The thing about sharing head space with the shadow is that she never stops. She doesn’t do anything that even resembles sleep. She doesn’t even do anything like rest. She’s in constant motion, like a shark swimming round and round so it doesn’t die.

Which means I don’t ever stop, either. I haven’t actually slept since I was a little girl, in the hospital after the storm that vomited me up onto that beach in Galveston. Even then, I wasn’t asleep. I was drugged. But we’ll get to that later.

When I was young and the shadow and I were new to each other, I used to kind of zone out for a few hours once in awhile. It wasn’t really sleep, but I wasn’t quite conscious, either. It was a sort of fugue state, my mind shutting down to get some relief from the constant, never-ending input from the shadow. My brain would sort of fade into a dull dial tone, and a few hours later I’d snap back awake.

Sometimes I’d wake up bloody with injuries. The shadow once broke both my hands, battering at a door and trying to get out because she couldn’t figure out a doorknob. Sometimes I’d wake up miles away from where I’d started. The shadow would just sort of steer me along towards the next thing that caught her interest, and then the next, and then the next. It was horrifying. She didn’t know about pain, for one thing. Or hunger, or thirst, or the million ways a human body is a fragile thing. When I was a little older, I started my life-long love affair with coffee. Stimulants helped to fight off the fugue states. Later on, I learned better methods.

I remember coming to one day, back when I was… thirteen years old? Maybe fourteen? I’ve watched other people wake up. My foster families, my first husband. It looks very sweet and easy, a gradual process. I never had that. I was suddenly alert and aware and it was like time had flashed forward without me. I hated it.

Anyway, this time I woke up knee deep in a creek in a cow field in central Texas. I knew the area. I’d sometimes come out here at night just to get out of the house. I could watch the stars while the shadow played with crickets and spiders and counted all the blades of grass. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this? I grew up in Texas, out in the ass-end of nowhere. A series of these teeny little one-horse towns in the desert. I loved the desert nights. The cool breeze, the animals that would come out, and the quiet.

It was very different in the daytime. The shadow loved the days in the desert.

I blinked and realized I was standing in a huge circle of shade, as though there were a huge disc up above me somewhere blocking the sun. Only of course there was nothing up there – the shade was just her. Everywhere, her. Gods, I was in the center of a circle that must have stretched out a hundred yards in every direction. She was so big, and so powerful… it made my breath catch in my throat.

See, it’s complicated, the way my shadow and I coexist. Complicated and unnatural, so it’s not like we had any references to guide us. Back then I knew she was dangerous, and that I had to keep her contained. Keep her weak enough that I could control her. She knew that I was cruel and harsh and kept her always hungry and weak. She wanted to kill me, maybe more than anything else, but without me she couldn’t live in this world. We struggled for control, and I… I didn’t always win.

She feeds on energy, you know. People assume a shadow’s weakness would be light, or fire, or some stupid shit like that, but they’re wrong. That’s a shadow’s food. Out there in the desert? The sun was beating down on the flat, hard-packed soil. It had to be a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten that April afternoon. The soil had baked hot and dry in the sun all day, and the stones were hot enough to burn your skin if you touched them. Lots and lots for her to eat, you know? So it was cool in my circle of shadow. Maybe seventy, seventy five degrees? 

She can eat the warmth to make it colder than that. A lot colder, if she applies herself, but it’s more effort than it’s worth to her. Like, imagine drinking your meals, thin and weak broth, let’s say, through a fifteen-foot straw. You’d burn more calories than you consume.

Fuck only knows how long I wandered around out there, but when I came to, she was a lot more powerful than I like her to be. A lot. When she was that strong, she could sometimes force me down, lock me away in another trance-like fugue while she did whatever she wanted with my body. I hated that.

So the first thing I did, I made her freeze the water. To use up the power, see? I remember the way she squealed in my head, like a pig. She’d barely had time to realize I’d awakened, and suddenly I was in her head, controlling her actions. I was punishing her by doing to her exactly what she’d done to me… you can see why it took us so many years to arrive at a working relationship.

The creek froze a good forty feet in both directions, and all the scrub grass frosted along the banks and out into the field on both sides, where it was hot enough the steam just boiled up from the ground like a fog rolling in. Not gonna lie; it was kind of impressive. The circle of shade constricted, too – eighty yards, forty… ten.

So there I am, standing in a slushy hole in all that ice, heart in my mouth, shaking, ’cause I’m scared to death and I have a pissed off shadow screaming bloody murder in my skull. I’d zoned out again, and for just that split second, I’d been vulnerable. I could have been gone. Forever. The shadow could have hollowed me out, right there, while I was out. She was certainly trying to right that minute, but I’d weakened her until I was stronger again. For now. I mean, the sun was still shining. She’d get strong again.

I think the only reason she didn’t snuff my mind like a candle when she had the chance is because she hadn’t quite figured out what was going on. We fought – fight – all the time. It’s a constant struggle over who’s in charge. And I think those first times, I was only getting away with it because she thought she’d won, understand? I was gone, and she thought she’d gotten rid of me at last. Then awhile later, I’d come back. I had to be so careful those times, because if I thought about that too long, she’d figure out what I was thinking, and she’d catch on to what was happening. She’s not thoughtless, like a dog or a trained animal. She’s sentient. She doesn’t quite grasp language, but she’s quite cunning in her way. And especially back then, she didn’t know much of anything about humans.

I sat down on the ice – my shorts were already soaked, so it made a better place to sit than the shore, where I’d just get muddy. I had a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes rolled in the sleeve of my tee shirt, and they were still dry, so I lit one and tried to remember what I’d missed. Yeah, I smoked back then. I’d steal them from my foster parents, a few at a time. It was handy to have an excuse to carry a fire source around with me. It was an easy way to bribe the shadow into behaving, letting her snack on a trashcan fire or a burning newspaper.

See, I’d been out of it but the shadow hadn’t been. And she doesn’t forget. Anything. Ever. The trick is getting information out of her in any kind of meaningful context. She’s blind, of course, and words are just noise to her without having me around to translate them into something meaningful.

I had a little pink watch, but the battery had died (or been eaten) and the digital display was blank. The sun was still fairly high, so it had to be early afternoon…

I finally remember I’m supposed to be in class. Well, I say class. It was actually an honest to fuck one-room school house. It was, oh, ’89 or so, so you didn’t find those too often, except out in those itty bitty little hick towns. We went there up through eighth grade, and then the county bussed us up the highway to the high school in the next county over.

I pulled myself up out of the hole in the ice, slipping and sliding the whole way. Skinned my knees up something awful and ruined my last few cigarettes while I was getting off the frozen river, got soaked to the bone, because she’d frozen the whole section solid as far as she could reach, but the water was still flowing on the upstream end, so it was washing down over the ice and flooding out the banks. I crawled up over the bank, fell in the mud – just made a hellacious mess of myself, so you can imagine the mood I was in by the time I was back on two feet and walking away from the river.

Terrified. I was in a terrified mood. That close. I’d come that close to just ending. Forever. And I didn’t know why, or how, or if it would happen again tomorrow or in ten minutes or never again.

But I couldn’t even think too much about why I was afraid, or she would hear. And then the next time I slipped up and zoned out, I’d be gone for real. So I cussed and swore and stomped through the mud and concentrated real hard on how annoyed with the whole thing I was as I walked the four miles back into town to see if I could sneak back into class or something. I skipped a lot and they were going to flunk me if I wasn’t careful, and I was double-damned if I was going to get stuck in that little hellhole for another year…

That’s the kind of thing I have to concentrate on. Had to concentrate on. Then. Not now, obviously. But then? Yeah, it made me behave erratically, sometimes. There were just so many thoughts I couldn’t let myself dwell on. I even got sent to a doctor when I was fifteen. My teacher thought I might be schizophrenic. Thought I needed help. Long story made short – the doctor saw it my way. But that’s another story.

‘Town’ consisted of two bars, three churches, a post office, a tractor-and-farm-supply shop with a dazzling assortment of John Deere hats and cowboy boots, a gas station and a general store that could pass for a liquor store in bad light.

Other than that, it was just shacks and trailers and sun-bleached houses. Nobody could work up to much of a yard, particularly in the summer when the heat would burn the grass dead, so nobody much bothered.

Most of the alleged town was off my path, but when I looked down Main Street toward the only real intersection in town, I noticed that the traffic light was out. That made me frown. My shadow had been big and strong, but if she’d knocked out the town’s power, drank it all down until she blew a transformer or something? Well, she should have been a lot stronger. It made me wonder where all that extra energy went. I wracked her memory, and got only confusing jumbles of noise and motion… too much for me to sort through back then. Today, I can replay the memory and understand it just fine. I could, anyway. But I won’t.

It wouldn’t make of whit of difference, and all the screaming would probably give me a headache. So no point, really.

