If only Hazrat had some shadows to work with…
He would never forget the first time his lethal power had come to him.
One of his family’s maids had made him food he didn’t approve of, something too spicy for his tastes, and rather than chide her as he normally did, Hazrat pictured the shadows near the door reaching out to strangle her…
The woman had suddenly started choking as the shadow hands met her neck. He suspended her in the air with the flick of his wrist and dropped her, the maid screaming as she ran out of the room.
It was Hazrat’s first attempt, and soon after, he’d go on to do some pretty remarkable things with shadows, from forming razor-sharp blades to creating creatures he could ride on.
But it had all started with choking a maid, and to use his power effectively he needed the right conditions. Being stuck in a room full of light with the inability to open his eyes made Hazrat feel more vulnerable than he’d ever felt before.
His thoughts returned to Roman Martin, reliving the incident in the pitiful immigration advisor’s office.
Hazrat should have killed the white-haired non-exemplar when he’d had the chance—should have sent one of his shadows directly through Roman’s throat, bursting out the back of his neck, blood spritzing into the air as the shadow looped back around and dipped into his forehead, skewering his brain.
This thought brought a smile to Hazrat’s face, as carnage normally did.
Being able to control any shadow had its advantages, one being that he could even use the shadow cast from a person’s nose, or the shadow under their chin, to choke them out.
Hazrat could use shadows to strip flesh, to break through bone. He could even send a shadow down someone’s throat and into their stomach, exploding it in an instant once it reached their guts.
Yet he had just sat there like an idiot after Roman called for security, shocked that someone would dare go against his wishes. And now his wife was still out there in Centralia, likely to be picked up by immigration authorities in the near future.
If Hazrat didn’t do something…
But what could he do? With too much light and no shadows in sight, his power was all but useless. That was one of his limitations—he had to see the shadow first to take control of it. Had Hazrat been able to simply feel for shadows, he would have been classified as a Type I in Centralia’s stupid system, and it would have been a lot harder to contain him.
“Water…” he whispered.
Hazrat knew the Centralian prison guard in his cell could hear him.
He sensed the man’s presence and had tried to strike up a conversation with him several times now, his conversation centering upon a single question: How much would it take for you to turn off the lights?
But the man never responded, and he only gave Hazrat fluid once per day, sticking a straw in his mouth and letting him drink just a small amount of sugary liquid.
“Please…”
Hazrat was ashamed he had been reduced to begging.
This was beneath a man from the Southern Alliance; he already had his trial tattoos that stretched from the back of his head down to the bottom of the spine, tattoos administered by a strongman digging an ink-covered knife deep into Hazrat’s flesh.
He hadn’t shed one tear in the process. Hadn’t made a peep. And Hazrat had kept his shadows away from the tattoo artist. That was another thing about his shadows, they were tied to his instinct. If his temper flared, or he was in trouble, they came alive on their own.
He hadn’t even asked the tattoo artist to stop, to take a break so he could recover. Yet here he was in Prison South, begging for mercy, his muscles screaming, his skin on fire from the hot lights, his throat parched, bright pink all he could see through his closed eyes.
And that was another thing. Hazrat had been blasted with light for so long now that he was afraid to open his eyes, knowing all too well what may happen to his pupils if he suddenly let the light in.
Hazrat lived for the shadows. The cleanliness of the light was something he actively avoided, and they were using his Achilles’ heel to imprison him.
It was hours later when a faint sound reached his ears.
Hazrat had nodded off, dreaming about his home in the Southern Alliance. The architecture, pagodas, stupas, all the things that made the South more interesting than Centralia. He’d been in his family’s palace in the dream, playing with a shadow form, wrestling but still in control.
It was something he did often.
Without any friends as a child, mostly due to his rigorous studies and overprotective parents, Hazrat often created shadow forms of himself to play with.
Now awake, Hazrat was cognizant enough not to actually open his eyes, knowing that the light would seriously damage his pupils. But he did slow his breath for a moment, listening again for the sound.
Whatever it was, it was moving closer.
The lights cut out. Darkness washed over him.
The guard in his cell shifted his attention to the front door, and the sound of hissing muscles met Hazrat’s ears as the guard’s beast form took shape.
“So you’re a morpher…” Hazrat whispered, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
It didn’t matter at that point.
There was some scuffling and shouting in the hallway, but it ended quite suddenly, the next sound to ricochet in Hazrat’s cell being the sound of a wall exploding below, then the floor creaking and bits of the ceiling coming down.
“There he is,” Hazrat heard a female voice say.
The beast-morphing guard sprang into action as soon as the wall came down. He quickly met his doom, his bones crunching as his attacker tore him to shreds.
Hazrat heard a body hit the floor, then more crunching bones, and the guard let out his last breath.
Rubble fell from the ceiling and the wall as someone stepped into the room.
“Hazrat Inayat?” a woman asked.
“Who are you?” came his reply.
“Will you swear loyalty to me if I free you from the cell?”
A wicked grin spread across Hazrat’s face. “Give me just another minute; I should be able to free myself by then.”
