Shadow Born: A Joseph Hunter Novel: Book 1 (Joseph Hunter Series)

by Alex Gates

  “I’m so… so sorry,” I muttered, closing her eyes.

  I glanced at Xander who stood drowned in darkness, surrounded by the silhouettes of monsters. His celestial guns glowed with radiance on his hips. He hadn’t drawn them before, probably wary of shooting in such a confined space where a bullet could ricochet off a stone wall and hit Mel. But that concerned him no longer. He drew his pistols faster than a teenage boy takes off his pants, and he dropped an Empousa in that same motion.

  Standing, I faced my daughter’s killer. “She was a child,” I said, gasping for breath. My entire body had tensed with rage. “Only seven.”

  Medea showed her fangs. “Death is not what you think. Yes, her body is now useless to this world, but with reason. Her spirit, still alive and vibrant and young, has moved to another realm where it still very much lives. Just like her mother. She is now home, Joseph.”

  The mention of Callie staggered me. “What does that mean? Her mother?”

  Medea smirked, then giggled. “This is not the only world where a spirit can existence, and nor is it the only realm of existence that sustains life.”

  Unable to listen to her smug voice any longer, I reached for my magic, forgetting that I had none. When I failed to reach power, I did what any other grieving, irrationally angry father would do—I charged the Priestess.

  Another quick succession of gunshots echoed like splitting mountains throughout the chamber.

  Medea raised an arm as I reached her, throwing up an invisible wall. I slammed into it, careening to the side, losing my balance, and falling on my ass. She chanted a summoning incantation, finishing her quick rant with the word, “Anemoi.” A crack thundered across the chamber and two more ethereal spirits appeared near Medea. Their incorporeal forms crackled with electricity, and wings in the form of smoke fluttered from their backs.

  Medea fully shifted from human to Raven Empousa. “You dare attack me?” she asked, her voice now ragged.

  I stood and faced her and her storm spirits, swallowing air like it was my last meal. “Why?” I asked. “Why her?”

  “Because your blood lives in her. And she is needed elsewhere.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I roared, baring my teeth.

  “I do not question my Nephil. She has her reasons, and she trusted me to provide her with the girl and your blood. I did not fail her.”

  My mind shadowed. I could barely think, let alone process Medea’s information.

  She stepped forward, toward me and away from her Anemoi. “Your purpose has been served, Arkos. Now, you shall die.”

  If I had a dollar for every monster that threatened to kill me, I might be able to buy a plane ticket the fuck out of here. Medea’s threat held a little more weight than the previous ones, though. I always had magic and guns to assist me out of any problem. In her dark, gloomy chamber—and not that one, pervert—I had no magic and no weapons to fight with. She had her full power, along with six storm spirits and a small army of Empousa.

  It’s crazy knowing you’re going to die, and knowing you can’t do shit about it. In that realization, I wasn’t afraid, just regretful of my life. Why had Callie and I not retired when we had a child? Why had we not move far away and lived like a real family? Why had I allowed Derek take my daughter? Why had I spent the past seven years wallowing in self-pity and depression, when I could have loved Mel? Why had I followed her and fallen into a routine that had allowed people to find me and her, leading to her capture and death?

  Every decision I had made over the past seven years weighed on me. I had fucked up—not only my life, but Callie’s and Mel’s. As much anger and hate as I had toward Medea, I possessed even more for myself.

  The flames in the chamber flickered, throwing even more shadows around me. I meant to die to end my miserable life, but I wouldn’t go without a fight. As Medea ambled toward me, smug as a bug in a rug, I grabbed a torch and sprinted toward her again. I anticipated her to throw up a magical shield, so when she raised her arm in the warding gesture, I sidestepped her entirely and threw the flame at a wind spirit. The Anemoi screeched like a gust howling through a gutter. I turned away from the spirits and leaped at Medea, hoping to catch her unaware at another sudden change of direction.

  It worked.

