Cloak Games: Shadow Jump Read online

  Ha. If only I had known.

  ###

  I drove my Vaquero back to Milwaukee and had dinner with the Marneys and Russell.

  Though I didn’t really like Thanksgiving, I had hoped to spend it with them, but it looked as if my job from Morvilind would keep that from happening. Before the Archon attack on Milwaukee, the Marneys had thought I was a computer programmer for Lord Morvilind, but I couldn’t maintain that pretense any longer. Computer programmers, generally speaking, did not know how to handle firearms as well as I did, and they had seen me shoot several orcish soldiers. I still couldn’t tell them the exact details of what I did for Morvilind – the less they knew, the safer everyone was – but they knew it was dangerous. Though James had always sort of known the truth. He had been one of Morvilind’s men-at-arms, fighting in the endless campaigns against the Archons in the Shadowlands, and he recognized that I had seen a lot of violence and danger.

  He could see it in my eyes, just as I could see it in his.

  After I bade them goodbye, I drove to my storage locker and traded the Vaquero for my old Royal Motors Caravanserai van. It was an unappealing beige color, and it had both 200,000 miles on the odometer and a large dent in the front bumper from when I had run over an anthrophage a few months ago, but it was still reliable as clockwork. I had taken out all of the seats except for the driver’s and the front passenger’s, and I used the freed space to store a variety of equipment and tools, some of it illegal but carefully concealed. One of the things I had hidden in the van was a golden medallion adorned with a symbol that looked a bit like a squid with nine tentacles.

  It was the sign of the Dark Ones, and I had taken the medallion from an anthrophage the cult of the Dark Ones had sent to kill me after I had helped kill Paul McCade. Of course, the cult of the Dark Ones was working with the Rebels, and I had really ticked off the Rebels, so the list of people who wanted me dead kept growing longer and longer.

  As if I didn’t already have enough problems!

  That medallion was one of those problems. I didn’t know what to do with the damned thing. It had a spell of dark magic upon it, and I kept it wrapped up, since I had the creepy feeling it was watching me. The medallion was probably dangerous, so I couldn’t leave it lying around or just dump it somewhere. Yet I suspected the cultists of the Dark One used the medallions as badges of identification, and I could think of situations where that might prove useful.

  So I kept it in my van. Kind of stupid, I know, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

  Because of all the illegal stuff in my van, I made sure to stay under the speed limit as I took I-94 and then I-90 to La Crosse. I didn’t want to get pulled over by some overzealous Homeland Security traffic patroller. But I didn’t see that many cars. Western Wisconsin, especially the hilly country in northwestern Wisconsin, is pretty empty. I think more people might have lived there before the Conquest, but save for the occasional small town built around a gas station, a bar, and a Homeland Security branch office, the countryside was empty.

  I got to La Crosse without incident. It was a town of about sixty thousand people on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. It was just small enough that I felt uneasy about hiding. Two million people lived Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs, which made it easy to become anonymous. The Homeland Security branch in La Crosse might have been smaller, but fewer people made it easier to keep an eye on them. Strangers would stand out more.

  I would have preferred to sleep in my van, but in November in Wisconsin that’s a great way to freeze to death, so I checked into a motel using forged identification. My cover story was that I was a web programmer from Milwaukee who had come to meet with a client about setting up a new site. I even had a fake website for my cover story, complete with a fake phone number with a voicemail box. My story would stand up to casual scrutiny, but it would fall apart if I really drew the attention of Homeland Security or, worse, the Inquisition.

  Best to avoid both, then.

  I spent the first afternoon in La Crosse scouting. The town was sort of spread out in a flat plain along the eastern bank of the Mississippi, with bluffs rising to the east. Most of the people lived in the lower area of the town, but the wealthier citizens and the Elven nobles kept their mansions on the bluffs overlooking the town and the river.

  Lord Castomyr’s mansion was the biggest of them. His mansion looked a great deal like Morvilind’s, with the same kind of Elven architecture. Acres of manicured gardens surrounded the house, covering the entire hillside, though at the moment ice encased the gardens. I did a casual drive-by of the mansion, and even from a single glance, I spotted the security guards patrolling the grounds. Breaking into the mansion was out of the question.

