A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) (29 page)

The ebony figure stood before them, the orange snake twisting around her arm — the only moving thing about her until the blue and green wings with eyes at the tips snapped open. She opened her eyes, and she seemed to radiate light from beneath her skin. Turning, she pointed behind her with the hand not holding the iron key to her lips.

The blackness behind her parted like a curtain onto a barren field. Unlike their normal dreams, the field wasn't filled with the bones of the dead, but the hunched figures of hundreds of people. They bowed deeply in supplication to something Angelica and Jovian couldn't see yet.

Behind the ranks of hunched backs clopped a bone-white horse, its eyes illuminated with death, and on its back rode a black cloaked figure. The rider of the Pale Horse.

Angelica and Jovian shivered, and their trembling was mirrored through the hunched backs of those gathered past the Pale Horse. As if in response to the feelings running across their skin, the figure turned, and from within the shadowed cloak, they were able to see a hint of gold, which quickly shifted to a noxious green.

Jovian gasped, and Angelica felt it mirrored in her mind.

Black shuck!
Jovian said and Angelica thought at once.

The figure laughed, a female laugh, and while they recognized it, they couldn't place where they had heard it before. But wherever they knew it from, this laugh was a perversion, a mockery of the laugh they had known.

“Who is it?” Jovian asked. Angelica shook her head that she didn't know, but she did — somewhere inside of her, she knew who this was. This person, so powerful, so into their own, not who they had once known, that was for sure, but whatever name was on the tip of her tongue wouldn't pass her lips.

“I don't know,” she admitted.

“But you feel they are familiar, right?” Jovian asked.

“I know them like I know myself; I just can't figure out who it is,” Angelica said.

The figure turned and pointed, like the ebony lady with the orange snake. Angelica and Jovian looked past the Pale Horse and its rider, and the fog parted like a dream, and there stood the terrible Turquoise Tower.

It flared with light, and Angelica fell to her knees. There was an impact beside her, and she knew that Jovian had also fallen. But she couldn't think about him then, because there was a pain so terrible in her back that Angelica felt she might tear apart at any moment.

She screamed, and her scream was echoed by the hundreds of postulant throats gathered before the monument. The light strengthened, and she felt something tear free from her back. Bones that hadn't ever been stretched found the breath they had been waiting for.

They were like arms behind her, stretching out — the pain of muscles cramped from holding position finally able to relax and unfurl.

The coppery smell of blood reached her nose, and the sound of something heavy and wet landing on the ground around her. It was her flesh, she knew.

The light faded, but the pain of growth still dulled her vision. When she came to, lying on the ground, panting through the pain, she saw black feathers floating through the air, and she turned her pained face up to see the hundreds of figures stretching to their full height. No longer were they human, but angels, black and white wings stretching higher and higher. And then they knew war, as black-winged angels and white-winged angels clashed in a battle that had seemed to wage since before the world was fashioned.

The Pale Horse and its rider clopped over the ground toward her, and she noticed the rider now had a full set of black wings which cast Angelica and Jovian in shadows, protecting them from the painful, transforming light coming from the Turquoise Tower.

The figure laughed again, and with the figure's laughter came tears. Angelica felt the fear and the dread they had felt over the last few days bubble up, and as the sound of sobbing came from behind her, her own tears spilled over her lids and made tracks down her cheeks.

As tears blurred her vision, the image of the warring angels faded in a gust of smoke.

They were no longer in the field before the Turquoise Tower, but the field they were in was still a wreck.

“What is this place?” Angelica asked.

Jovian stood from the ground, and Angelica was relieved at least not to see wings sprouting from his back. He eased the cramped muscles in his back and looked around. As another gust of wind billowed the smoke, the scene was revealed.

Joya stood, her back to them, crying. A figure lay on the ground before her, a pool of blood gathering around its head, matting long black hair to the withered grass. Snow, or ash, had started falling, soaking into the bloodied ground.

No matter what happened here, the world didn't care. The snow still fell as if there was no difference between this carnage and the streets of Meedesville.

“Jovian, is this…?” but he hushed Angelica as he neared Joya.

As Jovian touched her arm, a rusty kitchen knife fell from her hands and stabbed into the ground. It was covered in blood. Blood dripped from Joya's lax hands and she turned, burying her face in Jovian's shoulder.

As she moved, Angelica was able to see past her brother and sister to the figure on the ground.

Alhamar.

Angelica sat straight up in her bed.

“We have to leave, now!” she said. Joya and Jovian weren't so hard to wake up. In fact, at her pronouncement that they had to leave, Jovian and Joya stood as one and started preparing their departure.

If Caldamron and Shelara thought it was strange, they made no mention of it. Caldamron was still too worried about falling out of the sky to say much of anything. He helped pick up camp with a steady gaze fixed on the clouds, as if making sure the sky held its position and he wouldn't get sucked out into the blueness beyond.

“What did you see?” Uthia said, materializing out of the forest.

“Something isn't right at home.” Angelica felt a surge of fear at even saying it, like whatever was in her chest was bigger than her words, and threatened to sneak up behind them, carry the words back into her throat and hold them captive there.

They passed the Rayakshas’ and the Zandelos’ homes that day without a thought for either family. Both houses were shut tight, as if warding out whatever malignancy might be on the road.

