The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  I ignored Kellee’s narrowing eyes, saying, “Sota, stay close,” and stepped off the edge into the hole.

  Talen landed effortlessly beside me. “If we split up, we’ll cover more ground,” he said. Splitting the team to explore the tunnels made the most sense. We could cover more ground and everyone here was more than capable in combat. But splitting up would make us vulnerable.

  Kellee dropped in next, followed by Arran. I scanned the three males, each wearing their own fierce intensity. Whatever our problems, and we had many, these males were here, standing with me. That meant more than they’d ever know. Pride thrummed warmly through my chest, lending me a new kind of strength.

  Sota drifted down. “Splitting up is how people get dead.”

  “No splitting up,” I told them. “Not yet.” The tunnel Arran and I had already explored beckoned. I ventured in. The sweetness of freshly dug earth hung in the air, and it was noticeably cooler than before. “Talen, I want you up front with me. Kellee and Arran, watch the rear.”

  Talen moved up, but so did Kellee. “What deal did you strike with the guardian to have him obey you like that?” In the dark, with only Arran’s and Sota’s flashlight to guide us, the gold surrounding Kellee’s dark pupils flashed. Nothing got past him. I held his gaze, answering the challenge with my own. I would tell him. Later.

  “C’mon,” I spoke up. “It’s time we found some of Hapters’s answers.”

  Kellee’s attention cut deeper now I hadn’t answered him. He didn’t like being kept out of the loop. Well, now he knew what it felt like.

  The tunnel swallowed us just like before. This time, Sota’s high-intensity beam flooded the path ahead with brittle white light, washing every shadow away. But when we approached the wall of black rock, it absorbed even Sota’s artificial light, peeling it away from the tunnel edges and guiding it in. I’d never seen anything bend light that way. The others saw it too but said nothing. Acknowledging Faerie’s magic was another way of giving it power.

  The old fae words glittered like spider webs lit by morning dew.

  Time, our prison,

  Dark, our sentence,

  Light, our freedom.

  Nobody spoke. Talen stepped forward. The iron inlaid words began at his eye level and climbed higher. He looked at them with the same awe as when he had admired the stars in the sky, as though they held a wonderment I couldn’t possibly understand. When he touched the swirling trace of the first word, he hissed and yanked his hand back. Iron. Pure iron from his reaction. I expected him to move away, but he tilted his head, frowned, and then slammed his hand against the words.

  And everything caught fire.

  The blast of heat and light shoved me back. I leaned into it to keep from falling, and then as quickly as it had blasted outward, it blinked away, leaving the entire wall of black stone sparkling as though sunlight lit it from behind. Every internal shard, every sparkle blazed, scattering a kaleidoscope of color across Talen’s face and clothes, lighting him up and searing the image of him aglow into my mind.

  He cradled his fist against his chest. The light still blazed, but Talen’s pain-riddled face had nothing to do with his hand and everything to do with the rippling brightness in front of him.

  I stepped farther away, squinting into the light. At first, the sparkles appeared to be random, but slowly, an image took shape, one I hadn’t seen since I’d left Faerie almost six years ago. Inside the wall, hidden by the dark and only visible with the light cast behind it, was a map of Faerie’s night sky.

  “What is that?” Arran whispered.

  “Something that should not be here.” I moved back another step, reading the entire view. I only recognized a small section of the map, the part visible from the crystal palace, but I could trace the imaginary lines between the stars as easily as the lines across my palms.

  I tapped a finger against my palm, discreetly alerting Sota and using our ocular link to have him store several still images for later study.

  Talen looked over his shoulder, past me, straight to Kellee. “Eledan was here?”

  Why did a map of Faerie’s sky have anything to do with Eledan and how by-cyn did he even suspect Eledan of being here?

  “A long time ago,” Kellee replied, his voice pitched low. “We don’t know if he saw this.”

  “He did,” Talen replied solemnly like he was delivering a death sentence.

  “Oberon has Eledan locked down tight,” Kellee said.

