Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) (2 page)

Chapter One

TERROR WAS THE
color of crimson. It had a copper taste like arterial blood.

The criminal has escaped and left our world.

She stood beside her mate in a circle of seven. Their combined energies shone like a supernova. Dread darkened the group’s colors. Their leader’s grief and outrage was a smear of gray and black.

The change in her mate was that of a warrior rousing from sleep. She felt her own energy resonate to his, ringing like strained crystal.

We must find a way to stop him, or he will do untold damage.

All seven committed to the task and said good-bye to their home. They would never be able to return. With power and arcane fire, their leader prepared a potion from which they must drink in order to transform and travel to a strange world.

Her mate confronted his final moments with strength and courage. As his beautiful eyes closed, he promised,
I will see you soon
.

They had fit together with such perfection. They had been born at the same moment and had journeyed through life together, contrast and confluence, two interlocking pieces that sustained and balanced each other.

But no matter how connected they were in life, they each had to cross that midnight bridge on their own. Her energy bled ribbons of bright red as she faced the final moments of the only life she had known.

She tried to reply to him, but the poison had already disconnected her from her physical body. She sent him one last shining pulse of love and faith as darkness descended.

She had died such a long time ago.

Thousands of years ago.

Wait. What?

No.

Mary flung out a hand and cracked her knuckles against something hard. Pain shot up her arm.

She surged upright and wobbled where she sat. Shards of color surrounded her, like fractured pieces from the ruins of a stained-glass window. After several uncomprehending moments, she realized where she was. She was sprawled on her bed in a chaotic nest made up of her comforter, pillows, a pile of her clothes and scraps of material.

Her heart erupted into a conga drum medley then slowed to a more normal tempo. Her head, not so much. It pulsed with a steady throb of pain.

The bedside clock read 6:30
A.M
. For Christ’s sake. She’d only gotten home five hours ago. Her ER shift had been twenty-six hours long. It had involved a five-car accident and two gunshot victims, one of whom, a seventeen-year-old single mother, had died.

She thought of her dream and the criminal that the creatures had pursued. Sweat broke out as dread, mingled with a sense of unspeakable loss, ricocheted through her body with the intensity of a menopausal hot flash.

Some people played golf in their downtime, or went hiking or took aerobic classes. She dreamed of rainbow-pulsing creatures that drank poison Kool-Aid in some kind of bizarre suicide pact. Was that better or worse than dreaming of the gunshot victims?

She sucked air into constricted lungs. Maybe she shouldn’t try to answer that question right now.

Something stuck to her face. Her fingers quested across her skin. She pulled a scrap of cloth from her cheek and stared at it. The cloth had a blue and green paisley design.

A blurred memory surfaced, like the smear of color atop an oil-slicked roadside puddle.

She had found the cloth a couple of days ago in a clearance bin at the fabric store, and she was planning to incorporate it into the pattern of her next quilt. Still wound up from her overlong work shift when she had gotten home, she had released some of her nervous energy by doing household chores. She had fallen asleep in the middle of folding laundry.

Adrenaline had destroyed any chance of her getting back to sleep. Dragging herself off the rumpled bed, she yanked at her wrinkled T-shirt and shorts. She attempted to finger-comb her hair, which crackled with electricity. The tangled curls coaxed fingers into blind alleys and dead ends. Her shoulder-length tawny strands hinted at a mixed-race ancestry and were so thick and wavy she had to keep them layered by necessity.

At present her hair seemed to have more energy than she did. She gave up trying to untangle the mess. It sprawled across her shoulders unconquered, a wild lion’s mane.

She scooped up her house keys and sunglasses on the hall table, slipped on tennis shoes and grabbed a hooded sweatshirt. In less than a minute, she was outside in the early warm spring morning. Bright sunshine stabbed at her before she slipped on her sunglasses.

She lived in an ivory tower near a place she had privately nicknamed Witch Road. The ivory tower was a squat, crooked building in a wooded working-class neighborhood, located by the St. Joseph River in southeast Michigan. It was a shabby, unfashionable river dwelling, built almost a century ago, with a two-bedroom living area on the second floor over the garage that protected it from the river’s periodic flooding. She had rented it since her divorce five years ago.

