Elemental Shadows

by Phaedra Weldon

  "Did you see another Shadow Person while you were there?"

  Kyle nodded. "We did. But this one was taller, and he had a hat."

  "And he was pissed off," Levi said. "Thing hissed at us before it disappeared. Crwys here suddenly started calling you and when you didn't answer, we all piled in Kyle's car and Crwys lead us here."

  I looked at Crwys. "You knew I was in trouble."

  "I knew something was wrong. But it wasn't from you," he reached out and moved his hand gently over Grey's head. "She told me."

  "Grey?" I looked down at her. She looked up at me with those eyes that looked so human sometimes.

  "She is your Familiar. And," Crwys shrugged. "Your Salamander thought something was wrong."

  Now that really freaked me out. "You can hear my Salamander? My Fire?"

  Kyle cleared his throat. "We need to let her know the other part."

  "What other part?" I was miffed. What the hell was this bastard if he could talk to Elementals?

  "All the addresses you got calls from," Levi said. "With the exception of this last one and the Daemon possessed dog, were homes those kids disappeared from last month."

  I gasped. "The Changelings?"

  Kyle, Crwys, Levi and Ivan nodded in unison. Kyle spoke up. "I didn't put it together because I didn't have a list of all the missing children. But Levi did."

  "And we've got three more messages on the store phone about the same issue," Ivan said. When everyone looked at him, he held up his phone. "I checked remotely."

  Yeah, he'd checked remotely, just not with the damn phone. "This isn't a coincidence. All of the homes where the children turned on their parents are now experiencing hauntings, but they're all Shadow People."

  "Looks that way," Crwys pointed to Robin. "And this is the house where his niece lived, isn't it?"

  "Yeah but that wasn't his niece that came out of the fireplace. That thing morphed into a tall, red-eyed goblin."

  "Shadow People," Crwys said. "By definition, are little more than impressions. Bundles of emotions that are kinetically assembled between worlds and exist there."

  "Not sure I get your explanation this time either." Ivan sat in a chair.

  Levi put a hand on Crwys's shoulder. "Let me try this time, bro." His eyes shifted and became black over the whites. When he spoke his voice had a dual quality that I recognized as being the voice of the demon Ashur speaking through. "In my world, where thoughts create things in a more rapid fashion, and magic as you call it, is a much more tangible tool, there are always cast offs. Things that never grow into their full potential. The last Phantasm to rule my world liked to experiment with these things. And when she was done with them, she cast them off. With no purpose, they had no home and became little more than junk. They can move from world to world but they can never fully be a part of it," he inhaled and then sighed. "They exist between the worlds. Like things caught between two panes of glass."

  "But we perceive them," Ivan said. "They're like…on a different frequency. We just aren't made to fully see them, just their impression, like Crwys said."

  Ashur/Levi nodded. "That is correct. The Shadow People seen in these houses are somehow linked to the missing children."

  I had a really, really bad thought at that moment. Something that terrified me more than what the Arcane Magic could do to me. "What if…what if the Shadow People aren't linked. What if these Shadow People are the missing children?"

  "That's why I stopped you. We don't know what your beating up on. But as for making Shadow People from this side of things?" Crwys shook his head. "As far as I know that can't be done."

  "You just wanted to be safe. I get that." I finally pushed my chair out and stood up. I was all better now, physically. Mentally? Emotionally?

  I'll get back with you on those fronts.

  When he didn't answer, I put my finger in his face. "What if that was one of the kids? Or even worse, what if that really was Kathy and I let loose a storm of Elemental whoop-ass on her?" I hated to think or even imagine that horrific shadowy nightmare had been Kathy. Then again, it was better to find out for sure. I knew that meant contacting Tzariene.

  Again.

  The detective shook his head. "It can't be done."

  Levi shrugged. "We don't know that. What about a Coyote Flame?"

  I narrowed my eyes at Levi. "That sounds familiar. What is that?"

