Shadow Walker (Revenant’s Series Book 1) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  World Castle Publishing, LLC

  Pensacola, Florida

  Copyright © Elissa Daye 2020

  Paperback ISBN: 9781951642525

  eBook ISBN: 9781951642532

  First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, March 30, 2020

  http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com

  Licensing Notes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

  Cover: Melissa Davis

  Editor: Maxine Bringenberg

  Editor: Kevenn T. Smith

  Chapter 1

  Lyssa glanced around the clearing, not daring to move too quickly. She shouldn’t be out this late at night. The quad was barely lit up, and the shadows covered every inch around her, so she inched forward one step at a time. The safety of her dorm room was calling to her like the beacon of a lighthouse. If she continued forward quickly, maybe she would make it in time.

  A swish of air interrupted the silence behind her. Lyssa did not have to turn around, for she knew who it was…or rather, what. Grabbing her pentacle between her clasped fingers, she took a deep breath. Even though she felt her courage falter, she knew the gods would protect her.

  Lyssa walked a few more steps ever so slowly so that every movement was almost undetectable. The hairs on the back of her neck rose as she closed her eyes and dropped the pentacle. The necklace rested between the rising and falling of her chest, as small angry breaths tried to break their way free from her lungs. If that thing wanted a fight, then so be it. She was fed up with the taunting shape and done with the web of darkness that tainted the world around her. While everything in her body told her to flee, she knew it was simply not an option.

  Dropping her backpack, she whirled around to face her pursuer. A black shadow stood behind her, a strange black being somewhere between here and there, with no reason or rhyme, just a hollowness that ate up the air around her. With no discernible facial features, its only human feature was a pair of glowing yellow orbs where she assumed its eyes should be. As it moved closer to her, Lyssa knew it was daring her to run.

  Gathering courage, she found her voice. “I will not be threatened any longer.”

  The black being moved closer, floating as if there were no separation between the ground and the air. The shadow reminded her of a ghostly grim from horror stories of long ago, and a shiver ran down her spine. Lyssa closed her eyes and concentrated on bringing her energy from within to protect her. Raising her hands, she rubbed them together slowly, picturing the energy that would soon swirl like fire between them. The newly learned skill started to generate heat as she breathed in the air around her and pushed out everything she could into the slowly growing orb of energy in her hands. An electric current started to pick up, and Lyssa took another deep breath to hold it there.

  “You need to leave, right now! You’re not welcome here!”

  Part of her might regret banishing it, for she had learned to do no harm, but the desire to live through this moment pushed her forward. She believed in Karma, the magic of redemption, and the power of returns, and it sat on her shoulders like some devil vs. angel debate. This was why she hadn’t taken action before now. However, this thing was threatening her, and she had given it plenty of chances to leave while it still could. She had seen things like this before. They terrorized innocent children at night and chased people away from places of gathering with feelings of discomfort, ill will, and a gut wrenching need to leave as quickly as possible. They hated happiness and thrived on breaking up the stillness and peace within others. These same things had visited her the year before when the difference between life and death had been a mere slice away.

  The dark shadow continued to float toward her, and she had no other recourse but to react. Raising her hands, she shouted, “Away!” The ball of energy shot through the air like a speeding bullet. The bright light singed the darkness in the air around it and smashed into thousands of pieces as it slammed into the shadow. The dark being dissipated into a swirling mist before her, dancing like cigarette smoke in a clear open sky, before it was finally gone.

  Now she walked quickly across the quad, her heartbeat keeping pace with her loud footsteps as they echoed like drumbeats in the silence. Soon, even more would come, and this time, there would be more than a handful to deal with. Lyssa had never retaliated before, and while she felt a slight exhilaration, she dreaded whatever would come next. Now they would be prepared to do more than threaten her space—they would come for everything. Lyssa quickly formulated a plan somewhere amidst the racing panic and thoughts that couldn’t be shaken. By using her inner sight, she would find the entities that were sending out these dastardly minions to do their dirty work, and hopefully, find the source of the darkness. Unlike the many that were afraid to seek the powers behind these shadows, she would dare them to come, for she would not live in fear anymore. She simply refused. Lyssa had come to this town a year ago, and from the moment she settled into her dorm room, she had felt the presence rooted deeply in the grounds of the college campus every time the light fled and the darkness covered every corner. Something was terribly wrong here, and she was determined to figure it out.

  Lyssa remembered the last few years with no fondness. After breaking away from a vicious cycle of family abuse, she had found herself isolated from all her support groups back home, with no friends, no family, no one at all to help her. No one understood her; no one accepted her. No one believed her. When a few of her friends had been uncomfortable with the truths of her past, she stopped confiding in everyone. While she liked to think that her friends had deserted her in her time of need, the truth was she had pushed every single one of them away long before they had gotten the chance. Lyssa hit rock bottom, bruising every inch, every last centimeter of herself in the process. Thankfully, she had let Jackson in.

