The Book Of Shade (Shadeborn 1)

by Finn, K. C.

  The generation of power was really about spatial awareness, which immediately made Lily lose confidence, as she thought of her repeated failures to join the netball team in high school. She had never netted a ball in her life, making her a self-proclaimed bad judge of space to cover up her failing. Despite this, Novel suggested it was best to start with a focal point rather than just shooting fire into a big blank space, so the old vanishing cabinet became her first victim. Flames were the easiest thing to make, so that was to be her first goal.

  It had been easy enough to accidentally set her own hand burning in the club, but here under the pressure of Novel’s instructions, the power hardly came at all. Lily watched regretfully as tiny puffs of smoke generated at the cabinet’s legs where she aimed her focus, and as more failed attempts passed her by, she began to wonder again if this wasn’t all some hoax after all. Eventually she thumped her thighs with her fists and turned herself out of Novel’s phantom grip.

  “I can’t do it,” she sighed.

  “You’re not focused,” he said, sounding like some horrid impatient schoolmaster from an old movie.

  “I was!” she insisted, stamping her foot. “I was really bloody focused! Are you sure that thing’s not flame retardant?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Novel exclaimed, his mouth contorting into a sneer. “Nothing is flame retardant in the hands of a shade!”

  As his agitation grew, Lily saw tiny blue sparks shooting from his fingertips. The warning from Baptiste flashed across her mind, but she was too annoyed with herself to care and too annoyed with Novel for not helping her enough to calculate any risk.

  “Well maybe that’s the problem!” she said more loudly. “Maybe you’ve got it wrong Monsieur. Maybe I’m not cut out for this after all!”

  It was clear he didn’t care for her tone. “I am never wrong about magic.”

  “Oho really?” Lily shouted. “Well explain to me then why this doesn’t work!”

  She threw her hand back in the direction of the cabinet to punctuate her words, suddenly dropping to the ground as a loud explosion turned her knees weak. Novel crouched beside her, picking her up by her chin so that he could turn her face to see what was left of the cabinet in the corner, now blackened and smouldering. The illusionist helped Lily up slowly, her whole arm throbbing with a painful rush of blood. She cradled it and pulled away from his grip to inspect the damage. One of the smoky little cabinet legs collapsed, and the ruins of the whole structure went with it, collapsing to the ground in a heap of ash.

  “This is going to be more taxing than I thought,” Novel mused.

  Lily found herself shaking, overwhelmed by the sensation she had felt when her blood called the flames into life. She could hardly remember the split second surge of power that had shot through her, but now that it was gone, she trembled in its absence. It was true, every part of it. Her anger had made a bolt of fire shoot from her own hands. She had power, just like Novel had said. And she definitely didn’t feel human any more.

  “Should I get you a drink?” Novel asked, not daring to touch her again in her volatile state. His hand hovered over her throbbing arm until she nodded, then he left the room swiftly to fetch water.

  Lily stepped around the attic, turning away from the sight of the destruction she had caused. Her eyes eventually fell upon a desk and chair in the space where the roof slanted down. She crouched her way over to them, her gaze drawn to a large book on the table which had no title. The book was old, its pages browned and soft, bound in a coarse black thread that held them to a deep crimson cover made of cracked leather. Though there was nothing at all unusual about the very ancient book, it wasn’t covered in dust like everything else in the rehearsal space. Lily reached out with her aching arm to touch its shiny cover.

  The book opened by itself, flipping its old, cracking pages as Lily leapt back in shock. It flicked to and fro, like it would have if someone was unsure about which page to choose, only no hands were visible to turn each ancient leaf. She leaned in closer again and the page flipping began to slow down, eventually settling on one double spread. Lily frowned. The pages were all blank.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lily smacked her head hard on the sloping roof as she tried to turn. Novel stalked over and thrust the glass of cold water into her hand, his eyes travelling over the open book.

  “It just opened,” she stuttered. “It opened on its own. What does that mean?”

