Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  Asher moved in beside Remy and ordered a drink from Miss Tits the bartender, smiling in a way that unhinged my knees as he flirted with her. It was an act, I reminded myself when I had visions of kicking her head in. While she wiggled off to get his order, he pulled a small silver tin from his pocket and smoothed balm over his parted lips. Mine tingled, and a wild herd of emotions stampeded through me. Joy, lust, terror, grief, it was all in there, mixed up like a metaphysical hurricane full of soul-piercing shrapnel.

  An ache rolled through my center, and I had a strange sense of loss that struck me like the phantom pain from a severed limb. I’d woken up in the infirmary weeks ago feeling it, along with an intense craving for coconut, crying with the pain in my soul. It had plagued me a few times after that, but I couldn’t imagine what I might have lost. Other than my former life. That had to be it.

  What. The. Hell? I pinched myself under the lip of the bar. Was I about to pass out again?

  “Addy?”

  I tore my gaze from Asher and focused back on Gerald. “I’m sorry, what?”

  The lawyer touched my cheek with the backs of his fingers in a gesture that might have been sweet if I didn’t know he probably had hairy insect fingers in his true form, which lay buried within the guy’s mind. “You just lost your color. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Uh…” Maybe whatever weirdness just ate my brain could be my ticket? “No, actually, I think maybe I need to lie down for a few minutes. I’m just drink.” Or totally mental. “I mean drunk.” Gah!

  He took my arm, helping me off of the stool. “Let me drive you home, then.”

  Roads don’t go to where I live, buddy.

  “I’m actually from out of town, and”—I glanced at Asher, who stared at every woman but me—“and the guy I came with is being…difficult. You don’t have somewhere I could crash for the night, do you?” I shoved my mass of brown hair behind my ears and did my best to give him a sultry smile. Though it probably looked more like I had gas.

  A grin arched his lips, and his gray eyes turned stormy with all sorts of nasty thoughts, no doubt. He tossed a wad of bills on the bar, looped his arm around me, and said, “Never fear, my lady. I’ll see to your every need.”

  Yeah, I just bet he’d take care of me ten ways from Sunday if I was into that sort of thing. Which I wasn’t. At least not with him.

  I manufactured a bigger smile. “Awesome. Let’s go.” My subconscious screamed at me that he’d agreed faster than most and I’d probably fallen into his trap instead, but I wasn’t about to complain when something went right for a change. Life by the seat of my pants. It worked for me most of the time.

  I glanced over my shoulder to offer Asher a gloating look, but I ran into the crocodile staring out from his narrowed eyes. Some mixture of fury and…something. He’d clenched his fists until they’d ghosted. What the hell was his problem? I’d gotten the lawyer to go outside, so what had I done wrong now?

  No time to decipher him. I faced forward and tried to ignore the chill crawling up my back from Gerald’s arm. The wraith might have been big and bad, but I’d still evict his ass back to his frozen nowhere.

  Chapter Five

  The humid summer night hit me like a slobbery dog kiss as the lawyer and I emerged from the air-conditioning into the Chicago heat. A steady stream of cars passed beneath the streetlamps, which might pose a problem when it came time to disappear into the Shift so we could explode his wraith in private. There weren’t any dark alleys handy like we’d had in Nebraska last night.

  Fear began a slow simmer in my gut at what might have crawled into the guy and why his arrival in our reality had nearly drowned me in imagined frigid water.

  In my not-so-subtle search behind me for the guys, I stumbled off the sidewalk and ended up cradled in Gerald’s arms. Either the wraith gave him super speed, or I was losing my ever-loving mind.

  More of that mad-scientist laughter tumbled out of the lawyer. “You really are tipsy. I think I’ll just carry you, so I don’t have to play doctor before tucking you into my bed.”

  God, seriously? That was the worst line ever. I forced out a laugh.

  Any day now, guys. Hello!

  As we approached a shiny black sedan, I asked, “Is that your car already?” What would I do if he drove us away? I couldn’t exactly zap into the Shift without him noticing I’d vanished into thin air, blowing the element of surprise. Asher or Remy could wipe the guy’s memory later—I had yet to learn that skill—but I didn’t want the wraith shoving the real Gerald’s soul aside and taking over his body completely before I pushed it out, especially if it was a new kind of wraith.