I finally made it back to the school, this big red brick building with a black shingle roof instead of a tin one like almost everyone else had. It even had a bell tower on it, but we didn’t use the bell anymore. They’d wired the place up with an electric bell in the 70′s. Apparently it was quite the big deal, like oooh, fancy, we had an electric bell.

The first sign of trouble was that the power was out here, too. The second sign I noticed as I walked up to the school. The windows were wet. They were dripping with condensation, and fogged over on the inside. That’s when I knew I had a problem on my hands.

The school had two doors – a big double set of doors out front, and the back door that went out into the play yard. The play yard was fenced in so the toddlers didn’t wander off, but we older kids got forced out there twice a day, too. I spent most recesses sitting in the shade along the back wall of the school and scowling if anybody talked to me.

I climbed the fence and hustled across the yard, trying to figure out what to do. I thought about standing around in the play yard until Ms. Tiller – the teacher – let the brats out for afternoon recess, then going back in with them, but I didn’t know if I’d missed recess yet or not, and those wet windows had me worried.

I called it a one-room schoolhouse, and that’s about right, but it had been a big room and sometime in the last couple of decades, they had put up a wall, splitting it into two smaller rooms with a big archway between them. Ms. Tiller taught the older kids, fifth grade and up, and Mrs. Snyder taught the brats, fourth grade all the way down to toddlers, because the place was basically a daycare, too. We only had two toddlers while I was there – not many people in town, so not many kids. Maybe twenty students, all in all?

It was quiet. I opened the back door, and cool fog spilled out around my ankles. It was like walking into a walk-in freezer. I sighed. I knew what had happened, now it was just a question of seeing it for myself. I walked past the restrooms and straight into my classroom. There was no point in trying to sneak in anymore.

Everyone was dead.

I said, ‘God dammit, again?’ or something to that effect. No, I wasn’t really upset. I’d suspected something like that from the instant I’d seen the traffic light was out. Ice radiated out from my chair like crystalline flower petals. Some of the students were frozen in place, gawking in the general direction of my desk, others were looking up or toward the windows. They were probably wondering why it had gone so dark before they died. The teacher, bless her, was readying a shotgun, her frozen corpse locked in place stepping halfway out from behind her desk. 

Near as I can figure, she and my classmates had seen me, drinking from the outlets and light fixtures through tongues of living darkness, gorging on electricity until the grid itself went down. Then there had been a lot of noise and confusion, enough that the shadow had felt threatened. Then it had used all that energy to deal with the immediate threat.

What’s that?

Yes. The ‘immediate threat’ included the preschoolers in the next room over.

But this was a long time ago. Over twenty years, even. I’m much better at controlling her now. It was just growing pains, really. We had to trip and fall before we learned to run.

You’re staring. Stop that.

In the background the screaming started. My shadow and I heard the shrill sound leaping from one mouth to the next as panic spread through the crowd like wildfire. It began behind us, where a dead woman was falling to the ground after having had the bad luck to dance between us and the shooter. The other dancers saw the blood, their fallen friend, and started in on turning this party into a riot. Heart rates soared and the air was alive with throbbing music, adrenaline, flashing lights and screams. It was dizzying, feeling the ebb and flow of all that fear in the already-chaotic atmosphere.

The shadow coalesced on the bitter stink of cordite, on the taste and feel of hot gunmetal. It was one of those semiautomatic rifles with the stock that folds out. We felt the big gloved hands holding it, ran up muscular arms coated in some kind of hard, textured fabric, something that felt like a heavy nylon mesh. Our shooter was a man, six-one, about two-eighty judging by the mass of him. He wore combat boots and jeans and a flannel shirt, along with a heavy jacket, duster-length, which hid an assortment of even more weapons. It was no effort at all to take an inventory, which included two handguns, pebbled egg-shapes that we recognized from their taste as grenades, and a collection of long, sharp knives. And under the clothes and weapons, that funny fabric texture, a body suit of some kind. It seamlessly locked away his scent and flavor, his body heat, as though he was deliberately hiding from me and my shadow. Even his head and face was covered, a tight-fitting hood of that same mesh material, with bulky goggles.

I frowned as the man moved, a big, blank solid shape in all that thronging, screaming crowd, shifting on the balls of his feet, bringing the gun up again, aimed at us.

“Goddammit,” I spat, throwing myself under the table for cover and slamming into Honey, already down there, teeth ground tight.

She slapped my arm, screaming “Do something,” right in my face and I could barely hear her over the din.

“Do what?” I yelled back. “Someone didn’t let me bring my guns!” I still had some options available, though. Blind him, I thought, and my shadow painted herself over those goggles of his like a layer of black lacquer. Ha! What now, bitch?

Hot fire chewed across the back of my right calf and I knew I’d been shot before the pain even got started. Shot from a different direction! I gasped, and before I could even think it, I felt ribbons of darkness uncoiling in my body, reaching out from where the core of the shadow lived near my heart to the wet heat streaked across the back of my leg. The bits of her that were out permeating the room were looking for the second shooter and I felt the beginnings of a tickling itch in my calf before the she shut the pain down with her colder-than-ice touch. The blood stopped, frozen solid. My leg was numb from the knee down, but through her senses I could feel the two bullets in my calf.

Bright, hot fear filled my mouth with the taste of metal. Of course I wasn’t unarmed – even without the shadow, I’m never unarmed – but I wasn’t exactly loaded for bear either. Worse, I’d used up the best of my protective gear last month and even though I had a handful of items almost finished back home, I didn’t have anything with me that would hold up to bullets.

Why? Why on Earth had I left the house like this? Sometimes I’m so stupid it just hurts.

Some panicked fool slammed into our table, knocking it over us. A table leg caught Honey across the back hard enough to break the table leg as it spun and toppled. It drove her into me, and the asshole who had hit it tripped over my legs dropping on us like a ton of bricks.  More gunfire peppered the room, barely audible over the roar of the bar crowd – not my blinded shooter or the one who’d tagged my leg. A woman drove a spiky heel into the back of my hand as she sprinted by. Hot pain flared up my arm as she stumbled, fell, and was promptly trampled by two dozen stampeding feet.  Her blood hit my face and I realized several things at once:

All the gunfire was aimed in our direction. This wasn’t random fire into the crowd – more than two people were in here, and they were all shooting at us.

I wasn’t anywhere near protected enough to stand up to gunfire, and worse, I didn’t have anywhere near the kind of weaponry I needed to deal with a threat like this. A good offense being a good defense, and all that, but it wasn’t an option available to me.

We’d already lost track of the first shooter. There was so much movement, heat, confusion and noise in the club that the shadow’s senses were overwhelmed. It was just too much to assimilate all at once.

I had no goddamn idea whatsoever why we were under attack. Okay, there was the usual list, but that had been pretty much mitigated by circumstances lately. I was an abomination that the Order and the Arcana both wanted dead, but they were busy fighting with each other at the moment. I had a respectable tally of penny-ante enemies, ranging from customers I’d sold dud artifacts to people I’d shafted in other ways, but I couldn’t think of any of them with cause to go this far.

And, finally, we were going to get killed in this shitty little rat-trap of a club if I didn’t figure something out in a fucking hurry.

Honey shoved her way free of me and the guy who’d fallen on us. He slid off my back, scrambling to his feet and copping a feel in the process. It completely derailed my chain of thought and I looked up at him asking “Really?” Honey grabbed my arm, hauling me up as he ran off into the crowd. I forgot to compensate for my numbed leg and I fell into her.

“We gotta get out of here!” she yelled into my ear. I pushed off from her, feeling a dull ache in my wounded leg when I put weight on it. Find him, I thought as Honey pulled on my arm. I pictured the shape and feel of the original shooter, the slick fabric texture that had encased him.

The shadow hissed in my head, frustrated, reaching. I could feel her emptiness, her hunger. She was stretched as thin as paper, and had used up a lot of her reserves when she’d treated my injuries. I waved it off. So feed, I told her. We were in a club. There was plenty of power. Light, body heat, electricity, motion, even a huge, gas furnace in the basement – we were swimming in food.

The temperature in the room plunged and the lights dimmed and Honey’s next breath came out in a frosty plume of white. In the next heartbeat, we felt everything.

We found the first shooter and Grace at the same time, because she’d found him while I was busy getting shot, half-trampled and fondled. They circled each other, shoving people out of their way as they darted and feinted. Grace moved like greased lightning, swiping out with those nightmarish claws of hers. She wasn’t even bothering to hide her appearance. Blood – well, I call it blood, but it didn’t taste or smell anything like it – ran down her front from the shot she’d taken a moment ago, but it didn’t seem to be hurting her any. She swiped out, and the shooter jerked back, lunging in with a razor-sharp knife. One of those bent curvy knives… a kukri? He cut Grace’s dress, but she slipped back before he could cut deeper. She lunged for him and he eeled out of her grasp like oiled smoke. He was as fast as her, easy, and I doubted that was possible for a human.

