Shifting Shadows

by Patricia Briggs

  “Tell me, hobgoblin,” he said with soft menace. “What do you know about Margaret Flanagan?”

  • • •

  Butte, Montana, 1900

  He escorted the men through the tunnels, keeping to the front of the group so that the lanterns they carried wouldn’t damage his night vision. And also because it scared them that he didn’t need a lantern to find his way.

  The current location of his father’s opium den was a few hundred feet from where they’d started, though he’d led them through alternate routes that had added a half mile and more to the trip. It was imperative that they—mostly experienced miners, though one was a merchant’s son—not be able to find their way here without a guide. First, payment was made before they entered the mines, and anyone who made it to the den was assumed to have paid their fee. Second, it made it difficult for the police to find. To ensure the location remained a secret, the den was moved every couple of weeks.

  Thomas took a final turn and opened the makeshift door in invitation. The light from a dozen lanterns inside illuminated the smoky haze within. It looked like the hell the nuns had promised him.

  “Tap her light, Tommy,” said one of the men he’d escorted, giving him the traditional farewell wishes of a miner: when forcing a stick of explosive into a drilled hole in the granite, a miner wanted to be very careful tapping it in with his hammer.

  It caught Thomas by surprise, and he took a better look at the man’s face. Juhani. He’d been a Finnish boy whose father worked with the timber crews when they’d gone to school together once upon a time—twenty years and more ago. Now they were both damned—Thomas as his father’s monster, Juhani Koskinen as an opium addict.

  For a moment they stared at each other, then Juhani stepped through the door into the den, followed by the rest of the men.

  “Don’t know why you talk to him, Johnny, my boyo,” said one of them in a thick Irish lilt as Thomas closed the door, sealing them in. “He don’t never talk.”

  Not since he’d returned from the Master as his father’s new slave. What was there to say? Who would talk to him?

  Even before his mother’s brother, a famous scholar from a family of scholars, rescued his mother from his father’s care, she had not looked upon his face if she could help it—not since he had become a monster. She had taken her other children with her when she returned to China with her brother. Thomas had been left behind.

  For his father he had no words. Not that his father cared. He gave orders—and took him to the Master once a week to feed and be fed upon.

  Thomas hoped his father regretted his bargain, regretted at least the necessity of the once-a-week twenty-dollar gold piece that was more than his father paid any of his workers, either in the laundry or in the opium den hidden down in the mine.

  Alone, without a light of any kind, Thomas headed out deeper into the mines. The tunnels under the town were the labyrinthine result of more than three decades of every-day, round-the-clock mining. Aboveground, the gallows frames of the elevators that took men down and lifted them up again when their shifts were done clearly marked the different mines. Belowground, all of the mines interconnected.

  He’d heard that there were thousands of miles of tunnels and it wouldn’t surprise him if that were so. The other two men who ran dens sometimes took their nonpaying customers deep into the mines and left them in the maze of tunnels out of which they never found their way. His father’s customers all paid ahead of time or they didn’t get in.

  He had always been good at finding his way around the mines. Since he’d been turned, he’d gotten a lot better.

  He didn’t need light, didn’t need to see at all. He could feel the tunnel stretch around him—and the ones above, below, and beside him, too. He could sense the areas where miners were actively digging and the ones where no one had been for a very long time. He could tell north from south, up from down, and he knew where he was in relation to the city over his head.

  He never got lost in the tunnels.

  It was near three in the morning. His father had gone to sleep—the men Thomas had escorted in were the very last—and Thomas was free for the rest of the night. There were boys in the den whose job it would be to rouse their customers and escort them to the surface. Thomas never had to work in the den anymore: he scared the customers. He wasn’t sure if they feared him because his father used him to hurt the ones who displeased him, or if some atavistic sense warned them that he was a dangerous predator.

  Thomas walked to the nearest elevator shaft—he was safely between shifts, so he didn’t have to worry about the elevator cars—and began climbing down.

  The darkness soothed him, as did the growing heat. It was always hot in the lower levels. He didn’t need heat to survive anymore, but it had been such a luxury for him . . . before . . . that he always took pleasure in it. He climbed down until it suited him to stop a few levels above where they were actively mining. Descending the shaft pushed even his strength and abilities; he enjoyed it.

  He was always alone, but somehow, deep in the heart of the earth, with none but himself for company, he felt less so. Walking down tunnels that might not have seen people for decades, he felt comfortable in his skin and he relished it, even though it made it difficult to deny his growing hunger. Tomorrow he would have to feed.

  He dreaded the feeding time. Afterward, his Master renewed his orders and made certain his fledgling understood his place. Someday, Thomas was certain, someday he would be free. But for nearly a decade he had been slave to his father and the demon-thing that had, over a whole long year, turned him into what he was now.

  He put out his hand and touched the damp earth. There was water here, underground. A huge lake, he’d been told, and streams that ran just as the creeks aboveground did. He couldn’t feel the water the way he felt the earth, which spoke to his bones.

  Somewhere in the darkness in front of him chains rattled.

  “Please?”

