Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  Concentrating on the Shift, the great beating heart filled me up as I closed my eyes and followed the strongest book thread that seemed to be connected to a spot right between my eyes. I didn’t think it was coincidental that one of the chakras, sometimes called the third eye, was located there.

  We drifted through layers of reality, passing through cities with what appeared to be clay huts with straw roofs, another with odd glass buildings glinting in the sunlight, octagonal in shape and emitting a strange red light.

  The sensations of travel were different this time. Every time before, it had felt as if my will, for lack of a better description, propelled me through the layers. Now, it seemed as if something tugged me along headfirst by a thread at a hundred miles an hour. Hopefully there wasn’t someone on the other end of it, like Baku.

  Once city lights and traffic sounds lit up my senses, letting me know we neared the true reality, I resisted the pull and slowed us to a stop one layer above the world I’d grown up in. Not that I could remember where I’d lived because of the black holes that Asher had burned into my memory. Since he often called me a redneck, I had to assume it was in the country somewhere.

  My face burned with the cold. “I can’t pinpoint where the page is, so we’re going to get out of the Shift before I can get an exact location.”

  “Don’t break through the last layer yet.” He snatched his hand back and stuffed it into his pocket again. Why was he doing that so much lately? Probably wiping me off. Ass.

  Nasty sewer smell, exhaust, honking cars, a sea of yellow cabs. New York again. Awesome. Why couldn’t we go hunting somewhere that had more trees than concrete? Or in Hawaii?

  “Why not?” I clamped my teeth together, so they wouldn’t chatter.

  “Have a feel around; see what’s lurking. Know the waters before you jump in headfirst, so you don’t end up smashed against the rocks. First rule of staying alive.” He hunched his shoulders as if trying to ward off his own shivering. “Izan said Baku will try to convince you to do something for him, so we have to assume he’ll be looking for you.”

  Oh, balls. I hadn’t even thought about that. Instead of only having to find the pieces, we had to navigate around a dead dragon mantis, too. Fantastic.

  I opened my inner senses to the Shift. Shivering, I searched for spots of ice among the Arctic cold that seemed to be everywhere. And found exactly squat. “How are we supposed to find anything in this dimensional blizzard? Is that Izan’s doing, or Baku’s? What is it that someone doesn’t want us to see them doing?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know, but if it’s this cold in the Shift, it means the veil is probably getting thinner, exposing us to the wraiths’ frozen reality. We’re vulnerable, since we’re completely blind to them coming through.”

  The wraiths had to open the rift through every layer of false reality before they could make it to ours. That disturbance in the Shift, according to one of the few Machine bible pages that seemed to be true, was what hit our senses, so a mental alarm would be tripped when a wraith came through. I’d never seen a wraith within the Shift in its natural form or in a body. Maybe because the Shift usually had no people it could possess.

  “You find the page,” he continued, “and I’ll watch your back.” He spun me around to face him and pointed his inner crocodile at me. “You will do what I tell you, when I tell you.”

  “I’m not an idiot. Stop bossing me around.” I wiped off my scowl when those jade-star eyes locked with mine for only a second, but they struck me deeper than normal. They were so incredibly open and clear. I had a sense of exhilaration and vertigo, as if I could fall into them and drown. “Hey, are your eyes brighter than they were before?”

  “Can you focus, please?” He grabbed my arm, and we emerged in a sunken stairway in the true reality beside a brown brick high-rise backlit by light pollution. The stench tripled in intensity. Gak, it took a whole lot of swallowing to keep my pond-scum shake from painting my shoes green.

  “Is that why you won’t look at me, because something has changed in you, too?” Squinting, I stared at his profile. He didn’t have the white eyes of the wraith-possessed, but the Machine’s book of knowledge said a sentinel’s pupils wouldn’t disappear when we were infected by a wraith. “Oh, crap. Please tell me you don’t have a dead bugman in you.”

