The Shadow City

  DEDICATION

  For Tracy

  Always.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Dan Jolley

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  The woman known to her followers as “Primus” stood on the roof of a tall building. From there she could see San Francisco, the bay, and the mountains all spread before her like a painting.

  One day had passed since the battle against the child-elementalists on Alcatraz, and plumes of smoke still rose from the prison isle.

  The police had shut down the island soon after the children had fled and the Eternal Dawn retreated. Perhaps the hapless authorities blamed the earthquake for the damage the confrontation had done to the old buildings. Maybe they believed the bursts of flame that had lit the sky had been from a gas leak.

  Those without the Art could not see magick for what it was, and so their minds had to concoct ordinary explanations for the extraordinary events around them. They could never have guessed that the great wave that had leaped from the waters like a fist had been the product of arcane manipulation, or that the howls that had screeched across the water belonged to creatures ripped straight from another dimension.

  Primus wondered how such ignorant minds would interpret the breach that the children had unwittingly opened on Alcatraz. To her, it looked like a crack of gold hanging in the air, but it was so much more. It was the makings of a doorway between here and Arcadia.

  “Arcadia.” Primus sighed into the cool wind. The realm of pure magick that waited just behind San Francisco. The secret city that will remake the world.

  No longer draped in the ceremonial robes of the Dawn, Primus wore a nine-hundred-dollar suit that would have fit in at the most high-powered Wall Street offices. The breeze rippled her skirt, and she smoothed its fine fabric, grimacing as her hands grazed the bruises from her fight against the children. But this discomfort was slight compared to the pain of her defeat.

  Her failure.

  She paused for a moment to let the pain wash over her.

  She had come so close to success. Mere inches! And this made her loss all the more bitter.

  She would not fail again.

  History was on her side. The Eternal Dawn had outlasted every last one of their foes. It had been over a century since the creation of Arcadia, and the cult had never been stronger. It had never been closer to remaking the world.

  Yes, the battle of Alcatraz had been a setback, but success was just ahead. And the prize for victory was nothing less than an eternal dawn for all of humanity. To seal her place in this glorious history, all Primus needed was to find the descendant and the Emerald Tablet.

  But how?

  The Dawn’s hunters prowled the streets and abyssal bats patrolled the skies, but of the children they’d found no sign.

  The leadership of the Eternal Dawn was a heavy burden, and Primus had made her way to this quiet part of the city, to this peaceful rooftop, for a moment to herself. She gazed at the smoldering old prison across the water while she pondered her next move.

  She felt a prickle of irritation at the sound of soft footsteps behind her. She assumed it was simply one of the building’s residents, come to gawk at the scene at Alcatraz.

  “I believe it was a gas explosion,” she said, preempting the inevitable rubbernecker question.

  “It was nothing of the sort.”

  Primus turned quickly—not so quickly as to look startled, but quickly nonetheless—and raised one skeptical eyebrow when she saw the speaker. “Oh? And what do you know about it?”

  The speaker approached slowly. His eyes never left hers. Primus immediately saw something strange in those eyes. Something deep and dark and dangerous, and not of this world. “I know a great many things. I know the Truth. I know of the Way and the Power.”

  Primus’s throat seized in shock at the familiar incantation of the Dawn.

  Impossible!

  The figure in front of her smiled. Slow, cold. Deadly. “Dvai shvioutei pivuntxa, majia povrunshei taigho shviunta.”

  “How— Where did you learn those words?”

  He stepped closer. “I knew those words long before I came to know you, Charlotte.”

  Primus’s heart felt as if it might rupture from pure astonishment. She fell to one knee and bowed her head. “Master . . . Master Thorne! I apologize. You are . . . changed. When did you return? How did—”

  “To your feet,” he commanded.

  She stood, obedient. Jonathan Thorne! She clenched her hands into fists to keep them from trembling in his presence. She didn’t know how he had crossed the void between worlds, but it was undeniably him. Power radiated from him. Standing in front of him, she felt like a child standing before a god.

  “This is only a shard of myself. A fraction of my true might. You must ready the proper rite to bring about my complete return.” He circled around her as she spoke.

  She kept her eyes on her feet but could feel his gaze carving into her back as he passed behind her. “We have begun the process already, Master.”

  “You have failed.” He clipped his words off flatly. “I know of your past efforts, such as they were. Capturing the wrong sacrifice, releasing a null draak, letting the Emerald Tablet slip through your grasp . . .”

  Primus reddened as the list of her errors lengthened.

  “And I tell you,” Thorne continued, “that even had you captured the true descendant, your efforts would have been in vain without the Tablet. My total self has passed beyond the confines of mere mortality. No simple exchange of blood for blood is sufficient to bring me whole to this world again. I am more than a man, and a greater sacrifice must be offered. The Tablet must be destroyed during the ceremony—its energy will be consumed to fuel my crossing.”

  Primus’s head twitched involuntarily. For a moment she thought she had misheard. “M-Master? Destroyed? Sir, we need the Tablet! All that knowledge . . . all that power . . .”

