Blazing the Trail (25 page)

I knew I would dream of them enfolding me, snaring me, squeezing me, sucking the life out of me, and offering my shadow to the ShadowEaters.

“I should go in,” I said.

“No lock can protect you from them.” Jared was serious. “Should dragons be afraid of what needs to be done?”

“I’m not afraid,” I insisted, but we both knew it was a lie. “I just need more information before I risk my life. I need to have a plan.”

He watched me, humming, cutting me no slack.

I threw out my hands. “I’d built a team. I had everyone working together. Then you came along and scared Derek away, made it sound like I have to do everything myself. That’s not leading. That’s sacrificing.”

“Don’t Wyverns sacrifice their self-interest for the good of everyone else?”

“That’s what the last Wyvern did,” I said, my tone bitter. “I’m not quite ready to die.”

Jared said nothing. He held my gaze for a long moment, then bent to start the bike. “Suit yourself,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to answer to me.”

I knew I’d disappointed him, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t disappointed me a few times. I stood there and watched him ride away, knowing I was safe—for the moment—within his spell.

But as soon as he rounded the corner, I ran for the house. I was sure there were Mage spells pursuing me, but when I locked the door and looked through the peephole, all I saw was a cloud of golden eyes gleaming in the darkness.

M
EAGAN AND
G
ARRETT AND
L
IAM
were at the dining room table. Mrs. Jameson was in the kitchen, and dinner smelled good. Vegetarian lasagna, maybe. Even though I hadn’t thought I was hungry, I realized I hadn’t eaten much all day. The looks of relief on their faces reminded me that I hadn’t checked my messenger, either.

“You okay?” Liam asked, getting up when I appeared. “We were worried about you.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You’re late,” Meagan said, her expression filled with concern.

“I was with Jared,” I admitted, shedding my coat and taking a seat.

“I knew we had to trust you,” Garrett said. “That you’d let us know if you needed help.”

“But the thing is, we’ve found something,” Meagan said. “We broke the code on that book!”

“Not we—Meagan broke the code,” Garrett corrected.

“You mean the book about Mages and their spells that you found in the fall?” I asked. “The one that was in Latin and in code, too?”

“Right. We’d translated the Latin, but never broke the code. Until today.” Garrett nodded and nudged Meagan, his expression filled with admiration. “Tell her.”

Meagan blushed, pushed her glasses up her nose, flicked a look at Garrett, then back at me. “It’s about music, just like we thought, but it’s specifically about
musica universalis
.”

“Should I know what that means?”

“The music of the spheres,” Liam contributed. “Pythagoras wrote about it originally. For him, the harmony of the spheres was about celestial sounds emitted by the planets, each one harmonic with the others because their orbits were in proportion.”

“You know that?” I asked him, surprised.

He grinned. “I’ve learned it today.”

Garrett continued. “The idea is that there’s perfect harmony in the heavens and that we should emulate that here on earth.”

“Okay. But I don’t understand the harmony.”

“Pythagoras is the one who discovered the mathematical relationship between pitch and the length of the string on a stringed instrument, which led him to conclude that harmonious sounds can be mathematically calculated.”

I was lost and it must have shown on my face.

Garrett grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a sine wave. I remembered that from math class. Then he drew vertical lines, one at the beginning of the wave and a second where it started to repeat. “That’s one interval,” he said, and I nodded. Then he drew a second sine wave, one that had two repetitions in the same linear distance.

“That one’s half as long,” I said.

“If it’s exactly half as long, these two notes will be in perfect harmony.”

“But these are graphs,” I protested.

“Which represent tones.” Meagan went to the piano. She played a note, then a second one. When she played them together, I could hear the way they vibrated together in a very sweet kind of harmony.

“Wow. But what does this have to do with ShadowEaters?”

“The Mages figured out that if you have four harmonic tones in unison, it invokes power,” Garrett said. “Their book is all about those four perfect notes, how to sing them purely, how to add them together, then what to do once you have that chorus.”

