The Book of Broken Creatures: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 1)

by A L Hart

  Shame and anger with myself burned through my chest. “I’m . . . I’m not strong enough to stop what’s inside of me. Whatever it is. It’s starving and it’s appetite is larger than my control. It wants to consume him—all of him.”

  “Hungry?” she cooed, her hand gentling in my hair, then running through it. Almost as though she were—petting me.

  Why did I lean into it?

  Her eyes bore into mine intensely. Like she was seeing straight through me and looking right at it. “How hungry?” she continued.

  “Very,” I said on a nervous swallow.

  “For dark energy, yes?”

  My nod was shallow.

  “Hmm,” she hummed and then her mouth was at my neck, the flick of her tongue nearly sending me crashing into the boy’s unconscious body were it not for the vice grip she suddenly maintained of my hair. “You dabble in ponds when there are pools right in front of you.”

  “I . . .”

  The flick of her tongue was replaced by fangs, staying me. And then, just as a powerful tremble rocked through me, a heat began to roll into me steadily. Tendrils of fire slipping down my neck, through my lungs, and straight into my core.

  My stomach clamped down painfully, a shocked sound falling from my lips.

  Inside of me, that dark ball of energy gaped open wide—then snared close. Then opened, then closed. Absolutely demolishing the heat she poured with a ravenous hunger that’d been hiding before now. The vines then acted on their own, the dark energy climbing up from me, following that trail of heat with apostle-like devotion, aching, begging for more and I wasn’t aware I’d abandoned the boy’s body to clutch Jera—all but dragging her over the desk—until she ripped away from me, gray slates dripping with need as she regarded me.

  I only barely contained a growl of rage. At having her taken away from me. Having that taken away from me. Such a fiery, golden liquid, pouring into that dark nebulous centered within me. For the briefest eternity, I’d encountered paradise. That void inside of me had been blinded by the fire’s light and filled with a substance so rich and decadent, nothing would ever rival it.

  I needed more of it.

  I needed all of it.

  Rosebud lips curled. “Save the boy, Peter, and you can have it.”

  The nebulous shifted, then curdled so hard on itself my abdomen constricted in a cramp. Searching for more, decomposing and dying without it. That void was deepening more now, expanding wider, longer, and developing an acquired appetite.

  Tongue dry, body trembling, my hands clenched and unclenched as those vines of dark energy traveled to them, urging me to forsake this absurd quest to play hero. Just go to Jera.

  She was mine.

  And what value did she have over this human child?

  What did she care whether it prevailed or withered to nothing like all mortals were destined. Their fates strung up since the moment their pathetic makers bred and conceived just another wretched soul amongst an ocean of many, when we—when I could have so much more in this moment. Now. That female’s lips against mine would create a bliss worth far more than the insignificant life splayed out before me.

  In fact, all I had to do was reach down and inject my energy into this vessel, wipe him clean from this world and render the demon’s ultimatum—

  “The boy dies, you receive nothing,” Jera interrupted.

  A dark fog lifted in my head.

  Those thoughts . . . they weren’t mine.

  Atop the table, I watched Ethan breathe. I was overcome with a powerful urge to sustain those breaths, to see that his eyes opened and he and Danny had many, many years ahead with one another. So contradictory to the previous thoughts, so . . . disgusting.

  “Go on, Peter.”

  I cast Jera one more look, pushing down the dour, sickly thoughts of before and working to clear my mind again before projecting it onto the boy, sending one vine of dark energy in after him.

  Together the two of us ventured back towards the border of that fuchsia cluster and the deadly pearl.

  The vine paused when I did.

  I signalled it leftward. It obliged. Rightward. Complacent.

  Total control. Or temporary obedience.

  There was no time to ponder and question it. I sent it into the fray—wincing on habit—but it merely latched onto one of Ethan’s ribbons as though joining hands with an old friend. No splatter. No imminent consumption. Simple hand holding.

  I let out a harsh breath, chest deflating in relief.

  Jera noted it, pressing, “Find the light energy first.”

  “Already did,” I whispered, having forgotten to say so before.

  “Good. Separate it from the dark energy—gently.”

  At that, I stiffened but got the message loud and clear. Don’t sever a thread of light energy unless I wanted to sever the boy’s lifeline.

  Still baffled and expecting my own dark energy to turn on me at any moment, I steadily moved the vine down the boy’s ribbon of dark energy to the base of its shaft, where it twisted in heavy knots with those bands of joy, happiness and perennial warmth.

  Finding one loose opening in the knot was a task and a half. Slipping the vine into the structure took a level of concentration I’d never pushed myself to, but when a loop of the knot finally gave, the relief to pour through me was enough to renew my efforts tenfold.

  I worked like that for hours.

  And would have done hours more had the boy’s body not jerked beneath me.

  I froze mid-disentanglement on what must have been my sixth knot amongst thousands of them.

  “Stop for now,” Jera instructed.

  I did so instantly, curling and weaving the vine, urging it back inside of me. It obeyed without question, returning to the ball at the pit of my stomach where it was suspiciously silent.

  I opened my eyes.

