Darkness in the Blood (Gifted Blood Trilogy)

by Vicki Keire

  “Caspia,” he said sharply. “Pay attention.”

  When I snapped my eyes open, thick dark lines of dark Shadows obscured my hands and snaked their way up my outstretched arms. “Um. Ok. That was fast,” I stammered as the Shadows collected, growing thicker and darker. I fought the urge to brush them away.

  “Focus.” Ethan’s instructions were sharp and fast, like bullets. “Send them outward. Picture what you want to do with them, and they’ll do it. You’re drawing with Shadows instead of charcoal or pencils, but you’re still drawing.” As I stared at the Shadows climbing up my arms like coal-black snakes with vague, dumbfounded terror, he wielded words like an electrified whip. “Do it now,” he yelled.

  Now. Right.

  I just wanted them off me. Nothing elegant. I flipped my arms outward, imagining strong straight lines instead of the tangled mess climbing up my arms. Dark lines spiraled obediently down my arms and moved quickly outward, thick and straight. I tried not to look too closely at them. Pulled from the Dark Realms, they were the essence of absence and emptiness. It still frightened me to know I carried access to the Dark Realms inside me, no matter how formidable a weapon it was or how many times Ethan reassured me I carried Light, too.

  If I carried Light, why wouldn’t it come when I called? I hadn’t been able to summon it since the day of Logan’s accident, and Ethan had been right there to help me. Part of me grew more and more convinced every day that I’d used my one and only burst of Light bringing my brother back. Since then, only the Shadows came to me. I tried to remind myself of what I’d learned about the nature of good and evil in the last few months, and that it didn’t match up to light and dark in some neat, balanced equation. Mrs. Alice, whom I loved and trusted, was a dark witch and was as far from evil as I could imagine. Bearing a dark gift didn’t make me evil. My head knew this, but when Shadows slithered across my skin and beautiful burnt oak trees scented the air, my heart had a hard time believing.

  Shadows crept across the clearing towards Ethan. He stood firm as they got nearer, watching me closely. “Um, you might want to move,” I said a little breathlessly. “Remember the tree?”

  “You’re doing fine,” he countered absently, as if he wasn’t really listening. He stared at my hands intently and sucked in a deep breath. I flexed my fingers, turning my palms skyward before flipping them back down. I’d discovered that I could control the thickness of Shadow, just like I could when drawing with a pencil. I pinched my fingers inward, creating very thin lines. The more I handled them, the less nervous I got.

  But I didn’t want to be less nervous. It was like getting friendly with the monster under my bed. If I relaxed my guard, sooner or later he would crawl into my bed and eat me.

  ***

  When he finally let us quit, I was mentally and physically exhausted. Ethan’s idea to treat Shadows like any other artistic medium made them a little more manageable, if not less frightening. No matter how many times he told me otherwise, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it said something about my essential nature. Something bad.

  “You did great,” Ethan murmured. The river rushed madly on. I watched its flat gray streams and swirls with my throbbing head propped in his lap. My vision blurred as I tried to follow trails of water with my eyes. A sharp stab of blinding white light erased my sight totally for a minute. I cried out and curled up into a ball, suddenly sick to my stomach and dizzy. “What?” He crouched over me, his hand on my forehead. “What’s wrong?”

  It passed almost as quickly as it came. I uncurled a bit. “I’m not sure. My head hurt, and everything went white, and…” He looked panicked. “It went away.” Ethan eased back on his heels, watching me intently. “Really. I just feel tired now. I think I just overdid it.”

  He looked like he didn’t quite believe me. “Rest, then.” I found myself using his lap for a pillow. I smiled against the soft corduroy covering his legs. I couldn’t wait until spring. Whitfield in spring was beautiful. So far, he’d seen only our fall and winter. “Ok. I’ll rest,” I coaxed. “If you tell me the story of how you became human again.” I felt like an eager child demanding my favorite bedtime story. I hooked a leg over his and pulled him even closer, as if he were a puzzle I could solve by locking the pieces tighter together. “Please,” I added for good measure.

