“Exactly,” Hylas said, bobbing his head up and down. “Good, this is good. It almost feels like progress.”
“What does?”
“This, all of it,” Hylas said. “See, I remember now, Tobias and you need to remember, too. I can see much better from where I’m at now and if you don’t remember, bad, bad things are going to happen.” He took a deep breath. “You didn’t mean to forget in the first place, neither of us did, but that part just sort of happened. I think, well, I think we didn’t really think it through as well as we should have. Or at least you didn’t and I honestly didn’t think at all because fuck it, man, I will follow you anywhere. I’ve been doing it forever.”
“What are you talking about?!” Tobias yelled it, at the end of his tether. Nothing Hylas was saying made any sense (because he was the hallucination of a mentally ill individual) and it was driving him up the wall.
“Tobias, please calm down,” Hylas said. He frowned and touched the glass, visibly applied force and pushed at it. “I fucking hate this, I really do. If I could be there, if I knew how to get back to where you are, I’d do it. I swear I would, but I’m stuck on this side. I’m sorry for doing things this way, but like I said: You have to remember.”
“Remember what?” Tobias growled.
Hylas beamed at him and leaned forward to stage whisper, “What a badass you really are, that’s what.”
Tobias glared.
“You and me, we’re not human, Tobias,” Hylas said.
“Oh? What are we then, fairy princes? Or wait, let me guess; you’re Puck and I’m Oberon and this is some absurd Shakespearean derivative my broken brain has conjured up,” Tobias said.
“There you are, man,” Hylas said. He rubbed his hands together as he said, “If I just tell you then you won’t believe me anyway. I figured that out weeks ago while I was figuring everything else out.” He stopped rubbing his hands together and lifted them, palms hovering a hair’s breadth away from the thin surface that separated their planes. “But I can show you because another thing I figured out is that I don’t just give good or bad dreams. I can give memories, too, because those are always there in the sleep stew, never truly gone, just… put away.”
He pressed his palms to the mirror and said, “Look, Tobias.”
Because he couldn’t help it and because he still didn’t want to look away, Tobias looked. And as Hylas disappeared from the mirror, Tobias saw.
He stands on the shore of a vast, rushing river so wide its opposite bank is lost in a swirl of mist. The river is full of light, darting streaks of it twisting and tangling together then tearing loose again. Some lights collide with one another and others flit away as though repelled. The roar of the river is the mingled breaths of countless millions of souls.
He has stood on the banks of this river since time immemorial though once the river was small, not much more than a trickle. But as life grew, so did that little trickle until it crashed and boomed and became so filled with light the silver water was almost lost in the overwhelming size and ferocity of the lights. It is beautiful and it is his to control, to do with as he pleases. He could reach into that rushing flow and pluck any of those lights from it that he so chose; no matter how quicksilver fast they may be, he is faster still. He controls the flow and ebb; he could fill it until it stretches even wider or obliterate the lights until there was only a trickle once more. Or the river runs dry entirely.
On this day, however, he has other plans. He is going to dive into the river and give away all that he is. He is going to become one of those ethereal lights. He knows where he will be going and when he gets there, for once in over a thousand years, he will finally do things right. This time he will not repeat his same mistakes or forget. He will not miss everything all over again. Today, he will become mortal because this time he will not be late.
His brother has stood beside him for a while, looking into the river of souls as well. Now he turns to him and speaks, “Are you sure this is wise?”
“It will be fine,” he says.
“How can you know?”
He looks at his brother whose eyes are blue as velvet night and smiles. He shrugs, the feathers of his great black wings rustling softly and tickling the skin of his alabaster back. “How could it not be?”
“Then I will come with you,” says his brother. “I’ve long been curious about them. I’ve walked their dreams and sent them to sleep for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never really known them and I think I would like to.”
“Then come along,” he says. “It shall be an adventure.”
“An adventure, indeed,” says his brother with a slow, sleepy smile. “Where are we going?”