  “His brain must have been thriving on the dark energy long enough for it to become reliant upon it, whereas before it functioned solely under light energy. Separating the two too quickly could cause someone his age to go into shock as children do tend to be more fragile.”

  I nodded, understanding loosely.

  Ethan looked the same, face still pasty, lips blue, but his erratic, shallow breaths had evened out at some point into more reassuring, deep breaths.

  There it was. A chance of saving him all rolled out. A light at the end of the tunnel when before I’d been sure it was inevitable blackness ahead.

  I looked to Jera then and smiled. A real, awed smile that swelled that sensation inside my chest into what felt like thousands of bright lights and a basin overflowing with joy. I wanted to preserve it, to never let it end.

  Jera blinked at it, appearing confused for a moment when the corners of her mouth twitched, threatening to return the smile, just before Danny’s pounding seemed to claim both our gazes.

  With an exuberant chuff, the woman prowled up to the door and threw it open.

  Danny crashed straight to the floor but was upright in the next instant, eyes wild and drinking in everything at once. He was at his brother’s side in a flash, looking over him silently, his breath held. When all checked out in his book, his shoulders lowered as he exhaled his relief.

  Then glowered over at Jera who flashed a small hiss of fangs at him.

  I was waiting for him to recoil or shoot accusations of ‘witch’ at her, but he only huffed and turned to me. “Is he better now, boss?”

  The question seemed to stab fatigue into my very marrow. I stumbled, leaning against the wall as lethargy crashed over me, calling me down to sleep. Danny’s face swerved in and out of focus.

  It was similar to the day I’d first trained with Ophelia behind Jera’s back. The next day I’d had a grueling migraine—which I’d attributed to the pain Jera had afflicted following the disaster—but now I knew this was what it felt like to be drained.

  The long window revealed the dark early morning, the clock on the wall reading 4:31.

  “Boss?”
Danny neared.

  Jera stopped him. “He needs to rest, just as your brother needs to rest.” When concern flickered across his gaze, she shut down the boy’s spurt of anxiety before it took form. “Ethan is better, but he is not completely healed. It will take time. For now, you and your rag dog need to give Peter space.”

  When she flicked her hand at him, he collected the dark smudge of fur from the door, taking the dog to sit in the chair behind the desk. He scooted up to his brother until they were just an inch apart. There, he placed the dog on desk space beside Ethan and instantly it curled up against the boy’s leg, Danny leaning forward near his stomach, his hand closing around his brother’s.

  I left them then, but didn’t go far.

  Just past the threshold, I slid down the wall and sat staring straight ahead. Unlike before, I couldn’t sleep. Not through this.

  Instead, I stared at the wall in perpetual fear.

  Of what I was.

  And what I could be.

  Ch. 27

  I sat there long enough for the sun to reach through cracks in the tarp draping the lounge’s windows and fall over me. Long enough for the light in the office to stretch the door’s shadow out into the hall where I leaned, touching my knee just barely. I sat there and I stared and I wondered.

  Wondered things I had no business wondering but was so deeply consumed by that I couldn’t sleep no matter how much I desired to.

  Jera joined me eventually, the smell of my shampoo—which was gradually becoming the smell of her—hitting me before her presence did.

  My brows rose when she sat beside me, arms wrapped around her knees. She trained her eyes to the unremarkable wall I watched. After a bid of silence, she said, “He’s asleep.”

  My mouth opened. Had that been what she was waiting for? If so, I refrained from asking myself where the real Jera was, the one that would sooner drug his drink to get him to shut up and sleep rather than wait beside him. I couldn’t fathom it, but I also didn’t have the strength to search for any ulterior motives.

  “Thank y—” I stopped myself. “Thank goodness,” I said instead. I couldn’t figure out this demon’s game. Had she shown concern towards Ethan simply to keep me functional for her own gain or was there something more? Either way, it warranted a show of gratitude, but in the event she’d done it unknowingly, I didn’t want to risk having her revert to cold apathy.

  I didn’t want to do this alone.

  I leaned my head back against the wall. “Light energy . . .” I started slowly. “Can I—”

  “You can touch it, you can rearrange it, but you can’t handle it the way you can dark energy. You can’t heal an average, mundane illness.”

  “Why?” I asked, hoping the edge to my voice came across as ire towards my inability rather than her ease of guessing my train of thought.

  “Because most human illnesses have little to do with their light energy.”

  “Are there humans in your world?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could you possibly know so much about us.”

  “I’ve been here for years.”

  “How many?”

  “Enough to learn what I needed to.”

  “Ophelia said you both came to my world and paid the succubus’ price to find me.” I turned towards her. “Had you stayed in your world, you could have kissed whoever you wanted, slept with any man and not have been bound to them. But instead you came here.”

  “Are you blaming our predicament on me?” she asked but there was no malice.

  I shook my head. “When was it this world became infected with dark energy?”

  “Dark energy has seeped into this world for hundreds of centuries. It didn’t begin affecting humans until five years ago—and before you ask, I do not know why.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask that,” I said with a half smile. “I was going to say, if what you’re telling me is true, then I couldn’t have been infected with dark energy anything more than five years ago. Which means you couldn’t have come here more than five years ago, and it’s to my understanding you all spent that time searching for me, which is arguably not long enough to learn the intimate workings of us lowly humans.”

