The Shadow City

by Dan Jolley

  Lily put up a hand to shush Jackson, and asked, “What did Jackson tell you?”

  Brett continued. Slowly. Haltingly. “He promised me . . . he said, ‘Death isn’t the end. Dead isn’t gone.’ He swore to me that Charlie was in Arcadia. That’s why I did all this. The ritual that bound us to the elements down in the tunnels. Getting Gabe to unlock the Emerald Tablet. I was following Jackson’s instructions every step of the way.”

  By the time Brett was finished, Kaz was glaring at Jackson, but Lily couldn’t seem to look at him. She turned her back on all of them, her eyes shut tight.

  Jackson puffed out his chest, as much as he could with his thin little frame, and his mouth twisted into his trademark sneer. But then he stopped. Midbreath, he turned away, hunched his shoulders, and mumbled something at the ground.

  “What was that?” Lily spun toward him. “What did you say?”

  Jackson didn’t turn back around, but he spoke over his shoulder. “I said I’m sorry. I should not have lied to you, Brett. I just . . . I was trapped, and scared, and lonely.” His voice broke with pain. “I wanted to get out. I had to get out.”

  Harsh words bunched up in Brett’s mouth. He wanted to scream at Jackson, curse him, threaten him, make him feel every bit as bad about what he’d put Brett through as Brett did himself. But just as quickly as the anger appeared, Brett felt it ebb and fade away. Because how long had Brett been trapped, used as Thorne’s shell? How desperately had he wanted to escape? What would he have done to be free?

  Jackson was trapped, too. He was trapped for over a century.

  Brett realized he and Jackson had been—what did his grandmother say? Two peas in a pod. Just alike. Both of them craving something that seemed impossible. Both of them willing to do whatever it took to get it.

  “Look. We both made some serious mistakes. Lily, I did this to find Charlie, but . . .” It was the first time Brett had let himself really think about this in a long while. “The thing is, Lil . . .” Tears spilled down his cheeks. “I think he’s really gone. I think Charlie’s gone for good.” He knew he couldn’t stop the tears, and he didn’t try. There was a time when he’d have been furious to show such weakness. He would have yelled and shoved to keep people from seeing it. Tonight he didn’t care. As tears filled Lily’s own eyes, Brett said, “Charlie’s dead. He’s really dead. Dead and gone. And there’s nothing anybody can do to bring him back.”

  Lily’s glistening eyes ran over. Her lower lip trembled. She shook her head, shook it again, swallowed hard . . . and sank down onto the pavement, sobbing. Her arms wrapped around her knees. Her face hidden, Lily cried, and every time her body shook it felt like a blade to Brett’s heart.

  He knelt beside her and slowly put his arms around her. Lily’s arms unwound from around her legs, and she raised her tear-streaked face to his and hugged him.

  “I’m so sorry, Lil,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

  Lightning flashed overhead as dark clouds billowed and rolled. With a brittle crack of thunder, the sky opened up and wept along with them.

  Lily’s words hitched and wavered through her tears. “I miss him. Every single day.” She hid her face against his shoulder. “He was supposed to teach me to drive! He was supposed to show me how to play guitar! We had . . . plans.” The sobs came back full strength, and she didn’t try to talk anymore.

  Brett felt that blade to the heart plunge in deeper. All this time, Lily had been hurting every bit as much as he had. But she’d been so focused on making sure he was okay, he’d never given much thought to how she felt. She had always been so positive, so supportive. So good.

  “Think how much we can do with our elements, Brett. I can make us fly! We can battle these terrifying creatures! We can combine worlds. We have so much power! But no matter what we do, Charlie . . . Charlie’s still gone. And now Gabe’s gone, too.”

  Brett didn’t say anything else. But he thought that maybe Lily didn’t need him to. She just needed her brother to hold her.

  Brett lifted Lily’s face with a finger under her chin. “It’s okay, mi hermana.” With the corner of his sleeve he wiped away her tears. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

  Lily nodded. She even tried for an unstable little smile.

  I don’t deserve her. I don’t deserve any of my friends.

  Overhead, the rain slowed and stopped, and a breeze blew the dark clouds apart.

