“As I’ll ever be, I guess. I don’t know what to expect.”
“This…won’t be pleasant. Shadow walking is a fairly rare ability. I can take you with me, but your body really isn’t meant to do what it’s about to do. It’s going to be rough on your system.”
Marley frowned. “Rough how?”
“I’m not sure exactly. I’ve never taken a human—part or otherwise—into shadow before.”
She didn’t ask if it was safe. They had no choice. “Let’s do it.”
Ian stepped into her, wrapping strong arms around her. “Whatever happens, don’t let go.”
Marley nodded, linking her arms around his waist.
Then the bottom fell out of her world.
She was blind, lost in darkness and a screaming silence as her brain and stomach pitched with vertigo. She was a human pinball ricocheting off forces unseen, first one way, then another. She pressed her face into Ian’s chest and clung to him, her only anchor in the chaos. He hadn’t lied about the cold. The chill soaked into her bones, and ice crystals formed on her lashes. The fingers she had linked behind his back were going numb.
Whatever happens, don’t let go. His words echoed through her mind, and she struggled to tighten her grip as her feet whipped away from him, their bodies spun with some new centrifugal force. Ian’s arms slid up hers, gripping her shoulders. Marley’s fingers began to slip, the muscles too cramped with cold to tighten further. She tried to cry out, but her voice made no sound as one hand pulled free of the other. The cold rushed in, flooding the space between their bodies.
Marley was a rag doll at the mercy of unseen currents. Ian’s hand shot out, clamping around her wrist in a bruising grip. But the ice crystals had spread along her limbs, down her hands, and his fingers lost purchase.
Unable to scream or even breathe, she was lost to the tumbling darkness.
Chapter 10
Ian fought the current of darkness, though every instinct shrieked in protest. He threw himself out of shadow and braced to roll. It was like jumping from a bullet train, his body full of too much momentum. His surroundings blurred as he slammed into the ground, rolled, and came to a stop with a raucous metallic crash. Whatever he hit slid a foot and wobbled before settling again with a thump. Seconds passed with agonizing slowness as his body filled back out to three-dimensional space. Even before his lungs had properly re-inflated, he shoved the pain aside and opened his senses wide, scanning. There was no sign of Marley.
She’d trusted him to protect her and he’d lost her, let her slip from his hands when they hit an unexpected patch of turbulence. He had no idea how much farther he’d made it before dropping out of the stream himself. She could be miles away from here. He didn’t even know where the hell here was.
Ian staggered to his feet, initially unable to make sense of the acres of derelict cars, some stacked in towers like an automotive Stonehenge. The sun, a molten red ball on the horizon, cast long shadows in the aisles between them. He spied a crane sitting like a silent sentinel a hundred yards away.
A salvage yard.
Ian forced himself to calm, to slow his breathing and think. There was no easy way to back track. She wasn’t fully Mirus, so she had no race specific signature he could detect, even if he’d known what her father was. But she was the last person he’d fed upon. If she wasn’t too far out of range, he could track her that way. Closing his eyes, Ian exhaled, shoving his panic aside to focus on abilities he’d spent the better part of his life ignoring. There. A faint tug beneath his skin. An echo in his blood. He could still feel her.
Homing in on Marley’s signal, Ian dematerialized due east. He didn’t have to go far. Reforming in the lea of a rambling, ramshackle barn, he slipped inside. People filled the interior. Dozens of them, all sparking with greed, excitement and varying shades of aggression. The taste of all that emotion coated the back of his throat, mingling with scents of dirt, stale manure, and unwashed bodies. On the periphery, men lingered around wire cages housing roosters, taking bets, talking the merits of this bird or that, but the bulk gathered in groups around a central ring. Some held money or fliers in their fists.
Cock fighting, Ian thought with disgust as he moved, unnoticed, through the crowd. Something had stopped the fight in progress. A knot of people were arguing.
“We can’t call an ambulance. None of us are supposed to be here!”
“Somebody can drive her into town.”
“And tell them what exactly? This strange woman fell through the roof and looks like she got dumped out of a deep freeze?”
Ian’s blood ran cold. His gaze shot up to the hole in the roof, where he could just make out the deepening shades of twilight. At least twenty feet. Christ, a fall like that could break her. He shoved forward, elbowing the men out of the way.
“We can’t just do nothing. Look at her!”
A black shape hunched over a body in the center. A shape that no one but Ian could see because it didn’t belong outside the shadow plane. A shade. Suddenly the turbulence of the jump made sense. The thing had known Marley didn’t belong and used her to hitch a ride into this realm. And it was latched onto the back of her neck, feeding.
His instincts roared to life. With no thought to subtlety or finesse, Ian grabbed hold of every mind in the place. Drawing on the worst fears of the crowd, he pushed in a show of sheer, brute power. Doors splintered around them, holes were blown in the barn walls as more than a dozen armored men with guns rushed into the space.
“Police! Put your hands in the air!”
Pandemonium erupted. People began to run and shout, scrambling for the exits.
I’ll give you something to feed on, you bastard. As Ian fought his way through the panicked mob, he drew out the frenzy, punched it up until the crowd of men were all but rioting to escape. And still the shade didn’t let go of Marley.