Binding Shadows Read online

  Also by Jasmine Silvera

  Grace Bloods

  Death's Dancer

  Dancer's Flame

  The Talon & the Blade

  Tooth & Spell

  Binding Shadows (Coming Soon)

  Watch for more at Jasmine Silvera’s site.

  Binding Shadows

  Tooth & Spell Book One

  Jasmine Silvera

  About Binding Shadows

  There are two rules: find a way to use your magic and never reveal it to anyone.

  * * *

  Hunting lost books is more than a job; it's a way for Barbara to hide her powers in the mundane world of the university library. One misstep and she risks exposure to ruthless necromancers willing to destroy anything supernatural they cannot control. But the prickly new professor in charge of her latest assignment proves more than he seems, and rules are no match for her growing fascination.

  After years of battling to cage the beast within him, Tobias returns to Prague and the safety of his pack of brothers. But keeping his family safe means never revealing his dual nature, not even to the irresistible research assistant with a nose for rare books.

  When an enchanted book triggers unpredictable surges in Barbara's magic, unleashing his beast may be their only defense against the malevolent spell buried in its pages. Now, a 400-year-old witch's revenge threatens to reveal everything they've concealed. Trapped between a witch and a necromancer, Barbara and Tobias must choose: embrace the powers that could expose them or allow their secrets to destroy them.

  To mom,

  * * *

  for always knowing

  Contents

  Prague, 1998

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek

  Thanks For Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jasmine Silvera

  Prague, 1998

  Tobias was fourteen the first time the urge to tear off his clothes and catch small animals in his teeth gripped him. His own screams woke him from the dream of racing through the trees on four legs with moonlight in his fur.

  Instinctively, he called out for his brother. “Mark! A m-m-monster’s inside me.”

  “Not a monster, Toby. A beast,” Mark offered from the bed across the room.

  By the time their mother arrived, Tobias was hysterical. He buried his face in the worn, nubby chenille of her robe and panted.

  “You’re safe.” Her voice curled around the ragged edges of his consciousness as she settled on the edge of his bed. The lilac scent he always associated with her night cream flooded him in soothing relief. “Only a dream.”

  Her palm, relaxed on his sweaty brow, tingled. She began to sing one of the soft, lilting chants that had soothed all of her four children since birth, ones they would never be able to recall the lyrics to in the morning.

  As Tobias drifted again, his brother’s voice rose from the darkness. “Not only dreaming anymore, Ma. It’s gonna be soon. I can smell him now.”

  Their mother’s sigh turned to the whisper of wind in leaves as dreams swallowed him again. “We’ll take him this weekend.”

  He forgot her words the moment she spoke them.

  On Friday afternoon, he tumbled off the tram with Mark and their younger sister, eager for the weekend. They were used to seeing the car parked out front of their building on Fridays. Mom took Mark to the woods at least once a month. Tobias would spend two whole days buried in a book without his older brother giving him a hard time, or their mother urging him to go outside. But his steps slowed at the sight of his own duffle bag in the back of the Škoda wagon.

  His parents stood on the top step with his youngest brother between them. Mom shouldered her purse, bending low to give his baby brother a kiss, but her eyes were on her husband. “The performance is at six. Isela has call at four-thirty. Don’t forget extra pins for her hair.”

  “Ich weiß, Liebling.”

  “I know you know, I just…” Mom stretched up to kiss their father. The kiss went on for too long, as usual. Tobias averted his eyes, his cheeks hot. Mark made gagging noises.

  When the two of them parted, their father’s face softened into a brief smile before his gaze settled on Tobias. Tobias shivered at the worry in his father’s eyes.

  “Viel Glück mein Schatz.”

  Mom and Papa exchanged a final peck before she joined the boys at the lowest step. “You two scalawags in the car. Jetzt. Hop along.”

  Tobias fell asleep on the long drive to the cabin deep in the Šumava forest. Mom made spaghetti for dinner, his favorite, and when darkness fell, she shooed them both outside.

  “Everything will be alright,” she assured him as they left her a silhouette framed in the light of the doorway. She called to his brother, as always a few steps ahead, “Go easy, Markus.”

  “Just do what I do.” Mark’s skin, a brown richer than sun-warmed earth, absorbed the glow of moonlight as he shrugged out of his jeans and socks. “It’s easier for them this way.”

  “Who?” Tobias followed his brother’s lead, stripping bare though his skin prickled with goose bumps. Pressure rose in his chest.

  The memory of his nightmares returned in a jumbled wave of images and scents. The beast. His heart raced.

