Darkness Calls

by Marjorie M. Liu

  They always want something. Some just take longer to get around to it.

  I had been shot at, and nearly killed. Grant was heading for what most certainly felt like a trap, and the priest who had invited him had called me a singularly unique name. And then, that piggish little man. Coming to pay a call. To see how things stood.

  All of those disparate pieces belonged together—I could feel it in my gut—but it was like having a box full of fingers, and not knowing which part of the hand I should attach them to.

  I was on the south side of the market, near the big pig statue whose name I had forgotten—except for the fact that Zee and the others always wanted to eat the damn thing. Tourists all around me; and some locals. Everyone minding their own business. Cars, shops, chatter. I watched it all and suddenly felt like the only normal person in a surrealist landscape; as though the world were wavering into something peculiar and alien, while I stayed the same: outsider, unchanging, caught in time. Little more than a constant stranger.

  Near me stood a tall bald man wearing dark sunglasses, an earring, and a white MSU sweatshirt. He held a little boy in one arm, a camera in the other, and when he saw me glancing in his direction, he pointed at the giant pig that other parents had plopped their crying children upon. “Would you mind?”

  Zee rumbled ominously on my skin. I almost said no—wondering what, exactly, this man would say if he knew about all the demons sleeping on my body—but the kid in his arms looked at me with big blue eyes, and I was a sucker. I took the camera, and snapped some shots for them. It was another surreal moment, gazing through a lens at those smiling faces; baby bouncing and his father making little bunny ears with his fingers.

  I wondered how long they would live when the prison veil failed.

  I passed back the camera, waving good-bye as the man’s son continued to ride the pig, patting its head with a chubby hand and laughing delightedly. There must be a way to stop it. You have to. It can’t be hopeless.

  Some way, somehow. I had spent my life with a very narrow focus. See a demon. Kill a demon. Nothing subtle about it. Not much strategy involved. Zee and the others did all the heavy lifting.

  That could not last. The stakes were higher now. I had to be smarter, faster. If I was not careful, the world was going to end while I slept in a warm bed with a warm man and pretended I was a normal girl with demons living on her skin. My mother would have been ashamed. Her daughter, the wolf, turning into a house cat.

  It’s not just comfort that keeps you tame, I told myself. You fear the alternatives. You fear what you will become if you do as you must. You are afraid of the darkness that sleeps so lightly in your heart. More afraid of yourself, than the end of the world.

  True enough. But I was not simply afraid of the possibilities.

  I was terrified.

  I found a Starbucks on my way back to the car and bought some hot chocolate. Sat for a moment on a wet bench between wood barrels full of decorative ferns and ignored the drizzle floating down in a silver mist. The boys soaked up the water seeping through the bottoms of my jeans and sweater, and I had never minded a little rain on my face. Felt good and clean. Rain was something that never changed. Rain was part of the world, beyond human, beyond me. There was another kind of immortality in it, an agelessness that would last longer than even the boys—who were dependent solely on my bloodline for their longevity.

  One day the enemy would get lucky, whether in my lifetime or the next. I wondered if my mother had suffered any close calls. I could ask the boys, but Zee and the others did not talk much about their previous hosts. Memories pained them.

  I could sympathize. I was thinking about my mother when I saw a familiar MSU sweatshirt at the corner of my vision. Took a moment to register.

  A moment too long. Shadows gathered. I was surrounded. Hands lifted me, and I fought, screaming, listening to the roar of a car engine. The boys thundered against my skin.

  Too late. I was always too late.

  CHAPTER 6

  ONE night while staying in a cheap motel in Lubbock, Texas, I saw a news report on what to do if you ever got stuffed inside the trunk of a car.

  People were all fired up at the time. Some big case in a town thirty miles south had started it. Four vehicles found inside a lake, girls trapped within every one of them. According to the papers, the teens had still been alive when the waters started coming in.

  The security expert interviewed for the report was a pudgy white man with silver hair, a flat nose, and jowls that trembled every time he used a vowel. Break out the taillights, he rumbled. Find the release lever. Better yet, be vigilant. Don’t get caught. Fight like hell.

