Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  “I was fairly conventional, actually. Shy and retiring. Sensitive.” He rolled his eyes.

  I looked at him a moment, eyes narrow.

  “What?” he asked uneasily.

  “I want to talk to your mother.”

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to someone about all this maternity weirdness. My mother isn’t exactly Option A, so yours will have to do.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a great idea.”

  “I don’t actually have to have your permission for it. I have your dad’s phone number.”

  He sighed. “If you’re looking for bearskin-rug pictures, there aren’t any.”

  “We’ll see.” I stood and heaved my backpack onto my shoulder. “Pregnant lady needs lunch. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Magnolia

  DAMON

  I had to get away from her. Just for a few minutes. Surely she could only get into so much trouble in just a few minutes. I knew I would feel worse, not better, but my self-control was fraying. I had to get away.

  After a lunch scraped together from vending machines, of which I declined to partake, I shaded her to Movie Barn. Most Lumii didn’t shade all that often. Most Lumii had cars, and weren’t hugely pregnant. I could not bring myself to make her walk. No matter how much I did not want to touch her.

  “I’m going to go check on Audrey,” I said as I stepped back from her outside Movie Barn. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  Her stricken look, though she covered it quickly, jabbed me with guilt, which in turn made me even angrier — at Naomi, and at myself for blaming Naomi.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  “So I don’t need a bodyguard anymore?” she said.

  “You’re not glowing half so bright as you were a few days ago. Surrounded by people, in the middle of the day, you’ll be fine. Call me if you need me.” I shaded out before she could respond.

  Shading away from her was like ripping off a bandage. All over. Inside and out. I clenched my fists and my teeth for a few careful breaths until I was under control again.

  I could hear voices, I realized belatedly. I’d come into the shadows outside the dining room window, and it was open.

  “You’ll find a job, Wes. Don’t stress about it, it’s not like we’re gonna starve.” That was Galatea.

  “I like having a job. Keeping busy. It makes things easier.” Westley, of course.

  “Is that why you’ve been… sorta down lately? From getting laid off?”

  I froze on the verge of stepping into the open. My conscience didn’t like eavesdropping on Westley, but if I heard something that explained his strange behavior…

  Suspecting Westley made me sick. I’d take any excuse to stop doing so.

  “That, and… a lot of other things,” Westley said, voice strained.

  “You can tell me,” Galatea said.

  “I really can’t.” His voice dropped to a near-whisper.

  This was not helping my sick feeling. I edged closer to the window, turned my head just enough to see inside. Westley sat at the table before another job application. Galatea, across from him, was sorting wrinkled dollar bills into piles; her clarinet-on-the-corner earnings.

  Galatea set down a stack of money and took Westley’s hand. “I’m here, Wes,” she said. “I wish…” Her gaze dropped, went distant, thumb brushing back and forth across his knuckles.

  Tenebrii are a touchy-feely bunch. This was different.

  Westley pulled his hand away, gently, face pained. “Teya, don’t.”

  Galatea scrubbed at her face, a gesture that seemed equally frustrated and embarrassed. “I don’t understand. Jewel—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Jewel.”

  “I know I shouldn’t even want…”

  “I can hardly say anything on that subject, can I?” He reached across the table and took both her hands. “I wish things were different. I wish everything were different.”

  Galatea shook her head, gathered up her money, and left the room.

  I eased back from the window and began making my way quietly toward the back door.

  What in the world had I just overheard? Galatea and Westley… Galatea had breached years before I even covanted, paired up with Westley more or less by chance, helped him through Emily’s death much as Wes had helped me through Claire’s. They’d been roommates for over a decade. It would be almost expected for a human to fall in love with someone under those circumstances. But a Shadow? It was unthinkable.

  Kinda like covanting to a second Lumi, huh?

  Well, wrestling with something like this could explain a lot of weird behavior, that was for sure.

  I thought of shading up to Audrey’s room instead of bothering with the door. I didn’t particularly want to walk in on Westley right now. But I’d shaded three times today already, and weariness lurked in the back corners of my body. If I overdid it, I might need another “donation” from Naomi to set myself straight, and I’d rather do just about anything than that. I walked through the door.

