A Toiling Darkness

by Jaliza Burwell

  “Of course I do.” He didn’t hesitate with his response, which would have probably surprised me if I weren’t so focused on surviving.

  “Good.” I waved my hands and heard as he yelled in protest. A moment later he was gone and it was just me and the slauve in the room. Me and the enemy. If Kay stayed around, he would have only gotten in my way. Right now he was probably in my apartment and by the time he got back here, the fight should be over. Only one of us was going to survive this fight and I really wanted it to be me.

  I finally found Akhlys. When I first sensed her, I blacked out and when I came back to myself, I was outside this building and my body kept moving on its own.

  Now I faced her.

  Now I can kill her.

  I can be free.

  Can I? Can I be free? Is this okay?

  The woman was breathtakingly beautiful. She was tall and lean, in only leather pants and what could be mistaken as a leather bra. Her long black hair flowed around her delicate face. And yet something was wrong.

  I stared into the black pits that were her eyes and a shiver crawled along my spine.

  Kill her. End her.

  Freedom.

  But why does she remind me so much of that small child. Of Darkness.

  She looked…broken.

  Attack.

  Is it really okay to do this? There was no real proof. Just my master’s orders and his stories. Is this woman in front of me able to do something so horrible?

  My body moved on its own, my soul crying out as it charged at the woman, swinging the knife at her and hoping to land a hit. I tried to stop, to pull back. But I was in the back seat. My soul had control and he wanted her dead.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Chapter 13:

  The slauve attacked, quicker than my eyes could follow. By the time I saw him again, he was back in the same spot he started from and my arm was burning from a cut. It was a shallow wound on my arm, but the pain was massive. A fire entered through the cut and into my blood stream, spreading from my forearm and up to my shoulder.

  Magic, in a way, can be poison and that was exactly what was coating the blade. In normal circumstances I could heal the cut in less than a minute. There was nothing normal right now. With whatever magic was coating that damn blade, it not only slowed down the healing process, it also kept the wound bleeding.

  I shook off my surprise and the pain, and focused on the slauve. I’ll have to deal with the wounds later.

  The slauve went for another swing and I jumped back. I kicked out my leg, getting him in the stomach. He let out a grunt as he stepped back a little. I kept up the offense and whipped my leg out in a classic round house that got him in the head. He staggered, eyes a little unfocused and I used that moment to bind him with the shadows. They wrapped around him like the chains on his soul. His soul yowled, making his eyes dance around in the madness he was stuck in.

  He fought against the chains and I had to mentally fight to keep him strained. The slauve was stronger than I anticipated. Probably too strong for a slauve. The last slauve wasn’t even this close, power-wise. He had to be more than I thought as a human if he was so overpowering now that he was something else.

  I released even more power and aimed it all on the slauve. My brain pounded against my skull at the strain, but I pushed through it. He fell to his knees, his face twisted in a grimace. I pushed into his mind, to find that little bit of fear in there. Everyone had fear and it was easy to find his. It was in the forefront of his mind, always there, even now as he fought for his life. It wasn’t what I was looking for and I lingered in that fear in wonder. Usually, at this point, I could just use their fear of me and who I represented—but no, it wasn’t me he feared. He feared failure. There was even the fear of failing to kill me, but what overshadowed that was the fear of failing to find who killed that child in the park and took her older sister.

  Leaving the park and her body behind had bothered him more than he let on. The thought fluttered through my enraged mind, muddling my instincts. He wanted to keep those children alive and for some strange reason, I was one of those children he feared he couldn’t protect. He was still stuck in the alley, looking down on me as I bled. I caught the scene, a flash of my small white body. So frail. My stomach was a puddle of blood and I was squirming around. He didn’t know what to do or how to help. All he could do was watch while I fought of the souls that had invaded me.

  He’s scared for me. Not of me.

  He’s a slauve. Ignore it. Kill him.

  I shook off the image and began constructing my metaphysical attack. The only tangible fear that was useful was his fear for the children. I grabbed onto it and sent in my power, intensifying it.

  Another image of me popped into his mind. A little girl with big empty blue eyes, porcelain flawless skin, wavy blonde hair done up into two puffballs, and small delicate bone structures that looked so breakable. His image of me was of one of those delicate and yet cold and empty looking porcelain dolls. He didn’t want this little child to be hurt. He wanted to protect her. Seeing his image of me stirred something in his chest.

  Is he using me to represent the children?

  No, ignore it! Kill him.

  Shut up.

  I stood there, warring with my instincts, hesitating to finish what I started while he kneeled down in front me with so much hatred and disgust in his expression.

  Don’t do it. Don’t kill him.

  The little voice that kept telling me not to kill him was louder now, pounding against my skull and driving back the instincts that I allowed to control me through the entire fight. I did not want to kill this slauve. In a way, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  I touched his hair and felt the soft curls as it glided through my fingers. It really was as soft as I thought.

  “Kalen,” I whispered, still warring with my psyche.

