LEVEL FIVE
Y
ou’re not Griff,” Zach insisted. He could hear the childishness in his voice, but he clung to the truth of what he was saying.
“How would you know?” Griff asked.
“Because Griff would never let himself be used as a puppet by whatever fist is up your ass.”
The Not-Griff scowled. “You’ve got a big mouth, kid. I never liked that about you.”
“You can’t hurt me. That’s why you’re screwing with my head.”
“You look ready to piss your pants. I’d say it’s working.”
Zach hesitated. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you are, you’re not Griff.”
“Part of you knows I’m telling the truth, Zachary. The part that’s honest. I know things about you that you’d never admit to anyone else. Look at Cade. The closest thing you’ve got to a friend. And you betray him every day.”
Not true, Zach thought. That’s not true.
“Do you even know what’s true anymore, Zach?”
“I know Griff isn’t anywhere your side can reach him. I’m sure about that.”
Not-Griff shrugged, and some bit of organic matter fell from under his arm.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he conceded. “Part of Griff is gone. But he left behind plenty. I’m the part that gets left behind when everything good goes away. And trust me, kid: he left a lot of hate for you. He always thought you were worthless and weak.”
Zach’s legs trembled, but he stood his ground.
“I don’t believe you.”
The shadows gathered tightly around Zach again. He could barely see Griff now.
“That’s why your father split, Zach.”
“I dealt with all this in therapy. Try again.”
“Really?” Griff asked. “That’s not how I hear it.”
He stepped back completely into the shadows. His voice kept droning on, however.
“Your mother knew. Look at how she tried to protect you. Tried to shelter you from the truth of the world. Where you could never compete on your own. And you failed her, too.”
Not fair, Zach thought. “No. I was there for her.”
“She died alone.”
“I only left the room for a moment. I had a call. We were in the middle of a campaign.”
“Do you want to see it? Since you missed it before.”
Griff’s voice had changed. It became higher, softer and raspier. Zach knew it instantly. He closed his eyes.
And then he was there. Both the younger version of him, getting up and walking away from the hospital bed, phone already to his ear. Zach remembered the boredom and irritation he felt back then. The need to take a shower, to get back to his apartment and to get some work done. The election was in two weeks, and the voice-mail was piling up.
His mother reached after him, her eyes suddenly open. It was the end. The doctors said she’d felt no pain.
They’d lied.
Without his hand there, she’d had nothing to hold on to. She could hear him talking in the hallway on his phone, too loud, disturbing other patients despite all the signs that warned against using cell phones in the hospital.
The one time she really needed him. Her hand fell. Her body spasmed, and the life went out of her as she fell into the dark. All alone. Her last word was his name. He wasn’t there to hear it. He left her alone.
Zach screamed so hard he tore something in his throat, screamed until his lungs ached, and still it did not release a drop of the despair he felt filling him, drowning his soul.
EVENTUALLY, ZACH STOPPED SCREAMING.
From the shadows, Zach’s mother stepped forward. She still wore her hospital gown, the IV trailing behind her, hollowed out by the chemicals and the pain.
“You’re glad I’m dead,” she said. “You wanted it to happen. You were happy to be finished with the inconvenience.”
Zach was sobbing, fat tears flowing down his cheeks.
“No, Mom. Please don’t say that.”
“You failed me. That’s all you’ve ever done. Failed in every way. You never loved me.”
“Mom. Please. I love you. I’d do anything for you.”
“It’s too late. I’m dead.”
“No. Please. I’ll do anything.”
“There’s only one thing you can do, Zach. You have to die. Can you do that for me? Are you ready to die?”
FORTY
Part of this resilience we can attribute to the fact that Cade was more durable as a human than most of us in the modern era can understand. He was born in a time without vaccines, antibiotics or even decent sanitation and hygiene. He survived malnutrition and poverty in his childhood to become a sailor at a time when the physical demands of life on the seas were unbelievably grueling. After all that, he lived through an attack from what had to be a King Vampire.
—Dr. William Kavanaugh, Sanction V research group
W
hen Cade exited the lab, he found Bell backed up against the wall by Tania.
“She says she can get us out of here,” Tania said, not looking at him. “I’m pretty sure she’s better as a snack.”
Bell trembled, her chin up in the air as she tried to push herself even further back into the wall.
“Don’t kill her,” Cade found himself saying.
Bell and Tania both looked at him with some surprise.
“Not yet,” Cade added.
Tania stepped back, frowning.
“It’s done?” Cade asked her.
She gave him a withering look.
“I only wanted to know.”
Cade was about to say something else when he heard the scream. So did Tania. Even Bell heard it faintly, though it was at the far end of the Site, muted by tons of concrete and steel.
Zach.
Cade had never heard anything so terrible from him. Not ever.
He looked at Bell, who was horrified, but not by any fear of the unknown.
She had the look of someone who knew exactly what was happening to the person doing that screaming, and exactly how bad it was.
“Tell me,” Cade growled at her.
“Hewitt and Reynolds,” she said. “Oh God, they must still be here.”
“Who?”
