The Shadow City

by Dan Jolley

  Gabe stared down, so far down, at the water, a shimmering gold instead of the blue-gray of the real world. The black, twisted spires and broken streets of Arcadia loomed ahead of them, and the gold-and-amber sky swirled overhead.

  Magick. Everything is saturated with magick. No wonder the fire wants to run wild here!

  The closer they got to the city, the more awful it looked. Gabe saw creatures, tiny at this distance but unmistakable, winging through the air and scrambling over buildings and shattered roads. The city was a nightmare come to life.

  But nightmare or not—for the first time in ten years, he was with his mother and his uncle. Yeah, his uncle had grown back a leg that had been missing for a solid decade, and his mom had become some sort of magick-soaked monster, but nobody’s perfect.

  “I don’t want you to worry, Gabe,” Uncle Steve told him. “We are going to get you home. I don’t know how, but we’ll come up with something.”

  Home. Without a family, what did the word even mean? But thinking of San Francisco made Gabe remember how he’d been sent to Arcadia in the first place.

  “I meant to tell you—the Emerald Tablet’s gone! The ritual the Dawn used to bring me here, it turned the Tablet to dust in the process.”

  “The Book of Power destroyed!” Uncle Steve exclaimed. He couldn’t have looked more shocked. “It was thousands of years old! The foundation text of all our magickal knowledge!” he sputtered. “It was written by . . .” He trailed off. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now. But the Tablet created Arcadia. Without it, I don’t how Arcadia can ever be destroyed.”

  “Everything casts a shadow,” Aria said unexpectedly. Gabe thought he’d never get used to the strange dissonant key of her voice. “This world is the darkest of shadows,” she continued. “The darkest of reflections.”

  Gabe expected her to go on. When she didn’t, Gabe looked at Uncle Steve in hope of some explanation. But Steve seemed to be just as confused as Gabe was. Then it clicked.

  Wait. What was the first thing she said? “Everything casts a shadow”?

  “Hold on. I overheard something else before I got sent here!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What Mom said about casting shadows—Primus said it, too! After the Dawn grabbed me, I heard her talking about another book like the Emerald Tablet. She called it . . .” Gabe struggled to remember. “The Mirror Book? It’s the Emerald Tablet’s shadow or something.”

  Uncle Steve’s face winched itself even deeper into a frown.

  “The Emerald Tablet doesn’t cast a shadow,” Uncle Steve muttered to himself. Then Gabe saw his face light up. “Correction! The Emerald Tablet doesn’t cast a shadow on Earth.”

  “So you think that—”

  “Another Book of Power!” Uncle Steve said excitedly. “Here in Arcadia. A shadow of the Tablet, just like this dimension is a shadow of our own.”

  “That’s why Primus wasn’t all freaked out that she had to destroy the Tablet in the sacrifice!” Gabe said, now just as excited as Uncle Steve. “Because somewhere there’s another book that can do the same thing!”

  “The Mirror Book,” Aria said dreamily.

  Both Gabe and Uncle Steve peered over at her, startled.

  “Yes,” she said airily, “I know where that is.”

  Uncle Steve had set their small party down a few hundred feet from the water’s edge. Now they made their way along the city’s buckled sidewalks, following Aria. Gabe kept his eyes on the ruined houses that lined the boulevard. That way he didn’t have to look so much at the dead horses littering the broken street, half-concealed by mounds of rubble.

  It had taken Gabe a couple of minutes to realize that, while he and Uncle Steve shuffled along the street, Aria just sort of . . . glided. Her long green dress hid her feet, but Gabe was pretty sure they were hovering a couple of inches off the demolished roadway.

  His mother also hadn’t said a word since they’d descended to street level. She just started walking—gliding—without even a glance over her shoulder. Gabe and Uncle Steve had no choice but to follow along.

  Her silence was unnerving, but so were the streets that they walked. In much the same way he chose not to look at the dead horses, Gabe let his eyes slide past the alleyway draped to the rooftops with thick, white spiderwebs. He also skirted carefully around the hole in the street from which he could hear a buzzing like thousands upon thousands of beating wasp wings.

