by Sarah Blair
The Tides of Darkness Series by Sarah L. Blair
Darkness Loves Company
Darkness Shifting
Copyright © 2016 Rock Manor Studios, LLC
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Printing, 2016
Second edition, 2020
Cover concept and design by Laura Oliva and Sarah K. Roussel
Edited by Julie Hutchings
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
This book is dedicated to my Sweet Mama,
who gave me the keys to unlock boundless possibilities
by teaching me to read.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Acknowledgements
About the Author
One
She smelled it before she saw it.
Like always, the stink of the crime scene crept ahead of the gory view. Sidney Lake knew this one was bad; the meaty smell of torn flesh, the copper scent of blood, mixed with the tinge of electricity buzzing from the third rail of the subway tracks below, the putrid smell of an opened bowel swirled with the filth of scavenging rats.
It all made her very glad she hadn’t had time for breakfast when she’d gotten the call.
“Sorry about the late hour,” Dr. Tom Fellows said.
New York City’s Medical Examiner lifted the yellow caution tape marking off the crime scene to let Sidney under.
“It’s not late anymore. It’s early.” She grabbed the paper cup of coffee out of his hand and took a slug. It was cold and sour. She gagged. “Ugh. How long have you been down here, anyway?”
She’d rolled out of bed, thrown her trench coat over jeans and a black sweater, slipped on her favorite black steel-toed boots, and come straight down. There was never time for proper grooming or coffee when Tom called.
“Too long.” The medical examiner took his cup back, finished the last swig, and tossed it in a wire trash can.
Tom would have made a good linebacker thirty years ago, if he’d been taller. Instead, he’d chosen the lab over sports. Now his shoulders had a curve to them that never went away. A result of decades of being hunched over a table dissecting cadavers.
“What have you got?” Sidney asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Tom said.
He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and perched them on his nose again as they made their way down the long connecting corridor toward a part of the subway most New Yorkers never bothered taking the time to see: the abandoned City Hall Station. It was the first subway stop opened to the public in 1904, a legend for its intricate mosaics and architecture.
“You’re the medical examiner. I thought identifying bodies was part of your job description.”
The fluorescent lighting bounced off the white tiles and she figured it was no wonder Tom had lost track of time. The stark and seemingly endless tunnel reminded her of the hallways at the morgue where she was used to watching Dr. Fellows work. Except the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner didn’t have graffitied ads for one-time use toothbrushes and torn up movie posters plastered in the hallways.
Tom gave her a lopsided grin. “Wouldn’t have called you in for any run-of-the-mill homicide, would I? The weird stuff is your jurisdiction.”
Sidney opened her mouth to tell Tom exactly where he could put his weird cases this early in the morning, but they reached the platform and she saw the source of the awful stench.
Blood coated the tiles as if someone had hurled cans of paint at the walls. She swallowed back a gag and took a deep breath in through her mouth, filling her lungs slowly, and out through her nose, forcing the stink away.
“The amount of blood one body contains.” She shook her head. “It’s amazing.”
Tom nodded, allowing her to take a moment while her mind tried to make sense of the mess in front of her. It was always hard to process the bits and pieces at first, but once she picked out something familiar in the middle of the carnage, it all fell into place.
Her brain told her this was a cadaver, but it was like none she’d ever laid eyes on before. There was a leg over here, half a rib cage over there, and the head was… well, the head was something else entirely.
They moved around the curve of the short platform where a man she’d never met crouched by the other half of the rib cage scribbling notes on a clipboard.
“Agent Lake, I’d like you to meet my new assistant.” Tom swept his arm wide to make the introduction. “This is Dr. Jackson Banks.”
Whenever Tom called her in to view a scene, he’d already sent off the first responders, done the photos, and gathered the evidence. All that was left for Sidney to do was figure out what type of creature they were dealing with and how to stop it. She hadn’t expected anyone new to be let into their exclusive circle. Hell, their investigation team was so private it didn’t even have a name.
They called themselves Agents or Detectives depending on the situation, and they were only official in as much as they were certified private investigators. They didn’t have jurisdiction because they were above jurisdiction. They were like the Men In Black, except they weren’t dealing with aliens. They didn’t have the space-age technology for all the fun gadgets and weapons either.
