by Morgan Rice
“So you’re going to kill one of your own?” Kaia demanded. Could she use this? Was there a way to drive a wedge between them? “How did you decide which of you was going to die?”
“I chose this,” the young woman said. “I will be the one of our kind to change everything.”
There was a determination in her voice that Kaia found almost more disturbing than the rest of it. It was a kind of fanaticism that made it clear there would be no pushing her away from this, no talking her out of it or making her question why it had to be her to die rather than one of the others.
“Enough talking,” the stonemason said. “We have prepared everything. Tools that will use humanity’s own attachment to permanence and objects against them. The archway to anchor it is ready. The stone is carved. Now, there is only the ritual to complete.”
“Why are you even doing this?” Kaia asked. “Why are you trying to make a way into this world when you have a whole world of your own?”
“Why?” the aristocrat snorted. “When your kind see a new place, they do not need a reason to take it. Why should we?”
Kaia wanted to refute that, wanted to shout back that the shadow was wrong, but then her mind flickered back to the lessons she’d been taught at school about the empire that she lived in, which stretched further than any empire before. She was at the heart of another empire now.
“So you think you just get to invade?” Kaia asked.
“We have always entered this world,” the young woman said. “And the Shadowseers have beaten us back, but not this time. Not with portals at the heart of places like this. They have intruded on the dark with lights and fire, but these bastions of both will become the places we strike. So many people.”
“So many fractured people,” the aristocrat agreed. “So many with gaps we can flow into, and take. The mad, the addicts, the weak… delicious.”
Kaia swallowed as she imagined that, with a horde of shadows pouring out into Paris, seeking out body after body and taking over. Kaia had felt what it was like to have one of their kind crawling over her, enveloping her and trying to find a way in. Kaia had managed to fight it off, but how many people wouldn’t be able to?
“If you hate all this form and solidity,” Kaia said, “why take people’s bodies? If you hate humanity so much, why become us? I think you’re jealous.”
“Jealous?” the aristocrat said. “The only reason we take your bodies is to destroy you!”
“You’re jealous,” Kaia said. “You possess people because people can walk in the daytime, the way you can’t. All your powers, and you can’t even walk around when the sun is shining.”
She didn’t know why she was taunting them. Maybe she was hoping that if she did, they would do something stupid, something that might let her stop them. The only problem was that the ropes were still holding her tight to the statue, so Kaia wasn’t sure what she could do to stop them. She worried at the ropes, hoping to break clear of them.
“Enough,” the stonemason said. “Let the ritual begin.”
The young woman nodded, and then lay down on the stone slab. The stonemason and the aristocrat both moved over to the archway, and all three of the shadow-possessed people started to chant, in a language that seemed guttural and strange, every syllable of it seeming to promise pain.
The stonemason took his hammer and chisel, setting them to the stone and making just a couple of small incisions. They seemed to be the final parts to some greater pattern, though, because as soon as the stonemason made those cuts, the archway shone with light.
No, not light; this was more like the opposite of light, right through darkness and out on the other side. It was a darkness that seemed to burn in Kaia’s eyes, and the symbols that it formed were physically painful to look at. They seemed to writhe and twist, refusing to be pinned down or simply read.
The stonemason went to the stone block next, striking it with his chisel as precisely as he had the archway. Again, dark fire seemed to crawl up over the block, forming those same twisted symbols. Would Kaia have been able to see any of this if she hadn’t been different from most people?
The possessed people started to chant again, their voices starting low, but then rising, little by little. Kaia could feel a kind of power building in that, rising up with the chant. The symbols on the stone block and the arch seemed to move in response to the chant, their movements matching the rhythm of it.
Kaia worked more frantically at the ropes now, knowing that her only hope of stopping this would come if she could get out. It was her only hope of surviving this, too, because she had no doubt that they would kill her, as soon as they were done with the ritual.
“It’s time,” the stonemason said. He moved over to the stone slab, and set the chisel above the heart of the young woman lying there. “With this, you will change the world. It will never be the same again.”
He lifted the hammer he held above his head, and Kaia felt the power building to a surge. She knew in that moment that when he drove it down through the heart of the young woman below, that would be the spark for the rest of it, that it would send the full energy of the shadow within surging into the arch, and that would bring a host of them surging through into Paris.
Kaia yanked at the rope now in terror for the city, and the world, hoping that it would be enough to get her free. Maybe she still had time to throw herself at the stonemason and disrupt this.
The ropes still didn’t quite break open, though, and the hammer was at its apex, ready to come down. There was nothing that Kaia could do to stop this.
Then there was a crack as someone kicked the gate to the stonemason’s yard wide open.
“Stop, in the name of the law!” a voice called, and Kaia realized with a start that it did so in English. She looked over, and saw the last person she’d expected here.
Inspector Pinsley stood there, gun in his hand, clearly ready to fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Kaia had never felt as relieved as she did when the inspector showed up, his pistol out and leveled, ready to fire.
