Not even my weekly check-in calls with Bernice and Art at the Hidden government’s headquarters helped. They were busy trying to fill the empty positions on the Board. We kept in touch, but they didn’t need me either, unless I was willing to fly out to Kansas and help them conduct interviews. That wasn’t going to happen.
I sighed and grabbed my purse. No use letting the quiet ruin my mood. As I passed him on my way to the car, I blew Riley a kiss, and he blew one back.
I pulled out, singing made-up words to a song on the radio I’d never heard before. At the end of the driveway, I stopped to check for cars and prepared to turn left.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a figure staring at me. No. I felt it more than I saw it. Something impossibly tall and thin and dark. I whipped my head around to see it, but there was nothing there. The figure was gone.
Goosebumps covered my arms and sweat broke out on my upper lip. I shivered.
Nothing there, Zoey. What the hell is wrong with you?
Nothing there. Whatever I’d thought I’d seen clearly wasn’t there. Yet I didn’t believe that for a minute. Hungry or not, I backed the car up and returned to the house.
As I pulled in, Riley shut off the hose he’d been spraying to try to return my grass to its natural color. “Forget something?”
I stepped out of the car, my body shaking. “I saw him.”
Riley’s face paled. “Are you sure?” He didn’t bother to ask who I’d seen.
I nodded, paused, shook my head, paused, then nodded again.
He dropped everything and came to wrap his arms around me. “Well, shit.” He kissed the top of my head. “I guess the reprieve is over.”
I buried my face in his shirt and my voice was muffled. “I’m not ready.”
“We’re as ready as we can be. We’ve beaten everything that’s come before. We’ll be okay.”
He was right, of course. We’d beaten a hungry incubus intent on devouring every woman I came in contact with. We’d beaten the Leprechaun Mafia and a sorceress who’d tried to auction off all the Hidden to the highest bidder. We’d beaten the most powerful empath the world had known and a cult of Shadow Man’s worshippers attempting to set off the zombie apocalypse.
Knowing all this didn’t mean I believed we were ready. This was it. The end of the line. The Last Hidden had stepped into the world, and he was there to destroy it.
* * *
We’d known he was coming. Four months ago he’d sent a cult of worshippers to kill all the Aegises in the world, thereby breaking some mythical Covenant nobody really understood and causing the zombie apocalypse.
Except, it didn’t really go down that way. The cult had managed to kill all the Aegises but my Mom and me. And then they didn’t wait for this Covenant thing to be broken and the two of us to be dead. They went ahead and started the zombie apocalypse anyway.
It was all out of order. Which probably meant a couple of things. First, that not even this Last Hidden guy really knew the terms of the Covenant. And second, he wasn’t too eager to go by the book and was playing by his own rules.
In the end, we put the zombies (and werefolk, demons and vampires) back in their boxes. Mom and I had also been getting messages from the First Hidden, an enormous bird called the Simurgh. Like its descendant the phoenix, every time she died, she was reborn and started life again, which was why she was still around after thousands of years. At least, that was what my research suggested.
Her most recent message had been the awesome news that the Last Hidden had chosen a name. I’d really been hoping he’d be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but no. That wasn’t the name he chose.
Shadow Man.
Then, we had four months of peace and quiet. We’d dared to hope maybe he’d changed his mind. Or was two inches tall and not the threat he’d expected to be. Or invisible and totally helpless to communicate with us.
Anything was possible, right? A girl could hope.
But fun-time, apparently, was over.
In what I would forever think of as The Great Time of Peace and Quiet, I had researched Shadow Man. About six years ago, a group of psychology grad students at a small Midwestern college had created him as an experiment using a round-robin approach. The first person described Shadow Man as being tall and thin with an elongated face. From there, they each took turns adding to his description and creating a backstory.
Orange, bottomless eyes. Trailing overcoat the color of dried blood. The ability to unhinge his jaw like a snake. Sometimes appeared in bedrooms and watched people sleep. Peered through windows. Crickets followed in his wake.
Stole children from the playground. From the street. From their beds.
Once the group tired of creating this terrifying creature, they took him out on the Internet for a trial run. They mentioned him in urban-legend forums. They dropped his name on supernatural websites. They reported sightings in the comments on articles about Bigfoot and Nessie.
The result of the experiment was remarkable. Within weeks, doctored photos of alleged sightings of Shadow Man cropped up. None of them came from the grad students who’d invented him. People reported seeing Shadow Man looking in their bedroom windows. Conspiracy theorists blamed him for every AMBER alert and suggested he was a product of alien/human hybrid experiments.
That was all before the Last Hidden stepped out and chose the name. Up until I’d seen him from the corner of my eye at the end of my driveway, he’d been nothing but words and pictures created to see how quickly a simple story could grow into an urban legend. Now he was a flesh-and-bone representation of the stories he’d modeled himself after.
I sighed and took a step away from the safety of Riley’s arms. “Guess we’d better call everybody home.”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Try not to let them know how pleased you are about that part.”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
* * *
Mom and Darius appeared while I was still on the phone with Kam. I waved at them from the kitchen, and they sat together on the couch to chat with Riley.
