“YOU NEED WHAT?”
I finished stripping off the remains of my skirt. Fortunately, the underwear that Greta had dressed me in was so elaborate that I was probably three layers away from actually impacting my modesty.
“An airplane,” I repeated.
“We’re holding these for the Emperor and the court. We can’t—”
“Ivan, do you know how these things got on board?”
He just stared at me.
“These Shadows are made, not born. Just look at their clothes. They’re from here, or a world so close it doesn’t matter.”
“They’re monsters born of Chaos.”
“They’re human beings. You were there when Whedon got infected. Sick, possibly psychotic, but human.” I looked to the dead woman that Ivan had shot out of my arms. “They were made, then they were brought here.”
“How? Why?”
“How? Another airship. My guess is that someone slipped aboard that ship and did this to the passengers and crew, then flew parallel enough to this airship’s course to offload the victims like someone tossing grenades into a foxhole.” I looked away from the dead woman, and back at Ivan. “Why? Someone wants me dead.”
“You?”
“The John Doe you killed was trying to warn me. Either the person behind the Shadows knew where they were going, or they followed you and John Doe to me. Either way doesn’t matter. The one behind the Shadows followed us from my world to here, and right now they’re almost certainly in an airship flying in the next universe over.” I stepped up to Ivan. “I don’t care what your orders are. You are going to give me a weapon and an aircraft, so I can stop this now.”
The rest of the White Guard had circled around as I argued with Ivan. I noticed Mikhail took a step back to join the encircling soldiers, leaving me and Jacob as the focus of everyone’s attention.
“Our orders are to hold the retreat for the Emperor and the court.”
“You’re also supposed to fight these things, right?”
The guards ringing us were tense; it felt as if one wrong move could start a volley of gunfire. I was lucky, I think, in that Ivan seemed to be the ranking guy here. Mark or not, I had the feeling that if Ivan wasn’t here, I would probably join the Shadows littering the ground.
“You’re certain about this?”
“The airship is in the same world I felt them come from.”
Ivan narrowed his eyes. “You feel them—”
“Yes, I’ve always felt them.”
Someone in the ranks said something in Russian, and I didn’t need to understand the language to know it was a challenge. I saw the barrel of a gun raised, and Ivan snapped back, shouting something else in Russian that didn’t sound pleasant. The guard hesitated, but the barrel lowered.
“You can’t sense Shadows like normal Walkers,” Ivan said. “That’s why they’re Shadows.”
“It’s why I knew you were being attacked in my basement.”
“That’s . . . why are you different?”
Fuck it. He’d have to ask that.
Well, if no one had shot me yet, the truth probably wouldn’t break their discipline. “Because we share a bloodline,” I said.
I didn’t realize how much of the ambient noise was because of the guards shuffling around, shifting their weight and whispering among themselves, until all the noise stopped. Suddenly the only sound was the wind.
“You share a bloodline? That isn’t possible.”
I turned around, showing my naked shoulders, and the upper part of the Mark. “You’ve seen my Mark, enough of it anyway. Look at it, look at them.”
Ivan paused, then he turned and marched off, through the ring of guards which parted for him. He knelt next to the Shadow he had executed and pulled her blouse up so hard that the material tore off her body. Her underwear was less elaborate than mine, and he tore it free as well, exposing her naked back, and the twisted Mark carved into her skin.
It was the first time I had the chance to see the Mark on one of the Shadows while it was still. Before, I always had the sense that their Marks were deformed, asymmetrical, random . . .
That wasn’t quite right. It couldn’t be, not if Dr. Lefevre could draw a relation to my Mark and the Shadows’. When I told Ivan to check, I had been gambling that the similarities would be perceptible to a layman—like the schematics drawn on the charts in Dr. Lefevre’s exam room.
They were.
And the Shadow’s Mark wasn’t random, or even asymmetrical. What deformed the pattern, and made it appear so random, was that its symmetry did not coincide with the Shadow’s body. Exposed, it appeared as if the Mark was a literal shadow, cast upon the Shadow’s body at a strange angle. Where my Mark seemed to grow out of a point in the center of my lower back, the dead woman’s Mark grew from a black-lipped wound above and in front of her left hip. Not only was the pattern offset to center there, it tilted itself by thirty degrees off vertical, so the center of the Mark slashed across her side and her back from hip to shoulder-blade.
You didn’t need to be Dr. Lefevre to see the similarities with the Shadow’s Mark exposed. I was familiar enough with my own to see the likeness in the way the crude branches split and spiraled.
Ivan stood up from the corpse. He didn’t look happy. He raised his pistol and aimed it at me. “You are one of them.”
With a rustling wave, I was suddenly the focus of a dozen weapons pointed in my direction.
The embers of rage that had been banked and cooling suddenly flared up into a full-blown conflagration. Being pissed beyond all reason is the only explanation I had for snapping the way I did.
“You fucking asshole! Did you listen to one goddamn word I said?”
“You’re related to—”
“Like that makes me a Shadow? I guess the squiggles on your back make you the Emperor?” I folded my arms because I really wanted to take a swing at someone, and I wasn’t pissed enough to do that with all the guns pointed in my direction. “They’re trying to kill me, remember?”
Jacob stepped up and placed a hand on my shoulder, “Dana?”
“You want to kill me now, Ivan?”
“Don’t antagonize him, Dana.”
“Antagonize him? I’ve saved his life at least once, and he’s the one pointing a gun at me.”
“Sort of my point,” Jacob whispered.
Just like Jacob to find a solid piece of reality and tether me to it. My anger leaked out as I realized that I was poking an armed man with a rhetorical stick. Not something they recommend in cop school.
I think Jacob was as surprised as I was when he lowered the gun.
“And how were you planning to fly it?” Ivan asked me.