Fire in the Shadows (The Nightcrafters Book 3) Read online

  Fire in the Shadows

  The Nightcrafters - Book 3

  by

  RAMSEY ISLER

  copyright Ramsey Isler. © 2016. All rights reserved.

  www.ramseyisler.com

  cover design copyright

  2016 Ramsey Isler. Photography by Noel Bauza

  Creative Commons license CC0 1.0

  (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  It was Sunday night in Montreal, and I was fighting for my life.

  A very skilled and very sneaky nightcrafter had just smacked me with a spell that left my ears ringing and my eyes watering. While I tried to get my bearings, I rubbed my eyes to clear away the stinging tears. When I opened my eyes again, all I could see was a big blob of gray and orange hurtling in my direction. I ducked just in time to avoid getting my head smashed by a flaming block of concrete.

  Fire licked at my head. I heard hair singe, smelled the acrid odor of burning. I ran for cover, throwing defensive spells behind me blindly as I fled. I dove behind a massive delivery truck and peeked underneath it to scout the area across the street.

  Ten seconds ago there was a Baskin Robbins over there.

  Now it was a pile of rubble and wreckage that belched thick, billowing smoke into the sky. The gas line probably lit up when the building came down. Red-orange fire provided enough light to see, which I was thankful for since all the power in this neighborhood had been knocked out. Silhouetted against the flames were two man-shaped figures. I tried to think of a spell to throw at them, but they ran from the light and into the shadows.

  Shit.

  Some primal part of my brain told me I wasn’t safe, so I scampered from my cover like a paranoid mouse. A second later, the truck I’d been hiding behind crumpled like some invisible giant crushed it in its massive hand.

  “Where ya going, pussy?!?”

  The voice came from somewhere behind me, and it sounded young. Like, high school young. It was bad enough I’d lost control of the situation. The fact that I was getting my ass handed to me by kids was just salt in the wound.

  Time to even things up.

  I focused my mind and slipped into the cool, welcoming darkness of the world beyond the Rift. It would only take a second for my foes to follow me, but that was all the time I needed.

  In an instant my arms sprouted thick feathers crafted from the essence of the dark. The feathers multiplied and became full-on wings; huge raven-like wings full of magical power. I flapped my arms downward once, twice, and I was in the air. I soared as high as I could.

  I felt shock waves against my skin as my pursuers burst through the Rift. I was hoping they couldn’t fly. Those hopes were quickly dashed as I felt my enemies use magic to lift them skyward. These bastards were fast too; almost as fast as Kellar. This wasn’t going to work. I had to change tactics, now.

  I slipped back through the Rift and immediately got a face full of cloud. Condensation clung to my skin and left me soaked as I rocketed through it. I thought about hiding in here for a second, but that wouldn’t work. Something else might do the job though . . .

  My enemies tore through the Rift, splitting the air with a CRACK like thunder. They moved so fast they were almost through the cloud before I had a chance to spring my trap. In a half-second, I focused my mind on the effect I wanted. My crisscrossed senses saw the billions of water droplets in the cloud as tiny blue letter Bs that vibrated. In my mind’s eye I made those little Bs stop moving.

  And the cloud froze.

  The big cotton ball in the sky turned into a clump of snow in a heartbeat, trapping my pursuers. Snow, unlike water vapor, can’t float. Gravity claimed the cloud and took the nightcrafters with it. I allowed myself a small smile at my cleverness. But the falling snowball burst apart in an explosion of shadow. My enemies buzzed around like pissed off wasps. Then I felt my connection to the Rift get severed by hostile magic. My wings dissolved into nothing.

  I dropped like a stone.

  Wind whistled past my ears as I helplessly fell towards the nightcrafters. But they didn’t move to intercept me. They just let me fall. It dawned on me that they were perfectly content to watch me plummet to my death. By the time I realized this, I was a thousand feet below them and falling faster. Skyscrapers came rushing back into my view like giant stalagmites with pointy tips getting closer and closer.

  I focused my mind, trying to ignore the asphalt rapidly coming up to meet me. Then I saw it — the grid.

  The grid was the key to some of my new abilities. Newton called it a ‘phosphene’ — an optical illusion created by the crisscross drug that I was now taking regularly to enhance my abilities. The grid was a sheet of intersecting, rainbow-colored lines overlaid on whatever I looked at. Right now the grid enveloped my entire top-down view of the city. For a moment, time seemed to stop, and I had all the opportunity I needed to figure out what to do.

  I reached out to a point where the grid lines intersected. I pinched it between my thumb and index finger, and pulled.

  My connection to the Rift returned, suddenly flowing through me like rushing water through a pipe. The asphalt below me morphed and warped, growing upwards and towards me. I kept falling, but I hardly noticed. All my focus was on that single point on the grid. I pulled on it harder, and the black asphalt bubbled and frothed — a dark, ten-foot high version of root beer foam.

  Then I fell into it. Head first. At over a hundred miles per hour.

