Shadowshaper Legacy

by Daniel José Older

  Damn.

  No one was answering, and Mort was getting farther and farther away, and maybe Izzy’s app didn’t work or connect right, and even if it did maybe Izzy would be so mad she wouldn’t let them use it and —

  “Ay,” Rohan’s gruff voice said as the door cracked open and the muzzle of a Glock peeked out.

  Tee stepped back. “Whoa, man.”

  “Who goes there and all that.”

  “It’s me. Tee. I have to speak to Izzy. Now.”

  Rohan’s stern face replaced the gun. The door remained ajar. “Last I heard you went running off with the very dude I firmly instructed to leave you the hell alone earlier tonight, or am I mistaken in that?”

  “Yes, but … man, listen: I have to speak to Izzy, okay? And Caleb. It’s urgent!”

  “I need to know why you were running with the enemy, little sister. That’s all there is to it. Security of this place is currently in my hands, and it’s feeling very compromised right now, if you know what I mean.”

  Tee nodded, gulping. At least he’d taken that gun out of her face once he’d seen who she was. She couldn’t just pile-drive through this, no matter how rushed she was feeling to get this fight with Izzy over with and track down Mort. She took a breath. “Reconnaissance,” she finally said.

  Rohan quirked an eyebrow, and she knew she’d said the right thing. “Go on.”

  “That dude, Mort, right? He’s a power player in this situation we’re in. You could say, he holds some of the cards. And he made an offer to give me information tonight that I had to look into.”

  “Sounds like a classic disinformation campaign,” Rohan said. “But go on.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought too, right? Because clearly the dude’s bad news.”

  “I smelled that on him from a block away, to be honest. All the charm of a dead fish wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, as they say.”

  “Right. That’s why I linked up my phone to Izzy’s with this app that lets you know where the other phone is at any time.”

  Rohan’s eyes went wide. “Now that is some stalker shit right there. You guys might want to look into, I dunno, counseling or something, if you think that’s healthy in a relationship. I mean, maybe it is! I don’t know, but —”

  Tee waved her hands around. “No! Man, I know! We know! We tried it for like three seconds and then got freaked out and deactivated the app! Anyway, I had her turn it back on, and then I hid my phone in his car.”

  Rohan took a split second to put all the pieces together, then perked up. “Mort!”

  “Right!”

  “Oh, shit! Tee! We gotta let Izzy know! Come on, girl!” He flung the door open and hurried off down the hall. “Close the door behind you!”

  This is gonna suck this is gonna suck this is gonna suck this is gonna suck.

  Tee shuffled down the hallway and out into the wide-open garage, followed Rohan through the fleet of fancy Town Cars and past one of those huge Access-A-Ride vans that looked like it had been repurposed into a partymobile.

  This is gonna suck this is gonna suck this is gonna suck this is gonna suck.

  They crossed an open area where a few guys in coveralls gathered around the charred remains of a motorcycle, picking at its innards gingerly like neurotic buzzards over a kill.

  This is gonna —

  “Tee!” Izzy’s voice rang out, and Tee cringed as her girlfriend came running out of the office area at the far end of the garage. Caleb was behind her, and he seemed to sigh with relief and then took off on her heels. Tee couldn’t read her girlfriend’s expression clearly, but it definitely wasn’t happy. She braced herself as Izzy ran up and then almost crumbled to pieces when those two slender arms wrapped around her neck and the full weight of Izzy, all hundred and five pounds of her, smashed directly into Tee, followed by a hundred kisses.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Tee yelped.

  “Shut up and get these kisses,” Izzy whispered.

  “Wow,” Rohan said from somewhere nearby. “I’m just going to update Caleb over here because clearly you two need a minute.”

  “I thought, I thought, I thought,” Tee stammered.

  “Shut up, I said.” Izzy laughed, still kissing her.

  “I just.”

  “Woman,” Izzy growled.

  Tee shut up accordingly, and then suddenly she was sniffling — there was a sob in her for sure, trying to break out, but she wouldn’t let it, no way, not here in the middle of all these cars and killers and not now in the middle of everything going on.

  “Okay,” Izzy said after a bunch more kisses on Tee’s face and neck. “Now you can talk.” She still held Tee in a tight embrace.

  “I thought you were gonna kill me?” Tee said, half laughing, half maybe-crying, but not really either.

  “I thought about it,” Izzy admitted. “Decided I’d miss you too much. And then I was just worried. And while you were wrong for trying to sneak off — most of all for thinking you’d be able to.” She got up in Tee’s face with her finger, but, somehow, sweetly. “Never underestimate me again, Trejean.” Tee nodded. “I mean it.”

  “I wanted to apologize about that,” Tee said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I accept,” Izzy said, finally letting her go. “But yo — about that tracking situation.”

  “Yeah,” a gravelly voice said from the doorway Izzy had come out of. “About that.”

  A figure stood there, backlit by the sharp fluorescents of the office. She was slender and dapper as shit.

  “Is that —” Tee gasped into Izzy’s ear.

  “The one and only,” Izzy whispered.

  “Well, damn,” Tee said. “Shit just got real.”

