Gabriel threw his hands out toward the creature and felt a shock of energy move up from his solar plexus. The jolt left his hands like a bolt of bright blue lightning. It struck the shadowcreature in the back. The grimlock froze and began to shake like it was being electrocuted. Then it exploded. Gabriel raised his arms to shield his face, but there was nothing there. The creature simply evaporated into the darkness around them.
Gabriel looked at his hands for a moment, unsure as to what exactly had happened. His skin crawled with an eerie, prickly sensation and his fingers tingled. He heard a noise and spun around, looking for Jodi and Oglesby. They were nowhere to be seen. That was when he realized that he had once again slipped into the Shadow world. He’d been somewhere between for a few moments, but not anymore. He was now fully inside the Shadow world and he didn’t know how to get out. His mind flashed back to Jodi and Mr. Oglesby, and the army of shadowkind advancing on the mansion.
I have to get back, he thought.
He closed his eyes and tried to will himself back into the mansion. He blinked. Nothing had changed. He tried again. This time, he tried to visualize everything just the way it had been. He imagined the shards of broken glass lying all over the floor, and the big leather sofa in front of the windows. He imagined the rows of shelves and the fireplace, and Jodi and Mr. Oglesby on the floor…
Gabriel gasped for air as a wave of energy rolled over him. He felt himself pulled along as if on an ocean current. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the sensation stopped. He opened his eyes and a blast of cold wind hit him in the face. He was back. He was standing in front of the broken windows, facing the front of the library. Dozens of dark, shapeless figures moved across the front lawn, racing towards the mansion.
Gabriel glanced back at Jodi and Mr. Oglesby. Jodi was still lying there with her head in Mr. Oglesby’s lap. Something was strange though. Oglesby appeared to be asleep… or unconscious. Gabriel rushed over and knelt down next to them. “Oglesby?” he said. He reached out and shook the old man’s shoulder. “Mr. Oglesby? Are you all right?”
Oglesby blinked and slowly focused his eyes on Gabriel’s face. “All right,” he said in a whisper. “She’ll be all right…”
Gabriel glanced down at Jodi and realized that she had regained some color in her face. Her chest rose and fell in deep, steady breaths. Oglesby however, looked terrible. He looked washed out, as if all the blood had been drained out of him, and his eyes were dull and glazed.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “What happened?” he muttered.
Oglesby didn’t respond. His eyelids slid shut. He appeared to be sleeping. Gabriel was baffled for a moment, until he glanced down at Jodi’s side and saw Oglesby’s cane grasped firmly in her hand. Then he knew what had happened. Oglesby had given Jodi his cane… Gabriel’s mind flashed back to when he’d first met Flannigan Oglesby. He remembered the old man’s crazy story about how he had become a werewolf, back in World War II. Nazis had ambushed his caravan. He was badly wounded in the attack, but an old German man gave him a cane that had somehow kept him alive. The problem was that it was also cursed, and it turned Mr. Oglesby into a werewolf. Now that the spell was broken, Mr. Oglesby’s years were catching up to him. It was as if he was aging with every passing second.
“Wake up!” Gabriel said, shaking him. “Take the cane, Mr. Oglesby! Take it back!”
Oglesby blinked again and slowly shook his head. “Can’t,” he said. His voice was thick, gravelly… the sound of a dying man. “Too late. It’s my time, Gabriel. Take care of Jodi.”
Mr. Oglesby shuddered slightly. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. As he did, the pain seemed to vanish from his face. His body went relaxed, and his hand dropped from where he’d been holding Jodi’s head.
Gabriel stared at him for a moment, overwhelmed with grief and shock. He gently shook Oglesby’s shoulder, trying to wake him, but Oglesby’s body crumbled into a fine, white powder that floated into the air and disappeared on the wind. In the span of a second, Mr. Oglesby was gone. All that remained of him was his old suit, now strangely flat and lifeless… and his cane in Jodi’s hand.
Gabriel could only stare, shocked and heartbroken, at the empty space where his friend had been.
