Shifting Shadows

It caught Thomas by surprise, and he took a better look at the man’s face. Juhani. He’d been a Finnish boy whose father worked with the timber crews when they’d gone to school together once upon a time—twenty years and more ago. Now they were both damned—Thomas as his father’s monster, Juhani Koskinen as an opium addict.

For a moment they stared at each other, then Juhani stepped through the door into the den, followed by the rest of the men.

“Don’t know why you talk to him, Johnny, my boyo,” said one of them in a thick Irish lilt as Thomas closed the door, sealing them in. “He don’t never talk.”

Not since he’d returned from the Master as his father’s new slave. What was there to say? Who would talk to him?

Even before his mother’s brother, a famous scholar from a family of scholars, rescued his mother from his father’s care, she had not looked upon his face if she could help it—not since he had become a monster. She had taken her other children with her when she returned to China with her brother. Thomas had been left behind.

For his father he had no words. Not that his father cared. He gave orders—and took him to the Master once a week to feed and be fed upon.

Thomas hoped his father regretted his bargain, regretted at least the necessity of the once-a-week twenty-dollar gold piece that was more than his father paid any of his workers, either in the laundry or in the opium den hidden down in the mine.

Alone, without a light of any kind, Thomas headed out deeper into the mines. The tunnels under the town were the labyrinthine result of more than three decades of every-day, round-the-clock mining. Aboveground, the gallows frames of the elevators that took men down and lifted them up again when their shifts were done clearly marked the different mines. Belowground, all of the mines interconnected.

He’d heard that there were thousands of miles of tunnels and it wouldn’t surprise him if that were so. The other two men who ran dens sometimes took their nonpaying customers deep into the mines and left them in the maze of tunnels out of which they never found their way. His father’s customers all paid ahead of time or they didn’t get in.

He had always been good at finding his way around the mines. Since he’d been turned, he’d gotten a lot better.

He didn’t need light, didn’t need to see at all. He could feel the tunnel stretch around him—and the ones above, below, and beside him, too. He could sense the areas where miners were actively digging and the ones where no one had been for a very long time. He could tell north from south, up from down, and he knew where he was in relation to the city over his head.

He never got lost in the tunnels.

It was near three in the morning. His father had gone to sleep—the men Thomas had escorted in were the very last—and Thomas was free for the rest of the night. There were boys in the den whose job it would be to rouse their customers and escort them to the surface. Thomas never had to work in the den anymore: he scared the customers. He wasn’t sure if they feared him because his father used him to hurt the ones who displeased him, or if some atavistic sense warned them that he was a dangerous predator.

Thomas walked to the nearest elevator shaft—he was safely between shifts, so he didn’t have to worry about the elevator cars—and began climbing down.

The darkness soothed him, as did the growing heat. It was always hot in the lower levels. He didn’t need heat to survive anymore, but it had been such a luxury for him . . . before . . . that he always took pleasure in it. He climbed down until it suited him to stop a few levels above where they were actively mining. Descending the shaft pushed even his strength and abilities; he enjoyed it.

He was always alone, but somehow, deep in the heart of the earth, with none but himself for company, he felt less so. Walking down tunnels that might not have seen people for decades, he felt comfortable in his skin and he relished it, even though it made it difficult to deny his growing hunger. Tomorrow he would have to feed.

He dreaded the feeding time. Afterward, his Master renewed his orders and made certain his fledgling understood his place. Someday, Thomas was certain, someday he would be free. But for nearly a decade he had been slave to his father and the demon-thing that had, over a whole long year, turned him into what he was now.

He put out his hand and touched the damp earth. There was water here, underground. A huge lake, he’d been told, and streams that ran just as the creeks aboveground did. He couldn’t feel the water the way he felt the earth, which spoke to his bones.

Somewhere in the darkness in front of him chains rattled.

“Please?”

A woman’s voice, and Irish.

He froze where he stood. Maybe she was one of the ones who did not pay for her opium—though usually those were left much higher than this. No one but he wandered alone down here. He couldn’t believe that either Mr. Wong or Mr. Luk would waste money on chains for a nonpaying customer.

“Please, help me?”

He hadn’t been walking particularly quietly. She knew he was there.

The boy he’d been, Thomas Hao, would have run to the rescue. But that boy had died a long time ago and left a monster in his place.

“What would you do for me in return?” he said, breathing in for the first time in a long time. He didn’t have to, especially since he didn’t speak. It made his father nervous when he didn’t breathe, so he made a habit of letting his lungs sit empty.

He hadn’t sensed her as he did the miners, and it bothered him. He’d assumed he could sense everyone in the tunnels, in his realm.

The chains rattled hard, agitated, as if the woman had not really believed there was someone else in the mine. “O lords and ladies, you are there,” she said. “Please. My father is the Flanagan. The old one of high court. His element is fire. And I am accounted a power in my own right. Our gratitude will be yours, my word on it.”

Fae. That’s why he hadn’t felt her. Now that he knew she was here he could sense her, but she felt so close to the sighs and groans of the earth that it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed her before she’d spoken.

He avoided the fae when he could, and when he could not . . . well, the fae, unlike humans, knew exactly what he was, and they despised the monster almost as much as he despised himself.

“Please,” she said.

If she were fae, chained down here, no human had done it, not this deep under the hill. He had no desire to find himself in the middle of a fae dispute.

“Sir?”