  I needed an invitation.

  Fortunately, I knew just how to get one.

  I spent the next couple of days doing research. Most Elven nobles kept a staff of servants and slaves in their mansions, and Castomyr was no exception. However, not many Elves had the kind of staff that could handle preparing a Thanksgiving banquet for thousands of people. Even Elven nobles sometimes needed to contract jobs out to qualified professionals. A dozen different companies, some of them local, some of them from Milwaukee or the Twin Cities, were providing services for Castomyr’s banquet – catering, desserts, security, entertainment, and so forth. Service providers like that didn’t pay very well, and so tended to have a lot of employee turnover.

  That made it easy for me to get a job.

  Specifically, a got a job with LC Cleaners. My forged papers identified me as Julia Doyle, an unmarried native of Madison, Wisconsin, though the owner of LC Cleaners was desperate enough for help that he didn’t check my documents carefully. The company had been hired to help prepare for Lord Castomyr’s Thanksgiving banquet, and there was a lot of work to do. I put in eight straight twelve-hour days, helping the cleaning crew scrub every inch of the mansion and grounds. It was the sort of thing I had done before, and I fit right in with the other workers.

  That let me memorize the layout of the mansion, and conceal a few useful items within the grounds.

  While doing that, I made a copy of the official guest list for the banquet. Baron Castomyr had invited over three thousand people to his mansion for Thanksgiving, so it was very easy to add “Anna Rastov” to the guest list. I found the print shop that Castomyr’s staff used to make their official invitations, broke in one night, and printed an official invitation for “Miss Rastov”, complete with an embossed holographic seal. I had created a number of fake documents and records supporting the existence of “Anna Rastov”, so my false identity would withstand casual scrutiny.

  While cleaning the mansion, I figured out where Lord Castomyr kept his most valuable relics. Castomyr’s personal quarters occupied the entire top floor of the mansion’s northern wing, and the cleaning staff was allowed nowhere near it. Almost certainly the cuneiform tablet was hidden there.

  Once I knew that, all my preparations were more or less complete. I kept working at the cleaning company, keeping my head down and getting my work done. Leaving now would draw undue suspicion. I used the time to further memorize the mansion’s layout, specifically the location of the security cameras.

  Then, one week before the job, I took the day off and drove to Minneapolis.

  I had a date.

  ###

  Going on dates was sort of a new experience for me.

  Like, I knew how to flirt, which had proven useful on my various jobs for Morvilind, though I had never had to actually seduce anyone, thank God. But it wasn’t as if I had many potential suitors. Lucy Marney kept trying to introduce me to nice young men from her church, but that never went well. She had stopped after the Archon attack. Maybe she realized that it was a bad idea.

  I had been in love before. Nicholas Connor had been brilliant and handsome and funny and probably the single most ruthless man I had ever met. He had plotted a Rebel attack that would have killed tens of thousands of people, and he had pl
anned to dump the blame on me. I had stopped his plans and escaped, and if I ever saw him again, I would try to kill him before he killed me.

  Except that Nicholas and I hadn’t really, you know, dated.

  We had just sort of fallen into bed together, but we hadn’t gone out to movies or mini-golfing or whatever. At the time, I had thought Nicholas simply a professional thief, and the adrenalin of a successful job combined with our raw attraction had been enough. We had spent all our time planning jobs, executing jobs, and sleeping together.

  In hindsight that had been a really bad idea.

  Actually, that would have been a really bad idea even if Nicholas Connor hadn’t been a Rebel terrorist planning to kill thousands of people.

  Anyway, my point is that I knew a lot about a lot of different things…but I didn’t have a lot of experience of going to a social activity with a man I found attractive simply for the enjoyment of it.

  I…think I kind of liked it.

  I didn’t exactly get dressed up for the date, considering where we would be going, but I did up my hair, put on makeup and lipstick, and got dressed in high-heeled boots, along with jeans and a sweater a bit tighter than the clothes I usually wore. Once I was ready, I drove to where Riordan would meet me.

