A Shiver of Shadows

by Hunter J. Skye

Breathe.

  Blinding, blundering, belligerent secrets.

  Breathe.

  And they lined the walls of the small room. They crowded the makeshift bar and claimed every seat around every table in the hidden tavern. A pungent curtain of smoke threaded through the shadowy space. I’d smelled it before—the thurible the priest waved in my church on high Sundays. It was incense.

  My escort plunged into the maze of tables like she belonged there, but I could feel a tremor in her fingers where she clutched my wrist just below the bracelet. Knotted hands reached for her through the filmy air.

  “A blessing for a drink,” a dry voice offered.

  “No, thank you.” She bowed and trudged forward.

  “Would you like a revelation?” someone whispered to my left. I turned to the speaker and my gaze slid to his lap where he cradled his decapitated head in his hands. My stomach lurched.

  “No, thank you.” I forced a limp smile as reason bled from my mind. I’d seen a decapitated head before at the Ghost Fleet back home, but it wasn’t something one got used to. The raw memory of the hanging judge’s mottled face floated before my eyes on a bloody red mist.

  A discordant din of chimes and chants, prayers, and rollicking laughter wove through the candlelit room. Some of the figures had halos. Others had bleeding hands, bleeding feet, bleeding holes in their sides that trickled to the floor and mixed with the spilled wine and overturned ale. They gestured and laughed. They cried and crossed themselves. Some tossed dice and shuffled cards, while others performed miracles. Bread turned to flowers. Water turned to beer.

  My guide pulled me along the slick floor, but with each step, my feet slowed until finally I was mired in place. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. Agony and ecstasy tossed across their faces, crashing together like a storm-churned sea. My body quaked as my gaze skimmed over them. Their eyes swam with all the sins and all the salvation anyone would ever need. They were the best humanity could produce, and they were tortured for it.

  When my feet stopped moving, my companion turned to me. The look hanging from her face said she’d feared this would happen.

  “Just keep moving,” she instructed, but there was no way forward for me. Cataplexy swept through my muscles, and I went down. I crashed to a floor I should have never laid foot on. No human should have access to that place. I couldn’t read the weeping symbols on the door, but I knew what they said. They were a warning and an invitation at the same time. They said enter if your faith be true. Clearly, mine was not up to par, because the proximity of so much holiness was pulling my mind apart. How could I commune with something that, in some ways, still felt like a fairytale to me?

  “We can’t stay here,” she was saying, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. My diaphragm had frozen beneath my lungs. I thought to pray, but I didn’t dare. Not with a room full of drunken saints bending over me.

  A hush flowed through the chiming, chanting, begging cacophony, and a bell of silence rung through the room. The young woman’s fingers slipped from my wrist, and my hand fell to the floor. A soft light carried on the backs of a hundred doves flooded the space around me. Its feathery touch tickled across my skin. If I could have drawn breath, I would have laughed and laughed until the world fell down around me.

  Instead, I floated up from the wet and reeking floor. My body hovered as light as a leaf in the space between two tables. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized what a burden gravity was. My arms found their place by my sides. My bare toes brushed across the slippery floor. I was standing but not of my own volition. My eyes were seeing, but my mind hovered somewhere cloudy and safe as I looked into the eyes of the young, bearded man towering over me. He was beautiful and sad and holding a ball of glowing hope in his hand. I smiled as tears slid down my face.

  He was the one I sought whenever I was lost. He called to me when I was at the end of my strength, my belief, my dreams. He was the Saint of Lost Causes, and he’d come to me…at last. St. Jude stood before me, every bit the miracle he was, and the exquisite pain of his presence wrapped around me.

  “Melisande. My wandering child.” His voice fell over me in a blanket of blind faith. “You never cease to amaze.” His smile was the saddest music my heart had ever heard. “You know I am with you always.” He drifted closer and closer yet never seemed to draw near. “I think you also know there are some prayers I can answer and some I cannot.” The truth of it pierced me like a spear.

