Page 12 of Shaedes of Power (Soul Magic #1)

CHAPTER 12

T he other Shaedes were not that hard to wake up, light sleep being an unwanted byproduct of your realm being on the verge of destruction. We figured there was no time to lose since all our eggs were in this one basket and that it might be wise to travel under cover of midnight since Farris said Acorn Street is in a populated part of Boston and none of us had access to our clothes from the human realm anymore.

Lennyx let Farris borrow a billowy light blue shirt to swap with his heavily embroidered tunic, and Lennyx wore something similar in a darker shade. The girls and myself all opted for boots, suede leggings in various shades of brown, and long-sleeved tunics that were cut short to the hip and fit snug to the body. They had little detail on them so as not to attract too much attention.

No one questioned Farris coming along once they heard he was the one to decipher Jovii’s riddle, and we all arrived in the throne room on a fresh wave of adrenaline.

“Is it wise that we are all going?” asked Glory. “Obviously, I want to go. I know the most about Jovii, and I’m dying to meet him. But shouldn’t someone stay here and protect the realm?”

“I thought the whole point was that we were supposed to be stronger together,” said Leyanna. “The other High Shaedes left court all the time together.”

“Yeah, but that was not during times of war,” said Dru, pondering it over.

“I’d be happy to stay. Then the majority of power will be in the field and someone will still be here to at least make the court feel safe,” offered Lennyx.

“No offense, Lennyx,” Leyanna said, “but if we want the court to feel safe, you wouldn’t be my first choice.” Dru smacked Leyanna in the shoulder and mouthed the words be nice . But Lennyx just laughed.

“Don’t worry, no offense taken. You don’t know me well enough, so naturally you underestimate my abilities.”

Leyanna looked confused; she knew how to get a rise out of just about anyone, but Lennyx didn’t take the bait.

“Fine,” said Dru exasperatedly. “Glory will go as the resident expert on all things Jovii, I will go for protection, Farris will go in case we need a human for something, and Opal will go because she and Farris are pretty much a package deal. You and Lennyx can stay here and keep an eye on the realm.”

“What? Why do I have to stay behind with him?” Leyanna whined. Lennyx, instead of being offended, actually looked highly entertained by the whole thing.

“Weren’t you the one who just said you didn’t trust him to stay alone?” Dru asked.

Leyanna made an exasperated sound and stomped in the direction of the great entrance hall, Lennyx chuckling quietly to himself and the rest of us following close behind.

The entrance hall with its sweeping staircases was mostly deserted, save for a few Natural servants quietly going about their nightly chores. Opening a portal in the palace was still unwise, so we paraded out into the night, waiting only until we were outside the protections of the castle to travel. The substantial and ornate doorways led out to a large white stone bridge completely canopied by spindly trees and dripping with fuchsias and lobelia flowers. We crossed the bridge with purpose and stopped about fifty yards into the woods. Night was very dark away from the paths of the Corewood. Glowing lizards scattered and birds flew away as we startled the wildlife, invading the cool, untouched spaces of the night. Clouds of fireflies circled, and the cool scent of juniper, pine, and damp moss tickled our noses. I looked at Farris, who was in clear awe of it all.

Leyanna, without being asked, made quick work of a portal—146 North Acorn Street did not resemble the modern, dirty, metallic streets of New York City. From what I could glimpse through the portal, Acorn Street looked frozen in time. It had a cobblestone road and was too narrow for busy city traffic. Rows of brick residential buildings flanked both sides of the road, the only nature present being the baskets hanging with carefully manicured plants from people’s windows. It was all very picturesque and currently devoid of any passersby, which made it the perfect time to cross.

“Bye,” Leyanna said snidely. And with one step forward, we crossed the Seam.

Boston was bathed in the soft glow of an army of streetlamps that were so subtle they could have almost passed for faerie lamplight. A quick survey of the area confirmed that we were, in fact, alone. We started scanning the doorways for numbers indicating the exact address. For such uniform buildings, each doorway was entirely unique—painted, arched, or bordered with elaborate moldings. The address numbers were never in the same place, so it took us a few minutes to find the right door.

“That’s 146,” I read aloud. It was a little way away from where we portaled, but it was a purple door with a tiger head for a knocker, and somehow that seemed just right. The others gathered around behind me, and I knocked. It was so late, and Jovii was most likely asleep, but knocking seemed less rude than magically forcing our way in and scaring him half to death.

