The Forever Court Read online

  In return we will be saved.

  His heart was hammering so loudly it felt like the whole chamber shook. Grandfather was still speaking, but for the first time in his life Uriel didn’t heed him. Agony striped the blackness in his head. His breath came shallow and shaky, and as Ambrel’s finger trembled against his, Uriel wanted to shout with relief.

  It was starting, and it felt like destiny.

  Light spilled from Uriel, rich and gold as honey, hot and searing as a star. Two stars. His twin sister’s hair rose as crackling fire, the air twisting with unbearable heat. It cried for release, but Uriel tamed it, as a Croit was meant to do.

  Because they were special.

  The darkness around them had fled. No, not just fled: it was no longer there. I will never fear darkness again, Uriel thought, blood dripping down his skinned cheek. Grandfather was revealed before them, grim and towering. However, as tall as the old man was, he was dwarfed by what loomed behind—its rictus grin, its gaps and gleams.

  The glory of Her, Uriel thought. The terror.

  Their Redemptress.

  Grandfather favored the twins with a rare, triumphant smile.

  “Happy birthday.”

  DENIZEN HARDWICK LOVED BOOKSHOPS.

  It was a new romance for him. There simply hadn’t been any near the orphanage in which he’d grown up. Then again, Denizen hadn’t been a dramatically rich orphan, just a regular no-parents orphan, so it wasn’t like he could have bought anything anyway. But now Denizen lived in a city, with bookshops on every corner, and you couldn’t get him out of them with a crowbar.

  Whether a great sprawling emporium or a tiny tucked-away burrow that only opened for half an hour on wet Tuesdays in March, there was a magic to bookshops. A quiet sort of magic, which wasn’t Denizen’s area, but a magic nonetheless.

  And he’d never seen one as beautiful as this.

  Oak shelves gleamed caramel with varnish, filling the air with the faintest scent of forests. The shop’s actual dimensions were a mystery: antique furniture colluding artistically to carve up the quiet, turning each aisle into a clandestine affair between customer and book.

  Outside, the sun was half hidden in cloud, but somehow in here it was rich and golden—the sunlight of Narnia, of Lórien, of Faerûn and Hyboria and Klatch.

  It’s almost too perfect, Denizen thought. Charts on the walls and overstuffed, mismatched armchairs lent the place a reassuring feel of clutter and age. There was even a globe on the counter, as wide as Denizen’s shoulders, tattooed with the curves and jags of the world.

  Denizen let the door close behind him gently. A little silver bell chimed—the tonal equivalent of a polite cough.

  The owner’s head rose at the sound. He fitted the decor perfectly, as if the bookshop had grown up around him like the shell of a hermit crab. Tweed-clad—of course tweed-clad, Denizen thought—with tawny curls bobbing down round the dome of his liver-spotted scalp, the man was the epitome of a bookseller. There could never have been any other profession for a man like this, except maybe were-owl.

  His voice was the scrape of a finger down a page.

  “May I help you?”

  Denizen scrubbed a hand through his shaggy red hair. Encouraged by the coming summer, new freckles were pushing from the paleness of his skin like seeds, the darkest of them a single inkblot on his lower lip. He peered warily from the turned-up collar of a too-big coat.

  Wariness wasn’t unusual for Denizen Hardwick. It was how he’d looked at the world his entire life, as though he knew there was a blow coming, but not from whom or where. It had been a strange few months, however, and they had left their mark in peculiar and indefinable ways. Denizen still looked like he was expecting a blow, but now there was the distinct impression he might hit you back.

  He stared at the bookseller with sharp gray eyes.

  “I like your shop,” Denizen said. He really did—though, for all his admiration of each carefully chosen detail, his gaze kept drifting to the brightly colored flyers taped to the door, their cheap ink smudged from being passed through too many hands. “It’s quiet.”

  “Yes, most days,” the old man said, “but I get by.”

  “I get quiet days at work too,” Denizen said, glancing down at the wrinkled cover of a detective novel, “but ... I think this is going to be a loud one.”

