The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  Nicky, I thought. Nicky must have found out I lied to him about dropping the investigation. So what happens when you screw over the biggest racket boss in Nevada? A bullet in the head if I was lucky.

  Zip-ties clenched my ankles, tight enough to cut off the flow of blood and leave my toes tingling. I felt weak in the wake of the shocks, not in pain so much as exhausted and shaky. I rolled on the corrugated metal floor as the van lurched into gear, only for a pair of hands to hoist me to a sitting position with my back against the wheel well.

  “Don’t talk,” a man’s voice growled in my ear, “don’t move, don’t fucking blink under that hood. If you so much as think about pulling any tricks, you’ll find out what a stun gun against your balls feels like. Understand?”

  I nodded. It felt like the safest choice.

  “This is so wrong,” moaned a younger woman’s voice. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Shut up, Melanie, nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to come along.”

  “And now he knows my name,” she said, “idiot.”

  “It ain’t gonna matter,” the man said. I didn’t like the implications of that.

  #

  We rode in silence for about half an hour. I kept my mouth shut in part to avoid further shocks, and in part hoping my captors would let something slip. They were pretty good at impersonating statues. After their little exchange, all I heard was breathing and the thump of bad tires against bad road.

  I ruled out Nicky. These guys were good but they weren’t that good, and none of Nicky’s people would have made an outburst like the girl had. Someone connected to the Kaufman brothers, then? It might not even be a current grudge. God knows I’d made enough enemies in my time, but not many of them had the resources or the guts to pull off a daylight kidnapping.

  I experimentally flexed my wrists against the zip-ties. No good. If they’d handcuffed me, it would be a different story, but I wasn’t getting out of the tight plastic strips without a sharp surface and a really good angle.

  There was a certain strange comfort in being utterly helpless. With no avenue of escape and no options, my breathing slowed, burying my panic under quiet contemplation. Obviously I was in serious danger, and the man’s last words hinted that they were taking me on a one-way trip with an unhappy ending, but I wasn’t dead yet.

  I counted turns, getting a feel for the speed of the van, in the hope of figuring out where we were headed. Their wheelman was too good for that. I gradually realized that he was zig-zagging across the city, looping around entire blocks and making random turns, a pattern to throw off anyone following the van and make a mess of my internal compass in the process.

  Eventually the van slowed, gravel crunching under the wheels, and came to a stop.

  “I’m cutting the ties off your legs,” the man said, “so you can walk. You kick me, I fry you. Understand?”

  I nodded. He sounded a little too eager to use the stun gun again. The sliding door rattled open. Hands hoisted me to my feet and helped me out of the van, down onto the gravel. I trudged forward, steered by a beefy hand on my shoulder, gripping hard enough to make my bones ache.

  The surface underfoot changed from gravel to hard concrete, a metal door clanging shut behind us. A warehouse, maybe?

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” the girl said.

  “Shut up, Melanie. He’s gonna get what’s coming to him. That’s final. We all agreed.”

  “We didn’t all agree,” she said. “You and him agreed and bullied the rest of us into it.”

  “You’re still here, though.”

  “Trying to talk some sense into you, yeah.”

  We walked down a long, smooth ramp. Dripping water echoed under the faint rattling of chains and the murmur of hushed voices. The man shoved down hard on my shoulder, planting me in what felt like a metal folding chair. Two pairs of hands quickly tied me down, leashing my ankles to the chair legs.

  I squinted as the hood yanked away and a dangling light-bulb flared in my eyes. As my vision swam back into focus I made out dirty faces and ragged clothes, maybe a dozen people gathered on the workshop floor of a derelict factory. Machines rusted on broken tracks, the dying afternoon light streaming in through cracked skylights twenty feet above our heads.

  They weren’t all human. Maybe none of them were. As my gaze swam over them, their features warped as if maintaining a human face took constant effort. I saw flashes of broken fangs in lopsided mouths, patches of ratlike fur, scales, and glimmers of hungry yellow eyes.

