Blazing the Trail (7 page)

“So talk,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. I would go with the bold Wyvern routine, I decided.

“Not here,” he said. “Get in.”

I laughed.

“Seriously, Zoë.” His eyes were wide and he looked terrified. Again I wondered: Was that the truth or an illusion? It seemed a smidge over the top, especially if my dream hadn’t happened yet. He should still be cocky about their plan, at least the way I figured it. “Look, Adrian’s got this crazy idea and I don’t know how to talk him out of it. I need your help.”

I leaned back against the fence beside the sidewalk, keeping my distance. “That has to be a first.”

He shoved a hand through his hair. “He found this old book, and he thinks he can manage this spell, but I know he’s not skilled enough. I’m worried that it will all go wrong and no one will be able to stop it. He won’t listen to me!”

I straightened at that. “What kind of spell?” When he didn’t answer, I guessed. “The Invocation of Destruction?”

He stared at me in shock. “How do you know that?”

I shrugged. “How can you do it, though, without the NightBlade?”

And how could I stop them from even trying?

Trevor averted his gaze and shoved a hand through his hair. “It’s a special rite. I’ve never seen it done before. Adrian’s
sure he can nail it, but I’m afraid.” He did look freaked. I felt a teensy bit sorry for him. “This isn’t a joke, Zoë. You don’t know what he did last night.”

My Wyvern sense was on full alert. “Then why don’t you tell me?”

Trevor looked from side to side, as if there would be anyone stupid enough to stand out here in the snow and eavesdrop on us. His voice dropped to a hiss. “He went out to eat shadows. He said it would build his strength.”

“Whose shadows?” I thought I already knew the answer, but had to ask.

“Just get in. We have to stop him!”

“What makes you think I can change Adrian’s mind?”

“Maybe we should be on the same side, Zoë. Maybe this is important enough.”

Maybe Trevor wasn’t bad to the bone.

“Look, Zoë, there’s no time. The ritual has to be done tonight. If we’re going to stop him, we have to do it now. Who knows what he’s done while I’ve been gone? Just get in!”

“Do you have a plan?”

He nodded. “There’s only one copy of the book, at this library, in the reserves. I want you to incinerate it so everything in it is lost forever.”

“Can’t you destroy it yourself?”

His lips tightened. “I’ve tried. I think it needs dragonfire.” He looked at me. “Shifter power.”

That was news. “Why?”

“Trust me on this. Get in!”

Trust Trevor. That was a stretch.

On the other hand, it sounded like Adrian had been the one who had attacked Mozart—and he might be stalking more shifters. He knew what enough of us looked like in our human skins to find us. I didn’t trust Trevor to have my best
interests at heart, but I did trust him to understand Mage lore better than me.

And I wanted to believe that he had some redeeming features.

I pulled out my messenger and sent a message to Meagan that I was going with Trevor and hoping to stop Adrian from attacking more shifters. She’d figure out that I meant Mozart.

“Come on!” Trevor said, revving the engine.

I still hesitated a moment more before I got in.

That was all the time it took for me to check for spell light. There wasn’t any, so I figured that it would take Trevor longer to conjure a spell to trap me than it would take me to spontaneously manifest elsewhere. I had confidence in my dragon abilities—and also feared this might be my own chance to turn the tide and stop the ceremony. That was a risk I was prepared to take.

In hindsight, I can see that my decision was chock-full of assumptions.

T
REVOR’S CAR WAS PRETTY PLUSH
inside, with leather seats and a dashboard that looked as if it had been carved of wood. (Did they ever really do that?) I felt as if I should be wearing mirrored sunglasses, or a swinging ’60s Mondrian-inspired dress, go-go boots (white ones), or some other throwback fashion item.

Then he reached the main road beyond our school and I forgot about fashion statements. I was too busy hanging on.

Trevor drove like a maniac. Waaaaaaaaaaay too fast. I appreciated that he was worried about finding Adrian sooner rather than later, but wished I was under my own steam. Speeding was one thing, but he didn’t seem to be entirely in
control. This did not reassure me. Neither did his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel.

I took this as a sign that he really was scared.

“You could slow down,” I said, when he took a corner on two (squealing) wheels.

