The Shadow City

by Dan Jolley

  From near his head, Gabe heard Lily say, “Where are we?”

  But Gabe, still staring past Brett at the vortex on the ceiling, screamed, “Look out!” as five familiar, slimy tentacles shot through the portal and reached for them, writhing.

  Brett slammed his hands together. The portal snapped shut, severing the tentacles, and Gabe scrambled backward as they flopped and spasmed around the floor, flinging gobbets of golden slime everywhere.

  After a few moments of slime-slinging, the tentacles stopped moving. Gabe took Lily’s hand, and she hoisted him to his feet. He glanced around and spotted Kaz and Jackson off to one side by some armchairs. Neither one looked hurt, though Kaz was so tense his shoulders were practically level with his ears.

  Staring at the inert tentacles, Kaz said, “I really hate that thing.”

  “Hold still a second,” Brett said. He closed his eyes and moved his hands in little swirls, and every drop of water abruptly slid off Gabe and puddled around his feet. The same thing happened to Kaz, Lily, and Jackson. Brett himself was already bone-dry.

  Lily ran a hand through her hair, gazing at her brother. “I could’ve done that with air, y’know.” She grinned.

  Brett flashed a grin right back. “I think you mean you’re welcome.”

  “Yes, that was quite a feat.” Jackson sniffed disdainfully. “You two would be quite popular at a public swimming hole, I have no doubt.”

  The vortex was closed, the creature was gone, but Gabe still couldn’t look anyone in the eye. “Guys . . . I am so sorry. I led you right into that trap. Just walked us all straight into it. That was totally my fault.”

  “Hey.” Lily poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “Look at me.” Gabe raised his head. Lily said, “I don’t remember you holding a gun to any of our heads. We’re in this together. Right?” When he didn’t answer, she got louder. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right. So quit it. We all need to focus.”

  Gabe glanced around at Kaz and Brett, who both nodded, so Gabe didn’t push it. He still wanted to punch himself in the face, though.

  “Hey—uh . . . Brett?” Kaz said. “Thanks for getting us away from the giant snot creature, but . . . where did you take us?”

  Brett shrugged. “No idea. But I figured if Greta set up all those water glyphs to activate a portal, it had to lead somewhere safe.”

  Gabe took in his surroundings. The floor he’d slammed into was smooth parquet, and judging by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that took up three of the four walls, they were in someone’s private library. And a nice one, at that. Or at least it had been nice, before they arrived and got water and Arcadian creature goo all over the place. Uncle Steve would have loved a place like this, Gabe thought. It reminded him of Uncle Steve’s office in the house they’d shared—though this was way fancier, and the books on the shelves looked even older.

  The light coming through the few tall windows was too dim for Gabe to read any of the books’ titles. Gabe spotted a floor lamp next to a chair in a shadowy corner. “Let’s see if the power’s on.” He crossed to the lamp, found the pull chain, and tugged on it, and he almost jumped straight out of his skin when he realized someone was crouched on the floor by the chair. Gabe backpedaled away from the figure and didn’t quite fall on his butt again as he babbled, “Whuh, whuh, what is that?”

  Because it wasn’t a person by the chair. It was some kind of creepy mannequin.

  Kaz stepped up beside him, peering at the crouched figure. “Holy fish sticks. I didn’t see that coming.”

  Gabe spun toward him, his heart rate very gradually climbing down off the ceiling. “What? Didn’t see what coming?”

  “Well . . .” Kaz swallowed. “When I picked it up, back there in the hospital room, it still looked like Greta.”

  Gabe scowled. He didn’t even know who or what he was scowling at. It just felt right to scowl as he turned to examine the weird thing. With its magick stripped away, it was a roughly human-shaped construct, made of gray stone, slumped under the light of the floor lamp like an oversize marionette with its strings cut. “You brought it with you? Why?”

  Kaz said, “I felt bad just leaving Greta back there asleep—I mean, fake Greta—so I just . . . y’know . . . grabbed her.”

