Shadow Touched (26 page)

The Council wasn’t an option. That had been made clear. Cam was being sarcastic, which wasn’t him at all. They needed to let this conversation go, and soon.

“I’ve heard that little girl from Middleton is much better,” she said. “The family is going out west—”

“Gunnar Martin won’t be duped,” Cam continued. That tension was stringing him tight again, like a puppet on wires. “He will have thought of everything we have. Our only ace is that he doesn’t know Zander helped you kill Mathilde.”

He was going in circles, around the point, torturing himself with the hope that somehow he’d bump into a new answer.

He’d said it didn’t feel right to him, but no argument was going to change the facts, so she saved him from going around again. “So we kill him. We now know when and where.”

Cam looked over at her, shrugged. But she could tell he wasn’t resigned, not nearly. Yet he had no other recourse, either. “Unless—”

“Unless what?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Tell me.”

“Brand said
guile
.”

“Yeah?” Among magekind, apparently it was a virtue.

Cam smiled like his old self, his mind in charge. “Say we do this. Say we kill Gunnar Martin. Then what?”

She was smiling, too. This was the man she knew. “We have peace.”

“
Why
will we have peace?”

She narrowed her eyes to make herself think faster. “Well, with Zander inheriting—” Then she got it. The other key beneficiary. “Zander.”

“Zander who handed you the weapon to kill the first heir to Martin House.”

“Zander who inherits upon Gunnar’s death,” she said. “You think he’s setting us up?” He was the one person who had seemed to have a code of honor. It was a tit-for-tat kind of thing, but it had saved their lives.

“It’s possible,” Cam said. “Maybe he wasn’t helping us combat a psychopath; maybe he was seizing an opportunity to rise.”

Ellie frowned, remembering back. Her shadow had been immobile on the bed. Cam had been lost in a swell of Shadow. She’d managed to back to the fireplace. Zander had been lounging in a chair to its side. Hoping he wouldn’t notice, she’d reached behind her for a tool from the fireplace set, a weapon, anything to fight with. People always overlooked the flesh-and-blood version of herself, fearing her seemingly immortal shadow. They thought she was weak. Not a threat. But she could be just as deadly. Well, kinda. She’d grabbed the fireplace broom; Zander had so helpfully traded it out for the poker.

That one exchange had made the difference between their deaths and their escape. It’d also made the critical difference for Mathilde. And yes, Ellie had chalked Zander’s participation up to recognizing that Mathilde was a psychopath and needed to die before she did worse. But maybe—

“I was kinda hoping we had a friend in Zander,” Ellie said.

“Can’t count on anything.”

Cam couldn’t sleep. There’d been a time when he’d play video games all hours to find the solution to a problem suddenly, happily, in his head. That was how he could say he was “working” while convening with Xio Strongman, who lived in New York City and masqueraded online as a corseted warrior maiden. But now Cam didn’t even trust himself with fake fighting. The animation was too good.

Cam looked into the darkened bedroom where Ellie was sprawled in bed, so pretty. She wouldn’t want him to leave the suite, but he was going crazy. His lab was his second refuge, and he hadn’t set foot in there for weeks.

He found a pen and scribbled a note:
In lab. Work=good ~C

Just as he was leaning to stick the note on his pillow, Ellie’s shadow sat up from her body.
Oh no. Not again.
The dazzling dark form crawled off the bed, head cocked as if listening, as Ellie blinked awake.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Cam shook his head. “I don’t—”

Then the shadow shrieked loud and shrill. It had never done that before, but the sound was familiar, especially at Segue: wraith. And in a blur of darkness, the shadow was gone. Just like the night before.

“Cam?”

Alarms went off, stark white lights flashing outside the window.

“Oh God,” he said. Two assaults two nights in a row?

Ellie crawled out of the bed. “Could Gunnar loose the wraiths?”

So she’d heard the resemblance too. “I don’t know.”

Protocols protected residents of the institute, including double and triple safeties on the wraith containment. A complete lockdown would be in effect until the threat was managed. Passcodes at each doorway tracked movement through the hotel, though the recommendation was to stay put unless you were in danger or knew that your skills could help resolve the situation faster.

Ellie was dragging on sweats under Cam’s big T-shirt and shoving her feet into sneakers when the emergency announcement sounded: “Three wraiths released from holding on the premises. The barrows are intact.”

“The barrows” referred to the field of mounds, essentially graves, where wraiths were interred and thereby held captive in perpetuity. It was old magic revived to manage an old kind of monster.

“It’s too soon for you,” Ellie said, following Cam out of the suite at a dash.

No shit.
“And right on time for whoever is responsible. This is nothing less than outright war on Segue.” And he’d doubted the need to kill in cold blood? Tell him who right now, and he wouldn’t hesitate.

Cam punched an override code to call the elevator. The thirty seconds it took to arrive were interminable.

As they exited the elevator on the ground floor, another scream—piercing, otherworldly, soul-rending—shattered the night, this one banshee. It was Talia’s gift to shred the boundary between the worlds in order to force a wraith out of the mortal one. The scream came from outside the building, though the sound penetrated every wall, bone, and atom.

“The boys,” Ellie said. “She’d never leave them to go outside if there was danger, even to fight wraiths.”

Cam had closed his eyes because Shadow magic confused his senses. Talia Thorne’s scream had scraped against his skin, and a wild churn of colors glared through his eyelids. When the sound finally ceased, he sprinted after Ellie, who was already punching in a code to get through to the hotel’s immaculately restored main-floor salons and outside.

The wide white veranda looked over the lawns—Twilight trees flickered on the scene as if an old-time movie projector was just starting a fairy-tale-themed film. He spotted Talia running toward him, a small woman with a big kid clutched in her arms. The descending steps were off to the left, but Cam jumped the wall and didn’t feel when his feet hit the ground. Just ran toward her.

