Shadow Bound

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Twilight. No, not
that
Twilight. This is darker, sexier—part thriller, part fantasy, and part fairy tale. It’s the realm of In Between, where the land of Death crosses over into the world of the living.

I first read
Shadow Bound
in a writers’ contest, and the haunting opening immediately made me sit up and take notice. I knew right away this was a special book. Who was this mysterious Shadowman, so protective and so dangerous all at the same time? How in the world could any woman survive being hunted by a horde of soul-sucking wraiths? What will it take to end the existence of a brother who has now become a twisted monster? Erin Kellison’s vivid imagination guarantees that you never know what will happen next.

With ghosts, the fae of the Otherworld, and a little
Sleeping Beauty
thrown in for fun,
Shadow Bound
is a one-of-a-kind debut that takes romance in fantastically new directions.

And now, let’s slip into Shadow…

All best,

Leah Hultenschmidt

Editor

Talia heard Adam’s intake of breath as she wrapped the veil around them, the day falling from sunny blue to a dreamy murk. They stood in layered fog, the veils of shadow sensuously lapping at their bodies. The trees, the meadow beyond, the hulk of The Segue Institute were all there, yet somehow appeared transient. As if one good gust of wind might carry it all away.

Adam’s hand warmed in hers. He filled her with his wonder, which was better than all the rest. Made her realize how beautiful shadow was, too.

“A little more,” he said.

Talia reached, and the day darkened to dusk, the orb of the sun shifting from blazing yellow to deep violet. The world turned to myriad purples and shades of blue and black. Sounds stretched so that the birds’ twitters and crickets’ chirps became high, eerie notes warped by darkness. Shadow settled on her shoulders and slid deliciously against her skin in welcome.

Adam’s wonder turned to awe and building excitement.

Talia glanced at him to see how much of what he felt could be read on his face.

He looked down at her, about to say something, but instead he stopped and stared. That sensation was back, a trickle in the sense of his discovery, then a flood blotting it out. Desire.

A light in deepest Shadow.

The fae lord pulled his cloak around his face to dampen the intensity of the glow.
Futile.
The woman was still there, in his mind, shining like molten gold. The heat of her soulfire penetrated the veils between the mortal world and Twilight and slid across his skin in a caress. She, the sun, powerful enough to quicken even him.

From his dark vantage, he peered into her room. Her bed was made, pillow undented. He’d come too early to ride the rough waves of her dreams, to mellow her sharp knocks of pain and worry so that she could rest. He’d done as much since she was a child. It pleased him that the detritus of the sickroom huddled in a corner, unused. Oxygen in a tank. Machines dozing, their cords wrapped and waiting.

She sat on a stool in front of her easel, brush in hand, facing into a deep triangle of darkness cut away by the fall of light from the bedside lamp. She gazed into his Shadow world, just as he marveled at hers. On the canvas before her, she painted a fairy-tale landscape: lush hills lit by star shine, a border of black forest, and the wide gray sea beyond.

Her heart hitched, and the veils between them thinned as her time drew near. He both welcomed and braced against the sudden ache of her pain as it echoed through him—something of
her
to feel.

She paused for breath, hands falling to her knees. The tip of the brush made a drop of green on the skirt of her dress. He wondered at her strength of will as she gritted her teeth and forced her body back into a steady rhythm. Strange how she clung so fiercely to life, yet bent her skill to an image of Twilight.

He crept closer, into the variegated grays of her room, until he could just catch the scent of her—the bright smells that danced on her skin and clung to her hair, the musk of the paint on her fingers that never quite washed away, and something denser, darker, that was woman and mortal.

He sensed her grim resolve, tainted by desperation, in a concentration of spirit that kept her young heart beating, commanding its exercise long enough for her to embrace life, to make something that would last, a legacy of herself to the world. Though her emotion coursed over him like a wild river, he could not unravel her structured thoughts, the building blocks of her intellect, of motivation and creation as she changed her world in ways both subtle and great. Such was the beauty and power of mortality. If she only knew.

She mastered herself. Picked up her brush, put tip to canvas, then paused, head tilting.

“Are you there?” she called, her voice barely above a whisper.

Her sister was in a room beyond, out of earshot, staring into a silver window of moving lights and laughter.

“I know you’re there,” she said, though she regarded her painting. Her brush resumed its stroke. “You might as well come out and talk to me for once.”

So. She seeks
me.
It’s come to that at last, and yet, still too soon.
A small flame sparked to life in his chest, but he forced himself to pull back into Shadow, drawing his cloak around his shoulders.

She sighed. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She paused again to scan the room, her gaze touching on this corner and that empty chair, glancing off him, only to peer more keenly into the deepening grays to her other side.

She laughed, short and full of irony. “Fancy
you
being afraid of
me.
That’s got to be a first.”

Indeed.
Most cowered from the very idea of him. Not her.

“And after all this time we’ve spent together. Well, not exactly
together,
but you know what I mean. I wish we could talk for once. But then, I suppose it won’t be long before we meet. There will be more than enough time after.”

