Hearts of Darkness

by Kira Brady

  He had to regain control over his body and mind. Control was more necessary to him than oxygen. His whole adult life, since puberty when the Change had first hit him, he’d sought control over the beast inside. Fight the instincts. Fight the moon’s call. Fight the bloodlust and rage.

  He tried breathing deeply, which usually helped center him, but this time Kayla’s scent filled his nostrils, hijacked his brain, and set his skin on fire.

  He swore.

  “Need,” Kayla moaned. “Need more.”

  Her voice was breathy with want. It sent shivers over his skin, hot and cold.

  “I know,” he bit out. He knew what she needed. A dead man would know. Sweat dripped down his back from fighting his body’s instincts, but he couldn’t give in. He didn’t have that much control.

  His small four-room apartment wasn’t much, but it was warm, dry, and safe. Someday, when he was free, he’d go north. Somewhere far away from everyone and everything. Where it’d take a few days’ hike through the snow to catch sight of a neighbor. Build himself a log cabin. Fill it with . . . stuff. Didn’t really matter what, as long as it was new and his.

  The main room of his apartment had a small kitchen and a sitting area with a lumpy, faded armchair. Torn paperbacks, falling apart from use, spilled out of a wooden bookcase against the far wall. The only nice features were two oriental rugs spread over the dark oak floors. They looked the same to him, but he knew one was red and one was green.

  Hart decided to put the girl on the chair, but when he tried to set her down she clung to him. The drug Norgard had given her seemed to have amped up.

  “No,” she groaned. She was no longer catatonic, but she wasn’t lucid either. Her arousal scented the room, heavy and thick, overpowering the smell of the drug. “I need—”

  “Shh.” Hart tried to disentangle her arms from around his neck, but she clung on like a drowning man. “Let go. Kayla, let go.” He was afraid to hurt her. Her name sounded foreign on his tongue, and he tried to recall the last time he had called a woman by name. “Kayla.” He liked that. “Kay-lllah.” It rolled through his mouth and flicked off his tongue.

  She rubbed herself against him. Breasts smashed against his chest. She purred, a deep throaty sound that made all the blood rush to his groin. He’d seen chicks like this before. It wasn’t ecstasy. It was something new and much more powerful. An aphrodisiac on steroids.

  “Need more,” she begged. Rubbed. Writhed.

  Lady be, he wasn’t a saint. It was so tempting. Her heady scent overwhelmed his nostrils until Hart became drunk with it. It wasn’t like he was Norgard—planning to screw her and suck out her soul.

  He just wanted to screw her.

  She tilted her head up and tried to reach his lips. Her pupils were dilated.

  “Hell.” Hart swept her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom.

  Chapter 6

  Sven Norgard spread his thin membranous wings and caught an updraft over Elliott Bay. He left behind the carnival of the city, where a million lights blazed gaudily from every surface. A cheer painted on the city like a cheap trick. Even at this hour, humans buzzed to and fro with their gaggle of technology and gas-guzzling machines. While the power worked, wireless signals created a constant annoying buzz, throwing off his navigation. A mosquito in his ear that he couldn’t shake.

  Humans, bah. Sometimes he wanted to kill them all.

  He flicked his powerful tail and burst through the cloud cover into the ruddy glow of a pregnant moon. He stretched his wings above the clouds and plunged back down into the wet sky below. Ballard perched on the cliff edge like a tottering old man. The small town he’d founded over a hundred years ago with his flock had long since been annexed in Seattle’s hunger, but his people had maintained their old ways. The cafés along Ballard Avenue served pickled herring and lingonberries. The boats of Fisherman’s Terminal unloaded fresh salmon from Alaska daily. Celebrations of Yule and Tivoli turned the town into a colorful mass of Scandinavian flags.

