Shadows of Humanity Read online

  Like lepers, we’re forced to keep our true nature a secret to avoid persecution. I didn’t know what was happening to me when I found out I had powers and there was no one I could ask. I can only imagine how many more of us are out there feeling lost and confused, scared of what they are and what people will think. I was fortunate to have run into Lyle years ago. He just seemed to accept everything, unlike how most people in society think.

  I was worried about what kind of reception I’d get when I saw him. The last time we saw each other we had an argument about what I was doing with my life. I wanted to be human and lead a normal life, but after losing my parents and being hunted like an animal I started to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It was hard getting used to daily life again, even with Lyle’s help. I was constantly paranoid, especially once the sun went down. It scared me that anyone I got close to, friend or otherwise, would be in danger just because of their association with me.

  The only thing that had given me some amount of solace was taking things into my own hands and pre-emptively looking for trouble to deal with. Lyle was in on my vigilantism for a time and it earned him a lot of street cred as the lone officer who stopped a record number of crimes each night thanks to my help. People started getting suspicious after a while and Lyle wanted out. He argued that I wasn’t stopping crime for the right reasons. According to him, I was just venting my anger and frustration on criminals and not doing it to help clean up the city. I didn’t see why my intent made a difference. But to him I was walking a fine line, in danger of becoming just as bad as those who manipulated things behind the scenes for their personal games. He wanted me to get a job and play human. Although part of me wanted to start a career, make friends, and find love, that desire felt like a reminder of things I could never have for long. Things got heated so one night I decided to leave, and then Noah approached me about going to Japan.

  I never got to say goodbye or even let Lyle know I was leaving. After I cooled down I tried to convince myself he was better off without me. But now that the precinct was in sight I had a knot in my stomach that got worse with every step. Everything should have been fine, though…

  Chapter Two

  “Quit? What do you mean, he quit? Lyle would never quit.”

  “Well, he did. Left the force a little over a year ago,” the silver-haired officer behind the front desk answered. “Surprised us all. Kid showed real promise, too. Just came in one day and said it wasn’t for him anymore.”

  “Did he say what he wanted to do instead?” That knot in my stomach was about to burst. I had just lost my best friend – my only friend – for good because of a stupid argument.

  “Nope, sorry. Listen, I can’t spend time chit-chatting.” The officer’s attention shifted to some of his co-workers, who had just walked in. “Hey, Hernandez. You used to hang out with that Turner kid, right? This guy is asking about him.”

  I remembered Hernandez. I had never heard anyone use his first name, but he was always part of the group when I went out with Lyle and his cop buddies. We used to go down to a sports bar in Times Square to watch the game whenever the Yankees played. Between the two of them there wasn’t a single woman that walked by who didn’t get attention.

  “Hey, man. Dorian, right? Long time. How you been?” Hernandez’s friendly greeting was a good sign. At least Lyle hadn’t told his friends I was involved in drugs.

  “I’m all right. I’d be better if I knew where Lyle went. I just got back in town and found out he moved and quit.”

  “I don’t know, man. I tried to call him after he handed in his badge, but he got cagey. Didn’t really seem like he wanted to talk and by the next day his phone wasn’t in service anymore. The boys are saying he peaked too early. Probably burnt himself out and didn’t know where else to go once he was on top. It happens.”

  “Do you know if he moved before he quit? He’s not at the old apartment we shared.”

  “It had to be right after he quit. Some of the guys went to visit after work, but he was gone. Neighbor said he moved the same day. You could try asking his old partner. I thought quitting and moving must have been on his mind a while for him to have a new place lined up so quick.”

  “The schoolboy?” I asked. After Lyle was promoted to sergeant he was given a rookie to train who looked like he was still in high school.

  “Yeah, man. He’s a big shot now, just got a promotion and transferred down to the East Village. Turner had the Midas touch when he was showing him the ropes I guess. He ain’t so little anymore. He’s bigger than you!”

  “Ouch.” That hurt. I’d be turning twenty-four in March and still looked like a boyish, fresh-faced, barely twenty-year-old. Thanks, immortality. Couldn’t I have stopped aging around twenty-five at least? Maybe by then I’d be able to grow some facial hair. “Thanks, Hernandez.”

  “Stay safe. If you get hold of Turner tell him to look me up.”

  There had to be more to this. Lyle would never have quit the NYPD or bailed on his friends like that. Lyle took so much pride in being on the force. His father had been a cop and had died on the job. All Lyle talked about was how he wanted to make his father proud.

  A homeless woman on the sidewalk was hugging a small cat for warmth. I bent down and handed her the twenty from my pocket. They needed it a lot more than I did. She blessed my soul a multitude of times as I walked away, but it didn’t help take my mind off what might have happened to Lyle. Did he “peak too early” because of all the action we had been through? Maybe he was in trouble. What if someone was after me again and got to him first, like Noah had warned me about?

  Heading downtown to speak with his former partner wouldn’t get me anywhere. If this had anything to do with the supernatural it would be covered up too well. His mom had moved to Dayton, Ohio to be with her sisters when I was still living here. Noah would be back by tomorrow night, so I couldn’t leave the city to go searching in a completely different state.

