Breaking Away (The Man in the Shadows) (6 page)

James bit his tongue. He was all too used to speaking to Greta in an informal fashion as of late; he didn’t want anything snarky to slip out in front of the High Lord. He didn’t want any snide remarks to be aimed at the High Lord, either. He chose his words carefully. “It is my pleasure, as always. Greta’s plea was convincing.”

When he was within a mere two feet from the High Lord, James held up his right hand, palm out. Lamin held up his left hand and did the same, like the two were mirror images of each other. While their hands did not touch, an intense voltage began to crawl up the chasm between their palms, beginning with small sparks, but exhilarating into tiny, glowing jagged bolts of electricity. Fast, like a door being slammed by the wind, James’s eyes shut and his jaw clenched involuntarily. He gasped and shook violently for a second. With a swish, Lamin pulled his hand away from the violent electric storm, and released James from his trance.

James stumbled back from the High Lord somewhat, as if waking up from a long coma. He swallowed hard and looked up at Lamin, eyes wide and shaken. His first reaction was dread, as he thought,
LAMIN, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?
Then, coming to his senses, he slowly came to realize what had really just happened to him. An evil smile teased the corners of his mouth, with an edge of wonderment and suspicion. He looked down at his hands, and sluggishly brought them up to feel his face. Eyes, nose, mouth, chin, eyebrows, hair, they all felt unchanged. He finally vocalized steadily, “What did you do to me?”

Lamin smiled easily for the first time in days. His eyes seemed distant, like he was gazing into a glorious future, as he replied, “I gave you all that you’ll need for your mission.”

“The... the Magi?” James had a hard time even saying those words, as it seemed silly to suggest something in which he himself didn’t readily believe. The Magi was something James knew only from stories he heard as a child, from the myths of old. It didn’t really exist, did it?

“Yes, the Magi,” confirmed Lamin, as he sighed lightly. James gaped at him as he continued, “On this mission, you will need all the power and sorcery that this world can offer you. You need to be concealed, invisible, soundless; yet you must be able to control a human if need be. For once you go through the threshold and close the door behind you, you cannot open it again. Not without the Corner Stone willing it to open.”

Nodding, James instantly understood. The reality of the situation hit him then. Solemnly, soberly he bit his bottom lip. What if he couldn’t find this rogue spirit? What if, when the Corner Stone was at the mature age, it didn’t
want
to come back to its real home? What if it had escaped on purpose? Then... James would be trapped in an alien world, alone, lost, like smoke twisting and turning upwards towards the sky, hopeful it will reach its home, until it dissipates into nothing, never to be seen again, and never reaching its goal.

Once again, as if pushed out by some unseen force, words spilled from his lips. “I understand the risks. I will do it.”

***

A light snow danced in the predawn sky, like salt cast across a black tapestry. It swayed back and forth gently in the low breeze, making the world, just waking up from that solid winter sleep, seem like it was moving in slow motion. Steam radiated from chimneys and windows of the houses pecked across neatly kept boulevards, as the chill of the night lingered. Dusting the stiff, frozen grass, the snow made the world appear as if it were topped with a thin layer of sweet vanilla frosting.

Ethan hadn’t slept a wink. He was unable to get ahold of Maika. She didn’t answer her phone, she hadn’t updated her online social profile status; her closest girl friend, Zareh, hadn’t heard from her either. In the deepest part of the night, when he had gotten Zareh to finally pick up her phone after repeatedly calling 24 times in a row, they warily decided not to panic or call the police until morning. Convincing Ethan to try to rest, she hung up the phone, thinking it was just a fluke, a tactic that Maika sometimes pulled when she wanted to be alone, and thus Zareh advised him to make a trip over to Maika’s apartment in the morning.

Sitting on his bed, waiting, worried, scenarios filled with death and guilt danced through his head like stale gumdrops. His eyes darted over to his clock radio, it read 5:12am. That was close enough to morning for him, so he jumped to his feet, reached under his bed blindly for his boots, forced them on over his drooping socks, and put on his beaten jean jacket that had been hanging on his bedpost. He stood in the middle of his room, his hair a mess, dark circles under his eyes, and wondered if it was now too late. What if he got to her house, just to come face to face with her corpse? His imagination, fueled by over stimulated neurons and his obsession over Maika’s safety, envisioned her lying in the middle of her studio apartment, dried blood smeared on her face, her clothes, her bedspread; stale blood peeling off of her eyelashes and lips as she stared, eyes open and a piercing green even in death, mouth agape in a scream that never escaped her cut throat.

