The Shadow City Page 4

Kaz didn’t give Gabe a chance to answer. He slapped a hand down on the table and said, “Guys, I’m sorry, but I’m calling. I’ve got no choice. I should’ve done this days ago.”

  Brett shifted in his seat, as if he might try to get up and stop Kaz, but Gabe grabbed his shoulder. “Brett, he’s right. He’s got no choice.” Brett frowned, but he folded his arms across his chest, sank back into his seat, and stayed quiet.

  Kaz tapped the screen. Gabe could hear the faint ringing, and the even fainter sound of Mr. Smith’s voice. Kaz tried for a cheerful tone: “Hi, Dad!”

  Gabe heard a burst of sound from the phone, and figured it was an explosion of words on the other end of the line. With each of Kaz’s responses, his happy tone deteriorated further into shame and guilt.

  “What? No, no, I’m fine! I’m with Gabe and Lily and Brett!

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, I . . .

  “No, look, Dad, everything’s totally fine, it’s . . .

  “Huh? You already called them? Dad, there’s no reason to bring the cops into this! I’m telling you, I’m—”

  Lily sprang from her chair, grabbed the phone out of Kaz’s hand—“Hey!”—and stabbed the End button. She turned the phone off, took a couple of steps toward the kitchen island, and then began to riffle through one of its drawers.

  “Lily, what are you—” Gabe asked.

  He watched as, a moment later, she found a paper clip and went to work on the back of the phone. A second later she pulled out the phone’s SIM card.

  Wow—she thinks fast!

  The whole time, Kaz stood staring at her, goggle-eyed. “Lily! What the heck? That’s my phone! You can’t just—”

  “Sorry, Kaz, but if your dad already called the police, they were totally tracing that call.”

  Kaz sputtered. “But we turned off the GPS!”

  Lily shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. The cops can figure out which cell towers your call pinged off. I saw that on CSI.”

  “Great.” Brett leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So now what? We can’t leave the house because the cops will be combing the streets for us?”

  Lily glanced at Gabe while Kaz pouted. “What do we do?”

  Gabe stood. He circled around and put his hands on the back of his chair. “We need to get rid of all our SIM cards.” He grabbed the paper clip and popped his own phone’s card loose. “Come on. Everybody.” He waited while Lily and Brett did the same. “Give them to me, okay? I’ll make sure they’re trashed.” Once he had all four SIM cards in his hand, he said, “Look . . . I don’t think there’s anything we can do about the cops right now. But we’ve got all of Uncle Steve’s and Greta’s research right here, don’t we? We’ve got full stomachs, we’re protected by a billion air and water wards . . . let’s just lie low, put this time to good use, and try to figure something out.”

  If Kaz had had more hair, his eyebrows would have been in danger of disappearing into it. “How do you know the wards will protect us? They didn’t make any difference at your house.”

  “Do not worry.” Jackson Wright came strolling into the kitchen and leaned against the counter, as if he hadn’t just disappeared for forty-five minutes. “Few things can penetrate the walls of this house.”

  “Oh yeah?” Gabe turned to face him, not bothering to hide his suspicion. “And how exactly do you know that?”

  “These walls are lined with thrice-warded Egyptian silver, Gabriel. I watched them lay it in myself over a century ago, though I knew not at the time what I was witnessing.” Jackson gestured grandly about him. “This is Argent Court. This is my home.”

  Gabe’s jaw dropped. “You used to live here?”

  Jackson’s normally sour expression grew even more acerbic. He held out a photograph to Gabe—a faded Polaroid of Gabe’s mother and father holding an infant, all three of them posing on the front steps of an old-fashioned house.

  This house!

  Even after a week of incredible shocks, Gabe still reeled at the sight.

  Everything he knew about his life, or believed he knew, seemed as baffling and unfamiliar as if it had belonged to a complete stranger.

  “I did indeed live here, Gabriel,” Jackson sniffed. “And a century later, it appears, so did you.”

  4

  Lily woke to deep confusion, staring up at the tin ceiling of the dusty bedroom. What was that sound? A glance at the window showed her that it was still dark. She flipped on the nightstand lamp, and a bleary peek at an old-fashioned alarm clock confirmed the hour: 2:37 a.m.

