Me and My Shadow

  Gabriel groaned and closed his eyes for a moment, his hands fists as he knelt next to me. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to me? I’m not near you, May. I’m not even in the same country as you, and yet I’m hard and burning for your heat.”

  I was silent for a moment as the last shreds of my wits that had been scattered by Fiat’s attempt to kill me gathered up and coalesced into my normal reason. “Where are you?”

  “France. I will be home soon. I will be in your arms sooner. What happened to you?” He reached for me, as if he were going to stroke the hair from my cheek, his hand fisting again as he dropped his arm to his side.

  “Fiat tried to kill me.”

  He was so still that for a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me.

  “Then he will die for that folly.”

  I smiled, warmed to the tips of my toes by the cold, icy threat in his voice. “He didn’t succeed.”

  “So I gathered. Fiat? You are sure, Mayling?”

  “Quite.”

  He swore. “How did he slip past us? We were watching all means of transportation, monitoring all the por taling companies.”

  “I have no idea, but he’s definitely here, and Kostya wasn’t with him.”

  “What happened?”

  I gave him a brief rundown of the events that led up to us meeting Fiat in the bar. “Fiat more or less went off, and picked me as a likely recipient of his spleen venting. And much as it distresses me to admit it, he might have succeeded if I hadn’t been rescued.”

  Gabriel watched me for a few seconds, emotion running so high in him I could swear I felt it even over the distance I knew separated us. “Who rescued you?”

  “I never believed I’d ever actually have cause to say these words, but Magoth saved me. He coshed Fiat over the head with an eighteenth-century andiron in the shape of a peacock, which I have to admit is somewhat fitting. Gabriel, it’s not Kostya Fiat is working with—it’s Baltic. He’s here. This is actually his house. How or why he got Fiat to kidnap us is beyond me.”

  Gabriel stiffened. “Where is this house?”

  “About two hours outside of London.” I described the route we’d taken out of London. “Baltic said he and Ysolde designed the house. He said she was going to have an acceptance ceremony here.”

  “I am less interested in history than I am in why Baltic has taken you,” Gabriel said grimly. He glanced over his shoulder. “Do not move. I will return in a minute or two.”

  I laughed as I looked around me. During the conversation with Gabriel, I’d taken in the surroundings. Even though I was in the shadow world, it retained enough similarity to the real world that I knew exactly where I was—in the bowels of the house, deep down in a dimly lit, earth-walled room that served as a dungeon.

  I slid off the table upon which I’d been sitting, and examined the prison. There was one small door set at the far wall, no windows, and only the faintest flicker and buzz from a bare electric light overhead. Although sometimes the shadow-world version of an environment could look significantly different from what we knew as real, there was none of that feel about this room. The angles were all true, not slightly off, as was frequent in the shadow world. There were a table and three chairs, all broken and lying in a heap in the corner. The room was musty and earthy smelling, but there was an acid note to the air that had my nose wrinkling. I couldn’t figure out quite what it was, though, and took a few tentative sniffs to see if I could pinpoint the origins.

  “It is fear, little bird,” Gabriel said behind me.

  I spun around. He looked tired and depressed, the light in his normally shining eyes dimmed somewhat. “What’s fear?”

  “The scent you smell. I recognize it.”

  “Ugh. What’s wrong?” I asked, wanting to soothe away the distress I could see in his handsome face.

  The look he gave me spoke volumes. “My mate has been taken by another wyvern, my house destroyed, more than sixty dragons are dead by the hand of a wyvern I should have stopped long ago, and Chuan Ren is being unusually difficult.”

  “Sorry. That was a stupid question. Don’t worry about me—I will get us out of here just as soon as I make sure everyone is unharmed. As for Fiat—he’s not your responsibility, Gabriel. He’s a big boy, and knows what he’s doing. Don’t take upon yourself any blame that should lie solely on his head.”

  Gabriel was silent for a moment, his hand raised to touch my cheek. I felt nothing but the faintest of breezes, however. “If I said it was my job to rescue you, what would you say?”

  I kissed the air where his palm was. “I’d tell you to stop being silly, and hurry up and come home so we can re-form the heart and get rid of the shard once and for all.”

  “I have alerted the others to the fact that Fiat has slipped through our fingers,” he answered. “Do not do anything rash, mate.”

  I smiled at the rough note his voice had taken. “I love you, too.”

  Cautiously, I slipped out of the shadow world, but I really had no need of covertness.

  “Mayling!” Cyrene said as I stepped away from the wall, out of the deepest shadows I had instinctively sought. Relief dripped from her voice. “There you are. Have you found a way out?”

  I stepped over a prone form, then a second one. “What on earth happened here?” I asked, ignoring Cyrene’s question.

  “Your twin told Fiat that it was Magoth who slugged him,” Jim said from where it sat on Fiat’s chest. “So the F-man started duking it out with Magoth, screaming he was going to have revenge, only Mags is a bit lacking in the power department, so when Fiat went all dragon on him, Cy and I decided we’d better even things up.”

  I looked from the two men sprawled unconscious on the floor to Cyrene. “So you hit them both over their respective heads?”

