Shadowed Souls

by Jim Butcher

  Except me, Jessie Shimmer. I’d slain one of their kind. Entirely in self-defense, mind you, but that detail didn’t matter to them. I’d done something no human was supposed to be able to do, and so I was a threat to be dealt with. Public enemy number one. Dead woman walking.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said aloud as I turned south on High Street, passing Graeter’s Ice Cream and a couple of upscale wine and candle shops in trendy brick storefronts.

  I could have answered him telepathically. But that required a bit more concentration, so I saved it for when we were around other people. A seemingly one-sided conversation with a ferret tends to make folks think you’ve had a psychotic break, and then everything gets awkward.

  Vague premonition itched like hives in the back of my mind, worse now than it had when I woke from a nightmare at five a.m. I couldn’t remember the alarming dream, not even one detail, so I’d tried to ignore the whole thing. But the psychic irritation just kept building until I wanted to slam my head through a wall. Something was up, but neither meditation nor the couple of divination spells I’d tried gave me any clarity. My boyfriend, Cooper, was off with his little brothers and I didn’t want to interrupt family time with something I figured I could handle fine by myself. Eventually.

  Sometimes having Talent sucks. Magic is seldom straightforward when you need it to be. So I gave Mother Karen—thank God she’d been willing to give us a place to stay—a bullshit story about wanting to take a jog around Antrim Park, and borrowed her Corolla to see if being out and about on a mild Sunday evening would give me any relief or get me any answers. Karen’s a sharp witch and normally she’d twig to my lie right quick, but a couple of her foster kids were having a fight over the TV and she was so preoccupied with them that she just handed me the keys.

  I’d put my shotgun in the trunk, just in case, but it wouldn’t do any good if the Regnum paid us a visit.

  We should be staying put until the meeting with the Governing Circle, Pal fussed.

  “I know.” He wasn’t wrong; if Circle leader Riviera Jordan were willing to offer us safe haven, we’d be relatively okay staying in the city. Relatively. Riviera seemed like a fair lady, and she knew I’d gotten a raw deal. But she hadn’t made her decision yet, and going against the Regnum was an awfully big one. If I landed us in some kind of mess before the meeting and pissed off anyone else in the Circle, she would almost certainly wash her hands and tell us to get the hell out of Columbus.

  This is really quite dangerous, Pal said. And if you wanted to go to the park, we should have gone north.

  “I know. We’re not going to the park.” The buzz of premonition had moved from the back of my head into my chrysoberyl eye, and the scars around it were starting to itch a little. A flashback memory of fiery demon’s blood spraying across the left side of my face made me wince. My enchanted stone ocularis was damned handy for seeing all manner of things that normal humans couldn’t spy, but getting my eye melted out of my head was a memory I wished I could purge.

  My left hand and forearm were getting a pins-and-needles feeling, too. The same demon had bitten that arm off just below the elbow, and one thing led to another, and that arm became a torch of hellfire for a while. No more fire—thank God; constantly setting off smoke detectors is not a good way to keep a low profile—but now I had an eerie white replica of my lower arm that I couldn’t definitely say was flesh. I’d undergone an hours-long healing and exorcism ritual in Switzerland, and the ceremony was supposed to regrow my arm and restore it to normal, but the magic just couldn’t quite get there. Too much demonic residue in my system.

  Eerie or not, I wasn’t about to complain about getting a working limb back. Sure, it was cold as a refrigerated corpse and glowed faintly blue in the dark, but I could feel through it just fine. I kept telling myself that functionality was what mattered. Most days I told myself I still wore my magically flameproof gray opera glove just in case it flared up again, but, frankly, seeing that creepy white thing at the end of my arm made my skin crawl.

  Besides, if I touched anyone with the glove off and I wasn’t paying attention, there was a chance I might drag the both of us into my personal hell dimension. Awkward. Very awkward.

  Where are we going, then? Pal asked.

  “Trust me—I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that one out.”

