Smoke and Shadows by Tanya Huff Read Free Book Online Page B

small she felt it could safely be ignored.
    As he settled himself, she leaned back, crossed her legs, and steepled her fingers. When those pale blue eyes—eyes with the rare ability to see the world as it was without the usual filters of disbelief and denial—fastened on her face, she began. “I came to this world from another seven years ago.”
    Fingers stopped worrying at a faded patch of denim. “From another world?”
    â€œYes.” She waited, but he only indicated she should continue, his expression suggesting he’d merely asked for clarification in case he’d misheard. “My people were about to lose a war they had been fighting for many years. The enemy was at the gate and the gate had fallen and hope was dead. As it happened, hope had been dying for days—the last battalions of the army had been destroyed and nothing remained of our defenses save terrified men and women fighting individual losing battles against the shadows. I stood on the city wall, I watched the darkness advance, and I realized it was over. Certain I was about to die, I retreated to my workroom. It would only be a matter of moments before the enemy found me. In desperation, I tried something believed impossible. I tried to open a gate between my world and . . . and any world. My order had long insisted that the number of worlds were as infinite as the possibilities, but all previous attempts to break the barriers between them had failed.
    â€œI don’t know why I succeeded that day. Perhaps because failure would not result in a scholar’s footnote but rather a shallow grave. That kind of certainty tends to give one . . .” She could still feel the panic clawing at her; still taste the bile in the back of her throat. A drop of sweat rolled down her side, pebbling a line of flesh as she fought to keep her voice from trembling. “. . . encouragement. Perhaps I succeeded because for the first time a world—this world—was close enough to reach. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. The gate opened up into an empty cardboard box factory just as Chester Bane was investigating its potential as a home for his production company.”
    â€œSo CB knows about . . . ?” A disapproving flick of pale fingers served to indicate the general situation.
    â€œNot all of it. He hasn’t seen the shadows.”
    â€œWhy haven’t you told him?”
    Easy to hear the subtext— Why haven’t you told him so he could’ve done something?
    â€œThere’s nothing CB can do.” This was the absolute truth. If not all of it.
    The boy seemed to consider that for a moment, brows drawn in, a fold of his lower lip caught up between his teeth, then: “So, in this other world, you were a scientist?”
    â€œA what?” Arra hurriedly revisited everything she’d just said and snorted. “No, in this other world, I was a wizard.” She waited, but the comment about robes and pointy hats and Harry Potter never came. Upon reflection, hardly surprising. She very much doubted that Tony’s friend the Nightwalker slept in a crypt on a layer of his native earth. Their relationship—whatever it was and she was certainly in no position to judge—would have dealt speedily with cliché or it wouldn’t have lasted long enough to develop the bonds so obvious between them. “Our enemy was also a wizard. Naturally powerful, he had . . . It’s difficult to describe exactly what he had and what he did without indulging in excessively purple description.”
    â€œYeah, well, too late.” From the sudden flush, it was obvious the comment had slipped out accidentally. Arra decided to ignore it—and not only because she had a strong suspicion it was accurate. The story was difficult to tell without falling into the cadences of home.
    â€œWizards, like most people, are neither good nor evil, they merely are. This wizard, the enemy