The Shadow City

by Dan Jolley

  Jackson was right all along!

  How could Jackson have sensed something was wrong when Lily, Brett’s own twin sister, had missed it?

  Her brother’s head was tilted toward her, so Lily could see how wide and glassy his eyes were. “Brett!” Lily hissed his name. “Brett, can you hear me?”

  Brett’s head moved a fraction of an inch, and his pupils contracted. “Lily.” His voice could barely even be called a whisper.

  “Can you move? Are you all right?” She risked a glance back at Thorne, but he had drifted over toward the Eternal Dawn members and seemed to have forgotten about them entirely. Thank goodness!

  “I’m so sorry, Lil,” Brett rasped. “I tried to stop it . . . stop him. But I couldn’t. He’s so strong. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Rise,” Lily heard Thorne tell the cultists. As the founder of the Eternal Dawn’s rumbling words rolled over his followers, the lights dimmed and flickered again. “Rise . . . and attend me.”

  Lily strained and was finally able to muster the strength to push herself up. I’ve got to help Brett! We’ve all got to get out of here!

  Jackson leaned in close. “Go. Get him to safety. I will provide some cover against the Dawn.” He conjured six golden orbs the size of softballs.

  Lily followed his gaze to the closest group of cultists. A moment later, the orbs screamed past Lily’s head and crashed into the Dawn members like glowing cannonballs. Bones crunched and breath wheezed from emptied lungs, and Lily watched as Jackson got to his feet, his eyes flaring brilliant, fiery gold above gritted teeth.

  Kaz pulled Brett up onto his feet alongside Lily. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here right now.” He pointed to a yawning gap twenty feet behind them. “That shock wave knocked a hole in the floor.”

  Lily nodded, and she and Brett both took wobbly steps toward the ragged hole, but Lily stumbled when Primus’s hysterical voice screeched through the air. “Stop those children! Seize them!”

  The lights flickered again. “Belay that order.”

  Thorne’s voice was still as calm as a lake on a windless day, but it filled the room, echoing until it hammered at Lily’s eardrums. But they couldn’t let themselves slow. They jumped through the hole to the floor below, and Jackson joined them a moment later.

  An elevator stood at the end of a short hallway. Kaz gestured at it with his chin. “There! Come on!”

  Lily nodded. She slipped one of Brett’s arms over her shoulders, supporting him.

  Faintly, from the floor above, the voice of one of the cultists reached them. “But, Master Thorne, shouldn’t we capture them? They’re attuned to the elements!”

  Thorne’s voice boomed out as if every surface in the building had become a speaker, broadcasting his words. “The children are irrelevant. Now that I have returned, the city of San Francisco itself will merge the realms with its sacrifice.”

  Lily froze in place. She whispered, “What’d he just say?”

  “Huh?” Kaz asked as he tried to help support Brett from the other side. “Who cares? Let’s go!”

  Lily slipped Brett’s arm free of her shoulders and shook her head. “I need to hear this. You go on—take the elevator and get Brett out of here.”

  Brett shook his head and looked as if he was going to say something sharp, but when he tried to speak, he staggered and put a hand to his head.

  “You heard Thorne. He doesn’t care about us,” Lily said. “Gabe was the only one he wanted.”

  “But—” Kaz sputtered.

  “But,” Lily continued, “I’ll go out a window and float down at the first sign of trouble. I’ll be right behind you.”

  At her side, Jackson surprised her by saying, “We’ll be right behind you. I want to hear what that monster says as well.”

  Kaz hesitated, so Lily stepped closer to him and added more urgency to her words. “Go. Get Brett someplace safe.”

  It was obvious Kaz didn’t like it, but he got Brett—who was so drained he was literally dragging his feet—into the elevator. Lily waited until the red numbers on the display started counting down before she turned to Jackson. “Come on. We can hear him just fine from here, but maybe we can find someplace to watch him, too.”

  Jackson fell in beside her. Calmer now that Kaz was getting her twin out of harm’s way, Lily could concentrate well enough to summon a cushion of air under her feet. She rose just high enough to peek over the edge of the hole, and didn’t know whether to sigh in relief or yelp with fear.