  Fine advice. Problem was, people froze. Got taken off balance. Behaved in unanticipated ways. Something I should have remembered.

  Maybe if I had, I would not have been thinking of those murdered girls—four years later—and feeling ridiculously, impossibly irritated. Mostly at myself. Rocking and rolling in a small dark space with my arms and legs bound in crushing knots, a strip of duct tape over my mouth.

  I was not in the trunk of a car. I was inside a box. A box that had once been a coffin, but with all the bells and whistles stripped off. Just plain wood. No silk. No other body but mine. I was hot, and the air was bad. My nose felt stuffy.

  The coffin was sliding around the back of a windowless white van that I glimpsed just before being passed inside like a loaf of bread. I was a strong girl—stronger than most men—but I lost my chance to fight in the first two seconds of the attack. My fault. I had forgotten my own rule: Expect the unexpected. Worse, the men were professionals, and I had not dealt with many of those. Calm, fast, with an exact knowledge of what I was. No guns, no knives, no attempts to hit me over the head. No sedation. Just brute force, and nothing else.

  I thought about that as I lay in the coffin. I thought about those four girls in Texas and how it had been the end of their world—the same end others faced every day, and that yet more would endure, in different and varied ways once the veil came down. I remembered the zombie who killed those girls, and the look on his face as I exorcised the demon living in his soul. I had made him a man again.

  He was arrested twenty-four hours later, and after a speedy trial, given the death penalty for four murders he barely remembered committing. Quickest execution in Texas history. Up until the day he died, he claimed he was innocent. That someone had framed him.

  I understood how he felt.

  I stayed in the coffin for a long time. Felt the day trickle down as though the movement of the sun were in my blood.

  Near sunset, the van stopped moving. I heard no voices, but somewhere a door slid open. The coffin jiggled, then slammed up and down, tilting at wild angles until it felt as though I were pitching around inside a clothes dryer. I somersaulted, hovered, bounced. My stomach crawled up my throat.

  I should have suffered a head wound getting so knocked around, but the boys swarmed over my face at the first skip and hop. Felt like being pushed under hot water; all five of them, stretching over my cheeks and forehead, eyes and lips. Ready for anything. Pissed off. Hungry for sunset.

  The coffin finally dropped. Hit the floor so hard my teeth rattled, and the wood panels cracked. The lid had been nailed shut—as if my kidnappers could not be bothered to pay the five fucking dollars for a lock—and I listened as a crowbar was used to pry me out of the box.

  I found myself in a pitch-black room. My vision was excellent in darkness. I saw men ranged around me. At least four, wearing street clothes and night-vision goggles. They smelled like cigarettes and sweat, but if any were surprised that tattoos now covered my face, no one showed it. The men were professionally unexcitable.

  The coffin was upended, again—and that white MSU sweatshirt ghosted in front of me as I thudded against the floor. I smelled damp concrete. A basement scent, like I was in an old, rusty house that needed a good dose of Raid and a toxic-mold examination.

  Someone began stripping off my gloves. I ba
lled my hands into a fist, trying to stop him, and a moment later felt a knife sawing through the leather. I craned my neck, trying to see, and found the man in the MSU sweatshirt straddling me, switchblade in one hand, remains of my gloves in the other. He no longer looked like a goofy father. More like a soldier. Stone-faced, compact. The kind who shaved his head on purpose because he thought it made him a bad-ass. He was the only one in that pitch-dark room not wearing night-vision goggles. Just his sunglasses. He seemed to see me fine.

  MSU finished cutting away my gloves and barked a short, sharp word. The other men moved silently toward the single door, set beneath low, gurgling pipes—like someone was upstairs, using the water. I saw no light when they opened the door, not even a sliver. Just more darkness. No sounds but the water, and their shoes, and rough breathing.

  MSU waited for the others to leave before he pushed back his sunglasses and flipped a switch in the wall. Bright lights slammed, blinding me. My eyes watered. MSU moved sideways, out of sight, and after a brief silence I heard several distinctive clicks. A camera. He was taking pictures.