Ergo, these assholes weren’t human.

The shadow followed their movements while spreading through the club and finding four more people in those funny suits, plainclothes over them. Two of them – one as big as his friend the shooter – were closing in on the fight with Grace, and the other two were aimed at Honey and I. They were drawing guns, but the crowd was rallying now despite the sudden frigid cold and the dimming strobe lights. It was like they’d suddenly remembered they were from Detroit, where any given crowd is packing more heat than some standing armies. One assailant shoved a civilian out of his way, and the civvie retaliated by pulling a hand gun and dropping four rounds into the pusher.

The club’s main doors were flapping open and closed like a loose shutter in a storm. I’d barely been paying any attention to them, or the side doors, also flying open as club-goers abandoned ship. The club was emptying at an impressive rate, the formerly happy crowd charging out the doors with unerring aim, thanks to the bright flood lights that still, impossibly, illuminated all the exits. With the rate my shadow was drinking in the available light, nothing in this place should be that bright.

I tabled that thought and shook my bracelets down my wrists as a new assailant rushed me. This one was a she, judging by the shape of her, carrying a big gun, barrel still hot and stinking of cordite. This was the bitch who’d shot me a second ago – me and half a dozen other members of the crowd, if all the blood we could taste was any indication.

The shadow tugged at my attention as the woman lowered the gun and squeezed the trigger. I activated the bracelets, holding my hands out in front of me to direct the howling ice storm sealed within her way.

Bitter Northern Michigan winds in the negative double-digits, packed full of jagged shards of ice, shrieked out at her and through my shadow I felt each little icy blade flying through the arctic wind in two tight cones. And coming the other way, a hail of hot lead.

I didn’t even think – I just let the shadow move me. I kicked out, knocking Honey’s legs out from under her so she fell below the arc of fire, while letting the shadow’s guidance turn me sideways, side-stepping, ducking, my aim held steady as she tracked the shooter’s movements through the crowd. She could feel where the attacker’s gun barrel was pointed, extrapolate the bullets’ path, and know where I shouldn’t be standing almost instantaneously. A bullet creased across my shoulder because even the shadow couldn’t move me that fast, but the pain was there and gone in a split-second, sealed away in a slick red patch of ice over my skin.

The ice blast caught a double handful of bystanders on either side but the effect was narrow and they only got side-swiped. It was enough to spill more blood, but not kill. Our assailant was flayed with the worst of it, though, peeling back that weird suit in bloody swaths. She dropped the gun, clutching herself as she tumbled and fell and the shadow wallowed in her flavor, anxious to understand the nature of the threat.

It was nothing like human, as I’d guessed. The blood was cold, her skin dry and hard. She was soaked in an odd dusty, musty flavor we couldn’t quite place, but it was familiar. My shadow, with her bafflingly associative memory, thought briefly of home before I sharply told her to stay on-task. The bracelets sparked, fizzled, and the ice storm snapped off. The shadow surged over her, shrouding her in tendrils of hazy blackness and swaths of clinging, inky dark. The woman was already too cold – there was nothing there for the shadow to feed on, but she could with some effort, freeze that odd sluggish blood, spreading the woman’s flesh wider, tearing it deeper. She hissed in pain, and I snarled at her, turning my attention elsewhere.

Her partner, probably a man, was back on his feet after his brief encounter with the Second Amendment in action. The suits apparently offered more than a little ballistic protection, and this fellow, slender and wiry like a whip, was angry. He turned his gun on the civilian who’d fired on him, only to have the civvie’s friends – including the girlfriend by his side – return more fire.

Meanwhile, four guys had decided this was as good a time as any to make a profit and had charged the bar to bust open the cash register or snag some free booze. The bartender, a plucky little girl in a black tank top, had a big, heavy bottle in one hand and was bashing the lead looter across the face just as he was shoving a gun in her face. Before he could pull the trigger, a hand locked around his wrist, twisting his arm up and hand back in a quick move that snapped his wrist like a dry twig.

I spun on my heel in surprise as the shadow recognized this attacker: it was Cat! Detroit’s other rogue Inquisitor, Irish’s daughter was every bit as dangerous as her dear old dad. She was dressed much more tolerably in tight jeans and a mock turtleneck under her heavy winter coat. Michigan weather takes all the fun right out of vinyl catsuits, I suppose. While I was busy thinking that, Cat had spun and put her back to the man who’s wrist she just broke, spun them both around, and shot two of his compatriots with his gun as the bartender sagged back against the wall, bottle in hand and gasping for breath. Cat drove her elbow back into the gunman’s face and then slammed her fist forward into the last of the would-be looter’s mouth, dropping him like a bad habit. She jumped the bar without so much as a backwards glance at the four people she’d just beat the shit right out of and strode into the fray surrounding Grace –

Which struck me as a bit odd. She’d been more of a sneak in and stab you sort of fighter than the kind that dives right in and starts punching. Think ninja, not samurai. Irish, now, he was all samurai. Stealth wasn’t his thing, but winning fights was.

Grace had tired of toying with her dance partner and tackled him, all claws and teeth, gnawing a big bloody chunk out of his shoulder. He screamed and his two partners tried to take advantage of Grace’s distraction to cut in, literally in one case as the second big man pulled out a positively huge hunting knife. He stepped forward only to find himself face to face with Cat and her own two knives. Cat favored old World War I style trench spikes – picture a bowie knife with brass knuckles worked into the grip. Smiling sweetly, she drove them both forward and punctured his lungs in one clean strike, leaving him gasping and gagging and clutching at the knives sticking out of his chest as Cat spun and planted a sturdy boot – that still had more heel than I care for in a fight when I have a choice – right into his face. It left a long rent in that mesh hood of his, and destroyed some of his expensive optics. A reinforced heel, then, with some kind of blade on the edge. I made a mental note to copy that.

Grace’s final attacker favored a sneakier approach, possibly in the face of evened odds, and dropped a smoke grenade. Thick white smoke boiled up around the group, but we could feel their movements within as Cat and Grace fended off two of them, leaving the third, the one who had Cat ruin his goggles, staggered backwards firing a boxy little gun into the smoke. We felt his finger tighten on the clip, felt the chatter of bullets, and then felt the gun swing upward into the air as another man – Irish! – grabbed him from behind and pulled his arms upward. Way upward. Irish is a big guy, and he heaved the gunman right off his feet and swung him overhead, bringing him down right through a heavy tabletop.

I let out a breath of relief. Reinforcements had arrived. I’d take reinforcements, even if Irish was one of them. He’d flirted pretty heavily with me after Grace had un-brainwashed him last month, (long story) and then had all but faded into the woodwork. Not so much as an email, much less a phone call! Okay, granted, I’d been a little busy at first seeing Leonard, but that hardly mattered. That was business. I might be annoyed with Irish for ignoring me for the last few weeks, but I sure couldn’t fault his timing.

The woman I’d blasted to the bone with ice was, against all reason, picking herself up. She was bleeding from, oh, just about everywhere, but that didn’t seem to be stopping her. Her partner had given up on guns and was fighting his way free of the crowd that had surrounded him, all fists and jabs, faster than I could see, but not faster than we could feel. Bones cracked with each punch, and his assailants didn’t even have the chance to run away when they realized they were in trouble. He flattened the last of them with a punch that broke a jaw, looking not too much the worse for wear. He hadn’t escaped intact, though. Someone had managed to shank him a good one somewhere in the vicinity of his kidneys. Assuming he had kidneys.

The woman moved in a blur. She closed the gap separating us in less time than it takes to say Fuck, that’s fast! She lunged, trying for a grapple, and I let the shadow guide me, ducking her reach, dodging her grip. I returned with a solid shot to her face that snapped her head back – good to know those self-defense classes were worth something. Even with the shadow’s help, the woman was just too damn fast and she grabbed my arms. I got my first clear look at her face, through her mask that had been shredded by my ice shards. Her dark brown skin was pebbled like scales, her eyes bright yellow, the color thin around huge black pupils. Her gaze was flat, dead, like her eyes were something made of plastic or glass. I staggered back with a little disgusted cry but her grip was like iron. I shoved my right fist into her gut and triggered the pearl ring, the health sink, grinning into those flat eyes as she sucked wind in an indrawn gasp of shock.

My leg and shoulder suddenly felt much better, but it wasn’t enough to convince the bitch to let me go. Her mouth gaped wide open, so far I think she’d unhinged her goddam jaw, revealing giant backwards-curving fangs. I scrunched my eyes shut and twisted my face away a split second before she spit. The shadow boiled up between us and the side of my head was peppered with little frozen pellets of fuck knows what. The woman let out a wordless cry of rage but before she could try again or go for the bite Honey was suddenly behind her. When did she get up? Honey clamped one hand around the woman’s forehead and came around her with a jagged broken bottle in the other. She drove the bottle into the woman’s throat and jerked it sideways with a vicious grunt of effort, gouging the woman’s throat open and unleashing a tide of thick, sluggish blood.