An enormous hand wrapped around Hazrat’s throat, a calloused hand—one that could easily snap his neck in two.
“There are two of you?” he said, gasping for air.
“There are,” said the woman. “Ian, don’t kill him. Yet.”
The big hand around Hazrat’s neck relaxed.
“It’s very simple, Hazrat,” the woman said. “Either you join us, or we kill you. There is no other option.”
An alarm was going off now, somewhere in the distance.
“I’ll join you,” Hazrat finally said.
“Good,” the woman said as his shackles came to life, opening on their own. He started to fall forward but was prevented by the man still holding his neck.
“It may be hard to walk for a moment,” the woman told him.
Hazrat felt the concrete move around his legs, solidifying, taking a life of its own. A scarf slithered up his arm, binding itself around his eyes.
His concrete boots let him forward, Hazrat not yet in control of his body.
“Keep your eyes shut for a little while,” the woman told him. “We need you to be able to use your shadows. You’re useless to me blind.”
Lisa Painstake awoke to the sound of an explosion, the ground beneath her rumbling. Still in her Soul Speed form, she had been placed in a cell in the maximum-security part of Prison South.
The sound grew louder, guards shouting, and the lights flickered for a moment before turning off completely.
The building’s frame creaked, exemplars held in other cells yelling for guards, metal clinking against metal as they tried to break free of their shackles.
Lisa stood, her wrists bound by a sleek metal device that prevented her from dimming her form. The initial shock of having her umbilical cord of light cut hadn’t worn off, but she had g
ained her bearings some and managed to keep silent as the man made of light had interrogated her.
He’d promised the following day would be worse, that he would find a way to reach her, to affect her, a thought that scared Lisa to no end.
She wanted to blame Nadine, the Eastern spy who had gotten Lisa in all this mess, but it wasn’t quite Nadine’s fault.
It wasn’t like she could have seen this coming; hell, Lisa had never encountered someone who could actually see her in her Soul Speed form, so no one could have known this would happen.
The floor shook again; Lisa had the urge to press her ear to it, but her current form didn’t allow her the advantage of listening through objects. While she could stand, and the world around her was tangible, it was also soft, without the rigidity it should have had.
Lisa braced herself as the floor directly beneath her creaked, support pillars ripping from the outer-facing wall. She hopped to the front of the cell just in time to avoid the crumbling floor.
As the dust settled, Lisa took a few steps closer to the opening that now extended down to the second floor. Aside from an occasional pipe or loose brick, the opening seemed sturdy enough for her to try to navigate.
It wasn’t like she could get hurt in this form anyway, even with her wrists bound behind her back. Lisa scooted to the edge of the floor beneath her feet, glanced to the bottom once more, and jumped down, nearly catching herself but buckling in the end and landing on her knees.
No pain. Apparently, only the man made of light could actually hurt her in this form.
Lisa rolled to her side and used a large stone block to push herself to her feet.
Getting her bearings, she saw there was another hole through an opposite wall. She heard the footsteps of more guards outside the cell, followed by their screams as the floor came alive and sliced through their feet.
Hesitating, Lisa decided to take the hole in the wall rather than the hallway. And even as she moved over the brick rubble, she saw the bricks themselves trembling, rabid even, ready to move on the first form that came upon them.
“Stop!” a guard yelled behind her, and it was only a second later that the ground beneath him formed into a sharp pike, impaling the man.
Clear of the rubble and wanting to get as far away from the prison as she could, Lisa followed a trio moving in the distance, their forms barely illuminated by the moon.
She kept as low to the ground as she could without using her hands, walking crouched, keeping as large a distance as possible.
But Lisa was an eyesore in her Soul Speed form, light fizzling all around her, oscillating up and down her arms, and it didn’t take long for one of the people she was following to notice.
The ground lifted beneath Lisa, vines made of mud breaking from the soil and wrapping around her legs. They held her there as a hooded figured approached. Following close behind her was a towering man with red skin and spikes jutting out of his shoulders and forearms.
The two left the third man in their party behind as he simply stood in the shadows, a sliver of moonlight illuminating his blindfolded face.
“Who are you?” the hooded woman asked Lisa, as a vine made of mud tightened around Lisa’s neck.
The woman thought could do all she wanted to Lisa in her spectral form, a fact Lisa wanted to keep a secret for now.
So she played along.
“A prisoner,” she gasped in her best attempt at a choked voice. “Please, let me go.”
“A prisoner made of light energy?” The hooded woman considered this for a moment. She stood before Lisa now, her face completely shielded by shadow. “Where are you from?”
“Northern Alliance.”
“And why did they jail you?”
“I… I don’t know,” Lisa lied.
A pair of Centralian teleports flashed behind the hooded women, both of them seconds away from firing off blasts of energy.
The shots went wide as their clothing tightened, squeezing the life out of the two. The look of utter fear was the last thing Lisa saw on one of the Centralian’s faces, a woman, her eyes bulging as all the blood rushed to her head, streaming out of her nose, her eyes and her ears before she fell sideways.
