Lily hugged herself. "I just want to go home."
"Let's wait there a bit in case that thing is still looking for us."
For me, Lily thought. It wasn't after Gideon. Or at least, it hadn't been. If he was in danger, it was because he was helping her.
***
Delilah's house was a split level, built on a slope, the basement at the base of a steep grade. Gideon tried the door and found it wasn't locked. Doors in Laton seldom were.
"What about her parents?" Lily whispered.
"They both work all day," Gideon said. "She pretty much has the basement to herself anyway."
The basement was the cleanest that Lily had ever seen. Its furnishings were sparse, consisting of a black vinyl couch, a large flat-screen television, and a broad oak desk. The floor, walls, and ceiling were spotless stucco devoid of even dust.
Gideon fell back onto the couch with a grunt and leaned back with his hands over his face. "Now what?"
"I don't know," Lily pulled the chair out from behind the desk and sat in it sideways. "Wait for Delilah. Tell her what we saw, then try heading home."
"Tell her what we saw. She'll think we're nuts."
"We might be nuts. How do you know her, anyway?"
"She was in my little brother's class for awhile, and she'd come over while her parents were out. They she got skipped ahead, and they stopped hanging out, but she wasn't making any new friends at the high school, so I sat with her at lunch last year."
Lily nodded. "You're a good person, Gideon."
He blushed. "Don't you start."
"I mean it. You didn't have to help me."
"Yeah well. Look what it got me."
Her stomach churned. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to--"
Gideon sat up. "I didn't mean--"
Lily stood and stepped to the door, pulling the curtain over its window aside. All she could see was the town's quiet streets. She felt so ragged, so run-down, so emotionally exhausted by what she'd done and seen... she'd have to watch what she said with Gideon. He was probably just as wiped out.
When she turned back, Gideon was leaning back again, staring at the ceiling.
That figure. The dark one. She remembered it, remembered the accident.She sat in the desk chair once more, trying to put her thoughts in order.
"Gideon."
He looked at her. "Look, I didn't mean--"
"That thing. I've seen it before."
He sat up straight. "What?"
She sat at the desk, hands folded between her knees. "It... when I saw it, I remembered. The accident. We hit it."
"You what?"
"When I saw it, when I saw its eyes, I suddenly remembered that that's what happened," Lily said, staring into the redhead's eyes. "It's after us, because we hit it, and oh God, I didn't want to get you wrapped up in this."
"Hold up, what happened? Exactly?"
Lily dropped her eyes to her hands. "I remember we were leaving the Spot. Lauren was driving. None of us had had more than a sip or two to drink, but that didn't matter."
Ashley was in the back, and Lily'd been in the passenger seat, preoccupied with the fight she'd had with Derek. She remembered, quite suddenly, that she was going to break up with him, to let him loose, to cut him free to go to school in Boston or wherever else he wanted. She loved him, yes, but enough that her desire to possess him was overshadowed by her need to see him follow his own dreams.
"Ashley hit him. He was just... there suddenly. No, wait... he jumped out in front of us, stopping just long enough for us to hit him. I have this... this image of him in front of us, burned into my memory. Those eyes. When I saw them again, that's when I remembered."
Gideon's voice was scarcely audible. "And now it's after you."
Lily locked eyes with him. "Yes."
A rattle broke the silence, and Gideon was half-out the couch before Lily could even turn her head. The basement doorknob turned, the door opened, and there was Delilah.
"Hey," she said, dropping her pack next to the door. "How'd it go?"
A blackness seemed to flow past her, around her, into the living-room, a dark shadow made of inky darkness. It flowed past her, half-liquid, and coalesced into a roughly human-shaped pillar in the middle of the living room. Electric blue eyes winked into existence at human-head height.
"It's here!" Lily heard the words coming from her mouth as if someone else was speaking them, the world receding as Gideon tried to pull her away. "It's found us!"