  Jonathan Thorne, founder of the Eternal Dawn, growled low in his throat. The sound emerged odd and eerie from the flesh vessel he was inhabiting, growing and deepening until Primus felt it in her bones. The sound consumed her consciousness, the words reverberating deep inside her mind. For a moment Primus feared she might pass out.

  “I-I’m sorry, Master, I don’t—”

  “No, you do not understand, and there’s the pity.” He stopped in front of her and clamped her jaw in one hand, positioning her head so his eyes bored straight into hers. “We require a Book of Power, yes. But remember that everything in the universe casts a shadow, Ms. Terrington. Everything.”

  Realization slowly dawned on her.

  Everything casts a shadow! Of course!

  As she processed the implications of this new knowledge, Thorne released her, strode to the edge of the roof, and looked across the steely water to the smoking prison.

  “You will capture the descendant and bring me the Tablet, Charlotte.” He clasped his hands behind his back, still as a stone as he gazed at the city. “You shall have your second chance. Your final chance. Do you understand?”


  Primus nodded, mute with awe and terror.

  “I won’t disappoint you, Master! On my soul, I swear, the descendant and the Tablet will be yours!”

  Thorne turned back to her. The Founder’s gaze slashed through her like a blade.

  “Good,” he said. His voice was in her ear, and also in her mind. “Now listen, and remember, and obey. . . .”

  1

  “This’ll just be a tremor, right? We don’t need a full-on earthquake.”

  Kaz sighed. “Look, Gabe, if you’re nervous about this, it’s only going to make me nervous. And I really don’t want to be any more nervous than I already am. So please. At least try to relax. Okay?”

  Gabe put up his hands, backing off, and decided to stare at the Brookhaven Institute for Psychiatric Rehabilitation instead of at his friend. He’d never seen the hospital at night before. During the day the massive brick building could have passed for a hotel, but now its security patrols and chain-link fences topped with barbed wire made it look a lot more like a prison.

  A few days ago, it would have seemed completely crazy to try to break into a place like this. But a lot had changed over the last few days. And crazy or not, it’s still good to be out of the tunnels we’ve been hiding in.

  “Those guards just turned the corner, so I’d say we have about four minutes,” Lily said, stepping out from behind a hedge.

  “Did the wind tell you that?” Gabe asked, just loud enough for Lily to hear him.

  “No,” Lily whispered back. “My eyes did.”

  Lily’s twin brother, Brett, stood on her other side, their coal-black hair blending with the surrounding shadows. The three of them formed a half circle around Kaz as he knelt a few paces in front of them, speaking softly to himself. Kaz’s fingers traced patterns over the ground in time with his words.

  He’d been practicing this ritual for the last two days. It didn’t make much sense to Gabe, but then he didn’t expect it to. Earth was Kaz’s element. Kaz spoke the language of dirt and rocks and sand, and he could bend the earth to his will.

  Just like Lily could with air, and Brett with water. Just like Gabe himself could with fire.

  Kaz’s words grew louder, deeper. They echoed up from the ground below, filling with grit.

  Gabe tried to relax but couldn’t; for all he knew, Kaz using his elemental power might draw down a swarm of abyssal bats, the winged, skinless monstrosities that were scouring the city, searching for them.

  “Keep an eye out for anything weird, guys,” Gabe said.

  “Weird?” Brett asked. “Like, skinless-eyeless-hunter weird? Or skinless-eyeless-dragon-thing weird? Oh, or like humorless-snotty-Ghost-Boy weird? So many flavors of weird to choose from.”

  “How about all-of-the-above weird,” Gabe said. “Minus Ghost Boy, I guess.” Jackson Wright seemed to be on their side, for the moment. “Seriously, though, we need to be on the lookout.”

  “Don’t worry, man.” Brett clapped Gabe on the back. “Any of those beasties shows up here and we’ll be ready. Besides, we showed the Dawn who was boss back on Alcatraz, didn’t we?”

  The Dawn. The thought of the apocalyptic cult made Gabe shudder, partly in fear, but mostly in anger. He turned back to Brookhaven. This was where they’d first met Greta Jaeger. She’d tried to help them, and the Dawn had murdered her.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, remembering her last moments. The image of an abyssal bat’s daggerlike talons punching through Greta’s back and out through her chest was like a horrifying GIF he couldn’t close. He couldn’t forget the icicle-sharp pain in her eyes . . . or the split-second when he and Greta both knew she was about to die. He’d never watched anyone die before, and he hoped he never would again.

  Though given that the Eternal Dawn and their creatures were still hunting him and his friends, he didn’t think that hope was very realistic.

  Gabe peered into the shadows for the thousandth time, worried that he might find a member of the Dawn sneaking up on them. But the only person he saw was Jackson. The blond, pinch-faced Ghost Boy was leaning against a tree behind them, his arms folded across his chest and his usual sour expression on his face. He still looks like a ghost, he’s so pale. That wasn’t exactly accurate, since Jackson had never technically been a ghost. But what else do you call somebody who gets stuck between worlds for a hundred years, and keeps walking through walls for a while even after he gets unstuck?

  Gabe really wished they didn’t have to drag Jackson around with them, but he’d finally made peace with the knowledge that they needed him.

