Page 23 of Bright Soul

I repeated her report aloud. The other librarians conferred briefly.

Meanwhile, Phaeron was giving me instructions on how to handle the doskalo pair. I wished again that he was here.“You must fight each of them separately, in their containment rooms. If one of them sees its mate bloodied or dead, it will go berserk. The good news is they’re not intelligent enough to realize you’ve already killed one if it does not see the body.”

Leona led the group into the hallway. The floor beneath my feet vibrated in time with a hardthudfrom the closest door to our right. A complicated array of librarian witch magic flickered with purple light over the threshold when the creature on the other side struck it again.

“Leave it. This one,” Leona announced, pointing her sword toward the containment room Jin had indicated was closer to breach status. The metal of the door was dented outward and creaked ominously when hit from within by something large and desperate.

Leona signaled to us, and the Crystal fae stepped forward with Geo, who raised his shield and flared his wings to make himself a solid wall of defense.

With a complicated sweep of her sword’s tip, Leona deactivated the array holding the metal together, and out tumbled a massive creature with patches of dirty brown hair and pinkish skin.

Its stench stung my nose and made my eyes water instantly.“It stinks,”I complained to Phaeron.

“Get it into its containment room,”he replied, level and calm compared to the panic-fueled adrenaline pumping through my veins.

The group bristled with spells and silver weapons as the doskalo lurched to its feet. It seemed like some middle evolution of a massive dog becoming a werewolf, with arms that dragged the ground and scraped along with unevenly sharpened claws. Opening its mouth wider than any living thing should, it roared in fury and lunged at the closest target, Geo. He clipped its jaw with his shield. Without sunlight, the crystal didn’t ring, only making a dull thud as Geo leveraged it to knock the doskalo’s head aside.

Behind us came an answering roar, muffled. I glanced over my shoulder. Shit, we were going to be fighting both of them very soon.

I also noted with relief that the creature might be dead before I got close enough to slash it with my sword. Geo and the fae created an effective semicircle that protected us from it, but it also only made small windows for Bianca’s crossbow bolts, Ben’s throwing daggers, and the shards of glittering light Jordan hurled from the tip of her staff. Each brush of silver drew a whine from the creature, who started to retreat back into its containment room from such a fierce onslaught.

Still, I cast Lux and inched closer. I wasn’t expecting the freed doskalo to yip in pain and raise its clawed hand. It was shielding its face from the light…mylight. The blade of my sword glowed like an incandescent shard, far brighter than any Lux I’d cast before. I nearly blinded myself looking down at it in shock.

Leona was shouting, “Make way! Chase it the rest of the way into the containment room!”

She gestured at me, my friends parting to the sides. The doskalo, bleeding from several wounds smoking from silver exposure, backed away from the blade I waved at it, snapping its jaws wildly and tripping over itself to be as far away as possible. Its acidic saliva sizzled on the ground from it frothing at themouth, pupils contracting to invisible points. Geo moved with me, shield raised and wings still partially spread, ready to leap ahead of me if I needed it.

When the doskalo was back in its room, cowering down in a nest of sticks and rotting…I didn’t want to think about what the scraps of gray skin and fur might’ve been, Jonah stepped around me and cast the Inemos spell perfectly. I watched a wave of nearly invisible magic arc off his sword tip and hit the monster, freezing it into a new temporary stasis. With its muscles locked, Leona strode forward without fear and lopped its head off with a few brutal swings of her sword.

“Now the other one,” she said grimly, steering me by the shoulder out of the room before I could retch at the smell and sight of the dead unnatural in its messy nest.

“Cress?”Phaeron asked tentatively.

“It’s dead. I don’t think it was supposed to be that easy?”I asked. Like he’d know, several miles away.

He did seem bemused.“I shall wait for your business with both doskalos to conclude before pestering you further, however long or short a time it may be.”

The second doskalo died much like the first, leaving Ben and Bianca a little frustrated. “Put the spotlight away, I want a challenge,” Bianca muttered.

I would’ve apologized, but when I squeezed the hilt of my sword to dispel the Lux spell, I stumbled and held my forehead through a dizzy spell. It sank in just how much of my stored librarian witch magic it’d taken to power that spell. The hallway seemed much darker without the blinding magic.

I looked down at the blade, wondering if it were special in some way. Maybe it tripled the power of any spell cast through it. Lux was a basic spell, power level one. It should’ve never been powerful enough to strike such fear in monsters like those two doskalos.

“There are more creatures to put down,”Braza reminded us when Leona started my way, a question obviously poised on her tongue.

“Let’s talk about the magic later?” I suggested.

“Later,” the head librarian agreed.

When later came, it was after six hours of us facing down a handful of the unnaturals Braza deemed the most likely to break out of containment first. One would think those were the biggest, baddest creatures in the library, but Leona and Braza warned us of about a dozen more monsters still locked away that were deadly and unique. The kind of creatures strong enough to have titles and urban legends.

We’d handle them in the coming days. Tonight, I was the one under the microscope, and the ones doing the inspecting were Braza, Leona, Wren, and Phaeron still in my head. The head librarian had insisted on helping when I’d told her that we were experimenting with my magic.

“I’ve never seen a librarian with command of light like yours,” she said when we were in the private sanctum of the powercore.

“I have a theory,” Wren said. She’d come in carrying two staves—one was her old one, with the gold-plated sun at its top, and the other the scepter-sized one with silver crescent moons that she’d been casting with today. Without much preamble, she handed me the larger of the two.

The wood was warm and hummed beneath my fingertips. Unlike with Evening Guidance, which was sized and weightedfor a man’s use, this one was clearly designed for someone shorter.

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