For a moment, I thought I heard a chair move across wood floors inside, so we waited patiently for him to come to the door. But no one ever came. Then there were loud scraping sounds on the floor, some banging noises, and then a man shouting in pain.

All of us instinctively spelled the door to open at once, causing the very fibers of the wood to disintegrate before us. What looked like sawdust blew around us as we stormed into the foyer, the sounds of a fight rebounding off the walls and definitely coming from upstairs.

A shadow beast resembling an anaconda came slithering down the narrow staircase, but when it opened its mouth to greet us, a long black tongue with glinting spikes came shooting out. It waved its head wildly around the foyer, knocking over a small entryway table with a lamp, shattering a mirror, and brutalizing some picture frames. It was happy to impale itself with some of the debris from the broken items, as the sharp shards of glass and splinters of wood adhered to its long, weaponized tongue and only added to its arsenal.

Dru was dagger-ready and sliced off chunk after chunk of the beast’s tongue with the help of Glory, who was channeling some sort of calming power over the beast to keep it still. I used my magic to throw a shield over Farris, and once Dru finished beheading the creature, she pushed her way up the stairs.

Glory shapeshifted into a massive violet wolf. With fangs barred and claws clicking noisily, she galloped up the wooden stairs after Dru. Farris stole one look at my tense face. I was waiting for him to tell me to wait there, and I would have hated him for it, but instead he stood aside so I could reach the stairwell first. I felt him close behind me all the way up.

At the top of the stairs was madness. The sounds of a brawl were deafening in the small loft. On one end of the room, near the stairs and the windows of the front of the house, was a small sitting area where Glory was pinning a black-haired female with heavy eyeliner to a tattered brown leather sofa. The far end of the room was made up as an office or study, with long tables along the walls covered in papers and books and sketches strewn about. In the center of the room, Dru was confronting three dark-haired warriors dressed in black leather from head to toe. One with knives, one with an axe, and one with nothing but two very strong-looking fists .

Farris jumped to Dru’s side, taking a defensive position that I’d never seen him do with his body. His face said, try me , but my heart was screaming, don’t anyone dare ! Glory managed to shapeshift again, still holding the girl down by the throat.

“They’re humans!” she yelled, breathless. “We can’t use magic, or we’ll kill them.”

Suddenly the weaponless fighter walked over to one of the wooden tables, picked it up like it was a frisbee, and threw it at Dru. She ducked gracefully, her reflexes quicker than any of ours ever could be but causing me to receive the full velocity of the blow to my left shoulder. Surely the bones just shattered into dust. I saw stars, moons, and colors that hadn’t even been invented yet. I was that disoriented by the pain. But the hit had spun me around so fast that it gave me the perfect view of Glory’s prey pulling a knife from her boot and awkwardly but effectively slashing Glory’s arm in one long, deep ribbon.

“These are not ordinary humans,” Farris said through gritted teeth. The three warriors lunged at him and Dru, and I fell to my knees, trying to remember how to breathe. Glory shapeshifted again, and before the girl could take one more stab at her with her knife, Glory peeled the girl’s neck open in one deliberate bloody bite.

The fight ensued on the other side of the room, and Glory was suddenly there in human form, with warm blood cascading from her chin down her chest and dripping onto the floor. From my position on the ground, behind the scuffle, I caught a glimpse of white under one of the tables.

“It’s Jovii!” I yelled, atop the kicking and the grunting and the sound of thudding against the wood floors. Farris was so fast that he looked fluid delivering a punch to the neck, then finding himself behind his assailant and landing blows with his knee, then forcing his opponent’s body to contort a certain way and proceeding to kick the shit out of it. I wondered if he ever imagined himself actually using any of the fighting techniques that he’d studied over the years in real life. But whatever he had studied, he had certainly mastered.

I crawled on the floor along the side of the room on three limbs, my injured shoulder sending waves of agony over me with every few inches of movement. I reached Jovii’s body scrunched up on his side. His skin was cold, and his long white hair was matted with some blood from a large cut above his eye. “He’s dead!” I shouted.

“Oh fuck this!” Dru sighed with irritation as she threw her knife with frustration and watched it embed itself directly in one of the eyes of her adversary. She stomped once, and I felt a lick of green magic pass by. She stomped a second time, and it was like a bomb went off. I’ve never witnessed such a show of energy coming from one faerie. It was like a sonic wave exploded from her and went right into the three remaining targets, rattling the walls and floorboards, breaking the windows, kicking up an invisible wind, and causing the warriors’ bodies to implode.

