Shadowed Souls

by Jim Butcher

  Morgan paced me step for step as we walked, slanting little smiles in my direction, toying with her hair, and asking all those meaningless, flirty questions that sounded sort of like an Internet quiz gone weird. What sort of desserts did I like? Did I have any pets? Was the blond part of my hair natural, or did I get it done when I had my tips dyed?

  I answered her questions as honestly as I could, only dodging the ones that touched on my family. Mom and Dad were okay with me dating. They actually liked it when I got out of the house, since they thought that my social life might somehow inspire Artie to get one of his own. (As if. My baby brother got stronger pheromones from Dad than I did, and didn’t get half the control. If he so much as sneezed in the presence of people he wasn’t related to, he was going to be in a world of trouble.) But that didn’t mean I was allowed to blow our cover, or to ever reveal more information than I absolutely had to.

  “So, how did you find out about roller derby?” asked Morgan. She kept walking, passing a food truck that made excellent grilled-cheese sandwiches. My stomach grumbled.

  Pretty girl, more important than food. “One of my ex-girlfriends was a skater. She used to encourage me to come and cheer for the team, and sometimes convinced me that I should work the merch table for her during halftime. She was pretty persuasive.” And she’d kissed like it was her own invention, which helped a lot.

  “Lost the girlfriend, kept the derby?”

  “Something like that.”

  Morgan stopped in front of a food truck I’d never seen before. It was selling cupcakes. That wasn’t unusual. You can’t throw a rock in Portland without hitting half a dozen cupcake stands. “Just to be clear, you’re Elsinore Harrington, age twenty-six, daughter of Theodore Harrington? Currently unemployed, no significant other?”

  I gaped at her. “W-what?” I managed after a moment, recovering my senses enough to realize that something was extremely wrong.

  “Good enough for me,” said Morgan, and snapped her fingers.

  The needle bit into the meaty part of my shoulder, deep enough that it felt almost like I was being stabbed. I jerked forward, trying to get it out of me before it could inject whatever payload it was carrying, and started to spin around to see my attacker. Only started: I might have unseated the needle, but I couldn’t stop the injection, and as soon as it hit my bloodstream, everything began to spin without any help from me. My turn became a fumble, and then a collapse as my knees refused to support my weight any longer. I could still see, but I couldn’t process what I was seeing. It was like my brain and my vision had become disconnected, turning everything into a soup of colors and shapes and jagged lines.

  “I told you I could get her for you,” said Morgan, her voice distant and distorted. “Now pay up.”

  “As agreed,” said a male voice. I heard papers rustle, and then my face hit the food-court pavement and I stopped listening. It didn’t seem important anymore.

  Unlike my cousins, who seem to think that no day is complete unless they’ve knocked themselves unconscious on some obstacle or other, I have tried to maintain a life devoid of blackouts, concussions, and other forms of trauma. Maybe they’re better at pulling themselves back out of oblivion than I am. I crawled back to myself one inch at a time, becoming slowly aware of the world around me, even though I couldn’t force myself to move. It was like sleep paralysis, except for the part where I hadn’t gone to sleep. Going to sleep would have been too easy.

  The inside of my mouth tasted like a dentist’s office crossed with a perfume counter. It was obvious what had happened. Dad’s an incubus, which makes me a succubus. Half succubus, if you’re splitting hairs. I got some of his powers—not all—and I got all of his weaknesses, which is entirely unfair if you ask me. Couldn’t I have inherited some extra telepathy and skipped out on the violent allergy to aconite? The stuff’s poisonous to humans, deadly to werewolves, and acts on Lilu as a combination sedative and mind-control drug. It’s awesome.

  (Incubi and succubi are both Lilu—just the male and female of the species. Ours is a complicated and inconvenient nomenclature.)

  Whoever had grabbed me had shot me full of aconite, probably mixed with some more mundane sedative—or, hell, maybe it had just been mixed with saline. The end result would have been the same: one knocked-out succubus, no waiting, and no opportunity for me to get the hell out of Dodge.