  Novel’s brow came down rapidly to hood his thoughtful eyes. He stared at the book for a long moment, as though he was suspicious of it rather than Lily herself. She watched as fascination overtook him, and a thousand thoughts passed quite clearly in his glassy gaze as the illusionist was lost for long, drawn-out seconds of wonder.

  “It means nothing,” Novel said abruptly, slamming the crimson cover shut. “Let’s get back to practice.”

  Eno

  Lily made only one more visit to Novel before the next show loomed at the Theatre Imaginique. Dharma insisted on having the rehearsal space for herself and the illusionist had an act of his own to attend to. He asked Lily to practice a little on her own, and drop in before showtime to report. She only wished she actually had something to report, but so far her mild success in generating fire continued to happen by accident, after she’d got irritated with herself for failing. She had tried valiantly to channel some kind of false sense of anger in the hope that it would trick her body into performing the cast, but there’d been no luck thus far.

  She dragged Jazzy down to Old Mill Lane early so they would be at the front of the queue to get in, giving her a few minutes to nip backstage without it looking too suspicious. Baptiste was already waiting in the dim foyer despite the lack of a line, the MC grinned with his perfect sharp teeth as the girls approached. He took their tickets with his usual cordial grace and followed them in through the red double doors.

  “The Monsieur is expecting you Miss Lily,” he crooned. “Go on up and slip behind the curtain. Dressing room 14.” His dark eyes glittered over Jazzy. “I’m sure I can keep your friend company awhile.”

  Lily gave Baptiste a grateful smile and raced up onto the stage, quickly edging through the thick red curtain into a sudden hive of activity. Lawrence and Poppa Seward were costumed in their full voodoo gear, examining a set of lethal looking throwing knives whilst Dharma adjusted her curves within her skimpy dress. Lily weaved past them and narrowly avoided being smacked in the forehead by Rasmus and Erasmus carrying a limbo stick. Beyond the twins, there was a black door marked with the number one and a corridor branching off behind it.

  As Lily approached the first door, a cold shiver travelled up the back of her jacket. She was passing by a rather large cube shape draped in a thick black curtain, underneath which something was growling. She paused a moment, listening fearfully to the sound of scratching and scraping within, then hurried on down into the badly lit hall full of doors. She passed them by numerically until she had to double-back, realising that there was no number 13. With a jittery hand, she knocked right under the golden 14, hearing her own thumps echo through the wood.

  “Enter.”

  Novel was halfway into putting on his stage make-up. The illusionist’s face was a ghostly pale hue, but he had not yet painted the black skeletal sockets that framed his sharp eyes. He reached into his terribly untidy make-up box, retrieving a brush to start work on his lips, when he caught sight of Lily watching him in the large oval mirror.

  “Come and stand where I can see you,” he ordered sternly. “It’s bad luck to haunt other people’s mirrors.”

  Lily entered the room properly and leant on the wall beside the ornately framed looking glass. She admired the bronze patterns all around it, tracing a bolt of engraved lightning with her fingertips.

  “I’d kill for a make-up mirror like this,” she sighed.

  “It was a present from my mother,” Novel informed her. “How did you get on without me?”

  “Worse if anything,”
Lily admitted, hanging her head. She felt her cheeks flush pink as Novel let out a grumble.

  “I thought it might have been me putting you off,” he reasoned. “We’ll have to try something else.”

  Lily looked back up to find his lips encased in their perfect black shell. The artist had moved on to crafting the wicked arches in his eyebrows, and once they were in place, he began to assume that truly frightening expression that amazed the patrons every time he stepped on stage. Novel glanced at Lily in a moment’s pause, his lip quivering.

  “Don’t worry, I have an idea already that might help,” he added.

  His voice had that youth in it again that was so out of place with his painted frown and dark brows. Lily nodded and made her way back to the door, stopping to glance back one last time at Novel’s antiquated frame.

  “Can I just ask,” she began. “What’s in the covered box out there? The one that’s making those awful noises?”

  Novel shrugged. “Just a werewolf,” he remarked.

  “A real one?” Lily asked with a start.

