Darkness fell over the valley once more, and the trio prepared to capture the sirens, ending this headache of an assignment.

Even Orion, it seemed, was growing weary of the festival.

At the first sound of siren-music drifting up from the valley floor, Zephyra summoned her shield of air, and Jasper summoned his wall of darkness. Throughout their first few missions as a team, he and Zephyra had discovered that using these abilities together made them a force to be reckoned with – one that left them invisible and impervious to sound, as well as unlikely to be heard as they traveled through the darkness.

Orion’s powers directly opposed Jasper’s, so he stayed in the middle of their unit as they walked closely together, descending into the valley. Harnessing the power of the sun would have its moment; it just wasn’t now.

The descent was slow and tedious. Jasper was the only one who could see past the shadows cloaking them from outside eyes, so he gave Orion and Zephyra a hold of his coattails and they stumbled along behind him, towards the festival raging through the night. There was no chatter this time. For once, the two of them seemed to grasp the sensitivity of the situation, and for that Jasper was grateful.

It was the relative simplicity of the task that made Jasper uneasy. He’d been on missions like this before - they were stories not worth telling, so mundane that writing the debrief took an unholy amount of coffee and several days to complete. Catching unruly creatures in their net had become second-nature, and both Orion and Zephyra seemed to think that it wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. As they crawled across the valley floor, however, Jasper had that nagging sensation again.

He’d missed something.

Overlooked something.

Something that should have been obvious.

It had to do with the eyes of the dead woman he’d met backstage. The way she’d shaken her head – the way she’d forgotten how to speak. The way that when Delia approached, there was no recognition. As though Delia wasn’t one of them.

That could have been a coincidence, of course; perhaps the dead woman had never seen Delia. Perhaps she simply hadn’t been there when the woman was eaten. Delia could have been lounging somewhere else, waiting for her meal to be brought to her.

But that didn’t explain the ripple he’d felt in the darkness that first night. The eyes in the tree line. The creeping feeling up his spine, like thousands of icy fingers slowly making their way up each vertebra.

“Easy, Jazz,” Orion grumbled behind him. “We can’t see as well as you, remember?”

Jasper slowed. He’d been speeding up, strides lengthening as he lost himself in thought. The other two stumbled into him but adjusted their pace to match. So far, they’d gone unseen as they entered the festival grounds. It needed to stay that way – at least until they were in place.

“Maybe you could try to keep up,” he snapped back to Orion, who, being the taller of the two, had no excuse to fall behind.

Orion only snorted in response.

They wove their way through the tents, gone quiet and empty now that the music rumbled through the amphitheater. Jasper took them the way Delia had shown him earlier that day. He snaked behind the stage, over power cables, keeping the crowd on his right as he passed through areas out of reach of the stage lights. As the music shook the ground, that strange, sick feeling began to course through him again.

There were the seven sirens, up on the stage. They were dressed like any other girl band at the festival: hair flowing long over their shoulders, their skin glittering, slightly translucent under the stage lights. They wore tie-die and flowing shawls made to match what those in the audience wore. Their mouths moved, and with each word, the crowd seemed to move as well, surging like an ocean of incensed people towards the stage.

They drank up each syllable, eyes wide and glazed, some drooling. Jasper noticed matted hair and broken fingernails and bruises under the eyes. These humans hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, had exercised proper hygiene in…how long? It was a disgusting sight, but also a sad one. For once, the stone in his chest that sometimes felt like a heart twitched for them.

How they crave something to worship.

The voice sliced through him like a breeze through leaves, and Jasper bristled, looking for the source. Nothing but darkness and his companions, waiting for his instruction.

“This it?” Orion asked, peering into the pit. The stage lights filtered away some of Jasper’s shadows, and through the haze he and Zephyra could now see the ghastly sight below.

“Indeed,” Jasper said. “You two stay here. Wait for the signal. Zephyra – ”

He turned to her, but she had already moved outside the air shield, collecting the song of the sirens in her small hand. “Ready,” she said, winking at him. “Go get ‘em, Jazz.”

Where had that nickname come from? They’d been around these hippies for only a few days, and his companions were already taking on their strange mannerisms. Jasper glared at nothing in particular as he stepped out of the air shield and into a wall of noise.

