The Shade swallowed my left knee.
There went my right knee.
I’d vanished from mid-thigh down.
Even if I were able to dial IISS now—and I couldn’t because I had a lot of numbers in my cellphone and couldn’t find the bloody thing—even if he arrived instantly and somehow managed to do the unthinkable and kill it, my legs were already gone.
I wasted a fraction of a second wondering whether I wanted to live without legs.
There it was—IISS!
My thumb paused slightly above it, refused to move.
I could feel my legs. They were icy but there.
I peered down. The Shade was motionless, an inky, oily sleeve around my lower body.
I frowned. This wasn’t how Shades behaved. When Sorcha, a fellow sidhe-seer died, Clare had seen it happen, and said Sorcha vanished into her own boot as she pulled it on, thanks to a Shade tucked in the darkness within. This particular caste of Unseelie devoured their prey instantly and with one swift inhalation, then belched a small pile of crumbs. Or in her case, left them in her shoe.
Was it possible it wasn’t a Shade? If so, what was it? I realized with a distant part of my brain that my legs weren’t the only part of me that was cold. My left hand was freezing. And itching. I glanced at it. It was completely black, with dark veins crisscrossing my pale wrist. It was the hand I’d used to stab the Hunter with years ago when something of the ancient beast seemed to slither up my sword, infecting me.
The Shade was on the move again, inching upward.
I had no idea what might happen—if anything at all—but I sliced my cold black hand down into the inky cloud as if it were a blade.
The Shade recoiled violently and reared away. It stopped a dozen or so feet from me and hung suspended in the air. I was struck by the sudden certainty that it was assessing me. I could feel a sentient mind taking my measure, evaluating me, determining what to do next.
I glanced around. All the Shadelike things in the cemetery had gone still, and I deduced, from the slight lean of their amorphous forms, that they were peering at my attacker, as if listening. What the bloody hell was this? A collective swarm of evolved Shades? The thought was terrifying.
The cellphone was still in my hand, the screen lit, waiting for me to press IISS.
I thumbed it off. I was not calling for help. He’d left me on my own? I’d handle it myself.
“Get out of here!” I roared, lunging for whatever-it-was.
The shadowy shape recoiled again, vanishing on a sudden gust of wind then resolidifying in the same spot. More breezed over to join it, settling on either side, until I stood glaring at a nearly solid wall of blackness fifty feet wide.
I gestured threateningly with my left hand. “I’ll destroy you. You picked the wrong woman to mess with on the wrong bloody night. I was already in a bad enough mood!” I snarled. I paused and did that thing I used to do when I was young, when I was still killing with hate in my heart, enough to Kevlar all the Garda in Dublin. I embraced my rage at the injustice and hypocrisy of the world, welcomed it, let it fill my body, shape my limbs, backlight my eyes. I knew what I looked like when I let it happen—Ryodan on his worst day.
There was steel in my spine and death in my eyes when I swaggered toward the menacing wall. “You have two choices,” I said in a terrible voice, my left hand raised high. “Leave. Or die.”
The wall vanished.
I blinked, murmuring, “Well,” mildly surprised and majorly skeptical. I knew I could be intimidating, but I was a single person and there were hundreds of them.
I stood for several long moments, scanning the cemetery, unwilling to act rashly, from a misguided belief they were gone. The monsters that stalk our world are devious, patient, and sly. So are a lot of the humans.
While I waited I evened out my breath. It was a constant reminder of how I lived: Bold, Ruthless, Energy, Action, Tenacity, Hunger; B-R-E-A-T-H. I wanted to kick up into the slipstream and rush to the nearest pool of light but I don’t run from the things I fear anymore. They chase you, gaining substance and power the longer you run.
When several minutes passed without any of the shadows reappearing, I shoved the cellphone back in my pocket and turned to walk through the cemetery, eyes peeled for clues. I stumbled smack into a gravestone, tripped over it, rolled, sprang up and stood motionless, running a rapid internal assessment. I felt oddly shaky, weak as if my legs might go out from under me if I moved suddenly. Brushes with death usually invigorate me but this one had rattled me more than I’d realized. On the off chance I was simply hungry—a far more palatable conclusion to both tongue and ego—I crammed a protein bar in my mouth and resumed walking, taking careful mental notes about the locations from which the unknown entities had come, their shapes and sizes, their actions, and filed it all neatly away in my mental vaults.
I’d wanted a distraction.
I’d certainly gotten one. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, topped with a bow of suspense and danger.
I was whistling a cheery tune by the time Shazam bounded out of the night to join me, blood on his furry muzzle, delight in his violet eyes. We moved together and I rested my hand on his shaggy head as we padded into the night.
Still, I made a mental note to be a bit more careful about the things I asked the universe for in the future.