Myths & Magic: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection

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Myths & Magic: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection Page 302

by Kerry Adrienne


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  Shadowling

  Shadows attack…

  Sixteen year-old Dani Prado is not fond of the dark. In fact, it terrifies her. So, when something crawls from the depths of the earth through the local mine to snatch people and pets from her small town at night, she follows the police chief’s directives and stays in her house after the sun goes down each day.

  But now her younger brother Bobby is counted among the missing and she fears the worst. The police won’t help and the rest of the town is afraid to go looking for the captives, too. Wait, they tell her, until reinforcements come to help.

  Unable to tolerate the thought of her brother in the clutches of some shadowy monster while she waits, she decides to go into the mine looking for him, joined by her mother and a few friends. She has to solve the mystery of the missing people, and bring them back. If she can. The darkness beckons and the shadowling awaits. Dani will need every bit of her skill, ingenuity, and courage to enter a world without light, find her brother, and return. Hopefully with her body and mind still intact.

  Chapter 1

  The creature, whatever it was, gained on me with every breath, with every one of my too-slow steps. I ran as hard as I could, but it would catch me. Soon.

  The air burned as I tried to draw it from my surroundings. It was like fire in my throat, stinging my lungs and making my chest hurt. Why was the air so thick, and why could I not move faster? I pumped my arms, pushed my throbbing legs. Just a little faster.

  A door appeared up ahead. It hadn’t been there a second before. If I reached it, I could go through, close it, slow—even stop—the hunter right behind me. I lowered my head, leaning into the run, and pushed with all my might.

  Stars flecked the edge of my vision, and the world seemed to twist. Somewhere deep within my mind, a little voice told me I was about to pass out from lack of oxygen, that I was done for. It had been a good try, but the door was too far, I was too slow, my body not up to the challenge.

  I stomped on the voice in my head, silencing it. I gasped to take in one more bite of the precious air that seemed thick as taffy and threw myself into my simple task: get to the door.

  And there it was, right in front of me, one step away. I reached out, tears streaming from my eyes. I didn’t know if they were from the pain, from fear, or simply from the rush of air across my face as I ran.

  My hand closed around the knob. Do not look back. Go through the door. Close it. Then I’ll be safe. The thing chasing me surely couldn’t get through a door, right? Everyone knows monsters can’t get through doors.

  I felt movement behind me, a brush of air on the back of my neck. So close. There were no footsteps, no sound, just a change in the pressure on my skin as it pebbled with goose bumps. I rotated my hand to open the door.

  The knob wouldn’t move.

  Someone shrieked, and I realized it was my own voice, stuttering and strained as I used some of the precious air I had left to scream my defiance and fear. I put my other hand on top of the one already on the knob. With a mighty push, I turned the knob and the door opened away from me. Not locked, just stuck.

  I hurled my body through the opening, expecting at any moment to be torn to shreds from behind. As I cleared the portal, I turned and slammed the door. The latch clicked.

  Safe.

  I breathed in and out rapidly, trying to keep from hyperventilating as I leaned against the door. I was secure. Whatever chased me couldn’t get me in here. All I needed to do was…

  I saw then that the door had no lock. My heart, already trying to beat its way from my chest, seemed to double its rate. No lock? Why would the door have no lock?

  Looking frantically around, I saw nothing to help me. In fact, I saw nothing at all. I saw no walls, no furniture, nothing. Only the door floating in darkness. Where was I? Should I leave the door and run, or should I stay and hold it closed? The predator was faster than me. What would give me the best chance to survive?

  Again, I sensed movement. The door swung open, not toward me, but away from me. It had opened the other way a moment before, but the knob pulled from my grasp, and there was empty space where solid wood had been. A blackness, darker even than the night around me, rushed in, and I felt myself falling toward the ground, a peculiar sensation coursing through me. Maybe it was what you felt when you died.

  I jerked upright off my pillow with a strangled cry. Sweat covered me and I felt as if I had been breathing hard for an hour, like I’d been running for my life.

  A dream, then. I slowed my breathing, gulped to wet my dry throat. My heart was still beating so rapidly, it almost hurt. Like it did when we had to do sprints in track. I swiped away some hair that was plastered to the side of my face. It had been a long time since I’d had a nightmare that real. I thought I was really in danger, really there, though thinking back I recognized some signs that it was a dream. But that’s the way it worked, right? Your mind folded all the little inconsistencies and impossibilities into what you were seeing and it all seemed to fit, somehow. Well, I was awake, so it was over.

  I picked up my phone. Two-thirty in the morning. Ugh. Four and a half hours until I needed to get up for school.

  I pulled off the covers twisted all around me and swung my legs off the bed. My soft footfalls on the carpet of my room sounded almost loud in the quiet house. Ten steps to the bathroom and I was squinting through the light I flipped on.

