Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) Read Free Page A

ago, a group of psychology grad students at a small Midwestern college had created him as an experiment using a round-robin approach. The first person described Shadow Man as being tall and thin with an elongated face. From there, they each took turns adding to his description and creating a backstory.
    Orange, bottomless eyes. Trailing overcoat the color of dried blood. The ability to unhinge his jaw like a snake. Sometimes appeared in bedrooms and watched people sleep. Peered through windows. Crickets followed in his wake.
    Stole children from the playground. From the street. From their beds.
    Once the group tired of creating this terrifying creature, they took him out on the Internet for a trial run. They mentioned him in urban-legend forums. They dropped his name on supernatural websites. They reported sightings in the comments on articles about Bigfoot and Nessie.
    The result of the experiment was remarkable. Within weeks, doctored photos of alleged sightings of Shadow Man cropped up. None of them came from the grad students who’d invented him. People reported seeing Shadow Man looking in their bedroom windows. Conspiracy theorists blamed him for every AMBER alert and suggested he was a product of alien/human hybrid experiments.
    That was all before the Last Hidden stepped out and chose the name. Up until I’d seen him from the corner of my eye at the end of my driveway, he’d been nothing but words and pictures created to see how quickly a simple story could grow into an urban legend. Now he was a flesh-and-bone representation of the stories he’d modeled himself after.
    I sighed and took a step away from the safety of Riley’s arms. “Guess we’d better call everybody home.”
    He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Try not to let them know how pleased you are about that part.”
    I nodded. “I’ll try.”
    * * *
    Mom and Darius appeared while I was still on the phone with Kam. I waved at them from the kitchen, and they sat together on the couch to chat with Riley.
    Kam’s frustration trickled through the phone. “I was in Nevada last week. Why couldn’t he have shown up then?” Her breathing increased, as if she were pacing or lifting something. “I’m in eastern Wyoming. It’ll take me two days to get to you.”
    Something banged against something else on her end. “Kam, what are you doing? It sounds like you’re rebuilding a car engine.”
    “Ooph.” The phone clattered and she was quiet for a minute. “Sorry. Dropped the phone. I’m packing. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”
    I frowned. Kam used to change clothes constantly, using her magic to create elaborate costumes. It bothered me that she was doing something so ordinary as collecting belongings into a suitcase. The loss of one-third of her magic had turned my impetuous, creative friend into a mundane traveler. I was betting she didn’t have a single hoop skirt or tiara in her luggage.
    “Don’t overdo it,” I said. “We’re all right for the moment, so I don’t want you driving through the night and running off the road. Just get here when you can.”
    “Got it, boss!” From anyone else, that might have been sarcastic, but she sounded chipper. “No running off the road. Cross my heart.”
    After we hung up, my heart felt lighter. We’d known Shadow Man would show eventually, since the day the Simurgh had whispered it to Mom and me in a vision. But after a month of waiting for him to show, we’d all decided it was time to get on with our lives, at least until something happened.
    The fact that everyone scrambled to high alert based on something I may or may not have seen out of the corner of my eye said volumes about how serious we took the warnings.
    Of all the Aegises in all the world, Mom and I were the only ones left. Long before he had a form and a name, Shadow Man had managed to have all the other Aegises killed. We may have gone back to business-as-usual on the surface, but none of us had relaxed our guard. After