Shadow Fall (2 page)

“Is Mrs. Anansi going to let you in?” Khefar wondered. “Didn’t it take a while for her to welcome you back last time?”

“Really, children, there’s no need to be unkind,” the spider god chided. He spread his arms. “Though it has been some time since I’ve seen her, it’s true what they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. My Aso is a wonderful lady, a terrific cook, nimble of mind, and you should see the size of her—” Anansi cleared his throat. “Anyway, I have many new tales to tell. She always gives me a most enthusiastic welcome, thanks to those.”

“How long will you be gone?” Kira wondered, feeling strangely sad. She wondered which she’d miss most, the demigod’s stories or his cooking.

“Time is an immeasurable thing where I’m going,” he answered. “Which is a nice way of saying that my father is many things, but a timekeeper isn’t one of them.”

He lifted a fedora from his head that had been bare a moment ago, and then sketched a deep bow, the hat sweeping through the air. “If you need me, of course, you know how to call me. Otherwise, feel free to drop me an email.”

“Email?” Kira echoed.

Khefar cocked his head. “Inventor of the World Wide Web, remember?”

“Oh right. Of course you have email. Did you invent computer viruses, spam, and those Nigerian prince money-laundering scams too?”

The old man grinned. “What is it the Americans say? I plead the Fifth—I refuse to answer on the grounds I may incriminate myself. I would remind you, Shadowchaser, that I am a trickster. Still, I’m hardly the only one. Many a cunning demigod lives on, thanks to pranks and hoaxes on the Internet. You should see what Loki comes up with, and don’t get me started on what Coyote has done.”

Kira could imagine well enough to give her a headache. She rubbed her forehead. “I so didn’t need to know that.”

“You should know better than to ask Anansi questions like that,” Khefar told her. “You’re never going to like the answers.”

Khefar crossed to the spider god, grasped his forearm. “Safe journeys, Anansi.”

Anansi clapped the Medjay on the back. “Of course. You two take care of yourselves. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Or when Mrs. Anansi kicks you out.”

“Bite your tongue, Medjay,” the demigod said. A surprisingly solemn look—as if he wanted to tell them something particularly profound—drew down his features, but his expression softened as he spoke. “Look after each other and try not to destroy the city while I’m gone.”

Kira folded her arms. “Gee, Grandpa, you never let us have any fun.”

“Not you too.” Anansi sighed, lifted his eyes heavenward. “I think I’m actually going to enjoy my time away from you two ungrateful wretches. I’ll see you when I see you.”

He reached out a hand. A door appeared in the middle of the exercise room, made of a rich golden-brown wood. As Anansi turned the knob, Khefar stepped up behind her and dropped a hand over Kira’s eyes, his other arm encircling her waist.

“Hey!”

“Believe me, you don’t want to look through that door.”

She made a halfhearted effort to free herself. “Why not? Isn’t that the way he got Wynne and Zoo from London to Cairo?”

“No, not through
that
door. It’s not the door we used either. That’s a god’s door. The one time I looked through a door like that, I was dead for two days.”

“Oh.” She froze. “I suddenly find myself a lot less curious about Anansi’s method of travel. Is he gone?”

“Yes.”

“Then, do you think you could let me see and move again?”

His hand dropped from her eyes to her shoulder, but tightened his grip on her waist. “I could, but I’m enjoying holding you like this.”

She reached up, cupping the back of his neck with her hand. “I’m enjoying it too. Otherwise, I’d have thrown you to the mat by now.”

His breath was warm against her cheek. “You can throw me down now, if you like.”

Without a word, she bent low at the waist, flipping him over her shoulder. “I like,” she said with a grin, leaning over him.

He dug his hands into her braids. Her eyes slid shut as she reveled in the tactile experience, no less potent than the first time he’d touched her.

When he spoke, his voice acquired a rough rumble. “I’m thinking it’s time for the second part of our workout.”

“I like that part even better.” She bent to kiss him.

Despite more than three weeks of intimacy, Kira still felt the initial shock of being skin to skin with another person, a surge of fear that she’d made a mistake in touching him. Then he would hold her, kiss her, move deep inside her, and her heart would race for an entirely different reason.

