How interesting. Apparently Jackie was wandering around on the fringes of the city, away from anyone and everything, not bothering to shield herself even though she knew I’d be looking for her. Maybe she thought I was dead. Maybe she needed the water or this specific place to actualize her intentions. Maybe finding her was random luck. But I didn’t think so.
Not that it mattered. If she had lured me down to this secluded spot with bad intentions, so what? What was I going to do, go home? I hated playing out a game on my opponent’s home field, but if you go looking for someone, you seldom have a choice.
I jerked my head at Lou and started off down the long path that leads into the bay. The temperature remained constant, but it seemed colder the closer I got to the end. About fifty yards from the end of the jetty, I stopped. I could barely make out a figure standing there, waiting. I assumed it was Jackie, though from this distance I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.
The moon had risen over the water and its weak glow was in my eyes, making it even harder to see. I stopped out of reflex before I moved forward again, trying to keep an eye on what I could see of Jackie as well as everything else around me. She was expecting me and I’m sure she was prepared, probably with some nasty surprise. The path had narrowed and the water was now only a few yards away from me on both sides. It wouldn’t have been much of a surprise to see some ocean denizen launch itself out of the deep, flop onto the narrow path, and seize me in powerful jaws.
She’d chosen this place for a confrontation, and that didn’t bode well. The jetty ended in the waters of the bay; there was nowhere else to go from there, no escape route. Which meant Jackie wanted to end it here and now, and also meant she was confident in her ability to do so. Richter’s book must have given her something special, an edge that would prove decisive. I wasn’t that worried, at least not about the book. Knowledge and power are useful tools, but they’re not always the deciding factor. I’d fought practitioners and other things more powerful than me before this, and I’m still walking around. I got within thirty feet of her before she spoke.
“That’s close enough, Mason,” she said.
“Good to see you, too, Jackie. You know, if you wanted to talk, you could have picked a more pleasant spot. A warm café, for example.”
“I have no interest in talking,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. If she hadn’t wanted to talk, she would have launched an attack at me as soon as I was close enough.
“Why did you have to kill Malcolm?” I said. “He wasn’t a bad guy—he certainly didn’t deserve that.”
“Malcolm’s dead?”
“Yeah, that sometimes happens to people when you stick a knife into them.”
She seemed genuinely taken aback, though it was hard to tell at that distance by nothing more than the light of the half-moon. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t know anything about it. It was just a distraction—he’s far too tough to die over a little stab wound.”
“I was there when he died.”
She looked at me blankly. “I guess I was wrong, then.”
“Yeah, and what now? You kill me, too, so you can keep hold of that stupid book?” I paused. “Gosh, and I thought we meant something to each other.” She almost smiled.
“Yes, you were very clever about that. You had a good time, though, didn’t you? But you don’t understand. I’m not a bad person. I don’t like doing some of the things I have to do. But it’s the survival of the planet we’re talking about. Even if some people have to die. That’s a horrible thing, but sometimes it’s necessary.”
“And then what? You and your friends enjoy a pristine world without the rest of humanity’s fuckups to ruin it?”
“Yes. Clean air, clean water, mountain streams teeming with silver fish. All of the creatures of the goddess living—and dying—in harmony with nature. It’s not about us; it’s about Gaia. I can do it; I really can. I have the book now. All I need is some time to study it. But I won’t be around to enjoy that new world anyway, any more than you will.”
“Why not?”
“Richter was a black practitioner, remember? Something this big requires more than a simple drop of blood. It requires a blood sacrifice, a willing one; in fact, the enabler of the spell that creates it has to give up her life.
“And why wouldn’t you just let me have the book, anyway? Why won’t you leave me alone? I don’t want to hurt you. I like you, honestly. It’s not like what I’m doing is anybody else’s business. They’ll still have their miserable world to destroy, just like always.”
She did have a point. If what she was saying was true, why not leave her alone? Except, she was willing to kill to achieve her goals, and that’s never a good basis for a fresh start in life. And the law of unintended consequences would surely kick in. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen if Jackie were left alone with her precious book, but I was willing to bet it wouldn’t be good.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think things are as simple as you think they are.”
“I know. And you’ll keep hounding me until you get the book back. That’s why you have to go. I’m sorry. I really am. I hate this.”
This sounded like she was screwing up her courage to the sticking point, about to launch an attack. I set myself, ready for anything. I liked having the water so close; water is fluid and powerful, and makes a great metaphor for movement and transformation, applicable to many uses of talent. I gathered in the essence of the rippling, evermorphing waves, and waited patiently.
Jackie crouched down and I tensed, but I couldn’t detect any burst of talent coming from her. A small glow flared, as if she had struck a match, and a few seconds later a trail of fire arched into the night sky and explosions of color blossomed out. She’d set off a skyrocket.
At first I thought it was a diversion, meant to distract my attention away from the real attack, but there was no attack. She slipped away over the end of the jetty, disappearing behind the piled rocks. I didn’t understand what she was doing; there was no way out from there.
Except of course there was. A moment later I saw a sea kayak moving away from the rocks, heading out at a good clip, with Jackie paddling strongly. How utterly simple—I pride myself on coming up with elegant nonmagical solutions to conflict, but this time I’d had the tables turned on me.
But what point was there in luring me here only to escape at the last moment? Lou couldn’t have even found her in the first place if she hadn’t wanted him to. And what was the point of the skyrocket, for that matter?
Lou whipped his head around at the same moment the answer dawned on me. It hadn’t been just a random fire-work; it had been a signal. Now I saw the point of the jetty. There was no way back except the way I’d just come, and without a doubt there was something waiting there for me.
