My adrenaline subsides to make way for reality. The pain in my back and blood from the injury drop me to the ground. I crawl to a tree, my vision darkening.
“Hang on,” a voice calls out, but I don’t know who it is—only that it’s female.
Through the shadows and blur, Verity’s face fills the frame of my vision. “You’re hurt!” she cries. “What happened?”
“I don’t—I don’t—” Know.
What had happened? I want to tell her how glad I am to see her. To thank God she’s all right. But I can’t speak.
“I have you,” she says. “Don’t worry. Hang on. Stay will me, you’ll be all right.”
Verity’s voice soothes me like a mother’s lullaby soothes a child, and my own mother fills my vision. The woman she had been once, before the darkness arrived. Memories of being little and her grasping my wrists and spinning me over the tall grass in our back yard, until we were both dizzy and fell back to stare at a pale blue sky full of white cotton fluff, the only sound aside from our laughter the snapping of crisp linen hung to dry in the cool, early autumn breeze.
“You’re going to be fine,” Verity’s voice cuts in again, and my vision clears. “Here, take this,” she says, pressing some Daphne berries to my mouth. “Chew. Come on.”
Are those tears in her eyes?
I swallow the berries and grasp her hand. “How did you know?”
“Vanessa found me in the woods, shortly after you disappeared. I convinced her I was a friend and trying to help you, but by then, you were already gone. She said you might need my help one day and told me what to do. Then I saw all the townsfolk marching to the woods...and...I just knew you would be here. Oh, Abigail. You should have told me. Thank heavens you’re all right.”
Somehow, Vanessa had known to trust Verity more than I had. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“Verity, I—”
“Not now, please. Your friends still need you.”
She’s right. This battle isn’t over yet. Though the sun has killed all the Cruor on the field, we still have the Marked Ones and the remaining Morts to finish off. But we’re outnumbered, and William and Tess won’t make it long enough to finish this battle without my help.
I shake my head, willing her to leave my side. “Go. Please, Verity, don’t worry about me. If you’re going to . . .” I can’t say it. Can’t admit she’s risking her life because of me. But she is, and I need her to. “Help them.”
She bites her lip, nods her head sadly, and then pops more Daphne berries into my mouth before running into the fray.
April 1692
I grasp at the underbrush behind me, hopelessly hoping I’ll find more nightshade or Daphne berries or anything to help me recover, instead of leaving me incapacitated on the side of the battlefield.
But there’s nothing but branches with their first few leaves of spring waiting to break free.
Water laps against my back like waves on a beach at low tide. I shiver involuntarily against the chill, my body aching from the cold, but soon the water is soothing. My head sways as though I sit atop an iceberg on a choppy sea, and the pain of the cold is like needles pressing into my skin. But each time the tide pulls back, the poison seeps from my wound.
I feel the water healing me. Making me stronger than before. But it’s not helping quickly enough. Something black and pooling is in the water, swirling like smoke in the sea. I see my chime bob in the current, and my heart sinks.
Never let the chimes get wet.
The blackness snakes out toward the Morts, and soon I see their spirits growing and twisting. Their eyes glow red, and their increased strength is apparent by the way they begin to overtake our group. Their spirit-forms had at least resembled humanity; these morphed beings are less deceptive and more terrifying. They are monstrous, disfigured, and vibrating with a thudding evil.
One of the Morts grabs William by the neck and lifts him up onto his toes, and then further until his legs dangle.
They can touch us now—without the need for a human host.
The Mort uses his other hand to grab William’s chime necklace, and holds it up to inspect it as it reflects the sun’s rays. A grin twists his face, and he drops the chime, letting it plunk into the water to create its own smoky pool.
“No!” Tess yells, but she can’t get to him with all the other Morts and Marked Ones still between them. They need me.
I grab the root of the tree behind me and use my healing abilities in a new way. Not only for regrowth of what has died, but to force as much new growth as possible. The tree sprouts new branches. Old ones twist and extend, poking out further into the clearing. My energy is draining rapidly, but I won’t let go. I can’t.
