Shadow Witch Read online

  Firstborn Academy

  Shadow Witch

  Isla Frost

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

  Copyright © 2019 by Isla Frost

  All rights reserved.

  Published by JFP Trust

  2019 First Digital Edition

  ISBN: 978 0 6482532 5 9

  www.islafrost.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  My mind was still my own when I woke.

  Theus hadn’t lied then. The transformation ritual did not change who we were. Only our magic. And according to Lirielle, my wildcard gift would shake the worlds.

  But my immediate concerns were much smaller. Relief that I’d survived washed through me, followed immediately by the overwhelming need to see my friends. To know that they too were okay.

  Actually, seeing anything would be a good start. Wherever I was—probably the creepy transformation chamber if I had to guess—was as black as the gullet of a shadow stalker.

  Whatever my new powers might be, they apparently didn’t include enhanced night vision.

  “Hello?” I couldn’t hear anyone in the chamber with me, but you never knew with world walkers.

  No answer.

  “Millicent?” I asked.

  There was still no answer because I was talking to a building—or a manor as she preferred to be called. But Millicent was sentient and understood me just fine.

  “Um, would you mind opening the wall?”

  Light cracked into the room, painfully bright. My eyelids weren’t thick enough, so I flung an arm over my face as well.

  While I waited for the light to stop hurting, I assessed what sort of shape I was in. We’d been told we would wake up weak, that we’d require bed rest. Yet the only way I felt different was, well, better.

  I felt oddly energized. Bouncy even. Rather than as if my blood had been drained out, filtered through the body of one of the beings that had destroyed most of the human race, and put back in again.

  Huh.

  As soon as I could open my eyes without them watering, I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the narrow bed.

  That was when I saw the woman’s body.

  Chapter Two

  My fingers were on the woman’s throat, searching for a pulse before I realized that world walkers might not have an artery there. I’d seen them bleed. At least I’d seen one of them bleed. So they probably had a pulse. But I detected no fluttering heartbeat beneath my fingers. And the skin I touched was cold.

  I angled my ear to hover above her nose and mouth, trying to feel the tickle of breath or hear even the barest whisper of shifting air.

  Nothing.

  I rocked back on my knees. Who was she? What had happened to her?

  The stranger was strikingly attractive. Most world walkers were. The old stories had it wrong. Monsters were not gruesome misshapen things that repelled you on sight. They were arresting, bewitching, more beautiful versions of ourselves who possessed the power to destroy the world and had zero compunctions about doing it.

  Humankind had learned that lesson at the cost of most of the earth’s population. We should have shot first, should never have indulged our curiosity or the desire to feast our eyes upon their splendor. But the realization came too late.

  This walker’s strong but elegant features would have befitted the beloved warrior queen of some war-torn kingdom. Her face somehow still fierce and compelling even as she lay motionless and vulnerable in the dirt.

  I was troubled by her death—if that’s what it was. Not so much for her sake as for what it might mean. Theus had said the transformation ritual was dangerous for walkers too, but I hadn’t really believed him. Hadn’t thought he’d meant the lethal sort of danger.

  Now I was forced to reassess. And it made what I’d been told about the Firstborn Academy’s purpose even more nonsensical. Why on earth would the walkers go to such great lengths—the Agreement, the academy, and the transformation ritual that apparently risked their own lives—just to acquire a few humans with above-average magic?

  They’d revealed a few days ago that we would be trained alongside the walker students to become a specialized contingent of elite warriors. They had not revealed who we were being trained to fight against.

  I couldn’t imagine an enemy that would warrant such efforts by the incredibly powerful world walkers.

  More pressingly, what did this walker’s death mean for me? Would they blame me for it? Had the ritual been completed, or was I still just me?

  Maybe that was why I felt good. Great even. Like I’d woken up from an especially invigorating nap. Her death might have had nothing to do with the ritual. Perhaps she’d simply keeled over and died from whatever walkers die of, like clogged arteries or something, before she could begin.

  I snorted at my overly optimistic train of thought. Unlikely.

  Still, they couldn’t blame me for her death, could they? They were the ones who’d forced the ritual upon me. I’d had no choice in the matter. The fact I’d gone willingly, hoping to gain a power that might help overthrow them, was irrelevant.

  I knew it was callous to find a stranger dead at my feet and think only of the repercussions to myself. But she was a walker. They were responsible—directly and indirectly—for the deaths of billions of humans.

  Except Ameline’s question echoed in my head. Was this walker responsible?

