Shadow Fall

below, this upper level had several corridors branching off the landing. Luca stepped down one and opened a door, revealing a simple, colorless bedroom with a bathroom en suite. “Quarters,” Luca explained.

The room was little more than a cell. “I’m not a monk,” Custo argued.

Luca gave a long-suffering sigh. “Like I said, you like to court disaster. Your choice. These rooms are temporary anyway. Most get lodgings near their station in the world. Limits the coming and going from the tower, reducing the possibility of discovery. If you work in the control room, you stay here; if you’re in the field, you get your own place.”

So he could be part of The Order without actually having to put up with any of the Host. That was a consideration, especially if he had access to those weapons. There had to be a catch.

“No catch,” Luca said. “Service. Dedicating yourself to the well-being of the world, a nonissue because you already have. You wouldn’t be here, in mortality, if you hadn’t.”

Custo shook his head in denial. He was here on Earth because he’d jumped the gate and made a break for it.

“But why did you jump the gate?” Luca asked.

“Because no one up there would do anything.” Custo’s heart beat hard with sudden anger. “A war was going on, and no one would fucking listen to me.”

“How many times did I come to you during your vigil at the gate? Think about that and answer me this: who wouldn’t listen?” Luca tilted his head with subtle irony. “You’re listening now. Join us.”

Custo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. All he’d been through. Pissing off Death. Diving into the Shadowlands. His uncontrolled crash to Earth. Bringing the Shadow wolf with him.

“You always did like to do things the hard way,” Luca observed.

“Stay out of my head.”

Custo had to think, and he couldn’t think when every conclusion he came to was open to outside commentary.

“Why don’t you come back downstairs, observe for a little while, work things out?”

“Don’t patronize me either.”

Luca held up his hands in surrender. “I’m just trying to help.”

Luca turned then and left him alone in the cell. Custo could hear the soft pad of his tread down the steps. Luca was leaving him alone with his thoughts, giving him the most space he could to process this new information and come to a decision, one that Luca felt had already been made.

Had it?

Custo had no idea. Luca was persuasive, but then, Custo had been unprepared for this conversation. He thought he’d be taken into custody. Had feared that all his work would be left undone, his friends unprotected. Now, it seemed, those concerns were irrelevant.

The bright little room was claustrophobic. Custo exited and headed to the stairs. Maybe he should watch in the control room a little bit. Get a sense of The Order in action, then make his decision.

He passed the armory, remembering the dagger. It would be his to use, a compelling point in The Order’s favor. Talia would be safe with the wraiths on the defensive once again. And the Shadow wolf? There had to be something in that glittering assemblage for him, too.

Okay: An apartment in the city, near Annabella preferably. A way to fight the monsters that encroached on his friends’ lives. And all he’d have to deal with was the occasional interaction with The Order. Custo could almost see Luca’s point.

If Custo was already going to fight, he might as well do so with the best tools, under the aegis of others like him.

He reached the main floor, hovering on the brink of change. Luca stood at the rear of the control room, his back to Custo. When Custo approached, Luca shot him a glance. “Decide already?”

Nearly. But still Custo hesitated. Something was bothering him, had been itching in his brain since the conversation started.

Right. His mood darkened. “You said to Adam that the wraiths weren’t your concern at this time.”

Luca shook his head. “The wraiths are trapped in mortality; they aren’t going anywhere. Your Adam is doing an admirable job keeping them controlled while we fight active breaches in the barrier between the worlds. We have to repair them before any more dark fae can enter the world and wreak as much havoc as the one who created the wraiths in the first place.”

“But you fought the wraiths in the alley last night. What makes today any different?”

Luca heaved an impatient sigh, as if Custo kept missing his point. “We weren’t fighting the wraiths. That wasn’t our aim at all.”

“Uh…Looked that way to me.”

“Then you are still a fool,” Luca said. “We were fighting to save you. So that you can join us, add your great soul to our strength. There is more work to be done than you know. You are needed. Here. Now.”

“I can’t abandon my friends. I won’t.”

“Do you think the wraiths or the hunter are the only creatures to trouble the earth since Death cracked the universe open for love? Magic is again seeping into the world, and on the one hand we have art, beauty, and innovation with the makings of a great modern Renaissance—your Annabella is part of that, by the way—and on the other, we have every kind of dark fae testing the boundary to grasp the power of the mortal world. The repercussions go far deeper than the wraiths or a wolf on the prowl, and we are doing everything we can to stop it.”

“You said that magic is again seeping in the world. This has happened before?” Custo knew the answer before he’d finished phrasing the question. Of course it had happened before. Otherwise, where had all the stories, myths, and legends come from? The angel from Greece had said as much, too, that humanity had forgotten the old stories. Custo choked with the implications.

But the bottom line was…“You won’t fight the wraiths? What if Adam and Talia decided to quit?”

“The wraiths would probably grow bolder. More people would die.”

“And the wolf?”

“Similarly trapped here, and fixated for the moment on your Annabella. He is a lesser threat because, as a shape-shifter, he cannot hold his form indefinitely. Eventually, he will disperse into shadows.”

Custo had seen that effect himself, the wolf’s sudden contraction from beast to empty darkness. Problem was, the wolf could re-form again. “And in the meantime? What about Annabella?”

Luca’s face was expressionless.

Angry frustration burned in Custo’s blood. “So you won’t help.”

Luca met his gaze dead-on. “We are helping. You just won’t see it. This morning a little boy in China called a dragon—that’s right, a fire-breathing dragon—out of a storybook into mortality, and you want us to scour New York City looking for a wolf who will fade on his own?”

An exclamation within the command center set the angels in residence into a new flurry of activity.

Luca said, weary, “That would be Coyote, the trickster, and he just reassigned the flight numbers to all of the South-west’s airborne flights, and you want us to drop everything and hunt wraiths already pursued by Adam and world governments? Not to mention with Death abandoning his post, we have to guide the dead to our gate, or they would be lost to Shadow. We go where we’re most needed. We fight the best way we can. And we need your help.”

Custo was beyond caring. “If I can die in the mortal world, then the wolf can, too.” After all, the wolf crossed to mortality, too, when he fell to Earth.

A long pause wedged distance between Custo and Luca.

“Sure,” Luca said with a shrug of irritable defeat.

Custo’s heart throbbed in a quick burst of bloodlust.

“But,” Luca continued, waggling his head back and forth as if to argue a middling point, “as a shape-shifter, the hunter can return to a shadow-state, only to take on a live form again, man or wolf, uninjured. At least until whichever form is too difficult for him to hold.”