  This is why you don’t follow pretty girls you’ve just met without telling someone where you’re going, I thought sternly, and I accepted the chastisement as my due. This was all my own damn fault. I was the only one who was going to get me out of it.

  Concentrating hard, I twitched my big toe. It moved sluggishly at first, and then more easily, like it was remembering what it meant to be connected to a body. I did it again and again, until it was moving as readily as it ever had. Good. My sleep paralysis was broken, and it was time to figure out what the hell was going on.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was sitting up: that much was evident from my perspective on the room, which was small and boxy and looked for all the world like it had started out as somebody’s garage. My brother lives in a converted basement. Once you learn the tricks of repurposed architecture, they’re difficult to overlook.

  “She’s awake,” said a voice. I froze. It wasn’t familiar, per se: I was pretty sure I’d never heard this specific voice before. But I knew it all the same. It was a male voice, late teens or early twenties, the sort of voice that I had heard in too many teen comedies and over too many live video game chat channels. I was a succubus tied to a chair, with a kid in the Revenge of the Nerds/Weird Science age bracket somewhere nearby.

  This was not going to end well.

  “She doesn’t look like a demon,” said another voice, slightly higher but otherwise interchangeable with the first.

  “Succubi look like normal girls, only prettier,” said a third. “Didn’t you read my notes?”

  “Her hair’s pink,” said a fourth voice. “I didn’t expect a demon with pink hair.”

  It figures. My first kidnapping, and I get amateur hour. I yawned, trying to look as unconcerned by my situation as possible, before saying, “Anybody can have pink hair, if they understand the secret ways of Hot Topic and the local salon. Not that I use Manic Panic. You get what you pay for, right? Kool-Aid is cheaper and lasts about as long. Now, does this meeting of the Young Cryptologists Society want to come to order and untie me before I get mad?”

  “You’re trapped,” said the first voice. He sounded like he was projecting bravado as hard as he could. “You have to do what we tell you to do.”

  “I’m not trapped, I’m tied up,” I said. “There’s a difference. It’s a small one, granted, but it’s big enough to matter. Now untie me, and I won’t tell my parents about you.” Dad would be annoyed. Mom would be pissed, and while she often tries to forget that she comes from a violent family full of violent people who solve their problems with, yes, violence, threatening her kids had always been an excellent way to jog her memory.

  “The ropes are a precaution, not a prison,” said the first voice. He seemed to be their spokesman. He was probably the one who had managed to track me down. I thought fondly of putting his head through the wall.

  Property damage never makes friends. I looked down at the floor, finally realizing what they were implying. Sure enough, I was sitting smack in the middle of a Seal of Solomon. It had been painted on the concrete with the sort of precision that implied protractors and drafting tools had been involved, and I would have been very impressed if I hadn’t been tied to a chair. That was taking up most of my capacity to care.

  “Seriously?” I looked up again, scanning the walls for anything reflective that might show me my captors. They were somewhere behind me, probably out of a misguided belief that succubi shared certain attributes with gorgons. If looks could kill, I would have had a very different high school e
xperience. “A Seal of Solomon? Where did you get your information—the D&D Monster Manual?”

  Silence. Which was really an answer in and of itself.

  “I am not bothered by the Seal of Solomon, because I am not A, a demon, or B, deceased,” I said, speaking slowly and clearly. “I would have to be one of those two things before this would become a problem for me. Seriously, don’t you know anything? You really shouldn’t kidnap people if you don’t know how to safely contain them. Actually, scratch that. You shouldn’t kidnap people, period. Now come untie me, before I get pissed.”

  “You’re right: she can’t escape,” said one of the boys. He sounded utterly amazed, like this was the culmination of all his birthday wishes. There was a rustling sound, and then he was stepping into view, staring at me in awe. That just made me more uncomfortable. It wasn’t the sort of look you give another person. It was the sort of look you give a delicious cake, right after you’ve realized that it’s all for you. “She’s trapped.”