  This man wanted me dead, the look he gave me told me this clearly enough and yet I couldn’t find myself to kill him, to protect myself. He blinked up at me, the hatred dimming a little as he looked lost and confused, my reaction not what he wanted. Even his trapped soul hesitated. I ran my hand through his hair again, enjoying the silky strands as they glided through my fingers. I could not kill him.

  Finally, I gained control of my instincts and managed to push it down. It was like I was crawling out of a muddy pit in the middle of the forest. It was completely exhausting. I don’t think I ever went against my instincts and to do it took everything I had.

  Pain burned through my stomach, up to my chest and wrapped itself around my heart.

  I looked down and realized the dagger was sticking out of my stomach. I had loosened my hold on Kalen and he used that opportunity to stab me. A whimper escaped me as he pulled the dagger back out.

  I stepped back, shocked. The shadows surrounding him dissipated and he stood up slowly.

  “You can’t kill me,” I said simply, tampering down on the instincts as they tried to surge back up once again. I couldn’t let them control me, not anymore.

  He smirked and moved his knife around. It was now stained with my blood, all the way up to the hilt. I was pretty sure he added a little twist when he stabbed me to do as much damage as possible. The blood dripped down onto the beige rug.

  “I can certainly try. Doesn’t feel too good does it? Do you even understand what it feels like to suffer? I can feel it.” He moved his hand through the air, caressing it, before he continued. “All the pain and suffering you caused, it stained you and follows you around.”

  “Enough chatting, slauve,” I seethed, my anger getting the best of me. If he wanted Akhlys, I was going to give him her, along with everything she is. Everything.

  For the first time in nearly a thousand years, I let go. I dived right into that abyss of power and swam in it. The curse on my thigh burned, trying to dampen down on my powers and failing, keeping back only a small amount. It was like using a cup to scoop out an ocean. Completely ineffective. What did work
was the pain. It originated on the small brand on my thigh and spread itself through my entire body, cell by cell. I pushed through it, not caring at the moment.

  I knew pain, better than the slauve liked to believe. I was born out of man’s fear of the night and what resided in it. The moment I existed, I only ever met animosity and fear. People lash out if they think they are pushed into a corner and in my case, whole villages grabbed their makeshift weapons and torches. I’ve been whipped, beaten and tortured. Men came up with creative ways to kill me, always failing and in most cases ending with me surrounded with dead bodies. I became a survivor and I wasn’t going to let some slauve end me. My instincts wouldn’t allow that.

  El was in there, in the back of my mind, yelling at me. Whether it was the real him, using the night to communicate, or just my consciousness making an appearance was up for questioning. He kept telling me not to do it, to remember who I was. I pushed his annoying voice to the side and just let myself go.

  My body grew light, expanding beyond my skin and blacking out the entire room. I became the very darkness I manipulated. I no longer saw, not with eyes at least. I felt and tasted everything—the cool rain-spotted windows, the lemon from the cleaning products used on the mahogany wood, the coarse rug, the dust particles in the corners of the room, and especially the warm body of my victim. I could also hear every single living being within the city as they stalked in the night, making use of the storm. Before I got too caught up in the vast expanse of my powers, I focused back on to my victim. A heart pounding against a chest resonated through me, narrowing down my search for him.

  I wrapped myself around the warm body, trying to suffocate him. A white light glided through the darkness, cutting me. Hot pain shot through me along with a scream. It wasn’t a scream of pain, but of desperation, a small plea from my psych to stop. It tugged on me until I was back in my human form, completely naked and confused.

  And so damn tired. Last time I even did something like that was when I was with Kay and we were playing with a tribe that no longer existed. We teased them while they were out hunting and stayed out too long. Out of the five that were out, only one survived and only because Kay wouldn’t let me play with him.

  Practice really did make perfect and I haven’t even tried to do that for far too long.

  The slauve stood there, his chest heaving, his face pallid and beads of sweat fell from his hairline down to his neck and soaked into his shirt. I glanced down and wrapped the shadows around me, creating a little black dress. Two new cuts added to the already infernal pain dispersing through my body. One of them was on my right arm and the other on my left thigh.

  I stared at the slauve.

  Who the hell are you?

  The fight slowly left me as I grew too exhausted. My body grew numb from the power strain and knife wounds marring my body.

  “You really are an abomination.” His voice was gravel, each word painfully scraping against my skin. I flinched and stared at him in a new and yet old kind of pain.

  You’re an abomination!

  A monster!

  The devil!

  You mean the devil’s bitch!

  Kill her! End her! Monster! Abomination!

  Burn her! Drown her! Cut her up!

  Die, you abomination!

  “I’m only what humans made me to be,” I whispered, saying what I always said to others. This time the words were different. They weren’t cold and empty. No, they were full of agony, and the slauve heard the emotion. He stiffened and looked me over, a confusion so familiar falling over his features. Something wet trailed down my cheek and I wiped it away, expecting blood or sweat. Instead I found tears.

  I was no longer the woman I was before El got his hands on me.

  I couldn’t go back to being that woman again, even if I wanted to. Not when the man in front of me called me an abomination and the word felt like a skewer in my heart. Abomination—a word I heard thousands of times. The word had hurt at first and then I grew unflinching and numb to it. Not anymore apparently. I began to care about what Kalen said and thought, and now the word held the power to hurt me once again.

