Darkfever (f-1) by Karen Marie Moning

Author:Karen Marie Moning [Moning, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

CHAPTER 14

It was a quarter past eight by the time I made it back to the bookstore. I knew Barrons was there as soon as I turned the corner. His big black-and-chrome hog was parked outside the brilliantly spotlighted front, playing kissing cousins with Fiona's sedate sedan.

I rolled my eyes. My day continued to cruise downhill. I'd been hoping that Fiona had left on time, before Barrons had arrived, and before she could rat me out.

No such luck.

I detoured around back, deciding I would sneak in from the rear, pretend to have been upstairs all day—with my iPod on in case anyone claimed to have knocked—and see if I could pull it off. You never knew what you could get away with until you tried. Maybe nobody had bothered checking on me.

When I rounded the rear of the building, my gaze automatically shot to the end of the alley, past the store, to the dark perimeter of the abandoned neighborhood beyond the rear floodlights. I paused, searching for shadows that shouldn't be there. A humorless smile curved my lips; the strangest things were becoming instinctive.

I spotted four clusters of darkness that were wrong. Three clung to the shadowy eaves of a building two doors down on the right; the fourth was on my left and behaving far more boldly. It was creeping back and forth along the stone foundation of the shop directly adjacent to Barrons, shooting and retracting dark tendrils of itself, testing the edges of the pool of light flooding the rear entrances.

All four of them pulsed hungrily at my approach.

Stay to the light, Barrons had told me, and you will be safe. The Shades can only get you in full darkness. They are unable to tolerate even the smallest amount of light. You must never, Ms. Lane, ever enter the abandoned neighborhood at night.

Well, why doesn't somebody go in there during the day and fix all those broken streetlamps? I'd asked. Wouldn't that get rid of them? Or at least help?

The city has forgotten that section exists, he'd replied. You will not find a district of the Gardai that claims it, and if you ask city power or water they will have no record of service to any address within its bounds.

I'd snorted. Cities don't just lose entire neighborhoods. That's impossible.

He'd smiled faintly. In time, Ms. Lane, you will cease using that word.

As I climbed the steps to the rear door, I raised my fist and shook it angrily at the Shades. I'd had my fill of monsters for the night. The Shade that was creeping along the foundation startled me by bristling visibly back at me. I found its display of sentient hostility chilling.

The rear door was locked, but the third window I tried slid up easily. I muttered beneath my breath about Barrens' appalling lack of safety-consciousness, as I boosted myself up and over the sill. After a quick bathroom stop, I headed for the front of Barrons Books and Baubles.

I don't know what made

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