A Shiver of Shadows

by Hunter J. Skye

  Sage greens and bristling browns swept away in vast carpets below as the wind tore at me. Glimpses of blue water broke the coastline into rugged, glittering bays as I spun. From my height, the low sun gilded the entire landscape as I dropped through its golden glow. My vest tore away, and my shirt followed.

  I unzipped my atoms and slipped loose of Mother Earth’s gravitational hold. My unbound state lasted only a few seconds, but it brought me closer to the ground in a slower, more controlled fall.

  I picked another spot maybe twenty meters from the ground and translocated with my feet pointing down. A quick drop to ten meters, then five, then two. I hit the rocky ground with a jarring strike that wrenched my ankle and brought me to my knees.

  “Blast!” I fell forward and pressed my forehead to the dirt. The landing was a far sight better than I’d expected it would be. I could only pray the pilots were so lucky.

  A cool breeze stirred the pink heather around me. I’d landed in an empty expanse of moorland near a rise with what looked to be the ruins of a small castle at its highest point.

  I stood and brushed my torn trousers clean. Melisande liked to tease me for tying my boots so tightly at the ankle. I was thankful I had not acquiesced with regard to that habit. The extra support had saved my ankle and kept me from losing my boots mid-fall.

  I inspected the rough terrain for any trace of a path but found none. This was truly wild space. I’d spent time in Cornwall as a child. The rugged, southwestern tip of England was a world unto itself and, from the looks of it, had not changed much. In an odd way, the rambling countryside was a welcome sight.

  I picked my way toward the rise and scrambled up the crumbling steps of the ghostly structure. I needed a view of my surroundings. The hilltop was a verdant dream of sap green grasses wreathed in blushing heather. The empty footprint of the dwelling in which I stood was drawn out in stone. One wall still held an archway where horses may have once carried guests into the noble family’s estate. All their merriment and all their disasters were now the stuff of dreams. I passed under the arch and looked out over the drifting land. Uncultivated hills rolled and tumbled in the long shadows of the setting sun. Far in the distance, low-lying wetlands meandered to the sea.

  I looked to the setting sun. There were towns along both of Cornwall’s coasts, but even with my ability to translocate, it would be a long, difficult walk by moonlight.

  “It seems I am the honored guest tonight,” I addressed the stones wearily. I would sleep with the ghosts and tomorrow set a path to find my beloved.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nothing is certain but saints and sorrow.

  Melisande

  I woke to the sound of thunder, and just for a moment I was back in my bed with Grayford dreaming by my side, his soft, steady breath spinning storms to life over the river. I blinked at the violet darkness and remembered where I was. Celene had shown me to a small bedroom to rest up for the upcoming outing. I had meant to rest, not sleep. My vision squirmed with hypnopompic hallucinations.

  Thunder rolled again from deep in the barrel chest of the night. I slipped from my empty bed and padded across the cool, glazed tiles to the open window. My shallow balcony pouted toward the busy streets below as if it envied the constant activity of Barcelona’s winding Gothic corridors.

  The alleys and walkways sizzled and popped with the frantic fizzing of firecrackers. A single flare streaked for the darkness overhead, whining and wailing in protest over its short life. Assumption Day was a fever in the veins of the city. The faces of the revelers below glowed and sparked with revolt. Their eyes shifted under the knowledge of their own short lives. Now is the time to live, the night whispered. Nothing is certain but saints and sorrow, and tomorrow may never come.

  “You cannot sleep?” A shadowy voice threaded through the open door to the bedroom. I didn’t answer. I had no desire to engage my captors again. My skin tingled with a warning as Celene drifted through the doorway. The muscles in my back tensed. Her presence unnerved me, but being near her no longer drenched me in fear.

  I turned and stepped back into the room, putting my back to the balcony. It didn’t feel right to do that either, but I’d rather keep my eye on her than guard against the night. Celene wore a translucent top with dark iridescent gems strategically woven into the gossamer fabric. The curves of her high, martini-glass breasts were fully visible. For the moment, her nipples were still a mystery to be solved. I tried not to look, but it was like standing in front of a Bernini sculpture and trying not to notice the perfection of every alabaster slope and angle.