  I didn’t even notice how important Kalen became to me. He managed to slip into my heart and make a place in there, right next to El, Eithna, and in some twisted way, Kay.

  I couldn’t help it; I let out a small laugh. It sounded childish to even my own ears. Another hysterical laugh came out before I clamped my hands over my mouth. Then my body began to shake as I swallowed back the laughter.

  Kalen stood on the other side of the desk that somehow managed to survive when nothing else did. His expression was completely blank, his head tilted to the side as he watched me mentally break down.

  Me. Darkness. Having a goddamn breakdown for the first time ever.

  Finally, having enough of my antics, he lifted his blade and made a small move as he prepared to attack.

  I shook my head furiously and pulled the last remaining power I had left together and somehow, some way, managed to wrap the shadows around me.

  When you don’t have a specific destination in mine while moving through the shadows, it becomes a game of roulette as you hope you land in a safe and appropriate place. All I thought about was the need for someplace empty and dark, someplace I could be myself and safe. I ended up in the tallest building in New Rheems, with a good view of the harbor and city below. I was on the top floor, the large office completely empty and lights off. The rain pattered against the window like a spray of bullets. Lightening went off right outside, lighting up the sky with flashes, revealing the angry clouds that were still coming in. The storm was going to last the night, and go into the morning.

  This place was exactly what I needed. I could be here, in the dark, and be alone. I could watch the storm and heal without worry.

  I slumped against a wall, stared out the window that took up the entire wall, and allowed myself the freedom to hysterically laugh.

  I mentally shook my head at the irony of it all. I spent my entire existence keeping everyone away and Kalen—a slauve created to kill me—got through my defenses in only a matter of days while it took even El a good two weeks before I even tried to consider that maybe what he said and did was okay.

  Chapter 14:

  I laughed and laughed until my sides hurt and then I couldn’t stop hiccupping and my sides were on fire. I couldn’t even remember why I started laughing in the first place. None of what happened was funny. I think I even brushed against death tonight. To think I was emotionally numb for so long, only to break down so easily by a slauve calling me an abomination.

  Oh, that was the cherry I needed to top my day off. I banged my head against the wall.

  And then did it again and again until I saw fog.

  Fucking abomination, huh?

  Religion is an interesting concept and one I don’t poke at, even with a fifty-foot pole. It shapes how people think, what they believe in, and how they should act. Religion controlled people and led to war, massacres, persecutions, and more pain and suffering than anything else in the world. El explained it to me once and I couldn’t deny anything. Everything he said was true. His explanations answered questions I searched for, for a very long time. I’ve had humans try to use their religious symbols and texts against me countless times.

  When the Bible or Koran or even the Pyramid texts from Ancient Egypt didn’t work, I became an abomination, a problem they couldn’t find a solution to. The only thing all the different religious figures agreed on was that I shouldn’t exist, that no god or goddess would create someone like me because it would only be cruel. I’m not human, I’m not meant to exist and therefore I’m not any god’s creation. So what was left but to call me an abomination?

  Back then, I didn’t agree with them. I was simply someone trying to exist, trying to carve a place for myself in a world that didn’t want me. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Even Kalen came up with the same conclusion.

  The same fucking word.

  My
body was going numb both mentally and physically. My wounds were still bleeding and if I didn’t stop it soon, I was going to bleed out. I wanted to just close my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep. Instead, I closed my eyes and focused on the poison crawling through my body. I took deep breaths and forced myself to relax. It took who knows how long because time became inconsequential as I looked within myself.

  There it was, little particles of poison moving in my blood stream, causing a surprising amount of damage. A tear here, a scrape there, and then my body working overtime to heal those cuts and bruises. The kind of poison that was working so effectively against me made me want to laugh again. Good thing I was too tired to go into another fit of laughter. What made so much damage to me was magic of the light—an irony I couldn’t ignore.

  Only a witch would be able to make such a poison and a powerful one at that. It involved harvesting the light, subjecting it into reality, quantifying it, and then using it as a basis for the poison. What better way to defeat the darkness than to use the light? Brilliant. And so damn simple. If I was a lesser being, I would have died the moment his blade came into contact with me.

  I stared at the white light. It was off though. Light magic was yellow, even red. But not white. It felt like light magic, tasted like it, and worked like it, but it wasn’t quite it. That was something I needed to think about long and hard—just not right now.

  I focused even more on the white light traveling through my body and leaving a path of destruction in its wake. Sweat gathered across my skin, sending shivers to follow their trail as they traveled down. My breathing hitched and I grunted as I forced the light to surface on my skin. A scream tore through the empty office and I was barely aware that it came from me as I did one last final push. Giving birth naturally to a child would have been less painful than this. Not that I would ever know for sure.

  The poison created a path of scorched flesh as it made its way outside. Eventually, the sounds of beads hitting the linoleum floor mixed in with the scent of burnt flesh. I slumped against the wall I had propped myself against and watched as the beads of light rolled around the floor. They lit up the floor with a beautiful white light as they moved around and it was mesmerizing in a way.