Chapter 1
Twenty-eight years
later
Firelight dazzled Shadowman’s eyes.
Acrid smoke scorched his nose, throat, and lungs. His hands were
blistered by his work, the muscles of his neck and shoulders
knotted with strain. But no matter; what Kathleen suffered was far,
far worse.
How could it be that she, of all
mortals, had been consigned to Hell?
Channeling all his strength, he brought
the hammer down and rang the anvil with the force of his blow. The
note held, high and piercing, reverberating throughout the
cavernous space of the New Jersey dockside warehouse. White sparks
flew from the glowing hunk of iron and winked out in the depths of
his fae Shadows, now churning around him.
Filtering through his memory, a scrap
of talk from the fateful meeting that changed everything, her soft
voice laughing with irony: Fancy you being afraid
of me.
Yes, fancy that. Afraid. And yet he’d been present nearly every day of
her life, the veil between life and death made whisper-thin by her
weak heart.
It had begun simply—the soul fire of
Kathleen as a child had been golden bright, drawing the curiosity
of many of the fae, even him, the darkest of them all. For how
curious that her soul should burn so bright
when her heart was so very compromised. A moment in the presence of
her warmth, and Death was transfixed.
He’d watched her grow, fight and cry,
watched her grit her teeth as she willed her heart’s rhythm into
the beat of life.
And in spite of that ongoing labor, her
dreams had been more vivid, more controlled, than most other
humans’ sojourns into Twilight. In dreams, she’d directed him into
elaborate schemes of great daring in her imagination. She was a
master of the sword, and together they vanquished evil, she never
stopping for breath or blood.
And if Shadow had sent nightmares to
terrorize her sleep, he had commanded peace. Nothing would harm her
while he was present.
At first she wished for a magic cure,
of stars and fairy dust—though no fae, not even him, could ever
heal the flesh of a human. Her hopes later fixed on a handsome
doctor, who promised miracles he also could not deliver. And so
time passed.
Then one dark, hopeless day, the woman
Kathleen turned her gaze toward Shadow, the knowledge of her fate
in her eyes. And her gaze fell on Death, her childhood Shadowman,
still watching from across the veil. He’d been more transfixed than
ever.
Death afraid of a mortal woman. Yet,
for her, he had then and would now again dare anything. Shadowman
focused on the timbre of her voice, the light humor, and heaved the
hammer upward again. He concentrated himself into his grip on the
shaft and jarred Shadow with another sharp, hot strike. The iron
flattened, tapering just so.
I wish we could
talk, she’d said as she worked at her painting. Art had been
her solace, and what else would she have painted but Twilight, the
faery world on the other side of the shadows. Her pale profile had
gleamed in the wan light of her bedroom. Her tone was filled with
warmth. A voice across time. An echo in the dark.
After all, what harm would it be to
speak with her? She was so close to passing from the mortal world
regardless. Why not cross that divide first himself? Let her see
him, really see him, before all chances were lost? Shadow was so
cold; Kathleen was radiant. What would it be like to feel that warmth, just once?
Shadowman rotated the hammer in his
grip to use the tapered head to shape the end of the spear, the
decorative tip of the vertical bar to the gate he forged. It needed
to be razor sharp, all violence and cruelty, as was the nature of
the haunt to which the gate would open.
Please touch me. I want
to feel something real while I can, she’d said.
And so he’d crossed when he had no call
to do so. He had broken a cardinal law of nature and trespassed
where he did not belong. For Kathleen.
Mortals view Death as they conceive
him: ghoul, priest, demon. Kathleen had made him her dark prince
from her fairy tales, even knowing his true nature—the Grim Reaper.
His duty for all eternity was to transport souls across Twilight to
the Hereafter. Yet, even as she’d fought against that inevitable
passage, she’d embraced him. Bid him come closer, her emotions
coursing through Shadow and into him. Her intent was a revelation.
Her touch changed him. Changed everything.
He grasped the wooden haft of the
hammer tight, but he could feel her soft mortal skin under his
hands again. The satin glide from the slope of her waist to the
swell of her breast. He stroked his thumb in the hollow at the base
of her throat, then followed with a brush of his mouth. Her back
arched. Heat flared between them, a fire for the ages, far beyond
the sear of his forge. His death-tuned senses had perceived the
clamor of her heartbeat, and now he held the memory of the wild
rhythm in his head and used its passion to strike the glowing piece
of metal on the anvil.
