The demon seems to be listening for my movement as I sidestep to block the door. I hold fast to my power; it stings under my skin, beginning to burn, but not as much as it should. I need to focus it. I want it to be as strong as it can be. I can’t be weak. Not now.
I start to reach for my dagger, but before I can pull it free, the creature springs forward, coming at me, swiping a claw at my center. It rips off my amulet, leaving two long slashes down my chest to join the ones I got from the wraith. My shirt and my bandages tear. My whole body burns with the pain of new wounds.
I curl in on myself, stumbling to the floor, and scramble away as my feeble power flickers back to almost nothing, still too weak. The raven demon rumbles its low chuckle again and prowls down the arm of the couch, to the floor, and then perches on the edge of the desk.
I wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t ready. But I pull out my dagger anyway and begin the words, “The light of Elohim surrounds me—”
It interrupts me with a clacking of its teeth. “No, no. You don’t believe these things. These words are empty in your mouth, fleshy boy. Your bones are faithless.” It looks right at me, seeing me now with my amulet across the room. “So faithless and weak.” Its bulging eyes turn from black to silver as it keys in on me and smiles.
Then it springs again.
I scramble to the left, slashing at it with my blade, but it lands on my side, front talons digging deep into my arms, holding them tight. The back claws sink into my waist, piercing through my gut.
A scream rips from my chest.
The creature yanks with its hind claws, tearing me open.
“Die, fleshy. Pour your blood out for me.”
My body convulses. Every limb aches, weakening, making it too much to even hold my dagger as the blood spills out with each waning beat of my heart.
The demon keeps babbling as everything blurs from the shock of what’s happening. “Master Hunger brought me through the door when the earth shook. Master needs you out of the way, needs you with the worms where you belong, and he gives me the honors. He is here, yes. Helped me make my way from Sheol, calling me through. He tells me your fleshy flesh is mine if I want it.” It grins with its misshaped lips and hisses through its sharp teeth.
Oh, God, the demon Hunger? Could that horrifying beast somehow have found its way back from wherever Ava sent it? If that’s true, then it won’t just be searching for me—
Rebecca.
“No,” I say as the fire rises again inside me. My useless dagger hand sparks to life, my mark flickering through my torn shirt on my chest.
The demon spots the golden river rolling over my skin.
It screeches and releases me, flying backward through the air, landing on the arm of the couch. Then its scream turns into a mew as it shrinks down like it’s trying to look smaller. “It’s all right, boy of earth,” it says in a sly tone. “Calm your fire. You will meet your filthy god soon.”
I try to lift my head, to move, but my muscles are made of lead. “The love, the light of Elohim enfolds me,” I whisper. “He enfolds me.” I manage to get a tighter grip on my dagger hilt. “He enfolds me . . . His light enfolds me.”
The demon sneers down at me from its perch on the couch, looking disgusted. “Pathetic creatures. The filth of Grace may enfold you, but you will still watch me eat your heart.” And then its face begins to shift, its violet mouth elongating, hardening into a foot-long razor sharp black beak. And it’s horrifying.
My power surges in my torn gut and my heavy limbs react, moving me as far away as I can go. My body shakes, my blood slicking everything around me. I press my back into the one-way glass, feeling cold, so cold. The damp tatters of my bloody shirt chill my skin. My power grows, and the light roiling over my arm brightens. I feel my broken body begin to heal, one molecule weaving back together at a time.
But it’s too slow for the damage to be undone.
The lights of the dance floor pulse behind me through the glass, sending blues and purples over the oily feathers on the demon’s shoulders as it slinks closer, seemingly unafraid of my dagger or my power now. It’s almost beautiful in its size and shape, man and bird and beast, magical and petrifying.
And then it’s over me, looking sideways at my blade. It screeches at me, the light from my power reflecting in its eyes.
In a rush of air it lunges, razor beak slicing deep into my lower torso before I can defend myself.
No pain comes. No shock. I am numb. Cold.
My arm rises up. And I slide my blade into the demon’s neck, slow and deliberate.
Before it can pull away, I yank down, releasing a river of black.
The beak opens, its dark tongue flicking out as I manage another gouge right at the base of the jaw, locking its mouth open in a silent gape with the tip of my dagger.
“The love of Elohim enfolds me,” I gasp as my power surges into the body of the creature. When I see the black eyes fill with my fire, I pull my dagger free.
The light flickers inside its open beak, and screeches rise as its body bursts to flames. Then it crumples in on itself, becoming ash and dust.
I stare at the dark pile. Even turning it to ash doesn’t seem like enough. It killed Hanna.
Hanna.
The weight of exhaustion and sorrow falls over me in a rush. My head tips back against the cool glass. The vibrations of the music on the other side enter my skin, a pulse so much faster than my slowing heartbeat. I look down at my torso and don’t know how to digest what I’m seeing. My shirt is in tatters—or is that my skin hanging there? I can’t tell one from the other with all the blood; everything is shiny and crimson. Except for a spot of white. A bone—that’s a rib, bare of flesh.
The pressure, pain, and grief mount as if my chest is holding in a storm. I cough, sputtering red.
And more. And again.
