Nightbound: Curse of Shadows

4

A chill went down my spine. Of course she'd found out. Why wouldn't she?

Thunderstorm had the same look I must have. Like I was about to die. I might as well.

"You mean she really..."

"I... I guess so," I said, my stomach feeling sick.

I suppose it was worth it, if it saves her...

A force tugged at my mind, willing me to look up. I tried not to let my fear show. I wasn't giving her the satisfaction.

The human's eyes swirled with colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, red, looking like a snake about to strike. And ever so slowly, I felt myself freezing.

My belly growled the moment I sat up. I looked around at the walls wildly before remembering yesterday with North Sky and Sílier and Tandin. I was safe. They might not be. I could only hope.

I slipped outside. Judging by the moons, it wasn't long after I'd gone to sleep. I had a whole night left.

I made my way slowly to the edge of the camp. My den was near the outside anyway, but each crunch of snow beneath my paws still set me on edge.

With one last glance to make sure I wasn't being followed, I shifted to my dragon self and took off. The wind curled around my wings and tickled the feather ruff of my ears, seeming to welcome me back to the sky. There weren't many updrafts at night, but I found one anyway. It sprang up under me and pushed me as high as it could go. I spread my wings a little further and it pushed me higher and higher into the deep sky. The night was as clear as glass. Silver moonlight bathed the ground and rainbow moonlight colored it with hints of every color. The roots of the trees glowed slightly, but soon I was too high to see it. They say the trunks of the trees themselves once shine so bright the forests were as light as day, but for some reason they stopped long ago.

But the ground and its troubles were behind me.

All too soon, even though it was probably a couple hours after I'd left, my shoulder started aching. Great. Most of the time sky dragons could fly for days straight if they didn't get tired, but I'd wrenched my wing fighting Araktine about a month ago. I shouldn't be flying so high with it not perfectly healed, but I couldn't wait another week. I reluctantly tilted into a stoop and was a hundred feet above the ground in under a minute.

I circled over the nearly bare trees and ignored the soreness as well as I could, looking around to see which way would be best. I could keep going south. Maybe west. East was a desert, it would be hard to go that way without burning up, even if my leopard form wasn't better suited to forests and mountains. I could go any way but east. East was the sky prison and Razerali. East was somewhere I couldn't go back to.

Maybe south. South could work. Except if I went too far south I'd hit the desert strip, and I couldn't cross that easily at all.

Movement on the ground caught my eye. It was a small, red-orange figure walking carefully through the trees. I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to go to the ground, but I was curious. I landed in the biggest tree I could find as quietly as I could. Unfortunately there weren't many leafy trees here this time of year, but plenty of trees were big enough to support me gripping their trunk and branches and tall enough that I wouldn't be seen unless the person looked up.

I wondered for a moment why I didn't just shift to my leopard form or an owl, then decided it was because I was too proud to redo what I'd started as a dragon as anything else and justified it with my dragon form being easier to blend into the night with. I reminded myself that some of the trees were still literally glowing then told logical brain to shut up.

The red creature got closer. It was a fox, and her coat was a red-orange flame. Her paws seemed to make no sound in the snow, leaving only delicate pawprints. She stopped and sniffed the air a few feet from my tree. I held my breath until she made a movement a bit like a shrug and moved on.

I waited until she was a good distance away from me before dropping silently to the ground, fanning my wings a bit to slow the fall. I followed slowly, still wondering why I bothered and why I didn't just leave now. My feet seemed to barely disturb the snow. Maybe it was a Shadow thing, or a sky dragon thing, or maybe I was just crazy. Whatever it was, it softened my footsteps and kept me from being noticed.

The air in front of the fox shimmered slightly. I stopped and stood as still as I could. The fox suddenly went as still as me and stared straight ahead. I shifted to leopard out of panic and the fox whipped around too soon for me to disappear into the woods.

She didn't seem to react much, only stared at me curiously. I wasn't quite sure what to say. Could she tell I'd been following her? She couldn't have seen me as a dragon, or else she'd have either ran or attacked me already.

Finally she spoke. "So... who are you?"

My mind raced with the many answers I had to that question. Pretender. Murderer. Coward. Hated. Useless. Liar. Failure.

Phantom.

"Oh, you're Alvara, right? The new one?" She came closer.

It was oddly disorienting. Usually people were leaving me, not coming to me.

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, that would be me." I tried not to let her know that I was nervous. I wasn't entirely sure that it worked. I felt myself go even more still as her eyes seemed to look into me.

I finally blinked after what seemed like an eternal staring contest. Then I mentally cursed myself for forgetting to hide my eyes. "Who are you?" I asked, curious despite my stomach twisting about my slip up.

She did something that looked like biting the inside of her mouth.

"Okay then, Saideth, keep it to yourself," I said half jokingly.

She looked up. "Wait, what?"

"Saideth. Mysterious."

"Oh. Well... I'm Cienna."

This could be going a lot worse.

"What are you doing out here?" I dug my claws into the snow and looked around.

"Just nice out, You?"

"Yeah. Same. It's pretty. I just like walking out late at night."

"Even with all the Phantom stuff going on?"

I cringed internally as it hit me how weird that must have sounded given all recent events. "I don't know. I've never seen the Phantom. The attack here the other night is probably the closest I've ever been to an attack, and I travel a lot."

It wasn't exactly a lie, I thought, feeling sick at the memory. It was, after all, the closest I'd been to a Phantom attack. I'd done it myself.

"Me too," she said. Somehow it never ceases to amaze me that I can be thinking of one thing while a conversation goes on like my mind wasn't a thousand miles off track. "I traveled a lot when I was younger. I settled down for a while, but then I started again as soon as all this Phantom business started."

"Why then? Wouldn't it be more dangerous?"

"Honestly, I kind of wanted to figure out who it was. Nobody's ever actually witnessed an attack and survived."

I could have laughed at the irony. "How? I've heard the Phantom's pretty... thorough hiding her identity, whether it's an attack or not." Not a lie. Just not exactly the truth.

"I actually have a lead."

My heart skipped a beat. "Really? What is it?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

"I'm trying to keep it secret for now."

I didn't respond. Did she really have an accurate lead? I hoped not. I didn't exactly want to be found. And the moment she told anyone who I was, Araktine might ignore Sílier and take them- and her- out. It didn't matter if I said I was innocent. It would end the same.

"Do you think-" I began, but I forgot what I was about to ask when I was cut off by a bloodcurdling screech.