Forgotten Darkness Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarra Cannon

  ISBN: 978-1-62421-046-4

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Cover Design by Ravven

  http://www.ravven.com/

  Edited by The Atwater Group

  http://www.theatwatergroup.com/

  Formatting by Dead River Books

  http://www.deadriverbooks.com/

  For George & Andrew:

  Because you’re the ones my heart would refuse to forget.

  Break The Girl

  “What have you done to her?”

  My sister Magda leaned over the girl on the stone table and pushed her blonde hair back from her face. Sweat gathered along the girl’s temple, and her chest rose and fell with each labored breath.

  “Everything I can think of,” I said. I shook my head and paced the dusty floor. “She’s resisting all my best spells. Nothing seems to break her.”

  “Maybe she simply can’t be broken,” Magda said.

  The way she was touching the girl—almost reverently—sent a fresh wave of anger through my body. Did no one understand just how dangerous she was? How much she had done to ruin all our plans?

  “She can, and she will,” I said through clenched teeth. “Even if I have to cut her heart from her body, I will see the end of her before I’m done.”

  Magda turned to me, her eyes flashing red. “You can’t kill her. You know that,” she said. “The High Priestess wants her alive, and she’s already upset with you for taking the girl and bringing her here, of all places.”

  “If I had taken her anywhere else, the High Priestess would have already stolen her from me,” I said. I barely had control of my voice, but rage wasn’t going to do me any good in this argument. I was duty-bound to honor my priestess, and after what I’d tried to do by reopening the sapphire gates without her permission, I was already on thin ice.

  Still, Harper was mine. I had been the one to capture her when no one else had been strong enough.

  “If you harm her powers in any way, the High Priestess will have your head.” Magda leaned over the girl again, this time stroking her scarred arm.

  “I didn’t bring you here to admire her,” I snapped, pulling my sister’s arm away. “I brought you here to help me figure out a way to break her mind. If I can’t take her memories away, I have no hope of bringing her over to our side.”

  “And you tried your fractured stone spell?” she asked, as if I were some kind of fledgling witch who didn’t know the first thing about stealing memories.

  “Of course,” I said with a sigh. “That was the first spell I cast on her.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I was able to capture some of her memories,” I said. “She was so weak and confused, I thought surely it was going to work. But over time, she somehow regained the strongest of them. I tried again, cutting into her flesh a little deeper the second time and bleeding her for hours.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. As the wounds healed, many of her memories returned,” I said. My jaw hurt from the constant stress of grinding my teeth.

  I’d had her in my dungeons now for months, casting every spell I could find and torturing her in the most painful ways I could imagine. She would sometimes forget who she was completely, but over the following days, she would always remember.

  “Her memories of that demon boy are the strongest,” I said. “Nothing I have done to her so far has been able to remove him completely from her mind. It’s infuriating.”

  Magda smiled, and I wanted to slap her. This was not the kind of place where anyone was allowed to smile. This was a place of nightmares.

  “Maybe it’s not her mind you should be worried about,” she said.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it’s her heart that refuses to let go,” she said, absently touching the ruby snake pendant at her breast. “You never have understood matters of the heart the way a real mother might. Break her heart, and maybe you finally break the girl.”

  Fire ran through my veins. Magda threw motherhood in my face every chance she got, but arguing with her now would do me no good. Maybe she was right about the girl’s heart, after all.

  I studied Harper. She didn’t look like much lying there on the cold stone table, her body bruised and covered in scars. She was so young and weak now that it was hard to imagine she had ever been strong enough to defeat my sister Eloisa, Priestess of the Sapphire Gates.

  But I knew that deep inside that petite body, this girl held a power stronger than any this world had seen in decades. Maybe centuries. She could have done so much for the Order of Shadows. She could have been one of our greatest accomplishments, but my sister Eloisa had never been the smartest among us. She had taken the girl’s powers for granted and assumed she was nothing more than an annoyance.

  Eloisa’s pride had gotten her killed, but I was the one who had outsmarted this so-called heroine. She may have ruined my plans to reopen the sapphire gates, and yes, she may have even killed one of my precious daughters, but she was mine now. The power locked away inside her was mine to rule. All I had to do was figure out how to break her and turn her to my side.

  I had to find a way to convince her that she had been mine all along.

  Maybe Magda was right. Maybe I had been going about this whole thing all wrong. Spells and torture were not working as I had hoped, but perhaps it was her love for her friends and for the demon that would finally bring her to her knees.

  Besides, killing the demon would be a pleasure. He’d been torturing my hunters, and I simply wouldn’t stand for it.

  Yes, maybe this was the way.

  Break her heart—her spirit—and I break the girl.

  A sudden calm settled over me. I walked toward the girl on the stone table, her body shivering with fever, and leaned close to her ear.

  “You’re such a fighter,” I whispered. “Let’s see what happens when you think you have nothing left to fight for.”