He exhaled, wrapping himself in darkness.

Complete this time, so deep that if he stayed here too long, he would forget to return.

Focus.

He stalked the stage in a wide circle. Although he wouldn’t be seen, he didn’t want to be noticed by anything, not even the ghosts. Jasper found the generator station he’d seen earlier that day and approached. Once he disconnected the power cables, Orion would be free to start the next part of their plan – but once he reached them, Jasper froze.

There was the woman-spirit from before, curled up between the generators. Shaking. Trembling so badly that even in her spirit-body she couldn’t stand. She looked up at Jasper, eyes wide and pleading, mouth open, moving, but unable to speak. She lifted a finger and pointed.

Jasper turned to see what she did, just over his right shoulder.

And his stomach hollowed out.

He’d expected Delia, moving to intercept him. Maybe even to try and eat him, or feed him to the seven on stage. But it wasn’t Delia. It was someone else – something else, surging through the darkness towards him.

A tall, man-shaped shadow looking at him through blazing, red eyes. Eyes that bore into his head, into his brain. Eyes that made his bones sing with pain. A rasping voice – the one he’d heard before – coursed through his mind, whispering, Jasper.

As the creature spoke, Jasper's mouth filled with the taste of blood. His hands went clammy, cold. His hard beat erratically. His shadows fled, beckoned by the creature that stood before him, betraying him, until he was left exposed. In the open. The siren song echoing in his ears, turning his brain into soup.

There you are.

Jasper couldn't move. Couldn't tear his gaze away from the gravitational pull of its red eyes. The sirens wailed, their music turning into a hideous, screeching sound, like rusted metal on concrete. The shadow creature reached out what looked to be a hand, its mouth opening in a blaze of fire. The grimace revealed thousands of needle-point teeth, and in the moments before what was certainly going to be his death, he had a single moment of clarity.

Oh.

There is no eighth siren.

Just this…thing.

This is definitely new.

And if he was going to die, Jasper was glad it was at least this thing and not a siren that was going to eat him. A siren would be embarrassing. But this thing…

Jasper's vision narrowed. He remotely understood his feet trying to move, trying to get away. His hands twitched but no shadows answered. No spirits at the ready command. Nothing.

And then light.

So much light his eyes burned. It was like staring directly into the sun, only worse - staring into the sun without the option of looking away. The gravitational pull released and Jasper fell back, the music roaring into his ears, following by a ringing that reminded him of a bad hangover he'd once had in Soho. The world spun as the sound diminished, followed by a screech, and another blast of otherworldly light, this one farther away.

On stage.

Orion. The thought registered only briefly. Orion had done his part. The music had ceased. The generators were still roaring, but the sirens had stopped. Someone had cut the power to the stage.

Jasper sat up on his elbows and saw Delia, hovering over him, her long black hair brushing against his cheek.

"You okay, mister?" she asked, brows fit together in a mix of confusion and concern.

Jasper scrambled away from her, scratching his itchy cheek, and struggled to stand. Delia held an axe. The power to the stage was not just disconnected, but completely severed, the wires fraying at the edges. As though it had taken a few tries.

"What the - why'd you cut it?" Jasper managed, looking from the woman, to the cables, to the axe, so heavy that she dragged it on the ground with her. The ax had blood on it.

Delia didn't seem to notice, her chest heaving as she replied, "you saw that thing, right?"

She’d lost the flirtatious demeanor of that morning, and instead looked properly afraid. Jasper nearly pitied her.

He blinked. The Shadow Man. "Have you seen it before?"

She nodded. Her mouth opened, as though she was going to speak, and then she was interrupted by another monstrous sound from the stage.

"I hate to leave you," Jasper said, "but they need help. Are you okay?"

Delia nodded, tightening her grip on the axe. Jasper turned, still disoriented, and stumbled towards the stage.

Orion was the source of that distant blast of light, disrupting the sirens long enough for Zephyra to arrive. She wrapped her air-shield around the seven figures on the stage, entrapping them with the song she’d captured. The sirens were now entranced, following Zephyra’s illusion towards the northeast corner of the valley. She would take them to the rift and push them through, and the three of them would have to stitch it back together.

