The seaweed covered the rocks and sand and darkened the water leading out as far as I could see.

  The sky seemed to be the same shade of crimson streaked with yellows and oranges as before. So, not sunset or sunrise. Just a steady red sky.

  I resumed the climb to the summit.

  Eventually, I reached the top. As I pulled myself up, I half-expected to be greeted by a wall of seaweed darklings, but instead it was simply a rocky summit that meandered in a zigzag toward blackened rock and a curved line of rock sweeping around in an arc to the right.

  Welcome to the caldera, I thought.

  It was definitely part of an ancient volcano.

  I gazed outward at the sea from the top and saw a series of calderas in the distance. A ring of old volcanoes.

  I felt lightheaded so I sat and wondered what I should do. Where should I go? Walking along the caldera seemed fruitless as it clearly didn’t lead anywhere but to another caldera, though I suspected there would be gaps between them filled in by the cold, dark sea.

  If I’d been wearing Dorothy’s slippers, maybe I could have clicked them together and wished myself home.

  Wish in one hand…

  My stomach growled, and my mouth was dry.

  If I was going to stay here, I’d need food, water, and shelter.

  The seawater wouldn’t help me. Salt water isn’t for drinking, and I’d swallowed too much of it already.

  I didn’t see anything alive other than the seaweed, and I sure as hell didn’t want to climb down to try and eat any of that. There also wasn’t anything resembling shelter.

  The sky remained the same. Maybe it was like being at the North Pole where the days could last for a month or more. Maybe it was permanently the same here.

  It was a different dimension, after all.

  Anything was possible.

  For all I knew, I could reach up, grab a fistful of sky, and eat it.

  I reached for the sky.

  It was out of reach.

  Can’t say I didn’t try.

  I wandered along the edge of the cliff, looking down in hopes of seeing a hint of shadow somewhere. But the outcroppings didn’t cast shadows anywhere, and as before, I didn’t see a shadow coming from me either. I got down on my knees and held my hand just above the ground. By squinting, I could make out a slight shadow.

  Was it enough to allow travel?

  I had to try.

  I imagined going back to Kelly’s truck and tried to roll through the light shadow.

  I rolled over and found myself still on the cliff.

  Not enough shadow?

  Or had that ability been temporary?

  I looked at my fingertips.

  No scratches.

  I knew I must have scratched them as I ascended the cliff, but then again, the climb had been easy, so maybe not. Too many things I just didn’t know.

  Should I scratch myself to see if it healed? Or were there toxins in the air that could kill me if I made such an attempt.

  Did it matter if I died now or later?

  Nope.

  I grabbed a rock and scraped it across the skin on the backside of my hand. Success. The skin separated.

  Then the skin knitted itself back together.

  So, I still had the vampiric healing ability. That meant I’d still have the shadow traveling ability.

  I simply needed a good shadow.

  I peeled off my shirt, and hung it over a rock. Still not much shadow. But when I held my hand above my shirt and leaned down, I could finally see a definite shadow. It was faint, but it was there.

  I dropped through it, and like Indiana Jones snatching his hat before a temple door slammed closed, I grabbed my shirt as I phased through.

  And found myself on another caldera under the same damn sky.

  I moved to the edge of the cliff and looked out at the sea. The ocean looked normal out there now. Off to the left, I saw darkness beneath the water leading onto the sand and boulders. But that was a way off.

  Did the darklings know I’d made a jump?

  Only one way to find out.

  I donned my shirt, then began the climb to the rocks and sand below. Going down was pretty easy. I slipped once and covered more territory than I intended, but I caught myself without a problem. If the cliff wasn’t so steep, I probably could have tried to do a few controlled slides, but I didn’t want to risk missing an outcropping that could send me plummeting to my death smashed on the rocks below.

  Kinda defeated the purpose of escaping the darklings.

  Sometime later, I was on the ground. I had no clue how long I’d been there because the sky hadn’t changed at all. The wind kicked up a notch and the whispers sounded almost like words, but unintelligible. Maybe I was unconscious and drowning beneath the water, and this was my brain’s way of handling it—stretching out the experience.

  That sounded silly, but all I heard was the whispering wind and my own movements as my feet scraped the cliffside, and my breathing. The rocks smelled like the dirt from the construction sites I used to play in as a kid before the neighborhood houses were built.

  “Focus,” I told myself.

  I’d kept an eye on the dark seaweed, which looked like an oil slick in the water. It hadn’t moved toward me, so I chalked that up as a win. It struck me that the darklings couldn’t find me because they were all connected, and as long as I wasn’t in range, they couldn’t find me.

  In the darkness under the water, there would be plenty of deep shadows.

  Maybe I could make the jump back to my world from there.

  I hopped off the boulders to the black sand and crossed the beach to the water. I waded into the icy water, and kept going until I was waist deep. Then I dove under a wave. The sudden cold made me stiffen my arms.

  No darklings.

  No seaweed.

  I looked off in the direction I knew them to be.

  All I could see was darkness.