I’m not healing at all. The broken pieces of me are too far gone.
My limbs won’t move. The air around me thickens, becomes impossible to get into my lungs. I failed Hanna. How could I have made such a horrible miscalculation? She’s gone now—truly gone. And I’m swiftly following after her. My mother—I’ll see my mother now. I’ll chase her in the sand, my steps too small to catch up, but I’ll run faster, and she’ll be up ahead, waiting for me patiently.
Somehow, with my last breath, I manage to call out to her.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Aidan
I open my eyes to a frozen world. I’m looking through glass, down at a crowd of people on a dance floor below me. People are caught in their movement like statues, as if someone hit the pause button. Then I shift my gaze and see it. My body, to my right. It’s sitting on the carpet, leaning against the glass. My neck is limp, head tipped to the side. Blood smears my neck, my face . . . everything seems to be painted in red. It leaks from my lips, shimmers on my torn belly, and pools under me, creating a crimson mirror.
I look around for Eric, but somehow my spirit knows I’m not here to chat with anyone. I’m not here to be warned or instructed. This is nothing like that. I look up at the ceiling and realize the building has no roof. Above me is a huge expanse of the sky, scattered with more stars than I can ever remember seeing over the City of Angels. I watch them gleam as a blue-green light appears in a slow, steady bleed across the sky. Part of me wants to follow its path, to reach out and touch the light, feel its warmth.
But something tugs at me, holds me here, something at my feet.
My attention wanders back to my torn and broken body. And I remember I’m dead. Very. Dead.
But . . . this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I’m not destined to be killed by some demon in the club. After everything. How can it end here? It can’t.
My cold, torn flesh seems to disagree.
I forget the sky and move closer to my mangled body. The air around me is like a living thing, pushing me back, pressing in on me from all sides. But I ignore its insistence, needing to understand.
“Who are y
ou?” a soft, curious voice asks from behind me.
I turn and see a young woman standing on the other side of the couch. Her form is pale; I can almost make out the bookshelves on the opposite wall through her body. A ghost?
“I’m Aidan,” I say, not sure why the sight of her isn’t bothering me.
And then I realize where she’s standing: the same place the body was, the body that the demon was eating. Hanna. Wasn’t that Hanna?
I move around the couch and look down.
The young woman’s gaze follows mine. “Who’s that?” she asks.
It’s not Hanna. The body isn’t Hanna’s. Relief fills me in a rush, but then realization quickly follows in a bitter wave as I look down on what remains of this other young woman, her brown hair tied in a bun, face untouched and perfect, while her work uniform is torn apart just like her body.
“That’s you,” I say numbly.
She blinks down at herself, then over at my dead body. “And that’s you?” she asks, like a child might.
An emotion pricks inside of me for just a second: frustration. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
With a sigh, she says, “No.”
“No,” I echo. And then the anger trickles in, beginning to wash away the numbness. Slow at first, but soon a swell of it floods me. It’s not just anger, though—it’s more than that. It’s as if my power is sparking back to life a little, stirring in my insides that I no longer own. My body calls me back.
You will touch death with fire and bring it into life once more the journal said. You will touch death with fire and bring it into life once more. What you will awaken shall usher in the world’s end. The Cycle of Darkness has begun.
“No,” I say again. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. And we’re not going to let it.”
She gives me a look of surprise. “We’re not?”
“What’s your name?” I ask, letting my soul be led.
“Miranda,” she says, but it’s almost a question, like she’s not sure.
“I need you to trust me, Miranda.”
You will touch death with fire and bring it into life once more.
She nods slowly, her translucent form solidifying a little more. “All right.”
What is death? What do I touch? My eyes travel to her ravaged body . . . bring it into life once more. I kneel beside the shell of what once was a woman: Miranda. Something stirs in me as I get closer, it moves through my bones like a whisper, and when I reach out I see the mark on my hand, dark against my ghostly skin. The mark moves over my arm. It curls and uncurls, over and over, and when I make contact with Miranda’s dead body, my fingers grazing the blood-speckled skin, a part of the mark slides away, onto the lifeless arm, transferring from me to her.
“I can hear it,” she says. “Someone’s saying my name. Someone’s calling me.” She tips her head, listening. And then she flickers and disappears.
I turn and look down on her mangled body.
But it’s not mangled anymore. And all the blood is gone. Her clothes are still torn and her skin is pale, but the gouges and tears are all healed. She’s no longer a mutilated corpse, but she still appears to be a corpse.
Maybe it didn’t really work? Not all the way. I look at my ghost arm and see that the line on my mark that went onto her skin is still missing.
And then I see where it went, onto her soul. It’s wrapped around her bicep, just above her elbow, delicate and barely noticeable.
What does it mean? Did a part of my power go into her? And if it did, does that mean that I have less?
What am I thinking? It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m dead.
I stand and walk back to my own body, feeling alone now in this silent world. I lift my eyes back to the stars overhead and wonder what the hell God’s thinking. “Really?” I ask the blue-green light still flowing across the expansive sky. “What do you want from me, then? What’s all this about?”
