by J. S. Morin
“Good afternoon. What can I get for you?” the brunette asked in the same over-caffeinated voice as every barista I’ve ever met.
A more suave version of me would have ordered something exotic but practical, a drink I’d obviously spent years developing a taste for and tinkering with the specifics until I had it just the perfect way. I’d have rattled it off casually as she frantically jotted my order on the side of a cup.
But I didn’t like their exotic concoctions, and I wasn’t quite so desperate to make an impression on—the name tag said Clara—that I was going to order something I’d hate to get her attention. “Black regular, big as you’ve got.”
She tilted her head and gave me a lopsided grin. “Lemme guess. Hard night of partying?”
“Huh?”
“Dark glasses, ordering black coffee at noon, last night’s clothes… it’s OK. We’ve all been there.” She stepped over to the coffee pots and started prepping my order. Not that black coffee was a trick. Don’t spill and you’re golden.
As soon as she looked away, I glanced down at my rumpled clothes and ran fingers through my hair in lieu of a comb.
“Guess I am kind of a mess,” I admitted when she came back with my coffee. “But I wasn’t out drinking.”
“One of the night owls staking out the jail, then?” Her tone was light, with a hint of condescension. Subtle, unlike the jackhammer bitterness of the coffee upon first sip. The stuff was too hot for anything but sipping.
I looked pointedly around the restaurant. “Business is booming, huh?”
“We get foot traffic, and people are keeping off the streets because of that zoo escape.”
I followed Clara’s gaze out the storefront windows. A creature ambled by that looked like a scaly ostrich. My nerves were burnt to a crisp already, and with a wall of glass between us and it, somehow the shock that should have accompanied an otherworldly animal strolling down the street just failed to register as a shock.
“It’s not a zoo animal anymore. It’s a garrenbeast… probably.” I leaned against the counter like it was no big deal.
Clara brightened. “Like from the show?”
That perked up an eyebrow. Clara went up a notch in my book. They never had one on-screen in the TV version, but garrenbeasts were mentioned a few times.
“Kind of exactly like from the show. I’m not one of the sideshow gawkers camping the jail like it’s going to spawn power-ups, but I’m into that shit.”
“And you’re not afraid of the… garrenbeast?” Her voice pitched up an octave, making sure she’d gotten the name right.
Three hours sleep and two witnesses, one of whom was reading a newspaper like it was 1960. I could risk making an ass of myself. “It’d be more afraid of me.”
I pulled down my sunglasses and winked.
That drew a chuckle. “So what’s your name?”
“I’m Matt… which is coincidentally what all my friends call me.”
“Clara. Short for Clarabelle. Yeah, my parents actually did that.”
There was the third rail of first impressions. I had a snappy anecdote on the tip of my tongue about what assholes my parents were, but that wasn’t the road I wanted to drive. “Midwest?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’d think, right? No, I grew up in Connecticut.”
“I grew up in Cali, but I’ve been east so long it’s kind of home now.”
“Brutal. You picked Boston over sun and sand?”
“Not a lot of sand in San Jose, but yeah. Hey, listen. I’d love to hang here and keep you company in this ghost town, but I’ve got a buddy out on the streets somewhere not answering his cell. Gotta track him down and make sure he didn’t get eaten or something. Wouldn’t mind catching up with you later.”
Clara didn’t hesitate. “My shift’s over in about an hour. Maybe catch a late lunch?”
“To be honest, once I drag my friend home and off these streets, I’m probably going to crash for most of the afternoon. How about more like 10 tonight. There’s a chance I could get killed out there, but if I’m alive by ten, I’m all yours.”
She took a half step back from the counter. “You a drug dealer or something?”
“Nah, nothing like that,” I reassured her.
The guy with the gauged earlobes was dumping a pot of stale coffee. Mr. Newspaper had his nose in the business section. No one but Clara was watching.
