Shadowborn (3 page)

Donovan, my father, sat in a chair nearby. His light brown hair, cut shorter than he usually wore it, matched his goatee. He offered a small smile, but the tight lines of his mouth relayed worry. He was all I had remaining of my family, yet I couldn’t even tell any of my people about our relationship. Fae with mixed Seelie and Unseelie blood were considered no better than mutts at a purebred dog show.

Nix stood farther down the bright hallway. Beside him, Cas—one of Parthalan’s former guards—offered me a shy wave and a smile.

Gallagher searched my head again, little tendrils of thought creeping around like worms in my brain. He knew about the curse Parthalan left behind, though I didn’t think he’d picked up that Donovan was my father. If he did, he hadn’t let on.

“Are you in control?” Gallagher asked.

I groaned, letting my head fall back in exaggerated annoyance. “You too? Do I have ‘crazy fae’ written on my forehead today?”

Voice lowered, he said, “Your emotions are always more … volatile when the Unseelie is near.” Unseelie came out sounding as if he’d bitten into a juicy slug.

“Liam. His name is Liam.” I sighed, tired of the petty bickering between my people and the Unseelie Sidhe. How I’d reunite the two stubborn factions still eluded me. “Yes, I’m in control.”

“I have put measures in place in the event that you are overwhelmed by your … dark predator.”

“My dark predator. Nice.” I moved away, arms crossed. On a second thought, I turned back. “What kind of measures?”

“A way to isolate you from the humans in a hurry should the need arise.” He tented his digits together, the nails of his index fingers resting beneath his chin.

“Cryptic as always, I see.” I propped a palm on my hip. “Fine, if you think it’s necessary.”
And it’ll get everyone off my back.
I leaned in close. “Do you know what’s up with Nix? I’ve never seen him show his hatred for Liam as much as he did today. Did something happen between them you’re not telling me?”

“I, too, feel his discontent swelling, though I haven’t been able to discern the reason. He left Dun Bray last week during one of our training sessions, and since then, he’s kept his thoughts hidden from me.” Gallagher gave an elegant shrug and stared at me with what I took to be a hopeful glint in his eyes. “Give the word, and I will dig deeper into his psyche.”

“No way, buddy. I don’t need him pissed at me, too. I’ll get it out of him myself.” I pinned Gallagher under a glower. “Nix seems to think you know something about why we’ve been called here, so spill it.”

Gallagher turned toward the hall instead of me. “Something is happening to their people, an affliction I’ve seen before, though I hope the similarities are merely coincidence.” A shudder rattled through him.

If he’d hoped to settle my worry, his shaking hadn’t helped. Not much unnerved my aide.

The king’s intoxicating energy permeated my flesh as he came up behind me—a shockwave to steal away whatever demands I’d been about to make of Gallagher. “I should have enjoyed the time we had instead of being a jerk,” he said next to my ear. “I should have kissed you as I wanted to and told you everything, but my jealousy took over. Forgive me?”

His voice reached into me, making my abdomen twitch and tighten. How could I stay mad at him when his nearness made me react that way?

When he walked past me, I nodded, meeting his eyes for a moment, long enough for me to catch the hunger in his.

I sighed and tore my gaze from the vision before me. “Let’s get this over with.”
So I can see how good he looks without the suit.

My father stood and held out his arm. “You look so much like your mother in that dress,” he whispered. “Simply stunning.”

I let out a silly, little girl giggle, the sort only he could bring out of me. “If you say so.” I took his proffered arm and set my head down against his shoulder as we walked toward the rest of the group.

Nobody had ever questioned why I’d become so close to him, stealing moments for hugs and conversation I shared with few other than Nix, Gallagher, and Liam. Donovan’s presence filled me with calm, gentle thoughts, though I didn’t see him nearly enough since he’d become Liam’s advisor.

“I do say so, and I’m so proud of you.” He huffed out a disgruntled sound. “Later, you must tell me what’s bothering you. Your Light has changed in these last months.”

I looked up at him. Did he know about the danger I held inside of me, too? Forcing a smile and shaking my head, I said, “I think you’re going senile.”

