Shadow Bound (4 page)

Death finally turned on her. Cloaked in blackness, its body swirled in a century of stormy shadow. The blade angled out to the side and caught light where there was none to be had. Death reached toward her. His dark hand caressed the plane of her cheek.

Talia’s scream strangled in her throat. Choked. Vanished into a suffocated whimper.

And so did the cloaked nightmare.

Talia hugged herself, her fear drenching the room in blackness, but she could not stop shaking. They were earthquake-level shakes, rippling up from a tectonic shift at her core. She struggled to remain standing, bracing a hand on a wall
as the heavy metal insanity from next door echoed the white noise of her inner confusion.

The door to the apartment cracked. Help at last? Help too late?

The silhouette of a man pushed the door open and met resistance at one of the fallen bodies. He shoved harder, and when the door wouldn’t budge, he trip-stepped over the obstacle. “Robin? Grady?”

So, not help.

Talia let no air escape her and drew none to sustain her. Had to be another one of
them.
The monsters with bear-trap teeth.

He felt along the wall for the light. A lamp was already on, but Talia kept the dark battened down, hard. Bit her lips, too.

No matter what happened, she would not scream. Not ever again. Not allow that…that other devil into the world.

The man, tall, with swarthy skin and long black hair, moved deeper into the room.

“Robin?” He left the door open.

Talia spotted her purse on a chair across the room, out of reach. It held money, ID, her plane ticket. Not that she’d be going to Berkeley. That dream had died with Melanie.

Instead, she made for the door and silently slid out of the apartment. Then she flew down the concrete walkway that led to the apartment building’s outer stairs.

“Son of a bitch!” The shout exploded behind her, from inside the apartment.

She had taken the darkness with her. The man had just seen…everything.

She ran, leaping down the stairs to the parking lot by twos and threes, a billowing cloud of blackness seething on her skin.

A dark SUV idled next to the building, driver waiting.
She turned away from it, tucking herself behind a low wall that marked the perimeter of the building’s parking lot.

The stairs rang low and metallic as rapid footsteps descended.

Had to be him. She quieted her thudding heartbeat by holding her breath.

An automatic window hissed nearby.

“You see the girl?” a man demanded, not six feet from where she crouched.

“No. Nobody,” another man answered, drawling and lazy.

“Fucking carnage up there. Grady and Robin are dead.” Anger and disbelief roughened his voice.

Talia hunkered in her concrete corner. Her head pounded in time with the blood in her veins, and a residual whine from a memory of the band’s music set her teeth on edge.

“That’s not possible.”

“They were
dead,
” the man insisted.

“But He promised…”

“I know what
He
promised, and I know what I saw.” His words tumbled over each other in his urgency. “They’re dead and the girl’s gone. I swear she was there when I went in, but I couldn’t see worth shit. She’s got to be hiding here somewhere.”

“If Grady and Robin are dead, I don’t want any part of her. I signed on to
live.
”

“You dickhead. What happened to them up there is nothing compared to what He will do if we come back empty-handed. Get out of the fucking car and help me look. She’s just a girl, and we’re not going back without her.”

Campus life hummed through the apartment building at Talia’s back, students building bright futures and making lasting connections. Heart hollow with loneliness, her hand lingered on the brick for a moment, and then she fled alone into the trees.

Shadowman fights the lashes of darkness that harry him unwilling back to Twilight. The fae veils of Shadow ruthlessly bind him, silence him, rob him of any power that would permit another trespass across their boundary. Even as little as a word of warning.

He roars into the storm, but Twilight is cold to his pleas.

His daughter.

The deathless ones have found her.

The punishment for his transgression with her mother: to witness the hunt, perchance his daughter’s destruction, and in so doing, learn never to break the laws of Twilight again. So the sins of the father are visited upon the child.

In his mind’s eye, he can see her. She clings to Shadow for cover, the proof of her fae heritage. Skimming the farthest reaches of the Otherworld she flees, but she cannot cross to safety. Her mother’s mortality will not allow it. Thus, she is doomed to Between.

Run, child, run. And when the deathless find you again, scream, and I will come.

Then blood will tell.