  I wanted to speak, but I had no idea where my words had gone. I wanted to throw my arms around him. I wanted to ask him why God had made me like this. I wanted to cry, beg, show him my gratitude. But it wasn’t necessary. He saw it all in my eyes.

  He leaned forward from an impossible height, and I closed my eyes against the glowing ring circling his head. Lips brushed my forehead, and my skin sang with pins and needles. Gravity gently returned and my weight settled. I opened my eyes, and he was gone. I should have burned with loss, but I didn’t. My forehead tingled with a kiss I knew had always been there. I’d been blessed long ago and never realized.

  The Saint of Lost Causes was with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Spirit in the Hedgerow

  Grayford

  The satin-slick rocks of the underground spring shifted and rolled to fit my torso as the Maiden pulled me through the biting cold water. Panic pulsed its red warning through my veins. The fey were tricksters at best, and murderers at worst. Had my guide across the moors led me here as a gift for a hungry naiad?

  My lungs burned for air as her velvet body pumped from side to side like a giant fish. Her steely grip on my arms loosened as light stabbed my eyes. I broke the surface of the water in a thrashing gasp for air. The spring’s depths were different from the ocean. The sea was a forgiving captor. Its salty embrace was easily slipped. Fresh water, however, allowed no buoyancy. The air in one’s lungs was not a ticket to the surface. Had the Maiden not pulled me with her, I would have surely drowned in the squeezing rocks.

  The striated stone of the cavern I’d emerged in pressed low above my head. The dome was broken in spots, allowing shafts of light to illuminate the chamber. I swam toward a spur of rock that jutted from the clear water. My movements shattered the sparkling stillness. The slick stone offered little purchase. My boots slipped as I struggled onto the smooth rock.

  Coiling scales coursed past me in a flash of iridescence, and the underworld came alive with rippling fins and flashing eyes. I’d seen a great many things in my days on earth and even more in the days after. But the riot of writhing bodies beneath the lake’s surface was a horrid marvel I could have never imagined.

  Hands grazed my legs from beneath the troubled surface. Tongues breached the water in frantic forks. The watery-eyed elementals slithered to and fro as if angling for a better view of me. Sharp, high-pitched calls rang through the air as mouths escaped the chilled water. Bosoms bucked and rolled in naked splendor. Arms entwined; fingers grasped. The feminine spirits flashed like fish and wound like snakes.

  I placed a hand over my mouth. The carnal swarm of inhuman beauty threatened to stop my heart. I looked to the nearest break in the roof. Just above me the world was awakening to a day that still made sense, and I was lost to the madness down below.

  A silver-eyed nymph with hair the color of clouds climbed the rocks next to me. Her pale blue tongue flicked the air between us, and her pupils dilated. Water spilled from her trembling lips, and she took a breath.

  “Love?” Her voice wavered. She placed a slippery hand over mine and pried my fingers from the rock. With a pleading look she placed my hand against her cold breast. “You love?”

  Another hand reached for my chest and another for my groin. Fingers tugged at my trousers.

  “No.” My nervous command rang through the cavern. “I cannot.” The fray of fins, and fingers, and gaping mouths circled me in a torrent of temptation. Their wide eyes begged. Their arching bodies beckoned.

  Just as the wriggling, sq
uirming fracas reached a fevered pitch, a whiplash coil of emerald green scales cut through the melee. In a powerful pump of her gleaming tail, the Maiden rose above the sloshing water and clutched the tower of stone to which I clung. The long strands of her viridian hair clung to her pointed breasts. The glimmering veil trailed down her waist and fanned out in the water around her.

  “You reject us?” Her shiny eyes questioned. The petition on her glittering juniper lips was almost irresistible, but there were some delights I could not accept. No matter how tempting, I was for one woman.

  “I am only for her,” I whispered, and the thrashing stopped. I nearly lost my grip as the clutching hands vanished from my limbs. The tangle of bodies slipped their loops and shot away in every direction. Scales flashed in the distance then winked out of sight.