Not true.
She would pass through Twilight but briefly before moving on to the next world. Twilight was merely the boundary. She could not bide there long, no matter how he tried to delay her passage. And he would. He could not let her pass by him like a guttering candle at the end of its wick. Not his Bright Light.

Darkness lay heavy on his back, and he itched to cast his cloak away. Already she was aware of him. And her painting was proof that her view of Twilight was nigh unobstructed.

What harm could come of it, really?
If he could not keep her long in Twilight, perhaps he might steal a moment here.
Now.

Rending a thin layer of veil, the last remaining before her crossing, he stepped out of Twilight and into the half shadows of her room. Scents of the mortal world crowded around him, too many to discern individually. Except for her. She filled him with a single breath.

Her gaze darted to him. The brush fell to the floor. Her skin, already pale, washed white. Her eyes blinked like butterfly wings, blue-ringed indigo and fringed with curling black.

“Hush,” he said, reaching out a down-turned hand to calm the sudden shock and surprise that stopped her breath.

Her eyes filled with tears as she took in his presence, her
mind working its mortal power to shape his form according to her soul’s deepest conception of what he would be. It did not change his essence; now and forever he would be the Final Courier. The Ultimate Host. Captain of the small boat that would carry her from the mortal world, across the waters of Twilight, and release her on the shore beyond.

But the
form
he took—that was in her keeping. If mortals only knew the power they wielded, they could reshape the three worlds with a thought. Perhaps one day they would.

What did she see when she looked at him at last? A nightmare concocted of fear, aged beyond reckoning and grotesque? It happened like that quite often. Those whose dread of the dark passage created a terror out of the ether, shaping him with their minds into a being bent on horror.

No.
She did not fear time or Death. She did not tremble as he advanced closer to her. As he stepped forward to view her painting.

She’d gotten some things wrong: The black forest was darker, dark as pitch, and as inky as abject fear. She’d missed, too, the pillar of smoke that rose in the center from the fire of rage. But
he
was there, crouched in the foreground, a figure wrapped in gray wind. Storm wind. The kind that harries or hinders, a force unto itself. She’d caught
that
exactly, but she did not depict his face.

What did she see?
The question pricked him.

“Is it a good likeness?” Anxiety pitched her voice high.

He shifted his gaze to her. “Yes.”

She inhaled deeply, tamping down her emotion. “What is beyond the sea?”

He contemplated that often himself. “I don’t know. I can’t go there.”

“But I will.”

It wasn’t a question, but he nodded a confirmation anyway.

She brushed her tears away with a wrist. Then she held a
slightly trembling hand to him. “I’m Kathleen O’Brien. Nice to finally meet you in person.”

Ah, a friend, then. A companion.
That was good. He did not know if he could bear it if she feared him. If she saw him as a monster.

He knew the custom, had witnessed it for a millennia or more, but still he wondered as he reached out his own hand and grasped hers in a slow slide of Twilight and mortal skin. She was warm, soft, and for all her frailty, as strong as the tide. Her heartbeat reached to the end of her fingertips and stirred something alien in him.
Curious.

She drew a careful breath. “And what’s yours?”

He’d been called many things over the years, but all those he rejected. He would not have
those
names formed by her lips. “I don’t have one.”

“Everyone has a name.”

“Then I’ve forgotten it. Pick another for me. I swear I won’t forget again.” He laid himself open to her, waiting for the word that would name his soul, the sound of her claim on him.

A slow smile bloomed across her face, delight washing away the last of her unease. For that alone, trespassing the boundary had been worth it, come what may.

“I’ve been calling you Shadowman for, well…forever.”

“Then I am Shadowman forever.”

She kept his hand. He did not release hers. They were anchored together yet adrift. Kindred spirits from different worlds.

The light in her spirit darkened. “Is it time?”

“No. Not now.” He skimmed his mind along the shimmering veil. The membrane was thin, but still impenetrable for a mortal. “Not today, I think.”

Creases formed between her brows as she frowned. “I’m not sure that I am ready to go, but I am tired of waiting.”

He smiled slightly. Impatience was a universal trait for mortals. For them everything had a beginning and an end, like fixed points in a landscape of life, and that knowledge incited a persistent expectation of what was to come. Not so in Twilight, where everything stretched in-between and time was something Twilight folk wove into their midnight music.

“Do you know when?”

“I don’t. No one can know that. Would you really want to?”

Her gaze darted up, forehead tight.

“No. And yes. I want to know—or, or understand
something.
I’ve been sick my whole life. What is the point of being alive if I never get to live? I want—” Her words choked off. She took another steadying breath. “I guess I just want a reason.”

Riding through her body, down her arm, across her fingertips and into his hand—frustration and loneliness. Almost unbearable. Certainly unacceptable.

“There is no reason for beauty. It just is.” Scant comfort, he knew. “Perhaps you will find a better answer in the next world.” He raised his hand to the horizon line on her painting. “In the world beyond the sea.”

“And you can’t go there?”

“Just you. The faerie are forbidden.”

“So this is it.” She turned back, eyes shimmering with fresh pain. “This is all the time I get?”