Shadow Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  I started to slip up the stairs, but then I noticed through the railing that Kori had gone still again, this time staring at the floor, fists clenched at her sides. “Shut up,” she whispered.

  The guard stepped closer, so close his chest almost touched her back, and I could see her tense when he leaned down to whisper into her ear, words so soft I had to strain to hear them. “All this time, turning your nose up at everyone who wanted a taste, busting balls and splitting skulls with impunity because Tower liked you. But look at you now. My, how the mighty have fallen…”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a misquote,” she mumbled, as he circled her slowly, and I ducked behind the staircase again, out of sight, unless the guard on the other side of the foyer turned to look.

  “Fits, though, doesn’t it. The taller the pedestal, the harder the bitch on it crashes to the ground. Do you want to know what we saw?”

  “I want you to back the fuck off before I decide you’d look better with your nose on one side of your face.”

  “That was some messed up shit, Kori,” he continued, like she hadn’t even spoken. “I mean, I wanted to see you taken down a peg or two, but that was hard to watch, even for me. How you doin’ in the aftermath? Need a shoulder to—”

  The guard’s voice ended with the thunk of flesh against flesh, and I came forward until I could see him through the railing, lying flat on the floor, bleeding from his nose. Kori stood over him, feet spread in those stupid stilettos, bloodied fist still clenched from the blow.

  She thought I was already upstairs—I could tell by the look of pure rage on her face, something she wouldn’t have intentionally shown a recruit. She didn’t know what I’d seen or what I’d heard. Hell, I didn’t know what I’d heard. But it made my stomach churn.

  Aaron was right—they were monsters in human masks, and those masks were less convincing with every second I spent staring at them.

  The guard coughed at Kori’s feet and started to sit up, but she planted one pointy heel in his crotch to stop him. I glanced across the foyer at the other guard to make sure he wasn’t watching, and when I saw that he was staring at the party still going strong in the main part of the house, out of sight from my current position, I jogged silently up the stairs—hunched over so she wouldn’t see me—and into the first open, dark room I saw.

  Faintly, from below, I heard Kori’s heels click on marble, fading with each step as she headed for the front door.

  For one long moment, I stood frozen, listening for anything that would indicate the west wing—the employee wing, where Kori’d once lived—was currently populated. But I heard nothing. So I pressed my back against the wall with the door still open to the hall and closed my eyes, slowly drawing darkness toward me from every shadowed corner and shaded nook in the room. I called to it, from every darkened crack beneath every door in the hall. And the shadows began to coalesce around my feet, curling around my shins, wisps of pure darkness rolling over me.

  I lifted my hands, and the shadows rose with them, roiling around me, an inky oblivion, deeper and more satisfying than the shallow dark rendered useless by the infrared lighting grid I could feel overhead, blazing beyond the visible spectrum.

  The darkness was cool and quiet. It was peace given form and function. I could feel it with every cell in my body, deep into the marrow of my bones. Into my soul. The darkness was mine to command.

  Until half a minute later, when Kori Daniels stepped out of it and onto my right foot.

  “Ow!” I laughed as the pointed toe of her dress shoe ground into my foot, and she stepped back immediately.

  “Sorry!” she whispered, and I felt rather than saw her trip over her own shoes in the absolute darkness. I reached out for her instinctively, but let go as soon as she’d regained balance. “You did this?” she whispered again, from inches away, and I realized that if I couldn’t see her, she couldn’t see me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Holy shit, that’s incredible,” she breathed. Something moved between us, and it took me a moment to realize she was spreading her arms in the shadow I’d made, like a child in the rain. “It’s like finding a watering hole in the desert. A shadow on the sun.”

  “Yeah, except I didn’t find it. I made it.” Couldn’t hurt to remind her how valuable I was.

  I began to let the darkness go, a little at a time, and slowly light filtered in again from the hallway, feeling much brighter than it should have, after the absolute darkness. “That was impressive,” she said, when she could see well enough that her gaze met mine in the shadows. “No wonder Jake wants you.”

  “He’s not the only one,” I said, and her brows rose in interest as she stepped back and glanced around at the unoccupied bedroom.

  “Oh? Who else is courting you, Mr. Holt?”

  “Ruben Cavazos, most notably,” I whispered, following her toward the door. “Along with a couple of the smaller syndicates on the West Coast.”

  “Cavazos.” She practically spit his name, stepping out of the first of her shoes. “You don’t want anything to do with him.”

  I laughed softly and tried not to notice the shape of her calves as she took off the second shoe. “I’d hardly expect you to endorse the competition.”

  Kori straightened, holding both shoes by the straps in one hand. “He fucking shot me.”

  “Cavazos shot you?” I could hear the surprise in my own voice.