Groaning, his stomach turning, he forced one foot, and then the other, to move and lead him down the stairs and over to his car parked in the driveway below. He felt dizzy and repentant; he’d never be able to live with himself if something horrible had happened to her. What if...?

“No more what ifs...” he growled at himself. “Go... Just go.”

Climbing into his car, he thrust the key into the ignition, and the engine hesitated to turn over. “Come on!” he begged as he turned the key as hard as he could, as if the harder he turned it, the more the engine would try. Breath rushed from his mouth and nostrils in sheets of fog and floated away gently, as he hit the steering wheel with all of his might, his hands stinging in the cold air. It was 29 degrees out currently, so that may have had something to do with the car’s hesitation. “Don’t do this to me right now! You could have picked any time to be a bitch, and you had to pick NOW??” On the last word of the soliloquy that he screamed at the top of his voice, he pushed on the gas pedal until it hit the floor with his right foot, and the car roared to life. Stunned, his chest puffed up slightly in pride and he said kindly, “Thank you.”

Maika only lived about five miles from him, right off of 35W in South Minneapolis. Ethan lived in a nearby stuffy, snooty part of town called Edina, where the rich folks who ate organic food, ran marathons, and composted their own garbage lived. Why he lived amongst these types of people he didn’t know; he didn’t quite fit in with them. He was a struggling musician who worked at a hardware store in order to pay the bills. He wasn’t thrifty, he didn’t have enough money to buy organic or to buy a crossover hybrid. But his musical ability seemed to help him blend in with his neighbors a little better, and the bonfires he put on each weekend in the summer didn’t hurt, either.

Chancing his safety in the name of saving time, he blew through several stop signs and took the fastest backroad shortcuts he could think of. In his exhausted state, he narrowly missed hitting a parked car, and he ran over a curb or two, but with every minute that lapsed, he grew nearer to finding out the truth. Soon he could hear the roar of the interstate growing louder, and knew he was almost to his destination. Right before the bridge that arched over the interstate, he took a sharp left and pulled into her apartment complex, a mid 1970s brown brick building, bland and colorless, with a less than stellar upkeep.

Maika lived on the ground floor, so he jumped the locked metal security fence and ran, in a full on sprint, to her front door. It faced a modest courtyard, which encased many trees and small wild critters, with all the other apartment doors arranged in a circle around the small landscaped area. The birds were singing as the sun rose slowly in the eastern sky as Ethan came upon her door, and before he began to knock feverishly, he stopped to breathe, closing his eyes tightly, his hand frozen in mid air. He needed to compose himself and prepare for the worst. Unlikely as it was, his mind seemed to believe, irrationally and inconsolably, that to top off the horrendous night he’d endured, he would find her in some sort of awful state that was all his fault. He raised his hand to knock on the door and...

His focus snapped through Maika’s front window, the one just to the left of her front door. Ethan could see her bed through the blinds, and, curiously, she was in it! Not only was she in it, but she was sitting up, and smiling. Squinting in order to see her face clearer, he found that she was pantomiming a conversation with someone. Upon closer inspection, no one was in the room with her to converse with... What was going on? How did she get home?

Suddenly angry, he knocked on the door and called, “Maika! Let me in. This is important, Darling!!” All of the pain, all of the worry, all of his regret and guilt had been for nothing. Look! She was okay, and she had been completely ignoring him, all of his calls, all of his texts...

As the words came out of his mouth, she fell back onto her bed, in the same way that a rag doll is dropped to the floor. This startled him, as he’d never seen anyone move quite like that. She dropped like she had been under a hypnotic spell, and the hypnotist amazingly commanded her, ‘Sleep!’ His instincts went on high alert once more, because there had to be something strange going on. This spectacle he had just observed was definitely not normal.

