The Shadow Walkers

by Shannon Reber

  Erkens followed but I stayed there for a minute, looking around at them all. “I love you guys. I’m really glad you’re here,” I said and turned to leave.

  Ian followed, stopping me as I got to the back step. “I wish I could come with you, babe,” he said, pulling me in for a hug.

  I clung to him for a few seconds, savoring the peace that lingered around me. “You figuring out how to handle your gift is more important. Be careful, okay. And keep me posted on how things are going.”

  “I will.” He pulled me back and touched his lips to my brow. “I’ll see you soon, Mads.”

  I smiled as I turned to leave, thrilled that he was there. The fact he was going to learn how to use the gift Tria had given him was an amazing thing considering his former feelings about all things paranormal. I admired that about him, admiring pretty much everything about my boyfriend.

  Erkens shot a withering look over my shoulder at Ian but his expression softened when he looked at me. “I’ve just got a rental and I’d rather not drive it all the way to Philadelphia. I’m told you have a new car.”

  I smiled and motioned to my chariot. “The perfect car for me, actually,” I enthused, happy all over again at the sight of it.

  Erkens eyed the car, shooting me an incredulous look. “Madison, you are aware that part of our job is being inconspicuous?” he shook his head again at the bold, cobalt blue color of it. “That thing will stand out everywhere you go. You might as well have painted ‘The Flash’ across the hood.”

  I threw my head back and laughed as I got into the driver’s seat. “My car officially has a name,” I said, patting the dashboard. “I dub thee, The Flash. Now, let’s fly.”

  He humphed but the twinkle in his eyes told me the truth of his feelings. He got into the passenger seat as Spencer got into the back. I glanced at the house as we pulled out onto the road, waving to Ian as we drove away.

  “Erkens, do you know anything about Shadow Walkers?” I questioned, hoping he’d be able to give me more information.

  He pursed his lips as he considered. “I’ve heard of them but I’ve never dealt with them.”

  Spencer sighed loudly. “I have,” he said with a shrug. “The shadow realm has been at war since the dawn of time. One of my people allowed them through the portal to this realm and now they do act as soldiers of fortune. If the spirits are right that they’re coming, I’d say Dorothy Otto has an artifact that can help them.”

  I glanced back at him as we stopped at a red light. “Do you have power over them?” I asked, hoping we could have some kind of advantage.

  He nodded. “My power works on everything but I’m as limited as you are when they’re actually in the shadows. I can’t see them unless they allow themselves to be seen.”

  “So you have faced one before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you won,” I stated, slamming on the brakes as some idiot swerved out in front of me.

  I was irritated by the amount of traffic on the roads that morning. It was like everyone conspired to keep us in Pittsburgh. Admittedly, staying in the city that was my home was a far more comfortable idea. But Dorothy needed to know what was going on.

  My stomach fluttered as a thought floated its way through my mind. What if one of the shadows had taken her phone? What if she was hurt?

  Worse-case scenarios flitted their way through my brain along with guilt. I shouldn’t have been so eager to leave. I should have insisted that we stay and make sure everything was safe for her.

  If anything had happened . . . no. I didn’t believe it would be my fault but I would bear some responsibility. There was a difference. I had to know for sure.

  I pulled into a gas station and jumped out of the driver’s seat. “Spencer, will you please drive?” I asked, my phone already out.

  I turned on the hot spot and settled myself in the backseat with my laptop. As soon as everything was ready, I began my search for Dorothy’s phone.

  Spencer pulled back out onto the road, driving a lot faster than I had. Erkens grumbled, hooking his seatbelt around himself as we sped through the city. I would have found Spencer’s lead foot fun under normal circumstances. Right then, I was too anxious to care.

  It only took me a few seconds to hack my way into Dorothy’s phone and turn the GPS on. The odd thing was, the phone was right there in her house. Why wouldn’t she be answering it?

  Worry coated my throat. Dorothy was ninety-three-years old. What if she’d fallen down the steps or had a heart attack or something? Would anyone come by to check on her?

  Or worse yet, what if one of those Shadow Walkers had hurt her? I opened a secondary search for Shadow Walkers and began reading what was in our file.

  It would have been an interesting read if I was in the right mood. I wasn’t, though. I was worried and everything I read felt like a red flag.

  The Greek god Erebus was actually the creator of the Shadow Walkers. He was the god of darkness and shadow, the ruler of the darkness between earth and Hades.

  “Spencer . . . I think you might be related to the god who rules the shadow realm,” I breathed, unsure if that was the truth or not.

  There was very little mention of Erberus in mythology. And stories changed over the years, as well as from region to region. I couldn’t even tell if he was a good guy or a bad one from the information we had listed.

  Spencer blew out a long breath. “I don’t care,” he said quietly, his eyes fixed on the road. “Most of the things I’ve found out about myself and my lineage is as screwed up as my adopted family. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

  I looked up, seeing that he looked at me in the rearview mirror. It was like he understood that I had very similar feelings about my own past. It was a horrible thought, actually.

  I had spent most of my life telling myself that I was wrong and Mom was right. I had lied to everyone about the way things had been. No one, not even Ian, knew the depth of how things had been with Mom.

