by Tracey Tobin
Jacob mulled that over. “Do you have any other family?” he inquired.
Tori shook her head. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and my grandparents have all been gone for a long time. Both my parents were the only child in their families too, so no extended family at all, really.”
Jacob was silent for a moment before posing next next question carefully. “Do you have anyone…special? Back home?”
The question caused Tori to inexplicably picture dark hair and a football uniform. She shook her head violently to banish the image. “No,” she insisted, blunt and to the point. “I have no one like that.”
Jacob frowned at the glib tone of her response. “What about the young man who was calling to you? The one with my face?” he asked. As an afterthought he added, “And the small girl who was with him?”
“My friends,” Tori explained. “Schoolmates.”
At that Jacob’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “You’ve been schooled?” he gaped.
“Of course,” Tori replied. She wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction. “Every kid goes to school where I’m from.”
“Amazing,” Jacob said with clear awe. “In this world only the rich are permitted to be taught by the wise. You must know so much!”
Tori thought about that and had to snort. “I suppose you could say that,” she allowed, “but most of what I know would probably be pretty damn useless in this world, honestly.”
“I can’t imagine how that could possibly be true,” Jacob argued. “You-” But then his words cut off quite suddenly, and a second later he yanked Strider’s reins to stop the horse in his tracks . His eyes swept the forest. Over his face flashed alertness, concern, and then - after glancing at Tori - panic. Without warning he slid from his saddle, snatching up his sword in the process.
Tori had opened her mouth to ask, “What is it?” but then she heard it: an eerie slithering sound that was getting louder, approaching through the trees to their right.
Jacob offered her his hand and unceremoniously yanked her down from Ashes’ back. “We have to hide, now,” he hissed at her. “We’re about to have company.”
Chapter Four
Jacob offered no further explanation before unceremoniously dragging Tori off the path and into the forest, abandoning their horses on the path.
“Wait! What do you mean?” she demanded. “Who’s coming?”
“Shh!” Jacob demanded right back. “We have to be as quiet as possible. And it’s not ‘who’,” he added. “It’s ‘what’.”
His tone sent chills down Tori’s spine, so she clamped her mouth shut and let him lead her. After what felt like about half a mile through the brush he inexplicably stopped at a large tree, linked his hands together, crouched, and looked at Tori expectantly. For a moment she just stared, not understanding, and then she felt her face blanch and her stomach twist.
“Oh no,” she hissed. “Do not tell me that you expect me to climb this tree!”
The look Jacob gave her was the kind you might give to a child who refused to eat their vegetables. “It’s either climb or fight,” he told her, “and you have no weapons.”
His argument was infallible, she supposed. So, very conscious of the fact that she might very well break her neck this day, Tori put her foot in Jacob’s linked hands and let him boost her up to the first big branch. Once she had clumsily wrapped her legs around it and steadied herself she turned to offer Jacob a hand, but she found him already pulling himself up, muscles straining. She couldn’t help but stare, until he shot her a look and commanded in a low voice, “Keep going!”
Tori hadn’t climbed a tree since she was too young and stupid to realize how dangerous it was, and her thighs were already killing her from riding a horse for the first time ever. She felt stubbornly confident that whatever was coming through the forest was not nearly as much a threat to her health as was putting herself in the position to fall to her doom. But with Jacob’s constant encouragement she moved from branch to branch. She tried to imagine that she was back with her old cheerleading squad, being systematically raised to the top of the pyramid. Her foot slipped once and, with her heart in her throat, she was certain she was going down, but Jacob immediately snagged her arm and pulled her back to a safe footing. They continued to move up and up until Tori thought that they must be at least sixty feet in the air and was beginning to wonder just how tall the average tree grew in this world. It was here, amongst a great pile of gray-green leaves, that Jacob motioned for Tori to stop and stay still.
They hovered there for so long that Tori’s back began to twinge and she almost accused Jacob of being some kind of lunatic. There was nothing coming, and all she was accomplishing up here was to tire herself out. But just as she was about to open her mouth and peel a strip off of Jacob, she heard the sound again. It was a spine-chilling slithering sound, like an enormous snake moving through the forest underbrush.
“What is it?” Tori mouthed.
Jacob mouthed something back, but Tori couldn’t tell what the word was supposed to be - something that started with ‘s’, she thought. But rather than asking him to repeat, she held her breath and looked down as the rustling, slithering came ever closer.
Despite the strange sound and Jacob’s statement about the noise being a ‘what’, Tori was fully expecting a person to come pushing through the forest - a man in armor, perhaps, or a bandit in rags with knives in both hands. However, what eventually wandered beneath their tree was not a person. It wasn’t even an animal. It was something out of a child’s deepest nightmare.
