Shadow's Messenger: An Aileen Travers Novel

by T. A. White

  Seeing where I was looking, he tugged his jacket sleeve down to cover the bronze.

  “He’s been gone for almost four months,” he said grudgingly.

  I’d guessed right. The glare he shot me promised retribution. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. After the draugr was taken care of, I’d probably be in the hands of the vampires. I doubted he would want to start a war with them for the indignities he’d endured at my hands.

  “Great, you have your answer. How should we do this?” I asked, turning to Miriam.

  She swept the cards into a single deck, wiping her game clean.

  “First, I’ll call my apprentice, then we’ll see about summoning your trinkets.”

  We waited as she made the call, Peter muttering about the ridiculousness of it all. The call placed, Miriam shuffled another hand of solitaire to herself. I fought against the urge to pace. There were still several hours until dawn, but I didn’t know how long the wolves would give me before making their move.

  Flipping my phone over and over in my hand, I toyed with the idea of calling Liam and updating him about our plans. No, it would be best to wait. If we managed to get the items in hand, we could call him in then. Right now this plan of mine had only a small chance of succeeding.

  “Miriam? What’s this about?” Angela called from the front room. She didn’t sound happy to be here. Surprise registered on her face at seeing us as she stepped into the back room.

  “We have customers,” Miriam said, abandoning her game of solitaire.

  Looking like she had sucked on something sour, Angela gave us a nod before listening to Miriam’s instructions.

  “We need to perform a summoning ritual. Get what we need from the front room while I set up in back.” To me, Miriam said, “He’ll need to stay in here. My spells and rituals have been passed down from mentor to apprentice for generations and I have no intention of our knowledge falling into the hands of some barely minted sorcerer.”

  “Like I have any interest in the backwards, inefficient way you witches do things,” Peter returned.

  I didn’t know if I liked the idea of Angela participating given what I’d seen on the tape from the club, but I didn’t know what I could say to Miriam that would be believable. Angela was her apprentice. Chances were she’d trust anything she said over me and in the end I hadn’t seen anything that was a red flag.

  “That’s fine, Miriam.” I turned to Peter. “Then waiting here won’t be a problem for you.”

  He shrugged, not giving any of his thoughts away. “Whatever. If you want to trust these two, it’s your funeral.”

  I wasn’t too worried. It was just a summoning ritual. I didn’t know much about magic, but I didn’t imagine there was too much danger inherent in something that sounded relatively innocent.

  “What do you need from me?” I asked.

  Miriam had watched our interaction with an enigmatic expression. At my question, her expression shifted to amusement.

  “Not much. He’ll stay here, but you’re welcome to watch.”

  Magic had always interested me. From the time I was no bigger than my dad’s knee, I’d sought opportunities to watch magicians and their assistants. I read any book featuring witches and saw all the movies on the subject. Something about the idea of magic just drew me.

  When I made my transition, I’d anticipated a life filled with its possibility around every corner. So far, magic had been distinctly lacking in everything I did. From what I’d seen human technology worked just as well and was easier and quicker. I had no idea how either tech or magic worked but their effects were often the same.

  “I would love that.”

  I ignored the sorcerer’s snort of derision.

  “Follow me,” Miriam said.

  She stood and headed through a door I hadn’t noticed until now. It led to the back, but instead of an empty parking lot, we were in a meadow with a starry, night sky above us.

  “Illusion?”

  She shrugged one slim shoulder. “One man’s illusion is another’s reality.”

  How philosophical. A professor in college had said something similar. That every person’s perception of the same experience is slightly different, from the vantage point you see from, to all of your previous experiences that have influenced you until that moment. For that reason, everyone’s reality is different from one another in small but significant ways.

  Even after all these years, I remembered his words. They had made a certain poetic sense to me up to a point. At the same time, an apple was just an apple even if I was viewing it from above and you from the side. You might hate apples because of something that happened in your childhood, and I might love them, but the apple was still an apple. Its core essence didn’t change.

  That inability to fully grasp a philosophical concept is probably why I ended up with a C in the class. The only C I’d had my entire time in college.

  This illusion was impressive in the level of reality it presented, but it was still just an illusion. It was a waste of effort, in my opinion.

  “I have the supplies,” Angela said behind me.

  I looked away from the stars. Angela bent, her arms full, to set down her items. I tried to catch her eye to thank her. Being woken up in the early morning hours to perform a magic ritual was probably not that fun, but she turned her head away, giving what she was doing her full attention.

  “Shall we begin?” Miriam asked before I could speak to Angela.

  I nodded and stepped back as Angela straightened and began walking in a circle, dumping a white substance on the ground in a thin, consistent line. I sniffed experimentally. Salt. She was making a salt circle.

  Huh. Guess human fiction had gotten something right. Salt always seemed to be used to create wards or keep things out in those books I used to read.

  “So how is this going to work?” I asked, stepping up beside Miriam as Angela finished laying the circle.

  Miriam gave me a sidelong glance.

  “The ritual is one that has been in my family for nearly ten generations. Outsiders have rarely witnessed it.”