  Cambion, I thought, slumping in my chair. Because I didn’t have enough problems this week.

  I spotted the girl who’d spoken in my defense right away. Melanie hovered at the edge of the crowd, looking hesitant and guilty. She was maybe nineteen and unlike the others, who mostly looked homeless and half-starved, she bore the markings of a suburban girl who bought her punk couture from Hot Topic. The emo mop of neon-blue hair was a nice touch.

  The halfblood with the stun gun loomed over me, a bruiser whose veins popped and rippled over his muscles like tiny snakes under his skin. “That’s right, Dorothy,” he said, “you ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

  I looked up at him, dumbstruck.

  “Really?” I said. “Of all the badass things you could have said, that’s the line you decided to go with? Look, here’s a homework assignment for you: go and rent some vintage Schwarzenegger flicks, learn how to—”

  This time he pressed the stun gun against my rib cage. He was considerate enough to wait to talk until I stopped twitching and flopping.

  “Not so funny now, are ya?” He jabbed the plastic wand toward my face. “Not so funny now!”

  “Enough,” a voice rasped from the back of the crowd. The cambion parted, looking fearful as a familiar face approached my chair. The toe-eater. Great. “Before the sorcerer dies, does he have any last words?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pointedly glancing at the girl before looking back to him. “Why are you doing this? I mean, you’re a hobo whack job who thinks mages taste like Twinkies, I get that, but some of your buddies here actually seem lucid. What’d I ever do to you?”

  The cambion with the stun gun stroked it against my cheek, his finger resting on the trigger. “You put us back in chains, motherfucker,” he growled.

  “We were free!” the toe-eater cried, baring his cracked and yellowed teeth. “We! Were! Free! No rules, no rules, and you ruined us!”

  The cambion around him nodded, murmuring their assent, but they looked more frightened than anything else.

  “I don’t even know who you people are,” I said. “Let me level with you. I’ve done a lot of bad things to a lot of people, and I remember each and every one of ’em. Whoever you think I am, whatever it is you think I did, you’ve got the wrong—”

  “You loosed the hound!” the toe-eater roared, pointing a blackened fingernail at me as he trembled with rage.

  The hound, again. I still had no idea who or what the hound was. A few nights ago Toe-Eater was stalking me on Fremont Street, celebrating the hound being gone. Now the hound was back, and it was my fault? What had I done since—

  “Caitlin,” I said aloud, the pieces clicking together. “Caitlin is the hound.”

  The skylight exploded. The crowd of cambion jumped back, flailing and scattering, as a thunderstorm of broken glass rained onto the concrete and glimmered like diamonds in the dying light. Caitlin plummeted in its wake like a hawk plunging after its prey, landing on the heels of her high leather boots and rising gracefully from a crouch. A long white coat draped her willowy form, billowing around her, and she brushed a speck of glass from its tailored shoulder. She turned to me and smiled.

  “You called?”

  20.

  “Bitch!” screamed the cambion with the stun gun, charging her like a maddened bull. She didn’t hesitate, turning and flicking out her arm. A blur whined through the air, and the cambion crashed to his knees, clutching the ivory handle of a knife protruding from
his neck. His eyes bulged, blood guttering down the front of his shirt, his throat convulsing.

  “Correction,” Caitlin said, “the proper title is ‘hound.’ You’re the bitch. Now then, would anyone else like to do something foolish?”

  The cambion fell on his face, his breath rattling as he died. The others wavered on their feet, only a few of them still clustered behind the toe-eater. Not Melanie, though. She stared at Caitlin like a kid who just got caught forging her report card.

  Caitlin pulled back one side of her coat. A coiled bullwhip rested on her hip, its brass handle engraved with swirling sigils.

  “Most of you know me,” she said as she surveyed the room, “but for those who do not, I am Caitlleanabruaudi, the Wingtaker, hound of Prince Sitri’s court. You gather here in violation of hell’s law, and I stand in judgment. You live, or die, at my pleasure. So who would like to tell me what I want to know, in the hopes of putting me in a good mood before I pass sentence?”

