Emerald Darkness Read online

  “Is that why you’re here?” I asked. Andros didn’t come to the human world very often. He hated it here. He hated humans in general, really, and every time I saw him lately he tried to convince me to take stronger action against the Order. He didn’t understand why I was allowing Harper, a young human girl, to give the orders around here.

  Hell, sometimes I didn’t understand it myself. But Harper was the one who had saved Aerden when all the rest of us had failed. No matter how I felt about her personally, she deserved my loyalty and my trust.

  Besides, she was half-demon, a princess in her own right.

  “I’m afraid I’ve come for much more important matters,” Andros said, his expression growing dark and tense. He glanced at Aerden. “May I speak freely, Princess?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. But just in case, I turned to Aerden and added, “As long as you understand that anything discussed here stays between the three of us.”

  Aerden questioned me with his eyes, but nodded.

  Andros cleared his throat and looked around, as if making sure no one else was listening.

  “I try to keep eyes and ears on your father’s city in the Northern Kingdom,” he said. “But six months ago, after the fall of the sapphire demon gates, your father closed the gates of his own city. No one has been allowed to enter or leave since.”

  I already knew this, so I waited for him to say more.

  “But I do have a few of my men who are still inside. I haven’t heard from them in six full months, but a few hours ago, a messenger arrived at the secret entrance to the Underground. He had the tattoo of a phoenix on his arm.”

  My eyes widened. “My father’s insignia.”

  The Underground was the home of the Resistance Army, a group of hundreds of demons and their families who had banded together, vowing to fight against the Order and protect the demons outside the safety of the King’s City. Andros led the army, and when Jackson and I first found out the truth about the Order, about what had happened to Aerden and so many thousands of demons from our world, we had joined the Resistance ourselves for many years.

  As far as we knew, neither my father nor his guards knew the location of the Resistance forces.

  “How—”

  “One of my men inside must have trusted the guard enough to tell him where to find us,” Andros said. “That alone should tell you just how important it was that I receive his message.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Lea.” The way he said my name sent chills down my spine. Andros was one of the bravest, most stubborn demons I had ever met. He hardly knew the meaning of fear, but there was unease in his voice and in his eyes as he spoke. “He said your father has brought a stone guardian with a diamond heart to Leuxia, the King’s City.”

  My entire body froze, each muscle tense and unmoving. I couldn’t breathe. A gentle wind blew across my skin, a loose strand of hair from my braid fluttering against the back of my neck.

  I shivered.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, either,” Andros said. “But one of the King’s Guard taking such a risk to seek me out? He risked his life coming to me. I could have killed him for his knowledge of the Underground.”

  “I thought stone guardians were a myth,” Aerden said, shaking his head. “Like a scary bedtime story or a way to keep the citizens in line. ‘Don’t go into the Black Hills alone. The stone guardians will come after you.’ That kind of thing. They aren’t real. Are they?”

  “Stone guardians are very real,” Andros said. “And incredibly dangerous. Our entire race was nearly wiped out by the war between the guardians five thousand years ago.”

  “I thought they were extinct,” I said, barely finding my voice. “I thought they killed each other off in the war.”

  Andros shook his head. “Inside the libraries of the Underground, we have found many texts that reference the stone guardians as beings who come from another dimension. Just like the humans. There are many worlds besides these two, Lea. The stone guardians were not all killed. Those who survived were banished, the one remaining portal between their world and ours sealed and guarded for the last five thousand years.”

  “And you’re telling me that somehow my father, the King of the North, has opened that portal? That’s ridiculous. Why would he bring such a dangerous being back to our world? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  My mind raced, searching my own memories for any reference my parents had ever made to stone guardians. The only thing I remembered was that the mines of magical gemstones scattered throughout the Shadow World were said to be the decayed bodies of these giant stone beings.

  Diamonds were supposed to be the most powerful of all the gemstones. And the most rare. The symbol of the Order’s High Priestess.

  I touched a hand to the rope chain around my neck. The only true Shadow World diamond I had ever seen was embedded in a key Aerden had given me before he was kidnapped a hundred years ago. I had never been able to unlock its power, but I kept it with me at all times.

  Could all these things be connected? Why would my father have brought a diamond stone guardian to his city? Were they even real?

  Aerden was right. It sounded more like a myth than truth. There was nothing said about them that made me believe they were anything more than stories told in hushed whispers. Dark fairy tales meant to scare shadowlings into doing what they were told.

  “Your father has been slipping into madness for years, Princess, and you know it,” Andros said. “I have warned you many times that he was eventually going to do something that put us all in even more danger than we’ve already endured for so many years. Every chance he has had to fight back against the Order or to save his people, the king has turned his back on us. And it’s only gotten worse over time. The King’s Guard used to patrol the villages, keeping the Order’s hunters away. He slowly reduced the patrols to one single unit of six soldiers for the entire Northern Kingdom. They were useless. They spent more of their time searching for the Resistance than for the actual hunters.