  She had dropped her magical shield to attack my back, but I had turned and tackled her to the stone floor before she had the chance, mounting her. I drove my fist into her face, feeling something give. Following suit with my other fist, I cracked her jaw. When I went for a third strike, she dodged, and I punched the ground. My entire arm went numb as my knuckles shattered and my wrist broke.

  Medea dug her talons into my side, tearing into my flesh. Her face, split open and bleeding, popped back into place and healed. She giggled, pursing her lips and blowing as if presented a birthday cake. A gust of wind picked me up and threw me across the room. My head cracked against the stone wall. A wave of heat and nausea rushed over me, and my vision blurred from the impact.

  I worked my way to a squat, placing my good hand on the ground for support. My broken wrist throbbed, but the pain barely registered beneath my anger and adrenaline. I wanted nothing more than to take a nap right there on the cold stones, but I glared up at Medea. The Anemoi I had enflamed a few seconds prior hovered behind her, fully intact and unscathed.

  I had tried my best, and my best hadn’t even left a scratch.

  Dropping to my ass, I leaned my back against the wall and watched as the remaining Empousa and Anemoi overwhelmed Xander, rendering his divine guns useless. He dropped one to the ground and drew a white-glowing dagger and tried his darnedest to keep the monsters at bay.

  Would he die too, because of me? Just like Callie. Just like Mel.

  From my peripheral, the wind spirits glowed a light blue. I resigned myself to their attack and to death. I didn’t have the strength or the energy to fight, anyway. Four tendrils of lightning flashed from the Anemoi and stretched toward me.

  I closed my eyes. When a second passed and nothing had happened, I opened them. “What the honky-tonk?” I asked. A thin layer of shadow covered my body, absorbing the strands of lightning, and I barely felt a tickle from the assault.

  Medea’s face flushed. I thought I saw panic in her features. She mumbled and raised a hand into the air. An icy spike formed in her palm, and she screamed as she threw it toward me. A cold sensation spread across my body, like someone had dumped snow over my head, but I felt no pain from her attack.

  “What?” she gasped, taking a desperate step backward.

  The shadows that surrounded me moved. I saw form and substance within them. Reflexively, I reached for one, grabbing it. It shifted into the shape of the ice spike that Medea had hurled at me, and I threw the darkness back at her. It whistled through the air and plunged into her bare chest.

  She shrieked, clutching at the wound. Dark lines appeared over her skin like veins. They crawled across her body. Blood from the piercing spilled over her stomach. She began to hyperventilate, collapsing to her knees as she stared at me. “How?” she asked, voice trembling with fear. “It’s impossible.”

  With her concentration shattered, the Anemoi broke apart like smoke in a heavy wind—including the four surrounding Xander. Medea’s wounded skin attempted to heal over, as it had from my earlier strikes. It crawled and roiled, but the shadowed wedge in her body prevented her from recovering. With a weak voice, she said, “Take this from my body. Heal me.” Her hand worked over the darkness within her chest, but she couldn’t grip it to remove it.

  I stood on trembling legs and tottered toward her. I leaned over and gripped the shadow—it was substantial in my hand. I extracted it from her body, pulling away the blackened veins that had webbed across her skin.

  Medea gasped, collapsing into the fetal position.

  I held the shadow. It looked like a railroad spike. What the fuck? How had the shadows warded the lightning blasts? How had I wielded them like a weapon? What was happening? I shook thos
e questions from my mind. Those answers didn’t matter in the moment.

  “Why did you kill my daughter?” I asked, focusing on what was important.

  Medea lay in a ball on the cold stone ground. She trembled. I don’t think she cowered from me. I think I’d severely hurt her, and she hadn’t recovered.

  “Answer me!” My voiced reverberated off the chamber walls, followed by six quick gunshots. Footsteps casually approached me, and I felt Xander’s calming presence at my back and saw the radiant glow of his guns.

  “My Nephil told me to,” she whimpered.

  “Hecate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I—I don’t know. I never asked, I never question her.”

  Same answer as before. That left me with one more. “Where do I find Hecate, then?”

