Page 11 of Spears and Shadows (Defenders of the Light)
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Adam jumped backfrom Nora as if he had been burned by the proximity. Nora turned to look at him, momentarily dazed from the sudden change, and found Adam’s head already whipping back and forth, looking for the source of the danger. There was not just one voice screaming, but many. They sounded panicked, and the pounding of feet accompanied them. Nora thought the noise was coming from near the museum entrance.
Nora’s mind flew to the emergency preparedness drill they’d had a few weeks prior and the talk of multiple mass shootings across the country. She started towards the door, but Adam snaked his hand out and grabbed her by the back of the collar so suddenly that her head snapped back.
“Where in blazes do you think you’re going?”
Nora gestured towards the noises, confused as to why he was stopping her.
“There’s some sort of emergency here. It could be an active shooter or something,” Nora explained, working herself free of his grasp.
Adam gawked. “So your first response is to rush towards the screaming? That’s how people get killed, Nora.” He pulled her behind him and then started towards the door himself, keeping her body behind his. “We have to get out of here. We can use the back door by the loading bay.”
Nora opened her mouth, but before she could ask Adam how he knew where the back door was, there was a flashing of lights and a deafening, blaring noise as the fire alarms started going off. The office door swung shut of its own accord as the emergency systems went into effect. Right before the door slammed closed, she caught the briefest whiff of the hot and acrid smoke.
Nora yelled over the wild chiming. “The fire must be close, I could smell it.”
Adam continued to pull her towards the door as if she hadn’t spoken. She yanked on his arm to stop him, not about to let him charge towards a fire after he had just scolded her for running towards what she thought was an active shooter.
“If the fire is in the hallway, we can’t go out that way,” she shouted.
Adam shook his head, and when he looked at Nora, his eyes had gone as round as dinner plates.
“We have to get out of here,” he insisted.
“That’s a fire door.” Nora jerked her chin towards the now closed entrance to the hallway. “It would take hours to burn through it. We’ll be safe in here until they put it out.” She cast around, knowing there had to be a fire extinguisher in the office as well.
Adam didn’t seem comforted at all. In fact, the color had drained from his face, giving a ghostly cast to his golden bronze skin, and a slight sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Hey, it’s going to be all right,” she reassured him, shocked by his fearful reaction. “I’ll find the fire extinguisher just in case, okay?”
She made to turn away from him to begin her search, but with surprising strength, he grasped her wrist and pulled her back, making her bang into the workbench.
“Stay away from the door.” Adam’s voice was harsh.
Nora had already opened her mouth to snap that he needed to calm down when she saw it. At the bottom of the door, a thin line of black smoke was oozing its way through, despite the fire-resistant sealant. It twisted and writhed in a way that Nora found strange. Smoke didn’t usually behave like that. The cloud grew larger and denser until it was as tall as she was, then began to gather into a shape. Nora blinked as she realized the smoke was taking on the form of a human, but it wasn’t really all that human. It had two arms and two legs, but that was where the similarities ended. All the angles and proportions were wrong, and the thick smoke the thing was composed of continued to writhe and swirl in a way that made Nora sick to look at. As she was frozen on the spot, more smoke crept under the door and formed into dozens of the horrific creatures.
As Nora wondered what on earth had been in the coffee at that café, Adam stepped in front of her and put an arm across her as if to shield her. The first creature then began to roll forward on its warped legs, stretching out too-long arms towards the pair as if to envelope them in a hug. Nora opened her mouth to scream, but at that moment, Adam’s arm tightened. She realized he had not put it across her to shield her but was instead reaching for something—the sword. In an instant, his long fingers closed around the hilt and he swung the blade out in front of him in a long arc, slicing the being in a diagonal slash across its torso. The dark creature let out an unearthly shriek before fracturing into hundreds of fragments of shadow that wriggled away like Stygian maggots before dissolving into thin air.
Nora didn’t even have a second to process what had just happened before the rest of the creatures began advancing on them and Adam lunged forward into the midst of a swirling vortex of shadows. The creatures descended on him, shrieking in horrible voices that made Nora want to claw at her eardrums. Adam stood at the center of the mass and brandished the sword, slicing several more shadows that dispersed in much the same way as the first. Nora opened her mouth to warn him of more creatures creeping up behind him, but Adam had already whirled around and dispatched them before she could draw a breath. She watched, transfixed as he whirled and bobbed in the mass of creatures, swinging the sword faster than her eyes could follow. Shadow after shadow fell before the blade, but still more oozed under the door.
