The Shadow City

by Dan Jolley

  The elemental grinned hugely. “Yes! Good! More, more, more!”

  Gabe could hear Uncle Steve shouting behind him, but he couldn’t afford to pay attention. The fire elemental curled its fingers into claws and lifted them above its head, and columns of flame burst up from the floor around Gabe like bars of a cage. The books in the room behind him caught fire, and Gabe saw the ceiling was burning, too. The cage of columns began to close in on him. Gabe knew they would consume him if he didn’t stop them.

  But he could stop them. He would stop them. Because the fire belonged to Gabe, not this elemental creature. Gabe knew the fire. He was the fire.

  Gabe gritted his teeth, and the cage-bars scattered away from him, dancing across the floor, leaving blackened troughs in their wake before they puffed out. He took a great breath and screamed at the elemental. A vast gout of fire bellowed from his mouth like the roar of a dragon. As the flames washed over the fire elemental, it took a staggering step backward. Gabe was dimly aware that more and more of the library had started burning around him.

  The elemental regained its balance, its grin spreading wider. “Yes, Gabe! Let it burn. Burn. Burn. BURN.”

  Horrified, Gabe realized he recognized that voice. It was the one he had heard in his head. The all-consuming, rage-filled presence that wanted him to give in to the destruction, give in to the fury, abandon any thought of control, and lay waste to the entire world. This was that voice. All his fire-borne rage given form.

  Gabe’s skin suddenly felt very hot. His eyebrows and eyelashes blackened and turned to ash. Blisters raised on the tips of his fingers.

  The fire elemental wanted Gabe’s rage to consume the world, but if he couldn’t stop it, that same rage would burn Gabe along with it.

  A vast sucking sound overtook the hallway, and Gabe fell and slammed into the floor. Starved of oxygen, the fires guttered out in the blink of an eye. Gabe lifted his head just in time to see a fist of wind snatch the fire elemental off the floor and fling it, screaming, so far down the hallway that it disappeared from sight.

  Uncle Steve carefully picked Gabe up off the floor. At first Gabe couldn’t breathe because the impact had knocked all the air out of him. All he could do was cling to his uncle and croak out, “Thank you . . .” He saved me. Saved my life. Again!

  Then Uncle Steve’s eyes shone silvery-white, and air flowed back into Gabe’s lungs. He sucked it in gratefully.

  “Are you all right?”

  Gabe looked at his blistered hands. “It burned me. The fire burned me. I didn’t . . . I thought that couldn’t happen.”

  Uncle Steve glanced around. “Now this place is reflecting our own elements back at us. Turning them against us. Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But what about the Mirror Book?”

  “We can’t use the Mirror Book if we’re dead.” Uncle Steve took Gabe’s elbow and led him hurriedly back down the hallway toward the massive entrance doors . . . but in front of them, the corridor stretched out. Dark. Endless.

  Uncle Steve stopped. “Oh. Sorry. Wrong way.”

  They turned around, and in front of them . . . the corridor stretched away into the darkness. It was like a pair of mirrors set to reflect off each other into darkest infinity.

  We’re trapped!

  Then a low, breathy voice laughed from somewhere in the shadows.

  Gabe moved closer to his uncle. “What’s going on?”

  A breeze ruffled Gabe’s hair. It felt as if someone were running fingers across his scalp, and he winced and tried to brush it away. Uncle Steve groaned. “I’d guess now it’s my turn.”

  “Your turn indeed, Steven.” The low voice spoke from the nearest doorway, and they both spun toward it. Standing there, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, was a man who could have been Uncle Steve’s twin . . . except that, around the edges of his body, he simply faded away. It hurt Gabe’s eyes to look at him for more than a second at a time.

  Gabe took a firmer hold on his uncle’s arm. “So that’s . . . an air elemental?”

  Uncle Steve nodded. “First one I’ve ever seen.”

  “And the last.” The air elemental didn’t move, but its eyes turned a hard, metallic silver, and Gabe’s breath choked off in his throat. Suffocated, just like Uncle Steve had snuffed out the fire elemental’s flames. It only lasted for a second, but when he could breathe again, Uncle Steve was gone.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, he just disappeared. So did the air elemental. Both had vanished, as if they had never existed.