He laughed and slipped his arm around me. After leading me to the briefing room door where Liam waited, my father kissed my cheek and stepped back.

Nix, and Neve with her pink ponytail, stood in front of us. The rest waited behind. When we’d first met, she had strawberry blond hair, but it had been slowly changing to cotton candy pink.

“Remember to keep your glamour in place at all times,” Nix said loud enough for all of us to hear. “We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

“Here’s hoping they don’t try to hump my leg again.” Liam chuckled.

I glared at him, and he shrugged, looking sheepishly embarrassed.

“What can you expect? They’re human,” Andrew, one of my new guards, said from behind me. “Not much better than dogs if you ask me.”

I turned and glared at him. “Shut your mouth. If I hear one racial remark from you in front of them, you’re off my detail. Got it?”

He gave an exaggerated bow, but the amusement never left his face.

His shaved head and the scar passing over his cheeks and nose gave him a menacing appearance. I wondered how that could have happened given the faes’ abilities to heal themselves, but I never bothered to ask. The mischievous glint in his deep blue eyes didn’t help my impression of him, or that his gaze traveled the length of my body every time he looked at me.

I turned my back on him. He was heading straight for a smack upside the skull.

“I disarmed them all before your arrival.” In formal guard attire, Nix peered over his shoulder at me, his smile apparent in his eyes. “You’ll do great. And don’t worry about Andrew. I’ll talk to him.”

“Lead on, guard boy.” Liam gestured to the door, his upper lip wrinkled in what might have been a smirk or a snarl, I couldn’t tell.

Nix and Neve opened the doors and swept the room with their usual detailed scrutiny before ushering Liam and me inside. A line of human guards wearing dark gray military uniforms stood along the back wall, hands clasped behind their backs, wary eyes pointed forward.

The two Canadian coalition members sitting at the rectangular glass table stood as we entered.

Normally we had four. The two Americans were missing.

“Welcome back to Windsor.” James Rice, spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, wore a dark grey suit. His cropped hair was the color of brown sugar, and his eyes, a murky green, conveyed his usual lighthearted personality. “You remember my Lieutenant, Bethany Ross?” He gestured to the woman beside him, her curly, red hair twisted tight and secured in a clip at the back of her head.

James stepped away from the table and held his hand out to Liam, who reached out for it. I grabbed him and tugged him away.

Liam stopped and looked at me, his momentary confusion switching to understanding as he said, “Right. My bad.”

I met both of James and Bethany’s questioning stares. “I don’t mean to be so abrupt, but it’s better if we don’t touch, I think. You know … because of last time.”

A gruff laugh bellowed out of James. “Right. Oops.” He scrubbed a hand over the redness in his cheeks. “That was embarrassing as hell.”

When we’d dropped our glamour to prove what we were, the coalition members and their guards couldn’t stop ogling and trying to touch us long enough to listen to anything we had to say. After that, guns came out of holsters. Before they fired any panicked shots off, Nix had frozen them all in place. After their initial shock wore off, and they stopped trying to kill us, we settled on some rules—mainly that I was in charge, and they were to do whatever I told them, or they were on their own.

My father sat on my left, Liam on my right. Nix stood behind me, and the rest of the guards spread around the room. Across the table, Gallagher took the seat between the Canadians.

“We’re not entirely clear why you’ve requested this meeting,” I said, though I wondered if whatever loomed in my mind’s future had moved into the present.

“Something unusual is happening to our people north of Toronto.” Bethany sat ramrod straight, hands folded on her lap.

Donovan shifted toward her. “Tell us.”

3

I leaned on the table, wishing I didn’t have to listen to what Bethany was about to say.

“Since last week, we’ve had more than three hundred reported cases of people found in a comatose state,” she said, smoothing her fingers over a pad of paper in a methodical fashion. “Their vitals are all normal. They stare. They blink. They maintain primal survival instincts and appropriate reactions to pain stimuli. As far as we can tell, there’s no connection linking any of them together. But there seems to be no consciousness, and we’re feeding them through tubes.”

Gallagher clamped his fingers onto the edge of the table.

“What?” I asked him, afraid to know the reason for his reaction.

