Chapter 4
Periwinkle
My new snake-puppy sounds the alarm first. We’re just waving another crowd of humans off on their journey out of the city when it lets out a snort and squirms against my shoulders where it’s currently perched.
When I glance over, it winds down my arm to slurp its tongue across my hand. A wisp of essence trickles up from my skin.
In an instant, Raze is barging over. “If that thing is hurting you—”
The shadowkind creature—which I’ve found myself calling Falkor in my head after this human movie I caught a snippet of once, though that Falkor was a lot bigger and also better at conversation—is staring at me with its plaintive eyes.
My gaze flicks over my body, and I cut off Raze in the middle of his threat.
“I don’t think it hurt me. It’s showing me that I’m getting hurt. Look.”
I lift my other hand, and a small puff of essence drifts off it too. When I give the collar of my jacket a shake, a larger waft drifts off me as if I’ve been sitting too long and gotten dusty.
The creepy-crawling feeling that’s been nibbling at my skin since we first entered the shadow-drenched city shivers down to my bones. “I think the rift’s flood is starting to eat away at us.” I look around at my fellow shadowkind, and my heart skips a beat. “Mirage, you’re bleeding a little too.”
Mirage whirls his tails, and a thread of essence spirals into the air. He hops to one side as if he can dodge the effect. “Bad shadows.”
Hail peers down at his hands with a grimace. “We can’t help people if we’re falling apart.”
Jonah takes charge in his usual steady way, but his expression has tensed. “Let’s get to the fringes ourselves so you can all recover. We can carry out the evacuations in shifts now that we’ve got reinforcements.”
He signals the group of newbies Rollick sent who are now a couple blocks away, raising his voice so they’ll hear him. “We’re heading back to base camp. Keep an eye on your essence and get out of the city if the atmosphere gets too toxic.”
The horned being who’s been leading the new group gives us a thumbs up in acknowledgment. One of his companions brays at the surrounding buildings. “All right, everyone out! Time’s a-wasting.”
I hustle along beside my teammates through the streets we’ve done our best to clear.
My skin is crawling even more now that I know it’s literally starting to creep off my body.
“Do you think the new team will be able to convince the humans? I don’t know if any of them have talents as good at comforting people as Mirage’s. ”
“I’m sure they’ll do their best,” Jonah says.
Mirage nods. “There are lots of different roads to the same place.”
A tendril of relief reaches me through our connection, tinged with exhaustion. He’s been trying to hide it, but I think projecting all those illusions has been wearing him out as much as the strange darkness has.
My feet are aching from their old wounds. We all need a rest. If this shadowy murk can break down shadowkind bodies, who knows what it’s doing to Jonah?
Mini Falkor has slithered back up to my shoulders. His head bobs in time with my steps, as if the thumps of my feet are a dance beat. At least one of us is enjoying himself.
Or herself. I’m not sure if the creature even has a gender. But his namesake is male, so I’ll stick with that.
Raze eyes my hanger-on with open suspicion. “What if that thing shifts and gets mean? They all seem to do that eventually.”
“He’s been stable so far,” I say, and focus on the creature’s inner state. The emotions wavering off Falkor taste like frothy cream, mild curiosity and excitement. Apparently he thinks we’re going on an adventure.
But also— “I’m not sure he is one of the warped creatures. There must be some regular shadowkind around too, right? He doesn’t have that twitchy vibe the warped ones usually give off.”
Hail raises his eyebrows. “Lesser shadowkind don’t normally go all groupie on the rest of us.”
“Maybe he was scared.” I give the snake-puppy’s neck a scratch, and his two paws wiggle where he’s clinging to my jacket. “He needed someone to look after him.”
Jonah clears his throat. “I think being scared is a pretty appropriate response right now. Looks like we’ve got a whole pack to deal with.”
Several misshapen creatures have emerged farther down the road. One of them is rubbing its belly against the asphalt. Another rams its head repeatedly into a shop’s doorframe—if it moved just a little to the right, it could actually go inside!
The others aim menacing glances our way. A few slink forward to meet us. A feathery, beaked horse sort of thing lets out a squawk that doesn’t sound like a friendly greeting.
Jonah holds out his hands. “We can all get along here.”
He switches into the sorcerous syllables that make my skin shudder almost as much as the weird shadows do.