  Staying quiet and doing his best not to draw any attention to himself might actually be a very good idea.

  After trekking a dozen blocks, Gabe spotted something slimy and golden moving in the shadow of a half-collapsed house. When the creature emerged, Gabe immediately recognized the lean, skinless features of a hunter. Striding nimbly over a mound of shattered masonry, it looked as at home in the ruined city as a lion on the savanna.

  Like the hunters Gabe had seen in San Francisco, this creature had no eyes. But that didn’t stop Gabe from shivering when the beast turned directly toward him.

  The hunter’s muscles coiled and tensed as it prepared to charge.

  Gabe called up balls of fire around his hands. The hunter leaped up on top of a low brick wall, opened its fang-filled jaws wide . . . and froze.

  Gabe thought it sniffed.

  Aria hadn’t slowed down as the hunter emerged from hiding. Gabe didn’t think she even saw the monster, or if she did, she didn’t care. She just kept gliding along the sidewalk, and the closer she got, the more the hunter trembled. Finally, with a long, low, mournful bay, the hunter whipped around and bolted in the opposite direction.

  Gabe turned to his uncle and spoke very quietly. “Did you see that?”

  Steve nodded grimly but didn’t say anything.

  Gabe watched his mother as she led the way. An emotion he never, ever would have expected to associate with her suddenly presented itself, and it was impossible to ignore.

  Fear.

  The fear only intensified when he saw a flock of ten abyssal bats come diving toward them, only to bank sharply at the last second and climb, shrieking, back into the sky.

  It went on like that for what felt like ages as they made their way deeper and deeper in the shadow city. Aria silent, Gabe worried, and Uncle Steve, as far as Gabe could tell, pensive. Aria turned and led them down a cobblestone street toward the bay—away, to Gabe’s relief, from another pair of houses draped in thick, white spiderweb—and Uncle Steve finally broke the silence. “I think I know where we’re going.”

  Gabe was grateful to focus on something other than his mom and his worries about whatever she had become. “Yeah? Where?”

  Steve pointed off to one side of the street, his arm angling toward the water. “Black Point. I believe that’s what it’s called. She’s taking us to Fort Mason . . . or whatever version of Fort Mason they’ve got here.”

  Gabe had seen Fort Mason before, from a distance, riding in the car through the city. He knew it was a bunch of low, red-tiled buildings . . . but when Aria led them around the corner and he got an unobstructed view of the place, Gabe sighed. “Of course.”

  Arcadia’s Fort Mason was a massive mission-style palace, with arcades hundreds of feet high. What was unassuming red tile on Earth was here some kind of red-gold gem-like substance, and Gabe had to shield his eyes when light from the Arcadian sky glinted off it. An entry portal—he couldn’t call this gigantic thing a mere door—stood at least thirty feet tall, and Gabe gasped when he caught sight of the two biggest hunters he’d ever seen standing guard in front of it.

  “Uh . . . are they going to run away, too, when Mom gets close?”

  Uncle Steve squinted. “I don’t think those two will be running anywhere.”

  Gabe immediately saw what he meant. The two “guardian” hunters weren’t covered in gold ichor. They actually were gold. A pair of ornamental statues. He was more relieved than embarrassed for mistaking them for the real thing.

  “Come along, Gabe,” Aria said. “We’re almost
there.” She looked back at Gabe, and though she didn’t smile, there was a welcome twinkle in her eye. Frightening or not, she was his mother, and he quickened his pace to walk beside her.

  “It kind of looks like a library,” Gabe said.

  “A good place to find a book, I guess,” Uncle Steve said.

  “Right, but it looks deserted. I was expecting . . . I don’t know. A fortress. Like, with guards and defenses and stuff? If the Mirror Book’s so valuable, why isn’t the Dawn protecting it?”

  “The Dawn doesn’t dare enter this place,” Aria said as the shadow of the library palace fell across them. She raised her eyes to the towering walls and didn’t say anything more.

  Gabe huffed. “Why be afraid of a library? Books can’t hurt you!”