  “Ahhh,” she purred. “You like my choice?” She traced a finger over the shimmery, close-fitting blouse that rippled to a stop at the bottom of her rib cage. It left only a strip of bare, creamy flesh peeking above the high cummerbund waistband of her glittery black tights.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Melisande.” Her tongue danced across my name. “There is nothing to do but surrender to the Feast Days.” Celene looked me up and down. “Let me dress you. You will come with us to celebrate the Assumption, and then we will talk business.” She gestured to the streets below and the lifeblood of people that pumped through the city’s arteries. “The evening awaits. Now, take this off,” she ordered, grabbing the bottom of the shirt she’d dressed me in only a few hours before. I pulled away from her and a seam ripped. Celene glared at me. The poisonous expression melted almost immediately into a look of exasperation. “You can hide here in the shadows, or you can come with me.” She spun and her carotid-red hair fanned out around her. “I will draw you a bath. You will feel much better once you are clean and fresh.” With that, she swept through the doorway and disappeared from sight.

  ****

  I stepped behind a changing screen in the immense bathing room and surrendered my clothes the moment I saw the bath. The bubbling pool of warmth was level to the floor and large enough for six—maybe eight—people. The circular room was obviously built around the giant hot tub and tiled all the way to the copper-stamped ceiling with deep indigo majolica patterns.

  I peeked around the screen and thrust my hand out. The lascivious look slid from Celene’s face as she handed me the fluffy white towel.

  “Really, Melisande.” She rolled the R for longer than necessary. “You must abandon your puritanical American roots and embrace your feminine beauty.” She waited as I stepped from behind the screen fully swaddled in puffy terry cloth. I wasn’t the prude she clearly thought I was, but I didn’t give the milk away for free either. Disappointment dripped from her words. “If I teach you nothing else, I will teach you how to properly appreciate that.” She pointed at me, dragging her finger up and down. It suddenly felt like the towel I wore was as translucent as her top.

  My mind flashed to my bathroom back home when Josh had barged in. I’d stepped from my shower completely naked and in full view of the rest of the Ghost Town Investigations team. I wasn’t at all ashamed of what was under the terry cloth. I gripped the towel to tear it off, but something stopped me. I didn’t mind a little attention from a woman, but this particular woman was the wrong type to toy with. The aura of danger clinging to her skin was a definite buzzkill.

  “Enjoy.” She smiled, but her saccharine tone didn’t match the iron in her eyes. I stood perfectly still, clutching the towel long after she’d left the room. Something whispered to my hindbrain where all of humanity’s deepest fears are kept. The quiet message trickled over my skin like a near miss, a close call, a fatal step not taken. I’d just avoided something, but I didn’t know what.

  Finally, the whispering stopped. I took the towel off and stepped into the water.

  ****

  By the time I’d finished in the bathroom, Mephos and Bertrand had wandered up from the courtyard. I was actually relieved to see them lounging in the leather seats at the far end of the second-floor parlor. It meant I was no longer alone with Celene.

  The ambient Spanish club music that muttered hypnotically in the str
eets of Barcelona had picked up tempo. Its rhythmic invitation piped through the open windows and thrummed through my chest.

  Outside, the distant explosions I first mistook for thunder were growing closer and louder. Something sharp popped just outside the windows, and light flashed through the dimly lit room. I jumped, and a thin wave of cataplexy rolled down my arms and legs. My head sagged, and I drooped into an obliging armless chair next to me. I hoped the movement seemed intentional like a pouting flounce. The last thing I needed was for my captors to figure out the problem with my startle response. I had the feeling sharing a weakness would be like chumming the water around this crowd. The less they knew about my narcolepsy the better.

  “Come, come,” Celene ordered and tugged on the shoulder of the robe I’d found in the bathroom. I did my best to comply. Thankfully, the robe hid the way my knees braced together to hold my weight as I stood. I kept my head tilted until I had control of my jaw again and put one foot in front of the other.