  The bookseller’s smile became confused. “I’m sorry?”

  Denizen chose his words carefully, anger pulsing a tight band round his temples. That had been happening more and more recently. Normally, he could lose himself for hours in a bookshop…but lately that peace had been eluding him.

  He kept thinking—fragile. He kept thinking— flammable.

  “I’m just supposed to be doing recon,” he said. “Watch. Observe. That kind of thing.”

  His eyes never left the bookseller, but the captions from the flyers swam in his head.

  MISSING!

  HAVE YOU SEEN OUR ...

  HELP

  It was the last that stung him the most. A picture, a phone number, and a one-word plea.

  The old man’s smile remained, but his thin lips had drawn back, retreating from his teeth. His pupils glimmered blackly.

  “It took a while to be certain,” Denizen continued conversationally. “Taking photos. Staking out the shop. Even went through your trash, not that you have any. That was another clue. People always forget the little things. And so do you, I guess.”

  One of the ceiling lightbulbs flickered. Neither the bookseller nor Denizen looked at it. The tweed grain of the old man’s suit shifted, like muscles under skin. A single curl fell from his mottled scalp, a comma white and surprised.

  “My orders are to let her deal with you,” Denizen continued. “But I can’t. Not after ...”

  Blackness in the bookseller’s eyes. A twist of fire in Denizen’s throat.

  After what? the old man whispered, his voice the fluttering of dry, dead wings.

  “You put their pictures up on your door.”

  The Tenebrous attacked.

  The old man’s face came apart in a howl of paper and dust. Human teeth clattered to the floor, forced out by fangs more akin to those of an eel—serrated, back-hooked barbs. Limbs popped, shadows rushing free to clot the gaps. The lightbulb sizzled as the Tenebrous bounded across the bookshop floor, reality twitching uneasily in its wake.

  “Now!” Denizen shouted.

  Simon Hayes shimmered into view on his left, hands ablaze. The eel-in-tweed tried to twist in midair, but the tall boy snarled and a dart of fire folded the creature in half.

  It flew across the shop, smashing through a shelf in a flurry of books. Smoke rose from its flanks, but the flame vanished as quickly as it had appeared. A single spark spiraled downward to hiss harmlessly against the floor.

  Denizen sighed with relief. The power that roiled beneath his skin was many things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. Ravening beasts from the dark end of forever Denizen could handle—sort of—but he would never be party to the burning of a book.

  “Good job,” Denizen said, turning to his friend. “Very controlled. And you’re getting really good at bending light. I completely lost track of you.”

  “I know,” Simon said, grinning wryly. “You nearly caught me in the door.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Denizen said, “I got—”

  His next words were lost to a rising purr of wind. Books were eviscerated of pages; the flyers on the door beat helplessly at their tape before ripping free as well.

  “—distracted,” he finished.

  The bookseller’s skin dangled in folds from a shape now gaunt and towering. One hand still hung human at the end of its arm, the other a bulging claw of paper and bone. The heavy cabinet it lifted must have weighed more than Simon and Denizen together, but the beast flung it one-handed all the same.

  It was exactly what Denizen had been waiting for.

  Holding back when the Tenebrous attacked had been a struggle. If he were being hones
t, it was a struggle from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning to the moment he closed them at night, and then that same struggle haunted his dreams.

  It felt very good to cut loose.

  A shield of fused air blinked into existence for just long enough to catch the edge of the cabinet in midair, spinning it harmlessly sideways. It came apart against the wall, neatly reducing the antique globe to a collection of antique shards.

  Oh dear. It had been a really nice globe.

  Paper flexed and tore as the Tenebrous drew itself to its full height. The bulb above them finally cracked, its light bleeding to grays and blues as if lenses were being swept across it, as though filtered through the nictitating eyelid of a snake.

  “Well, go on, then,” Simon hissed out of the corner of his mouth. The unglow of the bulb had washed all the color out of his skin.

  “What?” Denizen hissed back.

  “You do it. You’re better.”

