In the heart of the library, the Reflection Room was an island of stability, a place where the parallel cities did not overlap.
That was where the Shadow Men were holding Holly.
Trix took a deep breath, held Anne’s hand more tightly, and followed Jim, Sally, and Jennifer up the library’s front steps, passing between the statues that represented Art and Science. The middle of the three arched doors stood propped open, inviting them in. Holly awaited within.
As for Jenny…
Trix let go of Anne’s hand, giving her a soft smile to let her know that she hadn’t done anything wrong. But as they passed through the doors, she found clarity returning. Anne was a beautiful fantasy, but Trix could not succumb to that dream. Not yet. Not when the Jenny she had always loved still needed her.
She glanced around anxiously as they walked through the vestibule, the pink marble deceptively warm. There were people moving about in the entrance hall, but she glanced within and saw nothing threatening about them, and no trace of the Shadow Men. Jim went in first, and Trix watched the door through which they had entered, just to make sure they would not be attacked from behind. When she walked into the entrance hall, Trix glanced at the vaulted ceiling, imagining that at any moment the Shadow Men would emerge from the tile mosaic and attack.
“Trix,” Jim said, and gestured for her to join them.
The others had gathered a few feet inside the hall and off to the right. The sound of weeping echoed off the walls, and she glanced up to see a grieving woman coming toward the doors, attended by a trio of comforting friends. Moments later, Trix caught sight of a woman who could only be the twin of the one who’d been grieving, and who was apparently following the group but trying not to be seen. She looked bewildered and afraid.
“It’s real,” Trix told her.
“What?” the woman asked, flinching, as though afraid Trix might try to strike her.
“All of this,” Trix said, waving her hand to indicate the women who had just left and the city as a whole. “It isn’t your imagination. It’s just what is now.”
The woman’s eyes widened and she hurried out the door, leaving Trix to wonder if the truth had done the woman good or harm.
“Stay with me,” Sally told them as Trix came to stand between Jennifer and Anne. Her little-girl face seemed anything but innocent now. She was grim and determined. “Veronica must have Shadow Men holding Holly, so be prepared. If they grab you, shake them off. They’ve got to partially solidify to hold you, so fight them. But don’t try to beat them, because you can’t.”
“You’re going to call some of them up, though, right?” Jennifer asked. “Some of your No-Face Men, the ones who answer to you?”
Uncertainty flashed in Sally’s eyes. “I’m going to try. But it takes focus to call them and to command them, and I’m so tired I can barely stand. All of this… it drains me.”
“You’ll do fine,” Jim assured her, one hand on the little girl’s shoulder.
But Sally was looking at Trix for reassurance. Trix smiled. They had bonded a little in the short time they’d known each other. “You’re the Oracle of two Bostons now,” Trix reminded her. “If there’s magic in all of this, you’ve got more of it than ever. You’ll kick ass.”
Sally smiled. “Thanks.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “You heard her. Sally knows exactly what room Holly’s in. We follow her in, get Holly, and let Sally worry about the Shadow Men. And we try not to let them take us into the In-Between.”
“What happens if they get one of us?” Anne asked.
“Let’s just say it would be bad,” Jim replied.
“Bad?” Trix said. “Great. Thanks.”
“We’d turn into them,” Jim explained. “Shadow Men.”
Trix felt sick, a terrible dread spreading like poison in her veins. She tried to shake it off, reaching out to clutch Anne’s hand, but it clung to her and would not be dispelled.
“Ready?” Sally asked.
“Not even close,” Anne said.
Jennifer glanced at her, their faces mirror images. “In some other world, this girl is your daughter.”
Anne shifted uneasily. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Just that I’m not ready. How could anyone ever be ready for this?”
Trix squeezed her hand and glanced at Sally. “Let’s go,” she said.
The atmosphere inside the library crackled with static electricity. Jim wondered if he might be the only one who felt it, and if it sprang from the knowledge that his daughter-his little girl-was so close. During the trek across town, he had forced himself not to hope, and now he put it inside an iron box in his heart and turned the key, not to be released until he held Holly in his arms again.