  Arran pulled my gaze to his. He had the same questions in his eyes that I did. They were keeping us in the dark. Anger and frustration fizzled hot and sharp where pride had glowed before.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Eledan.” I heard the coldness in my voice and liked it. I liked it even more when Kellee and Talen looked at me, both needing my answers.

  Eledan might have been buried in a hole somewhere, but if I believed the illusion of him I’d witnessed in Arcon, the mad prince had means of escaping. At least part of him did. He could dreamwalk. Neither Kellee nor Talen knew that and I couldn’t think of a way of telling them without them twisting the words into an accusation against me.

  The heavy weight of the talisman in my pocket reminded me of how Eledan could weave his way into human lives and linger there like a malignant tumor. Did he still linger in mine?

  “What do you know?” Kellee asked.

  If I told the marshal how I’d potentially spoken with Eledan before the Game of Lies and had kept it a secret all this time, he would never trust me. “Just that a fae with his abilities probably has other means of getting what he wants. Why don’t you tell me why his seeing this is so important? He has seen Faerie’s night sky his entire life.”

  I looked between them, at the silent conversation they were having with their eyes, excluding the rest of us. Damn them, their secrets, and their distrust. We couldn’t go on like this. They would have to trust me or the Messenger would never be anything more than a myth. “One of you had better start explaining this or this ends right here, right now.”

  Talen’s gaze slid to me, lingered for a few pensive seconds, and then he faced the wall and its glowing star map. “Three star systems in total,” he began. “All viewed from Faerie.” He pointed at a cluster of bright lights. “Sol with Earth at its center.” At another. “Valand.” Lower and lit by a tight cluster of stars. “Halow.” At the heart of each system, marking them like laser points, an intense red light pulsed.

  So, it was a map. Why did they both look as though this map was a whole lot more than that. “And?”

  “Three systems, each with a fragment of Faerie hidden within them,” Talen said grimly. The red stars throbbed hotter. Beacons. Targets. “The unseelie are not myths, and they are not gone, but they are forgotten. This map shows exactly where to find them and potentially the means to free them.” Talen turned his back to the map. Backlit, his expression was difficult to make out. But more than that, his outline blurred, losing its solid edges, crafting shadow where no shadow should be—inside the light.

  Once more, Talen’s gaze fell to Kellee. “If Eledan saw this… he may have already found the pieces.”

  Kellee held Talen’s gaze, the two of them sharing the weight of something bigger than a map to the unseelie hordes.

  Kellee’s jaw twitched.

  “It must be destroyed,” Talen said.

  “Wait.” I stepped forward, but Talen was already turning toward the light, his hand reaching outward. “Don’t!”

  Kellee’s grip encircled my arm, holding me back. I tugged, but his grip held. I would have swung for him if Talen’s touch hadn’t connected with the map at the exact same time as Kellee’s arm wrapped around my waist. Light poured in from all sides, so bright and so hot that my fury at Kellee for holding me back dissolved under the scorching onslaught. There was a noise too, like rock breaking, earth moving, worlds breaking apart. And then a silence so thick it smothered me.

  “Kesh!” Sota flew to my side. “I can’t see!” />
  I shoved Kellee back, clasped Sota in my hands, and peered into his red lens. “Are all your sensors out?”

  “All of them. Only infrared is functioning.”

  “Use that. I’ll fix you…” I trailed off as I noticed the rock the map had been etched inside was warped and twisted. There was little left but veins of silver.

  Talen had destroyed it. He lifted his gaze to me, his eyes downcast because he felt the thin thread of rage flowing through me. The map could have been valuable. We could have kept it safe, could have used it, but more than that, he and Kellee had taken the decision away from me. Because I was saru. Because there was more happening behind all this that I didn’t understand. And they continued to keep me in the dark. I was just a face to them. Just the Messenger myth.

  An animal screech erupted from the black space behind Talen, sounding like claws on glass.

  Talen whirled.

  Sota shot from my grip. “Incoming!”

  A wet, earth-rich wind blasted from deep within the darkness, and a wall of air, broiling with wings, claws, and fangs, poured over us.

