The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “What I need right now is that service elevator. Our deadline just got a little tighter.”

  I jogged down a maintenance corridor, past a corkboard still displaying yellowed bulletins from ten years ago.

  “Take the first left,” Bentley said after a moment’s pause, “then a short right.”

  The service elevator was big enough to deliver a grand piano. Dirty canvas padding covered the walls, and a scuffed rubber mat lined the floor. I hit the button for twelve and the doors rumbled shut, the cage springing to life with a wheezing groan.

  I thought back to every fire drill I had sat through as a kid, and how they had hammered it into my head that the one thing you never, ever do in a fire is use the elevators. Of course, I was pretty sure “don’t pick a fight with a crew of sorcerers who already kicked your ass once this week” was also on the list of things you shouldn’t do. I wasn’t setting any safety records tonight.

  Right about now, Jennifer would be sending the empty main elevator up to the Klondike, giving me the chance to slip around and get the element of surprise. At least, I hoped so. It was the only advantage I was going to get.

  I held my breath. The elevator chimed.

  Top floor, end of the line.

  42.

  The doors ground open, too loud for my liking, on a dark and empty kitchen. Fat blending bowls and double-decker ovens gathered dust. They’d been abandoned for years. I dropped low, crawl-walking around the counters with my shotgun held tight to my chest. Light streamed in through a service window to my left. Hearing voices, I slowly peeked up and over, into the lounge beyond.

  The Klondike Room really was a marvel of Old Vegas. I could imagine Sinatra singing on the scallop-walled stage with an approving crowd spread among the plush red velvet chairs and low glass cocktail tables. Toward the back, near the great brass doors of the main elevator, tables set with faded white cloth waited for a steak dinner that would never arrive.

  Tonight’s performance was nothing so elegant. The Etruscan Box sat on a black marble pillar at center stage. Swirls and sigils in bone-white chalk adorned the wooden slats around it. Hundreds of candles flooded the room with flickering light, set out on every table and ledge in patterns that hinted at some mad geometric design. On the only table without a candle, set up on stage squarely before the Box, sat five little pouches.

  “I can’t believe he’s this fucking stupid,” Meadow said, planted in front of the elevator doors. Tiny glowing numbers inched their way upward, the empty cage making its way to the top floor.

  “I can’t believe he got past your traps,” Sheldon said from the stage, kneeling as he put the final touches on a painted glyph. “It’s almost like you’re more interested in torturing people than building an effective security system.”

  “Ms. Carmichael,” Meadow said, “please tell Sheldon that if his idiot brother hadn’t fucked things up, we wouldn’t even be in this situation. And Tony would still be alive.”

  “Lauren,” Sheldon said as he stood up and brushed the dust from his slacks, “please tell Little Miss Torquemada that if she’d spend more time acting like a professional and less time acting like something out of a horror movie—”

  “Both of you, quiet,” Lauren said. She stood, imperious and regal, a step behind Meadow. Her hands wavered in the candlelight, slow and sinuous, fingertips trailing luminous green mist.

  Meadow turned her head, the light catching her ravaged face, and I held my breath. A vicious scar ran from her forehead to her jaw, carving off a lop of skin at the side of her nose. A string of tape and sutures held her raw, red flesh together.

  “He dies slow,” she hissed, “him and anyone with him.”

  Lauren narrowed her eyes, concentrating on the elevator door. “He dies, period, and we get back to work.”

  Three against one is a sucker’s bet. Odds were I’d be dead in the next ten minutes. Jennifer and me together, we might have taken them, but I’m a firm believer in contingency plans. Mine sat snug in my hip pocket, right next to my deck of cards.

  If you can’t change the odds, you can always change the game.

  “Is Jenny safe?” I whispered as loud as I dared, hoping the earpiece would pick it up.

  “She’s here with me,” Margaux said. “Fire department’s on the way, and they’ve cleared Fremont Street. You can see the flames in the windows, up to the third floor and climbing fast.”

  “You have to leave,” Bentley cut in. “Now, Daniel. Cormie says there’s an old fire escape on the west side of the building, but it stops at the eighth floor. You don’t have much time!”