  I looked her over again. She seemed too young. If she was human, I’d guess she was in her thirties, but walkers aged differently, so she might have been significantly older. Old enough to have been there fifty years ago.

  Even so, my attention fell on her luminous dark eyes that stared unseeing at the ceiling, this horrid cell the last thing she would ever see. And I found myself wondering about her family, her loved ones. A foolish way to think for someone who was hell-bent on taking them down.

  Kneeling beside her body, I realized in all my secret scheming to overthrow the walkers, I’d never envisaged the dead I might leave in my wake.

  I stood up, unwilling to pursue that train of thought any further. If the woman at my feet was truly dead—and I had a sick certainty that she was—then there was nothing I could do. And her stillness, her sightless dark eyes, fueled my need to escape from this creepy cell and find Ameline. Find Bryn.

  So I left the stranger lying there on the dirt floor of the chamber and fled. Out of Millicent’s basement. Along the first-floor corridor. Toward the dorm room I’d shared with my friends for the past three months.

  Except I didn’t make it.

  “Wha
t’s going on?” Professor Grimwort accosted me in the corridor. “How are you walking without assistance? Where’s Kyrrha?”

  “Um, I don’t—”

  Without waiting for an explanation (admittedly I didn’t have a good one anyway), Grimwort seized my arm in an iron grip and dragged me back the way I’d come.

  “You will accompany me until I get to the bottom of this.”

  “I need to see my friends,” I protested.

  He shot me a glare that might’ve shriveled the insides of a lesser mortal. His deep-set blue eyes were always shadowed and often contemptuous, and combined with his tall, angular build, the professor had excellent glaring capabilities.

  “And I need to see mine,” he said. “Why isn’t Kyrrha with you? What happened during your ritual?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know. She was like that when I woke up—”

  “Like what?”

  But I didn’t need to answer, because he could now see for himself.

  The woman’s body, lying there where I’d left her.

  Grimwort drew in a sharp breath. And when he spoke again, his voice was laden with command and tightly leashed fury.

  “Sit. Down.”

  He jabbed a finger at a corner of the basement without taking his eyes off the body.

  I sat.

  Within a few minutes, three other professors had joined Grimwort. Each one followed the same pattern of behavior. They would look at the dead woman, blanch or show some other sign of shock, then turn to stare at me.

  The most disconcerting thing was not the stares themselves but the emotion behind them.

  Fear.

  Except for Professor Cricklewood. In his eyes? I’d read speculation.

  Neither reaction made any sense to me.

  And now the professors were muttering among themselves. Too quiet for me to hear, except one word that was repeated enough times that I eventually made it out: Malus. The name the walkers had given the monstrous, devouring darkness they’d brought with them that had wiped out life from Europe and beyond.

  But the Malus hadn’t made it to our continent. Not yet. So that made no sense either. Did they think the monster had somehow crossed thousands of miles to kill this woman in the middle of my transformation ritual?

  I was growing increasingly ill at ease. What the hell was going on?

  The professors murmured some more, the conversation seeming to grow contentious yet no louder than before. Not loud enough to overhear.

  If they hadn’t been throwing frequent glances in my direction, I might have tried sneaking out.

  I should have tried anyway.

  Grimwort stalked over to me and grabbed my arm again. “Come with me.”

  His eyes were hard and wet, and every one of my instincts screamed that following him was a bad idea.

  But refusing him was probably worse. So I cooperated.

  He towed me to one of the tower rooms that spanned the full height of the manor. It was the room I’d arrived in when I’d stepped through the runegate all those months ago. A single window high above allowed cold winter light to shine down on the threadbare rug that covered the ancient timber floor. Aside from the rug, the only furnishings were an antique writing desk and a high-backed timber chair upholstered in faded velvet. No fireplace, no wall lamps, and no decoration but for the eccentric wallpaper that graced almost every one of Millicent’s rooms.

  It was still more pleasant than the basement.

  Professor Grimwort shoved me through the doorway and spoke in a voice rough with grief.

  “Millicent, do not let Nova out of this room under any circumstances until I say otherwise. Do I make myself clear? Disobey me in this and we’ll strip you of sentience so fast you won’t be able to twitch a floorboard, then burn you to the ground out of spite.”

  He wheeled and left, slamming the door behind him with enough force to rattle.

  Chapter Three

  The door vanished, becoming just another part of the wall. Millicent did things like that. And after the threat Grimwort had thrown her way, I couldn’t blame her.

  I paced the sparsely furnished room. I needed to see my friends, dammit. And instead they’d shut me in here without explanation.

