Shadow Touched (9 page)

Cam ranged around to get a different vantage. “Any new sightings of the boy?”

Twilight was also a realm of madness. If the boy still lived, he would either be trapped in a dream or a nightmare, no longer sensible of the mortal world.

“His mother said he stepped out of sight at 1400 hours on Saturday,” Col. Langer answered. “No visual since.”

Ellie did the math. Forty-seven hours. The kid’s chances weren’t good. Maybe if they’d gotten here sooner. Still, she was determined to try.

“So what do you think you can do that we haven’t already?”

She turned at Dr. Grant’s question, as did the others. She’d almost forgotten he was there.

“This is the third time that the Segue Institute has butted into one of my investigations,” Grant said. He looked like he’d been working around the clock, the meanness of his expression really just deep bags under his eyes. Frustration turned his mouth downward. He’d probably known from the moment he got here that his time was ticking, that Segue, the preeminent research institution for paranormal phenomena, would be stepping in soon.

Ellie waited while Cam looked long and hard at Grant. Then Cam turned around, and from the workstation picked up a sphere, like a soccer ball, but tethered to a black wire. Had to be some sort of scientific apparatus. “Have you gotten this across yet?”

She knew that Cam was trying to show Dr. Grant some measure of respect, rather than just kicking him off the search and rescue.

Grant’s jaw cocked to the side. “No. I’ve had no success breaching the boundary.”

She took the ball when Cam held it out to her. “Will it even get any readings?”

“Nope,” Cam said. “But if you would?”

Ellie stepped up to the water, felt a slight, cooling spray on her face. She closed her eyes and looked for the fracture within, the one that made her a monster, that made her afraid of her own shadow, and that made sanity irrelevant. And then she let the ball roll off her hand and into the water.

She opened her eyes to see it fall into the realm of Twilight, though she held the tether, a cord with hair-thin wires to relay information.

Dr. Grant made a whooping noise and dashed to the desk, presumably to turn on the retrieval component of the machine. Ellie’d bet he wasn’t tired anymore.

“Specialist,” Col. Langer said, repeating her title and looking at her more closely.

Deep within, her shadow looked back at him, priming, defensive. That colonel had better look elsewhere.

“Yes,” Ellie answered.
Specialist.
She twitched the cord and looked at Cam. “What do you want me to do with this?” The proximity to the falls was messing with her head. She wanted to dash into the Otherworld to find the boy, but that would be suicide. Wanted to do other insane things too.

“Pull it out,” Cam said, his tone even.

“No!” shouted Dr. Grant.

But Ellie towed on the wet line, hand over hand. The ball, only feet away in the forest, stayed put, nested on a root, though the black cord kept coming and coming, well past its original length. The cord was spooling at her feet when Dr. Grant came over to examine it, his expression stricken with confusion.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What kind of trick is this?”

“I’m not trying to trick you,” Cam said. “I’m trying to help you take the next step with your research.”

Ellie felt Col. Langer’s interest sharpen on her.

Within, her shadow snarled.

Cam stepped up beside her, drew out a pocketknife, and thumbed open the blade. “Nothing about the Otherworld makes sense, so no data gathering is possible.” He cut the cord, and the extraneous spooling gasped into black smoke. “Anything that crosses into Twilight is as good as lost. That ball isn’t five feet from us, as it appears. It’s a million miles away, in a realm that has no boundaries, no mappable features, and changes by the moment.”

“What the hell was that black smoke?”

Geez. Ellie let out a long breath. Grant had a lot to learn.

“The periodic table of Twilight has one element: Shadow,” Cam said. “It’s pure magic, as is the fae child who was left here. I’ll be needing to meet him next. Ellie and I have been assigned here because JT, gone two days now, doesn’t have time for your steep learning curve.”

Cam peered into the observation window of the holding cell. The fae child was in the corner of the room, curled into a ball on a cot. He appeared helpless, but Cam wasn’t so sure that was the case.

“I understand he’s taken no food?”

Dr. Velez, the woman who oversaw the fae’s care, answered. “It’s been offered, but he won’t touch it. He’s had water from the falls, 180 ml every two hours. He hasn’t urinated at all.”

Cam stepped back. “Unlock the door please.”

As the space was cramped, Col. Langer and Dr. Grant had remained in the main area of the unit so Cam and Ellie could take a look. Dr. Velez opened the door, and Cam stepped past her into the cell.

Ellie trailed behind him. As she crossed the threshold, the fae scrambled up, nonsensical syllables spilling in a rush from his mouth. His facial features appeared gaunter than in the original photos. The mortal world seemed to be as rough on him as Twilight surely was on JT.

Cam caught Ellie’s sharp look right before she stepped forward, hands open in a sign of peace and welcome to the fae. Who launched himself into her arms and wept against her neck like a child. Cam was not surprised at Ellie’s sudden affinity with a creature of Shadow, but it still left him conflicted. Her connection to the fae child was good for the mission, but he would not compromise Ellie or her shadow unless he was certain they would be safe. But all signs so far pointed to their going forward.

Shhh,
she soothed, stroking the fae child’s hair.

Cam knew this was no child; the fae were eternal. This had to be a game or some kind of deception. Curiosity toward the human world maybe. Predatory? They’d have to see. Maybe JT, whose face it shared, had been its prey.

“Has the fae been analyzed at all?” Cam asked. “Any tests performed? Samples taken from its person?”

Dr. Grant, now standing in the open doorway, hesitated before answering no.

Which Cam knew meant that he had tried, but no samples were possible because they had probably dematerialized into Shadow and wafted away. Pointless. Grant was a man of science; the fae was magic. Modern research required a marriage of the two.

