MADNESS: Book One of The Shadow-Keepers Series

by Jas T. Ward

  The most confused was Emma. Her puzzlement soared to the moon and came crashing back with each blow; each angry sound of the two heroes acting like much less.

  “Stop.” But her voice was barely there.

  Lied. Reno lied? Surely Jess was bullshitting and trying to make trouble. Reno knew how much trust meant to her. How much honesty steered her life.

  Reno got the upper-hand when Jess went to crash an elbow into his skull, using the opening to sweep Jess’ legs out from under him.

  The cowboy went crashing to the dance floor and Reno straddled him with fists flying, seething out word after word as he got lost in the fury of centuries of misuse, abuse and pain.

  “You never let me have anything! Why! Why can’t you just let me have something good? It’s all we asked for. All we wanted. We have it. Why can’t you just let us have it?”

  “Reno!”

  Evan and two other Breakers were hauling him off of Jess as he still tried to kick the man where he lay on the floor. Evan spun Reno around to talk some sense to him and suddenly stepped back with a freaked out look on his face. “Your eyes, man. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  The other two Breakers stepped away in alarm as well as Jess got to his feet behind him. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s not human. Never has been. Never will be. We were all tricked. And I was lied to.”

  “Reno?”

  Reno heard Emma’s voice, so small and scared behind him, as he hissed under his breath, “Get back inside.” But his dark side was enjoying it all too much to go back in and Reno knew it would show in his eyes as the blue was tinged with a flooding of red.

  But Sundown wasn’t going to take over. Not here. And not now.

  Reno would make sure of it with all he was worth. There were innocents here as well as his friends and he knew if he let his dark side out, Jess would be dead.

  In front of those same people.

  He closed his eyes, willing it to shut down, almost begging with it to go to back, but his dark side just chuckled in his head and prowled.

  “Told you to stay away from the woman. Told you it was going to go bad. I win.”

  “Emma...” Jess stepped up and tried to stop her from coming close, most likely afraid for her safety, but she had to see. Reno just stood there, heaving from the fight, with his fingers curling and uncurling into fists at his side.

  Emma had to see his face to know this was all some stupid trick Jess was playing. As she stepped up and around to be in front of him, her hand came up to cover her mouth in shock.

  Gone was the goofy face of her lover. In its place was that of a harder, meaner man. But that wasn’t what caused her shock so intense that her heart staggered in its beating.

  His eyes.

  Gone was their beautiful blue she would get lost in. In their place was a red the same hue as fresh blood. His lips were curled as he bared his fangs, grinding his teeth. Those strange eyes flicked to her. “Witch. I can explain.”

  Emma stumbled back as she heard the voice from the nightmare, a voice as if layered by not one but many in its utterance.

  Her hands shook as she reached out to touch him, but stopped herself letting them hang in the air. Darkness seemed to radiate out of him and she had never felt anything like it. “What are you?”

  Reno closed his eyes and said in a quiet, hurt voice, edged with a snarl despite the words spoken. “The man who loves you, that’s all that matters.”

  Jess laughed sarcastically and clapped. “Oh, that’s great. You want to know what he is, Emma? Easy. He was a dark half of someone who was more than happy to get rid of him. In fact, thought he had gotten rid of him. Thought finally a useless flaw was destroyed. Instead? I find out that little flaw was made into a real boy like some fucked up puppet. I was told he was handled. I assumed that meant destroyed. I guess I was wrong. I was lied to. We all were lied to.”

  Jess stepped in front of Reno and sneered as he still held part of a smile. “Deny it. You can’t.”

  Reno ignored him as he kept his eyes pinned on Emma. She had the deepest frown as her beautiful green eyes looked down at the floor, afraid to look at him. Her voice was sounded so hurt and hoarse. “Is it true?”

  Reno couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t give her that answer. If he did he knew he would lose everything that mattered. He would lose himself.

  “Emma. Please.”

