Shadowman (20 page)

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Authors: Erin Kellison

BOOK: Shadowman
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The fullness in Layla's chest turned painful, cutting off all her air so that the beat of her heart drummed loud in her head.
A baby smell sweetened the clinic's air. It was a mother smell, too. She concentrated on the pain of her scrapes, let it burn, burn, burn, so she wouldn't embarrass herself. If they were trying to wreck her, completely demolish her, they were doing a fantastic job. Meet the kids, but sorry, any time now you're going to die.
“Or not,” Talia said. “That's okay, too.”
But Layla could hear the hurt in Talia's voice.
Layla's face heated. Her eyes and nose pricked, ready to embarrass her. Damn it. The pressure in her chest was going to kill her if she didn't do something.
With a cough, she cleared the thickness blocking her voice. “No, really, I'd love to meet them. That would be . . . just . . . great. And then, if you don't mind, I'd like to borrow a camera.”
Chapter 11
Khan stood back from the angels as they lowered the gate into a cavern in the mountains not far from Segue. How clever of the angels to find a place inaccessible to humanity, as well as ever steeped in Shadow. Places like this, where darkness had long reigned, hovered on the edge of the Otherworld, its cave-dwelling creatures as skittish and wary of light as the fae.
kat-a-kat-a-kat
. The gate demanded,
Open me!
And how foolish to put a gate to Hell at its mouth.
Another group of angels had rigged a makeshift forge, and nearby, an anvil, black, with a horn on one end, much like the one he'd used to create the gate.
The hammer rested on the anvil. How he hated the slippery, contrary thing, but he'd wielded it on Kathleen's behalf, and now he would wield it on Layla's. Strange how each of her lives echoed the other.
“I found this in the warehouse,” Custo said, coming up behind him. Khan felt no sear at his approach. In this place, Shadow was stronger than even Custo's angelic light.
“Leave it, and move out of my way.”
Next to the hammer on the anvil Custo placed the black flower Khan had created as a trial piece for the blooms that adorned the gate. Three petals, one for each of the worlds, surrounded and protected an inner core, a soul. The iron, of course, was black—
black
for deep Shadow, black for Death. He'd welded the flowers onto the vertical bars along a clinging vine. They had represented his hope that Kathleen could survive in Hell, her spirit intact, until he could find her.
Then she'd found
him.
“I thought you might try the flower first, then move on to the gate.” Custo, who'd agreed to kill Layla if The Order found this tactic to be ineffectual.
Khan turned to face him.
“Shadowman, if it wasn't me, it'd be somebody else,” Custo said, his gaze steady, though a sick desperation rolled off him. “The gate has to be destroyed.”
Khan stoked Custo's discomfort. “Haven't you killed enough innocents?”
Khan knew Custo's past. The life he'd led before his passing had been filled with as much violence as good. If not for his last selfless act as a man, his existence in the Afterlife could have been very different. And now he was preparing to walk the fine line between darkness and light again.
“I gave you the hammer. It's my responsibility.” Custo regarded the hellgate and shuddered. “There's no way that thing can remain on Earth, but I don't want Layla to die. I'll help you in every way that I can. Just tell me what to do.”
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Movement brought Khan's attention around. An angel walked toward the gate. He moved slowly, as if in a dream, sickness and terror in a dirty cloud around him. The angel stretched out his hand toward the handle, fingers reaching. The gate had him in its thrall.
“Bran!” Custo barked.
The angel stalled, confused. Looked around.
And then he was dragged back by two other angels. He went limp, his gaze filled with horror and longing as they moved him out.
No one was impervious to the gate's draw.
Custo turned. “What can I do?”
Khan picked up the black flower and shoved it, bare-handed, into the glowing coals of the fire. Heat the metal, bang it down.
“You can take your friends and get out of here.”
“The Order will not leave you alone with the gate.” Custo shook his head. “Not with your Layla in the balance.”
“Fine. Just you then. The rest are to wait outside.”
Khan stared at the hammer, taking in its shape and the small line of shadow along the inside of its head and shaft cast by the glow of the fire. He summoned old darkness from the depths of the cave and gathered the cold, wet stuff to him for strength.
He reached for the hammer. His hand passed right through.
Taking a deep breath, he tried for it again. And clutched at nothing.
Shadow billowed off his shoulders in great cracking waves, but still he couldn't grasp the shaft.
“Shit,” Custo said under his breath.
Khan could sense the confidence shifting within the angels in the cavern. They would all have to learn patience. Either that, or prepare for war.
“After you gave me the hammer, it took hours to lift again for myself.” Hours of acute frustration. Each time he'd had to set it down during the creation of the gate, he'd known it would be a trial to pick back up. “And I did not have a choir of angels breathing down my neck.”
“Right.” Custo turned to the angels gathered around. “Everybody out.”
“He's not to be trusted,” said Ballard.
“If Rome wasn't built in a day,” Custo returned, “a gate to Hell can't be destroyed in five minutes. Get out or I'll help you out.”
An angel lifted his voice to argue, “He can't even pick—”
“Yet he managed to build the gate,” Custo shot back. “Get out.”
Khan poured his attention into the hammer while the cavern was vacated. The tool was not meant for fae hands and defied his attempts. The power to wield it had come from something else, deep, deep inside him. He searched for that space of quiet, for the time he'd spent with Kathleen. He thought of the red-gold fall of her hair, the shift of her features when she smiled, the natural pink to her lips.
He grasped for the hammer again. His Shadow hand passed through the tool, and he wasn't surprised. It was the wrong tack; he'd try another.
Layla.
He'd held her in his arms, her skin smooth and silky under his hands. Her body, warm like the earth, arching for him. Shuddering in pleasure. He recalled the salt of her sweat, the flash of her eyes. He drew from her dream, the child Layla, his glimpse into her life, her young gaze full of loneliness. Layla who'd needed a protector, yet had overcome her fears to brave wraith nests and Shadow. Layla, Layla . . .
“Layla,” he said in an invocation and reached.
The wooden shaft was smooth in his grip.
Rose hid her bad hand in her lap when she came to a stop at the security entrance to The Segue Institute. The deformation had extended to her thickening wrist. Corded sinew ran down from her elbow across her forearm. She'd attempted to paint her striated and . . . rather
pointy
fingernails a pretty pink, which made her bad hand look a little less disturbing, but a glove would be better still. Definitely before she reunited with Mickey.
She rolled down the window of her stolen delivery truck as two soldiers approached, one on either side. She had half a mind to floor the gas and bust through—
Find her!
the gate said in Rose's head—but the enclosure surrounding the place was made up of thick concrete and metal barriers. At full speed, the truck would crumple like a soda can.
Well, fudge.
“Ma'am? May I see your driver's license?” But the soldier thought,
Trouble
. He looked at the other soldier, who touched something around his throat and mumbled a series of numbers Rose couldn't quite make out. It must have been some kind of code for
trouble
, because his next thought was that it would take ninety seconds for backup to arrive.
Survive
, he thought. She had no idea what he meant by
wraith.
What was a wraith? It did not sound polite, particularly directed at her.
“If you'll just open the gate.” Rose tilted her head, smiled, did a double bat of her eyes. She mentally nudged him with the command. If she pushed too hard, his mind might break like that of the poor fool who'd refused to give up the truck, and then he'd be a drooling baby and no good to her at all.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Yes, yes. She was trying. Some things took a little time, a little subtlety. Movement rustled the trees along the road. The backup?
If this soldier would just cooperate . . .
“I have a truck full of groceries to deliver.” She insinuated truth into her sentence and pushed harder. “Open the gate, please.”
The soldier blinked at her with bleary eyes. “Can't. The lockdown command was already sent. No one goes in or out until Adam Thorne clears it.”
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
She'd think a whole lot better without the gate in her head. She pushed hard on the soldier. “Well, is there another way to get in?”
He swayed on his feet. “Lockdown.”
The second soldier approached. “Sullivan, you're relieved of duty.”
Rose guessed her time was up. The gate would just have to wait, and so would the girl it wanted her to deal with. Rose would think her entry through and then come back. Maybe sneak through the woods and climb over the wall. For now, though, it was better to go back than wait and find out what a wraith was and what the backup was going to do about it. She wasn't too excited about being shot at from all sides.
“Mike!” the soldier shouted, as the one outside her truck window fell to the ground. Minds were such delicate things.
'Course the road was too narrow to make a three-point turn easily. And she couldn't very well back down the mountain with the hulking cab behind her. She'd go right off the edge and that would be the end of Rose Petty. Nobody wanted that.
“Let me see your hands!” the soldier shouted at her. More soldiers in strange armor approached the vehicle from the front, angling in groups of two on either side. That was about ninety seconds, all right.
For Pete's sake, this was a bother.
Her bad hand twitched. All right, all right. She'd just have to do this the hard way.
 