  He made an exasperated squeak and curled up on the gray passenger’s seat in a tight, frustrated ball, his nose buried under his fluffy sable tail. He looked completely adorable, but now was not the time to tell him that. Probably he was wishing he were in his grizzly bear form so he could wrestle me for the wheel and get us turned around. But then he’d be far too big to fit in the compact car, and, besides, he needed a strong electrical jolt to trigger his shape-shift. We kept a stun gun around for that, and it wasn’t pleasant. I’d recently worked out an electroshock spell, but that wasn’t any nicer than the zapper.

  I’d have hated to be in his position. He was my first and only familiar, and when I got him, I didn’t realize that intelligent familiars are all indentured souls trapped in animal bodies. It’s kind of a horrifying system if you learn much about it, but familiars are so handy that nobody wants to know that part. Pal would have gotten freed eventually, once he’d served a fairly long sentence for a mistake he’d made when he was young, but I’d screwed that up by getting on the Regnum’s shit list. We were both outlaws now. Sticking by me meant his life was always going to be in danger. And in many ways he had to stick by me. We were still magically linked as master and familiar, and nobody but I could hear his telepathic speech. The magic binding familiars is powerful, and I didn’t know how to fix things so he’d be entirely free. And I couldn’t ever pay him back for everything he’d already done for me. If I thought about it too hard, I had Beck’s “Loser” playing as the soundtrack inside my head, and that wouldn’t do either of us any good, so I just tried to not think about it.

  “I’m not crazy,” I told him. “Well, okay, I am sort of having the crazies today, but this is me trying to fix that. I’m having a premonition I can’t figure out, and I’m hoping something jumps out at me.”

  Why didn’t you just say so? He sounded cross.

  “Because I figured it would sound dumb when I said it out loud.”

  When has that ever stopped you before?

  “Oh, bite me,” I said affectionately. If he was snarking at me, that meant he couldn’t be too angry.

  I followed my itchy instincts and turned left onto North Broadway. Soon we were approaching the bridge over I-71.

  Wait. There was something on the overpass fence. But I caught a glimpse of it only through my ocularis; my flesh eye hadn’t seen a thing. I clicked on my hazards and pulled over to the side of the road, annoying the driver of a little yellow Volkswagen Beetle behind me. He honked indignantly and zoomed around me. Nobody else was coming from either direction.

  I stared at the spot; through my ocularis it was an indistinct blur slowly moving up the fence. Man-sized, maybe? I started blinking through other enchanted views through the stone. Blur . . . blur . . . darker blur . . . bright blur . . . And suddenly I saw a thin, shirtless white guy with brown dreadlocks and blue basketball shorts struggling to climb the chain-link fence, his flip-flops giving him little purchase on the galvanized wire.

  “Holy shit, that’s Kai,” I told Pal.

  Where? my familiar peered around, confused.

  “On the fence. Someone turned him invisible. Mostly invisible. Come on.”

  Pal hopped onto my shoulder as I killed the engine. I hadn’t seen Kai in months; I’d sublet a room in his run-down Victorian rental for a few days while I was recuperating after the demon fight. I was seriously messed up in pretty much every way you can imagine, but he had a little crush on me anyhow, and he’d really been a huge help when I’d sorely needed it. Bit of a stoner, but a good guy. A little naive, but he was still a teenager afte
r all. As far as I knew, he didn’t hang out with anyone else who knew magic. Who could have turned him invisible?

  “Hey, Kai!” I stepped out of the car, pocketed the keys, and shut the door. “What are you doing out here?”

  “He said . . . He said . . .” Kai muttered. His voice was slurred, like he was drunk. Or under a magical compulsion.

  I waited for a silver Honda Odyssey minivan to pass and then jogged across the street. Kai still seemed determined to get up the fence. “What did he say?”

  “He said jump off a bridge. . . . He said jump off a bridge. . . .”

  “Whoa, no!” I reached up and grabbed his hairy leg. “Come on down from there. Let’s go get some coffee.”