  Celene led me across the hall to a brightly lit room. A sleek, reclined chair sat in the middle of the whitewashed room surrounded by silver dish lamps, reflector umbrellas, and a big, round diffuser shield on a tall tripod.

  “Is this a photo shoot?” I framed it as a casual question, but it was really a desperate prayer to the porn gods. Please don’t let me end up in some triple-X home movie, or worse—a snuff film. I wouldn’t put it past my shifty hosts.

  Celene pointed to the chair and rolled a large utility box with a collection of shelves from a corner, parking it next to the chair. I took a seat and marveled at row after row of eyeshadows, blushes, and lipsticks. Spritzers, powders, and creamy foundations in every skin tone packed the shelves. Sleek paintbrushes, puffy dusting brushes, and everything in-between hung from individual holes in a protruding acrylic panel. It was either an impressive makeup studio or a corpse prep room. Maybe both.

  “Lean back.” She smiled and sparks of ruby glitter flashed along her bottom lip. She’d decorated her sweeping eyelids with a dramatic sunset of colors. Each tone blended flawlessly into the next. Her naturally long lashes swept over her aqua eyes in an enchanting fan of indigo. At this intimate distance, I could count the delicate freckles playing across the tops of her cheeks. Their arrangement seemed artful and intentional. I followed the constellation of pigment until it vanished in a barely noticeable dusting of blush along the curve of her face.

  “You’re an artist.”

  Celene’s hand swept to her heart and what looked like a genuine expression of humble gratitude graced her perfect features. It was a brief window opened onto what might have been a real person, and then the predator façade slammed it shut.

  “Thank you.” She offered a demure look. “And you are the perfect canvas.”

  I did my best to relax my shoulders, but the urge to protect my neck overwhelmed me. Celene tipped my chair back, and the restful pose triggered my ever-present need for sleep.

  “Close your eyes,” she instructed, but with a sleep latency of thirty seconds, I’d be in REM stage before the base coat was even applied. She selected a thin brush and dabbed its angled tip against a cake of pearly power. With the brush held loosely between her fingers, she turned back to me and scowled. I gave her one last wary look, then closed my eyes.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three, and I was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  One was always polite to the Fey.

  Grayford

  Something woke me. A light touch. A sigh. I couldn’t be sure. Sleep was an awkward thing filled with gibbering thoughts, anxious concerns…and her. It had taken weeks for me to teach my brain to stay asleep for more than an hour. And always, when I woke, I’d had the reward of seeing Melisande’s heavenly face on the pillow next to me.

  The late summer night on the moor was cold, and the wind blew ceaselessly. I’d found a windbreak in the ruins where the remains of two walls met. I’d collected enough brush to keep the dew from settling on me in the night and had curled beneath the brittle nest.

  I listened for the sound to come again, but all that met my ears was the quiet chatter of insects, the distant call of an owl, and the gusting wind. I closed my eyes and groped inside my mind for the thin cord which had once bound Melisande to me. That connection had held a world of riches. The memory of her gentle essence coiled inside me. She’d been so tentative at first, afraid that she was intruding inside my mind. But then I’d made a place for her, a soft, pliable place where I kept the parts of me that were most presentable. After that, she’d grown more confident, more willing to make herself at home amongst my quiet reflections.

  No matter the joy I took from our shared contemplations, having Melisande’s velvet thoughts in my mind inevitably led to the same place—the red room of desire. I couldn’t help it. Her touch breathed life into me. It molded me, devoured me, owned me. We should have been more careful with what we’d shared. I should not have been allowed to ponder the pulsing rhythm of her yearning. It was a hungry tide that so easily swept me away.

  In turn, she should have trod lightly in the halls of my manhood. It was not for a woman to meditate on the dark drives of men. We’d lost ourselves to the alien sensations, and now I feared we were addicted to that endless wellspring of indulgence.

  Just the thought of her set my body trembling. I needed to find her and know that she was safe, but I also needed her back so that she might mend the wound of her removal from my desperate, tangled mind.

