Myths & Magic: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection

by Kerry Adrienne

  “Better,” I said, hardly getting the word out. I was talking to Jacob Benton. Alone. I worried about saying something stupid, and the air itself seemed to squeeze my chest, making it harder to breathe. “I mean, I’m much better with the staff than with the sticks.”

  “Really? Wow, you must be awesome. The thing you did earlier, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do in person. How did you get that good?”

  “Just practice, mostly,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I used to compete a little.”

  “A little?” Sam said as she came up on my other side. “You were the state champion for two years. You’re freaking awesome.”

  “Ssst,” I hissed at her, jerking my head toward the others. She got the hint and stepped to the side where the others had spread out across the wider tunnel, muttering something that sounded like an apology.

  “Well,” Jacob said, looking back toward Madison, who looked as if she’d had all she cared to put up with from Tyler and was preparing to join her boyfriend. “I’m glad there’s someone here who knows how to fight. I’ve never really had to.”

  “You’ll do fine,” I said. “You are a natural athlete and have great reflexes. I’ve watched you move—” I realized what that sounded like as I said it and could feel my face get hot. “Umm, and you are pretty efficient. With your body. Your motion. You…I’ll try to find time to teach you some basic strikes. You’ll do great.”

  “Thanks, Dani,” he said, his eyes twinkling as we passed under one of the lamps hanging from the ceiling. He was still doing his best to try to maintain eye contact with me, but I couldn’t. “I look forward to it.”

  He walked back toward Madison, who was coming at us as if on a mission.

  “What was that all about?” she asked him, shooting me a cold look.

  “Just finding out what’s going on,” he said.

  Sam smiled at me, as did Emily. Even Zach had a small grin on his face. My friends. If no one else, they would always back me up.

  “It’s here,” my mother said, as the corridor opened up into a larger chamber, darker than the tunnel we had been traveling. “The place where the security force lost contact.”

  There were barrels lined up in one area, cardboard and wooden boxes stacked on pallets near them, and a drilling machine that looked like it was in the process of being repaired. The dim yellow light silhouetted litter and the other items strewn about the darkened cavern. Several of the overhead lamps were not working.

  I turned my headlamp on to get a better look and gasped. The unlit lamps had been smashed. The crunching as I walked toward the center was probably the glass from the light covers. Some of the trash on the floor was clothing, torn and tattered. There were a few walkie-talkies there as well, in addition to three handguns I could see. Something clinked against my shoes as I walked. I had inadvertently kicked aside several bullet casings. A handful of dark spots that could have been bloodstains spotted the floor, but thankfully, no more than that.

  There were no people, alive or dead.

  Tyler picked up one of the guns. “This will be better than a crowbar.”

  Rick picked up another of the guns and checked the clip. “No bullets.”

  “This one, either,” Mom said. “I don’t see any ammo around. These will only be good for throwing.” She put it back on the floor.

  “What about the bullets you brought for your gun?” Tyler said. “Can’t you share?”

  “They’re not the same,” Mom said. “I’m using a thirty-eight. These are all nine millimeter. My bullets won’t work in these guns.”

  “Damn,” he said, earning a raised eyebrow from my mother. “I mean, that’s too bad.” He smiled at her.

  Emily gasped and everyone’s heads swiveled toward the sound. She was off near the wall of the chamber with Zach, the two of them picking through the refuse there.

  “What is it, Emily?” I said as I was walking toward her. I scanned the edges of the darkness as I did.

  “We found something,” Zach answered for her, “or someone.” They had both stepped back a few feet from where they had been.

  I was the first to reach them, Sam a step behind me. My headlamp shone in the space behind some crates that had been knocked off their pallet. There was a body there. I stopped abruptly, Sam running into me.

  I gripped my staff more firmly, ready to strike, but then realized there was no need. A slight trickle of blood had dried on the corpse’s head as it had dribbled from a bullet hole onto the floor. I would have expected there to have been more of it.

  “What is it?” Sam asked, stepping up to inspect it. I reached for her shoulder to hold her back, but wasn’t able to grab it in time. I stepped over a broken crate with metal machine parts spilling out of it so I was standing next to her.

  “Not one of the security guards,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the odor. It smelled like rotting meat. I gagged and had to turn away for a moment.

  The body was man-sized and man-shaped. It wasn’t a person, though. Its skin was pale and translucent, with creases and folds that told me it was thick and tough, more like some kind of hide. It also had no hair at all on its body. The head, maybe a little larger than a man the same size—or maybe not, it was hard to tell—had wide-set eyes that stared blankly back at me. Looking at it made me want to search the room for creepy crawly things. I shivered.

  “Look at its hands,” Sam said. How could she remain so calm? It was a dead thing in front of her. Emily and Zach had stayed back, their faces looking a little pale in the headlamp light.

  I did. The fingers were pointed, like claws, and the nails were much thicker than a person’s. They looked suitable for digging in hard dirt, maybe stone. What was this thing?

  “So,” Rick said, climbing over a barrel to get a look. “We find our first shadowling.”

  Sam and I stepped away to let the others get a look. It was a grisly sight, not one I wanted to stare at for any length of time.