EPISODE 2
CHAPTER ONE
Lily's limbs felt leaden as the shadow poured itself through the door into Delilah's basement, liquid in its movements as it swept past the younger girl to coalesce into a pillar in the center of the room. Lily could hear Gideon scrabble to his feet behind her, but the sound was tinny and distant, drowned out by the thunderous pounding of her heartbeat.
"It's here!" She could barely make out her own voice. "It's found us!"
And then someone, Gideon, pulled her away, dragged her from the thing manifesting in their midst. She couldn't get her limbs to cooperate, couldn't find her balance, couldn't stand on her own. All she could do was stare at this thing as it molded into something not quite human, but bone-white pale, cloaked in shadow, with brilliant magnesium-blue sparks for eyes.
The thing that had followed her from the hospital.
The thing that had leapt in front of the car weeks ago, killing her best friend Lauren, critically injuring Ashley, and putting Lily in a coma.
The thing that had ruined her life.
It said something, but in Lily's terror she heard only meaningless garble.
Gideon had pulled her to the foot of the stairs and, lifting her by the armpits, trying to get her to her feet. She found purchase and balance, turning desperately from the horror in the basement.
Tendrils of shadow wrapped around her waist, translucent but solid enough to yank her back off of her feet. She screamed as it dragged her back to the center of the room where the figure stood, fists clenched.
"Wait." This time its voice cut through the fear, a strange bass resonance that sounded clear even though nothing else did. "Please."
To her left she could see Gideon struggling against the shadow tendril pinning his arms to his sides. Delilah was held as well, standing rigid, only her eyes moving to follow the monster.
"I don't want to hurt you," it said.
Lily stared at it.
The creature's gaze flickered from her face to Gideon's, and its posture sagged.
She felt herself lifted into the air, deposited next to Gideon on the couch. Tendrils lifted Delilah over the creature's head and deposited alongside her. The creature pulled the chair over from the basement desk and sat in it, regarding them.
It watched them, silent, unmoving, and over the course of minutes the manic edge gradually bled from Lily's fear. It was a monster, strange and unknowable, but it wasn't hurting them, and she didn't see any way to escape from its grasp.
"What do you want?" she asked.
When it spoke, its voice was calmer, almost human. "I just want to talk. It... this wasn't supposed to be like this."
Delilah's hand, her arm still bound to her side, reached out and brushed Lily's. She held it tight.
"I never meant to hurt you. Or your friends. It was an accident."
"An accident?" Lily felt dizzy. She risked a quick glance at Gideon. He was staring at the creature, wide-eyed, stupefied.
"That's why I was there, in the hospital. To apologize to your friend. And then you showed up, and you ran..."
"You chased me!"
"Because you ran."
"You're blaming me?" Heat flashed through Lily's cheeks and she struggled to sit up on the couch. "You crash into my friends, kill Lauren, put me in a coma, leave me thinking like this is all my fault, and now you're blaming me for running away from you?"
"No, it's not like that."
The creature's denials only stoked the flames of Lily's anger.
; She stood, the shadow tentacles stretching to hold her. "Of course I ran. You're... you're terrifying! What's wrong with you!"
It shrunk back. "I'm sorry, I've just been on the run for so long... I don't know when the last time I slept was."
"You think that excuses you?"
"No!"
Lily flinched back as the resonance returned to its voice.
"No." Its tone softened. "No, there's no excuse. If I could take it back I would, but I'm not here to beg for forgiveness."
"Then why are you here?" Lily asked.
Delilah's voice sounded oddly calm and quiet. "What are you?"
"Look, I..." It sat back into the chair. "I'll explain, if I can let go of you. It's a long story."
Lily nodded, and the tendrils shrank back into the creature, along with its dark aura, until the long coat and black jeans he'd been wearing in the hospital were visible.
It glanced towards Gideon and Delilah. "You can go, if you want. I won't stop you."
Gideon looked at Lily, then shook his head.