  Gabe, Lily, Brett, and Kaz represented the four natural elements, but Jackson, for reasons Gabe still didn’t understand completely, was bound to a fifth element. Magick. And if they were going to do what needed to be done, all five of them would have to work together.

  Greta had told Gabe that with her last breath.

  The fact that Jackson had tricked them, lied to them, and almost gotten them all killed multiple times in his effort to return to this world . . . well, they just had to deal with it.

  “All right,” Kaz said. “Showtime, I guess. Cross your fingers. Actually, if you can, do me a favor and cross your toes, too.”

  “You got this, Kaz,” Gabe said. He tried to sound more certain than he felt.

  They’d gone over the game plan for getting into Brookhaven what felt like a million times. Gabe could still imagine too many ways it could go wrong. But they didn’t have a choice.

  His mom and his uncle Steve were trapped in Arcadia—and it was up to Gabe to rescue them and destroy the shadow city once and for all. He had no clue how to do this, but he did know that Uncle Steve and Greta had been working on plans to accomplish something similar for going on ten years. His best hope was that Greta had squirreled some of their research away in her room here at Brookhaven.

  Kaz’s fingers touched the ground. The tiniest of tremors ran through the earth.

  “Just a little rumble,” Gabe had said when he’d come up with his plan. “Make them think it’s an aftershock from the quake a couple days ago. Just rattle things around enough that they evacuate the building.”

  Lily had nodded. “And then we make a mad dash to Greta’s room and hope we find something that’ll help us.”

  “Exactly.”

  The next tremor Kaz made was more noticeable. A nearby tree swayed, as if in a gentle breeze.

  Brett held the Emerald Tablet in both hands. At first glance, it looked like a solid piece of green crystal, about the size and shape of an iPad. But it was actually a book, which opened to reveal thick pages covered with runes—glyphs that could only be read by someone attuned to one of the elements. Each of the elements had a different language, so the four of them each saw something different written in its pages.

  As if the Tablet weren’t weird enough already, it didn’t cast a shadow. Gabe could see this peculiarity now, in the unblinking glare of the hospital’s security floodlights. Without a shadow, the Tablet looked like it had been poorly photoshopped into Brett’s hands, as if it were only half in this world.

  The hairs on Gabe’s arms bristled at the sight. Creepy.

  Gabe wished he’d never seen the stupid book, but at the same time, the information it held might make them all better at their . . . Gabe still struggled with how to describe their elemental gifts. Do we call them “powers”? Or does that make us sound too much like superheroes?

  Kaz’s eyes had gone solid slate gray, and shimmers of green energy flashed and flared across their surface. He curled his hands into fists and thumped them into the grass. The ground beneath them buckled, knocking Lily off-balance and into Gabe.

  The trees around them began swaying back and forth as if they were trying to shake free of their leaves. From inside the institute, the shrill buzzing of an earthquake alarm pierced the air.

  That should do it. “Okay, Kaz,” Gabe said. “I think we’re good.”

  Car alarms started going off, one after another, up and down the street.
Kaz kept his head down, both fists on the ground.

  “Kaz, that’s enough,” Lily said.

  Gabe felt something in the air around them . . . tighten, as if the entire world were clenching its muscles.

  The street in front of them fractured and heaved with a sound like an avalanche, and on the other side of Brookhaven’s chain-link fence, a wide, jagged crack zigzagged its way from the hospital’s foundation all the way up to the roof.

  Gabe shouted, “Kaz!” He grabbed his friend’s shoulders and dragged him to his feet. Two fist-shaped craters remained in the ground where Kaz had been feeding his power into the earth.

  “Sorry,” Kaz gasped. His eyes flickered from gray back to brown. The green light sparked and died away. “Sorry.”

  A rumbling, cracking sound rolled out from the hospital, and Gabe saw one of its walls begin to buckle. He was afraid the whole building might come down, but after a few seconds, it looked as if it had settled.

  “What the devil was that?” Jackson demanded, appearing at Gabe’s side. “You were supposed to frighten the people out of the building, not entomb them.”

  Kaz’s face fell. “I know, I know. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I—the first tremors went totally right, but then there was this . . . like, this voice in my head . . .” He carefully ducked out of Gabe’s grasp, as if Gabe’s hands were so delicate that Kaz feared he might break them. “I didn’t know how to stop it . . .”

  A rush of sympathy filled Gabe, taking in Kaz’s haunted expression. Gabe had heard a similar voice in his head before. More than once. The voice of fire, urging him to give in to the power of his element, urging him to greater and greater destruction, hissing for him to burn . . . burn . . . burn . . . What would earth tell Kaz? Break . . . crush . . . shatter . . .

  Kaz put his hands out as if to steady himself. “It’s gone now . . . I think. Yeah. Okay. I’m okay.”

  Their powers were incredibly useful, but they were also seriously dangerous. That on top of being hunted by the Eternal Dawn and their twisted creatures from Arcadia . . .

  God, we are in so far over our heads.

  “Well, it worked,” Brett said drily. He pointed at the stream of inmates and employees rushing out of the building, shepherded along by scrub-wearing orderlies. They gathered on a patch of grass just shy of the perimeter fence.