  If Asher couldn’t find me in time, would I be able to jack out the wraith myself? Given how its power hit my senses, I didn’t think so.

  So. Screwed.

  “Wait,” I said, “I think I left my…um…jacket back in the bar.” Yeah, and my freakin’ meds, too, since clearly I needed something to screw my head on right. Who would bring a jacket out into a blast furnace of a night like this?

  “I know the owner,” he said, setting my butt down on the shiny hood of his car. “I’ll give him a call when we get to my penthouse. We can come and pick it up tomorrow.”

  Of course he lived in a penthouse. I imagined Asher lived in one, too, out in the Shift somewhere with his ironed underwear and color-coded sock drawer. “Okay.” What the hell else could I say? Wait, I need someone to help me fry the creepy alternate-reality dead thing living in your mind. Uh-huh. Right.

  Gerald opened the door and scooped me up again. I wiggled out of his grasp and crashed against the metal behemoth of a Mercedes. Ouch, dammit! Pain radiated from my shoulder and squeezed a whimper out of my throat.

  The box in my soul where I confined my power storm cracked. A rush swept through my body, like the satisfying release of a sneeze, and wind curled up from my palms. Oh, no, no, no. Did I just moan? That was the second time my power had slipped out during a fight, revealing me as part of the Machine while the infected guy was still distracted and thinking he might get lucky. If Asher had been watching from the Shift, I’d be in for a lengthy lecture and a load of sighs and eye rolls. Super.

  My next breath coated the air with frost. Gerald appeared to be having a seizure, his back arched and muscles twitching. As I watched in total confusion, his eyes paled, not to white like most wraith-possessed people, but to a lighter shade of gray than he had before.

  He cracked his neck. Or, rather, the wraith cracked his neck to get comfortable in his people costume, since it had just crawled up to take full control instead of only whispering suggestions to the man’s subconscious.

  And I’d gone from crap to double-crap with a side of shit.

  “Darkside Sun, I presume?” it asked with a grin. “So nice to make your acquaintance, finally.”

  Oh crap, oh hell, oh damn. That urge to tear out my lungs grew stronger, and his presence prickled along my flesh like a herd of frozen millipedes trying to burrow inside me. Where the hell were the guys? Be right behind me, my ass.

  The wraith inspected me from high heels to hair, cocking his head this way and that, gripping his dimpled chin between his thumb and finger. Sweeping a hand toward me, he glanced toward the night sky. “This is what you send to stand against me, Old One? This doe-eyed girl is the secret weapon you’ve gone to such painful lengths to hide from me?” He burst out laughing, psych-patient loud.

  My pulse sped out of control, and only concentration kept me from hyperventilating. I kicked off my shoes. Kat might have been able to fight in heels, but not me. “I’m not a weapon, and nobody’s hiding, assface.” Who was he talking to? Izan? He was the Machine’s founder, the creator of the Shift, and a being of pure energy who gave us our guardian mojo and sometimes appeared to me in the mirror as an Aztec boy.

  And where had all the cars gone? It was as if they’d all fled, avoiding the evil that’d come to town.

  “Not a weapon. Oh, that’s rich,” he said to the stars again
. “You’ve left your Architect ignorant of your master plan. To what end? Hoping this edition will stumble upon some genius in the dark that will defeat me? Her fear fills these nostrils like perfume.”

  Oh my God, what the hell was going on? “Just how many Architect ‘editions’ have there been?” I thought there’d only been my mom—who’d gone missing years before I’d officially assumed the position—and me. “Frankly, I think you’re trying to jerk my chain, which isn’t working by the way. Who are you, anyway?”

  “You may call me Baku.” His voice sounded so…normal. No accent, just a mellow tone that seemed wrong coming out of a bugman. There was an air of confidence and intellect about him that worried me. He lowered his gaze from the sky to me, and after a moment, his smirk flatlined. He took a step forward, hand stretched toward me, and I moved back into a fight stance. “The bigger question is who you are,” he said. “Something about you feels terribly familiar. Who are you?”