  The man said, “Yes, she’s wearing the ring. I’m sending you the photos now.”

  I lay on my stomach, arms bound behind me. My right hand was in plain sight. I rolled over on my back, hiding the finger armor. The man sighed. I tried looking at him, but again he stepped away, nothing but a glimpse, a ghost.

  Raw and Aaz began heating up my hands. Within seconds the wrists of my sweater singed. So did the duct tape. I smelled the faint, acrid taint of burning plastic, and gave an experimental tug. Something ripped.

  “Yes,” said MSU, behind me. “I’ve made the preparations. And thank you, again. This has been an honor.”

  I turned my head. Finally got a good look at the man. Nothing about him had changed. His sunglasses were on again. He closed his cell phone and shoved it into his pocket. Caught me staring, and did the same for one long moment—like he was judging me. Some Anubis with his scale, and feather, determining the lightness of my heart.

  And then he stopped looking, and stripped off his sweatshirt. He wore nothing underneath except for a shoulder holster and gun. One tattoo covered his chest.

  A labyrinth. Grant had been feeding my newfound fascination on the subject with as many books as he could find. The tattoo on the man’s chest resembled photographs I had seen of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France: four quadrants, eleven circuits, with a rosette design at the center that resembled the four arms of the cross. Sometimes called the Road of Jerusalem, the Chartres labyrinth had meant to serve as a substitute for the actual pilgrimage, walked as part of a quest, a journey to God and enlightenment.

  Somehow, I had a feeling his tattoo had a different meaning. When the man turned to toss aside his sweatshirt, I saw another design on his back: a large black cross. Maybe it was the curve of his spine, or the roll of his shoulder blades, but the icon had a sinuous, crooked quality to it that made my vision blur, and my heart give up an odd pained flutter.

  The man pulled the gun from the holster. A .44 Magnum, Dirty Harry-style. I did not feel particularly lucky. True sunset was several minutes away, but the man placed the gun against my brow, and clicked off the safety. Sweat rolled down his chest, but his hand was steady. He was going to get it right. His timing was going to be perfect.

  So was mine. I tested my bonds, and the duct tape fell apart, little more than wilted silver petals hanging from my hot wrists.

  The man had no time to react. I rolled over and the gun went off, bullet skimming the side of my head as I planted my bound feet in his gut, and kicked out. He fell, cracking his skull against the side of the coffin. Not dead. Not even unconscious. But it stunned him for a precious moment while I dug my nails into the duct tape around my ankles and ripped it away.

  I was free before he began to move, and pinned his throat with my hand, pressing him into the concrete floor with crushing strength—pinching the nerves of his wrist until he released the gun. I grabbed the weapon and slammed it hard into the concrete floor. Bits of it flew apart. I tossed the rest into the corner.

  I ripped off the duct tape covering my mouth. Then did the same to the man’s sunglasses. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to memorize it before the boys woke up and had their way.

  But I got a shock.

  His eyes were not human.

  No whites. Just a black, inky darkness that covered his corneas. Not contacts. Flesh and blood, full of dark life. He blinked rapidly, like a lizard, and a thin protective lid—bright as a mirror—briefly encapsulated his eyeball. I saw my tattooed reflection, distorted; then the lid rolled down, revealing once again those impossible, enormous, obsidian eyes.

  “Fuck,” I whispered.

  He gave me a look filled with terrible scorn. I hardly noticed. Those eyes. Jesus Christ. Those eyes were not remotely human. Demon, maybe, but there was no taint, no dark aura. He was something else.

  But man enough to fool you, I told myself. Man enough to answer to someone else.

  Cell phone. I searched his pockets, trying to ignore his cold, reptilian gaze. Skin crawling, and not just because of the boys.

  “So,” I muttered, wincing as I shoved my fingers deep into his front pocket. “Who wants me dead?”

  He gurgled. I was pressing down on his throat too hard, but I didn’t relax. I managed to hook my fingers around his cell phone and dragged it from his pocket, thumbing immediately for his most recent calls. More water gurgled through the pipes above my head; I heard a child crying. Maybe the kid from Pike Place Market.

