Netherworld, Book 1 of the Hallowed Realms Trilogy Read online

“I was such a wee lad then,” I said, smiling at the shot.

  “You loved riding on his shoulders like that.” She smiled. “Alana wanted to capture all of the moments around her,” Ma said, looking at the cluster of photos. “She’ll probably be cross I haven’t taken a single photo of her sick.” She glanced up at me. Her eyes were glassy from tears. “I didn’t want her to remember it.”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure my sister was likely to forget it. Should she make it back home.

  “Oh, I remember this one,” I said, trying to change the subject from her grief. It was a shot of me, Seamus, and Alana. She was wedged in the middle of us. One arm draped over Seamus’ arm, the other outstretched to snag the photo.

  Ma took the picture from me to examine it. “Where was this?”

  “That’s at the falls.”

  She smiled. “Oh, yes. The lot of ya loved to spend your days catching your death in those icy waters.”

  “It wasn’t that cold.”

  “Tell that to the blue lips you’re sportin’,” she said, nodding towards Alana’s lips.

  I took the photo back and sighed.

  “There was no telling her to get out either. Just as there was no telling Seamus not to get that lame tattoo.”

  “Seamus has a tattoo?” She gasped.

  I laughed. “Yeah. But don’t tell his da. He’d flip.”

  Ma’s face grew stern. “Don’t you be doing something so foolish now, you hear?”

  I raised my hands up in defense. “Not to worry. I have no desire to be marked.”

  “You home for lunch?” Ma said, picking up the scattered photos.

  I helped her gather them and put them back in the decorative box Alana kept them in.

  “Maybe a quick bite, but I wanna pop into the studio for a bit. I need to release some of the stress.”

  Ma nodded. She understood that about me. I was visceral. I needed the physical release. It was why I boxed too. Hitting things helped to centre me. I’d been hitting the bag a lot more these days. Ma preferred I spend my time constructively; hitting the clay instead. It probably didn’t hurt that I made good money on the commissions. Money I’d been saving to go to university. So much for that.

  “I brought home some bread. Fancy a slice?” Ma asked, closing the box.

  “You read my mind.” I grinned.

  She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek before we headed out to the kitchen.

  “Oh, speaking of minds, did you hear about Ms. Daly?” Ma asked as she pulled the loaf onto the table.

  “The lady who works at the library?”

  I pulled out a seat and sat down.

  Ma nodded with her eyes wide. “She’s gone mental.”

  She loved spreading gossip. It gave her such a kick. After what she’d been through the last three years, if talking about what the locals did took her mind off her own struggles, who was I to judge. “They found her screaming in her closet. She couldn’t talk. She just kept pointing and screaming, saying that something was after her. Papers say they had to sedate her to get her into hospital.”

  The hairs on my neck rose up. Ms. Daly’s experience, though different than the girl I’d seen, was no less chilling. What had the librarian seen? Could it have been the same thing that attacked that girl?

  There was no girl, Devlin. It was just your mind playing tricks on you.

  I pushed out from the table.

  “Creepy,” I said. “Look, I think I may skip the bread. I need to get into the studio for a few before I have to get back.”

  She tried to get me to stay longer, but I couldn’t keep thinking about what I’d seen. Or thought I had seen. I needed to focus on what was real. Clay was real. It was grounding.

  Ma pursed her lips into a tight line. “You hide in that studio, you know?”

  “So?” I said as I approached the door.

  “You don’t need to do that, luv. You’re allowed to move on. You’re allowed to have a life.”

  I stood there for a moment, surprised at her comment.

  “No, I’m not,” was all I said before I left the house.

  If Alana couldn’t have a social life, then I wasn’t going to either. It was actually a lot easier to retreat from life than I thought. Because we were twins, we had many of the same connections. They all stopped calling or visiting a few months after her diagnosis. It was as though they were afraid they’d catch her cancer. In the end, they all had futures to plan for. Husbands to marry. Our former mates had little time to spend on a dying one. Even Seamus, well, he retreated too. It was almost as though the two of us didn’t work as mates without Alana as the glue.

