The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 19 🔻 Light and Shadows

Crows continued to swarm their master while we stared each other down. Crow turned his head slightly at the sound of approaching footsteps.

"Skye!" Vale said as she hurried to me from the Dark, her and Webb pushing Elizabeth. Both sporting fresh healing wounds, but nothing afterlife-threatening. "There you are—Oh."

They both stopped dead in their tracks when they noticed the silhouette standing only yards away, with his cloak billowing in the wind.

"Who's this?" Webb asked.

I gripped my spear tighter and turned to them, my eyes no doubt as wide and round as my mask's lenses, and whispered, "Crow."

I held my spear out in front of me. Webb and Vale did the same with their own weapons.

Crow, meanwhile, sauntered up to us, birds in tow—all of which had gone silent and stared with their beaks pointed at the three of us. The man just smiled demurely in the glow of our blades. I still couldn't make out his entire face underneath his hood. But he didn't seem to mind the tangles of long, dark hair that covered his face, stirred by the gales. He reached out to prod the lux-coated point of my spear with a fingertip. "Oh, so young, yet you have already seen so much bloodshed," he murmured. His voice was more nasal than I expected.

I yanked my spear away from his touch. "You don't know anything about me."

He perked up under his hood when I spoke, as if he'd forgotten I was standing right in front of him. "Was not talking to you, was I?"

A sudden squall assaulted all of us, nearly blowing me to the ground. The crows grew frantic and filled the windy void with raucous alarm calls. The haggard man was instantly alert. He let out a growl through bared teeth. "Duck."

Vale pulled Webb and me to the sand just as a shadow leaped at us from behind. It landed in a tangle of limbs in the sand instead and snapped at us.

A whistle cut through the air over the roar of the sandstorm. The shadow twisted its head around to face Crow. "Over here, umāmu," the man said.

The shadow lunged at him. My friends and I could only stare in complete bafflement as the weaponless man took on a shadow. His crows took wing and circled the man and his opponent. The shadow led with its jaws and attempted to take a bite out of his left side. When the birds at Crow's left cried out, he dodged to the right, narrowly escaping the monster's teeth. He repeated that dance, over and over. The shadow would attack, the crows would sound the alarm, and Crow would escape unscathed. When the shadow let out a frustrated howl, the man laughed in its disgusting face.

Crow was toying with the monster.

More shadows slunk out of hiding, and my friends and I sprang into action ourselves. In between swipes at the horde, vibrations rattled down the pole of my spear when a shadow suddenly clamped down hard on a spearhead with its teeth. It let out a cry of pain when angry red sparks filled its mouth. I slashed its flanks when it turned tail and retreated.

"Watch it!" Crow yelled in my direction. "Took a nasty bite over there!"

"I did not!"

"Still was not talking to you," Crow huffed as he effortlessly dislocated his shadow's arm with deft precision. The shadow squealed, and Crow let it retreat.

Then I caught a flicker of eye shine behind him. "Look out—!"

But his crows had already sounded the alarm. The hollow swiveled around and wrapped the final shadow in a bear hug. Then he stood motionless, struggling with the muscular creature in his arms. He turned his head left and right, waiting.