Chapter Club: The Shadowrunner Chapter 14
Happy Friday! Hopefully the transition back to work hasn’t been too terrible. I’m excited to bring you another excerpt from The Shadowrunner.
Want to start from the beginning? You can find Chapter 1 here!
Last Time
Luke is the chief police officer in a small Arizona town called Abeja
His daughter, Lucy, has magical abilities that she is keeping secret from her parents
A Texan named Silvia Montes was murdered not far from Luke’s house. Lucy both met Silvia prior to her murder and saw the murderer the night of the crime. She has come to call the murderer a dragon
Luke found a storybook in Silvia Montes’s apartment with an inscription to Pejito
In a vision, Luke saw a man with white hair and scarred lips attacking one of Lucy’s classmates. The boy was in a coma, but has since disappeared from his room.
Rebecca and Sally are two of Luke’s coworkers. Rebecca is a forensic technician. Sally is the receptionist.
The story book had revealed nothing. There was no other writing in it besides what was on the inside cover. By the time he had finished skimming it, the artist in Phoenix had sent a sketch of the man with silver hair. After forwarding the sketch to Sally, he had asked for the artist to create sketches of the three children he had seen at the park. If the vision was one of Owen’s memories, he suspected that those children were in someone’s memory.
Sally sent the sketch to Rachel at the local paper, as well as anyone else who could disseminate the image. If anyone saw the man out in the open, they would find him.
That had brought Luke out to her desk and now he was sitting beside it, holding his hand over his eyes. They had been brainstorming solutions to the Pejito problem, as it was now labeled in his mind, for the past hour and they weren’t any closure to the truth than they had been when they started. Luke lowered his head to look at Sally.
“Start over with the pee ee jays,” he said.
As Sally started rereading the entries in the spanish dictionary they had found online, Rebecca out of the hall. She had her coat under one arm, ready to head home. Luke noticed she glanced at them as she passed. She bent her path so that she arrived in front of the desk.
“You two look awfully busy.”
Sally looked to Luke. She obviously didn’t want to say something that could be overheard. Luke glanced at the window into the rest of the station, noting that the other officers had either left on their beats or to go home. He looked over at the front door and both Rebecca and Sally followed his gaze. Once he was satisfied no one was coming in, he said, “we were looking at a name we found in this.”
He passed the storybook to Rebecca. She flipped it open and glanced at the inside cover.
“Pejito.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never heard of a Pejito.”
Luke gestured at the computer, “Neither has anyone else that we can find.”
She gazed off at the corner of the foyer, muttering the name of the character over and over again. Her eyes widened.
“Espejito.”
“What?” Sally said.
Rebecca snapped her fingers. “Espejito. It means little mirror.”
She smiled at the two of them. Luke frowned. “Why would she call someone little mirror?”
She shrugged.
While he didn’t understand it, there was an image coming to him. There had been three mirrors in the motel bathroom he and Bradley had searched.
He turned back to the mortician and nodded again. “Thank you, Rebecca.”
“You’re welcome, Officer Alden,” she said as she opened the door and walked out.
Sally sighed. “I don’t think that’s going to help us much.”
“Maybe.” Luke grabbed his jacket from where it was lying across the back of his chair. “I’m going to swing by the motel on the way back. Maybe there’s something there that we missed.”
“You do that,” Sally said. “I’m going home.”
“Enjoy,” Luke replied.
While the trip wasn’t long, Luke found himself pulling into the motel parking lot after he would have normally gotten home. He fired a quick text to Jenni, telling her that he was taking care of something at work before heading home. He added a promise that he would be home to help put Lucy down.
That gave him at least an hour to take care of things here. He passed on checking in with the receptionist. It wasn’t strictly necessary and he was in a hurry.
The interior of Silvia’s room was dark. He flipped the light switch on as he walked towards the bathroom. Inside, Luke found himself staring at the mirror hung on the back of the shower. He pulled open the shower door and watched the image shift. Tiles ran through his vision, then there was a flash of himself framed in the doorway, then more tile.
He glanced at the mirror hung over the bathroom door and pulled the door shut. He watched the new set of images shift until he saw the other mirror, pointed slightly to the side. Luke positioned the shower door so that the two mirrors were facing each other. He scanned the infinite regress of reflections, wondering if something would reveal itself from a different perspective. When nothing appeared, he stepped forward to open the door.
His stomach lurched as if he were falling and then he was somewhere else. It was a replica of the bathroom, he knew that, but to either side of him there was only darkness where the vanity and the other wall would be. His mouth was open in an attempt to gasp, but no sound escaped his mouth. It was as if someone had pressed mute on everything. There wasn’t even the sound of a fan or water running through the pipes.