“And what is your ability?” the hooded woman asked her.
“You’re looking at it. I can, um, command light. I can’t get away from it,” said Lisa, surprised she was able to come up with this on the fly.
“Light and shadow…”
The vines made of mud dropped from Lisa’s body. She immediately turned, showing the woman her cuffs. “They prevent me from using any extensions of my powers,” she said.
“And your form is always like this?”
“I… I can’t help it.”
“It’s a bit jarring, but it will prove useful.”
The cuffs fell to the ground, and Lisa could instantly free her hands.
“You will be joining us now, or the cuffs come back on and you remain in Prison South.”
“Join you?” Lisa looked from the hooded woman to the big man behind her, and from there to the man still in the shadows, hunched over, his shoulders heaving up and down.
“Yeah, I think not.”
Lisa became completely transparent, seeping into the ground and moving forward, as if swimming through the soil. When she reached the wall used to prevent outside teleporters, she moved through it and brought herself above ground once she’d reached the final wall.
Completely transparent and no longer in the hooded woman’s vicinity, Lisa stepped into the street outside the prison and turned in the direction of the trolley station.
If anyone would know what to do, it would be Nadine, and Lisa knew how to get ahold of her.
Chapter Seven: Stranger Things
Roman watched Nadine enter the diner.
Even with the distressed look on her face, she was beautiful, wearing a tight gunmetal-gray outfit that contrasted with her green eyes, her dirty-blond hair in a bun with a few strands hanging off to the side.
“I will introduce you; do not introduce yourself,” Roman said, aiming his voice at the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
“Are we meeting another one of your dolls?” a muffled voice asked him. Sitting next to Roman, Celia couldn’t help but giggle at the question.
Amazing she could hear it too, because the diner was loud—which meant Casper really needed to keep her voice down.
Really.
Feeling like he needed some fresh air, Roman had walked the ten blocks to a diner known as Centralian Central, a famous place with branches all over the country. He had let Casper look out as he walked, her hands perched on the edge of his pocket and her chin resting on the very same edge. Most people wouldn’t notice her anyway, or they would think her a toy.
But now that he was in public, public proper, she had been relegated to the bottom of his pocket, a useless strategy if she planned to talk loudly, her pitched voice audible in their booth, and the booth behind them if people were listening.
“No, we’re not meeting a doll,” Roman told Casper. “There are only you three, and you will stay quiet until we get to a better place for me to introduce you to Nadine. In fact…”
It only took a single thought. Casper was a toy again, no longer animated. It would be better this way, and it was something Roman should have done as soon as they’d arrived in the diner.
“Celia, Roman,” Nadine said as she sat down. She let out a quick exhale tinged in anxiety.
“And what will the lady be having?” asked a waitress, a thin woman seemingly without a chin. She was fast, already standing with her order pad ready in case Nadine knew what she wanted.
“Coffee, and a bran muffin if you have it.”
“Baked fresh this morning,” the waitress said as she scribbled down the order.
“Good, fine,” the Eastern spy said with a wave of her hand.
Once the waitress was gone, Nadine relaxed a little, a thin smile coming across her face as she took in Roman’s appear
ance. She tapped her finger against her temple and a mental message came to Roman:
Since we are in public, do not discuss anything outright. I’ve come to this location because I wanted everything to seem normal, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being trailed. I wasn’t, but we never know who could be listening, so keep things vague. We can discuss details later.
“So you say you haven’t seen a friend of yours since last night, right?” Roman asked, taking the cue.
Nadine wasn’t looking under his side of the table, but if she had been, she would have see that Celia had placed a hand on his leg.
“Yes, and we were at the party together,” the Eastern spy said, “We met someone…”
A telepathic message finished her statement: We met an exemplar who was able to cut through my asset’s incorporeal form. He tried to attack me too, but the asset saved me by forcing me back to my body.
“And did your friend go home with this person?” Roman asked carefully.
“Yes, and I haven’t heard from her since.”
“Where were you exactly? I mean, where was the party?”
“You know, I think it’d be best to discuss this in private,” said Nadine. “I don’t know why I agreed to meet you here. It’s just a very serious issue for me, and probably something we should discuss alone, because I like my friend so much and I’m worried about her.”
Roman nodded. “Do you have a place in mind?”
“Yes, but let me get my muffin first.” Nadine raised her hand and the waitress came back over. She instructed the woman to make her muffin ‘to go,’ and to cancel the coffee. As she did this, Roman finished his tea and paid the bill for the breakfast sandwich he’d eaten when he’d first arrived, as well as Nadine’s muffin.
The muffin came at about the time a teleporter appeared in a free space near the entrance of the diner. They followed the teleporter to the space used for teleportation purposes and checked with the host to make sure they were fine to go. Once they got the okay, Celia, Nadine and Roman vanished.
“Where are we?” were the first words out of Roman’s mouth once they appeared in a dark apartment, the teleporter gone as quickly as he’d come. Nadine was already getting comfortable, slipping out of her shoes and into a pair of house slippers.
House of Dolls 2 Page 5