  Jackson walked over, Brett and Lily right behind him. “It’s a kind of golem, I surmise.” Jackson peered at it, his eyes flickering to gold and back again. “A skeleton, if you will, around which Greta Jaeger built her apographon—her copy. The illusion would have been completed with a water skin.” He started to say something else but broke off in the middle of a word. There was a funny look on Ghost Boy’s face as he went to one of the windows, all of which bore heavy, old-fashioned toile curtains. In fact, it seemed to be the curtains themselves that he was interested in, not the window or what might lie beyond.

  Gabe watched Jackson sourly. Weirdo.

  Kaz nodded slowly. “So if Greta had that, uh, toilet portal set up, and used it to sneak out . . . she would’ve needed something to cover for her while she was gone. Right? And that’s where Fake Greta comes in? Orderlies do a bed check, and they see her in there, and they’re like, ‘Everything’s good.’”

  Lily gestured at the hundreds, maybe thousands, of books on the shelves. “So would that make this place . . . like, her lair?” She moved closer to the golem and reached out to touch it, but seemed to think better of that idea. “I wonder how often she sneaked out?”

  “She might have taken off whenever she felt like it,” Gabe said.

  Lily stepped around the golem and went to another window, ignoring Jackson, who had begun turning slowly in place, staring into every corner of the room. She moved the curtains and peered outside. “I think we’re in Nob Hill. Like, one of the town houses.”

  Without another word or even a glance, Jackson walked out of the room. Lily called, “Where are you going?” But he didn’t respond. “Jackson! You’re acting weirder than usual! You okay?”

  Still no answer.

  “Well,” Kaz said, watching Jackson disappear down the dimly lit hallway, “should we go after him?”

  “He’s probably just hypnotized by a bottle of Windex or something,” Gabe said. “Back to Greta—if she kept leaving the hospital to come here, I’m betting this is where she kept all her research. We need to learn as much about this place as we can. So step one, I’d say, is seeing if we can spot any more glyphs. Okay? If Ghost Boy wants to wander around with his nose in the air, let him.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said, “sounds good to me.”

  Gabe grinned. “I’ll go first.”

  Gabe took a deep breath and let his eyes blur. Slowly, carefully, he reached out with his fire sense, seeking sources of energy. The electricity humming along the wires of the house called to him, practically sang to him. For a few heartbeats he could see the power flowing through the home’s copper veins, blue-white fiery lifeblood just waiting to be used.

  But no glyphs.

  “Sorry, guys. No fire writing anywhere. Kaz?”

  Kaz did the same, and with the same result. “Nope. Nothing. Place is built on some fantastic bedrock, but no earth glyphs.”

  They turned to look at Lily. She closed her eyes and concentrated, and when she opened them again they had turned solid, radiant silver—a brilliant, beautiful shade that made Gabe’s insides tingle.

  She gasped. “Whoa. Jackpot.”

  “What is it?” Brett touched her shoulder. “What do you see?”

  Lily turned in a slow circle. “Air glyphs. They’re everywhere. Walls, floor, ceiling, windows. Gabe, they’re just like the ones we saw at your house.”

  Gabe frowned. His house had been all but destroyed in an Eternal Dawn attack, and a big part of the damage had been caused by air glyph booby traps left by his uncle. Wait—what? Does that mean Uncle Steve was here? He was Greta’s friend . . . But when would he have come?

  Brett seemed to understand what Gabe was thinking. “Guess Dr. Con
way still has a few more secrets.”

  Feeling hollow, Gabe nodded. “A few. Yeah.” Gabe suddenly missed his uncle with a sharp, hot pain. The last time they’d spoken, Gabe had been screaming at him about his nonsense occult research and his arbitrary rules. But his research hadn’t been nonsense at all, and the whole time, Uncle Steve had been fighting to make sure Gabe was safe. What else don’t I know?

  “Well.” Gabe cleared his throat. “At least none of the air glyphs have, y’know, gone off yet. Guess we’re not considered hostile, huh?”

  Brett scanned the room, his eyes glowing blue-green. “You’d better be glad about that. I’m seeing just as many water glyphs here as I did in Greta’s room back at Brookhaven.”

  Kaz’s forehead wrinkled up as Brett’s and Lily’s eyes returned to normal. “Air for your uncle, Gabe, and water for Greta?”

  Gabe nodded. “Can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Come on.” Lily started for the door Jackson had disappeared through. “Let’s explore this place.”