“The Shadowmen. They have Zach. They must be . . .” She swallowed over a catch in her throat. “They’re
playing
with him.”
FORTY-ONE
SHADOW PEOPLE: A creature or entity that shares many of the characteristics of a ghost, but also seems to have a palpable physical presence, these strange beings appear to be shadows without bodies to cast them. Witnesses report seeing a variety of types, including a man wearing an old-fashioned hat, others wearing cloaks or trench coats, and some with both. These shadows are nearly always malevolent. Rumors of a similar shadow creature preying on criminals in the 1930s and 1940s are probably urban legends, or an attempt to “domesticate” a truly frightening—and still unexplained—phenomenon.
—Cole Daniels,
Monsterpaedia
C
ade walked down the corridor. He couldn’t see a thing.
That in itself was unusual. His eyes were sensitive to the slightest amounts of light or heat. But it was as if the darkness lay over everything in the cells like a great blanket, smothering any possible detail.
He listened, instead.
He was unarmed.
He’d given his pack to Tania and told her to take Bell and go into the access shaft. If he and Zach didn’t show up at the elevator, she would know what to do.
He’d considered taking one of the guns with him, but Bell only shook her head.
“You can’t shoot them. They’re barely even there.”
He didn’t have time to ask what that meant.
He kept listening, moving down the corridor, his mind forming a picture from the sounds in the darkness.
There. Through the metal of a cell door locked open. The sound of a heartbeat. Zach’s heartbeat.
Faint. And getting fainter.
Cade stepped over the threshold.
A single, half-dead fluorescent tube flickered in the ceiling overhead. The murky light washed everything blue-gray in a small patch at the center of the cell.
Zach huddled on the floor, nearly catatonic. His body temperature had dropped. Cade’s senses barely registered Zach’s breathing. From the rustle of Zach’s clothes on the floor, Cade could hear him twitching—but slowly. Even his involuntary muscle movements were failing.
Cade had to get him out of here.
Again, he hesitated.
Someone else was in there with him. Even if he couldn’t see him. Or scent him.
The entire place seemed soaked in dread. All the terrors of the night were coiled in the corners, waiting to spring. It would have been quite frightening if Cade hadn’t been one of those terrors himself.
They wanted him inside. Zach was bait.
Cade knew it. He stepped over the threshold anyway.
He saw something, out of the corner of his eye. He moved, barely in time. He saw a daggerlike shadow retreat back into the dark.
Immediately, behind him, another stabbing attack. A blade—a wooden blade—appeared from nowhere in the dark. It sliced at him. He turned and caught it in his arm, rather than his back.
It was pulled from his flesh with a wet kiss of a noise, and vanished again.
He whirled and sent a kick back at his attacker, but nothing was there. If it weren’t for the cut, there’d be no evidence of any attacker at all.
Interesting.
There was still enough fresh blood in his system for the wound to close.
Behind him. The slightest scraping noise, a shoe touching the pavement, broke him from his thoughts.
He jumped this time, not waiting for it. A blade made of shadow sliced through the air where his head had been.
If he hadn’t moved, decapitation.
The follow-up attack came from behind, as he expected. This time he was ready for it, and avoided another cut from another razor-edged shadow.
What had Graves made here? They were not as fast as he was—not in thought or reflex, anyway. But they vanished without a trace. He spun around in a complete circle, trying desperately to see something. Anything.
He cranked his reflexes to their limit again. Everything in the room slowed. The darkness thickened, and this time, he could see the silhouette of a dagger, the edge looming like a battleship in the sea. Standing behind it was an outline, a man in a dark trench coat and old-fashioned fedora.
It was just a shadow. Only darkness, given form.
The shadow of the dagger raised over Zach’s head.
Cade had no time for other options. He threw himself into the shadow’s path.
It skidded along his ribs. If he had not leaned the right way, redirecting the force of the thrust, it would have pierced his heart.
They could have used flamethrowers and burned him. It would have been more effective. But all things in the dark hated and feared the light. It was instinctive. Fire was man’s first and oldest weapon against the Other Side. That told Cade something about what they were. They didn’t use the same equipment as the A/A soldiers, either because they didn’t have it or because they feared it like he did.
Of course, they didn’t need DU rounds or white phosphorus. They could just keep picking at him until they got lucky and got his heart. They could end him with a dollar’s worth of surveying stakes from Home Depot.
He hunched over Zach, trying to guard his chest and protect Zach at the same time.
He heard something.
Laughter. From the dark, from everywhere at once.
They were laughing at him. They took a moment to enjoy his helplessness. They loved being stronger. You could hear it in the echoes off the walls.
That’s how he knew for certain the Shadowmen were still partially human, whatever else they were.
That gave him something to work with.
He’d fought an invisible man once. This was different. That was no contest: he still breathed, still left footprints and still bled when Cade got to him. These Shadowmen didn’t just drop out of sight; they dropped completely out of the world.
As unbelievable as it was, they were somehow crossing back and forth between this world and the Other Side. They jumped over the border at will.
Cade marshaled everything he knew about the Other Side, trying to find a strategy.