by Jayne Hawke
Jess was a second behind, her glaive lodging in the man's face and throwing him to the ground. She was left defenceless, but before the killing blow could come to her Liam, who had finished his last enemy seconds before, threw his stiletto across the field of battle and lodged it in the spine of her opponent.
The assassins were growing concerned, the worry painted on their faces as they drew together. Their numbers were diminished, the pairings broken. This was when they were most unpredictable, the danger they posed the hardest to counter. We moved in around them, weapons raised. Jess had recovered her glaive, but Liam had left his stiletto where it fell. His sabre was held in front of him at an angle, his eyes narrowed, his face stone still.
At a hand signal from one of the men, the artificial sun that had been the blinding accompaniment to their arrival began to spin around us unpredictably, the light sweeping in circles and arcs, never reversing but continuously changing speed and bearing in its rotation. The shadows spun dizzily around us, my focus on them waning as the speed of their change made them useless to me.
Useless to me, but not to them. The four men who remained began to jump from shadow to shadow, their speed impossible as the shadows themselves drew them around. Each time they landed in our realm, they made a tiny cut somewhere on the pack, their timing split-second precise to make use of the tiny window between one shadowstep and the next. It was a dance, celestial mysticism in microcosm, the movement of the heavenly bodies brought to heel even as the chaos rose out of control.
Their speed was beyond us, our strikes helpless. Even attempting to predict their landing was hopeless, their time in our world so short that a successful strike was a papercut. We were witnessing an apocalypse made just for us, an endless series of tiny pains and solar cycles marking the waning of our time. We struck out again and again, blood dripping from our weapons in minute rivulets, but the battle was a formality. I began to draw energy from my sword, healing my pack of their wounds rather than trying to kill our enemies, hoping that the endless dance would give someone time to come up with a solution.
The solution, when it came, was infinitely simple. The sun burnt out. Their time was up, their game was played, and when the shadows ceased to spin and dropped abruptly back to night the dervishes and the shieldbearers were gone.
We looked around at each other, smiling despite our wounds. No one said a word as I drew the enemies who had fallen down deep into the ground beneath our feet. Elijah set the food back out and Rex handed out plates. Liam gathered our cups from where he'd precariously piled them in the front seat and returned them to us one by one, and the picnic returned to its purpose.
The candied tarantulas and Casu marzu were quite easy to identify. As much as it pained me to show weakness in front of the pack, I had to bow out of the soft cheese complete with small maggots writhing in it. We didn’t tell each other who had provided which food, but I really hoped whoever was behind that didn’t cook for us any time soon.
Personally, I’d gone the sweet route. It had taken me a good bit of digging to track down a baker able to find the ingredients and pull it off, but I’d provided a banshee scream cheesecake and cockatrice cupcakes. The former was surprisingly light and airy. The banshee scream itself sent a refreshing chill through me.
“These cupcakes are good, but I need more of that steak,” Jess said as she stuffed the last of her cockatrice cupcake in her mouth.
“Bison,” Elijah said with a smile.
I had to admit that what I’d had of the bison steak, served as chilled sashimi, had been very enjoyable. Still, there was a surreality to what we’d done. To the casualness of sitting down, clothes bloodied, bodies aching from the fight and weeks of training, to enjoy a bizarre picnic. This was our new normal. This was how we were trying to make the most of every last second that we had left on this earth.
The goddess had demonstrated that she was no longer playing fair. We were going to be brought into line, or we were going to suffer.
I nibbled on a starfish and closed my eyes to savour the intriguing taste. It was better to enjoy what we could than waste precious moment fretting about what might be. Who knew when I’d get to taste unusual and interesting things while sitting under the moon with my pack again?
Sixteen
Of course, we barely got a respite. That was the problem with pissing off a freaking goddess: She was a freaking goddess. And this one had a plan and a deadline. Things which we were fucking up for her. It turned out that she hated that.
I didn’t really know what shadow monsters were. I’d summoned, drawn forth shadows of various stripes and sorts, but I’d always carefully avoided the really difficult, unhelpful shadows. When you needed a weapon, a monster wouldn’t do. When you needed an ally, an anarchist wasn’t the answer.
The megaminds came and told me I couldn’t beat shadows. I sent back an image from a movie of shadows being wiped out by light. They sent back a panorama of shadows sweeping in circles as light sources attempted to diffuse them. I sent back a white void with a single human – me - among an infinite of light.
I didn’t dislike the megaminds, didn’t dislike any of the shadows. Sometimes, I felt like the shadows were my real pack and that Elijah, Jess, Liam, and Rex were just allies. Still, I wasn’t a shadow. I was a person, a member of the primary plane, and I wasn’t going to let them pretend to be more important. We cast shadows. They didn’t cast us.
When the shadow monster came out, when the goddess decided to prove her power, we were as ready as we could be. My pack was familiar with what shadows could do, had come to understand the eldritch oddity that their geometry brought forward. These beings were our reflections, and they were in our world only by our permiss.
The shadow was born of power, the shadow of a magical spectacle. Where the fae had crafted yet another layer for their power, the shadow of that spell had been brought into the retinue of the goddess. When it came into our world, it was everything I had taught the pack to fear.