  I took the earpiece and stuffed it in my shirt pocket. No distractions. My breath slowed. My pupils dilated, showing me the room in a spray of color, the winds of magic tracing the world in violet and gold. When we had fought at Spengler’s house, they got the drop on me. Things were different now.

  They’d probably kill me, but I’d make damn sure they bled for their victory.

  The elevator let out a merry chime. Before the doors were even halfway open, Lauren unleashed a torrent of bilious green fog, spilling from her hands like a flamethrower’s plume and flooding the elevator cage with acidic death. She was just realizing her mistake, looking at the steaming, pitted ruins of an empty elevator, when I burst through the swinging kitchen door and blasted them with the shotgun.

  I was fast. Lauren was faster. She spun and threw up her empty palm. The air shimmered, turning to jelly, and a wall of shotgun pellets hung in the web of her makeshift shield before tumbling to the ground. She twirled her other hand in a spinning motion, pointing, and suddenly I wasn’t holding a shotgun anymore. A fat rattlesnake nestled in my hands, its head twisting around to bite. On instinct, I threw the snake as far as I could. By the time it landed the illusion was gone, and my weapon clattered against the edge of the stage.

  I only had the one cartridge left anyway. I went for my cards, but then I saw Sheldon running up on me, his fists glowing with furious red energy. I couldn’t let him get close, not yet. I circled the closest table, a four-seater draped for dinner and displaying a dozen candles in tiny silver cups.

  “For my next trick,” I announced and grabbed hold of the tablecloth’s edge. The cloth whipped away in one smooth movement and left the candles standing on bare wood, untouched. Keeping the momentum, I swung the tablecloth over my head, bringing it around and letting it fly. It hit Sheldon square in the face and wrapped around him like a needy ghost, enveloping his arms and legs and sending him to the ground in a kicking tangle.

  A lance of green light flashed past my eyes, striking the wood-paneled wall and leaving a sizzling hole in its wake. I raced across the room, jumping over Sheldon, as my cards leaped from my pocket in a riffling stream to land in the palm of my outstretched hand. I ducked another of Lauren’s blasts and offered my retort, sending a pair of luminous poker cards screaming across the room like razor-edged boomerangs. Lauren threw herself behind a potted plant. Meadow ran over to help Sheldon, tugging at the clingy enchanted tablecloth.

  “Gimme your gun!” she shrieked at Sheldon as he forced one arm free. “Give me your fucking gun!”

  Lauren and I darted from cover to cover like gunfighters at high noon, taking shots where we could, keeping our heads down and our hands fast. I was almost to the stage when Sheldon got loose, shoving Meadow away and charging like an enraged bull. He had his pistol, all right, but he was good and pissed and wanted to finish this fight with his bare hands. Perfect. That’s what I was counting on.

  I backed up a few steps onto the stage and turned to face him. My timing had to be absolutely flawless, or it was all over. I raised my open hand, invoking the threads of a spell.

  He lunged out with a curled fist, sending a shockwave of power that hit me point blank in the stomach from five feet away, knocking the wind out of me and shattering my concentration. Then he leaped, his foot a blur as it whirled toward me. I felt ribs crack as I flew backward, slamming into the table with the soul-trap
pouches and sending it clattering to the ground, leaving me prone in a puddle of broken glass. Sheldon crouched over me, grabbed me by my collar, and hoisted me up, his fist drawn back.

  I didn’t see it land. I just felt the sudden white-hot pain as my nose cracked, painting my vision blood red, and then nothing.

  I must have only been out for a couple of minutes. I woke up, propped up against a railing off to the side of the stage. I tasted blood, my upper lip wet and sticky. My nose and ribs throbbed with icy pain.

  Meadow Brand stood over me. She had Sheldon’s gun now. He and Lauren were working to touch up the stage, fixing the paint I’d smeared and setting the soul-traps in their proper place once more.

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” I said with an exhausted smile. Meadow’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Spirited,” Lauren said, walking over to join us, “but you’re on the wrong side, Mr. Faust. You act like we’re trying to destroy the world, when we only want to save it.”

  “Yeah? I know a dead little girl who probably thinks different.”

  She looked wounded. “We aren’t sociopaths, Mr. Faust. A sociopath is, by definition, incapable of human empathy. Opening the Box requires a sacrifice of loved ones. We have all paid for our work, paid in pain and tears.”