  I took a seat on a park bench and closed my eyes to contemplate my options. It was nice and quiet for the moment. I wanted to let myself drift off to sleep, but I was too on guard in my new surroundings. My paranoia had nothing to do with the neighborhood itself; I hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time in years, and almost never without experiencing night terrors the first year abroad. Dreams of monsters and of my dead parents constantly plagued me. It didn’t help that a few weeks after I had finally achieved some sense of calm in Japan, Noah decided to shake things up by attacking me in my sleep.

  It wasn’t like the funny or obnoxious pranks that college kids love to play on each other. Noah full-on attacked me. He had stabbed his wakizashi through the palm of my hand.

  “You can’t leave yourself open, especially not when sleeping. That’s when people are expecting you to drop your guard,” he told me. I never knew when he was going to strike again. Sometimes days or weeks went by until I’d get ambushed, but each time was worse than the one before. I had been beaten, stabbed, poisoned, and even thrown from a cliff while blindfolded. It didn’t take long for me to start sleeping with one eye open. I’d take catnaps throughout the day instead of trying to settle in and give Noah another opportunity.

  Of course Noah couldn’t just give me my beating and leave; he had to be smug about it, too. That was what really motivated me even further. Noah was too damn fast and stealthy to give off any indication he was closing in. After a while he started ambushing me when I was awake just to rub it in.

  Even though I healed in a matter of seconds, I still felt the pain as a stinging reminder that he was taunting me. So, I got creative. I set a trap, if you could call it that. I hid in a crevasse and covered myself over with leaves to be less conspicuous while I pretended to sleep. I knew it would be too tempting for him to resist foiling my pathetic attempt at camouflage. Within the hour he struck.

  I took a blade to the forearm, but before he could get away I used my telekinetic power to wrest the sword from his hand and fly off with it. He
grabbed me by the ankle before I could get more than a few feet off the ground, but I kept going up and took him with me.

  “Give me back the sword or I’ll tear your leg off, you little shit!” He threatened as we cleared the trees below. Noah was always expecting me to just roll over whenever things got dangerous, but I had already been through so much I wasn’t sure how else to prove I was ready for the next step.

  “Go ahead! I’ll still have your sword and it’s a long way down.” I didn’t doubt he could survive the fall, but the fact that I showed him he wasn’t untouchable was more than enough for me. I could swear I saw a faint smile of approval right before he let go and disappeared into the clouds, but he never admitted to it. When I woke up on my own, Noah’s sword was gone from my hands and I still had all of my appendages intact. For a very short time after that I slept well and had blissful dreams of flying free.

  ---

  I stopped myself from dozing off on the park bench and headed to Central Park. I had no money and nowhere to stay; the park was the most obvious place to hide out, not to mention the closest thing to the nature that I was used to. Less than a block from the park, I could feel something wrong in the air.

  Noah had been teaching me to pay attention to what I couldn’t see when looking for danger. The real threats out there weren’t just going to walk right up and announce themselves. Since I couldn’t use my powers without seeing the target I was no better off than any other human in the dark. Noah had the brilliant idea of temporarily removing my eyes by replacing them with rocks so they wouldn’t regrow, but I talked him into just using a blindfold by promising I wouldn’t cheat.

  Noah and I went over the basic martial arts techniques that we had practiced earlier, but this time without my vision. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a fair fight even if I could see and he didn’t use his superhuman speed; Noah could bench press a small car with ease and had more combat experience under his belt than every martial arts grandmaster combined. Sparring with him was meant to train me how to use my telekinesis to anticipate and block incoming hits that my body wasn’t fast enough to react to and my eyes couldn’t see. I lived that way for a year, even searching and hunting for food through the use of my other senses, and periodically attempting to thwart ambushes from Noah. Eventually, my powers helped me develop a sixth sense, something like telekinetic sonar. I could project my telekinesis to radiate around me at very low power and feel the objects it came into contact with.

  And that was exactly how I knew I was being followed into the park.

  The intrusive sights, sounds, and smells of the city weren’t too much for me to pick up on the invisible stalker lurking a few feet behind. It wasn’t Noah testing me, or anyone nearly as talented as him, because they wouldn’t be keeping such a close distance between us. That was bad news for them. Without the element of surprise on their side, I was leading them on a leash into a trap. I wanted to spring my trap far from any innocent bystanders, and I didn’t want to risk the slightest chance of being caught.

  We were deep in the park when I could hear the very faint sound of the breeze moving around the invisible figure behind me. Whoever my stalker was, they were a real amateur. I brought them to a dark, secluded spot not far from the Alice in Wonderland statues and turned to face my second shadow.

  I smiled at the empty air before me and took my sunglasses off so whoever was there could see my eyes change as I pinned my stalker against a tree.

  “I’d say nice try, but that’s being too generous.” Wow! I’d been around Noah for so long I was starting to sound like him. A bearded middle-aged man in a tattered brown hoodie covered with stains stared back at me. He didn’t seem bothered as the whites of my eyes turned black, leaving only the gray ring from my natural color.