She kept her eyes open, focusing on Khefar’s face, drinking in his expression, running her hands over his body. With him, she could forget the world and its troubles, could forget she was different, could even forget she lived on borrowed time. With him, she could share an extraordinary pleasure that made her feel blissfully normal.

•   •   •

A while later, Khefar pulled her to her feet. “Not too much longer before we have to head out to the gala,” he said, a little unsteady on his feet. Fighting, training, and lovemaking—they both went at it with all the same level of intensity. “We need to get showered and dressed.”

“Will you do the lotion thing for me?” she asked, stretching to loosen her muscles again. Having Khefar rub her specially made shea butter lotion into her skin was pure heaven.

He watched her move, pleasure lighting his dark eyes. “I’m not sure which part you like better, the sex or the after-shower lotion rub.”

“You’re good at both, and I’m greedy. Do I have to choose?”

“No. Especially since that rubdown usually leads to other things.”

“Yeah.” She headed for the door. “Like a good, deep sleep.”

“Keep it up and you’ll be rubbing yourself.” He paused. “Wait. That didn’t come out right.”

He tried to explain further, but Kira was laughing too loud to hear him.

T
he Balm of Gilead, head of the Gilead Commission and the current living embodiment of Light, pushed back from her desk with a sigh. She straightened slowly, working the kinks from her back. Sleep had never been a close companion, even before she became head of the organization dedicated to opposing Shadow in all its forms.

The job of leading the organization of Shadowchasers, Light Adepts, field agents, and support personnel that policed the preternatural community was never an easy one. Not a thousand years ago when she’d first been elevated to take the mantle and honorific of Balm. Not now, when she’d been forced to replace the entire senior staff of Gilead London, send a renegade Shadowchaser to Refinement, and attempt to dissuade her recalcitrant daughter from an inevitable path. Of those, only the third continued to be cause for concern.

“Kira,” she murmured to herself, “what am I going to do with you?”

It was a question she’d frequently asked herself of late. Balm couldn’t afford to look back or second-guess herself. If she did, she’d never get any work done, and there was always work to do. With Kira however, she always wondered if she’d done the right thing, if she’d fulfilled the promise she’d made to Ana so long ago, to ensure that her daughter would always walk in the Light.

Balm had done her best to prepare Kira for each stage of her life. She’d taken Kira out of fosterage and placed her with a carefully screened, loving family once Balm was certain the young girl wouldn’t display any Shadow tendencies. Immediately bringing Kira to Santa Costa once she’d discovered that Kira’s adopted family hadn’t made her welfare a priority. Then channeling the understandable rage and despair into the one role guaranteed to ensure Kira’s survival: that of a Shadowchaser.

Balm stepped back from the hand-carved wood desk, and then strolled over to a beveled window set into the stone outer wall. A half-moon hung over the sea, its light barely illuminating the restless water below. She could hear the wind howling outside through the thickness of the glass. A storm was coming to Santa Costa.

The symbolism wasn’t lost on her. The tempest mirrored the changes she would soon have to weather, perhaps as soon as a few days. Circumstances pulled Kira in multiple directions, even more now than at any other time since her birth.

Balm had tried to stem the tide by beginning to train Kira in all the processes needed to run Gilead’s sprawling divisons and managing the Commission with the idea of Kira someday heading the organization. Diplomacy and restraint, however, weren’t Kira’s strong suit. With that necessary component absent from Kira’s nature, Balm had had little choice but to put Kira through Shadowchaser training.

And Kira had excelled. Balm allowed herself a self-congratulatory smile. Kira was one of those rare individuals the Commission coveted: inherently powerful, intelligent, tough, and even stubborn. Though there were Commissioners who handled each aspect of a Chaser’s training—physical, mental, or magical—Balm had personally overseen Kira’s development.

