Chapter 201: A Sealed Memory

Chapter 201: A Sealed Memory

Siobhan

Month 8 Day 14, Saturday 8:59 p.m.

The Red Guard agent screamed, and as if that had been a trigger, a scream burst from Siobhan’s mouth, too.

Siobhan’s shadow waited patiently for them to run out of breath, then turned its head to the agent. “You had better take off that glove before it consumes you.” It even sounded like Siobhan, though distant and muffled, as if heard through a wall.

Then it turned to her. “Siobhan, leave now. I will take care of things here, child.”ReAd lateSt chapters at novelhall.com Only

Another moment of vertigo hit her, but this one was more cerebral than physical, brought on by the sheer inconceivability of the situation. Except it wasn’t totally inconceivable. Those glowing amber eyes were familiar, and for a moment, a flash of blood and brain matter pooling out in front of the fire came to mind.

That was followed by a blink-fast vision of an egg with a yolk made of blood.

And then, even faster and on the edge of passing too quickly for her mind to grasp, a doorway filled with hungry sky.

Siobhan flinched back.

“Run,” her shadow added.

And she did.

Siobhan sprinted without coherent thought, fleeing with rabbit-panicked, pounding footsteps. The only bit of rationality remaining within her chest allowed her to keep that one vomit-wet hand to her mouth. The Circle remained unbroken, and some tiny part of her Will was left behind with her shadow.

She did not want to know what might happen if she dropped her shadow-familiar spell while it was detached and outside of her control.

And if not for her ability to split her Will, the panic might have overcome even a lifetime’s training to maintain concentration.

It was exhaustion that finally slowed her, her muscles burning and clumsy despite her pleas to continue. Her lungs heaved, screaming within her chest as if they had been scorched and blackened.

Sprinting at full speed had never been her forte, and she doubted she’d made it more than a kilometer at best. She stumbled to the side of a building and put her back to it as she looked around wildly for danger.

The streets were mostly empty, though the rain had lightened. The few pedestrians on the sidewalks noticeably avoided meeting her gaze or even looking at her. ‘I probably look crazed and dangerous,’ she realized. ‘Maybe I am crazed and dangerous.’

The stones beneath her feet and the brick of the building behind her were still shadow-free. ‘I am a woman without a shadow,’ she thought inanely. ‘It sounds like one half of a bad riddle.’ Siobhan swallowed down another sudden surge of bile.

She recognized the street she was on, and the house numbers were coherent and in the correct order. No one was watching through the windows, and those few people who passed her in the street had faces, even if they weren’t turned her way. All the streetlamps were working.

She could still feel her shadow, somewhere behind her. She had never stretched it so far from her. But then again, she had never detached it before, either.

When her breathing began to settle, she closed her eyes and thought she could almost tell what it was doing, sense its movements and its actions as it absorbed and expelled energy to stay coherent in form and affect the world around it even in minuscule ways. It was a little bit like sensing through the raven with the Lino-Wharton messenger spell, a little like the proprioception philtre, and above all reminded her of the bits of experience she’d had sensing the world through her shadow. Which made sense when she considered it.

She swallowed back a hysterical laugh at her own stupidity.

It was...standing before four Red Guard agents. At least she was pretty sure they were Red Guard agents. What the shadow had wasn’t a sense of sight, even if it was absorbing the light reflected off of their bodies. ‘So it had been two teams, then. The other two agents were probably lying in wait to act as backup.’ She could distinguish the one that had fought her from the other three, who had a lot more gear and were carrying full-size shields. As Siobhan concentrated harder, she made out some movement and vibration.

It was talking. “I find it displeasing when people attack my followers.”

Strangely, the burst of outrage that this description of Siobhan sparked helped to calm her down more than anything else. She pushed away from the side of the building, looking for somewhere familiar. Somewhere she could hide safely, both from any further threat from the Red Guard and from anyone who might happen to notice a strange woman without a shadow.

“But I will not attack you,” Siobhan’s shadow continued, gesturing to the agent wearing the mask with the flat stones for eyes.

