The Shadow King (8 page)

*****

Poppy watched her best friend disappear through the portal and then looked on helplessly as it slammed shut behind her, leaving Poppy alone in a deserted alley, frozen in place.

A string of unattractive thoughts raced through her rapidly heating mind. Fury was building inside, fighting with indignation. And fear.

She really hadn’t wanted Vi to go alone to the Dark to rescue her sister. She’d had a bad feeling about it from the start, and despite Lalura’s warnings that Violet needed to make this journey alone, the very notion of allowing her to do so went against every loyal bone in Poppy’s body.

She sort of wanted to strangle Dahlia, Violet’s sister. It wasn’t that Dahlia was a bad person, and certainly wasn’t that she was unworthy of her sister’s help. On the contrary, Poppy happened to know first hand what kind of soul Dahlia actually had. It was a sensitive one, one easily hurt, one more often lonely than not, one in constant search of something that she couldn’t even name. She was smart and stalwart, strong-willed as hell, and she was the third, vital piece in the puzzle that was the trio of magic users she, Violet, and Poppy created. They were the triad. They were the very best of friends and always would be.

But Dahlia would have said it just as firmly as anyone: “Violet, don’t you
dare
come after me through something like the Dark. You have a death wish? You know better than that!”

However, there was a major soft spot of both guilt and empathy in Violet’s heart for her sister. Unlike other fae, Dahlia’s magic burned like a candle’s flame, hot and fast. Between Violet, Poppy, and Dahlia, the latter’s spells were the most powerful. And her magic was drained the most rapidly.

Dahlia had always loathed the fact that Tuath had to bed other powerful people in order to regain their power. Dahlia especially hated the fact that she had to do it more often. To her, it felt like… well, it felt like something terrible. As if she were sacrificing a portion of herself, some vital piece she could never get back.

They should have recognized her building anger sooner than they had. Poppy was surprised Lalura hadn’t realized the road Dahlia was headed down. And now it was too late. Dahlia had betrayed her king, and the Entity had whisked her away to the Dark.

For purposes unknown.

Poppy couldn’t blame Violet for doing what she did, and she couldn’t
really
blame Dahlia either. But she still wanted to strangle her. Just a little. Especially at that very moment, while Poppy was surrounded by that fucking force field, frozen in time and space.

She tried to move, tried to shift, and the tip of her nose began to itch. She gritted her teeth and thought of all the unfairness in the world, and now she noticed that her hair was in her face. She could blink and breathe and clench her jaw, but she couldn’t scratch her nose, she couldn’t brush the lock from her cheek, and she couldn’t go after Violet to keep her from fucking dying in the stupid Dark because her damn sister decided to go rogue rather than just talk about how she felt and work something out!

Poppy held her breath when she heard a cracking sound. It sounded like ice splitting on a frozen lake.
Like giants popping their knuckles.
That’s what she’d always likened it to, growing up winters in a lakeside home in a place called Kenora, Ontario. The sound was instantly familiar, and yet it filled her with bewilderment – because it wasn’t winter, she was nowhere near a lake at the moment, and she wasn’t in Canada.

It started somewhere around her right boot. If she could have moved, she would have looked down. But there was no need anyway, as the sound began to climb. It rose steadily, crackling past her hip, then up her side, and finally splicing through the force field in a fissure directly in front of her face.
Exactly
like cracking ice.

But that makes no sense
, she thought. The spell didn’t literally
freeze
a person, it just made them go still. It wasn’t cold, and there was no ice involved.

And yet, at that very moment, Poppy realized she
was
a little cold. She moved again, on instinct, jostling her shoulder. At once, the crack in front of her split wider apart, and within seconds, the entire shell of magic surrounding her was shattering. It cascaded to the alley ground like a frozen waterfall.

“What… the….” Poppy turned a very slow circle where she stood. Beneath her crunching boots sparkled a myriad of shards of magical ice that glittered with a million facets like tiny diamonds.

Chapter Ten

You could get just about anywhere you wanted to go from the Twixt, including, even, the Shadow Realm –
if
you knew where to look.

Violet glanced over her shoulder at the pack she had slung tightly to her back. Within its zipped-up leather confines was the ancient text penned by Wolfram Lovelace. It’s magic pulsed against her so hard, she could almost hear it. It was like a heartbeat, strong and dark and beautiful.

It was too bad the man was notorious. The
magical
aspect of him, Violet found fascinating. She almost felt bad for being somewhat of a fan. But assuaging her guilt a little was the fact that she saw the man’s penchant for evil and his dark magic as being two very separate things.

Like a person and their shadow.

Violet blinked at the thought, and her brow furrowed. But the portal opened an exit in front of her, and she had no time to ponder any longer. She leapt, bending her legs for what she knew would be a rough landing. The portal sucked shut behind her, and she hit the ground, catching herself with one hand on the surface in front of her.

She hissed a sharp intake of breath when something pierced her palm. Yanking back her hand, she rose quickly to stand. A small drop of blood welled in the center of her palm. She brushed it away as her vision adjusted to the dimly lit forest around her.

It was slightly misty in this part of the Twixt, and the trees had thorns that grew on vines. Sometimes those vines spanned across the ground, weaving their painful way into a thick carpet. She’d landed right in the middle of a nest of them.

“Figures,” she whispered. But that was why she’d worn boots.

This area was the brambles of the in-between world, tangled and messy where it abutted a portal to the Goblin Kingdom. That particular portal had been out of use for eons. Ever since Damon Chroi had taken over as king of the goblins and their realm, the only way in or out had been through him.

