Black Swan Rising Read Online Free PDF Page A

ago.

Shadowmen
     
    After I cleaned up the paper confetti and stored it away in the box so I could show the jeweler tomorrow what had become of its contents, I closed the lid and left it on the worktable. I considered putting it in the safe where I kept my gold and silver supplies, but the whole house was alarmed. There was no reason to put it away unless my real motive was to keep me safe from
it
. . . and that was just silly.
    I took the one large scrap of paper and the silver seal that I had pried off the box with me into my bedroom though, because I wanted to look at them again when my vision cleared. I put them on my night table while I got undressed. The visual hallucinations were dissipating and I hadn’t burned myself, I thought as I crawled under the covers and wrapped my arms around myself to stop my shivering. That strange sensation I’d felt when the light flashed . . . well, that was some sort of electrical charge—a shock, nothing more. And the tremors I felt now were from fatigue. It had been a long day. Before I turned off the bedside lamp, though, I took off the medallion I had made when I was sixteen (I usually slept with it on) and picked up the seal that had come off the box so that I could look atthem side by side. Yes, they were almost identical, but there must have been many rings made with this seal. It didn’t
mean
anything. It
was
nice to have found a token that reminded me of my mother. Almost like a message from her. I fell asleep with the seal in my hand, my fingers tracing the shape of the swan beating its wings.
    In my dream I stood on the edge of a round pool. The sun was low on the opposite shore, setting behind an old stone tower and turning the water into a glittering sheet of molten gold upon which swam a black swan. The scene was tranquil, but somehow I knew that something awful was about to happen. The bird sensed it too. The black swan craned its long neck forward, spread its wings, and began to take off. I noticed as the swan stretched its neck that a silver chain with a heavy pendant lay on its breast feathers. Then, just as the swan’s wing tips cleared the surface of the water, I felt something whiz past my ear, and then an anguished cry rent the still golden surface of the lake. The air turned dark with black feathers as one minute I was watching from the shore, the next I was in the water . . . and then I was no longer even myself. I was, to my horror, the wounded swan. And I was making that horrible cry, a sound like the trumpets of Judgment Day.
    It was the trumpet blare that woke me.
    It took me only a second to identify the actual sound as the gallery alarm two floors below—a sound that made my blood freeze. Another second had me up, pulling on the jeans, sweatshirt, and workboots I had discarded beside the bed. One more and I was on the landing looking down through the stairwell. I heard the door on the floor below open and saw my father’s bald scalp appear at the banister.
    “Dad!” I shouted over the insistent blat of the alarm. “It’sprobably just a false alarm. Wait for the police to come.” But he couldn’t hear me—or chose not to. He ran down the stairs, his red paisley robe billowing loosely in the updraft from the first floor.
    Which meant the front door was open.
    I took off after him, my heart pounding with fear as I took the steps two at a time. Roman kept a gun in his night table—a souvenir from World War II. Had he been foolish enough to grab it?
    Halfway down the second flight I heard a shout—my father’s voice—and then a gunshot. I took the last flight in two leaps and landed on the first floor on my knees. Ignoring the pain, I continued toward the kitchen door, which stood wide-open at the end of the corridor. I reached the doorway in two long, awkward leaps . . . and then froze on the threshold. The scene inside was so bizarre I thought for a moment I had finally achieved my childhood dream of slipping into a painting: a