  His lair was built directly into the cliff face overlooking Puget Sound. Giant glass windows were eyes into the earth. He flew through one of the windows into the Great Hall. Landing, his claws gouged furrows in the gold-plated floor. It took but a thought to Turn. Shivers of Aether raced over his skin, peeling back scales like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

  He snapped his fingers and a servant brought him a change of clothes. He dressed in his preferred fashion, blending vintage styles with the technologically advanced fabrics of the modern era. The gold buttons on his tall leather boots glittered in the light from the gas wall sconces. He patted the pocket of his iridescent black waistcoat, where a gold chain secured a sparkling, diamond-encrusted compass. Shiny things. Sparkly things. Precious gems and golden talismans. One could not fight one’s nature.

  And why should he? The top of the food chain was a glorious place to be.

  He twisted the large malachite ring on the third finger of his left hand three times and commanded his servant to appear. An arctic breeze fluttered the tapestries on the walls. He adjusted the iron gears in his monocle. Through his naked eye, he saw a faint orb rippling in the air. Through the monocle, Mr. Nils looked like a portly man in a striped suit and bowler hat. The indistinct lines of his body dissolved and solidified, as if he hadn’t quite decided on the form. Haunting black eyes stared, unblinking, out of a corpse-white face. His slash of a mouth showed no inkling of emotion.

  “Accompany me, Mr. Nils,” Norgard ordered. He strolled down the sloping tunnels to the laboratory on the lowest level. Below it, more tunnels ran into bowels of the earth, some, it was rumored, to the very heart of the Spider’s lair. At the laboratory door, he placed the skeleton key that hung about his neck into the complicated lock. Gears grated on the other side. The lock slid open with a long whine.

  “Come, Mr. Nils,” he said and held open the door. Not that he needed to. Mr. Nils had no need of corporal fripperies.

  On either side of a long aisle, whirring steel monsters belched steam, obscuring the cavernous room. His skin greedily drank the heat of the machines. It was a pity humans weren’t designed to withstand the more agreeable temperatures. A deficit, he mused, he might fix when his current project was complete. Making humans strong enough to carry his offspring was the first order of business. Damned fragile things. Unfortunately, a necessary evil. If only Drekar could mate with their own kind, but one needed a soul to carry life. A human woman could nourish the dragonling in her womb with her own life force; a dragon female couldn’t. Unless, legend had it, that dragon female had found and bound herself to her eternal mate, thereby sharing his soul.

  Romantic drivel, if you asked him.

  Norgard rapped on a nearby boiler.

  “Hullo, little brother!” he called, projecting his voice to be heard over the clanging and whizzing machines. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  A clatter of instruments answered his summons, and a moment later a disembodied face appeared out of the steam. Disorderly dirty-blond hair stuck out over large goggles. A square, stubbled jaw smudged with grease. A prominent nose, like the prow of a longboat.

  “Sven?” the face asked, as if it could be anyone else.

  “The latest batch of serum did not work as desired,” Norgard said. “I am forced to descend into the dungeons to report on your failure.”

  “My apologies.” Leif stepped forward and pushed the goggles to the top of his head. His brilliant green eyes were distant, as if his brain still attended his experiment, rather than focusing on the here and now.

  “It was too strong,” Norgard said.

  “What size dose did you administer?”

  “How should I know? I gave the chit a box of chocolates. I assume she ate them all.”

  Leif rubbed his eyes. “Measuring is important. Precision. I need details. Please describe the response.”

  As always, the detached scientist. Why couldn’t his brother see the bigger picture for once? He ofte
n exploited Leif’s narrow focus to his own ends, but occasionally it became inconvenient. The man was too young, only two hundred compared to Norgard’s fifteen hundred. Leif had an irritable honest streak, unusual in their kind, and needed to be carefully managed.

  “The serum was too strong,” Norgard repeated. “She lost function in her arms and legs. Became incoherent. Almost passed out. I wanted an imitation of love, but the flavor was completely off.”

  The soul of a human in love satisfied like nothing else. It could reach crevices in his cold heart that had never known light. A soul in love was almost too pure to ingest. Almost, but not quite.

  “It’s strange that it’s still too strong. Our metabolisms are so high, I would have thought . . .” Leif muttered to himself.

  Originally the drug had been intended for Drekar. After centuries of soulless wandering, most slowly went insane. Norgard had discovered quickly that the drug was better administered through humans.