  The Dawn members were clustered in front of Jonathan Thorne at the far end of the immense room. She motioned for Jackson to be quiet, and when he nodded, she lifted him up beside her. The two of them watched, peering over the hole’s jagged edge, unnoticed.

  “The time of the terrestrial elements is at an end,” Thorne said. Lily figured he must be getting used to being on Earth now, because the lights only flickered a little bit when he spoke and his voice no longer sounded like it was coming out of a set of stadium amplifiers. A glimmer of gold caught her attention, and she turned to Jackson.

  Lily didn’t think she’d ever seen two different emotions so clearly displayed on anybody’s face before. Jackson Wright was terrified of Jonathan Thorne . . . but he also hated the man. The gold radiance glimmering from Jackson’s eyes could have been the fires of hell itself.

  Thorne went on. “I have come from Arcadia, my loyal children, and I bring with me a new order for this world. A new order for both worlds.”

  Murmuring broke out among the Dawn members. Lily spotted Primus, standing off to Thorne’s right, and she thought the cult leader looked . . . confused. Yes. Confused and worried.

  Thorne’s words might not be magically enhanced anymore, but they still boomed out effortlessly across the crowd. “I have come from the Shadow City, and now this city will pay the toll for the future I have come to deliver. Soon, my children, this vile blue sky shall tear asunder and reveal the true amber and gold behind it. Soon the water shall rise up and take millions in sacrifice. Soon cleansing flames shall billow and roll across the Earth, leaving blackened beauty in their wake. I have come from Arcadia, my children, to see this world undone.”

  Primus’s concern seemed to reach a peak. “M-Master Thorne? My Lord? Wh—what are you talking about? Are we not going to remake this world into something more glorious? With the magick of Arcadia, the Earth can be brought to a state of eternal dawn, with us as its leaders. Isn’t that why our order was founded? Isn’t that our purpose?”

  Thorne turned his head toward Primus, and her face lit up with the emerald radiance from his eyes. Lily suddenly felt very glad not to be on the receiving end of that stare. Primus recoiled but kept her footing.

  “Perhaps,” Thorne drawled. “Perhaps, long ago, that was the purpose of the Dawn. But I have returned with but a single desire.”

  Primus stuttered again but gathered herself enough to speak, “What desire, Master?”

  Thorne raised a hand toward her. “Blood.”

  Lily’s mind had a hard time processing what she saw next. At first it looked as though a small part of the world had collapsed in on itself . . . but then, to her own regret, she understood. Part of the shadow essence that had occupied Brett’s body leaped out of Thorne’s hand and narrowed to a long, thin spike. The spike snapped out like the stinging barb of some ghastly insect, and punched straight through Primus’s chest.

  The strike took less than a second. Lily blinked, and the long, black shadow-spear had vanished.

  Primus simply stood there, staring, as the blood drained from her face. Lily gasped as another blood cocoon started forming around the woman, streaming from the wound Thorne had made. One of the cultists, a young woman, screamed and rushed to Primus’s side, but this blood cocoon was different from the others Lily had seen. This one pushed the young woman’s hands away. Sealed her out. The woman collapsed, sobbing, as the cocoon finished forming.

  The rest of the cultists backed away from Primus, Thorne, and t
he young woman. Carefully. Silently.

  “He needs no ritual,” Jackson whispered in horror. “No silver dagger. No book of power. He can send people to Arcadia at will!”

  Lily tensed her muscles, ready to run, because God only knew what kind of Arcadian horror would emerge from the cocoon once Primus had been sent to the other world.

  But Jackson took hold of her forearm. “Wait,” he hissed. “This isn’t the same as the other cocoons we’ve seen. There’s no Exchange. Nothing is happening!” Lily saw that he was right: the blood cocoon wasn’t moving. There was no rippling or squirming from anything trying to fight its way out. The cocoon simply finished molding itself around Primus’s body and . . . stayed there.

  Waiting.

  The cultists began murmuring, their muffled words filled with fear, and when Lily saw Thorne’s face, she understood why. His pale skin, unnatural green eyes, and jet-black hair looked like the features of a human being, but when he grinned his human mask fell away.

