Blue Shadow

by Brad Magnarella

  I stiffened, remembering the same chilling command I’d heard in the woods. As though picking up the thought, Chepe’s eyes met mine through my visor, and he nodded gravely. He resumed talking.

  “Chepe lit a match to see,” the mayor said, “and in the place of the circle was a hole. A hungry black hole, its edges moving like lips. Farther down were rings of hooked teeth. Chepe could not say what the monstrosity was, but he knew it was not Maximon. ‘Come to me,’ it said now. Chepe ran instead. The words followed. Chepe felt them rippling past him, calling the evil beings of the world to the hole.”

  “That might be what brought the vampires,” I said.

  “Most likely,” Croft agreed.

  Mayor Flores nodded as the shaman went on. “Chepe was so weak when he returned to his home that he slept for two days. When he awoke, he tried to return to the site. He was determined to close the hole. But before he could reach it, five vampires met him. Only through a protection spell was he able to survive their attack. He descended to El Rosario that night and cast the death spells that raised the barrier around the town. Protection against the monster and vampires. Shortly after, the children began to disappear. Chepe wanted to help, but he needed more power. He hid in the forest and fasted. After two weeks, he attempted to return to the sacred site, to use the power that had opened the portal to close it again, but the vampires repelled him. They did this several times over the following days. Chepe began to despair until one night he dreamed you were coming.”

  “Us?” Yoofi said in surprise.

  “Yes, the Legion team. And in the same dream, he heard the being that is both Maximon and St. Paul call from a distant place, telling Chepe that you would help him. That same night, he returned to El Rosario to protect the building where you’d be staying. He then went in search of white wormwood.”

  “Interesting,” Croft remarked.

  “White wormwood is rare in this area,” the mayor explained, “and Chepe had never used it. Maximon told him it would close the hole, which the Legion team would help him to reach.” Chepe dug into his purse and surprised me by pulling out a standard Ziploc bag. He gave it a shake to show us the dried leaves inside. My nose wrinkled inside my helmet at the bitter odor.

  “And that’s what brought him to town today?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mayor Flores said.

  Chepe’s cloudy eyes held both hope and anguish as he nodded and tucked the bag away again.

  I turned to the laptop. “Diagnosis, Prof?”

  “Um, if you’ve got ear buds, you might want to plug them in.”

  I synched my earpiece to the computer. “All right, it’s just you and me.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said, his voice suddenly loud in my ear, “but what I’m going to tell you is pretty intense, and I didn’t want it to sound to the locals like I was pointing fingers.”

  “Understood.” I signaled to the rest of the table that I’d be back, scooped up the laptop, and carried it into the storage room. “So what’s going on?”

  “I’ve been looking up some things while the shaman and interpreter were talking.” Croft blew out his breath. “It adds up, but not in a good way. Remember how I told you that our world was more porous now? Well, it sounds like a Chagrath is trying to worm its way in. And succeeding.”

  “What the hell’s a Chagrath?” I asked.

  “They’re creatures from the Deep Down. Good at sniffing out gods and feeding off the beliefs that sustain them. Nasty things. Picture a hook worm, except a few thousand times larger and with more appendages. In this case the target is Maximon or St. Paul—for the sake of ease, I’ll just call him Maximon. Normally, the Chagrath are content to hang back and siphon off the excess.”

  “But this one went in for the full meal.”

  “Pretty much. It probably happened when the shaman shot his ceremony with extra juice,” Croft said. “Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But with all the rips out there, the extra energy blew open a hole, allowing the Chagrath into the plane where Maximon resides. The first thing the Chagrath would have done was sunk its hooks into Maximon, making him its host.”

  “So Maximon is being controlled by this Chagrath now?”

  “More or less. And the Chagrath’s appetite is huge. Beliefs alone don’t cut it anymore. It wants the fleshy packages those beliefs come in. It couldn’t enter our world, though, so it needed something to bring the packages to him. The shaman was absolutely right in comparing the voice he heard to a broadcast signal. Being a parasite itself, it’s fitting that the Chagrath lured other parasites. In this case vampires. There’s an active gang in Mexico City.”

  I nodded to myself, remembering the teardrop tattoo I’d seen on Calaca.

  “They fell under the Chagrath’s thrall and are doing its bidding.”

  “The one remaining vamp, anyway,” I said. “But why children?”

  “The children’s beliefs in Maximon are virgin, unadulterated. That holds an incredible power for a Chagrath. It’s like a pure dose of heroin to a junkie. He’ll never get the same fix off the old stuff. Probably doesn’t even want it.”

  So the beliefs had been key to why the other villages weren’t being attacked—just not in the way Sarah and I had thought. It also explained why the Chagrath had no interest in Nicho as sustenance. The boy didn’t believe in Maximon. The parasitic creature had found utility in Nicho as a courier, though.

  The muscles across my shoulders bunched at the thought of the creature using innocent children.

  Croft went on. “With its line to Maximon, and through him, Chepe, the Chagrath would have known about the clowns.”

  “Can we hold out any hope for the missing children?”

