Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) (2 page)

The result of the experiment was remarkable. Within weeks, doctored photos of alleged sightings of Shadow Man cropped up. None of them came from the grad students who’d invented him. People reported seeing Shadow Man looking in their bedroom windows. Conspiracy theorists blamed him for every AMBER alert and suggested he was a product of alien/human hybrid experiments.

That was all before the Last Hidden stepped out and chose the name. Up until I’d seen him from the corner of my eye at the end of my driveway, he’d been nothing but words and pictures created to see how quickly a simple story could grow into an urban legend. Now he was a flesh-and-bone representation of the stories he’d modeled himself after.

I sighed and took a step away from the safety of Riley’s arms. “Guess we’d better call everybody home.”

He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Try not to let them know how pleased you are about that part.”

I nodded. “I’ll try.”

* * *

Mom and Darius appeared while I was still on the phone with Kam. I waved at them from the kitchen, and they sat together on the couch to chat with Riley.

Kam’s frustration trickled through the phone. “I was in Nevada last week. Why couldn’t he have shown up then?” Her breathing increased, as if she were pacing or lifting something. “I’m in eastern Wyoming. It’ll take me two days to get to you.”

Something banged against something else on her end. “Kam, what are you doing? It sounds like you’re rebuilding a car engine.”

“Ooph.” The phone clattered and she was quiet for a minute. “Sorry. Dropped the phone. I’m packing. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”

I frowned. Kam used to change clothes constantly, using her magic to create elaborate costumes. It bothered me that she was doing something so ordinary as collecting belongings into a suitcase. The loss of one-third of her magic had turned my impetuous, creative friend into a mundane traveler. I was betting she didn’t have a single hoop skirt or tiara in her luggage.

“Don’t overdo it,” I said. “We’re all right for the moment, so I don’t want you driving through the night and running off the road. Just get here when you can.”

“Got it, boss!” From anyone else, that might have been sarcastic, but she sounded chipper. “No running off the road. Cross my heart.”

After we hung up, my heart felt lighter. We’d known Shadow Man would show eventually, since the day the Simurgh had whispered it to Mom and me in a vision. But after a month of waiting for him to show, we’d all decided it was time to get on with our lives, at least until something happened.

The fact that everyone scrambled to high alert based on something I may or may not have seen out of the corner of my eye said volumes about how serious we took the warnings.

Of all the Aegises in all the world, Mom and I were the only ones left. Long before he had a form and a name, Shadow Man had managed to have all the other Aegises killed. We may have gone back to business-as-usual on the surface, but none of us had relaxed our guard. After a short commercial break, it was showtime again.

I called Maurice and got his voicemail.

“Aloha! You’ve reached Maurice, but you haven’t really reached Maurice, because Maurice is out exploring the ruins of Pompeii or the deepest, darkest jungles of Peru. Leave a message! Soom Soom! Dag dag!”

I shook my head. So weird. “Maurice, when you get this message, either call me back or come home. He’s here. Time to man the battle stations.”

I hung up and tried Sara. Her voicemail kicked in before the first ring. “This is Sara. I’m not available right now, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

I smirked. Sara was still Sara. Professional, a little uptight, kind of formal—even if she now sported gold skin, silver hair and metallic, twisted horns. I left a similar message for her. Nothing more I could do but wait. They’d get the message as soon as their walkabout led them close enough to a city to get a signal.

Back in the living room, Mom’s face was pinched and nervous. She huddled into Darius as if he could protect her from the worst kind of nightmares in existence. I hoped she was right, because what we were up against probably was the worst kind of nightmare in existence.

I took a deep, cleansing breath. Now was not the time to panic. That time would come later. Much later, if we were lucky.

I settled into the vacant chair next to Riley, across from Mom. “So.” I smiled, trying to act like none of us were freaking out inside. “How’s the rose garden coming along?”

Mom sat a little straighter, still leaving no room between herself and the enormous dark-skinned mothman—totally human-looking since the sun hadn’t gone down yet. After sunset, not so much with the human. In his full mothman glory, Darius sprouted dusty wings and lost the majority of his face to a bottomless void. But Mom loved him, so I tried to see past his scariness. Family is family.

“Oh, Zoey,” Mom said. “The roses are gorgeous. Blooms the size of your head. No exaggeration.” She threaded an arm through Darius’s and sat back, beaming.

I knew she wasn’t telling a tall tale. We had dryads living in the woods between my house and the cottage. I had no doubt Mom had magical help with Aggie’s garden. No. I had to stop thinking of it as Aggie’s garden. It was Mom’s garden now. And Mom’s gardening skills had always been spectacular.