Jasper made to follow her but stopped when the monstrous screaming grew to an unbearable roar. He looked to the stage again.

Orion held his ground as the festivalgoers swarmed the stage. They tore at each other, climbing over one another to reach Orion. Incensed at the ceasing of the music, a magical withdrawal now coursing through their blood, they began to attack anything and everything that moved.

Jasper doubled back to help.

He was limited with what he could do – Barty had made it clear that his methods were particularly banned when it came to crowd control – but in a matter of moments, Orion had been trapped. He could blast his way through the crowd, but not without certainly killing some of them, and Orion still valued Barty’s good graces.

Jasper made it only a few feet before he saw Delia, climbing onto the stage. She was covered in blood, still dragging the bloody axe. Hundreds of enraged hippies, high on psychedelics surrounded her and Orion. They could hardly stand but clawed their way forward, over each other, through each other - and there was a growing mess of fallen victims gathering around the stage. The smell of blood filled his senses.

He watched, as though through a screen, as the hundreds of humans flooded the stage. He watched, and registered only the sound of a single voice, rising above the rest.

A scream – of terror. Of pain.

Something primal took over.

Jasper moved without thinking, without knowing what he was doing. The movement felt rehearsed, like a violent episode of déjà vu, and he coursed through the crowd.

There was no before.

But this felt familiar – this crackling rage that only that scream could summon. Before Jasper could stop himself, before he could reason through his decision, he opened the gates of his mind and let the other out.

The humans began to fall.

One by one.

Some curled up into themselves, drained of life as soon as Jasper touched them. Some burst into flames. Some merely turned to little piles of ash on the ground. And some took one look at his darkened face and fled, wailing into the night. They cleared as Jasper moved through them, climbing to the stage. Bodies and bones and ash fell in his wake, clouds of burning cinders erupting into the air around them. When he made it to Orion and Delia, they were bruised and scratched and bleeding. Orion had covered Delia with his own body, but they were both trembling, injured –

Orion’s stare was enough to break Jasper’s trance. He suddenly felt the ground beneath him, but felt like it was swaying slightly. He was unsteady, unbalanced, and Orion’s pale expression made his blood run cold.

Jasper looked out across the amphitheater, now clear of everything but the remains of those who’d been within reach. He felt nauseated. Clammy. It had happened in a matter of seconds.

Orion scrambled to stand, helping Delia.

Her scream, the other whispered into Jasper’s ear. She was staring at him, blood dripping from her ear.

Then Orion said, “Zephyra.”

Jasper only wanted to hide. To crawl back to the car and stay there. To drive away and never look back. To escape that incredulous stare. Delia’s eyes bore into his skull, and once again he had that feeling that she knew something.

Jasper reached for the shadows, reached for that power that had always been there, since the day he'd woken up. He felt it - faintly - flickering in the background, as though frightened.

And then a sound echoed through the trees.

Zephyra.

“She needs help,” he said to Orion, his voice hoarse. He didn’t look to see if Orion followed as he leapt off the stage and ran towards the trees.

All the while, he reached for his shadows.

They recoiled from him. Disgusted. Afraid.

 I need you, Jasper thought. Now is not the time to hide.

Then they answered.  

A surge of life, racing through his feet, up his shins, into the rest of his body - and the shadows returned, not as strong as before, but present. He wrapped them around himself and used them to propel him towards the trees. The aches in his body only grew, and there was a new pounding in his skull, but he pressed on, following the path Zephyra had taken through the trees.

Orion kept close at his heels while they sped after Zephyra, into the woods. She'd disappeared into the trees, but Jasper could hear the sounds of her distress, the sirens wailing, their beautiful voices grown sour and distorted in their rage. Something had gone terribly wrong.

As he ran, his mind spun. 

They'd still get chewed out by Barty. They'd still have to fill out a report for the humans that had died in the aftermath of the sirens. But they'd be finished here soon, and he could crawl back into the mustang and -

The moment he crossed into the dark canopy of trees, the strange feeling fell over him again. This time, however, it was stronger, and he could identify what it was.

