Shadowhunter (Nephilim Quest Book 1) (23 page)

Grandma's description was so vivid that the feeling of fear in my chest and stomach when I had seen the shadows as a child came flooding back.

"So, I drove past, and the shadow did not recognize me – I was downwind, as it were, a favorable direction from my point of view, and it had not spotted my car yet, so it couldn't smell me. I parked my car on the other side of the block and got up on the roof using the fire escape ladder."

As Grandma described how she'd caught the shadow, I could see her in my mind's eye walking down a darkened street with her determined, lithe gait, like something in a movie. And climbing up the fire escape onto a roof? Surely what she was telling me couldn't be true?

"I still can't believe that you do this!" The words burst out of me before I had time to stop them. "All on your own?"
 

"Believe it!" said Grandma and her voice had a steely ring that was new to me.
 

"But - aren't you scared?"

"I was in the early days. It's a skill like anything else. It's all about instinct - and one's instinct develops with time and experience. Anyway, on this occasion I had been following the shadow for some time before an opportunity presented itself..."

My Grandma the Shadow Hunter. For a while I thought about her climbing onto a roof using a ladder. But then again, she was very fit for her age. And looked a lot younger than her advanced years. She would manage it easily.

Grandma noticed me looking at her body. She smiled.

"I know. I don't exactly look as though I was in my seventies, do I?"

"No. You don't. What's the secret?"

"The buffer zone. It sort of helps, the absence of time. If you spend a lot of time in the buffer zone, you age much slower in the real world too. And also, it can be in the genes. I suppose my body is somewhere in its forties "

"I hope I have inherited your genes."

"I wouldn't be too sure of that..."

I wasn't sure I had heard right. Why would I not have inherited my grandmother's genes? At least some of them, the youthfulness being one of them, hopefully.

"But, back to the shadow. I jumped down on it from the roof and..."

"You what?" Now it was my Grandma the superhero?
 

"Quite, you don't know everything...you'll learn all about it soon enough. Let's just say I know how to jump from heights without hurting myself, using the buffer zone – it has to do with using Lilith's Key. Which I did. I landed behind the shadow, and managed to lasso it before it could flee."

"You lassoed it. All righty... and no one paid any attention to a grandmother throwing a lasso in an empty alleyway?"

"Not in that part of the town... no, no one saw. First of all no-one does see the shadows, when they are in their hiding mode, and secondly I was away from the alley with the shadow before you could say "Get out of there!" I took the shadow to the rooftop to destroy it."

"Sheesh! Are you sure you are my grandmother? I'm beginning to think someone's kidnapped the original and replaced her with an android. You sound like a killer out of a police series!" I eyed her in shock.

"Well, I am. Sort of. What makes it possible is the shadows aren't really real."

"This one sounds real enough!"

"They have been created from the substance of the lowest buffer zone – from the very same kind of negative, fearful thoughts that they hunt for in people. They need to feed on negativity to keep their solid form. And the core, which keeps them functioning and conscious, is an extension of the Hunter."

I didn't understand one bit.

"I'll try to explain this for you... their Hunters – well, they are like our Hunters, only they belong to the Immortals. Their job is to hunt down the people we find valuable, the ones who can learn how to move in the buffer zone, and through time. When they find them, they kill them. They don't want us to get any new Time Walkers for our team. It is a war."

I shivered.

"In the buffer zone, while the Immortals were learning to work with the energies, and molding their world, they also learned to concentrate a part of their consciousness away from themselves. It stays connected to them through an energy cord. They feed some of their energy out, into a shadow formed out of the buffer zone material, and send them away. You could say the shadows have a consciousness of their own because their material is made of human consciousness, but it is not concentrated consciousness. It cannot function on its own. The Hunter's energy is the thing that makes it truly functional. It is the Hunter, who is inside the shadow form, using it as an extension of themselves."

I tried to keep up with Grandma's explanations.

"When the Hunter withdraws their consciousness away from a shadow, the solid form they have created simply disintegrates. The shadow just crumbles away. Nothing remains. So when I say we kill the shadows, we disconnect the energy cord that leads back to their Hunter or Immortal."

I must have still looked confused, because Grandma, clearly trying hard to put this into words that I could understand, said: "The closest analogy that I can give you is that of the puppet. It has no life of its own, yet it moves, talks and can create the illusion of existence. A puppet master can even come to believe in the reality of his creation and the creation take on an apparent life of its own."

This was really starting to make me shudder, since who hasn't been frightened by the idea of a demonic doll at some point? It's not just the stuff of nightmares; it's a key component of horror movies.
 

"Would you like to see a shadow?" Grandma suddenly asked.

"See? Here?" Panic made me almost squeal and Grandma patted my hand.

"No, sweetheart, they cannot rise this high up in the buffer zone. I mean show you in another way. Here, follow me."

She led the way along criss-crossing corridors to a little room squeezed in between the towering book cases. It almost felt like standing in a chimney, looking up. The room was just big enough to house one small television - and a rather old one at that. Attached to it was a VHS player, and the shelves next to it were full old VHS tapes.

Grandma searched for a while, and then found what she was looking for. She put the TV on (it seemed to be attached to some sort of car battery for power) and pressed the buttons of the player.

"This is a very rare glimpse of a shadow that one of our hunters managed to video in the eighties. It only lasts a few seconds, so look carefully to the left of the screen. The shadow follows the man walking there."

The street was badly lit, but I made out a man walking towards whoever had videotaped this. The darkness seemed to intensify behind the walking figure and I bent forward automatically to see better.
 

A shadowy... something was there, following the silhouette of the walking man. Half human in shape, with odd hands that seemed to float in the air, it tried to grasp its victim. Then it froze, and suddenly disappeared.

