Kill

by L. J. Smith

  There was something in his voice now besides clinical dispassion. It was-hunger, Jenny thought, but not the cold, malicious hunger she'd seen in the ancient eyes and the whispering voices of the other Shadow Men. It was as if Julian was hungry for something he'd never had, filled with a crippling need even he didn't understand.

  "I couldn't see anything else, couldn't hear anything else. All I could think about was you. I wouldn't let anyone else hurt you, ever. I knew I had to have you, no matter what happened.

  They said I was crazy with love."

  He had gotten up and walked away to the edge of the firelight. As he stood there, Jenny seemed to see him for the first time, looking at him with new eyes. And he looked-small. Small and almost vulnerable.

  Nothing in the universe was moving except her heart, and that was shaking her body.

  She had never thought about what the other Shadow Men might say to Julian. She knew he was the youngest of a very old race, but she'd never thought about his life at all, or his point of view.

  She hadn't thought about him having a point of view.

  "What's it like, being-" She hesitated.

  "Being a Shadow Man? Watching from the dark places everything happening on the worlds that aren't full of shadows? Earth has colors, you know, that you never find here."

  "But-you can make anything you want. You can create it."

  "It's not the same. Things fade here. They don't last."

  "But why do you stay here, then? Instead of just watching us, you could-" Jenny stopped again.

  God, what was she saying? Inviting the Shadow Men to her own world? She took a deep breath.

  "If you could change-"

  "I can't change what I am. None of us can. The rest of the nine worlds keep us out; they say our nature is destructive. We're not welcome anywhere-but we'll always be near Earth, watching.

  From the shadows."

  There was something in his voice-too quiet and closed-off for bitterness. A-remoteness that was bleak beyond words.

  "Forever," he finished.

  "Forever? You never die?"

  "Something that isn't born can't die. We have a-beginning, of course. Our names carved on a runestave, a special runestave." He said, almost mockingly, "The stave of life."

  There had been something about staves in her grandfather's journal. A picture scrawled in ink, showing a sort of tall, flat branch with runes on it.

  "Carve our names on the stave-and we come into existence," Julian said. "Cut them out-and we disappear."

  It seemed very heartless to Jenny. Cold-but then the Shadow Men were cold. Not flesh and blood, but creatures that came into being through a carving in wood or stone.

  How cold to be a Shadow Man, she thought. And how sad. Condemned by your own destructiveness to be what you were forever.

  Julian was still standing at the edge of the firelight, face half in shadow, gazing at the darkness beyond. It gave Jenny a queer hollow feeling.

  What would it have been like, she wondered suddenly, if he hadn't tried to force her?

  From the beginning Julian had used force and trickery. He'd lured her into the More Games store and enticed her into buying the Game, knowing that when she put the paper house together it would suck her into the Shadow World. He'd kidnapped her. And then he'd appeared and bullied her: forced her to play his own demonic game to try and win her freedom. He'd threatened her, hurt her friends- killed Summer. He'd done everything to try and wring submission out of her.

  "Couldn't you just have come and asked?" she murmured.

  She'd said the same thing to him in the tower of the paper house. Didn't that ever occur to you?

  That you could just appear at my front door, no games, no threats, and just ask me? But in the tower the words had been part of a ruse to get free, and she hadn't really thought about them herself.

  Now she did. What if Julian had come to her, appearing some night out of the shadows while she was walking home, say, and told her that he loved her? What would she have done?

  She would have been afraid. Yes. But after the fear? If Julian had come, offering gifts, gentle, looking as vulnerable as he did now?

  If she had accepted his gifts . . .

  It was a strange future, too strange to visualize, really, but queerly thrilling. It was too foreign to imagine: herself as a sort of princess with a prince of darkness as consort. For just an instant Jenny got a rushing, heady glimpse; for a fraction of a second she could picture it.

