Shadow Train by J. Gabriel Gates Page A

cops ever found out she’d been with Rick that night, she’d make sure they knew she’d left Rick and headed straight home, and that she was blocks away when the fight had happened.
    It wouldn’t be as easy to manage Rick as it was to manipulate Nass, she thought as she cut up the next side street toward the brightness and relative bustle of Middleburg’s main thoroughfare. She’d fallen for Rick because she thought he was dangerous. She was a little afraid of him, and the fear was delicious—and there could be a great advantage to having a demon for a boyfriend. If her plan worked out, all her problems with Oscar and his drug-dealing crew back in South Central would be solved—permanently.
    * * *
    The sound of the scream jerked Maggie out of her meditation and caused her eyes to snap open.
    Just a few months ago, the idea that she would be happy sitting at home alone and meditating on Valentine’s Day night would have been completely inconceivable. But tonight, that’s just what she’d done. She had taken a bath, caught up on her homework, read a book for a while, watched some stupid videos online, texted back and forth to some of her friends to check up on their night, and then settled in for her daily meditation, just as Lily Rose and The Good Book had instructed her to do. The book the old woman had given Maggie not long after homecoming, when she’d felt so lost and confused, did give her comfort and guidance even though she didn’t quite understand how it worked. At first, she’d thought it was a Bible, but when she’d opened it she’d seen that it was something very different. Its blank pages were luminous, like clouds at night with the moon shining through them. And just when you needed an answer most, words would appear on those pages. But they hadn’t yet told her what to do about Rick.
    A flower-delivery guy came by earlier with his pathetic bouquet, his attempt at maintaining the charade of their relationship. Even that hadn’t dampened Maggie’s mood. She had no idea what had made him relax his controlling attitude toward her over the last couple of months, but whatever it was, she was grateful. He still went through the motions. Sometimes he’d force a kiss from her in the lunchroom, where she wouldn’t be able to pull away without causing a scene. Sometimes he’d coerce her, with veiled threats about her mother’s health, into going with him to one of his Topper dinners at Spinnacle. But more and more he left her alone, and that was fine with her.
    The only boy she really wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with had been vaporized on the old railroad tracks by a spectral locomotive. The memory sent a blinding howl of agony through her soul.
    She didn’t know where Raphael was or what had happened to him, but for some reason she held out hope that somewhere, somehow, he was still alive. She’d seen enough magic in this weird old dump of a small town that nothing would surprise her. Sometimes when she meditated she could almost feel Raphael’s presence; it felt like if she just concentrated hard enough, she would be able to reach out her hand and find him there. She was having that extraordinary, heavenly feeling on Valentine’s Day night when her mother’s scream cut her meditation short.
    Maggie galloped down the stairs and into her mother’s breakfast-room-turned-art-studio in seconds.
    â€œWhat, Mom? What happened?” she asked, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she saw the answer.
    The tapestry her mother worked obsessively on day and night was suspended in front of her, the fabric held taut by a huge wooden frame. And the part of the picture her mother had been embroidering was now covered in blood.
    Violet sat in a chair in front of the tapestry, gripping her wrist.
    â€œI—I didn’t do it!” she stammered as Maggie hurried over to assess the situation.
    Her