Together they had created a child,
Talia, now a woman with a family of her own and a strong protector
by her side. Talia had fought a nightmare scourge of wraiths to
come into her own fae power.
Now there remained only the second part
of Kathleen’s last wish, to find a way back, a way to be with them
both.
Death thumbed the edge of the metal
with his other hand, found a slight thickening, and lifted the
hammer again. Taking a deep breath, he gathered his intent, focused
his mind on the object of his creation until he shook with power,
then brought the tool down. . . .
The shadows stirred.
Sudden weakness diminished
him.
The hammer slipped from his grip and
clattered to the floor.
Shadowman panted, dismayed, as he
regarded the hammer. It was hard enough to create and sustain the
corporeal form of a human body. But to hold the hammer,
that hammer, took all of the power, will,
and memory within him. The tool had been created by angels and was
near unbearable to a fae’s touch.
Kathleen!
The last time he’d dropped the thing,
it had taken him hours to lift it again, and by then, the fire had
died. He gulped the smoky air and roared at the heavenly
object.
“Sorry,” a voice said.
Fae Death brought his head up and
jerked around to find Custo, the angel who’d given him the damn
hammer in the first place. Custo always seemed to be present when
Death needed him, but most especially when Death did not. Like now.
Custo’s olive-gold skin was lined with veins of Shadow, which meant
the angel had the power to cross through fae Twilight to any other
place on Earth, including this warehouse. But it was the angel’s
light that had banished the death shadows just enough for Shadowman
to lose his grip on the hammer.
Too late, Shadowman detected the even
beat of the angel’s mortal heart. Damn the boy.
What does he want now?
Shadowman tugged on the shadows
hovering like storm clouds around the angel. Immediately the
darkness delivered an echo of Custo’s emotions: Curiosity was
dominant, but anchored by determined control and personal
conviction, though what that conviction was, Shadowman could not
fathom. The fae could sense feelings, but thoughts were the purview
of the divine.
Bare-handed, Shadowman lifted the
spearhead from the anvil and plunged it into the glowing coals of
the forge. The fire leapt into red-gold curls, but the
skin-crackling burn did not signify. Not as Death finally let cold
Shadow take him, succor and restore him.
“What do you want?” Vitality pulsed
through Shadowman’s form with old magic. As always, he could not
escape the distant call of his discarded scythe, the hoary blade
clamoring from the twilight Shadowlands to be lifted in place of
the hammer.
No. Never again. He was done with
death.
Custo crossed fully from Twilight into
the mortal world. His pale inner light pushed the darkness of the
room back, revealing the scarred floor, old piles of discarded rope
and rotting crates, the dingy windows of the warehouse. “I . . . uh
. . . came to see . . .”
Shadowman knew the moment Custo’s gaze
hit the gate. Death watched the angel’s eyes narrow in examination,
then widen in horror. Custo stumbled backward, his fear pervading
the space. Shadowman could taste it, bitter and sharp, could smell
it, rank, could feel the terror that made Custo shake.
“Oh, God,” Custo said, breathless.
“What have you done?”
Death crouched to protect the hammer
where it lay on the floor. He brought his deep cloak around, as if
the fae folds could possibly hide something divine. Custo could not
have the hammer back. Not when the gate was so close to completion.
Not when he was so close to Kathleen.
“You told me yourself that she is not
in Heaven,” Shadowman said. “And you gave me the hammer. What did
you think I would do?”
Custo shot him a look of acute alarm,
his green eyes deepening to black. “It was a favor. I didn’t know
what your purpose was. I can read only mortal minds.”
Shadowman could sense the angel’s inner
conviction transforming into a pressing intent to act. The shadows
of the warehouse floor roiled as Custo added, “The fae are, as
usual, utterly obscure and insane.”
“Fae Shadow runs in your blood now.” Death drew on the silky darkness,
sucking the magic into his being, though Shadow could not possibly
help him lift the hammer. Lifting the hammer took concentration and
time. Shadow was a different kind of power, impulsive and
sudden.
Custo sighed. “Yeah . . . well . . . I
guess you have a point.” From an affectation of easy stillness, he
leapt, the fae ascendant in the blackness of his eyes.
Death twitched a finger, and midair,
the Shadows struck Custo down with a sickening head crack to the
concrete floor. The boy would have been much better off using his
angelic gifts. Shadow would forever and always obey Death first,
even the small portion of it that ran through Custo’s
veins.
Custo brought a hand to the floor and
grunted as he pushed himself up. “Be reasonable.”
