Blue Shadow

by Brad Magnarella

  “Hold your fire!” I shouted.

  With the smoke providing cover, the breather bolted. I got enough of a glimpse to know what we were dealing with. Swinging my weapon on its strap around my back, I bounded after him on hands and feet. Within seconds, I was behind the sixty pounds of flailing arms and legs. I reached a taloned hand forward and grabbed the boy by the back of his dirty shirt.

  “Déjame!” he shouted as I lifted him up. “Déjame, hijo de puta!”

  I knew enough Spanish to understand he’d just called me a son of a whore.

  As his dangling body rotated around the shirt in my grasp, I realized I’d never put my helmet back on. A moment later, we were face to face. The scrawny boy, who couldn’t have been older than ten, went slack. His eyes all but stood from his grimy face as they looked over my wolf features.

  My teammates arrived on either side of me. “A boy,” Takara said in disappointment, sheathing her blades.

  Yoofi giggled and shook his head.

  I lowered the boy to his bare feet. Thin scratches climbed his legs to a pair of shorts stiff with dirt. His long hair was littered with leaves and twigs, and a cross pendant swung from around his neck. He glanced around at Yoofi and Takara before wiping his running nose and returning his gaze to mine. He looked half-terrified, half-enthralled—and all human.

  I pulled out my tablet and scrolled through the photos of the missing children before radioing Sarah. “We encountered a boy on our patrol,” I said, “estimated age nine or ten. He doesn’t ID as one of the abducted, but he looks like he’s been out here for a while. Can you interpret for me?”

  “Yes. You can start by asking his name,” Sarah said. “Como se llama?”

  I posed the question. The boy stared for another moment before whispering, “Nicho.”

  “I want to know where he’s from and what he’s doing out here,” I said.

  Sarah provided the translation, which I repeated, trying not to flash my fangs.

  “El Sauce,” he said, fingering his cross pendant. “Estoy escondiendo.”

  Sarah replied quickly. “He says he’s from El Sauce—that’s a village one valley over—and that he’s hiding.”

  “Hiding from what?”

  When I asked the boy in the Spanish, he whispered, “El payas—”

  Yoofi let out a yell and collapsed to the ground.

  “What is it? What’s going on?” I demanded, but Yoofi was babbling in a language I couldn’t understand. Had he been shot? He began to writhe, arms and legs kicking like they were possessed.

  “El payaso,” the boy repeated in a louder voice.

  I turned back to him. Payaso? Where had I heard that before.

  “The clown,” Sarah practically yelled into my earpiece. “He said he’s hiding from the clown.”

  I wheeled toward where the boy was staring. In the spot where the trail had ended stood the clown with the skeleton face—Calaca. He watched us with red eyes, his thin lips breaking to form a grin to match the messy one painted around his mouth. His teeth glinted like blades.

  “We have contact!” I broadcast to the team.

  I shoved the boy behind me with one hand as gunfire exploded from the muzzle of my MP88.

  12

  Leaves and branches burst as incendiary rounds exploded around the vampire clown Calaca. He was in motion now, his skeletal frame seeming to dance as he flashed in and out of cover. I glanced to my left. Yoofi was still writhing on the ground, his staff beside him.

  “Circle to our three!” I called to Takara. Calaca was too damned fast. We needed to box him in. But when I looked over, she was nowhere to be seen. “Takara?” I called into my earpiece.

  No response.

  Had something happened, or was she freelancing again? Something told me the second. Fantastic. I released another burst of automatic fire. Remembering the boy, I peeked over a shoulder. Nicho was standing stock still, frozen by the sudden appearance of the clown and the ear-splitting explosions. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him flat.

  “Stay there!” I shouted, showing him with my hand.

  There was too much going on. I peered back up the hill. Calaca’s floppy red bow flashed through the dense foliage. Switching triggers, I picked out a narrow thread running between the trees and fired four grenade rounds into his path. Those didn’t miss. Calaca released an inhuman shriek as brutal detonations of shrapnel blew flesh from his bones and knocked him from his feet.