“Sparrow Falls, Louisiana,” he says. “It might be interesting.”
“It does not matter if it is hellish,” his brother says as he takes his arm. “I would follow you anywhere, no matter how long the journey.”
“It won’t be long at all. It is only a lifetime,” he says.
“Then take us there, Thanatos,” his brother says as they draw near enough to the water’s edge that it laps at their bare feet.
“Of course,” Thanatos says as he grabs his brother tightly and draws him close, tipping them off the bank into the rushing whirl of color and sound and life.
Tobias gasped as the vision faded away, leaving only Hylas behind in the mirror. He tried to hold his brother’s gaze, but the world shimmered and tilted around him. The very foundation of his psyche shook and began to crack apart, the façade that had been so carefully erected crumbled away in a cascade of dust.
What a hubristic fool he was to have ever thought a lifetime meant anything less than forever. A lifetime went on for an eternity and never long enough at the same time. On the mortal plane, the sunlight was much nearer and once you got that close, you never wanted to leave it or the softly singing moon behind. In a single lifetime you could gain and lose so much and its unending brevity gave it more weight, more worth, than always.
The internal trembling grew more pronounced, became pain sharp and silver beneath the skin of Tobias’s back. He tried to speak, tried to tell Hylas (Hypnos, that was his real name, yes, yes, it was) what he now understood. He opened his mouth and what came out instead of words was a scream as the pain in his back became unbearable. His knees gave out beneath him and he hit the floor with a crack. Something in his back ripped and he screamed again as the writhing, churning motion beneath his skin flexed. He felt the pull and tug on the skin of his back as it rippled upward and strained with the force.
“Tobias!” Hylas screamed from the mirror. There was the sound of him pounding his fists against the barrier between them. “Shit, shit. Talk to me. What’s happening?”
Tobias couldn’t answer him, only managed half a breath, the inhalation forced back out of his throat when the skin of his back gave way and began to tear open in two wide, wet fissures beginning at his shoulders and going all the way to his waist. He cried out and gagged at the pain of it; felt the folds of his rent flesh spreading wider into gaping mouths as the stirring beneath the wounds grew more intense. Something slid against the ragged lips of the rip on the right side of his back and a second later, he felt the same on the left. He collapsed entirely then, lying face down on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, almost driven mad by the excess of pain as whatever was under his skin pushed its way to the surface.
With the pain came more memories and the truth of who he was. It swarmed over him like a cloud of locusts, dark and buzzing, as piece by piece each thing fell back into its rightful place inside his mind. He screamed as he became who he had always been; the reality was inevitable once the wall fell down.
The thing on the right finally popped entirely free and flopped to the side with a wet splat. It was heavy, hot and slippery with blood as it lay against his back, reaching all the way to his ankle. Another minute and the thing on the left joined it with another thick splat. They lay across his back and legs like wet blankets, twitching fee
bly, sticking to his skin. Blood and pieces of his torn flesh puddled on the floor beneath Tobias in a thick maroon looking glass, the light throwing glaring stars back into his unblinking eyes. The things on his back twitched again. He knew what they were now and no mortal man could have survived their resurrection, the violent way they had torn themselves free again at long last.
Lenore landed beside his head and gently pecked his cheek. Do you get it now?
Tobias did get it; he had come all this way for one thing, to do it right this time and he had failed. In the end, he forgot everything, even himself. He remembered floating in the amniotic sea of his mother’s womb with frightening awareness. Then he was born in a rush of mucus and blood. He took his first mortal breath and he bellowed as he was wiped clean to begin anew. To begin a lifetime.
His first scream had pushed forth a black butterfly that went unnoticed in the delivery room, only the nurse charged with his care saw it though she later convinced herself she had not. It had been the soul of his mother who lay with bloodied thighs spread wide in stirrups, olive green eyes fixed in a Raphaelite stare at the ceiling. Her hair was wet with sweat, long ringlets stuck to her face, red as dragon’s fire. Her mouth was parted gently as though she was sighing or softly saying, Oh.