  “Is it true?!” She screamed the question again, this time her eyes filled with rage as she lifted them to his with her fists tightened at her side.

  “Yes. It’s true...but...” Reno desperately wanted to explain, and as he felt the darkness fade now that the violence was ending, he knew he could.

  But suddenly Emma was on him, hitting him and screaming as she kicked with such white hot rage.

  He tried to block her blows and not to hurt her in doing so as she seemed to become unhinged with each strike she plummeted against him. Her sister Rose ran over with several friends and pulled her off him.

  She screamed as tears ran down her face, her voice shrill and full of gut-wrenching pain. “You lied to me! All I wanted was honesty! I didn’t care where you came from! I didn’t care about anything but you loving me!” She tried to break free again and was held back.

  Reno lifted his hands as his eyes phased back to blue, feeling the burn of tears in his eyes when the rage gave way to complete and total fear of losing her. “I know! But if you just let me explain...”

  Suddenly Enforcer Wires burst through the doorway of the club and Jess pointed to him, barking out commands. “Get him out of here. He attacked another Breaker. And he is not wanted here.”

  The two large Wires grabbed Reno and he didn’t even try to fight back as they all but lifted him to the exit to throw him out into the street. He kept his feet when he hit and spun to face the club. Emma stood there, crying in her sister’s arms, with Jess and Evan flanking behind her.

  “Please! I can explain. Emma!”

  Reno took a step toward Emma and Jess was out the door to grab him and get in his face. “Go. You are not wanted here. Not by her. Not by any of us. You should have never been created. I should have never agreed to it.”

  Reno howled in desperation and shoved him, still trying to get to Emma. “You would have died! You can’t handle the pain! You couldn’t handle the insanity. Because that’s what I did! For you!” The Wires joined Jess in keeping Reno back as he felt like his whole world was crumbling , with him holding it with just his fingertips on its edge.

  “Witch! Please! You have to give me a chance to explain! I’ve loved you for my forever. Since that first night at the beach and I never stopped.” He was stopped within feet of the door with arms held behind his back as he tried to get to her, to explain, to stop this roller coaster of his cursed fate.

  Emma’s eyes went wide despite her tears and she felt like she was going to be sick. Her eyes went from Jess and then Reno to cry out in disgust. “What was all this? Some sick game you two thought would be fun? To use me? To break my heart, not once but twice? I can’t listen to this.”

  Her sister helped her back inside as the more Wires blocked the door. They did work for Jess after-all and Reno didn’t stand a chance.

  “Witch! No! Listen! Please!” He fought and struggled but it was no use as the door closed behind her, as if shutting him back in a hole with her parting. He sagged, rendered apart emotionally, as they let him go.

  “I can’t believe you exist.”

  Reno lifted his eyes to meet Jess’ brown ones and spit out, seething. “I wish you didn’t.”

  Jess snorted and went in to bring his head in close with words full of venom in his face. “You should have never been created. I don’t know what the Hell Bounce was thinking. And you were allowed to get around my family?”

  Reno bared his fangs as they got within inches of each other and hissed. “You abandoned them! You just walked away! You didn’t want them!”

  Jess stood up and smirked with that smil
e Reno wanted to rip off his face. “And now, you don’t have them either.”

  Reno bristled at that with a flash of red flaring in his eyes. “I will kill you for this. You could have just let me be. I finally had a life!”

  Jess gnashed his fangs and pointed a finger in Reno’s face. “Wrong. You had my life. And just like before, I took it away. And I’ll keep doing it. So stay away from them. Stay away from us all.”

  Then Jess turned motioning for his men to follow, to leave Reno standing in the rain alone.

  PART TWO

  SHADOWS... THEY BE A-COMIN

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Changes

  “Hey mister? Are you going to eat that?”

  The homeless man had watched the sandwich and bottle of water go untouched for over an hour. And lunch time at the Bayside Humanity Shelter was going to be ending any minute. And when that happened they would be pushed back out into the city, and he was a big man and still hungry.