  It looked like Spencer did know. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I had spent my life pretending everything was fine. To find that one of my best friends saw the truth . . . it was disconcerting.

  I turned my eyes away from him, startled to see Erkens looking at me too. “We’re talking about Shadow Walkers, not me,” I griped, fidgeting a little as they both eyed me.

  Erkens inclined his head. “We’re talking about Shadow Walkers but we’re also talking about you.” He gave me one of his earnest cop looks before going on. “What you need to understand is that abusers only escalate. They don’t really recover. I’ve seen hundreds of cases over my career where an abused child goes back to their abuser, thinking that person has healed. Their confidence has been so eroded by years of being told it’s all their fault that they believe things can change. It never changes.”

  I swallowed hard, looking out the window. “She’s sick, though. It’s not her fault,” I whispered, hearing the doubt in my own voice.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Madison. Your mother might have reasons for the way she has behaved but they do not excuse what she’s done.”

  I sat still for a few long seconds, slowly turning my eyes back to look at him. “You . . . knew?” I squeaked, finding it hard to speak around the lump in my throat.

  “I did,” he answered, raising his brows. “I looked into you when I started working the Emma Gregory case. If you can learn to face this down without blaming yourself, it can make you. If you allow your mother to control you, you’ll only keep being abused.”

  I sniffed and shook my head. “You’re making it sound a lot worse than it was.”

  Spencer shook his head. “Ian gets chatty when he’s worried. He told me everything he observed. He also mentioned that when you stood up to your mom yesterday, you looked like the weight of the world was lifted off your shoulders. Admitting the truth can help you heal.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on the view out the window, watching as the highway led us away from Pittsburgh. I kn
ew they were right. Both of them. But I also knew that I needed to focus on Dorothy, not myself. At least right then.

  I would face down that truth. I would learn to deal with it. I would force that situation to ‘make me’ as Erkens had said.

  NINETEEN

  I brought up a picture in my head of Dorothy’s house. Shelves of items. Coffered ceilings. Huge windows. And cameras. I had seen cameras set in the corners of a few rooms.

  Likely it was part of her security system. I checked to see what system she used and nodded. It was good but not the best system. In other words, I was through in about thirty-seven seconds.

  I narrowed my eyes as I saw that the system had been shut down manually from inside the house. Those shadows were serious error codes.

  I was able to turn on a few of the cameras but only long enough to look around each room. The cameras were at least good enough to be equipped with microphones, so I was able to listen as well. After I had scanned a few rooms, voices came through the speaker.

  I turned the volume up, hoping to figure out at least some of what was going on. What I heard was distant voices that grew closer and closer.

  “I’m sick of this. Let’s just clear the place out and be done,” one voice said, holding a strong, South-Philly accent.

  “Not until we find it,” another voice barked, that one with a slightly foreign accent. It was clear that English had not been the man’s first language but he did speak it well enough for me to know he’d spent a good bit of time in America.

  I moved the camera around but couldn’t see anyone at all. That was when I realized they must be in the attic and so far as I could tell, there were no cameras on that level.

  The first guy’s voice came next, harder and sharper than before. “Where is it?” he barked and what sounded like a slap sounded out.

  “I would have given it to you if you had just asked, young man. There was no need for any of this.”

  My blood ran cold. It was Dorothy’s voice and she sounded very weak. I had to do something, anything to help her.

  I turned the cameras off so there would be no red light pointing out the fact the system was back on. After that, I looked at Erkens. “Call the cops. I don’t know what they’re looking for but the shadows are attacking Dorothy.”

  Spencer shook his head. “Realm Enforcement. They’ll know how to handle the Shadow Walkers.”

  Erkens nodded and got on the phone, his voice clipped as he spoke.

  I hated the idea of leaving Dorothy alone in the house for another few hours. I suddenly wished I had indeed used the portal generator. We would be there, able to protect Dorothy if I had.

  “Spencer, is there any way to get somebody there to help Dorothy?”

  “I’m already talking to Gabe.”

  Oh, right. It had slipped my mind that Spencer’s family had the ability to communicate telepathically with each other. And Gabe also worked for Realm Enforcement, so that would speed things up for Erkens.

  I turned the camera back on, my worry intensifying as I heard retreating footsteps. Could the shadows have killed Dorothy? What were they looking for?

  “He’s in Philly. He can be to the house in less than ten minutes,” Spencer stated and for the hundredth time, I was grateful to have those guys on our side.

  The world was a far different place than I had believed most of my life. Now that I knew the truth about everything that was out there, it could have been overwhelming. It wasn’t, though, simply because of people like Spencer, Gabe, Imogen, Dawson, and now Ian.

  I kept an eye on the clock, turning on all the cameras in the house. I watched for any sign that Gabe had arrived. I also prayed. Hard.

  A shiver of horror passed over me. I shouldn’t have turned the cameras off. I might have been able to identify those things to Realm Enforcement if I had just kept them on.

  I also might have heard them hurt or kill Dorothy. I could be pretty cold-blooded when it came to observing suffering. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel it but I had gotten used to seeing it. With Dorothy, it was different.