  “No, I don’t have a wraith in me. Now shut up and find the page, so we can find your mom.”

  Definitely sounded like him, and who would know if the guy had a wraith, since his mood often shifted so violently from one extreme to the other. A little feel of him with my energy didn’t turn up any cold spots in my gut, so I trusted that the only guest in the Asher Inn was himself. Which left my original question unanswered. Maybe all of the guardians were changing now that they had an Architect again? I couldn’t believe I had that much influence on anybody, but stranger things had happened.

  We climbed the stairs and emerged onto a lamplit street. Glancing left and right, he asked, “Which way?”

  The thread tugged me right, so I followed it, marching past a Comfort Inn and a sign that said West Seventy-First Street.

  “Are you sure?” He rushed to keep up with me.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because something is literally pulling me to it. I think if I tried to go the other way, I’d crumple in a heap with the pain.” I rubbed my forehead, almost certain I’d find evidence of a physical cord even though there wasn’t one. To say it was unpleasant was an understatement.

  “And you’re sure it’s a page and not a wraith?”

  “Dammit, Asher, what do you want me to say? It has that same sense of home all of my mom’s stuff has. Which I don’t understand, by the way, since I have no memories of her. Have I snatched up a tasty piece of bait, and a dragon mantis is now reeling me in? How the hell should I know? It’s not like I got a manual for these stupid senses of mine.”

  The street ended, and I took us left onto Central Park West. The tugging took over reason, and I launched into a full-out run, ignoring him shouting behind me. I maneuvered around the few cars on the street, raced through intersections without waiting for the lights to change. Horns honked. Tires screeched. I tensed for blows that never came.

  The pull changed in an instant. I stopped dead on the sidewalk, panting and hot in the summer night air, and turned toward the page that called my every cell. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

  Asher drew up beside me. “What wrong?”

  I pointed up at the giant stone building with stairs leading up between the pillars. “That’s the American Museum of Natural History.”

  He raised a brow, checked out the building, stared at me again. “The suspense is killing me, Plaid. I still don’t get what’s wrong.”

  “Tell me why you call me that, and then stop doing it.” I kept my face pointed toward that thread of enticement beckoning me toward the giant horse statue and the stairs behind it. “Why do plaid shirts make me go all gooey inside? I know I was wearing one when you brought me to the facility.”

  “Because you grew up a country girl and find some sort of sappy sentiment in bumpkin clothing.” He flashed a condescending smile. “I find it strangely amusing. Now, is the page in there or not?”

  “I find it strangely amusing,” I echoed, mocking his aren’t-I-so-funny tone. Not. “And yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s in there. What do we do now?”

  He returned to full hunting mode, darting glances at everything that moved, which wasn’t much at the late hour. “We go inside, find whatever object the page is hidden in, and zip out through the Shift with it. Simple.”

  What? “How is that simple? I’m not breaking into a freakin’ museum and walking off with their stuff. That’s stealing.”

  He shot me an oh-my-God-you-are-such-a-goody-goody look. “Well then, oh moral one, what would you suggest we do? Waltz in there and offer to buy it with the change in our pockets? It isn’t a department store. Even if we could scr
ounge up enough cash to buy whatever it is, where do you think our money comes from? The Machine certainly doesn’t have a bank account or any sources of income.”

  A young couple ambled toward us, so I held my verbal hurricane until they passed by. “Are you saying everything we have that Izan doesn’t make is bought with stolen money? The guns? Sophia’s material? The food?”

  “We only take from those we cleanse.” He looked away at the last.

  Murder, he meant. The guardians used to kill people they couldn’t pull the wraiths out of, the only surefire way to destroy a bugman before I’d shown them another. As that thought percolated, I slowly clenched my fists. “A victimless crime, right? They were already dead, and, after all, they can’t take it with them. You can’t even look me in the eye while you say that, so don’t try to pass that off as okay.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was okay,” he snarled, “and I have a job in which my entire income goes to the Machine. We do what we have to. End of story. It’s a small price for humanity to pay in exchange for their survival.”