  Being intimate with Robbie had never really made much sense. It was like their bodies didn’t quite speak the same language, or more to the point: Robbie didn’t seem to know what he wanted. Things would get all hot and heavy, and then just as suddenly they’d cool but not in a way that felt natural or smooth, they just seemed to be following whatever strange conversation Robbie was having with himself in his own head. Which made sense, because that single dynamic did a pretty good job summarizing the whole non-lationship, and that’s why Sierra had finally spun all the way away.

  The strong, silent thing was cute from a distance, intriguing even, but once push came to shove, it turned out being with someone who knew how to express themselves, to say out loud what they wanted, were worried about, ashamed of, what brought them joy — that mattered, made all the difference in the world, in fact. And while Sierra couldn’t have put her finger on it at the time, that’s what ultimately let her know that she and Robbie, at least Robbie in his current form, weren’t going to make it as a couple. Or a semi-non-whatever couple. Or anything besides, hopefully, good friends who shared a deep understanding of a magical world almost no one else knew about. Which wasn’t the same thing as romance or love, as it happened, although it certainly had felt like what she imagined those things to feel like, at least for a while.

  Anthony, though.

  Anthony.

  That boy moved with Sierra like he was born to. It wasn’t just that he knew what he wanted and knew how to ask for it, both with his eyes and his words. He also knew how to listen. Sierra could feel Anthony’s body respond to the tiny trembles and directions of her own, could sense his attentiveness and care in how he touched her, the patience with which his hands found hers, and the gentleness with which he moved his body against hers. Anthony knew how to take his time, and somehow that had meant that even in the short time they’d spent together, Sierra had felt seen in a way she hadn’t felt from a partner before.

  And maybe that was why, standing there in his bedroom with what felt like the world spinning recklessly around them, with two warring houses poised to crash mercilessly into the empty space between them, Sierra couldn’t stop trembling. She managed to keep it hidden inside herself, so that was something. But even if Anthony couldn’t see it, she knew it was there, and it bugged her. That’s n
ot how she did things. Boys didn’t throw her off her game. They annoyed her. They caused some strife and headaches, sure, but they didn’t make her feel butt-ass naked when she had all her winter clothes on. This wasn’t part of the game.

  “Are you gonna go first or should I?” Anthony asked. He was sitting on the bed, looking directly at Sierra like maybe she had some of the answers to all this mess. She didn’t, though. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She was supposed to have him pinned and caught off guard with a hundred shimmering shards of spirit-powered ink arrows pointed at his neck for the kill shot, and then he was supposed to spill his guts about whatever bullshit had happened to cause him to betray her, and then she’d be done with it and curse him out or threaten him if he crossed her again or whatever and be on her merry way.

  Instead, she stood before him feeling exposed and nostalgic for a relationship that had barely existed.

  Instead, she had no idea what to say. Or what she wanted to hear.

  “Neither?” she said softly.

  He flinched a little. “Then do we just … just sit here?”

  It seemed nice, but she knew she didn’t have that luxury. She closed her eyes, silently called on the churning darkness and light deep inside. Breathed. “I came here to threaten you,” she said. Within her, the light rose; the shadow rose. “You were going to wake up to my spirit soldiers surrounding you, and you were going to tell me why —” The word came out in a guttural half sob and Sierra paused to collect herself. The shadow and light spun and sputtered like competing lava lakes. If she was just slightly reckless, if she tilted too far one way or the other, it would all come spilling out, and Sierra didn’t know what that would mean. “Why you swore allegiance to a house that you know is bent on my destruction.”

  “Si —”

  “Stop.” She felt something fierce flicker through her. That slight pleading sound in his voice. She wouldn’t tolerate excuses. Anthony couldn’t lie to her, not as a sworn soldier of the Iron House, but he could bend the truth to something that made him look good, and she would know, and she would hate him. “Think carefully about what you say next.”

  He nodded. Stood. Sierra steeled herself, looked up at him defiantly.

  “I read your letters,” Anthony said, all hints of pleading gone. “I read them over and over.” He shook his head, eyes far away. “Besides Juan, that was the only thing I had to cling to. That’s what grounded me. When I felt an attack coming, when my mind tried to overthrow me, when all that panic crept in: I would reread one of your letters, then another, until I had them all memorized so I didn’t have to pull them out to read them, I could just do it in my head.”

  Sierra kept her face stern, but inside, all she could think of was Anthony fighting off wave after wave of anxiety inside that hellpit of an island, surrounded by steel and men who hated him, far from his family, from her.

  “I don’t want to say you kept me alive,” he said, “because that’s not a fair burden to put on you, and anyway it’s not totally true — there were letters from my family too, and the thought of what Carmela would’ve done if I’d … if something had happened to me. And your brother. And whatever … there were a few things that kept me close to this world, but your letters — you, Sierra — most of all. For whatever reason. Well, because of how I feel about you, that’s the reason.”

  He paused, gulped, shook his head.

  “Go on,” Sierra said quietly.

  “When the House of Iron guy started talking to me, it was clear what he wanted from jump — he was there to recruit me, and it was obvious why too. They’d read your letters, of course, and they knew what I meant to you. They wanted to use me as a weapon.”