The ivory had become dingy over the years, the aluminum siding loose at one corner of the building. The outside concrete stairs leading up to her front door were narrow and crooked. The stairs were dangerous in an ice storm. Once while she was at work a heavy rain had turned to sleet, and she had been forced to crawl up the icy steps in order to get inside.

Still, the interior was warm with old pine paneling and scarred but beautiful hardwood floors, and it had a brick and flagstone fireplace. The first time she had stepped inside, something seemed to flow over her, embracing her in an invisible hug. She fancied it was the spirit of the place, welcoming her. Despite its condition and the many ways in which it was inconvenient, she had known she would live there. Sometimes she wondered if she would die there.

For all its shabbiness the ivory tower embodied an ordinary yet powerful magic. In the view from the second-story picture window, there was no sign of the street below or the neighboring houses that dotted the dead-end road. The scene gave the generous illusion she was in a cabin in the woods, far away from anyone else. She could stare out the window for hours at the evergreens, oaks and sycamores, watching flurries of white snow swirling in a snowstorm, or the moving shadows in the trees as daylight changed and faded.

Witch Road was a nearby street in the same neighborhood, part of a loop she had mapped for a daily two-mile run. The route cut close by the nearby river and had gradually pulled her under its spell as she jogged it repeatedly through the change of seasons.

Small houses were overpowered by tall, thick deciduous trees whose bones were uncovered with the death of every year, from the ones with straight willowy lines to those that had a more arthritic beauty, their gnarled joints and twisted limbs that shot in unexpected directions, ending in thousands of spidery-thin fingers grasping at air.

The underbrush was secretive and tangled. Thick vines and fallen limbs discouraged trespass from outsiders. The trees met overhead to rustle and whisper in the ebb and flow of restless, windy days, enclosing the narrow asphalt road with a leafy green canopy in the summertime.

She was too tired for her normal run. She walked the route instead.

The leafy canopy was fast returning with the warmer weather. On the other side of the green-edged lattice of tree limbs, fluffy cumulous clouds traveled across the sky at such speed, they seemed to be running from some unseen menace. The trees shifted and rustled. Leaves and twigs, the detritus from the death of the forest last autumn and winter, danced in circles that followed her down the street.

The swirling circles whispered to each other in small voices.

She’s not the one, stupid.

Yes, she is! She smells like blood. He’ll feed us well for this.

Mary paused and turned to look behind her. What a thing to fantasize.

She was imagining that, wasn’t she?

Other than the murmurous trees and the distant report of a car door slamming, the day was silent, while the wind tumbled sticks and leaves around like a child playing at jacks. A shadow covered the dancing debris, smearing it with darkness.

How could a tree cast that kind of shadow when the sun was not yet high in the sky? She glanced upward. Or perhaps it was a shadow thrown by a cloud.

Malice brushed the edge of her mind, and the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck rose. Or perhaps the darkness was something else, with an unfriendly agenda.

She shook her head at her own overactive imagination, turned back around and resumed walking again.

You saw! She looked at us. Does that mean she heard us?

Normal people don’t hear us. We must tell!

She jerked to a halt and broke out in a fresh sweat.

I didn’t just make that up.

I’m hearing voices.

I’m. Hearing. Voices.

An internal quake rattled her bones. She turned backward in a circle, staring around her with dry eyes. There was no one else close by. Down the street a couple of children exploded out of the front door of a house, their school bags slung over thin shoulders.

A few yards away twigs and pine needles tumbled in a dark pagan dance.

Everything else had stopped. There was no wind, no lick of breeze against her skin. Even the trees overhead had gone silent, waiting.

There was nothing around that would cause that wrong, impossible turbulence of air.

Her teeth clenched. She stamped her foot at the dancing sticks and leaves, and hissed, “Stop it!”

The small voices burst into chatter.

Yes, she heard us. She did.

