Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (8 page)

Another car was upside down; two others had somehow been stacked on each other.

Godzilla would have made less of a mess if he had rampaged through the parking zone.

Even my car—my loyal piece of crap that was well past its expiration date—was gripped in the clutch of the same kind of vines that climbed the canyon walls.

Isobel cried out again. Footsteps slurped behind me. Danger ahead, danger behind.

I wrenched the antenna off of my car, wielding it like a switch. Not much of a weapon, but there wasn’t much of anything to fight, either. I couldn’t whip the fog, couldn’t beat away the creepy silence that had fallen over Paradise Mile.

But I could slap the shit out of Nichols if he caught up with me.

Running blind, trying to follow Isobel’s voice, I had no way to tell if I was actually getting anywhere. The fog destroyed all sense of direction. I’d lost the house and the rec hall. All I saw were trees.

Then my knees slammed into wood. I tumbled over the sawhorses that had held the press back.

My hands slapped against the dirt road on the other side.

The news vans weren’t in disarray like all the cars were, but that was because there were no news vans at all. They’d vanished as though they never existed. No tracks, no oil stains, no imprints on the ground where their tripods had stood.

What the fuck?

Isobel gasped somewhere ahead. I scrambled to my feet and rushed toward her.

She emerged from the fog and bounced off of me.

I grabbed her elbows to steady her. “Whoa!”

Isobel had ditched the stilettos to run barefoot, and now she was covered in dust from the ankles down. Her eyes were wild and panicked. She looked like an animal that had spotted a hunter and heard the click of a gun.

“It doesn’t end,” she gasped, digging her nails into my sleeves. “It just keeps going!”

“What are you talking about?”

She flung her hand toward the road. “There’s no escaping through there!”

“We can’t just run off down the road anyway.” I employed my very best “soothe the crazy woman” voice. “We’re miles outside Mojave. There’s nothing but desert beyond the canyon. We don’t have water, we don’t have food…”

“Fuck food,” she snapped. “You heard what that man said!”

No hope
.

“I get that you’re scared, but we can’t just—”

“We have to get out of here,” Isobel said. “We’ll die if we don’t! We’ll be worse than dead!”

She was hysterical, but that didn’t mean she was wrong.

I could still hear footsteps. I had no idea where they were coming from or even if they belonged to Nichols. The crawling sensation at the back of my neck hinted that there might be many worse things out there than Suzy’s victim.

“All right. We can leave.”

Maybe we could flag someone down outside the canyon. Or maybe escaping that creepy fucking house would make my cell phone work again. Fritz would send a helicopter to pick us up if I could reach him.

But I’d only taken a few more steps when Isobel grabbed me again. “Didn’t you hear me? There’s no escape that way.”

“That’s the only way.” I handed her the antenna from my car. “Hang on to this for me.”

She clutched the antenna like it was a teddy bear. Didn’t even ask why I was giving it to her. “Okay. Okay, I can do that. But—”

“No buts. Come on.”

I dragged Isobel down the dirt road, ignoring her protests. I couldn’t blame her for being freaked out. I was freaked out, too. But if she wasn’t going to keep her cool, then I needed to hang on to composure for both our sakes.

The road leading out of the canyon was just as twisting and narrow on foot as it had been in a car. Maybe even narrower. It felt like the creepers were growing thicker, giving us less room to navigate. The fog had definitely become denser again. Made everything feel cramped.

But the exit was wide enough to allow cars to pass. I’d driven through it more than once. We could definitely get through on foot.

The canyon walls weren’t going to close in on us.

We didn’t get very far down the road. I stepped around a sharp corner and found myself staring at the Paradise Mile sign again, now consumed by so many vines that I could only make out half of the words. The house would be hidden in the mist just a few yards behind it.

“Wait.” I looked back the way I had come. How had I gotten turned around?

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Isobel said. “There’s no way out.”

A chill crawled over my scalp.

This was too much like the nightmares I’d been having—the weird distortion of reality, the doors that led to the wrong places, hallways where they didn’t belong.

Now the road looped back on itself.