  Nothing seemed to work without Alana. My life felt like it was on perpetual pause.

  Ma’s voice found me as I was heading towards the studio at the back of our land.

  “I’ll bring something out for you to eat, then.”

  I didn’t look back. “Don’t bother,” I yelled. “I’m not hungry.”

  Before I opened the studio door, I hauled my fist back and punched the door. The sting resonated into my knuckles then down my arm and echoed off the hills around me. I clenched my jaw, absorbing the pain. The gesture had become my ritual before I sculpted. I tended to forget the world when my fingers buried themselves into the clay, including my dying sister. If she was in pain, I needed to be too. Fortunately, I’d become quite skilled about how hard I could hit the door without fracturing or breaking the fingers I needed to sculpt with. Just a dull throb. That was all I needed.

  I ditched my jacket on a stool and washed the grease off my hands before I cut off a fresh hunk of earth. The soft mud felt cool against my fingertips, healing almost. I sighed as I sank down onto my stool to work. On the shelves that lined the walls were all the projects I’d begun working on before Alana got sick. Back when I had a future in sculpting. The pieces I had spent months working on sat in wait high on a shelf. Covered in dust, all fired and ready to be shipped off to galleries or auctions. The boxes were ready. I only needed to pack them. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to let them go. I clung onto them as tightly as I clung to a cure for Alana.

  “What a waste.” I sighed, looking down at my hands. “These were designed to sculpt, not tear apart engines.” I pounded the blob of clay with my fist to warm it as much as to release the tension.

  I worked for about twenty minutes, molding something new. It felt good not to work on filling an order, but rather, let the clay do what it wanted. It was only when I noticed the shape of my creation that my anger quelled. My subconscious had sculpted a heart-shaped vase. Perfect and unflawed. Not like my sister’s. My fists closed around it, collapsing it into itself in an instant.

  “Damn it!” I yelled, hurtling the blob of clay across the room, hating its reminder of her cancer.

  “Devlin!”

  I turned around and saw Ma standing there with a tray of food for me. Her eyes were wide with shock at my outburst.

  “I told you I wasn’t hungry.” I wasn’t mad at her for not listening to my request. I was mad at myself. She’d seen me lose my cool. Again. I stood up and walked over to her, taking the tray.

  “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  She smiled up at me and ran her hand against my wild, red waves. She was always trying to get my hair to lie flat. It wouldn’t matter how hard she fussed.

  “I know, luv,” she said, kissing the top of my head.

  I let out a breath as I set the beef stew and a generous slice of bread and butter down. I went to the sink in the corner of my studio and washed the clay out from under my nails.

  “I miss her too, you know,” she said.

  I looked up and saw tears in her eyes and I hated that I’d put them there.

  “Eat up before it gets cold.”

  “Aye.” I nodded.

  She paused in the doorway. “We’ll get through this, Devlin.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was saying it to assure me or herself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TARYN
r />   I SHOULDN’T BE ALIVE. A part of me wished I wasn’t.

  One week had passed since the Lorcan attack. After Eivin arrived too late to save that nurse. I survived only because I left her behind.

  The humans wouldn’t know how to help her. Even if I could find a way to bring her to my realm, her mind was already too far gone. Not even our Healers would be able to repair the damage done to her.

  I failed her and that was something I would have to live with. I just hadn’t figured out how to do that yet.

  While life went on as usual for those who lived in my city, my entire world changed that day. I might have been alive, but I was far from living.

  Though the Healers worked a miracle with my injuries, preventing the poison from reaching my heart, some scars would never heal. The Lorcan’s claws left patches of blackened flesh that would never regrow. At present they were hideous. Whatever hopes Ma had held out for finding me a suitor were gone now. That was something at least.

  For the first two days after the Healers left, I cowered in the corner of my room like an animal licking its wounds. I ignored the food Ma left outside my locked door. I even refused to see my da, which broke my heart. He was the only one, except for Eivin, who even came close to understanding me.