I turned up a hand and in my palm I formed a rune circle out of shadow. Freestanding, floating, completely impossible to have occurred by coincidence or a simple trick of the light. Of course I had no personal rune—I left the center blank and didn’t even try. Plus, I wasn’t sure shadow was even a viable material for crafting runes.
Clara gaped, wide eyed. I peered over the top of my sunglasses, curious what color hers were. I got a good look at a pair of turquoise contacts. Had to be. That color didn’t exist in nature. Suited her though.
I let the shadow disappear. Clara blinked. She looked at her hands. She pushed up her sleeves and checked her forearms. She felt the sides of her neck, just under her chin. “You’re not high. I’m for real.”
“Whoa…” she backed away but didn’t take her eyes off me.
“You’re not crazy, and I’m not dangerous. Well, not any danger to you, anyway. Offer stands. Pick anyplace in the city. I’ll meet you there.”
“Joe-Boy’s Diner,” she answered without a second’s hesitation.
Had it ever been this easy? Simple tastes, too. Nothing pretentious about her.
I raised my coffee in toast as I turned to leave. “See you then.”
My shadow hadn’t said a word the whole time, so this was all me. Or was it? There was a glassy look in those eyes, like Clara didn’t believe she was awake.
With Boston going to hell and Twilight Zone episodes seeping onto the streets, maybe she was just going with whatever flow came her way. I was just the lucky guy in the right place at the right time.
As I emerged onto the street, a cold breeze struck me. It woke me up more than the coffee had, though the coffee probably wasn’t hurting.
What the hell was I thinking? Clara was hot. She had a sense of humor. But why drag a complication into this mess?
I wasn’t thinking straight, but even as I paused to consider, one thing jumped out: Clara was kind of Judy’s type.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Despite the overcast skies, I still needed sunglasses to stave off the glare. Searching on foot seemed so slow, but there were hardly any shadows for hiding or travel. The nearest liquor store was a few blocks away. With no leads, I decided to start my quest for Simon there.
Distant sirens reminded me that the heat wasn’t totally off our little band of fugitives. The odds that the cops were after Simon paled against the chances of them being for a garrenbeast sighting or some other shadow-world oddity melding into the cityscape.
I kept up my pace and hung close to the sides of buildings. If anything with claws or fangs decided to spring into existence suddenly, I wanted a shadow close at hand for a quick escape.
The sirens grew closer, and I realized that I was heading the same way as them. A police cruiser parked outside Riverside Wine and Spirits with its lights flashing.
I peered around the corner as an ambulance unloaded a stretcher. Two paramedics entered the liquor store as another police cruiser pulled up.
A crowd was gathering at a safe distance, gawking.
Fighting down the rising dread that quickened my heart, I edged my way to the front of the crowd, angling my shoulder and rudely forcing my way between onlookers.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound morbidly curious instead of worried as hell.
“Stabbing,” someone grumbled.
Stepping back from the crowd, I put a hand over my mouth as if to stifle a yawn. “Go inside. Check it out. Keep hidden.”
My shadow grumbled but complied.
Scanning the crowd, I watched for signs that anyone noticed the shadow that m
oved of its own accord. If any of the onlookers picked up on it, no one made mention.
A moment later, my shadow returned. “Your friend Simon,” it whispered. “Quite dead.”
My mouth went dry.
I stumbled through the pressing bodies of the crowd, then turned and shoved my way out of the crush with a few muttered apologies.
My mind swirled. Simon was dead—murdered.
The odds of it being unrelated were nil. Someone had tracked him down, and all the cops in Boston weren’t going to find who did it.
I had to get back to the hideout.
Judy and everyone at Pi On Third were sitting ducks. I pulled out my phone to call ahead with a warning. That’s when I remembered Simon’s phone. If the cops didn’t have it yet, they would any minute.
I texted Judy: “Simon DEAD. Burn all phones.”
Then, realizing how she might react, I followed up with a quick: “omw back.”