Before I could shout a warning the woman’s partner loomed up over Honey, bringing a big fist crashing down on the side of her head. Honey dropped like a rock and I staggered back from my assailant, who had flopped to the ground, clutching her throat and gagging on her own blood.

The man drove his fist down at me and I jerked sideways while Honey, who was down but not out, swept his legs out from under him. He fell against me. Honey, shaking her head, eye unfocused, dragged herself up by his shoulder as I stuffed my agate ring up under his chin. With murder blazing in her eye, she brought the flats of both hands against his ears with a ragged, angry squall and I triggered the ring, unleashing the hex stored inside. The stone popped, chiming like a bell and cracking down the middle, and the man, apparently undeterred by Honey’s boxing his ears, jerked his gun out from its underarm holster, planted the barrel against my chest, and pulled the trigger. I squeaked and the gun jammed.

“Fuck!” he snapped, shrugging Honey off like she was a coat and shoving me away to get some room to work. I grabbed the gun when he shoved me, and he lost his grip, slipping and staggering over Honey and falling backwards into our broken table, the jagged broken leg of which skewered him through the inner thigh, perilously close to the old family jewels. He let out a girly squeal of pain and I grinned. Nothing like a bad luck hex to just straight ruin someone’s night, am I right?

Across the bar Grace was staggering back from the man she was fighting. Both were bleeding freely, Grace raining that alien ooze that passed for her blood, and her assailant dripping that slow, cold ichor. She’d wounded her dance partner badly, carving him up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and Cat was Cuisinarting her new friend from top to bottom. Irish favored a good old-fashioned brawl over just about anything else and was steadily beating the third and final jackass into paste, but like the Mister and Missus I was dealing with, Larry, Moe and Curly just would not fucking stop. It was like they couldn’t feel the pain we were causing them. They just kept getting up again!

Through the shadow, we felt Grace staggering back, clearing room as she knocked bystanders out of her way. She was jerking from somewhere in her guts, like she was about to vomit, and the shadow reached for her, looking to see if she hurt more badly than we’d first thought. She was badly cut along her back and arms, the wounds deep and ugly. We felt three bullet holes in her torso, too. I took a step her way and Grace doubled over and… well… horked.

She did this odd little hitching gagging sound, again and again. Each one made her whole body convulse, for all the world like a cat wrestling with a particularly difficult hairball. It was so odd her attacker actually paused, standing dumbstruck as Cat causally lashed out with one foot and broke his knee. Grace’s seventh or eighth spasm yielded fruit, and she leaned forward and vomited up a chunk of bile, bits of the first shooter and writhing white worms.

I was suddenly reminded of the spidery corruption that had infected Grace in the first place, a Stepford-wife-turned-abomination, with wriggling white maggots crawling in her gaping maw. The same little worms that had caused her eventual transformation into… whatever the hell she was these days. Damian had been able to mitigate the metamorphosis with his thaumaturgy, preventing Grace from turning feral like her creator… but apparently some things had bred true.

She smiled, a toothy nightmare grin, and leaned over the pile of vermin and chum. She breathed over them, passing her hand back and forth as though beckoning them. I felt a rare chill. If those things were anything like the ones that had turned Grace, they were horribly dangerous. I was about to send my shadow over there to snuff the life from them, when they all began convulsing.

The worms split, one by one, and from inside pale white wasps emerged. They spent a second or two beating their wet, silvery wings, and then took to the air. “End them,” Grace snarled, as the swarm began to spread through the bar.

“Holy. Shit,” I breathed, and before I could do anything about that hot mess, the shadow alerted me to the Mister, who’d freed himself from the table leg and gotten to his feet. “Oh, come on!” I yelled, turning to face him, working the action on my new gun and finding it miraculously unjammed. After all, I was the one with the bad luck hex. “What does it take to put you down?” Blood drooled down his leg, and he could barely put any weight on it, but still. Damn. Whatever the hell these things were, they were tough.

Mister reached behind his back, pulling out a Glock. I shot him, almost point-blank, four times. It staggered him, but not enough that he dropped his weapon. Swearing under my breath, I summoned a tendril of darkness, which twined up around my free hand and lashed it at him. It probably felt like a cool, gentle pat as it wrapped around his face, but it effectively blinded him as it sent feelers trickling down his sides aiming for the tears in his suit. He fired wild, a bullet whipping past my face as the shadow wriggled into his suit, climbing and oozing up his inhuman skin and under his hood. She flowed into his nostrils and mouth and I laughed, feeling every bit of it as she poured herself down his throat and into his sinus cavities. Now the fun part. We sent more and more shadow into him, drawing from her substance in the room at large and from her reserves in my flesh. We thickened and layered the darkness reaching into him, smothering him from the inside. It was a trick we’d learned only recently, and we’d been dying to try it again. Let’s see if these reptile motherfuckers need air, I thought.

About that time, some of the gangbangers who’d been shooting at Mister earlier were picking themselves up, licking their wounds and looked our way. The shadow felt them moving, felt one of them raising his gun, and at the last second, it did occur to me that of the two of us, at the moment, I looked more threatening. I was the cackling, gun wielding woman dressed in blood and darkness, with an inky black tentacle choking the life out of some guy. Not my most reassuring look.

The bullet took me through the throat.

The room was spinning, sickeningly fast, which seemed odd. I seemed to be spinning in the other direction, which was even more disorienting. I mean, I’d never felt like this before. Ever. I don’t lose my balance. Unlike humans, my sense of balance isn’t just contained in my inner ear. It’s usually spread out over most of a room. I clapped my hand to my throat, felt it washed in liquid heat for a split second as the shadow howled in the back of my mind, arcing up and down my nerves in frosty panicked spikes. The room wasn’t just spinning, either – the far ends were rising and falling as the room spun. It was a quease-inducing effect and I ignored it as best I could as I bled to death, wondering if this was what sea-sickness felt like. Should the walls and floor be rippling like that?

My eyes were morally certain the entire club had just turned into a carnival ride, and the shadow had brought all of her influence home to me in a terrified rush, so I let myself drift down to my knees as blood gurgled down my front. Guy must be shooting a small gun, a .22 or something. No wonder he hadn’t stopped Mister with that thing. If he’d been packing a man’s gun he’d have took my head clean off. Pansy hood rat. Must be my lucky night.

I felt blood freezing under my hand, freezing to my hand and the ice snapped me to my senses. I hauled the shadow back before she could get too carried away and froze all my veins and arteries solid in a last-ditch effort to save me. It’s one thing to freeze the surface wounds shut – I’m immune to frostbite, mostly, and those surface patches don’t do much damage. Freezing my carotid artery would shut down the blood flow to my brain, though!

The shadow caught up to my train of thought, and I felt her trembling panic, her purring, insistent voice in my head as she raked through my memories. Biology isn’t my strong suit, but we scraped up what I knew, and compared that to what she could feel in my mangled neck, concentrating on icy little tubes to carry precious blood.

Distantly, I heard more gunfire, in stuttering, dying bursts. I was hearing with my ears, just my ears. I was used to feeling the vibrations of sound in the air as it passed through my shadow, but she was all in, fighting to keep us alive. The screams were fading, replaced with sickened groans. I could still swear the room was moving, it even felt like I was moving, even with my eyes shut. I blocked it out, concentrating on not dying, for all the good it would do me. Frozen flesh wouldn’t heal, so it wasn’t like I could just kneel here for the next couple of months until my throat closed up on its own. I was just slowing down the inevitable. I had the health sink ring, but it wasn’t really built with something like this in mind, and besides, there was no one nearby to kill to save my life. Never an assassin within arm’s reach when you need one.

I had to grin. The shit hits the fan, I’m hip-deep in mystery killers attacking me, and it’s some fucking little random gangbanger that gets in a lucky shot and kills me.

“Alice!” Hands grabbed my shoulders – warm, familiar hands. Irish. I got my eyes open to find him staring at me, wide-eyed and ashen as he cupped my face and tilted my head to see the wound. “Oh, God,” he whispered. I nodded slightly, as much as I could. I felt a little bad for the kid who’d shot me. Irish was gonna be so mad. I frowned. But he hadn’t called in weeks.

He’d damn well better be so mad.

And then, with the shadow shrieking in my head, everything just faded away.

The music was so loud I could feel it rattling my fillings, a synthesized techno beat with a bass line that shook the floor and vibrated through the walls. Some overly auto-tuned gal was moaning along while colored lights strobed over walls draped in metallic fabric, and out on the dance floor people were gyrating and dry-humping. I sat at our table, glaring into my over-priced, watered-down drink, head pulsing as my shadow writhed in ecstasy. She loved it.