As disgusting, and frightening as the job could be sometimes, it was also thrilling and she was grateful to have it. She wasn’t sure where she would be if her boss Mitchell Harris hadn’t pulled her off the self-destructive path she was heading down six years ago and given her something meaningful to focus on. She’d wanted an escape from reality, from thinking about the awful way her parents met their end, from the nightmares that still haunted her. At least this was a more effective way of fighting the darkness than taking whatever pills she could get her hands on and drinking her way through all the hottest clubs in town.
“Call me Banks.” The man stood, clipboard in hand, shoe covers soggy with blood, drawing her out of her thoughts. His hands were enveloped in cerulean blue neoprene gloves, so he shrugged an apology rather than offering to shake. He gave a half-smile; embarrassed by the informality. “Jack is fine, too. Everybody called my father Dr. Banks.”
There was a drawl in his words that made her think of wide, shady porches and sweet tea in sweaty glasses. H
is graham cracker hair had gone too long without a trim. He was well-built and, unlike Tom, would have fit right on top of the homecoming float next to the prom queen.
His smile spread into a straight-toothed American grin, easy and contagious. Sidney started to smile but stopped herself. They were at a crime-scene. This was a job. She needed to be professional.
“I’m Lake,” she said.
“Pleasure,” Banks said, and glanced at the pile of shredded flesh between them with a shrug. “Well, considering.”
“A maintenance train operator spotted the body here on the platform right after 2:00 a.m.,” Tom said. “Nobody saw or heard anything, but there was enough time between trains for this to take place.”
“You’re finished photographing?” Sidney used the covered band she always kept on her wrist to pull her long, mahogany hair up into a messy bun on top of her head. She slipped on the shoe protectors over her well-worn boots and traded Tom her black trench coat for a pair of gloves to match Banks’.
“All yours,” he said.
She worked her fingers into the gloves and crouched next to the body. It was hard to tell exactly what was what. She noted the ragged marks at the edge of the wounds, and raised her eyebrows.
“This was done by hand?”
“That’s my guess,” Banks said. “Some of the severed edges are cleaner than others, but most of the damage happened by ripping or tearing. If you have a look at this, though, it explains some of the wounding. Whatever caused this damage was similar in nature to the victim.”
He lifted John Doe’s arm. Sidney squinted, despite the bright lights that had been brought in to illuminate the scene. At the end of the arm were five fingers of a man’s hand with thick black fingernails that narrowed and curved slightly at the ends.
“Are those claws?” She raised her eyebrows.
“That was our conclusion.” Tom stood by, watching.
“That’s not all,” Banks said. He reached over to the head of the body. The flesh at the neck was torn nearly all the way through, and the weight of the skull pulled back gave her a good view inside the esophagus.
Sidney grimaced, and made note of the jagged skin around the edges. “This was done by hand too?”
Banks gave a single nod. She wasn’t sure she wanted to think about what could be powerful enough to yank someone’s head off.
“And check this out.” Banks slid his hand under the skull and lifted it up. The thing stared right at her. Its limp tongue stretched out long between extremely sharp canines. Thick hair covered the entire face, not only along the jawline, which jutted out much farther than what was normal for the shape of a human skull. The one eye that remained intact rolled back into the head. On either side of the cranium were tall pointed ears.
Sidney stared into the face of a wolf.
“Is it what we think it is?” Banks was a little too excited about the find. He used the tips of his first two fingers to tilt the head down a little more to give her a better view.
“No.” She shook her head and stood up. “Werewolves are extinct.”
It was a sentence she repeated to herself so many times in the middle of the night, she’d lost count. Every time she woke up sweaty and shaking, she whispered those words to herself in the dark. Now she was on this filthy abandoned subway platform face-to-face with one of the creatures right out of her nightmares.
The gloves stuck to her palms, making it hard to yank them off.
“Come on,” Banks insisted. “This may as well be straight out of the Wolfman.”
“Hollywood special effects aren’t generally what we go on when identifying these types of things,” she said as she stuffed the gloves into a red jug marked Biohazard. “Werewolves never even made it to America. They were hunted into extinction hundreds of years ago. There’s no such thing as werewolves. Not anymore.”
“Then what is it?” Banks asked, his drawl too genteel for such a gory scene.
Sidney wished she had an answer to give him, but she didn’t. There were things she’d witnessed on this job that she never could have imagined would be possible. Witches and sorcerers were the most common thing they dealt with. Poltergeists and ghosts, sure. They even came across an occasional gargoyle or leprechaun every now and then. But not this. Not werewolves.
“We’ll get it loaded up and back to the lab,” Tom said. “Maybe we’ll find something new once we get it out on the table.”