No. I’m not dreaming. This can’t be right.

I grabbed her a little tighter. “It’s just the fog. We got disoriented and took a wrong turn.”

And I started walking again.

Isobel protested as I moved faster, feet scuffing against the dirt.

The vines were definitely covering more of the canyon walls now. The canopy was weaving tighter and tighter. No hint of sunlight could break through to burn away the fog.

There wasn’t a plant on this Earth that should have grown that fast.

I made sure to watch the ground so that I wouldn’t get confused by the turns this time.

Pops used to take my siblings and me to a corn maze every Halloween. The biggest damn corn maze that you can imagine. It had been so labyrinthine that the Minotaur would have gotten lost in it. Pops thought it was funny to drop us in there and let us try to figure it out on our own, while he drank with the farm’s owner.

It pissed me off at the time, but now I understood it was good parenting. What else do you do with three unruly kids on a Halloween sugar high? Throw ‘em in a maze and go drink hard cider until they’re exhausted.

Anyway, I’d quickly learned a trick to escaping that corn maze: just stick to the right-hand wall.

No matter where you’re going, if you follow the same wall, you’ll always get to the exit sooner or later. It worked on labyrinths of corn. It should have worked on the road, too.

Easy as pumpkin pie.

I followed the right wall of the canyon for ten minutes, according to my watch. Ten minutes alone in the fog with just the two of us.

Then we turned a corner.

My knee bumped against the Paradise Mile sign. I almost fell over it the way that I’d fallen over the sawhorses.

I definitely hadn’t gotten turned around that time.

Isobel had been right. The road kept dumping us back there, right in front of that house.

She didn’t rub it in. Judging by her expression, she’d wanted me to prove her wrong. Now we were back at the house and she was on the verge of tears, twisting the car antenna between both hands. “We’re going to die here.”

“No, we’re not,” I said. “Just because the road’s gone crazy doesn’t mean there isn’t a way out.”

Vines groaned, creaking as they shifted.

I glanced over my shoulder. They were crawling across the road now, forming a wall that blocked the exit. They didn’t move when I looked at them, but every time I blinked they were a few inches longer.

Little by little, the road beyond vanished.

It felt like those vines were mocking my forced optimism.

Isobel hadn’t noticed yet. I kept my tone casual as I said, “Let’s try to go in the other direction. Maybe there’s a way out through the back.”

She stiffened when I tried to walk her toward the house. But she was a good foot shorter than me and her resolve wasn’t strong. I practically had to lift her off her feet, but we walked.

There was no sound as we passed the house, keeping our distance from the windows decorated by tattered curtains. The weeds grew long on the left side of the building. They climbed around our ankles, scraped the calves of my slacks.

Call me crazy, but it felt like the house was watching us as we passed. It made no sense—the windows were empty, nobody should have been inside, nothing was moving in the fog.

But
someone
was watching us.

I stayed out of arm’s reach of the house’s walls. Just in case.

During my earlier visits, I hadn’t had cause to go behind the house to look around. I knew it was a retirement “village,” not just a home, but I was still surprised to see how many cottages occupied the rear of the canyon. Little ones. Didn’t look like they’d been used this century. The windows were boarded, the doors padlocked.

That was also where I found a garden. At least, I was pretty sure it was a garden. I could make out knee-high wrought-iron fencing and some trees that looked disturbingly human-shaped in the fog.

And were those tombstones hanging out between the trees? I didn't want to find out.

I steered clear of the garden, too.

When we passed that low fence, I could feel that we weren’t alone anymore. The hollowness of the fog had vanished. Isobel’s footsteps and mine were no longer the only noise.

Someone was following us again.

“I hear it, too,” Isobel whispered.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I’ve got you.”

A shadowy figure appeared from the direction of the rec hall.

The orderly.

I moved to put myself between Isobel and Nichols, lifting my hands. I wasn’t sure if it was in a soothing gesture or a defensive one.

How are you supposed to deal with a dead assailant?

He emerged from the fog, just as gray-skinned and dead as he had been the last time I saw him. He was ephemeral, a piece of the colorless nothing surrounding us. Didn’t even make the grass move when he walked through it.