  “Wait, hang on—”

  The beast bolted for the door, skittering low and using the bookshelves as cover. Denizen hesitated—like an idiot, he hesitated—and when the Tenebrous ripped the back door from its hinges and flung it at him, all Denizen could do was duck.

  A hideous smirk distended the creature’s face.

  Readers, it hissed with absolute scorn, and then shrieked as a comet cored it from behind.

  Abigail Falx had been raised to be thorough. She never took her eyes from the eel-of-tweed, light spilling from her fingers to pin the Tenebrous down—consuming every page that spun from its flailing coils, every drifting mote of dust. Layer after layer sloughed away until there was nothing left but a sketch of darkness curled against the floor.

  Soon there wasn’t even that.

  A smudge of soot marred Abigail’s dark cheek as the inferno faded from her eyes. She swept it away with a finger of iron.

  “You two,” she said pleasantly, “are idiots.”

  IT TURNED OUT TO be a popular opinion.

  “Reckless,” snapped Denizen’s mother, “absolutely reckless. What were you thinking?”

  She waved a connecting rod in the air as she spoke. At least Denizen thought it was a connecting rod. It might have been a camshaft. Or a piston. Or something ... else.

  For the garrison of a secret, mystical Order of Knights, Seraphim Row had quite a modern garage. Tools hung on the walls; engine components sat in tidy lines on the floor. Denizen might have inquired as to what some of them were, but Vivian Hardwick had been fiercely protective of her car before it had been ravaged by a pack of marauding Tenebrous, and now she barely let anyone near it at all.

  “You were just supposed to locate the beast,” she said, wiping black grease from her black iron hands, “not confront it yourselves.”

  Denizen stared at his toes and knew without looking that Simon was doing the same. It wasn’t the first time they had stood in an office together and been told that their behavior was unacceptable, though back in Crosscaper Orphanage there had been far less risk of dismemberment.

  Abigail, he was sure, would be staring straight ahead, but that was because Abigail was Abigail. She had been raised in garrisons just like this one, and while Denizen and Simon had been trying to liberate sweets from the orphanage kitchen, she had been learning how to disassemble a crossbow. Leather creaked as she flexed her gloved fingers. Abigail wasn’t used to disobeying orders, especially ones from a war hero.

  Vivian Hardwick was ... intimidating. She towered over them, even Simon—a lean, rangy woman with steel-gray hair and a stare that could etch glass. Her skin was threaded with scars, the map of a hard and violent life, and her movements thrummed with coiled tension—as if, at any moment, her long limbs would unfold into precise and unstoppable violence.

  “I’m waiting for a strategy,” she said flatly. “A reason.”

  Vivian was a Malleus, a Knight Superior of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, and she had been fighting Tenebrous since before Denizen was born. He and the others were just Neophytes, trainees, and, like everything else in their lives at the moment, this was a test.

  “Darcie identified the Tenebrous,” Denizen began. “John-of-Sorts—it favors replacing people, insinuating itself into a community to feed off their mistrust and paranoia.”

  Animals made sense. Plants made sense. Humans made sense, if you just looked at them from a biological point of view and ignored all the messy, individualistic fluff that went on inside their heads. Tenebrous came from outside this reality, and so were under no such obligation. The Knights of the Borrowed Dark knew very little about what they were capable of, and what they did know they had paid for in iron and blood.

  Denizen had paid his fair share too. He had first-hand experience of the Tenebrae, the pitch-black other-world from which the Tenebrous came. He’d felt their very presence distort reality like a stone flung in a pond, their every move a message: We do not belong here.

  And he knew they were flammable. As far as most Knights were concerned, this was all you needed to know.

  “We found out people had stopped going to the bookshop,” Simon said without looking up. “There had been hardly any customers in the last two weeks, and those who had gone in left looking ... scared.”

  “Local teenagers confirmed strange vibes,” Abigail added promptly, pushing a strand of black hair back from her ear. They’d been quite happy to chat with her—she was charming and friendly, and she possessed the ferocious beauty of a hawk. “They wouldn’t go near the shop.”