“
N
ot now,” Adam said. He pitched his voice low for Custo’s ears only.

They crossed the lobby of the FBI’s Phoenix field office, signed out with the guard on post, and exited into the blast of record heat. At 117 degrees, the city baked in a concrete-and-clay oven seasoned with sprigs of cactus and palm trees. Adam held a hand up to shield his face from the glare of the sun as the light seared across red-tiled rooftops. They strode to their rental car. Custo took the driver’s seat.

Adam opened the passenger door, burning his fingertips on the handle—
damn hot
—and slid in, adjusting the a/c controls to blow near arctic. Custo glanced over, green eyes transparent in the filtered light, his short dark blond hair spiked from his own drying sweat.

“How’d it go?” Adam asked, snagging a water bottle from the six-pack at his feet. While Adam had been interrogating their latest source, Custo had the unenviable job of bringing the locals up to speed on wraith capture and holding strategies.

“Local feds are skeptical, but informed.” Custo pulled away from the lot. “Apparently, Homeland Security has released a report on the wraith phenomena, though detailed accounts are lacking. The Phoenix branch is running a search on area
crime with the parameters I provided from Segue. Anything on your end?”

Adam shrugged his frustration. “The kid claims he knows a woman matching Talia’s description. Says she runs with the university street crowd, possibly an addict and a prostitute.”

Custo scowled. “Another dead end, then?”

“I don’t know. The kid said the woman always has a book, used to hang out in the university library until they kicked her out. Says she talks smart and can pass for one of the students.” Adam shifted in his seat. In spite of the heat, excess stress and tension had him edgy, his body complaining for a hard run. He contained the energy with grim determination. First things first.

“He was sure it was her, just a strung-out version of her.” Adam stared out the window. The deep blue of the sky paled to white overhead as the sun fell farther to the west. Night coming on. Another day lost.

Two months had passed since Talia O’Brien and her roommate, Melanie Prader, disappeared. The Prader family had peppered the University of Maryland campus with a picture of her face and had even managed a TV news spot, the girl’s mother pleading over a bold caption that read:
Have you seen Melanie?

For all his resources, Adam had done little better. He reached beyond the campus to a statewide and then national missing-persons search for both Talia and Melanie. He looked at government institutions, cults, organized crime, calling in favors and motivating the flow of information with the flow of cash. He’d covered the Internet as well, his people insinuating themselves onto message boards, friendship lists, as well as public and private forums. Disturbing forums.

And he’d been inundated with hits:

“Hooked up with the hot one with the short hair in a bar in Chicago…”

“The woman with the long hair looks exactly like my sister’s kid’s preschool teacher…”

“The blonde chick lives in the basement of a campus library. Fifty bucks, and I’ll tell you which one…”

Another dead end? Not acceptable.
Talia O’Brien was the only person in his six years of searching to use the name Shadowman in any kind of context that would help his brother. If she still lived, he was going to find her.

Adam forced himself to speak in the present tense. “Talia O’Brien is dependable, steady, and reliable. Predictable. She’s been in school all her life. I’ll bet she feels most comfortable near a campus. If one kid has seen her, others will have, too. I want to ask around.”

“I get why she’d choose Arizona in the winter when it’s warm, but why the summer when it’s hot as hell?” Custo merged the car onto a freeway marked 101. Traffic ran fast and free down lanes burned almost white and radiating heat in upward waves.

“If she’s here, she has a reason.”

Adam
knew
Talia, had studied her the way she had studied her academic subjects. One of the first things he did was contact the university to get his hands on her work. Her papers were creative, twisting logic, but she supported her conclusions with an abundance of data. Her life was ordered and planned with study time and classes blocked out in her planner for the semester she had never completed. Her books were even tabbed with color-coded stickies, a system it had taken him two frustrating days to decode. Talia O’Brien liked control. He doubted very much she was a strung-out prostitute. It was simply not in her nature to succumb to that degree of chaos.

They exited the freeway at University Drive and trolled
a palm tree– lined street along the outer perimeter of campus. Two kids lounged in a boxy shadow made by the setting sun ducking behind a building.