The force he’s putting into the sounds rings through his voice, but only one of the approaching creatures falters. As it veers toward the sidewalk, the other three keep prowling forward.
“So much for sorcery,” Hail mutters. He raises his hand with a puff of frost whirling around it.
Raze tenses to spring—but the warped beasts launch themselves at us first.
Hail heaves a stream of ice at one’s legs, and Raze hurtles into another. The third careens straight toward me.
With a yelp and a jolt of terror, I throw out my own hands.
A surge of dark energy smacks into the parakeet-horse and shoots past it to shake the darkened atmosphere beyond. The creature topples backward with an indignant screech.
And the connections between me and my men give a hitch as if they’re elastic bands someone’s just flicked.
I reach toward my teammates instinctively as if I can restore balance to our bond by touching them. Before I’ve even finished raising my arms, the flow of emotions between us has settled back into its usual stable current.
Still, the fact that it wavered at all has left my nerves wobbling even more than earlier. The sensation felt like when we shoved away that cloud of shadow an hour or two ago.
Who gave this murky flood permission to fiddle with my powers, and how can I revoke it?
Raze tosses the parakeet-horse through a high window like a basketball player making a three-point shot and then whirls toward me with a furrow in his brow. His concern echoes the uneasiness passing into me from my other marked men—and presumably pouring in the opposite direction too.
Before we can comment on the odd effect, another form ripples out of the shadows. A spindly man only a few inches taller than my diminutive height eases closer to us, raking his twig-like fingers through the air. His voice is scratchy. “You—you’re proper shadowkind.”
He gives off a vibe of cranberry-sharp wariness and fishy discomfort, not flavors I’d mix on purpose but totally understandable given the circumstances.
I cock my head. “So are you. You didn’t come out of this rift.” I swirl my hand toward the gaping maw that stretches all across the sky above the city.
The higher shadowkind peers up at the hazy darkness and trembles like, well, a twig in a breeze.
“I think I did. Not very far from here. I was moving through the shadow realm, and all of a sudden, it was as if the ground dropped under my feet. Except the shadow realm doesn’t really have a ground? So I don’t understand…”
As he trails off, his gaze slides to the lesser creatures still on their feet: the one banging its skull against the door frame and the other that’s now squirming around on its back as if trying to wriggle straight into the road.
His lips purse. “I really don’t understand all the other shadowkind around here. Did someone give them mushrooms?”
I can only guess what kind of mushrooms he’s talking about. Maybe Hail has experience with that mortal-realm feature, given his wry chuckle.
Jonah beckons the stick-like man. “Come with us. We’re heading out of the rift area. I don’t think it’s safe for any beings to hang around here very long.” He pauses. “You couldn’t go back to the shadow realm where you came through?”
The man shakes his head and frowns at the sky. “I tried to leap back through the shadows, but as soon as I got close to the rift it flipped me over again, and I ended up back here.”
I peer at the obsessive creatures as we pass them, mulling over our new companion’s words—and the things Viscera said to me before her essence burst apart.
The warped shadowkind all seem to think there’s something waiting for them here that they can’t get at.
And now the rift is spitting out beings who didn’t even want to come.
It’s got to add up to a bigger picture, but right now that picture is looking more like a Dali than a Da Vinci.
We hurry on to the edge of the city through the streets we’ve already cleared.
After a few more blocks, Falkor half-scrambles, half-winds around my torso and leaps to the ground to slither-bound along beside me.
I guess he wanted to stretch his paws… and stomach?
It’s hard to tell which is doing most of the work propelling him along.
As the haze up ahead brightens where the flood of shadows must end, a few more regular higher shadowkind slip out to join us. They all sound as puzzled as our twiggy friend, as if they fell asleep on the bus and ended up way past their expected stop. Except none of them were actually asleep.
“The shadows crashed all around me, and I fell right through them,” one woman says with a smack of her hands together. “What in the realms is going on?”
Mirage hums. “Dropped from the sky; let’s not cry.”
When she shoots him an even more bewildered look, Jonah steps in. “We’re trying to figure that out. None of us expected something like this to happen.”
Over the past week, the rift had been getting bigger and spewing out small floods. But this escalation was jumping from a pond to an ocean in one go.