I’d seen zombies before. Hell, I’d given one a freaking makeover, trying to make her look like she was still alive. I knew what zombies looked like.

This guy looked a lot more like a ghost than a zombie.

No such thing as ghosts.

“Hey there, Nichols,” I said.

He wasn’t looking at me. Isobel had the entirety of his attention. “No hope,” Nichols said again. “You shouldn’t have ever come here. You know what has to happen now.”

“Actually, we don’t.” I kept my tone level, same way I talked to any crazy person, living or dead. “Want to enlighten us? Tell us what you did in the basement and how to fix it?”

He gave a wet sob. Black fluid trickled afresh from the hole in his forehead. “I had to do it. He said he could break me from the contract, but he didn’t want me—he wanted
her
. She’s the only one he took for himself. He didn’t care about me at all.” Nichols took a step toward Isobel, but he stopped when I pushed her behind me. “Ander smelled you on this guy. You were screwed the instant someone called in to report ghosts.”

It sounded like he was getting personal with Isobel, like he already knew her. “What’s he talking about, Isobel?” I asked. “Who’s Ander?”

Before she could respond, Nichols said, “Isobel? Is that your name now?” He looked so confused.

She screamed and hurled herself at him, brandishing the antenna from the car.

“Jesus, Izzy, stop!”

She didn’t listen to me. She slipped out of my reach before I could seize her arm.

The antenna came whistling down, and she smashed it into the man’s shoulder. It made a pretty solid noise connecting with his pale form. Like, clavicle-breakingly solid.

I wasn’t exactly an expert, but I was willing to bet that ghosts wouldn’t have had clavicles to break if they existed.

Nichols dropped to his knees. Isobel whipped the antenna across his face, snapping his head to the side.

“No hope! No!” he cried.

He seized her wrists. Dragged her down with him.

They scuffled in the grass, Isobel raining blows on his face, Nichols tearing at her hair.

I tried to rip her off of him and earned a kick in the shin. Couldn’t tell whose foot that had been. I didn’t back off. Dead or not, Nichols was a lot bigger than Isobel—he could hurt her.

She managed to roll on top of him, pinning him down as he beat at her shoulders with his fists. She panted as she wrenched one of the feathers out of her hair. The tip glinted with metal like a quill, though it had a needle instead of a nib.

That didn’t look like an ordinary hair decoration.

Nichols tossed her off of him. The sound Isobel made when she hit the ground got every one of my protective instincts raging.

It wasn’t in me to stand back while a woman got her ass kicked, even if she seemed up for the fight.

I put the orderly in a headlock. He felt real enough. Solid and bony. His skin was slippery, like a fish without scales. “You’ve got to talk now,” I said to the struggling man in my arms. “How do we get out of here?”

If he planned on answering me, I’d never know.

Isobel got to her feet. Her cheek was a brilliant shade of red where Nichols had landed a blow. She lifted the needle-tipped feather and snapped her arm forward with all the speed of a striking snake.

The point buried into Nichols’s chest with a
thunk
.

And he died instantly.

His glassy eyes rolled into the back of his head. He went limp. The sudden weight made me sag, and I dropped him to the grass.

Nichols didn’t move when I checked for a pulse. There was nothing there. To be honest, I didn’t know if there ever had been. But he was definitely a lot deader now than he had been a few minutes earlier, and he was the only person who might have known what had happened in the basement of the house.

I rounded on Isobel. “What the hell was that for? I had him under control!”

“He attacked us,” she said, breathless. “I had to do something.”

“You mean, stake him like a vampire?”

“Don’t be silly. Vampires don’t exist.” She was regaining her composure now that he was gone. She straightened her dress, gently probed her facial wounds with her fingertips, slowed her breathing. But there was still fear in her eyes. “He was already practically dead. I just…shuffled him off the mortal coil.”

“And how did you do that, exactly?”

“I’m a death witch,” Isobel said, moving to return the feather to her hair. “The other priestesses who worshipped the Hand of Death taught me a few things.”