Chapter 6

This going to be darker than Hellim’s Hell, isn’t it?I thought as I dressed myself in a red silk agapa, black breeches, and boots. I braided my hair into a fishtail, flicked it over my shoulder, and gave Vex a look.

He had this … confident male expression of male triumph on his face. It was two parts sexy, one part annoying. And I loved it.

“Don’t antagonize the others,” I warned and he nodded, his smile fading slightly as I handed over a spirit charm for him to slip around his neck. I didn’t think he was the type, but I figured better safe than sorry. “And the, uh, mate thing, I’ll …”

“Get back to me when you’re ready,” Vex said, stepping up close to me, handsome as hell in a borrowed white undershirt and a pair of Air’s unbuttoned breeches. Vex was far too big to close them up properly, but gods above and below, did he look good. “Let’s just … go try this spell, shall we?” I nodded and turned toward the door, pausing when Vexer put his arms around me and whispered in my ear. “Does it make me a bad man that I’m hoping it never works? I just want you to be safe.”

I shook my head and opened the door—to find Jasinda standing there staring at me with wide, wide eyes.

“Everything is set up,” she said slowly, almost like she wasn’t sure quite what to say to me. “Trubble told me you wanted to try the spell so …”

“I do,” I said with a sharp nod. Because I was about two hundred percent certain the spell was going to fail the first thousand times we tried it. Why not start with the first dud?

“Brynn,” Jas said, grabbing my arm and yanking me down the hall away from Vexer. “Did you just do what I think you just did?”

“Uh, what?” I asked as we started down the stairs and I wondered what Eli’s and Air’s reactions would be.

“Had sex with the hunky griffin dude? You did, didn’t you? Oh my gods, you did!” Jasinda did a fist-pump that had me gaping. “He’s so good for you, Brynn. So good for you. And he’s gorgeous, and he smells good, and he woke you with that kiss.”

“Just like your friend, Matz, woke you,” Eli said from the bottom of the stairs, turning Jas’ cheeks a brilliant red color. She pushed past—well, through—him and over to the silver ash on the floor in the front room. “Good morning, Brynn,” Elijah said, leaning lazily against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked me up and down before flicking his eyes up to Vexer as the griffin man descended the staircase.

“Good morning,” I said, casting my glance over to the couch where Air was sitting, his eyes locked onto me. He looked like he was about this close to wrapping his ghostly hands around Vex’s neck and strangling him. “Air.”

“I’m glad you have the support you need,” he murmured, turning away and standing up, pacing into the kitchen and going for the ice box. It wasn’t until he’d reached out for the handle and missed it that he started cursing and pacing the floor.

“How could you sleep with that guy?” Dyre asked, suddenly right there in my face. “There are so many more important things to worry about.” I blinked at him, my mouth hanging open in shock as he swung his katana into the wall … and managed to create quite the nick. For a new spirit, he had an exceptional amount of influence.

“Did you seriously just stab my wall with a ghost sword?!” I asked, blinking a few more times as he scowled at me and glared with copper eyes, raking his fingers through his lavender hair. He even fluffed his tail at me which I was pretty sure constituted an insult of some sort. “It’s none of your business who I have sex with.”

“I’m sorry,” Trubble said, sitting on the floor near his brother’s feet and not looking at all apologetic about any of it. “But he’s a virgin and sometimes gets unnecessarily worked up about these things. I think it’s the sexual frustration poisoning his brain. Or maybe his feelings are hurt because he has a huge crush on you, sacrificed his life for you, and now has to watch you mate with a griffin instead of him?”

“Would you please shut up?” Dyre asked, sheathing his sword and turning that angry glare on me. “I don’t care who you have sex with. You’re right, that is your business, but it’s ridiculous with everything that’s going on that you’d even think to waste time like that. Do you have any idea what your dreams actually mean?”

“My dreams?” I echoed, putting a hand on my lower belly and feeling that achiness between my thighs that promised I’d had a very good time with Vex. I just prayed to Haversey that I wasn’t walking funny. “How do you know about my dreams?”

“Uh, guilty,” Professor Cross said, raising one hand from his position on the floor. He was lying there, completely shirtless, absorbing sunlight for his living ink. It was hard to not notice how toned and attractive he was, especially with all those feel-good hormones running through my body. “They’ve been on your mind so much, they’ve been impossible to ignore.”

“My mother’s coming to you in your dreams,” Dyre said, slouching against the wall with a sigh, his tail bobbing in irritation beside him.

“That’s your mother?!” I asked, taking a step back and bumping into Vexer. As soon as I touched him, felt his warm press into my back, I swear, my anxiety levels dropped about a hundred points. He was good for me, this Master of the Travelers’ Guild. “No wonder you were so protective of her at the Vibrant …”

“She’s been possessed by a shadow,” Dyre said, turning his eyes to the floor. I wondered what’d happened to his body after I’d been knocked out by the spirit whisperer. He was a prince, after all, so had the queen saved it like she’d done for her son? If so, I hadn’t heard anything about it. In fact, I hadn’t heard anything from Everess at all and that was starting to worry me.