  Medea remained silent for a moment. She screamed like a banshee and threw another spiked blast of air at me. It gouged through my stomach and exploded out of my back, dropping me to the ground like cement through water. My blood spilled onto the stone. Medea collapsed beside me, and we lay like that, side by side, panting our last breaths for a moment. I looked up and saw that Xander had raised both his guns and centered them on Medea’s chest.

  “Don’t,” I wheezed. “I get to kill her.”

  Again, without my comprehension or consent, shadows crept over my body and stitched my wound back together and snapped my wrist bones back in place. It was a crude restoration, and the injury didn’t heal completely, but the darkness had staunched the bleeding. I groaned as I rolled onto my ass and into a kneeling position. Holding the spiked shadow, I pressed it against Medea’s head, the tip breaking the thin layer of skin across her temple.

  “Where can I find Hecate?” I asked.

  “In fucking hell.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled the spike downward as she drove her head upward, impaling herself. Medea’s body went limp, and she sagged onto the stone floor—still as Mel’s corpse.

  With her dead and now useless, I only had one thought on my mind. Using my elbows, I crawled toward my daughter. Before I made it into the chalked circle though, the darkness enveloped me, and I fell unconscious.

  13

  I woke up who knows how much later. My head ached behind my eyes and at the stem of my neck, and my eyes stung, as if I hadn’t slept in days. To top it off, the adrenaline from battle had faded, and my acquired wounds sang a raucous tune. My left wrist had swollen to the size of a softball and had bruised to a smudgy, faded black. The side of my body, where Medea had tore into me with her claws had stiffened. My stomach, where she had thrown her spike through me, simmered with a low heat—as if in the early stage of an infection. The wound had opened again and was bleeding, despite the shadow’s measly effort to close it.

  Xander sat near me, against the stone wall of Medea’s chamber, with his eyes closed. The sconces that burned around the room lit his face and the wetness of his cheeks. I had a joke on the tip of my tongue—something about his masculinity and crying… blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t have the heart or the humor to utter it. Not with Mel—

  Still lying on my back, I rolled my head to face the chalked wheel. A handful of lumps rested on the ground where Xander had laid to rest the small army of Empousa. They had returned to their human form, and the scene resembled a mass cult suicide rather than a shootout.

  Highlighted beneath the glow of hundreds of melting candles, I saw Mel’s small body resting in a puddle of dark blood. Her lungs didn’t expand, her chest didn’t rise or fall.

  I coughed, and nausea overwhelmed me, but I didn’t vomit. Turning onto my hands and knees, a spat up a string of saliva that dangled off my lips. It tasted sour on my tongue. I gagged and splashed all the alcohol I had consumed that night onto the floor. Crawling away from my mess, I bumped into Xander. I rose off my hands and onto my knees, shuffling around to face him, and then I embraced my old friend.

  Together, we sobbed. Not only for Callie and Mel. We sobbed for each other. For our losses. For our brokenness and suffering. For the fact that we had to continue forward without hope to guide our way. What was this world without anything or anyone to share it with? So, we—or at least, I—sobbed knowing that we were all we had left. There were no words exchanged, no judgments given. Just two broken humans holding one another together as the darkness overpowered the fading torchlight.

  I stood inside Dr. Tacet’s death shop, staring out the far window as the rain pattered against the glass. The morning sun yawned awake in the east, breaking through dark clouds and painting the sky orange and pink, and threatening the start of Hephaestus’ hunt for me. I stared at the sunrise with tight lips and narrowed eyes, but I didn’t really see the spectacle. How could I enjoy beauty when everything beautiful was taken from me? Xander spoke from beside me, but I didn’t really hear him either. My mind kept wavering back to Medea’s chamber and back to Mel.

  After we had found the energy and the will to stand and leave, I stumbled to my daughter. I held her and apologized to her. Xander had touched my shoulder, shocking me back to the present.

  I had refused to leave Melanie in the darkness of that chamber, lying on the same cold, stone floor as her killer. Xander tried to convince me that leaving her was for the best. What would we do with her body? Store it in a freezer? He said the cops would take care of it legally. I told him to fuck off as I lifted her from the ground. My injuries screamed with her added weight, but I ignored the pain.