  Well, I can see him now, Pal remarked inside my mind. The spell fails at close range. Whoever cast that didn’t do much of a job.

  Fast and sloppy, I thought back. But it had to work only well enough to keep anyone from seeing him until he’d thrown himself over into traffic.

  It would be a quick death, maybe, but I cringed to imagine the massive freeway pileup that would follow. What if he splattered across the windshield of a car full of little kids? Jesus. Even if they survived the wreck, they’d never get over seeing something like that. Whoever did this definitely wanted Kai gone, but they were both too lazy to do it themselves and perverse enough to want his death to cause mayhem. That was a kind of twisted you didn’t see every day. I liked Kai and owed him a solid. But even if I’d hated his guts, I wanted to get to the bottom of all this, because whoever would cast a spell like this deserved to get their ass kicked. A lot.

  “He said jump off a bridge,” Kai insisted, clinging to the fence with white knuckles, trying to pull his leg from my grasp.

  I had to do something to break the enchantment and free him. But I didn’t have any spell ingredients on me. What could I use? I scanned the ground and spied a brown sparrow’s feather sticking out of a wind-drifted pile of dead grass and dust in the gutter.

  “Bingo.” I released his leg, plucked the feather, and stepped back to concentrate on the chant.

  Ubiquemancy is the art of finding and using magic in everyday objects. It’s just a little tricky. And I hate performing it out in the open, where random people can see. It isn’t just that public displays of magic are of those universally verboten things. It’s that ubiquemancy looks hella goofy. It’s the magical equivalent of speaking in tongues, and once I start a chant, for all I know I could end up barking like a dog or clucking like a chicken. I don’t have an overabundance of dignity, but some things you just feel better about doing in private.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to center myself.

  “Don’t you dare start laughing at me if this falls flat,” I muttered to Pal.

  Perish the thought. He was gazing at Kai struggling up the wire. At least the kid wasn’t making fast progress, so we had a bit of time. Serious situation is serious.

  I closed my eyes, focused on the feather in my cupped hands, took another deep breath, and started speaking words for freedom and release. The magic kicked in smoothly, and ancient, lost words started spilling from my lips. I could feel the little feather heating on my palm, smell it starting to burn. My chant grew louder, stronger, and I could feel the magic it carried pushing against the spell binding Kai. Tension rose, higher and higher, as the invisible forces torqued against each other.

  Suddenly the feather exploded with a pop! and Kai gave a startled yelp.

  “Whoa! What the hell?” His eyes were huge and panicked. It looked like I’d managed to nix both the compulsion and the lazy invisibility.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re on the North Broadway overpass,” I told him, trying to sound soothing. “Just come down from there, but go easy. Your body might not do what you want it to for a little while.”

  I helped him down off the fence, and he stood there, gasping, on shaky legs, looking gray faced and frail. Like a confused old man. For the first time, I noticed that his right eye was purpled and swollen, like he’d taken a solid punch in the face sometime in the past few hours.

  “What happened?” I asked him. “Who did this to you?”

  “I . . . I don’t . . .” He shook his head, but then his eyes seemed to focus and I could practically see the memories swarming back into his mind. “Oh, shit. Oh shit, shit, shit.”

  “Dude, stop panicking!” I put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Deep breaths. Tell me what happened.”

  “They took Alice! Oh, Jesus, we gotta find her, Jessie. They’re gonna do something terrible to her!”

  “Slow down, bro. Who’s Alice? Who took her?”

  “She . . . I met her a few weeks ago. She’s like you; she knows magic. I figured from the start she knew some dangerous dudes, but . . . Well, we got this jeweled statue of Santa Muerte that we were trying to sell off. I mean, the thing creeped me out and I wanted to just leave it in an alley someplace, but she was all, ‘We can get good coin for this,’ so—”

  “Wait.” There were some perfectly nice people in the world who prayed to lovely Saint Death, but most of the ones I’d met personally were either necromancers or hired guns working for the narco cartels. And nice wasn’t part of their job descriptions. “What were you doing with a statue of Santa Muerte?”

