Casting Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles)

by Amanda DeWees

  “Holy hell, that’s freaky!” Maddie was looking from him to Tanner and back again.

  Tan felt as if the blood was draining from his face. It must have been Raven he had spoken to, not Mo—and now the shifter was going to take his place in the band so that the concert could go forward.

  I didn’t even know he could play guitar, he thought. But then, there was a lot he didn’t know about Raven.

  He couldn’t leave the concert now. He’d have to stay and try to outmaneuver the shapeshifter. Joy would have to deliver the baby without him, facing god only knew what risks. He felt like putting a fist through the wall in frustration.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Maddie.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  His double disappeared into the wings, and Tanner sent a couple of quick urgent texts to Mo and Dr. Aysgarth as he tried to think what to do. There had to be a way of stopping it. But if he followed Raven backstage and he saw Tanner, he would just change to another shape, wouldn’t he? And then he’d lose him again.

  Without warning the lights went out. The preshow music, which he had hardly noticed behind the crowd noise, stopped at once. In the faint amber glow of emergency lights he saw Maddie’s face brighten.

  “Well, this’ll put a spoke in their wheel,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s bound to be back on in a second.” A genuine power outage was too much to hope for.

  Then the fire alarm started, and the ceiling sprinklers were suddenly spraying water over them. Now, that was a show-stopper.

  “Go,” ordered Maddie, as if reading his mind. “Be with Joy. I’ll keep an eye on things on this side.”

  “Are you sure?” But he was already halfway to the lobby. “Thanks, Mads!” he called back over his shoulder.

  Others were pushing their way toward the entrance, and the crush was suffocating. But soon enough the crowd was erupting out the doors onto the grounds, and as Tanner started at a run down the pathway he collided with someone who was, unbelievably, on his way toward the theater.

  “You want to get out of the way, man,” he said, and then recognized him. It was Billups.

  “What’s going on in there?” the reporter demanded.

  “The concert’s off,” said Tanner. “Better spread the news, fast. We don’t want our fans around the world tuned in for a broadcast that’s not coming.” There was the last link in the chain severed. Without any organized online event, Melisande’s fans would wander away to other entertainment, other causes, and not one in five would even remember an hour from now that they were supposed to be holding vigil.

  He lengthened his strides as he ran for the minivan. Now all he needed to do was get to Joy in time.

  Chapter 27

  William was in the wings making final tuning adjustments to his violin when Sheila showed up. Her slim figure was inviting in skinny jeans and a green sweater with a Christmas design on it. His pre-show euphoria cranked up another notch at the sight of her, and he put on a sleepy Ryan Gosling smile. “Hey, girl,” he drawled. “Wanna make out with a rock star?”

  She put her arms around his neck. “After the show. To celebrate. ’Kay?”

  “You bet.” He gave her a kiss to seal the promise, but after a moment she slipped away with a smiling shake of her head.

  “After, I said. Your public gets to have you first.”

  “Too bad they’re not as good-looking as you,” he said. Then a familiar figure dressed in grey appeared over Sheila’s shoulder. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Oh, for god’s sake. Reed, what are you butting in for? I told you I’d handle this.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Handle what?”

  Reed’s eyeglasses flashed rebukingly. “My employer and I have been very patient, but it’s time to make things official. Are you ready to sign now, William?”

  He almost groaned out loud, he was so sick of this. “I’ve told you both already, I’m not going to sign with Amdusias. Just drop it. It’s not happening.”

  Sheila put her head on one side. “But baby, I don’t think you really understand. All the popularity Aerosol Cheese has had lately? The audiences that can’t get enough? Don’t tell me you want that to end. Listen to them now.”

  The crowd was starting to stamp and clap in rhythm to show their impatience. William had to strain to hear Sheila over the noise of whistles and cries of “Aerosol Cheese!”

  “Who says it’s going to end?” he asked. “Why should I sign with Amdusias when we’re doing so well on our own?”