The club was deliberately poorly-lit, and the flashing laser light and wildly spinning spotlights made it easy for my shadow to writhe along the floor, between the dancers, and up among the rafters. She was drinking in the light and noise, the thumping vibrations and the dizzying array of tastes and scents all over the place. This of course meant that I was, too. There was so much mouthwash in my near future, not that it would help.

“See? I told you this would be fun!” Honey shouted into my face. I could barely hear her over the music and the thundering cacophony of two hundred and seventy six heartbeats. And that wasn’t even counting the rats in the walls. She was dancing in her seat, hands on the table tapping along, shoulders undulating and head bobbing.

“Oh, definitely,” I shouted back, mouth a sour twist. “Good times!” I lifted the plastic tumbler and drained the alleged screwdriver. I was in desperate need of some quiet and a cigarette. This was our third club tonight and so help me, I was going to gut the next skinny little asshole who introduced himself by grinding his crotch on my ass while I was trying to get a drink. Or I would, if I’d had a blade on me.

I adjusted the strap of my black knit dress, pulling it back up onto my shoulder. My jeans and blouse and bra were still back at Honey’s place, neatly folded on her coffee table. Honey had made me change, and the dress was one of hers. Despite the fact that I’m almost a foot taller than she is, the dress hung a lot lower on me, almost to my knees. I didn’t have Honey’s curves to fill it out, which, incidentally, meant that the neckline hung a lot lower on me, too. What curves I did have were rather more on display than I might have preferred. She had let me keep my black high heels, and I’d chosen all black jewelry tonight. A choker with a black silk ribbon and a tarnished silver spider cameo, jet-and-onyx beaded bracelets, four rings featuring black pearl, agate, and obsidian stones, and a pair of cast-iron chain anklets done in the finest, tiniest links I could forge by hand in my basement workshop. She’d also redone my hair, giving it more curl and bounce than usual. It hung just past my shoulders, and I’d layered my ruddy locks with swaths of living shadow, making the patches of color stand out all the more. With my pale, pale skin, it was a striking look – and I had, just like that, become a douchebag magnet.

I didn’t have a blade on me, but the ring with the black pearl was a health sink. I wondered if Honey would chew me out if I responded to my next sexual assault of the evening by ripping the guy’s auto-immune system to shreds?

“Ooo, girls, look!” Honey nodded towards the dance floor, and I followed her look, eyes widening as I spotted the man she was staring at. He was surrounded by a sweaty, enthralled bevy of young women, so I only caught a glimpse of him here and there as swaying bodies parted and closed.

Bit by bit, I put those glimpses together to assemble a mental picture. Long, dark wavy hair. Tight black jeans. A devilish smile, with smoldering dark eyes under heavy brows… a silver piercing accenting one eyebrow. A sleeveless black fishnet shirt, which would have counted against him, except he had the most wonderfully lithe and muscular body; lean, like a swimmer, and just a hint of a tan. The crowd shifted a little, and he looked our direction. Not directly at us, but near enough to give us the full effect. He was just a little Goth, but not so much as to be obnoxious. A little bit Eurotrash, but only enough to be enticing. The solid musculature, his boots and the wallet chain gave him a dash of biker, too, enough to evoke that classic bad boy look.

Well, well, well.

“Oh. My.” Grace sat up next to me.

It hadn’t been my idea to invite Grace along. Hell, it hadn’t been my idea to bring myself. This little Girls’ Night Out had been all Honey’s idea. She needs to get out, Honey had insisted. And by some bizarre twist of Honey-logic, ‘she’ translated as ‘the three of us.’ Looking at tall, dark, and delicious over there, I was starting to warm to the idea despite myself.

“Let’s go introduce ourselves.” Honey grinned as we all undressed him with our eyes. Honey hitched up the front of her bustier, unabashedly adjusting the girls. She was decked out in shades of dark emerald, from the ribbons laced up the back of her corset-style top to the lace on her eyepatch. Matching ribbons tied her jet-black hair into juvenile-delinquent pigtails, and coordinated beautifully with some of the highlights of her many tattoos. Her left arm was a complex sleeve of gorgeous, Technicolor designs, incorporating everything from a parrot to a zombie Ronald McDonald to fuzzy dice. With her naturally dusky skin tone, I’d often wondered how she managed to get ink so colorful. She licked her lips and gave a leer as the handsome stranger swung his hips in a particularly provocative way.

“You know what?” I asked, wishing he’d do that hip thing again. “I’m game. Best idea you’ve had all night.” His black jeans were skin tight, and it was a really nice ass. “I don’t get out much. How do we do this? Do we draw straws to see who gets him, or just let the best woman win?” I jingled my bracelet meaningfully, and grinned at back at her. For a moment, each of the black stones flared with a glowing crimson rune. “I should warn you, I’m armed.” Honey knew that I was a witch, and she knew how good I was at making something as innocent as a charm bracelet very, very dangerous indeed. I’d agreed to leave my guns at home tonight, but that didn’t mean a lot when one was as good an artificer as I was.

“What, you can’t share?” Honey shot me a wicked look and I felt my eyebrows crawl up.

“You wanna double-team him?” I hazarded, not quite sure if I’d had enough to drink for that kind of night. I eyed my empty tumbler. “Really?”

“We oughtta be able to keep him busy, right?” She made a little circle with one finger to indicate all three of us and tipped a wink at Grace.

Whoa. I flicked a quick look at Grace. There wasn’t enough booze in this whole bar for that kind of night.

“Whoa.” Grace held both hands up. “I just want a closer look. I don’t even know if I still have sex organs.”

Honey glanced at Grace, a bit startled. Well, of course – she couldn’t see the real Grace. All she could see was the beautiful raven-haired brunette with waterfalls of thick, gorgeous curly hair, the big blue eyes and the slender, fashion-model figure. I could see the real Grace, wavering in and out of the mental illusion she projected, the seven-foot tall monstrosity that was both insectoid and reptilian, fishbelly-white skin stretched tight over elongated bones interrupted by too many joints in the wrong places. Her skull was too long, raptorish, her face noseless and lipless, her eyes big chameleon-like orbs that swiveled independently in their sockets.

Oddly enough, she still had all that beautiful hair, and her eyes were still that rich cobalt blue, even if they rarely looked in the same direction anymore.

“Besides. Nothing personal, but…” She glanced at us with an apologetic look and a shrug.

“Oh, what? We aren’t hot enough for you?” I waved between me and Honey, who laughed.

“No! I mean –” Grace blushed fire-engine red – or at least, the mental projection did – and Honey laughed harder. Grace sighed, folded her razor talons, and rested her jutting jaw on them, shaking her head. “Oh, you know what I mean.” She sighed. “He is pretty though.”

I followed her gaze back to the extremely fine gentleman on the dance floor. A hot blonde wearing next to nothing and a good ten years younger than me was writhing against him, and he was grinning down at her. He had a great smile, all white teeth and raw sex appeal. He leaned down to whisper in the girl’s ear and she pressed herself against him, shuddering.

“Oh!” Grace straightened as the girl’s knees buckled and the man caught her. I quirked a surprised eyebrow up and looked to Grace. “He just did something naughty.” Grace’s faux face smirked, and I looked back to the man, confused.

“What? What did he do?” His hands were in plain sight and everyone’s clothes were in the right places. “I didn’t see anything.”

“He was using illusion, I’m pretty sure.” Grace chuckled. “I think he’s one of us, Alice.” Grace was an enchantress – not the same thing as an illusionist, but close enough that the two schools of magic were sensitive to one another.

“A hollowman?” I blurted without thinking, and that caught the shadow’s attention. I felt her perking up in my head, forgetting the delicious vibrations of the bass line to creep and flow closer toward him for a better inspection.

Technically, Grace and I were both corruptions; that is to say, we’ve both been physically altered and twisted by exposure to a piece of another reality. Grace was a monster, physically, while my own changes were more subtle. I didn’t sleep or feel the cold much, for example. I was a hollowman as well, though – I had a denizen of another reality sharing my skin. We were symbiotes, my shadow and I, while Grace was all alone in her misshapen body.

Grace smacked my arm. “No. I mean he’s Arcana. If his illusions are strong enough for me to feel it from here, and subtle enough to do… what he was doing to give that girl an orgasm on the dance floor…” my eyebrows went up again. Sexy Stranger’s boyfriend potential just went way, way up. “…then he’s definitely Arcana material.” The Arcana were the self-appointed top tier of the supernatural pyramid. Any magician worth his salt was dragooned into their ranks, myself included.