“So why is she coming to me?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself as Vexer rubbed his cheek against one of my wings. I tried really hard not to look right, at Elijah, or left, at Airmienan. Not that I thought I was doing anything wrong, but … I felt guilty anyway. I wanted someone alive with me, craved it. And they both knew it.

“I don’t know,” Dyre said with a sigh, closing his eyes. He was substantially more corporeal today. Maybe it was his rage that was helping him? Any strong emotion that a spirit felt could help them project more into the world of the living. “But I want to figure it out.” He opened his eyes again and glared at me. “Which is why I want you to do this spell.”

“You’re assuming it’s going to work the first time around?” I asked with a laugh and a shake of my head. “Getting this resurrection spell to work could take years.”

“So let’s get to it then,” Dyre said, moving over to the silver spell circle with his brother on his heels.

“Don’t let them boss you around,” Vex said, releasing me and following me around the staircase to look at the complicated pattern of runes. Jasinda was staring at her notes, checking and double checking everything. “Every choice you make is yours, Brynn.”

“Don’t you have a job and a home to go back to?” Elijah drawled, dragging himself into the room and sitting down on one of the ornate windowsills. Pigskin blinds—so named because they were paper thin and light pink in color, although one hundred percent not crafted from flesh—covered all the windows. They let in plenty of sunshine, but kept us hidden from the students or faculty that might be passing by outside.

“I’ll go when Brynn is ready to take me,” Vex said, coolly, refusing to rise to the bait.

“There’s something … else,” Jasinda said as Air walked into the room, managing to make noise with his boots against the wood floors. That sound, it made my heart feel like it might implode inside my chest. Glancing over, I found the prince’s pastel green eyes on my face. He looked almost apologetic which was weird, considering what’d just happened between me and Vex. “Some soldiers delivered a girl’s … corpse this morning.”

“A corpse?!” I asked, feeling my eyes go wide as I flicked a glance her way. Matz was waiting in the corner, a journal pressed to his chest, an entire sideboard covered in supplies to his right. All the things the gods had said I’d need, communicated via runes traced all over Elijah’s naked spiritual body. “What do you mean a corpse?”

“I mean, she sent over the body of a guard who recently died, and who didn’t leave a spirit. The message she sent along with it seems to indicate that she isn’t sure how, exactly, this all works. Do we need a body to put a spirit in? Or can we, somehow, recreate the form they died in? I’m suspecting the former.” Jasinda passed over an official letter from the queen, sealed with the same wax I’d seen on Elijah’s decree back at the Grandberg Manor. It was already cracked, so I opened it and scanned the message.

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” Air said, crossing his arms over the silver buttons on his black tunic. He looked every bit a prince in it, with that shiny blonde hair and those high cheekbones. “But making a whole body from scratch? We’d need a metaphysical womb. It makes more sense to think we could put a spirit into an available body.”

“What does that mean for me?” Eli asked as I turned my attention over to him. He’d been torn limb from limb and then eaten by wild animals. There was nothing left of Elijah of Haversey to salvage. “I’d get a completely new body?”

“That’d be my guess,” Jasinda said, but the spell I’d been given was ridiculously specific on somethings—ingredients for example—and horrifically vague on others. I guess that’s what happened when two gods, famous for their feuds, got together to create a spell. “But we won’t know unless we try.”

Eli slicked his fingers through his hair and glanced over at me, his blue eyes dark with worry. He didn’t want a new body. I mean, I could understand that, but it did make more sense.

“So the queen sent a corpse for me to, what, play with?” I pushed loose strands of white hair from my face and stared down at the pair of double circles on the floor. The larger of the two had Haversey’s symbol drawn inside of it while the inner had Hellim’s. In between the places where they overlapped, runes were meticulously drawn to match the images my mother had copied down. Just a slight change in one of those could affect the entire spell.

“She sent a body so you could test it,” Air said softly and I sighed, nodding in Matz’ direction.

“Well, let’s bring it … her? … in and get started.”

“Who are you going to be attempting this particular casting on?” Professor Cross asked, standing on the opposite side of the circle with his shirt still undone, his loose black tie hanging over his muscular, tattooed chest.

“Good question,” Eli said with a little brow raise. He slouched into the nearest chair like a lazy housecat. If he were Dyre or Vex and had a tail, I expected it’d be wagging in frustration right about now. “Because I’m quite happy with this”—he tapped at his crotch as I rolled my eyes—“and it sure seemed like you were, too, the other night.”

Vexer growled from behind me, spreading his wings wide enough that they blocked the flickering gas lamp on the wall and cast shadows across the floor.

