Cloak of Night (Circle of Shadows #2) - Evelyn Skye Page 0,32
time you accepted who you are and everything you can do.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t know what I can do.”
Liga nodded thoughtfully. “Let me show you.” He leaped into the air and hovered there, as if a current kept him buoyed. “All demigods can fly, as well as conjure small things.” He snapped his fingers, and the sound of lutes filled the chestnut grove.
“We are stronger, faster, and more agile than taigas and ryuu could ever dream of.” Liga zipped through the trees in a blur, so quickly that Daemon swore he could still see the silhouette of an alligator between the branches even after Liga had already returned to where he started. “We’re not immortal, but we can heal ourselves if given the chance.” He sliced his skin with a talon. Fairy gasped, but his flesh melded itself together before their eyes.
“On top of that,” Liga continued, landing on the forest floor, “all of Vespre’s children have powers related to the stars or night sky. Some, like me, can dim light.” He looked up at the sky, and it shifted from bright morning sun to the purpled gray of dusk and back again to daylight. “Others can ride electricity like comets. And you—when you were still a constellation in Celestae—were able to manipulate gravitational pull, as stars and black holes do.”
“I could do what?” Daemon’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“You could play with gravity.”
Daemon’s jaw dropped. “I can’t believe I had all of that once, and I gave it up.”
Liga smiled. “You can still have it. You just have to try. Starting with the basics.”
Just try. Daemon took a deep breath, shook out his limbs, and prepared to shift.
“I am an electric wolf,” he said.
Nope. He was a boy.
“I am an electric wolf.”
Still a boy.
“Say it with more feeling,” Liga said.
“I am an electric wolf!” Daemon shouted.
Nothing, gods dammit!
Fairy wrinkled her nose.
“What?” Daemon said, a little more harshly than he meant to.
“Nothing.”
“Sorry, I’m frustrated.” He took a deep breath. “Do you have a suggestion?” he asked slowly so that he didn’t snarl the question.
“It’s just that . . .” She waved a fern frond in the air as she figured out the best way to say it. “I don’t think yelling equates with believing in yourself. It might actually be the opposite.”
Daemon kicked a tree, and chestnuts rained down on him. “Ugh! I’ll never be able to do this.”
“Do you want to take a break from practicing?” she asked. “We need to go into the Imperial City anyway.”
Before Sora and Broomstick had left, they’d agreed that Daemon and Fairy would return to the Citadel and bloodstone palace every day to keep looking for clues to Empress Aki’s whereabouts and to try to put a wrench into whatever the Dragon Prince’s plans were. Sora had created several dozen dragonflies made from ryuu particles and enchanted them to be able to find her. That way, Daemon and Fairy would be able to send daily messages to her and Broomstick and vice versa, on top of communicating emotions through their gemina bonds.
“I don’t think we should go into the Imperial City until it’s dark,” Daemon said, wiping sweat from his brow.
Liga had been studying Daemon. He snapped his fingers, and blue sparks appeared, hovering in the air and forming themselves into a three-dimensional wolf made of stardust. “Perhaps if you envisioned the end state,” Liga said.
Daemon looked at the illusion dubiously. It wasn’t the easiest advice to follow, since being a constellation was so new. Or rather, he supposed, it was old knowledge, but Vespre had hidden it from Daemon when he left the sky and was reincarnated as a newborn baby. The memories were still inside Daemon, but buried deep, as his other powers had been.
“Wait, I have an idea,” Fairy said. She set down the plant she was dissecting and bounded over to Daemon. “This worked last time to give you some confidence.”
Before he knew what she was doing, she stood on the tips of her toes and kissed his neck softly. Then another, her lips like warm silk. He turned to putty.
“Liga, go for a walk, please,” Daemon said, his voice gruff.
His brother chuckled. “I’ll give you ten minutes, but then we have to get back to work.” He turned away and disappeared into the woods.
Daemon’s mouth was on Fairy’s in an instant, his days’-old stubble against her smooth skin. Their bodies smashed together, too, and the force sent them tumbling to