"I want to hear this," Delilah said. "What's your... what do we call you?"
"You can call me Mel."
"Mel?" Lily said. "Really? Mel? Your name is Mel?"
"My name is Melchizedek," he said. "It's Biblical. Mel is easier."
"Okay," Lily said. "What are you?"
Mel slipped his hands into his coat pockets, flapping them idly as he answered. "I'm your brother."
***
Barny's return to consciousness was slow, painful, and confusing.
Confusing because of the dream or whatever. It put him off, unsettled him, and had seemed so real.
Painful because that bitch Lily Baker had clocked him hard enough to send him reeling into a brier patch.Tiny thorns had pierced and scratched his skin when he'd landed.
When he remembered that part, it pissed him the fuck off.
What the fuck? She hit him?
Besides the scratches, his jaw was sore. Like she'd popped it when she hit him. And his neck ached, like he'd been lying with it at a weird angle. His head was turned to face the school.
Had he broken his neck in the fall? Fuck if that wouldn't be a joke. Baker gets one of her friends killed in a crash, then paralyzes a guy with a single punch. He could see the humor in that, if he wasn't the poor bastard with a broken neck.
No, wait. He could feel his toes wiggle. Not so bad, then. Still, better safe than sorry.
"Hey!" Barny's voice sounded weak. "Somebody!"
He waited, but nobody answered.
Shit.
You weren't supposed to move in situations like this -- when you might have hurt your neck or your back. But fuck if he was going to lie here in this bramble patch until the birds took an interest. Barny's hands crept up to his jaw... definitely felt like it'd been popped out of socket. He grabbed the crown of his skull with one hand, cheekbones with the other, and twisted.
"Fuck!" A blinding spasm of pain erupted from Barny's neck as he righted himself.
He blacked out for a few seconds.
When the sparks faded from his eyes, he found himself staring into cloudless early evening sky, arms splayed out at his sides. His neck felt fine, aside from the ghost of remembered agony. He rolled his head to either side and worked his mouth. No stiffness, and he must have popped his jaw back into place. Good.
His pleasure at 'fixing' himself faded fairly quickly, replaced with a slowly boiling anger at the girl who'd put him in this situation. Who the fuck did she think she was, going off and smacking him like that? Stupid bitch. Just because she couldn't bear to face the truth about how she'd gotten her friend killed. It took a weak person to shift that guilt into anger at a bystander.
Lily fucking Baker. He really shouldn't be surprised. She had everything handed to her, her whole life. No wonder she didn't have any sense of responsibility. Of accountability.
Well, this was one fucking action she'd have to face the consequences for. Nobody laid out Barny Carter. Didn't she know who he was? Did she think herself immune? Untouchable? He could ruin her life a thousand different ways, and she'd never see it coming.
His fists clenched, and he turned his head to see that his left hand was lying in a small fire.
"Fuck!" Barny scrambled to his feet as fast as he could, heedless of the thorns.
Correction. His left hand was on fire.
He shook it, slapping his palm against his jeans. The flames stuttered out.
He marveled at his hand, at the fact that it didn't hurt, at the fact that his skin wasn't burnt.
Well. That was an interesting twist.
CHAPTER TWO
"You're my what?" Lily asked.
"Brother," Mel said. "Half-brother."
"I don't have a brother. And if I did, it wouldn't be... whatever you are."
"I know how it sounds--"
Lily folded her arms. "I don't think you do."
Melchizedek stood. "I can prove it."
Gideon narrowed his eyes. "What are you going to do?"
"Have you been having the dreams?"
Lily felt Gideon flinch next to her. She glanced at him, then back at the demon, feeling a strange flutter in her belly.
"What dreams?" The words came out slowly, reluctantly, the question to an answer she wished she didn't already know.
"Dreams of a great city, of celestial pillars and rings of stardust. Dreams of being light, without form, pure energy. Dreams of a starless abyss bigger than infinity, filed with sparks of pure emotion. Dreams of mainlining pure love, of music so beautiful that it's like a full body orgasm. Dreams of belonging."