  3

  The town house was enormous, clearly built and owned by people with a lot of money, but except for the kitchen and bathrooms, it was also incredibly old-fashioned. “Wow,” Kaz said, wandering from the living room into the foyer. “Are we totally sure this is a house, and not, like, a museum?” Creaky wooden floors, hideously ugly wallpaper, and massive furniture dominated the decor.

  Plus it smells like mothballs and feet.

  “Hey, guys,” Brett called out. “Come check out the dining room.”

  As he followed Kaz and Lily, Gabe asked, “What happened to Ghost Boy, anyway?”

  As if in answer, they heard footsteps thumping overhead. Lily poked a thumb at the ceiling. “Second floor, I guess. Who knows what he’s doing up there.”

  Gabe snorted. “He can stay up there for all I care.”

  They walked into the dining room, where Brett spread his arms out. “Take a look at all this!”

  Gabe paused in the doorway and whistled softly through his teeth. The dining room had been converted into a . . . research center, he supposed would be accurate, but he wanted to call it a war room. Four free-standing whiteboards took up a lot of space along the walls, and the huge, heavy dining table was all but blanketed with papers, notebooks, and massive, ancient-looking books. It’s like Uncle Steve’s office exploded in here. Other than a single sleek laptop, the materials around the room were all pretty traditional.

  Kaz picked up one of the papers. “We wanted research on Arcadia, right?” He waved the paper at Gabe. “Well, here it is. This is your uncle’s handwriting, isn’t it?”

  Gabe took the paper. “Yeah.” He picked up one of the notebooks. “This is different, though. Looks . . . neater, right? More legible and organized.”

  Lily peered over his shoulder. “I’ll bet you ten bucks that’s Greta’s writing.”

  Brett picked up one of the two coffee mugs at the far end of the table and turned it upside down. “I think this brown crust in here used to be coffee.” He set the cup back down. “If two people were going to get together and research how to destroy a magickal demon dimension, this looks like the place they’d do it.”

  One of the whiteboards caught Gabe’s eye. He pointed. “Seriously. Look at that.”

  A symbol similar to a pentagram took up the center of the board, with four smaller symbols around its edge, color-coded: red, gray, blue, and green. Fire, air, water, earth. Eight or ten lines of text had been scrawled below the symbol, but—Gabe squinted—they were in Greek. No luck reading them.

  However, inside the big five-pointed design, Gabe recognized the sun insignia from the robes the Eternal Dawn wore. And right beside it . . .

  Kaz followed where Gabe was looking. “‘Aria,’” Kaz read. The word hung in the air just as powerfully as a magickal glyph.

  Gabe opened his mouth to speak, but his voice had caught in his throat. Instead, Brett spoke up. “Gabe’s mom. I met her when I was in Arcadia.”

  Lily picked up one of the heavy books and started flipping through it. “Okay, so Dr. Conway and Greta got together here to figure out how to destroy Arcadia and rescue Gabe’s mom. And that’s exactly what we want to do. We should be able to find out what we need from their research, right?”

  Lily’s voice reached Gabe’s ears as if from a great distance, rapidly replaced by a dull, pulsing roar. Gabe absently realized it was the pounding flow of his own blood. Fragments of thoughts tumbled over themselves in his mind.

  Uncle Steve had been coming here, to this empty old house . . .

  . . . with Greta Jaeger . . .

  . . . for who knows how many years . . .

  . . . to try to figure out how to rescue Gabe’s mother.

  It still shocked Gabe, how many and how huge were the secrets Uncle Steve had kept from him. Looking at the years of research around this dusty dining room, the revelations of the last few days hit him all at once. Gabe knew it wasn’t, but the floor under his feet felt as if it were swaying back and forth. He put out a hand to steady himself, misjudged the distance, and almost fell past the table. A quick sidestep caught him.

  How could he keep a whole life, a whole world from me?

  No one seemed to have noticed Gabe’s mini-meltdown, for which he felt enormously grateful. Answering Lily, Brett said, “Maybe. Except Dr. Conway and Greta didn’t know you need five elements, instead of just four. That’s why everything went so wrong the first time they tried to destroy Arcadia. They didn’t know they needed magick to tie everything together.”

