The Shadow Society (31 page)

Raphael set me down.

Lily was standing there, stock-still, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Then her hands slowly unclenched and lifted to cover her face. Her shoulders shook.

She was crying.

“No.” I hugged her. “Lily, don’t.” I smoothed a hand over her hair—which, for once, wasn’t dyed. It was her natural black. It occurred to me that maybe I
had
seen her, that day I biked to the library. And that if I’d stopped and let myself believe the impossible, I would have found my friends so much earlier. Lily lifted her face, and I saw she hadn’t lost her love for blue mascara. I wiped away her blue tears.

“We were so worried,” she whispered.

“I wasn’t,” said Taylor.

There was a silence as we watched Taylor nonchalantly throw off her coat and settle into an armchair. Finally, she noticed our stares. “What?” Taylor said. “She’s a Shade. She can’t get hurt.”

Jims narrowed his eyes. “You seem to have forgotten some of the finer details of Shade biology.”

“You really know.” I looked around the room. “All of you.”

Raphael nodded.

“Have you always known? About me? About this world?” My thoughts got very jumbly. “Am I the last one to find out about what I am?”

“It’s not like that,” said Lily.

“We figured it out once we got here,” said Raphael.

“Which is when? And how? And…” I looked at Taylor. “Why is she here?”

“Thanks a whole bunch,” she said.

Lily glanced at her. “We needed the ride,” she told me with a shrug.

“Somebody please explain,” I begged.

Lily began. “When you called me after Conn attacked you, and we got cut off, I ran across the yard to Jims’s place and hauled him out of his cave.”

“Interrupting an intense online gaming session, I might add.” Jims glanced at me, then threw up his hands defensively. “Which I totally did not mind, under the circumstances.”

“Then we called Raphael and told him to meet us at Marsha’s.”

“Now that you’re safe,” Jims asked me, “can I say how impressed I was by the damage? It was a wreck.”

“
Marsha
was a wreck,” said Lily.

“I got there around the same time as the police,” said Raphael. “Who were oh-so-helpful.”

“Jerks,” said Lily.

“They made a call and discovered that Conn had no registered address, or record of birth, or social security number, or
anything
that would indicate he actually existed,” Raphael continued. “And even though you’d think
they’d
think this was worth investigating, they kept telling Marsha there was nothing they could do until you’d been missing for at least twenty-four hours. That’s when Lily began screaming at them.”

“And Raphael looked like he’d punch someone,” Lily added.

“And Jims told Mr. Officer of the Law where he could put his nightstick,” said Jims.

“That snapped Marsha out of it,” said Raphael. “She began soothing ruffled feathers. She buttered up the police officers until they cared at least ten percent more than the zero they started out at. They agreed to drive her to the station so she could file a report, and we said we’d stay at her place in case you came back. Since the cops couldn’t be bothered to do their job, once they’d left with Marsha we searched the house for clues.”

“Anything,” said Lily. “Anything that might tell us where Conn might have taken you, or at least where he’d come from.”

“In your bedroom, we found
this
.” Jims pulled a small, leather-covered rectangle out of his jacket pocket.

I took it. It was an ID card with a holographic image of Conn framed by a metallic raised crest.
Interdimensional Bureau of Investigation,
it read. Below Conn’s photograph were his name and the words
Agent, First Class
. “His badge,” I said. “I remember … when he first brought me into the IBI, they gave him a hard time for losing this.”

Raphael said, “When Jims saw the badge, he went wild. He kept claiming that it explained everything. He was like, ‘I knew it! I knew there were other dimensions!’”

“They thought I was completely crazy,” said Jims.

Taylor sniffed. “Like he’s not.”

“Then Lily found your sketchbook on the living room floor,” said Raphael.

Lily shifted uncomfortably. “I know that’s private,” she said to me, “and please believe that normally I’d never look in it without asking you, but I couldn’t help remembering how edgy you’d seemed when you talked about your latest sketches. How you kept drawing cityscapes that looked like Chicago but weren’t, and how it didn’t feel like you were inventing a new city, but that you were drawing from memory. As I looked through the sketchbook, I saw that you were right. The sketches
did
look like another version of Chicago.”