As she died, he had begun to live and had taken in the world with brand new eyes as black as the bottom of a well. His wails became more strident, frightened; he only quieted when his brother was pulled free of their dead mother’s belly. When Hylas began to cry though, Tobias joined the chorus again, feeling their shared indignation, their bewilderment and not knowing the why of any of it.
Just down the hall, unknown to Tobias who was scrabbling for a hold in a mad world full of light and sound, a baby boy had been born to a woman named Keala at the same moment Tobias was brought forth. She held him in her arms for the first time as a black butterfly disappeared into the wall vent in a room down the hallway. She kissed his wet forehead and whispered his name for the very first time: Jeremy Dylan Harris. Only moments old, Jeremy’s damage had already been permanent because Thanatos had ruined his soul by loving him too much.
With a low growl, Tobias pushed himself to his feet. Blood dripped from the ends of his great black wings, droplets falling like rain to splash into the pool of red Tobias stood in. The wounds on his back throbbed and itched, but they would heal soon; they had already started. On a human being, such wounds would have likely been fatal, but on Tobias—on Thanatos—they were short-lived though no less torturous for their duration.
“I have made so many mistakes,” he said to Hylas, hanging his head to look at his blood-smeared feet instead of his brother’s face. “I was arrogant and it made me reckless and thoughtless.”
Despite everything, even knowing he was a god, Tobias could not think of himself as such any longer. The knowledge and the power were right there, but he was still, to his own mind, Tobias Dunwalton. In time, he would reconcile the two halves of himself—the one he had always been and the man he had become—but right then it felt impossible. The man he was felt shame and guilt so deep it was like drowning. Then again, he realized, so did the god he had always been.
For want of something to do, Tobias took his black pajama pants off the counter and tugged them on. He closed his eyes against the rivulets of blood that still ran down his pale calves and ignored the way the fabric of his trousers clung to the wetness.
“You didn’t know,” Hylas said. “Not about any of it.”
“Which is the problem,” Tobias snapped, lifting his head to meet Hylas’s eyes. “If I had for one moment stopped to think then none of this would have ever happened. Not to me or you or to him. What have I done?”
Hylas canted his head to the side in thought and finally said, “You did what anyone would have done if they had the power to do it.”
“Destroy the things they love the most?” Tobias asked with raised brows. In the bedroom, Billy Idol began to growl about an L.A. woman.
“Each man kills the thing he loves,” Hylas said. “You need to answer your phone.”
Tobias was not in the mood to do any such thing and he found the abrupt shift in topic jarring and annoying. “I am standing in a pool of blood with wings growing out of my back,” he said. “Answering my phone is the last thing I want to do right now.”
“You need to, you hear?” Hylas said.
Only then did Tobias realize how anxious he looked; how frightened.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Nothing yet, I don’t think, but if you don’t hurry then more felonious misdeeds will occur and… and I don’t think you would ever forgive yourself this time,” Hylas said.
“Then tell me,” Tobias said.
“It’s him and he has Dawn Marie,” Hylas said. “I don’t know a lot more, just that she needs you and you have to answer your fucking phone, Tobias.”
At the sound of her name, Tobias had already started to turn away. He stumbled into his bedroom, took his phone off the dresser and tapped “accept”.
There was nothing to hear at first but the low, rasping pant of breath and shaking exhalations. Then, “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” Tobias said.
A soft sob crackled down the line. “I’ve been looking for so long. Why did you hide from me?”
“I wasn’t hiding,” Tobias said. “I forgot everything for a little while. Even who I am.”
“I miss you,” Jeremy whispered. “I have missed you my entire life.”
“I’m sorry,” Tobias said. It was the only thing he could say and it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
“She kept you from me,” Jeremy said. “That bitch, that fucking bitch, she kept you from me.”
