“You have something that the Black Fever also has,” Amane explained. “A single particle present in your bloodstream. We’re not sure what it does or why you have it. We’d need to study it further, but we do know it’s likely death magic. It took me a while to remember where I’d seen something like this before.”
Amal nodded slowly. “On Thieron. This might mean mazir is somehow derived from death magic.”
Derek let a deep sigh leave his chest. We’d been doing a lot of that lately. “Then death magic is definitely involved in the propagation of Black Fever,” he concluded.
“And I’m somehow connected to it?” Valaine asked, looking at each of us with a mixture of anguish and hope. Maybe we’d tell her differently. But we couldn’t. We were all on the same blasted page.
“Maybe the Darklings know more about this,” I said. “About a connection between you and the Black Fever. Maybe it has to do with this element, and they don’t have all the facts, just this blind conviction that if they kill you, they stop it.”
“It’s been going on for so long. I’m not even that old…”
“Valaine, don’t despair yet,” Amal said. “Let us study your blood for a few more days. My sister and I can splice your DNA and get to the bottom of it. We just need more time.”
“We have to verify the Darklings’ assertions about you,” Amane added. “And if what they say turns out to be true, then we’ll just work together to put an end to it, okay?”
“What if they’re right, and you have to kill me? I’m not ready to die,” Valaine mumbled, shaking like a leaf.
It broke me to see her like this. Kneeling before her, I covered her hands in her lap with mine. “No one’s dying over this. Not anymore,” I said. “We’re better than this. If we were able to figure out a way to stop an elemental apocalypse, I’m certain we can figure out a way to save you, as well, and without any more Aeternae dying in the process.”
Tears glazed her eyes, but she didn’t let them flow. Taking a deep breath, she got up and pulled her hair back into a bun, then gave Amal and Amane a soft smile.
“You’re right. You need time. Please, continue your study,” Valaine said. “In the meantime, Tristan and I will go to the Visentis mansion and catch up with Kalon and Esme.”
“That’s a good idea,” I replied, eager to do whatever possible to get her mind off this unpleasant and confusing new revelation. “I need to speak to my sister, anyway. She had suspicions about Kalon being involved with the Darklings, but we got cut off. I’ve tried reaching out to her earlier, but I can’t get through. I’m worried.”
“Tristan, I still stand by what I said. Kalon wouldn’t hurt Esme,” Valaine murmured.
Our interrupted conversation earlier was still nagging me, along with an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach. What if something had gone wrong?
Derek nodded his agreement. “Okay. You two head out and find out what’s going on with Esme, but try to get some rest before tomorrow. It’s been a long journey, and I need you both to be sharp and safe,” he said. “Let us know about your sister and if you need our help, Tristan.”
I appreciated how Derek spoke to Valaine. It was as if she was already a part of our team. It seemed to make her feel good, as well, as she smiled and nodded enthusiastically. I wasn’t sure how we’d be able to help her if there really was a strong connection between her and the Black Fever, but I was certain I wouldn’t let anyone hurt Valaine—let alone kill her. No, that was out of the question.
Esme
Atlas the ghoul looked awfully hungry whenever he looked at me. Petra said he wouldn’t harm me, but how certain was she? I quivered at the mere sight of this thing. I didn’t even want to imagine what he might do.
Kalon pulled me closer, nervously eyeing his mother and brothers. Pain emanated from him like pure heat, and I couldn’t blame him. His little brothers were Darklings. Children who’d been indoctrinated with their beliefs. Innocent souls who had no true understanding of what they were participating in.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Kalon muttered.
Petra smirked. “It will be easy if Esme just agrees to do as she’s told.”
Veliko grunted from under her heel, but Petra applied more pressure, making him choke. She retrieved a key from his chest pocket. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” she muttered. I didn’t see a fair ending in sight for him, though I felt no sympathy for his impending demise.
Atlas towered behind us. He reached out to grab me, and I slashed at him with my claws before jumping back against the wall. Kalon didn’t take him on directly. Instead he grabbed one of the fallen scythes and came after the creature with the Reaper blade.