  Between her exhausted slumber and the unfamiliar surroundings, it took her a good ten seconds after she opened her eyes to remember where she was. She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, running one hand through her short, tousled hair. Despite her bleariness, she couldn’t help grinning as her eyes fell on the door of the en suite bath.

  After twelve years of sharing a bathroom with her brother, having one all to herself felt like some kind of royal luxury.

  She pulled on the thick terry-cloth robe she’d found hanging in the bathroom. She had one hand on the door to the hallway when she heard faint voices. That must be what woke me up. Lily opened the door and poked her head out, listening. She was the only one on this level, since Brett, Gabe, and Kaz had rushed all the way up to the fourth floor to find places to sleep. Lily was happy enough not to climb more stairs. The second-floor bedroom she’d found was perfect. Jackson had announced that, should anyone need to find him, he’d be in his old room on the third floor.

  Watching the former Ghost Boy trudge up the stairs, Lily had felt kind of sorry for him. Yes, he was the one whose lies had gotten both Dr. Conway and Brett sent to Arcadia, where Brett could have been killed and . . . Dr. Conway still might be. She still wanted to clock Jackson in his pasty face for that one. For the thousandth time, she said a quick prayer for the safety of Gabe’s uncle. But if she tried to put herself in Jackson’s shoes . . . she really couldn’t imagine how she’d feel. Coming back to a world a century ahead of the one she’d left behind? All her family and friends long dead? What a nightmare.

  She couldn’t tell exactly how Jackson felt about it. Lily wasn’t even sure Jackson was glad to be back on this plane of existence, since he acted so miserable all the time.

  She heard the voices again, echoing up the stairwell from below, one male, one female. The male voice sounded like Brett, but who could the woman be? Oh no—did the cops find us? Heart racing, Lily tiptoed down the hall and descended the ornate stairway, careful to not make any noise.

  An unexpected scent reached her nose when she got to the ground floor. She knew it well, as did anyone who’d spent any time in San Francisco: an ocean breeze. In this stuffy, sealed-up house, it struck her as immensely strange, and as she crept toward the dining room—the source of the voices—her skin prickled with gooseflesh. Feels like a storm’s coming. Dim, flickering yellow light emanated from the room, casting dancing shadows on the wall of the hallway outside the door.

  Lily peeked into the room, but it was hard to make sense of the shapes and silhouettes of the dimly lit space, and before she even really thought about it, her hand whipped out and flicked on the electric light switch. The chandelier over the dining table popped to life, flooding the room with bright-white light, and the before-the-storm feeling abruptly vanished.

  Her brother sat at the table across from an unfamiliar woman with long, straight, blue-black hair and skin pale as milk. Until Lily turned on the overhead lights, the room had been lit only by a dozen candles. And maybe the candles cast strange shadows, illuminating things in unexpected ways—because for a heartbeat, Brett’s face didn’t look like . . . like his face.

  Lily sucked in a sharp breath and took a step back.

  Brett grinned, his face back to normal. Had it been anything but normal? Was I seeing things? Brett said, “Hola, hermana.”

  Heart hammering against her ribs, Lily hovered in the dining roo
m doorway. “What are you doing? Who’s this?”

  The pale woman watched Lily with wide, placid blue eyes and said nothing.

  Brett spread his hands on the table. “I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d try to do something useful.”

  Lily took a step into the room. The pale woman tracked her movements, her expression unchanging. Lily cleared her throat. “Who are you?”

  From behind Lily, Gabe’s voice rang out. “Mom?”

  Lily turned and saw Gabe standing there in his boxer shorts, looking as if someone had just struck him between the eyes with a two-by-four. Emotions chased themselves across his face: confusion, hope, fear, love. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he dashed into the room and threw his arms around the woman. “Mom!”

  Horror settled around Lily like a bank of freezing mist as the pale woman’s skin rippled and flowed at Gabe’s touch. Then all Lily could hear was the sound of Gabe screaming.

