Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  He chuckled.

  “You’ve got plenty of hidey holes that I know nothing about. It shouldn’t be that hard to keep you out of Formyndari custody,” I said. “The problem is that you’ll never be able to come out of hiding unless we clear your name. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to come tell your side of the story to Priscilla and Lincoln?”

  He chuckled again, ruefully. “They’re decent folk, for Hunters. But I’m not going to put myself in their hands, admit to killing a human, and then ask them to let me go.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” I admitted, and sighed. “You’ve just got to make everything difficult.”

  “Yep, that’s me.” His gaze had returned to the stone, or perhaps the roses. “I’ll go to ground, then, and wait for you to come up with a brilliant solution.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anytime. I’ll check in with you or Jewel periodically. Or Naomi.”

  I hesitated. “Naomi and I may not, um, we may not be in contact much longer.”

  He cocked his head and regarded me thoughtfully. “Then you’re a moron,” he said, stepped back into the long shadow of a marble obelisk, and shaded out.

  NAOMI

  Shockingly, I was able to concentrate in class. In fact, the frantic pace of note-taking was a welcome aid in blocking out the unpleasant hollow weight of Damon’s absence. For a few minutes, I was so wrapped up in Shakespeare’s symbology, social context and dirty puns that I was able to forget everyone but Benedick and Beatrice. I didn’t even realize my hand had cramped until class ended and I couldn’t let go of the pen. I pried it loose and sat in the empty classroom, hands pressed to the cool surface of the desk, breathing carefully.

  “Naomi? Are you all right?”

  Oops. Not quite empty. Dr. Hayes, better known as The Shrew, stood before the markerboard, eraser in hand.

  “I’m — I’m fine,” I stammered. “Just tired.”

  “I bet,” she said. “When I was that far along with my son, I could barely get out of bed. I think it’s admirable that you’re still making it to class at all.”

  “Oh. Um. Thank you.”

  “How’s your end-of-term research paper coming?”

  “Coming along,” I lied. “Still got a ways to go.”

  “It’s due Friday, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “If you need any help, just let me know.”

  I visualized myself falling at her feet, wailing that my parents were mean to me, there was somebody’s kid living in my body, and my pet vampire didn’t like me anymore. The resulting smile I could feel trickling across my face seemed to unnerve her. She gave a polite nod and turned back to erasing the board.

  I tumbled my pen and notebook into my bag and waddled from the room, unnerved myself by her somewhat-less-than-shrewish manner. I guess everyone has an off day. Or maybe I looked even more pitiful than I felt.

  Visual Arts with Dr. Graham, despite having the misfortune of being three buildings away from Western Civ, was generally the highlight of my week. Today I approached the classroom with dread. We were supposed to use our class-time to work on our end-of-term projects, and all I had were two sketches of Damon.

  Even with that to look forward to, walking into the art room triggered relaxation. The wet smells of clay, paint, and papier-mâché; the familiar crowd of tables, racks, shelves, and easels; every time I walked through this door I could feel the Muse stretch and yawn, even if she usually just rolled over and went back to sleep.

  A few other students were milling around, pulling inks and pastels out of their bags, debating superglue versus Elmer’s, calling out jokes to each other. The best “horse” was still open and I made a beeline for it. Even accustomed as I was to art classrooms, the horses had baffled me at first; peculiar pieces of furniture comprised of a bench and an adjustable board for propping your stuff on, they were more comfortable than an easel, but considerably less dignified. Straddling the bench still made me feel like a four-year-old, especially if it was one of those horses old and rickety enough to actually rock.

  I propped the sketches in front of me and regarded them narrowly. They made an uneven little display; one sheet of thick, toothy sketchbook paper, one of thin college-ruled ripped from a notebook. One a complete image in sure, even lines, centered on the paper, the other a sketch in every sense, cluttered with eraser marks and fading off at the edges. What sort of project could I possibly make out of this?