  “Damon!” Westley made a visible effort to pull himself together as I approached. “Where’s the beachball?”

  “At work. I just wanted to come check on Audrey.”

  “You left her alone?”

  “Two co-workers and four customers is hardly alone.” My skin was already crawling, my body trying to follow the tide pulling it east, back toward town. You are staying put. As long as you’re away from her, you can’t do anything stupid. Like kiss her. Again.

  Westley was regarding me thoughtfully. “You’re still not taking this well, are you?”

  If I give in and love Naomi, does that make it okay for you to love Galatea? Is that the source of this enthusiasm? “Not noticeably well, no. Audrey?”

  “Is awake. She can function for an hour or two at a time before she gets tired and starts to lose it.”

  I was stunned. “It’s been less than forty-eight hours.”

  “She says the drugs help a lot. In fact, I’m thinking we may be creating an addict, but at least she’s alive.”

  He followed me upstairs to Audrey’s room, where she was, indeed, awake. Pale and bruise-eyed, with a quivering tension under each drug-drowsy movement, but awake, and not screaming. A gameboard sat on a tray in her lap — mancala? something with marbles — and Adonis, seated by the bed, was moving a handful of pieces. Jewel, sitting at the window with her feet swinging, looked up from the blue bootie she was knitting.

  “Damon!” she chirped. “Hey, look at Audrey’s flowers. Adonis brought them, they’re the first of the primroses from the garden.” She lifted the vase of tiny yellow blooms to my face.

  “They’re lovely. How are you feeling, Audrey?”

  “Suicidal,” she said, voice calm, dull, almost dreamy. “I can’t believe how much it hurts. But I want to fight it. I want to live.” Adonis squeezed her hand.

  “You’re doing really well. Surprisingly well. I’m impressed.” I met her eyes, gripped her shoulder. Praise and approval from an authority figure, warm and confident body language — these things could pull a Shadow back from the brink. “You’re strong, Audrey. You’re going to make it.”

  “Yes,” she said, with an admirable attempt at certainty. “I am.”

  “Good girl.” I clapped her shoulder again and turned to Westley. “Where are the others?”

  “I thought Paris was in here, but I guess not. Dove’s helping Darling with her hair.”

  Darling’s spiky pixie-cut and blood-red streaks violated the mold her Lumi had imposed upon her, and therefore wouldn’t hold more than a few days. The same thing happened whenever I cut my hair; three days later it was past my chin again.

  “Paris played a round of mancala, but then he left,” Jewel said.

  “Where did he go?”

  “He didn’t say. Hunting, maybe.”

  “Without a partner?”

  Jewel shrugged. “You know Paris. Always has to do his own thing.”<
br />
  The doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, trying not to admit to myself that it was a relief to have an excuse to leave. Mortality lurked too close to the surface in that room.

  I hadn’t expected anyone in particular at the door. But I certainly wasn’t expecting Priscilla and Lincoln.

  “Didn’t we already have this conversation?” I said before they could speak.

  Priscilla’s mouth formed a flat line. “We seek the kathair Paris Stonecastle, that his victims may be avenged.”

  The closest the Formyndari came to giving Miranda rights. “What?”

  “You know the drill, Damon.”

  “What do you want with Paris? What’s his alleged crime?”

  “What else? Murder.”

  NAOMI

  Being away from Damon was a piece of cake. One of those brick-like fruitcakes your great-aunt gives you for Christmas, that hurts your teeth and tastes like bitter almonds and dirt. I always looked forward to that cake arriving. Dad let me and Jonathan chop it up with his hatchet and put it in the compost heap.

  I entertained a brief image of Damon in our compost heap, glowering. With a banana peel on his head.

  Heap Big Boss Woman Jana shot a suspicious look at my sudden giggle. She’d been giving me suspicious looks all day. I liked to think that I always gave cheerful customer service, but today I was borderline manic. Each customer was a precious opportunity to fill my mind with something besides Damon’s absence.

