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I’d raised my hand to remove my glasses and polish the lenses, but it stilled just before my nose. What if his dormant Charmer powers were affecting the nature of his shadows? We’d never turned someone like him before, not to my knowledge. When Gaige discussed the absence of his Charmer magic, it wasn’t that it didn’t exist anymore, it was more that it wasn’t truly accessible any longer. I jerked my head toward his right hand, where I could just barely detect the edges of his Charmer’s symbol. It was thin and faded, asif etched into place with graphite rather than inked into his skin, but it was stillthere.
Gaige had never wielded blades before, but he had tamed beasts. He’d done it for decades.
As expected, the curling tendrils fled after several tense moments, and Gaige tossed his hands up in exasperation. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Everything,” I said, taking three quick strides to stand before him.
He looked like I’d slapped him. “Are you kidding me right now?”
“It’s not you, it’s your shadows.” I nodded to Ozias, and he took a few steps back to stand beside Calem. Gently, I reached for Gaige’s hands and rubbed my thumbs along his wrists.
His gaze was wary, but he didn’t retreat from my touch. “You really need to work on your delivery.”
“Never mind that.” Hope had my thoughts cascading in a rush that made it difficult to focus. And, apparently, speak. We’d been going about this all wrong. Gaige was perfectly capable of controlling his shadows, we just had to approach it from a different angle.
Turning his hands over, I nodded to his faded emblem. “You’re a Charmer, Gaige. That doesn’t disappear just because you died. Youknowhow to tame wild creatures.”
His brows furrowed. “So?”
My pulse quickened, and I released his hands. “Try again. Call on the shadows.”
“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word as he glanced back at Ozias and Calem. They were equally perplexed, though, and simply shrugged in response. Extending his palms outward, Gaige once again summoned shadows from the surrounding woods. And justlike before, they cut through the grass with the speed and efficiency of snakes to curl about his legs.
“Look at them,” I urged. “What do they look like?”
He glanced to his ankles. “Shadows?”
I gave him a pointed look. “Try harder.”
“Iamtrying. I just don’t understand what you want from me.” His hands fell to his sides as he forced himself to stare at the pool of writhing tendrils by his feet. “It looks like a snakes’ nest. That better?”
I didn’t even have to respond—the shadows did for me. A rush of power settled over us as the once wild, virulent forms shifted and solidified into something recognizable. Vipers. One hissed and cracked open its mouth, exposing gleaming, oily-black fangs. Another encircled Gaige’s calf. More yet slithered up his thighs, wrapped around his torso, draped along his arms. His mouth had gone slack, and with a timid finger, he stroked the length of a snake curling around his forearm. It gave a pleased hiss in response before lifting its head.
“Holy fuck,” Calem whispered.
“Honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen in my entire existence,” Ozias said a breath behind him.
“You don’t need control, Gaige. You’ve had it all along.” Something warm and full threatened to burst in my chest. “You just needed to remember who you are.”
A glassy sheen obscured his steel-blue stare, and he let out a throaty laugh that shifted to something louder and deeper. Without a word, the snakes raced off him and coalesced together in another snarling mess, only to take the shape of a monstrous feline—Okean. It wasn’t his beast, not really, but it looked exactly like the legendary feline, and it bounded through the clearing with a happy caterwaul that shook birds from their roosts. Gaige flicked his wrist, and theshadow beast cut into the woods. When it emerged, it’d shifted to a wolf. The beast loped through the fields before launching into the air and dissolving into hundreds of shadows that fled into the trees.
“Kost.” Gaige whirled to face me, eyes alight.
“I know.” My cheeks burned from the intensity of my grin, and then suddenly Gaige’s hands were on either side of my face and his lips were pressed tightly against mine. I froze at the sudden public display of affection, but his unbridled joy was contagious. I chuckled against his kiss and then returned the favor by lightly draping my hands around his neck. I vaguely registered Calem and Ozias whooping, but as it had been the night before with Gaige, all sounds were muffled. I was wrapped up in him, in his happiness, and nothing else in the world mattered.
But one sound, or rather a crescendo of earsplitting screams, cut through our private cocoon. We both broke away, our gazes first jumping to a confused Ozias and Calem. And then the shrieks crested again, and all four of us took off in the direction of the settlement. When we rounded our house and came upon the communal areas, we stuttered to an abrupt halt.
Monsters wereeverywhere.
I couldn’t catalog them all fast enough. The Charmers had summoned their beasts and were barely holding them at bay, but fighting monsters was nothing like battling against an army. There was no strategy to their movements, no front line to concentrate on. The monsters had wild, erratic patterns and would lunge toward one beast only to shift focus halfway through and attack a Charmer. All around them, virulent shadows licked at their heels and propelled them forward, as if coaxing them to attack.
Gaige’s knees hit the earth. “I thought… This can’t be happening…”
Panic had a way of ushering me into a heightened state ofawareness, and I summoned my shadow rapier and commanded thin tendrils to gather beneath my feet. We needed to be swift. We needed to be lethal. We needed to be the monsters.
“Calem.” My gaze bounced from creature to creature. “Go.”
Calem sprinted away, shifting into his beast as he ran. He crashed into a monster with writhing, thorn-laden tentacles and a scaled body just before it struck Kaori in the back. She called more beasts to her side as her legendary feline, Stella, joined Calem in taking the creature down.