  I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she had been so kind to me. Maybe it was because of the encounter with my mom. I didn’t know. But I liked Dorothy and the idea of hearing her being hurt disturbed me . . . a lot.

  Erkens ended his call and cleared his throat. “They’re on the way,” he said, his mouth drawn into a straight line.

  I gave a slow nod. “We shouldn’t have left her there alone,” I said, chewing my thumbnail as I watched the feed from the cameras.

  He glanced back at me and shook his head. “That one’s on me, Madison. I chose to leave despite the fact I would have stayed for any other client.” He cleared his throat again. “I let my discomfort make that decision for me.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but closed it when I saw Gabe’s dark head pass by one of the cameras at a quick pace. I tracked him through the house and waited to see what was going on.

  “She’s up here!” Gabe called out after he’d run past the camera on the third-floor and other sounds came through the speakers.

  Thank God. He had found Dorothy.

  “Spencer, ask him if Dorothy is alive,” I barked, feeling my eye twitch as my breaths came out in shallow gasps.

  A few seconds of silence passed before Spencer responded. “She’s alive but she’s not in good shape. He says she’s beat up badly and not conscious,” he reported, as more sounds came through the speakers.

  I watched another Realm Enforcement guy rush past the third-floor camera, then others with medic equipment followed. All of them seemed to know what they were doing, so I tipped my head back and thought for a few minutes.

  The voices hadn’t said what the shadows had been looking for. There had been a lot of artifacts in her house that could benefit a realm that was at war.

  I thought back through all the things I had examined and a pit formed in my stomach. The book of spells Ian and I had noticed could hold any number of curses that could do damage to a lot of people. Or on one of the shelves in the museum, I had seen something that looked like the Nanteos Cup. It could heal injuries if you drank from it. That would be an invaluable tool for an army to possess.

  The ability to heal your soldiers would make an army invincible. Could that be it? Or was it something else entirely? There were hundreds, if not thousands of things in Dorothy’s house and all of them held some kind of power.

  “They’re taking her to Penn Presbyterian,” Spencer told us, speeding up a little more as he gave us that information.

  I thought about it some more, then out of curiosity, I got into Dorothy’s financial records. My mouth fell open in wonderment at the size of her fortune but that wasn’t what I was looking for. It only took me a moment to find a payment to a company that sold GPS locators.

  It took me a little longer to get into that company’s system, their security far more impregnable than the average system. After what felt like hours, I was finally in.

  I nodded when I found a file for Dorothy Otto and hit activate on all the devices at once. After a few seconds, a map came up. A large number of dots glowed red right at Dorothy’s house . . . and one was moving away from the house.

  I checked to see what that thing was and my heart pounded. The cup of Jamshid. Erkens had mentioned it and I had walked past the thing in Dorothy’s kitchen several times.

  That relic was said to grant immortality. If the Shadow Walkers had taken it from the house, they would be a truly formidable fighting force.

  I had no idea if it truly could make a person immortal but that wasn’t what mattered. If someone believed it was true and was willing to beat up a ninety-three-year-old woman, they were serious villains and they would be stopped.

  TWENTY

  It took me awhile to convince Erkens and Spencer that we needed to follow the GPS locator instead of going straight to the hospital. I prefered the idea of going to Dorothy with news that the bad guys had been caught. And oh, I would be sure they w
ere caught.

  Because I’d lived in Philadelphia for a couple of years, I knew the city well enough. The place where the cup had been taken was in Nicetown, the highest crime neighborhood in the city. I had gone there once when I’d first moved to Philadelphia because there had been an ad for a pawn shop selling one of the best external hard drives on the market for a very good price.

  I’d found out immediately that I had made a serious mistake by coming to that neighborhood alone. Or the guys who’d tried to jump me had made the mistake. One of them had actually cried by the time I released him. I had chosen never to go back to that neighborhood again since one of those guys had sworn to kill me if he ever saw me.

  I wasn’t afraid. It just seemed like a better idea not to poke the bear. What I did instead was stick with what I knew best. I had done everything online.

  The problem was, my car was brand new. Taking it into the neighborhood we were heading for was asking for trouble. Hopefully the guys I’d had trouble with would have moved on or something. Not that my luck was ever so good.

  Erkens humphed when we pulled in at the address I’d given Spencer. The building looked ready to fall in on itself. Most of the windows were boarded up, while thugs loitered on the corners, and pros eyed passing cars with practiced eyes.

  He peered around, his face set in a ferocious scowl. “This is a bad idea,” he muttered, flicking his eyes back to look at me.

  I knew he was right but there was no other choice right then. “Let me go in alone. I’m less threatening than you two are. I’m also armed, so no one is going to mess with me without paying for it.”

  Spencer spoke before Erkens could refuse. “Erkens should stay just because he throws off the cop vibe. But I know how to blend in.”

  I gave him a considering look and nodded. “Okay, let’s do this,” I said, opening the back door.

  “Hold on,” Erkens decreed, taking his phone from his pocket. “I want you on speaker so I can hear what’s happening and call for backup if you need.”