Shadow's Messenger: An Aileen Travers Novel

by T. A. White

  “Where is it? You have it. They told me you had it,” the thing wailed, milky white eyes staring, unseeing into mine.

  It was vaguely humanoid but stretched impossibly long. What I thought were claws were actually long fingernails. It reeked of putrefaction and death, like something fresh from the grave.

  I kicked out, knocking it away from me as I scrambled to my feet.

  The creature was vaguely familiar, its skin patterned like bark and hair the color of moss. Its limbs were too long for a human’s, and it was reed thin. Pieces of it were missing, exposing jagged holes that seeped a white, pus-like substance. It looked like a dryad, one that had been dead for a long time and had already started to decompose.

  I reached for the charm the sorcerer had given me and broke it. He said that would summon him. Well, it was time for him to do his part.

  The creature lunged at me, and I jumped back and up, landing on top of a car. It was fast, running across the ground on all fours. I leapt to the next car as it landed on the roof I’d just been on.

  Its head cocked at an unnatural angle, like it had no bones in its neck. I edged back, stopping when my foot almost slid off the roof. The car the dryad creature was on buckled, the metal screeching and the glass abruptly shattering. The dryad began growing, turning into a hulking monster three times its size.

  I should have run, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like watching a train wreck in progress. The monster shook itself and set one hand on the hood, crushing it and leaving a palm print in the metal. That was going to be difficult for the mortals to explain.

  Any time now the sorcerer would show up and bust out some crazy spells to take out this thing.

  Any time.

  Where was he? I had kind of hoped he’d appear in a puff of smoke.

  A dry rattling came from its chest. With a start, I realized it was laughter. I’d have to wing this until the sorcerer got here.

  “Very impressive. You can get bigger,” I said sarcastically. “Any American with access to fast food and donuts can do the same.”

  The creature snarled and slapped the car, further crushing the hood until it was a mangled mess. I could not let that thing touch me. One swipe and I’d be dead.

  “I will pulverize your bones and feast on your flesh,” the thing hissed.

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ll have to catch me first.”

  I crouched as it sprang, covering the distance between us faster than I could blink. I leapt to the side at the last moment, rolling once as I hit the pavement and darting in a crouched run behind another set of cars.

  I was hoping its added size would slow it enough for me to escape using the cars as cover. A roar sounded behind me. There was a screech of metal and then a car door sailed over my head.

  Shit, this thing was strong and possessed a nasty temper.

  I moved stealthily, crawling beneath a four door truck and rolling to the other side. Heavy thuds followed me from the row I’d just left. I fitted myself next to the front wheel, making sure I wasn’t visible in case the creature leaned down to check underneath the truck.

  I held my breath. Please move past. Don’t look here.

  The footsteps paused on the other side of the truck.

  It was over. I was dead. My parents would probably never even find my body. Jenna would think I hated her.

  The footsteps retreated down the row.

  I exhaled shakily. Safe for now. I needed to find transportation before the thing caught up with me again.

  This was the second time I’d been attacked in two nights. The eyes of this thing had the same milky glaze as the wolf. It also had the same smell of death and decay, the kind that stuck around for days. I’d have to throw these clothes away, no way would I ever be able to wear them again without smelling that stench. Luckily, they weren’t mine.

  There was a connection between the two attacks. It made me question whether Brax had been the intended target. Both monsters accused me of having its treasure. I was beginning to think the two creatures were one and the same despite their different packaging.

  What made it keep targeting me? I didn’t have whatever it kept ranting about.

  I crawled from car to car, keeping an eye out for the dryad monster. Damn sorcerer still hadn’t shown up. What was the point of a charm to summon him if he didn’t come when called?

  Wait. The creature hadn’t targeted me until after I accepted this job. Why hadn’t the charm worked when the sorcerer had promised it would?

  How had the dryad known where to find me? Even the werewolves and vampires hadn’t been able to track me down this fast.

  I crept along the cars, working my way to where the smart cars were parked.

  Unless someone had tagged me like a wild animal. I looked down at the charm still hanging around my neck. Maybe a tracker placed in a summoning charm?

  It would explain how it had keyed into me twice now.

  No, something didn’t add up. The sorcerer needed my help and had the power to kill me outright. Why would he need to send a magical creature when he could just do it himself?

  The questions were turning me in circles. All the answers I came up with didn’t address the whole picture. None of it made sense.

  I needed answers. Making it out alive from those last two encounters with that monster had been luck. I didn’t think I would survive a third.

  I found a rental car and opened the door, sliding into the seat. I fished the stolen wallet out of my pocket and used a credit card to turn on the ignition. I didn’t have long. The engine starting would tell the monster exactly where I was.

  I backed the car out of its spot and floored it.

  “Come on,” I snapped as it scooted forward, making the whir, whir sound of a wind-up toy car.

  A roar sounded from three aisles away. Even with the pedal pressed all the way to the floor, the little car took forever to get up to speed. Metal sparked when I scraped the bottom of the carriage against concrete as I flew out of the parking lot.