  Instead of answering, she pulled the left shoulder strap of her dress down to expose a puckered scar on her shoulder, still pink and fresh. “Two months ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “Clash of the titans.” Barefoot, she peeked into the hall, then gestured for me to follow her. “Everyone fights for one side or the other.”

  “Are we sneaking?” I whispered, nodding at her shoes, wondering if I should take my own off.

  “Nah. There’s no one in this wing. I just hate heels.”

  I followed her down the hall and around the corner to the right. Three doors later, she turned left into a room with a billiard table in the center of the floor and a full-size bar along one wall. “Close the door,” she said over one shoulder as she dropped her shoes on the floor and headed for the bar.

  I pushed the door closed softly, then crossed the room and took a seat on the center bar stool while she took up the position of bartender.

  “What’ll it be?” She leaned forward with her elbows on the polished dark wood surface of the bar.

  “Scotch?”

  Kori rolled her eyes. “Of course you drink Scotch.”

  “Are you calling me a stereotype?”

  “Not yet, but if you don’t pull some surprises out of your hat soon, I suspect that moment is coming.” She dug beneath the bar and came up with a single short glass while I tried to decide how to respond to such a challenge. She wasn’t ready for any of my real surprises, and she never would be. Which was why I couldn’t get emotionally involved. Why I had to keep telling myself that she was just a hammer. A hammer with really nice legs, and eyes the color of good caramel, and…

  Focus.

  “Creating darkness wasn’t enough of a surprise?”

  She laughed. “It was a start. Ice?”

  “Four cubes.”

  Kori scooped ice into the glass and set a half-full bottle of very expensive Scotch in front of me. I held it up, examining the label, reluctantly impressed with Tower’s taste. “How much trouble will we be in if we get caught?”

  “We’re not going to get caught. If we hear footsteps, you make it dark, and I’ll make us disappear.” She produced a bottle of Grey Goose from beneath the counter, then circled the bar to sit on the stool next to mine. “There’s snack mix if you want, but you’re gonna have to serve yourself.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “This.” She twisted the lid off the bottle and gulped from it once, twice, three times, without flinching.

  “Rough night?” I asked, thinking about what I’d overheard.

>   “Any night that sees me in three-inch heels and sequins is a rough night.” She set the bottle on the bar, the cork stopper still clasped in one hand. “But I’ve certainly seen worse.”

  I watched her, and after nearly a minute of staring off into space, she turned to face me. “What?”

  “You drink like a man.”

  She shrugged and glanced at the bottle I had yet to pour from. “One of us should.”

  I wanted to ask, but at the same time, I didn’t want to know. Whatever the guard—David—had seen done to her was none of my business, and it wasn’t relevant to the job at hand. I already knew Tower was the scum of the earth, without having to hear the specifics.

  And for no reason I could have explained, I didn’t want her to know I’d heard.

  “So, what do you think so far?” She tilted her bottle up again as I poured from mine, then she wiped her mouth with the back of one hand. “Seen anything yet worth signing over your soul for?”

  “Is that what I’d be signing away? My soul?” I happened to agree, but I was surprised to hear it from her.

  Kori blinked, like she’d just realized she’d said too much—that pesky honesty getting in the way again. But she recovered quickly. “Nah. Just five years of your life. The standard term of service for most syndicates.”

  “How close are you to the five-year mark?” I picked up my glass and sipped from it, savoring a liquor I could never personally afford, trying not to think about the fact that if I were alone with the other Daniels sister, this whole thing could be over in a matter of seconds. My objective hadn’t changed, but the strategy certainly had. Use one sister to get to the other. And to do that, I’d have to pretend to be recruitable.

  “Five years came and went nearly a year and a half ago.” She twisted to show me her left arm, and the two interlocking chain links tattooed there. Marks of service. “One for each term.”

  I’d already seen them, of course, and I already knew what they meant. She was six and a half years into a ten-year commitment to serve Jake Tower and his syndicate. Her oath had been sealed with two linking tattoos, each containing a tiny bit of his blood—a flesh binding. Until the day her commitment expired and her tattoos faded into the dull gray of dead marks, she would be compelled to follow his orders, or she would die fighting the compulsion.

  Syndicate service was a miserable way to live. And often a miserable way to die. Only three kinds of people joined voluntarily: the ignorant, the ambitious and the desperate.

  Which category did Kori fit into? Which would be most believable for me?

  “You must like it here, then, if you signed on for another term,” I said, trying to embrace the part I had to play.

  Kori blinked, then took another swig of vodka, straight. Then she shoved the corked lid back into the bottle and pushed the Goose away, like it might be to blame for whatever she was about to say. “This is my home.”