Their flesh-glove had reached their neck and was stretching around it and up over their face.

“You can go ahead and take off that Aberrant before it eats you.”

The Red Guard agents shared distrustful looks.

Siobhan lifted her right arm, and her shadow moved with her, even though the amber eyes were still staring back at her. ‘Did it really just...come back?’ But it had. She could feel its connection, just as she had felt its disconnection. ‘It could be a trick. I can’t let down my guard.’ She continued to keep her hand in front of her mouth and a spark of her Will active in the spell, even though her hand and elbow were getting stiff from being held in the same position for too long.

“What are you?” she whispered.

“At the moment, I am your shadow,” it replied. Somehow, it was talking by vibrating the air. Considering that speaking without a tongue or lips was probably quite difficult, it was doing an admirable job of mimicking her voice.

“And when you are not my shadow?” Siobhan breathed, her back itching with new sweat against cold, damp clothes.

“I suppose there are a few ways one might describe me. For the moment...I suppose you can consider me a sealed, but not quite forgotten, memory.”

Siobhan shuddered convulsively. As shameful and horrible as it was, her eyes burned with the first onset of tears. She clenched her teeth so hard her jaw creaked under the strain and tilted her head back. She would not cry.

She could still sense something from it, the way it noted the jump of the muscles in her jaw and throat, tracking every involuntary movement with a mean amusement. It was enjoying this.

A surge of hatred, sickly sweet and cold, swept through her.

“Raaz didn’t quite catch everything,” it said. “Don’t you remember when we met? Don’t you remember my name?”

Siobhan did remember, even if she desperately wished she didn’t, but she wouldn’t say it. “If you’re sealed, how are you doing this? Taking over my shadow?”

Its amusement grew. “Well, you so kindly swallowed a beast core for me.”

She gasped. “You absorbed the power from the beast core? How?”

It continued as if she had not spoken. “And then you detached a piece of your existence for me, one conveniently not bound by the seal.”

Siobhan, for some reason, wanted to laugh. She tasted blood in her mouth.

“With the little cracks in said seal, it only took some effort and a bit of power to slip into the empty spot. I have to admit, I had such fun.”

“What would have happened if you ran out of the power you absorbed from that beast core while detached from me, inhabiting my shadow?” she asked.

“I would have had to slip into someone else’s shadow,” it said, but Siobhan felt its uncertainty and fear. “I believe I would have had to consume the original shadow to take over. Quite difficult to do with a powerful thaumaturge.”

Siobhan did her best to keep her face from reacting. This, she was sure, was a lie. It had made that up. It had no idea what would happen if it ran out of power away from her, but it didn’t believe it would be anything good. “Can you take control of my shadow again?”

“Any. Time. I. Want,” it said drolly.

That was a lie, too.

“Can you tell what I’m thinking?”

“Of course. I live in your head, darling. I ride around inside your thoughts.” It wavered, though neither the light nor Siobhan had moved. “I know how afraid you are right now,” it whispered. “But there’s no need to be quite that terrified. I was very helpful tonight, don’t you think? I protected you, at the cost of using up that meager bit of power. I was useful, and the borrowing of your shadow caused you no harm.”

But she could still feel the truth of the monster, and the way its rapacious feeling of starvation only heightened at the dilation in Siobhan’s pupils and the pulse in her throat. It didn’t want to eat her, literally. It just wanted to kill her and use her corpse for its own purposes. Metaphorically. Maybe not her physical corpse. But something like that.

And it was true that she was afraid, but if it had really been able to feel her emotions, it would have picked up on the hatred that she was barely tamping down. Her eyes burned with tears, but not from fear or despair. She simply felt too much loathing for one body to contain.

It was because of this thing that Grandfather was dead. Because of it, she had lost everything.

Siobhan swallowed and firmed her voice. “What do you want?”

Its voice warbled a little more, growing faint. “I want you to remember me,” it said.

Siobhan could feel its presence receding, leaving her natural shadow behind. Its eyes were the last to go, staring at her until the glow finally disappeared.