  “Uncle Steve?” No one answered him. Gabe suddenly felt very small and very alone. “Uncle Steve!”

  Faintly, from some impossible distance down the corridor, he heard his uncle’s voice, shouting. Screaming, though Gabe couldn’t tell whether in anger or pain. He took off at a sprint, heading toward the screams, and almost ran headlong into the wall of flames that sprang up directly in front of him.

  “Feed the fire,” the elemental said from a few paces behind him, and Gabe whirled to face it. Its voice had taken on a hissing, sibilant quality, like a gas leak in the moments before a catastrophic explosion. “You know you want to. You’ve never been good at anything but dessstruction.”

  “That’s not true,” Gabe said. But as the words left his mouth, the events of the last few days came back to him, and he had to wonder.

  His eyes ablaze, Gabe seized control of the flame curtain behind him, compressed it into a ball of fire the size of his head, and threw it straight at the elemental’s face. Laughing, the elemental dodged to one side—moving like fire itself, dancing, flickering—and the fireball crashed into the floor behind it and dissipated.

  Books burst into flames all around Gabe. Fire crept up the walls. He knew the entire place would burn down if he didn’t stop it.

  “Ssstop it?” the elemental hissed, reading Gabe’s mind. “You do not want to ssstop it. All the anger you have felt, your entire life. All the powerlesssnesss . . . all of that isss gone, Gabriel. You have power now. You are power. You are fire. Now feed it. Die for it.”

  The elemental darted forward and clamped its hands down on Gabe’s forearms. It felt as if Gabe had thrust his arms into an incinerator. His skin blistered, started to crack—and time slowed down. Gabe could see through the elemental’s hands. He could watch the damage being done to him.

  But suddenly it didn’t hurt anymore.

  Suddenly the burns felt like cool, clear spring water.

  “Yesss. You underssstand now, Gabriel. You want thisss. You need thisss.”

  And Gabe did want it. He wanted his whole body to burn . . . because that would free him, wouldn’t it? There would be no more pain, or fear, or worry. Everyone would understand, once he was nothing more than a pile of ash and charred bone. Everyone would see his anger. They would feel it. They would know the same burning pain that had lived in his heart for so long. He imagined people standing around the scorched remains of his body, his mind’s eye flitting from face to face, taking in the sympathy there, the sadness, the regret, the—

  Lily.

  Lily would be there.

  And Brett and Kaz. Mom and Uncle Steve, too. Even Jackson.

  They’d all be mourning his . . . his death?

  Something shifted in Gabe’s mind. In his heart. In his soul.

  Time sped back up to normal, and the fire elemental’s grin vanished. Gabe twisted his arms, broke the elemental’s grip, and slammed his own hands onto the elemental’s shoulders.

  “Nice try,” he gritted out. “You almost had me.”

  The elemental seemed to realize what was about to happen. Its cruel, funhouse-mirror version of Gabe’s face softened. “Gabe, don’t. Don’t! I’m you! Can’t you see that?”

  “You’re the growl in my stomach,” Gabe said, his voice low and terrible, like the hissing flow of red-hot magma. “You’re a hangnail.” His grip tightened, and the elemental’s body flickered. Parts of it darkened. Disappeared. “You are the fire. Y
ou are what I control.”

  “No . . . pleassse . . .”

  “And I’m putting you out.”

  The elemental shrieked—and for a second, less than a second, Gabe found himself staring into a different face. A face Gabe had carved deep into his memory. Then it burst into a shower of sparks and faded away.

  Gabe stood there, in the middle of the burning library. Almost absently, he waved his hands, and the fires around him winked out.

  Why had the fire elemental, in its last instant of existence, worn the face of the burning man from his dream? Just before it had vanished, why had it stared at him with the face of his own father?

  Gabe shook his discomfort out of his head. He had to focus on finding Uncle Steve.

  He was about to call out for his uncle when an earsplitting noise like a million panes of glass shattering crashed all around him. Gabe shut his eyes and clamped his hands to his ears—too late.

  The sound faded.