  “Of course,” Novel answered indignantly, delving into his powder box for a blackened sponge. “Almost everything you see within these walls is real. Eva really is clairvoyant, you know.”

  “And I suppose Poppa Seward’s a genuine voodoo master?” Lily added with a scoff.

  Novel just turned and gave her a nod.

  “Oh,” she replied, quite involuntarily.

  The revelation still reeled in Lily’s head when she got back to her chair. Michael was pleased that she and Jazzy had got in early and saved him a space right in the centre of the front row, but now that Lily knew a real live werewolf would soon be let loose on stage, she wasn’t so sure about Jazzy’s choice of seat. She also found herself wishing that Michael hadn’t decided on a Peperami for his snack tonight, the tantalising scent of spicy meat was the last thing any of them needed gathering in a cloud above them. But there was no way to warn her oblivious friends, so she sat back as the lights went down and hoped for the best.

  “Hey,” whispered Michael. “Which bits of this place are you restoring anyway? My seat’s still rusted as hell.”

  “I’ll get to it next time,” Lily answered with an eyeroll.

  “You got a rota or something?” he pressed.

  She shook her head. “It’s kind of ‘as and when’. Now shush, Baptiste’s coming on.”

  The MC’s smooth tone and patient smile brought comfort to Lily as the show began. She was impressed but unconcerned by Zita contorting her bony body into various glass canisters and boxes, since she was sure she could have seen those kinds of things at any human circus. Had Mum ever bothered to take me to one, that is. Similarly, the Slovak Twins and their back-breaking feats of limbo beneath a fire-coated pole were quite likely to be feats of genuine human endeavour, though she did have to wonder if Novel’s fingertips had given them the spark to start off the flames.

  The Monsieur himself was third on the bill, giving Lily the chance to see beyond his otherworldly powers into what he called ‘his art’: real human magic. He had a box full of life-size mirrors set at different angles which, he walked through and spun on rotating pivots to assure his spectators that no-one was hiding behind them. When his signature music began – the familiar sound of violins – Novel produced every other member of the theatre’s troupe from behind the mirrors. One by one, they appeared when he spun and shifted the shining panes, the genuine mastery of mental illusion preventing anyone in the audience from seeing where they had come from. It didn’t win him the wild applause that his other powers did, but when he bowed, his posture was far more proud than Lily had ever seen before. His expression, as always, gave nothing away.

  Do shades have a law against smiling? Am I breaking it right now?

  The disturbing feeling only really crept back in during ‘Dharma’s Deadly Game’ near the end of the playbill, where Lawrence, eyes wide shut, carried the vixen onto the stage and began to tie her curvaceous form to a huge spinning wheel. Lily watched his slack face, which she had once mistaken for damn good acting, now appreciating the loll of his head and the curve in his limp spine for what they really were. He was genuinely entranced.

  If she craned her head, Lily could actually see Poppa Seward in the left wing of the stage, with all his voodoo trimmings. In one hand he shook a painted wooden hourglass, shifting it upside down now and then. The other hand was balled in a fist, but through the gaps in his fingers, various bones of different sizes and shapes jutted out. All the while Poppa’s lips moved ferociously, his eyes never leaving his precious son. When Lawrence threw the pointed knives at Dharma as she spun on the wheel, her meagre skirt flying in all directions, it was really his voodoo Poppa that was taking aim. It was suddenly no wonder that Lawrence had told Lily and Jazzy and Poppa did all the work.

  Baptiste re-graced the stage with his polished shoes, turned up at the toes, to announce the headline act. Lily found herself gripping the armrest of her chair as she watched him. Michael took it as a canny opportunity to put his hand over hers, but she didn’t have a spare moment to react to him. All her energies were focused on the covered box being lowered from the ceiling. The rest of the audience waited with excited whispers, until Baptiste quieted them by placing one finger to his lips. His fingernail was long and sharp where it rested on the parting of his moustache.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I must request that you do not leave your seats during this performance, particularly those of you here in the forward stalls.” His eyes travelled slowly from Lily to Jazzy as he spoke. “This act is somewhat volatile, and there is a serious risk of injury to those patrons who interfere with it. With that in mind, I present to you Eno Rolin: The Lycanthrope!”

