GISELLE’S broken heart pulled her gaze to the dirt floor of the forest as she rose above from the freshly turned earth of her grave. She kept her hands folded on her breast, to hold the fragments of her love within her. Prince Albrecht would marry another, a royal lady, and not some peasant girl who knew nothing of the world. His betrayal killed her, yet she couldn’t help but love him still.
But she wasn’t a peasant girl any longer.
She was a wili, a ghost, and would dance forever.
Joining the host of other wilis caught in the midnight hush of the wood, Giselle tiptoed down the long diagonal sweep of dancers to bow to her wili queen, Myrtha.
Everything was as it should be, quiet and peaceful. Annabella’s body felt strong, ready for this moment, though a chill of anxiety had her nerves snapping. The sensation went beyond opening-night jitters, beyond nerves, to fear.
On one side of her was the woodland backdrop; on the other, the black yawn of theater where the audience sat, voyeurs to Giselle’s tragic love story. Annabella looked up and strained her eyes beyond the side curtains of the stage: A bright angel stood beyond the false trees, his pale green gaze fixed on her. He was her hope, her protection. With him watching, her dance would be lighter, her heart would be lighter.
If Custo were near, she would be safe.
Giselle rose from her deep curtsy and began the series of arabesque turns that marked her advent into the Other. Heart hammering in her chest, she stirred the air, spun her magic, and reached for a world beyond her own.
“Where are you, Tommy?” Custo bit out the words, keeping his gaze fixed on Annabella. She was dancing in the center of the stage, surrounded by the other dancers. There was no sign of the wolf. Yet.
Custo strode to the edge of the curtain. Should he grab her now? Stop the performance? Abort the mission? Would there be a second chance? Damn it.
“Why aren’t you in your seat?” Custo stretched his mind to locate Tommy, found him quickly, by the rear, ground-floor exits. Custo invaded his thoughts: the soldier had made up his mind to join the fray as soon as he signed off the call. But on whose side was Tommy going to fight?
Using Tommy as a reference, Custo pushed slightly outward to the mental press of the city. Looking for Adam was like looking for a known star, but in an alien night sky. Nothing familiar, then—
There. Adam, burning with single-minded determination to survive.
Tommy buzzed in Custo’s ear, answering, “I spotted a wraith and followed him rather than take my seat with the rest of the audience. Do you want me to pull the others from their positions?”
And leave Annabella unprotected and vulnerable?
“Recall only those in the back rows. Keep the stage surrounded and keep me apprised of the situation with the wraiths.”
Custo listened in as Tommy called soldiers by name and directed them to the back of the building.
“Move fast,” Custo added. Adam was out there. Talia and her babies needed him. If Adam died—well, there’d be one more angel—but a hell of a lot of good that’d do for the wraith war on Earth. Adam and Talia were mortality’s only hope.
From his position, Custo had only a partial view of the audience. They were rapt, attention on the stage, but a few rose and sidestepped down their aisles. He assumed others farther back were doing the same. It would have to do.
Jasper caught Annabella in the first of their high lifts, the one Custo had seen earlier in the studio, with Annabella supported high in the air at her hips. The movement looked effortless, but all things considered—wolf and wraiths—Custo wanted her two feet on the floor.
Wraiths weren’t in the plan, certainly not a coordinated public attack. They had to have been tipped off by someone inside Segue. The traitor. How had Adam survived so long with someone sabotaging every effort to fight?
Anger beat furiously through Custo’s system. He clenched his hands—the last time someone betrayed Adam, they hadn’t lived to regret it. This time would be no different.
A rustle behind Custo had him glancing back, but he saw only ghostly ballerinas in white waiting their turn to go back onstage.
The edge on his nerves had him looking closer, peering harder. There was no one unexpected, except…
In the blackest shadows, the figure of a man. He was dressed in black as well, his head covered by the hood of a sweatshirt, and bowed, difficult to see. His body seemed fit, a good 220 pounds and broad enough to have some muscle.
Not a stagehand. Not a Segue soldier.
Who was he? Custo extended his consciousness toward the man. Nothing.
He tried again, alarm sending a cold thrill of dread down his spine. His mind found only empty shadow, which left two possibilities: wolf or wraith.
Custo moved back, his stomach muscles tensing, his balance shifting to the balls of his feet, ready to fight. The dancers shuffled around him, filling his spot as he eased into the open area of the wing.
He was in full view of the man now, who had not so much as twitched. The stillness around him was uncanny, unnatural, a vacuum.