  “But you haven’t been on your own.” Somehow Reed could make himself heard without even raising his voice. “Amdusias has been giving you a little assist, just to show you what he can do for you. To give you a taste of what things will be like when you’ve signed the contract.”

  All the pre-show excitement drained out of him. Dismayed, he said, “So this hasn’t been real. Amdusias was pulling the strings.”

  “Now, don’t be mad.” Sheila was at her most beguiling. “You wouldn’t have come this far without a lot of talent. That’s why Amdusias wants you. And he can be really generous.”

  “And what’s in it for you? Do you get a finder’s fee?”

  “William!” she said reproachfully. “Your success is my success. I thought you understood that.”

  “If I may,” said Reed. “We need you to make a decision now, before going onstage. Unless you agree now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to remove the glamour I’ve cast over the audience. If history is anything to go by, you do not want to perform to them after that. If all those fans suddenly feel they’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes, after getting so hyped up, things could get ugly—for you and the other fellows in the band.”

  The chanting of the audience seemed to take on a more aggressive note, although William knew it was his imagination. Still, there were close to a thousand of them, all worked up to a pitch of anticipation. If somehow Reed had led them to expect something different from what the band would be giving them—

  “What’s going on?” asked Tanner, materializing beside them. “I just announced that we were running behind, but we need to get a move on.”

  “It’ll just be a minute.” William turned back to Sheila, determined to put an end to this business once and for all. “Look, threats or no threats, I’m not on board. I’m not going to change my answer. Even if it means canceling the show.”

  “Doing what?” Tanner looked from him to Reed, and his lip curled. “What mischief are you trying to work here?”

  Reed surveyed him with equal distaste. “And what, exactly, are you? Certainly not human.”

  “Of course I’m not human, you ridiculous toady.” Tanner’s face wore a look of cold menace that William had never seen before, and his eyes seemed somehow darker all of a sudden. He said in an ominous voice, “This is my night, and my mistress’s night, and you will not interfere.” His eyes flicked to Sheila then. “And what are you doing with him, may I ask?”

  “Nothing. I came to wish William luck.” She added quickly, “But Reed is trying to interfere in our plans. He told me Amdusias ordered him to get rid of you and make sure the ‘Mesmerize’ number doesn’t happen.”

  William was having trouble following. “Can’t this wait to be sorted out after the show?” he asked, but no one was listening.

  Tanner stared at Reed, his fingers curling and flexing. “Is that so?” he said.

  Reed tugged at his shirt cuffs, taking a step backward. “The girl’s a liar. My master has no dispute with you, sir, if you’ll just—”

  “Enough talk,” snarled Tanner, and backhanded Reed across the face. The force of the blow sent the shorter man staggering backward into the stage manager’s electrical board. There was a crash, and a shrill cry from Reed as he collapsed in the wreckage of the board. With a loud explosive pop, everything went dark.

  Pandemonium in the theater.

  “Tanner? What the hell’s going on?” As the dim emergency light
s came on backstage, William strained to see where everyone was. There was a smell of burning in the air. Screaming came from the audience, and it was no longer the happy screaming of moments before. In the sickly yellowish light he couldn’t catch sight of Tanner among all the hurrying, indistinct figures. “Sheila? Where are you?”

  “Here I am.” She seized him by the arm. “Come on, this way.”

  “We need to grab the other guys.”

  “No time!” she snapped. She was surprisingly strong. “This way is faster. We’ll get crushed in the crowd if we try to go out the front.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the faint light, William let Sheila lead him onto the stage, where she crouched to tug at something he couldn’t see. The audience was a boiling, indistinct mass, surging toward the far exits. “William!” he heard Blake calling from stage left. “Over here!” The red light of an exit sign shone from the direction of his voice.

  “Sheila, I think—”

  “Got it.” A section of flooring lifted up to reveal a square black hole in the stage. “You go down first,” she ordered. “I’ll light the way for you.” She produced a small flashlight, and in its light William could see a metal ladder leading down into a dingy little room. It didn’t look promising, but he obediently started down.