“Oh. Right,” I said as the shadow slithered over feet and around legs, reaching the mystery man and returning a disdainful verdict of ‘only human.’ My shadow was fiercely territorial, and we’d only just repelled an invasion from another hollowman. Two, really… though the second had only hosted his outlander for a matter of minutes. Now that she was paying attention, I could feel a slight, shivery tingle prickling her/my skin… magic. “You’re right. We can feel it too. I don’t know him, though.”

“Me either.” Grace stood up, unfolding from her hunched position in the chair. Her legs bent in all the wrong places now, which made sitting in a chair a bit of a chore. She stretched up to her full seven feet, the claws on her footpads scraping the tile floor as she peered over the crowd. “Maybe we should say hello. Officially.”

I caught her arm, her skin too hot under my hand, and I suppressed a grimace at the plasticene feel of her flesh. “Sit your ass back down. It’s not your job anymore.”

She kept one lizard eye on the magician, and shifted one to look at me. The expression on her fake face was angry, glaring at me. Her real face peeled her upper lip back, revealing an alarming number of long, sharp teeth. I tugged her arm as the shadow brought me the taste and feel of new leather boots – the magician’s – and the taste and scent of his cologne. Everything around him was cheap, trendy stink, but his cologne stood out, something full of smoke and amber and money. We could feel the air coming out of his mouth, taste peppermint and cognac on his breath, but the music was so loud we couldn’t discern his voice from the dull thud pounding out of the speakers.

Grace pulled her arm out of my grip and folded herself back down to the chair, the anger leaving her fake expression, replaced with a sullen heat.

Honey watched the two of us carefully. “Is there going to be a problem?”

“No.” Grace huffed the word out. She picked up the margarita that had been melting in front of her all night, glaring at it. “God, I want a drink.” She set it back down hard and some sloshed out on the table. Alcohol didn’t agree with her new digestive tract, poor thing.

Barely a month ago, Grace had been a beautiful woman, a human woman, a powerful woman. She’d been at the pinnacle of two careers. As Detroit’s Knight of Wands, she was charged with protecting the city and, more importantly, the interests of the Major Arcana. She’d complemented her abilities as an enchantress with an education, and had been one of the best therapists in Michigan. She’d been wealthy, influential, in love, and she’d had the whole world at her feet.

In one night, she’d lost it all, every last bit of it. Well, technically I suppose she was still a therapist, but she’d been on a leave of absence for the last month, and she didn’t talk like she was planning to go back to the job. She’d been in a fight against an abomination, a woman twisted and corrupted by an encounter with the hollowman who’d run amok in Detroit last month. Freshly corrupted, the taint of an alien world had been oozing from the poor creature, literally – and Grace had been contaminated by it. She’d managed to keep her sanity, and some measure of her magic, but the other effects had been a bitch.

The other Knights treated her politely, but that was about it. Damian Halkias, the Knight of Pentacles, paid lip service to finding a cure for her condition, but he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t work alongside something he didn’t understand or trust. He’d also been putting less and less work into finding that mythical ‘cure’ he was talking about. It was racism, pure and simple. I’d told him she didn’t need a cure any more than someone needed a cure for being Jewish. This was her natural state now.

Tyler Grant was worse. The Knight of Swords had been her One True Love, and when she’d dropped her enchantment and let him see her real face, he’d thrown up on his shoes. That had been over three weeks ago, and he hadn’t said a word to her since. I’d chewed his ass over that, even called him a bigot to his face. And in Detroit, when the skinny white girl calls the burly black man a bigot, well, them’s fighting words. But he hadn’t risen to the bait. He’d just shaken his head, and asked me to leave him alone to mourn the death of his fiancée in peace. He’d talked himself into believing that Grace wasn’t Grace at all – just some monster who’d eaten her alive from the inside out, and taken her memories along with her life.

To be fair, there’s a lot of merit to that theory, but at that point it’s a matter of apples and oranges, you know? Whether it’s her or whether it thinks it’s her, she still loves him, so does it really matter? To Tyler, it mattered a lot. Frankly, I couldn’t see his point, and when I’d said so, he’d just given me the oddest look and wandered off.
I get that a lot. I’ve had this alien shadow-being living in my skull for as long as I could remember, since I was a child, and it took me until my late twenties before I’d become any good at faking humanity.

Grace had taken to turning up at Honey’s bar as soon as Honey had had it repaired and reopened. She was following the two of us around a bit like a lost puppy. Damned if I know why. Okay, sure, she got dumped, and I guess that throws some gals for a loop, but as far as the Detroit Arcana knew, she was still the same old Grace. I’d worked hard to keep my shadow a secret, since the Arcana’s policy on hollowmen involved phrases like ‘kill it’ and ‘extreme prejudice.’ By the end of the debacle last month, my secret was out. But word hadn’t got out about Grace the way it had with me. She acted like Honey and I were the only friends she had in the world, which is pretty sad when you consider that Honey just met her and I didn’t actually like her all that much.

Honey patted Grace’s arm. “You know what? Maybe you should go say hi.” Grace and I gave Honey a startled look. “No, seriously. Go on over there and get your flirt on. You need to get out of this funk, girl.”

“That’s sweet, Honey, but I can’t –” Grace suddenly twitched forward, lurching into the table and knocking over my glass. Vodka splashed everywhere and the glass bounced to the floor. She spat out a hacking little noise somewhere between a cough and a gag and her mental projection flickered. Honey jerked back with a gasp, dropping Grace’s arm, her eye flying wide open. The projection reasserted itself as Grace whirled with a snarl and I saw the blood seeping into her blue caftan from a wound in her upper back.

“What the hell?” I stood, popping my clutch purse open and reaching inside. That was a gunshot wound. Somebody had shot Grace! I pulled out my brass Zippo, and Grace jerked back again with a sound like a cat’s squall, slapping a hand at her chest like something had just stung her. What, again?

My heart-slamming burst of alarm brought the shadow’s attention flooding back to me like a cold wave. She surged through my veins, a jagged wash of ice hissing along my limbs and in the back of my mind. I saw Grace’s hand blur from the corner of my eye, felt her moving before I even saw it, and still my flinch was too slow. I blinked and realized I was staring at the back of Grace’s fist, hanging an inch in front of my nose.

She turned her hand up and opened it, stretching up to her full height as she scanned the crowd. Sitting in the palm of her hand was a misshapen bullet. A red strobe caught the dull metal, making it glow bloody scarlet for a split second. She’d caught the damn thing before it hit me in my face. Holy shit.

“Honey, get down,” I said, grinning as I sent the shadow rolling out into the club, a frigid breeze winding through the dimness. We were almost numb, the music filling the air with too many vibrations for us to locate the sound of the gunshots, but we could taste everything. She billowed out, higher and farther, and found the scents and flavors of human sweat heavy with sex and adrenalin permeating the air, swirling around eddies of deodorant, alcohol, leather and perfume and there: the sudden stench of coppery fear filling the air, wrapped around acrid cordite and gun oil. “It’s about to get bad in here.”

The Bad News:

Teaser: Someone important is getting shot in the throat. Also, those of you with ophidiophobia are about to start having a bad time.

Actually, this is pretty standard for me. I think it was right around the original chapter six or seven in book one, just as I was inviting James to write with me, that I realized everything I had written up to that point was crap and had to be scrapped. Trust me. Those original chapters were awful.

And, much like those chapters were awful, I’m looking at what we’ve got here and thinking, “Well shit, folks, I just took six chapters to go to the club, kill a guy, and intro a new character. We’re six chapters in and we’ve only killed one person. This is terrible.”

The Good News:

James and I did some brain storming last night, and we’re pretty sure we can handle everything we’ve already done in two (maybe three) chapters while introducing two more new characters and considerably upping both the body count and explosions index. In short, we can do better than this.

TL;DR

We need to rewrite, y’all. Expect at least one meaty explosive bloody chapter come Monday morning (the 9th), and two if we can scrape together some spare time.

Climbing into our cab was a relief. The shadow stretched out into the ambient darkness as the cabbie pulled away from the curb, and I felt my shoulders loosen as she spread out, the sensation like exhaling after holding my breath for too long. I actually had a tension headache pinching behind my eyes. She purred in my head at the meager freedom and commenced cataloging the myriad of upsetting tastes and scents ground into the upholstery and footwells.

“Where to, sir?” The cabbie twisted in his seat to look at us. He was a young man, hat on backwards over short bleach blonde hair, which looked odd with his very Arabic face. His eyes were red and sleepy, and he gave me a big, lazy grin.

“Corner of Concord and Lambert,” Irish replied, settling in beside me and putting one arm around me. I settled in against his side, pretending I was cold for the look of the thing. I didn’t even bother to ask how he knew where to go. Instead, I had to smile at what my shadow had found in her explorations. The cabbie had two plastic baggies full of what tasted like very good weed crammed under the driver’s seat, and we could feel and taste the residue coating the inside of the car like a shimmer of oil on the surface of a puddle.