  “Not nearly enough,” I said.

  “You’ll understand,” she said with a faintly condescending smile. “Ms. Brand has requested that you be kept alive, in order to see the glory of our work. And to…make amends for injuring her.”

  Meadow stared down the sights of the gun with a killer’s eyes.

  “When our new slaves get here,” she snarled, “the things I am gonna make them do to you—you’ll wish you’d never been born. And before I let you die? I’m going to make them gather up all your friends, everybody you ever cared about, so you can watch them suffer and die first.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said to Lauren, ignoring Meadow. “I can tell you’re a bunch of real saints. This one’s humanitarian of the year material.”

  “The Enclave project requires a woman of Ms. Brand’s unique talents,” Lauren said with a long-suffering sigh, then shot her a warning glance. “I tolerate her eccentricities. Within limits.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Meadow hissed, her eyes fixed on mine. She held the pistol in a steel grip.

  Sheldon clapped his hands from the stage. “We’re ready!”

  “Very good,” Lauren said, adjusting the signet ring on her left hand. “Sheldon, you have the honor of opening the lock. I will bind Belephaia as soon as she emerges, then Sitri as he arrives.”

  She ascended the stage, standing in an arcane circle painted in daubs of yellow and white. Sheldon stood before the box, arms outstretched, the tray of pouches at his side. Latin words rumbled from his throat, twisting in the air as they slipped back, regressing to a coarser and more barbarous tongue.

  Streamers of pale white light slithered from the soul-traps like snakes’ tongues licking the air. The streamers stretched toward the Box, crackling as they made contact with its onyx hasp.

  “You really don’t want to do this,” I told Meadow. “You really don’t.”

  “Shut up,” she snarled. “We win, you lose. Simple as that.”

  The streamers tightened. They were lances now, pulsing and throbbing with pure soul-energy as they spread pools of blazing light in every nook, cranny, and recess of the casket’s face. Sheldon’s chant grew louder, and louder still, spiraling into a raw-throated ecstatic cry.

  The Box opened.

  43.

  I shouldn’t have looked.

  I knew I shouldn’t have looked, but as the Box slowly opened, swinging on ancient hinges, I sat in the perfect spot to take a peek inside. What I saw would haunt my nightmares forever.

  A space bigger than the casket that contained it, infinitely bigger, bathed in blinding light. A feathered wing covered in thousands of blinking, staring eyes, each a different color, each pronouncing a different judgment on my corrupt heart. Knowing every sin I’d ever committed and every sin I ever would commit, my heart nearly bursting under the weight of their raw hatred. I saw the tip of a yellowed and rotting bone spear, long and wickedly curved, then realized I was looking at a fingernail…

  One of the streamers of light sputtered. It yanked me from my reverie, hauling me back from the edge of madness and focusing my attention on the soul-traps. Sheldon looked at them, dumbfounded, shaking his head as the errant light crackled and whipped back, recoiling into its pouch as if rejected.

  If you can’t change the odds, change the game.

  I just leaned back and smiled.

  “The number of souls is five,” I said, echoing what the smoke-faced man had told Lauren so many years ago. “What was it he said? ‘To open the Box without the requisite sacrifice invites the wrath of its guardians.’ Something like that?”

  Lauren looked at me, torn between outrage and sudden terror. “What did you do?”

  “It must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain,” I said, the smile slipping from my face as my eyes went hard. “I fucked you over, that’s what.”

  The storm tunnel stank of mildew and regret. Stacy’s pouch rested heavy in my hand. Her half-formed wraith hovered across the line of dust, tortured mouth wide in a soundless wail.

  “I know. I’m so sorry. I want to free you, but…I need to hold onto this, just a little while longer. I swear to you, though. I swear to you, I’ll be back as soon as I’m done.”

  “My timing had to be perfect,” I told Lauren, “and it was. I let Sheldon hit me, so he could knock me right into the tray of soul-traps. Once I went down, palming one of the pouches and switching it with Stacy’s half-empty one was easy. Four and a half souls. You opened the box without the proper sacrifice. Gotta think that’s going to hurt.”

  The Box slammed shut. A new light boiled from the ebony casket itself, violent and swirling, the color of orange stained glass. Sheldon looked over, pinned in place, trembling as he called out.