  As she sunk into a deep depression, a desperate despair gripped at her as if she were swimming around in a barrel of crude oil, every inch of her being covered in the slimy depression that stained the pores of her skin. Lyssa had always promised herself that she would find a way to get out; that she would move on with her life and move past the sins that had been carved into her soul, all the memories that she had meticulously cataloged into a mental filing cabinet of things never to speak of again. She had survived this hellacious life of secrets that had devoured her innocence in order to find a freedom she had dreamt about since she was a child. And while she was proud of surviving, proud of how she had escaped a life that had seemed predestined, the moment of her escape was when the darkness had started to appear. That was when the filing cabinet had burst open, and all the sickening memories had come pouring out like a festering wound that had never healed, a wound so deep and infected that no simple Band-Aid would ever work to conceal the pain oozing out of it.

  Lyssa had barely noticed it, this shadow of cold darkness, because every arrow pointed to normal depression related to her childhood abuse, until one night, when she saw it for herself. The black figure had lingered so close that she had only to reach out a finger to feel its presence. It was the shadow, the shadow that was cold yet familiar to her at the same time, for she had lived a lifetime surviving the evil emanating from it. Th
e being had seemed to gaze at her from the window, almost as if to ask her to embrace her malcontent. Like a parasite, it had watched her from outside her room, growing larger every time it siphoned more life and joy out of her from a distance.

  Suddenly, she had discounted everything she had done to get where she was, the strength that she’d kept hidden from the rest of the world, and all the good things that she had transplanted into her life. The darkness came for her and built its tomb around her with icy talons that shook her to the very core. She had never thought of ending everything before then. Her plan had been to survive, to get away from her father’s corrupted grasping hands before he took everything she had left to give to the world.

  When the black void came, so had the whispering voices, voices that she had never heard before that moment. They brought volatile emotions that made her tremble like a leaf on the wind. “Just end it. End it now. Who will care? Who will miss you?” When she found the strength to carry her through those restless nights, the voices found another weakness. They soon began to blame her for everything that had gone wrong in the lives of those she cared about the most. Those attacks had bitten at her like mosquitoes, at first with timid suckles at the flesh of her guilt, then strong gasping gulps that had devoured every inch of her courage. “End it. You deserve to die. Look at what you’ve done to your family. It’s all your fault. You deserved it. End it. Then no one will be hurting anymore.”

  Before long, she had lost herself to the moment when the voices got too strong to ignore. “You don’t have anyone. No one wants you. No one loves you. They never did.” The message had repeated itself over and over again. Lyssa remembered the knife that she had used to carve a pumpkin. The metal blade had glistened from across the room as the candlelight cast its light around it. Suddenly, the temptation to pick it up and slash had risen so close to the surface of her mind that she had crossed the distance of the room and picked it up without a thought. Standing there in the stillness with the knife shaking in her hand, Lyssa had held it against her wrist. That was when she had heard a woman’s voice interrupt the record, and its message started to skip like a pebble across a pond.

  “The world would be a much sadder place without you.”

  Lyssa had turned to the sound and seen a spirit standing beside her. Her long brown cascading curls were swept up into a Grecian coronet. She wore a white gown that looked like something from a Greek mythology book that she had read in high school. Lyssa had never seen her before, yet her presence seemed vaguely familiar.

  The knife had clattered as it fell to the floor at her feet, leaving Lyssa staring in awe at the spirit before her. “Why would anyone be sad that I was no longer here? No one needs me, anyway.”

  “It is difficult for them to reach you now, for they have not traveled the roads you have. In time, your friends will understand. They need time to adapt. You must fight the darkness that tries to control your thoughts.”

  “What are they?” Lyssa had asked her.

  “You must discover that for yourself. Until you do, you must remember that you have a greater purpose than this thing can ever touch.” The spirit gestured to the being floating outside her window. “You have to keep fighting, keep believing, keep living.”

  When Lyssa had tried to ask her more, the spirit had already disappeared. It wasn’t until later that she learned that the spirit, Jephilia, was her spirit guide. The witty being had a way of disappearing before answering her questions in detail. When Jephilia wasn’t shocking her sides with energy jolts to get her attention, she was dropping messages that only a saint could interpret. From that moment, Lyssa had been able to break through the thoughts that had lived like a parasite in her brain for the past year, and she began to work on inner peace to build a barrier that the darkness could not touch.