  “It depends,” he replied, surprising me. “Chagraths can go long periods without food, but that requires rationing. For the last month this Chagrath has only been able to pluck up a child here and there. For purposes of self-preservation, it might have stored them in the equivalent of a slow-digestion chamber until food became more plentiful. It could just as easily have devoured them, though, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up.”

  I shielded my mind from the latter thought. “Is that its endgame? More food?”

  “Near term, it wants to become strong enough to discard Maximon and break through to our world. Right now, it can only interface with our world. Those black holes you’ve been seeing? That’s the Chagrath pushing one of its many mouths against the glass, so to speak.”

  So, not teleportation magic, I thought.

  “Those holes are also conduits back to the Chagrath’s realm. Children can be carried inside—and have been—beings like the vampires can enter and exit, but the Chagrath can’t come out. Not yet, anyway. With enough children, though, it will be able to break the glass and then it will feed, yes. And not just on those who believe in Maximon. It will feed on anyone who believes in anything.”

  “That’s the entire human race,” I said.

  “Yeah, and Chagraths replicate like viruses.”

  “We can stop it though, right? What about the dream Chepe had?”

  “That sounded like Maximon’s last gasp to purge itself of the Chagrath. Interestingly, white wormwood has powerful anti-parasitic properties. The indigenous in the region once used it to treat intestinal worms.”

  “Will it work on the Chagrath?”

  “Infused with the shaman’s power, it might.”

  I didn’t like Croft’s qualifier, but it was something.

  “So it’s a matter of—what?—dropping the wormwood into one of its mouths?” I asked.

  “The main mouth,” Croft corrected me. “The one that first appeared in Chepe’s circle. That goes to the core of the creature.”

  “He said the secret site was a day’s walk from here.”

  “Then you should probably get moving. I didn’t care for the wording of the latest threat. Like you guessed, the Chagrath wants to drive enough children out of El Rosario to snatch them up. Fa
iling that, I believe El Rosario will fall into a pit, and the creature will claim them that way.”

  “How, though? I thought you said it needed more children to break into our world.”

  “Those tremors you mentioned? I don’t think those were earthquakes. I have a bad feeling the Chagrath ran up against the shaman’s defenses and started burrowing underneath them. That’s what you’ve been feeling. The Chagrath is trying to undermine the town. One way or another it’ll get its meal.”

  “At midnight,” I muttered.

  “When the veil between worlds is thinnest.”

  I considered the challenge we faced. Accompanying the shaman to a remote site defended by at least one vampire, possibly more, arriving there before the midnight deadline, rescuing any surviving children, then throwing the wormwood into the hole and hoping it would be effective. And doing all of that with half a team and without Centurion’s backing. Didn’t exactly sound like a formula for mission accomplished. And if we failed…

  “Can your Order spare anyone?” I asked.

  “I’m putting a call into them right after I hang up.”

  “Good.” I had the feeling we were going to need backup.

  “But I can’t make any promises,” Croft added. “The higher ups have the power to stop something like a Chagrath, but they’re so committed to mending tears right now, there’s no telling when they’d get there. Don’t worry. I’ll make the case. I just don’t want you counting on them.”

  “We’ll take whatever we can get.”

  “I’d go myself, but you’re gonna want someone with more experience. I’ll keep you posted. Oh, and one more thing. Didn’t you say a team member walked out of a black hole this morning?”

  “Yeah. She’s resting in her room.”

  “Well, keep a close eye on her. She might not be herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to the info I was able to dig up, when a Chagrath seeks to control someone, it lays the equivalent of psychic eggs in the person’s mind. There’s a short incubation period, but very soon the eggs become squirming larvae, and the person’s mind is under the Chagrath’s control. It’s what happened to the vampires and that boy you mentioned.”

  My hand tingled with the phantom sensation of Nicho biting me. At the same moment, Takara’s door began to shake. I turned until I could see it rattling against the gate Rusty had installed. Takara was trying to get out. I snatched a pair of cuffs and pocketed them.

  “How do you break a Chagrath’s control?” I asked quickly.

  “A break dominion spell or one of its variants will usually do the trick.”

  The same thing Chepe had been attempting on Nicho before Guzman—and yeah, yours truly—had intervened. “Thanks for everything, I’ll be in touch,” I said quickly, and then ran toward Takara’s door. With Sarah and Olaf out of commission and Yoofi’s god in hiding, the last thing I needed was for her to be possessed. That would leave just me and Rusty.

  Assuming I could restrain her.

  “How are you doing in there?” I called carefully.

  I waited for a response. It came in the form of the gate blasting from the blown-open door. I leapt back as the gate ricocheted from the far wall and clanged to the floor. Takara emerged through the dust. Her irises were red, the symbols on her palms glowing through her clenched fists.

  Yoofi hollered in fright, and I heard his chair topple over as he scrambled to safety. I kept my eyes fixed on Takara as she stalked toward me. Though the wolf in me relished the idea of a third battle, the captain knew I needed to get control of the situation. And fast.