  A woman’s voice, and Irish.

  He froze where he stood. Maybe she was one of the ones who did not pay for her opium—though usually those were left much higher than this. No one but he wandered alone down here. He couldn’t believe that either Mr. Wong or Mr. Luk would waste money on chains for a nonpaying customer.

  “Please, help me?”

  He hadn’t been walking particularly quietly. She knew he was there.

  The boy he’d been, Thomas Hao, would have run to the rescue. But that boy had died a long time ago and left a monster in his place.

  “What would you do for me in return?” he said, breathing in for the first time in a long time. He didn’t have to, especially since he didn’t speak. It made his father nervous when he didn’t breathe, so he made a habit of letting his lungs sit empty.

  He hadn’t sensed her as he did the miners, and it bothered him. He’d assumed he could sense everyone in the tunnels, in his realm.

  The chains rattled hard, agitated, as if the woman had not really believed there was someone else in the mine. “O lords and ladies, you are there,” she said. “Please. My father is the Flanagan. The old one of high court. His element is fire. And I am accounted a power in my own right. Our gratitude will be yours, my word on it.”

  Fae. That’s why he hadn’t felt her. Now that he knew she was here he could sense her, but she felt so close to the sighs and groans of the earth that it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed her before she’d spoken.

  He avoided the fae when he could, and when he could not . . . well, the fae, unlike humans, knew exactly what he was, and they despised the monster almost as much as he despised himself.

  “Please,” she said.

  If she were fae, chained down here, no human had done it, not this deep under the hill. He had no desire to find himself in the middle of a fae dispute.

  “Sir?”

  He could feel her listening. But
he made no noise. This close to feeding day his heart only beat if he made it.

  “You have nothing I want,” he said, the words coming out hoarse and strange. He turned to go back the way he had come.

  “Vampire.”

  He paused.

  “They say there is a vampire who walks deep beneath the hill.”

  They must be the fae, because the humans didn’t know. He didn’t hunt: the Master forbade it. As a fledgling he could only take nourishment from another vampire, anyway. Taking the blood of humans did him no good at all. Every week the Master had him try it. The Master himself was agoraphobic, unable to leave his basement.

  “Vampire,” said the fae woman. “What do you wish most? I can grant you that.”

  Freedom, he thought. If only the freedom to die. The bleak knowledge that no one would be able to give that freedom to him until long after the remnants of Thomas Hao had been thoroughly eradicated, and there was nothing to free, made him angry with a rage that did not cloak his despair.

  The sun. It had been so long since he’d walked in daylight that the hunger for it nearly eclipsed his growing thirst.

  “I have power,” she said. “Just tell me what you want?”

  What I want, you cannot give me. And in the hopelessness of the thought, he found that he wanted her equally trapped, equally frantic, if only for a little while.

  “You could feed me,” he told her, his long-unused voice sharp and bitter. “I’m hungry.”

  “Come, then,” she said. “Come and drink.”

  No hunting, was the command. No unwilling victims. Sometimes the Master forgot things or did not word things carefully enough. Maybe he’d never conceived that Thomas would find a willing victim.

  If he intended to stay out of fae conflicts he should walk away—but a small part of him made him hesitate. It wasn’t the hunger. It was the boy he had been who wanted the woman freed. He found he couldn’t ignore the boy’s necessities any more than he’d ever been able to ignore the Master’s. It made the monster angry.

  He gave her no chance to adjust, to brace herself. He dropped beside her, gripping her head and chin. He jerked her until her neck stretched out and bit down, sinking his fangs deep. He could have made it pleasant for her; his master insisted upon it being pleasant. But he wanted her to struggle, which would force him to stop and give him an excuse not to save her, to be the monster they—the Master and his father—had made him.

  Other than a gasp as he struck, though, she was silent and still against him.

  Her blood tasted nothing like the Master’s. It reminded him of the taffy he’d eaten when he was human. Not in the flavor, but in the feeling of richness, of self-indulgence and satisfaction.

  Feeding with the Master was carnal in its most profane sense—pleasure and pain. When it was over, it sent his senses into a stupor and left him feeling desperate for the bath that never really cleaned the stain from his soul no matter how hard he scrubbed.

  This feeding was . . . as he imagined feeding from a dragon might be—sharp and not altogether comfortable, but rich with the bottomless power of fire and earth. The fire cleansed him, the earth restored him, leaving him raw and off balance—but not filthy.

  It was the first time he’d fed from someone other than the Master, and it was hard to stop. One more pull, he thought, just one more. And one more became . . . He remembered the eyes of his old Finnish friend as he headed into the opium den. It gave him the strength to stop.

  She was limp and unresponsive in his hold. He sealed the wounds he’d made, regretting the roughness of his attack and wondering if he had stopped too late. He lay beside her and listened to her heart beat.

  When it continued past the first few minutes, he decided that she’d survive. His hands told him that they’d only chained her feet. He slipped his fingers inside the cuffs and broke them, one at a time. The flesh beneath was blistered, and her feet were bare. His clever hands told him also that she was young, far younger than she’d sounded—thirteen or fourteen, he thought, and clad in her nightdress. They’d taken her from her bed.