“Maika!” he called again, this time rapping on the window pane, trying not to panic or become overly aghast by what he had witnessed. “I can see you! Please answer the door, it’s important, Darling!” As still as a statue, Maika laid sprawled upon her bed, as if someone had thrown her there in haste, a marionette thrown away.

Flabbergasted, Ethan turned away from the window and began to pace the sidewalk that encircled the courtyard. His face flushed a bright red and a frenzy took him over, no longer able to keep it at arms length. It dawned on him then, perhaps the experience of entering the club had done something to her. Ethan’s power to conjure up things in his imagination was one thing, but to make his visions a reality and keep them stable, he needed the Père.

He took his phone out from the front pocket of his jeans and flipped it up, cutting through the air like a knife as it pivoted open. “Dammit,” he breathed, annoyed, when he noticed that his phone was on its last vestige of battery power.
I better make this as quick as possible, then
he thought. Dialing the number three, the Père’s speed dial number, he raised the phone up and smashed it to his ear rigidly. He paced frantically as he waited for each ring to go by, anticipating an answer at any moment. On the fourth ring, a man answered the phone, sluggishly, tired.

“...Hello?”

“Père? It’s Sir Ethan, I have a very important question for you.”

Yawning, the man asked, “Who is this?”

“Ethan,” he replied slowly, confused. “This is the Père, correct?”

Waking up, the man laughed. “Oh. Ethan. I’m sorry, I was fast asleep. What do you need, Son?”

Ethan drew in a quick, sharp breath, and his words ran from him like blood from a wound. “Some very strange things have been happening with a friend I brought to the club in the warehouse district last night...”
“Stop right there.” Irritation took over the man’s voice. “You brought an outsider to the club? Without my permission?”

“I, um, I...” Ethan stumbled over his own tongue, becoming defensive. “I... yes, I did. She’s been my friend for twelve years, I didn’t think I’d have to ask permi...”

The man dismissed it dispassionately and said, his tone verging on becoming irked, “Okay, okay... go on.”

“Anyway,” Ethan composed himself again, laboring to shroud how jittery this conversation was making him. “I brought her there, and we had a little fight, so I lost track of her location. She disappeared. Just
poof,
like magic. She somehow made it home unscathed, but now I’m at her apartment to check on her and...” still pacing, eyes searching the courtyard absently, “...it looked like she was talking to someone just now, but no one was with her. It looked like she was under some sort of spell... Could her being an outsider have anything to do with this strange behavior?”

Silence.

Panicked, Ethan insisted, louder, eyes widening, “Hello?” He took the phone from his ear to find the battery had died, presumably during his long winded explanation of what happened to Maika. He hissed, incensed, “Fuck... FUCK!”

A voice answered from a distance, “Quiet down, asshole!”

Being oblivious to the early hour during his panicked cries, he glanced at his wrist watch. 5:45am. His fingers curled rigidly as he tried not to scream out of pure frustration. No wonder a resident of the apartment complex had yelled at him, no one should have to wake up before 6am due to a cursing vagrant. At a loss, he sat down cross legged, his back against a tree. The rough bark tore into his skin, but he paid it no mind. His eyes burned with tears, from the frustration and the heavy burden that weighed at his heart.

At least he knew she was alive. What he didn’t know was who was with her, invisible or otherwise, and why exactly she seemed to be under a spell. Determined, exasperated, and, out of nowhere, astoundingly full of life’s immense fury, he leapt to his feet, hunkered down, and in a millisecond his feet burst below him like a wild animal, his shoulder taking the lead, and he flew with all of the force he could muster right into Maika’s front door. The door exploded open, ricocheted off of the inside wall, and he flew face first into her apartment.

Finding himself on her living room floor, an expanse of tan carpet below his body, he staggered up onto his elbows, and brought one hand to his face. Blood. It ran over his lips and into his mouth, like hot melted wax, giving him the ominous taste of iron. His nose throbbed as he realized his powerful battering ram action had thrust him to the ground, and his nose took the brunt of the fall. Wincing as he touched the fresh wound, he felt as if someone had punched him right in the kisser. He could only breathe through his mouth now, but he couldn’t help his brain thinking in a flash that blood stains would tarnish his favorite jacket.