  “Relax! I’m just here to deliver a message.” There they were: the elongated canine teeth when he spoke. “Your grandpa wants you to visit.”

  “Is that supposed to be some sort of joke? My grandparents are dead.”

  Noah had instructed me not to get involved with any supernaturals during my time in New York. The consequences were never good, according to him, but he didn’t trust anybody. It was sad to me that we couldn’t trust our own kind, especially since supernaturals were such a minority, but at least I had Noah on my side.

  “This guy is dead too, I mean like me, you know.” The bearded man pointed to his teeth.

  An undead grandfather of mine? Only one person came to mind and he certainly wasn’t what I would consider family.

  “What does he want?” I released the man from my telekinetic grip. “Grampy,” as people called him, wasn’t bad for an undead bloodsucker. In fact, his insight was startlingly accurate in ways, although his eccentric demeanor made him difficult to take seriously. I wasn’t about to look down on him for his strange antics, though. He had tried to warn me about the crisis in Manhattan before it happened. If he was getting in touch again, it was probably to be helpful.

  “I don’t know. I’m just a fang-for-hire. He didn’t tell me anything except to give you that message.”

  “Take me to him then,” I ordered.

  “You gonna pay?”

  “That depends. What’ll they call you if I take the fangs out of your fangs-for-hire?”

  “All right! Relax already. Damn. He’s squatting in a burnt-down apartment building in the projects. Head up to West 138th – it’s not far from the hospital.” The mercenary wouldn’t stop twitching and scratching his arms and face while he talked. I didn’t think the undead could tweak out, but this guy was in serious need of a fix.

  “What’s wrong with you? You need blood?”

  “Not unless you got some stuff to go with it.” He was looking around, even more paranoid than before.

  “Stuff? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You know, stuff. Snow, blow, crack…”

  “I wasn’t offering you my blood, and for the second time tonight: I’m not on drugs. How does that even work if you’re undead?”

  He looked at me like I was stupid. As if this was in the brochure when I found out about the supernatural. “Drinking from users passes on some of the high.”

  “Great. Well, enjoy yourself.” The end of that grimy conversation was the perfect segue into a visit with Grampy.

  ---

  Grampy’s building was just what I expected: a filthy, hollowed-out shell of what was once part of a low-incoming housing project. What I didn’t expect was for it to be filled with other neck-biters in addition to him. They all looked like homeless men and women of varying ages. None of them gave me more than a passing glance as I let myself in. It was nice feeling accepted by them, knowing none of us had to hide our identities. These vagrant undead were called the Outsiders for their lack of affiliation with any of the three major covens or their signature traits.

  The whole place was covered in dust, most of the windows were broken or blacked out, and the rooms were decorated with arrangements of musty mixed-and-matched furniture that must have been recovered from the trash. It wasn’t the nicest place, but it was home, I guess. Some teenagers in hoodies and leather jackets were sitting around an old TV playing… video games? This was unusual. I hadn’t expected to see the immortal undead partake in something so youthful for entertainment.

  “Hey, do any of you know where Grampy is?”

  One of the kids waiting for his turn to play pointed upstairs, never taking his eyes off the screen. His face was made up to look like a skull with black and white face paint. Obviously, blending in wasn’t his first priority, but then again maybe the irony behind his self-expression was disguise enough.

  A room on the second floor stood out from the rest. The door was open a crack, enough for me to notice the sea of pink inside. It looked like someone had covered the room in bubble gum from floor to ceiling. Everything was painted pink, including the furniture. There was a pink wooden pony for a child to ride on, a queen-size bed with pink sheets and a pink comforter with c
artoon princesses on them, a dollhouse in the shape of a fairytale castle, and a large pink toy box filled with dolls. The only thing of a different color was a massive flat-screen TV playing some black-and-white monster movie. The little girl watching it from a pink beanbag chair was dressed in a pink ballerina tutu and clutched a black stuffed cat made out of socks with two buttons for eyes. She was probably the cleanest thing in the whole building; her hair was perfectly combed and her clothes were spotless. She took notice of my bewilderment in the hallway and ran over to hiss at me and slam the door shut.

  “Nice to see you again too, Emilia,” I said to the closed door.

  “Ahoy, there! You came!”

  An old man’s voice greeted me cheerfully. I couldn’t see anyone and my powers weren’t picking up any hidden people around.

  “Where are you, Grampy?”

  A broken chair next to some garbage jiggled and then transformed into the nutjob I was here for.

  “I was takin’ a nap,” he stated casually and shuffled over to me.

  “You can turn into a chair? What kind of power is that?”

  “All smoke and mirrors, my boy! No point in being invisible if I got kids runnin’ ‘round that can feel me out. Better to give ya something to see and overlook instead! Mhm!”

  “How did you know I could do that? Nobody was around except Noah when I learned.”

  “’Cuz you just told me, silly.”

  “That’s not an acceptable answer.” I tried to keep a straight face and stare him down, but the strange old man was too amusing to stay serious around for long.