Demons Anchor

Chapter Three:The World Beneath Chicago

The entrance to the shadow realm was a door that wasn't there.

Selene stood in front of what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary section of brick wall in a perfectly ordinary building in River North and watched Zarian press his palm flat against it and simply... wait. The shadows around his hand darkened, thickened, reached toward his fingers the way her shadows had always reached for her, and then the wall folded.

Not opened, not swung or slid but folded, like paper, like it had always been paper, and behind it was a corridor that had no right to exist in the physical geometry of the building.

"You're staring," he said.

"You folded a wall."

"The wall was always a boundary. I asked it to be a door instead." He gestured. "After you."

"That's not reassuring."

"I know."

She walked through.

The corridor beyond was neither fully physical nor fully shadow, it existed in between, in the pressured space that she had always half-perceived from the corner of her eye. The walls were the same material as the shadows she could hear, dense and humming, but they were solid enough to touch. The light came from nowhere specifically and landed on nothing directly. It should have been disorienting. Instead, she found it extraordinarily familiar. The way coming home is familiar, even to a home you've never been in before.

"You can feel it," Zarian said, watching her.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You're breathing differently."

She was. Slower, deeper, like the air here was easier. That was absurd, the air should be the same, it was just a corridor. But the humming that had lived under her skin her whole life, the constant pressure of the shadow world straining against the membrane of the physical, here, it was just gone. Here, she was in the thing, not pressed against the outside of it.

"The Council chambers are deeper," he said, moving ahead of her. "This is the outer boundary. The transitional zone."

"How many people know this exists?"

"In Chicago? Currently? You, and the seven members of my unit." He glanced back. "And the Council. And the sixty-old supernatural entities who pay council tax."

"Council tax."

"The shadow realm has governance, Selene. It has economics, law, diplomacy, and territorial boundaries. It has existed alongside your world for as long as your world has existed and has been considerably better organized for most of that time."

She almost smiled. Almost.

He stopped at a junction where the corridor branched four ways, each leading into deeper dark, and turned to face her. She was struck again by the quality of his stillness. Most people fidgeted, shifted weight, moved hands, or adjusted expressions. He was simply present, fully, without any of the usual human static. It should have been unsettling. She found it, against her better judgment, extraordinary.

"Before we go further," he said, "there are things you should know."

"Good. I love honesty."

"The Council will not present themselves as a threat to you. They will be civil, perhaps even warm. They will talk about duty, and sacrifice, and the greater good." He held her gaze. "Do not let the civility confuse you about their intentions."

Selene felt something tighten in her chest. "And what are their intentions?"

"There is a tear in the shadow realm. It has been widening for six months. It sits below the coordinates of downtown Chicago, approximately four hundred feet beneath street level, at the junction of three major shadow lines." He paused. "Something is on the other side of the tear, pressing against it. Something that has been imprisoned in the void between realms for six centuries."

"Imprisoned by whom?"

"The Council." Another pause. "It was imprisoned because it destroyed two cities and three thousand lives before they were able to contain it. They sealed it in the void using a shadow anchor, a rare form of binding that requires a specific kind of energy to hold."

She felt cold. "What kind of energy?"

"The kind that flows through shadow-gifted humans." He looked at her steadily. "The anchor has been degrading for fifty years. It needs to be reinforced. The Council needs someone who can channel shadow energy directly into the binding, hold it, pour themselves into it, rebuild it from the inside."

Selene's mouth was dry. "And that would mean what, exactly? For the person doing it?"

The pause this time was the longest yet. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly even and she hated him slightly for it because it meant she couldn't tell if he hated what he was saying.

"The last shadow-gifted human who reinforced a binding survived. Barely. They lost the ability to use their power permanently. They spent three years in recovery."

"The last one," she repeated. "Implying there have been more than one. What happened to the others?"

He said nothing.

The silence told her everything.

"How many others?" she asked, very quietly.

"Four." He did not look away. "In five hundred years, there have been five shadow-gifted humans found. Four of them died in the attempt to reinforce the binding. The fifth survived."

One out of five.

Twenty percent.

"And the Council," Selene said, her voice remarkably steady given what was happening in her chest, "is planning to ask me to try my luck."

"Yes," he said. "That is their plan."

"And your plan?"

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, it was carefully, in the way of someone choosing words they won't be able to take back.

"My plan," he said, "is still forming."

It was the most dangerous thing he could have said. More dangerous than a threat, more dangerous than a lie. He was telling her that he was choosing, actively, in real time, between the Council who had his six-century loyalty and the woman in front of him who he just met forty minutes ago.

She should not have found that as moving as she did.

"Tell me one more thing," she said.

"Ask."

"The accident that killed my parents. The circle in the field." She held his gaze. "Was that an accident?"

Zarian looked at her with those black, black eyes, and the shadows in the corridor around them went very still.

"No," he said.

The word hit her like cold water.

"Someone caused it?"

"Something caused it. Something that knew what you were, even before you knew yourself. Something that has been trying to destroy you since you were eight years old."

Selene thought about every near-miss of her life. The car that had come too close on Michigan Avenue. The building collapse she'd been pulled out of six hours before it happened, by an unexplained and persistent feeling. The shadow wraith in the alley tonight.

All of it. All of it connected.

"What something?" she asked.

He turned and looked at the deepest of the four corridors.

"The thing on the other side of the tear," he said. "It can reach through the weaknesses in the binding. It has been trying to eliminate you before you can strengthen it."

He looked back at her, and for the first time she saw something in his face that was not control or assessment or the careful management of information.

Something that looked, from a certain angle, like fury.

"It killed your parents," he said. "Trying to kill you. And the Council has known this for fifteen years and did not tell you because informing you was not useful to their plans."

Selene felt the glow surge in her palms, not the small, tentative warmth of the alley. Something larger. Something that had been waiting a very long time to have a reason.