Isco [https://shadowsprey.com/wp-content/uploads/story-images/01_37_Isco-S5.png]

Never had Isco imagined that shadows could make a sound. The mass that was evacuating from Kanna was screeching, hissing, the sound caught somewhere between a scream and a cry. The darkness pooled like mercury. It swirled around her, licking at her arms and curling around her body, laying its claim.

The shadows lashed out as if they had a mind of their own.

“Here!” Yassen shouted. He threw up a wall to deaden the blows. He braced himself against the wall, reknitting the cracks that formed as the barricade was battered by the shadows.

Before, Isco thought it a trick of the light. He had never heard of a loa that could control the dark, no one had. And he had never seen a dark so deep, a black so wrong. The world cracked open, unhinged itself and swallowed Kanna whole.

The force of it knocked Isco over and he fell, scrambling back as the shadows licked at his feet.

One of the tendrils reached him, wrapping around his ankle. His body went numb with cold.

Memories flashed in his mind--

His mother in the clinic, nodding as the doctor gave her life a timeline. Her hands gripping the cane she needed to maintain her balance as her body revolted against her.

Shaking hands with Cabal leaders who would fund his research, their nods of understanding and approval and the glittering glass vials lining the shelves of his lab.

The blood turning in the centrifuge, pressing between slides, splitting under his watch.

Sleepless nights and endless days, hitting wall after wall, not asking questions, only wanting answers and demanding more. More specimens, more time.

Then a wrong turn one night. Emaciated bodies, their veins bloated and bruised, hooked up to machines that drained them, the needles piercing the black slave bands on their necks. A woman’s eyes snapping open, looking into him as she lunged against her restraints and the machines beeped and clicked and pushed more sedatives so she slipped back once more into nothing.

Kanna in the cell, silent and broken. He wasn’t the one who shoved the drug into her blood but he might as well have been. If it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t even have it. He tried to set her bones, clean her wounds, but there wasn’t anything he could do to ease the guilt.

It didn’t erase the others, the ones that were methodically picked apart and drained. For him, for his research, for his cure. For his cure that never even came close to working, that only led to something that was used to harm others instead of help them.

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A grave. The sun was bright and hot. The sky didn’t even bother to show sympathy for his grief because it knew. He’d tried to cheat death and failed spectacularly.

He’d wished it would be wiped away, scrubbed from the face of the world and maybe then he could forget.

And then it was. Or, at least, they were. In one fell swoop, in one bloody night, they were destroyed but he wasn’t free of it.

He would never be free.

The memories were so raw it was like he was living them again, a thousand times over. He couldn’t breathe around the loss, couldn’t make sense of it.

Then--

Flames burned at his feet, running blue over the ground and turning the sand to glass. The shadow that held him hissed, releasing its grip and recoiling from the fire. An arm wrapped beneath his own and yanked him back to the chaos of the present.

A second man skidded into view, slamming down a shield of ice between them and the flames.

“Haru, go!”

The flames faltered, opening as a third man dove past them, running into the dark.

The shadows that surged through the fiery barrier hit the ice shield. It shattered, the shards casting off in all directions.

The flames grew once more, a cleansing heat that seared the shadows away.

“Alright champ, time to retreat.”

Isco’s world tilted the wrong way as he was hefted onto the man’s shoulders. The ground beneath him moved, blood mixed with dirt, grasping hands and fallen blades.

Even after they ducked behind Yassen’s barrier, they were still far from safe. The air screamed, the shadows unrelenting.

They wanted him.

They promised peace. They whispered that he could let go in the dark. That the guilt, the worry, would pass and the dark would be there for him. Always there.

Yassen held the earth in place, but the dark was a twisting thing. The shadows tried to curl around and above. Besides the two men that had pulled Isco to safety, Astar and another woman huddled behind the shelter with Yassen.

“I got this one.” The voice was so close to Isco’s ear, but at the same time a lifetime away. “Now what?”

“Retreat,” the other said. “We’ll go back into the tunnels and block them. It might help.”

“Might?” Astar asked, a bite in her voice.

“No time,” the man holding him up said, “Let’s move.”

“Count of three.”

The others nodded in assent.

“One--”

The pillar they were hiding behind cracked.

They ran.