A Shiver of Shadows

by Hunter J. Skye

  Insubstantial arms hooked under mine. My dear friend no longer had the constitution to lift my weight, but his efforts lent me some support. I launched through the front door and collapsed on the darkened lawn. My muscles locked in a feral pose. The feathery fog crept between the sentinel magnolias that stood guard at the edge of the cottage’s small yard. Just beyond them, the Elizabeth River poured into the misty bay. A bay that had been named for me.

  “You must release the vibration building inside you.”

  The pain between my ribs nearly blotted out Pratt’s words.

  “Remember the effort it took when you first achieved corporeal form. You must shape this new body the same way you once shaped your corporeal presence.” I tried to focus past the twisting in my gut. My tendons pulled; my muscles bunched until my entire body sang with otherworldly tension.

  “Make yourself a cannon and fire upon the night.” His fist clenched, ghostly fingers slipping through the tissue and bone of my shoulder. “Release it! Now!”

  My body quaked under the physical manifestation of the invisible force condensing at my core. My heart spasmed. My organs shifted. Pain sliced down my intricate, new spiderwebbing of nerves, lighting my hands and feet on fire. I was losing my grasp on the frail gift I’d been given. This new version of me was tearing apart.

  “Do not fight your flesh! You inhabit every cell, every vein, every follicle. They will respond to your command.”

  I had no command to give. I was under a mandate of agony issued to every part of me from somewhere deep within. Blackness fed on the edges of my vision.

  “Release it now…or you will perish again,” he whispered, and my scream tore the night. The magnolias groaned. The bulkhead twisted, and an impossible heaviness burst forth from my straining throat. Tender flesh shredded as the unseen force wrenched from my body. It split the waves directly in front of the yard and splintered the tiny dock. It roared away into the fog. Heartbeats later, a muffled impact thumped against the distant marina. Ropes slapped against masts, and hulls ground against the wooden planks of their slips. Far off shouts rode the raw night air.

  My arms buckled as I collapsed to the grass, spitting blood as I went. Pratt’s face was a mask of concern, but I remembered what it was like to be separate from the world and its perils. Pratt’s worry was genuine, but his eyes held the ice of acceptance. Injury was a part of mortal life. So was death. I stared back at him from a place of vulnerability. I had something to lose. I had a great something that could have only been bestowed on me by the Almighty Father, maker of Heaven and Earth.

  “You are still alive,” Pratt announced pragmatically. The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

  “It would appear so,” I croaked. Tiny strips of flayed flesh hung like pumpkin threads in the back of my throat.

  A shaft of light appeared from the window of the nearest neighbor’s house. Swimming Point was usually a quiet enclave of calm. The tiny cluster of houses jutting out into the bay were silent watchers peering out across the river at livelier parts of town. Its residents were not accustomed to providing the excitement. I pushed to my knees as another light shone in another window.

  “Can you walk?” Mr. Pratt inquired. His lower half turned and made for the front door. I nodded, shoved to my feet, and we clambered into the cottage.

  “May I ask how long these episodes have plagued you?” Pratt hovered next to the banister.

  I took a seat on the bottom step of the narrow staircase and rested my aching head in my hands.

  “It first happened tonight, just before Melisande was taken.”

  Pratt seemed ready to impart a valuable thought when, suddenly, a fractured, mouthless moan violated the stillness of the living room. The hairs on my arm stood erect. The sense of utter and complete ruination which had once emanated from Melisande’s little pet was now reduced to a nagging foreboding at the back of my mind. It was weakened. The intruder had clearly damaged the poltergeist. Or maybe my outburst had affected it somehow.

  Its seething presence usually set my teeth on edge, but now its swarming bits of mindless rage limped through the cottage, loosening nails, and tossing debris like a petulant child. No, I refused to feel sorry for it. It was a loathsome companion that offered Melisande more trouble than assistance. Wallpaper peeled as it stretched toward the open door. With an inhuman wail, it twisted through the doorway and disappeared into the darkness over the river. I breathed a sigh of relief as the pressure in the room eased with its passing.

  “Why does it linger?” Mr. Pratt questioned, eyeing the doorway and the night beyond.

