Shadow Blade

by Seressia Glass

  “I think I have the right to know the name

  of the person making demands of me.”

  The Nubian’s lips tightened. “My name is Kevin. Kevin Lambert.”

  Kira snorted. “I find it hard to believe that ‘Kevin’ was a common name four thousand years ago.”

  He remained silent while their waiter brought their drinks and left. Then he leaned forward. “My name is Khefar, son of Jeru, son of Natek. And yes, I was born more than four millennia ago. Now that the introductions are over, may I have my dagger back?”

  “I need you to answer some questions first.”

  A muscle in his right cheek ticked. “I want my blade back.”

  Praise for the writing of Seressia Glass,

  an author whom Romantic Times calls “phenomenal”!

  “Hits hard and sexy with an emotional edge. . . .”

  —Romantic Times about “In Walks Trouble” in

  Vegas Bites: Three of a Kind

  “Almost impossible to put down.”

  —The Romance Reader about

  No Commitment Required

  “An easy, fun, scary read.”

  —R.A.W. Sistaz about Dream of Shadows

  SERESSIA

  GLASS

  SHADOW

  BLADE

  POCKET BOOKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Seressia Glass

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  First Juno Books/Pocket Books paperback edition February 2010

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  Designed by Ester Paradelo

  Cover design by John Vairo Jr.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5679-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6900-1 (ebook)

  To Paula, my editor, and Jenny, my agent.

  Thanks for believing in my story!

  And to the fabulous Stacia Kane—you rock!

  And a special thanks to L.A. Banks for

  your enthusiasm and encouragement.

  This wouldn’t have happened without any of you.

  She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,

  And sees too deep for laughter;

  Her touch is a vibration and a light

  From worlds before and after.

  —Edwin Markham, “Poetry”

  Prologue

  Kira sat on a rough-hewn bench with faded tapestry cushions, her back against the gray stone wall of the hall. Thick glass windows were set into the corridor walls every few feet in a vain attempt to brighten the cold, desolate passageway. She didn’t know what this place was; she’d stopped caring and paying attention once she’d realized her parents were sending her away. She’d tried to stop caring about that too, but it was harder.

  She knew they were on an island as they’d had to reach it by boat. They had then climbed a steep hill dotted with rocks and windswept grass to reach what looked like a sprawling sun-bleached castle perched atop a cliff set against a sky the same robin’s egg blue as the water. Now, as she sat alone in the shadowy hallway, the sun and the sky and the sea seemed to have disappeared. The “castle” felt more like a prison than a palace.

  She huddled in the oversized navy blue all-weather coat that had become her protection from the world ever since she’d hit puberty a few months before. Across the hall from her bench, a heavy wooden door separated her from the adults deciding her future—but not from their words.

  “We can’t do this anymore!” Her adoptive father. Loud, but his deep voice shaking with anger . . . or fear. “She put our daughter in the hospital. Gilly’s still in a coma!”

  Kira flinched, then focused intently on her hands, encased in thick garden gloves with cuffs secured to the ends of her shirt sleeves by duct tape. The tape had been her idea, and her father hadn’t disagreed. Her jaw still hurt from when he’d hit her, the one and only time he’d ever touched her. She’d deserved it, though, because of Gilly.

  Gilly, who was afraid of thunderstorms at nine years old. Gilly, who’d been taught for the last five years not to touch her strange older sister but had come into Kira’s bedroom anyway because she was more afraid of lightning than the way Kira’s hands sometimes sparked blue.

  Lying in bed, semicomatose after retching half the night, twelve-year-old Kira had been exhausted from reliving every painful step of how her dinner had gotten to her plate. Eating had become a nightmare. The only food she could keep down were fruits and vegetables she picked herself, everything else came with confusing flashes of emotion and life from every individual who had handled it, processed it, packaged it, stocked it, sold it . . . Meat was unthinkable.

  But all the gardens in their community had been depleted as winter approached and Kira had been so desperately hungry she’d tried to eat, despite the consequences.

  Kira had been too sick that stormy night to realize her sister was there, had crept into bed with her to escape her fear of thunder and lightning. Kira hadn’t known she’d shifted and touched Gilly. Hadn’t realized even when she’d dreamed she was Gilly, thinking of how her older sister must be a magical fairy princess and would someday take them both back to fairyland. Only her mother’s screams had shocked her out of sleep, her father’s hand knocking her out of bed and to the floor when she’d bolted upright. Only when she saw Gilly’s limp form cradled in her mother’s arms did she realize that something, everything, had gone totally and finally wrong.