  Specifically, Sergeant Tom’s Shooting Range And Firearm Emporium in Minneapolis.

  Technically, under the High Queen’s laws, only veterans were allowed to keep firearms in their homes. In fact, they were obligated to do so, in the event that the Archons or the dwarves or some other invader opened a gate from the Shadowlands and attacked. In practice, it was easy to obtain a license for a handgun, and even easier to forge it. I had done it myself a dozen times. I eventually realized that the High Queen and the Elven nobles preferred an armed human population as a brake against any invaders.

  Besides, bullets manufactured on Earth could not hurt Elves, so I suspect they did not care.

  Anyway, Sergeant Tom’s Shooting Range And Firearm Emporium was a combination gun store, shooting range, and social club. The store had marksmanship tournaments on a regular basis, and an attached restaurant for casual dining after an afternoon spent shooting. Most of the clients were veteran men-at-arms and their wives and children, and I didn’t exactly fit in with them.

  But, then, neither did Riordan MacCormac.

  He waited for me by the front doors, silent and motionless and unobtrusive. I sometimes wondered if his Shadowmorph gave him increased abilities at stealth, but I had never asked. Today he wore jeans and a denim jacket over a T-shirt that was just tight enough to display the (admittedly) excellent musculature of his chest. He had a lean, hard face, a shock of brown hair, and brown eyes the color of expensive bookcases.

  “Miss Annovich,” he said.

  I smiled. “Corvus.” It was a joke between us. Katerina Annovich had been the fake name I had given him the first time we had met, while “Corvus” was the nickname his fellow Shadow Hunters had given him because of his somber demeanor.

  Yeah, I should mention that. He wasn’t entirely human. The name “Shadow Hunter” brings up all kinds of melodrama, but there were such people as the Shadow Hunters, a secret family of assassins who both carried out assassinations and hunted the servants of the Dark Ones. They didn’t actually call themselves the “Shadow Hunters”, and much of their popular image was deliberate misinformation. People knew about their strange powers, but they didn’t know about the source of those powers – the Shadowmorph symbiont creatures that granted them increased speed and strength and sensory perception in exchange for feeding on the life force of their victims. When I had first met Riordan, I had jokingly called him a vampire.

  There were no such things as vampires, but the Shadow Hunters came close.

  Riordan grimaced. “I hate that name.”

  My smile widened. “Then you shouldn’t have introduced yourself to me with it.”

  “You’re a cruel woman, Miss Annovich,” said Riordan.

  “And yet you keep inviting me out,” I said. “You must have good taste.”

  “I like to think so,” said Riordan. He bent and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He had to stoop a to do it. The heels added three inches to my height, but I was still pretty short, and most people were taller than me. Which was annoying, but I couldn’t do anything about that.

  Riordan straightened up, and a different feeling went through me. He wasn’t a pretty man, but he was a strong one, which was more attractive by far. Plus, it was the draw of his Shadowmorph. It wanted to feed on life force…and so it made him more attractive to potential sources of life force.

  Yeah, Riordan was dangerous.

  But he had saved my life several times, first at Paul McCade’s mansion, and then during the Archon attack on Milwaukee. And…he hadn’t pushed things with me. He would kiss me on the cheek and take my hand, but nothing more. We hadn’t even properly kissed yet, except that one time in McCade’s mansion to throw off the security guards.

  But given our pasts, it was best to take things slow. I kept telling myself that.

  “You sound frustrated,” I said. “Like you have a lot of pent-up energy.”

  “Oh?” he said. “And just what do you suggest I do about that?”

  Yeah. We might not have kissed, but we flirted a lot.

  “Shoot the hell out of some targets?” I said.

  “An excellent plan,” he said, and he took my hand. His fingers were hard, with the sort of calluses acquired from a lot of strength training. I grinned at him, and he led me to the shooting range.