If fae reacted badly to the presence of angels, as Talia had, then the man was not the wolf, or he’d be cringing. More likely, he was a wraith, part of the assault on the building, lying in wait until a prescribed moment when he would attack.
“Got one backstage,” Custo said, alerting the Segue team. “Look for others.”
Wraiths by definition were obscenely strong and couldn’t die, characteristics that drew thousands of people to relinquish their humanity for eternal youth.
A series of “all clears” came from the rest of the Segue team inside the theater.
The fight was outside, except for this one lone wraith. Coincidence? Custo didn’t care. The monster was getting a bullet to the head, then dragged out for transport and a lengthy wait in a cell until Talia delivered and could scream him to death.
In his peripheral vision, Custo marked the doorway that led to the outer hallway. He reached for his gun, not to fire—the report would disturb the performance—but to add stability to his fist. Then he’d force the wraith out and plug him in the hall. Several times.
The dancers aligned again, a commotion of silent white. In a blur they streamed onto the stage.
Custo stalked closer to his target, noting the subtle rise of the wraith’s chest as he took an unnecessary breath. Strange. Why wasn’t the monster moving? Why wasn’t it ripping the air with its shriek?
Then his head came up, the hood dropping to reveal his face.
The blood in Custo’s veins abruptly reversed its course. Not the wolf. Not a wraith. Those angry black eyes belonged to Death.
“Oh God,” Custo said.
“Ironic you should call on Him now,” Shadowman answered with a dark smile. He shifted away from the wall to standing. The planes of his face freckled with minute black splotches, burns, which fell in dust to the floor as the skin beneath rapidly healed.
The fae were harmed by angels, yes, but this was the lord of the fae, who had stood at Heaven’s Gate too many times to count.
Shadowman advanced, and Custo stumbled backward, glancing quickly at the fae forest growing around Annabella, her gift blooming to the night.
Custo raised his hands to hold Death at bay. “An angel has already come for me. I’ve agreed to go when this is done. One night is all I asked.”
“I am not concerned with the work of angels. Why would I be? I am nothing to them.” Shadowman’s voice was low, menacing. “I want only you. You who deceived me.”
Custo planted his feet, flexed his strength to keep him in one spot. “I had to get out of Heaven. I had to return to Earth. Lives depend on me. Please, I have to stay.”
Shadowman stalked closer. “How many souls, do you think, have pleaded before me? I have refused pain and anguish the likes of which you cannot begin to imagine. Spare me your sad tale of woe; I have heard far worse than yours and remained unmoved.”
But…“One of the fae, one of your own kind, threatens that dancer. She is vulnerable, innocent. But look what she can do!”
Custo looked over to the woman weaving magic not ten paces from his position. Annabella glowed with the intensity of her gift.
A sneer curled Shadowman’s lips. He didn’t deign to look at the stage. “My Kathleen painted the unimaginable vistas of the twilight Shadowlands, and she still passed beyond, as all must do. You want to help your woman, yet you contrived to keep me from mine.”
“I never said Kathleen was in Heaven,” Custo argued.
“We can argue the subtleties of deceit on our way. I’m sure you know more on that score than most of your angelic host.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Custo said, loud enough to get shhhhed by the stagehand near the curtain. “She needs me. I won’t desert her.”
“I think you will.” Shadowman laid a hand on Custo’s shoulder. At the point of contact, burning cold spread through his body as filaments of Shadow threaded into his system, mingling with his blood. His nerves spasmed, and his marrow curdled when touched by the dark, shady tendrils.
“Come,” Death said.
Custo fought the compulsion, his limbs, heart, and brain rebelling with every cell of strength. But still he moved forward.
“You should know,” Death added with a mean slide of his eyes, “that I would not have any power over you if your soul wasn’t dark and shadowed already. In the strange, ordered chaos of the universe, this is your choice.”
Dark, shadowed, even ruined, yes. But not my choice. Custo tried to deny Shadowman’s hold, but still moved a single step, then another. Custo’s own hand reached out to open the side stage exit, and though his eyes strained for one more glimpse of Annabella, his legs carried him away from her.
Custo could breathe, but he couldn’t speak. What do you want with me? he asked with his mind. His skin tightened with the thickening web of Shadow; he could almost feel himself grow dim as it leached vitality from his core. Somehow he didn’t think Death was going to deliver him to Heaven a second time, not that he ever belonged there.
The music of the ballet suddenly muted with the close of the heavy door. The melody of the story was gone. Only the whine of the strings and the burr of the bass lingered.