  Some Tenebrous hunted. Others laid traps. But no matter how good a Tenebrous’s disguise was, unconsciously, people still picked up that something was awry. A wrongness around the eyes. A joint that twisted instead of bent. Some trace of the monster beneath.

  “So you charged in?” Vivian asked darkly, but Simon shook his head.

  “We made sure. I made sure. I bent light to make myself invisible and scouted the house behind the shop. There was food rotting in the cupboards. Mail piling up in the hall. And in the basement ...”

  “It had taken children,” Denizen said suddenly. “They were in cages, but it hadn’t hurt them—yet.”

  He risked a quick glance upward. Vivian was staring right at him.

  “I didn’t go into the bookshop to attack,” Denizen lied. “I went in to scout, with Simon invisible as support. Abigail was covering the back. The Tenebrous knew what I was as soon as I got in the door. All we did was defend ourselves.”

  Maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe the best defense was a good offense. All Denizen knew for sure was that it was the first time he’d ever enjoyed the smell of burning paper.

  Vivian nodded. “The children?”

  “We set them free. They were too scared to even look at us. They’re not going to identify us.”

  A thread of softness entered the Malleus’s voice. “And the bookseller?”

  Denizen shook his head. Abigail looked away.

  The silence lasted until Vivian cleared her throat. “Well. I still believe you behaved recklessly, but it does seem you had reason to act. Your strategy was solid and none of you were hurt.” She frowned. “I do not condone disobeying a direct order but ... I am glad that you’re all unharmed.”

  Relief threatened to slump Denizen’s shoulders, but he squared them straight.

  “One last thing,” said Vivian.

  They waited.

  “Did you rehearse this?”

  “No!” they exclaimed together, and Vivian’s eyebrows rose.

  “I see. All right. You can go.”

  The Neophytes turned to leave, but Vivian’s voice called out: “Denizen—a moment?”

  Simon threw him a sympathetic look before he disappeared through the door, and then Denizen and his mother were alone.

  Until quite recently, Denizen had believed himself to be an orphan. In his defense, there had been quite a lot of supporting evidence. He’d been raised in an orphanage, for one thing. You didn’t just grow up in an orphanage if you weren’t an orp
han—it was like an exclusive and depressing club—and so Denizen had always believed himself alone in the world. Everyone around him had been alone too, though, and that had given him a miserable sort of peace.

  Six months ago, all that had changed. His thirteenth birthday had brought with it a gift for volatile magic. He’d learned of the existence of the Tenebrae, a world a shadow’s width beneath our own, and the Knights of the Borrowed Dark—the secret organization that held the line between. Most terribly, he had learned that this secret war had cost his father his life when Denizen was just two years old, driving his mother into a mad crusade of grief and revenge.

  It had been a busy few weeks for revelations.

  Vivian swept a hand over the newly restored hood of her car. “What you did made a sort of sense, considering the situation,” she said. “But it’s the why that concerns me.”

  Somewhere deep in Denizen’s chest, power woke in curling tendrils of heat. The Tenebrae. It was the foremost weapon of a Knight, a seething inferno lodged just below the heart. Maybe it was that proximity that made it treat emotion like fuel. The first time Denizen had channeled its power, he had been so angry, and Vivian had encouraged that rage, provoking him to fling it at her in fire. He still wondered why she had done that, instead of any number of gentler ways.

  “I think you wanted a fight,” Vivian continued. “I think you wanted to give the power inside you, the ... the anger, a way out.”

  Denizen had been brought up on a diet of fantasy books, so he’d always imagined evil as the flip side to good—dark, brooding, a little romantic. He’d been wrong. When a pack of rogue Tenebrous named the Clockwork Three had invaded his life, he had been surprised at their sheer pettiness.

  They’d schemed to provoke the Tenebrae’s ruler by kidnapping his daughter Mercy, framing the Order for it, and starting a war between the worlds—but the Three had spent just as much time and effort smashing windows, or eating lightbulbs, or scaring children. It was all about misery for them, not some great purpose or to convert the world to their cause. They just liked hurting things.