And all the while the smell of smoke got stronger and stronger, until it fused with the rising bile at the back of her throat. When Angelica saw the black smoke rising over the next hill, she couldn't help herself: she rushed to the edge of the road, and threw up.

Jovian came to her side then, rubbing her back as she retched up everything she had eaten for the last week, or so it felt. When she was done, Angelica realized the tears in her eyes had nothing to do with the vomiting and everything to do with the understanding of what lay ahead.

“Nothing will ever be the same again,” she sobbed.

“Come now,” Jovian said. “It could just be them burning in the fields.”

“What, do you think I'm a child?” Angelica asked. There was anger in her flooded eyes when she looked up at Jovian.

“There's no time for this,” Joya barked. “There might still be survivors.”

But Angelica knew Jovian and Joya were only holding onto a hope they knew was lost the moment they smelled the smoke.

Angelica dried her mouth and with the help of Joya's wyrd they sped around the corner in Voyager's Pass and saw the wreckage of their home before them.

At first Angelica couldn't see anything that looked like the plantation she had left. It was nothing but gore and smoke. Bodies of farmhands she remembered were pegged to trees by broken boards or other debris, or strung up in branches like some macabre ornaments of chaos. Her mind couldn't make sense of what she was seeing.

She stumbled to the front gate, or where the front gate had been, but now hung off its hinges, smashed and smeared with blood and soot. On shaky legs Angelica made her way up the crushed stone path. Parts of the house she remembered poked out of the teeth of its ruin.

It looked like the plantation had exploded from the inside out; a ruin of blocks and wood and gore lay around the yard at varying distances from the house. At times Angelica had to pick her way around debris in the walkway — or she should have, but since she was looking frantically for their father, instead she tripped over obstacles.

Angelica imagined that she would see Dauin at any moment. Maybe the smoke would clear and she would see him kneeling there, strong, stained in the blood of his enemies, talking softly to a worker as their life slipped from him.

But that didn't happen.

She could see the basin of the sink in the upstairs bathroom, and the smoke that curled out of her bedroom window. The entryway was open to the elements, the front door smashed to bits, splinters of its former splendor scattered over the bloodied ground.

She couldn't look at the mess of bodies, entrails, and severed heads. Even though she wanted nothing more than to find her father, she didn't want to see him there.

“Dad!” Joya yelled out, jogging past Angelica. “Dad, where are you?”

Joya drew to a stop, and looked around. Angelica knew what her sister was feeling. It was completely hopeless. Dauin could be any number of the ruined lumps in the yard that had once been a person.

“What ha—” Joya tried to say, but her voice cracked.

It finally sank in to Angelica what had truly happened, and she slumped to her knees. Confusion lay over her like a blanket. She had remembered playing with Jovian under that lilac tree where Candalyn now hung, impaled on a broken branch. Over there, to her right, was the field where their birthday parties had always been held, but now was only a smoldering mound of what she hoped was wood, but knew from the stench was bodies.

A bellow came from Jovian, and in his cry of torment the ground shook. He fell silent, and so did the ground, trembling into stillness, now only a memory like the home they once knew.

Shelara, Ulga, and Caldamron stood back at the gate, letting the Neferis youths have their moment.

“He can't be dead,” Jovian whispered.

“But he is,” they heard a familiar voice. Angelica looked up to see their cook, Ashell, pick her way out of the ruined entryway. The wind toyed with her brown hair and rustled the smoke-stained skirts around her stout frame. She held a rolling pin in her hand, and she looked more deranged than Angelica ever thought another person could.

“He said you would be coming back,” Ashell told them.

“Father?” Joya asked, turning around.

Ashell snickered, then outright laughed. She laughed so hysterically to herself, clutching at the burned-out doorway with a hand dried with blood.

“No — Dauin died before he could even form a thought!” The idea of it must have delighted Ashell, because she started laughing harder. “You should have seen him when he saw her!”

“Saw who?” Joya asked.

Porillon,
Angelica thought, and hatred seethed in her. Porillon, the woman who killed Jovian, who was behind Amber’s abduction, and now the sacking of their home. She
would
kill that woman!

But Ashell wasn't listening. She looked up, a hand to her throat, and brandished the rolling pin as if it were a sword. She was mimicking their father in his death throes, they could tell. A look of love came over her face, so completely in character with their father they could almost see him in her actions, pressed against the wall, reaching out to someone he knew, someone he loved.

Then she broke form and started laughing. Ashell pushed herself from the door.

“So
pathetic
,” she said, calming now from her laughter. “Her henchmen swooped in and rearranged a little bit, a welcome home gift for you all.”

Hatred surged through Angelica, she stood, a growl forming in her throat, her hands clenched at her side. She drew on the wyrd of the land all around her without realizing she was doing so, and when she loosed her vengeance it was swift and just.

Dark purple lightning arched out of the clear sky directly toward Angelica and she reached up for it. Harnessing the bolt, she threw it at Ashell and it hit right where she stood. The ground lurched with the force of the bolt, tossing dust and dirt up around the yard. When their heads cleared from the resounding boom, there was nothing left of Ashell but a smoking black space where she had stood.

“NO!” a scream tore from the barn. Angelica had no time to respond before the dark form was on her, pegging her to the ground. His first hit knocked her unconscious.