Petra screamed, “Kalon, no! You don’t know what Atlas is capable of!”
Growling upon hearing his name, the ghoul stopped right in front of me, glancing over his bulging shoulder. He caught Kalon by the head, his huge hand and lanky fingers large enough to wrap around it easily.
“Atlas, no!” Petra commanded him. “You cannot hurt my son!”
“Figured you’d say that,” came Kalon’s muffled voice. “Esme, catch!”
He tossed the scythe my way, and I caught it. A split second later, I used it to slice off Atlas’s other hand. I didn’t have any death magic knowledge, but the scythe could still serve as a basic weapon. The creature screamed in agony and immediately dropped Kalon.
Atlas gripped his left stump, ashes puffing out of where his hand used to be, his distorted face even uglier as he tried to express his physical pain. Kalon snuck around the creature as his brothers bolted toward us.
“Esme, give me the scythe!” Kalon said.
As soon as he reached me, I handed it back to him, my fingers still trembling from the peculiar and persistent chill. Simmon, Aganon, Moore, and Tudyk all lunged at us with their own blades, desperate to capture us.
Veliko managed to squirm out of Petra’s control. He grabbed the nearest fallen scythe from a dead Darkling and used it to cut her Achilles tendon. She cried out in pain, blood gushing from the wound to puddle across the floor.
The Visentis brothers were momentarily distracted, which was perfect. A moment was all we needed. Kalon grabbed my hand and whispered something into his Reaper blade, and we both vanished from the room. We slipped through the wall as matter around us bent and melted. Walls lost their shape. Everything warped as we moved through the world.
I held my breath as Kalon’s arm snuck around my waist, keeping me close. We walked from room to room, passing through every hard surface in our path.
“What the hell?” I managed, shortly before we dipped into the floor and wound up in the reception lobby surrounded by utterly confused and terrified Rimian servants. They must’ve heard the ruckus upstairs, but they didn’t look like they were interested in checking the upper level of the house—not while Petra was still screaming from her injured foot.
“Hold on,” Kalon told me.
He pulled me with him as we ran and jumped through the outer brick wall. We didn’t land outside the mansion, but instead rolled along a battered road, trees rising tall and dark around us. Above, the midnight sky unraveled, clear and beautiful and riddled with stars.
I exhaled sharply, blinking rapidly as I tried to make sense of what had just happened and where we were now.
“Are you okay?” Kalon asked. He scrambled off the ground to help me up.
To say I was dazed would be an understatement. White stars waltzed before my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether they were an illusion or part of the night sky above. The world was slowly, ever so slowly, coming into focus. My head felt light as a feather.
“Kalon, what… what just happened?” I murmured, finally able to look at him without the entire planet spinning beneath me.
“I learned a few tricks from my mother,” he admitted. “She tried to teach me some death magic to woo me to the Darklings’ side after I repeatedly refused. I also eavesdropped on her a few times when she was casting spe
lls. All I needed was to get my hands on a scythe.”
“You knew about death magic, then. Long before I did.” I scoffed, crossing my arms and remembering that I was supposed to be angry with him. After all, I was still discovering the truth with him—the unpleasant truth about how extensive his knowledge really was.
He nodded once. “Yes. But not enough to do much. This whole sliding trick is one of the few things I’m actually able to do properly without getting us both disintegrated.”
“Kalon, seriously?!” I shouted. “This needs to stop! You need to tell me everything! What the hell happened back there?! Your entire family are Darklings?”
“Yes, and I had no idea. I swear to you.”
I started walking up the road toward a clearing ahead. It was pretty wide, and there were lights twinkling across it. I couldn’t see much from this distance, but I figured it had to be a settlement of some kind.
