Chapter 1: Miami Nights, 1986

  The flickering neon lights of Ocean Drive flash off the puddles from the afternoon rain, creating a mass of colors across the wet pavement. Andres Vega hunched his shoulders inside his oversized denim jacket, trying to make himself smaller as he hurried down the back alley behind Club Midnight. The humid Miami night clung to his teenage skin like a film, his faded Genesis concert T-shirt already soaked through with sweat. As Andres turned the corner into the alley, there was an old denim backpack open with some torn-open brown paper bags and plastic lying on the ground. Andres squats down and takes a look inside the bag. Quickly realizes what's going on and drops the bag and starts to run towards the back alley. Just as he gets to the back alley, he hears someone yell.

  "There he is!" In a thick Haitian accent.

  The shout came from the street behind him. Three other men burst through the club's rear exit, silhouettes backlit by the pulsing lights inside. Leading them was Marcel Baptiste, known in Little Haiti as "The Bokor," feared across Miami as one of the ruthless leaders of the Voodoo Boys. The Haitian gang was infamous for guns, drugs, and business protection rackets, but it was Marcel's reputation that truly set them apart.

  Marcel had a way of getting inside people's heads. The people on the block were always talking about how he could make you confess with just a look. With his cold, dead eyes, he could pick through anything you had to say. It wasn't just Marcel's size, towering and broad-shouldered, that made him terrifying. It was the aura he carried, the sense that he knew something you didn't. His nickname came from whispers about his ties to Haitian Vodou, a mysticism that added to his legend. Some claimed he could curse his enemies through rituals. Others swore they had seen him call on spirits to protect his crew.

  "You think you can steal from me, boy?" Marcel's voice was smooth and low, his faint Haitian lilt turning every word into a threat. "Nobody takes my shit and lives to tell about it."

  Andres backed away, hands raised. "I didn't steal anything! The backpack and package were already empty when I picked them up!"

  Behind Marcel, his men spread out, blocking the alley's exits with practiced ease. One, a wiry man with a gold-toothed grin, cracked his knuckles. Another, taller and built like a linebacker, drew a switchblade and snapped it open with a soft metallic click.

  Marcel didn't even blink. He stepped forward, swinging his machete lazily, its edge glinting beneath the orange light of a nearby streetlamp. "Wrong answer, petit voleur," he said with a cold smile. "I will make an example of you so everyone sees what happens when someone steals from me."

  Andres's back hit the chain-link fence at the end of the alley. It was a dead end, boxed in by a couple of dumpsters. His heart started pounding faster, his eyes darting for any possible escape. He was sixteen years old, way too young to die in a back alley over something that Andres wasn't even involved in.

  The shadows around them deepened as a cloud slid across the moon. Something stirred at the edge of Andres's vision. The darkness itself seemed to ripple like oily water disturbed by an unseen current. He felt a strange pull from it, as though it were calling to him.

  "Please," Andres whispered. He didn't know if he was begging his attackers or the growing presence he felt around him.

  Marcel lunged, his machete flashing toward Andres's throat.

  Time slowed. The darkness beneath a parked car across the street suddenly looked solid, almost like a doorway without understanding how, Andres focused on that shadow, wishing more than anything to be there instead of here.

  The world crushed in around him. For a split second, he felt like he was pulled through the eye of a needle, a sensation both painful and impossible. His vision went black, and something stabbed into his skull before a cold wave rushed through his veins.

  Then it was over. Andres was crouching beside the parked car in the shadow, gasping for breath, his head pounding. He was thirty yards from where he had stood a second earlier. From where Marcel and his boys stood, it just looked like Andres faded into the shadows.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Kisa sa ye?" Marcel's voice echoed through the alley. "What the fuck, where did he go?"

  Andres pressed a hand over his mouth to quiet his breathing. His entire body felt drained, as if he had sprinted a mile. A cold emptiness throbbed in his chest where his heart should have been; it was like he had left a piece of himself behind in the dark.

  "He was right here!" one of Marcel's men shouted, kicking a can into the wall. "Where the hell did he go?"

  "Find him now!" Marcel snarled, his calm slipping for the first time. The machete scraped sparks off the pavement as he swung it in frustration.

  Andres's mind raced. What had just happened? How had he moved? Looking around the car, he saw Marcel's men splitting up, the old school security flashlights cutting harsh beams through the night.

  Instinctively, Andres reached toward the darkness beneath the car. This time, he was faintly aware of what he was doing. The shadow stretched toward him, wrapping around his fingers like smoke in water.

  I need a weapon, he thought. The darkness obeyed.

  A spike formed in his palm, hard and cold. It grew into a crude knife shaped like a cleaver, black as midnight. The effort sent pain through his chest and head, but the weapon felt solid in his trembling hand.

  Andres stared at the blade, stunned. It absorbs light rather than reflects it. He had created something impossible out of his fear and the darkness. Andres jerks back and stumbles, knocking over a beer bottle next to the car. One of the flashlight beams snaps towards the noise.

  "There! Over there!" one of Marcel's men shouts.

  Andres scrambles to his feet, clutching the weapon. He needed to run, to get as far from this alley as possible. His eyes landed on a shadow under a billboard down the street, a few blocks away.

  Andres quickly wondered if he could reach it without killing himself.

  He focused hard, channeling the same desperate energy from before. The pull came again, stronger this time, and his whole body convulsed as if Andres's life was being drained away. He realized it was too far, it was too dangerous. Pulling back, he fixed on a closer deep shadow beneath a closed bodega's awning just half a block away.

  Everything compressed again, crushing Andres as though he were being squeezed through a narrow tunnel. Then he was stumbling against the bodega's shuttered door, struggling for breath as waves of exhaustion rolled through him. The knife in his hand melted into black liquid that dripped between his fingers and vanished into the pavement. He staggered over to a stack of boxes and crouched among the trash.

  Behind him came distant shouts. Marcel and his crew were still checking the street around the car, unaware that Andres was gone, because to them it looked like Andres had stepped back into the shadows.

  Andres slumped against the wall of the bodega, his heart hammering away, trying to make sense of what was happening. Since he was little, Andres had always felt comfortable in the darkness, always able to move through dark rooms without any problems, but nothing like this. He had never controlled it before.

  As Andres's breathing started to slow, something shimmered in the shadow beside him. At first, he thought it was a trick of the light, then realized it was the same shadow from earlier, reforming, swirling upward into the shape of that shadow cleaver from earlier. He reached toward it, and it rose to meet his hand.

  "What are you?" he whispered.

  The shadow didn't speak, but a faint consciousness stirred within it, like it was part of him, an echo of his own will.

  The realization hit him.

  "Holy shit," he breathed. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the damp pavement, his mind spinning. He could slip through shadows. He could turn the shadow into weapons. He could create stuff from the darkness itself. Down the block

  Marcel Baptiste and his boys suddenly felt like a much smaller problem. Andres Vega had discovered something powerful in himself, and it was far more dangerous. Andres slumps to the ground unconscious. The drain on him is too much. Lucky for Andres, he's lying very still in a deep shadow. The darkness embraces Andres almost like he was part shadow.