I bent to pull free the fabric, and something slammed into my back, tackling me over. I rolled and found myself staring into a woman’s face; her eyes were jet black, no whites, as empty as the eye sockets in the last shadow. Her face twisted in a feral snarl that could have easily been as much pain as bloodlust.
I realized that I’d just shown the Shadows how to get past the barricade.
The Shadow-woman squatted on my hips, pinning me as her hands clamped on my throat. Her touch caused paralyzingly ugly sensations to run across my Mark. I didn’t have the ax anymore, and I didn’t know on what side of the barricade I’d dropped it. As far as I knew, it could be tumbling toward the Atlantic in the next universe over.
But my hands were free.
The Shadow was unnaturally strong, but untrained. She was throttling me, but she had no real idea where to put her hands. If I’d been attacked by someone who’d known what they were doing, I would have already been unconscious.
I locked my hands together in a double fist and brought my arms up between hers to land a solid blow on the bottom of her jaw. The impact snapped her head back, and the wedge of my arms forced her own arms apart enough for me to catch a breath.
She fought against me, trying to put more pressure on my throat, but I already had my arms up between hers. A skilled brawler would have let me go to retreat and regroup, but my Shadow leaned forward to try and keep the pressure on my neck. When she did that, her weight left my hips as she crouched over me, half-squatting, half-standing.
Once I wasn’t pinned, I folded my legs and brought both feet up into her groin. It wasn’t a damaging kick, but I run every day and can leg press about three times my own weight, so it was easy enough to push her up off the ground. I grabbed her upper arms and flipped her over my head to slam her back on the deck.
I rolled onto my hands and knees while twisting her right arm into a joint lock. She screamed because when I did that, her shoulder dislocated. It gave me pause, and I hesitated, remembering what happened to Whedon. I was fighting a human being, not a monster.
Either way, she had been trying to kill me.
I started to fold her over, pulling her wrist up to her shoulder blades. I had her immobilized, a prisoner we could question once—
A gunshot interrupted my thoughts, and half my Shadow-woman’s head erupted on the deck in front of her. She slumped forward, no longer struggling against my grip on her arm. I let go of her wrist and she fell to the side, unmoving.
I spun around to see Ivan holding a pistol, still pointed at where most of the Shadow’s head had been.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? I had her restrained!”
Ivan turned back to defend the barricade and said, matter-of-factly, “It was a Shadow.”
Two other Shadows had discovered the trick to passing through the barrier, but the White Guard defenders made quick work of them. The Shadows were little better than a mob, and like most rioters, they formed a terrifying mass when facing unarmed civilians, but when aimed at an armed and disciplined force, they became much less effective. By the time I had grabbed a length of pipe to rearm myself, the battle had pretty much ended.
All the Shadows were dead. I counted only three defenders among the corpses, all by the door, victims of a surprise attack. About twenty Shadow corpses littered the rest of the deck. To my relief, Jacob and Mikhail were unscathed.
I knew it was Ivan who grabbed my arm, even before he spun me around to face him. I knew his touch, the feel of his Mark brushing close to mine. After the corpse fingers of the Shadows, feeling his touch was almost enough to make me sigh in relief.
“Vi byezoomniy doorachok! Are you trying to be killed? Glupaya zhyenshshina!” He screamed into my face, quickly evaporating any relief I felt at his touch.
“Take your hand off of me,” I said through clenched teeth.
He shook me, instead. “What were you thinking? Running into crossfire—”
“Let go!” With him grabbing me and shaking, the sense of his Mark on mine had become suffocating. My gut filled with a toxic mix of anger and claustrophobia as I grabbed his wrist with my off hand. “Now!”
I’m not quite sure what I did. I brought my other hand up to push against his elbow, but at the same time I pushed inside myself. Not the same as letting the Mark push me through to another world, not pushing me, pushing away from me.
Ivan yanked his hand away as if I had suddenly burst into flame. “Chto vi—What did you do?”
I glared at him because I didn’t have an answer. Quietly, I told him, “Don’t ever grab me like that.”
He nodded, very slightly. “Yes, my Lady.”
I began feeling a twinge of guilt. My incandescent rage had banked itself down to a low smolder, and that let me realize that he had just been upset that I’d jumped into a suicidally dangerous situation. Understandable, and even somewhat endearing that he was that concerned for my safety. Given the cultural differences, I’d even give him a pass on being so damn condescending about it.
But I was still furious that he had taken out the Shadow I had restrained. Whatever was going on physically and mentally with the Shadows, they were human beings, and what Ivan had done was little more than murder. I might not have been a respecter of rules, especially when it involved dealing with the bad guys, but that had crossed over any of the lines I had ever come near.
And I don’t think he even understood what he had done.
“Are you all right?” Jacob’s voice came from the other side of the barrier. I was grateful for the distraction. I called back, “Everyone’s fine over here.”
I reached up and started pulling furniture from the makeshift barricade to let Jacob past.
Ivan asked me, “What are you doing?”
“Helping them in. Give me a hand here.”