  “Let that feeling come,” Mark murmured, resting a hand on Tobias’ still bony, paler shoulder. “It’s fun—you’ll see.”

  That promise clutched in the eagerness of his voice, kept Tobias from retreating back into the house. Still, he shivered, refusing to come out of his underwear even when Mark teased. At the sting of raw skin, he looked down to see his fingertips scratching at his own chest as if possessed. The pressure took shape and stretched against the inside of his ribcage.

  Mark grinned with too many teeth, all glittering and sharp. “Don’t fight him, brother. We’re meant for this.”

  Mark laughed, throwing his head up to the night, the last human sound he would make until dawn. Skin once smooth and brown became furred black. The places between the stars were no rival for the darkness of that tousled fur sprouting in all directions. His face became a snout, and his ears slid back to the top of his head.

  Tobias reeled away, but his feet wouldn’t hold him. He opened his mouth to scream, and an animal sound came out. He tumbled backward, scrambling in the mud and leaves, away from the juvenile wolf that stood on top of his brother’s rumpled clothes.

  The beast welled up inside him, flooding his consciousness with scents and sounds beyond his human awareness
.

  He blacked out just long enough to lose his last grasp of control. The beast inside him surged. When his senses returned, they drowned him. A shocking inner heat banished the night chill from his skin.

  What the beast did to his senses was only the beginning. Everything about the way his body moved felt like recovering a forgotten memory. He staggered to his feet—paws—and swung around, backing up in circles until he tripped over his own long legs and landed on his side in the heap of expelled air and lupine whimpers.

  The black wolf stood nearby. Mark. Tobias knew him. The same way he knew that what he had become had crawled up from inside his very bones.

  He read the black wolf’s body as fluently he read Mark’s face from growing up together.

  Come on, the hunched back and flagging tail ordered. When he barked, it was a clear command. Get a grip and let’s get on with it.

  But Tobias found nothing to hold on to. He managed to get upright after a multitude of attempts the black wolf found comical.

  Tobias looked down at his paws and fell over again. He caught a glimpse of his furred tail and tried to flee it. He crashed into brush and trees. All the while, a terrible noise sounded in his ears. The noise of an animal caught in a trap. The trap, his own body. The prisoner, his human consciousness.

  His mother called reassurance from the porch. The salt of her tears stung his nose. Tobias wanted to go to her, but the beast held him. When she took a step towards the edge of the porch, the beast bared teeth at her. Mark lunged between them, facing Tobias: head down, ears back, and this time there was no humor in the curl of his tail or the hunch of his shoulders.

  Tobias stumbled away, whining.

  The first night was a disaster. Mark tried to show him the wilderness around their cabin. They hunted a rabbit in the darkness—well, Mark did—and Tobias would never forget the high-pitched scream it made when Mark’s teeth closed on its neck. The black wolf retuned with the limp shape dangling from his jaws. Tobias recoiled, even as saliva flooded his mouth.

  A gnawing hunger surged in him as Tobias watched Mark tear open the soft belly and work the carcass with his teeth. Mark tossed the remainder to him. The beast ate, Toby screaming mutely inside.

  After that, he surrendered the last of his humanity and retreated into the darkness.

  In the morning, he woke on the porch, curled up with Mark as they had in the cradle. Only he was naked and shivering and mottled with what might have been dirt or dried blood. Their mother opened the door, threw out a couple of blankets, and disappeared again. She reemerged a few minutes later with cups of steaming hot cocoa and marshmallows. Mark took his mug, heading inside to the warmth of the fireplace.

  Tobias lay where he’d awoken, clutching the blanket around his body and shivering. Smudges of darkness swept semicircles beneath his mother’s eyes. She’d never seemed old to him before now.

  “We had to wait to see… if…” She offered the cup.

  He recoiled.

  At the scent of warm chocolate, he vomited on the porch. He sealed his eyes shut against the glimpse of glistening red meat and dark organs, bits of bone and hair.

  The second night he tried to fight the change, but the beast overtook him as soon as Mark’s paws hit the ground. The beast fought, but he refused to let go of humanity, forcing himself to recall every detail of his bedroom and his books, his siblings and their father.

  He slunk to the front door, head and tail bowed. Their mother appeared at the window, her face a question. The black wolf gave a human-like shrug in response. The door opened. She sighed as Tobias slunk past her to the blanket she’d laid by the fireplace. Annoyed, Mark abandoned him in favor of the night forest.

  On the way back to the city Sunday afternoon, Mark regaled their mother with stories of his roaming.

  “You’re so quiet,” she murmured to Tobias when they’d stopped to let Mark out to pee.

