“Too many shadows,” Patrick added, looking down the alley. Then he turned his attention back to Izzie, and added in a low, urgent voice, “Let’s wrap this up and get back inside.”
Izzie gave him a curt nod, and went looking for another spiraling mark that she could photograph. The shadows grew larger and more diffuse the farther away she moved from the mouth of the alley.
“Hey, Izzie,” she heard Daphne calling from the shadows ahead of her, “is this what we’re looking for?”
Izzie turned and looked in the direction of her voice, and saw that Daphne had already gone another thirty or forty feet further down the alley, using her phone’s flashlight function to scan the backs of the houses. At the moment, her attention was on a spot illuminated by her phone’s light on the rear exterior of a house five or six doors down from Patrick’s.
“I think it is. . . .” Daphne turned from the spot overhead to glance over in Izzie’s direction. “But I’m not sure.”
Izzie walked down the alley toward Daphne, conscious of the audible crunch of her boots stepping across broken glass and rock on the alley’s tarmac. The sounds of the revelers over on Almeria grew fainter and fainter the deeper into the alley she moved, almost as if the noise were being swallowed up by the shadows themselves. She couldn’t help but think of the dream she’d had that morning, briefly dozing on the couch in Patrick’s living room, and the way that the surrounding darkness had seemed like a solid medium through which she had struggled to move. Before the shadow had begun to consume her flesh bit by bit, that is.
“It looks like one of the markings,” Daphne said when Izzie reached her side. “But it’s got vines or some kind of brambles growing over it, so . . .” She trailed off, shrugging. “I can’t be sure.”
Izzie looked up at the spot illuminated by Daphne’s phone light and squinted. It did look like one of the old man’s marks might be hidden beneath the foliage, but it was hard to say for certain.
“It probably is. Must be a lot of them in that state, I’d guess. Patrick said that his great-uncle used to pay him and his cousins to keep the marks clean and clear.” Izzie turned to glance back toward the mouth of the alley, where Patrick was huddled protectively near Joyce. They seemed to be talking to each other, but the sound of their voices was little more than a dull murmur from this distance. “Every weekend, he’d be out here pulling crawling vines off the ones on the walls, or sweeping away dirt or trash from the ones on the ground. Sounds to me like . . .”
“Wait,” Daphne interrupted, reaching out to touch Izzie’s elbow. “Did they have to?”
“I suppose not.” Izzie looked back at her, and lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug. “The old guy paid them a quarter each for it, so it doesn’t sound like he made them do it.”
“No.” Daphne’s tone was more insistent now, and she took hold of Izzie’s upper arm, squeezing tightly. “Did they have to keep the marks clean and uncovered? For them to work?”
Izzie’s eyes widened as the implications of what Daphne was saying sunk in.
“Come on,” she said, taking hold of Daphne’s hand. “Let’s get back inside, okay?”
They turned to head back toward the mouth of the alley.
But the shadows in front of them had grown so thick that they could barely see the mouth of the alley.
“Izzie?” She could only faintly hear Daphne’s voice, even though she was right beside her.
Izzie felt a wave of nausea grip her insides, and a strange, unpleasant taste spread across her tongue. She had experienced this before. She knew what this was.
“Daphne?” She kept a firm grip on Daphne’s hand, squeezing it tightly, and for an instant savored the weight and warmth of it as Daphne squeezed back. “I think that we should . . .”
But before Izzie could finish, figures began to detach themselves from the shadows on either side of them, advancing on the two of them. Izzie could just barely make out the black spots that marked the skin of their faces and hands, darker still than the shadows around them.
They were the Ridden.
CHAPTER TEN
Patrick had been unable to stop glancing over at the mouth of the alley, where it met Almeria. He kept thinking about the car that Izzie had seen parked on the street earlier that day, and the truck that had nearly run her over. And he was reminded how he had felt like he was being watched earlier that day, when he ventured out from the 10th Precinct station house to get some lunch. Were they being watched? Was someone following them? Maybe Uncle Alf’s marks were protecting them here, but even then, there was something about that lurking just at the edge of his thoughts, an anxiety that wouldn’t stop nagging him, though he couldn’t bring it into clear focus.
“I’m cold,” Joyce had said, huddling close to him for warmth. “Do you think we’ve got enough to work with, so we can get inside already?”
“Yeah, we probably do,” Patrick had answered. “We just need to convince Izzie that . . .”
The sound of shouts issuing from the far end of the alley behind them interrupted him, and Patrick wheeled around, hand instinctively moving toward the semiautomatic holstered at his hip.
He saw Izzie and Daphne, some twenty yards away, menaced on both sides by figures emerging from the shadows. Was it just a couple of tweakers or crackheads, desperate for some easy money and thinking that two women walking down a dark alley made for easy marks? Or were they . . . ?
“Ridden!” Izzie shouted.
Patrick’s gaze shot up to the spiraling mark carved into the rear of his house, the same one that he’d spent countless weekends as a