  When the man got no answer, he snaked out a hand to grab the sandwich. Suddenly, a knife blade was stabbed right between his two fingers, deep into the worn wood of the table, barely missing his flesh. Letting out a gasp, he looked down at the hand that barely showed from the sleeve of the sweatshirt holding the hilt.

  The skin was pale and it looked like the veins were a weird dark color. The rest of the knife wielder was hidden by a dirty hoodie with the hood pulled down low to shadow the face, body hunched forward.

  The homeless man swallowed in fear and decided the sandwich wasn’t worth pissing off the dude with the knife. “Sorry man. Just can’t see good food going to waste.”

  The knife was pulled free and then that same hand pushed the sandwich towards him. Not even questioning, the homeless man grabbed the food and took off.

  Reno hadn’t planned on eating that sandwich anyway. Actually, he hadn’t eaten in days. His stomach felt like it was getting shredded from the inside, and he had the worst headache. Even now it was pounding like some big mental kettle drum that was giving birth to some more kettle drums. Glancing around the room of the shelter, under the dark of the hood, he knew it was about time to move.

  He would come here and grab breakfast, sit in the corner for lunch and then discreetly move to the grungy bathroom right before the break-over bell sounded off.

  Standing, he brought the bottle of water up to his forehead wishing the coolness of the surface would just help the pain beneath it. Just a little bit. Be nice if it would just stop hurting all together for just a little while.

  It had started this ache and throb the same night as Jess totally destroyed his world. And that had been three weeks ago. It was like that event turned on a pain switch in his brain, and he had no idea where the off switch was.

  Making his way through the mingling crowd to the hall in the back, he hoped he would find the dirty gritty men’s room empty and his wish was granted. Grabbing the broom that sat in the corner, he wedged it under the door handle to secure the door, and with a weary sigh, dropped the hood as he stood in front of the mirror over the sink.

  He looked worse than he did yesterday. His face was too lean and his skin was becoming sallow pale. Bags darkened under his eyes and his hair was a hopeless, dirty mess sticking up everywhere.

  He had tried to shower for the first week and half, but private showers were hard to find in the shelters, and he hated the stares, or having to make up some name of a disease that never existed when they saw whatever he was afflicted with.

  As he leaned in closer to look at his eyes, he tried not to freak out like he did when he looked at his veins. Just like them, the small red lines in his eyes from being bloodshot had turned black. The dark lines were stark against the white and starting to bleed black around the dull blue of his once bright irises.

  He shoved his sleeve back to stare at his arm as he sat down on a toilet, brushing his fingers over the thick vein that ran from his wrist up his forearm. It was black as was the rest. But even more strange was how the veins seemed to move when he touched them. As if the blood itself was trying to do its own thing.

  The moving thing had started last week with the mess he had made of his Grid stamp.

  He didn’t want to be tracked and he didn’t want to be found, so he had tried to slice and drain those nano-things out of his arm. But instead, they too seem to join the march in his blood. Now his Grid stamp was blurred as if it was changing.

  Reno didn’t know exactly how the stamp worked, but he didn’t think they were supposed to animate, and the sharp crisp lines of his stamp had now become a smear that was spreading the length of his arm.

  But Reno hoped that he had messed it up enough with his knife scraping and digging to at least make it malfunction. No way was he taking any chances, so he stayed on the move as he bounced from shelter to shelter in hopes of escaping a much worse bounce of a different kind.

  Someone rattled the door handle and he knew his alone time was up. He stood up and lifted the hood back over his head as he reached out at a lean to start to move the handle of the broom. The second it did, and the knob turned, he blurred out and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Regret and Wishes

  “Looked everywhere? How could you have possibly looked everywhere? You haven’t found him! San Fran is a huge city damn it!”

  Emma was beyond frustrated, above being sick with worry and below being buried under fear. Reno had been missing for three weeks now and the Grid was doing all it could to find him, yet coming up with almost nothing in its search.

