by John Levitt
“That’s close enough, Mason,” she said.
“Good to see you, too, Jackie. You know, if you wanted to talk, you could have picked a more pleasant spot. A warm café, for example.”
“I have no interest in talking,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. If she hadn’t wanted to talk, she would have launched an attack at me as soon as I was close enough.
“Why did you have to kill Malcolm?” I said. “He wasn’t a bad guy—he certainly didn’t deserve that.”
“Malcolm’s dead?”
“Yeah, that sometimes happens to people when you stick a knife into them.”
She seemed genuinely taken aback, though it was hard to tell at that distance by nothing more than the light of the half-moon. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t know anything about it. It was just a distraction—he’s far too tough to die over a little stab wound.”
“I was there when he died.”
She looked at me blankly. “I guess I was wrong, then.”
“Yeah, and what now? You kill me, too, so you can keep hold of that stupid book?” I paused. “Gosh, and I thought we meant something to each other.” She almost smiled.
“Yes, you were very clever about that. You had a good time, though, didn’t you? But you don’t understand. I’m not a bad person. I don’t like doing some of the things I have to do. But it’s the survival of the planet we’re talking about. Even if some people have to die. That’s a horrible thing, but sometimes it’s necessary.”
“And then what? You and your friends enjoy a pristine world without the rest of humanity’s fuckups to ruin it?”
“Yes. Clean air, clean water, mountain streams teeming with silver fish. All of the creatures of the goddess living—and dying—in harmony with nature. It’s not about us; it’s about Gaia. I can do it; I really can. I have the book now. All I need is some time to study it. But I won’t be around to enjoy that new world anyway, any more than you will.”
“Why not?”
“Richter was a black practitioner, remember? Something this big requires more than a simple drop of blood. It requires a blood sacrifice, a willing one; in fact, the enabler of the spell that creates it has to give up her life.
“And why wouldn’t you just let me have the book, anyway? Why won’t you leave me alone? I don’t want to hurt you. I like you, honestly. It’s not like what I’m doing is anybody else’s business. They’ll still have their miserable world to destroy, just like always.”
She did have a point. If what she was saying was true, why not leave her alone? Except, she was willing to kill to achieve her goals, and that’s never a good basis for a fresh start in life. And the law of unintended consequences would surely kick in. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen if Jackie were left alone with her precious book, but I was willing to bet it wouldn’t be good.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think things are as simple as you think they are.”
“I know. And you’ll keep hounding me until you get the book back. That’s why you have to go. I’m sorry. I really am. I hate this.”
This sounded like she was screwing up her courage to the sticking point, about to launch an attack. I set myself, ready for anything. I liked having the water so close; water is fluid and powerful, and makes a great metaphor for movement and transformation, applicable to many uses of talent. I gathered in the essence of the rippling, evermorphing waves, and waited patiently.
Jackie crouched down and I tensed, but I couldn’t detect any burst of talent coming from her. A small glow flared, as if she had struck a match, and a few seconds later a trail of fire arched into the night sky and explosions of color blossomed out. She’d set off a skyrocket.
At first I thought it was a diversion, meant to distract my attention away from the real attack, but there was no attack. She slipped away over the end of the jetty, disappearing behind the piled rocks. I didn’t understand what she was doing; there was no way out from there.
Except of course there was. A moment later I saw a sea kayak moving away from the rocks, heading out at a good clip, with Jackie paddling strongly. How utterly simple—I pride myself on coming up with elegant nonmagical solutions to conflict, but this time I’d had the tables turned on me.
But what point was there in luring me here only to escape at the last moment? Lou couldn’t have even found her in the first place if she hadn’t wanted him to. And what was the point of the skyrocket, for that matter?
Lou whipped his head around at the same moment the answer dawned on me. It hadn’t been just a random fire-work; it had been a signal. Now I saw the point of the jetty. There was no way back except the way I’d just come, and without a doubt there was something waiting there for me.
The moon was a little higher and at my back as I looked toward the shore, making it easier to see. I could barely make anything out, but Lou was focused alertly, so I followed his sight line and looked where he was looking. Not too far from where we stood, the reflections on the water of the bay vanished momentarily, a blank spot in the dark night. It moved slowly as I watched, like an enormous shadow.
A shadow. Night. Moonlight. A Shadow Man.
She had learned how to call them. That book must be a useful one indeed. What had Malcolm said? That they fed on life force, and how he’d driven one off, but nothing about how he’d done it.
It moved in closer, black as ink, blacker than the night, and it did indeed have a vaguely manlike shape. My first thought was to fight it with light—that was the logical thing. But I was far away from the city lights and didn’t have much to draw upon. I need to work with my environment; I’m not much good at creating things out of nothing. Victor could have whipped up a blinding fireball, I’m sure, but Victor wasn’t here.
I used the power essence of water that I’d stored up while facing Jackie and temporarily turned a section of the jetty into a liquid mass, incapable of supporting weight. The shadow flowed over it without hesitation, the way a shadow can move over any one surface as easily as any other. It was closer now, and I tried setting up an energy shield. I hated to do that since it takes so much out of me to keep it going, but I needn’t have worried. It flowed through the shield as if it weren’t there. I hadn’t really expected it to work; previous encounters had taught me that otherworldly entities are rarely directly affected by talent, and this thing was no exception.
