Shadow Play 5

by Vega Lizzie

  Backing out of his parking space, Marcus backed the tail end of his car to the opposite side of the parking lot. Turning the engine off, he opened two bottles of water, handing one to Terra. Instead of drinking it, she held it the side of her face.

  “Perfect, thanks.” Terra nodded, “Now we wait. I really don’t know how long we will have to be here. Keep your eye out for a small flash of light. I’m at a slight disadvantage for the time being.”

  “What?” Marcus exclaimed, then grinned, “You had a plan, you didn’t just go off…” He saw her expression, “oops, sorry.”

  ‘Yeah, my plan wasn’t to get beaten to a pulp if that’s what you mean. The plan actually starts when you see a tiny flash of green light. After that, pull down to that dark alley.”

  “Another dark alley…sure, great.”

  Not five minutes later, Marcus sat forward in is seat, “Green light in the alley. It sorta twinkled.” After a moment, a second one did as well. “You’ve got two.”

  “Oh, that little twerp,” she chuckled, “let’s go meet them.”

  Marcus scrambled out of the car and was at Terra’s door in seconds, “I’ll help you.” He offered her his hand and helped her get out of the low bucket seat. She held the glowing stone in her hand, but its intensity seemed to be diminishing. “Thank you for being such a gentleman. This won’t take long,” she gasped, “then home and in the tub for me.”

  As they walked slowly to the alley, Marcus kept Terra close to him for support. Other than the rattle of the plastic bag under Terra’s arm, it was too quiet. Two bright flashes of light lit up the secluded drive and Tatsumi and Antonia emerged from the void. They were immediately at Terra’s side.

  “You don’t know how badly I wanted to step in,” Tatsumi said instantly, “had you told me that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have let you do it.” He looked at her hand as the rays of blue light leaked through her fingers, “I do not approve of his teaching style.”

  Antonia glared at Terra and reached out to grab her chin, turning her bruised face to the side, “You are a pessoa louca, for sure. Kinda impressive.”

  Marcus grinned, “Loco, I got that.”

  Terra would have rolled her eyes had they not been swollen shut behind the healing mask of the stone, “Thanks for helping me. It means a lot to us.” She turned to Tatsumi, “You got him?”

  Tatsumi nodded, “I stayed as far back as I could, but he didn’t sense I was there.”

  Antonia seconded, “As luck would have it, he’s staying at the City Center Hotel. He didn’t see me, I’m sure of it. I grabbed a drink at the bar, and he was ordering from the menu. He’s in room 444.” Her thick eyebrow tipped up, “The protector in western numerology, by the way.”

  “That makes me feel so much better,” Terra said as she took the convenience store bag from Marcus, “I’m going to pay a very quick visit to his hotel room. Five minutes or less and I’ll come right back here.”

  As she took the heart-shaped box from the bag, Antonia glared at her, “You’re not right in the head at all.” She looked at Tatsumi and shrugged, “He would call me baka, at this point.”

  “Idiot,” Marcus grinned earning an appreciative chuckle from Tatsumi. He sighed heavily, “I’d go with lunatic. Are you sure about this?”

  “Not exactly,” Terra admitted, “He said something towards the end that is going to take some thinking. He doesn’t have Shannon, but he might know who does. I want to know what he finds acceptable.” With a nod to her friends, she slowly raised her hand and stepped through the void.

  Antonia took a step to the side but not before winking at Marcus, “I’ll shadow so she doesn’t see me. I’ll signal if we need help.”

  Tatsumi nodded, “I’ll find you in two minutes or less.” He looked to Marcus, “Stay safe, my friend. We’ll be right back.”

  True to their word, and only a minute or two later, Terra stepped out of the void and took a deep breath. Toni and Tatsumi stepped out beside her.

  “Never left the restaurant, and he’s not what you would expect from a physical standpoint,” she grinned, ‘Try not to get your butt kicked again, okay?”

  Terra smiled, “Thank you, sweetie. It’s time for all of us to go home.”