  I just couldn’t face that look in his eyes. The one that said ‘I told you so’ as a reminder that he’d warned me about the dangers. Da said I lived, so I should be proud of having survived a Lorcan attack. Instead, I felt only guilt.

  I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t someone worthy of the whispered rumours I could hear in the streets below my home as people passed. The beast chose the nurse over me because I knew she was the easier target. I ran when I should have stayed and fought. Some warrior I was.

  After a week haunted by my demons, an effect driven by the detox of the Lorcan poison, I gained a new understanding. Men didn’t get bogged down with emotion and self-doubt. They had a job to do and they did it. It was easy for them to think of their work as a means to an end. Eivin wouldn’t have failed if he’d been there instead. He was a good man, noble and strong. Even if he’d been weaponless, he would have never left an innocent behind.

  Even in my darkest moments trapped within a haze of fear brought on by the Lorcan poisoning, I never lost my will to fight. Male or female would not matter if those beasts came to kill my people. Yeah, I was a girl, but I’d be damned if I let that stop me. I would find a way to shove my emotion and self-doubt aside.

  I also never lost my suspicions that I’d been set up. In the long hours of the night, I thought a great deal about the man I met at the hospital. The reaper I couldn’t place. I knew most of the reapers from school. The others, those older than me, I knew from the ferry rides. The man at the hospital, I couldn’t recall seeing before.

  He had to be from another part of our realm. He was likely a new recruit called up to replace those soldiers in our village who had been sent off to fight on the Wall. Although Eivin would never admit it, I knew I was right. King Baylor was shuffling his soldiers around to cause confusion. To make it easier for people to be too distracted to ask questions.

  However, I was not like most people. I was not fooled by this new reaper’s handsome face. He had to be there for a reason. Could he have been a spy stationed on that hospital ward by the king? Baylor would want proof of my death and the man had certainly seemed shocked to find me hobbling up the hallway. Not to mention he seemed in no hurry to stop the Lorcan threat.

  I thought of what little I’d been able to see of him through my blurred vision. When I thought of him, all I remembered was his untamed shock of red hair and wide, expressive green eyes. They had been filled with fear and confusion. Fear that I was still alive and now he’d have to be the one to kill me, no doubt. Why did the bad ones always have to look so damn good?

  “Fit or not, he played me for a fool,” I whispered to the night.

  Leaning my head against the window, I breathed in the cool mist and closed my eyes. Somewhere out there was the man who had the answers I needed. I vowed I’d find him once the effects of the poison were finally out of my system. I’d make him talk…even if that meant learning a thing or two about torture.

  Although the hour was late, I couldn’t sleep. Unanswered questions swirled in the dark recesses of my mind. My family all expected me to talk about the attack so I could move on, but I had no intention of doing so. The less they knew the better. I couldn’t risk their safety, so pretending to have temporary amnesia was the easiest thing. Eivin suspected that I was faking. He knew me too well. But he was smart enough not to call me out on it.

  Therapy wasn’t going to help me either. Action would.

  I knew my parents grew restless with my refusal to talk about what had happened to me. The rumours about the attack became ugly as well wishes turned to accusations. Some claimed I was an attention seeker who played out a cruel hoax, carving my own face for effect. Others said I’d switched assignment cards to provoke the attack. Still, others seemed to think it was a wild tale about a barmaid who shared a resemblance to me from the pub just down the road.

  None knew the truth, nor would they be willing to listen even if I did speak out.

  Sooner or later I was going to have to emerge from my room and face the consequences of my actions. In the minds of the public, I had somehow provoked the attack. I waited each day for a royal guard to arrive at my doorstep to take me for questioning but perhaps word of my amnesia had spread from the Healers.

  Eivin had helped me change out of my leathers before we arrived at the ferry so I could remain undetected. He hid my blade among his own weapons to conceal my breach of the law. There was no physical evidence of my having done so.