  “No, of course not,” Cyrene said, pulling herself up with an indignant snort. “What do you take me for? I am a naiad! I am devoted body and soul to the worthy and altruistic cause of benefiting the planet! My being, my very reason for existence, is to better the world for mortalkind. For you to even suggest that I would do something so heinous, so evil, as bash someone over the head just because he was annoying and would not shut up no matter how much I threatened him is the purest slander. Purest slander!”

  I waited for a minute. “Are you finished?”

  “Not quite.” She took a deep breath. “I would never do anything to harm anyone. Ever!”

  I let the silence say it all.

  “I am good,” she said with much dignity. “I am not in the least bit bad.”

  “Yeah, ’cause holding someone down while a demon lord beats the snot out of him isn’t bad at all,” Jim said, snickering.

  “Holding someone’s arms is not the same as holding them down,” Cyrene said with a glare at the demon.

  “Yuh-huh. I see now why you and Magoth hooked up.”

  “Oh!” Cyrene said, outraged.

  “Enough bickering, you two.”

  “I didn’t hold Fiat down,” Cyrene reassured me. “I just helped Magoth get a tiny little edge.”

  “Whatever. Can we move on?” I asked.

  “That’s why you were dancing around yelling, ‘Smash the tar out of him, Mags!’ the whole time?” Jim asked.

  Cyrene gasped. “Lies! Scandalous lies! You take that back!”

  Jim made a motion that on a human would be a shrug. “OK, OK, don’t get your panties in a wad. I take it back. Magoth didn’t beat the snot out of Fiat. There was enough left in him to brain Magoth a few times on the rack over there before Cyrene bopped him upside the head with a cat.”

  Cyrene, to my extreme surprise, was holding a rust-stained cat-o’-nine-tails, swinging it gently from side to side. “That was purely self-defense, and thus doesn’t fall under the heading of bad,” she said, giving the cat a little twirl. “I knew if Fiat had me alone, he’d try to claim me.”

  I let the claiming comment go and eyed my twin for a few seconds. “Why the sudden emphasis on being good
? Oh, Cy. You’re not in trouble again, are you?”

  “No,” she said quickly, but her gaze dropped. “Not really. It’s just that Neptune is still a bit annoyed about that whole thing with letting my spring get tainted while I was taking care of Kostya, and when he gave it back to me last month, he made me swear that I wouldn’t do anything that could be considered detrimental to either the Otherworld or the mortal world for a year, or he’ll take away the spring permanently. And you know I couldn’t let him do that.”

  “No, of course not,” I said, mentally giving kudos to Neptune. Perhaps he could control my wild twin where I could not.

  “He really is the most unreasonable of persons, you know. He’s all blond and surfer boy, and has those lovely white teeth, and really impressive biceps, but he’s not at all as scatterbrained as he looks. And I swear he has it in for me. He’s always picking on me.”

  I let that comment go, too, and focused on what was important. “We need to get out of here. Door?”

  “Bolted from the other side,” Jim said, getting up off Fiat and shambling over to me, nuzzling my hand for a moment before cocking a canine eyebrow. “Any other bright ideas?”

  I glanced around the room. “Not really. Cy, is there anything you can do?”

  “Flood the room?” she asked, also looking around.

  “That would do nothing but drown us.”

  She stilled for a moment, her eyes closed as she opened herself up to the earth. “The pond is too shallow, and the stream is at its lowest peak. Neither source would be effective against the foundation of the house. Other than those two, there are no sources of water nearby that I could use.”

  “Damn.” I eyed Jim. “I know demon lords can move through space the way demons can, but I don’t know how to do it. Do you have any pointers?”

  “Yeah. Don’t do it.”

  “Why not?” I asked the demon.

  It shook its head. “Aisling tried it and got proscribed. I don’t think you want to end up that way, because it would give Bael some sort of control over you, what with you being bound to Magoth and all.”

  “Good point,” I said, reluctantly releasing the idea of using the dark power. “What we need is for a demon to rip open the fabric of space for us so we could leave.”

  “We have a demon,” Cyrene said, pointing to Jim.

  “No can do,” it answered, shaking its head. “I’d like to, but I can’t. Gotta have a direct order from my demon lord. My real demon lord, not someone with the temporary ability to command me.”

  “Damn,” I said again, thinking furiously. “We could wait for Gabriel to save us, but that could take longer than we have.”

  “There’s Magoth,” Cyrene said, poking him with the toe of her sandal. He moaned gently.

  “I am not giving him his powers while he’s in the mortal world,” I said hastily.

  “No, not all of them—just the ability to travel through rips and such.”

  I thought about that for a minute, then looked at Jim. “Is that possible?”

  “Maybe for someone who was familiar with the power, and had a firm grip on it, but you?” It made a little face. “Nope. Not doable.”

  “What about Jim?” Cyrene asked brightly.

  “I just told you I can’t do that without a direct order—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted, turning to me with a sunny smile. “What if you give Jim Magoth’s powers? Then it can open up a rip for us and we can escape.”

  “Leaving Jim in full possession of a demon lord’s powers,” I pointed out.