  All of this was his fault. Brett knew it. But maybe . . . maybe . . . there was a way to fix some of it.

  Without warning, the strange image flared again. This time, it hit him like a blow between the eyes. He staggered and would have fallen, but one of Lily’s wind gusts buoyed him up. He got a better look at it this time: a red snake.

  It didn’t make any sense, but he couldn’t shake it, and when he squeezed his eyes shut it only made it worse. Red snake. Red snake. Red snake.

  “I remember something from when Thorne was inside me! But I don’t know what it means!”

  On his other side, Kaz asked. “What is it? Something from Arcadia?”

  Brett shook his head violently, both to answer no and to try to dislodge the image. “It’s a snake! A red snake!” He pulled at his hair in frustration. “I can’t stop seeing it!”

  Brett opened his eyes in time to catch Lily and Kaz exchanging baffled glances. Kaz said, “Do you remember where you saw it? Or what was around it?”

  Brett didn’t have time to consider the question.

  Sudden thunder like a cannon shot left Brett’s ears ringing, and all four of them slammed into the ground as a tremendous quake shook the earth. A terrible crunching sound crashed out from a nearby building, and they dashed out into the street in time to see several tons of concrete and steel collapse.

  “Come on!” Lily shouted. Her tears were gone, and her eyes flashed silver-white. Wind swirled around them. “We need to get away from the buildings. We’re not far from the harbor!”

  Brett wondered if he could ever be as truly strong as Lily was.

  As they ran up the street, debris smashed into parked cars on either side of them and trees bucked and uprooted. The pavement fifty yards in front of them buckled, snapped, and threw a moving car completely off the road and into a storefront.

  “Come on!” Brett shouted, or tried to shout. He still felt so weak. “We should see if those people need help!”

  Lily poured on the wind speed, and the four of them reached the car. It had turned upside down, its rear end lodged into a display of designer dresses, and Brett started to say, “Get the doors open!”

  But he stopped short.

  Even without crouching down to peer through the windows, he recognized the blood cocoons. The car had held four passengers. Four blood cocoons now rested inside the cabin. Pulsing. Waiting.

  Brett was still staring when Lily came to his side, and said, “Oh no.”

  “How is this possible?” Brett asked. “How can they be sent to Arcadia from a car accident?”

  Jackson’s ordinarily solemn face turned scarily grim. “I am afraid this is what Thorne intends. This is the purpose of the earthquake. Everyone who would have died in the disaster will become encased like this. Sacrifices waiting to happen. Waiting to be triggered.”

  Lily nodded vigorously and gestured at the car. “He did this to Primus, too. Put her in a cocoon like this.”

  Brett stared at the blood cocoons in the car. “So he puts everybody in San Francisco in cocoons and then, what—sacrifices them all at once?”

  Kaz squeaked. It wasn’t even verbal.

  Lily nodded. “He said it’d be like 1906 again! Thousands and thousands—tens of thousands of people are gonna die, and he’ll send them all to Arcadia at the same time!”

  “Give me a lever and a place to stand.” Kaz’s voice had gone very quiet.

  Brett said, “What?”

  “Archimedes, the Greek mathematician. He said something like, ‘give me a lever and a place to stand, and I’ll move the w
orld.’ The earthquake. It’s Thorne’s lever. Except he’s not going to move the world, he’s going to pry open the doors to another one.” Kaz’s eyes flickered from dark brown to slate gray and back. “In the usual exchange ritual, one person on Earth gets switched out for someone else in Arcadia. But ten thousand sacrifices? A hundred thousand? All at once? It’ll knock the walls down. Guys, we can’t let him do this.”

  Lily said, “Brett—what about Abuela!”

  “I know,” Brett said. If the city was destroyed, their grandmother would be right in the middle of the disaster zone. “We have to stop him. We have to.” Brett threw his head back and turned in a small circle. “But how? How are we supposed to do that, with Gabe stuck in Arcadia and no Emerald Tablet?”

  Jackson’s eyes flared brilliant gold, and all three of them turned to him.

  The thin, pale boy said, “I have an idea.”