Ordinarily, Cam would have let Grant stay. The more Shadow was investigated, its properties understood and knowledge about them disseminated throughout the scientific communities, the better, because the world was entering an age that would be dominated by magic. Event horizons like the waterfall were common in legend and myth, and would become so again in modern times. Science could no longer fear the unknown; it would only impede progress.

Take Ellie for example. One part was blond, blue-eyed sweetness. Approachable. But Grant and Col. Langer would fear her shadow, a transparent grey replica, gorgeously naked. Ellie would be held in an observation room like this one. In fact, four months ago, Cam had done that to her himself, as if any kind of cell could possibly hold her shadow. No, that inky, sexy entity went after exactly what it wanted—through the walls even. She was both girl next door and dark goddess.

Science and magic. Only the Segue Institute embraced the two.

“It’s going to be okay.” Ellie crouched to put the fae back on the cot. “I’m here to help you.” Cam saw her warped reflection in the fae’s black eyes. “Help you,” she repeated. “Yes.”

They’d have to come back later and do this again, but without an audience outside the cell. If Ellie got such a positive reaction from the fae, her shadow might get one even more interesting. This was why they’d been sent, but Cam didn’t have to like it.

They eased back out of the room. The door locked automatically.

“Just what kind of specialist are you?” Col. Langer demanded of Ellie.

“Shadow,” she answered. “I’ve had a knack for it all my life.”

Cam concealed a wry smile at her play on words, intended just for him. Shadow, capital S, the magic from Twilight, was different from shadow, lower case, Ellie’s dark, primal self that could separate from her body. Everyone else heard the same word, but Cam, Ellie, and Segue knew the dramatic difference the size of one letter made.

“We’d like to meet Ms. Parson and her son, Carter,” Cam said. “I want to hear the story firsthand.”

 

Angie Parson had the look of a woman who’d been through hysteria and had come back out as the personification of brittle, cold rage. She sat on a thin bunk bed. Her son Carter had been escorted to the temporary cafeteria following his re-questioning. Her voice was chilly smooth. “I say we take that monster and throw him right back in the water.”

Ellie stood, leaning on the far wall of the temporary quarters to observe while Cam had pulled up a chair in front of the woman and rehashed the initial event. Her account gelled with the report Segue had received. The conversation had now moved on to the rescue.

“You’ve got the right idea,” Cam said, “wrong application.”

“What are you talking about?” Grief underscored Ms. Parson’s demand. She was a woman in pain.

A tightness choked Ellie’s throat. The feeling came from her shadow, wracking her with displaced emotion. A son lost, a mother in despair. Ellie withstood the bombardment, gritting her teeth and looking at the wall. If she didn’t let go of her shadow soon, it would rip free regardless. All of these strong emotions were too much.

Cam seemed to be managing just fine. “Ms. Parson, I think we can get your son back.”

Big promise. Ellie just hoped they could deliver. Cam knew as well as she did that two days in Twilight would feel like an eternity to the boy.

“Did you know that you are living an old, old story?” Cam asked Ms. Parson.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re in a changeling story, where the fae—yes, as in faeries—have made off with your son and replaced him with one of their own kind.”

“My son is missing and you are telling me a fairy tale?” Ms. Parson’s hands were shaking.

“My point is, the changeling story tells us that there’s a chance we can get him back, reverse the exchange, which is why I and my associate, Ms. Russo, are here.”

Ms. Parson glared up at Ellie. “How do you plan to do that? JT’s not even in the waterfall anymore. He got scared and ran off and I couldn’t reach him.” Her words were fraught with a sense of personal failure, when there had been nothing she could’ve done differently.

Ellie swallowed hard. “Someone, a specialist, would need to go in and get him.”

She and Cam had discussed the plan, then argued it, when Segue got the call. Any human who went into Twilight would go mad, would get lost, would be preyed upon by the fae. Retrieving that person would be nearly impossible. A couple of people associated with Segue had managed it, but not well, not easily. Others, angels or even Shadowman might cross (if they could be compelled to help), but they had as good a chance of finding JT in that vast infinity of forest as, say . . . Ellie’s shadow.

Ellie could call her shadow back at will, and the shadow had to obey. That ability had presented Segue with a potentially viable plan: Ellie would direct the dark part of herself to cross into Twilight, accompanied by the changeling (willing or captive), and seek out JT. Her shadow couldn’t be hurt, but just in case, it had demonstrated (probably too well) that it could and would defend itself. Then her shadow would cross back over, at Ellie’s command.

This was on the job training—mastering the dark part of herself and safely traversing Twilight. This was making herself useful to the people who’d taken her in and accepted her without reservation. This was making Cam proud, giving Segue a skill to work with, when she’d almost sabotaged his career. This was shadow into Shadow.

Ms. Parson’s eyes were hard, disbelieving. “What specialist?”

“Well, me,” Ellie said.

“You know how to get inside the waterfall?”

Ellie’s shadow beat against her heart like a drum.

“It will take some doing”—Ellie sighed—“but yes, I think I can cross.” Saying so to the mother meant no going back. “Can you tell me a little about JT so I know what to expect from him?”

Ellie was trying to get at what form his madness would take.

Ms. Parson’s frown deepened, as if she didn’t believe but would go along anyway. “He’s tough. Thinks he can do anything. He likes Legos and Matchbox cars and superheroes. Has a lot of friends, but since the divorce he’s been more attached to Carter, his older brother. He started wetting the bed during the divorce, too. Has nightmares about big dogs.”

Nightmares were a problem. Ellie didn’t like big dogs either.

Cam leaned forward. “When I was a kid, my mom gave me and my sisters a code word to help distinguish friends from strangers in case of an emergency. Tiara. Pretty humiliating the day it actually got used. Do you have something like that with your sons?”