He only hesitated a moment, then he got in and pulled aside a bulkhead door that cleared a path so Jacob and Mikhail could squeeze past. Once both were inside, Ivan slid the door back. I saw that the other members of the Guard were busy shoring up the defenses. Ivan saw me look and said, “They will be back. Our orders are to defend the aircraft and prevent them from cutting off our retreat.”
I looked down the deck, behind the barricade, and saw large doors in the outer skin. Parked on deck behind the doors were two-seater biplanes, wings folded back like a line of origami cranes. “Those can’t be anywhere near as heavy as my Charger.”
“What?” Ivan asked.
“We need an airplane.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“YOU NEED WHAT?”
I finished stripping off the remains of my skirt. Fortunately, the underwear that Greta had dressed me in was so elaborate that I was probably three layers away from actually impacting my modesty.
“An airplane,” I repeated.
“We’re holding these for the Emperor and the court. We can’t—”
“Ivan, do you know how these things got on board?”
He just stared at me.
“These Shadows are made, not born. Just look at their clothes. They’re from here, or a world so close it doesn’t matter.”
“They’re monsters born of Chaos.”
“They’re human beings. You were there when Whedon got infected. Sick, possibly psychotic, but human.” I looked to the dead woman that Ivan had shot out of my arms. “They were made, then they were brought here.”
“How? Why?”
“How? Another airship. My guess is that someone slipped aboard that ship and did this to the passengers and crew, then flew parallel enough to this airship’s course to offload the victims like someone tossing grenades into a foxhole.” I looked away from the dead woman, and back at Ivan. “Why? Someone wants me dead.”
“You?”
“The John Doe you killed was trying to warn me. Either the person behind the Shadows knew where
they were going, or they followed you and John Doe to me. Either way doesn’t matter. The one behind the Shadows followed us from my world to here, and right now they’re almost certainly in an airship flying in the next universe over.” I stepped up to Ivan. “I don’t care what your orders are. You are going to give me a weapon and an aircraft, so I can stop this now.”
The rest of the White Guard had circled around as I argued with Ivan. I noticed Mikhail took a step back to join the encircling soldiers, leaving me and Jacob as the focus of everyone’s attention.
“Our orders are to hold the retreat for the Emperor and the court.”
“You’re also supposed to fight these things, right?”
The guards ringing us were tense; it felt as if one wrong move could start a volley of gunfire. I was lucky, I think, in that Ivan seemed to be the ranking guy here. Mark or not, I had the feeling that if Ivan wasn’t here, I would probably join the Shadows littering the ground.
“You’re certain about this?”
“The airship is in the same world I felt them come from.”
Ivan narrowed his eyes. “You feel them—”
“Yes, I’ve always felt them.”
Someone in the ranks said something in Russian, and I didn’t need to understand the language to know it was a challenge. I saw the barrel of a gun raised, and Ivan snapped back, shouting something else in Russian that didn’t sound pleasant. The guard hesitated, but the barrel lowered.
“You can’t sense Shadows like normal Walkers,” Ivan said. “That’s why they’re Shadows.”
“It’s why I knew you were being attacked in my basement.”
“That’s . . . why are you different?”
Fuck it. He’d have to ask that.
Well, if no one had shot me yet, the truth probably wouldn’t break their discipline. “Because we share a bloodline,” I said.
I didn’t realize how much of the ambient noise was because of the guards shuffling around, shifting their weight and whispering among themselves, until all the noise stopped. Suddenly the only sound was the wind.
“You share a bloodline? That isn’t possible.”
I turned around, showing my naked shoulders, and the upper part of the Mark. “You’ve seen my Mark, enough of it anyway. Look at it, look at them.”
Ivan paused, then he turned and marched off, through the ring of guards which parted for him. He knelt next to the Shadow he had executed and pulled her blouse up so hard that the material tore off her body. Her underwear was less elaborate than mine, and he tore it free as well, exposing her naked back, and the twisted Mark carved into her skin.
It was the first time I had the chance to see the Mark on one of the Shadows while it was still. Before, I always had the sense that their Marks were deformed, asymmetrical, random . . .
That wasn’t quite right. It couldn’t be, not if Dr. Lefevre could draw a relation to my Mark and the Shadows’. When I told Ivan to check, I had been gambling that the similarities would be perceptible to a layman—like the schematics drawn on the charts in Dr. Lefevre’s exam room.
They were.
And the Shadow’s Mark wasn’t random, or even asymmetrical. What deformed the pattern, and made it appear so random, was that its symmetry did not coincide with the Shadow’s body. Exposed, it appeared as if the Mark was a literal shadow, cast upon the Shadow’s body at a strange angle. Where my Mark seemed to grow out of a point in the center of my lower back, the dead woman’s Mark grew from a black-lipped wound above and in front of her left hip. Not only was the pattern offset to center there, it tilted itself by thirty degrees off vertical, so the center of the Mark slashed across her side and her back from hip to shoulder-blade.
You didn’t need to be Dr. Lefevre to see the similarities with the Shadow’s Mark exposed. I was familiar enough with my own to see the likeness in the way the crude branches split and spiraled.