“No time to waste,” he muttered, and, I swear, he drove even faster.

We left the part of the city I know really well, lunging into an area I’d never visited before. The buildings were neither new enough to be sleek nor old enough to have the grace of bygone days. They were all square and practical, made of brick and concrete, so similar that they could have been poured from the same mold. I saw a paved schoolyard with a chain-link fence around it, little kids running back and forth inside their cage, and was glad I didn’t live around here.

Then Trevor took a couple of quick turns and screeched to a halt. He turned off the car engine. He’d parked in front of a building with broad concrete steps and double doors. The sign over the doors said it was a public library.

I still felt that foreboding of doom, but it seemed to me that we couldn’t get into too much trouble in a library.

Shouldn’t hindsight have served me better? I’d assumed myself to be safe before and been wrong.

Misplaced confidence was the first sign of trouble.

“The book is in the reserved collection,” Trevor said in a hushed voice. “They won’t let it leave the building.” He came around the car with purpose. “Come on!”

“You don’t think people will notice if I shift shape and start a fire?”

He was dismissive. “I’ll launch some spellsong. Don’t worry about the details—just fry that book and leave the rest to me!” He leapt out of the car and came around to my side.

I took a good look at the building. What was wrong? I had a very, very bad feeling.

“I’m not sure about this,” I said, just as the passenger’s door was opened. “Maybe it’s not a good idea.”

Trevor smiled as he tugged me out of the car, and I did not trust that smile.

Note sign of trouble number 2.

The street was deserted. Completely empty.

Portent of disaster number 3 present and accounted for.

Or was I just being chicken? Because if there was a book, I wanted to see it. I liked the idea of destroying a Mage tome. Breathe a little fire and terminate the possibility of anyone following those instructions ever again. It also sounded like there was something special about shifter power, something that worried the apprentice Mages, and I definitely wanted to know more about that. I didn’t mind taking a small risk in order to get the job done and change the future for the better.

I knew I couldn’t truly trust Trevor, but I’d beaten him before; even if Adrian was here, I’d thumped him a couple of times, as well. I rationalized that I could always spontaneously manifest elsewhere to get myself out of trouble. Even if I wasn’t entirely accurate in targeting locations when I did that, all I had to do was be anywhere else.

Piece of cake.

“The book’s inside,” Trevor said. “Only copy in the world.”

I was curious. You know what they say about curiosity and cats. I was pretty sure that didn’t apply to dragons.

Trevor and I started up the steps; then the building did a very odd thing.

It wavered.

Like a sheet in the wind.

That was when I knew it was a glamour. Whatever it was disguising couldn’t be good.

The book wasn’t here.

It was all a ruse.

A trap.

I spun to run, but Adrian lunged out of the glamour and snatched my other elbow. He’d been waiting there for me, disguised by the spell. Now there were two of them, one on either side of me. Adrian pulled hard to enough to make me stumble, and when I yelled in protest, he laughed.

When I looked up, I saw the orange spell light dancing in his eyes. He could have been filled with it, brimming with it, the spell light boiling up inside of him to fill his eyes.

Oh, shit.

In the heartbeat it took me to process that new data, Trevor kicked my feet out from beneath me. I fell, skinning my hands. I shouted and tried to shift shape, but an orange bolt of spell light slapped me across the face.

I trembled, too stunned by its impact to even respond. The pair of them hauled me up those steps while I was disoriented. They weren’t actually steps at all. They dissolved as we moved forward, disappearing as surely as if they’d never been.

Guess what the glamour was hiding?

You’ve got it. A vacant lot.

Unless I was very much mistaken, this was the same vacant lot where Skuld had brought me. That other kid from my dream was there, singing his Mage chant, holding a gleaming golden orb of spell light captive like a balloon on a string. It was filled to bursting with ShadowEaters, and they pressed against the side closest to me as Trevor and Adrian carried me into the lot.

“It’s not the full moon yet!” I protested.

“Sure it is,” Adrian said. “You just can’t see it in the daylight.”

