Valkyrie Chronicles 4 & 5 Bundle

by Erik Schubach

  I pulled my cell out of my pack, plugged in the headphones and cued up my running playlist and slipped the cell back into the pack and zipped it up most of the way. I leaned against the wall and started doing a little stretching. I glanced over and saw Mrs. Kim coming out and starting to pull the security gate aside in preparation to open the store.

  I gave her a smile and a nod. She smiled back and threw an apple to me. I caught it and nodded again. The old lady just grinned and started pulling the fruits and vegetable carts to the sidewalk. I dropped some change on one of the carts she pulled out as I took a big bite of the sweet apple. Then I started at a slow jog as I ate my breakfast. I know you aren't supposed to eat and run, so sue me.

  Once I finished the apple and tossed the core into a trash can on a corner a couple blocks away, I cranked the music and kicked up my pace to a run, and turned my eyes toward the suspension bridge two miles away.

  As a little girl, the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge always looked like something from a fairytale, with its two great stone towers. I had always seen lights flashing from it and the other bridges. Hearing sounds of violent clashes and roaring of great beasts at them at night, that was the first warning signs about my... umm... condition. My parents, back then, said I just had a vivid imagination.

  I picked up my pace to just shy of a sprint at the poison memories.

  The city was starting to wake up from its short slumber, the languid hours between two and seven in the morning are when the city sleeps. More and more people started emerging to start their days as I weaved my way through the streets.

  I swear I felt the ground shake and terrible screeching roar come from the bridge as I ran. I knew it wasn't real so I just ignored it. I crossed the street as I came up to a man who's shadow loomed like a horned beast. He was always out early sweeping his walk or tending the flowers on his stoop.

  Ever since puberty hit, I have been seeing the shadows. Not on everyone, only one or two people a day would have shadows that contradicted their appearance. Those shadows were what made my childhood a living nightmare. Maybe one out of every thousand or so people had one.

  I had made the mistake of telling my parents about the things I was starting to see, they at first wrote it off as more of my imagined fantasies. Until one time we were at a company picnic at my father's boss' house. It was the first time I had ever met my father's boss and when he walked up to us, I felt a wave of malice and something corrupt, rolling off of him. His shadow was inhuman and the gaping maw on it seemed to be twisted in a cruel grin. I had started screaming.

  That's when the endless streams of shrinks started in my life after I had 'embarrassed' my father. Shrinks and drugs that had me feeling half alive, just going through the paces and not really living. I had a break when we had changed psychiatrists and the man had an almost burning shadow that looked vaguely like a Minotaur. I had freaked out again.

  He seemed a little nervous when he and my parents got me to tell them why I freaked out. He was quick to diagnose me with paranoid schizophrenia and said I was having vivid hallucinations. The drugs he put me on made the others seem like candy. I hated my life then, it seemed like all my emotions and my personality were locked away behind a cage. Then to top it all off, they put me in a cage, well, the mental hospital, with the other crazy people.

  When I was sixteen my doctor skipped town without a word one day, just disappeared without a trace, and I was assigned a different shrink. This one put me on a more mild anti-psychotic, and I started to feel slightly human again and could think a little. I realized that as long as I insisted that I could occasionally see these altered shadows, they would keep me in there. So I came up a solution... I lied. I got really good at lying there.

  I convinced them that I couldn't see the shadows anymore. Over time I had convinced everyone, and the doctor said it was most likely my brain chemistry stabilizing after an imbalance caused by puberty. What a load of horseshit. I was finally released to go back home. I just pretended to take my medication every day and over the next few months when I was actually flushing it down the toilet, my head cleared and I felt human again, though I admit I am easy to piss off now. I harbor so much anger for what I feel is the unjustified loss of my childhood.

  My parents treated me like a freak and were timid around me, almost like if they said the wrong thing I'd go insane again, or break like a porcelain doll. They saw me as their embarrassment and a burden on their lives.

  I still saw the shadows, I just learned not to react to them, or the sounds of battle every night coming from the bridges. Then the day I became an adult, I left and never looked back. My only friend from school that never joined in on the taunting and teasing of the 'nutcase', Kyla, and her parents, took me in until I got a job in a warehouse a few weeks later and could afford my little apartment above the corner store.