  “Like everything had been turned up too much- the lights, the sound, the temperature, everything; and that I was carrying some kind of very heavy weight while trying to operate incredibly complex machinery with no instructions and every part of me was screaming different kinds of wants and needs, like hunger and cold and pain and fear- but they all meant essentially the same thing.”

  I rolled over on my side and pushed his hood down. “What?” I demanded, skimming my palm across his jaw. I knew the answer to this one, but I never tired of hearing it. “What same thing?” His face was stubbly. I let my eyes droop half closed, picturing a shirtless Ethan, drawing silver razor through scented white foam. The only man I had ever seen shave who was not my brother or my father. Shivers I could not define as warm or cool crept delicately up my neck.

  He caught my wrist and pulled. I yelped in surprise at the strength of him, sprawled on the forest floor. Even human, he was still strong. He pinned me, half-teasing, but searching my face for something.

  “Where does your mind go,” he said softly. It was a question, but it wasn’t addressed to me. “I wonder, sometimes.” Then he grinned, his blue green eyes crinkling around the edges. “Sometimes, I’m jealous.”

  “I was thinking of you,” I told him honestly. Shirtless and shaving, I didn’t add. “About how well you fit into my crazy life. About how it doesn’t even seem all that crazy, my life, with you in it.” This last, in a whisper.

  Cradled instead of pinned now, his words tickled my ear even as his rough cheek scraped and abraded my smooth one. “And I was telling you how it felt, that first day I was human. How every human need I had, every pain and hunger all combined into two little words.”

  My hands crept towards the curve of his spine, finding the indentation of his bowed back. My fingers rested there lightly. “Mmm,” I agreed, wanting him to keep talking as I rubbed small slow circles against the soft skin of his lower back.

  “Two words,” he repeated, warm damp breath brushing my ear. His heart pounded over the soft skin exposed by my open jacket. A black leather jacket that had once been his. “Caspia. Home.”

  Chapter Five:

  Shadow Sick

  I was dying or having a nightmare. Or both.

  The blood in my veins was on fire. An honest-to-God, five-alarm, someone put a bullet through my brain fire pulsed through me.

  My body was nothing but a fragile shell for the pain. Only two things could happen here: the burning would stop or I would die.

  I ran through strange corridors. Whispers rose and fell around me instead of wind. Everything was gray and barren, the walls around me crumbling. If there had once been a roof, it was long gone, so there was nothing to shelter me from the sky. I was barefoot, wearing nothing but my pajamas, not caring where I put my feet. Rocks and crumbling bits of wall littered the ground. I felt like I had run forever through gray stone corridors following whispers that led me, finally, to a courtyard.

  But the courtyard was gray too, gray and dead under an always-twilight sky. I collapsed on the edge of a dry fountain while my heart went supernova in my chest. Time runs differently in dreams, and death is forever. How long had I been running the corridors? Hours? Days? Above me the sky pulsated with all the shades of twilight. At home, this time of day was nothing but a bridge between day and night and a backdrop for the fairy lights in the park. It made me dizzy, though, and faintly sick, watching the symphony of twilight colors: shades of grays, blues and violets as they chased each other across the sky. My blood simmered with barely contained heat. I want, I thought. I want… something. God, I didn’t even know.

  After a moment a man stepped out from the shadows. Roughly my age, he
wore nothing but loose dark pants and tattoos. Dark hair, faintly golden skin. For a long moment we stared at each other. I wished I could see the shape of his features, but the shadows made this difficult. Heat traveled through my veins in waves and I had to remind myself to even out my breathing. At first he just stared at me like we were in Hell and I was trying to sell him Girl Scout cookies. Then his eyes flashed silver. Not solid, like mine, but in pieces, like stars. Shooting stars of pure pissed off.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded at last. “How did you get here?”

  “I ran,” I told him. I was acutely conscious of the fact that I wore nothing but thin pajamas. “I’m dying. Or having a nightmare,” I amended, hoping he would feel sorry for me.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said sharply. “Even in the Dreamtime. You have to go back. Now.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded. I tried to memorize him, his tattoos, his face, but the light was too dim and he seemed to flicker with a faint blue light when I try to focus on him.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Barefoot, he moved with the speed of angels, perching easily beside me on the fountain’s edge. He grew increasingly agitated. “How did you find this place?”