The moon was a little higher and at my back as I looked toward the shore, making it easier to see. I could barely make anything out, but Lou was focused alertly, so I followed his sight line and looked where he was looking. Not too far from where we stood, the reflections on the water of the bay vanished momentarily, a blank spot in the dark night. It moved slowly as I watched, like an enormous shadow.
A shadow. Night. Moonlight. A Shadow Man.
She had learned how to call them. That book must be a useful one indeed. What had Malcolm said? That they fed on life force, and how he’d driven one off, but nothing about how he’d done it.
It moved in closer, black as ink, blacker than the night, and it did indeed have a vaguely manlike shape. My first thought was to fight it with light—that was the logical thing. But I was far away from the city lights and didn’t have much to draw upon. I need to work with my environment; I’m not much good at creating things out of nothing. Victor could have whipped up a blinding fireball, I’m sure, but Victor wasn’t here.
I used the power essence of water that I’d stored up while facing Jackie and temporarily turned a section of the jetty into a liquid mass, incapable of supporting weight. The shadow flowed over it without hesitation, the way a shadow can move over any one surface as easily as any other. It was closer now, and I tried setting up an energy shield. I hated to do that since it takes so much out of me to keep it going, but I needn’t have worried. It flowed through the shield as if it weren’t there. I hadn’t really expected it to work; previous encounters had taught me that otherworldly entities are rarely directly affected by talent, and this thing was no exception.
Fifty feet from us, it stopped, assessing the situation. It liked what it saw. I thought about enhancing the far-off streetlights on Cargo Way to provide illumination, but the light would be weak and I had no reason to think it would act as a defense anyway. Not that I had time to do anything.
Once it had made up its mind, it moved, and it moved fast. Watching it glide slowly toward me, I had foolishly assumed that was its natural mode. But it was on me in two seconds, covering the last fifty feet between us in no time at all.
I automatically threw up my left arm to block its rush, and it latched onto me. Immediately my arm went numb, like it had fallen asleep, and I felt weariness creeping into my bones as if I’d just finished a twenty-mile hike. I grabbed at the creature with my free hand, trying to dislodge it, but there was nothing solid to get hold of. Not entirely corporeal, Malcolm had said. I wished I’d thought to ask him how he’d driven it off. It was like trying to fight a chocolate pudding; there was some resistance to its flesh, but my hand passed right through it and its substance closed up behind as my hand traveled through.
Of course, it couldn’t hurt me, either, not physically, but it didn’t have to. All it needed was to hold on to me in its unpleasantly sticky fashion and I’d soon be drained of life.
I panicked. I had no time; the longer it held on, the worse it would be for me. Even if I managed to ultimately defeat it and beat it back, I’d have lost years off my life, with what was left of my youth stolen away forever. I tried to tear my arm away from it, at the same time ineffectually beating at it with my free arm.
About this time Lou decided to sink his teeth into the thing’s leg. It may have presented a pudding-like consistency to normal folks, but Ifrits are not your everyday folk. He got a firm grip with his teeth and shook his head back and forth. The creature didn’t make a sound; I’m not sure it could. But it let go of me and reached toward Lou, although I can’t imagine what it thought it was going to do to him. That doughy consistency it possessed couldn’t hurt him, and I don’t think it could suck any of the life out of him, either.
But Lou certainly possessed the ability to hurt the Shadow Man. He gave a vigorous shake and then suddenly fell back, losing his balance. I thought he’d lost his grip, but instead he’d managed to tear off a good-sized chunk from the creature’s leg. He spit it out onto the dirt path and it lay there like a sticky bit of black felt. But not for long. It started to move, oozing back toward the creature, a grotesque inky amoeba trying to rejoin its parent.
At the same time, Lou went into a violent paroxysm of coughing and retching, just short of convulsing. He might have been able to hurt the thing, but in its own way it had hurt him as well. He was out of commission for a while. It looked like I was going to have to deal with it on my own after all.
The sight of the crawling piece of protoplasm reminded me of something. Amoebas react to stimuli. In the lab, the easiest way to demonstrate this is with a mild electric current. And the streetlights I’d dismissed were powered, of course, by electricity.
The creature had temporarily abandoned its attack on me, concerned more with reabsorbing its missing part. I reached out to the distant lights, almost out of my range, and felt the trickle of current that powered them. I gathered it up, and looked around for something to push it into. But we were out on the jetty, with nothing but rocks and sand and water, and I needed metal. The Shadow Man had finished reattaching and turned back toward me.
I dug in my pocket and came up with three quarters and a dime. Not the ideal metal to hold an electric charge, but this wasn’t precisely electric—like all my workings of talent, it was an analogue and a metaphor. I didn’t have much of the current, but I concentrated everything I had into those coins. They vibrated in my hand, the pent-up power waiting to escape.
Before the Shadow Man could close with me again, I flung one of the quarters at him, unleashing the power at the same instant. It hit him squarely in the chest and sizzled when it did, sparking like a live wire. It jumped back, confused, and I threw the dime. The coins weren’t lethal, not by any means, probably not even dangerous to it, but they hurt the creature and that surprised it. They were something completely outside its experience.
I had only two quarters left, but I walked toward it confidently, and as the Shadow Man backed away I threw another. It sizzled satisfyingly again as it struck. The Shadow Man moved farther away, more quickly this time. I pushed forward; in selling a bluff, confidence is essential.
I ran toward it as if eager to get as close as I could, and threw the last coin. I almost missed, which would have been a disaster, but it struck it right in the head, or what passed for a head. I actually got close enough to almost touch it before its nerve failed. At the last moment it turned tail, gliding back toward the parking lot at top speed. I made a show of chasing it for a few more steps before stopping and turning my attention to Lou. He had stopped coughing and was sitting with his head down.