  Something else occurred to me, something no one else mentioned. It was wearing pants. They were dark, the legs ripped off them to make them more like shorts, but it was definitely clothing. Weird.

  Mom stood there staring at the creature for a long moment. Her eyes darted across the still form, her mouth parted to allow a hiss of air through them. Her lips twitched once and she turned from it, putting her hand to her head as she went toward the center of the chamber. I wondered if I should go to her, ask her about what she was feeling, but Rick beat me to it, whispering something in her ear I couldn’t hear.

  After everyone had viewed the shadowling, we gathered in the center of the chamber. Madison was the last to leave, taking a selfie with the dead creature in the background. That girl really had something wrong with her.

  “What does it mean?” Tyler asked.

  “It means,” my mother answered, “that the security guards and the shadowling fought here. It means the men killed at least one of the…things, though with a dozen armed men, I’d think they would’ve killed more than that.”

  “Do you think they took their dead with them?” Rick asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “All except this one, because it was hidden in the corner over there. The question is, did they kill the guards and take their bodies away, too?”

  “Do you think,” Zach said, his face twisted into a grimace, “that they…eat people?”

  “Of course they eat people,” Madison said. “Why else would they take them? We need to find my sister before they eat her. She’s too rich to eat.”

  I found myself staring at the girl. How anyone could be so stupid and uncaring was beyond me.

  “Now, hold on,” Jacob cut in. “There’s no evidence they eat people. Let’s calm down and focus on the solution. We have to find the people who have been taken. Thinking beyond that won’t do us any good right now.”

  “Right,” Mom said. “Thank you for pointing that out, Jacob.” She opened up her map and laid it on the top of a barrel. “We n
eed to figure out where to go. We can’t wander aimlessly through the mine. There are too many tunnels.”

  “Where is the section where they were extending the tunnel?” I asked, trying to make sense of the mass of passageways drawn on the paper. “The problems started when the new section of the tunnel was drilled. That’s where the shadowling came from.”

  My mother traced her finger along the map until she stopped and tapped one section. “Here. If we go down that tunnel, the second from the left, it should slope down eventually to where the new section was dug last week. It’s quite a way, though.”

  “Then we better get started,” I said. “I don’t know about any of you, but I want to get this over with and get back outside where I can see the sun. This place creeps me out, even without dead creatures lying around.”

  “I’m more concerned about the live ones,” Sam said as we started down the slightly sloping corridor.

  Chapter 11

  As we walked, everyone settled back into brooding silence. The hum of the lights above seemed loud, drowning out the scraping feet and the soft crunching of bits of gravel and sand beneath our shoes. A chill ran through me. The temperature in the cave was cool, though manageable when moving. It wasn’t the air that made the goose bumps ripple along my neck, though.

  No one spoke, but that was fine. Conversation seemed foreign in the depths of the caves, unwelcome. It almost felt like trespassing to utter a sound. I remained silent, uncomfortable but still believing it to be the better choice.

  My mother’s eyes were still wide and had a frantic cast to them. She was still pretty freaked out. I could understand. I mean, her son had been taken by the things we had seen in the other chamber. I was even more scared than before. Seeing something so alien and strange made it all more real. Gone was any chance that it was something mundane like bandits or kidnappers.

  This was actually happening. Bobby had been taken and was somewhere in the darkness ahead. Despite the moderate temperature in the tunnels, I shivered a little. It was a mental thing. I’d have to fight the icy touch on my skin with my mind. It wasn’t real, or at least, it wasn’t physical.

  We came to another intersection of tunnels and stopped. Our choice was to continue straight or angle off to the right. Both paths sloped slightly down, the one on the right slightly more so. We still didn’t speak, all of us silently waiting as Mom looked at the map. It was so quiet—the lights here made little noise—I could hear Tyler’s breath from the back of the group. It was a sort of whistling, nasally sound. I guess he had allergies or something. The rock creaked above us, reminding me that tons of earth and stone were just above us.

  I caught movement to my far left, behind us. It was right at the limit of my peripheral vision. I spun as two of the shadowling came loping around the corner of a tunnel I didn’t know was there.

  The pair of creatures looked like the dead one we had seen, but their color differed. Instead of that pale, static tone, these seemed to blend with the stone around them, shadows playing across their rough skin. They were darker than the other one, almost as if they were made of shadow itself. It was hard to pinpoint where their bodies ended and the darkness began.

  One thing was for sure. By the way their already-large eyes widened even more, they were as surprised to see us as I was to see them. They stopped so abruptly, one of them skidded a few feet, scraping across the cavern floor.

  That motion and sound caused everyone else to snap their heads toward the two newcomers.

  I leapt at them, staff whirling. It’s better to engage quickly and seize the advantage early—those were almost the exact words my sensei repeated to me over and over again—so I attacked.

  Relentlessly. Without moderation.

  These creatures had taken my brother. They would not take us.

  It took a second or so for the shadowling to react. That was enough time for me to crack one over the head with my staff hard enough to stagger it. The other brought its claws up just as I lunged and rammed the end of my weapon into its face. I heard its nose crack, and it screamed in pain.