  Just darkness.

  Wonderful darkness.

  Maybe it concealed me from them as much as it concealed them from me. That struck me as important. They were connected. If I wasn’t connected to them or close enough to be seen, maybe I was safe from them.

  Only I wasn’t as safe as I thought. The darkness moved, and darklings separated from the seaweed. They raced toward me, gliding through the water like a shark homing in on a seal.

  There was no time to waste. I needed to go home.

  The darklings darted at me, and the sound of the creatures howling cut through the water. Sound moved well underwater. I hoped they could understand me when I used some of my air to say, “Fuck you!”

  I rolled through the darkness, and found myself finishing the roll across snow-covered pine needles.

  I was back!

  But now it was night.

  And it was cold.

  And I was wet.

  But hey, I was alive. And the darklings didn’t follow me.

  Winner winner, chicken dinner.

  I shouldn’t have thought that. Now I was hungry, too.

  And I was still not in my own world, but I could have sworn I heard someone say, “He’s back. Keep him here.”

  25

  I shivered in the darkness.

  The voice didn’t speak again, so I wondered if it was my imagination.

  The snow was bright enough that I cast a good shadow across it. I did a shoulder roll through my shadow and came up on the edge of a mountain road, but I was still in the wrong world.

  I needed to get back to the warmer weather. This dimension seemed to be layered on top of ours. I didn’t know if the scale was the same, but if I could at least head in the right direction, maybe I’d find a thinner veil that would make it easier to find my way home.

  I guessed if I went downhill, I’d be going toward Denver in my world. Of course, if I’d rolled the wrong direction, I could be moving toward Montrose.

  “Use the Force, Luke,” I said, as if that would help.

  Wandering around in the darkness, I could run into a pack of wolves, or other-worldly critters. Or I could simply get too cold, lay down, and die of hypothermia.

  Best to keep moving.

  Maybe shadows could speed things up. Get me closer to the thinner veils, or give me a sense of how to get through to my own world. I decided to take a chance. I found a good shadow from a line of trees against the ground beside an animal trail.

  A quick roll through the shadow put me in the middle of a bunch of pine trees with nothing else in sight.

  The land here angled downward, so maybe it was fine. I didn’t see any signs of cabins or roads, and the trees kept me from determining where the moon was in relation to the stars.

  I chose another good shadow, and rolled through it thinking about a clearing where I could see better.

  More damn trees.

  Maybe I couldn’t travel far enough to reach a clearing. Maybe I needed to know where it was. I hated not knowing the rules of shadow travel.

  Gee, Stacey, maybe you could have given me a few pointers.

  Oh well.

  I tried another shadow roll.

  More trees. But this time, I was beside a fallen tree, too. It gave me a decent shadow, so I rolled through it.

  Still more trees.

  I looked around.

  Twenty feet away, I saw the same stupid fallen tree.

  Had I been making little twenty-foot shadow runs? Or was I covering less distance with each attempt?

  I didn’t know.

  I kinda needed to know.

  I trudged back to the fallen tree and saw where I’d come through and rolled. I moved uphill another fifty feet or so, and found where I’d rolled through the previous shadow.

  So, I was losing distance with each attempt.

  Great.

  On the positive side, I didn’t feel like I’d lost much in the way of energy.

  On the negative side, I was colder than I had been. My fingers and toes burned. I could barely feel my legs. But I had to keep going. No reason to shadow hop if I couldn’t get any real distance out of it.

  So, I trudged back down. I passed the fallen tree, followed my steps to where I’d last rolled out of shadow. And I kept going hoping to find the thinner barriers, but with the cold, would I even notice them?

  I lost track of time. Next thing I knew, I took a tumble. I didn’t know if I’d tripped over a rock or tree root or something else. I just know I was moving forward one moment and then I face-planted in the snow.

  I couldn’t feel the snow on my cheeks.

  After a moment, I pushed myself to my feet, but then I swayed and dropped backward onto my ass.

  Smooth move.

  I tried to brush snow from my face, but it was like I had no control over my motor functions. I couldn’t tell if I managed anything at all.

  Then everything went black for a moment.

  No!

  Giving up was not in my DNA.

  I forced myself to my feet and stumbled in another direction, watching for the snow to thin and give way to more pine needles.

  What if I’d come through miles from where I’d left? I had no way of knowing.

  But then off in the distance, I spotted a hazy light. It looked warm, so I angled toward it. The snow faded away to simple pine needles, and the air felt warmer, but that could have been an illusion.

  I stumbled and fell and tried to get up, but my body betrayed me. My arms couldn’t lift me up.

  I dropped face-first in the pine needles and drifted off to sleep.

  26

  “Get up, you lazy bastard,” a voice said.

  I opened my eyes.

  Victor stood over me.

  “Get up or I’ll stomp your head into the ground,” he said.

  I didn’t move.

  He raised a foot, and aimed at my face.

  “Don’t do that, Victor,” another voice said.

  A familiar voice.

  “You take away all my fun,” Victor said.