Soon one of the branches is pressing so hard into another tree that the tree is leaning into the clearing. Its roots are lifting. The Mort who has William opens its new monstrous red eyes wide as the smaller tree begins to fall. He releases William to duck out of the way, and William twists his body in the other direction. Everyone in the tree’s path parts like the red sea. Bodies dive away to save themselves.
This won’t be enough, but it bought us a little time. I slump back against the tree, nearly unable to keep my eyes open. The water tingles my wounds and laps against me, rolling over me, soothing me.
Then, suddenly, I’m weightless.
The water pushes me up, until I am levitating above the clearing, the waves an uplifting swirl beneath me. Peace floods through me. Perhaps I was always meant to die in the water. Maybe that’s where my life went wrong—when my father saved me from drowning, only to later make me wish I were dead.
If I die today, will the water carry me back to Anna, or will my soul be lost forever?
Below, Adrian, Charles, and Vanessa have taken over fighting the Strigoi. Grace, though she can no longer move the Mort spirits, assists William and Tess by tossing any possessed humans out of the way, keeping them at bay as my friends do the work I should be doing alongside them.
The spirits crouch together like a pack of wolves, except their dark forms are so varied in shape and size that they resemble trees incised with human faces. All of them—even the children among them—are bereft of beauty and innocence.
In the horde of spirits, one captures my attention. His eyes hide in shadows, but his thick aquiline nose casts an elongated shadow that cuts through his lips and graduates to a point on his cleft chin.
Rage boils within me, my ears burning hot, my body trembling so fiercely I am surely hurting the air around me.
That particular Mort was the first.
He stole my family in Georgia.
My mind fixates on the moment before the accident. The moment before Pa lost control of the car. A man standing in the road. But it wasn’t a man. No, it was him: this Mort in front of me now. Pa jerked the car sideways to avoid what he thought was a man. The truck squealed as it angled on two wheels, and then it tumbled.
Anger cuts my peripheral vision, and I focus on him as though through a tunnel. The spirit of the Forever Girl swells within me and lends me the strength and energy I need. My muscles jerk with a surge of unexpected power. The Mort’s translucent body shimmers around a face as resolved as a dead-skin mask.
I reach out, squeeze my hand, and then pull my fist to my stomach, willing the Mort forward. Even in his spirit form, he stumbles. As though he’s opened his eyelids, the shadows peel back from his forehead, showing tiny green vortexes that seem to absorb the air around him. His middle teeth, as long and craggy as stalagmites, gleam with feigned moonlight.
I lift my arm, and his spirit rises, joining me in my levitation. When he closes in on me, I thrust my hand forward, my elongated nails slashing into his forehead, but before I can send him to an eternal non-existence, he thrusts his spirit hand forward and plunges it into my chest. Filaments of burning pain coil around my organs and constrict.
My lungs seize, and pain pulses through my chest as though I’ve swallowed a gulp of boiling water.
His blurry face grins, and he pulls me closer, yanking my body as if I’m his puppet.
“You,” he whispers with a voice like a rattlesnake.
His face stops inches from mine. I dig my nails deeper, and his smile turns into an angry grimace.
But he doesn’t stop. He presses so close against me that I can feel his spirit entering my body.
“No,” I try to say, but the word leaves me like a dying breath.
This is what I have spent a lifetime trying to avoid. This is the spirit that forces itself on you. The spirit that violates you. Now he’s taking everything that is left of me. Making my body his own.
I can’t surrender. I can’t be like Pa. My head feels thick and fuzzy. He’s pushing my body forward, down. My face plunges into the water, and I hold my breath. I can’t breathe. I open my eyes, but all I see is debris floating by, obscuring dozens of pairs of feet. I flail my arms, push against the ground, try to pull my head back up, but he makes me resist every effort. My arms are not my own. My spirit is breaking.
Finally he pulls me out of the water and throws my body back. The water surrounding us parts, as though running away. My emotions spill, and my tears soak my face. My mind flashes back to my Pa, and my body shuts down completely.
Get off me. Leave me alone.
His voice rattles: “You’re mine.”