  Chapter 15

  At the Game of Lies when the kelpie had tried to drown and trample me, I’d been at the mercy of Faerie’s whim. When the tunnel beneath Hapters’s plains filled with the same kind of wild vortex of chaos, I felt the same helplessness, as though Faerie had me in her enormous grasp and could crush me at any second.

  Creatures howled as one, pouring into the tunnel like a monstrous storm funneled into a narrow space. Their claws tore up my back and slashed my face. I fought to bring my hands up as a shield, but leathery wings beat the air and sharp teeth snapped, snickered, and flashed.

  Someone called my name, but the noise and pain swallowed that too. Dropping to my belly, I crawled forward. The screaming winged beasts sailed overhead, occasionally clipping my clothes and hair. I’d lost Sota somewhere in the melee and the ocular link was filled with so much chaos that I’d had to shut it down. One reach at a time, I moved forward, blocking out their screams.

  Something collided with the side of my head hard enough to dull the noise, and stopping seemed like a grand idea.

  A figure carved through the storm, broadsword slicing in an arc through the winged monsters ahead of him. His magic licked around him like flames. His reds took on a life of their own, lighting his clothes, his hair, all of him ablaze like a torch battling the dark.

  He cut the winged beasts down and stepped over their flailing bodies. Eventually, the stream learned to swerve around the male, and as he reached down for me, the beasts swerved around us both. I took his hand and scrambled to my feet. Sirius turned and led me back. A scream came at us. He cut the thing down with one deadly swipe. It slammed into the tunnel floor. The body was the size of a male fae, with the same humanoid figure but wrapped in leathery wings. It had claws and teeth that crowded its too-wide grinning mouth.

  Sirius continued onward.

  I tore my bloody hand from his. “Wait! The others!”

  “Their survival is not my concern!”

  “You said…” A winged fae dove above our heads. Sirius cut it out of the air, practically severing it in half. It flopped to the ground, bucking and flipping, and then stopped moving altogether.

  The guardian’s emerald eyes scored into mine. “I said I wouldn’t kill your friends, not that I’d save them.” He held out his hand again while the walls moved and the dark fae screamed their hideous song.

  “I can’t leave them.”

  “If they cannot save themselves, what good are they to you?”

  Arran’s sharp whistle penetrated their howls, coming from ahead, behind Sirius, and what must be the way out. Arran was okay. That meant Kellee and Talen were probably okay too.

  I took Sirius’s hand. Cool flame danced up my arm. I almost yanked my hand back, but the touch wasn’t hot. It flickered and licked over my torn coat, summoning something of Talen’s golden magic from within me and lighting me up in the same way Sirius glowed. The guardian cut a path to the crater hole.

  I grabbed the dangling rope and climbed out to the sight of Hapters’s sky simmering with dark fae. They fanned outward, blocking the light from Hapters’s twin moons and cawing into the night. I might have thought it beautiful if I hadn’t felt the sting of a thousand cuts.

  Kellee was running… toward me. I frowned, wondering where the others were and why Kellee was clutching his side, his face fierce with determination. “Run!”

  Run?

  The air shimmered between us, bending around something larger than us, exactly as it had bent around the unseelie in the tower.

  There were more of the unseelie monsters, just like I’d feared.

  I freed my whip, aglow with magic that wasn’t mine, and saw the new unseelie’s eyes burn red through the rippling illusion.

  Air rippled to my right. Another one.

  More than two.

  How many?

  Too many. And all cloaked.

  I had never fought in a battle before. Never seen anything more than organized arena combat. This wasn’t a one-on-one game to entertain an audience. The sky writhed with wings and talons. Screams drowned out my cry for Kellee. And the smell of wet meat, of blood and bone and dead things left to rot clogged my throat. And inside it all, I felt small, like I was in the eye of a storm I had no chance of controlling.

  “Nightshade,” a deep, wrangled voice gurgled to my right. The word was wet, the stench of its breath like poison.

  I had always believed I could fight and kill anything and anyone. That I was the Wraithmaker and invincible. But that belief slipped away.