Chapter 10
Memories washed over Gabriel. He recalled the first time he’d met Mr. Oglesby. Back then, Oglesby was just a crazy old Englishman with a cane and a mischievous glint in his eyes. He was an astronomy teacher, and it was at Oglesby’s lab at the middle school that Gabriel first learned about the Shadow. Gabriel hadn’t believed it at first, until Oglesby gave him hard proof that it was all real. A few weeks later, Gabriel saw Oglesby transform into a werewolf for the first time. The older man had very nearly sacrificed himself to save them from shadowfriends. And soon after that he’d saved them again by firing R9-11 rockets into the shadowfriends’ compound in China, while the rest of the team rescued Julia and the orphans.
As the memories washed over him, Gabriel found himself weeping. It all seemed so long ago, but in reality it hadn’t even been a year. Gabriel had known Oglesby for less than a year. In that time they’d become great friends. Gabriel had always known he could count on Mr. Oglesby. And now the old man was gone.
Gabriel raised his eyes and gazed helplessly at the army of shadowcreatures moving towards the mansion. They washed over the estate like a tsunami, a cold black wave that swallowed everything in its path. He thought of Jodi lying there helpless, and of the orphans hidden down in the basement.
I’m alone, Gabriel realized. I can’t protect them all by myself.
He thought of his sword upstairs. He considered racing up to retrieve it, but he knew it was hopeless. He couldn’t get back to the library fast enough. Even if he did, he couldn’t hope to hold the shadowkind off for more than a minute or two. There were dozens of them, maybe even hundreds.
Then suddenly a beam of light pierced the sky over the mansion, and he heard the steady beat of a helicopter in the distance. Bursts of colored light flashed in the darkness around the estate. An explosion went off, immediately followed by a blinding flash of violet light.
EGGs! Gabriel thought. Electromagnetic field-generating grenades were a D.A.S. invention. They released a combination of a magnetic pulse wave with a flash of ultraviolet and infrared lights. The weapon was mostly harmless against humans, but it was devastating against shadowkind.
The shadowcreatures scattered under the attack. Gabriel squinted against the flashes of light, wondering who could be out there. Had Reeves and Julia returned already? It had to be them. Had they known that D.A.S. was being attacked?
Gabriel got his answer soon enough, and it was completely unexpected. Gabriel heard human voices shouting back and forth across the grounds as lights flashed here and there, punctuated by loud explosive noises like gunshots and grenades. He caught glimpses of a team of soldiers working their way towards the mansion. They appeared to be wearing night vision helmets and black tactical clothing. They were armed with oddly shaped weapons that gave off some sort of electric glow, and shot out pulses of lightning when they fired.
The group of commandos broke through the ranks of shadowcreatures and stormed into the mansion. It didn’t take long for them to find Jodi and Gabriel in the library. A handful of them burst through the door, shining bright lights around the room. They stared at Gabriel for a moment through their dark visors and then spread out, checking the rest of the room.
The leader of the group came in behind them and stood over Gabriel. “Hello, Gabriel. I’m Commander Starling.” Gabriel was surprised to hear a woman’s voice under the helmet. She pulled it off, revealing a pretty face framed by shoulder-length black hair. She stared at him with dark, penetrating eyes. “Looks like we got here just in time,” she said.
Gabriel eyed her suspiciously. “Who are you?” he said.
“I already told you. I’m Commander Starling. You should pay more attention.” She turned to face her team of commandos. “Round them all up,
” she ordered. “I want everyone out in two minutes.”
A million thoughts went flying through Gabriel’s head at that moment. The first thing he thought to ask was, “How did you know about us?”
“Julia sent me,” Starling said. She glanced at her watch. “We don’t have much time. I’ll answer your questions later. If everyone cooperates we’ll all be out of here in just a minute.”
“Julia?” Gabriel echoed.
“Yes,” Starling said impatiently. She reached into the fireplace and flipped the switch to summon the elevator. Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up. If Starling knew about the D.A.S. headquarters, then Julia must have really sent her.