  “W-w-why, Mom?” The words scratched his raw throat.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’d hoped—I’d hoped—you just never seemed like you’d change.”

  “I don’t want to,” he whispered. “E-e-ever again.”

  “You have to. I know that much and, if you don’t, it will happen on its own, and you will lose control. We survive at the mercy of the necromancers. There are rules about how people like us behave in public. At the first hint of a violation, they can make us disappear, or worse. You understand? And it’s not so bad, is it? Your brother—”

  “Is a brainless idiot.” Tobias choked on the words. “I hate it. I’ll never like it. N-n-never.”

  She sighed. “Don’t talk that way about your brother.”

  She watched Mark trudge back from the woods. “Denying the change makes it more dangerous. You’ll come up to the cabin with us every weekend and during school breaks. When Markus says you’re in control, full control, you can stay inside and play checkers with me if you want.”

  “Ma!” he wailed.

  “Tobias, some things we don’t have a choice about in this life,” she snapped with dreadful finality. “At the least, you learn to live with it so you survive. If that’s all I can give you, so be it.”

  Tears choked out whatever reply he might have made. Mark climbed into the car. He avoided looking into the back seat, even though Tobias’s wet sobs must have been audible.

  Instead, he turned up the radio.

  At home, their mother garaged the car, resting for a moment with her palms on the steering wheel and her eyes closed.

  Mark touched her shoulder. “Go on in, Ma. I’ll get the bags.”

  She passed a hand over the tight coils of his hair and settled it on his cheek with a weary smile. “Thanks.”

  When she was gone, Mark shouldered Tobias aside, slamming the doors as he went.

  Blinking away tears, Tobias pulled his overnight bag out of the trunk. He passed one forearm under his dripping nose and glared. “I’m telling Dad.”

  Mark’s face hardened. “Who do you think helped pick out the cabin?”

  The pat he gave Tobias shoved him backward. Tobias whirled on him, the beast’s snarl rising in his chest. Shock stopped him in his tracks. Mark grinned at him, showing his teeth. His eyes glittered yellow for a moment before flashing back to human copper.

  “Quit feeling sorry for yourself, you big crybaby,” he said with a huff. “And if you say anything to Issy or Chris, I’ll kill you. I know where you sleep.”

  Chapter One

  Fourteen Years Later

  Dear Ms. Svobodová,

  We regret to inform you—

  Barbara should crumple up the letter without subjecting herself to the rest, but she never could resist the urge to finish once she’d started reading something.

  –that after careful consideration, your application for the fellowship position has not been selected.

  When the blur of tears made reading unmanageable, she reached for a tissue, sending one of the little cartoon pineapples clattering across her desk. She slapped a hand over the small plastic figurine to silence it with a worried glance.

  The forgotten office tucked away at the end of a long hall was empty. Situated in the oldest wing of the university library, with the original four-hundred-year-old stone walls, it was cold year-round and occasionally the power went out. She supposed eventually it would be remodeled as a storage closet. At least it was so far down on the priority list for restoration, it was relatively undisturbed by the work efforts that seemed to have turned other parts of the library into a cacophonous obstacle course. Unfortunately, the way things were going, she might still be stuck here in limbo when it finally happened.

  By the time the doors opened, she’d composed herself. She tucked her chin, dabbed her eyelashes, and slipped the rejection note back in its envelope under her keyboard. She would take it home and file it with the others. Then she would look over the upcoming fellowships and special research areas and prepare her next application. After five tries, she could almost do it in
her sleep.

  Her fellow research assistants drifted in, unwinding their scarves and removing their coats. Their break-time conversation lingered like the faint whiff of cigarette smoke.

  “…and you heard what he said to Novak when the department objected to his budget request?” The unofficial leader of their little cadre, Edita, was close to defending her dissertation, but still managed to stay on top of all the office gossip. She continued in Czech without waiting for a response, “Absolutely nothing. He just stared, with those eyes.”

  “Gods, those eyes!” Pale, ethereal Pavlina clasped her hands to her chest and pantomimed a swoon into the rickety chair near the back of the room.

  As the newest assistant, she had inherited the worst desk—close to the old window. Undaunted, she arrived on her first day with a stuffed woolen bumper to block the draft and a quilted cushion for her chair, and had, during her tenure, knit an impressive array of scarves, neck warmers and hats for each of them.

  The final member of their trio snorted in disbelief. Tall and severely thin, Honza would make an excellent grumpy librarian in thirty years. “Vogel insulted almost every member of the senior faculty, and two of the students on his team have filed complaints. Not a good start for a visiting professor.”