Chapter 2:
The siblings just stood there, gawking at the figure in the shadows. Tyler was terrified, but he held himself up straight, the façade of a warrior. Moonlight shone in through the opened window, the beams illuminated the blood red carpet, which Reni hadn’t noticed before. The light was shining right through the shadow man, but the light was trapped in his eyes, making them glow and flicker like they were alive. “That’s the one that took Mom,” Reni said with a bitter, hateful tone. Reni could remember the day her mother was taken, like it had happened the night before.
It had been abnormally cold; the type of chill that sent shivers up your spine and made you shutter. Reni had crawled out of bed, to turn up the heater. They had been living in an apartment above their bakery at the time, and the thermostat was in the coffee room, where employees could only go. She had walked down the stairs, and as she did, the air grew colder and colder. At the bottom of the stairs, she could see a feminine shadow shifting across the floor. Her mother was in the coffee room, and she was talking to someone, but there wasn’t another shadow on the floor. There was, however, one that seemed to be on the wall. In the shadow there were two glowing orbs. Since when could you see the eyes of a person by looking at the shadow? This shadow had turquoise eyes…
Reni came back into the moment. She shook her head to clear the fog from her brain, she was in charge now. She couldn’t dwell on the past, because the past was the past; it was gone… forgotten, done. “Come on Tyler, it’s time we get mom back.”
“Are we going to have to go with the Shadow Warrior?” Tyler asked studying the figure by the door. “Will it take us to Mom?”
Reni squeezed her brother’s shoulder. “That’s right buddy, it’ll take us right to mom, but we have to be strong. Are you ready?" The Shadow Warrior had gotten closer; it was practically in their faces now. Warmth flooded Reni’s back as she took a cautious step toward the window behind her.
It was a natural response; the Shadow Warrior was a demon, and her primeval soul and blood was screaming at her to take a step back. Where she should have felt the smooth glass of the window beneath her finger tips, all she felt was a burning heat that soaked into her skin and boiled her blood.
Reni knew she shouldn’t look behind her, but she couldn’t help herself. There was no longer a window and a back wall, in its place was a fiery doorway with demons and shadows flickering in its depths. Tyler was hyperventilating as he looked at the Shadow Warrior and then at the wall of fire and brimstone behind them, before it was a hell hole that led straight to the devil’s kingdom.
She felt cornered, hell behind her, and the demon walking closer to her. She knew she had to go into the fiery pit; but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Then the Shadow Warrior let out a howl that echoed inside the depths of Reni’s skull. The blatant shrills weren’t coming from it, but rather, from behind the siblings.
The demons and ghosts that were clutching at their shirts were now screaming as their fiery portal disintegrated into a shroud of black mist. “No, no, no…” Reni shook her head as the portal vanished. “No, we have to go in there!” With a growl, she turned around and grabbed at the Shadow Warrior, but it too was fading, and fast. “No, what happened to the portal?”
Tyler tugged at the hem of Reni’s shirt. “I think that guy had something to do with it, Reni,” Tyler pointed at the window. A boy was perched on the windowsill, a gleaming, sparkling, silver blade in his hand.
He wore a white tunic under a denim jacket, it wasn’t uncommon in this area, where the temperature got well into the eighties and dropped down into the forties when it rained, which was on and off constantly throughout the week. The boy had a goofy looking grin on his face that made Reni, surprisingly angry. He swung into the room and landed without a sound. It was then, that Reni noticed that he had silver, spider web-like marks running from the corner of his eye, down the whole right side of his face, over his collar bone, and disappeared into the neck of his tunic. Right then, Reni knew who this boy was… what he was.
He smiled and came closer. Protectively, Reni pushed Tyler behind her, this made the boy laugh. “I just saved your sorry ass, you should be thanking me, not looking at me like you want to kill me,” he gave Reni that lopsided grin again, and Reni’s hands clenched into a fists at her sides.
“Thanking you, you want me to thank you? We needed that Shadow Warrior to get into the Break!” Reni stepped closer to the boy. She had lost her temper, and when she lost that, she didn’t think clearly. The fact that he had a blade, designed solely for the purpose of killing, should have sent chills up her spine, especially since she was so close to it and its owner now, but strangely it didn’t. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”
“Well, I’m Finch of course,” he gave her the grin that made her think that he was mocking them. “You know, it looked like you were afraid to go into the portal. You should have known that, you had to go through the Tunnel of the Damned to get to the Break. If you truly wanted to go into that hell hole, you would have gone in before I had the chance to cut it out of this world,” Finch sheathed his blade and crossed his arms over his chest, satisfied with his comeback.
“Why didn’t you kill the Shadow Warrior, then? Why did you just close the portal? Isn’t killing those demons part of your job?” She snapped back.
His grin faded just slightly, but he shrugged nonchalantly. “It was fading before I could get to it,” she could see the stern set in his jaw line; he didn’t want to talk about it. Reni knew that he would kill them, if he had to; but he didn’t want to, he saw them as children, nothing more. She should have been happy that he didn’t want to kill them, but for some reason it enraged her further. “Now, who are you and why do you want to get into the Break?” Finish asked, changing the subject.
“That ain’t your place to ask,” Reni was up in Finch’s face now, and if he wanted to kill her he would have done it already. She and Finch were locked into a starring contest, for god knows how long, before the door was opened with a crash.
An obese man barged into the room. Behind him with a ring of keys there was a sickly woman, who looked like she was on drugs. “There they are.” He pointed a sausage-like finger in the direction of the siblings. Reni could hear people jogging down the hall toward their room.
“Shit, it’s Chambers. Come on Tyler let’s get outta here!” Reni grabbed her brother and practically threw him at the opened window. The boy who had cut through the portal to the Break was gone. No surprise there, Reni thought.
She was relieved that they got a room on the first floor; it made escaping that much easier. Tyler ran the minute his feet hit the pavement. Reni slipped out the window after her brother, with their backpack in her hands.
Tyler may have been really short for his age, but he was a good runner, Reni knew she didn’t have to worry about him while they were on the run. The sound of sirens echoed in the stuffy air around them. Reni peered over her shoulder to see how far back the cops were, and how many were after them. As far as she could tell, there was only one following them.
“How’d they find us Reni?” Tyler panted. “I thought we covered all our tracks, you said that they couldn’t connect it with us.”
She was silent for awhile listening to the sounds of their feet pounding against the pavement. She strained her ears to hear anything other than the sirens. “I don’t know. But they cannot catch us, you hear? They can’t, they’ll take you to a boy’s home and I’ll be sent to a detention center. Just keep running Ty, keep running.”
She veered to the right, looking for a place to hide so that they could get their bearings. She was vaguely aware of the fact that they were heading east, into the city, they needed to go west. “We’re almost there,” she told him. There was an abandoned tool house coming up, about a mile and half from where they were. She remembered seeing it as they walked to Motel 66. Reni could still hear the cop car screeching along after them, getting closer and closer. They weren’t going to make it!
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