Sacrifice, p.1
Sacrifice, page 1
part #3 of The Shift Chronicles Series
Copyright © 2016/2020 by S.M. Gaither
Cover by Covers by Juan
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Sacrifice
Book Three of The Shift Chronicles
S.M. Gaither
Contents
1. practice
2. power
3. freak
4. closed doors
5. vision
6. bait
7. walls
8. trapped
9. flesh and blood
10. feral
11. fear
12. mess
13. suspicious
14. shadows
15. problem
16. blind
17. madness
18. monsters
19. dirty
20. strong
21. ruthless
22. restored
23. fire
24. sunrise
Epilogue
One
practice
“For the love of all that is good on this green earth, BLOCK, CHILD!”
“For the last time, stop calling me a child!” I shouted back, lunging wildly to the right and narrowly avoiding the blast of smoke-colored magic that exploded against the rock.
The rock that I’d been standing in front of, like, two seconds ago.
That could have been my face that that exploded against, I thought, an involuntary whimper escaping me.
My breathing turned shallow and rapid as I scrambled to regain my balance on the narrow cliff edge. Across from me, and towering some ten feet above on his own, much more stable looking piece of the mountainside, Faolan looked completely indifferent to my shouting. He was only focused on building up another round of magic to launch at me. It tumbled and swirled between his hands, a dark, stormy grey ball that crackled with blue bolts of energy. He bounced it up and down a few times, his eyes narrowing toward the panting, probably-pathetic-looking creature that was me.
He stretched his arms wide, and the sphere stretched with them, into a javelin-like shape that he pointed my direction.
“Not ready,” I gasped.
The corner of his mouth quirked.
I gulped in a breath and managed to shout, “Not ready!”
Is this guy trying to kill me?
“You won’t die if you block!” he yelled in response to my panicky thought.
He is trying to kill me.
He pulled the javelin back, and he threw.
“Not ready, not ready, NOT REA—”
There wasn’t enough room left to run. I twisted out of the way as best I could, but a sliver of the magic still caught me in the arm with an incredible amount of force. It was like someone grabbing my sleeve and yanking as hard as they could. It threw me off my feet and sent me tumbling down the mountain. I landed on my side some twenty feet below, and I immediately threw my arms up to shield my face from the scattering dust and rocks that came tumbling down with me.
Bad idea, I realized, just as a particularly large chunk of rock slammed into the fresh, bloody wound the magic had burned into my forearm. My eyes stung with unshed tears. My teeth gritted so hard from the pain that I’m surprised they didn’t crack from the pressure. I curled into a tight, miserable ball and tried to imagine I was some place—anyplace— except here getting my butt kicked up and down the mountainside like this.
“...She didn’t block,” my sensitive ears heard Faolan mutter.
He hadn’t moved from his place at the top of the cliff.
Irritation surged through me and fueled movement. I uncurled and rolled over onto my hands and knees, which made a fresh, stinging pain shoot through my scorched flesh. My arm shook as I tried to brace it against the ground.
“Son of a mother duck.”
(That’s a new one,) Vanessa thought.
Yeah, it was. Because the only thing that was actually improving during these training sessions with Faolan was my already-expansive collection of creative curse words and phrases.
That crazy old werewolf inspired a lot of cursing, it turned out.
Vanessa picked her way down the rocks on delicate paws and slid to a stop next to me, lowering her head and offering her strong neck to me. I threw my uninjured arm around it and pulled myself back to my feet. Again. For probably the twentieth time that day.
I was brushing the bits of rock and dirt from my knees when I sensed another body behind me, his appearance so sudden, so close, that it sent the lycan part of my brain into an uneasy uproar. My wolf side still hadn’t figured out this unnatural creature that was Faolan; it didn’t like the way he came and went so quickly, here one moment and gone the next, in a way that made him almost impossible to properly track.
The human me didn’t particularly care for it either, actually.
But my human self had bigger issues with him at the moment.
I spun around and found him so close that our noses practically touched. He didn’t back away though. He never did. I think it was some sort of test, the way he always got in my personal bubble like this—like he thought he could make me uncomfortable enough that I would be the one who backed away.
He was sadly mistaken, though.
I had no problem with yelling directly into his face.
“Are you insane? I barely dodged that! Look at my arm!”
“You weren’t supposed to dodge it,” he said calmly. “You were supposed to block it. Why do you think I chose these cliffs as our practice ground, hm?”
“Um, is it because you’re insane?”
“It was so you would have nowhere to run,” he snapped.
