some time debating before opening the shop but in the end the answer had been obvious. Using some of the junk left over from the last time she had gone out wandering and hadn’t been able to offload anywhere else, plus a handful of her own special recipes, she had stocked the shelves of the one storefront she had cleared and declared herself open for business.
Not that any of it was really junk; a lot of it was just stuff that everyone else was already carrying.
Except for her recipes, of course. Those were personal.
Three other people lived and worked at Dragon Keep alongside Wendi, including Crucian, who was really handy when Wendi needed an extra burst of strength or to test out a new concoction when she was unsure about its effects. She was pretty sure that Crucian had some troll in his background, not because he looked particularly trollish, but because he has some features that raised suspicion in a sufficiently critical mind.
At almost seven feet tall, he was far too tall to be purely human, for starters. He had turned up as a full-blooded human in all of the tests Phemie had done on him but Wendi still had her doubts. His arms were too long for his body, as were his legs. Both of those caused him to walk slightly stooped over, as though the air at his head level was much heavier than the air where the rest of the population walked. Both of those features could be easily overlooked and written off as natural anomalies, were it not for the fact that the guy regenerated.
Humans just don’t do that.
“I just looked down there,” he called up to her, holding up an empty barrel and shaking it upside down over his head. “It’s empty.” Wendi winced at his action; the last time he had overturned a barrel over his head, it had turned out to be not quite as empty as he had believed and it had taken them the better part of the day to remove the sap that subsequently covered his body.
Also living at Dragon Keep was Phemie, who was barely over five feet tall with light brown hair that usually had bits of feathers, wooden beads, or other trinkets dangling from it. She was also the most talented witch Wendi had ever met. She was one of the best at identifying spells and forecasting what the effects of new magical items would be. Phemie was the one that brewed up all of the magical potions and decided which items should be stocked on the shelves as components and what didn’t need to be there.
Except poisons; she left those for Wendi.
Phemie was the person who had sparked Wendi’s interest in carrying the exotic and rare goods that her shop now specialized in. Until meeting Phemie, Wendi had believed, as most people did, that magic just happened. Someone who happened to be trained in the magical arts waved their hands or pointed a little stick and magic happened.
It wasn’t that easy.
“Magic is a process,” Phemie had explained patiently. “Much like cooking a cake or making a new pair of shoes. Each of these takes ingredients and a decent amount of skill to put the ingredients together in the right order.
“Done correctly, you’ll have the deliciously delectable treats that make a baker famous and the fabulous fashions that serve the ranks of royalty.
“Done wrong, however, you get a disgusting disaster.”
That philosophy, in a nutshell, was where Dragon Trading’s success came from. While paper, quills, candles, ink, whetstones, fishing hooks, and lamps could be found at just about any shop in any town a person could wander into, there weren’t many places that specialized in the harder-to-get components that mages always needed. In most places throughout the Inland Empire, magic users had to go out and find the components they needed for their spells all on their own. A handful of mages from the Academy at Three Rivers, students all, had discovered that the shop at Dragon Keep carried a lot of the magical supplies that they needed and word began spreading.
So quickly had word spread, in fact, that it appeared they’d run low on chupacabra blood.
Again.
Then there’s Jaegar. When Wendi first met him, she thought that he was just another standard human, even if he was a bit slow-witted at times. Jaegar had light brown hair with streaks of blond shot through it and bright blue eyes. He also had a tendency to run into walls and his explanation was always that he forgot to use the door.
It had been Phemie that discovered that Jaegar was actually an ogre, transmutated into a human with a spell that was strong enough that even Phemie hadn’t managed to come up with a cure for it yet.
Secretly, Wendi believed that inability was deliberate on Phemie’s part, although she’d never tell her friend she thought so. The only thing more dangerous to the structure of a building than a human who forgets he isn’t an ogre anymore is an ogre who forgets he isn’t human anymore.
With a sigh, Wendi carefully climbed down the ladder, keeping one eye on Crucian to make sure he wasn’t moving. “I’ll go look,” she said once terra firma was within reach. “There should be another cask of it down there.”
“Phemie said she used a bunch of it last week,” he called after her as she headed for the stairs.
