Chapter 7 #2
Pluck lifted his lip to show a glimmer of tooth. Tell her she’s being an insensitive yeth.
“I don’t think she cares,” I said, and then louder, “Fine. Do what you want. Remember my three rules. If you break one and get hurt, I’m not responsible. I don’t control them.”
It was something she wanted both to be true and to prove was false. Contradictory, but she would hate me either way. Her eyes narrowed. “Your three rules. For now.”
It was the best I’d get. “Well, Pluck?”
I will warn them. A shiver pulled through me as his tendril slipped from my ankle.
Whiplike tail swishing saucily, Pluck trotted down a gravel path to the little cinder-block hut tucked behind a wooden fence so new it was still unbleached from the sun.
It was the old emergency stair, landscaped to be unnoticed, and Pluck evaporated into a sparkling haze before slipping under the metal door and into the stairwell beyond it.
“Give me a second,” I said as I stopped before the fire door. Cameron pressed close as I woke up the inset panel and the high-tech screen lit. I hadn’t been to the grotto since Benedict had fixed ten years of dross inert, but anyone assigned to the loom should have twenty-four/seven access.
“Petra Grady,” I said when the light changed to green. “Weaver third-class,” I added, glancing sidelong at Cameron. With a thunk, the door unlocked.
Third-class, I mused as I pulled it open. As if there were any second- and first-class weavers. First-class traditionally taught, though, and I was not doing that.
“You have access?” Cameron asked, and I hesitated, waiting for her to go first.
“For almost ten years. I’ve worked for the university since I was eighteen,” I said, my pride obvious. “Before I was a weaver, I was one of their best sweepers. They left me in the system because they still call me to handle the hard stuff. After you.”
She hesitated as the automatic lights flickered on to show a stark stairway leading down. “That’s how you broke the lock on the gate? Magic? How? You don’t have a lodestone.”
“It was weaver magic, and as long as they have their shadows, weavers don’t need a lodestone.
” My neck felt empty, and I touched my upper chest where my amulet would be.
“You want me to go first?” I added, and she went inside.
For an instant, I toyed with the idea of walking away.
But no. I’d be blamed for whatever happened, and something would.
She was a mage walking into a shadows’ warren.
“At least it’s daylight,” I whispered as I pulled the door shut behind me. I couldn’t see Pluck, but he was probably at the bottom, waiting.
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” Cameron said, having heard me.
An icy mirth bubbled up in my thoughts, and I jumped when a comforting cold dropped from the ceiling, coating my shoulders. You are the dark, and she is afraid of you.
The handrail was grimy from a thousand desperate hands, and I wouldn’t touch it. Pluck, how bad an idea is this? I asked, and he slithered to the stairs, my side going numb in cold.
Right. I’ll find them, he thought, then streaked past Cameron.
The woman jerked, a small noise escaping her.
“Sorry,” I said, and she started moving again, her boots tapping out a new anger. “He’s telling them you’re coming. They don’t like mages.”
Two stories down was the original floor of the auditorium.
This was where the memorial shadows would be sipping on twenty years’ worth of collected dross, turned inert by Benedict to save Pluck from burning to death while protecting me from my old roommate.
And still the shadows don’t trust him? I wondered when we reached the fire door at the end and went through.
The sunlight spilling in from the well made a surprisingly bright beam on the original oak-floor stage, a good thirty feet below the new ceiling.
The rows of dusty chairs remained, looking eerie as they rose right up to the new ceiling, and though Pluck was correct that the university could probably hold a class here, it would be far too uncomfortable.
“They left it like this?” Cameron said as she squinted into the shadows. “Kind of foolish to put your city’s dross dump under an auditorium to begin with.”
“Kind of foolish to allow an untested material into your dross dump,” I countered.
Cameron frowned. “No one knew it could revert.”
I couldn’t stop my laugh. “That’s not true. I warned them. Repeatedly. Ask Ryan if you think I’m exaggerating.” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, and I added, “Are you really going to stand with your feet amid the fallout and tell me I am misremembering what I lived through?”
Doubt creased her forehead, and in the new quiet, a whisper of a voice hissed against the dusty walls, the words unclear even as a regular cadence became more obvious. Good, someone’s here.