  The Maiden’s eyes pried at my heart. Had I not promised myself to another, I would have collected her in my arms and drowned in the depths of her yearning mouth.

  “I cannot.” I tore my gaze from the painful beauty of the Maiden’s face. “I must reach her.” My words trailed into silence. Somewhere deep in the catacomb of hollowed rock the spring rushed and babbled and dripped.

  “Your heart is true.” Her chartreuse eyes caught a beam of gentle light. “I will grant your wish.”

  She wrapped her arms around me and back we went into the frigid water. A heart-pounding eternity later, we surfaced in the moss-rimmed well. I pulled myself back through the tangle of vines and watercress, into the shallow basin with its trail of lichen green steps leading away. The farmland outside was awake and stirring with pastoral sounds.

  I turned to the Maiden behind me. The powerful nature spirit might not have had an identity beyond that. She was more a force than an individual, a spirit in the hedgerow from a time almost forgotten. But when she smiled at me, it was a close approximation of human kindness.

  “Choose a garment.” She gestured to the tree and the clothing mixed in with the rags. I stepped from the well, and the morning breeze chilled my wet skin. I snatched a faded blue T-shirt from a low-hanging branch and tugged it on. It was a tight fit, but anything was better than trembling bare chested in the frigid loam.

  The Maiden beckoned. Though I was loathe to do it, I stepped back into the glacial water.

  “When I open the well, you will be taken along the ley line known to the druids as St. Michael’s Line. It runs along the bedrock, so bend your knees to—” She seemed to hunt for words. “—absorb the shock.” She turned her palms to face down as if indicating an energy from below. “You will be stopped at the intersection of the Belinus Line. These are contrary forces.” She crossed her arms. “You must step across the Belinus Line and let its energy pass through you.” Her eyes drifted over me again. “It is a…masculine energy.” Her green lips curved into a smile. “Once you have crossed the Spine of Belinus, you will be on the southern path of a trine. Hold tight to your magic.”

  I frowned as the mystifying directions continued.

  “You will come upon the Canterbury Line at the far corner of the trine. Take it quickly, as that well is watched. Move south to the Cathedral.” She fixed me with her glowing gaze and dipped her head as if waiting for my acknowledgment of all she’d said.

  I pushed the dripping hair from my eyes and gave a confused nod.

  “Each well is different and affected by the powers closest to it. Some have been transformed by the Christ energy, while others remain wild.” Her last word held a world of meaning I couldn’t understand. A feral shine flashed in her sap green eyes. “Do not step from a well until you’ve reached your destination, or you will be forced to entreat its denizen spirit.”

  The Maiden turned and seemed to glance at something far away. “A caution.” She turned back to me, and her face had become a tangle of vines. Her eyes were flowers, new and green, and her mouth yawned like a cavern into primordial darkness. “The Canterbury well no longer contributes to the lines. It has been desecrated.” Her voice transformed into breeze and birdsong. “Once there, you cannot return. Canterbury is one way.”

  I fought to my feet as the basin beneath me shook.

  This is a mistake.

  The clear water clouded as its silky sand stirred. The stone of the hill thrummed with power. I bent my knees, and the hand of the world ripped me away.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  That’s the last time I take you to a locals’ bar.

  Melisande

  We stepped into a dimly lit alley, and a door slammed behind us. I turned toward the exit we’d just come through, but it was gone. Instead, a wall of weathered stone rose before me. I brushed my fingers over the pockmarked surface.

  “That’s the last time I take you to a locals’ bar.” My rescuer attempted a joke, but her voice quivered with fear.

  “What—” I tried to formulate a question. “Why were they—” I pointed toward the blank wall.

  “It’s a feast day.” She shrugged. “Saints like to party too.”

  I stared at her. She reached for my hand again, but I yanked it away. I backed up until my feet struck the rough-hewn stone. She held her hands up as though I’d just pulled a gun on her.

  “Just a minute.” I waved my finger at her. “I need a minute.”

  The woman looked up and down the alley and above our heads at the darkened rooftops. Then she casually stepped over to the opposite wall and leaned against it.