I had no words. It had looked very much like the shadow in our garden.

Grandma put the VHS cassette back to the shelf and continued explaining while she led me back along the corridors.

"The most effective way to destroy the shadows is to use the same Keys that we use to create our own gates to this buffer zone. But as there are only three of these Keys in the world, we can't risk losing them, and normally we use more traditional ways of physical force. This isn't very pleasant to look at, as they can plead for life. Now they are mute, but they can still make gestures. If, however, they did have a soul, we would see it leaving the body in the buffer zone. But that never happens. We simply see the cord snap back to the Hunter that was giving energy to the shadow. And the substance of the shadow simply merges back into the pool of energy it came from. So strictly speaking the conscious energy goes back to the one who gave it to the shadow, and the shadow's basic energy remains, only sucked back into the energy mass of the buffer zone. It doesn't cease to exist; it simply melts back into the energy pool from which it was created. So in our view no one is really killing anyone or anything."

I hoped I had brought my notebook with me. I should have written all of this down.
 

"And this particular shadow in the alley was not pleading for its life. It was cursing me, and spat out something it shouldn't have. It hissed that when the Immortals found the Book of Watchers, I would be very, very sorry for the day I was born. This is when the shadow's Hunter connected to the shadow, probably feeling its anger, and killed the shadow himself, realizing what the shadow was revealing to me. So you cannot really say it was me who killed it. The Immortals killed it themselves. And ever since then, all of the shadows have been created differently so that they are always silent. That's what convinced us this Book of Watchers was worth investigating."

"Ever since then we have been searching for clues about it," Lilith's voice came from behind us. "We have found enough information to be extremely concerned. The dark Nephilim, and the Immortals, are planning something major, and it threatens the whole world."

I turned around.

"Aren't there any higher entities that could stop them?
 
Like those who have died and reached higher levels of existence?"

"Why would they want to come back to these denser energies, when they have reached the higher levels and have a new, more pleasant life there? On this earth we all have free will. We can do what we want to, and there is no one else to blame for the bad things happening here. Wars, murders, cheating... all of these are our own doing.  There's no creator we could put the blame on but ourselves. We made this bed, we must lie in it." Lilith's voice was calm. "So whatever happens here is our own doing. If the Immortals and bad Nephilim try to gain power, it is up to us to stop them."

"Ok, don't know about you, but I am hungry," Diana appeared from behind a shelf – no doubt she had been listening to our discussion. "Is anyone else ready for a bite to eat?"

"Now that you mention it..." Grandma patted her flat stomach, "food sounds like a good idea. Let's go."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

29. Scent

At last, something. Not much, but enough. The shadow had caught a scent. Perhaps they had rolled down the car window for a time, because it could follow her unmistakeable essence in a straight line for some distance. Then it disappeared again. It did not matter. Once a shadow had picked up the scent of its prey, it was only a matter of time - and this shadow knew it was on the right road. All it needed to do was to search all the junctions and the smaller roads ahead. At some point she would have left the car, and the shadow would find her.

CHAPTER THIRTY

30. Gatekeepers

Daniel was avoiding me, or so it seemed, after displaying his wings in the library. He no longer greeted me at the cafeteria. He turned the other way when he caught sight of me across the main hall, pretending he was occupied with something on a computer, or that he was deep in discussion with someone else. And once, when I said hi to him when we passed each other in the corridor, he didn't even answer. Instead he hurried past me with a quick nod, and I felt that he had even stepped aside to avoid coming into contact with me.
 

"What did I do?" I asked Diana, "I must have hurt his wings very badly for him to be so mad at me."

Diana shrugged.

"I don't know. I have never seen him like that, he is usually so in control of his emotions. But then again - I don't know of anyone else ever touching his wings before. He might behave like that towards anyone who did the same. Touchy subject for the Nephilim, the wings. Pun intended. His brother Elijah always avoids opening his wings if anyone is within touching distance."

"So he has a brother?" A statement of the obvious, but too late, I'd said it.

"Yes, as handsome as they come, but much more solemn than Daniel. He hardly ever smiles. There is some tragedy there but we don't talk about it."

I tried not to pay attention to Daniel's behaviour, but it was hard. I was suddenly left feeling like a worthless piece of garbage, not deserving the attention of a mighty Nephilim. This, of course, made me angry, and I decided I would not give him the satisfaction of showing I cared.

Because why should I have cared? We didn't know each other. He had no obligations towards me.
 

Instead I decided to concentrate on learning about the different groups in the Centre.
 

I had already met some members of the first group - the researchers with their noses in books in the library.
 

"They have frequent meetings where they share and cross-reference their findings.
 
Hints in texts about the Book of Watchers, as well as probable happenings in history that seem to involve Nephilim intervention - that kind of thing. Decisions to send Time Walker groups to historical events are made according to their meetings," Diana told me when we were lying in bed waiting for sleep to take over. "They are the ones who didn't excel in the other skills needed in the buffer zone, or they aren't sufficiently advanced in their training, so they can't physically join the Time Walker groups. They
 
make themselves useful while they learn. "

I had a feeling I'd be joining them soon.

Diana was my unofficial guide to the Center, and one morning she yanked me away from my breakfast so suddenly that I splashed coffee on my jeans.

"It's time for you to meet the teachers. We're starting with Mrs. Olanda. She should be available at the moment - and she hates anyone to be late."
 

Diana's explanation was flung over her shoulder as she hurried me along to one of the classrooms. Mrs Olanda was a round, short lady with deep dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.
 

"Olanda is my first name but everyone uses it.
 
And you should too, young lady," she beamed at me, "if not for any other reason than the sheer difficulty of my last name... it's a tongue-twister!"