  Antonia was staring at Terra’s odd choice of evening wear, “Is that a sarong or something?” Marcus sternly shook his head at her and glared. She took a step back, “I like your pretty bodyguard, Terra. I think he’s cute.”

  Grateful for the diversion from her tablecloth, she pushed on Marcus’s shoulder, “We’re outta here. Thanks guys. I’ll let you know what happens.”

  Back in the car, Terra took a huge breath, “It might have been a dumb thing to do, but I’ll call and tell Ollie and Eliza we’re coming home. Better yet, I’ll call.”

  “Where the hell are you?” an exasperated Eliza answered, “Get home right now…all hell’s breaking loose.”

  Chapter 28

  Fielding texts as they approached the alley entrance to the loft, Marcus drove in only to find it full. With a final text to signal arrival, Terra was relieved when Olivia opened the door, “Any word?” she asked apprehensively.

  Olivia shook her head, “Not exactly words,” she said as they walked in, “more like cosmic Pictionary with a light show.”

  “You’re okay?” Terra asked.

  “Yep, I’m good,” Olivia replied, then glanced at the glowing light from Terra’s closed fist, realizing that Marcus was the only reason she was standing, “You’re not, are you?”

  Terra shook her head, “This thing is wearing off but…I can wait. What’s going on?”

  Eliza rounded the corner from the living room stopped in her tracks, gasping at Terra’s condition. She immediately started to cry. Liam was instantly at Terra’s side, he looked at the dim blue light coming from her hand. “Come quickly,” he said, gently grasping her shoulders, then let go as she yelped. “I’m gonna be super-pissed at you later. Seems you’ve had a gift arrive.”

  It wasn’t until Terra came fully into the living room that she focused for a moment. Tess sat on the floor next to the coffee table staring at something in the middle of the table, “This has been going on almost twenty minutes.”

  Terra took a step into the room and three of the sentinel orbs left the table only to first swirl around her, then spin wildly around her closed hand.

  “They haven’t done anything but get really close to us,” Tess said quietly, “really close to Ollie while she was bridging and then when the blue stone showed up, they went crazy.”

  “We almost bailed,” Issac said as he walked toward Terra. “What the hell have you done to yourself?”

  Terra didn’t seem to be listening. She turned her hand over and opened her fingers only to have the glowing blue stone fade to nothing. For a quick moment, she drew a ragged breath as the extent of her injuries were revealed to her friends. The pain in her legs and shoulder returned and she slumped towards the floor.

  “Get her to the table,” Liam shouted, causing the orbiting spheres to pulse toward him then veer back to the newly arrived stone. Marcus and Issac supported her as they half carried her, arm outstretched to the edge of the coffee table. Without hesitation, Terra tried to pick up the second stone. The cuts and abrasions along her arm disappeared the moment she touched it. She put her head down for a moment of relief as the rays of the intense beam lit up the living room. “Thank you,” she whispered softly.

  First, the green orbs pulled back to spin high above the table, but the troublesome red ones remained close buzzing like angry bees until she sat up. After a final revolution around the living room, they vanished from the room.

  “I don’t understand that at all,” Tess said under her breath, but Terra heard her and began to stand, “I need a couple of minutes, okay?” As she stood, she looked down to the drawing on the table, then to Olivia, her chin trembling, “You reached out to her?”

  Olivia softly put her arms around Terra, “She reached out to us.”
She reached up and touched Terra’s cheek, “Do you want to get cleaned up first?”

  Terra nodded, then turned to look at the family gathered around her, “It might not be our best night. There’s something we all need to talk about. I need a fast shower.”

  Eliza moved to her, “I’ll help you….at least up the steps.” She turned to support Terra’s good arm and escorted her to the stairwell.

  “I’m okay, you guys,” she said when they hit the third step, but the groan the followed had them thinking otherwise. As they finally hit the upstairs landing, Tess collapsed in the overstuffed chair, “If it’s what I think it is,” she began with Liam quickly cutting her off, “You know it is. He did something…not fair to her…at all.”

  “Stop it,” Olivia said sharply, “It’s not gonna help to be pissed. Whatever is happening…this is new.”