  “We spit on your law!” the toe-eater snarled. “We spit on your prince! You have no authority over us!”

  The other cambion had looked intimidated by him before, even openly frightened, but now they seemed intent on edging as far away from him as they could. Anybody could see which way the wind was blowing. Anybody but him.

  Caitlin held up a slender hand, offering a faint smile that didn’t reach her frozen eyes. “I can be gracious, even in the face of rebellion. Tell me who put you up to this and you can walk away.”

  “No one!” the toe-eater shouted. “We are free and ungoverned! We will not be ruled by your bastard prince or any of his puppets!”

  “You know what?” Caitlin said. “I actually believe you. What a shame.”

  The whip flashed from her belt, slashing across the air and landing with a thunderous crack. Flames surged from the handle and raced along the leather like it was a trail of gasoline. The toe-eater turned to run. He never had a chance. She lunged out her arm, and the whip coiled around his neck and hauled him to the concrete floor. The fires engulfed him in a storm of napalm.

  The air stank with an unholy blend of burnt tires and pork. The cambion thrashed and shrieked. Caitlin held the whip fast, yanking him back down every time he tried to get up or roll free. The others backed away as the burning man flailed at them, screaming for help.

  It didn’t take long. Caitlin waited until there was nothing left but a charred husk, barely recognizable as anything close to human, before flicking her whip free. The fires died as she coiled the lash around her arm and hooked it back onto her belt.

  The crowd watched her in horrified silence.

  “You will go and tell others,” she said calmly, “that the hound has returned, that order has been restored, and the law will be obeyed. Be thankful. You all got a second chance tonight. I don’t give thirds. Now go. Except for you, Melanie. You come here. Now.”

  The cambion shuffled off, alone or in pairs, out into the night. The punk kid came over, her shoulders slumped and head down. She approached Caitlin like you might approach a lioness in the wild. Caitlin put her fingers under the shorter girl’s chin, forcing her head up. She looked Melanie in the eyes.

  “She wasn’t in on it,” I said quickly. “I mean, she was here, but she didn’t want to be. She tried to talk them out of it.”

  “I know,” Caitlin murmured. “Melanie, this is getting tiresome. You know this isn’t your crowd. You don’t belong here.”

  “I know,” she stammered, on the verge of tears, “I know, but…I didn’t realize. I mean, I thought it was just talk. I didn’t think they were really going to hurt anyone—”

  “Shh,” Caitlin said. “Now…you know I have to punish you for this. You understand that, right?”

  A tear rolled down Melanie’s cheek. “I know.”

  Caitlin pointed at the first corpse, the hilt of her dagger still jutting from his throat. “Go get my blade.”

  Melanie wrenched it from the bloody corpse, her face pale, looking torn between tears and throwing up. She carried it to Caitlin, holding it loosely between two fingers.

  “You will take this home with you,” Caitlin said, “and clean it until it is pristine. So clean you could cut your dinner with it, yes? While you do, I want you to think about what happens when people rebel against the law. You’ll bring the blade back to me tomorrow, and I’ll decide what to do with you then.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Melanie stammered. Caitlin waited until she’d vanished from sight before letting out a pent-up sigh.

  “Melanie is a good kid,” she said, her tone suddenly casual. “She really is, but she’s going through a phase right now.”

  “What are you going to do to her?” I asked. I must have sounded horrified. She took a look at me and giggled.

  “Tomorrow? Nothing. She’ll spend all night torturing herself with guilt and then start agonizing over what I might have in store for her. She won’t sleep a wink. Docile as a kitten by tomorrow night. I’ll tell her I’m proud of her for learning her lesson and give her a big hug. It’s all psychology.”

  “Pardon me for saying, you don’t seem like a hug person.”

  “What, you mean that?” She gestured toward the two corpses on the floor. “That’s my job, Daniel.”

  “Yeah, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m a little confused about that. And didn’t you, you know, go back to hell when I freed you?”

