Free The Conclave of Shadow by Alyc Helms

shadows have been dispersed or fled back to their masters. Let Mei Shen and Tsung chase what they’re chasing. I need to make sure that China is not blamed, but that is as far as my interest goes.”
    He stood. He was taller than me now, almost as tall as his father and uncle, and yet he still carried the beanpole thinness of youth. So young-looking. I wondered if he’d look this young for eternity. I wondered if all parents thought their kids stopped aging at seventeen.
    Mian Zi hesitated, and then pulled me into a stiff hug. I made it doubly awkward by clinging to him a little too hard and burying my nose into his lapel. There might have been a tear or two.
    â€œStay safe, mother. And try not to make more enemies than you already have.”
    I sniffled something like a laugh. “Well, where’s the fun in that?”
----
    I didn’t have Mian Zi’s aura of importance to protect me from Doris Han’s curiosity. He managed to make his escape without delay, but it took me a good hour to answer her questions about how I merited a private audience with Mr Long. At least I got a good meal with my mouthful of lies. And a show, because the expressions of disbelief Johnny kept shooting my way were comedy gold.
    After extracting a promise from Johnny that he’d let me know if he heard from Mei Shen, I headed out. Abby hadn’t responded to my text. I sent another, this one with a little more detail. You owe me an explanation .
    With Mian Zi exhausted as a lead and Mei Shen and David Tsung AWOL, I was fast running out of ways to find out what the hell was going on. I considered heading back to the Academy, but I suspected it would be cordoned off as a crime scene, and I wanted to keep Missy Masters as far away from that mess as I could manage.
    I spent the walk home scanning useless news articles and Twitter debates on the subject and deleting the social awareness spam that was already piling up in my junk account. I switched over to my Mr Mystic account as I was letting myself in through the back of the house.
    And only then remembered that I’d asked Jack to forward Sadakat’s pictures.
    â€œShimizu?” I called as I entered our bottom floor in-law. Echoes answered. I sent a quick text and got an almost immediate Date=Late followed by a string of emojis: scissors, a thumbs up, and a winky face.
    â€œKids today,” I muttered and fired up my laptop.
    The afternoon light faded and darkness shrouded the apartment, only broken by the light of my computer screen as I paged through the pictures, taking notes on placement, figure patterns, sigil repetition, variation. A few of the sigils looked familiar, and it was only when I got up to pull down my grandfather’s journals for comparison that I realized how dark it had gotten. Shimizu was always after me to turn on lights. That Midwest accent of hers made her sound like a crotchety grandma, warning me I’d lose my eyesight if I kept reading in the dark.
    But Shimizu wasn’t home to tut at me. I made tea by the light of the Google homepage and went back to trying to decipher the sigils that had been used at the Academy.
    My grandfather’s journal provided one key. The symbols were ideographic, modified by diacriticals to indicate function and relation. I supposed that made sense. I’d picked up the rudiments of Shadow speech growing up with Mitchell – not that I knew that’s what he was teaching me – and I’d improved my grasp of it during my years with Jian Huo. It was a language almost entirely composed of proper noun-verbs. No pronouns. No adverbs. It had confused the hell out of me until Jian Huo hauled out Plato and had me read up on the Realm of Forms.
    I suppose it followed that the written language, such as it was, would be comprised of sigils that could be marked as actor, action, or object: Dancer, Dancing, Dance.
    I came up for air when my phone dinged with a reply from Abby. Just a time