I glared at him, but between the pain in my arm and the fatigue that these past two hours had caused, I had a hard time coming up with a snappish response of my own.
“Because running will not save you, nor anyone else, now,” he said, his voice quieter as he finally turned away. “So you are going to have to learn to stand your ground against this sort of thing—against magic far greater and impossibly more powerful than mine.”
(Have you ever thought about maybe taking it slow?) Vanessa asked crossly, taking a step after Faolan’s retreating figure. (Alex has only had her grandfather’s magic abilities for like what, five weeks now? And Cyrus had an entire lifetime to study and perfect his control of that magic. You can’t really expect her to immediately get the hang of this!)
I sighed, but didn’t bother telling Vanessa I didn’t need her to defend me; it was just in her nature to do it.
Besides, I knew what Faolan’s response would be as soon as Vanessa asked the question.
“We don’t have a lifetime to work with, unfortunately,” he said.
Vanessa’s ears twitched and she let out an irritable snort, but there was nothing to say, and no argument to make about that.
Because Faolan was right.
I needed to get better at this. Fast. Every aching muscle in my body—along with every new burn and bloody scrape I’d gained today— seemed to flare painfully at the mere thought, but I had no choice but to push all that to the back of my mind. To refocus. I didn’t want Faolan to keep walking away. I wanted to keep going, to at least practice a little more today.
I had to.
But Faolan shook his head as soon as I thought it. “I believe you’re done for the day,” he said.
“What? No, no, I can keep going! I just—”
He spun, and grey daggers of magic flew from his fingertips in one incredibly quick, fluid motion. They hurtled straight at Vanessa. She crouched, prepared to spring aside.
Too slow, I thought.
My vision blacked out.
When it flickered back into focus, I was standing in front of Vanessa, my hands raised in front of me. And I watched as magic—my magic— slammed into Faolan’s. It wrapped around the daggers and crushed them into puffs of wispy smoke that floated harmlessly up into the cloudless sky.
I was completely locked in place for a moment, not even breathing as I watched the wisps disappear.
Then the familiar weakness, the one that always came after I actually managed to do any of this magic crap, hit me.
Hard.
I dropped to my knees. I couldn’t help it. My head was pounding. Everything was spinning. I could barely breathe, much less stand. Several moments passed before I came back to my senses, before I could see and hear well enough to make out the knobbly-kneed old man leaning over me, humming thoughtfully to himself.
“Ah, so you did learn something today, after all,” Faolan said. “Well done.”
“Yeah, this definitely feels like a victory,” I wheezed.
“Small victories add up to large triumphs,” he replied.
“What is that? Something you read on a fortune cookie somewhere?”
He crouched down next to me. Back in my bubble again. And he was giving me his most serious, stop-making-dumb-jokes-and-pay-attention-to-me face.
“Do you even understand what you've just done?”
“Um…”
He sighed. “This magic is an extension of your inner self that reflects, and is tainted by, your wants, desires…” he said. “Just as you only managed to br
“Yeah, that’s all well and noble,” I said, pushing back onto the balls of my feet, “but it doesn’t make any sense. Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t desire for you to almost kill me a few minutes ago, but my magic wasn’t making an appearance then, now was it?”
“No. But then I’m not sure you really wanted it to.”
“I—”
“Because aside from protecting yourself, what will it mean, to gain the sort of control over this magic that your grandfather once had? To be able to summon it as effortlessly as I wanted you to?”
“...I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
I stared at my feet and silently wished we could just keep practicing, that I could focus on the physical movements of this. Because it was easier than thinking about what my life was headed toward, about the hows and whys of it all.
“It will mean people following you,” Faolan said, “for better or worse. People gravitate to power. And this is even more true of lycans; your kind once had grand masters, you know. Benevolent ones, in the beginning—a master Father and Mother Alpha who lorded over even the alphas of individual packs, creating a unity among lycans that we haven’t seen since those ancient times. Your grandfather was one of those masters. And this is power that you potentially have, now, whether you can control it or not. Power that we need, if we want to have a chance of winning this war for good.”
“I didn’t ask for that power, though,” I said, dusting a few more bits of dust and rock from my pants. “Mother Alpha? Are you serious? I would be a terrible mother.”
“Have you ever met someone with the exact life they asked for?” He actually looked thoughtful for a moment, but then answered his own question by shaking his head. “It’s better this way, at least,” he added. “People who want power are seldom the ones who should have it. And the ones who think they know exactly how to use it are the most dangerous of all.”
“Well that’s perfect,” I said, “because again: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. So I’ll make a perfect leader, at least by your standards.”