“And that made you believe Jims?” I asked.

“No,” said Lily. “I still thought he was crazy. But when I turned to the last sketch…”

“I recognized it,” said Raphael. He walked over to the fireplace, and I noticed my black sketchbook resting on the mantel. He returned with the book and flipped it open to the last sketch I’d drawn: the mausoleum. “After the Great Chicago Fire, the city began a wave of big civic projects, and focused on building Lincoln Park. There used to be a cemetery there … well, like the one here. In our world, Chicago officials convinced every family with someone buried in that cemetery to let the city move them somewhere else—every family, that is, except the Couches. This”—Raphael pointed at the sketch—“is the Couch Mausoleum. It’s famous.”

“So famous only Raphael had ever heard of it,” Jims drawled.

“It’s a piece of Chicago history,” Raphael shot back, then continued. “The Couch family got into a snit, said that no way would they ever move their dead. So the city built Lincoln Park anyway, around the mausoleum.”

“The Couches had to have known it was a portal,” said Jims. “I mean,
some
people back home must know about this world. It can’t be a secret from everyone.”

“Luckily,” said Lily, “Raphael knew what it was, even if he didn’t know what it could do. Thank God he recognized it.”

“It’s right by the Chicago History Museum,” he said. “I go there all the time.”

“You know,” said Taylor, “it’s really cliché for an immigrant to be obsessed with American history.”

“I am not an immigrant,” Raphael said. “My
parents
are immigrants.”

“Whatever.”

“Can we get to the part where somebody explains what Taylor’s doing here?” I said.

“Raphael”—Taylor glared at him—“called me to ask if I wanted to rehearse for
Hamlet
, and could I
please
pick him up at Darcy’s house?”

“If I’d told you what was really going on, you never would have come,” Raphael protested.

“I pulled up, and the three of them crammed into my car, bullying me into driving around Lakebrook looking for you, as if I had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

I studied her with an unfamiliar curiosity. “But you did it.”

“Well…” Taylor looked down at her pink lacquered nails. “They were pretty upset.”

“We searched the neighborhood for hours,” Lily said, “but you were gone, and I could
feel
that you were gone. So we decided to drive to the Couch Mausoleum. I guess it was silly to think we’d find you there, but we couldn’t do
nothing
, and we didn’t know what you maybe hadn’t told us about the time you’d spent with Conn.”

“Remember when you ditched class?” said Jims.

“We thought it was possible that, at some point, you’d gone into the city with him, and had drawn the mausoleum from life. So maybe the place meant something to you, or to him, and maybe we’d at least find a clue about what had happened to you.”

“They were grasping at straws,” said Taylor.

“When we got downtown, everyone had gone silent. We parked at the Chicago History Museum and walked toward the mausoleum, and none of us could talk. Not even Jims.”

“That didn’t last long,” said Taylor. “As soon as we got to the mausoleum, Jims began babbling about its doorway, how it looked wavy around the edges. And then he said he could see
through
it, and that it looked like there was an entire cemetery inside the mausoleum.”

“Jims was primed,” I realized.

“Primed?” said Lily. “What do you mean? Like a canvas is primed?”

“Sort of. When we say a canvas is primed, we mean that it’s ready to be painted. Conn said—” I took a breath. It hurt to say his name out loud.

My friends had noticed how I’d paused over Conn’s name, and their faces hardened into cold masks.

Well, except Taylor. She still seemed mostly bored.

“Conn said that ‘primed’ is a psychology term,” I continued, “one that describes how the brain is able to accept information that on the surface seems insane, like the existence of an interdimensional portal, as long as it has been prepared—primed—for the possibility.”

“Ooh, I like that word,” said Jims. “Jims Lascewski: Primed and Ready for Action.”

“Jims kept insisting he saw something,” said Raphael, “and we got mad. It wasn’t the time for his stupid games. But then Lily saw it, and then I did, too.”

“Guess who was last,” said Taylor.

“We walked through the doorway, and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, we were surrounded by guards pointing weapons at us.”

“And who saved the day?” said Jims. “Go on. Who?”

“Jims did,” Raphael and Lily chorused wearily.