  The loft door swung open and Alicia walked in leading an ashen-colored Robbie, “You guys…something happened to Rob.”

  They stood there, both groups staring at each other until Robbie raise his hand to show a rolled up blueprint, “This happened.” he said quietly, “I was working on a revision for another house and before I realized what was happening…I had drawn this.”

  Alicia took hold of his arm, “I came in just at the tail end, His eyes were white…” she took a deep breath, wiping tears from her eyes, “I thought he was dead.”

  Robbie took a step toward the coffee table and saw Olivia’s drawing. He suddenly seemed more alert, “Oh, you have one too?” Unrolling the drawing, some of the markings and shapes matched Olivia’s drawing exactly.

  “Holy shit,” Tess gasped as her eyes went to the ceiling to check for advancing orbs, “Shannon reached out to you as well. This is nuts.”

  They heard the sound of the shower being shut off and Eliza appeared at the loft railing, “She’s, uh, doing much better. Down in a minute.” Seeing Robbie and Alicia, she smiled until she saw their expressions. Hurrying down the steps, she saw the drawings placed side by side, and glanced to Issac, then looked at Robbie, “Did you feel like something was off? Like you were getting light-headed?”

  Robbie shook his head, “Not exactly. I remember thinking I need to contact the city about hooking up to the city sewer system. I have to update the permits.” He pointed to the table, “then I woke up.”

  “I mighta screamed him awake,” Alicia tearfully confessed, “I completely freaked out. What is going on?”

  “Everybody have a seat.” It was Terra’s voice from the top of the steps, “I think we have something to discuss.” Eliza turned to them, “Just a sec.”

  Catching Terra at the foot of the steps, they had a quiet conversation, “Let’s look at the drawings first,” Eliza suggested, “There’s something else going on here. It’s either a manipulation from outside or…just don’t set things in stone just yet okay? I need a little more time to figure stuff out.”

  Terra glanced over Eliza’s shoulder as her friends gathered around the kitchen island, “Or it’s Shannon all by herself. She’s been seeing things since Colin upgraded her grimoire. She won’t or can’t tell me everything, but her power is growing by the day. I can feel it, but I was told something tonight that may change everything.”

  “She wants to protect you and Ollie,” Eliza whispered, “it’s her nature.”

  “She wants to protect all of us. Something big is on her horizon. Not sure if we are even involved.”

  Chapter 29

  When Shannon awoke, she had no idea how long she had slept or whether she had finally passed out from the constant pain. Her first thought was of Olivia and Terra, she’d left them without instructions, breaking every protection rule they had every talked about.

  She tried to sit up along the bench, but the first attempt produced a wave of nausea. “If I hurl,” she said out loud, “it might smell better in here.”

  That thought made her heart surge in her chest. Something’s dead. What if there’s someone else down here? What if they were disposed of?

  Her eyes more adjusted to the thick glass lights, she began to work her way to the end of the room, searching for anything as a harbinger of hope, something to hasten her escape. Feeling around in the gloom, she thought of Terra’s story of being trapped in the basement of the theater. She didn’t panic, she just kept moving, Shannon thought to herself, “And she wasn’t trussed up like fucking puppet either,” she hollered into the low ceilinged room only to be met with a muffled silence, her voice sucked up by the concrete and thickly-padded pipes.

  Her hands aching and mind racing, she tried to think through any series of spells or activations that didn’t require both hands or more than two fingers to initiate. She kept thinking back to when she and Marcus were building her fake grimoire. She’d used actual spells for the pages. Marcus had even commented that if it had fallen into the wrong hands…

  The tension in the wire harness shifted again and one of Shannon’s fingers, long asleep from circulation clicked back in its socket. The dull click of cartilage sent Shannon over the edge and her stomach turned enough for her to throw up.

  “Wrong idea,” she said after spitting and drooling, “it’s not better and I didn’t have breakfast. Not good.” After a deep breath, she stood. “Gotta get a look at this contraption on my hands.”