  Gingerly, Gabe opened his eyes.

  The library was gone. Where its shelves had been, nothing remained but shards of faintly golden glass. Uncle Steve had been right. This entire place had been like a funhouse illusion. A Library of Mirrors. The small room where Gabe now stood was empty except for a single volume, floating in the center of the sparkling debris. It was cloaked in shimmering blackness, and Gabe knew it had to be the Mirror Book.

  The black haze around it evaporated as soon as Gabe touched it. The Book, clad in reflective silver instead of its counterpart’s emerald, fell into his hand. It was cool against his blistered fingers. Clutching the Mirror Book to his chest, he pushed through the room’s only door.

  Outside, Uncle Steve lay in the middle of the hallway—which now had no other doorways, no other rooms opening off it—gasping for breath. Gabe ran to him and knelt beside him. “Uncle Steve! Are you okay? What happened?”

  Steve’s eyes turned silver-white, and his breathing quickly evened out. Shakily he sat up, rubbing his throat, and looked around with a confused expression. “The air . . . I couldn’t tell . . . couldn’t tell what was real. It was all just an illusion . . .” His eyes finally settled on Gabe. “Is that really you? Are you real? Are you real?”

  “I’m real, Uncle Steve. It’s me. It’s Gabe. And look what I found.” He waggled the Mirror Book.

  Uncle Steve’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, thank God that wasn’t all for nothing.” Gabe helped him to his feet. “I think we should get out of here.”

  Gabe couldn’t have agreed more. They hurried as fast as they could to the huge entrance door and, with a helping hand from a channeled stream of air, heaved the enormous portal open.

  Gabe knew something had gone very, very wrong as soon as they walked outside. The amber-gold sky, unsettling enough in its own right, had turned an angry bloodred. Above the soaring center spire of Alcatraz Citadel, scarlet clouds churned like stormy ocean waters.

  Gabe didn’t even have to ask his uncle what it meant. He knew.

  Something was happening in San Francisco.

  Something really, truly, deeply bad.

  18

  Lily, Brett, Kaz, and Jackson skimmed down Mason Street, heading for the waterfront. They had to get to Alcatraz, and the breach, so they could try to communicate with Gabe. But first they had to get out of the chaos of the quake-rocked city.

  No strangers to earthquakes, the people of San Francisco had dealt with the first event by staying calm and following emergency instructions. But then the first quake had been followed by two even more serious tremors.

  It was now clear that this was not a run-of-the-mill earthquake. The idea that this might be the beginning of “the big one” seemed to have registered to the people of the city, and their panic had begun to intensify. By now many streets had buckled and cracked so badly that travel by car had become impossible. So people ran, shouting, in throngs through the city.

  Lily still didn’t want to draw undue attention to herself and her friends by actually flying, but she’d put even more strength behind the tailwind that lent them extra speed as they ran. They now zipped along as fast as if they were on bicycles. With some experimenting, she’d grown fairly comfortable bending the air around them so they could hear one another speak at normal volume, too, and now Brett ran right next to her, his face grim as he listened to Jackson outline his idea for destroying Arcadia.

  “Look,” Jackson said. “If Greta Jaeger was right—and so far, we have no reason to think she was not—there is a chance that we can perform the ritual to completion and destroy Arcadia, using Gabe’s participation from the other side of the breach.”

  Lily’s stomach churned as they passed more and more blood cocoons on the street, all of them victims of Thorne’s earthquakes. When he’d claimed enough victims, Thorne would send them all to Arcadia at the same time. And then . . .

  Then the walls come tumbling down.

  To their left, a house shook and split almost down the middle, and a second later a plume of flame shot up through the wreckage as the gas line broke and ignited. The smell of concrete dust and smoke was everywhere. The shock waves from Thorne’s magickal earthquake were getting worse and growing closer and closer together.

  “Kaz, have you still got all the stuff we need?” Lily said. “Jackson’s family ring and whatever?”

  “I still harbor grave doubts about using the ring,” Jackson grumbled.