  Then a dim bell rang in his memory. Something about an underground chamber. He paused a few rungs down to ask, “Are you sure we can get out of the building this way?”

  “Positive. Hold on just a sec, you’ve got something on your face.” She leaned toward him, and even as he was wondering why she’d bring up something so trivial, she brought a handkerchief up to his nose and mouth.

  A sickeningly sweet fragrance assailed him, and he felt his hands loosening on the rungs of the ladder. The last thing he was aware of was her dark silhouette behind the beam of the flashlight, and then he was falling into blackness.

  His first coherent thought when he swam into consciousness was that, whatever he’d been drinking to make his head feel like this, he was swearing off it.

  Except he hadn’t been drinking. Glimpses of memory came to him: the blackout, the trap door, the handkerchief. Sheila had deliberately knocked him out. Why?

  He opened his eyes. It was harder than it should have been. His vision was swimmy, and it made the strange scene even more confusing. There was Sheila, standing with her back to him. It was too dark to see where they were, but the floor under him was too smooth to be earth. Firelight shone on a wall—so they were indoors. The light came from a fire in some kind of hibachi or something on the floor; he couldn’t be sure, because his eyes didn’t want to focus. He could still hear the fire alarm ringing, more distantly.

  But he started to make out words. Sheila was talking to somebody.

  “By blood and fire, by earth and song I conjure you,” she was saying. Chanting, more like. A hollow echo clung to the words. “O dark lord of music, possess now your votary, whose mortal flesh we ready to welcome your infernal form—”

  His head gave a terrible throb, and a groan escaped him before he could stop it. Sheila turned to look at him, lowering the piece of paper she had evidently been reading from, and he tried in vain to sit up. Only then did he realize that his ankles were bound with something, and his wrists were secured behind his back. She nudged him with one foot. “Shut up,” she said, mildly enough. “You’ll make me mess up the invocation.”

  “What did you knock me out with?” His words sounded slurred to his own ears.

  “Just chloroform. A stun gun would have been tidier, but I didn’t want to hurt you more than necessary. I’m afraid you got a nasty crack on the head as it is.” She crouched down beside him and checked that the bonds around his ankles and wrists were secure. “I really did like you, William. If you hadn’t been so stubborn about pledging yourself to Amdusias, I think we really might have been able to make it work.”

  His head was still too fogbound for him to quite take this in. “What are you talking about? Who is this Amdusias guy, anyway?”

  She gave him that familiar exasperated look. “Amdusias is the demon of music, duh. He needs a body to possess if he’s going to walk in this dimension. If you’d just accepted his offer, you’d get to enjoy having this insanely super career.” She straightened. “Now, be quiet and let me finish, or I’ll have to duct tape your mouth. Unless you’ve changed your mind and want to read the incantation with me?”

  “The what?”

  “The incantation to summon Amdusias, doofus. If he doesn’t rise tonight, it’ll be months before he gets another chance, and I haven’t done all this groundwork for nothing.”

  So that’s what he’d been to her. Groundwork.

  He shut his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. None of this made any sense, except the part where Sheila had been playing him. That much he grasped.

  That, and that she was clearly nuts. Maybe she thought she was some kind of Wiccan sorceress. How was he going to talk her out of—out of whatever the hell she had planned? That mini barbecue grill suddenly looked threatening. “But you need me to sign voluntarily, right?” he said through dry lips. “That’s why you and Reed kept pestering me.”

  She shrugged. “It’ll work this way too—it’s just that you’ll be a plain old meat suit instead of getting to share the cockpit with him. As I understand it, you’ll still look like William, but you won’t be in your head any more.” She squatted down beside him, and all at once he saw that there was a knife in her hand. He wriggled ineffectually to get away from her. “Hold still,” she said. “I don’t want you bleeding all over these jeans.”