  She moved away after that, leaving me staring after her in bemusement. Well, that was cryptic. I watched as the two of them moved around the clearing with sure, precise movements. It was like watching a dance, one with a music only the two of them could hear.

  The trees branches rustled in the light breeze as the grass added their own melody to the night. I closed my eyes, listening. For a moment, it felt like I could hear a very faint strain of the music. That whisper of a melody disappeared when Miriam said, “We’re ready.”

  My eyes popped open. They’d been busy while I’d been entertaining myself with a nonexistent song.

  At each of the four corners a candle burned and a small bowl, each one filled with different substance. A map had been set in the middle along with the photo copy of Jackson Miller and his wife.

  Miriam and Angela were still in their normal clothes. I had envisioned a crazy scenario of them conducting the ritual skyclad, which I thought was the hippie way of saying naked, or in elaborate ceremonial robes.

  Neither of them seemed inclined to strip. I shivered as a sudden breeze whipped by. Being naked in this weather would have been unbearable, anyway. There also wasn’t any sign of robes.

  “I don’t suppose you have anything besides this photo from the draugr?”

  I shook my head. Getting close to a creature rather intent on my death had been the last thing on my mind.

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Her head tilted in thought. “It may make things a little difficult.”

  “Her presence in the circle might strengthen the connection,” Angela suddenly spoke up. “The draugr seems to have fixated on her. It could bolster the ritual enough to work.”

  Miriam gave Angela an assessing gaze, her thoughts shielded and inscrutable. “That is a possibility.”

  I waited, not sure if she wanted my involvement. Her words hadn’t been
a rousing endorsement of Angela’s idea.

  There was an odd distance between Miriam and Angela, one that hadn’t been there the last time I was at the shop. I wondered if Miriam was still upset about Angela seeing Victor behind her back. I had a better grasp of why Miriam might want Angela to steer clear now that I knew the man was a werewolf. None of the otherworld sects cared for the other. Miriam probably didn’t want a personal association between her apprentice and another group. On the other hand, I’d met Victor and I wouldn’t want someone I cared about dating that jerk.

  Miriam gestured me forward. As I stepped over the salt circle, I felt a slight buzzing across my senses. I shivered again as the hair on my body stood straight up. It felt like I was continually getting zapped by mild static electricity. It was unsettling and brought my fight or flight instincts to the fore.

  I kept moving forward, my anticipation turning into a need to get this over and done with. I stopped next to the map and the copy of the photo as Miriam indicated.

  Their voices rose and lifted in a chant, the background buzzing edging from simply uncomfortable to something approaching pain. It felt like a hand had me in a vise grip and was squeezing my insides then relaxing. Again and again.

  Was this normal? If so, I’d have to rethink participating in any other magic rituals. This was how I always imagined it felt being in one of those g-force simulators, but instead of a constant gravity, the force surged and receded like a strong wind.

  Miriam raised her face to the sky, the words pouring from her mouth faster and faster. I couldn’t decipher the individual words, only the cadence of them in the rising melody. That same unseen force gathered around her, tightening like a boa constrictor. Her body was shadowed and hard to see as the force around her strengthened and grew.

  I shifted my gaze to Angela, whose voice rose and fell in tandem with Miriam’s. In contrast to the older woman’s almost holy look, Angela’s gaze remained fixed on mine. She seemed determined and victorious as she stared me down. Smug satisfaction oozed from her expression.

  My gaze snagged on her necklace. I had seen it before, and recently. A single branch stood out among the fine details. My eyes shot to the photo of Jackson Miller and his wife. I knew where I had seen it.

  Everything came together for me. Angela’s locket and Victor’s hostility. I’d been right when I saw her on the vampire’s club tape. I don’t know why she’d lured the victim on it to his death, but I had no doubt now that it was the sorcerer’s contact I’d been meant to meet.

  This was a trap. How could I have been so stupid? Miriam must be in on it too. Her interest in the photo had been pronounced. Now I knew why. She probably fed me that line about the ritual being an old ancestral one to get the sorcerer out of the way.

  I advanced forward despite the invisible wind buffeting me. I needed to stop this before it was too late. Pain bit at me. It felt like pieces of me were breaking off and disintegrating into the ether.

  I screamed, the sound wordless and full of rage.

  This was not how I was going out.

  I forced myself an inch closer, darkness eating at the edges of my vision and the song reaching a crescendo.

  I reached out, my skin and hand dissolving even as I inched closer and closer to Miriam. Almost. Almost. Just another few inches.

  I touched the skin of her face right as her eyes popped open and the song stopped. Silence waited for an eternal minute and then darkness raced in on me. I saw no more.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My head felt like an Army drill team was performing on it. I lifted it and winced as the matter between my ears throbbed in protest. I hadn’t felt this hung over since that one time in college when Caroline decided she wanted to conduct an experiment on which liquor could get us drunk fastest. Tequila won.

  How much had I drunk last night? I was too old to party like I used to. My body didn’t recover the same.

  I sat up, brushing away the paper plastered to my face. Even the crinkle of it as I set it aside hurt my ears.