  When we’d left Medea’s house and were sitting in the car—which he had parked on the other block and a street up—I used Xander’s cell phone and called Dakota. He had sent Medea’s address to her when I still had her phone earlier that night, so he had her number in his recent messages. I told Dakota the basics of what had happened in Medea’s chamber, though I had left out the parts about my blood offering and the unexplainable access to a new power.

  Dakota had promised to take care of the crime scene for us, eliminating any evidence of our involvement there. And I promised her that if she did, I would help her find her father. She advised me to stay low—the Sheriff’s Department was pretty baffled about how I’d managed to escape their interrogation room by just blinking out of existence. “They’re blaming their camera,” she said, referring to Hephaestus teleporting me out of there. “With the bodies found at your house, Detective Gross isn’t too enamored with you for managing to get away. The force will be looking for you.” As an afterthought, she also mentioned that she had collected her credit card from my belongings that Aarseth had booked. “Thankfully they hadn’t processed the evidence, otherwise I would have been attached to you.” Unfortunately, she left my phone at the precinct.

  She had also mentioned that she knew a retired coroner who owned a cemetery and would take care of Melanie’s body for us. After giving us his address, Xander and I had changed direction and headed to his house. Dr. Mortimer Tacet was the man’s name—he was tall with long limbs and a short torso and liver-spotted hands. He welcomed us in the driveway, and then he led us into his shop. A casual observer would have noted that Dr. Tacet wasn’t too retired in the coroner business. He had five bodies lying on gurneys, and thirty freezer-coffins that filled an entire wall.

  After taking Mel from me, Dr. Tacet had set her on a metal table and covered her with a sheet. “You’re welcome to stay with her as long as you need to,” he had said, before shuffling to the other end of the shop and sitting at his desk—where he still was.

  “Joseph,” Xander said, his voice low and harsh.

  I blinked a few times, glancing away from the shop window and over to him. He stood before me, extending a mug of steaming coffee. Tacet must have made a pot for us as my thoughts and regrets had swept me away. “Thanks,” I muttered, accepting his gift. My hands were frozen, so I just cupped the mug between my palms and let the warmth take over.

  “You need to say goodbye,” he said.

  I turned away from the window and faced the sheet that covered my daugh
ter’s body. What was I supposed to say? I hadn’t known her, and she hadn’t known me.

  Knowing I had to leave her with something, though, I stepped forward and pulled back the sheet to expose her pale face which was still splattered with blood. The drawing I had stolen from her journal earlier remained in my pants pocket back in Xander’s condo, along with her teddy bear that I had snatched off her bed—otherwise, I would have left them for her. But all I had to give in that moment were my words. “You were wrong,” I said, swallowing a thick lump. “Cheerios suck big time.” I cleared my throat. “And I wasn’t too late. Hecate has your spirit—your life essence. I’m still going to save you. I promise.” I kissed her cold forehead and then covered her face again, and I moved away from her and toward Xander.

  “We have to talk,” he said.

  “No we don’t,” I said, turning my head and staring back out the window to hide my tears. The last thing I wanted to do was talk.

  Xander remained silent for a time—the rain tittering on the glass the only sound—then he said, “I collected the silver coins.” He licked his lips and stared at his coffee. “And I put them in the chalice.” He grimaced as he said that last part, most likely pained that he had intermixed something so evil with something so holy.

  I vaguely recalled him carrying the goblet to the car as I carried Mel’s’ body, but at the time it didn’t register. I wondered if he had removed the items to erase our involvement at the scene, or if he believed they actually possessed a deeper, more sinister purpose. The sheriff’s department probably wouldn’t entertain the idea that vampires had not only attacked me in my home—and that’s why dead bodies were burned to a crisp—but they had also attacked me in a strange woman’s ritualistic chamber as she murdered my daughter, the daughter of the now-deceased Derek and Marie. Last night had been the bookend to a long, sloppy string of events, and I had been present at three different homicide scenes.