  Herself, wearing black silk and sable, sitting on a black marble throne in a big stone hall where it was always twilight. Growing paler and colder, maybe, as she forgot about the ordinary world she'd left behind -but happy, maybe, in her power and position. Would she have little Shadow World creatures to order around and look after? Servants? Would she be able to control the elements here the way Julian did?

  Or maybe not a black gown-maybe white, with little icicles all over it, like Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen. And jewels like frost-flowers, around her neck and a blue-eyed white tiger crouching at her feet. What would Dee and Audrey think if they saw her like that? They might be afraid at first-but she'd serve them strange drinks, like the sweet, hot stuff in the mug, and after a while they'd get used to it. Audrey would envy the pretty things, and Dee would envy the power.

  What else? Julian had said she could have anything-anything. If she could have anything in the world she wanted, with no limits, no restrictions on her imagination-if she could have anything . . .

  I'd want Tom.

  She'd forgotten him for a moment, because the picture of the big stone hall was so alien. Tom's warmth and strength and lazy smile didn't fit there at all-which of course made sense because Julian would never let him in. But any world without Tom was a world Jenny didn't want.

  The vision of the white gown and the jewels disappeared, and she knew somehow that it would never come back, not the way it had for that one moment, when she could feel it and believe in it.

  She would never forget it, but she would never be able to recapture it, either.

  Just as well, she thought unsteadily. She didn't want to think about this anymore; in fact, she thought it was high time that she got out of here. She was tingling all over with a sense of danger.

  "I'm warm now," she said, pushing the white fur away. All she could think of was that she had to leave. She should thank him, maybe, for saving her life-although it wouldn't have been in danger in the first place if not for him.

  He was looking at her. Jenny looked away, concentrated on getting her legs under her. When she stood, they were wobbly. She tried to step out of the white nest, and stumbled.

  He was there in an instant.

  She felt his warm hands close around her arms, steadying her. She stared at his chest, bare under the leather vest and lifting quickly with his breathing. The firelight touched everything with gold.

  She didn't want to look up into his face, but somehow it happened anyway.

  His eyes were still hugely dilated, the blue mere circles around pupils dark and bottomless as midnight. His pupils always sprang open for her, she realized, but just now there was something haunting about those lonely depths.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered, hardly knowing what she meant. "I have to* leave now. I'm sorry."

  "I know."

  In that instant he seemed to understand better than she did herself. He looked very young, and very tired, and heavy with some knowledge she didn't share. Face still solemn, he leaned in slightly.

  Jenny shut her eyes.

  It was different from any kiss they'd ever had. Not because it was softer-Julian's kisses were usually soft, at the beginning anyway. Not even because it was so slow-Julian's kisses were almost always slow. But it was different, in a way that sent Jenny's mind spinning into confusion.

  Feeling . . . that was it. Not just sensation, but emotion. Emotion so strong that it left her shaking.

  It was such an innocent kiss, so-chaste. His warm mouth touchin
g hers. His lips trembling against hers. How could something that simple move her so much?

  Because she could sense his feelings, she realized. When she touched his lips, she could feel his pain, the almost unendurable pain of someone whose heart was breaking with sadness. What she tasted on those warm, soft lips was unbearable loss. If he'd been dying, or she had, she would have been able to understand such a kiss.

  He's suffering like that-from losing me? Jenny had never been particularly modest, but she could hardly believe it. She might have rejected the idea outright-except for what she was feeling herself.

  What she felt . . . was a shattering inside.

  When he stepped back, Jenny was in something like a trance. She stood there, eyes shut, still feeling everything, unable to move. Tears welled up around her lashes.

  But Tom.

  The time in sixth grade when he'd broken his leg and sat in a tide pool, white but still wisecracking, holding on to Jenny's hand, not letting anybody else see how bad the pain was. All the many times he'd held Jenny for her sake, when she got scared at movies, or when she cried over the stray animals she took in. He'd stayed up all night when she thought Cosette, the kitten she'd rescued- from a vacant lot, was dying. He had been part of her life since she was seven years old. He was a part of her.

