Chapter 22
Periwinkle
Iburst out of the trailer with a blink through the shadows. Jonah’s right behind me, throwing open the door I skipped beneath.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my heart in my throat. Has Viscera made another attack already?
One of Rollick’s assistants is standing at the edge of our pretend movie set, wringing her hands in the growing dimness of the falling evening. As my other men materialize nearby and the six shadowbloods lope over to join us, she gulps for air.
“The rift. It’s spewing out that shadowy substance again, all over the factory yard.”
My pulse stutters. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than Viscera lashing out.
At least with her, we have some idea what’s driving her and what she’ll do. The bizarre rift vomit is still a total mystery.
Jonah takes charge with the confident air that served him so well when he was a teacher. “Let’s get over there and see what we can do to mitigate the damage. Anyone who can carry silver and iron, there are chains in the storage trailer. Grab them fast and get in the vans!”
He hustles off to follow his own orders with the shadowbloods darting alongside him. I dive into the nearest van and reform my physical body on the bench.
Raze, Hail, and Mirage follow me. Another of Rollick’s assistants leaps into the driver’s seat.
As the assistant starts the engine, his voice wobbles. “I don’t know what’s going on with the rifts. We got a report that the one up in Canada did the same thing a couple of days ago—just upchucked a mass of shadow material over about an acre of forest.”
I shiver. “Did anyone get hurt?”
He shakes his head and yanks at the steering wheel to guide us toward the road.
“No one was around except the shadowkind keeping an eye on it. The other odd rifts are all pretty far away from humans. But it warped the bark on the trees and frightened the animals. It doesn’t make sense.
I’ve never seen rifts act like this—any of it.
And we still haven’t been able to get at the rifts from the shadow-realm side. ”
His words tie my stomach into a knot. I’ve never seen anything like this either, but I’m relatively young as shadowkind go. A lot of Rollick’s people have been working with him for centuries.
This is a brand-new flavor of strangeness. Which means no one has any idea how to deal with it, not really.
We just have to do our best to whip it into something palatable.
The van’s headlights streak through the thickening darkness. Dusk fell quickly while I was talking—and doing other things—with Jonah.
Do the other men I marked realize how close I was getting with the sorcerer? I can’t imagine my joy was all that subdued.
None of them mention anything. Raze slides his arm around me to tuck me close with his usual protective fierceness, and Mirage flicks out his ears with a mischievous twitching when he catches me looking at him, maybe in an attempt to make me smile.
It works.
Hail peers out the window morosely as if the rest of us aren’t here at all. At least the impressions I’m picking up from him don’t feel outright upset, only tense and uneasy.
Another van rumbles behind us. We careen toward the city together and grind to a halt just outside the factory’s fence.
No vehicles remain in the adjoining parking lot. A tiny waft of relief runs through my body.
The workers must have gone home for the night. There isn’t anyone in the building who could be hurt by the rift.
In this building, at least. Last time, the shadowy deluge spilled all the way past the brick walls.
The current flood is lurching out of the rift’s mouth as if it’s vomiting pure darkness.
The filmy sludge courses across the yard and into the factory building.
The bricks that had already deteriorated with the first onslaught are crumbling further, little chunks disintegrating into the flow of shadows.
If that mess does swallow any mortal beings for long… I hate to think what will happen to them.
Riva looks at the shadowy muck with a shudder. “Last time it just… stopped and pulled back into the rift. What are the chances that’ll happen again?”
Jonah has hopped out of the other van too. “I don’t think we should count on our problems being solved for us.”
Movement in the deluge catches my eye. My skin crawls as if I’ve been splattered with the ephemeral goop. “It’s not acting exactly the same way. It’s… bulging and dipping.”
As I make the observation, the whole flood heaves more. Its upper surface undulates like a lake in an increasingly forceful storm. The sort-of waves smack into the factory wall, passing through the solid surface but dragging more crumbs out of the brick and mortar at the same time.
Hail grimaces. “That doesn’t look good. I don’t think we can hold back an entire ocean of shadow.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Jonah mutters, and gestures to Riva and Zian. “Come on, quickly. We’ll get out the silver-and-iron chains and see if they have any effect.”
We didn’t have those metals on hand when the rift took us by surprise last time. As Jonah and the shadowbloods haul the sacks of noxious metals out of the back of their van, I head around the building to check how far the flood extends.
Along the side wall, some of the dark substance sloshes out to puddle in on the concrete walkway, which dents beneath the unnerving substance. Little cracks open up in the cement.
As I dodge the puddles in a manic game of hopscotch, Mirage bounds after me. “Back and forth, back and forth. Rock-a-bye shadows. No one’s going to sleep here.”
It takes a second for me to realize he’s talking about more than our jumping when he says, “Back and forth.” The puddles contract into the walls, giving me a jolt of hope that the rift is already sucking the deluge back in, but then they dribble out again.
They’re acting like waves—up and down, in and out.
Why is the shadowy substance so volatile today? Last time, as far as I remember, it just flowed straight out.
Has the rift caught a more exotic disease than indigestion, with some crazy new version of vomit?
I don’t suppose chucking a few buckets of antacid down its gullet would cure the problem.