We chatted awhile about compost and sunscreen, gluten and anti-frizz hair-care products. In other words, the kinds of things people talked about when they didn’t have a care in the world—or when they were trying to pretend they didn’t.

Late afternoon rolled around, and nobody felt like eating. We were all a little twitchy, taking turns looking out the window. Finally, I flipped on the television for some noise and happened to catch the news.

The lead story was about a fourth-grade class from a local school. They’d gone on a field trip to Stinson Beach to study wildlife and coastal ecosystems.

Six kids were missing. Six. About fifteen minutes from where we were sitting.

My stomach flipped and my face felt hot with anger. The missing kids couldn’t be a coincidence.

Live coverage showed the beach crawling with police and rescue workers scouring the area. Tear-stricken parents and teachers stood behind yellow tape, and reporters shoved cameras and mics in some of their faces.

A devastated teacher with short blond hair and empty eyes answered the newscaster’s questions in flat tones. “No,” she said. “I swear, we had them all together. They didn’t have time to wander off. One minute they were there, and the next they were gone.”

She burst into tears, and the cameraman had the good taste to return the focus to the reporter.

The story switched to the studio, where a photo appeared behind the anchor’s head. “This photo was taken minutes before the children went missing, giving police a timeframe from which to work.”

My breath caught in my throat. The anchor seemed oblivious, but I knew what I saw.

In the upper left-hand corner of the photo, far in the distance, stood the watching figure of Shadow Man.

Chapter Two

The most chilling part of the photograph was how closely the picture and the news story mimicked the intentionally faked material on the Internet. It was Shadow Man to the letter.

A piece I’d read on the popular website, Cryptokeepers, had described a similar story to what was playing out now on my own television. In the original tale from three years earlier, six children on a field trip to the zoo had disappeared right out from under their chaperones’ noses. The children had been found hours later, huddling together in the dry moat surrounding a tiger enclosure. The doctored photo accompanying the story showed a dark figure watching the children a short distance away, exactly like what I’d seen on the news a few seconds ago.

These stories had all been created in fun. But now they were coming to life.

I rubbed the goosebumps along my arms. “Did anybody else see that?” I grabbed the remote and rewound to the photograph of dozens of smiling children posing for a group shot on the beach. “There. See that up on the cliff behind them?”

Riley stood close to the television, squinting. “Are you sure? It could be any guy in a dark trench coat.”

Mom drew in a sharp breath. “Riley, don’t you see how long his face is? Don’t you see what’s wrong with him?”

I swallowed hard. The photo was hard to make out without having it blown up. But I saw.

Mom’s face was pale. Mine probably matched. But her back was straight and her voice was stony. “We have to stop him. Coming after us is one thing, but taking children is going too far.” She was up and over by the front door, sweater in hand before anyone could react. “Who’s driving?”

Riley and Darius both looked at me, as if I had the final word on what everyone should do. I shrugged. “I guess we’re going to the beach.”

The three of them piled into my SUV, and Riley snagged the driver’s spot while I was still in my room searching for my Wonder Woman hoodie. March on a northern California beach would be chilly, and the hoodie was thick enough to combat the frigid wind. By the time I found it and got outside, I’d lost out on shotgun as well.

Mom and I sat in the back, while Darius navigated. We didn’t have a plan other than getting to the beach where the kids had gone missing. The news had shown a lot of people milling around already, and nobody was getting past the barriers the police had put up.

But we didn’t really need to get to where the kids had been. We needed to scout the area around it.

“How far could he have gone?” I pictured Shadow Man coaxing the kids away like the terrifying Child Catcher from
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
—waving lollipops and doing a creepy little skipping dance. I shuddered. That part of the movie had always frightened me when I was a kid. “He took six of them. Do you think he had help, or did he just—I don’t know—hypnotize them to follow him?”

Darius shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. He was squashed into it like a size-eight woman in size-six leggings. Any second he’d have to open the window and stick out an arm to gain some space. “He had that cult working for him before. We never did track all of them down.” He banged his knee against the dashboard and cursed under his breath. “Chances are good they’re still around somewhere doing his bidding.”

I nodded. “Maybe.”

I so hoped we weren’t dealing with Shadow Man’s religious followers again. But Darius was right. Now that their shiny new god had taken form, they’d be even more likely to do his dirty work.

Through their chanting, they’d been able to call dangerous creatures called aswangs through portals from other worlds. The chanting also served to hypnotize the aswangs into seeking out and killing Aegises. It stood to reason, if kids were being hypnotized into walking off with strangers, Shadow Man’s worshippers were behind it.

