by J. S. Morin
She waited. The footsteps drew closer, slowing to a cautious pace. “Was that supposed to be a—”
“Yes,” I snapped. “It’s not working.”
We should have traced the shadows down the dark side of the lighthouse. My shadow-jumping had done nothing.
Judy closed her eyes. “Try again.”
I tried a second time.
Nothing happened. We stayed put, in accordance with the commonly accepted laws of physics.
A shotgun barrel caught my attention and kept it. I was vaguely aware of a middle-aged man in an overcoat holding it trained at Judy and me.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Stand up. Keep your hands where I can see ‘em,” the lighthouse keeper ordered.
“Please, sir. This is all just a misunderstanding,” Judy said as she climbed to her feet.
I took a deep, slow breath and tried to keep my calm. The shotgun hadn’t budged as Judy moved; it was aimed squarely at my head. “Up, shadow scum!”
My eyes went wide, and I complied.
Forcing myself to take a closer look at my adversary, my breath caught in my throat.
The lighthouse keeper’s eyes were set unnaturally wide. If he wore glasses, he’d have been staring at the hinges. But if there was one thing that the Order of Vigilants was known for, it was impeccable eyesight.
“You got this all wrong,” I said, not moving a muscle once I assumed the classic bank-hold-up pose. “We’re here to fight the shadow incursion.”
“Heard that one afore.” The vigilant spat over the edge of the catwalk. “You thralls need some new material. Bad enough they keep sendin’ the dregs my way. Oughtta at least give you a fighting chance.” He glanced at Judy. “Nothing of the taint on you. This your boyfriend here? He make you do this? What’s your story?”
Judy swallowed. “He’s not my boyfriend. Actually, I’m in a committed relationship that I’ve started to reevaluate lately. My boyfriend is a good person and potentially excellent father material, but he’s growing more career focused and less interested in me physically. Matt and I have been friends for ten years and have recently admitted certain mutual attractions that we’ve been hiding from one another. And while he’s certainly more openly affectionate and a better communicator, I don’t know that I can end a long-term relationship without putting in a good faith effort to make things work. Plus, when I consider my own career, I’m not sure I’m ready for the emotional upheaval of a major change in relationships—increased dopamine levels, shifting evening routine, intruding thoughts of sexual encounters during meetings. Not to mention the fact that until very recently I was concerned about Matt’s mental state, which I’ve now come to understand is directly related to being hounded by a shadow. In light of that—no pun intended—I’ve reevaluated his recent behavior and realized that all things considered, he’s been a model of mental health. If it had been me who was being hounded, I don’t think I’d have left my therapist’s office until she had me committed to someplace with excellent lighting. And while Matt hasn’t forced me along on any of this, he’s certainly been highly persuasive in his efforts to convince me that the fate of the world might rest on our near-term actions.
“We are actually trying to help,” Judy said, finally taking a breath.
I grimaced. The saving grace of the whole thing was that she hadn’t compared how well Tim and I were endowed.
“So…” the vigilant said. “He’s mucked your brain up.”
“Excuse me!” Judy said.
“Just you step aside, young lady. Might want to avert them eyes, too.”
I watched his eyes. The vigilant didn’t blink. I knew from the books and show that they couldn’t if they wanted to, but I had to see for myself. Those eyes just bored into me.
“I see you tryin’ that shadow hocus pocus,” the vigilant said. “Not on my watch. And girl, move that backside of yours or I’m liable to shoot the both of you and call it a night.”
“Patricia Martinez sent us,” Judy said. “We were looking for an invisible USB drive.”
The vigilant patted his coat pocket. “It’ll be the third time someone’s come lookin’. It’s there for someone, and it sure as sunrise wasn’t put there for the likes of you two. Got some friends who’re going to want answers from you, young lady. The right ones, and you might earn some protective custody from the shadows. This one though…”
The vigilant brought the shotgun up to eye level and sighted down the barrel at me.
Judy stepped in front of me and ushered me around the lens, away from the vigilant. As he tried to come around to reacquire his target, I circled the lens, keeping it between the two of us.
The vigilant paid Judy no heed as she ducked out of the way except to avoid tripping over her.
My sneakers pounded on the metallic grate floor of the catwalk. The vigilant’s boots did likewise.
He was slow and stiff, a combination of age and cumbersome attire that provided the only advantage I had. It was tempting to dive for the stairwell to get out of his sight, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough.
Any anointed knight of the Order of Vigilants would be able to see through the floor—and this guy looked too old to be an acolyte. Under the vigilant’s watchful eyes, my shadow was impotent. I’d end up breaking every bone in my body, unable to shadow-jump to safety.
Not to mention that I couldn’t abandon Judy.
I heard a squeaking sound. On one pass around the lens, I noticed Judy had a marker out and was drawing a rune circle on the base of the flashlight.
It was quick thinking; a vigilant’s power wasn’t going to stop rune magic.
Of course, that assumed that Judy’s personal rune was going to present itself in the next few seconds.
The vigilant was breathing heavily.