  She herself was out on the streets every day and most of the night, showing a picture of him, one of him smiling with her and Sophia, to anyone who would look at it. In the park they used to take Sophia to play at. At every police station in town and in the stores. But no one had seen him.

  They knew he wasn’t dead. Every now and then they would get a hiss of static on the Grid from his stamp but no sooner than it showed up it would vanish again without the duration to have it pin-pointed.

  “Still nothing?”

  Emma ended the call and turned to look at Bella. The young woman had come to stay here when Reno disappeared. She wanted to help find him after he had saved her life. Emma was glad, because with her being out so much, Bella stayed with Sophia. But even more importantly, the young woman and she had bonded over both losing so much to war. Emma didn’t know how she could have handled all this without Bella.

  Sophia cried several times a day for her ‘Eno’ and it broke Emma’s heart to hear her little girl so sad. How could she explain to a three-year old the mess that had become their lives? That the man they thought they loved and knew...well, she didn’t even know what Reno was now. Maybe she didn’t know who he was then, but that felt wrong, despite once again, the facts.

  After that night she had refused to talk to Jess, but Bounce wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was then that Bounce explained how Reno came to be. How he was Jess’ split personality who was never meant to be. But because he had fallen in love with her, he wanted to be more.

  Now that one magical night years ago made total sense as to why she could never re-enact it again with Jess. He was the man she had thought she had been with, rather than the man who just shared his body.

  Bounce told her how Reno was willing to sacrifice himself when he was still a part of Jess, just because Jess had broken her heart. It was all still confusing to Emma, but she knew one thing was still true despite all the lies and twists.

  She still loved Reno.

  Crossing her arms around herself, she shook her head and sighed. “No. They say they’ve looked everywhere, but how can that be true? He’s not home.”

  Emma sat down and brought her legs up to rest her forehead on her knees and staring down at her sneakers. She heard Bella move to sit next to her on the couch and almost wished the girl would leave her alone so she could scream or cry, or both at the same time.

  “They thought my dad was crazy, too.”

 
; Emma turned her head to place her cheek where her chin just sat and looked at Bella. What?”

  Bella curled up against the arm of the couch and picked at a tear in knee of her new jeans. Reno and she had taken the girl on a shopping spree and no sooner than the tags were off the denim, the cuts were in the knees and now frayed. Reno said that Bella just wanted to be herself, and the jeans let her show it, so it was okay.

  “My dad. He went kind of crazy after my mom was killed.” Bella’s face became troubled and she twisted a frayed thread around her finger. “I tell everyone she died. But it’s not true. She was killed.”

  Emma listened and reached out to take Bella’s other hand, completely feeling a kindred bond with the 17-year old. “What happened?”

  Bella shrugged and tugged at the thread. “He didn’t know. They got attacked and he got bit. So he doesn’t remember it, just that he wasn’t able to save her. I think that was the worst part, you know?” She lifted her hazel eyes to meet Emma’s. “That not only could he not save her, but he can’t even remember the moment he lost her. So...,” she looked back down at the thread. “It drove him crazy. He fought it for a long time but eventually? It just kind of became too much.”

  “Reno isn’t...” but she stopped herself and frowned with her eyes going back to her sneakers. She really didn’t know. Was Reno crazy and broken?

  It was all so confusing, and as much as Bounce had tried to tell her Reno was different and good, some things just didn’t match up. Like the man she saw beating Jess that night. The way he spoke.

  Bella whispered softly, still intently focused on that thread. “He’s not bad. I just know he isn’t.”

  Emma looked back at Bella and said softly. “He’s not. He’s just...” she closed her eyes and felt like she was going to cry yet again. “He’s just lost. And I’m afraid I had a part in him losing his way.”

  Bella squeezed her hand as if she understood without Emma saying another word. “Can I help you find him? I mean, go out with you tonight?”