Touch of Shadow (The Shadow Sorceress Book 5)

by Bilinda Sheehan

  But that wasn't all I remembered. Digging my fingers into the ground, I could still sense the dead beneath me. It was something I'd never felt before. The dead were just that—they were gone, merely husks, the physical house for those who had lived. But with their spirits gone, there was nothing but flesh and bone remaining, so why could I feel them like a distant buzzing that crawled beneath my skin?

  "Jason called us, asked us to meet you both here, that you might have something useful about the whole ghost-dead-body thing," Victoria said, continuing to watch me with her worry filled eyes. "We passed Jason on the road and we nearly went after him but...." Victoria trailed off and stared up at Marcel with a mixture of admiration and something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It definitely wasn't the loathing I'd seen her stare at him with earlier. What the hell had happened to cause her to look at him like that?

  "But I could sense you," Marcel said, picking up right where Victoria left off.

  "Sense me? What does that mean?"

  "It means if you're not careful, whatever is hunting King City is going to come looking for you. It has been a very long time since I felt power like yours.... Centuries, in fact," Marcel said.

  "Centuries? I don't understand," I said, the confusion only making the pain in my head that much worse. With a groan, I pushed up onto my feet. Victoria grabbed my arm to steady me and I couldn't keep the surprise from my face.

  Whatever she saw reflected in my gaze made her shrug apologetically. "I didn't mean to decapitate you, but with the amount of power you were calling I wasn't sure if you would feel my punch," she said. The look on her face was all contrition and I fought the urge to laugh. "I've grown fond of you," she said softly before releasing my arm and allowing me to stand on my own two feet.

  Hearing such a declaration from her was more than surprising and I struggled to find the right words to respond with.

  "No problem," I said finally, after a couple of awkward seconds had passed by. It seemed woefully inadequate, but then, this wasn't exactly familiar territory for me. How did you accept the apology of a changeling that had punched you so hard she accidentally severed your head from your spine?

  She nodded and smiled. Clearly, all I needed to do was accept her apology. Changeling logic. I was never going to get to grips with it.

  Marcel grinned at me. "There is a lot you do not know about me, Shadow Mistress," he said, addressing me with the same name he'd used on me right before Victoria had knocked me out.

  "Why do you keep calling me that?" I asked.

  "Because that is what you are. I apologise for earlier," he said, catching me completely off guard.

  "Right, now I know you hit me too hard. I'm obviously concussed because there is no way you just apologised to me," I said, turning away from Marcel and starting back up toward the gate that led out of the cemetery.

  My stomach grumbled and I was suddenly acutely aware of the hollow feeling in the pit of my belly as though it had been weeks since I'd last eaten. It grumbled again, and this time, it was accompanied by a weird tremor that raced through my brain, making me feel utterly unsteady on my feet.

  I sucked in a deep breath and fought to stay on my feet. It took a moment but the feeling finally passed, leaving me a little sweaty and more than a little breathless.

  "What the hell was that?" I said to no one in particular.

  "You need to eat," Marcel answered, catching up to me. "You are powerful, no doubt, but you are young and inexperienced. A true shadow sorcerer would not have allowed her magic to consume and control her in the way that you did."

  "Nothing controlled or consumed me," I argued, but it seemed utterly redundant. Deep down, I knew he was right; I'd allowed my magic to spiral out of the control and it had very nearly.... I cut off my own thoughts. I wasn't even sure what exactly it was that my power had almost done, but I knew without a doubt that if it had gone on unchecked, the consequences would have been catastrophic.

  Marcel nodded but he didn't argue with me. He seemed like a different man from the arrogant asshole I'd met earlier. I was missing something, and I hated feeling as though I was way behind the curve in comparison to everyone else.

  "We can do a drive-through," I said hopefully.

  Neither of them answered, but with a nod of her head, I knew Victoria was on board with the idea.

  "You can eat and I will explain what I know so far," Marcel said, more than forthcoming. I liked this new him but it unnerved the hell out of me, and if I was honest with myself, I really wasn't sure how I was supposed to take it. Was it simply that he had seen the demonstration of my power and so he was being nice to me?

  There was also the nagging question of his odd usage of the word “centuries.” Sure, there was a lot I didn't know about him, but I was almost positive that, despite being a Bokor, he was, in fact, all human, making it impossible for him to have lived as long as his use of the word suggested. It was just another of the many questions I would have to ask him when I had the chance.

  "That sounds good to me," I said. "And you can fill me in on what happened with the zombies back at the bar." I hated calling them zombies, but I still hadn't come up with a better name for the unfortunate creatures, and until then, they were stuck with the cliché.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the rune-covered blade lying discarded in the grass, and I scooped it up. It tingled in my grip before growing quiet. Slipping it onto my belt, I patted it softly. I'd commanded Jason to leave, but there had been a moment … little more than a second, but it had been enough. He knew. Probably not everything, but enough for him to leave the blade behind for me.

  Of course, if he knew I was a shadow sorcerer, it would be only a matter of time before he came for me, but for now, at least, he wasn't pursuing me. But his knowing what I was definitely deserved a conversation. For now, at least I had his blade. What I was going to do with the blade ... well, that part was less clear, but there was a part of me that knew I would need it to summon Tess.