The shadow was a globular cloud of curves, negative space in a soupy sea of accomplishment. It crested over us for second after second, minute after minute, and we schemed and planned beneath the behemoth’s potential. When it finally landed, when it gained its motive force and threw off the shackles of its momentum, we had already seen its path, known its potential. I expected it to surrender, to turn its power to my purposes. I thought that complete knowledge of what it was and could be would be enough to cow it.
When the breaker of its fullness struck down on us, my foolishness was revealed and the near-worship I’d begun to create among the pack fell to pieces. I was the shadow walker, the witch without limits who knew things no other could, and it was universally believed, so I fancied, that I could predict the damned tides of shadow. When those tides crashed down on us, the final proof of my imperfection came hard and fast.
It would be years before I proved the megaminds wrong, before I gained the ability to defeat the shadows. Perhaps they knew that time would come and spoke only in the timescale of our present. Perhaps they knew the eventual outcome and spoke only to encourage me. Perhaps, as I preferred it, they spoke from ignorance. Perhaps my eventual conquest, our eventual conquest of the shadows was a shock to them. Perhaps the bell I struck, the mark I reached was a principal long awaited but never imagined. No matter what the eventuality of it all was, on that day we made one infinitesimal, impossible step towards an irreversible shift in the balance.
The shadow was a tidal wave, neither irregular nor mundane, and no shadow could see what would become of it.
In the time that would come, the megaminds came to call it the Yourself. I don’t think they named it, don’t think they would have named it as it was named, but I knew it as the Yourself and as so many names do it outlived any explanation.
As it hung over us, hanged over us, as its mass suspended itself above us like a foreboding breaker, I resisted the urge to fall into metaphor. There was something about a huge, impossible monster that
made me want to wax poetic, but the reality was that each and every member of the pack was about to fight for their lives. The last thing they needed was my half-formed philosophy.
Elijah called the charge, and we charged. I held my blade at ready and drew on the wind around me to drive the wave above us back. It was a small force, but I was coming to realize something fundamental about shadow magic: Small forces create huge results. The shadow breaker that had hoped to bring down the mass of the fae spell onto our heads, to drive us beneath the weight of the goddess’ will, was tipped just enough to fall backwards on its haunches, the slippery perhaps of the darkness too light to oppose the elemental weight of our plane’s winds.
The pack saw the shadow’s failure and, though they understood little of what they saw, had a warrior’s comprehension of weakness. Once they had fallen upon the failed breaker, they struck out with their weapons, practiced strokes delivered in tandem. The megaminds were right, in their way, the pack driving weapons home against absence even as I drew on all my magic to strike deep into the nothingness never making any meaningful headway towards destroying the shadow. Still, our efforts did their work, the force of our wills and the skill of our training proving beyond doubt that we were a force the shadows could not dismiss.
When the shadow drew itself back up, taking the form of the original spell again, its shape was exactly as before but somehow the message was different. It had seen what we were and knew its purpose. It dripped away back to the shadow plane, its message clear. When we needed it, it would show as much strength as we had.
Seventeen
Everything was changing at a breakneck pace. The city around us felt entirely the same, full of people who had no idea what was going on. Behind the scenes, within the walls of our house it was all go.
There were things left to be done. The megaminds weren’t ready for an all-out war with the goddess. Could the world ever be ready for such a thing? They needed us to push harder and do more to give them the smaller pieces they required for their part on the shadow plane.
“Remind me why we picked a fight with a goddess again,” Rex grumbled.
“We didn’t pick a fight with her. Lily was pushed into a deal she had no say in. And now we’re saving the world,” Elijah said.
“How can we be sure that we’re saving the world?” Liam asked.
“Yea, what if the goddess being on the god plane is better for things? I mean, what if she wasn’t really meant to fall? We don’t know how these things work,” Jess said.
That was exactly the kind of discussion I wasn’t ready to have. We weren’t in a position to really sit and doubt our plan, our position. There was no way to truly know if we were doing the right thing. How could we know the minds of the gods who were sitting on the god plane? The goddess wouldn’t give us any more truth than they would.
Of course, putting our faith in the megaminds was sketchy at best. They were sentient hyper-intelligent shadows, in many ways more alien to us than even the gods. Fuck knows what their end game was. For all we knew, it involved them devouring the Earth plane.
But we had no choice.
And that ate at me. I hated having the freedom, the ability to choose for myself taken out of my hands. It had happened when the goddess had given me the shadow magic, and now it was happening again.
Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on the present. Losing myself in what ifs, maybes, should haves, and all the other related considerations only wasted energy on things that I couldn’t change. And that was what it really came down to. I couldn’t change where we stood, what had happened, or our allies. So, we needed to buckle down and what with what we had.
All that was left was to carry out the plan and to hope with all we had that we’d done the right thing.
Somehow the list of things to do seemed to be getting longer. Maybe the megaminds were filling my brain up with more and more, maybe I had just underestimated how much work would go into the ones we’d had to begin with, but either way the pack was going to have to buckle down. Knowing how competitive they could be, Elijah and I decided to separate the work into five roughly equal lists, each with items ranked from quick and easy to tricky and arduous. A bit of magic later and the game was ready. Then we called the pack outside, where the sun was on the edge of setting.