No! I couldn’t screw up this badly. I couldn’t be the reason their spell succeeded and my dream came true. I had to get out of there ASAP. I called to the shimmer, intent upon being anywhere else on the planet, but I couldn’t find it. Somehow it had been shut down or turned off or blocked. I panicked and felt for it frantically, but no luck. I could only find a hard wall of orange in my thoughts.

A spell barrier that kept me from the power of what I was.

You can believe that I lost it.

I struggled and I twisted. I fought and I kicked and I swore and I screamed. None of it made any difference. Trevor and Adrian sang a nasty spell, one that I’d heard before and liked even less this time. As soon as they started, golden ropes of spells appeared in the air, growing longer and thicker as they wound all around me. I was trussed up in no time and powerless to escape, just like a shifter I’d seen sacrificed when I infiltrated the Mages’ hive memory; just like Jessica and the guys had been in the fall.

And my blue shimmer was AWOL.

I didn’t stop trying to summon it, even though I knew it wasn’t going to answer. Meanwhile, Trevor and Adrian hauled me ever deeper into the vacant lot, the one that wasn’t very vacant after all. They joined in the chant with the other kid, making the globe overhead get bigger and brighter, the silhouettes inside moving with greater agitation. The ShadowEaters pressed against the barrier of the spell orb, so close that I could see their eyes.

They glowed orange, just like in my dream. They had no pupils, no irises, nothing but orange spell light shining like beacons where their eyes should have been. The
ShadowEaters could have been just skins filled with orange spell light. It was like the light in Adrian’s eyes but a hundred times worse, and a thousand times more terrifying.

They were going to eat my shadow and destroy me, and there wasn’t one thing I could do about it.

Except panic. I had that covered.

And my terror only increased when I saw Kohana.

The Thunderbird shifter who had tried to betray my kind to the Mages the previous spring, who had attacked me in the fall, and who had worked with me under protest to destroy the Mages’ collective memory sauntered toward us, working his way through the broken bottles and discarded car fenders and busted furniture.

He still had dark hair and dark eyes, a secretive smile, and a tight pair of jeans. He was wearing a dark T-shirt this time, one that covered the feather tattoo I knew he had on his shoulder, and it seemed to me that his expression was a little bit mean.

Was he enchanted? I dared to hope, but there was no spell light around Kohana.

My heart stopped cold when I saw that he had the NightBlade, the weapon he had stolen from the Mages in November. He’d said then that he was going to destroy it, as it was the tool they used to cut the shadows away from the bodies of their victims, the better to offer sacrifices to the ShadowEaters. But he was back, he still had it, and it didn’t look damaged in the least.

Plus he held it up, as if intending to use it.

This was how they were going to complete the ceremony—they
had
the NightBlade. Kohana had brought it to them.

No! Kohana’s expression turned resolute, and my very bad feeling became forty-seven thousand times worse.

Because it didn’t take much to figure out whose shadow was the plat du jour.

T
HE
S
HADOW
E
ATERS CLEARLY KNEW WHAT
was going to happen. Their forms were moving more quickly, shifting and shimmering, vibrating with excitement and anticipation. The orb was being stretched in every direction as they fought to become free. And there was a point in the orb where they strained toward Kohana, their fingers grasping in the direction of the NightBlade.

Even though they were still inside that orb of spell light that had conjured them, I could hear them salivating, licking their lips and clicking their teeth together. I swear their bellies growled—even though they didn’t appear to have any.

They were the stuff of nightmares.

I struggled as I heard Trevor and Adrian and the other kid sing the spell of sacrifice. I knew I was next, that I was feeling the same horror and futility the other sacrificed shifters must have felt. I did not want to know how it felt to be eaten alive by ShadowEaters.

If they took me out, as Wyvern of the
Pyr
, I feared the rest of the dragon shifters would lose heart. My dad would be easy to trap then, in his grief, and he’s the leader of our kind. I feared that all the dragon shifters would seek revenge, only to follow me and my dad to oblivion.

Because I’d been too cocky.

Big mistake.

I knew there was nothing I could do, but I still fought. I watched the mesh of spell light grow brighter and denser. Kohana’s form was like a shadow falling over the spell light. He held the NightBlade high and called the invocation, the same invocation that the Mages had sung in the fall.