  “There were corridors,” I tried to explain. My blood gave one hot violent throb at his nearness. Him. It was all suddenly, horribly clear. The fire in my blood, the wanting, the whispers leading me here. To him. In this twilit dreamscape, the fire was becoming an inferno, and this angry young man could help. Need you, I tried to say, but I was on my knees dry heaving into the fountain instead. Heat raced through me. I arched my back like a cat, my fingers claws in the fountain’s edge.

  “Your blood is on fire.” He sounded horrified, like a television doctor right before he calls for the crash cart. “You’re Shadow-sick. You’re burning out.”

  Shadow-sick. That sounded major. “I don’t know what that means,” I admitted through clenched teeth. “I. Need. Something.” It was all I could manage before I dry heaved again. Instantly, I felt strange hands spanning the nape of my neck.

  “Shadow-sick. Did you…” He hissed angrily the second he touched me. His hands rested against my neck, radiating coolness and calm. But his tone was bottled murder. “I bet you call it practicing, or something cute like that. Did you ‘practice’ summoning any Shadows today?” Normally I’d meet sarcasm with sarcasm, but since the angry half-naked tattooed man was saving me from burning alive, I decided to let it slide.

  “For hours,” I admitted. He inhaled sharply. “I practiced with Ethan over and over. To learn to defend myself.” Now that the wave of sickness had passed, I felt euphoric and slightly drowsy. “The bad angels are trying to kidnap me,” I told him conspiratorially. Might as well bat for crazy, too.

  “Don’t move,” he ordered. I didn’t. He stood behind me, his hands splayed across my upper back where wings would be, if I had them. I felt the fire cooling to a bearable level. The burning sensation moved inward as it ebbed, like he’d caught electric eels and was reeling them in through my veins. His fingers trembled more and more against me as the fire disappeared. His breathing became more labored. Finally, he dropped his shaking hands. I sat back on my heels, feeling strangely hollowed out.

  He collapsed on the edge of the fountain, not looking much better than I felt. “You’re wildly untrained. I’m sure this Ethan person means well, but he isn’t one of us.” Then, a bit angrily, he muttered, “You really need a teacher.”

  I looked up at him sharply. “One of us?” I echoed. “A Nephilim descendent? Is that what you are?”

  He wouldn’t answer. “For now, only use the Shadows if you’re being attacked. Do you understand?” He pulled me up. This close, I could see his face: fine sharp bones, high and angled upward. Dark, almost black hair, and eyes even darker. Only then did I really notice his tattoos. They were moving, the ink of his strange symbols and markings gleaming as if alive. His forearms rested against mine, my whole hands held under his. As his tattoos moved, my blood cooled more and more. “Do you understand?” he repeated.

  “Who are you?” I whispered, frightened now.

  “You’re only dreaming,” he said. “Your blood called to mine in the Dreamtime because you needed me. You were burning out. That’s the only possible explanation. But you must never come here again.” He looked up at the scintillating twilit sky. “He’d like nothing better than to trap you here, with the rest of us.”

  “Who?” I demanded. “Where is here?”

  “I’ll find you. It’s what I do.” His hand covered my eyes. “Time to wake up.”

  “But I don’t even know…”

  “Wake up,” he repeated.

  “…your name.”

  “Caspia? Wake up.”

  “But…”

  “You’re having a nightmare. It’s ok. Wake up.”

  I opened my eyes to the faint light of dawn through my bay window. Ethan was level with me, kneeling beside the bed. Confused, I reached out and touched his face. “What happened?”

  He stroked my sweaty forehead. “You’re burning up. I’m worried you’re sick or something. You were talking in your sleep and thrashing. I’ll get a thermometer.”