Either the crowd had grown or the newscast hadn’t done it justice. We had trouble finding a place to park. We pulled off to the side of the lot and wedged ourselves on the sand in a legally questionable spot, then piled out. Darius spent a little longer dislodging himself. I smirked, thinking how he would have managed in my old VW Bug before it got squashed by a thunderbird. He never would have gotten the door closed.

As I stepped out of the car, the emotionally charged atmosphere nearly knocked me backward, despite the mental walls I’d built for protection. There was too much emotion darting through the air.
Fear. Guilt. Anger. Despair
. It pelted me from all sides—parents, teachers, emergency personnel. Even the nosy bystanders were agitated and concerned.

I closed my eyes and went inside myself. The walls I’d built were strong, but I always kept a few open windows with screens over them to filter through some of the emotion outside of me. Without some sort of emotional feedback, I sometimes had trouble reading other people’s body language. But with this much going on, the filters couldn’t hold it all back. I was being overwhelmed.

I closed up the holes in my walls, sealing myself in, at least until the search was over. I couldn’t help if I couldn’t breathe. When I opened my eyes, seconds had passed, but the difference was so much better. Until we left, I’d only have my own emotions to deal with.

We split up and milled through the crowd, listening for any information we could glean. Most people stood with hands in pockets or arms folded, as if waiting for something to happen. I sidled up to a woman with a thick braid pulled over her shoulder and a cellphone in her hand.

“Hey,” I said. “I just got here. Anything new happening?”

She popped a mint in her mouth. “They’re talking about arranging us into search parties.” She crunched the candy between her teeth. “You have a kid missing?”

I shrugged. “No, but I live close by. Thought I might be able to help.”

She squinted at the water. “I used to be a lifeguard. I thought the same thing.” She stuck her hand out at me, though her gaze didn’t shift from the rolling waves. “Holly.”

I took her hand. “Zoey.”

A pair of detectives—one a short brunette and the other a tall redheaded man—came through the crowd and divided us into groups. Riley and I were tagged to go north, and Mom and Darius were sent south. Each group had about ten people lined up to keep from missing any clues.

Progress was slow, but thorough. My calves hurt from walking in the sand. I kicked off my shoes to make it easier to walk and continued with them slung around my neck with the laces tied together. Before long, my feet were numb from the cold, but I had a better grip on the terrain with my toes than I did with shoes. My legs thanked me, even as my feet threatened anarchy.

I set my face in a determined grimace. I knew who’d taken those kids. I wasn’t going home until we found them, even if I had to put my shoes back on and crawl across the beach looking for clues.

We walked, scanning the sand beneath our feet. The salty, almost fishy scent of the bay normally calmed me and helped me think, but I barely registered it as I slogged down the beach. I was in the middle of the line, but the people on the ends were charged with checking the water on our left and the scrubby hills on our right. Parts of the beach were narrow and we had to scrabble over rocks. Other areas were so wide we had to spread out to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Holly the lifeguard stayed on the end, constantly scanning the water in case she spotted the kids were out there instead of on dry land.

We’d been at it for about forty-five minutes when Detective Diane’s radio crackled and she called to us to stop. She was too far away for me to hear what the voice on the radio said, but a cheer rose up from the people around her.

Good news, then.

“They found them!” Her face lit up with excitement, and she waved at everyone to head back the way we’d come. “The kids are all safe!”

Safe. Riley ran toward me, the expression on his face probably matching mine—relief mixed with confusion. Did Shadow Man let them go? Was the disappearance of the children unrelated? Had we completely overreacted?

We jogged back down the beach. My heart pounded more from anticipation of what we’d find out than from the exertion. Okay, it was also the exertion. After all the danger I’d already been through, I should have taken the lull in life-threatening danger to get in shape. Maybe take some classes and get some sweet ninja moves like Sara. I should have at least done a little yoga. I hadn’t done any of that, and now I was paying the price.

When we caught up, the kids were all shivering and wrapped in blankets while their parents hovered behind emergency workers who were checking the kids’ vital signs. Several reporters stood to the side, microphones clutched in their hands and cameras capturing the story.

Mom and Darius weaved through the crowd when they saw us, and Mom grabbed my elbows when she caught up to us. “Did you hear what happened?” Her eyes were wide and excited.

I shook my head. “All we know is the kids are safe. Where did they find them?”

She craned her neck left and right, then dragged me to the side where people wouldn’t hear her. “They were in a hole in the middle of the beach. I was the one who found them. I’d have fallen into the hole myself if Darius hadn’t caught me in time.”