  Sierra scrunched up her face, blinked away a few tears, but they came anyway.

  “That’s how scared they are of you,” Anthony said with undisguised awe. Then he scowled. “And that’s how dirty they are. So when Grintly — that’s the guy Iron House has on the inside, or one of them anyway — when he started talking me up, I just listened. Peeped the game and listened. He told me all kinds of stories about how Iron House came to be and this guy Old Crane who’d infiltrated the shadowshapers while secretly building his own crew on the side, and how we grew even more powerful in death Obi-Wan Kenobi style, etc. etc.”

  Sierra groaned and motioned for him to go on.

  “Exactly. Grintly kept talking about how the Iron House is the one true path and the only way forward to peace and how their reign will end this silly age of warfare between the houses, and look, I’ve read enough American history textbooks to know when I’m being fed a pile of propaganda garbage dressed in shiny golden bullshit, and I know how to look impressed, so I played along, played along until —”

  Somehow the truth of what had happened had been creeping through Sierra’s mind all along, at least this possibility of it, but now that it was turning out to be true, it terrified her more than she’d realized it would. “Until they made the offer to initiate you into House Iron.”

  He nodded. “Between the letters you wrote me telling me about your life and the shadowshapers and everything else, and this guy’s crooked version of the world, I put the pieces together and had a pretty clear idea of what might be coming down the pipes.”

  “So you accepted?” Sierra’s whole body thrummed. He didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into, and he’d done it for her? It was too much. Way too much.

  Anthony raised his eyebrows. “They swore that this was the path to peace, and —”

  “And you believed them?” Sierra seethed.

  Anthony scoffed. “Of course not! I mean, I know they can’t lie, but I know their version of peace involves you being out of the picture.”

  “But …”

  “But mine doesn’t.”

  Sierra cocked her head at him.

  “I made Grintly go over what the ceremony would entail, step by step. What I’d have to say, what I’d have to swear to. All that.”

  “And?”

  “And I never lied to them. I will do everything it takes to protect the Iron House and bring peace to the warring factions of the Deck of Worlds.”

  Sierra closed her eyes, knew what was coming. Loved and hated it with equal ferocity. “And?” she whispered.

  “And that means I will do anything I can to help you overthrow the King of Iron and destroy anyone that gets in the way of us forging a true peace between Iron House and the House of Shadow and Light.” Sierra looked at him, and finally, for what seemed like the first time in ages, Anthony let his big, brilliant, unstoppable smile shine through. “And I’ll do it from the inside.”

  Sierra shook her head. “Why?”

  “I already told you: You saved my life. Least I could do is try and infiltrate the assholes who are trying to take yours and burn them to the ground.”

  She laughed, crying a little too. It won’t work, everything inside her screamed. They’ll use you as a hostage, and as soon as I make a wrong move they’ll still use you against me, only you’ll pay the price for my recklessness. They’ll break you and then use you to break me.

  She shoved the voices away, stepped forward into Anthony’s open arms, then put her hands on either side of his face and brought it down to hers.

  “What’d you say this app thing is called?” R said in her tobacco-stained voice. “I gotta get me one of these. Can just follow along out of sight and you don’t have to worry about losing the trail!”

  “Stalkr,” Tee said. She still couldn’t get used to the idea that this unstoppable force of a woman was driving them nonchalantly through the streets of Brooklyn. Tee and Izzy’s first encounter with R had been at a creepy upstate campsite; they’d tracked a killer priest up there with Uncle Neville and then gotten themselves hemmed in by some Bloodhaüs goons, and then R had shown up, guns literally blazing, and scared off everyone, saving their asses and inspiring hours and hours of what was basically glorified fan fiction as Tee and Izzy wondered over and over who Uncle Neville’s myst
erious friend was. He wouldn’t give up any answers, not even a name, so they had to be content with making shit up.

  And now the mysterious Ms. R was just sitting there next to Tee like it was no big deal, maneuvering her Crown Vic through the shadows like it was some kind of steel-cased shark with tires. R was probably in her fifties but moved like she had been a dancer in another life, that simple grace and ease, and Tee knew those hands had taken more than a few lives. “And this character we’re tracking, what’s his deal?”

  “He’s like a …” Tee fumbled around for the words.

  “He’s like an underboss,” Izzy said from the back seat. “But he’s a top dog. A power broker. One of five, and they’re supposed to be neutral or maintain balance or whatever it is powerful people convince themselves they’re doing when they’re clearly tipping the scales in their own favor.”

  “And it seems like whatever is in Mort’s favor is maybe in ours too,” Tee added. “Emphasis on maybe. But he did take out one of our enemies for us — their main muscle, in fact.”

  R cocked an eyebrow. “Take out?”

  “Literally crushed the dude with his SUV,” Izzy said.

  “And then backed up to finish the job when the homey got up,” Tee put in. “It was disgusting.”

  R nodded, clearly impressed. “That’s a friendly gesture and all, but still. I don’t trust him.”

  “Good,” Izzy said. “Neither do we.”

  “Hence the little phone maneuver,” R said. “Got it. Speaking of which …”