  Poor thing.

  He picked her up and carried her to the elevator shaft. She didn’t wake up until he fed her sweet tea in his father’s dark laundry. She drank two cups before she said anything, her big gray eyes looking at the face of the monster he was.

  He felt ashamed, and at the same time better than he had any-time these past twenty years or more, as if she had saved him, instead of the other way around.

  He was not hungry at all.

  “What is your name?” she asked. “I’m Margaret Flanagan. Maggie.” Her voice sounded composed, but her hands were shaking so badly.

  He was pretty sure she was scared of him. He had put his arm around her to brace her while he fed her tea. He expected his nearness made it worse, but he also expected that if he backed away from her right now, she’d fall off the stool.

  For all that she was fae, she was a child.

  He told himself that her fear didn’t make him sad. He was confused and hid it behind his usual emotionless mask.

  “I am Hao’s monster,” he told her abruptly. “Where is your father? I will take you home.”

  She tilted her head. She closed her eyes for one breath, heaved a sigh of heartfelt relief. When she looked up at him, she smiled, her face as bright as the sun he hadn’t seen in years.

  “He’s coming,” she said. “He’ll be right here.”

  “Good,” said Thomas, though he didn’t know if that were true. If she had such power as he’d felt as he drank from her—earth and fire in abundance—then her father likely had more.

  “Very true,” said a man’s voice, answering his thoughts—because Thomas had not spoken.

  It took all of Thomas’s considerable control not to show his surprise.

  “Papa,” said Margaret Flanagan, sounding for the first time as young as she looked. She pulled away from him and ran across the room to the arms of the man who stood in Hao’s Laundry in a flannel shirt and dungarees, though the door was locked and the room had been empty when Thomas had carried her here.

  The Flanagan didn’t look imposing—only a few inches taller than Thomas, which made him short by the standards of the Irish in Butte. He didn’t have the shoulders of a miner, though his hands showed the calluses of hard work.

  “Vampire,” he said, over his daughter’s head. “I could destroy you, you’re right. Fire is mine, and your kind are particularly vulnerable to it.”

  “Yes,” acknowledged Thomas coolly. He might have been frightened, he thought, if he had really been afraid of death. Hell wasn’t a pleasant thought, but then neither was a lifetime, possibly a hundred lifetimes, tied to the depraved thing that was his Master.

  If a monster had taken advantage of someone he loved the way he had taken advantage of Margaret Flanagan, he would have killed that one and never felt regret. The wounds on her neck were closed, but his attack had been brutal and it would be a while before the red marks on her skin faded. The Flanagan stayed where he was.

  Margaret turned her head until she could see Thomas.

  “You have it now,” she told him. “What will you do with it?”

  “Have what?” asked Thomas.

  “Freedom,” she told him, and then collapsed in her father’s arms.

  He hadn’t understood what she had done at first, not when he’d let her and her father out and relocked the laundry’s door, not when he’d gone into the cupboard where he died for the day, not even when what had come to him had been sleep rather than death. He’d awakened and followed his father up the hill to the Master’s house.

  Hao Xun took him down the stairs to the basement as he always did, leaving Thomas with a gold coin at his feet.

  “Pretty boy,” said his Master. “Come here to me.”

  Obediently, Thomas stepped down the
single stair. Above them, he heard his father walk out the door and shut it behind him.

  “Give us a kiss, my sweet thing,” the vampire told Thomas.

  Thomas bent down to kiss his Master’s cheek, one side and then the other. As he did, he reached out with one hand to grasp the long, wooden candlestick that always sat on the little table beside the wing chair, though the candle it held was seldom lit.

  “I’m so hungry for your blood,” whispered his Master as Thomas pulled back.

  As I hunger for yours, Thomas thought, thrusting the candlestick through the soft beeswax candle and into the old one’s heart. He took two steps back, amazed that at long last he’d been able to do such a thing.

  The old vampire leaned forward and smiled at him.

  “Pretty boy,” he said—and collapsed into himself.

  Only then, staring at the dust that had been his Master, did Thomas understand the gift he’d been given.

  • • •

  Butte, Montana, present day

  Freedom, Thomas thought, following the hobgoblin up the hill to wherever Nick wanted him to go. He’d spoken to her with his lips, and Margaret had heard his heart.

  Thomas had left Butte that very night, with his father’s twenty-dollar gold piece in his pocket. He could not wait for Hao Xun to come and get him, because he didn’t want to kill the man who had sired his human self the way he’d killed the thing that had sired his current flesh. If he’d seen his father again, he wasn’t certain he could have helped himself.

  He had never seen the two fae again, either, but unlike any of the vampires he’d met since then, he saw the sun every day and it did not burn him. He no longer needed to feed from a vampire in order to survive. Margaret had given him everything he’d desired as well as the feeding he’d asked for.

  Nick stopped at a small well-kept house near the base of Big Butte, the hill that had given its name to the town—despite not being a butte at all. He let himself in the front door.