Demons Anchor

The shadows were screaming again. Selene Cross pressed her back against the alley wall, both hands balled into fists at her sides, and she tried and tried to breathe through it. The sound wasn't something anyone else could hear. She knew that now. She'd learned it the hard way, at age fourteen, when she'd told her foster mother that the darkness in the corner of the room was crying and woke up the next morning in a psychiatric evaluation. She didn't talk about the shadows anymore. But they talked to her constantly. Tonight they were worse than usual. She'd felt it building all day, the hum under her skin, the way the darkness in every room seemed to lean toward her like a plant toward sunlight. She'd left work early. Walked the long way home through the back streets of Chicago's South Loop because the crowds in the subway made it worse, all those people casting shadows that brushed against her like hands. She was three blocks from her apartment when the shadow in the alley moved. Not the way shadows move when a car passes or a cloud shifts. It moved with intention. It peeled itself off the wall and stretched toward her, slow and deliberate, like something tasting the air. "No," Selene whispered. "Not tonight, I'm tired, go away." The shadow didn't go away. It lunged. What happened next, Selene could never fully explain afterward. One moment the shadow was rushing at her, cold, dark and wrong, and the next her right hand shot out and she grabbed it; grabbed it like you'd grab a snake behind the head and the scream that tore through the shadow layer of the world shook every window on the block. The shadow exploded. Not violently, not like a bomb but like a soap bubble. One second there, the next simply gone, and where it had been was a faint phosphorescent shimmer that faded in seconds. Selene stood in the alley with her fist still clenched around nothing, her chest heaving, staring at her own hand like it belonged to someone else. Her palm was glowing. It lasted three seconds. Then the light died, and her hand was just her hand again, small, slightly scarred and trembling. "Okay," she said to nobody. "Okay. That's new." She heard the footsteps behind her. She spun. He was standing at the alley entrance, tall, dark-coated, utterly still in the way that things are still when stillness is a choice rather than a default. She couldn't see his face clearly. The streetlamp behind him threw his shadow forward, long and sharp, and unlike every other shadow she had ever seen, his didn't reach toward her. His shadow was leaning away. As if it was afraid of her. "Selene Cross," the man said. His voice was low and precise, the kind of voice that was accustomed to being obeyed. "You need to come with me." Selene looked at him. Looked at the shadow that was retreating from her. Looked at her still-tingling hand. "Absolutely not," she said, and ran. ***** He didn't chase her. That was the part that frightened her most. She ran six blocks, cut through two parking structures, took a stairwell up three floors and a fire escape down two, and emerged on a street she knew well, breathing hard, hair loose from its braid. She stopped and listened but there was nothing. No footsteps. No sound of pursuit. She turned the corner toward her building. He was already there, leaning against the front door with his arms folded, looking at her with an expression that was not quite amusement and was much too close to patience. Selene stopped walking. The space between them was twenty feet of wet pavement and the full weight of something she didn't have a name for yet. She could see him properly now, dark hair, darker eyes, a face that had been carved by someone who understood severity. Not handsome the way men in magazines were handsome. Something older than that. Something that had looked at a great many things over a great many years and had stopped being surprised by most of them. His shadow still wasn't reaching for her. Every other shadow in her life had reached for her since she was a child. She had learned to live with that the way you learn to live with a chronic ache — present, constant, managed. His shadow was afraid of her. "You ran the wrong direction," he said. "I noticed." She kept her distance. "Who are you?" "Someone who arrived before the thing in that alley killed you." "I handled the thing in the alley." "You destroyed a shadow wraith with your bare hands." A pause. "Do you know what a shadow wraith is?" "I'm going to go ahead and assume it's not great." "It's a predator from the shadow realm that feeds on human life force." His voice remained utterly level. "They are not destroyable by human hands. Under any circumstances. Under any known circumstances," he corrected, and she had the distinct sense that the correction cost him something. Selene looked at her hand again. Back at him. "What am I?" Something shifted in his face. Just briefly. Just enough to tell her that the answer was significant. "That," he said, "is what I've been sent to determine." He took one step toward her. She held her ground, barely. "My name is Zarian," he said. "And you should know, Selene, that I am not the most dangerous thing looking for you tonight." He looked up, not at the sky, but at the shadows between the buildings. "They're already here," he said. Then every shadow on the block came alive at once. Selene had exactly one second to decide if the terrifying man in front of her was her enemy, or the only thing standing between her and what was pouring out of the dark.