  Yanking the sorcerer’s charm from my neck, I rolled down the window and tossed it out of the car. It was time to go off book. I’d been playing by everyone else’s rules for too long. Time for people to find out exactly who they were messing with.

  Chapter Nine

  The receptionist was still at her post despite the late hour. I pulled my phone back. Turning the camera on and angling it around the corner wasn’t the best method of surveillance, but it would do in a pinch.

  I stuffed the cell phone into my messenger bag. I picked up the bag along with a few other supplies at one of my caches a few miles from here. I had similar stashes all over the city in case of an emergency. This life was dangerous, as my current circumstance attested to. The go-bags were a last ditch plan in case things went to shit, if the vampires ever descended on my life.

  The worst of my scenarios had already happened, but I refused to abandon the life I’d created here without a fight.

  First step, I needed to get past the receptionist without announcing my presence. In the past half hour of my stakeout, she hadn’t moved an inch. A coffee or bathroom break would have made my life infinitely easier. But that didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon.

  How to do this without tripping any wards this guy had? We were on the second floor so I couldn’t exactly break a window. Pulling the fire alarm also wouldn’t work. Nobody was here to evacuate, and the sorcerer could probably extinguish any flames, making an evacuation unnecessary for the two of them.

  What to do? I dug through the bag and pulled out a cuff made of beaten copper. It had faded geometric designs etched into the dull metal. It was a gift from a satisfied client. He told me the thing could suppress the wearer’s magic if it was locked around the wrist. Why he thought I’d have any need for the thing as a vampire, I had no clue. Vampires didn’t usually have power that needed to be suppressed. Whatever the reason, it was going to come in handy today.

  “What are you doing here?�
� a teenager said behind me.

  I froze. Almost in slow motion, I turned, taking in the sorcerer standing there sipping on a jumbo sized gas station fountain drink and holding a food container from the best late night pizza place in the city.

  I just might have been the worst thief in the history of bad thieves. My intended target was standing right in front of me and had managed to sneak up on me despite my superior vampire senses.

  That was just great. Maybe next time I could send out invitations to my stake out. It’d probably achieve the same result.

  He gave me a look patented by teenagers everywhere, infusing it with a skeptical scorn that drove anybody over the age of twenty five close to homicidal.

  I needed a plausible lie.

  My mind was blank.

  The cuff in my hand clinked against the metal in my jacket. Right. New plan. Sneaking up on him and ambushing him wasn’t going to work. I’d have to improvise.

  “What’s that?” the sorcerer asked, his eyes focusing on the cuff.

  I lurched forward swinging my bag at his face. He flinched back, raising his occupied hands to protect his face. I snapped the cuff around one of those hands and danced back out of his reach.

  Had it worked? If it hadn’t, my goose was cooked.

  “What the fuck?” the sorcerer spat, lowering his hands.

  The copper shone dully from his wrist. The thing was on. I had a feeling I’d know if it had done its job in the next few seconds.

  “What is this?” he hissed, finally noticing his new bracelet.

  “I don’t know,” I said cautiously. “You tell me.”

  There was no need to tell him I had tried to limit his power if the thing didn’t work.

  “It looks like a genie’s shackle,” the sorcerer ground out. “Which would be crazy and suicidal on your part because everyone knows these don’t work on sorcerers.”

  This was going to be painful and deadly, but mostly painful.

  He reached for the cuff and yanked. And yanked. The cuff didn’t budge, remaining stubbornly attached to his wrist.

  “Whatever, I don’t need it off to take care of you,” he sneered and raised a hand. “That was a big mistake on your part.”

  Nothing happened.

  He blinked at me, his face turning nearly purple with rage. He dropped the drink and pizza and raised both hands, then shook them when nothing worked. He hopped up and down, shaking his hands like a giant bird. If I hadn’t been so scared the cuff would stop working at any minute, I would have found his flailing hilarious.

  “What did you do to me?” he screeched, his teenage voice cracking.

  I shrugged, not feeling too bad about binding his powers after the session in the basement. “Just evened the playing field a little.”

  “Take it off, vampire.”

  I folded my arms. “I don’t think so.”

  He shook his arm at me. “Take it off, or I will grind up your parts for use in my spells and when you heal, I will dismantle you to do it all over again and again until you’re begging me for death.”

  Like a threat like that was going to convince me to follow his orders? Right. Let me get right on that.

  “Like you wouldn’t do that anyway.”

  “Arg,” he screamed and kicked the wall.

  I rolled my eyes and waited out his little hissy fit. I had no idea sorcerers could be so temperamental. It was going a long way to detracting from the mysterious air they cultivated. He was beginning to seem more like a person and less like this dark, scary being capable of ending me with a snap of the fingers.

  “Take it off,” he whined. “I feel like I can’t breathe, like a limb has been amputated.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. He was really laying it on thick. “I’ll think about it, but in the meantime you’re going to answer some questions.”

  “What? What is it that you want?”

  There were many things I wanted but only a few he could help me with.

  “What’s been doing all this killing? You know more than what you told me.”

  “Have you encountered it?” he asked, his eyes filling with a feverish light. “Describe it to me. Tell me everything.”