Fifty feet from us, it stopped, assessing the situation. It liked what it saw. I thought about enhancing the far-off streetlights on Cargo Way to provide illumination, but the light would be weak and I had no reason to think it would act as a defense anyway. Not that I had time to do anything.
Once it had made up its mind, it moved, and it moved fast. Watching it glide slowly toward me, I had foolishly assumed that was its natural mode. But it was on me in two seconds, covering the last fifty feet between us in no time at all.
I automatically threw up my left arm to block its rush, and it latched onto me. Immediately my arm went numb, like it had fallen asleep, and I felt weariness creeping into my bones as if I’d just finished a twenty-mile hike. I grabbed at the creature with my free hand, trying to dislodge it, but there was nothing solid to get hold of. Not entirely corporeal, Malcolm had said. I wished I’d thought to ask him how he’d driven it off. It was like trying to fight a chocolate pudding; there was some resistance to its flesh, but my hand passed right through it and its substance closed up behind as my hand traveled through.
Of course, it couldn’t hurt me, either, not physically, but it didn’t have to. All it needed was to hold on to me in its unpleasantly sticky fashion and I’d soon be drained of life.
I panicked. I had no time; the longer it held on, the worse it would be for me. Even if I managed to ultimately defeat it and beat it back, I’d have lost years off my life, with what was left of my youth stolen away forever. I tried to tear my arm away from it, at the same time ineffectually beating at it with
my free arm.
About this time Lou decided to sink his teeth into the thing’s leg. It may have presented a pudding-like consistency to normal folks, but Ifrits are not your everyday folk. He got a firm grip with his teeth and shook his head back and forth. The creature didn’t make a sound; I’m not sure it could. But it let go of me and reached toward Lou, although I can’t imagine what it thought it was going to do to him. That doughy consistency it possessed couldn’t hurt him, and I don’t think it could suck any of the life out of him, either.
But Lou certainly possessed the ability to hurt the Shadow Man. He gave a vigorous shake and then suddenly fell back, losing his balance. I thought he’d lost his grip, but instead he’d managed to tear off a good-sized chunk from the creature’s leg. He spit it out onto the dirt path and it lay there like a sticky bit of black felt. But not for long. It started to move, oozing back toward the creature, a grotesque inky amoeba trying to rejoin its parent.
At the same time, Lou went into a violent paroxysm of coughing and retching, just short of convulsing. He might have been able to hurt the thing, but in its own way it had hurt him as well. He was out of commission for a while. It looked like I was going to have to deal with it on my own after all.
The sight of the crawling piece of protoplasm reminded me of something. Amoebas react to stimuli. In the lab, the easiest way to demonstrate this is with a mild electric current. And the streetlights I’d dismissed were powered, of course, by electricity.
The creature had temporarily abandoned its attack on me, concerned more with reabsorbing its missing part. I reached out to the distant lights, almost out of my range, and felt the trickle of current that powered them. I gathered it up, and looked around for something to push it into. But we were out on the jetty, with nothing but rocks and sand and water, and I needed metal. The Shadow Man had finished reattaching and turned back toward me.
I dug in my pocket and came up with three quarters and a dime. Not the ideal metal to hold an electric charge, but this wasn’t precisely electric—like all my workings of talent, it was an analogue and a metaphor. I didn’t have much of the current, but I concentrated everything I had into those coins. They vibrated in my hand, the pent-up power waiting to escape.
Before the Shadow Man could close with me again, I flung one of the quarters at him, unleashing the power at the same instant. It hit him squarely in the chest and sizzled when it did, sparking like a live wire. It jumped back, confused, and I threw the dime. The coins weren’t lethal, not by any means, probably not even dangerous to it, but they hurt the creature and that surprised it. They were something completely outside its experience.
I had only two quarters left, but I walked toward it confidently, and as the Shadow Man backed away I threw another. It sizzled satisfyingly again as it struck. The Shadow Man moved farther away, more quickly this time. I pushed forward; in selling a bluff, confidence is essential.
I ran toward it as if eager to get as close as I could, and threw the last coin. I almost missed, which would have been a disaster, but it struck it right in the head, or what passed for a head. I actually got close enough to almost touch it before its nerve failed. At the last moment it turned tail, gliding back toward the parking lot at top speed. I made a show of chasing it for a few more steps before stopping and turning my attention to Lou. He had stopped coughing and was sitting with his head down.
“You okay?” I said.
He coughed a couple more times and got to his feet. I don’t know what that thing tasted like, but I’ll bet it was disgusting. It must be a problem when your only weapon is your teeth and things you run into are made of stuff you don’t even want to touch, much less eat.
Right where we’d been struggling, an oily black residue coated a small area of the path. I kicked some dirt over it, kneaded it into a messy paste, scooped it up, and dumped it into my jacket pocket. It might not be of any use, but it couldn’t hurt. Victor or Eli might be able to use it to extract some information about the thing.