  Damon sleeping in the chair was bad enough. The other sketch, though it was in profile, seemed to be watching me. The pitiful thing was that I wished it was.

  They’re just pictures. Lines on paper. I waved my hands over the sketches. You have no power over me.

  “What have you got there, Naomi?”

  I jumped. “Um. Nothing. Drugs. Weapons. Smuggled antiques.”

  “Mm-hmm. Are those for your project?” Dr. Graham craned her neck, looking at them upside down, then bustled, in her wonderful hen-like way, around the horse to peer at them over my shoulder. “They’re quite good. Who is he?”

  “He’s my, um, he’s a friend of mine.”

  Dr. Graham raised an eyebrow but forbore to pursue it. “Tell me what you plan to do with them.”

  I fiddled with the edges of the papers. “Knit them together into a magic carpet?”

  “You’d never manage it by Friday. But you might turn one of them into a painting. Or surround it with a collage. Use it as the basis for a sculpture — no, not enough time for that.” She ruffled my hair. “You have a good eye, Naomi, and a perfectly usable brain. I want to see you working on something at least remotely identifiable by the end of class.” She bustled off toward the next lost-looking student.

  I stared at the sketches and thought of beauty and sublimity, lights and shadows, cliffs and caves and thunderstorms in boxes. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Rocket ship bedsheets.

  First order of business was to copy the notebook-paper sketch onto better paper. I couldn’t do a thing with it as it was, and it would buy me time to think. I tore another sheet from my sketchbook, pulled a bit of blessedly cheap vine-charcoal from my dwindling store, and began copying — making the sketch larger and more detailed, straining to submerge myself in the task, enter the Art Zone as I used to do so easily in high school. I would miss entire classroom lectures, entire conversations with my mother, so absorbed in the frog or moose or flower or doorknob I was drawing that nothing else showed up on the radar. I was a little rusty at it now…

  And then the next thing I knew, my classmates were shuffling to their feet around me, putting away markers and charcoal, rinsing out paintbrushes, cleaning up bits of scrap paper. Class was over.

  “And what have you got for me, Naomi?” Dr. Graham took the charcoal sketch from my hand. “Well, I’m not sure what this is, Naomi, but I think I like it. What do you think it is?”

  I looked at what I’d drawn. Only the head and shoulders of Damon’s profile had survived; I had framed him like a cameo, in a swirling forest of ravens, cliffs, and stormclouds, flames and swords and, to my chagrin and secret amusement, bats.

  “I think…” I massaged my cramping write hand. “I think it’s pretty accurate, actually.”

  Dr. Graham nodded thoughtfully. “Good. Go with it. I want to see this transmogrified into an eighty-five-percent-complete project by Thursday.”

  And I want to see a briefcase full of tens and twenties. Life sucks, huh? But I smiled and nodded, enclosed the sketches into the portfolio Dr. Graham handed me, and left.

  I scraped enough change out of my pockets to buy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the Snack Shack in the science building, and sat down to eat it at the table in front of the empty fish tank. I watched the dead, green water stagnate quietly to itself and reflected on how much better my life was without Damon. Already I was getting more schoolwork done. It was better not to have distractions.

  I glanced at my watch, then crammed the rest of the sandwich in my mouth and w
addled to the water fountain to rinse it down. I was supposed to be at work in half an hour, and now that I was free of that terribly distracting young man, I had to hoof it. Time to get back to real life.

  DAMON

  I stayed at the Kansas cemetery after Paris had gone. It was small, not terribly well-maintained, and lacked the peaceful isolation of my former refuge — cars rumbled by on the other side of a thin stand of trees, and there was a light on in the church — but it was as good a place as any to think.

  “Have you ever forgiven Claire?”

  I had loved her, hated her, needed her. Been by turns captivated and repelled, adored and tortured by her. Since her death there had been days I wept with relief that she was gone, and days I would have traded anything I had, anything I could beg, borrow, steal, or kill for, to bring her back.