  She Was Nowhere

  Darkness fell upon the mountain, creating shadows I could slip through undetected. The hunter wasn’t far. I could smell her rot from here as she made her way up the crooked path toward her lair.

  This had to be it. She’d performed her duties in the fishing village earlier, scoping out the remaining demons. I’d watched her for hours as she studied them in their work, spying on them from the edge of the small village. None of the demons had noticed her, but I’d been tracking her for days.

  I knew when she had found her target, a younger demon who had revealed the strength of his power as he helped his father unload the day’s catch. He’d unloaded an entire ship’s worth of boxes in a matter of minutes, not showing any signs of fatigue as he cast his magic. He had smiled and tilted his head toward the eastern sun. His joy had made my heart ache.

  Despite the ruin of most of the villages here in the Northern Kingdom, there were still those who chose to live on their own terms, refusing to leave their homes behind out of fear. This village was one of the few that still thrived along this part of the coast, and the demons here were determined to protect their own.

  For decades they had succeeded, casting powerful wards around the village that kept many of the hunters out. But now that most of the outerlands had been picked clean or abandoned, the hunters had started studying these demons, watching their routines and finding their weaknesses.

  This young
demon couldn’t have been older than sixty years. He was just coming into his true power, and he foolishly flaunted it. Their safety had made them complacent, and the emerald priestess’s hunter had her eye on him.

  She’d smiled as she watched him, her rotting lips stretching over her blackened teeth. She’d pulled a small glass box from her robes and opened it carefully. Her lips moved as she spoke words of power that didn’t reach my ears.

  I had never seen this part of the process and was terrified when the young demon on the docks frowned and clutched his heart. There was almost no visible sign of the magic she had cast on him, but in the heat of the sun, I could just make out a wave of energy flowing from the hunter to the demon. Whatever she’d trapped inside that box had made its way to the young demon, entering his body and marking him.

  Just as quickly as the energy had reached him, the hunter pulled it back, closing it into her box with a small emerald key.

  So this was how they marked their targets. Some dark magic reached out to unsuspecting demons, its fingers seeking them out and reaching deep inside them, placing some kind of mark on their souls.

  I knew that sometime in the near future, the hunter would return to this village in the dead of night. She would open her box of horrors and summon him from his bed and into a nearby field, likely close to where I was now hiding among the ginger reeds. She would open a portal to some emerald gate in the human world, and the Prima there would suck the demon through, enslaving him inside the body of a newly initiated human girl. After that, there would be no saving him until the emerald priestess herself was killed.

  No easy task, but if I had anything to say about it, the witch was going to die. And soon.

  I made my way around the shadowy mountain-top, following the hunter back to her lair. I’d made an art out of tracking hunters over the past few months since Harper had been taken from us.

  God, I miss her.

  Life had no purpose without her by my side. When I’d stood outside the priestess’s door that night, kneeling in Harper’s blood, I thought I would have her back in days. I needed her back.

  But need was not enough.

  The emerald priestess had hidden her away somewhere no one could find her, and no matter what I did or who I killed, I hadn’t been able to save her.

  Being in the castle was difficult. She was everywhere, and she was nowhere. Her absence was a constant knife in my heart.

  So I left as often as I could. I hunted. I killed. I destroyed those who worked for my enemy, and their deaths were a drug that numbed the pain, if only for awhile.

  Already a dozen hunters had died at my hand.

  After tonight, it would be thirteen.

  I stayed far enough back that the hunter couldn’t see or sense me, moving slowly and as quietly as the grave. My weapons were strapped to my belt and pants: Fifteen different knives and daggers. More than twenty small potions. I’d even brought an enchanted gun for when things got interesting.

  But my most powerful weapon was the necklace wrapped around my left wrist. Harper’s locket and her mother’s pendant hung from the broken chain. I kept her most treasured items close to me at all times. They gave me purpose and kept the fear at bay. I would move heaven and earth to find her, and I wasn’t going to let anyone stand in my way.

  I paused near a large white boulder, shifting back to my human form and crouching low to the ground. I listened, no longer hearing the subtle flapping of the hunter’s robes in the windy night. She had stopped. Her lair had to be close.

  I waited, taking stock of my weapons and drawing my favorite dagger into my hand. I uncorked a swiftness potion and drank it quickly, ignoring the bitter taste of the elven root. With any luck, the hunter would be in chains before she’d even realized I was there.

  When I was certain the hunter was no longer on the move, I crept out of my hiding place, following the trail. Hunters practically floated above the ground, leaving no footsteps and making them difficult to track, but I’d followed enough of them over the past few months to recognize the places where their robes had trailed along the ground, disturbing the dust and rocks and weeds along the way.

  I caught sight of her trail just a few feet away and walked with nearly silent footsteps until I saw the mouth of her cave.

  Many hunters lived in caves like this, carved into the side of mountains. They often had traps and wards in place to protect their homes. Many used illusions to conceal the fact that there was a cave at all, but I had the rare ability to see through illusions, making me particularly suited to tracking these hunters.