  “You do? What is it?” The needles in my brain stopped me from searching for the answer myself.

  “I teach anthropology at a university in Ontario.”

  “Is that how we met? At that university?” Excitement filled me with jumping beans at the aha moment I seemed to be having. “Is that how I met Kyle? Because I’m sure I know him somehow.”

  He seemed to have grown a steel rod for a spine. Coming so close his eyes were all I could see, he said, “Stop digging around in the past, and concentrate on this task.”

  “How can you be so nice one second and such a jerk the next? God, I hope we run into this guy you say I’m going to fall in love with here in New York, because this is the last time I’m going anywhere with you. And since you steal from your victims, and there won’t be any more victims now that we can pull wraiths out without killing the hosts, you’re either going to have to get everyone a job, or we’re going to have to start begging for scraps on the street.”

  His lips parted, and his demonic expression suggested he was thinking of arguing, but he shrugged. “You’re the Architect. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  Still fuming, I considered our options. We didn’t have money to buy whatever artifact contained the page, even if the museum had been open and curators were willing to sell a priceless object. They wouldn’t give it to us, since they didn’t know us from Adam’s elbow, and we couldn’t very well tell them who we were and why we needed it. Hell, I wasn’t even sure why we needed the pages, only that we did. We were out of time for my moral compass to find north.

  After minutes of brain-melting thought, I kept coming back to Asher’s smash-and-grab solution. “Fine, we’ll steal it. If we can get the page out without destroying the thing, then we’ll give the object back.”

  His smile turned smug. “Shall we go, then?”

  Growling low in my throat, I marched along the sidewalk. “I don’t like this slippery road you have me on, Asher. You’re turning me into a criminal.”

  A quiet sound drew my gaze over my shoulder. He appeared to have swallowed a tarantula, his lips contorting into a grimace and lids falling low over his eyes.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked. Ohhhh, crap. He’d once been a hit man for the mob back in the 1930s before Izan snatched him up for the Machine. Yeah, way to stir up his shit, Addy. Wait, why hadn’t he wiped that out of my head along with the rest of my past? He hated that I’d seen him at his worst the first time I’d gone into his head. I didn’t think it was the time to poke that rattlesnake.

  “Stop wasting my time, and take us to whatever led you here,” he barked.

  Crap.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “If you’d put half as much energy into your job as you do looking for ghosts, you’d have the Machine running by now.” He sped up and passed me.

  I nodded, feeling like a giant asshole despite his latest insult. This was going to make my crappiest nights of all-time list, I just knew it.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Asher turned right at the edge of the building, I plodded along behind. To slip into the Shift, we needed privacy, so I assumed he was looking for cover.

  I hated that I’d inadvertently brought up his past and accused him of dragging me into a life of crime. Still, nobody else ever made me feel like such a pile of poo, not even Kat or the Colonel. Asher had a special talent that way.

  “If my senses are so intent on the pages, then I must need them to defeat Baku,” I said. “But if they were so important, why would Izan or Mom or whoever have hidden them all over the place? Why not hand them over to me the instant I iced Marcus?”

  “You tell me,” he said. Turning right again when we reached the end of the building, he hugged the wall until it gave way to a little courtyard of sorts. The entire left side of the building had been rigged up with scaffolding, and behind that, plastic covered parts of the construction.

  “Izan said we need to suffer through this to make us stronger, so maybe it’s the journey and not the information on the pages that’s important.”

  “I have no idea. I’ve stopped trying to understand his methods.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid Baku can use the bible against me? I guess there’s no point in speculating, since we have no proof.”

  “Agreed, now shut up.” He slipped into the shadows of the building. Thanks to tree cover, the darkness could have hidden a beluga.