  Lily, Kaz, Jackson, and Brett sat around the dining table, and the thing that looked like Aria, Gabe’s mother, remained in its place. Only Gabe was standing. He was back in the corner of the room the farthest away from the pale female shape, his eyes still red and puffy from the sudden burst of tears. He’d furiously wiped his cheeks dry.

  Cheeks exactly the same color as the woman’s skin. Lily’s eyes flicked back and forth from Gabe to the thing in the chair.

  “Why does this thing—this apographon—look like my mom?” The tremors had finally left his voice. Lily had never seen Gabe this freaked out before. Not that she could blame him. “Brett, did you . . . did you do this?” His volume increased as he stared at the pale figure. “What are you?”

  “My name is Aria,” the figure said, in a tone all the more horrifying because it sounded so dead and wooden.

  Gabe snorted and folded his arms across his chest.

  Lily pursed her lips as a deep pang of sympathy shot through her. What would I have done if this thing had looked like Charlie? The memory of her older brother loomed large.

  Brett sighed. “Look, there’s a reason I did this, okay? Just, just try to follow me here.” He held up a thin stack of pages, covered in Greta’s graceful, looping handwriting, and waved it at the group. “Dr. Conway and Greta always believed Aria might have survived that last ritual. The one where they tried to destroy Arcadia, that ended up being a disaster.”

  Lily stared at the tabletop. That was the very same ritual they were currently working so hard to re-create.

  Brett went on. “Dr. Conway and Greta were air and water. They thought they needed fire and earth—they didn’t know they needed magick.”

  Lily could see Jackson’s jaw tighten, but he didn’t say anything.

  “They also knew how dangerous working this kind of magick can get, so they didn’t want to bring in any new people if they could help it. That’s why they decided to see if they could get Gabe’s mom to help them. From Arcadia.” Brett held up a small book bound in red leather. Lily couldn’t work out the title, what with Brett waving it around, but the words appeared to be French. “I found this under a pile of diary pages. It’s called Whisper of the Remains, more or less.”

  Lily raised an eyebrow. “You speak French? Since when?”

  Brett grinned. “Well, there was this girl I liked, and she was taking a French class. She had really curly hair and . . .” Lily rolled her eyes and sighed. “Right, not relevant, sorry. Anyway, according to this”—he tapped the red book—“an apographon is able to mimic a person by synching with his or her consciousness. This one was created to look like Gabe’s mom because they were trying to make a connection to her in Arcadia. They figured that they could maybe talk with her through it and get her to help them pull off another ritual.”

  “Wait. Hang on,” Kaz said. “If this is the apographon from Greta’s room, then how come it’s sitting up and talking now? It was just a pile of disguised rocks and wood back when it looked like Greta.”

  “That’s the thing,” Brett said. “While Greta was alive, the apographon was a perfect copy. It could probably talk like her and answer questions and everything. But since she died—once the consciousness it was linked to went quiet—it went . . . inert, I guess. Dr. Conway and Greta ran into a similar problem when trying to connect with Gabe’s mom. This thing might look and sound like her, but, as you can see, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know there’s something really not right about her.”

  Lily frowned. “Because Arcadia was too far away for it to make a good connection?”

  “Exactly,” Brett said. “So when connecting to Gabe’s mom failed, I’m guessing Greta must have reprogrammed it to look like herself and used it to cover for her when she slipped out of Brookhaven.” Brett looked over at Gabe, sort of apologetically. “I was checking the apographon out, and I found this . . . sort of a residue. Like, just a trace of your mom. I didn’t mean to freak you out, but this is good news, right? The fact that it’s moving and talking at all proves that your mom is still alive in Arcadia. I know it’s not the real thing, but—”

  Gabe pushed off from the wall and tore his eyes away from the apographon. He drifted out of the room, his face so haunted Lily thought he looked more like a ghost than Jackson ever had. As he passed through the doorway, over his shoulder he said, “Get rid of it. I don’t want to see it anymore.”

  Brett half stood. “But Gabe! Wait! We need it! Studying this thing could help us!”

  Gabe paused, his back to them. “I don’t care. I want it gone.”