  Spinning, I swept the dazed creature’s legs out from under it and thumped its head again as it fell, but I didn’t see it hit the floor. I was already turning again to attack the other one. It had recovered from the shock of its nose being broken, shaking its head and springing toward me.

  I back-stepped, slapping its clawed hands aside with my staff as it tried to tear at me with them. It was so fast. It pressed on, forcing me to retreat at a speed I wasn’t comfortable with. I hoped I didn’t trip on anything. It was already all I could do to keep it from tearing me apart.

  A dull thunk echoed in the tunnel and the shadowling lurched forward, stumbling. Zach came into view behind it, finishing up a swing with his baseball bat. Jacob was there, too, flailing ineffectually with the sticks, managing to land maybe one of four blows. I torqued my hips and spun the staff as hard as I could upward. It caught the creature under the jaw and not only stopped its forward momentum but flung it backward. It slapped the floor hard with its back, and Zach pounced on it with his large survival knife, punching the blade into its throat. It tried to scream, but only a whistling, gurgling sound came out.

  It thrashed for a few seconds and then stopped moving.

  I leaned on my staff, trying to catch my breath. It suddenly hit me that there had been two of them. I searched the area for the other one and located it.

  Located its body.

  Rick was leaning over the thing, the last few inches of the sword in his hand colored with a dark fluid. His eyes met mine, and he nodded as my gaze skittered off to the side. His mouth twisted as if he was going to be sick.

  Retching sounds assaulted my ears from a couple of different directions. Zach was leaning over near the corridor I hadn’t seen, hands on knees. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. A few feet away, Emily was in a similar posture. I didn’t blame them. My own stomach was roiling.

  My mother stood exactly where she had been before it all started. The map hung loosely in her hand, and she stared at the creature Rick was standing over. The whites of her eyes almost glowed and looked much bigger than should have been possible.

  “Mom?” I said. “Mom!”

  She started and the map fell to the floor. Her wide eyes met mine and then filled with liquid. “I…they…”

  I pulled her into a hug. She was trembling, her entire body vibrating. “Sh. It’s okay. They surprised us. It’s fine. They’re gone now.” Looking to Rick, who seemed shocked himself as he gazed at the creature he had killed, I jerked my head toward the hidden corridor.

  He blinked but seemed to understand. Holding his sword out, he went ahead, just to the limits of where I could see him, scanned the tunnel, and then looked back at me and shook his head. Good, there were only the two. For now.

  It took a few minutes for Mom to stop shaking and for her to be comfortable enough to talk.

  “I don’t know why I froze,” she said. “I didn’t even think of taking out the gun. It was so fast. They were just suddenly there.”

  “It’s fine, Mom. It’s probably better you didn’t use the gun. The sound probably would have drawn others. We got lucky it was just the two of them and that they were as surprised as we were.”

  “Rick,” she said. “That one came at me and he stepped in front of me. He swung and cut it. He saved my life.”

  “I’m sure you’ll return the favor,” Rick said. “We can watch each other’s backs. It’s the reason I came, after all.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Are you guys all right?” I asked. They pressed in, all of us in a tight bunch as if no one wanted to be too far from the others.

  “We’re good,” Jacob said, stroking Madison’s hair. The girl was as wide-eyed as my mother, mumbling incoherently. “No one got injured. You distracted them and dazed them so we could attack them from behind.” He smiled at me and the tunnel suddenly didn’t seem quite as dark.

  We took a few mi
nutes to recover from our short, but intense, ordeal. The others were speaking silently together, Rick soothing my mother, my friends in a clump, and Jacob still trying to relax Madison. None of them were near the bodies of the creatures we had just killed. In fact, they all turned their backs to the corpses. I felt strangely detached. I hadn’t ever killed anything bigger than a bug, but for some reason, I was calm. Would the feeling end suddenly when the shock wore off? Would I freak out then? I hadn’t actually landed a killing blow, just distracted the creatures so the others could.

  I stepped up to one of the bodies, the one Zach had killed. It looked…different, now that it was dead. I planted my staff on the floor of the cavern and leaned on it to get a closer look.

  “What do you see?” Rick’s voice made me jump.

  “Ah! Don’t sneak up on me like that. You scared me to death.”

  “Sorry.”

  I stood up and turned to face him. “Do you notice anything about these two?” I motioned toward the dead creatures, lying only ten feet apart.

  He looked at the one near my feet, then narrowed his eyes to scrutinize it more closely. “Those torn pants or shorts they’re wearing. It looks like the same color and material as the other one we found.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I mean, anything that’s different now that they’re dead?”

  “I don’t know. I guess their skin has changed color a little. That’s normal when things die, though. People do the same thing.”

  “It’s more than that, though,” I said. “When they’re alive, it’s like they’re camouflaged, like they’re made out of shadow. When I saw them earlier, I could have sworn they were dark gray or black, not this paler color.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Now that you mention it, it was kind of hard to see where their edges were, how big they really were, before. Even right under the lamps. Is it a trick of the light or did everything happen so fast that we couldn’t get a good look?”