The light seems to brighten in answer. And then it moves closer, pulsing like a heartbeat. Closer. Closer. So large it fills my vision, blinding me. The heat of it begins to sting my skin, warmer and warmer. It fills every piece of me, overwhelming everything else. Until I’m branded by it, seared.
Sealed.
Then the heat seeps away, the light gone, and all I see is darkness.
Someone’s saying my name far away, calling me in a frantic voice. I turn to see who it is, but I’m suddenly made of stone. My muscles protest and my chest burns. I can’t breathe.
“Aidan!” a male voice says, worried. “Are you sure that’s his name?”
“Yes—I mean, I think so.” That voice is familiar, female. I heard it a long time ago, when I was dead.
The man speaks again, a deep, gravely voice. “I thought he was here to talk to Hanna. Where is she?”
“She got a phone call and stepped out the side door a few minutes ago. I was just waiting for her when . . . gosh, I don’t remember.”
I crack open my eyes. A hand grips my arm, the smell of relief and panic mingling in the room, creating a bittersweet cocktail of emotions.
“Hey!” the male voice says, giving my arm a shake. “What happened? Did you pass out, kid?”
“I told you we didn’t need to call 911,” the young woman says.
I open my lead eyelids wider, wide enough to see a blur of black suit and brown hair.
“How’d you both get your clothes all torn to pieces?” the man asks, sounding dubious. “Did you do that to each other?”
“No! Jeez, Frank! I think I’d remember that.”
Frank comes into view first, his face hovering over mine. “Well, maybe you hit your head and don’t remember.” He’s so close I notice a twisted scar just under his left eye.
“Don’t be a dope.” The woman comes into view next. I see that it’s Miranda, the dead girl, holding her white uniform shirt closed with her fist. There’s no blood on her at all. Not one drop.
I manage to move my head and look down at my own tattered torso. But there’s no blood, no lacerations, no claw marks left from the wraith’s attack earlier, not even the impossible hole from the demon’s beak. There’s nothing but thick white scars to prove that anything happened at all.
The only thing in tatters now is my blue T-shirt.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aidan
Frank has asked me what feels like two hundred questions, and he still won’t let me leave to find Rebecca and Connor. I barely hear him over the words thundering in my head.
Dead.
I was dead.
And where’s Hanna? Miranda said she’d stepped out to take a call, but where did she go? I need to be sure she’s okay.
Instead of Hanna, it was this woman, Miranda, who was dead. But now she’s not. She’s fine. Because I brought her back? My God, that’s just . . . that’s crazy. But . . . if it’s true that I resurrected the Biblical prophet Daniel from bones and dust, if I could do that, it makes a crazy sort of sense that I could bring back someone who’d just been dead a few minutes.
The under-passages in Eric’s journal still ring in my ears: You will touch death with fire and bring it into life once more. What you will awaken shall usher in the world’s end.
I stare up at Miranda as Frank asks his questions. My mark is still there, on her arm, just like it was when I watched it slide its way from my soul onto hers. Clearly, though, she can’t see it, and doesn’t remember anything that happened. Thank God.
I look down at my own mark and see the piece is still missing. I can only assume I gave her some of my power in the resurrection. I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Frank finally lets me go, despite the fact that Miranda and I can’t give any good answers. As I make my way to the car, I pull out my cell and I punch in Hanna’s number. I listen to the rings, praying, “Please pick up. Be okay, please be—”
“Hello, Aidan? Are you here yet?”
I release the breath I was holding. “You’re okay?”
&
nbsp; She pauses. “Yes, why?”
“Where are you? I went up to your office and you weren’t there.”
“I’m fine, Aidan.” She pauses again and I hear a male voice say something.
“Who is that you’re talking to?” I ask.
“It’s Eric.”
“I need to speak to him,” I say, a second wave of relief passing through me. He must’ve listened to me and reconnected with her. Which is crazy. But I’m so glad he did.
“He says he’ll call you,” she says. “Are you all right?”
No. “Yeah, I guess. Tell him I really need to talk.” I decide not to push, to just take the win: Hanna’s safe, she’s with Eric, and I can ask my million questions when I don’t feel like I’ve been torn to bloody bits and then taped back together. Which I guess I sort of was.
“What took you so long?” Connor asks when I slide into the backseat of the Camaro.
Rebecca turns around in her seat, her eyes squinting to focus on me. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I mutter. I stole someone’s shirt from the break room, so it’s not like she’s looking at my tattered one. Second shirt ruined in two days.
“I know there’s something,” she says. “You’re . . . different.”
I sigh, really not aware enough to explain. “Listen, I’m still processing. I’m all right, though, okay?”
She seems to be considering whether or not to push more. “Okay,” she says, quietly.
Connor starts the car and heads out onto the main road.
After we drive for a while in silence, it comes back at me in a burst of memory. “Hunger!” I say the name louder than I’d meant it to. How could I have almost forgotten?
Rebecca looks at me and asks with a frown, “You’re hungry?”
I grip my retrieved amulet in my fist. I’m relieved to see she’s wearing hers, too. “Hunger, the demon. The one that was after you before. It may be back.”
Darkness Fair (The Dark Cycle Book 2) Page 16