“You will let the young ladies go!” he ordered. Kaia realized then that he didn’t know exactly what was going on. He thought that the shadows were planning a murder in front of her, and didn’t understand the full scope of what was going on.
That was why, when the young woman hopped down off the slab and started to walk to him, he beckoned to her, rather than shooting her the way Kaia would have preferred.
“That’s right, miss, come over to me.”
Kaia knew that she had to say something, had to try to warn him, even if he wouldn’t believe it.
“Pinsley!” Kaia called out. “She’s one of them!”
A look of puzzlement passed over the inspector’s face, and he started to take a step back. A second earlier, and her warning might have been in time. As it was, though, the young woman lashed out, striking the inspector’s arm and sending the pistol in it flying.
The inspector reacted quickly, moving to the side, lunging for the gun again, but the others were already moving. The aristocrat lifted his cane and started forward, while the stonemason brandished his chisel like a knife. Shadows flowed out, wrapping around the gun, and Kaia guessed that to anyone without her talents, it would look as if it had simply disappeared.
Certainly, the inspector cursed and grabbed around for a different weapon. He came up with the marble arm of a statue, bringing it up in time to parry the first attack from the cane. It was a hard enough blow that the wood of the cane snapped, leaving the aristocrat holding just the stub of it.
As the inspector started to wield his makeshift club like a cavalry saber, Kaia kept working at the ropes that held her. She knew that she had to help with this, because even someone as skilled in a fight as him couldn’t hope to prevail against three shadows at once. He’d been hurt enough, just fighting the one inside Xander.
Then again, these people didn’t appear to have Xander’s skills, obviously learned in fighting the s
hadows. They were still strong and fast, as the shadows pushed their bodies in ways that they might not have done without them inside, but they didn’t have a lifetime of ingrained reflexes the way Xander had.
It meant that, for the moment, the inspector was managing to hold them off, striking out with the marble arm and forcing them back. It gave Kaia time to try to work to get free. If she could just get to the knots…
There, she felt the moment when they gave, and wrenched her arms clear of the statue. Even as she did it, the young woman came at her, swinging a punch at Kaia that she barely dodged.
“You think you can win?” the young woman asked her, lashing out again. This time, Kaia dodged back among the statues, so that her opponent’s strike knocked one over, sending it crashing to the ground in a shower of dust.
“I think we’re doing a pretty good job of it,” Kaia said, taunting her forward. If she could at least distract this one from the fight with the inspector, she could give him a chance in the fight.
She saw him continuing to fight back against the possessed people. The stonemason struck at him with his chisel, and the inspector deflected it the way he might have parried a fencing thrust. The aristocrat came at him from the side, but Pinsley struck him with a fist, driving him back.
Kaia had no time to watch after that, because the young woman had grabbed a metal support for one of the statues now, wielding it like a spear and jabbing it at Kaia. Kaia barely dodged aside, and the support spike scraped off another of the statues there.
Kaia could see the shadows closing in on the inspector, too. Maybe against one of them, he could have held his own, but even knowing nothing about fighting, Kaia could see that he couldn’t strike at one of them there without the other managing to attack him.
That was when Kaia felt the power starting to build up in her. She felt the relentless pressure of it expanding inside her, like her heart might burst. She saw a glow start to cut through the dark around her, and she knew what she had to do.
The young woman lunged at her again with her makeshift spear, and this time as she dodged, Kaia stepped in close. She put a hand out on her chest, and the energy within her burst out in a scream that seemed to fill the stonemason’s yard. It was loud enough that the statues shook with it, loud enough that one made from plaster burst where it was.
Kaia poured power into the young woman attacking her without quite knowing how, and that power simply left no room for the shadow that controlled her. It pushed it out in wisps, and then in a torrent, the young woman throwing her head back, joining Kaia in a cry of her own. Only this cry had the shadow with it, pouring it out into the night. It lunged in towards Kaia and she threw up a hand towards it, power bursting from her again to force it back. The young woman slumped back against a statue, shaking her head like she was trying to clear it.
Kaia saw the others stagger with the force of her shout, and the inspector seemed to sense his chance to act. He struck out with the stone arm he held, catching the stonemason across the jaw and sending him sprawling into unconsciousness. As he fell, Kaia saw the shadows start to pour from him, obviously not wanting to be trapped in his body when there was someone close by like Kaia, whose powers might be a threat.
That left only the aristocrat. He looked round at Pinsley, then at Kaia, obviously trying to weigh the odds. Then he took off, using one of the stone blocks as a stepping stone to leap over the wall of the stonemason’s yard. He was gone into the night then, so that even if Kaia and the inspector had wanted to go after him, they wouldn’t have been able to do it quickly enough.
The inspector came forward, approaching her and the young woman. He still held the statue’s arm, obviously ready to use it.
“It’s all right,” Kaia said, realizing that he still thought that the young woman in front of him was on the side of the others. “She’s not a threat anymore. I pushed the shadow out of her.”
She realized that the inspector wouldn’t have seen much of what had happened with the shadows. He might still think that she was a threat.
