Page 9 of Throwing Shade
This thing had picked me out as prey and he’d intended to leave me broken or dead because he thought I was weak. Irrelevant.
Plot twist. I was no longer a shadow of my former self.
I was the shadow master.
Alex made another hand gesture, but my shadow kicked, sweeping low, and he tripped forward, breaking the magic paralysis on me.
“The game has changed, asshole,” I said, scooting behind the crooked dumpster. It smelled like Eli’s hockey bag: baked-in sweat and stinky feet dipped in Satan’s farts. “Having fun? Because I’m enjoying myself immensely.”
“Not for much longer, bitch.” Alex fired more magic, but I pressed tight behind the dumpster, unhurt, because he required a line of sight to attack me directly, though my shadow was still vulnerable.
I swallowed against the nausea creeping up my esophagus from maintaining both sets of perceptions and screwed my eyes shut so that only the night vision remained.
A few feet away, Alex and my shadow circled each other warily. Behind his blue eyes lurked a deep malevolence and my skin crawled in revulsion. He feinted left, faked me out, and hit me with his magic, forcing my shadow to throw itself against the broken edge of a mirror sticking out of the trash container.
I screamed and clapped a hand against my shoulder, warm blood oozing through my fingers and onto my torn shirt.
A thin gap of moonlight streamed through the shadow’s shoulder.
With a snap, I was expelled from that inky form onto my ass, narrowly avoiding a questionable puddle, a hand still pressed against the wound. Exhausted and in pain, I couldn’t even stagger to my feet to save myself.
Jaw tight, Alex stalked toward me, a deadly glint in his eyes.
A black mesh swam up from the ground and enveloped me. I no longer cast a shadow. Instead, it cloaked me, its edges blurring into the rest of the darkness.
“Where’d you go?” Alex cautiously felt out with a foot.
I rolled sideways onto my back, narrowly missing coming in contact with him. I brushed my finger against the mesh’s velvety softness and a tingle rippled through me.
Alex peered behind the dumpster. “Where are you?” he growled.
I hugged my knees to my chest with one arm, the other applying pressure to the injury, certain either my raspy breaths or the pounding of my heart would give me away, clinging to this magic invisibility by my fingertips.
My brain screamed at me to finish this, because letting Alex escape would be more dangerous than the actual attack, but the idea of killing him made me shudder.
It’s him or you, Feldman.
Swallowing a sour disgust, I tried to stand up, still cloaked, but only got as far as my hands and knees before sighing in defeat, my arms wobbling. I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. I had nothing left.
Casting one final worried glance around, Alex swore and hurried away, periodically glancing back until he left the alley.
Tapped out, I had no choice but to let him leave. The black mesh flickered, holes punched in both my shield and the life I’d so carefully built. This wasn’t over. The past had taught me that much.
I took a ragged breath. Forty wasn’t the new twenty, because if it was, I would have run home and hidden behind locked doors, denying what had happened. However, I was older and wouldn’t shy away from the truth.
The magic that I’d kept hidden for almost thirty years had been unleashed once more.
Shaking, I sat up, caught on a knife’s edge between fear and exhilaration. For most of my life, I’d been convinced that using this power would be signing my own death warrant, but tonight I’d go home and hug my daughter, breathing in her coconut shampoo and laughing when she made her inevitable crack about being taller than me. All because of…
Shadows littered the ground, mine as ordinary as the others. For now, at least.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I’d made a choice in order to survive, but I had no doubt that the shockwaves from this supernova would hit hard, fast, and deadly.
Behind me, my shadow kissed both its biceps, then held a fist up in victory.