“We made a bargain once,” Shadowman said. They strode the back halls of the center, their footfalls hitting the floor in perfect time. “I intend to use you in another.”
Custo made to respond, but couldn’t even grunt. Shadow choked him. By now Jens had to know that he was gone. He’d adjust the coverage for Annabella, or maybe…maybe stop the performance because of the wraith attack.
Custo’s hands cramped, so he knew he’d been reflexively trying to grip them. Even the clamoring beat of his heart was yoked in Shadow. Where are you taking me?
“If my Kathleen is not in Heaven, then she must be…elsewhere.” Death’s voice lost its loose sarcasm and took on bitterness. “She doesn’t belong there. I broke the laws of Faerie, not her. I used my power to cross. What justice is served by sending her there?”
Custo had no choice but to remain silent. He didn’t know anything about justice anyway.
“There is no justice,” Shadowman concluded. “So I intend to make another bargain, this time with Hell. A simple trade, like ours at Heaven’s Gate. You, for my Kathleen.”
The Shadow kept Custo from shaking involuntarily. They reached the back doors that led to the street. From inside, Custo could hear a wraith screech, gunfire, screams, among sirens.
Shadowman slapped his hand against the door and stepped out into the melee. Leashed, Custo followed at his heels, the fetid stench of wraiths blowing up his nostrils, into a scene of chaos illuminated by the overcast hover of clouds reflecting city light back on itself. The street was unofficially cordoned off by abandoned cars. Bodies, human and wraith, littered the area. A cluster of wraiths had made human shields of two Segue operatives, while several other wraiths crouched like spiders on the building walls, ready to strike.
Adam, his back to a building on the other side of the street, his face crusted with blood, whipped to aim his rifle at Shadowman and Custo as they exited. The wraiths let out a quailing chorus, cringing from Death.
In the past, Shadowman had cut down the wraiths with great sweeps of his scythe. His duty for all time was to render the dead out of the mortal world, and none were more dead than the immortal wraiths. The smell alone was proof of that. Custo had witnessed Death’s coming before, called by his daughter’s banshee scream, at the West Virginia location of Segue. Shadowman had struck with a father’s vengeance then, but he didn’t seem to give a damn now.
Death descended the concrete steps, and Custo was compelled to follow.
Adam lowered his gun slightly. “Custo?”
Custo couldn’t answer. Adam would know what to do for Annabella. Adam always knew what to do.
“Custo!” Adam repeated, louder. When he didn’t get an answer a second time, he transferred his attention to Shadowman. Custo caught the dawn of realization on Adam’s face.
“Shadowman, stop!” Adam glanced sharply to his side at the wraiths cringing from Death.
Shadowman halted and shot Adam a pained look. “Every moment I linger here is a moment of pain Kathleen endures in Hell.”
“I need Custo to help me fight,” Adam said.
“I need to trade him for Kathleen,” Death returned, icy.
Adam’s gaze flicked to Custo’s face, but Custo knew Adam could read nothing from his Shadow-webbed expression.
“I’m sorry for her. For you,” Adam said, looking back at Death. “But I cannot fight this war and protect Talia at the same time.”
Custo noted the slow descent of a skinny female wraith dropping to the pavement at the corner of a building near Adam, but obstructed from his view.
“My daughter can protect herself.” Shadowman turned, dragging Custo along.
“She can’t do anything,” Adam shouted after him. “She’s pregnant. Every time she touches Shadow, every time she uses her voice, she risks both her life and the lives of our twins. We are besieged until she delivers.”
Shadowman stopped again. The street’s shadows throbbed around him.
“What would Kathleen want?” Adam asked.
Death bowed his head.
“Didn’t she give her life to bring Talia into this world?”
“Twenty-nine years of pain in Hell,” Shadowman ground out.
“That was her trade,” Adam said. “Twenty-nine years for a daughter and two grandchildren. It was a good bargain. The best of bargains.” Adam’s eyes took on a strange sheen. “I need Custo to see that Kathleen’s legacy is safe. Join us, help us end this war, and we can find a way to free Kathleen that much faster.”
“You can’t help me free her, mortal,” Shadowman sneered. Then he threw his head back and roared to the sky. The air convulsed with his rage and ripples of power blew the windows out of the immediate buildings.
But Custo felt a contraction within him, a shudder of darkness, and then a scoring rip as the tendrils of Shadow released him. He fell to the ground in a heap, his head landing on shattered glass. Blinking through a haze of red, Custo saw Death continue alone into the night, then disappear beyond the strobe of police lights.