Well, more or less. He was admittedly more distracted these days than he’d been in the past, and rumor had it, you could almost just ride on through the Goblin Kingdom’s massive gates without him knowing you’d arrived because the handsome hard body was too busy wrangling three newborn babies and a veritable zoo of injured animals while trying to keep his hands off his beautiful queen.

Violet smiled winsomely. She adored love stories with happy endings, and every fae knew the Goblin King certainly deserved one.

Slowly, she rose, turning a full circle. She needed to use the Twixt to get to the Unlit Woods, where she could finally breach the entrance to the Dark. But the Twixt wasn’t exactly a safe place either. Sure, there were some harmless species of fae that chose to make the Twixt their home, such as the Duwomm, a friendly race born with two lives to live. When one ran out, the other kicked in. Talk about lucky.

But the Duwomm were one of the
few
innocuous beings you could come across here. By a wide margin, the chances were better of running into someone or something more dangerous than not. Everything in the Twixt was twisted somehow, which leant to its name. No safe food grew in the Twixt, and cute, friendly little animals usually turned out to be anything
but
.

In the in-between world, just as in the mortal realm, there were millions of species of plants, and some of those were poisonous. But, the frequency with which these occurred was greater, and the poison was faster acting, more insidious. If she wasn’t careful, she would wind up sprawled across a path somewhere between here and the Woods, fast asleep for a full week.

Here there were also strange phenomena, such as will-o-wisps, which unlike the quasi-explained balls of gas in the mortal realm, were very real and living beings in the Shadow Realm and neighboring areas like the Twixt. They were composed of the negativity that remained when a rogue shadow such as a wayward Pan was killed. They were shadow ghosts, so to speak, and like anything weightless and misty, they sometimes traveled beyond the borders of their native territory and into the realms beyond.

There were also the Dullahan in the Twixt – the headless horsemen composed of darkness who searched for
partial
bodies, namely new heads, and feared the flash of gold as if it were a deadly poison to them. But they were rare.

There were dozens to remember, perhaps a hundred she had thoroughly studied. So, she readied a defensive spell, choosing once more to opt for warlock magic rather than Tuath. Anyone in the Twixt was less likely to be able to fight against warlock magic, because it was less common here.

“Look at you, all ready to fight your way on even though you were warned not to.”

Violet spun to face whoever had spoken behind her. But only mist and emptiness greeted her. There was no one there.

Laughter rose, low and mocking. “You think that just because you know a few extra spells, you can travel into the Dark alone?”

Again, the voice was behind her. And again, she spun to face nothing.

A strange feeling suddenly overcame her, one of dizziness and disorientation. Something was wrong. Something felt way, way off.

Wait
, she thought, remembering a note she’d read about the Dark and the varying ways to get to it. One of the passages she’d studied had said something about the thorns in this part of the Twixt.

She looked down at the carpet of sharp, darkly tipped spikes beneath her thick soled leather boots. “Oh crap,” she said aloud. She glanced at her hand, and her suspicions were confirmed when she noticed the ring of red that had already formed around the piercing.

I’ve been poisoned.

At once, she pulled the backpack off her shoulders and swung it around, unzipping it as she went. From its interior, she grasped one of five small crystal bottles she had clipped to its side. She’d made the clips by hand so she wouldn’t have to go rummaging around in the bag in an emergency. She was so grateful right now for her own ingenuity, she could have cried.

Because the voice was speaking to her again, and the dizziness was growing worse. “You’ve always blown me away, how you think you’re so special just because you can cast a few warlock spells. You know, you
stole
Lovelace’s journal from Lalura. You little thief. You aren’t worthy of it.”

Stars were popping in and out of her vision. She focused on those rather than the words hissed by the strange, disconnected voice. It was a female voice, but barely. It was her own inner voice, filled with malice. That was the poison of the thorns. One pierce, and you slowly lost yourself.

The first thing they did was make you doubt. Then they made you scared. And before you knew it, you were rambling aimlessly through twisted woods, scraping the skin off your own body by moving through the thorns with abandon. The plants were an ancient safety measure put in place by the Goblin King long, long ago to protect the portal and the realm beyond it.

Violet hastily ripped the seal off the crystal bottle and uncorked it. How could she have forgotten about the trees and their thorns? Why hadn’t she been more prepared for something so small?

“Because you shouldn’t be here,” the voice replied triumphantly.

Violet tipped the contents of the bottle into her mouth and swallowed as the voice began to laugh. The laughter spread, and as the dizziness slowly lifted and the stars vanished one by one, the laughter was swallowed up by the mist and the wood and the twisted, thorny trees. Silence followed, deep and hollow. But it was brief.

“Oh, little fae. You
so
don’t belong here.”

Violet’s body went stiff at the sound of the
new
voice. This one wasn’t her own; it was male. And rather than sounding disappointed in her, it seemed wickedly pleased to find her there. And unfortunately, she recognized it, and the joined sound of laughter from the others.

She turned toward them, her mind racing. “You boys sure do get around,” she said softly as her head grass-hopped from spell to spell, and her heart raced to prepare for fight or flight. “First the Underground, and now the Twixt. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were following me.”

They were the same men she’d encountered in the Underground the night before, all six of them. It was the blond one, the one who was obviously their leader, who’d spoken to her.

“Well, now,” he said, hands in his dark jeans pockets, stature deceptively at ease, “
do
you know any better?” His eyes searched hers, black pools she could far too easily sink into and never come up again. He looked away and scanned the tangled wood surrounding them. “You don’t know enough not to come
here
. So, I’d say probably not.”