The Shadow King (3 page)

“So, Pi tells me you’ve begun packing your bag for your trek into the Dark,” said Poppy. The fireplace crackled merrily beside them. It was a high-end model that afforded no heat when the owners didn’t want it to, which was fortunate with the heat wave they were experiencing. Instead, the air conditioners overhead hummed at the same time, and the fireplaces burned for ambience alone.

“I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t come with me,” Violet told her. “Remember what Lalura said.”

Poppy shrugged. “I know what she said. I’m not deaf. But I
am
your best friend, and frankly, I wouldn’t be much of one if I let you venture into the Dark alone. What have you learned in all your research?” She stared at Violet over the steaming lip of her paper coffee cup.

Violet looked around the shop, debating how much to tell her friend. University classes would begin in a week, Fall was settling in, and the few people in the coffee shop were students back in town from summer breaks. At last, she said, “Well, you already know what shadows are.”

“Not to be confused with shades.”

“Right,” Vi nodded, taking a quick sip of her own coffee. “Shades live in the Twixt between the Seelie and Unseelie Realms, and they’re bad news. Shadows, on the other hand, are just that – the shadows of mortals. And they live in the Shadow Realm.”

“You mean when they’re not busy living in
our
realm.”

“Right,” Vi said again. “During the day, or when a mortal is awake, the shadow is attached to them in a kind of symbiotic relationship. But when the mortal’s asleep, the shadow leaves to live its other life in the Shadow Realm.”

Poppy looked down at the floor, and Violet knew she was checking out the blotch of darkness attached to the soles of her shoes. “I wonder how wild my shadow is at night.” Then she looked up and cocked her head to one side. “What do you suppose it is exactly that shadows do when they’re ‘living’ in the Shadow Realm?”

“According to the things I’ve read, they actually build lives for themselves. I mean, they have houses, neighborhoods, towns, cities, businesses. In the Shadow Realm, they have substance, like you and me.”

“So they just look like people.”

Vi nodded.

“So my shadow could be married with little shadow babies and be the president of the shadow PTA.”

Violet smiled. “Your shadow is more likely in shadow jail.”

Poppy laughed and sipped her coffee. Vi continued with her explanation. “Anyway, they live these lives… until and unless they mistakenly venture out of the Shadow Realm.” Some shadows decided to wander, and when they did, they reverted to their shadowy selves, beings of pure darkness with neither dimension nor characteristic.

Some of these wayward shadows wound up in the Dark. And there, they got lost. And when they got lost, they
changed
.

“Some wind up in the Dark,” Violet said, voicing her thoughts. “And the Dark is like a terrible labyrinth to them. They can’t find their way back out again.”

“So they can’t reunite with their mortal before the mortal wakes up?”

Violet nodded. “When that happens, it’s like a domino effect of badness. First, the mortal can’t exist without some kind of shadow, so a new one forms. But the second one isn’t anything like the first. It’s dead and dull, and lifeless, and it doesn’t support the mortal the way its original shadow did.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

Violet considered how to explain it. “Well, like I said, the relationship between a person and her shadow is symbiotic. The shadow gives her dimension and mental stability. In turn, the mortal gives the shadow experience and knowledge. The shadow learns everything its mortal does, tastes everything, hears everything, sees everything, and so forth. Without the mortal body to give them life experiences, they have nothing.”

“So what happens when the shadow doesn’t come back in time?”

“A new shadow forms, but it’s called a
Sliver
because that’s just what it is – a sliver of darkness that isn’t alive the way the shadow was. It’s just there to fill the gap.”

“What happens to the mortal?” Poppy asked. Her color had paled a bit, no doubt because she probably already had a good idea of what a mortal without its shadow would be like. She was intuitive that way.

“The mortal loses its dimension. Many mortals without their shadows become ill, their immune systems falter, they can become depressed, and sometimes they just…
die
. Those people without their original shadows are technically referred to as
Sinumbras
. But no one uses that term any more. Now they’re just called the
Abandoned
.”

There was a pause of silence while Poppy digested this. They drank a bit, and finally Poppy asked, “What happens to the lost shadow?”

“It depends. If they’re unlucky, they get lost in the Dark, fail to reunite with their mortal, and become Pan Shadows – shadows that search endlessly throughout time for some mortal that will make them feel as complete as their own mortal once did. Pan Shadows are tragic spirits, and desperate.”

Poppy was clearly troubled by this. She went a while before drinking any more of her coffee. “And… if they’re lucky?”

“Well, if they’re really lucky, the Nimbus finds them before their mortal forms a sliver and returns them to their mortal in time to reunite. And all is well.”

“What is a Nimbus?”

“
The
Nimbus is a group of hunters from the Shadow Realm. They go out every single night and hunt down lost shadows in the hopes of reuniting them with their mortals on time. The strongest among them even venture into the Dark to do so.”

Poppy’s eyes grew shiny. “So these guys are pretty bad ass, huh?”

Violet smiled. “They are, actually. One of the books I read that mentioned them even had a picture in it. Their leader is a mystery. No one knows who he is. He’s always either wearing a black hooded cloak or he’s transformed into some kind of shadowy beast.” She felt her heart rate quicken as she imagined a handful of dark riders outlined by the moon, their leader a handsome stranger swathed in shadow. There was little she loved more than a good guy who was disguised as a “bad guy.”

“You know,” Poppy said with a grin, “your eyes are glazing over with lust.”

“No, my eyes are glazing over because I’m high on caffeine.”

Poppy laughed, and Violet ordered another cup.