Custo planted a hand on the ground. His arm shook as he pushed himself to sitting. As he brought up his head, the female wraith darted toward Adam’s turned back, her jaw unlocking, jagged teeth extending. Custo gulped free air and shouted, “Adam!”
Giselle drew Prince Albrecht to the side of the clearing as a line of wilis flew down the stage like a severe arrow of white. Myrtha stepped out from the trees, holding branches of rosemary to symbolize remembrance. Like Giselle, each of the wili spirits had died betrayed by a man who’d pledged to love them.
The music lowered with condemnation as Myrtha cursed Albrecht in the language of the dance. She pointed at him, you, she circled her hands over her head, will dance, and then she crossed her wrists in front of her, until you are dead.
Giselle rushed forward, placing herself between her love and her queen, stretching her arms out to the sides to protect him.
It was too late. Myrtha had no pity. The wilis rearranged themselves on the edge of the clearing, cold and indifferent to the lovers.
Giselle did not join them. If Albrecht had to dance, then she would dance with him. Together they would pass the darkest hours of night, and her love for him would see him to the dawn.
She tiptoed to the center of the clearing. The music deepened and the notes lengthened, a sad violin singing over the dread of the curse.
She began a slow développé to the side, stretching the limits of her ghostly form, then stroked the air and inclined into a melancholy, turning arabesque. The movements were effortless, boneless, as if, indeed, the laws of nature no longer applied to her.
Holding on to the moment, Annabella slowly focused her eyes on her surroundings. The stage, the two-dimensional trees, and the audience were all there, solid, but superimposed on a vast, darkening landscape of magic. The Shadowlands.
She’d done it again.
Her heart clutched. Her fear had the magic wavering, but she steadied herself with the knowledge that an angel watched over her.
Albrecht supported a soft turn. Where before the promenade had been a negotiation of skill and balance, now the movement was easy. She didn’t have to think or try at all. All she had to do was feel, and want, and the magic would comply.
It could be like this always, his voice said in her mind.
Their communication was suddenly just as easy as the movements they’d practiced over and over, just another level of their performance communion.
A dream. It can’t last, she answered to herself.
Albrecht lifted her into a soaring spiral over his head. In the regular world, the lift was a difficult study in trusting her partner, but now she was flying. Gravity had no pull on her.
In the Shadowlands, anything is possible, especially forever. Let’s linger a while.
Yes. There was a reason she needed to stay in this between place, though it was fading from her mind fast. All she had to do was dance, dance her best, and someone else—who?—would take care of the rest. Would see her safely home.
Her body arched to stretch the magic. To see just how high she could go. And Albrecht was with her, his caresses no longer performance-perfect, but sensual, a pleasure that stroked deeper than the surface clutches they’d rehearsed over and over again. His heat at her back sent a ripple of carnal desire over her skin, emanating from him but stirring her. Tantalizing her.
Join me, he coaxed, wordless. Stay in this wood with me.
It’s not real.
It’s as real as you choose to make it. The low timbre of his voice mixed with the hum of her blood. Stay.
Annabella sighed into the next lift, the worlds spinning around her. Hadn’t she dreamed of feeling like this her entire life? Wasn’t this what she’d worked for, punished her body daily to achieve?
Stay with me and dance.
Was it possible?
The first movement ended and the audience called their approval, the emotion shaking the tree branches of the Shadowlands. “Brava! Bravo!” The calls were both deafening and muted as the boundary between the worlds shuddered.
Annabella inhaled deeply to strengthen herself for the first of her solos. She opened her arms and gestured to Al-brecht, as if giving him handfuls of love.
Albrecht met her gaze, his eyes roiling with desire. With Shadow.
Annabella froze.
Wolf.
Her sudden terror reminded her that she had a heartbeat, and that she was on a stage in the real world. She chanced a glimpse at side stage, focusing beyond the myriad trees to reality. No angel brightened the shadows. Custo was gone.
The orchestra waited on her while the audience applauded like thunder.
She whipped her gaze to the other side of the stage. Where was he? She couldn’t do this alone. Had he left her alone?
Why do you look for him? He cannot possibly understand you. Understand this.
How could Custo abandon her?
Dance, Wolf begged. He had to be Wolf now, so much more than just any “wolf,” after what they’d shared.
His request had her aching to move. He motioned to the crowd and took his place to watch her perform.
But how could she? You attacked me. Would have raped me. You killed another.
Wolf canted his head. I didn’t know what you were, or the ways of this world.
The audience began to murmur, waiting for her.
Dance, Wolf repeated. You want this; you want me.