  "It's an old doorway spell," Kyle said. "It was created as a means into the other Worlds."

  "And it's dangerous," Crwys pushed my finger away from his face. "Don't even try to make one of those. They're unreliable."

  "How so?"

  "Because you don't know where the other door is going to form. They're unstable. You could create a door here with the intent of going directly into Alfheim and end up in an Ethereal dungeon."

  "I heard that world shut down," Levi said. "Someone rebooted it."

  Crwys pointed at his partner. "Not now."

  "I don't know about this Ethereal place," Kyle said. "But Arden can tell you more about the Coyote Flame. I wasn't ever allowed to learn how they're made. That's Elder magic."

  "Well unfortunately Arden's in jail," I rubbed at my eyes.

  "No, she's not," Crwys moved around the den and looked out the window at the back yard. I knew there was a very lonely swing set out there, and a trampoline, missing the joy and laughter of children. "She made bail before we even booked her. Woman's got powerful allies. Not to mention Prescott's starting to like her."

  Oh great. That was not what the city needed.

  Grey pushed at my hip with her nose and I reached down to her. Weight pressed on my shoulders. I started yawning. I was going to have to sleep. And eat. My magic came directly from my own energy, and I needed to refill it. "I'm going home."

  "Want us back at the shop?" Kyle asked.

  "No…you go on home, Kyle. I'll take Ivan back so he can get his car. Just come in early."

  Kyle nodded.

  "What about Robin?" Crwys asked. I was touched that he did.

  I looked at my boyfriend, still sound asleep on the couch. He looked terrible. Even more so now. "I don't know. Is there a way to ward against these Shadow People?"

  "I can do what I did for the other houses we visited," Kyle said. "I have my kit in the car. The detectives can help me if they want and then I can take them back to get their car."

  "I'd appreciate it. You two okay with this?"

  The detectives nodded. I gave Robin a kiss on his cheek. We were growing so far apart, he and I. With Rose's death, and Kathy's disappearance…he was falling apart.

  Ivan and I didn't talk on the way back. Ivan didn't bat an eye when I turned away from the shop and pulled up next to Ina's house. We went inside and things were just as I left them. I asked him to search the house for the book, just in case the Shadow Person hadn't been able to take it and had hidden it instead.

  "It's not here." Ivan and I were in the back yard, looking at the Circle. "But I can see Arcane all over that Circle. What the hell happened out there?"

  "Something terrible." I looked up at the sky for a few seconds. The sun was setting, leaving behind a wash of pinks and soft oranges. "You know who Ronald Kennett is."

  Ivan's head snapped around as he turned around to face me. "How did you know?"

  "Because you're a lousy poker player. And you've been very picky about how much time you spend diving into the web. Almost like you were afraid something like that would happen to you because you knew it had already happened to someone else."

  He narrowed his eyes at me. "This is why we came here."

  "Wards are still up. There aren't any devices here that can spy on us. No one knows we're here. This is where we can tell each other secrets."

  "I know yours. Now you want to know mine?"

  "One of them." I leaned my head to my shoulder. "What happened?"

  Ivan shoved his hands into his pockets. "I was online about a month ago—this was before any of this Arcane stuff happened.
I came across an article telling how a local women's shelter had been hacked, and the worker's private information was leaked out. Two of the workers were killed a day after that information got out and I found a direct link between the hack and the deaths."

  "This kid did it? He hacked and killed the two women?"

  "No. His girlfriend was in one of the shelters but he didn't know which one. So he started hacking them all to find her, and when he did, he leaked the information out. This forced her to leave the shelter when the two women were attacked in their homes and killed." Ivan looked upset. "I knew this bastard was responsible for the leak, even though some hacking group calling themselves Soul Machine took credit. So I looked for him, followed the path of his hack back to his computer."

  I took a step toward Ivan; terrified he was going to tell me he had something to do with this kid's murder. "What did you do?"