Custo slowed to a stop. Adam hopped out, Talia’s picture in hand. The heat outside immediately leeched fluid from his body, drying him from the inside out.

One kid shook his head. The other’s gaze flicked up at the photo and back down to his iPhone. “Haven’t seen her.”

Four blocks later, a thicker group gathered in the parking lot of an old 7-Eleven. Dark, short men, brims of baseball caps pulled down over their eyes.

“No la ví.”
Haven’t seen her.

Another group—older teens mixed with university bums this time—swelled in a parking lot in front of an old strip mall. Their attention was trained on a young man, a Caucasian with dreadlocks, holding court from a tall concrete wall that separated the parking lot from the adjacent business.

Adam tried a kid first, maybe fifteen. He held out Talia’s picture.

“Nah. Haven’t seen her.” The kid popped his skateboard. His shirt was salt-stained from perspiration.

Adam’s own charcoal-green polo had dampened on his back. He held up a twenty-dollar bill. “Can you tell me where she might hang out?”

“You her old man?” Gaze appraising, the boy spoke with a cynical maturity beyond his years.

“Brother,” Adam corrected.
Brother
was the most important relationship in his life. It did him good to remind himself of the bond every chance he got.

The kid snatched the twenty. “She might hang out under the overpass at Dobson and Granite Reef, but I doubt she’d be there now. Night’s coming on.”

“Oi!” shouted the man with dreadlocks from the wall.

Adam ignored him, addressing the crowd. “All I want is
to take my sister home. Get her the help that she needs. I am willing to pay
anything
to get her back.”

The boy slid his gaze over to Dreadlocks, waiting.

“Do you know how much
anything
is?” Adam pressed. “Enough to buy a comfortable life for each one of you.”

Come on, give me something.

The group hesitated on the edge of interest. Even to Ad-am’s ears, a big cash outlay sounded like a false promise, but he meant every word. Whoever helped him find Talia O’Brien would be set for life. Based on appearances, these kids had nothing to lose.

Dreadlocks jumped off the concrete wall and sauntered over to Adam. Dirty jeans. Limp black T-shirt. Flip-flops. Braided hemp cord knotted around his thin wrist.

He glanced at the picture. “Yeah, I’ve seen her.”

“Where? I’m going to need specific information.” Adam didn’t have time to waste here. Police might have a better handle on university sublife. Local hangouts. Ideal abandoned buildings.

Dreadlocks looked over at the sun, now dipping below the tree line, and frowned. “Come back tomorrow. Sun sets and the beasties come out. I got to get my people inside.”

Adam’s attention arrested. “The beasties?”

“Demons. It’s the end of the world, man, but no one can see it except us. End of the world.” He gestured to the blaze growing on the horizon. “Sun sets fast here and the beasties come out. You ever heard of Sweet Drink?”

“No.”

“It’s a band, man. Their music tells how it’s gonna be. How it is. End of the world. End of death. It’s coming with the setting sun. Listen up:
Demons walk and demons feed. Take away all human need. Join the army. Break the curse. The human race to crush Death first.
”

“I don’t understand,” Adam said, but the lyrics still sent
chills across his hot back and reminded him somehow of Jacob.

Dreadlocks cocked his head. “You musta inherited that money then, ’cause I’m saying it as plain as I can, and you just don’t get it. I’m saying the sun is setting, and if your sister has any brains at all she is going inside somewhere or she will be the demons’ feed.”

“Where inside?” Adam pulled out a hundred, held it up.

Dreadlocks waved the bill away with a grimace of disdain. “End of the world, man. What the fuck is that paper going to do for me? For any of us?”

“It’ll get you off the street.”
Just tell me where.

“
I
can get me off the street. I’m here by
choice.
I’m here because
here
is
real.
It’s you and your fancy shirt that are shit, man. You live in the dark; you just don’t know it.”

Adam kept his voice calm, his expression controlled even though he wanted to grab the punk by the throat. “I want to see, too. Help me see so I can find her.”

“If she’s here, she’s inside. Or she should be. Tally likes to live dangerously. Doesn’t trust anybody. I offered her a place in my family, but she refused. Where she’s got to now, I don’t know.”