“These symptoms are the hallmark of the Shadowborn,” he uttered in a gruff whisper, “though we’ve not seen them in centuries.”

“What the blue blazes are Shadowborn?” I glanced around at the others to see if they knew, but they all looked as confused as me.

“Legend has it they descend from the earliest of the Goddess’s living creations on this Earth—the elves. Though I’ve met a few throughout the ages who dispute that claim. They can travel through shadow only, rise up out of one and steal away a soul without the victim ever knowing what happened. The body remains alive but with no consciousness.”

I scratched my head, but it didn’t help me make sense out of what he’d said. “But … why steal the souls?”

“That’s all the Shadowborn are.” Gallagher’s audible swallow rose above the shifting of butts in chairs. “Human souls are the easiest to snatch and command. The last time they did this was more than a thousand years ago when they wiped out a third of the fae in the same manner. We weren’t even their target, but they were building an army.”

Had Gallagher been alive then? How old was he?

“Explain.” Liam slid his hand over top of mine under the table.

I squeezed it, allowing the electrical current to relax me a little.

“There used to be a race called the Brunai. Vicious, water-bound creatures that grew out of control and dominated the seas, including all of its creatures. Desperate to regain their freedom, the selkies hired the Shadowborn to wipe them out.”

“What are selkies?” James shrugged out of his jacket. Sweat stains marred the underarms of his white shirt.

“Distant relatives of the fae.” Gallagher sat up straighter, a hint of a smile tilting his lips. He did love to give history lessons. “They are water elementals, able to shift into seal form, but only when they don their enchanted seal skins.”

James cocked an eyebrow at Bethany as if to say
now I’ve heard everything
. “And you think these Shadowborn have been hired by these seal people again?”

Gallagher nodded. “Hired, yes, but not by selkies, I don’t believe. I know the price they paid upon their first hiring of the dark creatures. Never will they summon them again. In their words, may death take them first.”

“Jesus,” James said.

Based on the little tremor shaking Gallagher, I took it the price was one of flesh and blood. I didn’t think bringing
that
up in front of the coalition would be such a good idea.

“What about the Magi. Maybe they hired them?” I turned to Liam. “They did blackmail your guys into killing the selkies and stealing their magic.”

Liam’s lip twitched before it settled back against his teeth. “Now isn’t the time for that conversation,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

Through my stare, I conveyed,
you will tell me before the day’s end or find my foot against your ass.

“The bigger question is who were they hired to destroy this time?” Donovan’s arm went around the back of my chair.

“Yeah.” I smiled my agreement with my father. “Knowing the target will lead us back to the dicks who ordered the hit in the first place.”

Everyone gave his or her opinion at once, raising a ruckus my mind refused to block out. I clenched my fists and tried to breathe through the sudden influx of emotion wafting through me like black smoke in a small room.

Voices wobbled into a lower octave like guitar strings unwound too far on their pegs, creating a humming twang that became indecipherable.

I launched out of my seat clutching my throat, preparing to yell them all into quiet submission.

Faces became foreign, distorted and monstrous.

Those who had once been my friends turned into beasts, their glares aimed toward me.

Choking on a scream, I flew back into the wall, my chair crashing onto the tile. My hands pressed over my ears. “Stay away from me!”

Unbidden, dark energy surged forward within me.

What have you done to me? My hands! My face!

A black nothing surrounded me. Shadows crept around the ceiling above in silence.

Have to get out!

All sound stopped. Nothing moved, not even the current of air that had been filtering down from the vent in the ceiling. Even the dust particles froze in place.

One of the creatures crouched on my left, another did the same on my right. They each took one of my hands from my ears. I closed my eyes, fear waiting like a rabid wolf about to consume my flesh with jagged teeth.

Their touch surrounded me in calm, forcing my focus to resettle and return to normal. With my eyes open again, Gallagher and Andrew stood beside me. Through hyperventilated breaths, I managed to say, “What’s ha—happening to me?”

“Take a moment.” Gallagher held my trembling fingers in his. “Andrew can pause time, so nobody is aware of us at this moment. Do you know why you’re so frightened?”