Chapter Three

The Seattle night smelled a little like mold and a lot like approaching cold. The heat wave was officially over, and the temps had dropped a full twenty degrees in the course of a few hours.

It also smelled a little like
magic
, but Violet doubted too many others would catch that particular scent. She was good at catching whiffs of things in the air. She was like Gus from
Psych
, with a “super sniffer.”

She also doubted anyone would recognize what they smelled as magic. She wondered, at first, whether the magic she could taste in the air was a part of the approaching cold, but as she infiltrated the Seattle Underground and made her way beneath the streets of the city, the smell of magic grew stronger.

I’m in the right place then,
she thought. The magic had nothing to do with the cold, and everything to do with the portal to the Shadow Realm.

Three months of preparing had brought her to this night. She wasn’t ready to start on this “adventure” just yet, but she needed to see whether or not what she had deciphered was correct. One of the more ancient texts on the Shadow Realm had been the only source she’d located on portals that could take someone to that dark place. The texts had been penned by no other than Wolfram Lovelace, and she wasn’t surprised. It would take someone who’d been that dark and lived that long ago to understand something this hidden.

But he’d written in his own code, and what he’d said on the matter was hard to understand and confusing to translate. Either the portal to the Shadow Realm was here, beneath the streets, in the 19
th
century first-level town of Seattle, or it was located in a Vietnamese vegan restaurant.

Violet pulled out her cell phone and pretended to thumb a few links on the screen as she surreptitiously looked around from beneath the protection of her hood. She was alone; the street was deserted but for a homeless woman at the far end of Pioneer Square who was having a heated argument with the totem pole.

Violet tucked her phone back into her pocket and descended the damp, moldy steps to the wrought iron gate that separated the aboveground from the underground. It was the same door the “Seattle Underground” tour guide had taken Vi’s tour group through earlier that day, when she’d attended one just to scope it out a bit. The scent of magic had been missing, no doubt because the more humans there were in a location, the more diluted its magic became. The nervous tourist chatter accompanying them earlier was of course gone, and it was almost as if the noise had been replaced by mist.
Something
always came in to occupy the space where things once were.

Violet touched the gate’s lock with her index finger, which tingled uncomfortably at her contact. There was a lot of iron in it. The black metal was enveloped in a warm light before the lock clicked open. The chain slid noisily away. Vi chanced a glance over her shoulder, nervous someone might have heard. But the stairs rose up to the street level behind her, shielding her from anyone who would have seen her from above.

When the gate in front of her automatically began to swing inward, Violet’s head whipped back around. She held her breath as it creaked open until it clanged against the bricks behind it and stopped. The mist around her seemed to coil and build; then it spread its fingers into the corridor before her. Up ahead, shadows pulled long across the pathway, concealing the old concrete and brickwork. But Violet had been there earlier that day and had a vague recollection of how the hall twisted and turned.

She entered and re-worked the lock by hand, fastening it once more. She felt as if she were fighting against the iron in the steel the lock was made of, like forcing something rusted, or trying to run underwater, but she’d been saving up her strength, the ring pulsed protectively on her finger, and as always, she wanted to refrain from using magic in the mortal realm unless it was necessary.

Once the gate was locked safely locked behind her, she turned to face the darkness ahead. At once, she was alone and cut off from civilization in the Seattle Underground. She moved further down the hall, and when she was far enough away from the gate for her light to be detected, she pulled her phone back out and flicked on the flashlight app. Any fae could have used a light spell for something so simple, but again, she was trying not to use her magic just yet, and what was the point of wasting magical strength when you could use technology instead? To her, science was a wonderful kind of magic itself, anyway.

Violet traced the worn path around a few corners, following the feel of magic in the air as it grew stronger. Within a minute or so, she reached a long hall with a floor that had once obviously been the interior of a store. At the end of the long hall, attached to what had been the side of a building, was a hand-painted sign that read, “111 Yesler.” She couldn’t recall from the tour whether this was the name of a street or a shop, but she did remember that Yesler was one of the names of the founding fathers of Seattle. Henry Yesler, she recalled. He built the steam-powered sawmill.

Violet moved down the hall, but as she moved, her footsteps slowed. The taint of magic was growing stronger, but there was something different about it here. The sign glowed white in the darkness up ahead, as if the paint of its letters was a beacon in a strange black. The shadows seemed to be shifting.

She stopped when the inkiness coiled and moved. It wasn’t natural.

Something was wrong. Was it the portal? Was it near?

Was this how dangerous her trek into the Shadow Realm was going to be? Was this what it would feel like? She hadn’t even started, and already, it was distinctly uncomfortable.

The air grew heavy with something like dark power, and when she inhaled, she almost felt she was pulling it into her lungs. It choked her a little; sweat broke out along her brow. She turned in a quick circle, flashing her light into the darkness.

It recoiled, shying from the beam, and dread filled Violet’s body.

A heartbeat after she realized what was happening, the phone was knocked violently from her hand. She heard it hit the ground, probably shattering the screen. The impact numbed her fingers and wrist, and plunged the underground into pure darkness. She backpedalled, but was allowed a mere two steps before her progress was halted by the presence of something tall and hard at her back.

She spun, but could see nothing there, and then she heard a scratching behind her; she spun once more. She was surrounded by shadows. She froze, her blood freezing right along with her. The silence stretched, and the black around her grew impossible dimensions. There was everything and anything in that darkness.

“
She’s… a Tuath
…” something hissed, the voice wrapping around her like the sound of snakes slithering.