We walked back down the path to the parking lot. Lou acted unconcerned, which was a good indication the Shadow Man was really gone, but that didn’t keep me from peering suspiciously at every dark and shadowed area. Two minutes later we were headed home. Another fruitful and productive evening.
FIFTEEN
IT TOOK ALMOST AS LONG TO RELATE THE EXPERIENCES of the last few days to Eli and Victor as it had to experience them. It didn’t help that Eli interrupted me after every sentence with a question, which led to another question and so on until I finally didn’t know the answer.
“Part of my arm is still numb,” I said. “I can use it fine, but it feels weird.”
“Have you called Campbell?” Eli asked.
“Not yet. I thought it might just go away.”
“Or maybe get worse and spread,” Victor said.
“Point taken. In the meantime, what are we going to do about Jackie? I’d just as soon forget about her, though she did try to kill me. But with the second book, she’s liable to start really messing with the edges of our reality.”
Eli nodded. “She doesn’t appear to be amenable to reason, does she? She’ll be trying experiments, and experiments can have unintended consequences. Like the Shadow Man. And have you forgotten Rolf’s attempt to create an Ifrit? That had quite an effect on us all, did it not?”
“True.”
“And that experiment was on a much smaller scale than what she’s contemplating. Think about the implications of that for a moment. Things could easily get worse, far worse.”
“I get that. But if this is dangerous, why hasn’t Jessie been straight with me? She’s still holding back, I can tell.”
“Maybe she’s trying to protect her daughter. Maybe she wants that second book for herself.”
“And what am I going to do about this Shadow Man? If it’s zeroed in on me, I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder every time I go out at night.”
I pulled out a paper bag. In it was the dirt and residue I’d collected from the Shadow Man. A paper bag is better than a plastic one if what you’re dealing with is damp or sticky. A plastic bag traps organic compounds as they break down, and whatever is in it eventually becomes a useless, foul-smelling sludge.
“What’s in the bag?” Victor asked.
“I collected some of the Shadow Man’s leavings. Maybe we can use them to make a protective shield.”
“Good thinking,” Victor said. “You’re learning.” Victor could make even a compliment sound condescending. “But I think I’ve got something simpler that will work just as well.”
He walked over to the huge safe that sits in the corner of the study, placed the bag inside, and rummaged around in it for a moment. The safe is where he keeps magical props, rare crystals, elixirs, arcane volumes of magical lore, and pictures of his family for all I knew. As well as firearms of various types—Victor likes to be prepared for any and every eventuality.
“I don’t think a gun would be of much use,” I said. “It would be like trying to shoot silly putty.”
“Agreed,” he said. “Take this.” He handed me a slim black object the size of a cigarette pack. Two silver prongs jutted out of one end. “You slide the safety switch forward and push the button.”
“A stun gun?”
“Exactly. It doesn’t like electricity, you said.”
I held it at arm’s length, pushed the button, and was rewarded by a bright arc between the terminals and a satisfying electrical buzz. This was just the ticket.
“All right,” said Victor. “Now that’s out of the way, we can concentrate on finding Jackie. Eli?”
“If she’s gone to earth, I doubt we can locate her. She’s a strong practitioner, and if she’s shielding, we’re not going to find her. But we can make a device that will alert us if and when she tries to implement a major spell.” Eli joined Victor by the safe and peered inside.
“Did you get the idea from Richter’s book?” Victor asked.
“Exactly
. We’ll need to modify it some, of course—Richter used blood for everything, sometimes quite a bit of it. Blood was more available back then.” He stuck his head in a little farther. “We’ll need some mercury, copper filings, a battery, of course, for an energy analogue ...”
His voice grew muffled as his head poked in deeper still, and when he backed out he had several items in his hands. I watched with interest as Victor and Eli proceeded to assemble a makeshift magical energy detector. The crux of it was a thin shim of metal, pointed at one end, floating on the surface of a bowl of mercury. The bowl itself had crude runes drawn around the rim on the outside, just below the lip.
“That’s done it,” Eli said. “All that’s needed now is to sensitize the metal. It needs to be balanced in a state of tension, between opposing forces.”
“That will take Mason’s assistance, then,” Victor said.
“Glad to help,” I said.
I always felt a bit intimidated when Victor and Eli were busy whipping up a complex spell or operation that was beyond me, like I was a slow child who could only watch in wonder. And I was sometimes envious of Eli’s knowledge and intellect.
But I also wondered if Eli ever felt angst of his own, though he never shows it. He hasn’t got the intrinsic power to implement the spells he crafts—he has to rely on others to carry out that part. Like a basketball coach who plots out the strategy, sets the defense, and knows just where everyone should be and exactly what they need to do in order to win, he’s invaluable. He can even teach proper stance and footwork, helping players reach their potential. But he has to rely on those players, because he can’t do any of those things himself. It would be hard to avoid some measure of envy and even jealousy as he watches those amazing athletes fly through the air and knock down the shot.
Victor, now, was a player coach. He could do it all, but I wasn’t jealous of him in the slightest. Maybe that’s because he’s not a very happy man and I wouldn’t want to be him.