  But I hadn’t felt either of those extremes for years now.

  Things that reminded me of her — champagne, Madonna songs, orchids, power outages, strawberry jam and cream cheese — still bit into me like fish hooks. But fish hooks were a long way from broadswords through the gut.

  I brushed one of Paris’s white roses with my fingertips, and forced myself to remember Claire, her face, her voice, the pale glow of her skin and curve of her neck. It was like holding my hand in a fire, but I clenched my teeth and held it there, and waited to observe my own reaction.

  Grief came first, a crushing, jagged-edged weight on my chest. Fear — that was interesting. After all this time, she still had that power over me. And a higher, thinner sadness, a different grief, not for my loss, but for hers. For her confusion and pain, the hole at her center that I couldn’t fill. The sad, futile, sordid waste of her life.

  I waited for anger, the hot, bitter ocean of it that had threatened once to drown me. But what came was guilt, dark and clinging, a fanged thing sunk into my skin. The shame of what I did, the shame of what I didn’t do — more than enough poison to sicken myself on, but not from Claire’s hand. Not this part.

  I do forgive you, I told the image of Claire floating in my mind’s eye. To my own considerable surprise, I forgive you for all the awful things you did to me, and the good things, too, which is harder. I even forgive you for dying, which I never thought I could. But I won’t be forgiving myself anytime soon.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dogwood

  DAMON

  I left the cemetery when it began to remind me of Naomi’s grandfather’s funeral.

  Over thirteen years of hunting, I had learned — mostly — how to cordon off unwanted memories. Naomi’s were proving more difficult, and her Grampa Charlie’s death when she was in junior high had featured prominently in a series of nightmares she’d suffered in the last few months. In the nightmare, she entered the funeral parlor with its ghastly choking scent of flowers and approached the casket with trembling grief and horror — only to find her own face, not her grandfather’s, posed in pale mockery of sleep. Waking usually led to her weeping for her lost grandfather, though he was not technically in the dream at all. She remembered standing in the cemetery as they lowered his body into the ground, shaking with the effort of controlling her tears, for the sake of her mother’s disapproval of emotional displays. When they got home, her mother slapped her — for the first and only time — for her indifference to her grandfather’s death.

  I thought my mother was difficult to please.

  Once Naomi’s memories started leaking in, it was hard to stop them. The cold wind reminded me of her wardrobe problems. The electronics store across the street gave me a flashback to the interview that got her the job at Movie Barn. A young man with blond hair walking out of the church looked like Tyler.

  I slammed the floodgates closed. I did not want to remember anything whatsoever about Tyler.

  It was time to get back to the Orphanage and figure out how to get rid of the Formyndari.

  When I got there, however, the guard and his Shadow were gone.

  “He got some kind of emergency call,” Westley said. He seemed normal enough now. “They left in a hurry.”

  An emergency for the Formyndari meant someone’s day had just gone very bad, or ended altogether. I felt a stir of unease, but it wasn’t my problem.

  “How’s Audrey?” I asked.

  “She’s outside. She wants to talk to you, actually.”

  I found Audrey in a lawn chair in the backyard, in one of the few spots of full, if fading, sun. She looked weak and tired, but lucid. A glass of lemonade gathered condensation in the armrest cupholder, while blood and drugs trickled through separate IV lines at each elbow. As I approached, she set aside a half-knitted scarf, which she didn’t seem to have been making progress with anyway.

  “Out and about,” I said. “Good sign.”

  “I wanted to sit in the sun, but it doesn’t help much,” she sighed, voice sluggish with medication. “I’m still freezing. I can handle the hunger, I can handle the pain. But I really hate being cold all the time.”

