Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell) (2 page)

“Cady—”

“—we’ll just go back inside and—”

“Ahhh!”

Lon lurched away from the side of the house and nearly toppled off the narrow roof. I felt it a second later: fire on my back, spreading across the wood siding. I yelped in pain, then ducked into a crouch as a sudden
boom!
rattled the house. Flames burst from the open window, a column of orange fire like dragon’s breath. It spewed over our heads, just missing one of Lon’s horns, then retreated. Mostly. Flames continued to cavort around the window and surrounding wall.

The scent of burning hair wafted. I furiously patted my bleached white Bride of Frankenstein streak, which hung over my shoulders and stood out against my otherwise dark hair. “How is he doing that?” I hissed.

“Hell if I know. Even transmutated, there’s no way he should be able to do this.”

But Merrimoth
wasn’t
transmutated, which made even less sense. Many Earthbounds have a demonic ability, what they call a knack. Lon’s an empath. He can read your emotions. Transmuted, like he was at that moment, he can also read your thoughts. Merrimoth possessed a knack I once would’ve classified as harmless: temperature control. Last time I saw him, he could warm my hand with a touch. But creating giant blasts of fire? This was new.

“Ha!” Merrimoth’s joyful voice called out from inside the house. “I am God—no, the Devil himself. I’ve never felt so alive!”

And I’d never felt so angry. Come to think of it, I’d felt nothing but hate for David Merrimoth since I met him at the Hellfire caves several months back. Not only because the elderly Earthbound tried to feed Lon to a caged Æthyric demon in a fighting ring, but also because he wanted to herd me into an Incubus orgy.

“Stay right there, won’t you?” Merrimoth hollered from inside the house. His batshit-crazy laugh was lost in the crackle of flames that licked around the window frame.

Lon pulled me to my feet and craned to see inside the window. “He’s going downstairs.”

Heat from Merrimoth’s fire caused sweat to trickle down my back. We weren’t circus lions. No way was I jumping through the ring of a window on fire, but I wasn’t going to stand there and wait for Merrimoth to come back and shoot us. I gazed at the balcony and resigned myself to a tightrope act. “I’ll go first. Wait until I’ve crossed.”

“Like hell. I’m not going to stand here and watch you fall. We both go.”

Fine. If our combined weight destroyed the ledge, maybe I’d get to give him an I-told-you-so on the other side. I flattened my back against the house and gingerly sidled onto the cedar ledge. My heart drummed inside my chest as salty ocean air filled my lungs. I stretched out an arm and guided myself forward with an open palm on the siding for balance. One step . . . two steps. . . . The ledge creaked.

“Slow, Cady,” Lon’s voice said somewhere behind me.

I was inching forward one foot at a time—how much slower could I go?

Something fell on my face. A sharp pinpoint of cold. Then another.
Plop.

“Shit.” So much for clear skies. A handful of plops, then the heavens just opened up without warning and dumped a torrent of winter rain.

“Keep going,” Lon said.

Christmas was next week, for the love of Pete. I should be wrapping presents right now and preparing myself to meet Lon’s extended family—not running from fire and tightroping across the side of some nut-job’s house in a storm.

At least the anger was motivating. Three more steps and we were halfway there. Or were we? It was hard to tell—I couldn’t turn my neck to look back or I’d lose my balance. Blustering wind thrashed my hair and fanned a hard sheet of rain across my face. Vertigo turned my knees to jelly.

“Ignore it!” Lon barked at my side.

He was right. Too late to turn back now. I had to press forward. Had to make it. All I needed to do was slide one foot, fingers reaching, slide second foot, and repeat. But during the next step, I felt the house rumble against my back.

“What was that?” I whispered.

Something behind us, on the safe little island of roofing we’d left. I’d fall if I glanced back. Lon must’ve detected something with his knack because his hand suddenly gripped my shoulder. All my muscles went rigid as a breath stuck in my throat.

A gun’s report cracked the night air.

My back stiffened. Fingernails gouged the rain-slick siding, scrabbling for purchase. Lon swore indecipherably.