  I sprinted up the hill until I had a clean line of sight on him. His torn skin was already healing, wounds melding back into waxy brown flesh. Underneath his makeup, he looked like he’d once been a local.

  As he leapt to his feet, I switched back to the rifle and poured automatic fire into his emaciated body. More chunks of flesh flew from his bones. The impacts threw him into a tree, his screams more enraged than pained.

  “Not so fun when someone fights back, huh?”

  His painted face twisting, talons flashing from his fingers, Calaca coiled to launch himself at me. My next burst of rounds blew open his chest and pierced his heart. In a gust of smoke, he flopped face down. A single grenade round fired beneath him flipped him like a pancake.

  I arrived above him seconds later. Calaca looked catatonic, blood-red eyes staring past the smoke rising from his body. His shredded skin was closing, but slowly—thanks to the silver powder. I slung my weapon over a shoulder and unsheathed my combat knife. Wrapping Calaca’s body with an arm, I sat him up in front of me and placed the knife against his throat. His neck was barely the circumference of my wrist. With my superhuman strength, I had only to flex to take his head off and end him. But first I needed information.

  As I waited for him to come to, my skin broke out in gooseflesh. Even through my protective wear I could feel the cold that emanated from him, a greedy chill that sucked the heat of life from anything within its aura.

  “I have one of the vamps,” I radioed to Sarah. “I want to ask him where they took the children.”

  “Dónde estan los niños?” Sarah said.

  I waited for Calaca’s breaths to return in thin gasps, then I embedded the knife blade in his throat until it was sitting atop his narrow larynx. “Dónde estan los niños?” I demanded.

  I held him from behind, my free arm clenching his bony body. Calaca struggled inside my grasp. His returning strength would soon match mine. I dug the blade in deeper. “Dónde estan los niños!”

  A giggle rasped from his lips. He drew in his breath as though to answer, but in the next instant the back of his head smashed into my snout. Pain exploding through my nose, I swore and flexed my knife arm. Flesh and bone crunched beneath the blade, but my faltering grasp had given the clown an opening, and now he was twisting free from me. With a final thrust I tried to complete the decapitation, but he was out, and I was falling onto my back.

  As he peered down at me, I saw that I had nearly succeeded. One of his gloved hands was holding his head on his nearly hacked-through neck. Half of his face paint had been rubbed away, and I could see a cheap-looking tattoo of a teardrop beneath the corner of his right eye.

  I lunged toward him, but a clown shoe caught me in the chest, knocking the wind from me. I lashed out with the other taloned hand, but he was already taking off, head jostling sickly between his hand and healing neck.

  Eyes watering from the blow to my nose, I struggled up. I glanced over to make sure the boy was still down—he was—and gave chase. I’d be damned if I was going to let the vampire clown get away.

  I brought my weapon around, raised it into firing position—and watched Calaca disappear. One second he had been leaping over a fallen tree, and in the next, he was gone.

  “What’s going on?” Sarah asked.

  I arrived at the spot a second later, but it was as if the earth had swallowed him whole. The clown was nowhere. Heart slamming, I peered wildly around. I then raised my healing nose and sniffed. For an instant I caught an odor of decay, but the smell of the woods rushed
over it, and I had nothing.

  “Lost him,” I growled.

  “Is the clown gone?” Yoofi asked.

  I turned to find him coming up the hill, leaning on his staff with each limping step.

  “Yeah,” I grunted, peering around again. “What in the hell happened to you?”

  “Ooh.” Yoofi shook his head as he arrived beside me. “Dabu was telling me a joke when all of a sudden I heard him scream. The sound like a spike through my head. Something scared Dabu bad. And then just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“the screaming stopped.”

  I wondered if Calaca had hit him with a spell.

  “Did it feel to Dabu like the magic in the compound?”

  “Don’t know,” Yoofi replied. “When it ended, Dabu ran and hid. Won’t talk to me.”

  “So you’re defenseless.” When he nodded, I sighed and handed him my loaded Beretta. “Keep the safety on until you need it.”

  I spotted the boy peeking through the brush and waved for him to join us.