Starling sent two of her commandos down to retrieve Pete and the orphans. A few moments later, they were back. Pete immediately knelt down next to Jodi and felt her head, and then checked her pulse. “She’s unconscious,” he said. “Her vitals are okay. What happened?”
Gabriel searched his mind for the words to explain it all, but in the end all he could do was point to Oglesby’s cane, still clutched in Jodi’s hand, and the empty suit on the floor between them. Pete’s eyebrows shot up. “Oglesby?” he said. “Is he…?”
Gabriel nodded.
Pete’s face fell, his eyes searching the room as he struggled with this sudden grief. Gabriel could see the questions racing through Pete’s mind, the implications of it all, but there was nothing he could say that could make sense of it.
Commander Starling leaned over and placed her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “We’ve got to go, boys,” she said. “We have the property secured for now, but those shadowcreatures could be back any second.”
Gabriel nodded. He lifted Jodi’s limp body and started for the door. “Gabriel, let one of my soldiers carry her,” Starling said. Gabriel ignored her and kept walking.
As they left the building, a long black bus pulled into the driveway. “This is our ride,” Starling said. She gestured for the children to climb aboard.
Gabriel twisted sideways, carrying Jodi up the narrow steps, and then he took her to the long bench at the back of the bus. Pete guided the orphans to their seats and helped them get settled down. Starling opened one of the overhead compartments and pulled out blankets and pillows for everyone, including Jodi. Jodi didn’t even blink as Gabriel covered her up and put the pillow under her head. She was out like a light.
As the bus began to move, Gabriel leaned up against the steel pole next to the bench. He watched over Jodi to be sure she wouldn’t fall off the seat if they hit a bump or made a sudden stop. As they drove away, he saw the silhouette of the mansion against the night sky. It rose up out of the landscape like a crumbling ruin, the windows broken, smoke curling up from a fire near the kitchen. The rest of the estate looked barren under the cold moonlight. The trees looked gnarled and dead, the broad lawns lifeless and desolate. Gabriel barely recognized the place he had come to call home. It wasn’t the same. Somehow, in the last few hours, everything had changed.
Pete settled onto a nearby seat. He put his head back and closed his eyes. Gabriel thought he might be crying. He looked away so Pete wouldn’t be embarrassed. At the front of the bus, Starling sat sideways in her seat, watching them silently. Gabriel avoided her gaze.
In the back of his mind, Gabriel thought of Julia and Reeves, and he wondered where they were. According to Starling, Julia had known what was happening and sent her to help. He wondered if she’d been monitoring the estate’s security system from afar. If nothing else, at least that meant she and Reeves were safe.
He took a deep breath and threw his gaze around the bus. Starling was there, along with the bus driver and one armed guard. They all wore the same black tactical uniforms and Kevlar vests. The guard had one of those modified semi-automatic rifles, but Gabriel couldn’t be sure what those modifications were or how they worked. Starling and her companion both had semi-automatic pistols as side arms, tazers and handcuffs hanging from their belts, and backup weapons tucked into their boots.
Gabriel could see that they were well-trained soldiers, but they weren’t combat ready. Not for the Shadow, anyway. They worked well as a team but Gabriel knew that if they became separated, they wouldn’t last in a desperate situation. They were soldiers, not Shadow-warriors. They knew how to drive back the shadowkind with EGGS and R9-11, but without weapons, they would be helpless.
Gabriel suddenly realized what he’d been thinking, and he forced himself to stop. It was his training kicking in, and it was a hard habit to break. For the moment, all that mattered was that the children were safe. He turned his attention back to the orphans and realized that most of them were crying. They looked lost and terrified, and he felt guilty for not doing something about it sooner.
“Come on,” he said, patting Pete on the back. “Let’s get these kids cheered up.”
Pete wiped the tears from his cheeks and nodded. “Right,” he said.
Chapter 11
They spent a brief time moving back and forth through the bus, buckling the children into their seatbelts, tucking them in with blankets and pillows, and assuring them that everything would be okay. Naturally, the children wanted to know what was happening and where they were going. Unfortunately, Gabriel and Pete did not have these answers. Instead, they told the children it was a big surprise and that they were going somewhere very exciting.