  “A good question,” I answered. “It is broken, I think.” I stared out at the amorphous fog. “And only Melisande can fix it.”

  Chapter Three

  Cold Cuts in Crazy Town

  Melisande

  I knew it was too good to be true. If there was one thing I knew about the universe, it was that the great vastness of creation thought I was a waste of time. It would take energy for the universe to throw me a bone. To do me a solid. To part with one of its treasured happily ever afters. Maybe its inventory was running low and it just couldn’t part with anymore bountiful joy. At least not for me, a narcoleptic misfit with a shoddy hypothalamus.

  I thought to sit up, but what was the point. I was blind. I blinked my eyes, but it made no difference. I lifted my foot. The tiny movement set off a vibrato of echoes. I rubbed my eyes, but all I could see were the skittering thoughts inside my mind.

  The neon blaze of my own foolishness burned through the blackness, vibrant afterimages eating the memory of happiness from my brain. I saw the lines and planes of the cottage’s living room, the ultraviolet curve of Grayford’s face, the sizzling green ghost of the man who had taken me.

  The man. Oh, God.

  I waved my arms through the void above me, then sat up. No sound came to me but the echoes of my own movements. I touched my face, my eyelids.

  “Hello?” A vast space fought over the word I’d uttered, ripping it into hundreds of whispery pieces. I ran my hands along the smooth, cold surface upon which I sat. It felt like rock. Not crumbly rock. More like slick stone. Not a floor. It was too bumpy and uneven for that. Maybe I was in a cave. Or on an asteroid. It was certainly cold enough.

  I reached around me in a circle, feeling for any change in the surface. Other than a few crater-like indentations, it seemed to go on in all directions. But that echoing made me very nervous. I could be on a cliff or near a well. One move in the wrong direction and I might plummet to my death.

  My lungs suddenly cried out for more air. The void around me filled with my panicked breathing. It whooshed and rasped around me in a volley of sound until something moved.

  A sharp noise, like a splash, cut through the silence. I held my breath and waited for the sound to come again. Adrenaline forced me to exhale. I blew the air out slowly then held my breath again.

  A set of sounds this time, soft like bare feet whispering across the ground. And then I heard it.

  Thhhhump. Thump, thump. Thhhhump.

  Cataplexy swept through my muscles, and I collapsed backward, cracking my head against the edge of a small protrusion. Lights flickered through the darkness as slick and wriggling as tadpoles. I waited for them to fade, but they didn’t. I watched from my blind cocoon of desperate breaths as the flickers turned to a warm, wavering light. Shadows raced along jagged surfaces, running full speed from the man with the stuttering heart. I wanted to flee with them, but for the second time today my broken neuroreceptors had dropped me like a narcoleptic stone.

  Fear ran red through my veins, pumping out to the farthest parts of my body. My fingertips pulsed with it. My toes tingled. I tried to quiet my breathing. Maybe he’d lose sight of me in the twisting shadows. If I could just keep from making any sound.

  I peered through my lashes as the flickering light flared around me, revealing sparkling cascades of crystalline rock. The walls bubbled up into darkness above me, then dripped down i
n bloated stalactites.

  “Miss Blythe. I see you are awake.” The crumbling man with the drumming heart leaned over me. “Good. Our journey is nearly complete, but there is something I need you to see before we resume our travels.”

  When I didn’t move, his head ticked sideways. His burnished eyes danced along my limp form. “Are you injured?” He moved the small lantern he was carrying closer to my face. My eyelids fluttered. I moved my lips, but my tongue was still paralyzed.

  “Yes, sometimes the flesh responds poorly to translocation.” He straightened and a series of dry pops accompanied the movement. “I would give you a moment to adjust, but we really must be on our way.” The man jerked his head around as if expecting someone or something to step from the darkness at the edge of his lantern’s light. He took a few steps to the side and placed his lantern on the stone floor.

  My neck twitched, and my jaw rolled. I willed my teeth together.

  “There is something you must see.” The man’s yellowed eyes pinned me with their intensity. My chin trembled, but my jaw was back in place. My head wobbled a little, but I lifted it. It clearly wasn’t enough for him, because he shuffled back to me and grabbed my wrist.

