Nancy Holder - Son of the Shadows

He eased into her line of sight, muscles tensed for battle, fireball in his fist.

“Stop! Stop right there!” she ordered, grabbing her Medusa and rising just enough to rest her elbows on the trunk so she could take aim. Moonlight dappled her face as she stared him down. Her chest was heaving. She was naked, covered with blood and mud, and her hands were shaking.

“Mes amis!” Jean-Marc called, hoping to get through to any werewolf who was coming after her. “Je suis Jean-Marc! Je suis là!” My friends, I am Jean-Marc. I am here. He howled in the werewolves’ language, warning them, preparing him.

Then Andre, the wolf pack’s alpha, staggered into the clearing in his human form. He took one look at Isabelle, and Caresse bleeding beside her, and rushed toward them.

“Caresse, ma femme,” Andre said. “Ah, non. Non, non.” He took a step forward. Another, each one a lurch of traumatized outrage. “Who did this, ma petite?”

Isabelle gestured at him with her gun.

“Stop right there,” she ordered. “Both of you. And raise your hands.”

“Andre,” Jean-Marc warned, eyeing the Medusa, “keep back.”

“Jolie, what are you doing?” Andre gasped at Isabelle. “What happened?”

“Back,” she said, aiming at him. To Jean-Marc, “Get rid of that ball of fire. If you do anything, make one move, I’ll shoot him.”

“Jean-Marc, what is wrong with her? Is she bewitched?” Andre demanded. “Isabelle, it’s us.”

“I am. I’m what’s wrong with her,” Jean-Marc said dully. He was sorry he had taught her how to defend herself so well. He lifted his hands above his head. The fireball floated for a second or two, then extinguished. He heard the poor, gibbering police officer on the altar and sent out a spell to quiet the man. He could do nothing more to give him peace. If the man died without his soul, he would thrash throughout eternity in mindless anguish.

That would have been my fate, he reminded himself, if Alain and Isabelle had not intervened.

Non, a voice whispered inside his head. Your eternity would have been glorious. An unending existence of pleasure. They stopped it. They robbed you.

He shut out the insinuating whispers and focused on Isabelle. By his patron the Grey King, despite everything, she was uncannily beautiful, possessing a light that had long ago abandoned Lilliane, if it had ever been there in the first place. He had no idea why his calming spell on her had lost its potency, allowing her to run from him. Perhaps it was because she was half Bouvard and half Malchance, an unknown quantity to him.

“And now?” he asked her. “They are coming, Isabelle.”

Her chest rose and fell. Her nostrils flared. He honed in on her, intent, trying to See inside her.

I need to get to him, Isabelle thought.

Jean-Marc knew she wasn’t sending out her thoughts. Maybe she had forgotten that he could read her mind if she neglected to cloak it. But he received a clear image of Pat Kittrell’s face and absorbed Isabelle’s intense fear for his life. So something of her past had resurfaced. Perhaps that was a sign that the shock was wearing off. He tried to push Pat’s image more firmly into her mind, cloud her actions with an overwhelming urgency to get to him. He would manipulate her without compunction if it served his ends—to keep her alive and save Caresse.

“Let us tend to her,” Jean-Marc said. “Then I swear I’ll find Pat for you.” He sensed her confusion and sent out more images into her mind—Pat, struggling for breath, calling her name, Izzy. “Pat. Your lover. The man you need to save.”

She wavered. He felt her anguish, her bewilderment, as if they were physical entities tearing at his skin, his hair, and he knew that while the connection between them had weakened, it was not gone. He concentrated, trying to strengthen it with magical energy, make her trust him, make her listen.

“He doesn’t call me Isabelle,” she said tightly. “You do.” She was quiet a moment. “He calls me Izzy.”

So she had some memory, then.

“Put the gun down, Izzy,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. He glanced back down at Caresse, whose face was turning blue. His heart skipped a beat. The Shadows weren’t healers and never had been, but even he could see that Caresse had little time left. “She needs—”

His words were cut off as the world exploded.

Izzy screamed.

The mud to her left geysered upward in a plume; the bayou water to her right shot straight up as if from a broken fire hydrant. The ground beneath her feet shook so violently that she dropped to her knees. Instinctively she flattened against the mud, shouting, “Incoming! Incoming! Duck and cover!” As soon as she was stable, she made a tripod with her elbows and shot off another round with her Medusa.

Its report was soundless, but she’d hit a target: something in the darkness bellowed with pain. As if in reply, scarlet pinwheels of light blossomed above drooping cypress treetops, obliterating the moon. White and red flares peppered the landscape like dueling fireworks. She shot off more rounds, having no idea what was coming yet sure that they meant to kill her.

They who? What’s happening?

Something sizzled along the length of her body, breaking her concentration. She looked down as a catsuit and body armor appeared fully formed on her body. She yelled and batted at it, but it was on to stay, and after a couple of seconds she realized it wasn’t hurting her in any way and was preferable to being naked. It was identical to Jean-Marc’s except that on the bicep of the clinging second-skin, there was some kind of patch depicting a trio of white flames that looked very familiar.

I belong here, she thought, jerking as a layer of deep indigo light completely surrounded her. Oh, my God, is that my aura?

“Protect yourself!” Jean-Marc leaped in front of her, his back to her as he spread his legs wide and shot off rounds from an Uzi he hadn’t had before. He followed them with one of the balls of fire he could make with his hands. “Make a shield now!”

She had no idea what he was talking about, and no time to wonder about it, as an incoming blur of white light slammed into the field of blue. Panic turned her blood to ice as she caught her breath, ducked her head and pulled the trigger—realizing too late that Jean-Marc stood directly in her line of fire.

“Arête!” he yelled at her, as he dove for the mud. Landing on his belly, he rolled onto his left elbow, his face contorted in a combination of terror and fury. A ball of fire erupted from his right hand, engulfing the space between them. Heat slapped her icy face and she reflexively looped her finger around the trigger as he lobbed a second fireball. A tiny object pierced the center of the fiery globe and exploded—it was her 9 mm cartridge—and he chanted in a language she didn’t understand, speaking rapidly and firmly as he pointed his fingers at her.

Invisible hands grabbed her and propelled her into the air. Five feet above his prone body, she hovered in smoke for a few heartbeats, and then she plummeted, landing beside him in the mud. Shifting patterns of blue and black undulated in her field of vision as he flung his arm around her and pressed her to the ground.

“Don’t shoot at me!”

She smelled oranges, roses, hot metal, oil and something else—blood and death. He moved his fingers in a circle and the gun shot out of her grasp. She lunged for it as he grabbed it out of the air.

“Give that back!” she bellowed, lunging at him, slithering and sliding in the mud as she scrambled over his body and grabbed at the gun. He wrapped his free hand around her forearm, pushed himself to a standing position and dragged her toward the closest tangle of bayou undergrowth. When the catsuit and armor had appeared, so had boots; inside them, her stockinged feet were cut and bleeding. He turned to her, rage spinning in his dark, hooded eyes. His white teeth were clenched and he looked horrifically feral, more like an animal than a man. His chest began to heave, his hand to tighten around her arm. Painfully.