Blood and bone shards sprayed the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Not an inch was spared, not even our own bodies. The leather that they had been wearing was reduced to liquid, along with everything else that had once been solid about them. This was the battle magic of the Balance.

Glory, to her credit, remained focused and came running to my side, pulling Jovii out from under the table and placing a healing hand on my shoulder. The feeling of my bones knitting themselves back together was always a strange one, but one I was thankful for. There was no knitting Jovii back together, however; he was gone.

I went to Farris, who was only a few steps away, but it felt like miles. We embraced, even though the gore that covered us was like paste on the skin.

“I think it is safe to say that did not go as expected,” Farris said.

“You, human, can definitely hold your own in a fight. Well done.” Dru came up and held out a hand, which Farris shook with vigor. Then she looked around the room, gesturing to all the carnage. “I’m really sorry about all this. It’s embarrassing to admit that I did not mean to create this much… violence. But Farris is right; those were not ordinary humans.”

Glory left Jovii on the floor and walked over to the girl lying open-mouthed and dead on the sofa. She inspected the girl’s mouth and then lifted her limp arm up to get a closer look at her hands .

“I thought I was hallucinating at first; she jumped on me so fast. But she had no magic, I could feel that. Yet she had filed down her teeth and her nails to a point. Why go to such lengths to imitate a dark faerie?” Glory took a few more scans of her kill and then went over and started rummaging through some of the papers and books now scattered about the room in disarray.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” said Farris. “These wouldn’t be the first humans to worship demons. And if you hadn’t killed them, they would have been hell-bent on killing us. Not to mention if they are working for Ciaran somehow, it is best that anything they learned from Jovii stay here and not with him.”

“Opal, are you all right?” asked Dru. “I saw you take that table with your shoulder. What made these humans so fast and so strong?”

“I don’t know,” I said in earnest. “But I do know neighbors had to have heard the fighting or, at the very least, felt the tremors from your magic. It won’t be long before the human authorities will be here.”

We scattered around the room quickly, overturning papers, reading book covers, and trying to connect anything Jovii had been researching to high-level refinement magic.

“Here’s a book on Nymphs,” said Glory, wiping some blood splatter off a leather bound book cover.

“He seemed to be a sports fan. Here is a huge stack of Sports Illustrated . But I don’t think that’s very helpful,” mused Farris, bent over in a corner.

I stood up and walked back over to Jovii, somehow desensitized to all the death and gore. After having watched my parents drop dead on the dais, I didn’t know if anything would shock me anymore.

Jovii was on to something. Otherwise, why would dark fae human minions be stalking his refuge in the human realm? Amira must have told them where he lived—she had said she had visited everywhere on her travels. I didn’t doubt that she had discovered his whereabouts at some point. Just another betrayal on a list of sins that could never be forgiven. “What were you looking at, Jovii?” I whispered to the air between us. I knelt down and just happened to glance at his hand bent at an awkward angle toward his chest. In his fist was a crumpled up piece of paper, so old that it was almost transparent.

I gently took it and smoothed it out on the floor, reading the scrolling words along with Jovii’s iconic uppercase notes. “This is it,” I said as much to myself as the rest of the room.

Everyone came to crouch by me. “The Renaissance Spell?” Glory read the words like a question. “I don’t know that one.”

“This has to be it,” I said. “Look what it says: ‘The Renaissance Spell: results in the creation of new life. Ancient Nymph magic. Components unknown.’ Then it looks like Jovii underlined new and wrote underneath it ‘Draku.’ And under the word components , he wrote ‘Soul magic—Permanent.’ This has to be it.”

“I hope this is not it,” Glory said, “because no one has ever uncovered the root evil that created Draku in the first place. We surmise that the transformation into dark fae lies somewhere with the transference of faerie blood and that Fayonir must have cast some sort of spell before she died. But whatever magic could create something horrible like Draku, it is probably knowledge no one should possess.”

Blaring sirens echoed against the colonial brick row houses, making Glory’s warning that much more ominous. The dimly lit room was suddenly filled with bright red and blue lights.

“Time to go,” I said, throwing up a portal so fast that all I had to do was think it. But there was no time to bask in the marvel of my upgraded Balance magic. I grabbed the spell off the floor and we all disappeared back across the Seam.