  I found a number and hit the call button. Heard ringing, a click.

  “Greetings, Franco,” said a smooth male voice. “Is it done?”

  Fuck no, and fuck you, I almost said, and hung up. Powered off the phone for good measure. And then smashed it into the floor, following up with my fist. Concrete cracked. So did the SIM card and the rest of the phone’s components.

  I did not recognize the voice on the other end of the line, but even so, I knew who was responsible for sending the man beneath me. I could take a hint. Tattoos of crosses were not exactly subtle.

  “Cribari,” I said slowly. “You were sent by Antony Cribari.”

  The man, Franco, flinched—which was confirmation enough. Cribari. Cribari had been responsible for having me shot at—this morning. Two good attempts to kill me. Two attempts that should never have happened. No priest, no human, should have known I existed—let alone my weakness.

  Nor did the priest’s involvement explain the inhuman eyes. Not in the slightest.

  I shook Franco. “Why?”

  Franco’s mouth tightened, and his body writhed upward, trying to buck me off. I held on, grabbing his ear, and yanked his head toward mine. He grunted in pain, red-faced, sweating.

  “This world is no longer yours,” he hissed, silver lids briefly encapsulating his eyes. “I won’t let you take my soul.”

  “Keep it,” I snarled. “Tell me what I want to know.”

  He grimaced, slamming his fist into my gut. I did not budge. He wrapped his fingers around my throat, but strangling me was about as effective as tying a California red-wood into knots. He tried everything to make me let go, but I was patient. It was going to be sunset soon. I had all the time in the world.

  “Why?” I asked him again, when he slumped against the floor, panting. “What are you?”

  Franco’s gaze remained righteously defiant, feverishly bright. He looked at me like I was the biggest piece of shit-sin he had ever seen, and that if I did not burn straight out after dying, then at the very least I was going to be highly and hellishly uncomfortable for the rest of eternity.

  He spat on me. My skin hissed. Acid in his saliva. I slapped his face so hard his lip bloodied. Behind us the door creaked open. Dim silver light poured through the room. I glanced over my shoulder, staring at the silhouettes of men, who grunted with surprise.

  Franco choked out an unintelligible word, and the men rushed me. I was already
low to the ground, and rammed my fist into the kneecap of the first man who came at me. Momentum did most of the work, but I also had brute strength on my side. I heard a snap, his leg bent backward, and the scream that filled the room as he went down was more animal than man.

  Franco scrabbled backward. I hooked the front pocket of his jeans and used my full body weight to slam my knee into his groin. Bone crunched, and he arched upward, breath rattling in his throat.

  Hands snatched at my hair. Someone kicked me in the face, striking my tattooed cheek. I felt no pain from the impact, but flew sideways, crunching into the coffin. Another boot tried to stomp on my throat. I grabbed that meaty ankle, and my attacker staggered, cursing.

  I felt something hard beneath the leg of his jeans. A sheath, a knife. I yanked out the weapon and released the man. He danced away from me, eyes wary. All the men, staring, casting shadows in the dull light from the open door.

  I barely saw them. I stood, swaying. All I could think of was Cribari. Alone with Grant.

  Something in me broke. Inside my heart, beneath my ribs, a dark force fluttered. Familiar and cold, stirring into wakefulness; an alien entity separate from me, independent of the boys.

  I had no name for it. I did not know what it was. I did not know where it had come from. But when it stirred, bad things always happened. Inside me. Around me.

  No, I thought. No, don’t.

  You need us, whispered a sibilant voice, and the men in front of me suddenly seemed small in the shadows; like mice, eyes glittering. Made me smile. Hard, fierce, like there were daggers on my tongue, or death, and I fought myself. I fought so hard. Smiles did not belong here. No such thing as laughter in violence.

  But I felt it. I drowned. All it took was a moment, but something rushed through me, and I knew the feeling— like the bloom of panic, or rage. Only, this was darkness. Darkness, swelling into euphoria, stretching within my chest like a long body rising from sleep.