“And y’all had a ghoul in the house? The very first ghoul ever made on Visio? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds? How does one even make a ghoul? How did they trap him? How did they convince Atlas to forsake his own nature? Oh, God, I have so many questions, and I can’t really trust you to give me a straight answer…”
Kalon caught my arm and pulled me back into a kiss. I felt it rippling through me like warm honey and sunshine. For a moment, I abandoned myself in this temporary bliss, but my ego fought hard to get back to the surface, and I jumped away from him.
“No, no, no!” I said. “You don’t get to kiss your way out of this one, mister!”
He almost smiled but pressed his lips tight and bowed his head in a bid to appease me. “I just want you to understand that my feelings for you are real,” he replied. “I couldn’t think of a better way to get that point across.”
“It’s fine,” I mumbled, touching my lips. The skin was electrified, tickling my fingertips. “I need to get to my brother. I can’t reach out to him via Telluris anymore. You have to take me to him.”
Kalon shook his head. “The city is too dangerous right now. They’ll be looking for us. I need to find us a safe place first, then we can send a message to Tristan.”
“No!” I snapped again. He wasn’t really listening to me. “We just barely escaped from a handful of Darklings and a big-ass murderous ghoul! All of them bearing the last name Visentis. Your last name! My brother and the rest of my team need to know this! They’ll be in danger, Kalon!”
“Dammit, I have my reasons for doing things this way. Can you please have just a little faith in me?”
He was frustrated, but my sense of urgency trumped everything else. I was too pumped up to care about my own personal safety. I started walking down the road, taking my compass out to find the north. The forest wouldn’t last forever, I figured.
“That’s fine. I’ll find my own way back,” I shot back.
“Esme, don’t do this,” Kalon replied.
“Listen, you go hide or whatever. I need to see my brother and keep my people safe.”
I had no idea where this level of snark was coming from, but considering everything I’d just experienced, I decided to go with it. Kalon had sort of already made up for some of the lies by getting me out of the mansion, but I was still stumbling across more things he hadn’t told me. I couldn’t let him off the hook that easily.
“Esme, don’t make me do this.”
“Do what?” I asked, gazing ahead. The north was somewhere to my left.
I heard him whisper something, then felt the cold blade touch the back of my neck. Everything darkened so quickly that I didn’t even realize I was passing out until I felt his arms around my waist. My head lolled back.
The deepest sleep enveloped me, my sense of urgency lingering somewhere in the pitch-black nothing I was sinking into. Oh, Kalon, what did you do now?
Kelara
By the time we reached the third site, a nebulous feeling swirled around me. A premonition telling me that I was barely scratching the surface about what had happened on Cruor. Every terrible event had left its imprint on this place. Every tear, every cry for help, had been woven into the fabric of this barren, mountainous wasteland. It was the same everywhere.
Empty, lonely, cold.
With every search we conducted, more ruins emerged. We’d settled in a valley where stony peaks rose around us, tall and quiet and gray beneath the misty red sky. The wind whistled across the remnants of a village. A forest must’ve once covered this entire area, and the wood nymphs would have lived in houses here.
Soul stayed close, revealing a side of his personality I was still working to understand. The maniac, the creature who had enjoyed mind games throughout his existence… he’d become attached to me. He took care of me, holding me up when I couldn’t stand, guiding me through my visions and this awful experience of digging through the Night Bringer’s memories.
It took some getting used to, but I happened to like this version of the Soul Crusher. “The Soul Mender” would’ve been a more appropriate title, but I didn’t say that out loud. He had a rep to maintain.
“This whole place is drenched in misery,” Morning said, sorrowfully looking around. Phantom and Widow stayed close to her the same way Soul stayed close to me. She needed support, too. She could feel her brother, though not as deeply and as intensely as I could, due to my hypersensitivity to death magic. We’d broken two Beta elements, and we only had three more to go. Of course, the process included a ton of pain and nightmarish memories, but I’d gotten through so far. I couldn’t back out now. The sooner we set the Night Bringer free, the faster we could move on to finding the Unending and speeding up Death’s release.
She was the only authority capable of setting Visio straight.
“He was here,” I replied after a while. “The Night Bringer.”