Liam leaned closer. “Even better, it’s how they made the NightBlade out of the stone from a meteorite.”

“It’s the weakness Kohana was looking for. It’s how we can break the NightBlade,” I guessed.

They all nodded. “As long as the power we summon isn’t stolen by the ShadowEaters for their own purpose,” Meagan added.

Cheerful thought.

“Do you know what the notes are?”

Meagan shook her head. “It’s obviously a secret passed down orally through the generations. It’s never defined in the book.”

“Or at least we haven’t found it yet,” Garrett added.

Meagan frowned. “It’d be hard to get pure harmonic notes with the human voice and to hold them for long enough to achieve anything. I’d think they’d each train for one note.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Garrett said.

I had a thought and leaned across the table. “Isn’t your mom surprised to have the guys here?”

They all clearly thought this was funny, because their eyes danced with mischief. Meagan grinned. “Garrett told her that we had an assignment together, that he and Liam were new here and needed extra tutoring.”

“You beguiled her,” I accused Garrett, and saw the truth in his quick smile.

“Just a little. For the greater good.”

“But what about later?”

“We’ll guard from the roof,” Liam said.

I shook my head. “You’d better ask Jared for some spell protection. They’re out there and they took other shifters last night. I don’t want to lose you guys.”

“I’ll ask him,” Meagan said, and pulled out her messenger to do it. “He can teach me the spell and we’ll weave it together.”

“Does Jared know the four notes?” I asked. “Or one of them?”

Meagan shook her head as she kept tapping. “I already asked.”

“That part is up to us,” Garrett said.

It was like a riddle, but one I had very little chance of solving on my own.

There was an optimistic thought to end the day.

“Has anyone heard from Derek?” I asked, ever hopeful, but they shook their heads as one. Everyone had messaged him, so now I tried, too.

I seriously hoped I hadn’t offered up the next sacrificial victim.

I
SLEPT WITH
S
KULD’S
shears under my pillow, one hand locked around them.

Just in case.

I
shivered in the night, feeling the cold chill of snow slip down the back of my shirt. I tugged the comforter up higher, trying to block the icy fingers of the wind, and squeezed my eyes shut. I held on tight to the shears. I really didn’t want to visit Skuld and her sisters. I thought maybe I could ignore the whole dream interlude.

No luck. A finger poked me in the shoulder. Hard.

“You think I can’t tell when you’re awake?” There was a thread of humor in Skuld’s tone. “Come on, Wyvern. You have work to do. No ShadowEaters will get you on my watch.”

I felt her move away, obviously expecting me to follow. The absence of her presence was as formidable as the weight of her gaze on me. I felt a huge yawning void behind me, dared to be relieved that she was gone, then caught a whiff of carrion.

It wasn’t her absence that made the air seem still.

It was that the wind had completely stopped. I sat up and looked.

Skuld
was
gone.

I think. The thing was that I couldn’t see very much clearly. I was surrounded by a blanket of white fog, fog that glistened slightly, as if illuminated by a source I couldn’t see. I stood up with reluctance, the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. That smell of rot was pervasive and troubling. I recalled Skuld’s affection for battlefields and had an idea where I might be.

I looked down and yelped. I was standing on a pile of corpses. There was blood staining the ground, the smell of putrefaction in my nostrils, gaping wounds and spilled guts and eyes staring at nothing everywhere I looked.

Suddenly, being without Skuld didn’t seem like such a good idea. I thought I heard something ahead of me and to the right, so I ran that way. I winced as bits crunched under my feet, knowing they were bones and teeth and skulls.

For my once in my life, I wished I’d worn boots to bed.

My bile rose along with my panic. My state was such that spotting Skuld, striding through the detritus as if she were going to pick up the mail, was a relief. I raced after her, and she must have heard me coming, because she paused and turned to watch me approach. There was humor in her eyes, as if I were the crazy one.

I gagged when I saw the eyeball impaled on the end of her knife.

She laughed at me, then ate it off the tip of the blade, chewing with gusto. “Thought you were too tired after your day of doing nothing,” she said, arching a brow.