There were three of them, and they were all vaguely the size and shape of an average man, but that was where their similarities to a human being ended. Their bodies were black, inky, and featureless. Their ichor-like forms twisted and writhed, getting smaller, larger, longer, wider with each passing moment. Seemingly at will, the midnight-black creatures changed and contorted to suit their needs and desires. When one came upon a large tree root its lower body oozed and slid over the obstruction rather than stepping over or around it. When another wanted to look around a grouping of trees its neck stretched several feet away from its body while the rest of it continued to move on in the opposite direction. The third seemed to be the leader of the group, and it hung back as the others searched. While it waited it casually flicked its arms up and down; with each flick down the vaguely human-like hands became shiny black blades with needle-thin tips, and then transformed back with each flick up.
Tori’s heart hammered like a drum, so loud in her ears that she was sure the entire forest would be able to hear it as well. She had to remove one hand from the branch she was hanging onto so that she could cover her mouth to keep from shrieking. Tears sprung to her eyes as she found herself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to blink.
Jacob watched the creatures intently as they scoured the land beneath him. One hand clutched at the hilt of his sword, pulsing with tension. Tori wondered if he might be considering an aerial attack, but they were so high up that it would have been suicide. Instead he stayed with her, standing as still as a statue, barely breathing while they waited for the creatures to move on.
It must have been an hour before the black monsters finally wandered far enough to be out of sight. It felt twice as long before they could no longer hear the slithering sounds moving through the forest and Jacob finally relaxed and began to descend the tree. Too terrified to speak, Tori followed in silence, making absolutely certain that each foothold was true because her knees were shaking uncontrollably.
By the time they’d reached the ground again Tori couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. She grabbed Jacob’s wrist and stared at him with eyes as wide as the moon. “What in the name of god were those things?”
Jacob almost seemed amused by her reaction for a moment, but mostly he just looked angry and frustrated. “I take it you don’t have Shadows in your world,” he surmised. “Lucky you.”
Tori felt like there was some cosmic joke being play
ed on her. Just one thing after another. “What are they?” she demanded again. “They looked like they were made of pure darkness!”
Jacob’s face was grim. “That’s why we call them Shadows,” he explained. He made sure his sword was properly sheathed and began working his way back the way they’d come. “No one truly knows what they are or where they come from. Well, except for maybe the royal family. The way it’s told, the Shadows appeared in this world one day, without warning, and just began ravaging the land, killing hundreds, maybe thousands. The king and queen brought them under control, but immediately after they went mad and began using their new pets to rule the lands with an iron fist.” He stopped for a moment to give Tori a meaningful look. “There are thousands of those things roaming this world, doing the royal family’s bidding. Maybe hundreds of thousands. No one knows for sure.”
Tori understood suddenly. “Those were the ‘emissaries’ you told me about.”
Jacob nodded. “The regular ones are awful enough, absolutely horrible creatures” he told her. “But if you ever see one with a jewel like yours embedded in its throat, run. They’re like the leaders, I suppose, and they’re the strongest and nastiest of the bunch.”
Tori shuddered. “I’ll run if I see any of them, thanks.” She had to wrap her arms around herself to keep from bursting into tears as her body shook like a leaf in the wind. What the hell kind of world is this?
It was getting rather dark by the time they’d made their way back to the horses. Ashes and Strider were hanging out on the path right where they’d been left, munching some grass, either unaware or unconcerned that their riders had just been hiding from storybook monsters.
“We’d better keep moving for a while before we make camp,” Jacob suggested. “We’ve lost a lot of time, and I’d rather get some more distance between us and them before we rest.”
“How do we know they won’t come back?” Tori asked. She knew that her voice sounded like a frightened child’s, but she couldn’t steady the waver behind it. “Or that more won’t show up?” She was shivering violently as Jacob helped her to remount Ashes, though the evening had actually warmed up a little.
“We don’t,” Jacob admitted. “But it’s actually very unusual for Shadows to wander out this far, so it isn’t likely that we’ll come across any more of them. And those three were obviously sent out here on a specific job, so I’m willing to bet that they’re just going to keep moving forward until they accomplish it.”
Tori gripped Ashes’ reins a little too hard. “What do you think they were looking for?” she asked.
Jacob hopped up onto Strider’s back and shook his head slowly. “A royal fugitive, maybe?” he suggested. “Someone who didn’t pay their taxes, perhaps? Either way, I hope they get away. It isn’t easy to fight a Shadow.”
She almost hated to ask, but she had to. “How do you fight a Shadow?”
Jacob flicked his reins and sighed as the horses began a slow trot. “It’s very difficult,” he told her. “They’re fast, and as you saw they can contort their bodies to avoid attack or become harder targets. You can cut bits off, but they just seem to regrow them. The only surefire way to stop them seems to be a stroke to the heart - or whatever they have that’s in place of a heart - but since they can change their form you can’t always tell where the sweet-spot is.”
Tori remembered the way the Shadows’ bodies had writhed and twisted and felt a cold grip on her own heart.
“I apologize,” Jacob added. “I really should have found you a weapon before we set out. It’s just that it’s been so long since I saw any Shadows out this way that I guess I got complacent. I only even bring my sword with me because it was my fathers and I never leave it behind.”