“We should take a moment, then,” Phantom advised. “To rest, to look around, to find the next Beta element.”
We’d searched a few other places before this one, but they’d yielded nothing more than vague imprints of massacres of the wood nymphs who’d once lived here, long before the Elders. This village, however… it felt right.
Widow and Soul started searching the area, brushing dirt and dust aside, unearthing pieces of stone as they looked for the next engraved object. From what we could tell, the Night Bringer had found the Beta elements after Spirit left him here. He’d possessed surviving wood nymphs to look around, and he’d made them carve his messages into each of the elements, complete with his most troubling and vivid memories.
“You know, Seeley got in touch a few hours ago,” I said. “He’s okay. He’s free. The Darklings had captured him. There’s a whole new level of weird going on over there.”
“That makes our mission all the more important,” Phantom replied.
“Yeah, the faster Death gets free, the faster we’ll be able to neutralize whatever threat Visio poses to our entire species. Plus, apparently Spirit had his fingers in that pie, as well,” I muttered. “Seeley didn’t give me any specific details, but I believe him. The living creatures there use death magic and ghouls.”
Morning sighed deeply. “I’m not surprised. Spirit was one conniving SOB. I never thought him capable of such awful things until he went ahead and did what he did to me.”
“Kelara!” Soul called out. “I think we found something.”
I turned to see that he and Phantom had pulled out a sturdy stone block, each side covered in carved symbols. “Are you sure that’s it?” I asked.
“It feels heavy. Emotionally speaking,” Widow said. “Even I can feel it.”
“Imagine how I’ll experience it,” I muttered, walking over to them.
As soon as I touched the top of the cube, the current blew through me as though lightning itself had turned me into a conduit. I blacked out listening to the sound of my own breathing. I heard Soul’s voice somewhere in the darkness, beckoning me to focus. To follow my instinct, because my instinct would do me no wrong.
My eyes
peeled open, and I was suddenly assaulted by a powerful feeling of despair. I was a wood nymph again—a different one, who was watching her world die in real time. The sky had darkened, the sun swallowed by the reddish mist that had become a staple of Cruor. The trees were dying, their leaves turning gold, then brown, before forming a sad carpet at my feet.
The fruits fell from the orchards, blackened and rotten. Fish washed ashore along the riverside, their pale bellies facing the sky. Everything was dying. Life could no longer be sustained here. There was something in the air, in the ground, in the water. Something angry and toxic, unable to free itself, unable to do anything. Its impotence struck me hard as I felt its presence inside me. The Night Bringer had possessed this wood nymph, and he was seeing it all through her eyes.
I sensed his grief as well as hers.
Nymphs were dying, too. Some from the toxic water. Others from the poisonous fruit. Many were emaciated, barely able to stand. But they struggled to live on. They were determined to survive. My wood nymph toiled away at the stone cube, the urgency of her situation making my own blood boil. The Night Bringer was writing his message using her hands.
A bright white hole tore through the sky, and I froze at the sight of a strange ship emerging, surrounded by lightning and swirls of hot air. Its propellers spun, but not for long. Flames burst from the back, and the ship descended rapidly, leaving behind a trail of black smoke.
I watched it crash in the dying woods nearby. My carving was done, so I felt it was my duty to see who those people were and how they’d come here. The incandescent hole in the sky was closing up—in my mind, I knew what it was, though I did wonder how it had opened in the first place. Who’d opened it all the way up there? The witches had connected the Supernatural Dimension to Earth, but they typically opened up portals at ground level. This event was unusual, to say the least.
Rushing through the woods, I reached the crash site just in time to see a side door burst open. The ship had sunk into the ground, its metal frame bloated and deformed. Smoke rose from multiple fires, but it was the creature who slipped out of the vessel who caught my attention. She was a witch, her rich dark hair adorned with long black feathers. There were puncture marks on her neck and bare shoulders. Her skin was pale, her eyes sunken. She’d been bled nearly dry.
A Shade of Vampire 81: A Bringer of Night Page 20