The head of Gilead showed no favoritism, and her foster daughter’s training had been no different. A Shadowchaser’s training was rigorous out of necessity, a forewarning of what they would be required to face in the field. Despite careful screening, some candidates failed or were killed even before they reached the Crucible, the rigorous final performance examination before candidates claimed their Lightblades. Kira had passed every standard Chaser test. She had also passed extra ones Balm had devised. She had survived the Crucible, completing the trial faster than any Chaser to date. Kira Solomon was the best and the brightest the Gilead Commission had to offer, and Balm would make sure that she remained that way.

Balm crossed back to her desk. A small cedar chest sat atop the blotter, a foot wide and about the same deep, weathered with age and constant use. It contained her most private and precious possessions: memories. In a few hours the chest would be on its way to Kira, and Balm could only hope that her daughter would be able to survive the consequences of opening her own personal Pandora’s box.

A soft knock announced Lysander’s arrival. Her assistant entered, his slight, androgynous features golden in the lamplight. He carried her ceremonial robe, woven of Light magic and gossamer material. The robe was actually older than she was, a hooded affair worn by the Balms of Gilead since time began. “My lady, it is time.”

“A moment longer.” Her fingers skimmed the edges of the chest. Times like this, she felt every one of her years. Felt the selfish regret of the choice she had made, anger at the choice that had peeled away her right to live her life for herself instead of living it for the good of everyone else.

She picked up a bundle of letters, bound with a magical cord woven of her own hair, and placed them into the chest before pressing the lid into place. Kira would have to use her magic to open the chest, more magic to untie the cord and read the letters. Balm could only hope her message got to Kira before the memories did.

Lysander hung the pale robe on a jutting stone nodule as Balm approached the interior grotto planted centuries ago on the north side of her office. “Shall I deliver the chest while you are away?”

Balm stared at the indoor garden, the wild vines, overgrown trees, and assorted plants. The verdant display helped to soothe her sublimated soul, a soul that needed growing things, loamy soil, and bright sunshine. “No. I will need to add one more item to it when I return.”

“As you wish, my lady.”

Lysander helped her disrobe, kneeling to remove her soft leather slippers before helping her settle the pale blue material onto her shoulders. It could barely be called fabric—it seemed spun from light itself, shimmering with every movement she made and breath she took.

Lysander reached for the silver chain about her neck to unfasten it, but Balm wrapped her hand around the locket it supported. “No, I would leave it.”

“Mistress, you requested the pendant be placed in the chest you are sending to Kira,” he reminded her in gentle tones. Lysander was never harsh, except for when she needed him to be, when he shared her bed.

“So it shall,” Balm replied, unpinning her hair, then arranging it about her shoulders. “First, I would have her know of this, if she’s able to read the pendant.”

“Of course, Mistress.”

Her robes shimmered with the emerald sheen of growing things as she touched a dark green tendril. The vines slithered in acknowledgment. At her silent request the verdant strands parted to reveal a thick arched door of golden-red wood so old the tree it had come from was now extinct. Reinforced with heavy bands of black iron, the door bore the symbol of a moon, perfectly split between Light and Shadow with a wide band of apparent emptiness between them.

Balm called up the power that had been conferred on her when she assumed the leadership of Gilead. Wrapped in softly glowing blue light, she placed her right palm over the Light half of the moon. A sliver of elemental magic edged the entry as the portal formed on the other side.

Lysander pulled the heavy door open with one hand. Everything and nothing swirled on the other side, a fog that shimmered and shifted color and shape. Balm could feel the buildup of pressure as two other portals were opened into this area outside of time and space, a place that neither Light nor Shadow controlled. At the half-moon, when neither Light nor Shadow dominated, each aspect could, and most times would, come together to parley.

Balm paused at the portal’s edge. This was the part she dreaded the most, and it had nothing to do with the freezing temperature of the swirling fog. No, the miasma served as purification as well as transportation, cleansing her mind, body, and soul and enabling her to assume the mantle of the embodiment of Light before meeting her sisters. Each time she made the journey she felt as if she lost a piece of herself in the process, another bit of detritus that had made up the person she was before she became Balm. Not that she could remember much about what her life had been like before. She hadn’t seen many summers before the Commission chose her to be the Vessel of Light, and she’d been Balm for many lifetimes now.