  My guess about their age was supported by his appearance. He was thin, in that not-finished-yet way that some people don’t lose until they hit their thirties, with a scrubby brown mustache on his upper lip and hair that didn’t appear to have encountered a brush in quite some time. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a giant robot on it. Artie had the same one. In fact, just based on age and general scruffiness, this kid could have been my little brother, except for the part where my brother would never tie me to a chair, drop me in the middle of a Seal of Solomon, and invite all his friends over for a look.

  Also, my brother didn’t have that many friends.

  “What are you, twelve?” I demanded. “This isn’t how you meet girls. This is even worse than listening to pickup artists.”

  The kid blinked. “What?”

  “Seriously, no woman is going to love you because you tell her she’d look good if she lost a few pounds. She’s just going to punch you through the nearest salad bar. And no succubus is going to play the Jeannie to your Master just because you tie her to a chair.”

  He blinked at me again before turning an impressively bright shade of red. “That’s not— I mean, we didn’t— I mean, we would never do that. That’s not okay.”

  I blinked. Apparently, I had been misreading the situation. That, or a hundred erotic fanfics had gotten it all wrong. “Then why am I here?”

  “Because you’re a demon,” said a second boy, walking into my field of vision. He had short, curly black hair, dark skin, and a solemn expression. “We needed a demon, and when we asked around, you were the safest one we could find.”

  I wanted to tell him—again—that I wasn’t a demon, but since it hadn’t gotten through the first time, I wasn’t sure what good it would do me. I settled for frowning at him sternly and asking, “Why did you need a demon? Demons don’t grant wishes, you know. Mostly they play piñata with the people who mess with them. You’re not full of candy. The average demon thinks entrails are just as nice.”

  “We needed a demon because a demon took my baby sister and I have to get her back,” he said, and everything changed.

  “Oh,” I said softly.

  Shit.

  “Her name is Angie,” he said. They still hadn’t untied me, but all four of them were in front of me now. I was trying to see that as an improvement and not as a sign that they were planning to sacrifice me to something. “She’s seven. She’s the smartest kid you’ve ever met, but she’s sort of dumb sometimes too, you know? Little kids don’t always know that they shouldn’t trust everyone they meet.”

  “Are you the one who hired Morgan to get me out of the derby game?” I asked. He looked away. “Thought so. Just as an FYI, sometimes adults don’t recognize danger either. Everybody messes up sometimes.”

  “She followed this gray-skinned thing into the sewers,” he shot back. “How is that messing up?”

  A gray-skinned thing in the sewers was a lot more likely to be a bogeyman than it was to be a demon. I shook my head. “I still don’t know what you want me to do. I’m a succubus. If you wanted someone persuaded to make out with you, I’d be your girl, except for the part where I don’t do that sort of thing. It’s shitty and date rape-y, and I refuse. But I can’t find missing kids, and I can’t reverse time to prevent bad decisions.”

  “You’re a demon,” said the kid with the scraggly mustache resolutely. Of the four, he was the least willing to budge from that point. “The person we hired to get you for us injected you with enough aconite to kill an elephant, and you’re still alive. That means you can’t be human, and you have to do what we say.”

  Anger suddenly swelled in my chest, hot and tight and unforgiving. “Wait, you mean you weren’t sure?” I demanded. “You thought there was a chance I was human, and you had them pump me full of aconite anyway? Kid, you missed a murder charge by one mistaken identity. You get that, right? If your little honey trap had landed anyone else in that warehouse, you would have had a body on your hands.”

  “It didn’t happen that way,” said the first kid. “We hired professionals.”

  “Professional what?”

  “Bigfoot hunters,” said one of the other kids—one who hadn’t been speaking much up to this point, apparently happy to let his friends dig their own graves while he stared, awestruck, at my breasts. “They came very highly recommended. And they had a money-back guarantee.”