“Dawn Marie has nothing to do with this,” Tobias said, clenching his phone harder. “She didn’t know.”
“Oh, yes, she did,” Jeremy said. “I figured it out. She hid you and lied to you and I won’t stand for it. Maybe you can forgive her, but I cannot.”
“Don’t you dare hurt her,” Tobias snarled. “Leave her be.”
“What are you going to do, my love, kill me?” Jeremy asked. His voice was edged with bitterness and hurt, brittle as dry leaves and crackling. “She has to be punished.”
In the background, Tobias could hear Mooncricket yelling, “Jeremy, stop it! Please, please stop it!”
Tobias didn’t hear Dawn Marie though and a cold wave washed over him.
“I’ll see you soon, Thanatos,” Jeremy whispered in his ear in a sing-song. “Soon, soon, soon.”
Then the line went dead and Tobias dropped his phone, whirling on his heels to run out of the house. Jeremy had what he finally wanted, but it wasn’t enough because he blamed Dawn Marie for it. It was one more ugly piece of proof that Tobias’s—Thanatos’s—love had destroyed Jeremy, had made him into a monster; something that could neither be controlled nor reasoned with any longer.
As Tobias ran into the darkness, the crows called loudly from the trees, deafening in their welcome as he strode into their midst. He paused for only a second then spread his big black wings. The first beat of his wings was muscle memory and the agony of the movement was beyond belief, but he rose into the air. His head spun at the change in elevation, at the feel of his feet leaving the ground, but he beat his wings again, surer that time.
All around him, the night lived and breathed and died and it was beautiful; the mist and coil of each thing’s breath turning the darkness into prismatic fog. He had always felt like there was something just out of his view, something he was overlooking or just plain not seeing. Now he could see again, the light and flicker of every living thing’s essence.
Lenore came even with him and turned her head to look at him before she drew ahead of him. Tobias followed her, each stroke of his wings cutting through the air like splinters of burning glass in his still healing flesh. As they flew, the other crows lifted from their perches to join them like a rising tide of shadows.
He and Lenore flew quickly and when he touched down on the ground outside the barn, stumbling at the unfamiliar sensation of landing, the other crows were only an encroaching blackness on the horizon. Soon they would swallow the sky, Tobias thought as he found his footing and strode toward the barn doors.
Mooncricket was pounding at the heavy wood and shouting for Jeremy to open the fucking door.
“Move,” Tobias said. He didn’t raise his voice or shout, but he didn’t have to. That one softly spoken word had the weight of a command behind it and it was enough.
Mooncricket jerked and fell to the side, staring up at Tobias when he hit the ground with a thud. His face was shiny with tears that turned it silver in the weak light.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Mooncricket said. He began to sob, doubled up over on himself in the long grass. “Please don’t.”
“I never wanted to hurt him,” Tobias said as he walked right up to the barn doors and shoved them open. As the lock tore free and the wood cracked like broken thunder, he knew though that hurt him was all he had ever done.
The interior of the barn was awash with candlelight and in the golden glow stood Jeremy. He had a knife in his hand, but was frozen with shock, nearly lost in the center of a vortex of moving shadows that jerked and jittered like crazed minstrels. They screamed in adulation when Tobias walked into the barn, all of them pouring across the ground to twist around him in a frenzied mass. His wraiths, his agents, the things that he sent to do his bidding because he could not be everywhere at once and always. Their numbers were legion, but to find any at all in this place was strange. Then again, the entire barn smelled like sick magic.
“You came,” Jeremy said as the knife slipped from his fingers. He fell to his knees in the grass and behind him lay Dawn Marie. She was breathing, but slow and labored, eyes wide open and seeing nothing. Blood stained her neck black, but it didn’t squirt from a severed artery. She wasn’t dead, but she would be soon; Tobias had almost been too late. If he had not broken the door when he did, thus interrupting Jeremy, then her throat would be a grisly screaming maw right now.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 38