  I frowned. It felt like she was starting a new conversation, rather than continuing the one already in progress. “No, this is your job.”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?” she asked, and I let my frown deepen, so she would explain what I already knew, and I would listen and respond, and ask all the right questions, and with every minute that passed she would trust me a little more, because she would know I was no threat. She had all the power, because she had all the knowledge.

  And because she thought she could cut my balls off with one hand while slicing my throat open with the other.

  Kori exhaled slowly, and a brief glimpse of guilt flickered across her face, like she was already regretting the pitch she was about to throw at me. That told me she was neither ambitious nor ignorant—at least, not after more than six years of service, which came as no surprise, after what I’d overheard on the stairs.

  And that only left desperate.

  “When you sign on with a syndicate—any syndicate, not just this one—you’re not just taking a job, you’re becoming part of a community. Like an extended family. You’re getting job security, medical care, personal protection and virtually limitless resources. The syndicate isn’t just employment—it’s a way of life. A very stable, secure way of life.”

  “Sounds awesome.” It also sounded like a very well-rehearsed speech. “What’s the catch? Is it all the following orders? Because honestly, that’s what I balk at.” To say the very, very least.

  “There’s some of that, of course. But that’s not really so different from any other job, is it?” she asked, and I couldn’t help noting that now that I’d pointed out a flaw in the system, she was referring to it as a mere job again. “Any workplace is a hierarchy, right? There’s a CEO, management, and the rest of the employees. Everyone has a boss, except whoever’s at the top. That’s how we operate, too.”

  “Yes, but in any other job, you can quit if you don’t like the orders.”

  “That’s not true.” She smiled, like she’d caught me in a lie. “You can’t just quit military service if you don’t like the orders.”

  “So, would you say service to the Tower syndicate is more like military service than like a civilian job?”

  She had to think about that for a minute. “Yeah, I guess, only without the patriotism and gratitude from your fellow citizens. Large community. Great benefits. They even get chevrons for time in service.” She twisted to show me her arm again, to emphasize the parallel.

  But I knew what she wasn’t saying—in the military, you can take the chevrons off at the end of the day, but the syndicate owns you for the life of the mark, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You’re never off the clock. And the word no has no meaning. I couldn’t understand why anyone would ever sign on for that.

  “Okay, obviously following orders is what’s bothering you, and I can understand that. So why don’t we just lay the truth out on the table?”

  “The truth?” I watched her in interest. The truth was a rarity in life in general and even more so in the syndicate. Only the fearless and the foolish wielded it so boldly, and I already knew Kori Daniels was no fool.

  “Blinders are rare, and you’re the best I’ve ever seen. That makes you very valuable, and I’d bet my best knife that we’re not the only ones who’ve made you an offer?” Her sentence ended on a question, and I could only nod. “Right now, everyone’s playing nice and pulling out the best china because you’re being recruited. But if that doesn’t work, you’ll be hunted. And eventually you will be caught, and when that happens, you’ll be all out of choices. It’s a winner-takes-all kind of game.”

  “I’m assuming there’s a silver lining to this cloud of doom?” The cloud that had been hanging over me since I was twelve years old, when my mother explained how the rarity and power of my Skill would shape the rest of my life. As a kid, I’d thought she was being paranoid. As an adult, I’d learned better.

  “The silver lining is that at this stage in the game, you can still decide what mark you want to bear. Who you want to serve. Because you will wind up serving someone.” Kori shrugged and glanced longingly at the corked bottle of vodka. “Hell, I’m not sure how you went unnoticed as long as you did.”

  Flying below the syndicates’ radar hadn’t been easy, and dipping beneath it again once this was over would no doubt be even harder.

  “That’s a rather ominous bit of truth,” I said, committing to nothing.

  Kori shrugged again. “It can’t be changed, so you might as well understand your options.”

  “And those would be…?”

  “The Tower syndicate, or some other, inferior organization.”

  Or…door number three, the option she either didn’t know existed or didn’t believe possible: hide.

  “And the others are inferior because…?”

  “Because we have the best of everything.” She leaned closer, and I expected to smell vodka on her breath, but I couldn’t, and suddenly I wanted to kiss her, to see if I could taste it. Or maybe just to taste her.

  I blinked in s
urprise at the thought, but Kori didn’t seem to notice. She was still talking.

  “Jake wants you,” she said, staring straight into my eyes. “I mean he really fucking wants you, which gives you more power going into negotiations than most people have. You could get just about whatever you want out of him.”

  Was it my imagination, or did she seem a little pleased at the idea of me taking Tower for all he was worth? More than pleased. She looked…excited. Her lips parted and her eyes shone with eagerness. She looked fierce, like the chain links on her arm could restrain her, but never truly tame her.

  And as she watched me, probably waiting to see the gleam of greed that would tell her I was interested, I had a sudden, dangerous, treacherous thought. What would Tower give me, if I asked? Would he give me her?