Page 21 of Soul of Shadow
11
There was no furniture in the dining room. No table. No chairs. No lamps or decorative plants. Only a weathered chandelier hanging from the ceiling, a dozen pillar candles scattered throughout the room, and a thick, bloodred carpet. And in the center of that carpet…
Elias Everhart, barefoot and bare chested, stood with his back to the doorway, his head tilted down. His shoulders were wider than she realized, sculpted with knotted muscle. She couldn’t see his face, but he seemed to be muttering, as if speaking to the floor. It sounded like a chant, or perhaps a prayer. Deep and steady. Reverent.
Her eyes traveled past his body, landing on the wall in front of him. The one she had thought was covered with a tapestry. She had been terribly, horrifyingly wrong. There was no painting, no blanket or canvas. There was only a blank wall covered in a sea of manic brushstrokes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Nordic symbols, all painted one atop the other, bleeding into each other, like the scrawling of a madman.
Charlie had made a grave mistake walking into that house.
This was no den of drugs and delinquency. This was something far, far worse.
She turned, preparing herself to run screaming through the forest until she attracted the attention of the police a mile away, when something caught her eye.
At first, she thought it was only a shadow. A strange flicker of darkness around Elias’s body caused by the many candles situated around the room. But the shadow seemed to grow, to expand and rise. And soon Charlie realized that she wasn’t seeing just a random flash of darkness; it came from every inch of his body, like an outline. It took on the exact shape of Elias’s body and began to rise. It was as if his soul were leaving his body. Or like he was creating a second copy of himself. A copy made only of shadow.
Charlie took a step backward on the carpet. The room spun.What the hell is happening?
Then, as abruptly as it started to rise, the shadow copy burst free from Elias’s body.
It peeled away, leaping out of Elias as if he were nothing more than a limp set of clothes. Elias’s body crumpled to the floor. He hit the carpet and bunched up into a little ball. He stayed there, unmoving, as the shadow stood above him, stretching out its intangible limbs, getting comfortable. Settling into itself.
Breath heaved in and out of Charlie’s lungs. She had one hand on the doorway, the other hanging uselessly at her side. She was frozen, unable to run, unable to look away, unable to even accept what was happening before her.A ghost just leapt out of Elias Everhart’s body.No. That’s not possible. Ghosts didn’t exist.Nothingsupernatural existed. Not phantoms, not demons, not vampires or zombies. That was the world she lived in. That wasreality.
But how could she deny what she saw with her own eyes?
You can’t, whispered a voice in her head.You know you can’t.
The room was spinning so fast now. She was lightheaded, had gone weak. But she needed to escape, to put as much distance as possible between herself and the creature standing in that dining room.
She turned on the carpet and ran.
She didn’t care if she was being too loud. The door was so close. If she could just get there, could just make it back to the fresh air, back to reality—
Something wrapped around her ankles, pulling tight. She tripped, her arms flailing forward as she fell to the floor. The carpet broke her fall, but her shoulder and temple still bounced painfully off the ground. She groaned, trying to shake her legs free. Whatever was around her ankles had bound her with impressive tightness.
“And just what,” said a low, whispery voice above her, “am I going to do with you?”
12
Run.
The word flashed through Charlie’s head like a billboard flying past on the highway.
Get up and run.
It’s going to kill you.
But she couldn’t. When she looked down at her legs, they were bound by black cords that appeared to be made of the same substance as the creature itself. The cords shivered and flaked, as if only half corporeal. Yet they felt entirely real, so tight they dug into her skin.
Slowly, hesitantly, she lifted her head and looked up at the thing flickering above her.
The shadow creature stood the same way a human would. It had the complete shape of Elias’s body, from his bare feet up to his broad shoulders, but it was made entirely of darkness, with no distinction between skin and clothing. As her eyes climbed its form, she realized how large it was, much taller than Elias, long and lithe, radiating a primal scent, dark and ancient, as if it somehow wore the very deepest part of earth.
When she reached its face, her breath caught in her throat.
It had his face. His high cheekbones, his strong jawline, thedistinct shape of his hair. But more than anything else, it had his eyes. Bright green. Cold. Mocking.
When she first saw the creature, she assumed it had been living inside Elias’s body, inhabiting it the way a demon might. But seeing those eyes…