“Please, you’d be lucky to be resurrected as a woman,” I said and he smirked at me.

“I don’t particular mind either way,” Professor Cross said, pulling out a pair of glasses from the front pocket of his open jacket and tucking them on his nose. “Women have twice as many nerve endings in their clitoris as men have in their penis, so I imagine sex could very well be twice as pleasurable.” He flicked his attention up to me and smiled. “Do it. Make me a woman,” he said, runes sparkling across the surface of his glasses. I knew they were fake, a figment of his soul in spirit form—the real glasses he’d once worn were long gone—but still, I was impressed. Spelled glasses like that cost a fortune in gems.

“Okay then,” I said, sucking in a sharp breath and reaching up to touch the necklaces hanging from my throat. I looked first to Air, then Eli, Jas and Matz, Professor Cross, Dyre and Trubble, before glancing back at Vexer. “Let’s give it a shot.”

Doing a spell this complex was like … starring as the lead in a complicated play, one that you’d never been allowed to rehearse.

One that had consequences. Big ones.

Professor Cross … err, Spicer sat in the middle of the circle with his red rectangular glasses drooping down his nose, his blue and turquoise eyes following me as I walked the circle and chanted in a language I didn’t know. As soon as I started speaking the words however, I felt them. Haversey and Hellim. They filled me like, well, I didn’t mean to be crude, but like Vexer had filled me earlier. My chest felt stretched, my spirit swollen with their magic.

Two echoes overlapped my words—one high and feminine, the other booming and masculine.

“Holy fuck,” Eli whispered as I passed by.

“Excellent,” Trubble purred as I came full circle and paused at the point representing the bottom point of Haversey’s star.

With a sigh, I pulled first Haversey’s knife from my belt and cut one palm, before doing the same to the other with Hellim’s. Crimson droplets spattered the floor as I held my arms straight forward, palms down, liquid dripping into the silver ash. As soon as my blood touched it, it was absorbed, silver light blooming along the runes and the double stars.

At this point, the instructions of the spell were muddled.

Speak the spellwords.That’s what the runes said. But what spellwords? None were listed in the instructions, so I’d have to make it up. Obviously, I was going to try out my Haversey spellwords first. Elijah’s are so much cooler, I thought, narrowing my eyes in his direction. He smirked at me, but it was toeing that line between shit-eating grin and supportive smile, so I let it go.

“Goddess-speed and happy endings,” I whispered, and magic rippled out from me, lighting up the whole circle and casting shimmering reflections on all the faces in the room. I clapped my palms together as the instructions had indicated, mingling the blood from both hands.

But Hellim’s circle remained dark.

“I don’t have spellwords as a shadow whisperer,” I said aloud, dropping my hands by my sides.

“Do you think we should take care of that first?” Air asked, moving around the circle and standing so close to me that our shoulders touched. I gently pushed him away and he smiled at me. He knew as well as I did that if we were pressed up against each other when I started casting, the whole thing could go haywire.

Technically, to officially register my spellwords, I had to visit a clerk’s office in the Whisperer District, check to see if any other shadow whisperer had used those words before, have my mentor sign off on them. But I didn’t have a mentor nor did I think an Amerin Royal Clerk would sign off on me having spellwords of any kind considering I’d never been trained in shadow magic.

“Only Hellim has to agree to my words,” I hazarded, because that was true. For spellwords to be active, to have power, I only had to speak them while using shadow magic and wait for the dark god to respond. Hellim’s spellwords weren’t nearly as important to him as Haversey’s were. Thank fig or else I’d end up losing two feathers for every flub-up.

“Technically, yes,” Air said with an exhale and a little shark smile. I loved his slightly pointed teeth. They made me want to kiss him, to run my tongue over those little points and see if I could make myself bleed. “And if anyone asks, technically the crown prince should have all the powers and then some of a clerk. We’ll say I fast-tracked it.”

“Aw, well thank you for that,” I said with a slight smile, turning back to the circle and letting my mind whir through a dozen super lame phrases. It’d taken me weeks to come up with my Haversey spellwords and even then, they were still sort of … not cool. And now I had to come up with some on the fly? “Cursed spirits and shadows,” I said, reaching up to rub my hand down my face. As I did, blood spattered across the second star … and it lit up in with swirls of black magic.

Well, crap.

Pretty sure I’d just set my new spellwords to a popular slang phrase.

That was nice.

But once it was done, it was done and the spell roared to life, casting the glittering shapes of silver and black runes on the ceiling and walls.

As per the instructions, I collected up the black earth that Vexer had risked his neck for and anointed all five points of both gods’ stars. I tried not to pay attention to the dead blonde girl that was lying in the middle of it all, her still form dressed in the purple, red, and white robes that the queen favored. She was curled on her side around Professor Cross.