Retracing my route back to the pizza shop, there weren’t enough shadows for me to jump the whole way. I kept my eyes open, watching for signs of pursuit or surveillance. I didn’t have long to wait.
In the alley that ran behind the liquor store, a familiar figure all in black leaned against a brick wall. Half concealed among the wasteland of dumpsters and jutting air conditioners, he raised a beer bottle in toast as I caught sight of him.
Prudence said to run.
Even in the muddy gray daylight, there were shadows to jump through to help lose pursuit.
But prudence and I weren’t on good terms lately.
“What do you want?” I called out as I approached.
The Black-Hatted Stranger tipped back his beer and threw the empty bottle down the alley to shatter on the asphalt. “I want my friend Sweeny back. But we’re even now. Eye for an eye; guy for a guy.”
My feet stuck to the pavement. My heart froze. “Simon was a bystander. You fucking killed him.”
The Black-Hatted Stranger pushed himself away from the wall and leveled a finger at me. “You’re the one who upped the stakes. Freak. You can’t control your goddamn shadow, so you just unleashed the fucking thing. Yeah. I got you figured. You’re a wannabe tough guy, but you can’t do your own dirty work. Just close your eyes and your shadow does it for you. This ends now. We’ve got bigger problems now, thanks to you.”
“Me?”
“You’ve called in an airstrike. We’re slipping in the back door and you bust down a wall. That prison break ripped the barrier between worlds enough that it changed.”
“What’d I do? Why the prison and not the T?”
“Go ask your Chinese friends. I’ve got no idea. All I know is that this is getting international attention that I didn’t want. The only upside is that Kang’s crew is having an even bigger fit over it than we are.”
“Who’s we? Who do you work for?”
The Black-Hatted Stranger shook his head. “You’ve got no business in this fight. No fucking clue. Want my advice? Take that sorry-ass gang of yours and get out of the city. Go piss in someone else’s pond. Or…”
He took a menacing step toward me.
I took a matching step back. There were two police cruisers around the other side of the building, but I didn’t dream they would be able to do anything to help. “Try me, buddy. Let’s see who comes to avenge your death.”
He stopped. “You’d do it, too. Wouldn’t you?” When I didn’t answer, he just shook his head. “Crazy fucker. You’d hand yourself to your shadow just to pretend you’re a tough guy? Fine.”
The Black-Hatted Stranger turned to leave via the far end of the alley.
“Hey! Why Simon?”
He paused and looked over his shoulder. “First one I came across. Fuck with us again, I’ll pick one of the girls.”
My vision went red.
My jaw ached from clenching.
I willed my shadow into solid form. A blade… I needed something sharp in my hand. Tearing down the alley, I rushed for the Black-Hatted Stranger before he disappeared from sight. But when I got there, I was empty-handed, grasping nothing but insubstantial shadow.
The Black-Hatted Stranger whirled on me, and the blade in his hand looked real and solid. I skidded to a stop so suddenly that as I leaned away from him my sneakers slid out from under me. The pavement slammed into my ribs and hip, and I scrambled to regain my feet. But before I could stand, a booted foot pinned me to the ground.
Above the cloudy skies, the sun was directly overhead. I was in no shadow but the Black-Hatted Stranger’s, and he didn’t seem like a path I should dare traverse.
He leaned down. “You got issues, buddy. But you want out of this? Lemme make you a deal. I want what Martinez hid in that office. You’re going to bring it to me tonight, ten o’clock. Museum of Science. In the theater with the lightning show. I trust you to figure out your own way in.”
“Can you make it tomorrow?” I asked in a gasp. The weight from his boot was crushing down on me, making it hard to breathe. “I’ve got a date.”
“You think this is funny, you little bitch?”
“You could be finger-painting with his entrails if you just give me a moment,” my shadow interceded.
Black-Hat must have overheard, because he eased up in an instant. Still, the boot rested on my back.
“Gimme until tomorrow night. I’ve gotta get it from where it’s stashed.”
The boot lifted. Just as I thought I was free, it bore down and ground my chest into the pavement.