  17

  Gabe felt sweat bead across his forehead as Aria grasped the library’s monstrous circular door handle. The door looked as if it weighed at least a ton. A low, awful grating sound rolled out from it as Aria dragged it open, but she didn’t seem to be exerting any real effort. Gabe wondered how strong she really was.

  Aria’s blue eyes gleamed as she turned to him and Uncle Steve. “In you go now.”

  Gabe frowned, and Uncle Steve spoke up. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  Aria gave them only the ghost of a pointy-toothed smile as she stepped to one side and gestured them into the building.

  Gabe swallowed hard. “I guess it’s just us.”

  Uncle Steve peered into the gloom. All Gabe could see was a long hallway lined with doors. The air itself was infused with dim light, but not enough to keep the hallway from fading into shadows. Gabe couldn’t get a sense of how deep the corridor went. “Stick close to me,” Uncle Steve said. “I don’t want to hear any Scooby-Doo ‘let’s split up’ nonsense.”

  Gabe nodded. “Not even close to a problem.”

  Slowly, constantly peering around for anything strange, Gabe and his uncle walked into the library. Aria shut the door behind them.

  Moving as quietly as he could, Gabe went to the first of the doorways along the hall and peered around its frame. He got ready to jerk back if anything sprang at him from inside—but he was relieved to see that the room was free of monsters. Just walls lined with shelves, every shelf packed tightly with books.

  The room smelled of dust and old paper and bookbinding glue. And even in the midst of a sinister palace library in a shadow city on another plane of existence, he took a smidgen of comfort from that.

  Libraries smell like libraries no matter where they are, I guess.

  He went to the next doorway, and the one after that, and found much the same thing. Bookshelves abounded, crammed with volumes of all sizes, shapes, and colors. An endless series of rooms opened off empty hallways. Each room, Gabe figured, was about twenty feet by thirty, rectangular, and every square inch of every one of the rooms’ walls was covered in bookshelves.

  The hallway stretched out in front of them and faded into darkness. Maybe it was endless. Gabe figured that in Arcadia, anything was possible.

  “It’s so quiet,” Gabe said. “I mean, I know a library’s supposed to be quiet, but not like this. Do you feel like we’re being watched?”

  Uncle Steve said, “Yes, everything about this place is unnerving. We have to be careful. We’ll take it room by room. If the Mirror Book is here, we’ve got to find it.”

  Going to different shelves, Gabe and Uncle Steve began to pick through the array of tomes. The Short Life of a Lost Boy in a Dark City. Apologies to a Dead Mentor. The Unyielding Temptation of Flame. The books Gabe found were all titled in English, and—Gabe couldn’t help noticing—appeared to be on subjects just a little too close to his own situation. The Hungry Fire. On Accepting the Loss of a Mother.

  The pit in his stomach seemed to deepen with each spine he read. Every book here could have been written about him. He sidled closer to Steve and saw his uncle’s face was pale and lips grim.

  “Uh, the books here, they’re like—” Gabe began, but he didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Yes,” Uncle Steve said. “For me, too. The library—or whatever this place truly is—seems to be reflecting elements of ourselves back at us. The titles represent our fears or hopes or history. It’s insidious.”

  “So if this place can look inside us,” Gabe said. “That means that it knows what we want.”

  “Worse than that. It means it knows how to stop us from getting it,” Uncle Steve said.

  Gabe was about ask something else when he caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye, near the doorway. Except when he turned to look, there was nothing there.

  “Did you see that?”

  Uncle Steve turned quickly. “What?”

  “I thought I saw something. Over there.” He pointed.

  Steve crossed the room cautiously and peered around the doorframe. “No, I didn’t see anything. And there’s nothing out in the hallway now.”

  Gabe shrugged, frowning. “I might be seeing things.”

  “In a place like this? You’re almost certainly not ‘seeing things.’ Just stay alert. Let’s move on.”

  As they stepped out into the hallway, Gabe stopped Uncle Steve with a hand on his arm. Reading the titles of those books, seeing his worries and regrets engraved into leather, had made Gabe think of all the things he wished he could change. And here, in a shadow dimension straight out of a nightmare, he didn’t know how many chances he’d have to put things right. “Listen, I want to tell you that I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  Steve paused. “Sorry for what?”