“You’ll just have to wait and see,” Gabriel said.
This was something of a gamble of course, because for all Gabriel knew they might end up in a warehouse in the middle of the desert. Fortunately, the children were young enough that even a warehouse in the middle of the desert might be an adventure. Anything was an adventure to the orphans, as long as it didn’t involve chores. Wherever they were going, Gabriel doubted Starling was going to make the orphans scrub floors and take out the garbage. At least, he hoped not.
The bus exited the highway on the far side of town and drove through a dirty old neighborhood along the railroad tracks. Gabriel thought this was rather odd. If Starling was with the army, or some sort of government agency, he doubted she’d have a base in the middle of a rundown old railroad district. This raised the question of who exactly Starling was and who she worked for, but Gabriel thought it might be better to save those questions for later. He didn’t want to frighten the children.
Shortly, the bus left the road and pulled into an old railroad lot. They cruised down a narrow street, past dozens of decaying brick buildings spray-painted with graffiti and filled with broken and boarded up windows. Rats scurried about here and there among the debris, and litter blew back and forth across the road. Gabriel shot a curious glance in Commander Starling’s direction.
“This area used to be an industrial hub, before the railroad went out of business,” she explained. “They shipped millions of dollars of freight through here every single day.”
The bus turned aside, entering a concrete area covered with crisscrossing railroad lines. Up ahead, the lines led through a giant entryway into the front of an enormous warehouse-like building. The bus driver followed the tracks. As they entered the building, he reached out and hit a button on the dash. A loud creaking sound came from underneath the bus, and the floor shuddered. The bus lifted slightly, and began to roll along the rails.
Pete sat upright. “Did this bus just turn into a train?” he said.
Commander Starling smiled broadly. “You think that’s cool, wait ‘till you see what happens next.”
The building they entered was an old rail station. The bus headlights cast a pale glow about the place, illuminating an old ticket booth and a waiting area with benches and tables, all in a very bad state of disrepair. Decaying old signs hung suspended by wires that stretched up into the darkness, pointing to shipping and receiving areas that were now little more than faded paint lines on the dusty concrete floors. Massive spider webs crawled up the walls and filled the corners, so heavily layered in dust that they almost appeared to be some sort of alien constructs.
“This
is the creepiest place I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pete said. “It’s a good thing Jodi’s not awake.”
“That it is,” Starling said. “Sixty years ago, this place was filled with people. Now the rust and spider webs are the only thing holding it all together.”
In his mind’s eye, Gabriel imagined all the people that had once worked there, and the customers coming and going. Trains pulled in and out of the station and he heard the raucous sounds of whistles and engines and hundreds of voices shouting over the din. Now the place was a ghost town. Now it was just a huge empty building, wasting away from lack of maintenance and filled with trash blown in by the wind.
Up ahead, the tracks dropped out of sight. The bus-train followed them. It rolled down through the floor of the building, and entered a long black tunnel. The orphans gasped and cheered. To them, it was like a roller coaster ride. Gabriel and Pete were speechless. This was the strangest drive either of them had ever experienced.
Commander Starling reached up and turned on the lights along the roof. “Okay, everybody hang on,” she said. “This is the best part. We are going to go FAST!”
The bus driver flicked a switch and the bus’s old diesel engine went silent. A whirring sound like an electric motor started up, and the vehicle leapt forward. Gabriel felt g-forces pushing him back into his seat as they accelerated. The orphans laughed and cheered.
The tunnel was dark and Gabriel had a hard time judging their speed. He craned his neck, stealing a glance at the speedometer on the dash, but it was too far away to read. “Three hundred,” Starling said. “We’re doing about three hundred right now. But we’ll be doing seven in a few seconds.”
“Seven hundred miles per hour?” Pete said incredulously. “Is that even possible? The last I read, an experimental Japanese bullet train had the record at three hundred and fifty miles per hour.”
Shadow Rising (Shadow Born Trilogy Book 2) Page 4