“Got it.” He turned left, barely making it through a yellow light, apparently not stoned enough to forget to start the meter. He turned the radio up, filling the car with Lady Gaga and plenty of bass. Bad Romance, one of the shadow’s favorites. The speakers and windows resonated with the beat, and the shadow thrummed along with the melody, occasionally referencing the back of my head for the meaning of a particular lyric, but mostly riding the vibrations like a surfer rode the waves at the beach.

Well, at least he wouldn’t be listening in. To be sure, I had the shadow divert some attention to breaking up any of the sounds coming from the back seat.

I was a little surprised at how well Irish and I fit together. I was a tall woman, more on the skinny side of the scale than the statuesque, and Irish was a large man, all bulk and mass. With the camp chair, there wasn’t a lot of extra room in the back seat, but it was surprisingly comfy. Irish shifted, pulling me a little closer and his mouth twitched up, a quick smile at my bemused expression. He leaned in a bit, his voice a low rumble in my ear as he said, “You’re still at the Packard plant, right?”

Not quite what I was expecting to hear. “Yeah. It’ll do until I find a good spot to open a new shop.” I glanced towards the cabbie and caught him grinning at us in the rear view mirror. It occurred to me that Irish and I probably looked pretty cuddly. I wondered if stoner cabbies were lip readers, and my shadow obligingly frosted over his rear-view mirror. He swiped it with his thumb and turned up the heat, but it kept hazing over.

“What did you think of him?”

For a second, I thought Irish meant the cabbie, before I realized who he meant. “Jean-Luc?” I looked up at him and smirked. “Total manslut.” Irish cracked a grin at that and I went on, “But watch him. He had some clever tricks back there.”

“Oh, aye. He’s been in a fight or two before. He likes to be underestimated, I think. Smarter than he acts, and he likes makin’ other people look like fools.” Irish paused, his eyes darkening as his expression took a grim turn. “He seemed pretty interested in you, too.”

“Well, female,” I began, but Irish cut me off.

“No, more than that. He barely batted an eye when he realized who I am. But you…” Irish shook his head. “He all but gushed over you.”

I snorted. “That’s all you’ve got? Seriously?”

He shrugged. “That one is careful with his words. But if you like, you can call it a hunch, then. One of my hunches, at that. I didn’t like the way he looked at you. Seemed awful keen to meet you, too, considerin’ how much your Arcana loves hollowmen.”

I shook my head slightly. “That’s pretty thin, Irish.”

“Is it? Leonard let you live, when his own laws call for your execution, or imprisonment, like that Owen fellow. That can’t have been a good move for him, politically. He likes you that much?” Irish arched a skeptical eyebrow at me as I turned a sharp look up at him. “Or is he letting on he’s got you tamed, like Owen? Doesn’t that make him pretty powerful, then? It seems to me that if he left you alive and unleashed, he’s revealing a weakness to the other Major Arcana. And if he is pretending to control you, he’s making himself look like a threat to the others.”

“What are you saying? Are you…” I stopped myself, forcing myself to think it through. Politics aren’t really my thing. I was aware of them, sure, but it was a game I didn’t have a lot of interest in or practice at. I’d spent most of my life flying under the radar, which meant I hadn’t taken part in much of that garbage.

“Where’s Laurent from? Who did he work for before Leonard? Why’d he move here? He didn’t seem all that impressed with Detroit, did he? After Paris? Hard to see that as an upward promotion, isn’t it? What if he took Leonard’s offer because someone else has an interest in you, Alice?”

I chewed my lip, forehead crinkling as I considered it. I felt the shadow, slithering around my thoughts, stroking them, easing herself through the shape of them. Her curiosity was a cold spark tangled up in my thoughts. She wasn’t following the particulars, but she did grasp that we might be in more danger than we’d thought we were. Somewhat unsettlingly, the idea pleased her.

“So what if he is?” I finally asked. “Maybe he’ll make me a good offer.” I actually felt Irish tense.

“You’d leave Detroit?” His tone was casual, but his eyes were sharp.

I had intended to say something flippant, but something about the way he asked made me seriously consider it. Detroit was my territory; I’d fought hard for it. That said, it really wasn’t much of a prize. I could probably do better for myself. “Maybe. Who knows? If it’s a good enough offer…” Hell, if it was a good enough offer, I might even be able to convince the shadow to let me leave. I glanced up at Irish again to find a hint of dismay in his eyes.

“You don’t want to do that,” he said softly.

Admittedly, I kind of didn’t. Even as I thought it, I felt the shadow snatching at my thoughts, her alarm raking down my nerves. “Not really,” I agreed, ridiculously gratified to feel him relax again next to me. Even so, the shadow’s concern itched in the back of my mind, a crawling, worried little hum that shivered down my spine.

“We’re here,” the cabbie announced, turning the radio down. “Looks nasty out there, folks. You want somewhere specific?”

“The curb’s fine.” I sat forward, feeling my skin cool with the sudden absence of Irish’s body heat. It occurred to me that it would be real damn easy to get used to having him next to me like that. I found my wallet and paid the cabbie as Irish got out. I scooted over, stepping out of the cab and standing up.

I lit a cigarette as the cabbie pulled away. “Up that way,” I pointed to the empty, ominous hulk of the old Packard plant, a vast decrepit shape full of broken peaks and skeletal towers blotting out the glow of Detroit behind it. “We want that first building on the left.” Broken windows looked down at us, and none of the security lights were working in this area. I’d shot a few of them out myself.

“I remember.”

“France,” I mused out loud as the shadow filled the darkness before us, feeling out the clearest path. I moved confidently through icy trash and debris, avoiding the slippery patches. Irish, wise to this little stunt of mine, followed behind me. Or maybe he just liked the view. “Damn, I can’t remember who’s over there. A lot of the Majors have influence in Europe, but there are a few big boys. Your two, the Tower and the Heirophant, but I’m not sure who else.”

“They aren’t ‘my two.’” Irish’s voice was an angry growl. The Tower and the Heirophant had allied centuries ago, even before the Arcana had coalesced into a real organization. To collect as much mystical power as they could, and to eliminate any others who might pose a threat to them, they’d built a secret society of their own: The Order of St. Heinrich. Witch-hunters. Assassins. Later, when they’d been accepted as two of the leaders of the first global coalition of magicians, they’d used their rank and position to aim their bred-from-birth Inquisitors like smart bombs, removing still more of the competition. Irish had been one of their agents for most of his life – and not even one of their best. He’d been stationed here, in the Midwest, and had largely been ignored by his superiors. Considering the reputation he’d built, so impressive that even the rumor of his name was enough to make ancient vampires and powerful witches pull up stakes and leave the state, I’d hate to face one of the Order’s finest alone in a dark alley.

Hmm, poor choice of words. If I had to meet one of their heavy hitters, a dark alley would probably be my venue of choice. I do well in the dark.

“Okay, granted. They’re not yours. You were theirs.” He bristled, but couldn’t really argue the point. “The tricky bit is who to ask.” I flicked ashes as we wandered into the pitch black shadows filling the alleys between abandoned buildings. “I could check some of the online registries, but they’re notoriously unreliable. I don’t know anyone who would know who wouldn’t also want to know why I was asking.”

“Ask Laurent.” Irish put a hand on my shoulder so he could keep track of me. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I didn’t need to. Through the shadow, I could feel my way along. Irish, on the other hand, was just blind. Sometimes that didn’t bother him. Tonight, it seemed to.

“That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?”

“Don’t see how it matters. If he’s here to make you an offer, then it won’t matter if you caught him out and want all the details, right? And if he’s not, then yer just bein’ curious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but what if he isn’t here to make a friendly offer?” I ducked through a sagging door frame into a building that had once been part of the most modern car factory in the world. “Mind your step.”

“I guess if he gets too pushy, we’ll need to teach him a lesson, eh?” His hand tightened on my shoulder as he stumbled over a piece of former ceiling. “Shite – Alice, wait.” He pulled me to a stop just as I put my arm across his chest to stop him.

The shadow stretched, shifting through the garbage and debris. This part of the factory had once held the world’s most advanced assembly line, so it was a big, wide-open space, broken up by heavy support columns made of steel I-beams and crumbling cement. The ceiling was coming down in big chunks, littering the floor in plaster, insulation, and concrete. The shadow oozed through the freezing wet mess, chasing rats ahead of her, slithering over slimy patches of mold and around rotting mattresses, through drifts of leaves and trash. We knew the layout of the plant very well, after a month of living here. Well enough that we could recognize even small changes since our last time through here. We could tell there was some fresh graffiti on the west wall, that the rats living in the broken desk down the hall had just had a litter of babies, and that someone had recently driven a car through here, probably from the east entrance, the one I usually used. The exhaust still hadn’t completely cleared from the enclosed ruins.