We must go!

As abruptly as they had started, the voices stopped. The leaves and twigs dropped to the ground.

Nothing else disturbed the stillness, just a few cars pulling out of driveways as people headed to work under the watchfulness of the looming forest, as some of the trees only tolerated the humans who had moved into their territory—

Where had that thought come from? Why would she think such a thing?

Panic clawed her. She was used to dreaming strange dreams. She’d done it her entire life. Hearing voices though, and seeing what she saw—seeing what she thought she just saw—that was psychosis.

She clamped down on the panic. No. She was just too tired and not fully awake yet. She was still half-caught in a dream state where Dalí’s clock melted and Escher’s stairways led on an endless loop to nowhere.

Coffee would shake off this crazy fugue. She turned around and headed back in the direction of her house, working to a lope as she rounded the corner.

Her ex-husband, Justin, stood on her deck at the bottom of the concrete stairs. His dark hair shone with glints of copper in the early morning sun, his narrow, clever face bisected by dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. He was dressed for the office in a functional yet elegant suit, the jacket unbuttoned in the unseasonal warmth of the spring morning.

When she caught sight of him, she groaned under her breath and slowed to a stop. Justin caught sight of her before she could pivot and jog away.

Oh, great. Just what she needed, on top of everything else.

Well, the sooner she talked to him, the sooner he would go away again. Resigned, she walked forward to meet him.

Chapter Two

MICHAEL HAD BEEN
in a rage for as long as he could remember, long before he understood the reasons for it.

As a small boy, over thirty years ago, he had been prone to screaming fits and spells of inconsolable sobbing that had lasted hours. Once it had lasted days. In his memory of that time, his parents were vague, ineffectual shadows, pantomiming concern and alarm. That one time had involved doctors, along with a hypodermic needle.

He hadn’t liked shots. Five adults had been needed to hold him pinned down. After that he had gone through a period of medication and therapy. The medicine taught him a valuable lesson. It made him feel odd and fuzzy. He realized he would have to curb his behavior if he wanted to be free of it, so he learned how to be cunning.

He colored a lot of pictures and studied the therapist as much as she studied him. As soon as he figured her out, he told her everything she wanted to hear. Eventually the sessions stopped, and so did the medication.

Still, he remained a stormy, headstrong, brilliant child. Despite all of their early literacy efforts, his parents could not interest him in reading until he saw an evening news segment on the First Persian Gulf War. Rapt, he watched unblinking until the news program was over, and then he demanded that his father read every article in the newspaper on the subject. Within a few years, his reading comprehension approached the college level.

School was pastel. It didn’t make much of an impression on him. The other children were pastel too. He didn’t have friends. He had followers. By observation and raw gut instinct he knew what the teachers thought of him, that they were both intrigued by him and also worried about his future.

He didn’t care. They were pastel. Nothing external was ever quite as real as what shouted inside of him.

He was well on his way to developing into an adult sociopath. His dreams of release from pastel rules were as yet unformed but increasingly dangerous. He had already been in several fights with other children, and he had discovered that he liked violence.

And he was good at it.

One day when he was eight, an old woman appeared at the fence of his schoolyard playground.

Michael was as aware of her presence as he was aware of everything else around him, but he ignored her while he organized his group of followers for a strenuous bout of playground mischief.

Then the most extraordinary thing happened.

Boy
, the old woman said.

That was all. But she said it
INSIDE HIS HEAD
.

He turned to stare at her.

The old bat looked exceedingly pastel. She looked like just a nondescript woman with a cheerful apple-dumpling face who had paused to watch children run and play during a school break.

His eyes narrowing, he walked toward her, school, stranger-danger, followers and mischief, all else forgotten. Several of the other kids called his name, and some kind of missile thumped him on the shoulder. He ignored everything else and stopped about fifteen yards away from the six-foot chain-link fence. All the while, the old woman watched him with bright, black raisin eyes.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

Shrieking children ran between them, playing a game of tag, but she still heard him in spite of the noise. Her face crinkled into a friendly smile.
It’s a secret
, she said.
I know a lot of secrets.