  Kaz ignored him. “I’ve got everything, yeah. We don’t have the Emerald Tablet, but Gabe was holding it when he was sent to Arcadia, so all we can do is hope he still has it. But, guys, even with all the right ingredients or reagents or whatever, how are we going to pull this off? It took me two whole days to learn how to make one little earthquake, and even then I barely kept it from shaking a hospital to pieces. Now we’re supposed to destroy an entire reality, with zero time to practice? What if we mess it up? What if I forget the words? What if one of us has a panic attack and throws up all over the components? Not . . . not that anyone would do that. Okay, I might do that. Guys, I’m probably going to do that.”

  “That’s not what I’m most worried about,” Brett said. He still looked really pale around his eyes and mouth. Lily could only guess how physically drained he was, but she had a good idea of the toll his ordeal had taken on him emotionally. He’d survived Thorne and Arcadia, but the secrets he’d kept from Lily and their friends must have been just as heavy a burden. She hoped that coming clean about them had helped at least a little.

  “What is it, Brett?” she asked.

  “Gabe!” Brett blurted out. “We can’t destroy Arcadia with him in it. We just can’t.”

  Lily glanced at Kaz, who nodded. Jackson took a few long moments but finally agreed. “No, I suppose we cannot.”

  Lily nudged the flow of wind around them to help steer clear of a multicar pileup thick with blood cocoons. Another wave of tectonic thunder rumbled all around them. “There has to be something we can do. Everyone think.”

  Kaz frowned, pulled his backpack off, and scrounged inside it. After a couple of seconds he pulled out what looked like two cracked ceramic bowls. “Could we use this?”

  Brett’s eyebrows rose toward his hairline. “What the heck is that?”

  Kaz slung his backpack back over his shoulders, took one bowl-like object in each hand, and deftly fitted them together. In an instant Lily realized what Kaz held: the disembodied head of the apographon. She just barely kept from squealing. “Kaz! Why in the world are you still carrying that creepy thing around with you?”

  He looked sort of sheepish. “I didn’t want to just leave it with my family. But listen, people who get sacrificed during the right ritual are swapped with somebody who’s in Arcadia now, right? But only if they’re part of the same bloodline—if they’re not, it just ends up bringing over some giant crazy monster, like when it happened to Brett.” He took a deep breath. “So . . . do you guys think, maybe, if we got the apographon to turn into Gabe’s mom again, we could swap it for him? I mea
n, if it’s got a little bit of her life energy in it still. We could try to send it through and get him back?”

  Jackson seemed to chew that over. “It is an intriguing hypothesis, Kazuo. It may be worth an attempt.”

  Lily tried to look at what Kaz was saying from every angle. The problem was, she didn’t feel as if she could see every angle. So much of this stuff goes right over my head. But if Kaz and Jackson think it could work, I guess we should try. But then a thought occurred to her. “Hold on. If that were possible, why didn’t Greta and Dr. Conway try it before?”

  “Well, maybe they did?” Kaz said. “But now that the breach is open, things might work that didn’t before . . .”

  “That’s an awful lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes.’” Lily cleared her throat. “And even if it works, that still leaves Dr. Conway and Gabe’s mom. What do we do about them?”

  Kaz looked crestfallen. Jackson stared straight ahead, his eyes narrowed and his mouth a thin, hard line.

  Lily glanced at Brett. A crease had formed between his eyebrows—which she knew meant he was in some kind of pain. His lips were moving, too. She hoped he might have an idea. Maybe some weird but useful occult knowledge of Thorne’s had lodged somewhere in his brain. But when she leaned toward him to hear, she just heard him whispering, “Red snake . . . red snake . . . red snake . . .” Over and over and over, his eyes unfocused.

  It gutted her to think about it, but Lily had to wonder if Brett’s entire mind had made it back from Arcadia. Or how much of it might have been . . . eaten by that horrible shadow sludge. How much of her twin was left?

  “Brett.” She wasn’t sure what to ask. “Is there . . . some way I can help with this ‘red snake’ thing?”

  Brett groaned. It sounded half angry, half embarrassed. Then he turned his face away and shook his head.

  Lily was grateful to see the water’s edge coming up in front of them. As they slowed to a stop, Lily said, “Okay, who’s driving?”