It had become unbearably hot in the room as the fire alarms continued to sound, and a layer of sweat formed on her skin and dampened her hair. Her back was still pressed against the workbench, her hands on the edge with a white-knuckled grip. Her brain refused to process what was happening in front of her. At any moment, she expected to jerk awake from a very strange nightmare. Or perhaps there was a fire and she was suffering from hallucinatory smoke poisoning. Another small voice in the back of her head, that still clung to sanity, tried to scream at her that Adam shouldn’t be touching an artifact with his bare hands, let alone using it like this, but she decided that, in this moment, sanity was vastly overrated.
For a heartbeat, she lost sight of Adam as the shadows around him became denser, and it was the impetus she needed to regain the power to move. She scrabbled on the workbench behind her and grabbed the first thing her hand touched: a long pair of pointed tweezers from her open supply kit.
When she turned back, Adam was grappling with a shadow creature who had managed to grab his tie and was attempting to use it to drag him down into the swirling pit of darkness around his feet. Nora gripped the tweezers in her left hand and, for a fleeting moment, she desperately tried to remember everything Drew had taught her about playing darts. Then she lobbed the tweezers at the shadow creature as hard as she could.
The creature let out a shriek that cut through the already deafening alarms as the tweezers sunk into where an eye would be if it had any sort of conventional features. It immediately released Adam’s tie as its arms flew to its face, and he took the opportunity to stab the sword through its chest, looking much less like a lanky college professor and much more like a heroic warrior. As the creature dissolved, Adam glanced over to where Nora was standing, a look of something Nora didn’t recognize crossing his otherwise focused face. The moment was gone as quickly as it came as Adam was forced to make a quick turn to dodge under a whip-like arm of blackness. The motion caused his glasses to slip off his face and they were crushed under his heel, but he continued slashing and parrying as if he hadn’t noticed.
Nora’s use of tweezers as projectiles seemed to have drawn the attention of the other shadow creatures, and she spotted one slithering across the floor toward where she stood. She reached behind her for something else she could throw, hoping for a scalpel of some sort this time, but the creature was too fast for her. Pain seared her ankle and then she was falling. She heard the back of her head hit the edge of her workbench with a sickening crack before she felt it, and the world swam before her eyes in a dizzying swirl of shadows and light.
When her eyes refocused, the monster had a whip-like arm wrapped around her ankle, its grip burning into her flesh. The creature began pulling on her leg, reeling her towards its darkness like a fish on the end of its line. Nora reached behind her to grab the bottom of the work bench, trying to keep herself from being drawn across the floor. As she stopped her own forward progress, the creature shrieked in frustration and began clawing its way up her calf to her body, where she lay on the floor. A scream bubbled up in her throat, but she was unable to get it out around the intense heat clawing its way down into her lungs. Red coals burned where the creature’s eyes should be, and the shadows parted in a sick parody of a smile.
Adam screamed her name as she clawed at the table behind her, trying to find something—anything—to defend herself with as the creature reached her upper thigh. In that moment, her hand closed around heavy metal, and before she could process what was happening, she had swung the spear down in a long arc and jabbed it forward, sending the blade straight through the place where the creature’s face should have been. With one last shriek, it exploded into its shadow fragments and the weight on her leg was gone, although the pain was still there.
The spear rested heavily across her lap as she panted in fear and relief. When she raised her eyes, Adam was still fighting the shadows, but only a few remained and the smoke had stopped coming in from under the door. As he dealt with the lingering creatures, Nora’s eyes slid closed and she leaned her head against her table, the throbbing from where her skull had collided with the edge forcing itself back to the forefront of her consciousness.
After what felt like a few moments but was probably several minutes, there was a clatter and a warm presence at her side. Nora forced her eyes open to see that Adam had dropped the sword and kneeled on the floor beside her. His hands flew to her face and smoothed over her forehead, trying to meet her unfocused eyes with his. The warmth of his fingers felt nice in her hair, despite how sweaty she was.