“You don’t show, I’m going to hunt down your friends one by one until you give your soul over to your shadow to fight back,” he replied. “Then I’m going to run like hell and leave your mind trapped behind the control of a shadow from the other world. You can’t keep squirming your way back to consciousness forever. One of these times it’s going to be you that’s the helpless, insubstantial one. Capisce?”
“Yeah.”
Oh, I got it all right. This fucker wanted me to think I was going to lose my battle with my own shadow. Like hell I was going to turn into a shadow thrall just for his benefit.
“Repeat it back.”
I closed my eyes. “Museum of Science. 10 PM tomorrow. Theater of Electricity.”
“Good, you know exactly where I’m talking about. And what are you bringing?”
“A USB drive.”
The pressure eased on my back but didn’t disappear. “Oh, really? What’s on it?”
“A message from Martinez, recorded before she died. She knew her death was coming.”
The boot jammed down on top of me before the Black-Hatted Stranger lifted it off. I was left sucking wind on the alley pavement as he walked away. “Yeah, she said as much.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
I stumbled back toward Pi On Third, knowing that sooner or later I was going to have to jump through the shadows to obscure my path.
First, I needed to collect the tattered shreds of my dignity and sew them back into something resembling the guy who scored a date with a girl he just met. After that, it would be finding a public restroom where I could pull up my shirt and feel along my ribs for broken bones.
Once I got that out of the way, maybe then I could tiptoe through the shadows to tell my friends in person how Simon died.
Tortured squawking pierced the city noise. The scattered pedestrians around me had cell phones out, aimed at the sky. Overhead, flying in V formation, was a flock of six-winged, serpentine birds.
Having read the Shadowblood series back-to-front multiple times, I still had no idea what those avian creatures were. The best my fantasy mythology could come up with was some sort of couatl with extra wings.
A dog walker hustled past with a pack of furry canines pulling her along. The leashes spread line the strings of a fistful of balloons. One dog in particular caught my eye, trailing wisps of gauzy shadow. If the dog walker noticed, she was playing it way cool. I stared after them a while, until the sparse foot traffic was enough to obscure both Earthly and unearthly
creatures.
“Fucking city’s going to hell,” I muttered to no one in particular.
“Hell would be warm,” my shadow observed.
“Enough out of you,” I snapped halfheartedly. Real vitriol would have killed my ribs. “If you’d showed me how to make a solid blade, I wouldn’t be in this sorry-ass state.”
“You slipped and fell, then got stepped on. Short of me taking over completely, you left little to work with.”
Telling my shadow to go fuck itself would have felt good. But I couldn’t even disagree with it.
I slipped into a deli I never patronized, someplace no one was likely to recognize me, and ducked into the men’s room.
My hands were scraped up. I had some scuffmarks where asphalt had ground my clothes against skin. Nothing felt broken, at least as far as my fingers could tell. To all inspection, I hardly had a scratch on me.
“How the hell do boxers and soldiers go around bleeding and with broken bones?” I mused. Were some people just born with a reduced capacity to feel pain? Or was this just me being a wuss?
“Training, I suppose,” my shadow mused along with me. “None of them could write like you. They’d stare at a page, the mere idea of having to fill it with unique thought causing actual mental anguish.”
I ran the tap and squirted pump soap into my hands. “That’s all you really want out of me, isn’t it? Just a fan-fic writer to replace Martinez.”
“You can do better than that. Better than her, given time.”
Hands disinfected, I rinsed them off and splashed some of the water in my face. “Times like this, you start convincing me you’re all in my head, no matter what Judy or Kelly or anyone else says. I could be in a hospital bed, imagining all this. Matt Lee, heroic writer. Matt Lee, semi-competent action hero who fights like an 8-year-old. Matt Lee: Total. Fucking. Nutjob.”
“Never disbelieve your own sanity. There’s no return from there.”
With a twist of a knob, the water shut off.
I swallowed.