  I just ran and let the endorphin rush push me as I went. There was a huge blue flash in the sky over the bridge and another inhuman roar as I rounded onto the approach to the bridge. I ignored it all, it wasn't real.

  I was almost at the midpoint of the bridge when I saw it happen. There was a tall man in black leather, a rugged forty or so, at maybe six foot two, holding back another, much larger, man in a dark trenchcoat. I blinked at it, they were obviously locked in mortal combat, but the size difference made the smaller man holding back the brute that much more impressive.

  I stopped a short distance from them and I ignored the fact that the smaller man didn't seem to have a shadow, it just sort of melted into the shadows of the bridge in the twilight, under the harsh streetlights. The other man had a huge nightmare for a shadow, a swirling seething, inhuman mass that looked like a vengeful spirit, a wraith, or a grim reaper. They broke apart and started exchanging blows that were actually sending tremors through the bridge. The smaller man looked so tired but was holding his own.

  The cars were just driving by as the two fought in the middle of the bridge like they didn't see what was transpiring, or honking their horns at the men. I had just decided to call the police when the sinister shadow swung at the man, it looked like a large shadow blade sunk through the smaller man. “Hellstones and fire!” I blurted.

  The man screamed in pain and dropped to his knees, there was real blood staining his shirt... from the shadow? Even then, he grappled with the larger man and wouldn't let go of him. Then he turned his eyes up to the brute and a cold smile came to his lips and blood bubbled on his lips as he said, “It's too late Veldshee, sunrise is here.”

  The larger man bellowed in rage and started plunging the shadow blade into the man over and over. Shit! I squeezed through the barrier between the pedestrian walkway and the motor vehicle lanes and ran at them, almost getting hit by a van and I leapt up and kicked the big man in the chest. He only stumbled back a half step and sneered at me. I saw that shadow blade raising to strike toward me when the first rays of sun peeked over the horizon.

  The man looked back at it and uttered a curse and ran toward the Kentucky side of the bridge. He made a cutting motion with his hand and then simply vanished through a shadow in the air. I blinked twice then realized where I was as a car sped past, honking its horn.

  I grabbed the injured man under the arms and dragged him the the side by the gap in the barrier I had used before, near the blue painted steel girders. He was losing a lot of blood and I pulled off my hooded top and pressed it firmly against the wounds. I looked back to where the man had disappeared as I dialed 911.

  I looked at the muscular man on the ground beside me and asked, “What the hell was that thing? His shadow... it was...”

  He looked up at me in apparent shock. “You saw? You're Shadow-Kin?”

  I looked at him in confusion, “What are you talking about?” He must have been delirious.

  Then I heard someone on my cell repeating, “911, please state your emergency.”

  I blurted out, “A man has been stabbed on the Roebling, he's losing a lot of blood.” They got some i
nformation from me as I cradled the man's head in my lap as I held my sweat-top against his chest.

  I hung up and then the man coughed up some blood and looked up at me. “What's your name?” he croaked out.

  I looked at him, “It's Evangeline Kane, everyone just calls me Kane. Don't talk, help is on the way.” I heard sirens approaching in the distance

  He looked almost sadly at me and said in a wheeze, “Evangeline, I'm Kellen, Troll of this bridge. I'm really sorry about this, but I'm dying and we need to do the transfer. There's no time to get a True-Born.”

  I looked at him in confusion as one of his hands shot out to the metal of the bridge and the other grabbed my wrist. He had a grip of steel, I blinked as I realized that his hand was now really made of blue painted steel and my skin seemed to be becoming metal as well where we touched. The steel slowly crawled up my arm. I tried to pull away in panic, but it was impossible. Soon I felt the metal encasing my whole body as I thrashed, trying to pull away, but then the metal was simply gone.

  He and I were flesh and blood again, but... he now had a real shadow and mine was gone, blending with the shadow of the bridge. His hand dropped from mine and he said in a fading voice, “The bridge is yours now Evangeline, protect her well.” Then he seemed to exhale as the spark of life left his eyes.

  I just sat there crying for this man who I didn't know, that had died in my arms as the ambulance, police, and fire engines arrived. I just stared at my arm where he had grabbed me.