  What was I so worried about, anyway? Damon himself said I was safe here, and no matter what his personal issues with me might be, I trusted his judgment. I wasn’t worried about myself.

  “Can a Shadow die before his Lumi?”

  “It’s very nearly impossible.”

  “Very nearly isn’t impossible.”

  Now I really was being ridiculous. Damon was faster and stronger than a human, with better eyesight, probably better senses in general, really sharp teeth, and the ability to teleport. He was going to be just fine without me, and if he wasn’t, what in blazes were me and the Wonder Tummy going to do about it anyway?

  I checked my watch. Time had been moving in funny little hops this afternoon; minutes felt like hours, hours went by like minutes. I still had forty-seven minutes before my shift ended. Then I’d have two hours to find a present for Carmen’s birthday tomorrow before meeting the DiNovis for dinner at seven. Oh, yes, that was one advantage to Damon’s absence — he couldn’t stop me from calling his parents from the restroom.

  The door chimed as a customer entered, and I turned with my Plastic Employee smile, which became abruptly real when I recognized Damon.

  Mine wasn’t the only head that turned; a flock of teenage girls in the New Movies section began giggling and fluttering like a flock of pigeons. I was torn between a mighty surge of jealousy and an equally mighty swell of pride. Mine.

  Mental wrist-slap. Not mine. Not even my type, really. I’d always gone for the Tylers of the world — cheery, earnest, clean-cut. I had never seen the appeal of the bad boy. Damon, with his long hair, leather jacket, fingerless gloves, and scary expression, was not the type I could bring home to Mommy. Not that bringing Tyler home to Mommy had worked out so flippin’ fantastic, I had to admit.

  Damon leaned across the counter toward me, the lines of his body tense enough to set off a Geiger counter, and motioned me closer. I swallowed, leaned, and tried to focus on what he was saying as he spoke in a low murmur.

  “Have you heard from Paris?”

  “Paris? No, why would I? Is he okay?”

  “The Formyndari are looking for him. I have to find him first. They want him for murder.”

  “What? Do you mean—”

  “Not Liberty. They’re claiming he killed two people up in Boston, maybe a hunt gone wrong — they wouldn’t give me any details. They turned the house upside down and left guards in case he came back. I don’t know—”

  “Can I help you, sir?” Jana said pointedly.

  “No, thank you, this young lady is helping me already.” They exchanged glares, and after a moment it was Jana who found something to do at the other end of the desk.

  “I don’t know nearly enough about where Paris spends his time, but there’s a few places I can check. If he comes here — I don’t know why he would, but he likes you, who knows what’s going on in his head — tell him to run for it. Try to get a location where I can find him, but tell him go to ground and stay there.”

  “But — but if he killed someone—”

  “Then I’ll deal with it. When and if I’m convinced of his guilt. I’m not turning him over to the ‘Dari.” He tapped a fist against the counter, gaze distant. “We’ve all made mistakes, Naomi.” He turned and left, and it wasn’t until his fingers were no longer around my wrist that I realized he’d been holding it the whole time.

  “Movie Barn is not your social secretary, Naomi,” Jana said.

  I mumbled something, and was grateful when a customer distracted her from further interrogation.

  Damon seemed to think this had nothing to do with Liberty, and I supposed he knew best. But if Paris was the type to lose control while hunting, then maybe he was also the type to lose his temper when he found out that a Shadow was being abused. Might even be ‘beat-you-to-death-with-my-bare-hands’ not cool with it, eh?

  I want to know what happened to his Lumi. It may not tell me anything. Or it may tell me everything.

  The last forty-five minutes of my shift dragged like cans behind a car, jouncing and rattling all the way up my spine. I told two people the wrong due date for their movies and shorted another on his change. I found myself staring at the door, rubbing my wrist. Damon hadn’t said whether he was coming back for me after work.

  He did, though. When I stepped out the door and began walking down the sidewalk, he fell into step next to me, as if he hadn’t been nowhere-to-be-seen moments before.