  Sharp rock tore at my thin shirt as he dragged me, drawing stinging lines across my back.

  “Here.” He adjusted the hand lamp again and pulled on my arm until I was halfway to a sitting position. He crumbled to his knees next to me and jabbed a boney finger at a segment of rock wall that glittered in the pale spill of light. A milky white malignancy encased the upper half of the wall.

  I forced my eyes to focus on the smudged stone surface. Dark lines stretched across the warped rock. Some were arrow straight and barbed at the end like spears. Some curved and branched like horns or tapered into sharp hooves. It took long, stretched moments for my brain to make sense of what I was seeing.

  Paintings. Cave paintings.

  The man loomed close to my face. Before I could make out the individual shapes of the herding figures traced along the wall, his wispy frame blocked my view.

  “I am not to speak of this. They said, ‘Do not speak of it.’ They didn’t say I could not show you. The fools.”

  Something slithered through the stagnant air, and suddenly the darkness above us was no longer empty. The pale man glanced upward, then reached a hand under my other arm and hoisted me as though I were a toddler. “Remember what you’ve seen,” he ordered, and the feeble lantern light extinguished.

  ****

  Laughter seemed all wrong for this moment, but nevertheless, a chorus of carefree chortling assaulted my ears. Sunlight stabbed at my eyes as I reacquainted myself with physical form. Nausea gripped my stomach while I fought to focus on something. I steadied my breathing and lifted my head.

  Blue. Dazzling. Blazing. Flat.

  The sea drew a searing line of azure across my vision, marking the distant horizon. I took in the sky, the waves, the rocky beach. I lived on the coastal plain of Virginia where the land crept to the sea like an ancient, defeated thing. Where I was from, the ocean ruled. The waves pounded the shore with a clockwork dominance. This was not the sea that spread out before me.

  I fought free of the disintegrating man’s grip and staggered to the edge of a wide terrace. I gaped at the sluggish surf far below me. It rolled in like a half-formed thought. This sea had lost its fight against the monolithic boulders jutting along its shore. A ragged truce carved the cliffs into tiny private beaches and blue-green coves. This was not the Atlantic. I’d seen enough postcards to know that I stood before the sparkling gem of the Mediterranean.

  “Rasmus,” a voice with a heavy Spanish accent barked, and the laughter stopped.

  “Where am I?” A riot of emotion poured into my hushed words. I was almost sure I knew what had just happened. I’d felt that invading pull before. It was the Joining. The dizziness, the lack of orientation, it was just like before. But this time a new phone line crackled to life inside my mind, and Grayford was not on the other end.

  The loss gripped my stomach and twisted. Hard.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the pale man with the hammering heart. A hint of that sickly, staggering beat echoed through my own chest. Ancient, aching thoughts unraveled through my consciousness unbidden. And a thirst. An unending thirst pulled at the core of my being.

  A bronze-skinned young man, with a dark tumble of jaw-length hair, stepped in front of Rasmus. The man’s sable brow and roguish features would have been the perfect picture of masculinity if not for his age. The curves of his face and his plump bottom lip still held the dew of youth. There was a boyish charm to his smile. His widespread shoulders poked beneath his shirt as if still raw-boned from recent growth. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

  He turned from me to my abductor, then back to me. He whispered something in Spanish to Rasmus, and the fragmenting man answered in the same tongue. The man’s cinnamon stare raced over me in a blatant manner.

  A woman with midnight-red hair stepped from a stretch of billowing curtains into the early light. The ocher slant of sunshine lit the crimson strands on fire. Garnets, rubies, and deepest carnelian sparkled along the spill of her waist-length waves. The sun had kissed her pale cheeks and the bridge of her nose, leaving a sprinkle of tawny freckles.

  I backed away from the trio until my heels struck the carved base of the stone railing behind me. I was on a sun-bleached balcony too many stories above the ocean to count. Over my shoulder, above the foreign sea, the sun ascended on a day that had not yet reached my part of the world.

  “Where am I?” I demanded. Had I asked that already? My voice rang off the cool, glazed tile under my feet. The jubilant squares of repeating color covered every inch of the deck in a decree of forced festive opulence.