  As Gabe disappeared down the hallway, Lily couldn’t help wondering how terrible it had to feel, finding something that looked so much like the person you’d lost, only to find out that it was a lie.

  5

  Gabe sat between his mother and father as they cruised down the country road in his father’s pickup. They were on their way to the movies, and his taste buds were all set for heavily buttered popcorn. He watched the way his father’s hands gripped the wheel, the lines of muscle in his father’s forearms. Gabe hoped he’d be as strong as his dad one day.

  “Excited, honey?” his mother asked, and twined her fingers through Gabe’s. Her skin was smooth and cool, and he nestled against her, the heavy curtain of her long black hair falling around him.

  “I can’t wait! It’s supposed to be awesome!”

  His mother patted his hair and rested the side of her face against the top of his head.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to be late, son,” Gabe’s father said, and let his foot sink farther toward the floorboard. The pickup’s engine growled as they accelerated. The trees along the side of the road became greenish-brown blurs.

  “Now, now, sweetheart, we’ve got plenty of time.” Gabe’s mother put a finger under Gabe’s chin and tipped his face up to look at her.

  Gabe glanced at his dad behind the wheel and saw that his eyes were on fire. Twin suns that could burn through anything. The fire spread across his father’s face, and searing pain lanced through Gabe’s hands, because they were on fire, too.

  His mother leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “We will always be a family.”

  Gabe turned toward his father and screamed.

  The driver’s seat was an inferno.

  Arms made of flame encircled Gabe as the pickup veered off the road, and he tried to reach the door, tried to jump out, but he couldn’t. The flames held him tightly as they seared through his clothes and his flesh and his bones, and the truck hurtled down a rocky cliff face, and Gabe knew he would die in a massive ball of fire. . . .

  And in his head a rough, whispered voice chanted, Burn . . . burn . . . burn . . .

  Gabe’s eyes sprang open. His badly trembling hand switched on the light beside his bed, and he stared around at the Argent Court bedroom, convincing himself, willing himself to believe that this was real, this was reality.

  Not that dream.

  That nightmare.

  He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat there with his knees on his elb
ows, staring at the floor. His toes dug into the nap of the rug covering the hardwood. His fingertips gingerly checked for burns, and when they found none, he finally breathed an unsteady sigh of relief. There was no fire. There was no fire.

  Weak early-morning light the color of dirty dishwater leaked in around the heavy curtains. Gabe didn’t know if he could go back to sleep, but he was a hundred percent certain he didn’t want to. Moving slowly, he stood and pulled on his clothes again.

  Details of his encounter with the Mom-shaped apographon came back to him bit by bit, whether he wanted them to or not. No wonder I had nightmares. Gabe decided to concentrate on breakfast, or at least try to. He trudged down the stairs.

  The lights in the dining room were still on, so Gabe stopped there before he even reached the kitchen. Brett was still sitting in the same chair, like he was glued to it, with the Emerald Tablet and one of Uncle Steve’s notebooks open in front of him.

  “Morning,” Gabe said. He didn’t know what to think about this new, studious Brett Hernandez. The most he’d ever known Brett to read before was video game item descriptions, but since he’d come back from Arcadia, Brett had taken to books like a cat to catnip. Of all the ways Brett could be coping with the experience, Gabe figured this had to be one of the better ones. It was just weird, was all.

  Brett didn’t look up, and the grunt he made didn’t even count as a word. But Gabe nearly jumped when, from the shadows in one corner, Jackson Wright said, “You look as if you haven’t slept in a year.”

  Gabe composed himself. Barely. “Could you try not being weird and creepy? Just once? Or is that too much for you?”

  Jackson, standing there with his arms folded, went back to watching Brett, which it seemed he’d been doing for a while. Gabe couldn’t tell if Brett had even gone to bed at all. “Yes, Gabriel, I’m so inspired to be pleasant to you,” Jackson said. “Because of your open, honest, forgiving nature.”

  Gabe fell silent and headed toward the kitchen again. Weird and creepy Jackson might be, but Gabe had tried to shove him into a shadow dimension. Shame made him feel heavier.