He returned her coat but she didn’t put it back on. A thin sheen of sweat covered the back of her neck.
Banks’ forehead creased deeply and his lower lip jutted out the tiniest bit. She couldn’t tell if he was concentrating on a new theory or disappointed his first one hadn’t worked out.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
“Be seeing you around, I’m sure,” he said, and went back to study the scene in front of him.
Tom escorted her back up the tunnel, even though she insisted she could go it alone.
“Let me know what you find out at the lab,” she said.
“You’ll be my first call.”
“We should get together for another cookout soon. It’d be nice to see you over something other than a dead body,” Sidney said.
Tom chuckled, “A ribeye is still technically a piece of dead meat.”
“But so much more appetizing,” Sidney smiled.
“It’s a good idea. Banks is new in town, I’m sure Carla would like to take him under her wing.”
“She’s good at that. Make it happen.” Sidney gave him a light punch on the shoulder. “Stay safe.”
“You too.”
She turned and shuffled up the stairs along with a crowd flooding the walkway from the Number Six train. She flinched as her eyes adjusted to the full daylight above ground.
Lush green grass carpeted City Hall Park. Daffodils waved happily in flowerbeds around the edge of the path. Tiny green buds dotted all the branches on the trees overhead. Lawyers in bold power ties carried expensive leather cases towards the courthouse down the block. Students cut through the park on the way to early classes at the university over on Park Row. Tourists hurried across the street to walk the Brooklyn Bridge.
Not one of them knew what was down there in the subway tunnel. They were all too busy and self-involved to guess what lay in the darkness beyond the platform. Sidney and her fellow agents had to keep it that way.
Two
The stink of the crime scene stuck to Sidney like perfume sprayed by an overzealous Macy’s sales associate. She wanted to go home and take a long, hot bath, but she was already downtown only a few blocks away from the office. She opted to go grab that coffee she’d skipped in her hurry to get out the door.
She cut through the park to her favorite little coffee spot. A tiny hut in the middle of the sidewalk, painted green and crammed full of newspapers and magazines, pastries, bottled water, and all the other various and sundry items necessary for a respite from the rush of life, an island oasis in the middle of the bustling city. After the unnerving crime scene, the sight of her favorite vendor behind the counter was a comfort.
“Morning, Jai.” She waved while he handed a receipt to a man in a brushed silk suit. Lawyer, she guessed. The man pushed out the door without even so much as a thanks, leaving her as the only customer in the shop.
“Hey there, pretty lady.”
Jai’s straight, jet black hair lay neatly across his forehead. He wore a white button up under a navy blue t-shirt with the Yankees logo on it. It was pretty much his uniform.
“What’s going on today?” Jai made himself busy during the lull by refilling the donut case with all shapes and flavors of fried dough.
“Oh, you know, the usual.” She checked her image in the shiny side of the donut case, smoothed a finger over her eyebrows, and made a mental note to stop by the salon for a wax. Shrugging back into her coat, she switched her impromptu bun to a high ponytail. “How’s the coffee coming?”
“Brewing fresh. Be right up.” H
e came out from behind the counter and snapped the plastic tie around a bunch of newspapers with a pocket knife, then rearranged the stack to a new pile. The headline on the Times caught her attention:
CONGRESS PASSES BILL, AWARDS LAKE INDUSTRIES CONTRACT
Below the headline two men shook hands in a full-color photo. The piercing turquoise eyes and familiar smug smile from the man on the right raised her heart rate. She picked up the paper and read the beginning of the article.
Chairman of Lake Industries, Alexander Lake (pictured above, right), was in Washington D.C. yesterday, shaking hands with the U.S. Defense Secretary, Richard Skeller (upper, left).
Lake Industries, a research and development firm known mostly for its genetic research, has partnered with the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) and will be using the newly awarded 1.2 Billion Dollar grant to fund a new division of military research.
“Here you go, pretty lady.” Jai offered her a steaming cup. “With half-and-half, right? Your favorite.”
She tossed the paper back on the stack and took the cup. “Thanks, Jai.”
“Everything okay?” he asked. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Technical term for that is spectral apparition,” a familiar voice said behind her.
Her partner, Graham Williams, was the all-in-one brother and best friend she’d never had, so of course they gave each other constant hell. Sarcasm and insults were their preferred method of communication. It was perfect for her, really; he had her back no matter what, and she never had to get too personal.