  “Where’s Takara?” Yoofi asked as he shoved the weapon down the front of his pants like a gangster.

  “Good question.” I pulled the tablet from my vest and was bringing up the map when something whirred into my hearing. A moment later, the whirring turned to whacking. Shredded leaves fell from the canopy. Yoofi fumbled for the pistol, but I showed a staying hand.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rusty said over the commo feed as a drone appeared through the foliage. “We heard your call, but Olaf and I are a good thirty minutes out. I overrode Drone 1 and sent her over.” The drone hovered overhead, the camera buzzing as it adjusted its aperture to the dim light.

  “Just watch where you point the payload,” I said, eyeing the missiles I’d armed it with the night before.

  “What happened to Takara?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “I was just about to pull her up.”

  “No, that’s what I’m saying, boss. She’s not showing up in the system.”

  “Not showing up?” I accessed the map and looked. Sure enough, icons pulsed for the rest of us—I could even see Sarah’s back at the compound—but nothing for Takara.

  I looked around. The woods were quiet, the smoke from the battle dissipating and drifting off. Aside from some chewed-up trees, there was little to suggest the freak fight that had just gone down.

  “Are you seeing anything, Sarah?” I asked.

  “Nothing on my system either. Takara, do you copy? Takara, do you copy?”

  Once again, no response. Could she have deactivated her GPS and communication? Sure, but why? It didn’t make sense. She’d been right beside me just a couple of minutes ago.

  “Keep Drone 1 under the foliage and start a radial search of the area,” I told Rusty. “I’ll see if I can pick up her scent.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Rusty answered as the drone whirred away.

  Small crunches sounded in the undergrowth. The boy had gotten up, and now he approached with tentative steps. “It’s all right,” I said, waving him toward us again. The boy sped up until he was standing beside me. He clutched the side of my pants for security, then peered around wide-eyed.

  “El payaso no esta,” I assured him. The clown was gone. Then a thought occurred to me. “Hey, Sarah, how do I ask if he saw where Takara went?”

  “Dónde se fue el mujer?” she said.

  I knelt in front of Nicho and posed the question.

  “La sombra,” he answered. “La sombra se la comió.”

  “‘The shadow,’” Sarah translated. “He’s saying, ‘The shadow ate her.’”

  The shadow ate her? “Dónde?” I asked.

  I followed the boy’s pointed finger to the spot where the clown had disappeared a minute earlier. Had I missed a cave or something? I left him and searched the area, heaving aside limbs and fallen trees. But the ground was solid. There were no caves, and by the time I had cleared the area, there were barely any shadows. Takara was simply gone.

  “I suggest we regroup back at the compound,” Sarah said. “The rest of you could be at risk. There’s some new information we should go over as well.”

  But I was already shaking my head emphatically.

  “Not without our teammate,” I growled.

  13

  We searched the area for the rest of the morning, Yoofi and I on foot, Rusty using the drone. Without me having to tell him, Nicho stayed close to my side. When our efforts failed to turn up any signs of Takara, I went against my earlier reservations and called in Centurion’s quick reaction force.

  By early afternoon, eight men in battle gear joined the search. I organized them into two patrols. From the valley, Rusty made several attempts to reboot Takara’s GPS device and reestablish radio contact, but no dice. It was as if Takara had fallen off the face of the earth.

  When a hard rain began to hammer the tree canopy in the late afternoon, I suspended the search. We needed to start planning for that night, and with dusk nearing I wasn’t going to leave the Centurion force alone in the woods with vampires out and about. Leaving Takara out here was bad enough.

  As the soldiers flew back to their base, I drove Yoofi and Nicho to the compound. The van’s windshield wipers slashed at the falling rain while the tires crashed through massive brown puddles.

  “Is Dabu saying anything yet?” I asked Yoofi.

  He shook his head. “I give him much smoke and drink, but whatever happened scare Dabu good. He doesn’t want to talk right now.”

  “Will that change anytime soon?”

  Yoofi shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Mr. Wolfe.”

  A god of the dead scared? That didn’t bode well.