Reasonable? There was no such thing.
Not in a universe that had consigned Kathleen to Hell, when
he’d been the one to rend the boundary
between the worlds. He’d broken the law that
bound the fae to the Other side. He’d
stepped into her room to view her painting. To speak with her. To
touch her. If anyone was at fault, it was he.
Shadowman grabbed at the hammer. His
hand passed right through it.
Kathleen! he
thought, and tried for the hammer again. The tip of his finger
budged the shaft slightly. So close . . .
Shadowman thought of her pale face, her
gold hair, her violet eyes, but it was the memory of her smell,
tinged with the chemical musk of her paints, that helped him close
his hand around the grip of the hammer. He forced all his strength
into his clenched fist. Mass, that contrary mortal magic, had
always defied the fae.
Custo stood, shaking his head, and
regarded the gate again. “You can’t think for a moment that The
Order will suffer that . . . that . . . thing on Earth.”
“That thing?”
Death mocked, standing again.
“The Order would call it an
abomination.”
“And what would you call
it?”
“Seriously fucked up.”
Shadowman gripped the hammer, a tool of
the angels. With it, he could forge the gate. Barbed and brutal,
the gate’s only decorative element was a few spare flowers, the
kind that could grow in the harshest, darkest clime. Three
wrought-iron, triangular petals were folded close to guard the
core. The blooms were his desperate hope, a symbol that Kathleen
could endure beyond, her soul bearing the empty pitch until he
could find her.
“Are you going to tell them?” Death
asked.
“I’m part of The Order,” Custo said.
“The angels can read my mind. I couldn’t hide this if I wanted to.
And I don’t. We’ve had enough trouble dealing with the last
forbidden passage you created between the worlds. Wraiths are still
plaguing humankind. There’s a war out there. Don’t open up a way
even more dangerous.”
Shadowman glanced at the
gate.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat, the gate answered, trembling on
its posts. The gate had been talking to him like that since it had
been mounted.
And he knew he could not wait to
retrieve Kathleen from Hell. There was no higher purpose in her
presence there that he could fathom. No order or justice to her
damnation. He broke the law, but Kathleen suffered in Hell. There
was nothing to do but fetch her back.
“Look ahead, if you can,” Custo said,
the green forcing out the black in his eyes. His urgency, thick and
pungent, saturated the shadows. “I beg you to look
ahead.”
Shadowman gripped the hammer tighter.
The gate was nearly complete. Soon, very soon, it would be ready.
The fae existed in the now, the present moment, but he could see
that far into the future.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
The gate already clamored to
open.
“What do you think a gate to Hell will
do to the mortal world?” Custo’s burnished skin gleamed in the
dark. He was all angel now, fighting once again for the people on
Earth. “If you can pass through it, what do you think will come out
our way?”
Nothing good, that was
certain.
So Shadowman answered with a question
of his own. “And if it were your Annabella?”
Custo went silent, breathing deeply,
thinking of the beautiful ballerina who was his wife. It didn’t
take long for his mouth to twist.
“It hurts you even to think of it, yet
Kathleen is there, right now.”
Custo closed his eyes. “There has to be
a reason . . .”
“. . . for her to bear pain and despair
unending?” Shadowman’s arm ached with the burden of the hammer. The
sinews and muscles strained to hold it, but he held fast to his
human form. He had a gate to finish. “And you could tolerate this
for Annabella while you had the means to save her?”
“Oh, God. I gave you the means. Oh,
shit.” Selfrecrimination threaded through Custo’s distress. “That
makes me responsible.”
“Then see it through.”
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Shadowman turned to regard the gate. At
his side, Custo did the same. The potent menace coming off the
thing was palpable. Shadow shimmered against the hellthrob of his
creation. A gate to Hell, forged by Death.
Shadowman felt the moment Custo came to
a decision, his hard resolve overcoming the wilder
emotions.
“I begged for a day once, and that’s
what I’ll give you,” Custo said. “Then I swear I’ll bring the
angels. We will rip it apart, even if you, Kathleen, or . . . or .
. . even Annabella are behind it. It is wrong. You fae obviously
have trouble telling the difference.” kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Right? Wrong? Shadowman didn’t care.
Death, by nature and necessity, was numb to such
considerations.
“I don’t require your permission, boy.”
The pain of his grip on the hammer crawled over his
shoulder.
“Mark my words,” Custo said, summoning
Shadow to depart. “The angels are coming.”
“Mark mine,” Death returned. “I’ll have
her back.”