Shadow Kissed

Chapter 3

Three

Gray

Murderer.

Guilt flooded my gut, hot and prickly.

She was just a kid. I was supposed to save her.

Instead, I’d gotten her killed.

I puked all over the front of my shirt.

This can’t be happening.

Think, Gray. Think.

Wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I returned my attention to her glassy eyes. Empty eyes.

Right now, more than anything, I wanted her alive. I wanted to take her to Luna’s Café for a cup of coffee and a hot meal, to teach her how to defend herself against vampires and rogue shifters and bad men hiding out in alleys. I wanted it with a deep and endless yearning, a soul-sucking desperation that felt like it was turning me inside out.

“Please, Bean. Please.” I stared into her vacant eyes. “Come back.”

Silence.

I reached forward again, grabbing her limp hand, but something felt… off. Like I was being watched. Trapped. I whipped my head around and scanned the end of the alley, peering into the misty darkness of the street beyond. An old car backfired nearby, making me flinch. But I saw nothing. Smelled nothing.

I turned back to Bean, my arms erupting in goosebumps. Instantly the temperature plummeted, turning my breath icy with frost.

The alley tilted sideways. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt an old, familiar rush, a pulsing heat gathering deep inside.

No. Not again…

I fought to resist it, but it called to me, warm and inviting where seconds ago I’d been shivering. I opened my eyes, the world spinning and blurring before me.

When it finally stopped, the alley was gone.

I was on my knees in a lush, moonlit forest, my hands full of rich earth.

There were no buildings here, no brick walls or vampires or greasy men. I was alone in the middle of nowhere, the only sound a gentle breeze whispering through a canopy of leaves. The soothing scents of lilac and lavender washed over me.

I know this place.

Rising slowly, I wiped my dirty hands on my jeans. Several paces ahead, indigo light pulsed, urging me forward along a path clogged with tangled vines and flowers so big their stems had bent beneath the weight.

Picking my way through the growth, I followed the light until I reached a small clearing surrounded by dense trees, darker and more ominous than the forest I’d been kneeling in. Nestled among the blackest branches, a hundred pairs of silver eyes glittered in the night.

Watching.

Not so alone after all…

At the center of the clearing, a chest-high pedestal made of smooth white stones rose out of the earth, vines twining through the gaps between the rocks. Here was the source of my seductive light—a pentacle etched into a stone slab balanced on top, glowing as if it had been carved with living, indigo fire.

Instinctively, I reached forward, my fingers slipping into the promise of warmth offered by the light. My skin tingled, but it wasn’t creepy or unpleasant; more like getting into a bath that’s just a little too hot—a surprise at first, then bliss.

“What is this place?” I whispered.

A soft breeze danced across my hair, bringing with it the lilac and lavender scent I knew so well. The answer was in my head, all around me, everywhere at once.

I knew. Remembered.

This was my place. My magic. My source.

The place of calm serenity I’d retreat to, deep inside myself, when my adopted mother Calla was first teaching me how to use my magic.

Some witches drew magical energy by visualizing their bodies extending into the earth, like the roots of a tree—Sophie was like that. Others got energy from the moon, or by raising a cone of power with other witches, or by performing rituals to call on the grace of their deities.

There were as many ways to access energy for magic as there were witches.

Me? I’d always come here to access it.

I hadn’t, though—not for over nine years.

But now I felt the magic humming through my veins again, waking up after its long nap.

“How is this possible?”

Behind me, the leaves rustled.

It felt so good, so right, such a part of me I wondered how I’d managed to go so long without it. Calla had always told me it was a rare and powerful witch who could generate her own magic energy, but once we figured out that it was my method, she’d done her best to teach me how to care for it, access it, and replenish it.

I’d loved coming here. Always. And for the first sixteen years of my life, I’d known it as well as I’d known my own face in the mirror.

But I was twenty-five now, and this place… It wasn’t exactly as I’d remembered.

Beneath the scent of lilac and lavender I’d always associated with my magic, something else lurked—a cloying, rotten scent I couldn’t quite place. Where once the path was clear and well-defined, edged in knee-high colorful blooms and ferns as soft as feathers, now it was wild and untamed. Uncontrolled. Before, there had been no eyes watching, glittering and unblinking in the pale moonlight. And out beyond the stone pedestal, the gentle rolling meadow so bright in my memory was now a gnarled, leafless forest. The trees were enshrouded in mist, their branches barren and broken.