"Of family," Gideon said. "Of being part of something greater."
Melchizedek's blue eyes widened. "You've had them too?"
Gideon nodded.
"So have I," Delilah said.
"Oh," Melchizedek said. "Oh wow. That's... that makes sense, actually."
"What?" Lily said. "I don't understand."
"Have you been having the dreams?"
She looked from Gideon's awed face to Delilah's blank expression.
"Yeah. Since the coma. Maybe during it, I don't remember."
"That's about when mine started, too," Gideon said.
"What do they mean?" Delilah asked.
Something seemed to have excited Melchizedek. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, and snapping his fingers as he spoke.
"No, it makes sense. Let me start from the beginning."
"Okay," Lily said.
"Do you have," he pointed from Lily to Gideon before settling on Delilah. "Do you have anything to drink? My throat's a little dry."
"What," the youngest said. "Like water? Soda?"
"Soda's fine. Or whatever."
The girl rose and walked over to the stairs, where a few boxes of soft drinks were stacked.
"Can I get a coke?" Gideon called.
"No," Delilah said.
She grabbed one for him anyway, and a second for Melchizedek. Lily shook her head when offered the third.
"Okay." Melchizedek opened his drink, then exhaled. "I was like you, once. Just... normal."
He pointed towards the luminescent blue sparks where his eyes should have been. "None of this. I was kinda pale, but not like this."
"What happened?" Lily asked.
"I got shot. Wait, let me back up a little." He took a sip from his soda. "Bear with me, I've never told this story to anyone."
"Okay," Lily said.
"You're all adopted or whatever, right?"
"Yeah," Lily said.
"Okay. You, me, all three of you, we're all related. Siblings."
Lily gestured from her own African-American features towards Gideon's ginger face and Delilah's pale blondness. "You sure?"
Gideon gave a nervous giggle.
"Half-siblings. Same father. Different mothers."
"You're sure. We look nothing alike. And you're..."
"I'll get to me," Melchizedek said. "But yeah. Our father is.
.. he wasn't exactly human."
"What do you mean?" Delilah asked.
"I mean not human. At all. He was... something else."
"Are you serious?" Lily asked.
Melchizedek gave her a look, then conjured a ball of shadow between his hands.
"Okay," Lily said. "Then what was he? What are you?"
"Something else."
"You don't know?" Delilah asked.
"Okay, look. We were all born in this small town somewhere as part of some commune. Then something happened. This was, like, 1999, 2000, something like that. Do any of you remember early childhood?"
Lily shook her head. "Nothing before kindergarten."
"No," Gideon said.
"I would have been an infant," Delilah said.
"Neither do I. Maybe that's what the dreams are. But something happened--"
"Again with the something," Lily said.
"Hey," Melchizedek said. "I heard this story second hand. The woman who raised me told me that I came from a big loving family, until bad men came and took all my brothers and sisters away. She escaped with me, said maybe some of the others had too."
"She wasn't your mother?" Lily asked.
"No," Melchizedek. "But she raised me like one."
"So you're saying that we were all taken from this town and what, put into orphanages?" Delilah said.
Melchizedek took another sip of his soda. "When I was a kid I just accepted what Marianne told me. When I was older, I began to question it, the way we lived. We moved around a lot, avoided the cops, avoided cameras. Avoided everything. I wondered if she maybe, you know, kidnapped me. If we were fugitives. I didn't care -- she had basically raised me, and was a loving woman -- but I wanted to know the truth."
Lily nodded.
"I got it." Mel put the soda down and folded his hands on his lap. "I never asked her, but one day I came home from school and she was freaking out. Panicked. Said that 'they' had found us, and that I needed to get my things. For the first time, I resisted. I wanted to know what was really going on, and she said it was just like she had told me."
Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) Page 6
