Sleepless (Curse of the Blood Fox Trilogy, Book #1) (35 page)

Traken stared at me for a moment, his
unreadable brow darkening his face. Then he turned, ever so slightly, and
flicked a finger at the cage. It jerked and flew up out of the water, which splashed
up around the edges like natural liquid this time. I hurried over to it, and
glanced inside. What I saw made my stomach lurch. The Angelblood’s body was
there, pale and bloated and twisted around itself like noodles in a bowl. It
barely seemed like he could have bones. I let out a quaking breath and stared
at him like that, stared as long as I possibly could manage. I couldn’t see his
face, but I wondered what sort of expression it held. I wondered if the
peaceful Angelblood I had met in Rusuro ever cried for the fates of his
brothers and sisters. Worse than seers, they were used like magical beasts for
spells and power, and thrown out as if they weren’t even human.

I looked, because I knew someone had
to.

“I’m sorry,” I said aloud. Something
caught my eye, and I glanced down below the cage. My mind balked, and I fell to
a crouch, staring beneath the surface of the water that was glowing, but no
longer metallic. It was crystal, crystal clear.

“What are you doing?” Traken asked
from his spot near the door. He had refused to come in any further. I started
to motion for him, and suddenly felt a slight tingle in the air that froze me.
I narrowed my eyes.

“Traken… there’s no one here? Are you
sure?”

His eyes sharpened, catching the
warning in my voice.

“There are no minds to listen to. A
presence is the aura of a soul… there are no souls besides you and I.” His
words were quick, shallow. I spun around again, feeling another tingle of
something from a different direction. The ceiling was high in this room, though
not as high as the hallway, but the lack of any light besides the magi-globe
hanging in the air between Traken and myself cast dark shadows all over the
walls and in the corners.

“Something’s here,” I said in a loud
whisper. “Block the door.”

Traken slammed it shut instantly,
closing us in. His eyes scanned the walls just like mine, teeth gritted.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s there,” I said, and thought I
saw the shadows shift. I whirled again. There was magic… or something… moving
around my skin from the far reaches of the darkness, but I couldn’t get rid of
the thought that it wasn’t normal.

Another movement, and this time Traken
and I both turned. His breath hissed.

“I saw it! There
is
something.”

“Can you make more light?” I asked,
sliding both my swords out of their sheaths and whipping them around. Their
weight was familiar, but their hilts were still and cold.

He didn’t even deign a response; four
more magi-globes popped into existence above our heads and hurtled towards the
four corners of the vast room. To my right, I saw it—something made of darkness
and mist, only half-solid, sweeping across the wall like a cockroach. It moved
at inhuman speed, its misty entrails trailing long waves of after-image behind
it.

Traken braced as if to lunge forward,
and I stopped him with a sharp, “No.” My feet were already moving me, and I
bent forward to gain speed. “Stay at the door, Traken. That’s its only way
out.”

He did, but I felt the magic stir and
pulse around him. The thing on the wall stopped, and turned to look at me. It
had shoulders like a human, and limbs lost in the dark fog that clung to it,
but the head was nothing but a large, bulbous growth. There was no face, just a
single, wide eye. The pupil shrank as it took me in, and suddenly the thing was
tearing across the wall and around the room.

I followed, charging towards the spot
I knew it would soon be. I launched myself onto the wall at full speed,
managing one, then two steps. My swords swept forward in a wide arc just as the
shadowed creature flew past.

It screamed, a sound much like a wild
animal’s, and I fell back onto my feet with a groan. Instantly the room spun
and my stomach screamed at me. As I wobbled, the thing fell to the ground in
front of me and wiggled back on to its legs, too many legs but they all looked
human, and shot at breakneck speed towards the door.

“Yours!” I shouted, scrambling after
it but slower. Traken was ready. The air surged around him, and the creature
slammed against the floor, screaming again. It was the same gravity spell he
had used on me in this very same room. As it shivered, stuck to the floor, I
steadied myself again and trudged after it.

“Don’t kill yourself already,” Traken
advised, raising an eyebrow as I approached. He had come away from the door to
the creature’s side as well. I didn’t answer him; my vision was red.

“You,” I said, and slammed my foot
down on its head, right under the wide, wide eye. Its whole body bucked, but
couldn’t go far against the constant pressure Traken was harnessing against it.

The Week of Colors was over, though,
and I knew I needed to move fast before Traken’s energy wore out.

“It’s not one of our creatures,” he
added, kicking it lightly as well.

“I know,” I said, eyes narrowed on the
thing. My words came out through each hissing, labored breath. “What have you
done? More importantly, why?”

Traken looked up at me sharply. The
thing, groaning on the floor, seemed to be oozing mist from the places I had
struck it. Its voice, high and pained, came out like a human woman’s, even
though I could see no lips.

“Don’t hurt me, Child. I’m not allowed
to hurt you. Don’t hurt me.”

“A voice?” Traken said. “There is no
soul; how is it speaking?”

“What have you done?” I repeated,
practically shouting. My blood boiled, and still my hungry swords didn’t stir.

“What
has
it done?” Traken
asked pointedly. I motioned towards the pond with Valentina’s glittering blade.

“Look inside.”

Traken walked those couple meters and
peeked in. I saw his back stiffen, and knew the feeling. It was the same
emotion that had crashed into me when I glanced down into the pond, through
waters that for some reason were now clean of any metallic tinge, and saw the
ethereal body of his young master lying there, submerged like a rock, skin
glistening and vivid eyes wide open with shock. The hand I had cut from his
body lay on the floor of the deep pond next to him, and his stump reached
towards the surface as if he had been trying to climb out. Beside him was
another body I couldn’t recognize, a nameless male whose back had been facing
up.

“He’s dead,” Traken said, tone flat.
“The other one is Balron, our witch.”