In front of him, there was another copy of the bathroom. Behind him, the same. He turned and was about to take a step when he saw a light in the dark. It was a little globe of yellow-colored light, hovering within an arm’s reach of the boundary where the room repeated itself. Luke stepped toward it, waiting for the lurching sensation. When it didn’t come, he reached out to feel the light. There wasn’t any heat coming off of it. The other globes of light had felt the same way. He reached his hand in to touch it.
Just like with the piece of Owen, Luke felt a sudden blossoming of emotion in his chest. Lucy had said it made her laugh. Luke felt the urge to smile wide as the moon and stifled a chuckle. Bringing his hand away, the feeling subsided.
This was Lucy’s imaginary friend. After Silvia had talked to her she must have brought it here. It was a tremendous hiding spot. Luke had a hard time guessing how he would have even guessed that anything was hidden in the mirrors. Or maybe it was between them. He didn’t know.
He looked back in the direction that he had stepped. Somewhere back there was the way out of this infinite hallway. But if he wasn’t mistaken, there was one more light from the map that was unaccounted for.
Turning back to face the endlessly repeating surface of the mirror, Luke stepped forward and his stomach lurched again. The further he walked, the blurrier the edges of the space became. Colors bled together until everything faded into gray. It was there that he found another light. The third x from the map. This one was a blood-red, much too intense for him to want to touch.
He took off his jacket and wrapped it around the orb. He turned back in the direction of the world of sharp lines and defined colors. Somewhere between him and the exit, the yellow orb waited. He was about to start walking when he heard something. Wind chimes.
Something about the sound filled him with fear. Was the hallway collapsing? Was something breaking or was it approaching?
He didn’t want to find out. He broke into a run, his stomach tumbling over itself as if he was on a rollercoaster. He barely stopped to bundle the yellow light inside his jacket before continuing. The sound was growing louder and louder, sounding more and more like the breaking of glass.
When the sounds of lights and pipes came back to him, he stopped and pushed the shower door shut. With the infinite regress broken, he paused, realizing that the sounds were still emanating from the mirror on the back of shower door. Something flew out of the mirror, causing Luke to drop the jacket full of light, draw his pistol, and point it at the shape.
It was tall, whatever it was. It reminded him of what a scarecrow would look like if it didn’t have any of the extra padding. Its skin was silvery, reflecting the light from the overhead bulb in a glare that hurt Luke’s eyes. The face was smooth and expressionless. There weren’t even hands or a mouth. As he watched it turned in on itself, as if it were a kaleidoscope spinning around in a children’s toy. The room filled with the sound of clinking, as if there were a wind chime rustling in the wind Luke couldn’t see. He kept his gun leveled on the creature, unsure of its next move. A part of him was screaming, but it wasn’t the part that guided his movements now. The part that controlled him was the cool, detached part that came to the front when it was time to act.
“What are you? You understand me?”
The sound of chimes intensified as color bled into the creature. Luke didn’t think about what the neighbors would hear. He just pulled the trigger.
The wall behind the creature released a puff of particulate sheet rock, but the creature continued to spin and spin. Luke watched as the creature’s skin turned black and gold. Then the spinning started to slow and the creature rose to its full height. Luke felt his mouth go dry when he saw its face again.
It was his own face, looking back at him. Its eyes, his eyes, were covered in what seemed to be a shadow. With a start, he realized it was how he would look in a mirror.
He also saw that in its hand was another pistol, identical to the one he held in his hand. Before the creature could mimic what he had done, Luke threw up his hands.
“Wait!”
The dark clone glared at Luke as he crouched down, dropping the pistol on the floor. The creature continued to look at him with that same dark look. He watched as a sneer wrinkled his borrowed face.
Outside, he heard people talking, shouting. There were footsteps coming toward the apartment.
“The receptionist is coming over here. If you don’t want her to see you, let me go and talk to her.”
For a single, horrible moment, he thought it was going to shoot him. Then the creature nodded and gestured with the gun to go to the front door. Luke nodded and then ran back out of the bathroom and meeting the receptionist at the door.
“Officer! There was a gun and —“
“Everything is under control,” he assured her, even though he wasn’t so sure of it himself. For the second time in this case, he could feel his hold on reality starting to slip.
“But, what happened?” she demanded.
Rather than falling back on the inscrutability of law enforcement, he said, “Something in the closet moved and I mistook it for an attacker. I thought it was the murderer. It was just a coat.”