  Looking down the row, she chose the brightest of the four lamps and moved to stand as close to one as she could get. The only benefit of that was to be able to see that her fingers were slowly being pushed in the same direction. She thought back to junior high when a basketball had been thrown to her without warning, the jamming of the ball against her middle finger had caused a severe dislocation. The backwards jammed finger had taken two weeks to heal. She began to wonder if she had more than two days. “Without food or water…shhhh,” she said quietly, “let’s not go there quite yet.”

  She sighed, then stood. “Insulated pipes and probably electrical conduit,” she said to herself, “but why have a room if there’s nothing to do, why have a warning.” A moment later she’d found an access panel that looked maintenance related but the overly large padlock put an end to that idea. More searching yielded nothing except short lengths of flexible electrical conduit. With her hands and fingers restrained, she could barely pick it up from the shelf where she found it. It fell from her fingers as she set it back down. The resulting sound was a hollow echo. The shelf was a lid for a plumbing access

  Moving along the top of the box, her heart sank when her fingertips encountered a second padlock. “Shit,” she shouted and banged her hands against the lock. Even in the dim light, it rattled too much. Rubbing her forearm along the lock, it twisted to reveal the hook-shaped latch. If this is empty, Shannon thought, I’m at Darien’s mercy.

  Lifting from below the lock, she forced the hook upwards and after several increasingly close misses, the padlock fell to the floor.

  “What’s in here?” Pushing again with her fingers, the heavy lid of the container was a struggle. Two broken fingernails later, the lid was open. Shannon instantly recognized the two large round metal wheels as valves. After a short-lived moment of victory, she realized there was no way to grasp them. Even a short push against the solid wheel was painful. During the third try, the restraining device shifted against her fingers causing another wave of pain throughout her hands and wrists.

  “Stop,” she instructed herself, “take a break. Then try again. Think like Robbie,” she whispered, “I really need your skillful hands right now.” She found herself smiling and started to cry as the thoughts of her family began to march through her head. “I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve doomed them all. Terra…Ollie, please help me.”

  Then she heard it. Something dripped at the end of the container. Had she loosened the valve? It hadn’t felt like it had moved but she steeled herself to try again. After struggling to pick up the loose conduit, she tried to put it through the connecting spines of the valve only to have fall through to the bottom of the enclosure.
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br />   “Steady pressure…just keep pushing on the edge…I don’t even know if it’s water. Don’t give up.” She could feel exhaustion coming but she reached out again, straining against the cold steel of the handwheel, shoving her crippled hands against it one last time.

  With a painful gasp, Shannon closed her eyes, her fingers strained for one more touch of the wheel. “No,” her eyes flashed open, staring into the gray shapes of the room, “Don’t get angry, she thought, don’t be scared and give up. What does that show Olivia? What does that leave behind? Find the waves on the water.

  She laid her head on her arms and closed her eyes. Her ears began to ring, and it seemed as though the wheel moved just enough for its curving grip to touch her fingertips. Seconds later there was a rush of pressure over her head as air began to seep through the pipes.

  “There’s water running somewhere.” No sooner had she said it then a burst of air spewed from behind her. With a final push on the valve, the pain was too great, and consciousness began to fade. As her thoughts drifted away, the picture of her bathroom mirror surfaced in her mind. The wavy lines are water, she thought, water ensures the harvest…the arch of diamonds is wheat bending in the wind. It had suddenly seemed easier, like she’d had help to push against the immovable wheel.

  “If only I could just reach out to hold you one last time, just …just once, hold both of you…Ollie,” she cried out softly, her voice was weak and ragged, “if you could just hear me, just think about me for just a second. Who wears the mask? Find the cat.”

  Her tired voice faded to a whisper. After a moment, she wasn’t able to discern whether she was speaking out loud or was listening to her own disembodied voice. Putting her head down on her arms, her fingers moved slightly closer to the fire engine red wheel of the valve. “I’ll rest a bit, then I’ll try again…I’ve got a mystery to solve.” Closing her eyes, her mind went to the flowing shape she’d seen in the mirror. Its water, she thought, I could really use some…there’s wheat, there’s the cat mask…wonder what Ollie wants to be for Halloween this year…