She used her new code to open the door, glancing out over her shoulder at him with a look of thanks, and then they stepped inside.
The room echoed with emptiness. Bare shelves lined the far wall, a couple of someone else’s thick books stacked and forgotten on one shelf. The walls were plain white, scuffed here and there from equipment and storage. A dark wood conference table stood in the middle, her laptop open at one end. As far as he could see, her near-death research remained in cardboard boxes, but instead of on the table, where he had put them himself, now they were beneath, acting as a footrest.
“You know you can requisition anything you need or want for this space,” Adam said, looking around for signs of her personality, her work, of someone moving in with the intent to stay. He really wanted her stay. He’d be thrilled if she’d drain Segue’s account to make herself comfortable. If he could make her comfortable.
She beckoned him over to her laptop and hit the space bar to void the field of stars moving across the screen as she took a seat.
An image appeared, a photograph of a sculpture in a gallery setting. Adam bent low to make out a mixed-media, abstract creation, a representation of a human form writhing in agony and trapped by encircling mesh layers. Adam’s gut responded to the piece, aching in sudden sympathy for the futility with which the figure fought his trap. The figure could be anyone, but Adam saw himself.
“Very powerful,” he said, ignoring the way the sculpture thinned the air in his lungs. It was exactly the way Jacob made him feel. Trapped.
“Did you look at the name of the piece?”
Adam glanced down again. The image wasn’t labeled in text on the screen as he expected, but if he squinted, he could just make out words on a placard on the floor in the photograph. MAN OF SHADOWS.
“That’s not…You don’t think…” She couldn’t possibly believe that the sculpture was a rendering of the Shadowman.
“I do.” Talia smiled. Her eyes finally lit with excitement, her darker emotion buried under the thrill of discovery. The expression set his nerves zapping. Pleasure made her positively beautiful. He had to tear his eyes away to concentrate on the screen.
“Aside from the name, how do you know?”
Talia held up a wait-for-it finger while she scrolled through the many files she had open on her screen and clicked with the other hand. Another image popped up, a black-and-white photograph, manipulated with digital illustration to create a desolate landscape, a figure similarly writhing, harried by a subtly transparent whirlwind around his body. The rendering was more surreal than the first, like a Salvador Dalí, but the effect was comparable.
His eyes flicked to the title, scrawled in pencil in the white margin beneath the image. Shadow’s Man.
“Coincidence,” Adam argued. “Believe me, I’ve checked out every reference to Shadowman on the Internet…”
Talia shook her head from side to side, eyebrows lifted.
“What?” Pressure built up in Adam’s chest in a strange combination of frustration and excitement. He hated the thought that he had missed something all these years, but if there were more answers to be had this day, he’d take them gladly.
“I can show you six more, all similar. The images don’t come up on an Internet search. Like you said, nothing related to Shadowman does. Somebody out there is controlling that. However, text inside images is not searchable, and in each of these cases, the titles are part of the image. You have to know the names of the artists and what to look for to find anything.”
Adam grabbed and dragged a chair squealing on its wheels to sit next to Talia. “Explain it to me.”
His motion had her tensing, but that couldn’t be helped. The way things were going, he’d be around her a lot. She better start getting used to him now.
She sighed heavily. “It goes back to the accident I had when I was fifteen. My aunt Maggie died and, for a moment, I did, too. One minute I was in the car, the next I was surrounded by a darkness far deeper and denser than my shadows. I knew I was dying. I glimpsed this man”—Talia tapped the screen—“trapped by a dark wind. I can’t describe the sensation. All I can say is that I knew instinctively he was…” She took a deep breath. “…my father. As you know, meeting family upon crossing is common in near-death experiences. I knew his name, Shadowman. He tried to speak, but I was already being pulled back to life. The EMTs had zapped me back.”
Adam kept his composure. “Your father is Shadowman.”
Talia’s face whitened. He felt her searching him for a reaction.
“You are the source referenced in your dissertation,” he concluded.
She nodded stiffly—attempting to cover some strong emotion—and went on. “Then my first year in college I was struck dumb when I happened into the student gallery. And there he was—Shadowman—in a sketch. The artist had no idea where he got the inspiration. Ditto for the other artists I’ve spoken to. The image just ‘came to them.’ So apparently, I’m not the only one who has seen him. Others have, too. And some have attempted to make a visual representation of him.” Talia clicked through a couple of screens to demonstrate.
The similarities could not be denied. A bound male identified with shadow.
“So what are you thinking? Mass hysteria?”
“Hysteria, no.” She winced. “Have you seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”
“You think Shadowman is an alien?” That was just too much.
She laughed in surprise, her expression clearing again. “No. Not that part. In the beginning of the movie, all these people with different kinds of lives envision the location where the spaceships eventually land. The mountain. Richard Dreyfuss makes a giant mud mountain in his kitchen…”
“I get it. You think Shadowman is trying to tell us something.”
“Yes.” She sat back in her own seat. “Maybe he’s calling for help.”
“Talia, if Shadowman is trying to contact someone, why not me? I’ve dedicated myself, my life, to discovering…What? Why are you making that face?”
She relaxed her look of skepticism. “I doubt you’d readily welcome or respond to subliminal messages. You’re just not the type.”
“You know my type?” This ought to be interesting.
She stuck a strand of white gold behind her ear. The lock slipped out and curled again at her temple.
“Most of the images I’ve been able to find are by artists. You know, people particularly attuned to inspiration. You’re more of a manager. A leader. You’re not”—she waved her hand in the air as if looking for just the right word—“open enough.”
“Not open,” he repeated, processing this. Right now he was open to a lot of interesting ideas.
“Not impulsive,” she corrected, peering at her screen.
“I can be impulsive,” he said. He glanced at her mouth. He’d been pushed just about as far as any reasonable man could.
Ah, shit. Here he was going to warn Spencer off pursuing her, and he was ready—to what? Drive her away completely?
“What else have you got?” he asked to distract himself. He had to do something with his hands or he was going to touch her. He reached out, grabbed the laptop, and flicked to another image.
“No!”
But Talia was too late. A vibrant illustration filled the screen.
The graphic artist depicted a nude bombshell beauty reclining on a sumptuous divan, white-blonde curls cascading, mingling with a dark, multilayered cloak that spilled from her shoulders to the floor. Her heavy-lidded, tilted eyes regarded the viewer. She was somnambulant, sexual, and powerful. The woman’s facial features were unmistakably Talia’s. The provocative slope of her bare hips, the dip of her waist, the sudden swell of her breasts, branded his mind and scalded his blood.