  “When the King’s Guard stopped their patrols, it seemed like a blessing. But then the doors to the gate around the King’s City closed soon after, and we realized the king had given up on his subjects outside the city. He practically offered us to the Order on a silver platter. The fact that the doors closed right after the Order increased their recruiting can’t be lost on you, can it?”

  The anger in his tone grew as he spoke, and it kind of pissed me off. I knew what was coming next.

  “So you come here to accuse me of turning my back on you as well, is that it? Is that what you’re saying?” I stepped toward him.

  “You must know it is true if you’re so quick to understand my meaning,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  My jaw tensed. “No, I just know you that well,” I said. “How do I know this story about the stone guardians isn’t just your way of getting me to come home and fight for the Resistance?”

  “Do you think I would lie about such things?”

  “I think you would do whatever you thought necessary to achieve your goals.”

  “Is that not an honorable thing? Doing whatever it takes to save my people? Your people, Princess. Or have you forgotten where you come from? Who you are? Have you been living with these humans for so long you’ve forgotten where your duty truly lies?”

  Anger boiled in my veins, its power so strong my body began shifting to the black smoke of my demon form. Tendrils of dark shadows swirled around my skin like snakes.

  Aerden took a step toward me, but one glance warned him off. I regretted saying he could stay. If I had known what Andros was about to accuse my father of, I never would have let him say it in front of Aerden.

  “I understand why you came here,” Andros said, his voice softening. He raised his hands and stepped back, putting some distance between us. “I know you only did what you thought you had to do out of love. But what reason do you have to stay now?
Jackson is engaged to another. Harper is the heir to her father’s kingdom in the south and will soon take her place on his throne. Let them handle what is needed here in the human world and in the Southern Kingdom. Your people need you now more than ever. I’m begging you. If your father has brought a stone guardian into the King’s City, then he has truly gone mad. He must believe the giant will protect him from the Order. It’s the only explanation. The time has come, Princess. You cannot deny your place as queen any longer. Please, for the sake of your people, come home to claim your throne.”

  With this, he got down on one knee before me and lowered his head.

  My anger dissipated, leaving behind fear and confusion.

  Andros was right. I had only come to the human world because of Jackson. I followed him here because I loved him, and I foolishly believed that if I joined him in his quest to save his brother, he would someday return to me. That we would be married and have a life together.

  There was a part of me that held onto that hope even after he fell in love with Harper. But now? When he asked me to release him from our engagement—to give back the heart stone he had given me one hundred years ago during our engagement ceremony—he broke my heart all over again.

  Why would I choose to stay here with them, instead of returning to my homeland?

  Tears stung the corners of my eyes, but I forced them back. I would not cry. I was stronger than that.

  I lifted my head and motioned for Andros to stand.

  “Tell me everything you know about stone guardians.”

  I Didn’t Know

  My visions were becoming more violent.

  Sometimes I saw them clearly in my mind like flashes of memory, but other times I had to put pencil to paper to extract them from my brain. When a vision was struggling to be released, I often felt it like a fever. It was almost like a sickness that needed to be drawn out from me, the way surgeons used to use leeches to draw blood from patients.

  Until it had shape and form, I had no hope of relief. And tonight, I had the fever.

  I drew with my eyes closed, almost as if in a trance. My hands worked on their own, as if the visions were speaking directly to them, bypassing the rest of me in an effort to work more efficiently. I worked fast and hard, stopping only to tear my shirt from my body, sweat pouring from me.

  Sometimes the visions held onto me for hours, my hands working through image after image, page after page, without pause. Tonight, there was a stack of nearly twenty pages already filled to the very edge with scenes of battle. Blood running through the streets of a small town. Swords raised against each other. Magic clashing in the air in a burst of light.

  And a woman in a black hood. She was always there, but her face was never visible.

  Some of tonight’s drawings were a small piece of the scene shown in detail, like the side of someone’s face with a streak of blood along their cheek. Others were more like silhouettes, drawn in sweeping strokes and dark shadows, but with no real detail.

  The hooded woman was in every single drawing, but she always appeared like a ghost or a memory, see-through and shaded. A piece of her cloak, the profile of her hood, I drew them all, begging for my vision to show me her face or give some other clue. But none came.

  Who was she?

  It wasn’t until I finally drew a panorama of the entire scene that my pencil fell to the desktop, my fingers cramped and twisted. I pushed away from the desk and stood for the first time in hours.

  I walked to the window and looked back toward the bed where Harper slept. We had switched places at some point in the early morning hours. I couldn’t sleep, but she was finally peaceful and quiet.

  Lately, we both seemed to spend a lot of time staring out of this window. It was the place where our eyes had first locked onto each other, our souls connected in ways we couldn’t have realized at the time.

  Whenever I started to feel hopeless or afraid that the coming war would be too much for us, I thought of that first moment when I saw her, standing right here looking down at me. She had no idea just how important she was or how much we all needed her. And yet, when the time came, she was the only one strong enough to fight back.