  I knew Eivin would never rat me out. I had zero faith in Ma, though. If threatened with the safety of the rest of my family, she would cave under the council’s questioning in a heartbeat and spill everything she knew, which was why I said nothing.

  And if I did tell the truth, no one would believe my side of the story. A corrupt king set me up? Right. That would play well.

  My people loved and praised King Baylor. They fawned over his beautiful wife. And the girls my age would give their right arm for a chance to be bedded by their handsome son, Prince Aed. If he ever returned from fighting along the Wall.

  The villagers chose beauty, wealth, and prestige over the truth. All they had to do was open their eyes and they would notice the groups of reapers suddenly being called to the Wall from all over the Netherworld. Was it really so hard for people to put together the pieces of evidence staring right at them? Men were dying and the king was behind it somehow.

  The king’s version of safety was a mirage. I refused to accept his lies and that placed a large target on my back. I was sure of it.

  Standing in direct opposition to the crown would only lead me to one path: banishment. I never meant for my actions to hurt my family, but sometimes standing up for what you believe in came with sacrifices. Sure, my ma drove me crazy with her never-ending matchmaking attempts and love of gossip. My younger twin sisters, Iona’s and Kyna’s whining was almost enough to make me volunteer for banishment, but they were still family. Besides, who would keep Da sane if I were gone?

  Eivin came each day to check on me when he returned from his reaper duties in the human realm. I never let him in, though. I feared seeing his disappointment. Worse, I feared seeing condemnation for being a coward.

  From down the hall I could hear him speaking with my parents. Their voices were muffled, but I knew they were talking about me. They were worried. Not nearly as much as I was.

  While they spoke about my health and the fragile state of my mind, I thought only about the fate of my people. A storm was coming and it was going to blow through my city of Eimear with such a force of death and destruction. There was no one to warn them. No one to wake them up before it was too late.

  If I was someday banished, would Eivin take my place? Would he stand on the streets and yell out the truth? S
o far he had been a silent supporter. After my attack, I feared he’d change his mind entirely.

  The Lorcan were getting stronger. I could feel it. Like somehow my wounds had forged a bond with them. The monster that attacked me had done so without a hint of fear of retaliation. It was hungry, that much I sensed, but there was something more—an awareness.

  I’d often wondered if the beasts could speak to each other. Their grunts meant nothing to us, but to a fellow Lorcan, it might mean everything. Or perhaps they had a telepathic communication. Whatever it was, I could sense trouble brewing.

  I never used to be afraid of the dark. Now, I knew what lurked in the shadows. The beasts were no longer just hungry. I could sense they wanted revenge on those who kept them imprisoned. They were born into an instant hatred of my kind.

  If they ever breached the Wall, they would raze this city to the ground.

  “How is she holdin’ up?”

  The words broke through my thoughts and I turned at the sound of Eivin’s voice. He was closer to my room now. I hopped down from the window ledge and pressed my ear against the wooden door to listen.

  “She’s refusing to eat or let us through the door. I’d hoped she would see ya when you turned up,” Da said and I strained to hear.

  I knew the burden my attack had placed on my father. He felt responsible. Eivin had insisted that Da not only knew of our training session but that he gave his permission. My cousin always was the more level-headed between us. I hadn’t stopped to wonder at Da’s blessing, but I realised now that I should have.

  That small detail would have made it clear that Da knew more than he was letting on. He knew something was not right in our realm. Why else would he risk his daughter learning to fight?

  He never talked about his time spent fighting Lorcan at the Wall. I always respected that his time there held memories he didn’t want to wade through, but it was hard not to ask. I didn’t even know how he’d injured his leg.

  Ma would wrap me around the side of the head for being rude anytime I’d bring it up to her, so I learned early on to let that mystery lie. Knowing that Eivin’s training saved my life didn’t make it any easier. Da was a good man, but I feared he sometimes lacked proper vision now. I guess that was easier to do when you were a parent trying to protect those you loved.