Darius smiled. “The hole was covered with a blanket. I’ve lived in the woods enough times to recognize a trap when I see it.”

Mom released my elbow long enough to give him a dismissive wave. “Smarty pants.” When her hand returned to my skin, I realized it was like ice. “Darius pulled back the blanket and there they were, huddled together in the dark, about eight feet down.”

“Holy shit.” I let that sink in. Eight feet was crazy deep, especially for the beach. “They must have been standing in water.”

Darius nodded. “Shivering, wet and terrified.”

I checked to be sure Mom had pulled us far enough away from the crowd and took a few more steps away to be sure. Mom and the guys followed. I kept my voice low. “Was there any sign of him? What did the kids say?”

Mom sighed and let go of me. “The kids don’t know how they got there. Last thing they remember is listening to their teacher talk about sandpipers. Several said they remembered hearing flute music.”

I swallowed hard. “Flute music. That’s not in any of the Internet stories of Shadow Man. I’m sure it was him, though. I can feel it. Is he going off book?”

Riley put his arm around me. “Either that or the Pied Piper really did come to town.” He kissed my cheek. “I’ll be right back. Gonna see if I can get more info.”

He took off in the direction of the line of ambulances. Before the Board had reassigned Riley to be my bodyguard, he’d supplemented his reaper income as an EMT. Apparently, bodyguard paid better than reaper, so he’d been able to quit the EMT gig to keep a closer eye on me.

Mom watched him go. “I think you’re right. It was Shadow Man—or at least one of his followers. We were meant to see this. He didn’t hurt those kids, not really. It was a warning to us. He wants us to know he’s here.”

My chest felt tight. I had to agree with her. Shadow Man appearing at the end of my driveway, then in the background on the news a few hours later was no coincidence. He was sending us a clear message: the reprieve was over. He was coming for us.

I thought I’d accepted that fact before we left the house. After all, I’d seen Shadow Man with my own eyes and, despite the surreal quality of the experience, I never doubted for a second that he’d been there. I’d called in the troops. And when we’d watched the news, I hadn’t questioned seeing Shadow Man in the background.

I didn’t think for a second there was any other cause for those missing children. But so far, he hadn’t been leaving us a lot of clues to follow to track him down.

When Riley returned, he wrapped both arms around me and held on for a moment before pulling away. “Tony’s working today. He said...” Riley trailed off, a thoughtful expression furrowing his brow. “He said that all six kids smelled like they’d been rolling around in a pile of gingerbread.”

Darius looked startled, which was interesting, since I couldn’t recall his ever looking startled before. “Gingerbread? How truly bizarre.”

I had to agree with his assessment. “What does it mean?”

Riley shrugged. “Beats me. But it’s the only real clue we have.”

“But...” Mom hesitated, her face thoughtful. “In all the research we did on Shadow Man, we never found mention of odd smells—gingerbread or otherwise.”

She was right. Queasy stomachs, occasional nosebleeds, paranoia, chills—nothing about odd aromas. “Maybe it was one of his lackeys. Is there a type of Hidden I don’t know about that smells like baked goods?”

Mom shook her head. “I saw a movie once where angels were supposed to smell like chocolate chip cookies.”

“You think that’s it?” Riley asked. “Angels saved the kids and left them smelling like a pastry shop?”

“Not likely.” Darius folded his arms across his broad chest. “There hasn’t been an angel sighting in over forty years. And they smell like dusty books, not food.”

Mom gave him a questioning look, and he refused to make eye contact. Weird. I’d never thought about Darius having a past before he met Mom. Looked like he not only had one, it was a doozy and he didn’t want to talk about it.

Gradually, the crowd thinned and the parking lot emptied. The ambulances carried off their shivering cargo with parents following in their own vehicles. With the kids gone, the media cleared out, since the police weren’t talking in front of the cameras.

I considered dragging everyone back to the hole where Mom and Darius had found the kids, but the police had it cordoned off, and if there’d been anything immediately easy to spot, Darius would have already found it anyway.

We’d have to go home and regroup. We still couldn’t rule out an unrelated kidnapping, but Mom and I both felt the truth in our guts, even if we couldn’t prove Shadow Man had done it. But he’d left us several clues. If we could figure out his game, maybe we could stop him from taking anyone else.

By the time we made it home, I was starving. The smell of something rich and savory cooking in my kitchen hit me head-on the minute my foot touched the front porch. My mouth watered, my stomach rumbled and my heart sped with joy. The smells could only mean that Maurice and Sara were home.