As I approached the bookstore, I scanned the façade of the old-world, four-story building carefully. Exterior spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides bathed the tall brick building in light. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES that hung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elaborate brass pole, creaked as it swung in the increasingly chilly night breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned green-tinted windows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the bookstore’s grand, alcoved entrance. Ornate, diamond-paned cherry doors nestled between limestone columns gleamed in the light.
All was well with my “home.” The lights were on, the building protected from my deadly neighbors. I stopped and stared for a moment down the street, into the abandoned neighborhood, making sure no Shades had made inroads into my territory.
The Dark Zone at the edge of Barrons Books and Baubles is the largest one I’ve seen so far (and the largest I hope to ever see!), encompassing more than twenty city blocks, crammed to overflowing with lethal dark shadows. Two things characterize a Dark Zone: darkness and death. Creatures of night, the Shades devour everything that lives, from people, to grass, to leaves, even down to the worms in the soil, leaving behind a wasteland.
Even now, they were moving restlessly, writhing like flies stuck on tape, desperate to exchange their lifeless shadows for the fertile, well-lit neighborhoods beyond.
For the moment I was safe. The Shades can’t tolerate light, and near the bookstore, I was bathed in it. However, if I were to wander twenty feet down the street, into the gloom where the streetlamps were all out, I’d be dead.
I’m obsessed with my neighbors. They’re vampires in the truest sense of the word. I’ve seen what they do to people. They consume them, leaving only piles of clothing, jewelry, and other inanimate objects, topped by a small, dry papery husk of whatever human matter they find unpalatable. Like leaving the tail of a shrimp, I guess; part of us is too crunchy for their taste. Not even I can kill them. They have no real substance, which makes weapons useless. The only thing that works against them is light, and it doesn’t kill them, it just holds them at bay. Penned in on all sides by the lights of surrounding neighborhoods, this Dark Zone had remained roughly the same size for several months. I know; I scout its perimeter regularly.
If you’re not a sidhe-seer, you can’t even see them. The people who die in a Dark Zone never know the face of their executioner. Not that the Shades have faces. Featureless is their middle name. If you are a sidhe-seer, they’re still difficult to separate from the night, even when you know what you’re looking for. Darker than the darkness, like inky black fog, they slither and slide, creeping over buildings, oozing down drainpipes, twining around broken streetlamps. Although I’ve never gotten close enough to test my hunch and hope I never do, I think they’re cold.
They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from as small as a cat to as large as—
I blinked.
Surely that wasn’t the one that had cornered me in the back parlor the night Fiona, the woman who used to run the bookstore, had tried to kill me, by letting a horde of them inside while I slept! The last time I’d seen it, roughly five weeks ago, counting the month I’d lost in Faery, it had been about twenty feet long and nine feet high. It was now twice as large, a dense cloud of oily darkness stretching nearly the entire length of the deserted building adjacent to Barrons.
Did they grow from eating us? Could one get as big as a small town? Maybe hunker down on top of it and swallow it whole?
I stared. For a thing that had no face, it certainly seemed to be staring back at me. I’d flipped this thing off a time or two. Last time I’d seen it, it had shaped itself into an almost human form and shot the insult right back at me.
I wasn’t about to teach it any new tricks.
I gave myself a brisk shake, and immediately regretted it. My head hurt so badly my brain felt bruised, and I’d just jostled it from side to side against the inner walls of my skull.
Though the rain had finally stopped—or rather taken one of those all too brief Dublin hiatuses—I was wet and freezing, and had better things to do than stand out here brooding over one of my many enemies. Things like eating a half a bottle of aspirin, and standing under a scalding shower. Things like clearing my head so I could ponder the ramifications of what I’d seen tonight, and finding Barrons to tell him all about it. I had no doubt he would be as astonished as I was by the Book’s method of locomotion. What dark agenda was it pursuing? Were random chaos and violence purpose enough?