  The girl in the mirror looked like she had been wrestling. In the heat. With a skilled opponent. Basically, she looked like she’d been beaten up. Her long chestnut hair was a tangled, frizzy mess. I should have put it up before going to sleep, but I had been so tired when I went to bed. Brown eyes peeked out from under the mass of locks, squinting slightly to focus. I didn’t like her oval face much, but I guess it could be worse. At least I wasn’t covered in zits.

  Sighing, I splashed some water on my face, dabbed it dry with the towel, and flipped off the light. After stumbling across the room—my mom would have a fit if she saw the clothes I’d tossed on the floor—I hopped back into bed, pulled the covers over me, shivered once, and wiggled around until I was comfortable. I had four and a half hours of sleep coming to me, and no stupid nightmare was going to keep me from it.

  Chapter 2

  When I finally dragged myself out of bed, after hitting the snooze more times than I could count, I gradually got ready for school. Jeans, the first pair of flats I pulled from the closet, and a tee shirt that read What You Looking At?, and I was about as presentable as could be expected. I sighed. It was only Wednesday. Not even halfway through the week yet.

  I lived close enough to walk to school. Good thing, too, since I didn’t have a car like some of the kids my age did. At sixteen, I had my driving permit, but my mother didn’t let me practice driving much. She had a little trouble handling me at the wheel. She was many things, but a calm passenger for a teenage driver was not one of them. Whatever. I wasn’t in a great hurry to start driving. Where did I need to go?

  She had dragged us from our home in Tucson to Lode, a much smaller town. She always claimed the job was a good opportunity, and more money than the job she had been doing, but I didn’t buy it. I think, like me, she wasn’t able to handle all the reminders of my father. Since he died in the car accident, many things had changed. So many things.

  As I made my way out of my house and down my street, I tried to focus on the sunshine and the other kids walking. But the sun didn’t seem to be as bright as it had been before the move, before the accident, and the kids seemed to be merely shadows of people I would never know.

  “Danica Prado,” a voice said.

  I turned to see its source padding up to me. I knew who it had to be. Only one person teased me with my full name
like that.

  “Hey, Sam,” I said.

  Samantha Yin, my best friend, stood about an inch shorter than my five feet, six inches. Her long black hair fell to the middle of her slender back. Her mom and dad were from China, but she was born here in Arizona. Her eyes had a squashed egg shape, tapering at the edges. They were brown, though when I looked closely at them, I saw a hint of red around the iris. Not red like she was tired, but lines of it through the mocha coloring. I only knew this because she made me stare into her eyes a few months before because she thought something had gotten into them. I wasn’t big on eye contact. She was so pretty, sometimes I was jealous of her. It didn’t last long, though. I loved her like a sister.

  “Another Wednesday, huh, Dani?” she said, falling into step next to me. She only lived a couple of blocks from me, and we normally timed it so that we walked to school together.

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at me, studying my face and peering into my eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m pretty tired.”

  “Oh. Not the best way to be with more than half a week left.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “I’ll have to try to catch up on my sleep in math class.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  We continued walking, me too tired to really say anything and her too polite to try to draw me out. I finally relented.

  “Did you see Jacob Benton yesterday at the water polo match?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said, hugging herself. “Do you think I go to those things just to watch you play? Please.”

  “My God, he’s gorgeous,” I said, thinking of him and his body.

  Jacob was the captain of the water polo team at school, the best wrestler we had, and the captain of the baseball team. He was tall, dark-haired, muscular, and so handsome I couldn’t look at him without feeling like I’d held my breath for too long.

  Of course, he also had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in school: Madison Cairsen.

  We made it to the school and began heading up the sidewalk toward the courtyard when I ran into the back of Sam while I was looking toward a group of kids laughing loudly. She had stopped abruptly.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s the big idea? Don’t stop on a dime like that. What are—”

  She had reached back and was groping around for me while keeping her eyes straight ahead. When her hand found my face, she used her grip on my chin to swivel my head around to our left and about twenty feet ahead.

  It was Jacob Benton.

  The sunlight shone on him like he was some sort of angel. Seriously, there was a break in the morning clouds that sort of spotlighted him just as I caught sight of him. It made me think about all that symbolism stuff we’d been studying in Lit class. We both turned toward the bench to the right of the sidewalk and pretended we had dropped something. I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

  Tall, ripped, and so, so hot, he was everything I liked in a guy. His short brown hair, almost as dark as my own, always had that “controlled mess” look. Those dark eyes flicked toward where Sam and I were standing and I stopped trying to watch him for a moment, until I checked back and saw him looking away. I wasn’t able to breathe again until he had passed by and gone around the admin building.

  He was with his girlfriend, of course, a fact that effectively killed the fantasies running through my head. What did he see in that girl? What could he possibly find attractive about a beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed captain of the cheerleading squad? Who also happened to be as rich as his family? I sighed. How did I get stuck in a Hollywood movie about the prom king and queen and the awkward girl?

  “I hate her,” Sam said.

  She crushed on Jacob, too, but would never admit it. Her disgust with all that was Madison was mainly on my behalf. She was my best friend, after all.