  “We’ve done everything we can do,” her father continued, his voice thickening. “But she . . . she refuses to listen to us, and her . . . problem . . . just keeps growing. Bethany’s at her wit’s end.”

  Kira had tried. Tried to do what they wanted, tried to make them happy so they would keep her. For four years she’d kept expecting them to change their minds, these people who had rescued her from the orphanage. She’d always thought of Gilly as her sister, from the very beginning, but it was only this year she’d really begun to consider them all family. Only this year had she finally begun to believe that she belonged.

  Then she’d gotten her period and her life had gone to hell. Twelve years old and her life was over.

  It had started to hurt to wear clothes if she didn’t wash them hersel
f, to have anyone else come into her room and touch her things, to eat processed food that so many had a hand in creating. No part of her skin could touch anything or anyone else without crazy images filling her head and tiring her.

  It was worse with her hands, especially when they started to glow. Her parents had bought her gloves, of course—all sorts of gloves—pretending she was starting a new fashion trend but really to protect themselves from Kira’s touch—a touch that was, at first, like an uncomfortably heavy static charge but had progressed in the weeks following her menarche to being more like a high-voltage electric shock, a shock that somehow drained the recipient. Everything had become so hard that staying in her room had been the safest thing.

  “We can’t help her,” her father’s words came through the door. “We certainly don’t dare touch her anymore. Not after what she did to Gilly!”

  Kira slapped her hands over her ears, trying to escape the sound of his crying but unable to escape her own thoughts. She’d almost killed her sister. Why didn’t he just say it like he’d said it that night, tell whoever he was talking to that she was a freak, a monster, and that she couldn’t be around normal people? That they were afraid of her and what she might do next? She knew what they thought of her, had seen it all when her father had hit her.

  Make it stop. Please, someone, make it stop!

  Kira jumped to her feet, needing to get away, somewhere, anywhere. She took a step, just one, before the door opened. She turned, raising an arm to shield her eyes as brilliance flooded the hallway.

  “Kira Solomon.” The light resolved itself into a bronze-skinned woman with long dark brown hair and golden eyes. The floor-length gold dress and the ornate smoky topaz necklace she wore made her look like a princess. “I am Balm. Welcome to Santa Costa, the home of Gilead. Your new home.”

  Home. As if. She peered into the office, but there was no sign of her father. Former father. Already gone, probably overjoyed that he’d gotten rid of her. “So he’s just throwing me away? Just like that?”

  The woman regarded her. “He could have thrown you over the side of the ferry, or worse still, handed you over to the authorities even though what happened was a horrible accident. Instead, your father brought you here. Why do you think that is?”

  The answer was easy. “ ’Cause I’m a freak and this is a prison for freaks?”

  Balm laughed. “We’re all freaks here, but this is hardly a prison. Of course, you may think differently before we’re done.”

  She stepped back, gesturing at the brightly lit doorway. “If you want to continue to sulk and feel sorry for yourself, then stay there. But if you want a warm bath, hot food that won’t make you sick, and the chance to control your gifts and their effects, then you can come with me. Choose now.”

  Kira chose. Without another word, she followed the strange woman into her office, leaving her old life behind forever.

  Chapter 1

  The dagger reeked of ancient magic.

  Kira Solomon stared down at it, trying not to salivate with longing. The blade itself, shining spotless and deadly, swept proudly from the ornate hilt. Swirls and symbols stood out in sharp relief on the gold-banded handle that gleamed like old ivory. Even shielded by her gloves, her palms itched with the urge to lift it, to hold it in her hands, to test its weight and sharpness.

  The things she could do with such a blade.

  “Well?”

  Kira blinked, then looked up at her client and mentor, Bernie Comstock. The professor turned art dealer stood on the other side of her worktable, eyes shining in his sharp, dark face. He didn’t seem affected by the weapon’s energy, which Kira supposed was just as well. Being insensitive to magic made the art dealer good at his job. Detecting magic made Kira good at hers.

  “I thought I was done with being tested, Bernie.”

  “This isn’t a test, Kira,” Comstock hastened to assure her. “I trust you completely.”

  She gestured to the blade, nestled in a custom-fitted gray foam core inside an aluminum travel case. “What is this, then?”

  “I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

  “Old man.” She suppressed a sigh mixed with exasperation and wry amusement. Even though she’d more than proven herself over the years, he still liked to slip a ringer in every now and again. The mentor in him would never die. As if she needed testing to stay sharp. If she wasn’t sharp, she’d be dead.