  A great gust of wind blew the thick black cover off the cube, which was revealed to be a cage suspended about a metre above the stage itself. It hung on a long steel chain, with links thicker than a person’s arm, and swung forward suddenly as the creature inside it saw that he had an audience. Eno was human, so far as Lily could tell, but he hobbled on all fours and ranted like a beast, flecks of spit flying out of the cage, caught in the spotlight now trained on his raging form. He was all long limbs and ragged tufts of grey-blonde hair, half naked in just a pair of half-mast trousers made of some ruined cloth. Some of the audience laughed at his ravings; some just waited for the transformation to happen. Lily gripped her chair so hard that she broke a nail, looking up to the theatre’s roof as a call came from above.

  Novel was standing on a little walkway that jutted out from the high painted ceiling of the Theatre Imaginique. He handled a device attached to the ceiling that looked something like a great brass telescope, angling it down so that it pointed straight at the man in the cage. With a whip of the illusionist’s arm, something too fast to witness happened and the telescope shot a beam of bright blue light down at Eno. The other spotlight fell away, illuminating him in the eerie glow, which Lily soon recognised for what it truly was.

  Moonlight.

  Eno began to run in circles, shaking the cage and making it swing out at frightening angles. Lily watched, transfixed by the horror of it all as his limbs elongated before her eyes. The small tufts of human hair running along his back sprouted into full, thick fur of the same shade as he jerked and twisted against the beam of light. In minutes, he was all teeth and claws, his pained human face stretched to disgusting proportions until a snout and snarling gnashers replaced his nose and mouth. Eno’s eyes grew into great black discs that reflected the light in a pale green shade, just the way that dog’s eyes did. He calmed only when his transformation was complete, panting and huffing against the cage wall as it continued to swing.

  “Wicked,” whispered Michael.

  The moonbeam went out, and the audience were left in blackness. The applause started right away, everyone rising to their feet to show their appreciation for the marvellous special effect they thought they had just witnessed. Everyone except Lily, who sank into her chair and brea
thed heavily with her head almost touching her knees. She didn’t dare take her hands off the arms of her chair for fear that they would start her off with the shakes, so she sat in the midst of all the cheers and whistles until they had faded away.

  This was the grisly truth of the world she was slowly stepping into. Danger and terror were waiting on every corner. Nothing now could be the same as it had been before, no matter whether she turned forward or back. It was one thing when the cool parts like making fire from nowhere turned out to be real, but it was quite another when the things that haunted every child’s nightmares were also no longer fictional. Lily looked back up to the roof when the houselights came on, her terrified eyes finding Novel. He was still leaning on the high walkway and, though she could hardly see his eyes, she knew he was looking straight at her again.

  She wanted to speak, to ask for explanations, to find some way to not know what she had just discovered. The shock of a new reality was too much to bear, and she wished desperately for some way to erase it from her mind, her pleading eyes staring at the man who had brought her into his world.

  Novel simply nodded as though he understood.

  DECEMBER

  Starbathing

  Without having the courage to return to the Theatre Imaginique, Lily had busied herself with a new project from Professor Havers. She had let almost two weeks pass her by in her various attempts to have a normal human existence and forget what she knew about the supernatural side of life. It was 3a.m. when she awoke from a nightmare that her latest paper (on the development of nineteenth century prison ships) had gotten her kicked out of Pike U for being too kind-hearted from the perspective of the inmates. She lay in her bed, listening to Jazzy’s gentle snoring and willing herself back to sleep.

  A rustling of paper caught her ears. She froze, thinking for a moment that it might be a mouse, until one of her own sheets of printed research rose by itself from her desk. In the starlight shining through the window, she saw a pen rise to meet it. The ballpoint clicked itself and started to write in a calligraphic, elegant hand that Lily recognised as the script on every one of her theatre tickets. When it was finished, she sat up slowly to read the message floating before her.