  Leif took a deep breath and focused, for once. He looked serious. Norgard felt a trickle of foreboding.

  “I heard about Desiree,” his brother said. “I’m sorry.”

  Desiree. The memory rose, like a puff of steam from one of the nearby machines, only to float, ethereal and untouchable, in the echoing turbines of his mind.

  Mechanically, he examined it. His chest tensed for only a heartbeat, then once again relaxed. He felt nothing, only the familiar sucking darkness in his breast, swirling emptiness that contracted and expanded with the currents of the Gate.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. And it wasn’t.

  Leif frowned. “But—”

  “She has a sister.” Norgard cut him off before he could embarrass them both with some insipid emotional drivel. “If the first Miss Friday was strong enough to conceive my child, the second should be as well.”

  “Ah.” Leif studied the toes of his boots. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “There is only one problem. Desiree died in possession of Kingu’s Stone.”

  “How? When?”

  Norgard shrugged, loath to admit such failure under his watch. “I wore it on a leather thong around my neck. She must have lifted it when I was screwing her that last time.”

  He remembered the girl’s smooth skin, glowing with a sheen of sweat, those little noises she made in the back of her throat when he thrust into her. He remembered her belly growing round with his child. His gut tightened.

  Must be indigestion.

  “I set the werewolf upon its trail once I realized it was missing,” Norgard said.

  “When—”

  “Two days ago.” Norgard refused to think of her. She was nothing, but she dared to steal his child. Dared to steal his treasure. Dared to run from him—he who razed empires. He who raised kings.

  “You set the werewolf on her, and now she’s dead.”

  “His target was the necklace,” Norgard said. He didn’t have to explain himself. He would do the same if the situation repeated itself. “He wouldn’t terminate the suspect before locating his target.”

  “How can you be sure? You know he’s unstable,” Leif said. “What if the Stone falls into the wrong hands? If someone breaks open the Gate with it—”

  “You think I haven’t thought of that? I told him it was only a sentimental trinket. No one knew I had it, but the necklace’s connection to Tiamat will call to any Drekar who finds it.”

  “You think one of our own would open the Gate to gain power.” It was not a question.

  The Drekar were naturally solitary creatures. They disliked Norgard’s rule on principle. The current political bonds, with Norgard as the Regent and all Drekar organized into a clan hierarchy, was necessary to succeed on a crowded earth, but unstable. Any one of their number would jump at the chance to seize power.

  “Free Kingu, and we could return to the glory days when we rode at the head of the Demon Horde. When humans knew their place and dragon-kind ruled the world. When the skies were our domain, and we could fly free with the sun upon our wings. Who of our kind would not want that power?”

  “Not me, thank you.” Leif scrubbed a hand through his messy hair so that it stuck straight up. “I like civilization. You’re talking about Ragnorök. The battle to end the world—”

  “Don’t be dramatic. It wouldn’t be that bad.”

  “Unleashing Kingu and his horde? Of course it would be!”

  “I’ll take care of you, little brother. If you don’t want to see the stone in the wrong hands, then we better find it first.”

  “Lovely.” Leif’s voice showed he thought it was anything but. “And the Raven Lord knows about this?”

  “The Kivati also seek it.”

  “Corbette wouldn’t use it. He’s sworn to protect the humans.”

  “He cares more about secluding his precious Kivati from the evils of the outside world. Since we arrived on this cursed earth, Corbette has sought to destroy us.”

  They stood in silence, contemplating the immensity of the Gate breaking.

  “I suppose,” Leif said, his scientist brain returning to the nitty-gritty of solving the fallout of such a situation, “the Aether problem is more important with the Gate under peril.”

  “Yes.” But Norgard was prepared for the worst. He had food and supplies stockpiled for the coming reign. Clean drinking water and medical supplies would be the currency of the new Dark Age. He had learned centuries ago that the true wealth lay in holding a monopoly on limited nondiscretionary resources. “I need to know that I can control my spirit servants if the Gate falls. I need to know how much power an Aether flare of that magnitude will give wraiths and demons that cross over.”

