Dark Siren (28 page)

Had it been human, it would have been the least threatening thing Alice had ever seen. But it wasn’t human, not anymore. And as its wrinkled face split into a disgusting, intelligent grin, she knew it wasn’t even a simple ghost anymore. Isaac’s magic had failed and Alice’s singing wasn’t working.

They wouldn’t be able to close the portal. The old man was the
first
dead thing to bleed into the world of the living, but she knew, many more would come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Shadow Unleashed

Alice backed away from the mirror one step at a time, watching the world’s most terrifying prison break unfold before her very eyes. Everything had gone eerily quiet—deathly quiet—like the calm before the storm. She could see the shapes writhing and approaching, becoming real and physical. All she could do was watch and try not to fly into a panic.

The poltergeist advanced a step, and then began to walk in a circle around Alice and Isaac, who were backing away. An instant later, three screaming shadows came howling out of the darkness, wailing their banshee call as if to wake the night. Glass cabinets shattered at the sound, and the room seemed to pulse between light and darkness as their wild, swooping flight paths crossed in front of the windows and lights.

Behind them came the hulking form of a tall man wearing a gas mask around his face. It had to crouch in order to fit through the frame. As it came through, Alice heard the horrible sound of its ragged, almost mechanical breathing. She wondered how often Emily had heard that sound, and she hoped it wasn’t often. It was sure to evoke nightmares.

For a moment she thought it was over, thought the other creatures she could sense lurking beyond the threshold wouldn’t come, but they did. The way to this world was clear, and nothing would stop them from pushing their way through the portal. Alice, however, didn’t stay put to see this happen.

The world around her seemed to slow, affording her a kind of predatory clarity. She saw Isaac, saw his bangle held high, and could see him screaming in the direction of the poltergeist—the old man. Alice couldn’t hear his words over the sound of her own pulsing heart, but they had a kind of weight to them that she could
feel
inside her chest with every consonant he spoke. There was a great compression of air, and then a pulse of invisible energy shot out of Isaac’s right palm, striking the old man and sending him sprawling to the floor.

Alice steeled her nerves and pulled her camera up. Without looking, and without changing the toggle to REF, she forced as much of her own strange energy into the little black machine as she could and pulled the trigger in the general direction of the gas mask man. The camera spat out a bright blue flash which seemed to disorient the towering man, allowing Isaac a single second to strike the thing down with magic.

Immediately, Alice realized that the camera hadn’t stolen the gas mask man’s essence as it had before. It was still here, still whole, but it had been disoriented. The gasmask man was too strong for Trapper to capture it, but Isaac’s relentless attacks brought it to its knees. The thing let out a horrible, garbled, booming cry, a sound made even more grotesque by the breathing apparatus he was wearing over his mouth. He started scratching at his face, trying to rip the mask off. It almost looked—and smelled—as if his face was
cooking
like a steak on a pan inside the mask.

One more and he’s toast,
she thought as she pulled the Polaroid out of the camera slot, tossed it to the ground, and aimed the camera. The gas mask man put a hand out against Alice, not to bat the camera away, but to plead. A satisfyingly warm rush of energy filled her as the flash struck the gas mask man and made him explode into a cloud of dust.

A huge force like a bowling ball struck Alice in the small of her back. Her bones gave a loud, sickening crack as she screamed, and then collapsed with her palms spread out on the floor. Stars were dancing in front of her eyes. She didn’t feel the pain until she tried to move and a hot, bright, crippling sensation shot through her. Her brain was sending the right commands to move, but her body did not, and could not, respond. What the fuck had hit her?

Her mind conjured an image of a sickly looking old man charging at a wooden support beam with enough force to cause the ceiling to quake. It had been the poltergeist, she was sure. But then another thought struck her.
My camera
.
Where is it?
It was gone. She had pulled it off of her neck to attack the gas mask man and had dropped it when she was hit. Her shoes were gone, too. The heels she was wearing weren’t the kind with straps around the ankles.

The worst of it, though, was that Alice thought she couldn’t move. Forget the camera and her shoes; Alice’s back was broken.

The song came suddenly—a haunting melody as old as time itself, as beautiful as the clearest, star-filled night, and as terrible as the crushing depths of the ocean. It was a song she had once thought was a hallucination. One she had heard many times before, but had forgotten all about until tonight when she harmonized with it in order to open the mirror portal. A dark siren calling from across a bleak, quiet ocean covered in a writhing fog.

Nyx’s song.

The song of the night.

It filled Alice’s head and made everything else—Isaac, Emily, Nate—seem distant and insignificant, as if she were on a ship sailing away from them into something bigger and better. Something more real than they had ever been.

She wanted to speak, to move, to act. She wanted to do something,
anything
, but her body wasn’t hers anymore. It was numb. A shell soon to be discarded and left to rot, if she was lucky. If she was unlucky, Nyx would keep her alive only to inflict further pain and suffering on her later, to teach Alice a lesson for taking things that weren’t hers. If Alice could just close her eyes, she may be able to enjoy a moment of rest before an eternity of pain began.

And she did rest, if only for a second, until her body filled with warmth—a kind of inner warmth which came from inside her own self as much as it did from the soul of the little child living inside of her. The pain didn’t go away, but it dulled, and Alice’s eyes flew open. Gritting her teeth, she planted one hand on the floor, then another, and pushed her torso up off the ground. Her bones resisted, screaming out, but Alice pushed through the pain and pulled a knee up to her chest, using it to gain a little leverage.

A second knee came up, and a moment later she was standing. Her spine seemed to crack in several places as she stood, and more stars danced before her eyes. Then she was moving, shuffling at first, then walking, and then running. Alice was aware of Isaac’s voice begging her to stay still, but she ran anyway, racing across the room to grab the sword embedded in the wall.