  “Uh.” He scratched his scalp nervously. “After you left, I rented your room to this guy named Halulu, and he came up with the idea to do a deal with some gangbangers to make some cash for the rent. I thought it was just going to be weed, but it was meth, and the whole thing went sideways.”

  Oh, Mensa is bereft of this lad, and its members weep, Pal intoned from my shoulder.

  “A drug deal?” I said. “For God’s sake. Really?”

  “Yeah, okay, I know. Okay?” Kai looked embarrassed. “Halulu had this way of making it seem totally reasonable, but I know it wasn’t. I’m not stupid.”

  He rubbed his arms as if he were remembering something terrifying. “Some really freaky shit went down. One of the gang dudes got shot; I spoke to his ghost, and there was this thing in the room with us. . . .”

  He trailed off, looking horrified, but shook himself and continued. “Alice sort of took charge afterward and helped us get out of the mess. We were able to pay back the guys in Detroit, and it was all good. I mean, except for the dead guy. But all we had left over from the deal was the statue, and we still needed to pay the rent. So Alice started checking around—friends of friends, you know? And someone was interested in the statue. And they came to the house this afternoon and . . . Oh, god.”

  He went pale, his lips a clamped line.

  “Could they have been friends of the dead guy?” I prompted.

  Kai shook his head, his dreadlocks brushing his shoulders. “He was a murderer—his ghost told me so—but he was regular, you know? Maybe a sociopath or whatever, but he was just a guy. But the ones who showed up . . . I don’t think they were even human. They were just trying to look like people. They wanted the statue, but they also wanted Alice, and when I tried to stop them, the boss guy backhanded me across the room like I was nothing and told me to jump off a bridge. And . . . I don’t know much after that.”

  I paused. Kai didn’t know any Talents before me. He hadn’t been mixed up in anything more dangerous or illegal than a pair of sad marijuana plants he and his roommates were growing in the basement. Could my brief stay at his house have made him vulnerable to darker forces and set all this in motion? I didn’t voice my concern to Pal; he’d tell me that I couldn’t think that way or else I’d drive myself crazy and blah, blah, blah. But I was thinking that way, and consequently I felt even worse for Kai. Even if he had been a dumbass.

  “I guess Alice means a whole lot to you?”

  “Hell, yeah.” He had a dreamy look in his brown eyes that made me certain he was hard in love with her. “She’s great. Y
ou’d like her, Jessie.”

  “I’m sure.” If she was as much of a loose cannon as I suspected she was, we’d either get on like a house on fire or want to stab each other in the face. “Let’s go back to your place, and we can start tracking her down.”

  Kai’s rental on East Avenue was a huge old Victorian single in desperate need of a fresh paint job; the glow of the setting sun didn’t make it look any better. The broad front porch had surely been stately a hundred years before. Now the floorboards were warped and the railings were as broken and gray as a meth addict’s teeth. Ragged lawn chairs surrounded a squat red plastic table covered in crumpled Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. Cigarette butts spilled from an old brown glass ashtray.

  Ah, hovel, sweet hovel. Pal’s telepathic voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “Your roommates around?” I asked Kai.

  “Nah, Mikey and Patrick went down to Athens for a house party. They’ll probably roll in late tonight.”

  “Just as well,” I replied. “They probably couldn’t have stopped the guys who took Alice, either.”

  Assuming that they’d even try, Pal grumped to me. Neither of those two seemed to have an overabundance of bravery.

  Shush, I thought back.

  “Ah, shit, the door’s open.” Kai ran up onto the porch and pushed into the house. “Dammit!”

  “What?” I called.

  “Someone stole our shit!” He pulled at his dreadlocks, looking like he was going to cry. “The flat-screen and our game stuff are gone! Today is just fuckin’ fired.”

  No surprise that someone had seized the opportunity to loot the house. You could leave your door unlocked in some neighborhoods, but north campus was not one of them. “Deep breaths. I can help you with that, too, but let’s worry about Alice first, okay?”