  Thorne’s mouth was filled with triangular, serrated teeth. Like a shark. Lily stared, transfixed, and watched as the fangs changed, becoming long, needle-sharp spines, like those of some fearsome deep-sea creature—and then changed again, into rings of horrifying, inward-curving hooks.

  The horror show that was Jonathan Thorne’s grin kept transforming, each iteration more terrifying than the last, and even as Lily struggled to keep herself from running away from sheer terror, she couldn’t help but wonder: What has Jonathan Thorne become?

  Part of that had been inside Brett? What did it do to him?

  “Silence!” Thorne suddenly roared. He pursed his thin lips, concealing his monstrous teeth. “It is true, what you have long been taught. The right elements, the right reagents and words and sacrifice and ritual can merge Arcadia with this world. But now that I have come, there is a much simpler way. A way that requires no children playing elementalists.” He packed eons’ worth of disgust into those last three words. “Listen to me. The corridor between worlds is narrow. Force too many beings through it at once, and its walls will collapse.”

  One of the cultists in the front row, a tall, tanned woman spoke up with a quavering voice. “But . . . Master Thorne . . . how can we do it? How can we sacrifice so many people at once?”

  Thorne flashed his mutant carnivore grin, and Lily had to look away. “The same way Arcadia was created in the first place. An earthquake strong enough to destroy San Francisco. Just as it was destroyed in 1906.”

  15

  The Arcadian wind blew tiny motes of golden light into Gabe’s eyes and ruffled his hair. The rest of him remained stock-still, like a statue, as he stared at his mother. She gazed back at him serenely. From behind him, Uncle Steve said something, but the words bounced off Gabe’s ears.

  Gabe’s memories of his mother occupied a space far, far back in his mind, among the earliest thoughts and impressions he could recall. Accessing that space was like dredging up a barely remembered dream. A dream before he could read, before he could speak, before he could even walk without falling down.

  Back then, his mother had been his world.

  Gabe had seen photographs of his mother, and he had connected her face to his memories, but only in an abstract way. To Gabe, his mother was more a collection of sensations. . . . The softness of her skin. The warmth of the blanket she tucked around him in his bed. The blueberry scent of her hair when his face rested on her shoulder. The overwhelming knowledge that, with her, he was safe.

  Gabe had felt a heart-stopping jolt that night he’d faced the apographon. Standing there in Argent Court, staring at something that looked exactly like someone so important to him, he’d felt the edges of his world quiver and threaten to buckle.

  That was nothing compared with what he felt as the woman in the green dress turned and fixed him with her impossibly blue eyes.

  “I know you,” she said, in a voice like a high note on an out-of-tune piano. “Gabe.”

  Gabe ran to her and threw his arms around her before he even knew what he was doing. She bent slightly to return the embrace, and with his face pressed to her collarbone, Gabe was transported, thrown back into those flashes of memory from his childhood.

  Her skin feels the same! Her hair still smells like blueberries!

  He felt the beating of her heart against the side of his face and shuddered to think that he had been fooled by the apographon for even one second.

  Gabe loosened his hold on his mother and stepped back. She straightened up . . . and the euphoric haze shattered. Gabe’s throat locked up tight, his mouth instantly dry. His mother looked down at him with her own blue eyes, yes, but . . .

  Were her eyes always so big?

  Disturbing details sprang out at him like a barrage of punches. Her fingers were long. Too long. And he knew she was tall, but he had seen her in photos standing next to his father and Uncle Steve. She’d been shorter than Uncle Steve’s six feet, but now, when Steve came to stand next to her, Aria loomed over him by half a head. Plus . . . a few gray hairs threaded their way through his uncle’s blond mane, but his mother looked the same age—exactly the same age—as she had in the photographs from ten years ago.

  Gabe took another step back, the wheels in his head spinning so fast they threatened to come off their axles.

  As she regarded him calmly, neither smiling nor frowning, Gabe got the impression that there was something under the blue of her eyes . . . something crouched there, waiting, a bare millimeter under the surface.

  This is my mother. I know it is.

  And yet, in some way Gabe couldn’t even begin to define, she wasn’t.

  Something else lived there, inside her. Something dangerous.