  Holding my ground between Takara and the others, I showed my hands.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You’re Takara, a member of the Legion team. You’ve been in the clutches of a creature who wants to turn you against us. You’re not yourself.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “It is okay,” Chepe said, arriving beside me.

  I thought he was talking to Takara, but when I glanced over, he was looking up at my visor and nodding. Takara stopped a foot away. Expecting blades to pop from her sleeves, I angled my body in front of Chepe. She jabbed me hard twice in the chest with a finger.

  “The next time you lock me in a room,” she said, “I’ll kill you.”

  She turned sharply and walked to the kitchen.

  “It is okay,” the shaman repeated. “No dominion.”

  “So, she’s herself?” I asked him. “You’re all right?” I called to Takara.

  She grabbed a water bottle, then shouldered past me and strode into the main room, where Yoofi and Rusty watched from the doorway to the office. They were practically hugging one another. She sat at the table across from Mayor Flores, took a swallow of water, and crossed her leather-clad legs.

  “I’ve seen the children,” she announced. “They’re still alive. But I don’t know for how much longer.”

  23

  “Back up just a minute,” I said to Takara as I returned to the table. “What happened yesterday? Where did you disappear to?”

  “I’ve been gone since yesterday?”

  “Yes,” Yoofi said, creeping back to the table. “Right after we found that boy. We looked everywhere, but you were nowhere. You just disappear!”

  She took another swallow of water and then nodded slowly. “We found the boy behind the tree,” she said, as though retracing her steps, “and then the vampire clown appeared. While you engaged him, I circled to get into a better position. Higher up, I spotted a hole in a bank. I knew that’s where the vampire had appeared from. One of us would have heard him, otherwise.”

  “And so you went in,” I said. “Without telling anyone.”

  “I was just going in to check it out,” she shot back. “I thought it could have been the vampire nest, or where the children were being held. But once I passed through the opening … everything changed.” She squinted slightly, her tone becoming less certain. “I wasn’t in a tunnel so much as another world. There was mist everywhere, hard to see. When I tried to return through the hole, I couldn’t find it. I tried to contact you, but my radio was dead. So I searched for an exit. It felt like I was wandering a system of caverns, sometimes walking, sometimes swimming, but not through water. If you’ve ever been to the astral realm, it felt like that.”

  “Can’t say I have,” I grunted.

  She looked me up and down. “I’m not surprised.”

  Did she just take another dig at me? I thought up a few retorts but bit my tongue. This was the most that had ever come out of Takara’s mouth since I’d met her. Not only that, she had vital intel on the world beyond the holes.

  “Travel in the astral realm is a function of thought,” she continued. “This realm felt similar, so I stopped and thought of the missing children. The world spun, and moments later I found myself outside of a chamber filled with a green fluid. Inside the fluid, several shapes were suspended. As my senses sharpened, I recognized them as the children. At first I thought they were dead, but the nearest one’s leg kicked. Strange-looking tubes ran into his nose, his mouth, both of his ears.”

  I thought about what Croft had said about a slow-digestion chamber.

  “When I reached a hand inside for him, the tubes came to life. They yanked him away from me. The tubes holding the other children did the same, drawing them deeper into the chamber. If I could free the children from the tubes, I thought, I could bring them out. I extended my blades and stepped into the fluid. It was strange, more gel than liquid. I hadn’t gone a few feet when the walls shook to life, and more worm-like tubes began attacking me.”

  I noticed the mayor staring at Takara in a kind of horror-stricken fascination.

  “The fighting was intense,” she went on. “For every tube I severed, two or three more sprung into their place. I could make no progress toward the children. At last, I was forced from the chamber, where I was confronted by a new threat: batlike creatures with large wings and long tails. I�
�ve never seen their kind. They swooped down, intent on wrapping their tails around my throat. I fought them off, but there were too many and no place to retreat. I concentrated my power. When I’d gathered enough, I released it out in all directions. The space around me shuddered, and a hole opened. I stepped through it, and found myself on a road. The van was speeding toward me. And then I … I must have lost consciousness.”

  “That was when we found you,” I said, wondering if the Chagrath had released her into the path of our speeding van on purpose. Something told me it had.

  “Yes, when I came to, we were at the soccer fields. But I could only recall bits of what had happened. I needed to focus.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “And then you locked me in my room.”

  “It was a precaution,” I said. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  She shook her head in irritation and took another swallow of water.

  I stood from the table and paced the room. “I spoke further with our consultant,” I said. “He thinks we’re dealing with an other-worldly creature called a Chagrath. An enormous parasite, basically. It accessed the local god’s realm on the night of Chepe’s ceremony and is now using children to try to break into our world. Croft believes the written threat is very real. The tremors we’ve been feeling are the Chagrath undermining the town. If the town doesn’t clear out, the Chagrath will sink it.”

  “Then we need to evacuate right away,” the mayor said, shooting to her feet.

  “No,” I said firmly, motioning for her to sit back down. “The Chagrath will only grab the remaining children it needs.”

  “What about your helicopters?” she said. “Can’t they carry us to safety?”