  The young man dipped his handsome chin until all I could focus on were his warm, brown eyes and the gaping bullet holes of his pupils. He swept his hand in the direction of the sparkling horizon. “You are in the only place to be, Ms. Blythe. Welcome to the Costa Brava.”

  My heart sped up, slamming against my ribs to a faltering beat that almost mirrored the pale man’s. Costa Brava? His accent rolled the R and lisped over the T.

  “You are in Catalonia, my dear,” the woman practically sang as she swayed across the tiles. She slinked to my side and raised her hands to my face. Her cool touch slithered across my burning cheeks. I opened my fingers and ice stung my palms.

  “España, Melisande.” The woman’s aqua gaze slid over my features, seeming to drink the curve of my lips, the line of my jaw, the sweep of my lashes. Her fingers brushed the white streaks at my temples. “You are in Spain,” she giggled.

  I spun back to the marble railing and retched.

  ****

  I’d been here before. Not Spain. I’d never been to Spain, but I had been in the grip of predators before. I knew what it felt like. The woman with the blood-red hair and blue-green eyes wove a web of seduction around me. I’d been caught in that sort of snare before. Shades of Edwardia, that evil entity that had attempted to become the Seventh Devil, trembled through me. I’d stopped Edwardia weeks ago, but she’d left her mark on me. The beginnings of post-traumatic stress quivered to life in the backseat of my mind.

  The woman’s lips parted, her cheeks blushed, and silky fingers curved to fit the line of my neck, the slope of my shoulder. She was claiming me with each stolen trace of her fingertips.

  “No.” I leaned away, and thin chains manifested from my open hands. I still knew very little about the frozen ectoplasmic formations that expressed from my body when I was in danger. Seth had tested the icy substance over and over again, but all we’d learned was that my conscious will somehow called them into being, and they had some kind of subduing effect on the electromagnetic fabric of ghosts. The slithering chains rose through the morning light, hissing and popping in the hot, dry air. I looped them above her beautiful head. Then, with a mere thought, I tied the sparkling links into a dead man’s knot. It was meant
as a warning. My chains only worked on ghosts. To humans, they were just ice.

  The woman smiled a wide, carnivorous curve of full, shapely lips. With her gaze on mine, she slowly slid her languid arms above her head. Her wrists pressed together as her hands grasped, fingers entwining. I watched in rapt shock as the woman slipped her delicate hands through the frozen noose above her.

  “Please?” The breathy feminine appeal wound through me, seeking a silent door with a lock and a slender key.

  “No,” my mouth said, but something farther down disagreed. Blood crept, flesh pulsed. This wasn’t happening again. Several sets of eyes drank my response like an elixir. I suddenly felt like a fine wine, a precious potion. Who were these people, and what did they want? I was a nobody. A broken girl. The old assessment of myself pulled and popped its buttons. It no longer truly fit. I’d defeated the Seventh Devil. I’d closed the Hell Gate. I was someone new.

  A twitch of my will caused the icy knot to tighten. Chains slid around the woman’s wrists like sparkling bracelets. Her body quaked, and beneath the silky fabric of her clinging sundress, the turgid tips of her breasts sharpened.

  The man with the penny-brown eyes and dark, careless hair clapped. Amusement played across his young face. “Oh, Melisande. Beautiful Melisande. We weren’t expecting you until winter, but it’s so wonderful to have you among us now. Melisande Blythe, Slayer of Demons,” he crooned, “Destroyer of Gates.” He laughed, and his voice crashed like waves. I rolled with the wicked tumult of it. They were not the words of a nineteen-year-old.

  “I believe introductions are in order.” He took a second to preen. His tailored, blue pants and loose, white linen shirt screamed casual money. His tan espadrilles communicated a foreign, relaxed manliness. “I am Mephos the Innocent, Keeper of the Caldron of Cathar.” His soft gaze fell into a practiced glance of meekness. I could see where that look may have once fit that face. That dark-lashed, olive-skinned, playful face. But there were fathoms of experience flashing in those caramel depths. His inky pupils sharpened with reptilian ease. Those were predator’s eyes, no matter what face they were in.