  I looked over at Nicho in the passenger seat. I had given the boy several energy bars over the course of the search, and now, fed, and protected from the elements, he was fast asleep. We would consult the mayor about what to do with him—maybe a family or the church would take him until he could be returned to his village—but in the meantime, I wanted Sarah to talk to him. Find out what he was doing in the foothills and what he knew about the vampire clowns.

  I pulled the van into the empty carport. Rusty and Olaf were out, doing final tweaking on the surveillance system. Sarah emerged from her office as Yoofi, Nicho, and I entered the main downstairs room. Though her expression remained flat, I picked up a few strain lines around her eyes. Whether they were out of concern for Takara or from staring at computer monitors all day, I couldn’t tell. I removed my helmet and gloves and set them on the table.

  “Is anyone hurt?” she asked.

  I turned to Yoofi, but he showed his hands. “No, I am fine now. But Dabu needs more drink.”

  “The vampire and I mixed it up a little,” I said as Yoofi went off to refill his flasks, “but he didn’t get his teeth or claws into me.” I rubbed the place on my nose where Calaca had smashed me with his head. It had healed, but the warrior in me still smarted from not finishing the decapitation.

  “Do you believe Takara was taken?” Sarah asked.

  “Ultimately, yeah.” I walked over to the wall map. “We first made contact with Calaca here.” I tapped the spot with a talon. “The boy says he last saw Takara up here. She may have been attempting to climb to a more advantageous position. I don’t know because she didn’t communicate like we’d trained.”

  Dammit.

  “But that’s where Nicho says the shadow ‘ate’ her.” I bracketed the word with hooked fingers and looked over at the boy. He was kicking an empty water bottle around the room like it was a soccer ball.

  “The vampire you faced might have been a teleporter,” Sarah said.

  “A teleporter?” I echoed.

  “Like I said, there are accounts of magic-users being turned into vampires. Mayor Flores denied knowing any practitioners of magic in the area, though. And despite an exhaustive search on Centurion’s database, I came up with little actionable info, so I looked into … other sources.” She glanced away in evident discomfort. “T
he internet, namely. The integrity there will always be suspect, of course, but when you described how Takara and the clown disappeared, I began searching for an explanation. It seems some magic-users have the ability to teleport themselves—and others—to remote locations. Allegedly.”

  “Well, it would explain his and Takara’s disappearances into thin air,” I said, also thinking about how the scent of the missing child I’d been tracking had just ended. “And Yoofi’s confirmed there’s magic at play.”

  “Ooh, very bad magic,” he said, rejoining us. He took several gulps from a flask.

  “Still, even if we’re talking teleportation,” I said, “the question remains: Where are they being taken? Any intel on how far these magic-users can teleport? Our search covered a five-mile radius.”

  “Up for debate,” Sarah answered. “I found several forums where fights had broken out over the question. Opinions ranged from only locations the magic-user could see to hundreds of miles.”

  “So we don’t know, in other words.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I can keep searching.”

  At that moment, the water bottle skidded past us, Nicho in hot pursuit.

  “Let’s focus on the boy while we have him,” I said. “If he’s been in the woods, hiding from clowns, he may have seen other things.”

  “Nicho,” Sarah called. “Necesitamos hablar.”

  The boy left the water bottle spinning on the cement floor and joined us at the table. He chose a seat across from Sarah, then pulled the neighboring chair close to his and waved for me to sit beside him. He’d become attached to me over the course of the day, despite—or maybe because of—my wolf face. Yoofi took a seat at the end of the table and lit a cigar.

  “How long were you in the woods?” I asked Nicho.

  Following an exchange in Spanish, Sarah said, “Since yesterday.”

  “Why did you go into the woods? Why did you stay?”

  “He says his father grazes their four cattle in the woods around their village. He ties each one to a rope, which is secured to a tree. Their largest cow, a bull with long horns, got off his rope late in the day, so his father sent Nicho in search of him. Nicho could hear the bull lowing high in the hills, so he followed the sound. When he got there, the bull was down on the ground. A clown was kneeling over him, sucking the blood from his neck.”