  The corners of his mother’s lips curved upward in a slow, deliberate motion, but the smile didn’t reveal her teeth. “You’ve grown so,” she said, but her eyes seemed to focus on the ground right behind him. “The spitting image of your father.” Gabe tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she turned away from him and moved closer to the edge of the wall, staring out across the bay at the shadowy city on the opposite shore.

  When she moved, Gabe finally noticed a wide swath of . . . What are those things? No, more accurate: what were those things? On the top of the wall around and behind her lay a scattering of creatures that looked like insects, but each one was at least as big as a small dog, and they had all been crushed. Gabe couldn’t tell by what exactly, just that they were all very, very dead and leaking their grayish innards onto the bone wall’s surface. His mother had been standing at the edge of the insectoid carnage.

  Did she do that? How did she do that?

  Gabe stared at his mother, and as he did, black and gold shadows rose and swirled around her like a terrifying cloak.

  Gabe couldn’t take his eyes off her as he grabbed his uncle’s wrist and led him what he hoped was far enough away to be out of earshot. Uncle Steve didn’t seem surprised, and he dipped his head to make it easier for Gabe to speak to him in a whisper.

  “That’s—that’s my mom.”

  Uncle Steve nodded. “Yes.”

  Gabe let go of his wrist but moved closer. “What happened to her?”

  Uncle Steve’s face was creased with pain. “Arcadia happened to her. The place itself. Magick is poison, Gabe. Spend too much time with it, and it leaves a mark. And if you’re here . . . that means Jonathan Thorne is in San Francisco. Plotting to spread magick’s poison across the entire world.”

  Gabe put up protesting hands. “Forget about Thorne. That’s my mom!” He pointed to the woman cloaked in shadows. “How do we get her back to San Francisco? If she’s sick with magick stuff, how do we . . .” He tore his gaze away from his mother and looked his uncle in the eye. “How do we make her better?”

  The pain on Uncle Steve’s face grew deeper. “Gabe . . . there’s no way to send her back. Maybe if we’d gotten to her years ago. But she’s been in Arcadia too long. She just . . . she doesn’t belong on Earth anymore.”<
br />
  Gabe shook his head. “No. No. Okay? She’s just sick. There’s gotta be a—a ritual or something! To get the magick out of her! There’s rituals for every other freaking thing; there’s gotta be one for this!”

  Uncle Steve let out a long, ragged breath. “There isn’t. I’m sorry. If she went back, she’d spread magick’s corruption with her, just like Thorne. I hate to say this, and I wish more than anything that it weren’t true, but the only world where you and Aria can be together is this one.”

  For a long moment it felt as if Gabe couldn’t breathe.

  It’s not fair. It’s not fair!

  He wanted to scream the words. Or just scream. He turned his back on his uncle, and the tears welling up in his eyes hissed into steam as the fire rose inside him.

  Gabe hadn’t let himself hope. Not truly. When Brett had told him his mother was still alive, even when he saw the apographon, deep in his heart, Gabe hadn’t dared let himself hope. It was too much to wish for. Too much to be real.

  But she was alive! She was standing right there. He could’ve hoped! He could’ve pinned all his dreams on this, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to save her.

  “I tried everything to get her back before—before it was too late.” Uncle Steve spoke over Gabe’s shoulder, and when Gabe realized the quaver in Steve’s voice came from his own welling tears, it shocked the fire back into place. “I tried everything.” Gabe had never heard this tone in his uncle’s voice before. “I swear to God. I tried everything to get her back.” Gabe realized Uncle Steve was asking for his forgiveness.

  “We should leave this place,” Aria called, still gazing out across the water. Her clear voice carried extremely well, but its off-key, warped-bell quality made Gabe’s skin crawl. Immediately, he felt guilty.

  Mom, what happened to you?

  “Come on.” Uncle Steve beckoned for Gabe to follow him as he went to join Aria. “She’s right. We have a safe place, and once we get there, we can figure out how to get you back to Earth. Let’s go.”

  Gabe stood between Aria and Uncle Steve and watched as Steve’s eyes turned silver-white, just like Lily’s did when she commanded the air. “Relax,” his uncle said. “I won’t drop you.” Gabe’s stomach lurched as his feet left the wall, and a pillar of air sent him and his mother and his uncle sailing out across the waters of the bay.