  And Julian had hurt him. Julian had blown his chance right at the very beginning, when he'd done that.

  Jenny opened her eyes, the trance broken. She stepped back, and saw Julian's face change. As if he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  "Tom needs me," she said.

  Julian smiled then, grimly, in a way that chased the cobwebs out of Jenny's brain. The lost, haunted look was gone, as if it had never existed.

  "Oh, yes. Tommy needs you like air. But I need you like-"

  "What?" Jenny said when it was clear he wasn't going on.

  "Like light," Julian said, with the same bitter smile. "You're light, all right-like a flame to a moth. I told you once that you shouldn't mess with forbidden things-I should have taken my own advice."

  "Light shouldn't be forbidden," Jenny said.

  "It is to me. It's deadly to a Shadow Man. Light kills shadows, don't you know? And of course the other way around."

  He seemed to find this amusing. He'd done one of his quicksilver mood changes, and looking at his face now, Jenny almost wondered if the last half hour had been a dream.

  "Don't think that just because I pulled you out of the water, the Game is over," he added. "You need three gold coins to get to your precious Tommy. And time's tick, tick, ticking. ..."

  "I've got one, remember. I-" Jenny broke off with an inarticulate noise, feeling in her jeans pocket.

  The Swiss Army knife was still there, but the gold doubloon he'd tossed her in the cavern was gone.

  "But I had it. It must have fallen out-"

  "Sorry. Only one turn to a customer. No replays. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars."

  "You-" Jenny broke off again. Her anger drained, but she felt something inside herself harden, ice over. All right, then. She must have been crazy, feeling sorry for Julian-Julian!-but now she knew better. They were opponents, as always, playing against each other in a Game that was as cutthroat and pitiless as Julian himself.

  "I'll get the coins-if you give me the chance. I can't do much in here," she said.

  "True. Exit doors are to the left. Please watch your step and keep moving. We hope you've enjoyed the ride."

  Jenny turned and saw a rectangle of dim light. It hadn't been there before.

  She took a breath and started toward it, careful to walk straight.

  She didn't mean to look back. But as she got close to the door, close enough to see that it looked like an ordinary double door, like the kind that led out of Space Mountain at Disneyland, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder.

  He was standing where she'd left him, a black silhouette in front of the fire. She couldn't tell anything by his posture.

  She turned away and stepped through the door, blinking. She could see tiny distant lights, lots of them, sparkling and wheeling in a dazzling display.

  "What-?" she whispered.

  Something grabbed her.

  CHAPTclunkedER 8

  Thank God!" a voice shouted in Jenny's ear. Jenny relaxed against the slim but very strong arms holding her.

  "Dee-you scared me to death. . . ." The lights were on the canopy of the merry-go-round across the lake. It was turning and Jenny could hear faint music from a Wurlitzer band organ.

  "You scared us to death," Audrey said. "Where have you been for the last two hours? We ran down that shaft with the roof caving in right behind us all the way-and then when we finally got to the mouth of the cave, we realized you weren't with us. Then Dee went crazy and tried to go back while everything was still falling, but it almost killed us and we had to go out-and when we got out, it was just a ride again."

  "The caving-in noise stopped," Michael explained, "and I looked back and the cave was fiberglass again."

  "And empty," Dee said, giving Jenny a fierce hug before letting go. "We walked all through it, the three of us, and you weren't in it. It was just a mine ride."

  "That is the Emergency Exit we just came out of," Audrey said, pointing a finger at Jenny's door.

  "So the question is, where have you been? You've seen him, haven't you?"

  Jenny was looking down at herself by the light of a nearby fountain-a fountain which had been dark when they'd first gone into the ride. Her jeans were rumpled but dry, her hair was all ridges and waves, the way it got when it dried without her brushing it. The supplies she'd packed so carefully to help her face the Shadow World were gone. Even her flashlight was gone.