  “Are ye alive?” A voice creaked from the curtain of night around me.

  “Who goes there?” I reached for my missing sword. “Show yourself.”

  “Pardon me, sir, but are ye dead?”

  The disembodied voice seemed nonthreatening, but Cornwall was the land of Spriggans, and I was currently lying in a stone ruin which was their known haunt.

  I pushed from my warren of scrub and placed my back to the corner of stone.

  “Who addresses me?”

  “It’s a simple question—are ye alive or are ye dead?”

  It was a simple question without a simple answer.

  “I am afraid I cannot say,” I offered honestly. I relaxed my defensive stance and peered into the drifting night. A pair of small, yellowy eyes stared back.

  “Are ye the one that fell from the sky?”

  “Yes…I suppose so.”

  “He supposes,” the voice chuckled. “It seems a thing of which a lad would be certain. Either ye fell from the sky or ye did naught. Either ye’re alive or ye are naught.”

  I rubbed my face and took a calming breath.

  “Yes, I fell, and I am as alive as the Good Lord wills. That is all I can say.”

  “The Good Lord? Are ye a Christian, then?” The rusty voice squeaked. I knew there were creatures in the Cornish countryside that pre-dated the Christians and the Celts and even the Neolithic settlers that once worshipped them as deities.

  “I’ll take yer silence as affirmation.”

  With a hand at the ready, I leaned closer to the pair of unblinking eyes.

  “What are you?” I returned the question.

  “I’m too old for fancies like faith. That’s what I am.”

  I smiled at that. I knew the eroding effect of which he spoke.

  “Age robs the mind of constructs like religion. It is possible to outlive any belief system, given enough years.”

  The yellow eyes regarded me.

  “Ye’re naught wrong about that.” A sharp rasp and a brilliant spark of light illuminated a squat little figure with a face that was much wider than it was long. His small body could be measured in inches rather than meters. The tiny match he’d struck curved into the end of a pipe, and a warm cherry-red glow crackled to life. The miniature man sucked on the pipe once, twice, three times, and the orange glow of it lit his smooth, protruding cheeks. Fey.

  “So, what brings ye to my piece of the moor, Sky Man?”

  “Colonel William Grayford,” I offered, but did not put out
my hand. Our difference in size was awkward to say the least, and from what I understood, touching the fey was not always a good idea. Giving them your full name was not a bright idea either, but I was a visitor in his land, and one was always polite to the fey.

  “Colonel.” He nodded, but offered no name in reply.

  In response to his question, I offered, “My lady friend was abducted and taken to a place referred to as the Second Gate. I believe it to be a portal to—”

  “Are ye druid-kind?” the little man barked. He leapt over the pile of stones behind him and snuffed out his pipe. I wasn’t sure which shocked me more, his abruptness or his agility. The tufts of hair escaping the edges of his pointed red hat were as gray as iron. There were rumors and myths about how the fey aged so I couldn’t be sure of his years, but he didn’t speak like a young man.

  “I am not.” I waved a placating hand before me. “I assure you.”

  “Ye speak of gates. Those are in-between places. That’s the business of druids.”

  My heart stirred and began to knock on my ribs with renewed hope.

  “These druids, do they have a gate to another dimension?”

  “Aye. They do.” The fey lowered his voice and peered into the darkness around us. Slowly, he climbed back over the stones and took a seat.

  “Where can I find them?” My breath sprinted after my speeding heart.

  “That is naught a sort ye want to find. Trust me.”

  “They may have my woman,” I explained in the crudest of terms, for she was my woman. She belonged to me as I belonged to her. She was my equal and my possession at the same time. No man would know her but me.

  An image of Melisande entered my mind. Her face creased with fear. The wound inside me gaped wide. I’d kill the man named Rasmus. I’d kill anyone who thought to harm her. Pressure bloomed in my chest.

  “Then, I am sorry for her. Dark deeds—that is what the druids are about.” He struck another match and lit his pipe again. “If they have her…” The petite man’s brow crumpled.