“There’s a car,” I whispered as Irish said, “Someone’s here.” He stepped to the side, pulling me with him, out of the doorway, where we’d have been framed in the feeble light coming from outside.

She was already inspecting the car we’d found. It was parked right next to mine, where a moldy and half-collapsed hallway led into some long-abandoned office spaces. It was a small, sleek car, sporty, low to the ground and wide, built for taking sharp corners at high speeds. My Barracuda probably looked like an old Soviet tank next to its more modern fiberglass and plastic cousin. I wasn’t entirely displeased with that comparison. I’d had to do some combative driving last month, and I’d made some modifications to the Barracuda for next time. ‘Tank’ wasn’t far off the mark anymore.

“Car?” Irish prompted, voice quiet, just a breath of sound. He shifted me a bit to the side and a bit behind, putting my back to the wall and himself ahead of me. He kept one hand on my shoulder, heavy there and warm, to keep track of me.

“It’s a little sports car.” I frowned, considering the shape of it. “Ferrari, maybe. It’s got that swoopy shape to the front, low seats and a dual exhaust. Sound familiar?”

“No. Expensive, though. Feist?”

“Nah, he likes BMWs.” The shadow explored the hall, finding it empty save for some skittering vermin. At the same time, she was embracing the strange car, slithering into it, seeping in around the windows and doors. “It’s parked right next to mine.”

“What, really?” I nodded. “They shouldn’t have been able to do that,” we said in unison.

There was a gadget just in front of my car, that I’d made from a dissected adding machine, a metronome, and some cricket parts. Also about two thousand dollars’ worth of gold wiring, that I’d cobble-jobbed into a junction box against the wall. The metronome was silent – and I know it’d been active when I’d left. The steady ticking of it generated an air of dread and nervousness, a sort of ‘haunted house’ vibe, that kept scavengers away from my car.

As soon as my shadow penetrated into the car I could taste the driver, smell his skin. The driver’s seat was soaked in his scent and flavor, the smell of his cologne and the hotel soap he’d used to wash with, the scent of the gun oil he preferred, the kind of gum he liked to chew. I recognized it – him. And the recognition did not soothe me even a teeny little bit. “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?” Irish’s grip tightened on my shoulder, catching my attention, and my eyes focused on his dark shape in front of me. “Who is it?”

“Have I ever told you about my ex-husband? The second one?”

“You mentioned him once. The one you divorced?” I could hear the confusion in Irish’s voice.

“Did I ever tell you what he does for a living?” The shadow was reacting to my alarm. I felt her drawing on me, stealing my warmth and energy as she flung herself into the natural darkness, filling as much of it as she could. Ground floor – clear. Basement storage areas – still mostly flooded, collapsed, and empty – clear. Second floor – what she could feel, also clear. We seemed to be alone. If she weren’t so hungry, she could have spread herself out even farther, but for now this was the best she could do. Even this was taking its toll on me – I was getting the tactile, olfactory and taste-laden input of the better part of an entire city block. It made it a little hard to concentrate on my own senses, and I wrapped my hands around Irish’s wrist where he was holding my shoulder, to anchor myself.

“No…” Irish said slowly, voice now full of a dawning concern at my reaction. “No, you did not.”

“He’s, ah, well…” I swallowed. “He’s a professional hit man.”

“There was a long moment of thoughtful silence. Then, “Was he any good at it?” Irish asked, with mild curiosity.

“Yes.” There was no one out there, not for as far as the shadow could reach. But Dillon’s car was right there, so he had to be around here somewhere.

“Good enough to find ye, at any rate,” Irish murmured, thinking out loud. “But he pulled right in here and parked next to you, so he’s not trying to hide. Was it a friendly divorce?”

“Pretty friendly, yeah.” I grinned in the dark, remembering our post-divorce night on the town. We’d gone to Vegas for the divorce, to mirror the wedding. It had turned into a post-divorce weekend. “We didn’t hate each other. It just wasn’t working out.”

“Maybe the Order tried to hire him, and he’s here to warn you?”

“Maybe the Order did hire him, and he’s counting on ‘friendly’ to get him close enough to take a shot.” I countered. “We can’t find anyone here. No one’s around.”

“Let’s get inside then.” He took a step away and let his breath out in an annoyed snort. “Does it need t’be this dark?”

“You did see all those windows on the west side, didn’t you?” I put my eyebrow up and smirked, a wasted effort since he couldn’t see my face. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but if I were going to snipe somebody, that’s where I’d be, and we can’t reach out there to check.”

“Dammit…” He pulled in a deep breath. “I don’t like letting you go first.”

“What, are you kidding? I’m in the basement, and most of the second story. I’m coating the walls, and blocking the windows. I’m in the sports car, and I’ve already gone down the hall checking for bombs and lurkers. I always go first. Come on – just follow me and give a shout if you feel like someone might be getting shooty.”

“The room was big, but not that big. I could have made it to my front door in a minute by myself, without so much as a stumble. I could feel the entire room against my skin, the shape of it and position of each piece of junk laid out like a map in my head. I knew exactly where my feet needed to go. For once, Irish was slowing me down. He had to walk with more care, feeling his way along, which was odd, now that I thought of it. I’d seen him fight in the shadow’s darkness. Well, I’d felt him, at any rate. Either way, the man turned blind-fighting into a goddamn art form. He sure the hell didn’t need to see then.

I’d noticed that about him before, though. It was like his abilities worked better when he didn’t think about them. He’d said something like that up on the roof, too, hadn’t he? They don’t just happen at will. I have to sort of, well, get into a certain frame of mind and wait for them. The whole process seemed dreadfully ass-backwards to me. Every trick I knew I’d had to put the work and effort into learning – years with different mentors spent learning magic, every minute of my life practicing with the shadow. An ability that only worked well when you were expecting it to in the same thoughtless way you expected your lungs to keep pulling in breath struck me as incredibly alien.

But really, who am I to criticize?

“Wasn’t your first husband a cop, or something?” Irish asked, apparently feeling the need to fill the darkness with small talk.

“A district attorney. Also an asshole.”

“He died?”

I laughed, a short bark of hilarity. “Eventually, yeah.”

“And your second was a hit man. Gene, he was a monster hunter.”

“And an accountant.”

“Accounting was what he did. Hunting? That was what he was.” I grunted, ceding the point. “You do seem to like powerful, dangerous men, don’t you?”

I gave the metronome a tap, setting off the steady ticking that would repel looky-loos from finding my little home-outside-my-home. “I’m no pushover myself,” I pointed out, my heels clacking on the floor tiles as I led Irish down the hallway. The floor was spotlessly clean. Gene must have swept recently. “Maybe the soft-spoken kind of guy just doesn’t feel that they’re in my league?”

We reached the third door on the left, the only office door that still boasted an intact frame and wasn’t sagging off its hinges. I scuffed a toe of one my shoes over the floor. “No ashes.”

“Ashes?” Irish stepped up behind me and I felt my wards sputter in his presence.

“Yes, ashes. If someone tried to force their way in here, they’d be in for a short, hot surprise.” I opened the door and the hall light spilled out in a warm, yellow glow. The shadow poured through, pulling herself in from all around in her rush to get inside where it was warm. I reached in and flipped the light switch just inside the door, and the defensive wards powered down with a gentle whine. “Come on in.” I ushered Irish in and followed him, switching the wards back on and shutting the door.

The door clicked shut, I turned the lock, and a tension I hadn’t quite realized I was carrying drained out of my shoulders. I let out a slow breath, glad to be home again and safe.

I turned to find Irish blinking in the light, glancing around, still a little put off by the fact that we’d just stepped into a Southern plantation home instead of the empty, falling down office he might have expected from the door. It was still dark outside – the front parlor windows looked out over a wide expanse of overgrown lawn, cypress trees, and encroaching swampland. It was a lot warmer, though. Upper sixties, low seventies, maybe? Quite a change from Michigan’s bitter ten degree weather that we’d just left.

The shadow flowed past us, the lights dimming as she drank. I didn’t usually let her eat the house supply – I do have an electric bill to pay, after all – but after tonight’s fun and games she was starving, and she’d been so good I hated to deny her. There was a fire burning in the kitchen fireplace, and she writhed happily along the floor, seeking the warm flames to dance in and drink.

I put a hand on Irish’s arm and lifted a foot to pull my high heel off. He caught my arm to steady me and I glanced up at him to find a smile on his face. I put an eyebrow up at him, recognizing the smile as that grin men get when they catch their women doing something cute. I let myself return the smile, a little voice in the back of my head pointing out that I had him alone in the house and all to myself for a bit, and it might be fun to see where that went.

And that’s when the shadow reached the kitchen and found Dillon sitting at the island, a cup of coffee and a deck of cards in front of him, Gene standing across from him. My grip on Irish’s arm tightened as he turned, possibly realizing at the same time I did that we weren’t alone in the house.

Image by Daniel Haaser.