Kam’s frustration trickled through the phone. “I was in Nevada last week. Why couldn’t he have shown up then?” Her breathing increased, as if she were pacing or lifting something. “I’m in eastern Wyoming. It’ll take me two days to get to you.”
Something banged against something else on her end. “Kam, what are you doing? It sounds like you’re rebuilding a car engine.”
“Ooph.” The phone clattered and she was quiet for a minute. “Sorry. Dropped the phone. I’m packing. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”
I frowned. Kam used to change clothes constantly, using her magic to create elaborate costumes. It bothered me that she was doing something so ordinary as collecting belongings into a suitcase. The loss of one-third of her magic had turned my impetuous, creative friend into a mundane traveler. I was betting she didn’t have a single hoop skirt or tiara in her luggage.
“Don’t overdo it,” I said. “We’re all right for the moment, so I don’t want you driving through the night and running off the road. Just get here when you can.”
“Got it, boss!” From anyone else, that might have been sarcastic, but she sounded chipper. “No running off the road. Cross my heart.”
After we hung up, my heart felt lighter. We’d known Shadow Man would show eventually, since the day the Simurgh had whispered it to Mom and me in a vision. But after a month of waiting for him to show, we’d all decided it was time to get on with our lives, at least until something happened.
The fact that everyone scrambled to high alert based on something I may or may not have seen out of the corner of my eye said volumes about how serious we took the warnings.
Of all the Aegises in all the world, Mom and I were the only ones left. Long before he had a form and a name, Shadow M
an had managed to have all the other Aegises killed. We may have gone back to business-as-usual on the surface, but none of us had relaxed our guard. After a short commercial break, it was showtime again.
I called Maurice and got his voicemail.
“Aloha! You’ve reached Maurice, but you haven’t really reached Maurice, because Maurice is out exploring the ruins of Pompeii or the deepest, darkest jungles of Peru. Leave a message! Soom Soom! Dag dag!”
I shook my head. So weird. “Maurice, when you get this message, either call me back or come home. He’s here. Time to man the battle stations.”
I hung up and tried Sara. Her voicemail kicked in before the first ring. “This is Sara. I’m not available right now, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
I smirked. Sara was still Sara. Professional, a little uptight, kind of formal—even if she now sported gold skin, silver hair and metallic, twisted horns. I left a similar message for her. Nothing more I could do but wait. They’d get the message as soon as their walkabout led them close enough to a city to get a signal.
Back in the living room, Mom’s face was pinched and nervous. She huddled into Darius as if he could protect her from the worst kind of nightmares in existence. I hoped she was right, because what we were up against probably was the worst kind of nightmare in existence.
I took a deep, cleansing breath. Now was not the time to panic. That time would come later. Much later, if we were lucky.
I settled into the vacant chair next to Riley, across from Mom. “So.” I smiled, trying to act like none of us were freaking out inside. “How’s the rose garden coming along?”
Mom sat a little straighter, still leaving no room between herself and the enormous dark-skinned mothman—totally human-looking since the sun hadn’t gone down yet. After sunset, not so much with the human. In his full mothman glory, Darius sprouted dusty wings and lost the majority of his face to a bottomless void. But Mom loved him, so I tried to see past his scariness. Family is family.
“Oh, Zoey,” Mom said. “The roses are gorgeous. Blooms the size of your head. No exaggeration.” She threaded an arm through Darius’s and sat back, beaming.
I knew she wasn’t telling a tall tale. We had dryads living in the woods between my house and the cottage. I had no doubt Mom had magical help with Aggie’s garden. No. I had to stop thinking of it as Aggie’s garden. It was Mom’s garden now. And Mom’s gardening skills had always been spectacular.
We chatted awhile about compost and sunscreen, gluten and anti-frizz hair-care products. In other words, the kinds of things people talked about when they didn’t have a care in the world—or when they were trying to pretend they didn’t.
Late afternoon rolled around, and nobody felt like eating. We were all a little twitchy, taking turns looking out the window. Finally, I flipped on the television for some noise and happened to catch the news.
The lead story was about a fourth-grade class from a local school. They’d gone on a field trip to Stinson Beach to study wildlife and coastal ecosystems.
Six kids were missing. Six. About fifteen minutes from where we were sitting.
My stomach flipped and my face felt hot with anger. The missing kids couldn’t be a coincidence.
Live coverage showed the beach crawling with police and rescue workers scouring the area. Tear-stricken parents and teachers stood behind yellow tape, and reporters shoved cameras and mics in some of their faces.
A devastated teacher with short blond hair and empty eyes answered the newscaster’s questions in flat tones. “No,” she said. “I swear, we had them all together. They didn’t have time to wander off. One minute they were there, and the next they were gone.”
She burst into tears, and the cameraman had the good taste to return the focus to the reporter.