  “I am so behind that idea,” Jim said.

  “Well, I’m not. Cy—it’s a demon. As in . . . demon.”

  “Why do people always talk about me like I’m not here?” Jim asked no one in particular.

  “It’s a good demon,” she pointed out.

  She had a point. Not a big one, but it was a point. I eyed Jim for a few moments, amused despite myself by the big puppy dog eyes it was giving me. “No,” I said, deciding it was just too big of a risk. “I can’t do it.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, then give the powers to me,” she said, disgusted.

  “You? Miss ‘I am the purest thing that ever walked on two legs’? The one who pledged an oath to not do anything wrong for the next year? I bet Neptune would take a dim view of a proscribed naiad.”

  She whomped me on the arm. “I’m an elemental being, silly. We can’t be proscribed.”

  “You can’t?” I’d never heard that before. “Since when?”

  “Since always. Why do you think I survived Magoth enthralling me? A thrall kills most beings, but not us. Elemental beings are particularly resistant to dark powers. Everyone knows that.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said slowly, wishing for a second that doppelgangers were considered elemental beings.

  “Well, now you do. And don’t pull Neptune on me again—using the power to get us out of here is a good act, not bad. He can’t say a thing about it.”

  “Yes, but who’s to say that you won’t inadvertently use the powers in some other way?”

  She straightened up, giving me a look that was almost intimidating. “I am over a thousand years old, Mayling. I think I can handle a little demonic power.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but after another twenty minutes of arguing the point, I conceded that there really was no other option, and proceeded to—reluctantly, and with many dire warnings regarding the misuse thereof—transfer the power to her.

  “This is going to be so handy,” Cyrene said, her voice filled with excitement as Jim guided her to the proper procedure for tearing open the fabric of space. “I can’t believe I never thought of doing this before. No more flying, Mayling! No more long lines at a portal station. No more trains and cars and ships! Just a rip and a tear, and a shove through the fabric, and voilà! Instant transportation.”

  She swung her hands around as she spoke, tearing off little strips of reality.

  “Don’t forget to focus on where you’re going,” Jim warned, ducking as one of her swings went a bit wild. “You have to keep that focus or you’ll end up in Timbuktu. Man alive! You almost took off my ear!”

  “Sorry. Focusing.” Her face scrunched up as she held an image in her mind. “Now tear?”

  “Yeah.” Jim retreated back to where I stood, well out of her reach. “You do know that there’s going to be a price to pay for this, right?”

  “What do you mean, a price?” she asked, her eyes still screwed tight as she reached out blindly to select just the right possibility, the threads of location that would take us where she wanted.

  “Dark power isn’t free. You use it, you pay a price.”

  “I’m elemental—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you can’t be proscribed, but you still pay a price.”

  One of her eyes popped open as I asked, “What sort of a price? It’s nothing dangerous, is it?”

  Worry gathered in my belly. Had I just done something extremely stupid?

  The demon shrugged. “Won’t know until you use it.”

  “I’m an elemental being,” Cyrene said with a shake of her head as she reached back out to find the threads she wanted. “There’s nothing dark power can do to me.”

  “Famous last words, eh?” Jim said five minutes later as it released Magoth’s feet. I heaved the upper part of him onto my bed in Aisling’s yellow bedroom, and let him drop with an audible grunt.

  “And I thought Fiat was heavy,” I grumbled, rubbing my back as I straightened up. Fiat was sprawled, still unconscious, on the armchair next to the bed. I made sure both men were still out before I turned to look at my twin, flinching just a little as the light hit her full on.

  Cyrene stared in horror at her reflection in the small mirror next to the door. One hand rose slowly to touch her hair. “It’s . . . white. I’m . . .”

  “Black,” Jim said, giving her a visual once-over.

  She turned to look at me, her expression frozen. “My eyes . . .”

/>   “Orange,” I said, trying to absorb the new look to my twin. “I think you’ve done a flip colorwise, Cy. All the colors are reversed. Your skin is now very dark brown, your hair is white, and your once-blue eyes are orange. It’s an interesting look.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Jim said, its head tipped as it considered her. “It’s like you’re a negative image of yourself. Fun.”

  She blinked at me with those eerie eyes and then opened the door, her face still frozen in shock. “I need water. Lots of water. I’ll be in Drake’s pool.”

  “I just hope Aisling isn’t down there giving birth,” I said as she tottered off.

  Jim cocked its head. “No screaming. Besides, she was going to do that in the big tub before she changed her mind and decided on some sort of big chair with a hole in the seat.”

  “Birthing chairs are very common, I believe. I suppose I’d better go tell Drake he has a guest.”

  “Yeah, I’d better check on Ash and let her know we’re back. She worries about that sort of thing, and that’s probably not too good for her right now.”

  I ruffled the demon’s head as I followed it into the hall. “Just when I get thinking you’re nothing but a pain in the butt, you go and show you’re just a big softy.”

  “Love ya, too, babe,” it said, rubbing its head on me as we headed down the hallway.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I knew the second Gabriel entered Drake’s house. The air thickened, and seemed to vibrate with energy. I froze, the words I had been speaking drying up on my lips.