  A confused mix of sensations flooded my mind. The sticky sensation of the aerated asphalt tasted like Oreo cookies. The jolt of pain that ran through my back smelled like rancid milk. The bubbles in the asphalt popped as my body sacrificed them for shock absorption. Black particles flew into the air, into my mouth, up my nose. When it was all over, there was nothing but a goopy mess. The blacktop had lost its fizz.

  But I was alive.

  I was also absolutely exhausted. I couldn’t even summon the energy to stand. My head was pounding. My chest heaved up and down as I fought for breath. I was certain this was what dying was supposed to feel like.

  Five more nightcrafters slipped out of the darkness. Their bodies were human-shaped vortexes of smoke and bristling magical energy. They were young. Healthy. Strong. The cavalry had arrived. Too bad it wasn’t my cavalry.

  “We finally got you,” one of my young opponents said with a sneer.

  “Yeah,” I said breathlessly, “but . . . you guys have . . . gotten me before. That’s not . . . a big deal. It’s keeping me that’s the hard part.”

  “This isn’t a capture operation, dumb ass,” one of the voices said. “We aren’t here to bring you in. We’re here to take you down.”

  I thought about closing my eyes. It seemed appropriate to meet my end in darkness. But then I figured I wasn’t going to give these motherfuckers the pleasure of seeing me turn away. Whatever existed on the other side of death, I was going to meet it with eyes wide open.

  And then I saw the light.

  But it wasn’t the brightness of the Pearly Gates openin
g, or the stunning brilliance of the universe’s core as my soul flew off to some other realm. It was a searing electronic column of light beaming from the sky — a searchlight that encircled my would-be-murderers in whiteness. I looked up, and in the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a . . . helicopter.

  Why didn’t I hear it?

  That thought was immediately forgotten when a goddamn car fell out of the heavens and smashed the young men in front of me into nightcrafter pulp. Blood, flesh, and other things I didn’t want to think about squirted into the air. A stream of this reddish-black stuff shot out from one of the bodies and splattered across my face. It was warm.

  Then I puked.

  While I vomited, the light from the sky shut off. I wanted to look up and search the skies for the source of all this sudden mayhem, but the combination of exhaustion and violent nausea kept me on my hands and knees, praying for some sort of relief. And, surprisingly, sweet comfort arrived.

  A cool, refreshing gust of air blew over me. Then I felt an effervescent bubbling throughout my entire being. The raw, post-puke feeling in my throat went away. The freshly squeezed nightcrafter pulp on my face magically disappeared too. I tried to stand, but the swirling pain in my head hadn’t quite subsided yet, so I sat back on my butt.

  I heard the scrape of metal against concrete and turned to my left. The helicopter that had floated soundlessly above me was now on the ground, right in the middle of the street. Its searchlight hung from its belly, dark and lifeless now. There was no pilot in the cockpit. No passenger either. The rotors were absolutely motionless. That chopper hadn’t moved by any conventional means, and I didn’t need to wait long to find out the real force behind all this.

  A new form materialized out of the darkness and stood over me, offering a half-smile. I’d never been so happy to see him.

  Kellar said, “You have an incredible knack for getting yourself into trouble.”

  “Uh, I think you got me into this trouble,” I said.

  Kellar thought about that for a second. “Ah. I guess you’re right. Well, at least I got you out of the trouble this time. So no harm done.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Did you find it?”

  “Yes,” Kellar said. “So, if you’re done barfing like a frat boy, we have work to do.”

  * * *

  Moments later, after I’d gotten a good breather, Kellar and I stalked the dark, empty streets of Montreal. It was absolutely surreal to be in a big city with not a single citizen to be seen, but that’s what the world was like ever since magic users started stirring up shit after Cecil’s untimely demise.

  The euphoria of defeating Cecil and simultaneously bringing Kellar to my side didn’t last long before reality pissed all over my parade. Cecil hadn’t been bluffing about having friends who could help bring about the world he wanted to see. They were everywhere — government, big business, even several megachurches. You’d be surprised how many nightcrafters were Scientologists.

  As a group, they were a shadow force that had extensive reach and influence. And once they learned that Cecil was dead, they started raising hell. They called themselves Prohibitionists, and they made their goal of forbidding the nightcraft known far and wide. When word reached the other nightcrafters, and they knew they were being targeted, a war broke out.

  The chaos began with the blackouts. Maine and New Hampshire went dark first. Several days with no electricity. Power lines were severed so badly that the local authorities had no way to keep up. It was worse than any brutal natural disaster had over done. The Prohibitionists were always the cause behind the blackouts. Epic battles were fought in the darkness. The Prohibitionists won some, lost others, and showed no signs of stopping.

  Then, just to show that they were neither biased nor limited, Cecil’s pals started hitting Canada too. Half of Montreal was without power for a week. Neighborhoods that were usually protected from magical creatures by the hindering light of streetlamps went completely dark, and the Rift-kind came out to frolic.