Sickness. Like a black mold, crawling up over the walls of an abandoned building, infecting the very air. Each inhale felt wrong, and Jasper slowed. He was suddenly engulfed in darkness. He couldn't no longer hear Orion or Zephyra. The sirens had gone silent, and there was no sign of the glittering rift that was supposed to be in the trees. Jasper swiveled about, looking for any sign of his companions, but his attention was dragged away towards a deeper, darker part of the woods.

Jasper. It called his name in a singsong voice; another siren? Jasper followed it into the trees. The darkness wrapped around him, but instead of that calm, cool presence he'd come to know - come to love, in a way - this was oppressive. Thick, like tar. Trying to weigh him down, drag him into the ground.

Red eyes peered out at him across the darkness. And a mouth, widening in a smile.

The mouth didn't move, but he heard its silken voice inside his head.

So you found me after all, Jasper.

The Shadow Man.

Jasper wasted no time, summoning the shadows that had abandoned him the first time he'd met this thing. He flung them at the creature, but the moment they touched, it opened its mouth wide and hit him with a blast of heat and sound so intense he fell. He hit something and rolled, branches and roots snagging on his clothes as he descended into a dark pit in the forest floor.

Do you know my name?

The Shadow Man came towards him, moving as though there were no trees, no roots, nothing standing in his way. Jasper scrambled away. He reached for the shadows again, but this time the mere twitch of his fingers met him with pain that arched up his arms and into his shoulders - lightning pain that threatened to shatter his very skull -

And then darkness. Thick, heavy darkness; but not darkness like the one he loved; warm and close and snug. No - this was the darkness of emptiness, of an endless void. A darkness of eternal solitude.

The darkness of death.

Jasper didn't know if he thought the words or if it was the Shadow Man, rasping into his ear. He tasted blood in his mouth and fought for any ounce of control he could muster. He'd never met another creature who could call to the shadows and they would answer him. He didn't know if that power was finite, if the Shadow Man had taken it from him. All he knew was that he'd been pitched into a blackness so deep, his feet flailing as he scrambled to catch a hold of something, anything to break his fall.

I am Jasper Nightingale, he hissed at the creature. I am the Master of Shadows.

And it laughed. Laughed. It's voice was a wound in the fabric of sound, grating over his ears and bones. Like the sirens, it drew him closer, but unlike the sirens, it hurt.

Time seemed to still. Vaguely, Jasper registered the distant screech of a bird, piercing the night. Then, a blast of light hurled Jasper in the other direction. His body slammed into something hard, and he found himself back in the forest, in a heap against a tree. Everything felt bruised as he tried to get to his feet.

In the blast, he caught a glimpse of the thing trying to steal his shadows.

It's ugly, skeletal face. It's piercing red eyes. It's smile.

The light was strange - unlike Orion's, which had the heat and hue of the sun. This light was cool, blue, soothing; and it beat back the Shadow Man's talons, releasing his hold on Jasper for just a moment. A moment was all he needed.

He flicked his wrists, and instead of calling on the shadows, he urged them to disperse, pushing them away with as much power as he could muster. The Shadow Man let out a screech and stumbled backward as the darkness fled. The cool, blue light grew closer.

The Shadow Man took one last look at Jasper, hurling a fistful of liquid night at his head. It was the last thing Jasper saw before the darkness became complete.

---

Delia's face hovered over him when his eyes opened again.

Jasper's entire body ached, as though he'd been thrown down several sets of tightly wound stairs. There was a blinding pain behind his left eye, and he still had the rancid taste of blood in his mouth. But he was alive. Daylight filtered through the forest canopy, and he heard…nothing. No festival. No music. No sirens. Just the chirping of a few morning birds.

As Jasper sat up, pain began to awaken in his bones, rippling through him. 

"Glad to see you're still with us," Delia said, although her concerned expression didn't change.

"Where are the other two?" Jasper grunted through clenched teeth. He scanned the undergrowth for any sign of the Shadow Man, but all, it seemed, had returned to its usual state. "What happened to the Shadow Man?"

Delia's dark brows knit together. "I didn't see him," she said. "Just you - stumbling around in the dark."

"But he was here," Jasper insisted. "Where could he have gone?"

Delia said, "you took a nasty fall. And it was dark. Maybe you tripped on something?"