Jaw set, hands clenched, he marched grimly across the entrance hall, his companions nearly forgotten. A glance into the main reading room showed precisely what he had expected-not the quiet studiousness of an ordinary day but the shock and hushed trauma of the aftermath of catastrophe. People sat on the floor, or at reading carrels, faces buried in their hands or laid upon the shoulder of another, who might try to provide comfort in the midst of their own astonishment and horror. The whole city was like this now, and it would take time for them to wake from this shock-trance and try to see how much of their lives remained.
“Upstairs,” Sally said, nudging him as she passed by and went through the triumphal arch to the marble staircase.
Jennifer, Anne, and Trix followed, but Jim hesitated a moment. Something wasn’t right in the reading room. Something was off, a sense that no one there was concentrating on whatever they appeared to be doing. He met the gaze of a white-haired old man who had begun to stare at him and turned away so that the man would not think him some kind of ghoul, entertained by the dozens of little tragedies unfolding in that room. Then he caught sight of a plump black woman standing beside a pale white teenage boy with orange hair. They seemed to sense him looking and turned toward him. Jim felt himself the focus of unsettling attention.
Holly, Jim thought, tearing his gaze from them and hurrying through the arch toward the stairs. The others were already moving up the steps, and Jim hustled to catch up, glancing around warily. At the landing above, where the steps turned before continuing up to the second floor, the marble lions seemed ready to pounce. He couldn’t help feeling that the air held a similar threat.
“It’s like some kind of weird Roman palazzo in here,” Jennifer whispered, her voice echoing off the marble walls and staircase as she stared at the paintings in the arched recesses at the top of the steps.
Jim barely acknowledged that she’d spoken, quickening his pace so that by the time Sally reached the second floor he was only two steps behind her. In the shuffle of echoes that their climb had sent cascading from the walls, he thought he heard something that shouldn’t be there, something that didn’t match, and it took him a moment to realize that there were footfalls below them on the stairs. He glanced over the balustrade and spotted the plump woman and her ginger-haired teen companion starting up the stairs.
“This way,” Sally whispered, spurring him on.
They went through the arcade that separated the stairwell from the second-floor corridor, a gallery named for the artist whose paintings hung there but whose name Jim could not recall. His mural of the Muses of Greek mythology was one of the best-known pieces of art in the library, and two men stood in the corridor staring at it with the casual air of tourists, despite the disaster the city had become. Jim frowned at the sight of them, but now they were so close to Holly he could practically feel the presence of his daughter.
At the southern end of the gallery corridor was the Abbey Room. Jim passed Sally, but the young Oracle grabbed the tail of his shirt and forced him not to rush ahead. The girl glanced back at Trix and Anne. “I’m kind of a wreck. If I have to call up my No-Face Men, I may pass out,” Sally said. “Will somebody catch me?”
“I’ve got you,” Anne said.
“Me, too,” Jennifer added
. She had been lagging behind, the shocks of the day catching up to her, turning her gaze distant and hollow. “Do what you have to do.”
They went into the Abbey Room and spread out instantly, Jim taking the lead with Sally and Trix behind him, and Jennifer and Anne coming last. The room rivaled the greatest museums Jim had ever entered, not just because of the paintings but because of the beauty of the room itself, all oak and marble, with thick ornamental rafters on the ceiling. As Sally had told them, the room had been divided by a wall, this portion just over thirty feet to a side. The far end of the room had heavy oak doors set into the dividing wall, and Holly waited on the other side.
There were half a dozen people in the Abbey Room already. Two middle-aged women-European tourists by the look of them-huddled together on a bench, holding each other as though cowering in fear. A sixtyish Asian man in a business suit stood in the center of the room, facing Jim and the others as they rushed in. A young couple, perhaps graduate students, flanked the far door as if they were guarding it.
The sixth person was a dead security guard. He lay on the marble not far from the Asian man, a pool of blood beneath him.
Sally stopped short, glancing anxiously around, and the rest of them followed suit. “I should have realized…,” Sally said. “I sensed them, but I didn’t see them. I never thought she’d risk it.”