  The memory served as a reminder that there were still witches inside the Order who were pure of heart. Victims trapped under the tyranny of the four remaining sister priestesses.

  It reminded me that even though my brother was free, there were still others who needed and deserved our help.

  Despite the price yet to be paid.

  I studied my final drawing, the pencil marks smudging at the edge of the paper under my thumb. I had drawn it with heartbreaking accuracy.

  The Southern Kingdom. The domed city built by Harper’s father, the King of the South, to protect his people from the Order. He had built it decades ago, inviting all who lived in his kingdom to join him inside the safety of the dome. Now, thousands lived there, all protected by the king’s loyal soldiers and the magic of the dome that kept the Order’s hunters out.

  It was Harper’s kingdom now. Harper’s city.

  And someday soon, the war would bring it down.

  I crumpled the drawing in my fist and walked over to the desk with its stack of papers. I tossed them all in the trash can. I didn’t want Harper to see this. She had enough to worry about without having to see it with her own eyes.

  She whimpered, and I turned, crossing to her in seconds. At first, I thought my moving around had woken her up, but when I sat beside her on the bed, I saw that she was still sleeping.

  Her face twisted into a frown and she whimpered again. Her chin jerked to the side, her hands curled into fists.

  I touched her forehead. She was hot, her hair drenched in sweat.

  “Harper,” I said softly, gripping her fist with my own. I ran my hand across her cheek, trying not to startle her, but wanting to pull her from the nightmare.

  Like my visions, she’d been feverish with dreams. She didn’t like to talk about it, and I understood. I hadn’t told her the truth about my drawings, either. If we didn’t talk about our fears out loud, they weren’t real yet.

  And I had desperately wanted to enjoy the happiness of our engagement for just a few more days.

  But I knew our time for pretending was up. Our months of peace were over, and something was coming for us.

  I could feel the heat of the next vision already warming the blood in my veins. They were relentless, consuming my nights the way these nightmares often consumed her.

  I’d hidden it from her longer than I ever should have, and man, was she going to be pissed.

  Harper thrashed to the side, another cry escaping from her throat as she reached her hands out, holding onto my forearms.

  “Harper,” I said, louder this time. I wrapped my hands around her wrists and shook her slightly. “Wake up.”

  Her eyes opened and she drew in a strangled breath.

  I pulled her into my arms and held her close to me.

  “You’re okay,” I said softly. “I’m here. It was just a dream.”

  Hot tears fell onto my shoulder. Harper clung to me, crying as she struggled to catch her breath.

  When she finally pulled away, her dark brown eyes were wide and her cheeks were flushed.

  “What is it?” I asked in a whisper. “What happened?”

  She took a breath and shook her head.

  “Emeralds,” she said. “I think someone’s been trying to warn me.”

  My body tensed and grew suddenly ice-cold, as if a ghost were breathing down my neck. “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I’ve never seen her face, but she’s there in every dream, Jackson. All this time, I thought she wanted to hurt me, but tonight, I got farther than I ever have before. I forced myself to keep going. She’s tall and when she moves, it’s like she’s floating on air, just gliding over the surface instead of actually walking. I keep trying to see her face, but—”

  “She’s wearing a black cloak?”
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  Harper paused, lips slightly open. Her eyes widened and she stared at me for a long moment before the realization finally came to her. She released my arms and scooted back against her pillows, drawing her legs up to her chest.

  “You’ve seen her, too,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Her gaze flicked to the desk.

  “Yes.” I waited for the anger. I knew better than to keep secrets from her, but all I wanted to do was protect her. Whenever I shared my visions with her in the past, we usually misinterpreted them, leading to unnecessary fear and worry. I didn’t want to do that to her again. Not until I was sure what I was seeing.

  “Do you know who she is?” she asked. There was sadness in her voice, but not anger.

  Somehow, that was worse.

  “I haven’t been able to see her face, either,” I said. “But she’s in every single drawing.”

  “I want to see them.” Harper stood and crossed to the desk.

  I moved faster, quickly nudging between her and the notebook. I’d thrown tonight’s drawings in the trash, but there were many more still inside my book. None as gruesome as tonight’s, but I still didn’t want her to see them.

  “We don’t know what they mean, anyway,” I said. I placed a hand on her shoulder, but she twisted away. My heart tightened.

  “After all this time, you still want to hide from me,” she said. “I thought the memories you showed me last night before you proposed were supposed to change things between us. You said you wanted me to see you at your worst before I agreed to a lifetime together. And yet, here you are, still hiding the truth from me, because you think I can’t handle it.”

  “That’s not it at all,” I said. “I only want to protect you. Seeing pieces of the future is my burden, Harper. Not yours.”

  Her eyes snapped to mine, the anger I’d been dreading blazing in her expression.

  She stepped toward me and put one hand on the gold locket I’d given her. The other rose to my chest, covering my heart.