Page 62 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

CHAPTER TWO

Magpie Windwitch stood six inches tall from the tips of her toes to the top of her head, with her foxlick adding an extra half inch.

Her chestnut hair had combed out shiny but not neat, and her eyes were impossibly blue.

She had a stubborn mouth and a sharp, foxy face that was always alive with mischief or glee or some other big, bursting feeling.

Magpie never did feelings halfway. Her dragonfly wings were as sleek as blades and as swift as any under the sun or moon—which she had reason to know, since she’d race anyone who was willing, including the winds, many of whom were her cousins and who loved her best of all their faerie relations.

The audience beheld a lass in a frock of shimmering silver, and if she wore it a bit as a ferret wears a saddle—resentfully—they failed to notice.

Her scene began simply enough. She had to traipse around looking carefree as deadly danger crept up on her.

The fun came of the audience seeing it while she remained oblivious.

She smelled a flower, helped a beetle up a doorstep, and wound a lock of hair around her little finger.

When an ominous drumbeat arose, she pretended not to hear it.

When sinister shadows leapt long and strange, she was facing the wrong way.

“Behind you!” sprouts called out from the audience, just as they always did.

Heeding their warning, Magpie looked behind her. The instant she did, the drums cut off. The shadows vanished. She turned back to the audience with a shrug, and the drums and shadows resumed. There were groans and laughter as she repeated the charade.

Doom doom , said the drums.

Creep menace loomed the shadows.

Tra-la-la went the carefree village lass.

But for the first time ever, Magpie was struggling with the “carefree” part.

The strange, cold dread didn’t fade the way stage fright always did.

It stayed with her like a chill in her heart, and it was a good thing she’d done the play so many times before.

Her body and face knew what to do. She carried on, but her blood was moving unnaturally fast. She felt jumpy, almost panicky, and she had no idea why.

She kept wanting to dart anxious glances over her shoulders, and that was exactly what she couldn’t do.

She was supposed to be blithely unaware of the threat as the crows closed in on her.

As always, it wasn’t gasps that heralded their attack, but laughter—great gales of it. Magpie spun around and there they were, all seven of them: hopping, cheerful, absurd.

“Devils!” she cried, staggering back in her best impression of terror.

The laughter only grew louder as they came at her with eyestalks bobbing and batwings flapping.

The drums kicked into a frenzy. The flute joined in, shrill, and madcap choreography ensued as Magpie made wild attempts to escape, and the “devils” cut her off at every turn.

Bertram pounced, and she skidded under him.

Swig grabbed at her, and she leapt over him.

She tried to fly away, but Mingus’s whip tail lashed around her ankle.

She gave a piteous cry and twisted free.

..right into the embrace of Calypso’s velvet tentacles.

He shimmied so they shook, and the audience snorted and chortled.

And so it went, with every devil getting its chance to menace her—in the most unmenacing ways.

Finally, Pup and Pigeon went for her at the same time, and she dove clear so they collided and rebounded, both keeling over backward with their feet straight up in the air.

That got the most laughs yet. The audience could barely breathe now, and tears of mirth were steaming down their cheeks.

Magpie’s own breath was coming fast when Calypso reared up before her, unfurling his costume’s great, hidden mouth, ready to swallow her whole. “I’m done for!” she cried out in theatrical desperation. “This is the end!”

But it wasn’t, of course, because the champion saved her.

That was the whole point of everything. Kite sprang between Magpie and Calypso, brandishing Skandaraj, the legendary axe.

It painted the air with swirls of smoke as she took on devil after devil.

With every stroke, a crow stiffened and fell.

No one was laughing now. Kite’s choreography wasn’t funny.

It was epic. She spun and twirled, pure grace and power, and Magpie watched along with the audience.

She didn’t have to pretend. Her awe was real.

She knew her mother’s moves by heart, and ached to perform each strike and spin herself.

She could almost feel the weight of the axe and see herself painting smoke on the air.

A powerful longing filled her—to do that, be that.

A warrior, a champion. And not just onstage, but for real.

Soon it was all over and the crows lay in feathery heaps on the stage, defeated and...snoring?

Indeed. They were feigning sleep, not death.

Bellatrix hadn’t slain the devils back during the wars.

Skandaraj hadn’t been that kind of axe. It was a djinncraft weapon—deep magic.

When it struck flesh, it didn’t cleave, but turned to smoke and passed right through, causing no hurt but dropping its foes into dreamy slumber so that Bellatrix could capture them easy as pie.

The champions had captured devils, or so the legends said.

They’d put them into golden bottles. Kite produced one now.

It was a prop, of course—just gilded copper, not solid gold like the ones in the stories.

She uncorked it and held it out, and, devil by snoring devil, she sucked them right into it!

It was a real crowd-pleaser, this bit. The bottle was no bigger than an acorn.

A crow couldn’t fit one foot in it. And yet it swallowed them up, all seven of them.

There were poofs of smoke and then they were gone, leaving naught but trails of sparkle behind that the bottle slurped down like noodles.

It was a neat trick: stage magic, with a just a smidge of the real thing.

The crows weren’t really in the bottle, of course.

They were in the crawlspace under the stage.

They’d fallen through trapdoors, so sudden and with the smoke for distraction that you couldn’t even see it happen (unless, that is, one or the other of them got stuck with their tail feathers up in the air, as had been known to happen).

The audience adored it, and Kite had to wait for the applause to die down before she turned to Magpie and said, her voice rich and warm, “Lass, come now. It’s all over. You’re safe.”

And this was where Magpie was supposed to go to her, gaze up at her in wonderment, and thank her for saving her life.

Instead...things took a bit of a turn.

The word safe was hardly out of Kite’s mouth when the forest erupted.

Or so it felt in that first second. There was a great rending and splintering and a storm of leaves exploded outward, with bits of bark and grit swirling and stinging against Magpie’s cheeks.

She thought the whole forest was coming down, but in the next second, blinking, she saw it was just two trees at the edge of the glade, violently sundered and shoved aside like blades of grass!

By what?

Oh.

Oh no.

The thing was half in shadow, but even hidden it was clearly.

.. wrong . That was the word that formed in Magpie’s mind and lingered there like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

Wrong , wrong , wrong . It was a wrong thing.

There was another word that tried to form but failed because it was unthinkable.

It couldn’t be...that. The world was free of them, and had been for twenty-five thousand years!

Whatever it was and whatever it wasn’t, it crashed into the glade, yellow eyes rolling wild in a misshapen head.

Free of the shadows, its full wrongness revealed, it was almost too much to take in.

Its bloated shape was toad-like, but it was bigger and nastier than any toad.

If you were to form a round body out of clay, then dent it and wrench it, pinch out legs and twist them, you’d begin to have something like it.

Nay, and that still wasn’t ugly enough. You had to do all that and pull it inside out, too, like a sock or a mitten off the drying line.

It looked like its inside skin was on its outside, all raw, wet, and red.

It was as big as a boar, with horns willy-nilly in all the wrong places, and a muscular tail that lashed back and forth with a knob on the end that was knuckled like a fist, ready to punch and pound.

The beast landed in a crouch, and the audience gasped.

All this in just seconds. One for the tree-tearing.

Two for the leap and landing. Three, and the creature’s reek rolled over them like a wave.

It hit Magpie at the edge of the stage—an eye-watering, dead stench like nothing she had ever smelled, and that’s when she knew.

She knew, but there was no space in her mind for the knowing. It couldn’t be.

It was.

The truth slashed open her disbelief, and Magpie whispered, “ Devil .”