“Sally?” Jim said warily.
“What the hell is this?” Trix asked.
Jim glanced back the way they’d come and saw the woman and the orange-haired kid from downstairs follow them into the room. The old man who had caught his eye entered a moment later, still staring at Jim. “Who are they, Sally?” Jim asked.
“Not ‘who,’ “Sally said. “But ‘what’? They’re Shadow Men.”
“But they look normal,” Trix whispered, glancing at Anne and Jennifer, the five of them clustering together as the strangers began to close in on them. Only the two terrified women on the bench did not rise-they were ordinary people, trapped here in the midst of the horror.
“They haven’t been changed completely yet,” Jim told her, glancing at Sally to confirm his suspicion.
Sally nodded. “They’re not dead yet.”
The white-haired Asian man had remained in the center of the room, but now he glanced at the others, and the strangers all paused. Jim blinked, thinking his vision had begun to blur, but it was the strangers that were blurring. The orange-haired teen’s shadow seemed to separate from him, wavering just a few inches to one side like a ghostly conjoined twin. The others all shuddered as the same transformation went through them. Part human and part wraith, they were bodies with living shadows.
One of the women on the bench screamed; the other sobbed hysterically.
Jennifer grabbed Jim’s arm. “What do we do?”
Jim glanced at Trix. “We fight.”
“What?” Trix asked.
Jim grinned, all his anger and fear swelling up inside him, fists clenching. “They’re solid, Trixie. Let’s get Holly. And if they try to stop us, kick the shit out of them.”
“Jim…,” Anne said.
Sally nodded, reached out, and gave Jim a shove toward the door at the far end of the room. “Go!” she shouted.
Even as her voice echoed off the walls, the Asian man made a single gesture, and the Half Shadows attacked.
The Light of a Fading Star
They were inhumanly fast.
Trix swung a fist at the redheaded kid, but he darted past her blow and grabbed her wrist. He started dragging her toward the wall that separated the Abbey Room from the Reflection Room. She tried to fight her way free, but now he had her by both wrists, and he was strong. She planted her feet, but the soles of her shoes slid across the marble floor.
“No!” Anne shouted. “Let her go!” But as she launched herself at Trix and the redhead, the terror of losing her lover twice in a lifetime clearly making her crazed, the woman who’d come in with the teenager grabbed the back of her neck with one splayed hand and hurled Anne at the ground. Her head struck marble and she cried out. For a second, Trix feared the worst, but then Anne scrambled away from the Half Shadow, who stalked her across the room.
Scuffles and shouts echoed all around. The old man who’d entered last seemed focused on Jim, as did the couple who had been guarding the door to the Reflection Room. Jennifer stood in front of Sally as though to protect her, which seemed strange, considering the girl had more ability to fight back than any of them. The screaming woman had gone silent with fear, and now she got her sobbing friend up from the bench. With one last glance at the dead security guard, they ran for the exit.
The well-dressed man darted toward them, trailing his Shadow Twin like a comet’s tail. He grabbed the sobbing woman and drove her head into the wall so hard that her skull cracked, loud as a gunshot, and she slid to the floor, dead. The other woman began screaming again, and she fought him, trying to claw his face and then his Shadow self.
Terror turned Trix’s blood to ice. The sobbing woman had died in an instant. They didn’t want witnesses, didn’t want anyone to come and help, and that told her a great deal. They could be hurt. They could be beaten. And they didn’t have any backup.
She shot out a leg, tripped the redheaded kid, and rode him down as he fell. His head bounced off the floor, and she grabbed hold of his ears and started slamming his skull against the marble tile. Someone was screaming, shrill and hysterical, and only when she bared her teeth as she fought his efforts to rise-and the screaming ceased-did she realize it had been her all along.
His orange hair was dark and wet now, and it left bright crimson smears on the tile. His eyes were going out of focus. But then he reached up and struck her in the stomach, took her wrists, and broke her grip. He tossed her away and she hit hard. Trix scrambled up and saw that his Shadow Twin hung even farther out of him. Had it been the Shadow’s hands on her, or the human boy’s? Did it matter?