“Thank you,” the young woman said. “Thank you. While that… thing was in me, I felt… I don’t know what I felt. Like I was another version of me. Like I was just a passenger in my own body.”
“You understand how this sounds,” the inspector said. “Shadows, and the rest of it?”
He was going to try to cling to reason, even now? Kaia had expected that this might have been enough, but then, what would the inspector actually have seen? If he didn’t see the shadows, then it would have just looked like bursting in on three mad, murderous people.
“Who are you?” Kaia asked the young woman.
“My name is Amelie,” she replied. “Amelie de Fiaux.”
“The actress?” Pinsley said, sounding even more startled by that than by the rest of it. “The one who has been missing?”
Kaia realized then that they’d found an answer for at least part of the mysteries around the theatre. There was a kind of satisfaction in that, but also so many other things they still didn’t know.
“She was missing because she was controlled,” Kaia said.
“I… just walked out,” Amelie said. “I knew that I had something more important to do. Something that would make me more important than anyone had been.”
The ritual. The one they’d been performing, that was supposed to fill the world with shadows. Just the thought of it made Kaia shudder, but Pinsley was still focused on the theatre, apparently.
“Something that involved killing other actresses?” Pinsley demanded.
Kaia looked across at him, and realized that it was the obvious solution to this in a lot of ways. It seemed like too much of a coincidence otherwise that actresses were being murdered at the same theatre Amelie had gone missing from.
“That wasn’t me,” Amelie said.
“Not even under the influence of the shadows?”
“I swear it wasn’t me,” she insisted.
To Kaia, she sounded sincere, but was that enough? Kaia could remember when the police in London hadn’t been willing to believe her, but did that mean that she should believe Amelie now?
“If not you, then who?” Pinsley demanded, obviously unwilling to let the logic of it go. “All your replacements in the role were murdered.”
“It wasn’t me,” Amelie insisted. She looked over to Kaia. “You know about the shadows, so if I’d done it, I would just tell you. I would admit it, and you would understand that they made me do it, yes?”
“Yes,” Kaia admitted, she would. That made a kind of sense.
“Then I’ll tell you again, I didn’t do this, even with a shadow in me. That wasn’t what it wanted. It wanted me to help with this, to help make its doorway to another world.”
Kaia could believe the part about the portals, and the rest… Amelie was right. If she knew that Kaia knew about the shadows and what they could do, then she would lose nothing by admitting the killings. She would know that Kaia would understand that she was controlled at the time.
Pinsley clearly didn’t feel the same way.
“Do you know how that sounds?” the inspector said.
Amelie looked over at Kaia. “Is he always like this?”
“Pretty much,” Kaia said, and then turned to Pinsley. “I believe her. I don’t think she killed anyone. I think she was just caught up in the shadows’ plans.“
“You’re sure?” the inspector asked. Obviously he didn’t want to let go of a chance to finish this.
“I’m sure,” Kaia said. “I followed the feeling of the shadows; I suppose there’s no reason why it has to lead to the killer so simply.”
“Damn,” Pinsley said.
“Even they thought I was just here to try to stop their plans,” Kaia said. She stopped for a moment, as a thought occurred to her. “Actually, they thought I was someone else.”
If there was someone who looked that much like her, Kaia could think of only one person that might be. Was it possible that the shadows knew w
here her sister was?
“Amelie, I don’t know how it works, but the last time I met someone who had been possessed by a shadow, they had access to some of the things the shadow was thinking. Do you know anything about what they intend now?”
“They didn’t plan beyond this,” Amelie said. “At least, the one in me didn’t. It knew it was going to die.”
Of course, which meant that it wouldn’t need to know the rest of any plan. Kaia felt as if her best chance to stop all of this had been ripped away from her.
“But I do know it thought you were someone very dangerous, someone special. There’s a house not far from Montmartre Cemetery. It had me watch it, checking to make sure that there were no threats. A house with a statue of an angel above the door. When they saw you, they were afraid that you would go there.”
Kaia filed that piece of information away, not knowing yet how she was going to be able to make use of it, or if she was. She could only hope that it would be useful. She still wanted to know more, about the shadows, and about exactly who they had thought she was. She had a thousand questions for Amelie, and unlike with Xander, there might actually be time to get answers.
Then she heard the sound of boots on the ground outside the stonemason’s yard, with whistles sounding as figures forced their way inside, holding lanterns.
“Sûreté! Nobody move! We have had reports of a woman screaming here, and sounds of violence.”
Kaia winced at that. Of course her scream had carried around the quarter. Probably, it had brought every police officer who had heard it running. Maybe if the fight had still been going on, they might have been able to help, but now, they would only complicate things.
“Who are you?” one of the Sûreté officers demanded.
“I’m Amelie de Fiaux,” Amelie said. “Officer, these people have just saved me from-”
“Wait. Amelie de Fiaux? The actress? The one who has been missing?”
“That’s right,” Amelie said, sounding relieved, as if it was a good thing that the police had recognized her. Kaia could already guess all the reasons why it wasn’t.
