by Angie West
RETURN TO THE SHADOWS
By
Angie West
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Cover by Olivia, OliviaProDesigns.
Copyright© 2016 Angie West
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission.
The Shadows Trilogy
Shadow Cave
Return to the Shadows
Shadow Borne
Also by Angie West
Spirit of the Wolf
Incubus
The Fifth Hour
Jaxson’s Song
The Game
Dedication
To Mary Lou…kindred spirit, confidant, best friend, Mother.
Chapter One
Quiet Places
“A flame to light the path; gateway to all things past. A door from which there is no going back.
Born in truth; forged in lies. Never betray the secret…forever shielded from human eyes.”
It had been a hell of a year. A year chock full of firsts and new and a blessed normalcy that was both comforting and strangely terrifying; one would think that a return to a normal pace would be a welcome change. But it wasn’t, at least not for me. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure I knew what “normal” was anymore.
I was back in my home, surrounded by my family, working at the same job with the same people I had worked amongst for several years. Yet nothing was familiar. It took a while to realize the unsettling truth; they hadn’t changed. I had. But then, I was in good company…Terlain had changed a lot of people. I closed my eyes, letting the memories wash over me.
I grew up in the heart of Washington, in a town called Edmonds, the middle child of what could only be termed “an artistic power couple.” Mom worked as a high profile wedding planner for over twenty years, and Dad had been an architect for as long as any of us kids could remember. So, like I said, three of us kids grew up there. My brother Mike was the baby of the family, and my junior by a couple of years.
The two of us had always been close; he shared my love of science, my coloring, and obviously we were close in age. But that was where the similarities ended. Where I was casual, he was Type A. Where I was calm, he was tense. It had always been that way. Our family used to joke that even though he was the younger brother, he never got the memo. He was part watchdog to Megan and myself, part baby brother.
When he was not harassing all of us about safety, or in the field, he could be found in his home away from home—hard at work at the historical museum of archaeology.
As for myself, I was a botanist. I graduated from college a few years ago and had worked in pharmaceuticals ever since. I was employed by a company called The LanTech Corporation. Like my brother, I got most of my looks from my father. There used to be a time when I wished for my mother’s dark hair and green eyes, and later, for true blonde hair. Basically, anything other than my own shade of not-quite-blonde-not-quite-brown.
My sister Megan was the oldest, and the prettiest, of the bunch. She took after our mother that way. If she hadn’t been such a great sister and all around good person, I probably would have envied her classic beauty and natural charm. But that was always the thing with Megan; beauty and grace just came naturally to her. Simply put, she couldn’t help it. As a young child, her interests had centered on music and art; as she’d grown older, boys had begun to take center stage in her life. She married young and divorced after only a few years. Praise the Lord. We had all hated her husband, especially me. But then, why wouldn’t I?
After all, he had tried to kill me.
It all started six years ago, on a typically hot and dusty afternoon in Zaire, Africa. My brother had been in the country on assignment—a dig in a location that went undisclosed to the general public. He’d been part of a team tasked with excavating the remains of a newly discovered African tribe. That’s when he found the key.
An ancient relic and the cornerstone of a centuries old legend, we were unaware of how the item he unearthed would forever change our lives. For reasons only Mike could fully explain, he did something completely and totally out of character; rather than turn the key over to the African government, he kept it for himself.
Mike spent the five years that followed researching the Legend of Terlain. As the story goes, a band of ancient high priests forged the disc-like key using stone from their holy land during a ritualistic ceremony. The elder priest, a man whose name remains unknown even to this day, saw visions of the “other” world, to which the key belonged. Four men entered the Cave of Shadows to find the portal to Terlain; three men came out. The remaining three priests documented their findings using a combination of written and oral transcript. They told tales of warlocks and demons, strange creatures, and even stranger surroundings.
Most bizarre of all, they told the tale of ordinary people, ordinary people fighting a losing battle against a force so powerful it threatened all that it touched. No mention was ever made regarding the fate of the fourth priest. Still, in the end, the remaining three made a conscious decision to destroy the key to the land they called Terlain. They felt it posed such a threat to humanity that it must never be found.