“That’s right. I whipped out McCrea’s badge and began waving it around, telling them I was Agent McCrea, returning from an important mission, and I outranked them, and they’d better shut up and let me bring my prisoners back to the Interdimensional Bureau of Investigation.”

“Didn’t they notice that you look nothing like Conn?” I said.

“I held my thumb over the photo. It always works in movies.”

Lily said, “We settled into the city and spent every day looking for you. We were afraid to go to the IBI, because that’s Conn’s home ground. Plus we didn’t want anyone to recognize us from that stunt we pulled at the mausoleum and decide to boot us back home—or worse, arrest us. Then we heard about Shades. And we knew.”

“Did Marsha tell you what happened at her house?” I asked. “How she threw a knife at me—accidentally—and I vanished?”

“No. She never mentioned that.”

“Then…”

“It’s because of the way you
look
, dummy,” said Taylor. “It was obvious.”

I felt suddenly tired. I sank down onto the sofa with Lily next to me, while Raphael and Jims arranged themselves into armchairs and Taylor coolly watched us. “You don’t … care about what I am? You’re still my friends?”

“How can you even ask that?” said Lily.

“Shades are mass murderers,” I muttered.

“But you’re not. A few Shades have done some awful things, but that doesn’t mean they’re all evil.”

Which was the point I’d been making to Conn.

“People here have lost perspective,” she continued. “Shades are the monster under the bed.”

“Frankly,” said Jims, “I think you’re
awesome
. Aside from fire being your obvious kryptonite, you’re practically invulnerable.”

In a low voice I said, “I don’t feel invulnerable.”

“That’s okay,” said Jims. “You’ve got us. We’ll play Robin to your Batman.”

Lily looked at me. She knew I wasn’t talking about physical weaknesses. She leaned comfortingly against me.

“I still can’t believe you’re here,” I said. “I can’t believe we ever found each other.”

“We hoped you’d make it back to the Couch Mausoleum,” said Raphael, “and try to go home. Of course we wouldn’t have been able to see you, but you’d at least notice one of us. So we took shifts watching it around the clock.”

“Except Jims,” said Taylor. “Jims didn’t have to stand around in the cold. At night. In the
snow
.”

“Jims has a job that keeps the roof over our heads,” said Jims.

I glanced around the swanky apartment, then back at him.

“That’s right,” he said. “Daddy’s bringing home the bacon.”

“Please stop calling yourself that,” Lily moaned.

“Exactly what kind of job do you have?” I paused. “Are you a drug dealer?”

“Close,” he said. “I’m a Storyteller.”

“This world has no television, no movies,” said Raphael, “but it’s big on the performing arts, like theater, ballet, and—”

“—role-playing games,” Jims finished. “I happen to be a very talented Game Master. I run about fifty games a week, and I am
rolling
in money. Oh, and can we please talk about my social life?”

“Jims,” said Lily.

“The ladies here
love
me.”

Lily rolled her eyes.

“I am a thousand volts of deliciosity,” Jims insisted.

“I’ve heard more than I ever need to on this subject,” said Taylor. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to know what Darcy’s been up to.”

“Taylor,” warned Raphael.

“No, seriously. We deserve some answers. So.” Her hazel eyes bored into mine. “Spill.”

“Taylor, shut up,” said Lily.

“Why? We told her everything that happened to us.”

“She’ll tell us if she wants to!”

“I do want to,” I said quietly. “But not tonight, okay? Tonight I just want to be happy. I want to hang out with my best friends.”

“Done.” Jims stood and clapped his hands once. “How about dinner? Darcy’s cooking. Right, Darcy?”

“For you guys? Anything.”

*   *   *

A
S WE SAT AROUND
the table in the dining room with steaming plates of curried veggies in front of us, Jims opened a bottle of champagne. “We were saving this for tomorrow night, but I guess in the morning we’ll pack up and head home. Unless you want to stick around for New Year’s Eve, Darcy? It could be fun.”

I shuddered at the thought of my friends in the heart of Meridian’s catastrophe. But it wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. The mayor would cancel the celebration. Even the thought, though, upset me. “No,” I said.

“Any special reason why not?” Taylor speared a carrot and inspected it before eating.