Authors: Erin Kellison
Shadowman (28 page)
They hadn't even given her a moment's warning.
Death summoned Shadow, deeper and deeper, until the cavern walls ran with sightless bugs streaming toward the mouth. Bats screamed through the air in a cacophonous flapping. And the gate rattled with hysterical glee.
Shadowman sent a gale of power and struck Ballard. His head bounced off the gate, bloodied, but he held on.
How valiant. But angels were mortal and this one was going to die.
Death flexed his magic and took to his feet. He hoped they saw a beast. They deserved to meet a beast for the murder they planned. He grabbed Ballard's hair in his hand and bashed his head against the gate. Used his skull like a new hammer. Thrilled toward the moment when white bone would show through.
But his arm was caught by that dog, Custo. “Let meâ!” The rest of his words were lost on the wind.
Just as well. Shadowman shook off the hold, drew Ballard back, and struck the gate again. Finally, the damn angel's body went slack, the hammer dropping to the cavern floor. Death tossed the used body aside and turned to the angels, who were regrouping for a fight.
Custo stood between them, eyes black with Shadow, arms lifted, hands flattened to say,
Stop!
Stop!
The moment they struck Layla, the angels had taken matters way past stopping.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat: Open me. I've an army at your disposal.
“She'll comply!” Custo shouted at them. “Layla has agreed!”
“I don't,” Shadowman's thunderstorm grumbled.
Another angel stepped forward. “Recuse yourself, Custo. You are blinded by your friendships.”
“Layla just found out,” Custo said. “She agreed. Give her a little time. . . .”
“There is no such thing as time,” Death said. Not anymore. There was only forever. And he would have no less.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat: I can give you forever.
“Listen to me!” Custo shouted. “Layla found her purpose. She can set things straight. Shadowman will go back to Twilight.”
“I will not.” For a moment, he had considered it. For a moment, he would have taken the heartbreak, if that was what Layla really wanted him to do. He'd have gone back and done his duty. Now he only wanted his scythe to strike down the angels. His bare hands would have to do.
“Shadowman, please. Listen to reason,” Custo said. “It's the way things are meant to be.”
Ballard stirred from his collapse on the ground. Put a hand to the cave floor.
Through the air, a gleam of steel flew. A dagger, a weapon of the angels. Shadowman stuck out his chest to accept the impact. No blade could kill him, and in the belly of the earth where darkness reigned, it would not even slow him. The point slid into his heart with a thunk as the hilt met muscle. He grinned against the pain, baring his teeth at the host like an animal. He had only to move his Shadow forward, and the dagger would fall to the ground. And so it did.
“No bloodshed!” Custo implored him. “If you don't want to be Death, don't kill today. Layla wouldn't want it. You know that.”
“Your kind struck her first.” And now Shadowman could only see death around him. Could only see the wasted bodies littering the cave. A war with Heaven. Endless fighting until the world was scorched beyond reckoning.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat: Open me, and no one will strike Layla again.
Ballard pushed himself up. His nose was crushed, one eye turned slightly inward, blood streaming down his chin, but his body would repair itself rapidly, as angels were wont to do. Soon he would be whole again. However, like a devil, angels could be killed, and Death could not. Why did they fight when they had no hope of prevailing?
“The time for discussion is past,” Shadowman said.
“What if we bury it?” Custo said. “What if I guard it until Layla is old and ready to go?”
The boy was grasping at straws.
Ballard wiped the blood from his mouth and stood. “The risk is too great, the temptation overwhelming. The gate must be destroyed now. We do not compromise with evil or with Shadow.”
“Let them at least prepare,” Custo begged. “Let her say good-bye.”
“The decision is made,” Ballard said.
“The fuck it is!” Custo shouted back.
Shadowman bid dark magic to flow through his veins. No one would so much as lay a finger on the gate. “You're right,” he said to Ballard. “The decision has been made. Custo, it is time for you to choose a side. Order or madness?”
Custo let his extended arms drop. His chest rose and fell with his breath. Conviction overrode the anguish that ripped his Shadow and Ordered halves apart. “Well, when you put it like that . . .”
And he went to stand next to Death.
“You're a fool.” Ballard spit blood onto the ground.
“This won't end well, will it?” Custo murmured.
“No,” Shadowman answered. “It will not.”
“Look at me, Layla.”
She focused on Adam, who crouched in front of her.
“You feel okay? Like the first time this happened?”
Her head hurt like crazy, but yeah, she'd live.
He held up a finger in front of her eyes, tracking to the left and right. “Patel's been evacuated, or I'd have him give you a once-over.”
“I'm okay, and I think we can safely say the gate still stands, too.” If she was relatively unscathed, the gate must be. Shadowman had stopped them. She just hoped Custo could keep the whole thing civilized. But remembering the look in Shadowman's face, the darkening of his skin and eyes, she really didn't think civilized was possible. Death was pissed.
“Was anyone else hurt in the attack?” Layla asked.
“When the alarm went off, most were evacuated. Some staff remain, those who were trapped in their rooms, and the soldiers are here. We're still well protected, just not organized.”
Layla glanced toward Talia, who was leaning in the bedroom doorway, the black-eyed baby in her arms. “Will the kids be safe?”