“Do you hear that?” Cameron spun to the stage, where a hazy nothing sat slumped against the podium. “My God, is that…”
“A shadow? Not yet,” I said as heartache tightened my chest. It was a rez, and I squinted to pick out the ratty throw over a professional skirt, her legs outstretched and a hand held to a length of beaded hair.
A mundane would call it a ghost, and they would be right.
The energy from a sudden death had made a circuit of energy that dross could activate, in essence creating a ghost reliving the last moments of a person’s life.
“Go,” the rez whispered, and the haze of a face became more certain, as if the energy trapped in a circular pattern knew we were here. “I’m sorry. Tell everyone I’m sorry.”
The rez was my old boss, Darrell, and my heartache deepened. I had washed the grit from her eyes. I had held her hand as she told me how the loom and vault had been destroyed. She had been dying—and still she held back shadow to try to save me.
“Go,” the rez said again, its voice gaining clarity. “I’m sorry. Tell everyone I’m sorry.”
Hands on her hips, Cameron inched closer to the stage. “That’s a rez,” she said, anger tightening the corners of her eyes. “You seriously thought I’d believe that’s a shadow?”
“Marshal, you are a piece of work.” Frowning, I stayed where I was in the orchestra pit. “Did I not just say it wasn’t a shadow yet? Not everyone lies to you.”
“Most people do,” she said softly.
Which might be why she used that act of friendly good cop, I mused. “You’re right that that’s a rez,” I said. “But a shadow has been using it. Moved it here.”
Cameron laughed bitterly. “More lies. Rezes can’t move.”
I flipped a cushion down in the first row, surprised to find the fabric clean where it had been touching the back of the chair.
“Right again,” I said as I sat in it and propped my stick against the chair beside me.
On the stage, the rez continued to beg me to go.
Maybe Darrell was right. “Yet there it is.”
“Then how did it get here?”
Finally, a good question. “A shadow animated it. Brought it here. Dropped it when done,” I said, and her eyebrows went high in question. “Shadows are able to use a rez to communicate. Even I wouldn’t let a strange shadow into my mind.”
I swear, Cameron Owens, if you arrest me because I can’t produce shadows…I thought, my attention going to the darker places of the grotto. “Where is everyone?” I whispered. Sure, the sun was pouring through the hole in the ceiling, but someone should be about.
Gone, iced through me, and I jumped when Pluck’s suspicion, worry, and annoyance suddenly twined about my own. Only Aasta remains.
“Gone where?” I asked, and Cameron scowled as if I were making up the entire conversation.
“I’m sorry. Tell everyone I’m sorry,” the memory of Darrell whispered, and then a chill dropped through me when the rez turned and looked straight at me. “They have fled the eater,” she added, the cadence and faint accent both familiar and wrong.
“Darrell,” I blurted, finding my feet in a splurge of motion.
Aasta, Pluck corrected, and I warmed in embarrassment.
“My God,” Cameron whispered, and the shadow animating Darrell made the apparition frown. “I don’t believe it.”
Takes practice, fizzed through me, Pluck’s embarrassment a quick flash. But it’s easier than creating a fully solid form who can talk. Be careful. Aasta is viciously protective of those she takes into her circle. You are not within it.
Great, I mused. “Yeah, not many people know it’s possible,” I said to Cameron.
Nervous, I moved closer to the stage. The hazy form slumped against the podium wasn’t my former mentor and boss; it was a desert shadow pulling the memory of Darrell on like a sweater.
It hurt to see her with her beaded hair and brown skin wrinkled by time—bittersweet.
The apparition even had some of Darrell’s memories, especially those concerning me. But it wasn’t Darrell. It was a shadow, one so desperate for a human connection that it had wrapped itself in a dead memory. The old Black woman would probably find it amusing, not horrifying as most people did.
“Weaver Grady.” Aasta nodded at me, Darrell’s beads clinking as she slid her cold gaze to Cameron. “Is the mage an offering or a mistake?”
Offering? I wondered, stiffening when an image of Cameron lying on the filthy carpet, shaking in a seizure, flashed through me via Pluck. “A mistake!” I blurted, and Cameron frowned at my obvious panic. “She’s a mistake.”
“I’m not a mistake!” Cameron predictably argued, then stifled a gasp when the apparition hazed, solidifying again a few feet closer, green glittering eyes fixed on her with malevolence.
“You are a mistake, or you are mad.” The shadow animating Darrell eyed Pluck. “But perhaps we are all mad and it’s time to stop pretending.”