I had to look away, look anywhere but at her with her gleaming eyes and those squishy pink eye bits between her teeth as she smiled.

“I didn’t do nothing today,” I protested, trying to defend myself. “I fought the ShadowEaters even before the sun was up.”

“But not when you could have beaten them,” Skuld said, giving me a significant glance.

“They could have captured me with their spells if I’d gone into that glamour. It would have been reckless and stupid.”

“Bold,” she said, bending to examine a corpse. The person had been decapitated, and Skuld showed a keen interest in the severed head. She slit the rotting skin, poked her knife into a fissure between the bones, and used it to widen the gap. I nearly retched.

“It would have been stupid,” I said.

“It’s stupid to forget your assets.” She gave me a steady glance, munching on a treat from the decapitated body. The corpse’s staring eyes seemed to look at me, too. “I’m going to stop giving you gifts if you forget to use them.”

“Where are they now?”

“Hovering.” She peered into the distance, chewing. “They prefer to hunt when you’re all asleep, but that will change as they get stronger.” She finished her snack and tossed the head like a baseball before turning to stride on. I glanced after the discarded head and caught my breath.

Because it had landed beside a corpse that looked just like Derek.

I charged through the debris with purpose, needing to know for sure. I dropped to my knees in front of the body, not caring about the muck anymore.

It
was
Derek, and that truth made me whimper. His pale blue eyes were wide open, staring up at the sky. His heart was silenced. I touched his shoulder, unable to believe my eyes, but his skin was cold. His hoodie was torn and I looked down to see that his chest had been ripped open and his guts were spilled on the ground.

Then I did puke.

“You’ll know this one, too,” Skuld said with an ease I wasn’t nearly feeling. She seized my shoulder when I didn’t move and dragged me through blood and bodies to another corpse.

Garrett, frozen forever in a grimace of pain. As still as a sculpture. His body was shredded, just like Derek’s. I saw with horror that he cast no shadow.

“No,” I whispered.

“Sure,” Skuld corrected me easily. “Take a good look at the future, Wyvern.” She strode away then, content to leave me to take it all in.

They were all there. It didn’t take me long to find them. King and Mozart and Jessica, Liam and Garrett and Nick, Derek and Kohana. They were all mixed up, their bodies tangled with one another and various parts torn away. There were other corpses mingled with them and I guessed that these were the shifters of their kinds, the ones I didn’t know. I saw the kid brothers of Liam and Garrett and Nick, too, the
Pyr
who were just coming into their powers. I saw all of the older
Pyr
I knew and loved, every single one of them slaughtered and dead.

So many dead shifters. The future was a battlefield covered with fallen shifters. It had to be all of them, really, except for me. I had to put my head between my knees for a minute at the prospect of being all alone.

When I opened my eyes, I saw a dragon talon severed from the claw. It was so covered in blood that I couldn’t even identify the original color.

I pushed to my feet and shouted after Skuld. “Why? Why are you showing me this?”

My cry echoed and I realized that the air was ridiculously still. There was destruction in every direction, fog obscuring the distance, but the only movement came from me and Skuld.

The only life.

She turned to peruse me, still chewing. “Because you let it happen, of course. Do you think I show you these things for my own amusement?”

“I wouldn’t put it past you. There are a lot of livers here.”

She smiled and sighed, nudging a body with her boot. “And more than one good soul.” She gave me an intent look, as if I were missing something important.

That was when I saw that the corpse she poked was me.

Impossible!

I marched to her side in terror and denial, forcing my way through the fallen, needing a closer look. It
was
me, wearing my fave black jacket and boots, silver rings on my fingers and my earlobes, my body ripped open and my guts spilled on the ground.

Utterly still.

One hand was missing.

That had been
my
dragon claw I’d found twenty feet away.

“What did I do?”

She shook her head. “No, Wyvern. The question is what
didn’t
you do.” With one last searing look, she spun on her heel and walked away. She moved really fast, covering distance in a major way with her long strides, but I tried to run after her.