  I looked around. I was in a cemetery and not one I recognized. Tombstones surrounded me, so faded with time that the names were illegible.

  Where was I?

  This went beyond having a few too many drinks the previous night. I stood on shaky legs and glanced around. The cemetery was deserted this late at night, not a soul to be seen. I walked carefully over several graves, nearly tripping on the uneven ground, until I reached the gravel path.

  My memories began to come back to me. Miriam, Angela, the spell. Something had gone wrong.

  It was hard to think. My brain felt like it was encased in cotton.

  I clutched at the map in my hand. It was a reassuring totem in a world gone topsy turvy. I didn’t even know it was possible to teleport people using magic. It violated pretty much every law of physics I’d ever learned in high school.

  Unless the spell had simply knocked me unconscious, and Miriam and Angela had dumped me in the cemetery. Or this could be an illusion. Like the one that had covered Miriam’s back parking lot.

  I thought the spell was supposed to summon the items to me. Not send me to the items. Maybe Angela wearing the locket made the spell go wonky.

  I looked around again, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place slower than I’d like. I was in a cemetery. From the looks of it, an old cemetery. Possibly a cemetery circa the civil war time period.

  Now what monster did we know derived from that time period and rose from its own grave? Ding, ding, ding. A draugr.

  One or both of the crazy bitches had sent me to the same cemetery containing the draugr’s grave. Fuck. If the night wasn’t already bad enough with my discovery that Angela was at least partially responsible for the murders, I’d also been delivered to the monster’s doorstep. This was just hunky dory.

  I felt for my pocket. If there was ever time to call in back up, it was now. I had no desire to run into the draugr alone.

  I dialed Liam, skulking from headstone to headstone as the phone rang.

  Come on, pick up. Pick up. You blew my phone up all night, but you can’t pick up the one time I need you?

  It went to voicemail. Shit. I dialed again.

  I might be a vampire, but walking through a graveyard late at night by myself was still creepy. My skin crawled with the expectation that at any moment something was going to jump out at me.

  It went to voicemail again. Liam’s terse voice barked at me to leave a message.

  “You give me shit about checking in with you and then when I do, you don’t answer?” I hissed. “As soon as you get this, get to the civil war cemetery in Westgate. Oh, and I figured out that one of the people responsible for all the recent deaths is a witch named Angela. She’s on your recordings in the club meeting with a nerdy guy.”

  The phone beeped, signaling my time was over. I hung up with a mental curse.

  I thought a moment and then dialed another number. Brax had been interested in finding the culprits, and I’d certainly done that. Their possession of the items would just have to be proof enough.

  The phone rang and rang before going to voicemail.

  Again? This was ridiculous.

  Perhaps the sorcerer could help me. I didn’t have a phone number for him, but I did have his mark. That’s what it was supposedly for, right? Keeping him in touch?

  I bared my forearm, and ran one finger along it thinking dire thoughts. I dug a fingernail into it, thinking maybe it needed pain to activate. Nothing. I had no idea if it worked or not.

  Looked like I was on my own.

  I wasn’t prepared to be on my own. I had no weapons. I left those in my car. I had no idea how to defeat the draugr beyond a vague plan of wrestling it back into its grave. I had my doubts as to the effectiveness of that method, even if I could figure out which grave was his.

  Stop panicking, soldier. We’re still alive. We just need to make it out of the cemetery and back to some sort of highway. From there I could get back to Elements. I act
ually wasn’t too far from it. I just needed to move quickly and carefully and everything would be all right.

  I rounded a set of tombstones and came face to face with two wolves. I froze.

  Ever unexpectedly come face to face with a predator in the wild? The great wide beyond is its territory and you know if you move, if you even breathe wrong, that it might be the last thing you ever do. Still, you can’t help but stare at the majestic beast in front of you, hyper-aware that something so fierce and wonderful can exist in this world. Coming face to face with the wolves was kind of like that.

  Time slowed, coming almost to a standstill. Then in the next moment it sped up.

  One of the wolves changed, its form folding in on itself as the fur receded, leaving a man crouched in its place.

  A naked Brax stood.

  He’d got my message. Thank God.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Or not.

  Wait, if he didn’t get my voicemail, why was he standing in front of me naked.

  “I told you everything in the voicemail. Didn’t you listen to it?”

  He gestured at his naked body. “Do I look like I’m carrying around a phone?”

  Males. Always picking the absolute worst time to display sarcasm.

  “What are you doing here if you didn’t get my message?”

  No, wait. He’d said something about going hunting. I closed my eyes. Of course he hadn’t waited. Why would he do that? He was a big alpha male capable of subduing monsters with a single irate glare. My mistake.

  “We’re patrolling. I have several teams in the area scouting out the draugr and possible hideouts.”

  “I thought you said you’d give me a little time to get the proof you needed.”

  It was getting hard keeping my eyes trained on his face. All that naked flesh, covering miles of ripped muscle, had a way of distracting a person. He was most women’s wet dream, cut in all the right places with sharply defined ridges. Guess all that running around on all fours had a nice effect on the body. If all werewolves were built like this, I might want to rethink my policy on fraternizing with beings from the otherworld.