Jasper shook his head, temples throbbing. He looked up at her, watching him through slightly narrowed eyes, her lips firmly pressed together. She reached to help him up, but Jasper avoided her touch, hauling himself off the ground with the help of the gnarled tree. He swayed slightly, his skin prickling under Delia's gaze.

Jasper didn't wait for her, but turned on his heel, trudging back through the trees. He had a vague notion of where the cars were parked and kept the rising sun in front of him as he picked his way over brambles and roots poking out of the earth.

When he made it back to the amphitheater, however, his mood shifted. Clouds gathered over his mind. In the distance, he saw Orion and Zephyra picking through the remains of their battle, Zephyra using her command of the air to gather up the charred bodies left from the fight. 

Bodies he'd put there, turned to nothing more than husks. 

Barty was going to have his hide. 

Delia stopped beside him, taking in the scene, cast into stark relief in the morning light. Jasper turned to her and snapped, "what are you still doing here?"

Only then did Jasper notice the sunlight on her face, and her lack of a parasol, and how although her nose was slightly pink in the light, she wasn't dissolving into ash.

Delia frowned back at him. And then the corner of her mouth twitched - as if she knew what he was thinking. It was a look that said, not a siren, after all. 

Zephyra saw them and waved, trotting over to where they stood. Her face was dirty and bruised, but she looked unharmed otherwise. 

"What happened to you?" she asked breathlessly, looking Jasper over. 

"Took a fall and hit his head," Delia supplied, when Jasper didn't answer. The scene of destruction before him was overwhelming, even as Orion set to work quickly burning any evidence they'd even been there. The Order would come in after them to cover their tracks, and it would be as though this event had never happened - but that didn't mean Barty would be pleased. 

It didn't mean that Jasper wouldn't be expelled or reprimanded or set before the council of elders for disciplinary action - 

"What happened to the sirens?" Jasper demanded, as his thoughts began to tip. This was not the place to spiral. Not the time. He focused on a bruise under Zephyra's eye as she answered, even if he hardly registered what she said. 

"We put them back through the rift," she returned, a little peeved. "Where'd you run off to? You were supposed to be right behind, ready to stitch up the rift."

"Did you see a shadow creature in the woods?" Jasper deflected her question with his own. 

"Not a thing," she replied. 

Jasper didn't answer. There would be time for this conversation in the debrief, but at the moment, there was damage control. 

He turned back to Delia, who was still watching him with that intensely terrifying stare. 

"Don't you have folks to return to?" Jasper asked. "Back in Chicago?"

"Did I say that?" she replied. Delia didn't blink, and the way she held his gaze made his stomach flip.

"Well, go back to wherever it is you came from," he said. "Get far away from this place."

He wasn't sure why he said it - only that the strange sickness he'd felt in the woods nagged at him. Maybe Delia was a perfectly normal human girl. If that was the case, then she had no business being anywhere near somewhere a rift had been formed.

For a moment, Delia looked as though she was going to argue with him. Then, she shrugged, slipping into the casual coolness she'd had when they'd met. "It's been fun," she said. "See you around, Jasper."

When she said his name - the name he hadn't given her - Jasper's blood cooled. Delia didn't wait to see his reaction. She swished her dark hair over her shoulders and sauntered away, heading back towards the charred and ruined tents. Jasper watched her go. 

He only tore his gaze away from her when Zephyra said, "how are we going to explain this to Barty?"

She gestured to the destruction in the amphitheater. The bodies. The evidence of every rule Jasper had broken. 

"It was necessary," he told Zephyra. "Barty will understand."

And Jasper only hoped that was true. 

---

 

The black mustang glistened in the morning light, the engine already humming by the time Jasper reached it. Something creeped along his spine as he ducked into the drivers' seat, looking out at the woods in the valley below.

Something moved. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it.

Something dark.

Something that laughed at him.

But there was a debrief in the making, and hunger had finally caught up to Jasper, as well as a headache that robbed him of any sense of humor he might have had that day. So he put the mustang in reverse and put the valley to his back.

If the Shadow Man ever returned, he would deal with it. But for now, he sped towards his own rift, towards home, while the mustang blared The Who over the radio.

Click Here to Continue to Episode 2

---

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