He tried to rise but stumbled and hit the floor, too disoriented to attack her.
Jennifer screamed for Jim.
Trix looked up and saw the Asian man looming over Jennifer. He had a fistful of her pretty hair, and in that moment, she was Jenny. Or she might as well have been. Trix ran for her, only to see Sally behind her, drawing symbols on the floor in what must be the girl’s own blood. Whatever Sally was up to, Trix knew she had to protect her until it was done.
But then Anne screamed and Trix twisted around to see the buxom woman, Shadow Twin almost entirely outside her flesh, dragging Anne across the floor by one ankle. The thing was taking her toward the Reflection Room, or at least toward that door or wall, just as the redhead had tried to take Trix. There was something to be made of that-something obvious that Trix just wasn’t getting-but she didn’t have the luxury of thinking.
This chaos would end with them all dead, unless the young Oracle could do something to help them.
Jim saw Trix run past, headed for the door to the Reflection Room, and he prayed she would get through that door, that she would get to Holly. Right now he had trouble of his own. As Trix ran by, the dapper businessman Jim had first seen down in the reading room reached for her and missed, despite his unnatural speed. It gave Jim an instant to act. The other two, the young couple, were grappling with him, trying to stop him from getting to the Oracle.
“Sally!” Jim shouted. “Whatever you’re going to do-”
He didn’t get to finish. The old businessman punched him in the mouth and Jim reeled backward, breaking the grip of one of the two who still held him. He lunged toward the wall, but what he wanted leaned against it-a wooden captain’s chair that had, like the benches, been placed there for older patrons to rest on while touring the library.
Gritting his teeth against its weight, he swung the chair with all the strength he could muster, smashing it into the face and chest of the thing still holding him. The young man let go, flailing as he stumbled back. Blood spurted from his broken nose and dripped down his chin as he sprawled to the
floor. He lay with his eyes closed, unconscious and broken, but the shadow part of him created by his time lost in the In-Between-before Veronica had fished him out to make him do her bidding-remained awake, and enraged. It tried to pull itself fully out of him, but it was tethered within him, was him, in some fundamental way.
“Sally!” Jim shouted. He faced the other two Half Shadows menacing him, brandishing the captain’s chair, which grew heavier with every heartbeat.
“She did it!” Jennifer said, excitement mingling with her fear. “They’re here!”
Jim glanced toward the sound of her voice and saw some of Sally’s No-Face Men. He counted four, including one grappling with the Asian man who had been attacking Jennifer. A fifth No-Face Man slid up through the floor and darted toward the redheaded kid Trix had beaten the shit out of. The kid had started to stand, limbs moving jerkily, as though his Shadow self was a puppeteer pulling his strings.
Jennifer cradled Sally in her arms. For a moment he thought the girl might be dead, but then Sally stirred, lifting her head weakly and pointing toward the Half Shadows Jim had been fighting. “Destroy them!” she shouted, her commanding tone making her sound much older than her years.
Two No-Face Men sailed across the room and attacked the woman who’d been after Jim. Their hands passed through her flesh and bone, but they weren’t interested in her body. Those spectral hands grabbed hold of the shadow stuff, the dusky twin of this woman who had been lost between worlds through no fault of her own, and began to tear it off as though peeling a second skin away from her flesh.
The woman shrieked as though they were gutting her, distracting the other Half Shadows. Another of Sally’s No-Face Men careened into the businessman Jim had been fighting and dragged him down, clawing at his body like an animal, though its talons slashed through flesh without damaging the man’s body or his clothes. The Shadow Twin within him, though, was eviscerated.
The woman who had been stripped of her Shadow Twin shuffled away on her knees, staggered to her feet, and then stared at her hands as though she had never seen them before. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she touched her face, somehow verifying that she was herself and alive. Then she turned and fled screaming from the Abbey Room, running out into the corridor, and presumably out of the library and into a new world.
The Shadow Men hc-4 Page 23