Tori was having great difficultly banishing the memory of the Shadows’ horrible bodies from her mind, but she gave herself a little shake and nodded toward Jacob. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I probably wouldn’t have a clue how to fight anyway.” She imagined it for a moment, and the image her mind conjured was of her laying prone on the ground with her own sword through her leg. “But I wouldn’t mind picking up a weapon when we reach this village of yours. Just in case.”
Jacob nodded his agreement, but Tori’s inner torment was laughing maniacally at her. A weapon! it hooted. Oh lovely, I just can’t wait to see this!
For what felt like the thousandth time in the past forty-eight, Tori was feeling certain that she’d lost her mind somewhere along the line. Traipsing through some kind of parallel universe with Jared’s doppleganger was messed up enough as it was, but now there were monsters. Honest-to-goodness goddamn monsters that were more frightening than anything she’d ever seen in a horror movie. And here she was, considering how she was going to go about fighting them if the opportunity arose again. Maybe I really am in an asylum, dreaming all this shit up. Maybe I never woke up after Jared brought me home from the bank and a bunch of doctors are cutting my brain open at this exact moment.
They rode in silence for over an hour while Tori worked diligently to push the memory of the Shadows into the back corners of her mind. Luckily - if such a thing could be thought of as ‘luck’ - the pain that was spreading throughout her lower body was an excellent distraction. Just as she was starting to think that her thighs and pelvic bone would never be the same again, Jacob flicked Strider’s reins and motioned for them all to stop. There was a small, open area off to one side of the path that would serve as a camp for the night.
Sore, tired, cranky, and more than a little bit terrified, Tori rested on a felled log while Jacob removed their supplies from the horses and gathered some wood to make a small fire. Once a lovely little flame was burning she had expected him to produce a tent or some sleeping bags, but all that came from the packs was a handful of blankets. Tori accepted hers graciously, but she had to grit her teeth at the idea of sleeping on the hard ground after a day that had pushed her mind and body to their limits already. It cemented in her mind then, for possibly the first time in her life, that she was truly a product of modern society and had zero survivalist skills to aid her in an emergency. Quietly, she thanked the stars that she hadn’t appeared here alone in an empty field and that at least she had Jacob looking out for her in this brave new world.
She was staring up through the trees and wondering what made the stars shine with so many different colors when Jacob settled down on the log next to her. “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. He was holding an apple in one hand and what looked like dried meat in the other. Unsure about the meat, Tori accepted the apple and happily bit into it. It tasted sweeter than any apple she’d ever eaten back home. It was actually very pleasant, and she devoured it ravenously.
Jacob took a bite of the mystery meat and threw some more wood on the fire. Thoughtful, curiosity in his eyes, he waited until Tori had finished her apple and then asked, “What is your world like?”
Tori thought about that, wondering how much she could really say that he would understand. “It’s loud,” she finally settled on. “We rely a lot on technology, and we aren’t really in touch with nature.”
Jacob’s eyebrows knitted together as he took this in. “How… How can you become out of touch with nature?” he asked. “It’s all around you.”
Tori actually let out a bit of a chuckle at that. “Yeah, not so much,” she said. “We have cities so big that you could go for miles without seeing a tree, or grass even.”
Jacob’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. “How could you construct such a marvel?” he asked with the curiosity of a small boy.
Despite herself, Tori couldn’t help smiling at his childlike innocence. “It’s a bit difficult to explain,” she told him. “We have very advanced machines that allow us to move very heavy objects, and super-intelligent devices that work out the complicated bits for us.” After a moment of hesitation she pulled her phone out of her pocket and beckoned Jacob to come closer. “Watch this,” she instructed, and when she hit the power button Jacob almost fell
backward off the log.
“You hold starlight in your hand!” he cried.
Tori laughed aloud, a real laugh that actually made her forget her troubles, if only for a moment. “It’s not just light,” she explained as she swiped through the phone’s menus. “It’s called a cell phone, and it allows you to communicate with anyone on the planet, as long as they have one as well.”
Jacob reached forward like a cautious animal and poked the screen, inadvertently opening the forward-facing camera. This time he actually did fall off the log in his shock. Tori laughed deep down in her gut as he scrambled back up and stared with his mouth hanging open. “It’s us!” he gaped. “It’s like looking into the clearest pond in the world!”
“It’s called a camera,” Tori told him, and she was smiling the most genuine smile she’d been capable of in a long time. “Come here and stand next to me and I’ll show you.”
Careful and cautious as a fox, Jacob set himself back down on the log. He sat close so that both their faces were fully on the screen. Tori almost pulled away as she was overcome with an outdoorsy scent that made her heart skip a beat, but instead she stood her ground and pushed the ‘Record’ icon.
“Now, say something,” she instructed.
Jacob looked at her like she was crazy. “Say what?” he asked.
“Just look at the camera and say hi or something,” she insisted.
Eyebrows lifted and jaw a little stiff, Jacob looked back at the screen and raised his hand in a wave. “Hello Camera Victoria and Camera Jacob.”
Tori had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing again. She hit the icon to stop the recording and said, “Now watch,” before hitting ‘Play’. Jacob’s jaw dropped when the video playback began and their voices rang out at him.
“It’s magic!” he exclaimed.