  Someone grabbed me under the arms and pulled me to my feet. Hands maneuvered me around so I could face my rescuer.

  Stacey Fitzpatrick.

  “Hey there, Loverboy,” she said. “Ready to go home?”

  “I have a home?” I asked.

  She laughed, and I felt myself falling.

  I landed on a hotel bed with Stacey on top of me.

  If I’d had any of my senses about me, that might have been nice. As things stood, I was simply confused.

  She got off me. “He’s all yours, Kelly,” Stacey said.

  Short-haired Kelly leaned over me. “Hello, Jonathan. Nice to see you’re still among the living.”

  “And how,” Esther said.

  “I don’t feel alive,” I said, and then a sharp pain in my arm flared and everything went dark again.

  An indeterminate amount of time later, I felt twin pains in my throat.

  Then someone kissed me.

  And my mouth filled with blood.

  Everything went dark, and I figured it must have been a dream.

  Sunlight streamed through the window.

  I opened my eyes a bit, found the light too blinding, so I turned away.

  I was in a hotel room. But it was not the same hotel room I’d been in before.

  Esther sat with her back inside the television and kicked her legs through the dresser. She noticed that I was awake and popped over to me.

  “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey,” she said.

  I tried to swat at her, but my hands passed right through her.

  She laughed at me.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “Whine much?” Esther said. But she was still smiling.

  “I want to sleep,” I said.

  “You’ve been asleep for eighteen hours,” short-haired Kelly said, stepping into view. “Prior to that, you’d been missing for a week.”

  A week?

  “That’s not right.”

  “Close enough. You phased out of sight with some of those darkling creatures a week ago, and we didn’t see you again until yesterday. Stacey and Victor found you.”

  “Thirsty,” I said.

  Kelly disappeared for a moment and returned with a glass of water. I sat up and she handed it to me.

  “Sip,” someone said from my other side.

  I turned to see a large Black woman seated next to the bed.

  “Who?” Then a name from a lifetime ago popped into my head. “Lina?”

  “That’s me. Just take a sip. Don’t you dare drain that glass in one gulp, young man.”

  “I know.” I sipped. Let the water sit on my tongue. When I swallowed, it had the faint flavor of copper.

  I took another sip and used my tongue to wet my lips.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I’ve been looking after you since last night.”

  “But you’re a healer.”

  “And you can’t be healed with magic,” she said. “Fortunately, I didn’t need magic to warm you up, but I sure needed it to keep you from vamping out on us.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Well, Stacey had to bite you, swish your blood around in her mouth then get you to swallow it. Disgusting as that sounds, it was the best way to save you.”

  “That was a dream.”

  “No, honey, that part was all too real.”

  “I’m lost,” I said.

  “When you lay down with vampires, you wake up with fangs,” Kelly said.

  “I don’t have fangs,” I said.

  “You did for about an hour.”

  “You were in and out of delirium,” Lina said. “Stacey didn’t go through the entire turning sequence, so you’re not a vampire. Well, not fully.”

  “Yet,” Kelly said.

  I looked at each of them in turn. Lina looked kind, as always. Kelly looked stoic. Esther gave me an enigmatic shrug.

  “Are you saying I’m turning into a bloodsucker?”

  Lina hesitated. “We don’t know.”

  “Well, either I am or I’m not.”

  “And we’re waiting to see which it is.”

  “Swapping bodily fluids with the undead can lead to the ability to travel through shadow, see better at night, and give you greater strength and stamina,” Kelly said.

  “But the side effects,” Lina said, “include a craving for human blood, burning up in direct sunlight, restless leg syndrome, diarrhea, erectile dysfunction, and death.”

  “Did you spend the last few hours coming up with that list?”

  “Just being honest.” Her eyebrows rose. “Are you experiencing any cravings?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “What’s the latest on the darkling invasion?”

  “Oh, that’s over,” Kelly said. “We handled it.”

  “Color me lost,” I said.

  “Big battle while you were gone. You took enough darklings with you that we were able to save the world. Again.”

  “And I was the decoy?”

  “Exactly as planned from the start, yes.”

  I blinked. “Stacey told me she changed her plan.”

  “She did,” Kelly said. “The original plan was to sacrifice you to the darklings. I told her that if she killed you, I’d rip her head off and put it on a spike on the 16th Street Mall.”

  “And I was going to help,” Esther said.

  “So, it’s over?”

  “That phase is complete,” Kelly said.

  “And I was out of the main action?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  I considered that. “Yes,” I said. “It does.”

  “We’ve been known to solve problems without you, Jonathan. In fact, I’ve worked with you a total of twice, and this time I was mostly keeping you out of harm’s way until things went down.”

  “Lenora?”

  “And Vera. They each have one of the Rings of Aten, and with those, they and Victor were able to withstand the sunlight they needed to stream into the Shadow Realm.”

  I felt dizzy and lost. Lenora I’d seen. Vera, I hadn’t. And weren’t they sister enemies or something? My brain wouldn’t focus.

 

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