  The beast in front of me charged, its illusion sloughing off. I saw Kellee leap, saw his claws flash and sink in, saw the beast rear up.

  Something wet and thick and warm pushed against my neck and rode up my cheek. I swallowed and heard the thing make a deep, rumbling sound. A laugh.

  “A fleshling with power. Mmm…”

  It huffed, blasting me with its breath, and then reared. I saw it towering over me, saw its claws spread just like Kellee’s, saw its mouth yawn wide, opening to devour me in a single bite.

  Sirius slammed into my shoulder, knocking me off my feet. I hit the ground, rolled, and the terror that had clamped me still snapped loose. But it was too late for Sirius.

  The beast’s mouth came down. The guardian plunged his sword inside its throat, up to his own elbow, but whether he missed the mark or if he’d acted too late, the strike did nothing to slow the beast down. The beast’s massive mouth slammed shut around Sirius’s arm, sword and all. It jerked its head, lifting the guardian into the air, lashing him left to right like a rag doll.

  I was running, whip cracking, but too late. We were too small and too few to fight so many monsters.

  The beast shook the guardian and then tossed Sirius aside, done with him. I cracked the whip, zipping open the beast’s left eye. It reared and howled in agony, turning toward me and away from where Sirius had fallen. I skidded in, slipping between its forelegs, and there I planted a string of tek-razors. Jaws snapped in. I rolled aside. The razors exploded behind me and peppered the beast’s underbelly with holes. It screamed, whirled on me, and froze.

  In my left hand, I held up the brooch as high as I could stretch my arm. The talisman throbbed its magical beat, and to my surprise as much as the beast’s, the tek flung silver vines outward, unraveling, twisting, becoming something bright and alive and hungry in my hand. The people of this planet knew it could protect them. That was why the mother had been reaching for it. She’d been too late. But I wasn’t.

  The talisman glowed a deep undulating glow, light like Talen’s inside me. The light of Faerie.

  The beast dipped its head, and its one good eye darted, as though the thing were ashamed to be seen.

  Snarls rippled across its lips. And then slowly, begrudgingly, it pulled its glamour over itself and slunk away.

  It wasn’t over.

  The sky was so thick w
ith dark fae that barely any light leaked through their swirling vortex of bodies. The plains below them rippled with moving shadows, the ground alive with the unseen.

  Hapters was theirs.

  Talen had guided Shinj, the warcruiser, over the township, enabling us to collect our shuttle, Hapters’s remaining colonists, and Sirius’s scattered flight of fae scouts. The warcruiser groaned her displeasure, but she loosened up as we climbed through thinner air and eventually entered the planet’s orbit. Below us, the once peaceful farming planet bled black like rotten fruit.

  I’d wanted to help these people, but somehow, I’d condemned their homes to the unseelie. This wasn’t my fault. If Kellee and Talen had told me even half of the truth, I could have planned. I could have prevented this.

  “Sensors back online,” Sota announced from his favorite shelf inside my chamber. He had been rebooting while I had walked the ship, helping people get settled. I knew how unnerving it could be inside a sentient ship, especially as their last visit to a fae ship had been as prisoners. I assured them my ship was different. Some believed me. But some looked at me like Kellee sometimes did—with a heavy dose of skepticism.

  “Good.” Earlier, I had spread Talen’s coat out across my bed. The dark fae had torn it to strips, but it was resealing itself. I too had healed the thousands of cuts in a way that wasn’t possible for saru. More questions circled my thoughts as I watched the coat shimmer.

  The collective injuries of the crew were minor. Nobody had died and the people were safe. All but Sirius.

  “How is the guardian?” I asked Sota.

  “Unconscious but stable.”

  We would struggle to control the fae scattered among the survivors without Sirius, but we had time before they organized themselves. The fae flight had also regarded me with skepticism, suspicion, and outright hostility. I couldn’t blame them for that. As the face of the Wraithmaker and the Messenger, I was hated and loved on all sides. Around Talen, who had walked the ship beside me, Sirius’s flight had regarded us curiously.