 
It was late afternoon by the time Layla led Talia around the outside of the west wing of Segue's hulk. Once Talia had put a baby in Layla's arms, she hadn't wanted to give him up again. Both children, Michael and Cole, were little lumps of wonderfulness, so soft, so perfect. The fit in her arms, the sweet smell of their skin—it was its own kind of magic, and she'd been utterly caught in the spell.
She'd spent so much time with the babies that Layla had had little more than a peek at the pile of research Talia had amassed on her behalf. At the top of the stack was a tablet labeled
Jacob Andrew Thorne, wraith
. And here Layla had thought Adam's brother had died in a tragic boating accident. Interesting reading, she was sure. She'd have snatched it up if not for the little tickle of panic about the shadow on the Segue building.
Talia. The babies. The shadow had to come first, before something else happened.
The photo op took them outside of Segue, down the grand front steps, and to the left, along the foundation. Kev and company followed close behind as protection. Adam frowned down at them from the veranda, one baby strapped in some kind of carryall on his chest, the other in a stroller, which he rocked back and forth. Mr. Thorne Industries in the role of dad. She almost snapped a picture of him like that, for Talia.
Layla's neck goose-bumped with the memory of the flying wraith, but she pressed on, leader of the pack. As soon as she rounded the corner of the building's base, the storm of darkness crowded her sight. She reeled back a few steps, cringing, while the rest of the group looked at her . . . yes, as if she were crazy.
“You don't see it.” Obviously. Or they wouldn't be standing so close to the shadow.
Talia looked up, squinted, flicked her gaze around. “Where exactly am I supposed to look?”
Hello?
It was
everywhere.
Layla took a deep breath. “Do you see any shadows?”
“Little ones. Under the windows?” Talia's breath came in a puff of cold air.
“No. A big, black blotch covering half the building. God, I can even
feel
it.”

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