The receptionist looked over his shoulder and then back at him, her eyes wild. She stood up, recovering her breath as she did so. “I trust that the police department will be covering the cost of the damage?”
Luke winced. That was going to be expensive. He briefly wondered if Pollard or Bradley would use it to get back at him, even in a small way, for how badly he had scolded them the other day.
“Of course.”
The receptionist nodded, pressed down the wrinkles in her shirt and nodded at Luke. She turned to the door next Silvia’s and knocked. When it opened, she started explaining to the tenants what had happened and Luke slipped back into Silvia’s motel room.
When he got back to the bathroom, his dark clone was still standing there and it immediately pointed the pistol back at him. Luke threw his hands into the air and closed the door behind him with his foot.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
The creature continued to stare at him with his own face. The face he had made when he shot the creature. The face that was terrified by it and wanted to destroy it before it could hurt him.
If he was seeing the part of himself that wanted to destroy what he was terrified by, he would have to change that part of himself very quickly. Either that, or convince the creature to go back to whatever its natural form was.
“What would it take for me to convince you to turn into something other than me?”
For one dreadful moment, he almost expected the creature to talk back using his own voice. But instead, the creature lowered the gun to its waist, watching him every inch of the way down. Luke sensed that if he were to move for his own gun, the creature would shoot him. His heart was pounding in his chest, but he wouldn’t let that part play boss right now.
When the gun came to rest by the side of the creature, the color started to drain out of the edges and concentrate in the middle. The creature spun and Luke’s dark clone was obliterated, leaving the original form he had seen before: a glass scarecrow with a blank face. There was a shower of what sounded like musical notes played on chimes. The first bit was indecipherable, but the last part sounded like three ascending notes on a scale.
“Was that yes?”
The same three notes.
“What’s no?”
Three descending notes.
“Convenient,” Luke said. “Are you going to hurt me if I put my gun away?”
The shimmering figure in the corner emitted the three notes for no, and Luke holstered his gun again. He kept his hand by his side, in case he needed to draw it again, but the creature made no move to attack him. Come to think of it, it had barely moved since it had come out of the mirror.
“Are you Pejito?”
The ascending series of notes, followed by a cascade of chimes that he couldn’t understand.
“You know Silvia?”
Yes.
Luke let his hand drop away from his gun. If Pejito was going to hurt him, he would have done it during the pause between his questions. He found that now that the adrenaline was draining away, the questions were rising. How was what he was seeing possible? Those kinds of things didn’t exist, couldn’t exist. And yet here was something that looked as though it was from a dream, standing in front of him.
“She’s dead.”
For the first time, the creature moved. It dropped its head and Luke could have sworn he saw a drop of something silver running off the orb of its face. It let out a tone that sounded dissonant to Luke. He wondered briefly if someone who knew music well would have better luck talking to it before shoving it away. Who was he going to show this?
“Someone killed her, do you know who might have done it?”
Yes.
Luke’s heart pounded in his chest. He could find out if the man he had seen in Owen’s vision was the same person that had killed Silvia. He might be on the cusp of finding some answers.
“Can you lead me to him?”
The creature, Pejito, lifted its head back to him. Luke found his hand drifting back to his pistol as silence reigned in the apartment. He felt as though the creature was offended by what he had asked. Why else would it have stopped answering his questions so quickly?
He forced himself to remain calm. He didn’t know how quickly this thing could change shape, but he didn’t want to learn that he was going to get shot that way.
Pejito’s form sunk into the floor as if it had turned into mercury in an old thermometer. Silvery liquid pooled on the ground in a round puddle. Luke stepped back as the edge of it reached the tip of his boot. As he looked back toward the center, he found it filling with a black, as if an inkwell had tipped over on top of it. Then a splash of yellow and orange along the upper edge.
When all was said and done, he found himself looking at a scene from the day before. It was a bridge with a sidewalk running underneath it. It was the bridge where Pollard and Bradley had called for help. Was this where the killer was hiding?
But they hadn’t found anything in there. No animal. Nobody. Nothing. How could nothing have killed Silvia? Unless what was there had moved there after this morning.
“Thank you, Pejito,” he said. It seemed awkward at first, to say thank you to an alien he could only understand through yes or no questions. But not offering his thanks also felt wrong. His mother would have disapproved of it. But then again, his mother wouldn’t have understood any of this in the first place.
Pejito chimed some more, a happy chime this time, before leaping up and back into the mirror. Luke looked out into the hallway and then back at the mirror. There wasn’t much left to do besides close the door behind him.
I hope you enjoyed this sneak-peak of The Shadowrunner. What did you think? Let me know in the comments below!