In a Shadow world where darkness shaded all
certainty, she knew for a fact that she did.
Custo watched Adam spin, bring up his gun, and riddle the torso of the female wraith with a line of black holes in a cacophony of painful, echoing noise. The wraith trembled with multiple impacts, then fell in a heap to regenerate.
“What about Annabella?” Adam shouted.
Custo’s limbs felt like jelly, but he managed to stand, bracing himself on the wall.
Annabella.
He lurched back toward the entrance. She needed him. Even now the wolf could be—
His vision blanked as something crushed him from above. A wraith. Disorientation had his head spinning as the wraith grasped him and clawed into his shoulder, taking him as a human shield.
Except Custo wasn’t human.
Renewed strength percolated though his system, though his shoulder burned with the wraith’s grasp. He didn’t have time for this shit; Annabella was alone.
Custo reached behind him, grabbed the wraith by his open jaw, and heaved the stinking creature over his shoulder. Adam caught the thing midflight with another earsplitting round. The wraith was still moving when it hit the pavement, so Custo bent and broke the fucker’s neck to extend its rejuvenation process. Custo wiped his hands on his pants, but the fetid smell clung.
Another wraith jumped on a car, tore off its hood with an eeerch of warping metal that would render any normal person deaf, and advanced down the street.
“Custo!” Adam shouted.
Custo kept his concentration on the new wraith. The hood would protect it long enough to get close to Adam. If Adam were disarmed, this fight was over. Hell, the wraith war was likely over, too.
The wraith swung the car hood like a misshapen Frisbee toward Adam. Custo darted into the arc of its trajectory, the metal crushing his ribs in a sickening, blood-wet exhalation that brought him to his knees. His mouth was coated in wet copper. Each searing, panting breath was like a drowning man’s last.
Adam’s gunfire filled the air again. “Custo! Look!”
Custo slowly brought up his gaze, but arrested on the first fallen wraith. His neck was skewed from Custo’s break, but the rest of the creature’s body had grayed to fleshy ash. Its bones seemed to be collapsing within the leathered skin. The smell coming off the thing had Custo fighting his gag reflex.
The wraith was dead. As in dead, never to regenerate again.
“How did you do that?” Adam yelled.
Custo inhaled, the pain diminishing to a general bitch of an ache as his ribs knit back together.
He had no idea how he did that. Probably an angel thing, but he couldn’t stay to find out.
He hefted to standing and, wavering, wiped the blood from his mouth and temple with his arm. The remaining handful of wraiths on the street had frozen, looking bug-eyed and baffled at the corpse of their…friend.
“I’ve got to get to Annabella,” Custo said.
A shot fired. Something bit him in his side. He glanced down as another fiery bullet took him in the arm and knocked him, spinning, to the ground again.
His vision blurred with dancing white spots. Warmth spread on the skin, plastering his shirt to his side, as a chill seeped into his bones. More shots punctuated the air, but he was insensible to their source or target. He concentrated solely on the burn that signaled regeneration.
It wasn’t coming.
A hand at Custo’s arm pulled him suddenly upward. His knees buckled so he ended up kneeling. A fight raged around him, a gun discharged, shouts. He caught Adam’s voice, shouting, “Here!” but to whom he spoke, Custo had no idea.
Custo peered into the bleary sky, blinking rapidly to focus.
Luca looked down at him. “I thought we lost you. Well, pull yourself together and get off your lazy ass.”
Custo was abruptly released as Luca dived into the fray. Custo stared, weak and stupid, at the street fight around him. Each movement was a strange rainbow arc of color in his vision. Each mundane shape was irregular and strange. He found Adam, expression fierce and joyful at the same time. That, too, was wrong; Adam was too perpetually worried to look that happy. Had Shadowman returned? Dead wraiths were stinking up the alley. The fetid smell made Custo’s eyes tear.
No, not Death. Others had joined the fight against the wraiths. Their faces weren’t familiar, but they were beautiful, skin perfect, eyes too deeply aware to be human. Custo knew them for what they were: angels. One held a wicked-looking short blade, its shaft subtly winging at its base like a trident. Custo could almost hear it singing though the air. The weapon was murder on wraiths.
Slowly the world solidified. The blurry colors collected in their rightful places. The shapes of building and body took on defined edges. And a blissful burn roared through his gut. He was healing at last.
Annabella.
Custo opened his consciousness to find her. He swept through the thousands in the audience, the bright specks congregated on the stage, the people waiting in the wings.
Custo searched for the glowing spirit that had brought him back to life, and found her flickering on the edge of hers.