  "I dumped his hard drive. Copied it all to another server and threatened if he ever did anything like that again I'd send evidence to the FBI of what happened. I told him to leave his ex and everyone else alone. And don't look at me like that. What I do isn't traceable because there's no IP. I don't log in through anyone's account. I just access it. So he couldn't trace me if he wanted to."

  "But you traced him."

  "Because he didn't know what he was doing. He was only half educated in what he was. I could sense his Cyber signature but he still worked on the assumption he had to log in to hardware, and he didn't have to."

  "Could he trace where you put the information?"

  "He could trace the actual information. But I don't think he ever did. When I didn't hear anything else from him and his ex didn't either, I went back to his computer." He looked down and didn't say anything else.

  "You found him dead."

  "Yeah…it was the scariest thing I'd ever done. I mean, I could use his webcam and see he was dead. And he'd been dead a few days. So I scrubbed everything and backed out."

  "But you didn't tell the police."

  "Tell them what? Hey, I can put my mind into the web and take a look into people's computers and I saw this dead guy?" He made a face. "I checked in with his parent's itinerary and knew they'd be home with within twenty-four hours of my discovery."

  "What you saw…that scared you, didn't it? That he'd gotten so involved that he died."

  "Yes."

  "And you guys saw Shadow People in his house?"

  "That's what I don't understand. These things aren't ghosts, not like we define them. If they're showing up at the houses children were taken from by Dionysus to make the Changelings, why there? There wasn't a child missing from that house."

  That was odd. No wait…everything in this was odd. All kinds of pieces and nothing fitting together.

  "I hope your theory isn't right," Ivan said. "About the Shadow People being the children. Did you see what your Elementals were doing to that thing?"

  I winced. Yeah I had. I remembered the little Gnome chopping the Shadow Person down to size. I also remembered the screams of pain.

  He put his arm over my shoulder. "Things are getting bad, Sam."

  "Yeah, they are." I wrapped my arm around his back. We both faced the Circle. "There's no way you can download that book again from memory?"

  "No. I tossed every byte of that infernal thing the first chance I got. I don't have any of it stored in memory. Sorry, Sam."

  "Oh. Well. I just don't know why a Shadow Person would take the book. Or how. I'd made it a physical book at that point."

  "Oh it was physical, but probably not stable," Ivan offered. "I made it with an expander in mind, so it would convert back to the necklace. Any great amount of pressure on it would make it pop back into its smaller shape."

  "And…it would have to digitize to do that?"

  "Yeah," he pulled away and looked down at me. "What?"

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket and did a quick inventory of where my guns were. In my car. Right. And Grey…I felt her still roaming the house. I held the phone out to him. "Look for Arcane."

  "Oh I can see it. It's in the circuitry of your phone. But it's not real…" he pursed his lips. "It's like trace Arcane."

  "Say that again?"

  "I mean it's like what got left behind for me when I uploaded and downloaded that book. Like ghost images of what had been there. I suggest you find a way to dump your phone to get that out of there."

  "So, something Arcane was in my phone, or had to be to leave these elements?"

  He nodded vigorously. "Yeah."

  "So I brought whatever it was from the shop, into Ina's house and there it came out of my phone and grabbed the book."

  Ivan didn't answer at first. Grey came out of the house and started sniffing around the grass nearby. Poor thing. Probably had to go real bad. "How did it get back out of the house?"

  "Huh?"

  "If you brought it in through your phone, did you take it back out through your phone?"

  I stared up at him. "I don't think so. I used my phone right after it to talk to Kyle."

  He snapped his fingers. "That's how it got out. It went through the connection to Kyle's phone," and then his expression changed. "Oh shit…it's in Kyle's phone!"

  "But how can something that's allegedly spiritual even attach itself to a phone?"

  Ivan closed his eyes. "Who said these things were spiritual?" He held out his hands, palms up and I watched as he connected to the web. I didn't know how he did it, and I wasn't going to try and suss out the logistics. It was just something I'd seen and grown to accept.