  We donned protective glasses, ear protectors, and then went through a lot of bullets. I shot five hundred and fifty rounds, which was expensive, but he was paying, so I didn’t hold back. We started with pistols, and then worked our way up to rifles. Riordan was a better shot than I was, annoyingly, but he had the benefit of greater experience and the enhanced senses granted by his Shadowmorph. Still, I wasn’t a bad shot myself. Sergeant Tom’s Shooting Range And Firearm Emporium was the kind of place where a woman who was a halfway decent shot could get a lot of male attention, but no one approached me.

  I was obviously with Riordan, and veteran men-at-arms had excellent survival instincts.

  Later, we had dinner in the restaurant, and I told Riordan a little of what I was doing. Not a lot of it, and we spoke in low voices. Everything I told Riordan could be interpreted as elfophobic, and those veteran men-at-arms would have absolutely no compunction about turning me over to Homeland Security or the Inquisition if they decided I had said something elfophobic.

  If they knew what I really was, they would shoot me dead on the spot.

  “I see,” said Riordan, his customary frown deepening.

  “You know of the Baron,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Riordan. “My family has had the misfortunes of dealing with him in the past.”

  “Misfortunes?” I said. I leaned closer, moving my lips closer to his ear. To anyone watching, it would look like I had leaned in for a kiss. Part of me wished I was really doing that. “Then you’ve been hired to kill him?”

  “Twice,” murmured Riordan as I leaned back. “Once by one of his neighbors, and once by Duke Carothrace in Madison. Both times the Firstborn approved the petitions for his death and both times Castomyr killed the Hunters sent to kill him.”

  I blinked. “He killed them?”

  Riordan nodded. “Both times. The man is extremely dangerous, and has the cunning of a snake. Be very careful around him.”

  I frowned, wondering why the Shadow Hunters would have been willing to go after an Elven noble. “Did…he worship the Dark Ones?”

  “Maybe,” said Riordan. “I don’t know.”

  “Do Elven nobles even worship the Dark Ones?” I said.

  “Sometimes,” said Riordan.

  That threw me for a loop, but it shouldn’t have. I had thought that the cults of the Dark Ones were limited to humans…but, then, the Archons that had chased the High Queen off the Elven homeworld were
followers of the Dark Ones, were they not?

  I realized I didn’t know very much about what the Elves believed in terms of religion. I had once heard an Archon rant about the “superstitions of the Protector”, but I had been trying to stay alive at the time and had not given it any thought. Did the Elves believe in God? Or gods? They interfered in human religion often– Christianity was permitted in the Americas while Islam was banned, and the reverse was true in the parts of Asia ruled by the Caliphate and the Imamate.

  But what did the Elves themselves believe?

  There was so much I didn’t know…but right now, it didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t help me steal that tablet.

  “Damn,” I said. “I thought this would be an easy one.”

  “Be very careful around him,” said Riordan.

  “Oh, you know me,” I said. “I’m always careful.”

  He started to answer, and then a thoughtful look came over his face. “You are. You’re possibly one of the most careful people, man or woman, that I’ve ever met, except…”

  “Except when?” I said, leaning a little closer. There was a glint in his brown eyes that I found appealing. Riordan was so serious that it was amusing when he was not. “When I’m going out with a dangerous and mysterious assassin?”

  “True,” he conceded. “I was going to say you’re less careful when your life is in danger. How many people did you run over?”

  “I’ve never run over any people,” I said. “I ran over a bunch of orcs and anthrophages. They’re not people so they don’t count.”

  “You did blow up a restaurant full of Rebels at the Ducal Mall,” said Riordan.

  “They were Rebels,” I said. “They were trying to kill me. It just sucks for them that I was better at it.”

  That amused him, and his stern, lean face relaxed into something almost like a genuine smile. I smiled back at that.

  See, I’ve said before, again and again, that I’m not a good person. I’m Nadia Moran, illegal wizard and expert thief and occasional killer, and I’ve done a lot of bad things. Granted, I had good reasons…but sometimes, in my more honest moments, I wondered if I used Russell’s illness as an excuse to go farther than I should have. Maybe that was why I had resisted Lucy Marney’s attempts to match me up with a nice young man from her church. Because those young men really were nice young men…and they didn’t deserve to have someone like me fall into their lives.