  Her small grin may have held an iota of admiration at my thoroughness, but it was quickly covered by a shrug. “Some learn faster than others.”

  “Or—you came here before five years ago. Long before.”

  Another shrug. “It’s possible.”

  The obscurity scathed. If they’d come long before the dark energy altered humans, then had their objective still been to find me? If so, what could I possibly have been useful for as just another ordinary human?

  “But you’re leaving out a third option,” she murmured.

  I looked at her curiously.

  “We came for you, yes. But not you.”

  Understanding hit. “The Maker.” Understanding vanished. “Ophelia said he’s dead.”

  “Assumption, nothing more. All traces of him perished from our world. For a time, we’d said good riddance. But then Lia became sick and we’ve been searching for him endlessly since. She assumed he was here. He wasn’t.”

  The first words Ophelia uttered that night in this shop suddenly came to me. “‘He can heal me,’ she’s said,” I murmured. Then, “If she was sick when in your world, having yet come to mine, then what sickness did she have if not the succubus’ price?”

  My thoughts doubled back to that ghastly presence lurking behind Ophelia’s heart, but Jera said, “It’s what she is. The dark energy she expels, her gift itself, over the centuries, it’d begun to grow, and due to the Maker having subdued the full extent of her powers, the accumulating energy began to defect. Tearing her apart from the inside out.”

  I am Death.

  We are Damnation.

  This is Torment.

  The hollow voice of death incarnate sent a harrowing shiver throughout all of me. That thing inside of her, whatever it was, had that been what was destroying Ophelia?

  If so, it didn’t make any sense. When I’d tried to rewire Ophelia and allow her to move at her full potential, it’d cast me out, as if it didn’t want to be free.

  “Is it possible . . .” I started. “Is it possible for dark energy to be sentient? To have a mind of its own?”

  She glanced up at me from under those curls, studying me a moment. “No,” she said. “It shouldn’t be.”

  I frowned, searching inside myself for my own dark energy. I’d swear the thing was staring Jera down with drool dripping from its vaguely configured, malformed mouth. Seemed sentient to me.

  “Why do you ask?” she ventured.

  Before I could explain, Danny’s voice suddenly drifted out into the hall.

  “Tathri is waiting right here for you, Ethan. Me and him.” The words were that of a sleep-deprived child, coated in naivety and endearing optimism. “You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

  So long as I could help it, I wouldn’t make a liar out of him.

  “Last night,” I murmured quietly. “How did you find me?”

  “Bond.”

  I scrunched my nose. I didn’t understand this moment we were having. Why it felt surreal, like a faux calm, truce. Jera wouldn’t have wanted me to say it—even think it—but it felt entirely like a predisposed orchestration of rightness. As though all the chips were falling into place on a grander puzzle and she and I, sitting side by side, working together, this was how it should have been.

  Or maybe it was all wishful thinking.

  “When I spoke with Vincent, he told me of a faery in Wichita who might be of help to us if our plan failed.”

  Jera glanced my way before returning that ruminative gaze back to the wall. “And?”

  I sighed. “And I know my first plan wasn’t exactly the best plan—”

  “Arguably the worst.”

  “—but Vincent seemed convinced this woman was a straight shot at success. We don’t really have the option to be patient and garner a
llies while they’re doing who knows what to Ophelia. So unless you have friends I don’t know about . . .” But I knew she didn’t. Otherwise she’d have chosen to take up residence with them rather than an untrained hybrid human.

  She was quiet.

  “Look, I know I messed up once, but this faery could prove helpful.”

  “No faery offers their aid without a price. Especially not to a demon.”

  I figured as much. “Whatever the price, I’ll pay it.” I had too many others counting on me not to.

  She studied me openly and when her eyes fell on my mouth, her lids lowered to half-moons. “Why are humans so foolish,” she murmured to herself in silken threads. “So emotionally present, logically absent.”

  “Should I take that as a yes, we’ll try?”

  “Mm,” she said. “I suppose it is notably safer and more reasonable than my own plan.”

  “Which was what?” I probably didn’t want to know.

  “Sell your blood for arms.”

  Called it.

  “You’re insane. Who would want my blood?”

  “For starters, likely the faery we are to speak with. An immortal’s blood contains various euphoric emotions across the scale, depending on the mood of the vessel when it’s extracted. Most fae have tasted all extractions across the market. But a human tainted with dark energy and granted the Maker’s gift? They would kill for just a taste.”

  I blinked. “No one’s tried to take any yet.”

  “Your town is pathetically under-populated. The local immortals are all either inebriated in one way or another, thus requesting foolish things such as getting rid of their cysts when immortals can’t even get cysts.” I remembered that phone call. “And then the immortals who happen to have their wits about them enough to know that if they exploit you, reveal you to the wrong contenders, you’re as good as dead when they finish fighting over you, thus they profit in no way. Prime example, Elise and Vincent.”

  “They’ve done so much for us,” I countered. “And are about to give us information that’ll help us get Ophelia back. I highly doubt they’re like the immortals you’re talking about.”