It looked like a great black skeleton army on the march.

Nothing is static, a voice inside me said. All things must change.

As I peered into the dark wood, the bare trees began to shift, slowly revealing a new path. Something compelled me forward, though this path was narrower, the trees so closely packed their branches scraped my arms.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched—not just by the eyes of the forest, but by something else. Something sinister.

I will find you…

Rubbing the goosebumps from my arms, I hurried down the path toward another clearing, stopping before a stone archway choked with black vines and carved with glowing, silver-blue runes.

Enter, the trees seemed to whisper.

An iron gate appeared beneath the arch, and I wrenched it open and stepped through. Stars glittered in the night sky, but soon the shifting clouds obscured the view. The clearing before me darkened.

The trees were closing in.

Dense mist crept out from the forest and swirled around my ankles, and once again I was shivering. The black skeleton army stepped forward, and for the first time, I noticed the black-and-silver threads draped over their branches, swaying in the breeze like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

It was breathtaking.

As I watched, mesmerized, the bare black branches stretched forward, closing in around me. With the same instinctual movement that had guided me into the warm indigo light on the pedestal, I reached for the closest branch, twining my fingers with the cool, shimmering threads. They wound around my hands, instantly tightening, icy cold and wrong, wrong, wrong.

“No!” I jerked backward out of the mist and back through the gate, falling hard on my ass. The forest vanished on impact, the alley reappearing just as quickly. But this time, I was surrounded by a dome—some kind of iridescent shield. It glimmered like a soap bubble, blocking out the mist and the sounds of the warehouse district.

The tinsel-like threads had vanished from my hands, but my skin was streaked an oily black where they’d touched. When I turned my hands over, my palms ignited in dark indigo flames that licked the night air and cast the alley in a blue glow. The flames didn’t burn.

I gasped, turning to look at Bean. Silver mist poured from her mouth, shimmering in the darkness like the sheerest gossamer scarf.

Her soul.

On the pavement next to her, a raven appeared. He was more beast than bird, with opalescent black feathers and great golden eyes that held the wisdom of a creature a thousand times his age. I stared open-mouthed, my body frozen in shock. I knew the raven wasn't a real bird—not one that I could feel with my hands—but a shadow creature that by all accounts, I shouldn't be able to see.

He was a messenger. A ferrier of souls.

And the most magnificent, terrifying creature I had ever seen.

But I couldn’t let him take her. She wasn’t ready. Wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t be helped.

Possessed by some ancient, unnamed knowledge, I raised my flaming hands, horrified as they caught the edge of Bean’s soul. But instead of igniting, the misty fabric of her essence simply recoiled, slithering back into her mouth.

The raven disappeared.

The flames in my hands died out, the black streaks fading from my skin.

The shield dropped away.

“Bean!” I knelt beside her, pressing a hand to her forehead. She was even colder now. Her eyes were still open but covered with a sick, milky-white film shot through with tiny blue veins.

The sound of new breath sucking into her lungs nearly stopped my heart.

Bean gasped and sputtered, her legs twitching. Then she sat bolt upright.

I shot to my feet and stumbled backward, slamming into the wall behind me. Didn’t matter. For once, I was grateful for the pain. The bricks were reassuring against my shoulders, a piece of solid reality in a night that had gone utterly sideways.

Bean moaned, her curdled-milk eyes staring right through me.

My heart dropped into my stomach. Was she a zombie? A revenant? Whatever she was, I’d made her, and I’d done it with something dark. Other. Something festering inside me that I didn’t understand and absolutely did not want to f**k with.

Worse, I’d broken my only unbreakable rule. After nine-plus years of lying low—not even so much as a heat spell for my coffee or a money spell to help with rent—I’d just used my magic.

In a series of jerky, disjointed movements, the girl—creature—hauled herself up. She pinned me with those rheumy eyes, seething with an unspoken accusation.

You did this to me, witch.

I wanted to bolt—every instinct inside me shouted at me to get away—but I couldn’t. I let her approach, shuffling and awkward, my own body paralyzed with a mix of fear and morbid curiosity.

She tilted forward, face close to mine, and inhaled deeply.

But rather than attack, as I’d half-expected—or die again, as I’d half-wished—she simply turned away and shuffled down the alley, disappearing into the misty dark.

Instead of going after her, I did what I do best.

Ran like hell.