  But, oddly enough, there weren’t many civilian casualties. Almost none, in fact. It was almost like someone was keeping an eye on them and making sure they didn’t harm any innocents. But the Rift-kind still caused havoc just by being around people. Frantic citizens started calling emergency services and screaming about strange creatures clawing at their doors. At first, the authorities played it off as the usual uptick in paranoia and fear during extended blackouts. But as the calls became more frequent, and notable politicians and celebrities started having encounters in their homes, panic started to spread across the whole northeast coast of North America.

  Now, whenever there was a blackout in an area, people left in droves.

  Dominique and her mysterious government cronies kept an eye on the situation as best they could. They also got to work on some world-class media manipulation. Thankfully, because they exist in the dark, nobody could ever actually capture a Rift-kind on good video. So there was never any good footage for the TV networks to plaster all over the airwaves. Government forces took advantage of the lack of solid proof to muddy waters and keep the public from getting at the truth. The official story was that a virus had been driving animal predators into hyper-aggression, and the lack of light in the city invited them to come in and find new hunting grounds. Most people believed this, mainly because the average person’s brain can’t handle the idea of supernatural creatures scratching at their front door.

  But, again, the remarkable thing about it all was that almost nobody died during all this. The Rift-kind terrified a lot of people, but fatalities were exceptionally low. We couldn’t figure it out until we noticed a small but significant spike in missing person reports. Newton’s automated data filters picked up a pattern, then it all became clear.

  The Prohibitionists weren’t causing the blackouts to create chaos; they were doing it to identify and isolate nightcrafters easier.

  It took Kellar a while to confirm it since nightcrafters didn’t really congregate much and there wasn’t a central repository of nightcraft students anywhere. But after Kellar used his considerable powers of persuasion on a few key members of the nightcrafter ranks, we had our answer. Every single person who mysteriously vanished during the blackouts was a nightcrafter.

  Cecil’s master plan had been to kill all the nightcrafters who didn’t agree with his ideal of voluntarily giving up magic cold turkey for the greater good. Now that he was dead, it seemed his followers had taken it upon themselves to see his vision come to life.

  On this particular evening in Montreal, the Prohibitionists were out to kill two of their most wanted enemies — namely me and Kellar.

  We didn’t know how they found out we’d be in Montreal, but we certainly knew why they chose this moment to come after us. While Kellar was out interrogating nightcrafters to figure out what was behind the blackouts, he stumbled on a piece of ancient nightcrafter history. He refused to tell anyone exactly what it was, but he knew it was in Montreal. And he was absolutely convinced that it held the secret to something that many people thought was impossible — the key to closing the Rift forever.

  * * *

  Once we were sure all the Prohibitionists sent to kill us were either dead or running away, we moved towards our target. I thought we were going to sneak through the city’s darkness like ninjas, but Kellar didn’t seem to think there was a point to that. He walked boldly right down the middle of a vacant street, and I followed.

  As we walked, I kept my head on a swivel and scanned every square inch of the area with my eyes and my Rift-sense. Kellar was much more relaxed, and he kept his attention straight ahead.

  This district of the city was totally vacant and creepy as all hell. This was maybe the fourth or fifth blackout the city had suffered in the past few months, and the frazzled nerves of the populace had reached the breaking point. Everybody pretty much just said “fuck it”, or however you say that in French. The city administrators had even formulated an orderly plan for evacuat
ion in times like this. They had it down to a science. Nobody objected at this point. They just left.

  I had expected the place to look like something out of a zombie flick, but it didn’t. It was more like a movie set that had simply closed for the night. Everything was clean. Windows were intact. There were no signs of chaos or looting or anything. There wasn’t even much litter on the sidewalks.

  The surreal situation was made even stranger by the fact that there was an orange glow on the horizon. Just a few miles out, the rest of the city had power. And that was part of the brilliance in the Prohibitionist plan. If you lived here and the power went out for days, why stick around when you can just grab a hotel or stay with friends and family just a half hour’s drive away? Staying only made sense if you were a child of the darkness, like a nightcrafter.

  Kellar and I kept walking until our target came into view — a pretty building made of marble and glass. I knew it was a museum, but there weren’t any signs or labels providing more detail than that. Kellar started a slow jog towards it, and I followed. We got to the entrance without incident and saw a few scattered, dim lights glowing inside. But the power in the neighborhood was still out.

  Kellar smashed the tempered glass in the front door with a burst of unseen energy. A weak, warbling alarm trickled from hidden speakers. It was a sad sound, made sadder by the fact that there was no one besides us around to hear it. Still, the noise made me even more nervous. I instinctively hid in the nearest deep shadow I could find, waiting for another group of enemies to appear.

  “Relax,” Kellar said. “The others are occupied elsewhere. We shouldn’t have any more interruptions.”

  “And what exactly is occupying them?” I asked.

  “Not what,” Kellar said. “Who. Or whom? I never could get that right. Regardless, I have somebody providing a distraction.”