Yet found it was. The elder priest entrusted with the task of destroying the key fell victim to the most basic weakness of man; he found himself unable to fulfill his obligation and, rather than destroy the key to Terlain, he buried it deep in the earth, where it remained for centuries.
Five years after my brother found and subsequently took possession of the key, he was ready to make his move. He was undoubtedly anxious to prove, or disprove, the legend that had captured his attention and fascinated him since childhood. It was this fascination that severely clouded his judgment…if you ask me.
What he possessed in ambition, he lacked in financial backing. It was LanTech he approached with his request. More specifically, he asked John Hanlen, our sister Megan’s dear ex-husband, for the money to fund his one-man project. Mike was eager to bag the find of a lifetime. As strange a choice as it may seem, Mike had precious few options for scraping together funding and sponsorship for such an expedition. Even with his careful documentation, he would have been laughed out the door of the foundations and museums that normally put up the capital for archaeological expeditions.
John Hanlen must have seemed like the perfect last-ditch option. He was familiar with Mike and his work, and he had access to a large supply of cash. Unfortunately, he was also greedy and a cold-hearted bastard. John had a different agenda. He meant to plunder and pillage Terlain to his heart’s content. His plan was to eliminate my brother once he was able to prove that Terlain existed and ultimately lead the way to the portal.
Mike was set to return home in six months’ time; he never made it. Unknown to John at that time, Mike had been captured in Terlain by the guardsmen of Kahn, a dark warlock determined to rule Terlain with an iron fist.
When my brother failed to return in the allotted six-month period, John, fearing he’d been swindled, did a little research of his own. That is, if you can call breaking and entering “research.” He stole several boxes containing Mike’s notes, and was attempting to find a way to track him when a golden opportunity presented itself. Me.
Written in the back cover of one of Mike’s notebooks was a personal message to me. I was summoned to John’s personal office and conference room early one morning, where I was briefed on the situation, shown Mike’s coded notebooks, and “asked
” to aid in finding my missing brother. I was shocked to say the least, first to learn of Mike’s involvement with John, then to hear a wild story about a priest and a warlock.
In the end, what was a girl to do? I set out on a six-week long quest to find Mike and the fabled land known as Terlain. I wouldn’t say that John made it an easy feat, because he didn’t. I’d never forget the hours I spent painstakingly decoding Mike’s notes and trying to retrace his steps. Believe me, I encountered more than my fair share of stumbling blocks along the way.
The first came just after I received my big break in the case. Arriving late one evening to Mike’s apartment, I learned that it had already been scoured and searched from top to bottom. But John and his men had overlooked one very important detail…Mike’s computer. For all they’d probably tried, they had been unable to crack the password that would have granted them access to his most private files. Let’s just say I had better luck. I guessed the coveted password in a matter of minutes and, lo and behold, found a file with my name on it.
Too bad I hadn’t counted on the apartment being wire tapped. John and his minions heard enough to realize I had found what they had been unable to get. I was officially expendable. Even worse, I had become a liability…just another unfortunate soul who knew too much. In short, as far as John Hanlen was concerned, I was better off dead, and he did his level best to make that happen.
They were waiting for me that night when I returned home, three of them. Men who lurked in the shadows. Men who waited for me with a sinister plan. They had been sent to carry out my execution, but as luck would have it, at least one of the men wasn’t too bright. Had they not waited for me in complete darkness, the night probably would have had a very different ending.
That first night, I had driven as far as the end of my street when I noticed two very important things, the first being that I was certain I’d left the living room light on before I had taken off for my brother’s apartment. I stopped for a moment, and would have shrugged it off and chalked it up to stress causing me to be forgetful, but a split second later, the living room curtains moved a fraction of an inch. Even better, the man behind the curtain hadn’t bothered to lower his flashlight before shutting the drapes. He was probably wondering why his quarry was idling in the middle of the street and trying to get a better look at my car. Yet, in doing so, he had alerted me to his presence.
I sped off into the night, finding a hotel to hole up in for a day or so while I read through the file and figured out just what I was going to do next. Initially, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief on managing to evade a direct confrontation with the men who had taken up residence in my house. That relief turned out to be woefully short-lived.