  I wanted to reach out for him as we slid into the inky darkness, as much to comfort him as to chase back my own fears of the dark. The symphony of city sounds drowned out his footsteps. Squinting didn’t help me locate him. “Asher?” I whisper-shouted and then promptly body-slammed his very divinely scented form.

  “Watch it!”

  I stepped back, my skin alive with the brief contact. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “There are external cameras that have probably brought us to the night guard’s notice in the museum, so let’s go up a layer and slip inside before they come looking, hmm?” Why did he sound so winded? I didn’t hit him that hard.

  “Could you be a little more condescending? Because I don’t do subtlety.” Before I could search the side of the building for the cameras and wonder how he’d seen them when I hadn’t, that sleeping-infant touch landed on my arm again. We ascended into the Shift. I let him do the guiding this time, and he maneuvered us so we were positioned directly above the main lobby in the first layer of the Shift where nobody would see us.

  I wasn’t sure why I needed to be in the true reality to pin down the location. It would have been easier if we could have gone directly to the right place in the museum. Something about that thin barrier between the real and the false realities seemed to distort my senses, like light refracted in water.

  Stone and shiny marble made up the vast space that opened up three stories, topped off with a dome ceiling. In the center of the floor, an amazing elephant statue with tusks stretching out three feet sat on top of a stone platform. Another of those echoes hit me right in the chest.

  “Have I been here before?” I asked.

  “Why?” He glanced at me and away again.

  “Because…oh hell, I don’t know. I just got a wicked case of déjà vu when I saw that elephant.” At his silence, frustration rushed out in sharp words. “Telling me whether or not I’ve been here won’t hurt anything. How am I supposed to exist like this when I don’t even know why I like books or the rain or touching soft things? You didn’t have to take everything from me to keep my family safe, whoever they are. Baku got my mom, anyway. I don’t even know my own birthday. How am I supposed to know where to go when I don’t know where I’ve been? This sucks.”

  When a security guard the size of a gorilla wandered through the empty lobby, I realized that, since the museum was closed, they would no doubt have a security system in place to protect the displays. Double shit. It might t
ake me a bit to pinpoint the artifact and get it out of its case, which wouldn’t work with alarms blaring. We also needed tools. Tools and time, and they wouldn’t be easy to come by.

  Remembering the little Houdini Iris slipping into locked doors at the facility, I smiled. No, I didn’t need tools, but a person who knew how to B&E. And if Kyle could set up security systems like he said he could back in the wardrobe room, maybe he could also disarm them? I knew I needed Kyle and Iris for something. Kind of creepy when my instincts knew things before I did.

  Asher continued to ignore me, as if I hadn’t just spilled out my heart to him.

  “Lovely conversation as always,” I said, “but I’m going to get Iris and Kyle.”

  I called the Shift, but before it answered, he grabbed my arm. “Why Kyle?”

  Squinting, I stared at his hand on my biceps. I stared at his demon expression. He let me go. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  Huh. That was the second time he’d apologized to me. Shocking. “Because he might be able to disarm the security systems.”

  He stared at his zillion-dollar loafers. “I don’t care if he holds the secrets of the universe, you’re not going anywhere without me.”

  A grin tried to arch my lips at his protectiveness, but I forced them flat, reminding myself that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with keeping the Machine’s Architect from doing something stupid. “Why did you ask about Kyle and not Iris? I’d say you were jealous, but this is you we’re talking about, and I rate about as high as a slug on your romance scale.”

  He squinted at me. I’d confused him, great. “Because he’s a potential threat, and she isn’t.”

  “A threat to what? He’s a redheaded, freckled boy next door, as harmless as they come.”

  “I don’t want him involved with you—with this. Let’s just get Iris.”

  I laughed. “Clearly you haven’t paid enough attention if you think Iris is safer than Kyle. Whatever your issue is with Kyle, get over it.”

  After digging the silver tin from his pocket, he slathered some balm on his lips. Nervous habit?