  “Any sign of him?” I asked.

  “No.” He rubbed his face wearily. “But if I can’t find him, maybe the Formyndari can’t, either.”

  We took another few steps in silence. “I didn’t know you two were so close.”

  “We’re not,” he said. “Paris keeps everyone at arm’s length. But he’s… mine. My responsibility. He trusts me to lead him — for the most part — and I have to look out for him.” He stretched an apparent kink in his neck and sighed. “This is not the life I had in mind when I decided not to die, thirteen years ago. I thought I would be alone, a wanderer, like the kathairna of the stories. I even named myself for it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s lame. ‘Damon’ is ‘nomad’ backwards.”

  “Huh. I guess it is.” I glanced at him sideways. “It’s also from the same root word as ‘demon.’”

  “That, too,” he said serenely.

  “So… Your parents named you Gabriel. And after… when you became an orphan, you named yourself Damon.”

  “Yes.”

  Should I ask? I was going to ask. Phrased as sensitively as possible. “What was your name in the meantime?”

  He was silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but at length I heard an inflectionless near-whisper. “Ro, mostly. Short for Romeo.”

  She named you Romeo? I wouldn’t name a dog Romeo. Okay, actually Romeo would be a cute name for a dog, especially if you had two dogs and named the other one Juliet, but her name was Claire, not Juliet, and she had no right to name you Romeo. I bit my lip hard. After a minute, I gathered myself together enough to say, “It’s hard to come up with a nickname for Naomi. Sometimes my brother calls me Nims. When he was little, he called me Nobby.”

  “Nobby?” I had the reward of seeing him laugh through the weariness and tension in his face.

  “He was eight years old before I could completely break him of it. I was twelve, see, with appropriately knobby knees, and terrified that the nickname would catch on at school.”

  �
��I bet you were adorable.” He wasn’t looking at me, didn’t seem aware that he’d said it aloud. “How are your feet doing?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “I’ve been shading all over the place today. But I can get you home, if you want.”

  I eyed him sideways. “What happens if you shade too much?”

  “I get tired. Hungry. It’ll start to hurt eventually.” Judging from the way he kept massaging this or that muscle, the hurting stage was in sight. “If I really overdo it, I’ll start to go blurry and need blood.”

  “My feet are fine,” I decided. “Besides, I have a few stops to make. I have to find a birthday present for Carmen before dinner with your parents.”

  “Dinner… with… what?”

  “Your parents. At seven.”

  “I thought I already expressed my displeasure with that idea.”

  “You did, yes. But it’s really not about you at all, Damon. It’s about maternal bonding. Your mother has trodden the path I tread, and therein lies our conversation topic. Do you have some kind of objection to that?”

  He threw his hands in the air. “I guess not.”

  “Gracias. If you’re still too tired to take me there, I’m sure they can pick us up. Only problem is, that’s two hours away, and I’m hungry now.”

  “Me, too,” Damon admitted.

  “Well, if you glance up that hill, you will spy, with your little eye, a pair of golden arches. We can each get a cheeseburger for a grand total of two bucks.”

  Once I was fortified with saturated fat, I felt more equal to the task of hitting the thrift stores. Well, thrift store, singular; the Salvation Army was the only one within decent walking distance. My feet tried to stage a mutiny, but I quashed it and walked on.

  “You’re not terribly big, for seven months,” Damon said. “I hope that’s not a rude thing to say.”

  “Kind of like ‘you don’t sweat much for a fat girl’?” I laughed. “I sure feel plenty huge. But I really haven’t gained weight like I should have. I really do try to eat healthy, but… what do you do when Baby needs whole grains and fresh fruit, and all you can afford is generic cereal and ramen? When a dollar-menu cheeseburger is a splurge? When prenatal vitamins versus shoes-without-holes equals ‘don’t step in puddles’? Plus there’s the walking, I burn a lot of calories that way. But on the upside, maybe that’s why I haven’t had much back pain, supposedly the bane of most pregnancies. Walking has made me strong! Rawr.” I curled my arms, showing off nonexistent biceps.