He tried to outsmart me, reversing direction without warning, but his lumbering steps were no match for youth and mortal fear. We came to a standstill with me on Judy’s side of the lamp and him on the far side of the lens. Though we could see one another through the distorted glass, I was safe from buckshot so long as he was unwilling to blast through the key component of the lighthouse. He faked moving to one side; I went the other way.
“Can’t… keep getting lucky all night,” the vigilant said. “Give ya credit. You’re… quicker than the last two… to try getting it.”
“Freeze!” Judy shouted, popping up and aiming the flashlight at the vigilant. “Put down the gun!”
The vigilant chuckled. “There are no arcanists your age, young lady.” Instead of lowering his weapon, he turned it toward Judy.
Judy hit the button.
The beam shined right in the vigilant’s eyes from a few feet away. It shone as if the midday sun had parted the starry sky like a bank of clouds after a storm.
The vigilant cried out and covered his eyes. The shotgun angled away as his hands were busied shielding those sensitive, unblinking eyes.
I’m not sure what came over me. Matt Lee was no hero, if I examined myself objectively. What happened next I blame on adrenaline, plus maybe a bit of chivalry, having just seen that gun pointed at Judy.
Dashing around the central lens, I crashed into the vigilant before he could recover and aim the weapon my way.
He slammed against the wrought iron safety fence that surrounded the top of the lighthouse and struck his head. The shotgun clattered to the floor beside him.
The vigilant flopped to the catwalk face first. That was when I saw the third eye, centered in the back of his bald head, staring vacantly up at me. He groaned and struggled to rise. In a panic, I picked up the shotgun and slammed the butt of it down on his head with a crack. This time when he fell, the vigilant lay still.
“My God, Matt. Did you kill him?” Judy asked.
Avoiding the blood seeping from his scalp, I felt for a pulse.
“He’s just out cold.”
I felt inside the pocket he had patted and felt a thumb drive. It was invisible when I held it out to
Judy.
She snatched it from me and held it between her fingers, staring through it in the moonlight. “It’ll be safer with me.”
“Which one of us has magic powers and just saved us from a vigilant?”
Judy closed her hand around the USB drive and slid it straight into her jeans pocket.
I chuckled. “Let’s get out of here. He might not be the only one.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
We never got around to that whole plan about checking into a motel. I’d enjoyed the idea of the old lady with her glasses on a chain giving us dirty looks as we checked in with no luggage. But we never got a chance to play out that scenario.
We slept in Judy’s car.
The night before, I’d plotted a heist involving a team of seven, a getaway van, and costumes. This morning, I woke up in a dingy parking lot behind a lobster shack that had closed for the season. My brain could barely connect the dots that had led me so far astray from the original plan.
With the getaway on our minds, Judy and I hadn’t even explored the second USB drive. Judy had plugged it in, but the contents had been overwhelming. It was a quarter terabyte drive with hardly any room to spare.
In the passenger’s seat, Judy’s chest rose and fell. Her glasses were folded with an arm hooked on her shirt collar. She looked so… regular.
When Judy was awake and talkative, it was hard to confuse her with the mass of peasants out there who struggled to file their taxes and thought math was a four-letter word. It was also hard to confuse her with the general population who could watch sports, look strangers in the eye, and generally relax. She just wasn’t wired like regular people.
I didn’t want to wake her. But it was coming up on noon, and we’d overslept our plans to sneak back into Boston before breakfast and find out the lay of the land.
Putting a hand on Judy’s shoulder, I shook her gently.
“Rise and shine,” I whispered.
“I hate that saying,” my shadow griped.
I flashed the shadow a silent snarl so as not to involve Judy in our bickering. Playing my cards right, I wouldn’t have to follow through on that visit to Dr. Grace. Continue arguing with thin air, and Judy might still strong-arm me into seeing her.
After all, half the people who went to therapy did it just to be able to act sane. Trouble with a talking shadow still probably counted as a relationship issue.
“Come on,” I said a little louder. “We need to get home.”
Judy stirred, then woke with a sudden start. Blinking and rubbing her eyes, she felt around until she located her glasses and put them on. She was quiet a moment, eyes scanning the car. “That all happened, right?”
“Yes, it still all happened. If you want, I can record it for you to use as an alarm on your phone. ‘Yes, the world’s still fucked up. No, you’re not asleep, dreaming, or dead.’”
“Matt?”
I gave her my undivided attention in all seriousness.
“Is it OK if I’m ravenously hungry but don’t want to eat?”
With a forced chuckle to lighten the mood, I started the car. “Hey, you’re welcome to try. But sooner or later, we’ve got to eat.”
“My stomach’s in knots,” Judy went on. “I hate puking, but I feel like it would help.”
“It’s your car,” I said with a shrug.
“That’s not it, though. We’re criminals. We don’t have any safe place to go. We’re on the run. Tim’s in jail, and there’s no way to get a hold of him to apologize. Throwing up won’t fix any of that.”
She had a point. This wasn’t a bad burrito we were dealing with.
“Tim’s going to be fine,” I assured her. “I know plenty of recently anointed lawyers who might do me a favor.”
One of the upsides of attending Harvard was having Facebook friends filtering through the bar exams.
“And what if the guy who keeps harassing you decides to go after Tim in jail?” Judy countered. She clutched her stomach.