  “Fine,” she said at last, deciding to go along with whatever game he was playing. “The markings on the handle are worn, but look to be Egyptian.” She hadn’t attempted to scan the blade with her extrasense yet, but she could feel magic radiating from it. The weapon called to her with a gentle but insistent call. She wondered what would happen when she took off her gloves and touched the dagger with her bare hands.

  “The blade itself appears to be bronze, the hilt carved ivory with inset gold,” she murmured, reaching out to drag the task lamp closer before bending over the silvery case again. “Obviously not ceremonial, since the blade is not gold and the wear on the handle suggests considerable use. It’s in the style of daggers from the Middle Kingdom, meaning, if this is authentic, that the blade is roughly four thousand years old.”

  Thrusting her hands into her lab coat’s pockets to keep from touching the handle, Kira looked at Comstock. “Considering the pristine condition of the blade, I’d say you have a very impressive fake.”

  “I thought so too, especially considering where I found it.” Comstock’s expression reminded her even more of a fox. “That is real ivory and the construction of the blade doesn’t speak to modern manufacturing technology.”

  Kira’s hands flexed with the need to lift the blade. She stepped back from the table instead. “This looks like something Wynne might make, except I doubt she’d be able to keep the creation of something so perfect a secret from me.”

  “Wynne Marlowe’s one of the best metalworkers in the country and not just because she doesn’t use modern technology when re-creating ancient weaponry, although that’s certainly part of the reason,” the art dealer acknowledged. “But this isn’t her work.”

  “You know this because . . . ?” Wynne could certainly create a ritual weapon, Kira knew, especially if her husband Zoo channeled the magic into it. The boot daggers Wynne and Zoo had made for Kira proved that. She decided not to point the magical element out to her former mentor. It wasn’t like he needed to know that Zoo was a real witch.

  Comstock gave her a knowing glance. “Because, as you said, Wynne couldn’t keep this a secret from you. I had a feeling that, once you’d seen it, you wouldn’t let something like this out of your sight.”

  Kira knew he was right. The dagger was astounding as a replica. If it were the real thing . . .

  Her gaze dropped to the blade again. She felt a little like Gollum looking at his “Precious.” “You’re not going to tell me how you came across this, are you?”

  “And deny you the joy of discovering it for yourself when you touch it?” Comstock grinned, peeling years off his multiracial, sixty-ish face. “Besides, you know I’ll share all my secrets with you only if you come to work for me.”

  “Come on, Bernie, you know I prefer being freelance.” Kira braced one hip against the edge of the worn oak surface, idly fingering the heavy Zuni silver necklace at her throat. “I like being able to set my own schedule.”

  “You’d still have autonomy,” Comstock wheedled. “You’d also have fewer expenses and full access to my clients and their collections.”

  Kira hesitated, tempted as always. She worked well with Bernie. They’d clicked from the moment she’d stumbled into him at the Petrie Museum at University College in London during one of the few summers the Gilead Commission had allowed her a break from training to fight Shadow. She’d consequently transferred to the school to study under him and had then worked freelance for him when he retired from teaching, reduced his duties at the museum, and expanded his private antiquities business. At times she fantasized she�
��d even be happy working for him, surrounded by ancient artifacts and books, far away from people and things no human should ever know existed.

  That happiness wouldn’t last, though. One day Bernie would look at her and begin to wonder. She knew the questions would start—questions about her frequent absences, her penchant for dropping everything to run off to every corner of the globe, returning home bruised if not bloodied. Eventually he’d come to realize his former apprentice was using her job as an antiquities expert as a cover for a second, deadlier career.

  Not having to answer to anyone best suited her second job, a job she preferred Comstock knew nothing about. It was one thing for Bernie to believe in magic and her ability to detect and defuse it; it was another for him to believe in demons and things that go bump in the night. Even if he could accept that much, he’d still never be convinced it was her sworn duty to eliminate the baddest of the bad: the Fallen and their Shadow Avatars. A duty she’d been trained for since she was twelve by the Gilead Commission. He wouldn’t believe the Gilead Commission, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to fighting Shadow, was more advanced than the U.S. military machine and more effective than Homeland Security. He certainly wouldn’t believe she’d grown up in the Commission’s headquarters on the island of Santa Costa as the surrogate daughter of Balm, the ageless head of Gilead, or that her education had been more about learning to kill than learning to live.

  Kira was a Shadowchaser, an elite fighter in Gilead’s clandestine army. Humans with extrasensory skills and paramilitary training were used to police low-level half-breeds and humans experimenting in Chaos magic. Shadowchasers were sent in when upper echelon Shadow creatures attempted to disrupt the Universal Balance and tip the world into Shadow and Chaos, usually in ways that involved high body counts.