  For the first time, as she turned to face him, Aria smiled fully. Her lips stretched, and stretched, and stretched, until a horrid, Cheshire-cat grin split her face in half, literally reaching from ear to ear. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The mouth that had once kissed him and sung him lullabies was filled with far, far too many teeth. And every one of them came to a needle-sharp point.

  Gabe looked at her in horror and then realized he’d been wrong.

  The Emerald Tablet had been used to create Arcadia. It had gotten his dad killed and trapped Gabe in another dimension. It had delivered a demonic monster to San Francisco and turned his mom into . . .

  Gabe took a deep breath, turned to the library, and prepared himself for anything.

  A book had started all this trouble in the first place.

  16

  Brett moved one foot in front of the other, testing the strength of his legs.

  His legs, he had to remind himself as he walked.

  After days of being a prisoner in his own body, each step seemed like its own miracle.

  He felt split down the middle. Half of him relished the familiar sights and sounds and smells of San Francisco. The other half of him still held on to foul echoes of Thorne. He struggled with the knowledge that he’d been worn like a suit, a vehicle for something so horrifying that his mind could only glance at it before having to turn away.

  Being possessed by Thorne had been like being a hostage in a vehicle driven by a madman. And there had been times when Brett had felt blindfolded, unable to tell what Thorne was up to, as the monster walked in his sneakers and spoke with his voice.

  But Brett had seen enough to know that Thorne had conspired with Primus to arrange the ambush in Greta’s room at Brookhaven. He knew that Thorne had sabotaged the water glyphs at Argent Court to broadcast its location to the Dawn.

  Perhaps worst of all, he knew that Thorne had nearly drowned Gabe in order to allow the Dawn to capture him.

  While sharing the same body as Thorne, Brett had touched the surface of the man’s dark heart. He’d felt the apocalyptic hunger of the beast’s desire. He’d glimpsed a century’s worth of horrific acts he could not—and did not want to—comprehend.

  And always one particular image flashed brighter than all the others, hovering there at the edges of his perception. Something red. Circular. Reptilian? He could still see it.

  Brett tried to focus on it, but it slithered away.

  “Where are they?” Kaz’s hands fluttered. They both stood by the entrance of the Transamerica building. “What if Thorne’s got them? What if he’s putting that shadow goop in them now?” Kaz seemed to realize what he’d just said, and his fluttering hands got even flutterier. “Oh, Brett! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I wasn’t trying to—”

  Brett was going to tell Kaz not to worry about it, but just then a gust of wind blew his hair back, and Lily and Jackson dropped straight out of the sky and landed right in front of them.

  Lily’s silver-white eyes faded to dark brown as she threw her arms around him. He hugged her back, and they stood like that for a long while.

  “Hermano,” she eventually whispered into his neck. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. He wanted this to be true, but he was afraid to let go of her. He was afraid of what he’d done while he was Thorne’s puppet and terrified of what would happen next.

  She drew away from him and stared into his eyes for a long moment, then spoke gently. “I really want to get you out of here.”

  He wanted that, too, but first he had to ask. “Gabe?”

  Lily’s jaw clenched. She shook her head, her eyes glistening. “They . . . they exchanged him. Traded him for . . . the rest of Thorne. Gabe must be in Arcadia now.”

  Brett drew breath to speak, but he stopped when what sounded like distant thunder rumbled. He looked skyward to the Transamerica building’s crowning pyramid.

  He was horrified to see waves of golden light rippling from where the building pierced the sky. Concentric waves of magick were coursing outward from the tower like ripples on the surface of a pond.

  Lily’s eyes flickered, brown to silver to brown, as she stared up at the display. “It’s Thorne. Jackson and I heard him say he’s planning to use another huge earthquake to merge Earth and Arcadia!”

  Kaz said, “What? How?”

  “Let’s just say we don’t want to be here when it gets started,” Lily said. “We need to go.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” Brett said.

  “I concur,” Jackson agreed.

  For the first time, Brett took a good look at the smaller boy. It was only a moment before he had to look away. The sight of Jackson in the flesh reminded Brett of his own mistakes—mistakes that had led them into the terrible danger they were up to their necks in.