  I reached inside a small leather satchel at my side and grabbed a handful of enchanted dust, one of Rend’s most recent creations. I crouched in front of the cave’s entrance and opened my palm, blowing the dust in front of me and searching for any sign of traps. As I suspected, the outline of a spell appeared with a brief shimmer across the middle of the entrance.

  From the looks of it, this spell was nothing more than a sort of simple tripwire. If I crossed it, the spell would alert the hunter to my presence and likely unleash some sort of cave guardian, like a demon dog or a shadow guard.

  It was the kind of spell I knew how to disarm. I settled my dagger back in its sheath and pulled out a special set of tools I had crafted by hand. Essex had made a special leather holster for my tools. It was nearly weightless and took up almost no space in my pocket, but when I untied the leather strap and unrolled it, the tool belt tripled in size.

  I removed a simple knife with a jagged saw edge along the tip and another one that had a hook on the end. I held my breath and carefully worked at the trap. One wrong move or slip of my hand and the thing would go off, killing the element of surprise. But my hand was steady and my skill was improving.

  It was amazing what you could learn to do when love was on the line.

  I disarmed the trap in less than a minute, smiling as the shimmering tripwire disappeared, leaving the entrance defenseless. I replaced my tools and put the leather roll back into my pocket, reaching once again for my favorite dagger.

  I stood, my back pressed against the solid rock wall. I took a deep breath to calm my rapidly beating heart. Would this hunter know more than the others? Was this finally going to be the one who would provide some clue as to where the emerald priestess had taken Harper?

  I brought the locket to my lips and kissed it for good luck before I stepped inside the hunter’s cave and all hell broke loose.

  Die With Honor

  The moment I stepped into the cave, the entrance closed behind me with a slam. The hunter stood in the center of the large room, her eyes locked on my face. She laughed, the sound echoing all around me.

  I spun, realizing too late that she’d been expecting me. I wasn’t sure where I’d messed up, but there was no doubt she had known I was coming.

  I shifted to shadow and tried to find any exit around the black magical barrier that had slammed shut around the mouth of the cave, but I was trapped. There was no way out, not even a sliver of light or space to slip through.

  I shifted again and pressed my back against the barrier, lifting my dagger as I faced the hunter.

  “It was only a matter of time until you came after me,” she said. “But I am smarter than my fellow hunters. I won’t be killed so easily, demon.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I muttered.

  My eyes searched the cave, looking for any sign of an exit or weakness that could be used against her. We were on her turf, but I could handle a single hunter. All I needed was time.

  I saw no exit, meaning the barrier at my back was the only way out. I had a feeling the barrier wasn’t going anywhere until she was dead.

  The hunter carried no weapons that I could see, but a hunter’s real weapons had nothing to do with steel or daggers. The power they wielded was dark magic, given to them by their priestess when their humanity was stolen.

  I gathered my own power into my core, drawing from the magic that infused the very air here in
the Shadow World. But before I cast, I saw a shadow slink across the ceiling of the cave. My eyes followed the movement.

  We were not alone.

  My jaw tightened. In my confidence and carelessness, I had walked right into a trap. The only way out of this was to fight, and from the looks of the shadows now slinking down the walls, I was going to have my work cut out for me.

  The shadows gathered at the hunter’s feet, a slithering mass of darkness that covered the surface of the rock. She lifted her hands and pushed them forward, sending her small army of shadow-snakes toward me.

  The snakes coiled, ready to strike. I planted my feet and gathered my power into my hands, letting it build through my body until my fingertips were covered in frost. With a great push forward, I sent a solid thread of ice across the ground.

  The coiled snakes froze in place, their shadows solidified and encased in a thick blue ice.

  The hunter screamed and sent a poisonous ball of green acid soaring across the space between us. I lifted my palm just before the magic reached me, a shield of frost protecting me from the blast.

  The acid corroded my shield, and several drops splashed against my arms, burning deep into my skin. I ignored the pain and shifted to black smoke, twisting toward the ceiling and coming down behind the hunter. I retook my human form and shot black ropes of shadow from my hands. I wrapped them around her neck and twisted, pulling her backward against me. She sputtered and gasped, her long fingernails scratching at her own neck, trying to break free of my magic.

  Her body jerked and she vomited. Acid cascaded down her chin, burning into my ropes. I drew back as she flew forward, free of my grasp. She cupped her hands against her mouth and blew into them, a thick fog of gas filling the room. She pushed the fog toward the ground, the dark magic melting the ice around the snakes.

  I sheathed my dagger, needing both hands to cast. I raised my palms in front of my body and began moving them in a circle. A sheet of ice formed, spinning in the air in front of me. I breathed in and when I released my breath into the sheet of ice, twenty spikes formed on its surface. I focused my attention on the shadow-snakes slithering toward me.