Without having to ask, Jasinda passed over a glass bottle filled with a tincture she’d made from the herbs and ever-dark flowers. I swigged a small amount of it and tried not to throw up everywhere. It tasted a thousand times worse than those purple salads Jasinda had ordered the last three days in a row.

“Sprinkle over target,” I said aloud, repeating the instructions so everyone could hear them. If there was a wrong way to interpret that, I had no idea. So I took the mixture and shook it over both the professor’s ghost and the dead body.

Lastly, I took the mineral water and anointed my wrists, ankles, and face before kneeling down on the top point of Hellim’s star and chanting again. The gods were bickering inside of me, much like they had before, but this time … Haversey fled before it escalated any further and I was overwhelmed with the darkness of Hellim’s magic.

Before I could quite figure out what was going on, Trubble trotted into the center of the double circles, climbing right over the corpse and sitting inside of Professor Cross.

I wrinkled up my brow … just before magic exploded outward in a violent wave and sent me flying back into Vexer and crashing into the wall.

Coughing past the dust and debris, I sat up and blinked through the haze at the cat-sized fox, the ghost, and the corpse. Nothing looked different, but Haversey’s holy hallelujah, I felt it in my chest, that spot where the god Hellim had taken up residence … was being occupied by something else.

“What the fuck did you just do?!” I shouted, surging out of Vex’s arms and to my feet. A single … white? … feather drifted off. I caught it in my palm and just stared at it.

“Well, that was an unexpected side effect,” Trubble said, yawning and stretching as he trotted over to sit at my feet. “I suppose since the spell was shadow based, and your wings were black from Hellim’s gift, the Haversey magic had to go somewhere.”

“The … what?!” I asked, curling my wings around my body and gaping in abject shock.

My ebony feathers … were now as white as my hair. Hellim’s physical blessing was now erased, and Haversey’s favor—pure white wings—were there in its place. I wouldn’t have been less shocked if the resurrection spell had actually worked.

“Matz, let’s move the body back to the coffin,” Jas said, taking control of a situation that was quickly becoming anything but.

“The spell backfired … and gave you white wings?” Eli was asking as I stood there glaring at Trubble and trembling. Magic surged through me, hot and violent and dark; it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I felt, for the first time ever, that I was more shadow whisperer than spirit whisper. It was disconcerting enough to make me stumble. Okay, so I was clumsy as flub so maybe it was a little of that, too, but if Vex hadn’t caught me, I’d have fallen to my knees.

“It’s more than that,” Professor Cross was saying, pushing his glasses up with a middle finger and rising up from the center of the circle. His tattoos shifted across his muscles, almost like they were straining to get out of him and into me.

“You didn’t?” Dyre was asking, staring at his brother with wide eyes, his spirit form flickering between a glaring blue-white color and an almost invisible outline. “Trubble!”

“You gave me a problem and I presented a solution,” the fox said, using his tail to poke at the silver ash on the floor. It was as he did that when I noticed that two of the runes had been altered just slightly. One had a loop atop a vertical line that was now incomplete, and the other, previously shaped like a capital ‘R’ now looked more like a ‘K’.

I’d been duped … again.

“What. Did. You. Do?!” I snarled, grabbing the fox by the scruff before he could even think to get out of the way of my rage. I was tired of spirits and shadows using me for free room and board. If they wanted something from me, why not just ask?

“An unbound shadow quickly goes to Hell in Hellim’s handbasket, am I right?” Trubble asked with a smirk. A smirk. He dared smirk at me?! “I needed to bind myself to an appropriate target and—”

“You could have asked!” I roared, shadow magic swirling around inside my chest. I could feel my connection to the little shadow creature, this binding fist squeezing tight on the very fabric of my soul. “All you had to do was ask.”

My right hand was holding the fox aloft, and I used my left to clutch the pair of necklaces around my throat.

“Oh? Well, it’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?” Trubble asked … just before magic exploded out from my necklaces and I found myself no longer holding onto a furry scruff, but looking up into the face of an extremely handsome man.

My fingers were curled around the nape of his neck, my breasts pressed against his bare midsection, his naked bits pressed up against mine.

“What the—” I won’t repeat the words that Air said because, you know, they were vulgar enough that I’d probably lose feathers by proxy. That, and he’d added a few choice exclamations in like zooterkins, whatever the flub that meant.

Ah, and also, I was pressing front to front with a naked dude who used to be a fox.

“Mm,” Trubble said, putting his hands on my hips and grinning with two sharp little canines. He teased a fluffy tail down the length of one arm and leaned toward me, dark purple hair flopping into his face. “This, this is even more unexpected.” He reached out and teased the edge of one of my wings, drawing attention to the fact that they were now black again. “And this I very much like.”

He leaned in to kiss me as I shoved back and went to punch him in the face.

Vexer, though, he beat me to it.