  The only thing I knew for certain was the magical community, as it stood now, did not need to know that Witches like Ivan existed. It would be the same if the government ever found out about us.

  I could just see the threads of wireless magic surrounding him, spinning around his fingers as he manipulated local Internet connections, security cameras and service providers. I assumed he was looking for Kyle's phone.

  When Ivan opened his eyes they were green and glowing. He moved his hands and ghostly images appeared in front of him. He swiped at them like anyone would swipe at a tablet screen or smart phone, pinching things to make them smaller or using gestures to make them grow.

  I saw strands of colors as he plucked through them and then centered on one strand that glittered a bright and brilliant red.

  "I got him. He's on the phone with…" Ivan narrowed his eyes. "I don't know this guy. Might be somebody new he met."

  "Is he at home?"

  "No. He's on the road, and he's not near his house. I know the communication between the phones is red because of the Shadow entity—and it looks like the thing's trying to move from Kyle's phone to this other person's phone."

  Oh shit. "Can you stop it?"

  "I can cut the connection. But Kyle's just going to call him back or vice versa."

  "Do it anyway. Can you shut his phone down?"

  Ivan moved the strand of glittering red to the right and then widened it. "Yes. He's got that app on it to find his phone. I can shut it down, but then we won't be able to communicate with him either."

  "Find out where he is first." I slapped a hand to my mouth as I fought back a yawn. I'd noticed the overwhelming fatigue settling on my shoulders since leaving Rose's house and now it was even heavier.

  "I'll zero in on him with traffic cameras."

  I tried to move all those pieces together in my head as I waited on Ivan to locate Kyle. The Clerics had given me twenty-four hours. That was at nine this morning. It was already closing in on six in the evening and the sun was setting. I had fourteen hours or so to find the Hammer or they were going to request a warlock. Truth was, that was taking the request to Parliament. Who knew how much longer it would take Parliament make a decision? The Witch Parliament wasn't exactly a speedy bunch. Part of me figured if I didn't find them what they needed or invent something to placate them by exactly nine in the morning, there was still time.

  "Got him," Ivan said as he moved blurry
images across his virtual screen and read out an address.

  "That's near Arden's house."

  "He might be going to see his aunt."

  "And the phone wouldn't work in her house to begin with. Let's meet him over there and get that phone."

  Ivan blinked a few times as the images vanished and his eyes became their beautiful light brown. "And then what?"

  "You're going to force that son of a bitch out of that damn phone and I'm going to get that book back."

  Thinking it in my head, it sounded really cool. Saying it out loud made me sound like a dumbass.

  We grabbed Grey and got back in my Jeep and headed to Arden's.

  She lived in the Garden District, not far from Anne Rice's former home. Arden lived on a corner lot in a mansion to rival any of the others on her street. The house was lit up against the night for a party when we arrived; cars parked up and down the street. I used my Park Fu and found a spot down the street from Kyle's car. I jumped out and looked inside, hoping maybe he just left the phone in the car.

  No such luck. There wasn't an Arcane thing in it.

  "You really want me to go in there?" Ivan looked worried as he stepped out of the Jeep. He knew how much I didn't want Arden to know what he was. He was afraid of the woman because she'd inadvertently put him in a coma when they first met. Long story.

  "Yeah. I need you with me. Just don't connect with anything in the house. Can you do that?"

  He nodded, but he still looked worried.

  I made sure I had my guns and Grey followed at my heels as we headed to the house. The iron front gate was open and we walked in.

  The place was packed—literally—with people. Everyone was dressed in nice clothing, which made our casual apparel stick out. Grey hung outside and settled in the bushes. I had the clear impression she did not want to go inside.

  "Sam!"

  I heard Kyle's voice as we slowly made our way through the crowd. I spotted him, waved, and the three of us met in a corner near the staircase where there were no people and no furniture. I gaped at Kyle. He was actually dressed up in a nice suit. "What's going on?"