He reached out his arms to receive Cole, whose head was lolling back, unconscious—but Talia held on tightly. “Can you see Michael? Find Michael!” Cole’s twin. She was frantic.

Mic—?
Cam flashed hot. How had the kids gotten out in the first place? Was this Gunnar, then? Going after the children, the legacy worthy of the loss of his daughter?

“You
find
him.” Talia sounded wrecked. “I—I have to get Cole help.”

He nodded. “I’ll find him. I swear I will. Can you make it to the porch? Ellie’s there. She’ll help you.” He turned and yelled for her. “Ellie!”

But he didn’t wait for her to appear. Michael was out here somewhere, wraiths on the loose, Shadow on the ground.
This
was the nightmare, the reckoning, they had all feared. Gunnar had struck at their heart.

Cam ran farther into the field, away from Segue’s floodlights, and looked left-right for any hint that would tell him where to search first. He didn’t like to
see
, but he was desperate to take in everything at once: the fall trees, a mix of oak and spruce, native to the mountainous region. Pockets of darkness under their boughs were luminous to him. A short silhouette deep within teased his sight, but instinct told him it was one of those deceivers, the fae.

He turned and sought in another direction. An old garden, bare in this season, was blocked out in front of the hotel. It might conceal a collapsed body, but since he was hoping for a live one, he’d search there after everywhere else was exhausted.

A far-off, deep violet sparkle finally arrested his search. The color glimmered through the forest, magenta and gold, a reflection or inner glow—Ellie’s shadow. It would go where it was needed most.

He knew her shadow would be protecting Ellie’s home, the only place where she had been accepted since the death of her grandmother. If her shadow was out there, then Michael might be, too.

Cam sprinted in that direction, veering around the garden and plunging into the treeline. Leaves crunched underfoot and dry branches broke. The trees themselves seemed to step out of the way for him as he came upon a scene of horror.

Michael stood, alive and well, but with an extreme expression of yuck on his face.

Ellie’s magnificent shadow held a wraith with one hand, fingers digging gruesomely into his face for purchase; with the other hand she was repeatedly pounding its chest, where the flesh had broken away and crushed bone powdered the pulp of organs inside. The smell of rot had Cam clenching his teeth so as not to vomit.

The shadow looked over at him. “Not dead.” And then beat on the wraith—what was once probably a woman—some more.

Wraiths were immortal. They couldn’t die, a concept impossible for the shadow to understand. She just kept punching. Very messy. Potentially traumatic for the kid.

Though his lungs, blood, and mind were suffused with Shadow, Cam found that violence against the wraiths bothered him not at all. It was just . . . gory and pitiful. When this woman had traded her soul for immortal life, he’d bet she didn’t have
this
in mind.

Cam drew his Martin blade and approached. Mortal weapons couldn’t end a wraith, but this blade could sever it from life. It didn’t take any strength to cut off its head. The body fell in a noxious heap; its head dropped a millisecond later. The shadow crouched to examine the remains.

“Okay, kid.” Cam motioned for Michael to step around the mess.

A flicker in his peripheral vision, and Cam turned.

The atoms floating in the air seemed to go still for him, because he could see with absolute clarity: A mage—umbra streaming behind him—was hunkered down in the wood’s bracken.

Him.
He’d done this.

The characteristic staccato blur of movement revealed to Cam’s sight what the mage was going to do.

No. He wasn’t getting near Michael.

Cam drew his blade again, and with a swift flick of his wrist, sent it flying three degrees off from where the mage now crouched, to where he’d be a fraction of a second later.

The
thunk
in his chest was audible, and the mage collapsed.

A shudder of ecstasy ran over Cam, tripping his mind, loosening his grip on reality. He wasn’t in the woods in the Appalachian Mountains. He was in another forest, far more perilous with beauty and danger alike. The sounds—trees sighing in a strange, gut-claiming song—and a scent in the air seductive, distracting. He’d never been this deep before, not even this morning, on that bloody highway, where he’d been able to see and smell the death and have a dual sense of two worlds overlapping.

He had to stay right where he was. Not one step. Not one movement, or he’d be lost. And what about Michael? Was it safe for him now? The wraith and mage were both dead, but what if something else was sneaking in close?

“You need to run, Michael,” Cam said. Could the kid even hear him?

The more air Cam drew, the more his mind fuzzed. Twilight did that—turned people mad.

“You need to run,” he said, again. “Right now, back to Segue. No stopping. Run. Can you do that?”

No answer. But then, it could be that they were truly in different worlds now, Cam stuck in Shadow, Michael still lost in the woods, alone at night.

No, wait. This was Adam Thorne’s kid. He wasn’t helpless. He was fully briefed on what to do in all sorts of emergency situations. And everyone would be searching for him by now. Talia would’ve stripped Segue of soldiers and personnel, awakened everyone, to organize the effort. Michael would be okay.

But Cam felt a small, sweaty hand take his.

“It’s this way,” Michael said. “I know the way home. My granddad taught me.”

Shadowman. Seemed he’d been tutoring the grandkids on the finer points of surviving Shadow, too. Of course he had. He’d take care of his own.

“Ellie is so cool,” Michael said, as he led the way back. “She totally nailed that wraith.”

Kid needed therapy.

Michael walked him out of forest and darkness. Unseen leaves crunched underfoot. Brittle fallen branches cracked, and then soft yellow grass cushioned his feet. Magic billowed all around, like a giant, curling ocean wave just crashing to shore, but they walked out ahead of the deluge, where the tide was low, and toward the bright, white-lit building again.