  “I’m the chick who’s going to turn you into a snow globe, you dead prick.” My voice could stop shaking any time now.

  More chuckling, though it sounded tentative. “Bold. I like bold. Come here so I might have a glimpse into that ignorant mind of yours.”

  “Lay so much as an antenna on me, and I’ll rip it off.”

  He shuffled closer. Afraid of me, or psyching me out? “As pointless as this is, you’ll be entertaining at least.”

  When he feigned left and jumped forward, I launched a roundhouse at the guy’s head, but he ducked. He came at me like a bullet, forcing me to dive sideways to the pavement since I hadn’t recovered my footing to do anything else. Consecutive eighteen-hour days of hunting, sometimes more, would slow down the body and instincts every time.

  “You’re pretty spry for a dead guy.” I grunted as I came back to my feet, my dress ripped down the side. Oh, great. If the wraith didn’t murder me, Sophia might.

  “You have no idea,” he said and came at me faster than anybody should be able to move.

  I had no time to do anything, so I called the Shift so I could disappear. Only it didn’t answer like normal. Balls. If my backup had gone up a layer, maybe they couldn’t get back down. Izan, what the hell?

  Baku had me by the neck before I came up with a plan B. “Oh dear, it would seem we’re in a bit of trouble.” The lawyer’s cologne choked me as his face hovered close to mine.

  My airway cut off any screaming I might have done when something pierced my nape, flooding me with the same liquid ice as in my dream. My eyelids flew up as Baku’s vile presence entered me like a thunderclap, large and deafening and utterly frigid.

  He felt as old as the hills and just as enduring, his excitement thrilling through my veins. He’s in me. He could use me to open a doorway to the wraith dimension like Marcus tried to do. Oh, God!

  He pushed at my mind, but I clamped down on him while unleashing my storm. Machine energy manifested inside us like a giant, swirling tornado, often chaotic and overwhelming. It rushed up to meet him with terrifying violence, spiraling up like some fantastic hurricane of morphing colors.

  A howl rushed up his throat, and he flew back as if I’d launched him. As he stood there gawking at me, a second image erupted from him. His true form pulsed around the lawyer’s body, like a partially see-through glob of congealed mist. The head resembled a long, thin dragon with empty eye sockets and a set of rear-facing spikes, the rest of him more like a fat praying mantis with several sets of phantom wings in faded multitone shades of green and blue. And I thought my weird-shit-o-meter had reached its limit.

  Breaths heaved in and out of him before his composure returned. “Izan, you sly old fool. You have brought out the big guns, only in a most deceiving package. Perhaps you have kept your promise after all.” He smiled in a way that made my skin crawl worse. “It would seem I’m not the only walking dead in Chicago tonight.”

  Silence in my head, save for the rushing of blood echoing in my ears. “What the hell are you talking about? I am not dead.” Am I? What promise?

  “You truly have no idea who you are or what he’s done. He’s left you ignorant in more ways than one. Once you know the extent of his crimes against your world, you might not be his willing puppet.”

  I’d had my doubts about Izan’s loyalties lately, but… Izan, what have you done? “If you’re so smart, why don’t you enlighten me?”

  My pulse jumped in my neck, but I hoped my face didn’t give away my doubt. I knew who I was. So I had no idea where I’d been born, or what my parents looked like, or what kind of life I’d had, but…okay, so I had no idea who I was. Oh, God, maybe I never survived my stab wound, and I was wandering around some creepy afterlife dream?

  Baku tipped his face up to the stars again. “Since you have refused to give me what I want, I must wonder why you have created the very tool I’ve been seeking. She’s not yet come into enough power, but when she does, I will take her from you before you can use her against me. Let the contest begin, and may the better monster rise victorious.”

  Chapter Six

  Remy and Asher erupted out of the Shift, panting as if they’d just sprinted from South America. Asher gaped at Baku, who rocked from toe to heel with his hands in his pockets, grinning like a drunk at a comedy show.

  “Christ, what is that hovering around him?” Asher asked.