  “L-Lauren?”

  The other soul-traps snapped closed, their lights whipping back into the pouches, rejected and undevoured.

  “Lauren!” Sheldon screamed, just before the orange light ate him alive.

  It crashed over him like a rogue wave, flooding his mouth, saturating his skin, motes of brilliant fire swirling around him. The motes ate him like a school of piranha feasting on a bleeding calf. Skin tore away in tiny chunks, blood spattering the stage, the light shredding him one nickel-sized bite of flesh at a time.

  Meadow lunged at me, pressing the barrel of her gun to my forehead. I’d been waiting. I jerked my head to the side and grabbed the pistol, twisting it hard and yanking it from her grip. She dove out of the way as I fired off two fast shots. The bullets went wide, shattering a glass table and sending burning candles to the floor, a tablecloth igniting.

  Sheldon’s eyes exploded. Still transfixed by the light, he shrieked endlessly as it chewed him down to ragged muscle and bone. Lauren ran from the stage, throwing up a desperate shield to ripple the air as I snapped off another shot. Meadow waited by the emergency stairwell, holding the door open.

  “Lauren!” Meadow shouted. “Let’s go!”

  “You’re not leaving,” I snarled, giving chase. Then I froze and looked back. The Silverlode was going down in flames, literally. If I abandoned the pouches on the stage, they’d be lost forever. Maybe the souls trapped inside would be freed when the enchanted leather burned, but maybe they wouldn’t.

  I could settle up with Lauren and Meadow another time. Cursing under my breath, I dove for the stage as hungry tendrils of orange light snapped like whips just above my head. I grabbed the tray, clutched it to my chest, and rolled clear as Sheldon’s ravaged corpse collapsed in a bloody heap. I didn’t stop running until I hit the emergency stairwell, pausing just long enough to count the pouches and stow them in my pockets.

  A few floors down, a metal door rattled and chunked shut. I took the concrete st
eps two at a time, swinging around the handrails. By the time I hit the eighth floor my heart was pounding like a kettledrum and my breath was ragged, but there wasn’t a second to lose. Bentley had said the fire escape topped out on the eighth floor. That must be where Lauren and Meadow were headed, and it’d be my way out too.

  The door grip rattled uselessly in my hand. Looking closer, I could see the warped metal in the doorjamb, how it ran like melted wax. They’d destroyed the lock.

  I ran down to the seventh floor landing and hauled open the stairwell door. A sudden furnace-blast of heat seared my lungs and stole my breath. Flames licked the walls of the hallway beyond, curling the antique hotel wallpaper and blackening the dusty carpet.

  If the fire was this out of control, going any lower would be suicide. I could run back up to nine and hope the flames hadn’t reached it yet, then try jumping down to the fire escape, but if the windows didn’t line up I’d be trapped. Meanwhile, my window of opportunity on seven closing tighter than a hangman’s noose.

  I took my last breath of clean air and ran for it, keeping to the middle of the hallway as the fire raged around me. I knew it was a bad idea once I hit the first intersection and suddenly couldn’t tell left from right. The billowing smoke stung my watering eyes, spinning me around, leaving me choking and blind.

  The hotel rumbled. Somewhere to my side, sparks flew as a chunk of burning wall came crashing down.

  I kept low, my sleeve over my mouth, aching for breath as I ran the other way. I couldn’t inhale without the air gusting back out in a hacking cough. An open doorway offered a hint of escape, and I took it. Dead end. Just another stripped-down hotel room, the ceiling blanketed in roiling smoke.

  I ran to the window. Red and blue lights strobed against the darkness far below. No sign of the fire escape. I’d gotten turned around, confused in the chaos, and now I was trapped. Out in the hallway, another tremor sent timbers crashing down from the ceiling, throwing up walls of flame.

  Seven floors. I’d heard of people surviving falls from that high up, miracle cases. Far more likely I’d end up a broken ragdoll on the asphalt, but it was still better than burning to death. I threw my shoulder against the window, gritting my teeth against the jarring pain, but the glass didn’t budge. The smoke had stolen my strength and my breath, leaving me weak as a newborn kitten. With my burning eyes squeezed shut I punched the window again and again. I tried to muster the focus for a spell, but constant lung-searing coughs tore my concentration to pieces.