Adam’s chest burned, an emotion he couldn’t name breaching containment. He glanced down at the photograph in his hand. “I never said her name.”

“Well, I told you I’d seen her. You didn’t believe me?” Dreadlocks grinned, spreading his arms wide to invite a laugh at Adam’s expense from his crew. The group tittered on cue.

Adam didn’t care as long as he got information.

“Well then, maybe now you’ll believe me about the demon night,” Dreadlocks said.

Adam already believed. “Where inside?”
Please.

Dreadlocks sighed. “Try Priest, man. North of Santa Maria. Mountainside.”

“Priest?” Adam controlled himself through a long inhalation, though his heart pumped to act. He kept a choke hold on his hope.

“They’re roads, man. You know what a road is?”

Only Jacob ever talked down to him, but Adam was too grateful to be irritated.

“I get that you don’t want my money.” Adam stopped and corrected himself. “Don’t
choose
my money. But it’s all I have to give. That and my thanks.” He pulled out his wallet, took every bill in the leather sheath, thumbed a couple of business cards—the personal ones with his direct mobile number—and held them out. When Dreadlocks didn’t lift a hand, Adam dropped the lot on the ground.

“Call me if you ever need anything. If you want to tell me more. If you are in trouble.” He lifted his gaze to the crowd of kids. “Goes for all of you. If your demons are what I call wraiths, you’re going to need my help. Now get inside.”

Adam jogged back to the car, his body humming with anticipation. He glanced over his shoulder toward the bonfire glow of the setting sun, and then faced Custo.

Custo must have read the excitement on his face. “She’s alive,” he concluded.

“Calls herself Tally.” Adam could barely speak over the buzzing in his ears.

“Where?”

“Priest and Santa Maria.”

“A church?” Custo typed rapidly into the rental car’s GPS.

“Roads, man.”

Black spots swam in Talia’s vision. If she twitched her eyes left, the spots skated left. If she twitched them right, the spots skated right. No matter how hard she tried, she could
never examine one of the spots dead-on. Bothersome game. Like keep-away from childhood, but more frustrating because the pastime—and that’s all it was good for,
passing time
—made the intense pounding behind her eyes worse. Nauseatingly so.

She gave up for the moment and focused down the alley on the soul-sucking monster at its entrance. Talia was trapped at the other end in a belly made of concrete wall and pavement. The hulking brute blocked the exit of the garbage lane to her apartment complex to stand sentry, to watch for her as he’d done when he caught up with her in Denver, then Las Vegas.

This time she had spotted him first and turned down an unfamiliar alley rather than ducking through the gate to the complex’s square of scraggly lawn where a couple of teenage girls had set out chairs to sun themselves. Stupid to ruin their skin and cost her an escape route. But she couldn’t very well lead the monster to vibrant young lives. Not after Melanie. Therefore, the alley.

She’d been here a day and a half and smelled just as bad as the garbage. Good thing her shadowy shield obscured more than light or the monster would have discovered her that first day. The dark cloak dampened most sensory perception of her; sight, smell, and sound all concealed under its folds. With the exception of her pulse, she was a shrouded ghost.

Talia worked her thick and uncooperative tongue on the roof of her mouth to swallow. Frustrating reflex—nothing but glue to work with, and the motion made her lungs burn.

A day and a half. Sooner or later something would have to give.

Talia crept forward, palms and knees on blazing pavement, around the side of a sagging yellow mattress that inclined
against the back wall of the alley. The small movement set her heart beating wildly, and the throb in her head intensified. But it was worth it. From this position, the cast of her strange shadows matched the trajectory of the sun’s waning light, affording her the chance to rest against the musty but soft mattress.

As soon as her head dropped back against the pillowed surface, the world upended, vision blanked, sound roared in her ears as unconsciousness tried to swallow her. She fought back. Blinked hard. Shook her head. Forced the world back into focus. Her gaze darted to the monster.

He had pushed away from the wall and turned to face down the length of the alley, nose in the air, sniffing. Gaze searching.

Talia grabbed at her shadows, eyes wide and dry, fixated on the monster that had scented her. She gathered the darkness tightly to her so her shield would not slip off again.