  “I don’t think it’s safe to fly with so many abyssal bats around, but if you’ll stick close, I can speed us along,” Lily said.

  They started walking quickly. Winds flowed around Brett, gently supporting him, providing extra lift along the backs of his legs and under his feet. As Lily led the way, Brett couldn’t help admiring her control. Assisted by her air, they were walking in fast, long strides with hardly any effort. Within moments they were blocks away.

  Lily led them into a little park studded with cypress trees. When they stopped, Lily fixed Brett with serious eyes. “Before we go any farther, are you really okay, hermano? Are you, y’know . . . you?”

  Brett slumped against a concrete wall. He couldn’t blame her for asking. “I’m me. Yeah. All that . . . that other stuff. Him. It’s all gone now.”

  “We’re really glad you’re back, Brett,” Kaz said. “But what the heck do we do now?”

  “We’ve got to get Gabe back,” Lily said.

  “And we must also stop Thorne from manifesting a disaster of the magnitude of the 1906 earthquake,” Jackson said.

  “Right,” Kaz said. “Okay, not to be a pest or anything, but how?”

  Lily cleared her throat. “Brett, since you sort of had Thorne in you, can you think of anything that might help?”

  Brett frowned. This was the last thing he wanted to think about, but he had no choice. His best friend’s life might depend upon it. Not to mention the lives of everyone else on the planet. “The last thing I really remember, I was in Arcadia, down in the bottom of this massively screwed-up version of Alcatraz. And I was staring into these huge green eyes.”

  Kaz shuddered. “Thorne has green eyes. Just like Gabe.” He seemed to realize what he’d just said, and his words tumbled over each other. “Not that there’s anything wrong with having green eyes! I’m not saying Gabe’s like Thorne! Except, I guess he’s Thorne’s descendant? But that doesn’t mean he’s like Thorne!” Lily put a hand on Kaz’s shoulder, and he fell silent.

  Brett went on. “It was Thorne. I realize that now. But it was like . . . his eyes were huge. They looked human, but they were also, like, the size of freaking Volvos. And the rest of him, it—” With a shudder, he remembered the enormous mass of tentacles writhing inside a thundercloud. “He isn’t human anymore. I don’t think there’s a word for whatever he is now.”

  Lily took his hand gently. “And that’s it? There�
��s nothing else? You woke up a few minutes ago?”

  Brett sighed. “I can remember bits and pieces. Like how a dream comes back to you sometimes.” He let go of Lily’s hand and covered his face. He didn’t want to remember, but more than that: trying to remember hurt. Like the memories themselves were laced with barbed wire. “Ugh . . . Thorne was . . . it was like he was reading me. Digging through me, looking at all my memories all my thoughts . . . learning about the world. The modern world. He even learned how to sound exactly like me. God, I can still feel him in there!” Brett thumped one fist against the side of his head. For a heartbeat, he saw a flash of red. Circular . . . Scales. He took a breath, and the image vanished. “It’s like he left a slime trail through my whole brain.”

  Kaz said, “Ew.”

  Lily shot Kaz a look. Kaz blushed and stared at his feet.

  Brett glanced back and forth between his sister and Kaz and steeled himself. “Guys, I need to tell you something.”

  After everything that had happened, Brett had decided something. Thorne had done terrible things while inhabiting Brett’s body . . . but Brett was no saint himself. And it was time his friends knew the truth.

  Brett opened his mouth, but for a moment, no words came. Finally he forced them out. “Thisisallmyfault,” he said, rushing through the words. “All of it, from the very beginning. I’m the one who contacted Ghost Dork over there . . .”

  Jackson stood up straight. “I beg your pardon!”

  But Brett plowed onward. It was hard enough to start telling Lily and Kaz what he’d done. If he let Jackson stop him, he wasn’t sure he’d ever finish his confession. “ . . . and got this whole mess started, and then I really screwed up and let Thorne in. But it was only because . . . because I was trying to find Charlie, and Jackson told me that—”

  Jackson said, “Look here, now is not the time to—”