  “So, your name is Melisande?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  I nodded.

  “I’m Prim,” she offered. “Primrose Proffit.” She looked down at her manicured nails, then fastened that strange hazel gaze on me again. “You said you were taken from your home. Do you live here?”

  “No.”

  She looked down at my clothes.

  “You sound American, but you don’t look like an American.”

  “I had a makeover.”

  She raised an eyebrow. A tidal wave of words rose inside me then tumbled from my lips.

  “This sickly-looking man with a loud, stammering heartbeat took me from my house in Virginia, and suddenly I was standing at the edge of the Mediterranean. Those…people…won’t let me make a call. They won’t let me out of their sight. I’m trapped.” I pulled at the glittering bracelet again.

  Prim tipped her head sideways as though she were weighing my words for truth. The results took a moment.

  “Rasmus,” she finally said. “Yeah, he’s a barrel of laughs.”

  “Yes! That’s his name.” The fact that she knew him meant I wasn’t hallucinating. This was all actually happening to me. “Is he a…you know…too?”

  “A vampire? No. He is an asshole, though.”

  “If I were to jump in a cab, go to the airport, and board a plane, would I make it home or would he come for me again?”

  “That’s a good question. Rasmus is one of only a few flesh and blood beings who can translocate. That makes him pretty popular with certain groups who eschew the typical forms of travel. Still…” She uncrossed her arms and tapped her fingers on the wall behind her. “Why move you here that way? If I’m to answer you, I need to know why they wanted you here.”

  It was my turn to scrutinize her. What I didn’t know about Primrose Proffit was a lot. What I did know was that she had knowledge that might get me out of this situation. She was familiar with the paranormal side of things. And most importantly, she had a cell phone in her back pocket.

  “The Hell Gate.” I dropped the words like stones. Prim’s shapely brow crinkled, then her entire face slackened.

  “You’re her,” she whispered. “The one that closed the American gate.”

  I shrugged. How was I supposed to respond to that? I’d pushed a terrible creature into a spatial anomaly. I’d released a child’s spirit from an endless nightmare. That had triggered the hell gate in the middle of my hometown to collapse. So, yeah, I’d closed a hell gate.

  “They said they have a hell gate that needs…fine-tuning.” I made
air quotes with my fingers.

  “They want you to adjust a doorway to hell?”

  “I guess. I don’t really know. They said they want my opinion on a new development.”

  “There are rumors that Europe has, not one but, two gates. Did they say where this one is located?” She looked around nervously at the cobblestone alley, as though the ground might open up under our feet and suck us into another dimension.

  “They didn’t really say, but part of the travel plans involved mountains, and they spoke of a Caldron of Cathar.”

  “Cathar?” She locked onto the word. “That’s Southern France or maybe Andorra. They’re talking about the Pyrenees.”

  “The Pyrenees Mountains?”

  “Yes.”

  “They said they were going to invite me this winter, but I got the impression Rasmus had pushed my visit up by a few months. In fact, he…Rasmus said that he was supposed to take me somewhere else, but it would have to wait.” I unloaded the bits and pieces of the earlier conversation that had stuck in my memory. Cataplexy and good old-fashioned shock had probably erased more of that exchange than I could remember.

  “I think the Caldron of Cathar is one of the spa resorts in Andorra. All of those spas are run by vampires. Something about the water up there helps them draw life energy from their guests. The country of Andorra is a haven for them.”

  I could actually feel the blood draining from my face. Europe was becoming less and less appealing by the moment.

  The alleyway filled with our quickening breath.

  “How do you know these things?” I broke the gasping silence. Prim dipped her head.

  “If it’s bad, I know about it,” she whispered.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Prim raised suddenly tired eyes as if our conversation was heading in an exhausting direction for her.

  “I could tell you were in danger because I feed on it.”

  “You feed on danger?”

  She nodded.

  “Like an adrenaline junky?”

  “No.” Her sun-bleached spirals swished as she shook her head. “Like a vulture circling an animal that’s about to die.”