  He could see the dragon-mantis-phantom-thing still hovering around the lawyer? Up until now, only I had been able to see the wraith’s true forms. Then again, I’d never seen a wraith while it inhabited a body, as I could now, so something had obviously changed when it stuck its ghostly fingers into my neck. Which wouldn’t explain why Asher could see it, too.

  “What talking about?” Remy checked the guy out. “Just the lawyer looking all smug.”

  “Asher can see the guy’s wraith,” I said, “and I’m not sure why yet. Ever heard of a wraith named Baku?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.” Asher finally looked at me, his gaze lingering on my torn dress and the blood seeping out of my bandaged shoulder and through the bodice. Teeth clenched, he rushed across the pavement and tackled Baku, riding him to the ground and then proceeding to pound the ever-loving tar out of him.

  “How dare you?” Asher screamed in his face, his body humming with raw violence. He had an air of sorrow about him, as if something about the scene on the street had struck a deeply buried nerve. “Nobody will ever take her from me again, do you hear me? You’re dead. Dead!”

  Take me from him? Was he having some sort of flashback from when I’d almost died? Or maybe he was living in the memory of his childhood, terrified his father would kill his mother? I wasn’t sure what to do.

  I shuffled closer. Now that Asher had stopped punching Baku, a grin spread across the lawyer’s bloodied face. “I expected more from you,” Baku said. “You’re pathetic.”

  Asher brought his fist down with frightening force again.

  “Enough, brah!” Remy shouted. “Think we need to know the deal with this one, so we need him alive.” He jumped on the guy’s legs, and either he or Asher—or maybe it was Izan, I wasn’t sure—took us deep into the Shift.

  Empty worlds passed by like a fast-forwarded movie. Towers of stone stretched from a green land to a purple sky. In another, small glass houses reflected the light from three pale moons. We finally landed in a grassy field full of strange, glowing insects. Although people and animals didn’t live in the Shift, we had come across some strange bugs now and then, some of them as big as my shoe. Gross.

  When Asher started choking Baku and reached to the back of his dress pants for his gun, I knelt beside him. “Asher, stop. Asher! Look at me, please.” I pressed my hand to his cheek and forced his face in line with mine. “This man is innocent, so let’s kill his wraith and not him, okay?”

  Huffing like a bull, Asher offered a snarling face that might have sent me running if I didn’t have a desperate need to take the fear out of his eyes. As if recognition slowly drove back the beast, he blinked a
t me and didn’t resist when I took the gun from him and passed it over to Remy.

  “I can’t,” he whispered, staring inward, leaning harder into my hand. Maybe he couldn’t even see me through the rage that still seemed to be simmering under his skin. At least he’d loosened his grip on the lawyer, who’d stopped struggling as if exhausted. “I won’t watch you die again,” Asher continued. “Never again.”

  Remy’s head whipped back around, the tattooed half of his face bunched up with a hammer-to-the-forehead stare that must have matched mine. Why had my almost-death three weeks earlier hit Asher so hard just now?

  Trying not to choke up, I said, “I didn’t die, Asher. I’m right here. You took me to the infirmary, remember? You saved me.” I wasn’t dead; Baku was just screwing with my mind. My instincts insisted that this was real, and I was alive.

  Asher blinked and finally seemed to notice me in front of him, reaching out tentatively as if he didn’t trust his own eyes. Such raw emotion in his face, in the set of his parted lips, it broke something inside of me. I ached for him to make contact, but the lousy shit on the ground laughed, and Asher snatched his hand back.

  “Such a tender moment on the eve of war,” Baku said from where he lay placidly in front of us. “Such a sight is as rare as a rose in the dead of winter. You’re still a sentimental fool within a bastard, I see.”

  What? “Do you know this guy?” I asked Asher.

  “No. He’s just screwing with us like they all do.” He put a two-handed choke on Baku again, growling out primal sounds of pure hatred. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  I jerked on his arm, drowning in what-the-hells. “Stop it. Crap, look what you did to his face.” I inspected the lawyer for other injuries, but only his nose and lip bled. “He needs to answer a few questions, and then we’re going to do this how it’s supposed to be done.”

  Asher stared at me for seconds as the violence receded from his eyes. Were they brighter than normal? No, it was probably just because it was mostly dark in the barren reality we’d landed in.