She’d forgotten about that. Chupacabra blood was one of the main ingredients in Phemie’s camouflage potions, mostly because of the obnoxious critters’ ability to blend in with their surroundings. The shop had run low on that particular variety of potions the week before so of course Phemie had used a bunch of it to brew more.
Handy as a chupa’s skill at hiding was when it came to potion brewing, it made it that much harder to go out and capture the cursed things.
“Fine.” she took a couple steps to the side and scooped up the feathers that he had spilled onto the floor. “I’ll see if anyone’s heard of another one around here somewhere.”
“There’s supposed to be one out in Landor,” Phemie supplied as she flew into the room. Phemie, always original, didn’t use a broomstick like other witches. Particularly inside the shop it just wasn’t feasible; she would crash into everything even more often than Crucian did. Instead, she’d enchanted an overstuffed, hideously green colored lounge chair to fly her around to where she needed to go. It just didn’t get more than six inches off the floor, which was much more manageable as far as Wendi was concerned.
“I’m assuming you’re talking about the chupa.”
She landed in a small open area of the floor near the back of the shop. “I started looking into that as soon as I knew I’d be using the last of it and heard tell that there’s a bunch of goatsucker sightings out that way.” She wore her standard uniform of a loose, flowing black dress. That day’s particular one was spotted with small silver sigils, magical markings that had been stitched to the fabric of the skirt.
Wendi hadn't ever asked why she wore clothes like those, nor did she ask why she had so many sigils tattooed onto her chest, arms, legs, pretty much anywhere but her face.
The main reason Wendi didn’t ask about things like that was because she didn’t want Phemie, or anyone else for that matter, to ask the same kinds of quest ions about her. Why Wendi had black, pupil-less eyes, for example, or where the rough scar that ran from her left cheekbone and covered most of the lower left side of her face and neck came from. There were just some questions for which she didn’t have answers, at least not easy ones.
“I’ll head out that way in a couple days or so, then.” If Wendi had been going out after something larger than just a goatsucker, she would have brought more of the group with her but she wouldn’t need them for this. Besides, Jaegar would just scare the skittish things off and Wendi would have to go out and track them while they were hiding. No reason to make her job any harder than it already was. “Can you mind the shop while I’m gone?”
It was a ridiculous question; she knew it as soon as she asked. Phemie was probably more capable of taking care of the shop than Wendi herself was.
Early the next morning, Wendi had Crucian help her load a handful of supplies into her travelling wagon. Crucian and Jaegar had built the wagon for her to use when she went out to gather fresh specimens and it had quickly become mandatory for her to use while travelling. It had a wooden frame on it with huge timbers that were strong enough to hold up all but the largest creatures while she worked on them. Multiple hooks lined each wall of the wagon, attachment points for her to secure anything that she needed to transport while she was out.
This wagon was slower and a lot more ungainly than her regular wagon but it had proven invaluable so there was no way she was going to go hunting without it. Landor was over thirty miles away and even though chupacabras were relatively small creatures, they were vicious and sneaky, more prone than most creatures to escape whatever binds she could put them into, so she wasn’t about to even attempt to lug one that far intact.
Thankfully the bitterly cold weather of winter had relented and the air, while still crisp, was clear and there weren’t many clouds in the sky to disrupt what little warmth the sun was able to provide. There were a handful of small animals out along the way, mostly rabbits and other early risers that didn’t mind the cold. It was almost noon before the thin layer of frost completely dissipated and even the residual water didn’t last for very long.
When the outlying buildings of Landor appeared on the horizon, Wendi pulled the hood of her travelling cloak up to cover her head. The scar that covered part of her face didn’t bother her much, it had stopped hurting about two years earlier, but it still bothered other people who saw it. They always asked the inevitable questions and there was no good way for Wendi to explain that she didn’t know where it came from.
She had ideas, of course. She’d come into close contact with more spells and poisons in the last five years than most people did in a lifetime. Any one of the explosions that had occurred, the result of incorrect mixtures in her laboratory, could have resulted in damage similar to what she had received.
Even more disturbing to other people than her scars were her eyes. Someone came up with the ridiculous idea long ago that a person’s eyes were the windows to their soul, or some such nonsense. Since then, everyone automatically assumed that Wendi’s soul was every bit as devoid of light as her eyes.