Raze frowns and hurries onward. “This doesn’t seem like a good development.”
At the front of the building, the dark flood has spread as far as the road beyond—shallower but still knee-deep, like a drift of snow in the opposite color.
A couple of cars have jarred to a halt on either side. One driver has gotten out to stare; another peers from the side window with an incredulous expression.
I wave my arms at them, reaching for an appropriate human-ish explanation. “Get away! The terrorist gangsters made a toxic spill!”
They remain frozen like deer in headlights.
Do I need to make the situation sound even more ominous? My mind scrambles. “It was terrorist gangsters from space!”
If anything, the humans only look more stunned. Not the effect I was going for.
With a roll of his eyes, Hail steps in.
“This stuff will damage your cars,” he says, without even sounding all that concerned, but the news spurs the humans into action. They throw their vehicles into reverse and zoom away.
The edge of the still-expanding pool spasms, and a separate body pops out—a creature about the size of a pigeon, though it has four wings instead of two and four scaly legs to coordinate. As its head jerks around, a waft of fear hits me.
I scoot closer. “Hey, there. Everything’s all right.”
I mean, other than the fact that it’s at the edge of a strange shadowy spew, it might morph into an even more awkward shape at any moment, and if it changes shape enough, it could completely disintegrate. But I’d like my words to be true.
And nothing about this situation will get better if the creature freaks out.
Raze makes a rough sound. “There are more.”
With a couple of pops like bubbles in simmering sauce, a second creature and then a third spill out of the deluge.
The new ones aren’t much bigger than the first, none of them higher beings, but my nerves jitter all the same. “We’ve never seen more than one come out at once, have we?”
Mirage shakes his head. “The more the merrier?” he says, but he can’t quite make the question sound hopeful.
As we circle the three creatures, which all look more dazed than anything else, Zian comes jogging over. “The metals aren’t having any effect on the stuff from the rift, but the flow seems to be slowing down. Oh, hell, what are those?”
“New shadowkind creatures that tumbled out with the flood.” I crouch down so I’m closer to their level. The stream of sensations I’m picking up from each twitches and quivers, and I tense up. “I think they’re going to morph already. I’ll try to keep them calm.”
“Peri,” Raze says in a worried tone. He positions himself at my flank, ready to leap in should he need to.
Zian takes in the scene and then rushes off. “Maybe the chains will help with them.”
I focus on the three beings, summoning all the peace and happiness I can inside me.
The way I felt when Jonah admitted he wants to be with me.
The comfort of Raze watching over me. The delight of Mirage’s jokes, keeping our spirits up even when it’s hard.
Hail’s cool nonchalance that nonetheless ensured the humans got out of harm’s way.
Like I did before, I push the sense of contentment out of me toward the creatures.
I’ve never attempted this with more than one being at the same time. I’ve barely experimented with what I’m capable of at all.
But if we can’t settle them down… I don’t know what we’ll have to do to them.
Sparks of anger and flares of frustration hit me with a caustic tang. I keep aiming my calming emotions at them, not shoving too hard, simply sending out a steady glow of warmth.
The creatures stumble and spasm—and two of them collide into each other.
One second, there’s the quadruple-winged pigeon and a being with scruffy fur and three oversized paws like a lopsided bunny.
The next, there’s just one beast—wings protruding on one side, fat paws groping at the asphalt on the other, two heads merged at the cheeks, mouths opening in a joint squawk-squeal.
I jerk backward in surprise. As the merged creature squirms, it morphs further: one paw lengthening, one wing taking on a ridge of spines.
But it can’t seem to propel itself in any direction with its mishmashed limbs. And…
Pain washes through me with a sharp edge of panic that turns the mixture as bitter as raw mustard. I flinch.
“It hurts. Something about the way the bodies combined—it isn’t right. So much of them is in pain.”
Mirage shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Can we pull them apart?”
“I don’t think so. They look—and feel—like they’re totally fused. I don’t know how that happened.” My own horror merges with the anguish still streaming into me.
It doesn’t matter if Zian brings metals to restrain the combined creatures. They’ll still be in agony.
My own distress must be reverberating into my men. Raze eases past me. With a blink, he erases the contacts that cover his stark black eyes. “I’ll put it—them—out of their misery. They shouldn’t have to live like that.”
Hail grunts. I half expect him to argue, but instead he strides in front of Raze, holding out his arm. “I can do it. A sudden freeze will be totally painless.”
The basilisk shifter stares at the winter fae, but he backs up to give Hail room.
Hail’s discomfort mingles with my own. I swallow hard. “Hail, you don’t have to—”
“Someone has to,” he interrupts. “I can do it best. So it should be me.”
With a soft crackle in the air, a sheen of frost whips over the merged creature. The pain emanating from it vanishes.
It rocks over on its side, frozen solid.
I offer Hail a strained smile. “It isn’t feeling anything anymore.”
He ducks his head. “Good. As long as they don’t all start mashing together like that.”
We look up at the sound of pounding feet. During our distraction, the flood contracted all the way back into the building. The rift must be collecting it again.
Zian rejoins us, his face flushed. “That rogue higher shadowkind—she’s just popped up on the other side of town.”