  That wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. Something along the lines of furious denial, yes. Sudden interest and begging for details, no. Perhaps I’d been wrong in my assumption of his involvement in the attacks on me.

  “It seemed to reanimate the dead,” I said. I had turned events over in my head the whole way here. It’s the only thing that made sense. “The things that attacked us had the milky eyes of the dead, and the flesh was in an advanced state of decomposition.”

  “That’s not specific enough,” the sorcerer said, biting his thumbnail. “Too many creatures have the same ability. I need more information before I can narrow it down.”

  “Could they also talk through the dead in the same voice?”

  He cocked his head in thought. “The same voice or the voices of the host.”

  It had been the same. I think. I tried to remember. The wolf shouldn’t have been able to form real words, not having the same vocal cords as a human.

  “Yes, same voice. It was also able to make itself bigger. It attacked me in the shape of a wolf and what I think was a dryad.”

  “You think?”

  “I’ve never actually encountered a dryad, just heard them described.”

  “You are unbelievably useless,” he muttered.

  Said the man unable to use magic due to a copper bracelet blocking his powers.

  He stared at the ground, rocking from side to side like a boxer getting ready for the ring. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Something I said must have triggered a memory or provided a clue.

  He shot past me, heading past the receptionist desk. I blinked at finding it empty. Where had she gone? Now that I thought about it, it was a little odd she hadn’t come to investigate during our argument.

  “Where’d your receptionist go?”

  He paused and looked at the empty desk, then continued into the next hallway. “She must have gone on break.”

  “And we didn’t see her pass us? There’s only one way out of here, and we were standing in front of it.”

  He sighed. “Why does it even matter?”

  I stared at him open mouthed. Was he kidding?

  “Uh, maybe because there’s a murderer running around the city and your receptionist just disappeared.”

  His shoulders tightened as he sped up, hitting the double doors at a dead run. Instead of the star filled conference room of before, we stepped into a cozy office lined on three sides with shelves and shelves of books. The carpet in here was the same as the hallway, but that was about the only thing that looked like it belonged.

  I turned in a circle. The room looked like it had been crammed with artifact after artifact, some of it quite old.

  “Good,” the teenager sounded relieved. “I was afraid this had disappeared too.”

  Disappeared too?

  “There never was a receptionist, was there?”

  It made sense. I’d known there was something off with her. She’d never moved from the desk, instead repeating the same types of tasks over and over. Kind of like a recording. Even her interaction with me had been one sided, like a prerecorded message. How could I not have seen it before?

  The sorcerer shot me a look and hurried to one of the bookshelves.

  I was right. I’d stake money on it.

  “Ah ha.”

  Ah ha, what?

  I crossed the room as he pulled a book, placing it on the desk with a thud. It was old, the kind of old that looked like it had been put together by monks in a monastery somewhere, complete with intricate drawings and bound by hand. The kind of tome that should be sitting protected in a library archive in a temperature controlled room, handled by people wearing gloves, not being tossed around in some dirty office.

  I looked at where he was pointing but couldn’t read the words. It might have
been Sanskrit to me as it looked like a bunch of chicken scratch. Luckily there were pictures. The hand drawn portrait was of a man in armor, clawing his way out of a grave with purple flowers on it. The man was dead, his nails and teeth black with the flesh hanging in strips from his face. The eyes looked crazy.

  “And what is it?”

  A picture of a zombie creature told me nothing I didn’t already know.

  “A draugr.” He said it like he expected me to know exactly what he was talking about.

  I gave him a blank stare.

  “A draugr. You know, the Norse undead.”

  That didn’t really clear things up for me.

  The sorcerer must have sensed that. He scrubbed one hand through his hair, leaving it to stick up in all different directions. It would have been adorable if he hadn’t followed the action with words.

  “I really don’t know how you made it through the selection to become a vampire,” he muttered. “You’re as dumb as a rock. They usually only pick the best.”

  “Hey, cut me a break. This stuff is pretty new for me. I’ve only been at this for a little over two years.”

  “That’s plenty of time to learn something. I knew more than this in the first year of my apprenticeship.”

  “Sorry that my mythical education didn’t include Norse mythology. We’re in the frickin’ states. It didn’t exactly make the list of creatures I was likely to encounter. Quit belittling my lack of knowledge and just explain what the damn thing is.”

  His face was mutinous as he said, “Fine. The draugr can be traced to the Norse. The name literally means ‘Again Walkers’. They rise from the dead. Usually they’re former warriors, but nobody is quite sure what gives rise to them.”

  “So they’re basically zombies.”

  “Not at all. The draugr retain their intelligence and aren’t contagious. The stories contradict each other but most agree that the draugr possess certain talents, including the ability to change their size, possess animals and drive them mad, ride the dead, walk in dreams and control the weather.”

  I didn’t like the sound of the last two. It’d been hard enough dealing with the draugr when he was reanimating dead bodies and making them two times their natural size. I didn’t know what I’d do if he was suddenly able to throw a twister at me or invade my dreams. How did I guard against that?