  The roaring filled Gabe’s ears again. Went so wrong . . . that was an understatement if he’d ever heard one. The last time Uncle Steve, Greta, and Gabe’s parents had tried to destroy Arcadia, Uncle Steve had lost his leg, Greta had gone insane, and both Gabe’s parents had died.

  Only it turned out that Gabe’s mom hadn’t died, and Uncle Steve had suspected as much all along.

  Brett’s eyes shifted over to Gabe. “But now we know we need five elements. We might have to tweak some stuff to make it all work, but we will figure it out, Gabe. We’ll get your mom and your uncle back. I promise.”

  Gabe gave Brett a weak smile. I am so freaking lucky to have friends like these. And before anyone could say anything else, Kaz’s stomach rumbled so loudly it practically echoed around the room. Gabe chuckled. Meals had been hard to come by down in the tunnels. “So, who wants to see if the kitchen’s stocked?”

  As it turned out, the kitchen was stocked very well. Gabe could tell Uncle Steve had been the one buying the groceries because the cabinets and the fridge were full of his favorites. This made sense, given that Uncle Steve wasn’t the one who was a fugitive from a mental institution. After a quick debate over the proper meal, in which both spaghetti and bacon and eggs were ruled out, Gabe slapped four thick hamburger patties onto a stove top grill.

  He’d cook another one if Jackson ever showed up again. They could still hear Ghost Boy clomping around on the second floor. He’d ignored them both times they’d tried to call him down for dinner. Gabe knew it’d be a waste of time to go chasing after him. Jackson always did his own thing, and Gabe knew he would come down when he was good and ready and not a moment before.

  Sitting at a small breakfast table in the kitchen, they all tore into their burgers with great gusto, but halfway through his, Kaz paused and dug into his pocket. Gabe swallowed the bite he’d been working on and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. “What’s up, Kaz?”

  Kaz pulled out his phone, which was still buzzing. “It’s my dad. He’s texting me. Again.”

  Gabe kept his voice level. “Kaz . . . you know you can’t respond to him, right? That was the whole point of hiding out in the tunnels. So nobody could track us. The last thing we want is the Eternal Dawn showing up at anybody’s front door.”

  “No, I know. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to my parents or my sisters. But Dad’s getting really upset. Now he says if I don’t text him back he’s calling the cop
s.”

  When they first went underground, Kaz told his parents he was going on a sleepover. That had turned into a spur-of-the-moment camping trip, and after that he’d stopped responding altogether.

  He stared down at the phone. “Dad’s been leaving voice mails and sending emails . . . and so have Mom and all of my sisters. They’re kind of . . .”

  “Freaking out?” Lily put a comforting hand on his arm.

  Kaz nodded.

  Brett and Lily’s parents were out of town and had left them to stay with their grandmother, who was a very nice old lady. A very nice, gullible old lady. She’d believed everything they’d told her about going on a white-water rafting trip with Kaz and the rest of the Smith family.

  Gabe’s only relatives were either dead or trapped in another dimension.

  Kaz, on the other hand, had a huge, loving, worried-sick family not three miles from where they sat.

  The phone buzzed in Kaz’s hand. “Oh . . . crap.” Kaz’s face paled as his eyes flicked across the screen, and he held it up so everyone could see it.

  To whomever is holding my son. It’s not too late to release him. If you do so right now, there is a good chance you can escape before the police find you.

  Kaz shoved his chair back from the table and started pacing, waving his hands as he stomped around the kitchen. “I can’t put them through this! Dad’ll have a heart attack. I mean, he probably won’t, he’s in great shape actually—he runs marathons—but what if my abduction traumatizes my sisters? What if they get PTSD and can’t leave the house? They’ll never get into college if they can’t leave the house!”

  Gabe leaned across the table toward Brett and Lily. “We can’t put him through this. Them either. He’s got to check in with his family.”

  Lily nodded in agreement, but Brett made a sharp gesture with one hand. “It’s too risky. What if he accidentally gives something away?”

  Pain creased Lily’s face. “But what if this is the only way to convince the Smiths that Kaz is all right?” She turned to Gabe. “What do you think?”