  “You’ll get used to it. There’ll be days you don’t even notice it.” Not consciously, anyway; it would still be a slow subliminal torture, darkening her mood, clouding her thoughts. But she didn’t need to hear that right now. Neither did I, frankly. “Was that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  She sipped her lemonade and shook her head. “When you brought Naomi here, and said she was your Lumi, you said the situation was temporary.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re planning to breach.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I think you’re crazy. At this point I’d beg Martin to beat me, if… if it would…” She trailed off, eyes distant, and I remembered that there were some heavy painkillers coming down that IV line. “I could never have left him, you know,” she murmured.

  “He had to die for me to be free. It hurts so much and I miss him so much but I can’t be sorry… can’t be sorry he’s dead…” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Anyway. I figure you’re only waiting for me. So if you’re that determined, go ahead. I don’t think I really need the drip anymore.” She glanced up at the red bag dangling above her head. “I won’t be competing for your resources.”

  I hesitated, almost asked her to explain that whole not-sorry-he’s-dead remark, but what came out was only, “Are you sure? There’s no hurry.”

  “I’m over the worst of it,” she said. “As long as I’ve got my happy pills… happy liquid… I’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah… about that. You can’t stay on that stuff forever. It’s not easy to get.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “I was thinking I might try marijuana next. I can pass as a cancer patient easily enough.” She raised an eyebrow at my uneasy expression. “That was a joke.”

  “Mm,” I said, unconvinced. “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said drowsily. When I walked away, she had her head back and her eyes closed. If the drugs let orphans fall asleep that easily, maybe they weren’t such a bad idea. Except for making you say incriminating things about your dead Lumi…

  Dove cornered me when I came back inside; there was still no sign of Darling, and she was frantic. With the guard gone, there was no point in keeping up appearances; I sent Dove and Galatea to look for her. Finding a Shadow who didn’t want to be found was virtually impossible, but Dove knew her roommate’s likely hiding places. I made a deliberate decision not to get worked up over Darling’s absence; she was hardly a helpless flower, and she’d only been gone a few hours. If she wasn’t back by morning, I would reassess my opinion. Until then, this was just Dove, worrying in her Dove-like way.

  My hands needed something to do; I turned to the dishes piled beside the sink, put my gloves in a jacket pocket, and began packing the dishes into the washer.

  Dove and Darling were the greatest success among my roommate/hunting partner pairings, much to my surprise. Dove was gentle, quiet, motherly; Darling,
though fifty years older, was considerably less mature — stubborn, short-tempered, rebellious. I could exact obedience from Darling by way of threats, punishments, and intimidation, but Dove got the same results with a single soft word. They did almost everything together and rarely argued, though they kept up a continuous low-level squabble, like an old married couple. As present circumstances were proving, they didn’t take separation well.

  To a certain extent, all the hunting pairs seemed to work that way. Audrey and Adonis, Westley and Galatea, the nonresident pairs — they all tended to get, not just attached, but downright possessive of each other. We were a species designed to live in pairs, to be a “we” rather than an “I.”

  It had not escaped my notice that I alone had no roommate, no hunting partner. I usually paired up with the newbies, the fragile ones in most need of support and guidance, and in between them I tagged along with Wes and Galatea. And that had worked for me — I had made it work for me — until Naomi.

  The plate in my hand was crusted with cheese and ketchup. I turned on the hot water and started scrubbing.

  The path away from Naomi was unimpeded now. Audrey was okay. The Formyndari didn’t have me under a microscope. True, the Liberty situation remained unresolved, but if I waited for that, Naomi could have gray hair by the time I got around to breaching. That wouldn’t do. Every day made it harder, strengthened the tug pulling me toward her, like a plant turning toward the sun. The bone-deep ache of it would not get better when I breached. But the need for her would go away. My mind wouldn’t be stuck in this loop of Naomi, Naomi, Naomi.

  Yeah. ‘Cause you totally stopped thinking about Claire when she died.

  Maybe not, but I had survived. I held myself together, for my parents’ sakes, for Westley’s sake, for the sake of a growing number of people who depended on me. I survived because I had a purpose, a cause, people who needed my help.