“You couldn’t hit a buffalo with this old thing,” Merrimoth’s voice shouted into the storm.

“Keep going,” Lon said to me. “The Lupara’s out of shells now.”

I drew harsh breaths through my nostrils and took an indecisive step. Then another. Lon was saying something behind me again, but I blocked him out. Three steps to the balcony. I extended my arm. I could do this. Two steps. Almost there. My fingertips reached for the wooden railing—

Glass doors swung open.

A green halo swam in front of my eyes as Merrimoth burst onto the balcony. The gray-haired Earthbound was in his early seventies. He wore perfectly ironed gray slacks and a white shirt that gaped open three too many buttons to expose a plush thicket of curly gray chest hair.

“How stupid do you think I am?” he said breathlessly as rain soaked through his shirt. No horns, no fiery halo. He definitely wasn’t transmutated, so how could his knack be potent enough to create fire?

“Merrimoth!” Lon shouted. “Let us inside. We’ll discuss this like adults.”

“There’s nothing to discuss, m’boy. Dare wants to sic his hounds on me? And not even worthy hounds—Jonathan Butler’s privileged ragamuffin son and his witchy Sheba, barely old enough to tie her own shoes, much less bind me properly. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that little stunt you pulled in the Hellfire caves. Dare blamed me for the vermillion binding circle you broke. He flayed me for it.”

The crazy Earthbound held out an upturned palm. My rain-bleary vision took several seconds to register that his hand was striped with pink scars.

“Dare said I couldn’t touch you or I was out of the Hellfire Club. But I don’t need them anymore, not with power like this!” The beginning of a laugh was choked in his throat as his gaze narrowed and landed on Lon. “Get out of my brain, Butler. I feel you poking around. You want to know how I started those fires? I’m not telling. But remember that my knack always went both ways—hot and cold. Would you like a demonstration?”

“Merrimoth—”

“Look at you, little birds perched on my house. The footing on that ledge looks awfully dicey. Would be even more precarious if the temperature dropped a few degrees . . .”

The rain surged and swirled as the Earthbound flicked his wrist. A volley of cold, sharp raindrops flew against my body and pinged off the house, sounding like a thousand marbles had been scattered into the wind. Hail. He’d frozen the rain around us.

Ice quickly formed on both the ledge below and the wooden siding at our backs. My fingers slipped. Merrimoth swooped his arm in a downward arc and a long strip of ice solidified at our feet. It shot out into the night air like the enormous, curling tongue of a mythological Nordic Frost Giant.

Lon’s leg banged against mine, then his foot gave way. I turned just in time to see him careen down the icy slide. He launched into the air, rocketing into the night sky as if he’d been released from a slingshot. I watched in horror as his body hung for a split second, then dropped, heading straight for the rocky coastline below.

I didn’t have time to make a plan. No option existed but stopping Lon’s fall. And after all the trouble I’d been having summoning up my moon power to bind Merrimoth, in that single moment—the second Lon dropped—the erratic magick immediately submitted to my will and lashed out like lightning. I had no particular spell in mind, not even a sigil. Only one thought ballooned inside my head and crackled through my synapses:
N
o.

Magick whooshed out of me with my breath. I blinked, drowsy and momentarily disoriented. I knew I’d done something big, but it took me a moment to realize exactly
what
.

Time had slowed.

I glanced around in shock. A peculiar silver light swathed my vision. Raindrops hung suspended in the air—illuminated by light from the house’s windows, they looked like clusters of misshapen glass beads. And on the balcony, Merrimoth’s body stood stock-still, his mouth open, hand poised in the middle of some unrealized gesture like a wax figure. As if I’d pushed a pause button. I peered over the arch of ice at my feet, dreading what I might find.

Lon!

He was suspended in the air a floor below me, caught in my magick, falling facedown, his halo and long hair streaming behind.

I’d never,
never
done anything this big—never even imagined I could. But the amount of energy it took to power it was already draining me.