  That wasn’t his idea of a good time either, but it definitely seemed to be the direction things were going in. He squirmed frantically to move out of her reach, but she calmly reached out and took hold of his shirt, raising the hand with the dagger higher. He tried and failed to think of any way to stall.

  Then a Valkyrie arrived.

  At least, that was what she seemed like to William’s dazed senses. A woman’s voice rang out, commanding “Get away from him, you bitch!” and as Sheila leapt to her feet to face the newcomer, time seemed to slow down.

  As if in slow motion, Maddie ran toward them, ferocious intent in her eyes, her burgundy hair streaming behind her like a comet’s tail. She was holding a weapon aloft in her hands like some warrior goddess. Sheila didn’t react quickly enough to fend her off, and when Maddie brought the weapon down with a thunk on her head, Sheila simply crumpled to the ground.

  Then Maddie was on her knees beside him, gazing anxiously into his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “Uh… yeah,” he said, trying to focus on this dazzling woman.

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “I’ll live.” He was starting to think that he might not want to, though, with his head throbbing and his stomach beginning to roil dangerously. Maddie looked around for Sheila’s knife and, finding it, began to work hurriedly at whatever was binding his ankles. Then she stopped and gave him a considering look.

  “Aw, hell, why not,” she muttered as if to herself, and then, leaning over him, took his face in her hands and put her lips to his.

  Her kiss was both passionate and thorough. When she finally released him he felt even dizzier than he had before. “Why did you do that?” he asked faintly.

  She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Seemed like it might be my last chance.” She glanced over her shoulder to where Sheila still lay splayed on the floor, not moving, and a wild little laugh escaped her. “I think I may have killed your girlfriend,” she said.

  “What did you hit her with?”

  “A fire extinguisher. Boy, did it feel good to wallop her, too. I guess I’m the jealous type after all.” She picked up the knife again and cut through whatever was binding his arms behind him. As his cramped limbs were released he reached for her hand.

  “It’s always been you, Maddie,” he said.

  “About time you figured that out.” But then her eyes fell on the hand holdin
g hers, and with her other forefinger she touched the red marks the tape had left around his wrist. When she raised her eyes to meet his, the bravado had fallen away. “I love you too,” she said simply. “I would’ve lost my shit if anything had happened to you.”

  There were so many things he could say, but “Let’s get out of here” seemed the most relevant.

  “You’re right.” She sawed with renewed vigor at the tape around his ankles, and when it gave she reached out to take him by the arms and help him to his feet. “Can you walk?”

  He wasn’t sure. Vertical, he felt even worse than he had lying on the ground. Queasiness rose in him, and his legs didn’t want to hold him up. “Don’t look,” he managed to say before he collapsed onto all fours and threw up.

  “Ick. I’m glad I kissed you when I did.” But the concern in her voice belied her words. She had stooped to help him back up when there came an unexpected sound: the echoing note of hard-soled shoes on the ladder that led from the next room up to the trap door.

  “Go,” he whispered, but she shook her head energetically, got her hands under his armpits, and began dragging him bodily toward the rows of prop shelves, where the light didn’t reach and where they could be screened from the view of whoever was coming. William’s high-tops offered little friction against the floor, so the slight noise of their retreat was covered by the sounds of the oncoming unknown—at least until Maddie backed into the corner of the shelving and knocked something onto the floor that landed with a sloshy yet metallic noise.

  The sound of oncoming footsteps paused.

  Maddie hastily pulled William the last few feet, and then they were both concealed. From their vantage point behind the shelves they watched between boxes and jugs of paint and kerosene.

  The figure advancing into the firelit chamber was Reed. Even in the tension of the moment, William was surprised; he would have put his money on Tanner being the one to have won that fight.

  Reed cast a cursory glance around, noted the pool of vomit, shuddered fastidiously, and then walked over to where Sheila lay. He surveyed her and then bent down to shake her, none too gently, by one shoulder. There was a groan, and she sat up, one hand going to her scalp.