  “Oh, that makes it all better,” I said bitterly. There are two kinds of Bigfoot hunters in the world: the gently deluded ones who just want to meet something mysterious and who never manage to actually encounter a real Bigfoot, and the mercenary bastards who believe that everything in this world exists to be broken down for parts and sold on the alchemical, scientific, and pharmaceutical black markets. There are people who swear that powdered Bigfoot bones cure erectile dysfunction, or that the hair of a dragon princess will bring wealth. Bigfeet have been hunted to the verge of extinction by assholes looking to make a quick buck, which has forced their hunters to step up their game.

  Catching me had probably netted them a few thousand bucks, enough to buy some better tracking gear and a bunch more guns. I supposed I should count myself lucky that there’s not much of a market for succubus bits—we’re not sex magnets like our male counterparts—but I couldn’t help but feel like I had just dodged a bullet that should never have been pointed in my direction to begin with.

  “It’s not like you’re a person,” said the first kid, pulling my attention back to him. He quailed a bit under my glare, but rallied quickly. “Anyway, we didn’t hurt you. We just needed you to listen. You have to get Angie back.”

  “Why would I do you any favors?” I asked.

  “Because either you’re a demon, and the Seal of Solomon means you have to do what we say, or you’re a person who’s also a succubus, and you can go where we can’t. You can get Angie back.”

  His logic was sound, once you got past the part where it had started with a kidnapping. I looked at him flatly. “You’re going to need to make me a promise and answer a question before I agree to help you. If you don’t promise or you don’t answer, then we’re finished here. You can keep me tied up forever if you like. It won’t get your sister back.”

  “But if we promise and answer, you’ll do it?” he asked. The desperation in his voice was too raw to have been anything but real. He was at the end of his rope, and while I felt bad about that, I wasn’t ready to forgive him for what he’d done to me.

  “I’ll consider it,” I said.

  “Anything,” he said.

  “First off, you have to promise me that you’ll never do anything like this again, ever. No matter how important you think it is, no matter how much you want to go ‘Well, it worked last time, we got a succubus and she fixed things for us,’ you need to leave your friendly neighborhood inhumans alone. Got me? I am a person, I have a life, I do not need to get kidnapped by
the Hardy Boys every time one of you has a hangnail. If I hear so much as a whisper of you doing this to somebody else, I will rain down fire and brimstone on your heads, and I will not be sorry. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said the boy with the missing sister. None of them had given me their names. It made sense. If they still thought I was a demon, they wouldn’t want me to have that sort of power over them. “We promise.”

  “Good.” I still didn’t know whether it was safe to believe them, of course, but that would come later, after I had gotten out of this garage and told my family about the teenage demon stealers. These kids would learn the hard way not to mess with people if they ever tried anything like this again. “Now here’s the question: How did you find out about me?”

  One of the other kids, the one with the black hair and the uneasy eyes, told me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  There was a momentary silence.

  “Untie me,” I said. “I need to go get your sister.”

  Bogeymen have always been nocturnal. Long before humans were building cities with functional sewer systems, their close cousins were figuring out ways to get around without being seen, and coming up with excuses for why they never came out during the day. Lots of bogeymen got in trouble for being vampires during the Victorian era, or corpse eaters, or grave-robbers, even though they weren’t any of those things. They were just polite, reclusive neighbors whose place on the hominid family tree wasn’t quite so well lit.

  Portland’s bogeymen had a lot of light pollution and a high population of hipsters, Goths, and punks to contend with—all barriers to a comfortable nocturnal community. So they had done what any species that wanted to coexist with humans without actually talking to them would do: They had installed a bunch of lovely “sewer drains” that fed into a system of tunnels not found on any municipal map, connecting to basements all over the metro area. They could move from place to place without ever seeing the light of day, and they had entrances near several local grocery and big-box stores. Supplies weren’t the problem.