Chapter 26

  Black and Shade

  He came in on a thought, stepping through dreams and nightmares like a spider through its web, and like a spider he sensed a touch, a tremor, a tremble. He was being called. His name was being spoken, his image invoked. Someone elsewhere was attempting to manifest him in a dream, as a facsimile composed of the fog. Yet he had an angel inside him and could not be replicated. He could not be in two places at once. Where one dreamed him into being in the fog, there he was in truth.

  Abraham Black stepped out of the mist in front of the creature called Shade. They gazed at each other for a moment. Abraham Black had known one like this, though not the same. A different Shade. He grinned horribly.

  Shade, in his fine tailored suit, stumbled back after a moment, eyes wide, suddenly understanding that the nightmare before him was no illusion. “By the ten,” he said. “It’s actually you!”

  Black was upon him in an instant, his dark eyes gleaming, yellow teeth bared in a wide bleeding smile, his stringy hair wild in a sudden wind. One of his silver revolvers was under Shade’s chin, and the cold iron grip of Black’s other hand held his head in place.

  “What did you shay?” Black whispered. It seemed that all the mist around them whispered it back.

  “I-I said–it’s you!” stammered Shade. “I didn’t think–”

  “Before that,” said Black. “Shomething about…ten.”

  “Y-yes,” said Shade. “The ten gods.”

  Black lifted up on his revolver while holding Shade’s head in place until Shade whimpered in pain. “Not godsh,” he whispered. “Demonsh. I’m going to kill them all, shee? Every lasht one. They musht pay the prishe.”

  He dropped Shade to the ground, losing interest. Shade dusted himself off.

  “So,” said Shade, a false veneer of carefree confidence in his voice as though he had not been a hair’s breadth from death. “They were in your story, too?”

  “The prishe,” Black repeated, staring into the mist. It formed flickering, ghostly shapes, colored shapes.

  “And you want vengeance?” said Shade. “Interesting. What did they do, if you don’t m–”

  A metallic click, somehow ear-shatteringly loud in the fog. Light shined off the polished surface of the revolver aimed at Shade, though there was no sun in sight. “I do mind,” said Black.

  “Well…okay. We’re from different Narratives. I was only curious. But I’m on your side. You know that, right?”

  “Yesh,” said Black. He lowered the gun, slid it back in place. This Shade was no threat. The Shade that Black recalled from his own story had been far more dangerous than this, far more sinister, for more powerful, even without the optics of future-sight, which this pathetic figure lacked.

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  This lesser Shade continued. “You’re just a bit…uh, different from the Abraham Black that I knew.”

  “I shee,” said Black. The fog near to him was darkening as though stained by his presence, as though he were leaking into it. Black saw the trepidation in Shade’s eyes, matched by curiosity. Black had seen that before. He laughed, and Shade flinched at the sound, and the mist echoed and writhed with the horrible noise.

  Abraham Black looked about with eyes that pierced the fog. He stood in a deserted city street, empty of people, empty of life, empty of dreams. His hand twitched, aching for something to shoot. There was Shade. But Shade, he knew, could be useful.

  “I will show you shomething,” said Black.

  Everything changed. The surrounding fog parted, coalesced, condensed into another place. It was a pastel world, a world made of paper, all things aflame.

  The air was hot and thick with fire that spread across the land, a place whose healing from its curse had not gone quite as planned, a test that she had failed because she didn’t understand.

  The demons gathered here in numbers never seen before, for Black had never caught them out with more than three or four, and now they came together, stepping through ten different doors.

  There never would have been a better chance to make them pay, together with the flaming serpent that he swore to slay, but alas, he was not there, for he had been torn away.

  Now his vengeance burned and Black, he yearned to send them back to hell, and their reckoning approached them with a fury none could quell, though for now the world he stood upon was cracking like a shell.

  “But I took the key, ash you can shee, and doomed them all ash well.” Black held up his left hand, showing Shade a glistening black ring on his middle finger.

  Shade’s eyes widened. “That’s the dark key?” He looked around at his new surroundings, taking in the ten figures that stood around him. “And these are…”

  “Dead,” said Black. Thunder rolled in upon thunder, crashing through the air like a sudden wave. Abraham Black stood at the center of a wheel of smoke. Ten shots, five from each revolver, nearly simultaneous. The ten figures he had called into being around himself and Shade evaporated, each with a bullet hole through their head. He shot one of them twice more as it dissolved. It was the red one. Abraham Black hated her the most. That one had made him what he was. Had toyed with him. Had put an angel in him. Had given him the key to her own destruction.

  Everything resolved back into gray fog.

  “If you have the black key…” said Shade. “They’re doomed, just like you said. Why bother going back?”

  “I want to finish them myshelf,” Black replied. “What do you want, Shade?”

  “Easy,” Shade replied. “I want to end everything. The cycle.”

  “Memory ish a harsh punishment,” Black said by way of agreement. “Let ush do it together. You may be of shome ushe to me, and I to you.”

  Shade considered the offer carefully. “We find a way back in,” he said slowly. “We each get a chance. You for vengeance. I for discontinuation.”

  “You show me the way,” said Black, his rictus grin more frightening than ever before. “I deshtroy everything.”

  “That’s why you wanted their angels,” said Shade to himself. “You’ve been trying to get back in.” A pleased smile crept over Shade’s face. “Oh, I know the way,” he said.