  “If the Gate falls altogether, that isn’t just a flare. The very makeup of the Aether would change. At the very least, there would be no more electric charge in the land of the living. I don’t have the technology to test something of that scope—”

  “Do your best with what you’ve got. Start with the effect of a flare on Mr. Nils here. He is most eager to be of service.”

  Mr. Nils shimmered in the air in acknowledgment.

  “Fine.” Leif led the way to the back of the laboratory, where a giant engine lurked in the corner. It was the size of a barn and made of burnished brass. Wires fanned out from steel knobs, sparking up to the distant ceiling. On the front side spanned a series of levers and dials, some marked with tape on which was written, in his brother’s distinctive scrawl, Pull me first! and Touch me gently! and PUSH ONLY IN EMERGENCY.

  Leif pulled the goggles back down over his eyes and handed Norgard a matching pair. “Put these on.”

  “But—”

  “It’s not worth the risk,” Leif said. “I’ve never tried it at the highest setting.”

  Norgard took the goggles. They fit over his monocle, but only just.

  “Besides,” said Leif, in a smug younger-brother tone, “I’ve no interest in ruling should anything happen to you.”

  “You’d do a rotten job of it anyway,” Norgard muttered.

  “Too true.” Leif strode to a raised pool of water to the right of the engine. “Mr. Nils, if you please.”

  Without removing his clothing, Mr. Nils climbed into the pool. The water didn’t ripple. He didn’t get wet.

  Leif hummed under his breath as he set about connecting wires from the engine to the pool. One for every direction of the compass, each bristling with energy. He moved to the panel to push buttons and twist knobs. The machine coughed, belched, lurched to life like a mechanical Frankenstein.

  “Brace yourself,” Leif shouted over the noise. With his left hand, he pulled a gold pocket watch out of his lab coat and studied the steadily ticking second hand. When it reached twelve, he yanked a chain dangling over his head. The engine screeched like a stuck pig. Green fire burst from the steel dials, descending down the wires in every direction. It snaked toward the pool where stoic Mr. Nils waited with a gallows-bait expression.

  Norgard plugged his ears against the shrieki
ng pipes. Time seemed to slow while the fire burned down the wires, closer, closer, until finally they hit the pool with a sizzle.

  Water exploded into mist and the world went dark. An Aether wind tore through the airtight room, a storm swirling in the darkness. It pulled at their clothing and tore at their skin. Over the noise of the storm rose a howl, growing louder, until it filled every cranny with the sound of its pain.

  The green fire flashed. Once. Twice. Three times. Each one bigger than the last. Each one a momentary reprieve from the terrible darkness.

  In the midst of the gale, Norgard felt a ghostly presence. It brushed the outside of his consciousness, the lightest knock to the hollow house of his missing soul. Beneath his woolen coat and linen shirt, cold fingers touched his spine. Slowly, they rose, growing longer and icier, caressing his naked skin, freezing his marrow, stealing his will.

  He tensed against the invasion. “Mr. Nils,” he bit out. The wind whipped the words from his lips, but he knew his words had been heard. The fingers paused.

  “Mr. Nils,” he said again, louder, an edge to his voice. “I bind you, Mr. Nils, not the other way around.”

  The cold fingers turned to claws. They scratched, angry, down his skin, tearing the flesh beneath their electrically sharpened nails.

  “Leif! Turn it off!”

  With a bang, the machine blew. It wheezed and sagged and moaned, a crone stuttering at the top of a steep hill. Acrid smoke filled the lab, making both men cough. Mercifully, the wind stopped and the icy fingers disappeared. The gaslights flickered back on.

  Norgard leaned against a nearby boiler to catch his breath, weakness be damned. He pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and mopped the water out of his now-sopping hair.

  “Needs more work,” Leif mumbled. His face was black with soot and grease. He yanked the goggles off his eyes, exposing wide, white circles like a raccoon. He pulled off a leather glove and ran a hand through his filth-streaked hair.

  “Indeed.” With measured precision, Norgard folded his wet handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. Removing the goggles, he handed them to his brother. He straightened his damp jacket and squeezed the excess water from his dripping cuffs.