Mike’s notes to me were specific, explaining his motives, warning me what I was up against in both Terlain and Seattle, and instructing me on what I had to do next in order to survive. Oh, and apologizing profusely for dragging me into a situation that had a high potential to get me killed within a week’s time.
His instructions were explicit. My orders were simple; find the key and destroy it if he had not returned within six months. Not for so much as a second did I actually consider following his orders. I’d like to think he would have done the same for me had our situations been reversed.
When he’d left to find Terlain, he had taken only half of the key. The other half was hidden in a warehouse, and I would need to retrieve it before I could continue my quest. The key was meant to be used in pairs, so to speak. It was a fail-safe carefully designed by the old tribal priests, who believed that no one man should wield such a power, or enter Terlain alone. Once I was in possession of the other half of the key, I could retrace Mike’s step and find the portal.
That, or find Mike himself. For all I knew, he may not have ever made it to the Cave of Shadows that housed the portal. The African wilderness was rough terrain to travel, even for someone with Mike’s level of experience. He had been gone longer than six months. It was more than enough time for him to have succumbed to any number of natural or man-made threats, Heaven forbid. I’d had to consider the possibility that he had never made it to the cave, that he could have been lying dead somewhere along the trail.
“Mom?”
The soft voice broke through my dismal reminiscing, causing me to blink momentarily while I tried to regain my bearings.
“Ashley, what are you doing out of bed, little love? Come here.” I enveloped the warm six-year-old in a tight embrace, inhaling the scent of baby powder and strawberry shampoo, a heady scent that was exclusively Ashley…my daughter.
“I can’t sleep.” Her Cupid’s bow mouth pouted and she gazed at me with liquid blue eyes fringed in jet-black lashes.
“I see. Well, why don’t you sit here on this couch with me for a while and tell me your troubles?”
“Okay. I guess I could do that.”
“Did you have that dream again?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?” I tried, grasping at straws. When Ashley was in a mood, it was usually a long and cumbersome process to get her to open up.
“Can I have a cookie?” She looked almost hopeful.
“No, you can’t have a cookie at ten-thirty at night. Sorry, baby, no deal.”
“Then I’m not hungry.” There was steel in her little voice and a defiant tilt to her chin. She was scared, I realized as I studied her defensive posture.
“You can have a banana, if you’d like,” I offered.
“Can I have ice cream instead?”
“Now if I wouldn’t let you have a cookie, why on earth would I say yes to ice cream?” I sighed.
“Fine. I’ll have the banana,” she relented, climbing down from my lap to follow me to the kitchen.
“Do you want a glass of milk with this?” I sliced the banana in half lengthwise, just the way she liked it, and handed her the plastic Kermit the Frog plate that was her favorite.
“Sure.” Her thin shoulders rose in a shrug as she slowly munched on the fruit.
“You know you can talk to me about anything.”
“I know.”
“I just need to remind you of that sometimes. You’re pretty special to me, just so you know.” I smiled and fluffed her dark hair.
“I love you too, Mama.”
“I’ll never let anything happen to you. I can promise you that. I’ll always keep you safe and sound.”
“Because you carry a gun in your purse.” She nodded. “I know, Mom.”
“Ah, well, that too, but—hey, wait—I do not carry my gun in my purse. I keep it in the—” I stopped the awkward tirade, abruptly realizing what I had been about to say. Ashley had paused in eating her snack and was staring at me with blatant curiosity.
“Never you mind where I keep it. Anyway, that’s not what I meant,” I quickly explained before she could ask any questions. “I meant that because I’m your mom, I will always love and protect you and keep you safe. So you don’t have to be afraid at night.”
“Sometimes I get bad dreams at night. Scary dreams,” she confessed in a quiet tone. It was obvious to see what it cost the child to speak the words out loud, and the knowledge tore at my heart.
“Do you want to tell me about the one you had tonight?” I struggled to keep my voice level.
“No.” She shook her head emphatically and bit down on a section of banana.
“Are you sure? Sometimes it helps to talk about these things.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. That’s okay, honey. You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t feel comfortable talking about. Do you want to sleep in my room for the rest of the night?” I offered as casually as I could manage.
She nodded.
“Come on, then. We’d better get some sleep. You have school tomorrow and I have work.”