  Leaving the cemetery, I could still feel the buzz of the dead, but this time it was inside my head, and the further away I got from the ground, the easier I could deal with the sensation. Whatever had happened wasn't just going away because Victoria had distracted me, and clearly, the power hadn't just all been used up to heal me.

  But that was a problem for another time—right now I had more than enough on my plate to deal with, and the current issues were more than enough to keep me distracted from thinking about Nic and what he had done ... or what he was going through....

  But try as I might to ignore it, the void inside was still there, like a huge, gaping wound that sat just beneath the surface. I knew it wasn't going to take much to tip me over the edge again.

  12

  "So they haven't been able to move even one person from the bar?" I asked, cramming my second quarter pounder into my mouth. Juice and grease ran down my chin, but I didn't care. All I knew or understood on a primal level was that the hunger within needed to be fed or it was going to spill over and I would spiral out of control. Or worse, I would pass out again, and I was more than done with that.

  I'd done my fair share of fainting since I'd discovered my new abilities and it had gotten old real fast. Being knocked out twice in just a few hours meant I was already at my quota for helpless damsel and I would do everything in my power to ensure it didn't happen again.

  "Every time they try, they get violent, and the one man they did manage to subdue long enough to take him outside to the waiting Elite van started to rot the second his foot went over the threshold," Victoria said, picking at the chicken she had ordered for herself. "How can you eat this?" she asked finally, picking up a piece of greasy breast and staring at it as though it might cluck any second.

  "Really easy," I said, scooping up a handful of fries and cramming them into my mouth.

  "Now, spit roasted..." she said, her eyes darkening momentarily. "That's the kind of chicken I can get behind."

  "So, w
hat? They're just going to leave them there?" I asked.

  Marcel nodded from his position in the driver's seat. "There is no choice until they can work out how to put them back in the ground."

  "Heddou would know how to put them back," I said, his name popping into my head. I'd seen the way he treated his enemies, keeping them around long after they were dead. If he knew how to raise them, then he had to know how to put them back.

  "I was wondering when his name would come up," Marcel said, staring out through the windshield. His expression was carefully blank but I'd seen his shoulders stiffen as soon as I'd mentioned the Voodoo priest’s name.

  "You know him?" I asked, feigning nonchalance, but I caught the glance Marcel gave me in the rearview mirror. He wasn't buying it for a second.

  "Do you really think I am a fool?"

  "No, but I know there's history or something between you and Heddou. I wanted to see if you were willing to be as truly open about everything as you claimed you would be," I said, wiping my hands clean on the paper napkins I'd fished out of the food bag.

  Marcel smiled and returned his gaze out through the windshield. "Heddou was my teacher," he said, catching me completely unawares with his confession. "He was once the most powerful Bokor I knew, until I surpassed him," he said, with absolutely no hint of sarcasm or arrogance in his voice.

  "You said earlier you were centuries old. If he was your teacher, then doesn't that make him even older?"

  "A little, give or take a few decades or more," Marcel said with a grin.

  Victoria didn't bat an eye at any of it, but then, why would she? She was a changeling; longevity was kind of her thing.

  "So would he know or not?" I asked.

  "Honestly, I do not know, but we can pay him a visit if you wish. Although I cannot imagine he will be happy to see me here," Marcel said.

  My cell phone buzzed silently in my pocket and I fished it out. Graham's name flashed as he rang me again but the last thing I felt like doing was taking the call. He'd lied to me, protected a woman who was abusing her child. I knew he hadn't known, but that still didn't mean I wanted to talk to him.

  The call ended and the screen grew dark. The second it did, Victoria's phone started its shrill ringing and I jumped. She dropped the chicken she'd been picking at and grabbed the cell from the dashboard. Before I could warn her, she answered, and after a second, she passed the phone back to me.

  "He's pretty pissed," she said.

  "Got it." Taking the cell, I pressed it to my ear. "What?" I said, keeping my voice clipped and hostile.

  "Where the hell did you disappear to? I need you to get over to the hospital. There's something you need to see," he said.

  "Like what? More bruises courtesy of his mother?" The words escaped me before I had the chance to stop them and Graham's sharp inhalation on the other end of the phone told me I'd crossed the line.

  "This is an order, Amber. Get your ass down to St. Bart’s," he said before the line went dead.

  I passed the phone back to Victoria and she raised an eyebrow in my direction. "You didn't say what he needed you for earlier," she said.

  "It's something that can wait," I said. "If he calls back, I'm not here."

  "I cannot lie, Amber," she said.

  "Then make something up, or just don't take the call, but I do not want to speak to him." Anger coloured my words and I didn't care. Graham had an awful habit of dragging me into shit without giving me all the facts. I cared for him, loved him, even, but that didn't mean I always had to like him or his ways of getting stuff done.

  "I take it we're not going to St. Bart’s hospital, either," she said.

  "Nope, it can wait. Right now, we're going to pay Heddou a visit to see if he can help those people down at the bar.... And maybe he'll know what's going on in the city," I said.