Screwing up my courage, I chanced a couple of small, cautious steps on the slick ledge until my hand wrapped around the railing. I took a deep breath and awkwardly pitched myself sideways, scrambled onto the balcony, and skidded, almost crashing into Merrimoth. Silver fog swirled around his legs. Creepy as hell. Even creepier when I realized he wasn’t completely still. His arm was rising in slow motion, a hair at a time. His angry gaze struggled to shift in my direction.

A wave of dizziness unsteadied me. My Heka reserves were draining and I was running out of time. I shuffled around Merrimoth, spotted Lon’s vintage gun in his hand, and pried it out of his fingers. Then I scurried through the balcony doors into the house.

I found myself inside a cavernous bedroom, decorated with restraint and neutral colors, like the rest of Merrimoth’s home. Automated ceiling sprinklers doused everything with circular sprays of water. I stumbled across polished wood flooring, frantically looking for a way out, and found more than I wanted: three cameras on tripods, a bed outfitted with black rubber sheets, an object that I initially thought was a curly dildo (and upon closer inspection, was, I thought, a butt plug with one end shaped like a pig’s tail), and a gleaming, shiver-inducing metal speculum. I scurried around a black leather swing hanging from an exposed beam and darted into the hallway.

Silver fog eddied around my feet as I galloped down the main stairwell and rushed through the living room. The layout was disorienting. Lon and I had only been in this room a few moments before Merrimoth went apeshit earlier and chased us upstairs. I finally spotted a pair of glass doors. My fingers shook as they flipped a dead bolt and flung the doors open.

A small set of stairs led to the beach. Trudging over wet sand, I slipped the bulky Lupara inside my jacket and scoured the shoreline. Lon’s golden halo hummed in the darkness. He was still hanging in the sky over the foaming water, though he’d descended a bit. If he dropped a few more feet, I could reach him . . . if he weren’t suspended a few yards out over the ocean.

Minutes ago, the crashing tide would’ve pounded me to a pulp against the rocks here, but now the water was eerily still, silver fog clinging to the quiet surface. I plodded into the winter-chilled water. My steps left dark holes in the foamy surf. Utterly surreal. I marveled at the way the splashes around my watery footprints hung in midair, how they deepened as I waded knee-deep. Farther away, somewhere beyond Merrimoth’s house, I could hear the surf pounding: my moon magick apparently had limits.

Lon was above me now, his black peacoat billowing at his sides like the wings of a fallen angel. I focused on climbing the rocks to reach him, a task more difficult than I initially thought. They were slimy with seaweed, rough with broken mussel shells, and it didn’t help that shivers racked my body. When I got to a point where I could stand without falling, I stretched and nabbed Lon’s ankle, then tugged. He moved a few inches. Holy Whore—it was like pulling a box of bricks out of the sky. I tugged harder and, with a series of groans, dragged him through the air, retracing my steps to shore.

My lungs felt close to bursting and I was seriously dizzy from the amount of Heka I was using. But I knew that once I let go of the moon magick, Merrimoth would inflict some sort of insane Narnian winter across the beach. Maybe even turn us into frozen statues. Or set us on fire. I shoved Lon closer to the ground, leaning across his back, then finally sitting on him when that didn’t work.

Screw David Merrimoth and screw Dare for calling me up in the middle of the night to bind him. As I considered whether I had the strength to wrangle Lon up the driveway and into the car so we could just get out of there, a figure materialized in the shadows beneath the stilted house.

It was a woman, possibly fifty years old, long and lean. She was wearing odd clothing—a toga-like gray dress. Silver fog clung to her bare ankles. Her dark hair was pinned up and dusted with gray at the crown. She had intelligent eyes, cheekbones that could cut diamond, and a full, sensual mouth. French, through and through. She crossed her elegant arms with an air of superiority and smiled at me like she’d just won the lottery.

When I realized who she was, I screamed bloody murder.

Complete shock severed my connection to the moon magick, and the woman disappeared in a flash. Newly reanimated, Lon faceplanted into the sand just as the ocean roared back to life, echoing Merrimoth’s angry shouting somewhere above us.