Ivan stood up from the corpse. He didn’t look happy. He raised his pistol and aimed it at me. “You are one of them.”
With a rustling wave, I was suddenly the focus of a dozen weapons pointed in my direction.
The embers of rage that had been banked and cooling suddenly flared up into a full-blown conflagration. Being pissed beyond all reason is the only explanation I had for snapping the way I did.
“You fucking asshole! Did you listen to one goddamn word I said?”
“You’re related to—”
“Like that makes me a Shadow? I guess the squiggles on your back make you the Emperor?” I folded my arms because I really wanted to take a swing at someone, and I wasn’t pissed enough to do that with all the guns pointed in my direction. “They’re trying to kill me, remember?”
Jacob stepped up and placed a hand on my shoulder, “Dana?”
“You want to kill me now, Ivan?”
“Don’t antagonize him, Dana.”
“Antagonize him? I’ve saved his life at least once, and he’s the one pointing a gun at me.”
“Sort of my point,” Jacob whispered.
Just like Jacob to find a solid piece of reality and tether me to it. My anger leaked out as I realized that I was poking an armed man with a rhetorical stick. Not something they recommend in cop school.
I think Jacob was as surprised as I was when he lowered the gun.
“And how were you planning to fly it?” Ivan asked me.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I WAS GLAD to have Ivan back on my side, but I was also irritated that he did have a point. Not only had I never flown an aircraft, I’d only flown in an aircraft once—my current airship ride excluded. If I was going to do anything, I needed a pilot.
I glanced over at Jacob, who shook his head—which wasn’t very surprising. Even if Jacob, by some miracle, had a pilot’s license, I doubt it would have qualified him to fly one of these biplanes.
I turned back toward Ivan and said, “I guess I’m going to have to learn how.”
He gave me an “Are you serious?” look, then said, “I’ll fly you.” One of the guardsmen raised an objection in Russian, but Ivan cut him short.
“You’re a pilot?” I asked incredulously.
“No,” Ivan said. “However, standard training for the White Guard includes fifteen hours of flight training.”
Fifteen hours did not sound like a lot. Jacob must have felt the same way because he touched my arm and asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“It’s this, or try not to die as we wait for the Bad Guy to attack from a more accessible location.”
Jacob sighed and said, “Here.” He held out the gun Mikhail had given him. It was an oversized automatic, bearing some resemblance to a Luger if the Luger had started taking steroids and doing some serious weight training. “I checked the magazine. There are five shots left.”
It took me a moment to figure out where the safety was on the thing. Just when I found it and was trying to decide what part of my underwear could be used as a holster, Ivan cleared his throat. I turned around to see him holding out a long coat that must have come from one of the other guards. “You’ll need this,” he said.
I almost made an asinine remark about not worrying about my modesty when I realized that these biplanes had open-air cockpits and I was naked from cleavage upward. The only reason I wasn’t freezing now was because of the adrenaline rush from fighting the Shadows.
I let him put the jacket on me. The thing hung on me like I was a little girl trying on daddy’s sports coat. It smelled of gun smoke and a stranger’s sweat, and the heavy wool was not meant to rest on naked skin. My shoulders started itching immediately.
But at least it answered the question of where to put Mr. Luger’s big brother. The gun went into one of the coat’s oversized pockets.
“Come this way,” Ivan waved toward the large doors opposite the folded biplanes.
* * *
&n
bsp; —
THERE was an elaborate system of tracks and cables in the ceiling, leading from where the folded biplanes were parked and out the skin of the airship above the hangar doors. The cable and pulley system would suspend the folded plane like a cable car from the track above and allow it to roll out the door.
The doors felt large, but objectively they weren’t any bigger than the garage door at my townhouse. With the wings folded, and the propeller vertical, the biplanes weren’t any wider than my Charger.
Ivan didn’t go to one of the parked planes. Instead he walked up to a smaller, human-sized door set next to the big door. He checked a lighted console between the big door and the small one, opened a panel, and threw a pair of knife switches that looked like they belonged in Frankenstein’s laboratory.
“This one is fueled and ready,” he said. He began turning the wheel on the smaller door.
I looked back at the parked biplanes and said, “What about . . .” I trailed off when I realized that when I had seen the airship from the outside there were biplanes suspended from the sides of the airship already. What I saw parked on the deck here were reserves.
The one Ivan wanted to fly was already outside.
He opened the door, and frigid air started rushing by me. He shouted over the sound of the wind ripping by us. “Come through! I have to close the door!”
I stepped over the threshold and winced as my feet touched the metal ledge on the other side of the door. I’d kicked off my impractical shoes earlier; now I wanted them back. The metal was cold enough to have a layer of frost. I grabbed a wall of mesh netting to keep from falling and found myself looking down along the shadowed length of the airship into the moonlit clouds.
I gasped, and the frigid wind cut at my throat.
Ivan pulled the door shut behind us, and we were alone outside the airship.
“Come on!”
He held on to a cable strung along a gangway that led away from the airship. It was only about twenty or thirty feet long, but that was thirty feet into midair, and from where I cowered, it looked like a mile.
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