Shadow Mage: (Witchling Wars: Luxra Echelon, Book 1) Read online

  I pushed away from the wall and walked toward the bodies sitting on the metal slabs like nothing but mangled meat. Then I brought my hands up before me and tried to summon my magic.

  Little flickers sparked between my fingers. Nothing but blue shocks of electricity fizzled out. I gave my hands a solid shake and tried again. I was too distraught. I couldn’t get a handle on anything, let alone a power within me I only realized existed a matter of days ago.

  Marek was still behind me, watching carefully as I struggled. He closed the space between us and came to stand only inches away from me. His hands closed in on mine with a sort of tenderness that shocked me.

  “You want to use magic tapping, don’t you?” he asked me.

  William made it sound like I was the worst of criminals when he told me what magic tapping was. Would Marek think the same?

  “I have to know what they remember,” I said. “I have to see their memories and know if they saw anything that I didn’t.”

  His cool fingers entwined with mine. Then he led me over to Emily’s lifeless body.

  “Place your hands just over her head,” he instructed me. “Then I want you to close your eyes and picture Emily during the final moments of her life. What’s the last thing she would remember if she was still here?”

  “Looking into the backseat of the car and seeing how sick Annette was.”

  “Start with that.”

  I did as he said, picturing Emily’s lovely face filled with panic as she peered into the backseat to see Annette foaming at the mouth.

  The tips of my fingers tingled. I kept my eyes shut, hoping that it was working. When cobalt blue light flickered just under my lashes even with my eyes shut, I knew something was happening.

  “Now move the memories back. What else happened that night?”

  To my shock, an image appeared at the forefront of my mind. It was me. I was seated in the back of the car without my seatbelt on. We were seconds from colliding with another car and spinning out of control. I was inside Emily’s memories. My magic was successfully tapping into her.

  “Ease back,” Marek instructed me. “See what else happened in her memories that night.”

  I did as he said, navigating the night backward and witnessing everything Emily had done. A guy was flirting and trying to make moves on her. She seemed to think he was cute and let him put his hands on her hips. There was the drive to the club, the pre-drinking, and her trying to finish a few paragraphs on her dissertation before she got ready for the night.

  I let my hands down in frustration. “Nothing,” I said. “Just typical stuff. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Moving on then.”

  He guided me over to Caitlyn’s body. I kept my eyes down, refusing to look at her face. Even with her eyes shut it felt like she was watching me.

  Marek did the same thing once more, taking my hands into his and directing me on how to channel my magic. He must have met a great number of luxra witchlings throughout his five long centuries of life because he knew more about how my magic worked than I did. But then again, most magical beings probably would. I was a special case in my ignorance.

  I sighed and brought my hands up to the side of Caitlyn’s head, extending my fingers and letting Marek wrap his around mine once more even though it felt like ice-cold marble enclosing around my thin fingers.

  The scent of the forest and smoke drifted through my senses, sending me to a place where I was at ease. If not calm. It was coming from Marek’s long black coat. The scent was from the realm inside the tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The floating candles, the wildlife, and trees, along with the water seeped through Marek’s clothes and wafted through me.

  I shut my eyes once more and thought back to what would have been Caitlyn’s last memory before the wreck happened, following the same directions Marek gave me only moments ago.

  There was Annette and me in the backseat. Then the motorway lights of oncoming cars on the other side of the street. She left the nightclub a few times to smoke cigarettes and asked Annette once or twice if we could go to a quieter nightclub. She wasn’t crazy about the wild techno style music and much preferred live band style clubs. But it was Annette’s birthday choice, so she took breaks outside and came back in to stick through the night. Farther back there was the pre-drinking, and then the long nap she took to help her get through the night of partying ahead.

  I lowered my hands. “Nothing.”

  “Lucky number three then,” Marek said, placing a hand on my side and dangerously high.

  I almost shoved his hand away. I rolled my shoulders back and decided to let it go, knowing that this was more important than my pride or the fact that Marek was playing with fire by placing his hand dangerously close to my breast.

  I huffed and raised my hands over Annette’s head, wishing I had started with her rather than waiting. Her memories were fuzzy at best. An effect of whatever was in the morning sickness potion Liam had given her. There was nothing but blackness in her memories. I had to go back. Way back. All the way to the moment when she pulled me over to the bar for a round of drinks and we headed to the dance floor for the first time.

  Maybe I was wrong that night. She couldn’t hold her liquor nearly as well as I thought. I went back further to the pre-drinking, seeing every second through Annette’s eyes. Then the way men stared at her with longing and downright predatory desire. The way she ignored it and looked away in shame. I had no idea she held so much insecurity. Or perhaps it wasn’t insecurity. It was guilt for how she got pregnant.

  ‘Wait, how far back can I go?’