“I'm a banshee,” Talia said. “If we're attacked by wraiths, my scream will bring my father. Add Adam's firepower and they are as safe as we can make them.”
“Banshee,” Layla repeated. She hadn't meant it to be out loud. So that was the deal with Talia's voice.
“Yes.” Talia returned her gaze, waiting for a reaction.
“I heard you scream,” Layla said, recalling that piercing terror. “Down in the holding facility.”
Adam craned his neck to look at his wife. “She did hear you, even though I couldn't. She sent me running.”
Layla gave a wry smile. “One of the kids has quite the scream, too. I could hear him through Kathleen's painting. He makes the leaves rustle like there's a wind blowing through the trees. Totally confused me, but I get it now. The veil is thin for me.” She felt the smile twist on her face. “Getting thinner by the hour.”
“You don't really want Khan to go back, do you?” Talia put the baby over her shoulder and patted his back. The other one let out an angry squall, and Adam went to fetch him.
“For myself, no, of course not.” But this was bigger than her. Layla shrugged. “I hate it, but I can't think of an alternative. And at least we can be together there for a little while.” A very little while.
Talia shook her head. “I can't believe it. For you guys to find each other again, and now this? It's worse than wights and the devil put together.”
“Funny thing is,” Layla said as his winter Twilight sprang to mind, “even if he does go back, I don't think he'll last long. He's too far gone.”
The desolation he faced filled her with sorrow. The ashy ground, the barren branches, the dirty gray of his unending existence. She'd felt the utter lack for a few moments last night and could bear that nothingness only with his arms around her. The pain of his abject loneliness echoed hers. It had been in his voice, and in that lonesome howl, when she'd asked him to reveal himself. He'd known the emptiness of the future, and the monster it would surely make of him.
Layla wept for her love, for his duty, and for his ruin.
“What do you mean?” Talia asked, both urgency and sadness in her voice.
Layla wiped at the tears that coursed down her cheeks. She lifted a helpless hand. “Maybe twenty-some years ago there might have been a chance, but not now.” Layla's throat contracted at the thought of him trapped in his solitude. How long would it take to resolve things with the gate? Before she could hold him? Would he bend, or would he fight? Fight. “I think it would kill the good in him and leave the dark. And then what?”
She remembered the look on his face when he'd held her in his arms, the insane rage, backed by the might of his magic. It was more frightening than the beast who had stared Rose down before he'd changed into Shadowman before Layla's eyes.
“I'm supposed to convince him,” Layla said.
“I wish I could help.” Worry lines formed on Talia's forehead. “But I don't know how or what to do.”
“No, you've got the kids.”
A chattery hiss rose in the room, like the sound of a downpour on a tin roof or nighttime bug talk in the middle of a jungle. Segue was exposed to neither of those conditions, so Layla stood, a now too familiar tightness pulling in her chest.
“Abby?” she heard from far, far away, but she didn't recognize the voice. It was young and broken and afraid. “Don't leave me, sis.”
Oh, no. Fresh alarm stirred Layla's misery to panic. Not Abigail. Not now.
The wraith attack had precipitated something else, too. Everything was coming all at once, with no time to mourn or say good-bye. All the stolen time was spent.
The living room seemed to warp slightly, and Layla remembered the Shadow over Segue, the twisting lines of the building's architecture. In the rush and danger of the past few hours, she hadn't had a chance to ask Khan, now Shadowman, what it was. And now she didn't need to.
She
knew.
She
knew.
The Shadow was here for Abigail. Zoe's sister was passing. The reason Layla knew this was simple: Soon she would pass, too, even though she hadâfinally hadâpeople who would try to hang on to her with all their might. This crossing was inevitable, for Abigail and for her.
Order was asserting itself everywhere.
Layla turned to Talia, who moved strangely slow-fast forward, her mouth shaping words, though the sound was unintelligible. Her face had that fae glow to it again, the tilt of her eyes a touch more extreme.
Abigail was putting Segue, and everyone remaining within it, at the brink, too.
“Scream,” Layla said. She meant to shout it.
Color in the room suddenly amped, and finallyâ
finally
âTalia whirled back to Adam, a look of alarm transforming the concern on her features.
finally
âTalia whirled back to Adam, a look of alarm transforming the concern on her features.
And with a crashing rush like the ocean on rocks, Layla could hear again.
Adam opened a drawer and pulled out a handgun. “Where is it?”
He was looking for a wraith or a wight. Layla was shaking her head. “Shadow's coming. An ocean of it. Scream!”
“Won't help,” Talia was saying, holding her baby fast to her shoulder. “Have to be in the presence of the living dead, like a wraith, for my father to hear. But if it's Shadow, we should be okay. I'll keep us safe.”
“This isn't just Shadow. It's freaking
Twilight
.” Where was a wraith when you needed one?
Twilight
.” Where was a wraith when you needed one?
A tsunami of great force was coming. Layla's bones trembled with the gather of its force. Colors bled into others, luscious in hue and wicked in severity.
“What do I do?” Adam's face flushed red, veins popping. The child in his arms screamed in confusion, but the one in Talia's laughed.
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