Page 116 of Claim the Light
This area used to be controlled by Scorn dragons. In the past, I would have been bracing for the possibility of a golden bullet in my back, but now my heartbeat is elevated for different reasons.
The dark witch I’m tracking is the last of the three witches who escaped from the veil prison.
I found the other two more easily since they weren’t so cautious about using their powers and left a trail of human bodies in their wake. They were working together, and I imagine they thought their chances of survival would be higher that way. It only made them easier to locate.
But this witch… She’s cunning.
She’ll know I’m coming for her.
I should turn around and head back the way I came, seek reinforcements, and try to find her again later. This expedition was meant purely for surveillance. In fact, I promised Callan that I was only going out for some air.
But I unexpectedly caught her scent, and I can’t let this opportunity pass me by.
I’ve never been so close to catching her as I am now.
She turns a corner up ahead into another back street, one I’m vaguely familiar with. It’s a short street and several of the buildings lining it have been condemned. The streetlights are broken and only one is working at the far end, causing the shadows to thicken around me as I follow her.
Shadows were once my friend, but I shudder at the memory of how dark my world seemed to become when Tyler ruled these streets. That was before Sophia defeated him and banished him to the keeper’s realm.
Some of that darkness threatened to continue even after he was overcome. When I returned to the prison veil afterward, I made a disconcerting discovery.
In the level of the prison where I had been kept, next to the cage where the shadow panthers were imprisoned and I fought for my life, I discovered a hole in the wall.
Another cage had been hidden behind that wall.
Someone was being kept there, but I still have no idea who.
Isaac, too, was baffled. And alarmed. He told me he didn’t know there was a cage there, let alone another prisoner, and the absence of sour lemon on my tongue confirmed he was telling the truth. Not that Isaac would ever lie to me.
We only have theories about who the prisoner might have been and how their presence was so well concealed. One is that a magical barrier must have been placed across the wall to conceal the extra cage completely. Even from me. Another theory is that the cage was actually a separate pocket of the veil, similar to the one the then-Celestial Ascendant had placed behind my cell, where she put the dragon’s light.
Most concerning was what the cage itself told me: a creature of powerful blood had been kept there.
The scraps of discarded clothing on the floor—in fact the very air within the cage—filled my chest and my mind with an overpowering sense of danger. It was a dark creature. Possibly female. Carrying a spark of rage within her that felt as scorching as dragon’s flame.
As for the shadow panthers that also escaped, I haven’t sensed them within this city. If they’re here, they certainly haven’t caused any carnage. Unfortunately, Isaac and I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when they escaped from the veil. My focus when I first returned to the prison after liberating the dragon’s light had been on making sure the Roden-Darr were properly secured. I’d sent Micah back to Sophia that night and then I’d taken the time needed to ensure the Roden-Darr were constrained.
The panthers could have escaped right out from under our noses while we were in the veil and moving between levels. Given the proximity of the shadow panther’s cell to the hidden cage behind it, it’s possible that the unknown inhabitant of that cage took the panthers with them.
I may never know what really happened.
All I know for certain is that the powerful prisoner, whoever she is, has not remained in my city. I haven’t sensed her presence and that’s just as well because otherwise, I wouldn’t stop until I hunted her down.
Unlike this witch I’m tracking now. This old woman smells like rotten fruit, and I’ve already connected her scent to multiple human deaths.
Proceeding more carefully along the darker side of the street, I watch the witch flit into a nearby alley. Her movement is so quick that I suspect there’s either a hidden entrance to her hideout in that alley, or she knows she’s being followed.
I pause at the corner into the passageway, listening intently to the scuffling sounds within it, not far from my position.
My hand lifts to my hair, where my glaive is masquerading as a small, golden pin. I found that as my pregnancy progressed, my back pain increased, and I took to wearing my glaive in my hair, instead of in a harness across my back.
I’m reassured by my weapon’s presence, but I now face a difficult decision.
If this is indeed the location of the witch’s lair, then I can come back later with reinforcements, because I can be assured she’ll turn up here again. But if she’s merely passing through, then losing her now could mean months of searching for her again. In the meantime, she’s bound to kill again. Dark magic thrives on death. She won’t stop.
I quell my inner groan. I don’t want fatalities on my hands when I can prevent them.
At the same time, I don’t want to endanger my child.