  I shifted from side to side and refocused, trying to go back even further. There was the phone call she made to me, asking if I could pick up her medicine. A morning of her hanging her head over a toilet with her breakfast of old milk and cereal spilling out. Then more phone calls to a number I didn’t recognize. She was panicked. If not frantic. She couldn’t reach whoever she was trying to contact. She went over to the bed and held her hand tight over her stomach. She knew who the father was. That had to be who she was trying to call.

  The pain in my head erupted into a sea of curling flames weaving around my head and settling in for the long haul. I was new at this. I couldn’t hold on much longer.

  I groaned as the pain got worse.

  Marek’s hands tightened around me, forcing me to hold them in place.

  “Work through it,” he encouraged me. “It’s normal if you haven’t gotten used to magic tapping. Especially for memories of the dead.”

  “Huh?”

  He curved his head down to whisper right in my ear. I could feel the heat of his breath touching my skin, the only part of him that I imagined was still warm.

  “Memory tapping only causes pain when you search for the memories of the dead. These bodies have been gone for days. No oxygen, no beating heart, nothing. As the bodies decay more, their memories won’t be salvageable. They’ll disappear along with their souls. You have to finish this now if you have any hope of getting the answers you want.”

  I curled my toes and tightened my fingers. Anything to help me refocus and work through the burning sensation coursing through my head.

  Annette sat there on the bed. Then she folded up into a fetal position and began crying. I saw her moving backward, replaying memories as though I were rewinding a TV show. Only I was seeing the show through her own eyes. She got into the fancy car we drove that night until she reached someone’s expensive house. It wasn’t far from the Royal Mile. The row of houses definitely wasn’t for those who had to ask the price in order to afford it. They looked more expensive than anything I could ever dream of owning.

  She walked back up in reverse to the door and banged on the intricately carved wood.

  “Don’t leave me out here like this!” She hollered in desperation. “Please, Edgar! I’m begging you!”

  Her fingernails dragged against the wood. She plunged both hands down to the gold doorknob and wiggled it
.

  Only then did I see what caused her to be so distraught. The door opened and she went tumbling back inside, barely able to stay on her feet. It hardly made sense watching it backward. But the face I saw made it all come together.

  Annette was banging on Professor Connelly’s door. He ripped it open and took her wrists into his hands forcing her back inside. Of course, I had to rework it in my mind. He wasn’t forcing her in. He had thrown her out. She clawed at his door because she wanted him to open up again.

  A sharp red hot poker plunged just behind my eyes. I fell away and dropped down to my knees, holding my head in my hands and wanting nothing more than for the pain to go away. I heaved heavy breaths in and out. The pain immediately began to dissipate but not nearly fast enough.

  Marek rounded me and took a hand to my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes. “What did you see?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to believe what was so blatantly obvious now. Only I didn’t know how to explain it to Marek. To him, it would probably be no more than girl drama.

  “I found out who the father of her baby was. Annette went to his home to tell him. He cast her out.”

  Marek scoffed and backed away. “That’s what you came here for? To find out who the baby daddy was of another common whore that threw herself at a professor for high marks? You wasted my time.”

  I stared daggers at him. “That wasn’t what I wanted to know. I had a hunch about something. A theory.”

  I crawled back up to my hands and forced myself up again. This time, I didn’t hold my hands over Annette’s head for her memories. I held them over her womb. Flickers of cobalt blue light glowed out of my palm and wafted into her skin. It was the worst possible thing I could imagine. I could sense the fetus inside, it’s lifeless form fallen away when she died. Only there was one detail that I couldn’t have gotten without Marek’s help that night. A detail that made the last few days more real to me than anything William said or Marek did.

  I let my magic soak back into my skin and inched away, unable to look down at Annette’s body anymore. The white clothes that covered them lay a few feet away from me. I reached for them, covered the bodies once more, and rolled them back into the cases in the wall where they would remain until their families put them to rest the following day.

  Marek moved toward the door, ready to get out of there and unable to believe that I would waste his time on such a seemingly meaningless venture.

  “If you excuse me, I’d like to get back to my evening,” he growled. “There are drunken people all over this city by midnight and I have other priorities outside of childish female drama.”

  “He’s a demon,” I mumbled, leaning into the metal cases behind me. “A powerful one.”

  “Who is?”

  “My dissertation professor. Professor Edgar Connelly. He got Annette pregnant with a half-demon baby. Then he abandoned her.”

  “I still don’t see how this isn’t typical female drama,” Marek grumbled. He twisted the knob of the door and moved to leave, behaving as if what I had said wasn’t earth shattering. If anything, it was a typical night in Edinburgh for him.

  “Don’t you understand?” I hollered at him, moving to the door and shutting it before he could get it all the way open. “The car we were driving that night was Professor Edgar Connelly’s. He let her use it and she never gave it back. He was watching me at the memorial service even though I had a shadow charm over me. He knew what I was. Maybe he always knew. If he’s a demon he could sense my magic deep inside me. It wasn’t the Roganach-Ciar that tried to kill me that night. It was Professor Connelly. He killed two birds with one stone. He forced my magic to resurface and he prevented Annette from leaving the country with his child inside her. Emily and Caitlyn were just casualties in a war they never even knew existed.”