  "I saw him," she told Audrey briefly without looking at her. "I found out what the new Game is."

  She explained what Julian had told her about finding the three doubloons to get to Zach and Tom.

  She didn't say anything about the other Shadow Men, or the rising water in the dark cave, or how it had felt to die. She wanted to; she wanted to talk about it in privacy, and maybe cry, and be comforted, safe with her friends. But she wasn't safe, and there wasn't any privacy, and what was the point of alarming everybody?

  As for Julian and his bizarre mood swings-she didn't even want to get on the subject.

  "So at least we got something out of that ride," Michael said. "I mean, it nearly killed us, and we lost most of our stuff, but we did get some weapons, and now we know what we're doing. What happens after we collect these doubloons?"

  "I think we go to the bridge, just like that kid said in the regular park," Jenny said. She was grateful- and proud. They were all battered and tired, and there were only two flashlights left-but no one was even talking about giving up.

  "The bridge must be on the other side of the lake, around back," she added. "When we get there, I guess Julian will let us across." She looked at the lake. The merry-go-round lights were reflected in it, and so were other lights, blue and green and gold, from the island itself. Shadows of trees broke them up.

  In the center of the island, standing very tall and white, was the lighthouse. It looked the same as the one Jenny had seen that afternoon, in the real park, except that now it was illuminated like the Washington Monument. Like a tower for imprisoned princes.

  "That's where Tom and Zach are," she said quietly.

  "Where should we start looking?" Dee said, equally quiet.

  The Emergency Exit door had brought Jenny out close to the front of the mine ride. "Well-we could go left to Kiddieland," she said, "or right, back the way we came from the Fish Pond. Or around the front of the lake, toward the merry-go-round."

  Michael ran a hand through his rumpled dark hair. "Let's go around the lake-it'll take us by the billboard about the contest. Maybe that'll give us a clue."

  "That's where we came in tonight," Audrey said. "When we came through the door with the runes, I mean."

  They walked past the dark ringt
oss booth and around the gentle northern curve of the lake. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to which parts of the park were awake and which still slept.

  They kept a close eye out for things like the one that had attacked Dee, but they saw nothing.

  Then, as they got closer to the billboard, Jenny heard a voice.

  A low voice. It scared her-who else was in the park with them?

  She rounded a clump of spruce trees and saw a car from a circus train, with a red roof and silver bars.

  "I'm Leo the Paper-Eating Lion," the muzzle thrust between the bars said.

  Only the voice-was wrong. It wasn't the peppy, friendly tenor of the Leo in the regular park. It had dropped two octaves and become distorted and almost machinelike. A thick, muddy cybervoice.

  "Geez," Michael whispered.

  Jenny moved cautiously closer, following Dee. The circus car was lighted, very bright and gay against a dark background of bushes. The animal looked like the Leo of the ordinary park, with a shiny caramel-colored face, dark mane, and painted body. Jenny's eyes were drawn to the muzzle, spread in a permanent smiling O so it could suck up trash. It looked as if it were calling "Yoohoo!"

  "I eat all kinds of things," the growling, guttural voice said.

  "I bet," breathed Michael.

  "What's it doing here? Is it just to scare us?" Audrey said, circling the cart at a safe distance. Dee was playing her flashlight into the olastic muzzle.

  "I think there's something in there," she said.

  "You're kidding. You are kidding, aren't you?" Jenny edged along beside Audrey. She didn't want to get any closer to the lion than she had to-the asphalt path wasn't nearly wide enough in her opinion.

  Dee knelt and squinted. "Something gold," she said. "No, really, I'm serious. Look way back in there, in the throat."

  Unhappily Jenny took the flashlight and aimed it at the dark hole. It did look as if there might be something shining inside, but gold or silver, she couldn't tell.

  "It might just be a gum wrapper," she said.