  I remembered flashes of my strange dream: forever twilight, crumbling gray stone. I wondered if I should tell him, wondered what he would think. Then I remembered the burning in my veins and a pair of dark eyes shot through with stars. Bare tattooed skin cooling mine. He isn’t one of us. “It was just a dream,” I said. I grabbed his wrist before he could leave. Shadow-sick. Burning out. Trap you here. “I think I’m just worn out from yesterday. Stay with me. Please?”

  Ethan didn’t say anything. He frowned, but he pulled me close as the sun rose.

  ***

  Ethan repeated his warning about Logan and I always having someone with us when we left the apartment that morning. I never mentioned my dream. I wanted time to process it, to figure out how I felt about it and maybe what it meant before I tried to explain it to anyone else. The nightmarish landscape and the dimly remembered warnings of the night before made me skittish through breakfast.

  But when the three of us hit the square, we could see it was the beginning of a busy workday. Citizens of Whitfield went about their everyday routines, bustling in and out of stores, eating at outdoor tables, and generally getting on with their lives. Across the street, a few brave souls in short sleeves stretched out on blankets in the park, trying to soak up the weak early spring sunshine.

  I was willing to bet what was left in my checking account that more than half of them had some kind of hidden powers. I would bet even more of my meager savings that if Dark Nephilim were stupid enough to try to snatch either me or my brother from the middle of Whitfield’s Old Town Square in broad daylight, my supernatural neighbors, who usually minded their own business, would be on them in a heartbeat.

  I giggled as I pictured some of my stodgier neighbors suddenly sprouting fangs and claws to come to my defense. My giggles climbed in pitch until they bordered on hysterical when I imagined the good ladies of the gardening club chucking weeds and balls of fire at invaders. I turned my back on them as they knelt by the flowerbeds across from the fountain. I wouldn’t want them to think I was laughing at them. They might lob fireballs, or worst of all, give me a public scolding.

  “What?” Ethan demanded.

  “It’s just really hard to picture anything nefarious happening here,” I said.

  “Nefarious,” Logan repeated slowly. “Like being assaulted and kidnapped by Dark Nephilim in the middle of the park on your way home from work?”

  “Point taken,” I sighed. “But really, it was just that once.” Logan rolled his eyes at me. “Look, you and Ethan both have to get to work. I have to go drop off three sets of hand-painted Tarot decks at Mrs. Alice’s. This buddy system thing is silly on the square during business hours. I mean, just look around you. Nothing happens on the square without everyone knowing about it.”

  “We live in a fish bow
l,” Logan muttered.

  “A big square friendly fish bowl,” I chirped back.

  “Replace friendly with nosy and I’ll agree with you,” he retorted.

  “A big square friendly fish bowl full of nosy supernatural…”

  “You’re both right,” Ethan interrupted quickly. After a minute Logan shrugged philosophically and disappeared into the hardware store. “You’re terrible,” Ethan said under his breath as I followed him to J. Roth’s, Bookseller. “You torment him endlessly.”

  “Why, thank you, Ethan,” I said. We paused just outside the diamond-paned door, and in three short hops I pressed myself up against him. “It’s what little sisters are for. It’s how I show him I care.” I stuck my hands in his jacket pockets. “I’ll miss you. To tell you the truth, you sort of have my dream job. Quiet, plenty to read. I can’t believe Old Man Roth decided to semi-retire.”

  Ethan laughed. “What would Mr. Markov do without his Coffee Goddess? Not to mention the caffeine withdrawal you’d go through. It wouldn’t be pretty.” He locked his hands in a tight circle around my waist, drawing me closer. “It’s really kind of a nightmare in the bookstore. Mr. Roth had his own system for cataloguing everything, and not even Calla can understand it. We’re trying to sort it out, but it’s a mess.”

  Calla was Mr. Roth’s pink-haired niece. She was the only other employee of Whitfield’s one and only bookstore. I felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought of the two of them working together, alone, for long stretches of time. It’s just a stupid job, I told myself fiercely and pushed it away. “Still, be careful. Don’t work too hard, ok?” I thought about all those heavy stacks of books, all the piles of disorganized papers he could trip over, and shuddered. “Are you sure it’s something you’re comfortable with? I mean if you want to wait, we’ll work it out.”