  She walked behind my chair, sliding another dagger from inside her coat. She sliced through my zip-ties. I rubbed my aching wrists, clenching and unclenching my fingers against the bloodless tingling.

  “Number one, you’re confused because you’re not supposed to know any of this exists. We’re irritated enough that you occult-underground types even know what cambion are, but that cat got out of the bag during the Dark Ages. Number two, I don’t live in hell; I live in Las Vegas. There really is a difference, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell, especially in August.”

  “How did you know I was in trouble?” I asked. She sliced my ankles free, spinning the ivory-hilted dagger in her hand before slipping it back into her inner coat pocket.

  “I’ve been following you, silly. I hoped that the people who set me up would come after you for revenge. Instead I snared a clot of feral little opportunists. Not the prize I wanted. Don’t give me that look; you were never truly in danger.”

  “The people who set you up? Besides Artie Kaufman?”

  “That pig had nothing to do with it. He was just the babysitter. He did what he was told. His brother’s the key, and I never saw his brother, just heard him on the phone.”

  I stood up, shook my legs out, and contemplated Caitlin. She looked like she’d just stepped off a Paris runway, even after murdering two men without thinking twice about it. Corman’s words lingered in the back of my mind. She’d gut you as soon as give you the time of day, no matter how nice she smiles.

  Maybe I was falling for a pretty face. Maybe I was just dumb enough to want to ride this train a little farther, a little closer to the end of the line, to see what I’d find there. I could justify it all day long, talk about how I needed help closing in on Sheldon Kaufman, how it was necessary to free Stacy’s soul, but those were just excuses. What I said next, I said because I wanted to.

  “We should compare notes,” I told her.

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Not remotely.”

  “Smart boy. All right, but if we’re going to talk, we’re going to do it over a meal. I’m famished.”

  I glanced nervously at the corpses, and she put her hands on her hips. “I don’t eat carrion,” she said. “Come on, my car’s outside.”

  A white Audi Quattro with napa-leather seats sat in the abandoned factory’s parking lot. It squawked as she unlocked the doors from her keychain.

  “Here’s all you need to know,” she told me as she strode toward the car. “A good-sized chunk of the western United States is under the authority of the Court
of Jade Tears and its honored ruler, Prince Sitri. I am his hound, his whip-hand, the keeper of his law on Earth, and his court’s appointed persecutor—”

  “You mean prosecutor?”

  She just rolled her eyes.

  “Among other things,” she said, “many other things, this means policing the local cambion population to ensure they don’t do anything stupid, and protecting them should they need help. Most of them, like Melanie, are fine. The ferals are the problem.”

  “Wait, that kid’s the norm? I thought they were all psychotics except for a few.”

  I got in the car while she tossed her coat and weapons in the trunk. Underneath she wore a white silk blouse and a black pencil skirt, the hint of a silver pendant gleaming at her neckline. She slid into the driver’s seat. The engine purred to life. Her fingertips caressed the wheel.

  “Most cambion,” Caitlin said, “are perfectly well-adjusted and normal, relatively speaking. You don’t know about them because they’re very good at hiding.”

  “How many are there?”

  “A generous handful. My prince’s court is one of the few that doesn’t have an open-season policy on them. Many feel that, being half human, they’re abominations and impure by nature.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said. The Audi rumbled out of the factory lot and onto the street.

  “We, however, deem them worthy of existence and protection so long as they obey our laws. As a result, more than a few halfbloods migrate in from the Midwest and East Coast, looking for a place to thrive. The other courts’ shortsighted loss is our long-term gain. As usual.”

  “So you’re…the sheriff?”

  She grinned. “The sheriff, the diplomat, the occasional guidance counselor. Any business of the prince’s on Earth is my responsibility. I do occasionally need to go home for work or pleasure, but by and large, this world is my oyster so long as I’m strong enough to keep the job. Ah! Here we are.”

  A valet ran over to take her keys as we pulled up to the curb. We walked together through the casino, under a ceiling painted the color of a midsummer sky. When we got to the restaurant, I eyed the marquee over the doors dubiously.