  I nodded as we walked on toward our first class.

  Sam and I were early to class, as normal. I liked to be on time, unlike my mother. Whenever I had to be somewhere and she was involved, I knew I was going to be late. We just didn’t see eye-to-eye on that subject. I got my punctuality from my dad, I think.

  We sat and watched as the other students filed into the classroom, moving faster as the sounding of the bell drew nearer. When it sounded, the kids who had not yet made it to their seats ran the last few steps. Well, most of them did. Some were too cool to hurry.

  Mr. Reynolds was in front, going through some papers. He was tall and lanky, with black hair showing a few patches of gray. His thin face would probably never be called good-looking, but when he smiled—which he did a lot—it made everyone within range feel better. I know; I had asked Sam and others who had his class.

  One of the best things about Mr. Reynolds was his passion for the subject he taught. He enjoyed English in general, but his excitement really shone through in his literature classes, like the one I was sitting in. Medieval Literature.

  “Okay, everyone,” he said. “Okay, settle down.”

  The kids who had been gabbing with their friends trailed off and turned toward Mr. Reynolds.

  “Yesterday, we were talking about Inferno. I am assuming all of you did the reading for last night.” He scanned the room, obviously looking for those students who could not meet his eye. There were several. I laughed inside, but calmly met his gaze and kept my face neutral on the outside. As his eyes met mine, he nodded. He knew I would have read the assigned pages.

  Samantha looked over at me and smiled. She would have completed her homework, too, probably gone beyond the assignment. She was a perfect student, and her grades reflected that. Since I met her, I had never seen her get anything other than an A on any assignment or test. She was a beast when it came to schoolwork.

  “Dante Alighieri, as with many artists of his time, infused his work with religious themes,” Mr. Reynolds said. “But although his work, the Divine Comedy, of which Inferno is the first volume, described in great detail the inner workings of hell, its value is really in how the story is a metaphor for the political climate at the time, and in a broader sense, life itself.”

  I wondered at how my teacher had even gotten approval to put this book in the curriculum. People seemed to freak out when religion was concerned, especially at school. I chalked it up to Lode being a small town. I was glad he did get approval, though. The story was fascinating in itself, but I could really sink my teeth into analyzing the allegory.

  Yeah, I was one of those: kids who are way too academic for their own good. I hadn’t ever really been a geek or nerd or anything before. But when I moved to Lode, I had no friends and looked forward to homework so I would have something to do. As I focused on my assignments, I became more interested in what I was learning and did well in my classes. As I did well, it became even more interesting. By the time I had accumulated a few friends—all good students because that’s what we had in common—my path was set as one of the “smart kids.” I didn’t feel any different than I had before, but now I had a label I never thought would apply to me.

  Anyway, I had a kind of morbid fascination for this assignment, like people do for a big car accident. The darkness and depressive nature of the poem sort of gave me chills, but I liked it. A little bit.

  “…and symbolism can be seen throughout the account,” Mr. Reynolds went on. “Everything from the use of mythological people and beasts to taking accounts directly from the Bible itself gives us a deeper picture of the world at that time, as well as the enduring humans search for perfection.”

  The class continued, and as it did, I thought about the story. I actually looked forward to reading more of it. I had friends, but I’d made a habit of doing well in school and would keep it up. Besides, I was curious to see how Dante fared as he traveled deeper into hell. I wondered if his account could compare to the hell I lived every day.

  Chapter 3

  At lunch, I met up with the rest of the crew.

  “Hey,�
� Zachary Pinse said, as he hopped over the back of the bench I was sitting on, landing to sit next to me. “Your favorite guy in the world is here!”

  I leaned forward and craned my neck so I could look around him. “Funny, I can’t see him. You’re probably in the way.”

  He laughed as he high-fived me, his always-smiling face breaking out into an even bigger grin. He didn’t have a chance to respond, though.

  “Who ever heard of doing maths first thing in the morning?” Emily Hartford said in her English accent. “I really think it should be outlawed. What a horrid way to start the day.” Her freckled face was flushed—either from her rant or from rushing to get to our normal lunch spot from the other side of campus—and her long brown hair swung as she took a seat on the other side of me.

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t get lit class with Sam and me,” I said. “It’s actually pretty interesting.”

  Emily looked around. “Where is Sam?”

  “She had to go to the gym to talk to Mr. Farrel really quickly before lunch. She’ll be here in—” I cut off as she appeared.

  “Are we ready then?” Emily said. “I’m famished.”

  “You could have started eating without me,” Sam said, her face a little pink also, no doubt from walking so quickly. Or maybe embarrassment. I wasn’t sure.

  “That wouldn’t have been very polite, would it, now?” Emily said.

  “How long have you been in the States again?” Sam asked. “We’re not big on etiquette here, you know.”

  “Yes, well, old habits die hard.”

  Emily had moved from England a couple of years earlier and still occasionally had difficulties with how things were done here. She was very polite, in stark contrast to most of the kids our age here in Lode.

 

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