He smirked, an expression that looked a bit out of place on his ancient, heavily-wrinkled face. Then from the pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a small stick covered in intricately-designed carvings of different phases of moons, and he gave it a couple flicks. It grew to nearly five times its length. “At any rate,” he said, digging one end of the stick into the ground and resting his chin on the other, “I still think that’s enough for one day.”
“...Fine,” I relented, and I turned to Vanessa. Because if we weren’t practicing anymore, I had approximately zero desire to see that old man’s face for another second.
But the instant I turned away, THWACK!
Faolan slammed the stick into the side of my head hard enough to make the trees spin all over again. I fell forward and buried my forehead in the dirt, pressing the heels of my palms against my temples and trying to stop this newest throbbing pain.
“Tomorrow,” Faolan said, his cheerful voice just inches from my ear, “I believe I’ll teach you about never letting your guard down.”
By the time I managed to blink my eyes open again, he was nearly out of sight, skipping and humming his way through the evergreen trees in the distance. I didn’t bother trying to stop him.
“I hate literally everything about that guy,” I moaned as Vanessa crouched down beside me.
(Not literally,) she said.
“Yes. Literally. There has to be somebody else that can help me practice this stuff. Anybody else.”
She wagged her tail against me in a friendly sort of way, and her tongue lolled out of her mouth in an expression that—if lycans were capable of it— I would have called bemused. (You know as well as I do that our contacts in this department are sort of limited,) she said. (Magic users aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Particularly not ones we can at least sort of trust.)
I sat up, and without thinking about it, my fingers found the white-gold ring that I’d hung from a chain around my neck. “There was another magic user I trusted,” I muttered.
(His knowledge of this stuff wasn’t as advanced as Faolan’s, you know.) She sank back on her hind legs and cocked her head sideways. (Besides, let’s be real here: do you really think Kael would be a more sensitive teacher?)
“I mean, I doubt he’d hit me in the head with sticks.”
She snorted—the canine equivalent of laughter. (Don’t be so sure.)
I gave her a wry grin, but it quickly turned into a frown as I got to my feet. Because I needed to stop doing this. To stop letting every conversation circle back around to Kael. He was gone. He’d been gone for over a month now, and he hadn’t sent so much as a postcard, hadn’t dropped a single phone call to say hey, I’m still alive, no need to worry.
So why the hell should I care enough to keep thinking about him, if he couldn’t be bothered to do that much? And when he’d left me, now of all times, with a war approaching and this weird new magic stirring in my blood?
He was the only one who had managed to calm that magic when it awakened in me a few weeks ago. The only one who made me feel like I could stop, like I could come back from the massive mistake I’d made.
And now he was gone, just like so many others were gone, and these past weeks had been nothing except day after awful day of trying desperately to get this power I didn’t ask for under control before I hurt somebody.
Or worse.
So no, I didn’t want to care about where he’d gone or if he was ever coming back. He’d abandoned me, and now I had bigger problems to focus on. I didn’t need him, anyway. I could take care of myself.
But for some reason, I was still wearing the ring he’d given me, chained like an anchor around my neck.
Two
power
It was dark by the time we made it back to Eli’s house.
Or back to headquarters, I suppose was the more proper term at this point. Because it wasn’t the warm, inviting mansion of a house that I’d first visited what seemed like forever ago now. The quiet halls and private rooms with only a crackling fireplace for company were long gone; now, everything was movement and noise and crowds of people shuffling about, preparing for war.
More people than I ever would have expected.
I should have been grateful for that, I knew. That we had so many on our side, I mean. Now that the pact was dissolved, people couldn’t ignore the threat that Valkos and his army posed, and so they’d been coming from every direction—some more willingly than others— to face the inevitable fight.
There were members from nearby packs that I was familiar with, but also ones I’d never even heard of who came from neighboring states and beyond. We had declared our own territory a neutral, cooperative gathering ground, but most of our visitors were still obviously uneasy. Packs had staked their claim on different rooms, and for the most part, their members kept to those respective rooms.
Typical wolf behavior.
Still annoying, though, because it meant regular scuffles breaking out in corridors. And sure enough, Vanessa and I walked straight into one of those scuffles the moment we stepped inside.
All it took, though, was one of them—a younger guy, with dreadlocks—catching a single glimpse of me, and the scuffle was over just like that. He stumbled back from me so quickly that he nearly tripped. The one he’d been fighting with did the same a second later. And then they both took off, more concerned with trying to get out of my line of sight than with whatever they’d been fighting about.
I had that effect on just about everyone here.
It was great.