The story switched to the studio, where a photo appeared behind the anchor’s head. “This photo was taken minutes before the children went missing, giving police a timeframe from which to work.”
My breath caught in my throat. The anchor seemed oblivious, but I knew what I saw.
In the upper left-hand corner of the photo, far in the distance, stood the watching figure of Shadow Man.
Chapter Two
The most chilling part of the photograph was how closely the picture and the news story mimicked the intentionally faked material on the Internet. It was Shadow Man to the letter.
A piece I’d read on the popular website, Cryptokeepers, had described a similar story to what was playing out now on my own television. In the original tale from three years earlier, six children on a field trip to the zoo had disappeared right out from under their chaperones’ noses. The children had been found hours later, huddling together in the dry moat surrounding a tiger enclosure. The doctored photo accompanying the story showed a dark figure watching the children a short distance away, exactly like what I’d seen on the news a few seconds ago.
These stories had all been created in fun. But now they were coming to life.
I rubbed the goosebumps along my arms. “Did anybody else see that?” I grabbed the remote and rewound to the photograph of dozens of smiling children posing for a group shot on the beach. “There. See that up on the cliff behind them?”
Riley stood close to the television, squinting. “Are you sure? It could be any guy in a dark trench coat.”
Mom drew in a sharp breath. “Riley, don’t you see how long his face is? Don’t you see what’s wrong with him?”
I swallowed hard. The photo was hard to make out without having it blown up. But I saw.
Mom’s face was pale. Mine probably matched. But her back was straight and her voice was stony. “We have to stop him. Coming after us is one thing, but taking children is going too far.” She was up and over by the front door, sweater in hand before anyone could react. “Who’s driving?”
Riley and Darius both looked at me, as if I had the final word on what everyone should do. I shrugged. “I guess we’re going to the beach.”
The three of them piled into my SUV, and Riley snagged the driver’s spot while I was still in my room searching for my Wonder Woman hoodie. March on a northern California beach would be chilly, and the hoodie was thick enough to combat the frigid wind. By the time I found it and got outside, I’d lost out on shotgun as well.
Mom and I sat in the back, while Darius navigated. We didn’t have a plan other than getting to the beach where the kids had gone missing. The news had shown a lot of people milling around already, and nobody was getting past the barriers the police had put up.
But we didn’t really need to get to where the kids had been. We needed to scout the area around it.
“How far could he have gone?” I pictured Shadow Man coaxing the kids away like the terrifying Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—waving lollipops and doing a creepy little skipping dance. I shuddered. That part of the movie had always frightened me when I was a kid. “He took six of them. Do you think he had help, or did he just—I don’t know—hypnotize them to follow him?”
Darius shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. He was squashed into it like a size-eight woman in size-six leggings. Any second he’d have to open the window and stick out an arm to gain some space. “He had that cult working for him before. We never did track all of them down.” He banged his knee against the dashboard and cursed under his breath. “Chances are good they’re still around somewhere doing his bidding.”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
I so hoped we weren’t dealing with Shadow Man’s religious followers again. But Darius was right. Now that their shiny new god had taken form, they’d be even more likely to do his dirty work.
Through their chanting, they’d been able to call dangerous creatures called aswangs through portals from other worlds. The chanting also served to hypnotize the aswangs into seeking
out and killing Aegises. It stood to reason, if kids were being hypnotized into walking off with strangers, Shadow Man’s worshippers were behind it.
Either the crowd had grown or the newscast hadn’t done it justice. We had trouble finding a place to park. We pulled off to the side of the lot and wedged ourselves on the sand in a legally questionable spot, then piled out. Darius spent a little longer dislodging himself. I smirked, thinking how he would have managed in my old VW Bug before it got squashed by a thunderbird. He never would have gotten the door closed.
As I stepped out of the car, the emotionally charged atmosphere nearly knocked me backward, despite the mental walls I’d built for protection. There was too much emotion darting through the air. Fear. Guilt. Anger. Despair. It pelted me from all sides—parents, teachers, emergency personnel. Even the nosy bystanders were agitated and concerned.
I closed my eyes and went inside myself. The walls I’d built were strong, but I always kept a few open windows with screens over them to filter through some of the emotion outside of me. Without some sort of emotional feedback, I sometimes had trouble reading other people’s body language. But with this much going on, the filters couldn’t hold it all back. I was being overwhelmed.
I closed up the holes in my walls, sealing myself in, at least until the search was over. I couldn’t help if I couldn’t breathe. When I opened my eyes, seconds had passed, but the difference was so much better. Until we left, I’d only have my own emotions to deal with.
We split up and milled through the crowd, listening for any information we could glean. Most people stood with hands in pockets or arms folded, as if waiting for something to happen. I sidled up to a woman with a thick braid pulled over her shoulder and a cellphone in her hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I just got here. Anything new happening?”
She popped a mint in her mouth. “They’re talking about arranging us into search parties.” She crunched the candy between her teeth. “You have a kid missing?”
I shrugged. “No, but I live close by. Thought I might be able to help.”
Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) Page 2