For both of these reasons, she kept her hood pulled tightly against her face as she entered town. The fabric of her cloak was heavy enough to keep heat in but the weave was loose enough that it didn’t impair her vision regardless of how low she pulled her hood.
As with most towns in the area, Landor was comprised of loosely gathered buildings and a handful of small farms scattered along the outer edge. There was the standard baker, general store, weaver, and a handful of other small businesses scattered through the town, but what caught her eye immediately was all of the posters lining almost every wall, tacked onto every hitching post, and scattered everywhere her eyes fell. Curious, she climbed down from the wagon and walked over to investigate.
“Reward,” the posters promised. “For information regarding the whereabouts of the missing slaves from Basch.”
She felt her breath catch in her throat as she read the words. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was slavers. Those people, in her opinion, were the ones devoid of a functioning soul. Life was precious, a valuable thing, and for people to be traded like cattle was the ultimate offense.
She snatched the paper from the wall, then the next, then the one after that, furious that the people of Landor would allow such a thing to be posted in their town. She began to wonder if some of the residents secretly supported the slave trade. If so, she would have to reconsider her opinion of the small town. Soon, she had a small stack of the offensive papers in her hand and noticed that a few of the townspeople had begun looking at her strangely.
No surprise, Wendi thought to herself. Her hood had slipped as she frantically removed the notices. She felt their stares piercing her skin like tiny daggers but rather than giving them the satisfaction of seeing her act irrationally any further than they already had, she shoved the stack of posters into the pocket of her cloak and strode off towards the general store.
“Can I help you find something?” a voice called out to her from behind the counter. The voice came from a tall but portly man, easily in his fiftieth year. Even as he inquired, Wendi could still feel that there were still plenty of strange glances in her direction as she perused the dust-filled shelves of the store, so it took her a few moments to figure out what she was looking for. Why was she there?
Right, she was supposed to be looking for a chupacabra. It had been almost a year since the last time she had tracked one, now she just needed to remember how she had done it then. “Do you know where I can find a goat?” she asked as she turned her obsidian eyes on the shopkeeper.
His eyes widened when he met her glance and he took a step backward. “A... a goat?” he repeated. “Why do you want one of those?”
“I’m looking for a chupacabra,” she explained. Most of the town had already seen her face so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it any longer. The smaller the town, the faster the gossip spread. She had learned that from years of experience. Anyone who hadn’t seen her directly would likely be informed of her presence within the hour. “They like goats.” It wasn’t an understatement; goats were the preferred snack of chupacabras everywhere, as far as Wendi had been able to tell.
They were called goatsuckers for a reason, after all.
“You can get one from my nana’s farm,” a small child at the end of the counter spoke up. He looked at her directly, without any of the fear or hesitation that Wendi knew would develop with age. “She has lots of goats.”
2
There was a reason Wendi didn’t like goats. They were mean, filthy, smelly animals that seemed to take perverse pleasure in doing exactly what you wanted them not to do. The one she had purchased that evening for three silver sheckles was no different, refusing to walk where she wanted it to go. It had no intention of leaving its home farm willfully, so the only way she could get it to where she needed it to be was by tying a rope from the goat to the wagon and forcibly pulling it.
“Come on, you stupid beast,” she called out to it as it bleated contentiously behind the wagon. It left deep gouges along the ground as they went, digging its hooves into the packed dirt and refusing to budge. “Should’ve brought something to knock it unconscious until we got there,” she grumbled.
She brought it a few miles out of town, hoping that she was at least heading to the right area. Phemie had said that the chupacabra was to the northeast of town but Wendi’s sense of direction was not always the most accurate of her senses. Finally, she found a small clearing that would work and unhitched the goat.
Immediately, the goat tried to kick at her with both hind hooves, but she was expecting that and stepped easily out of the way. With a heavy iron spike, she tied its lead to the ground so it couldn’t escape, sidestepped its attempted ramming of her, and moved the wagon so that it was out of sight. She could never be sure how a chupacabra – or any other beast, for that matter - would react to the wagon’s presence, so it was best to keep it out of sight until she needed it again.