His breath left him. He stared at her in wonder. She might be old and wrinkled, but she was definitely not pastel. He took another quick, impetuous step toward her. “Teach me!”

Her smile wrinkles deepened although she never stopped watching him. Those bright eyes of hers were alight with amusement and something sharper.
I might
, she said, her mental voice casual.
Or I might not. It all depends.

Never before in his short, pampered life had he been stared at as if he had been weighed and found wanting, but that was how the old woman stared at him now. He scowled, not liking the sensation. “It depends on what?”

On whether or not you know any manners, young man
, she told him.
And whether or not you’re still salvageable.

He had never seen eyes as old as hers. He was too young and ignorant to understand how deadly they were. All he knew was that this strange conversation was more real than anything else that he could remember.

He ran to the fence, clutched metal links in both hands and looked up at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. The unaccustomed words stuck in his throat, but he forced them out anyway. “I’m sorry I was rude. Please, would you teach me how you did that?”

Her face softened and she touched his clenched fists with gnarled fingers as she spoke aloud for the first time. “Well said. And I might teach you, but it still depends on one more thing.”

He shook his head in confusion. It was so odd. From a distance she had seemed so small, barely taller than he was. Now that he was right up next to her she seemed to tower over him.

“Anything,” he promised. He had been so young.

She bent forward and locked gazes with him. He realized that he had been wrong about her eyes too. They weren’t like friendly little raisins. They were hot and full of burning power like black suns.

“You must keep it a secret,” she whispered. “Or I will have to kill you.”

Terror thrilled him. Never, in reality or his wildest imagination, had an adult spoken to him like that. And she might even mean it.

(Whereas the man he had grown into knew very well that she had.)

He pushed against the fence. “I promise. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Ever,” said the old woman.

He nodded. “Ever.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Cross your heart and hope to die.”

Those words. She meant them. Wow, this was so cool. He held her gaze and grinned. He crossed his heart and hoped to die.

The old woman smiled her approval. “Atta boy.”

She told him to be quiet and wait, and he did, though it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

He was rewarded for his patience two weeks later. Walking home from school, he saw a U-Haul van parked in front of a small house located a couple of doors down from where he lived.

Curious, he wandered over to watch half a dozen men unloading furniture, appliances and boxes. There were no toys, no bikes, nothing weird or spooky, just ordinary furniture. Pastel. He had started to turn away when he heard a thin, elderly female voice from within the house call out to the men.

A sharp, delicious shiver, like the flat of a cold blade, ran over his skin.

He hadn’t heard that voice for very long, but he would recognize it anywhere.

He knocked on her door. She gave him a cookie. To the hired movers they looked like a pleasant, ordinary old woman making friends with a well-mannered, curious neighborhood boy.

A week later the old woman met his parents. Soon after that he was taking piano lessons from her on Tuesdays and Thursdays. His family didn’t own a piano, so he also went over to her house on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so he could practice on hers.

His parents were amazed and delighted at the strength of his artistic dedication. It seemed to be just the key they needed to settle him down. When his mentor invited him for summer vacations, they agreed with a poorly concealed relief.

In the meantime, Michael grew from a troubled little boy with messy, uncontrollable emotions into something quiet, controlled and infinitely more deadly.

He learned who he was.

More importantly, he learned why he was the way he was.

“You lost the other half of yourself,” his mentor told him. “It happened a very long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that I am surprised there is any sanity left in you at all. You must remember who you are. You must remember everything you can, and rediscover your skills and your purpose. I can help you do that.”

As he learned meditation and discipline, he grew to understand what his mentor meant. He felt that raging part of him like a beast that was too lightly restrained. He harnessed that energy as he grew older, turning all of his focus onto it, and scarlet threads of memory began to unfurl into the past.

Past before his birth in this lifetime.

Past into distant history, so very long ago.

And he began to remember what he had lost.
Who
he had lost.

The other half of himself.

An unshakable determination settled into him. If she still existed in any way, he would find her again.

He would find her.