When she reached the wall, she grabbed the black hilt and yanked it hard. The wall may have looked like marble, but it was fake, so the sword came loose with a single try.

Isaac called to Alice. When she turned around, she saw he was standing with his right arm raised over his head, his hair was being tugged by a phantom wind, and his magic bangle was glowing bright blue and pulsing powerfully. She noticed he was encased in some kind of shimmering, translucent bubble. One of the shadows came swooping down to attack, but the bubble flashed bright blue and the flying shadow retreated, shrieking as though burned.

Alice could see other figures standing in the room now, standing quiet and still like the audience at a movie theater watching a scene as it unfolds on the big screen. The
moviegoers
didn’t interfere, didn’t attack Isaac or Alice, didn’t seem to move at all. The crowd remained still except one moving figure. It was a woman, slender, delicate, and wreathed in an aura of living shadow. She was weaving in and out of the crowd, touching one on the shoulder, caressing another on the cheek, and she was humming. It was Nyx, but Alice had the impression that she wasn’t entirely
there.
Not like the rest of the
things in this room were
here
, at any rate.

“The mirror,” Isaac said, screaming over the howling of the wraiths circling above, “It’s their link! Smash it!”

The sword in Alice’s hand seemed to vibrate, and when she looked at the blade she noticed it had lost its silver sheen and had become as black as night.
Because Nyx touched it,
she thought. When she looked up, Nyx was standing in front of her, a dark cloud of living shadow in the shape of a woman. Her eyes, bright as blue embers, shone even brighter now.

I have you now
, they said, but Alice steadied her grip on the sword, took three steps, and lunged, bringing the blade up in a cutting, diagonal arc. When the mass of shadow was struck by the sword, it broke apart and dispersed into a hundred shrieking pieces of solid darkness. Using the sword’s momentum, Alice started to run, gliding over wet floors covered in pieces of glass from broken displays, and hit the back of the mirror with her shoulder.

Striking it was like smashing against a stone wall, and Alice groaned from the explosion of pain in her shoulder, but the mirror wobbled and began to tip. The room erupted into a deafening roar of wails and screams. Alice saw the poltergeist rushing up to her, giving her only a second to react. Remembering the strength it possessed, she waited until it got close and then threw herself away from the mirror as it came barreling toward her.

The mirror didn’t just topple when the poltergeist smashed it, it sailed half way across the room, struck a marble column, and shattered into tiny pieces. The old man opened his black hole of a mouth and moaned, swiped around to hit Alice. Alice ducked, rolled, and dashed toward the protective circle of shimmering light Isaac had created, sliding the last couple of feet like a baseball player trying to make it to home plate. The poltergeist, who had given chase, made contact with the protective shield, causing the bubble to shimmer and flash vibrantly at the moment of contact. The old man fell back wailing and moaning, the gray flesh of its hand burnt and seared.

Another scream filled the room now, this one powerful enough to cause a cascading explosion of windowpanes. Alice had no choice but to cover her ears, and even then she could hear the scream—could feel it in her nerve endings. When Alice looked up, more than half of the shadow people who had been standing in the room were already gone. The others were scrambling to flee.

The old man with the burned flesh considered the shield, growled through a mouth of crooked, mostly missing, teeth, and made a mad dash for one of the windows. It leapt high, and as it jumped its body transformed into a cloud of shadow which was able to slip through the bars as if they hadn’t been there. Behind it, the three flying shadow wraiths followed, howling into the night. Nyx, like the rest of her children, was nowhere to be seen.

In the silence following the destruction of the mirror, only Alice’s breathing could be heard. She let her head rest on the wet floor and took deep breaths to steady herself.
They’re gone
, she thought to herself,
we sent them back.
But this wasn’t an entirely comforting thought because they hadn’t sent
all
of them back, only some of them. The poltergeist had gotten away, as had the three screeching shadows, and several other unknowable entities. The big question, though, was Nyx.

Where was she?

“Are you alright?” Isaac finally asked.

“Fine,” Alice said, though her back, arms, and sides still throbbed. She felt like she had been tackled by a three hundred pound NFL Quarterback, and then piled on by the rest of the team. “Do you know where they went?”

“I don’t, but I’ll try my best to track them down. You were right to destroy the mirror after all… I felt a great deal of them disappear when the mirror collapsed.”

“A great deal isn’t the same as all of them.”

Alice scanned the room. The exhibit was a wet, damaged mess and Isaac’s magic bubble had disappeared. Several of the marble busts had been knocked over and had cracked apart. Chunks of white marble were strewn across the floor along with shattered glass and bits of old pottery. The mirror—Hermes’ Mirror—lay face down on top of a bed of shattered pieces of reflective glass. And beneath the large model of the Greek amphitheater was Alice’s camera; miraculously, both the display and the camera were still intact.

Tough little thing,
she thought, and she smiled.

Alice approached, bent over to pick her camera up, and smiled again. “There you are,” she said, but when she straightened her aching back she saw someone staring at her from across the display.

“My mirror,” Helena said.

Alice frowned. “Your mirror? Did you… did you just
watch
all this?”

“You destroyed my mirror…”

“Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Maybe it was the pain Alice was in now, but she didn’t have time for this woman’s attitude.

Helena came around the display, walking slowly, clutching her soaked clothes and crying. Alice followed her as she walked up to the broken mirror and knelt beside it. There was no way Isaac would be able to restore this thing even if he wanted to. This thing was well and truly gone, and good riddance, too. One less piece of Nyx to contend with.