  Marek wasn’t looking at me like I was an irritating school girl anymore. His mouth twisted into a wicked sort of smile. “You’re brighter than I was willing to give you credit for.”

  I ignored his backward version of a compliment.

  The mortuary went dark. The little color that existed seemed to dampen. Shadows were appearing in the upper corners of the ceiling. They floated down over the walls like smoke funneling through tubes only to crawl over the tiles on the floor.

  “What is it?” Marek demanded, seeing the sudden worry cross my face.

  The shadowy figures began to take shape, forming human silhouettes and morphing into solid forms.

  “We have company,” I mumbled under my breath.

  Marek’s arm covered my front, protecting me once he realized what was happening.

  I could see demons as they appeared. He couldn’t. Not until they began to take a smoky human form. I learned something that night that I wasn’t supposed to. There was little doubt in my mind that these unpleasant bastards were here to make sure that I didn’t get away with it.

  “You know that key you’ve been hiding under your blouse all night?” Marek said.

  My eyes shot up at him.

  “Now would be a good time for you to learn how it works. You won’t make it out of here otherwise.”

  “What about you?”

  He laughed. “I’m a vampire. I’ll survive one way or another. You, on the other hand, have a beating heart. They’ll be determined to change that unless you brace yourself.”

  I fought demons on some small level before. Well, mostly I just ran from them. Fighting them back was something I knew was beyond my depth.

  I took out the key from the chain around my neck and held it tight. I didn’t come this far just to die once I got some answers.

  “Are you ready for a proper witchling, demon, and vampire brawl, little demon?” Marek said once the demons took human form and eyed the both of us with more hatred than I had ever had someone direct at me.

  “No,” I mumbled from behind him. “But I won’t let that stop me anymore.”

  THE END OF BOOK ONE

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  Glossary

  BLACKATTER

  A genetic line of lycan (see below) dating back to ancient times in Europe. Having helped the vixra witchlings in the past, their familial bloodline was gifted with a special form a magic that activates if they are bitten by a lycan. This magic is called crowning magic (see below).

  CROWNING MAGIC

  When a vixra witchling (see below) is near death (regardless of the causes) their magic abruptly changes into a powerful form of red magic. This magic is extremely strong, often chaotic, and eventually consumes the vixra witchling to the point of death. Crowning magic can appear days or only hours before a vixra witchling will die. The imminent causes of death are not always known when crowning magic appears. Vixra often capture a small amount of this magic and keep it stored in case of extreme circumstances. But given its powerful nature it is rarely used. The only supernatural beings ever gifted with a small and non-fatal amount of it are the Blackatter lycan bloodline.

  CLAIOMH SOLAIS

  An enchanted sword enchanted by an ancient luxra witchling (see below). It has blue sapphires on it, a long silver blade, a black leather grip, and two daggers extending from the side. Once only a sword, additions were made to those who found it over the centuries. The blue sapphires on the hilt were enchanted by a luxra witchling in the 18th century and help the bearer of the sword to use its power for the purpose of destroying the Dolch Erbe (see below). The sword chooses who can and cannot use its magic.

  CROXA = crock-sha

  A deceased person whose soul turns rabid, often the result of consuming vixra blood. These ghost-like creatures feed on emotional fears and haunt humans and witchlings alike. Stuck between worlds, they're not living or
entirely dead. Their appearance if often distorted, rotted, and very frightening.

  DEMONS

  Evil beings that reside in both the human and spiritual realm. They survive through deception, ill-will, a hunger for violence and bloodshed, and using mankind to bring about their wicked desires through scheming. They are difficult to kill and never show mercy to those they are hunting. Their main weapon against witchlings is magic tapping, a way of draining a witchling's magic so it never returns. All demons possess the ability to dissipate their form into a smoke-like state and only take human form when they choose to. When taking a human form they are extremely attractive toward their potential victims. When in their true demon form they appear monstrous and terrifying.

  DOLCHE ERBE

  An evil group that formed in early Bohemia after a group of renegade lycan destroyed a village and killed its inhabitants. The original purpose was to protect mankind from the brutality of the lycan. Over time, this group became obsessed with destroying all magical beings. With the use of dark magic, they preserved their souls so they could be reborn every century into powerful bodies until their mission of killing all magical creatures could be accomplished. The upper echelon of this group is referred to as the Inner Circle.

  ELEMENTAL MAGIC

  A low-tier form of magic that vampires (see below) can tap into when they consume vixra blood (see below). It permits them controlled use of the elements such as water, earth, air, and fire.

  KRUXA = crew-sha

  A low-tier witchling with very diluted magical powers. Their magic is often unpredictable and very difficult to control given their ancestors chose to mate with humans, therefore diluting the magic in their offspring's blood. They are not well-respected in the witchling world and many live in exile after years of being hunted by vampires (see marking below). They are considered the peasants of the witchling world.