I dug my foot harder into the thing’s
neck/head. Words were having a hard time forming on my tongue, but when they
did they came sharp and loud. “He was mine. I’ve waited such a long time. You
stole him from me.”

“He was meaningless, worthless,” the
thing squeaked, squirming. “He wasn’t supposed to harm you, he was supposed to
leave you alone. It was the deal, but he went back on his word. He took things
too far.”

“Too far?” I roared, gripping my
swords so tight I could feel the leather from their handles imprinting my skin.
“It is more than a hundred years too late for ‘too far’. Who are you? Why do I
matter so much to you, when Popollo didn’t? Why interfere now, after I finally
found him?”

“You can’t know, I can’t tell you,”
the thing screamed, whimpering under my weight. “I am just a servant, Child. I
am just a pawn. You are the important one.”

“Why?” I asked. “Who do you serve?”

“They are of the shadows,” it said.
“They watch you, they wait for you. We have been waiting for your song. Curious
luck, little miracles. Changing the impossible. That is your power, the power
that will change our fate.”

“What does this have to do with me?
Whose fate?”

“Everyone’s,” it said, eye growing
wider. “Don’t you know, Child? Isn’t it strange, those with Angel’s breath
converging around you? A man with power, and his two most loyal betray him the
moment you arrive? You can change anything.”

“I can’t change everything,” I
growled. “I can’t bring my people
back
. Who do you serve? Were they the
ones who told him to curse me?”

“He took it too far,” it sobbed. “The
Dark Ones told him there was someone important among the Children, someone
whose fate he must set in motion. The fate of the rest of the Children was his
payment. He was a greedy fool, and so the fool is gone. Your song will spread
across the world. It will heal us.”

“My song? My blood?” I wanted to
scream. My mind was racing. “Why does everyone want my blood? It doesn’t grant
life.”

“It heals life,” the thing insisted,
groaning under the increasing pressure of Traken’s spell. It was panting out
words as if the words would save it. “Child, oh please Child, don’t hurt me.
Look at your sorcerer. Look at your swords. It healed them. They have all
tasted bliss.”

I looked down at my swords, a chill as
harsh as the cold that death brings rushing down my back. Healed? Did that
mean… they weren’t there anymore? The swords dropped out of my hands, clattering
to the floor with an empty sound, and it felt like I had been holding
corpses.                   

“No, no,” I murmured, backing away
from the thing. I wanted to kill it, tear it apart, and it wasn’t even a danger
to me. I wanted to make everything it said a lie. I looked at it, hands
trembling as I curled them into fist. “Who are they? Tell me.”

“They—” Its answer cut off into a
horrible scream, a sound so loud it rung in my ears and echoed in each far
reaching corner. The misty shadows that clung to it like skin bubbled up, bones
popping somewhere underneath the surface as each limb bent and shrunk. The
scream was then quickly cut off as the body suddenly flattened and then
evaporated into a thick cloud of shadowy smoke, which billowed along the floor
of the room and slowly disappeared.

I was left staring at nothing, breath
quivering, trying to reel in each rabid thought that threatened to unnerve me.
Traken wandered back over as I fell to a crouch, staring at my swords.

“Something killed it,” he said,
speaking slowly. He sounded surprised.  “It wasn’t me.”

I heard, but did not register how that
could be more important than the two beautiful blades in front of me that no
longer held life, whatever form that life might have been. 

“We were supposed to kill him
together,” I said instead of replying. I reached out and touched Phernado’s
shiny gold-stained metal. It wasn’t just silence, like with the unicorn. Now
that I was looking for it, I could feel an emptiness that had never been there
before. They were definitely gone. “They left me alone, and he died anyway.
This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t right.”

“It seems that you had worse things
than my father after you,” Traken said. He came to stand beside me, behind my
right shoulder. “He is paranoid. This town has magi-wards all over it, and this
building has protections from outside magic, ill-will and displacing. The only
way to get in and out is through the entrance I brought you, which is guarded
by his guardians and a couple hundred more protection wards. These people,
whoever they are, managed to get this thing in through the barrier, a thing
strong enough to kill him and the best witch in East Kurdak. I’ve never seen a
living familiar that could do that. Not even the Le Fam could manage it.”

“This isn’t right,” I said again.
“What am I supposed to do if he’s already dead? I can’t take anything from that.
I can’t put to rest haunted souls, I can’t destroy the curse, I can’t do
anything.”

My palms pressed flat against the
stone floor, I could feel the quivers shaking through them. It was as if my
village had been destroyed all over again. For so many years, I had lived on
the raw ambition that if the people responsible were still alive, then I would
find them and make them pay. Now that hope had been shattered. Nothing felt
complete, or resolved. I hadn’t gotten to show my enemy my strength, I hadn’t
gotten to shove in his face how wrong he was and make him regret ever causing
so much pain. I did not get anything from it at all.

“Are you lost already?” Traken’s voice
trickled into my conscious from above. His voice was indifferent, and somewhat
cold. “I certainly picked the wrong side to be on.”

His words grated my already injured
ego, and I snapped. One arm whipped out and grabbed him by his wrist, yanking
him towards me. He grunted, falling forward, and in that same moment I twisted
in my crouch and used my opposite fist to punch him hard in the stomach and
send him flying backwards instead.

Before he could move I was leaning
over him, one fist pressed hard to his chest, fighting back the dizziness that
swam through my vision. My own voice sounded too loud in my ears.

“Lost? Don’t mock me, Traken. I am
going to
destroy
them. I am going to hunt down every single person
involved in whatever shadow group this is, and make them answer me. I am
not
a puppet.”

That’s when I looked in his face, and
my rant dried up on my tongue. His eyes were dancing, the warmest smile spread
across his face.