The Black Necromancer-Book 4

Chapter 3

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Chapter 3

                Kayla and Luna wheeled around, too stunned to do anything else. The scream had come from the tent which they had left not five minutes previously and there were only three people left there: Raven, Europa and Io.

                In their momentary frozen states, neither Kayla nor Luna moved as the Moon Children swarmed towards the tent in panic; their soon-to-be-queen was supposedly in there and most of them had an instinct to protect her.

                When a Moon Child shoved her out of the way roughly, Kayla unfroze. She stumbled and caught herself just before she fell. Glancing around, she realized that she had lost sight of Luna, especially in the hectic commotion. One Moon Children pushed at her to get up, shoving her towards the exit. Irritation swept over her, but as she lifted her arm to punch him in the jaw, someone grabbed her arm to stop her.

                “Don’t, Kayla!” Troy said firmly, pulling her arm back with surprising strength.

                Kayla’s eyes locked with her brother’s and she guessed what he was thinking. The Moon Children were clearing all the magicians away from their camp, but they couldn’t prevent Troy from shadow-travelling anywhere he wanted.

                Relaxing her arm, she nodded gratefully to him. Gingerly, almost as if he didn’t trust himself, Troy took Dahlia’s hand from next to him; apparently they must have been somewhere nearby in order to hear the commotion at the Moon Children’s camp. Kayla caught the hurt expression on Dahlia’s face for a brief second –she was pretty sure that Troy did too- before Dahlia smoothed out her face with a concerned look. Before Kayla could confirm mentally that some issue was going on between Troy and Dahlia, they vanished in Troy’s shadow.

                Shadow-travelling was not fun for many magicians, including Dahlia, but Kayla sort of enjoyed it. She was used to conversing with the dead and she knew how the Ghost Kingdom, one of the three worlds that co-existed together, was, so she was used to the cold, empty feelings of the Shadow Realm. When Troy shadow-travelled, he brought them through the shadows in the Shadow Realm. For magicians like Dahlia, whose power was mostly situated in the Mortal World, shadow-travelling was not her favourite form of travel.

                As they reappeared within Luna’s tent, Kayla’s stomach squirmed, threatening to make her throw up. What she was seeing was bad enough to make even her feel ill. There were two Lunas in the room. That wouldn’t have been a major problem, but one of them was sprawled on the floor, gasping for breath like a fish out of water.

                “What’s going on?” Dahlia gasped, but even as she spoke, the Luna on the tent floor changed form, shifting into her old appearance: Raven.

                “Raven?” Troy spluttered. “What- how-?”

                The real Luna looked up from where she was kneeling next to Raven. Her face was guilt-stricken and Kayla knew why; Luna was the reason that Raven had been targeted, by what she still wasn’t sure. Even as they knelt down next to Luna, Raven started to thrash around on the floor, bubbles of dirty yellow liquid creating foam in her mouth. Luna handed Kayla a dart that she had tugged out of Raven’s body, evidently too late to prevent the poison from spreading.