  Chapter 2

  When she finally reached her dorm, she knocked on Jackson’s door. After a year of begging him to leave his college in Utah, he had come back home to Illinois and now lived right down the hall from her. They clicked in ways no one in this world could ever understand—in ways that confounded both of them from time to time—with an immeasurable bond that seemed to transcend time and space. They had been to hell and back together, and the handbasket they had traveled in had been worn and tattered along the way, but with love and nurturing, it was still intact. Jackson had been a lifeline in a time of darkness. Together, they worked through the pain that they hid deep beneath the shame of their pasts.

  “What’s with that cold air?” He opened the door, and his hazel eyes darted to the hallway. It never failed to amaze her how tall he was compared to her average stature, and how his handsome features were always enhanced by the spiky brown hair with blond and red highlights. Sometimes she wondered if his magical abilities allowed him to roll out of bed without a hair out of place, for he made his appearance seem effortless.

  “It was following me again, so I took care of it. Now, they’re really pissed.”

  “Come inside.” He closed the door quickly behind him. “I’ll light some candles and burn some incense right away.”

  “I’ll make an energy barrier. They’re coming, and we need to protect ourselves. We can’t let them find us.” Lyssa took a wand out of her backpack and started to draw a protective circle around them, calling silently to each of the four corners to protect them from the darkness outside.

  “What are they going to do?” Jackson lit the last candle representing spirit and protection.

  “I don’t know, but I’m tired of running. There are enough of us on this campus to do something about those things out there. First, we need to find out where they’re coming from.” Looking through her bag of oddities, she let out a sigh of relief when she found the feather from one of the large crows that spent a lot of time outside her window. Lyssa had considered the possibility that this particular bird was one of her totem animals, so she had picked up the feather to preserve the link that she had felt to him. When she had first channeled with him, she knew at once that she had been right. From that moment on, the black bird seemed to follow her everywhere, and she had taken to calling him, Thor.

  Lyssa placed the feather in the middle of their circle and pondered how she could work with her totem to find this evil presence. “Keep an eye out. I’m going in.” She sat down and crossed her legs in front of her. Picking up the feather from the floor, she held it in her right hand and then grounded herself by breathing in the energy around her until she could see the rainbow aura flowing from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet. Lyssa called out to the bird in an ethereal voice that was in between planes of existence. “Thor, brother bird, let me see what you see. Let your eyes be my eyes. Show me where they are.”

  As the bird took flight, she could only see through its eyes. Lyssa felt as if she were wearing blinders that blocked out everything except what she could see in the space on her forehead between her two eyes, right where the axis of the third eye was located. He flew away from the college campus and down the main street that connected the two sister cities. Then the bird soared over the movie theater, the grocery store, and past the hospital. Soon, he was crossing over downtown to where the old abandoned factory buildings were located. When he reached one of these buildings, Thor perched on a windowsill on the fifth floor.

  The building was like any other abandoned building. The windows were filmy; some broken, some boarded. This window was clouded over, which made it difficult to see the people inside, but Lyssa clearly recognized the darkness that the bird felt. The air was thick, making it hard to breathe. The disturbing blackness was ebbing around her like the pulse of a migraine at the front of her temples. After a few moments, the bird trained its eyes on the occupants of the room.

  A small murmuring of collective voices came from inside. Five people stood near the flames of a small fire, chanting words that were indecipherable to the outside world. As the chanting got louder, the f
lames rose higher from the old oil barrel, so high that the fire seemed to leap into the air and live separately from their earthly container. They took the shape of a shadow, much like the shadow she had seen earlier this evening. The being turned with haunting accuracy as it looked directly to where Thor was perched outside. Instantaneously she felt the air being sucked out of her lungs, and the sight that her totem spirit had provided her was quickly blocked. She dropped the feather and gasped. “They’re onto me. Quick, send the guardians to erase our location before we’re found.”

  Jackson’s hands began motioning to each corner of the room. He sent guardians of each corner—North, East, South, and West. They needed protection from the minions that were sure to find them if they did not act quickly. While he summoned the guardians, she asked her spirit guides to push out any unwelcome guests from their dorm as they waited in silence.

  The phone rang, and Jackson picked it up before the second ring and put it on speaker. “Hello?”

  “What the hell did you do?” Lana accused through the phone.

  “What do you mean?” Jackson’s eyebrows rose indignantly.

  “Have you seen the shadows outside? They’re all circling the campus right now, you moron! Tell me you didn’t try to find them?”

  “We may have tried to find them, but we can’t worry about that right now. We’ve sent out the guardians to mask our location.” Lyssa shuffled her feet, guilt forming in her mind.

  “I’m on my way.” Lana’s annoyance was clear even from across campus.

  “Oh lord, here we go!” Lyssa sighed outwardly. “She’ll bring her whole coven with her before long. We don’t need that attention here.”

  “Give her some credit, Lyssa. She won’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  After ten minutes, there was a knock on the door. Jackson opened it up to find a man that neither one of them had seen before.