  I was confused. I was frustrated. I was famished. Worst of all, I was starting to feel scared.

  Grimwort had never paid me any special attention, never given any human student more than the bare minimum of his notice that I’d seen. He acted as if we were beneath him, as if we were wasting his time. But his dislike was impersonal.

  At least it had been.

  That had changed from the moment he’d seen his friend Kyrrha on the floor. Now he noticed me, all right. And I didn’t like it one bit.

  What on earth was going on? What were they planning on doing with me?

  Hours passed without answer.

  I paced. I sat. I contemplated attempting to escape, then concluded I couldn’t do that to Millicent.

  She’d survived hundreds of years of human industry and then the end of our world. Who was I to bring about her downfall? Besides, after a rough start, we’d become friends of sorts.

  In the window high above, the sky grew dark.

  And with no interior lamps for Millicent to adjust, the room grew dark too.

  The need to know whether my friends were all right was a physical ache in my chest.

  At least the dark I could do something about.

  When we’d first arrived, Ameline, Bryn, and I had explored every inch of this room, searching for an escape or a key or lever to reveal a secret door. We hadn’t found one, but I remembered a candle in the desk drawer. I retrieved it now in the thickening gloom.

  There were no matches, and I didn’t have a thaumaturgy rod (a.k.a. a wand carved from the bone of a walker that allowed humans to access magic), but the transformation ritual was supposed to increase our abilities. We’d been told it would unlock power beyond the conception of most of humankind. And if a walker’s bone allowed ordinary humans to use magic, surely a walker’s blood flowing through my veins would do far more.

  So I did as Grimwort had taught us in our Rudimentary Magic lessons. I focused on the candle’s wick, visualizing it igniting into flame with as much clarity as my mind’s eye could muster. And then, since I didn’t have a wand to aim my magic through, I mentally shoved toward the candle.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried again.

  A third time.

  Then I threw the candle to the floor and slumped down beside it.

  Your magic will shake the worlds, Lirielle had told me. Lirielle who was inarguably strange but had been right the last time she’d predicted something.

  Yet I couldn’t even light a freaking candle.

  Sometime later, the two-headed golin who served as the academy custodian found me still there.

  The creature was six feet tall and walked upright on two powerful legs, trailed by a long and heavy tail. Large armored scales covered most of its body except for where black fur graced the underside of its jaws and continued down its belly. Its two heads were oddly cute—with large dark eyes, small rounded ears, and long, tapered snouts that ended in delicate noses. The cuteness factor was offset by the sheer size of the creature and the razor-sharp claws on its two forelimbs.

  “What are you doing sitting in the dark, dear?” asked the head on the left, Glennys. She was the nice one.

  I mumbled something about having less power to light up a room than a glowworm. Then I realized the custodian’s presence might mean my situation had changed and scrambled to my feet.

  “Wait, am I allowed out now? Where’s Ameline? Where’s Bryn? Are they all right? What’s going on?”

  Glenn, the head on the right, curled his lip back in the golin version of a grimace. “So many words and yet not a single one of appreciation. Here. We brought you this.”

  They dumped a steaming bowl of stew down on the desk behind me.

  “Oh, thank you. I’m starving. It’
s just—”

  “We know, poor thing. You must be quite out of sorts. From what we understand, no one’s told you anything.”

  “Yes. Can you—”

  “No one’s told us anything either.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that we haven’t deduced a great deal,” Glenn added, “but we’re not about to gossip with the students.”

  “Glenn’s right, I’m afraid,” Glennys agreed. “It’s not our place. Besides, we might be wrong.”

  Glenn sniffed haughtily at that last part.

  I waited until I was sure I wouldn’t say anything I might regret, then unclenched my jaw.

  “Can you at least tell me whether Ameline and Bryn survived their rituals?”

  “Oh, of course they did,” Glennys reassured me.

  My heart soared—

  “Only one student died this time.”

  —And plummeted. Like a bird flying beak-first into a window.

  Only?

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Petra.”

  Petra. A scrappy girl with an affinity for water magic that I’d seen freeze the wings of a harpy-like monster to save her teammate. I hadn’t known her well, and I felt a rush of sorrow for her life cut short, tinged with guilty relief that it wasn’t Ameline or Bryn.

  Glenn peered down his long nose at me. “One student and one walker.”

  I swallowed. Hard. But I straightened my spine and met his gaze.

  The news put my own problems into perspective. They were substantial, I thought, remembering Grimwort’s anger and the other professors’ fear, but I wasn’t dead. Not yet.