  "And if he is the one behind Tess's death?" Victoria asked. I couldn't help but notice how Marcel stayed deliberately silent on the issue, which instantly made me suspicious. Was there something he knew that he wasn't telling us? It was certainly possible.

  "Then we'll deal with it when we get there," I said. I'd been naive the first time I'd gone into his lair, but I wasn't going to fall for his crap again. Not now, not that I knew what he was capable of, and anyway, he and I had a score to settle. He'd taken my hair, made a Voodoo doll, and given it to a fae lord who'd used it to try and turn me into his slave. That wasn't something I was going to easily forgive or forget.

  No, as far as I was concerned, Heddou and I were well overdue for a showdown, and I wasn't the amateur incapable of handling my magic that I had been when we'd met the first time.

  Settling back against the leather back seat, I refastened my seat belt. Heddou was going to be in for a rude awakening if he thought he could play me for a fool again.

  13

  Marcel didn't need directions to Heddou's house, which made me even more suspicious that there was more going on than he was telling us. Of course, he had said he’d been Heddou's student, but I’d assumed that that had been quite a long time ago.

  He parked across the street and I stared up at the huge, rambling house. The gates that had been present when Heddou had tossed me out on my ass were no longer there. Was he expecting me or had he simply removed them because he believed I wouldn't come back? Whatever the reason, the lack of a barrier made it easier for me to get the face-off with him that I’d wanted.

  Hopping out of the car, I started across the street. The sound of the other car doors opening and slamming shut told me that both Victoria and Marcel were close behind.

  Stepping onto the path, I sucked in a deep breath, preparing to be hit with Heddou's familiar magic, but when nothing happened, I let it out slowly. Marcel paused on the path and stared up at the house, his expression utterly unreadable—but I could tell from the tension in his shoulders that whatever he was thinking wasn't pleasant.

  "Something is wrong," Victoria said, moving cautiously forward.

  "Wrong?" I asked, dropping my meta-physical shields just a little to get a better feel for the house and its occupants. There was nothing. Whatever Victoria was feeling, I wasn't picking up on it.

  I opened my mouth to answer her, and then it hit me. I wasn't feeling anything at all, and that all by itself was more than a little weird. Dropping my shields further, I waited for the onslaught of power, but still nothing. The taste of rot on my tongue was the only indication that there had been anything here at all. It wasn't a smell; it was more like a feeling. Whatever power had been here was gone, and the remnants had begun to rot.

  Marcel didn't speak, but the moment Victoria had spoken, the tension in his body had rocketed. He picked up his pace and headed for the front porch.

  The memory of the last time I'd been here slammed into me. Nic had had my back, and I'd felt as though I could have marched into Hell itself and not been afraid. Of course, at the time, I'd been way too stubborn, fighting back my feelings for him and keeping him at arms’ length. If I hadn't, then maybe we would have had more time together.... But more time together wouldn't have changed the outcome.

  I shook away the memory before it brought back the terrible emptiness I'd managed to cram down inside. I made my way up the steps just as Marcel knocked on the front door. It swung inwards and my stomach sank into my shoes. It was bad—really bad. Heddou was security-conscious. There was no way he would leave the door open for just anyone to walk in.

  Marcel beat me inside and he disappeared into the darkened hall before I could stop him. Was it all a trap? If it was, then it was far more elaborate than anything I'd ever imagined Heddou would bother with.

  Entering the house, my skin broke out in goosebumps, but gone was the rush of suffocating magic I'd felt the first time I'd come this way. I followed the hall deeper into the house, the eerie silence conjuring all kinds of images in my head. The door to the reception room in which I'd first met Heddou was open and I stopped dead in my tracks as I crossed the threshold.

 
; The floor was littered with bodies in various stages of decomposition, but there was a familiarity about them that had bile creeping up the back of my throat. The bodies belonged to Heddou's enemies, the ones he kept around.... I'd had nightmares about them for weeks after seeing them for the first time. But now, seeing them like this, all I could feel was pity.

  Some of them on the floor lay with their arms flung wide open, their bodies broken beyond recognition, but there were a few crowded against the back wall, huddled together. Moving further into the room, I side-stepped the corpses on the ground until I was close enough to the bodies against the back wall that I could figure out exactly what I was looking at.

  The second I did, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as magic prickled against my skin and a vision washed over me. My stomach revolted at the sight and the food I'd eaten for lunch attempted to crawl its way back up my throat.

  Slapping my hand across my mouth, I struggled to stop myself from vomiting. I sucked in a deep breath through my nose but the smell washed over me, making everything so much worse.

  Turning away, I clamped my eyes shut as they started to water and tears dripped down my cheeks.

  "Amber?" Victoria called my name, but there was a question in her voice. She'd seen my reaction to crime scenes before and it didn't normally reduce me to a vomiting, crying mess.

  "They were afraid," I said finally, managing to get the words out past the nausea that washed over me in waves.

  "How do you know?" she asked, stepping around one of the bodies near the doorway.

  "Use your senses, changeling. Your partner is right; they were terrified..." Marcel said, his voice cold and unfeeling. "Some even begged for their lives, but he couldn't save them."