“Tim’ll be safe… in…”
I thought back to my own time in lockup. That was just the “we don’t know what to do with you yet” holding cell. Tim would get transferred to a real jail cell, arraigned, and given one of those Shaolin-looking orange jumpsuits.
But armed guards and razor wire wouldn’t keep out the shadows if they wanted in.
“Shit,” I muttered. Well, add that to my list of personal crosses to bear.
I’d nearly killed a guy last night. Concussed him, at the least.
There was nothing in the books to suggest that knights of the Order of Vigilants were any stronger or tougher than regular people. They rode without helmets to allow their vision its full potential—and in the case of the show, because it looked cool—not because they were impervious.
Now I had to worry that my self-appointed nemesis might do something to Tim in retaliation.
“Now you see what I mean?” Judy asked.
I didn’t know how she did it, but Judy always seemed to know when I’d finished thinking something through.
“Yeah. But starving to death won’t help. Let’s grab some breakfast—with cash—and check out that drive. You mentioned finding another video…”
“Did I?” Judy asked with a yawn. “The dreams I’ve been having lately… it’s hard to keep track.”
She flipped open her laptop and accessed the files.
I put the car in gear and backed out of the scrubby dirt parking lot.
“Yeah. Here it is,” Judy confirmed.
It wasn’t the safest ride, but I kept glancing over as Judy hit play.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The speakers on Judy’s laptop broke into the voice of Patricia Martinez.
“Dear God in heaven, I hope whoever is watching this is the one who needs most to see it.”
Martinez appeared sitting behind the same office as the first video. But if she looked haggard the first time, this time she was downright disheveled. Her hair was loose and tangled, held away from her face by the glasses pushed up onto her head.
Just barely in the frame was a tumbler with a pair of half-melted ice cubes and a residue of amber liquid at the bottom. Trembling hands rested on the desk in front of her, clasped as if to steady one another.
“If there is one hope I cling to, it is that you are the one I believe you to be. As best I can, I’m going to dispense with the bullshit and pretense I have to maintain in my public persona, my professional persona, and even my private life. This is just you and me now. By the time you’re watching this, I know I’ll be dead.”
My shadow slithered out from between the driver and passenger seats. “Why, Matt… I do believe she might be talking to you.”
I swallowed and forced myself to continue breathing. This was real confirmation that I wasn’t delusional. She really was talking to me, personally.
“To have gotten this far, you must have realized that Shadowblood isn’t fictional. I’ve dramatized it, but the core is not only really happening, it was foreseen. I have that gift, as do you.”
Judy cast me a wary glance. I snapped my eyes back fully to the road.
“In so many alternate futures, I’ve watched you die. My every effort to save you fails. But you’ve seen farther into our dark future than I ever have. You just don’t know how or perhaps even that you’ve really done so. Please trust me that you have. Our future isn’t set in stone but rather flows like magma. It can be steered but only so much. It can’t be reversed or undone, but with effort certain outcomes you foresee can be altered.
“This drive contains everything I’ve been able to gather about the coming invasion. The shadows are not a unified force, but rather a gnarled and twisted mish-mosh of alliances and rivalries whose quarrels are spilling into Earth. The conflicts of the shadow world are never settled any more so than Earth’s, and Earth has been pushing back occasional spillover from that other world for thousands of years.
“Ancient shadowbloods have slain pharaohs and kahns.
They’ve been repelled in the name of Zeus, Wodin, and Christ. This time, I fear they may gain a foothold.”
“The other shadows tell me that there were a few other tries that didn’t make it out of China and Egypt.”
I shushed my shadow, drawing a look of concern from Judy. She paused the video.
“You OK, Matt?” Judy ventured. “I know this is some heady stuff, but—”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. Earth was just getting a little claustrophobic, that’s all, what with a clairvoyant predicting my unavoidable death.
“Nothing I try works. For years I’ve been mitigating the damage, slowing their incursion, but nothing stops them. That was when I realized the limited horizon of my vision. Victory or defeat lie past that boundary. You’ve seen deeper into the future than I have, but I’ve seen your death. There was no path I could find—and believe me, I searched—where both of us survive. For months, I’ve been hoping that pulling Saliera’s death scene into the season five finale would be a needless precaution. I’d seen that it would catch your attention, since you’d seen it as well.”
I snorted. “She can say that again.”
“I’m sorry for leaving you alone to discover your power. Every way I foresaw it, telling you would only have made you complacent. I needed your drive, your fire, your insatiability intact. Plus, you can’t imagine the strain I’ve been under, trying to keep every genie in his own bottle.”
“Meddlesome hag,” my shadow whispered. “She should have stuck to fiction and left the arcane arts alone.”
Despite the shadow’s objection, Martinez continued on.
“Now, you have no buffer but your own wits and a few allies who I’ve identified in the attached files. If you’re reading this, you know that the Order of Vigilants is alive and well, if small in number, here on Earth. I hope Randall didn’t give you too much trouble before allowing you to retrieve this drive. He’s a good friend, and I owe him more than I can ever repay. If you’re with him watching this, Randall: thank you.”