a crackle and a puff of smoke—and the tinkle of several antique fittings shattering apart. I held myself totally still for several seconds, my ears pricked for any indication that someone in the house had noticed the sound, but the hall stayed silent.
When I pressed on the handle, the lock creaked, balked, and then crunched with a harder jerk. At my push, the door swung open.
Holy mother of mackerels, this was a collection room all right. I’d seen a lot of them, but even so, I couldn’t help gaping.
The “room” looked as if it had actually been three or four rooms with the walls taken down between them, stretching like some grand ballroom into the distance. Built-in wooden shelves stuffed with books, trinkets, and other objects lined the walls on either side of me from floor to vaulted ceiling. In front of those shelves at regular intervals, globe-like lights beamed down into glinting cages not so different from those you’d expect to house birds. Their vertical bars rose into domed tops, and their bases ranged from the size of my palm to the length of my arm.
I counted at least a dozen of them spread out down the vast space. It was rare to come across a collector who’d managed to get his hands on more than a few shadow creatures. This dude had been busy.
I tore my gaze away from the cages to skim the wall and note the thick velvet curtains that covered the room’s narrow windows in the few gaps between the shelves. There were my possible escape routes.
Another, more massive velvet curtain hung across the entire width of the room at the far end. What in Pete’s name lay past that?
A reddish blotch caught my eye in the middle of the blue-and-gold patterned rug. That maroon shade verging on brown—it was a bloodstain. One so big I could have lain down on it and not covered the whole thing.
A fresh twinge of nerves shot through my gut. It wasn’t at all unusual for collectors to experiment with all kinds of supposed supernatural rituals, including blood-based spells, but this guy appeared to have gone all out and not made any attempt to clean up afterward. He’d left the evidence on display as if it were a valuable part of the exhibit.
There was creepy, and then there was “here’s a fellow who might very well enjoy wearing other people’s skin as a three-piece suit.”
Before I returned my attention to the cages, I took a few moments to browse the shelves and pocket artifacts from the dude’s non-living collection—whatever looked both valuable and not so distinctive it’d be easily recognized when I sold it on the black market. I settled on a gold bangle, a large ruby set in ebony, and a handful of antique coins.
That should cover at least a few month’s room and board while I figured out my next heist. A gal’s got to pay the rent somehow. It seemed fitting that the collectors indirectly funded my efforts to shut them down. Call me the Robin Hood of monster emancipation.
Because that was what lurked in those cages under their spotlights. At least, the collectors called them monsters. And to be fair, for the most part the creatures that slunk through rifts from the shadow realm into our mortal one did fit the standard criteria.
Those of us who both knew of the creatures’ existence—and had bothered to speak at any length with the ones capable of talking—chose our terminology with a little more respect. “Shadowkind” came in all shapes, sizes, and inclinations, and most of them were a heck of a lot less monstrous than the worst human beings I’d tangled with.
It was difficult to tell what exactly this guy had caged in his extensive menagerie. Shadowkind could literally meld into our world’s shadows and travel through them, hence the name, but they had to be able to reach those shadows first. The spotlights were positioned to fill each entire cage and the space beyond the bars with light, preventing that sort of escape.
Distressed by their incarceration and that constant glaring light, the creatures shrank in on themselves. I could only make out a blurred, flickering smudge of darkness in each: a glimpse of spines here, a flash of fangs there. When the collectors wanted to gloat over their prizes, they dimmed the lights just enough to coax their captives into showing themselves more clearly without allowing any full shadows to fall into range.
Silver and iron twined