  “For acting like such a little snot. For yelling at you back before this all started. For not understanding. All those years, all the moving around . . . I know you were trying to keep me safe. I mean, it still sucked. But I get it now. I just wanted to tell you, I appreciate it, and, uh . . . I love you.”

  Uncle Steve took a long moment before finally pulling Gabe into a sideways, one-armed hug. “I love you too, kid. And it feels great to hear you say that. I know it wasn’t easy on you. All the moving. All the secrets. But you’re a good kid, Gabe. Always were. And twelve-year-olds are supposed to act like little snots. Right?”

  Gabe grinned. “So . . . like, what are you like when you don’t have to worry about killer magickal doomsday cults all the time? You ever, y’know, chill? Do something fun?”

  A smile played around Uncle Steve’s lips. “I don’t know that I can even remember what I was like. Not have to worry? Have fun? What language are you even speaking?” His face took on a thoughtful expression, though mischief still lingered around his eyes. “I do think I used to have fewer gray hairs, though. I’m almost sure of it.”

  In that moment—the first truly honest, unguarded moment he could ever remember having with his uncle—Gabe realized how lucky he was. How lucky he’d always been.

  He was trying to think of something to say when Uncle Steve’s head snapped up, peering down the hallway. Gabe tried to follow his line of sight. “What? What is it?”

  “Like you said. Thought I saw something.”

  Gabe stared down the hallway, but it looked utterly deserted. He couldn’t even see motes of dust moving in the air. Uncle Steve said, “Come on, let’s get to the next room.” Gabe followed him. As far as he could tell, they were utterly alone, but that didn’t stop all the hairs on the back of his neck from standing straight up.

  They moved on to the second room, which looked just like the first. Gabe approached the nearest shelf. The first book was called Skylines of Doom and Shadow.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  Gabe pointed at the title. “This book. It’s . . . I’m pretty sure was in the first room, too.” He scanned the nearby spines, and all their titles were familiar. “All of these. I’ve already seen them.”

  Uncle Steve glanced at
the shelf nearest him. “You’re right. Let’s try the next room,” he said.

  But they found the same thing in that room, and in the room after that, and the one after that, too.

  In the fifth room, Uncle Steve scowled and muttered a word he had made Gabe promise never to say in polite society. “Of course. Of course.” He turned back to Gabe. “The books are arranged differently, but . . . all these rooms. They’re the same. The Mirror Book. Just like the book titles reflect elements from ourselves, each of these rooms are reflections of one another. This is both a mind game and a maze of illusions. A Library of Mirrors.”

  Gabe slumped. “So if the Mirror Book isn’t in any of the ones we’ve already been through . . . that means it’s just plain not here at all?”

  Uncle Steve opened his mouth but stopped when a voice floated toward them from out in the hallway. A voice that crackled and hissed.

  “Ga-a-abe . . . come here, Gabe . . .”

  He and Uncle Steve stared at each other, wide-eyed.

  Uncle Steve said, “Stay behind me,” and went to the door. Gabe followed closely—closely enough to peer under his uncle’s arm and get a good look at what waited for them outside in the corridor.

  A boy stood there. He was on fire.

  Gabe choked back a frightened cry.

  The boy had Gabe’s face. No, more than that—it was Gabe. Same clothes, same hair, but flames licked up and down his limbs, his torso. The boy’s flesh blackened, cracked, bubbled, but immediately re-formed itself, burning and healing, burning and healing. He said, “There you are,” and smiled, and Gabe wanted to scream.

  “It’s a fire elemental,” Uncle Steve said quietly. “Fire come to life.”

  “What does it want?”

  The elemental laughed. It sounded like tiny explosions. “You’re smart enough to know, Gabe.” It raised its hands, and the flames around them flared white-hot. “I want you to burn!”

  The elemental thrust its hands forward, and Gabe shoved Uncle Steve out of the way. He felt his eyes burst into red-orange infernos. Twin lances of fire shot out from the elemental’s hands, but Gabe took control of them, bent them to his will, so they crooked ninety degrees and scoured the ceiling above.