As they came through the door, the lists politely fluttered over and distributed themselves at random, one to each, with the final two coming to Elijah and me respectively. Still blank, they earned us a quizzical look.
“You each have in your hands a list which has chosen you. On each is a list of tasks,” Elijah began. Liam raised a finger, which earned him an indulgent look from Elijah, who continued. “When Lily triggers the spell, the sheets will count down from ten, at which point the tasks will light up and the game will begin.”
I stepped in. “Do your tasks in order, top to bottom. Whoever finishes the most tasks by dawn gets a shadow pet as close to your description as I can make it. Earn its loyalty, and it will be the most faithful companion you can imagine.” Infinity took a moment to dance in the fading sun, ever the showman.
“If Lily wins, she takes an item of her choosing from one of our collections. Knife, artifact, whatever takes her fancy. Do play nice, though naturally we can’t watch everyone at once...” Elijah finished with a smirk, crossing his arms.
I made an entirely unnecessary snap of my fingers and the papers began to pulse with moonlight on the seconds. When they all flashed to full completion, they bound themselves to the person holding them such that the light wouldn’t give away anyone’s position, and the pack sprinted. Liam took an early lead, but before he could make it to his car Jess swept past him in cougar form with a triumphant scream, her car foregone in favour of the manoeuvrability of the great cat.
When they’d had a few moments’ head start, Elijah and I each sprinted after them, shoving and giggling like we hadn’t a care in the world before leaping into our cars and speeding out of the driveway.
The early tasks were intentionally the silly, easy stuff. Firstly, it seemed in the spirit of the thing to start off with some encouraging bite-sized wins, and secondly my instinct was that more small tasks done was better than fewer big ones. Since it was hard to tell when my instincts were really information from the megaminds, I’d come to trust them more and more when dealing with shadow problems. It was a choice that would be concerning in retrospect, but at the time it was expedient and – more troublingly – natural.
My first task was to trim some hedges on a piece of land abutting the pack’s, the work of a moment. I all but power-slid onto the median, leapt from the car without turning it off, and used a long shadow blade to make a sequence of perfect rectangles out of the gangly mess of untended box hedges. With a swipe of my finger, the task crossed itself out.
Next was a crumbling brick wall in the same district the arsonist had frequented; it needed help to finish crumbling, and I was the girl for the job. It was a decent ways, and that gave me a chance to put the Charger through its paces. I crossed a hundred easily and kept pushing, hours spent exploring the Brighton streets paying off as I swept across the city without a moment’s hesitation. When I arrived, it was just a matter of using some quick earth magic to finish off what time had started. Didn’t even need to get out of the car.
Another slash, another task done. Barely ten minutes spent. I felt confident that I was taking an early lead and resolved to keep up the pace. My third task was to pin a Foucault’s pendulum in place. The pendulum essentially just went back and forth – and it needed to not. There was a more complex math thing having to do with the planet’s rotation that separated it from a regular pendulum, but I’d never looked into it in any detail. Hopefully, the pendulum wasn’t what actually made the earth rotate.
This was the first break-in, which would have put it lower on the list but for the fact that it was held in a Victorian-style greenhouse made more or less entirely of glass. The trip over could only be accomplished along
small, winding roads, and I cursed every turn as I had to choose between slowing down and slamming the car’s ass into a building. By the time I got there, it felt like a decade had passed. I’d put tape over my car’s clock halfway there, unable to bear the judgmental digits, and I couldn’t decide if not knowing was better or worse.
In either case, the unwarded building was easily scaled and, once I’d reached the top, I popped an unsecured pane of glass out, leaned down, and magically rusted the mechanism of the massive pendulum until it stuck in place. I slipped the glass back into place and slid down the side of the building, landing in the dirt at a run to get back to the car.
Three up, three down. My fourth was, mercifully, close at hand running alongside the park. It was a much more prank-y exercise, mixing up the order of a series of signs shaped like letters that had been placed to read BRIGHTON as you drove past them to instead read BRO THING. I could swear some of these were just for the fun of it, but I wasn’t one to argue with a list.
By the time I got to my fifth, they were starting to get difficult. I needed to trespass on a fancy garden and clean a blockage out of a pipe that fed a statue of a pissing cupid. Yet another strange design trend I’d never understand, but if the statue needed to be pissing then pissing it would be. I had to make my approach more quietly than before, the combination of a residential neighbourhood and a crime someone might go to the trouble of prosecuting (guerrilla garden clean-up seems like a favour on the surface but is easily mistaken for less wholesome activity after midnight) making a roaring muscle car’s approach something of a liability.
When I arrived, I found heavy wards on the front of the house. I parked my car and slipped around the side of the property, feeling lucky that the garden was unwarded. Hardly unusual, given the price of warding and the infrequency of garden gnome theft, but my luck wasn’t always this good. Where things got frustrating was when I found the regrettably pissless cupid serviced by an unseen pipe likely buried underground and running to the house. I had been foolishly hoping for something drawing directly from a pool beneath it or some such, but it was not to be.