Not yet. There’s still a part of me left. I can’t let him take me.
My body struggles to fight back, but I can’t overcome him. He’s stronger than most other Morts I’ve encountered. I went about this the wrong way. I should have hidden myself with my wings on my approach. Too late now.
He is inside of me, and his form wreaths around my spine. I fall back, twisting in agony.
Tess straddles me, pinning my shoulders down. “Let her go!” she screams. She pounds my chest. Tears gleam in her eyes and fury twists her face. “Get out! GET OUT!”
Through the haze of my vision, I see black veins branching on my shoulders where Tess touches me. The skin starts to gray, and my heart throttles into a panic. My mouth twists open and my neck bends to one side, and vertebrae pop between my shoulder blades. My eyes roll back. Then laughter that is not my own bubbles from my throat.
“Kill me,” he says, mocking her. “Kill...me.”
Killing the host is the only way an Ankou without Ferrum nature can end a Mort spirit that has possessed human flesh. But Tess is driven by her sense of justice. She wouldn’t kill me to kill him.
Would she?
Tess’ long dark braid falls in front of her shoulder, and loose strands of hair stick to her face. Water drips from her nose. “You won’t take her from me,” she says through her teeth. She slams her hand into my chest again. “You won’t take her!”
In my blurred vision, she reaches into her pack at her side and removes the Malleus Maleficarum. She grabs my hand—his hand?—and presses it again the book. “Cord, please. We need you. Anna needs you.”
Images flash into my mind. My gift of psychometry sends visions flying by as it searches for a memory I can use imprinted on the book. Anything. All I see is destruction. Burnings. Beheadings. Hangings. Slaughter. Lies. Deceit. A world in which women are the sexual playmates of Satan. I want to break away from this—the idea that witchcraft sprang from carnal lust. That in women, lust is insatiable.
The image freezes. Clears on a girl in a white flowing gown, standing still in a sea of commotion, her dress fluttering gently in the breeze. She’s reaching toward me. She’s saying something . . .
Regna terrae, cantata Omne, psallite Cernunnos.
The spirit tenses within me, bends my body painfully sideways. It coils my organs, and it squeezes. I hear myself scream—my own voice. The Mort is deep within me, harboring in my body, recoiling. Growling.
Regna terrae, cantata Omne, psallite Aradia.
It grips at my gut and twists my body so hard that Tess is thrown from me, but she doesn’t let the book leave my hand. I pull my face out of the mud, and there is a moment of solace before the spirit twists around my belly again. I scream again, this time in the spirit’s voice—a cougar’s voice.
In my vision, a dark storm surrounds the girl in white.
Caeli Omne, terrae, Humiliter majestati gloriae tuae tu a nobis, Ut ab omni infernalium spirituum potestate.
The Mort shrieks. He lifts one of my hands and plunges my fingernails into my own face. I try to press out my Ferrum nature, in hopes of biting myself, but he won’t let me. It’s too late.
Laqueo, and deception nequitia. Omnis fallaciae libera nos, dominates. Exorcizamus you omnis spiritus malus.
My body jerks backwards until I’m up straight, and then slams backward again, hitting a rock and opening my scalp. My vision clouds, but the girl is still in my mind. Fading and returning, fading and returning, her voice somewhere in the distance . . .
Omnis malus potestas, omnis incursion, infernalis adversarri, omnis legio. Omnis and congretatio secta diabolica!
The roar in my head is so loud it feels as though my brain is bleeding. My body convulses. Pure evil pours from my mouth, a raspy voice that is not my own. “No one wants you, Tess! Go away. Go away, little girl! You’re dead, you’re dead!”
I feel Tess’ trembling, but I cannot comfort her.
I hate myself. I want to die. I want my life to end before this Mort makes me do anything unforgivable. Is this what it had been like for my father? Was he as much as victim as me?
The girl from the book’s memories continues, a fire catching behind her, blazing in the background. Ab insidiis mali, lobera nos, dominates, ut coven tuam secura tibi libertate servire facias, te rogamus, audi nos!
My whole body is convulsing. Something wet drops from the corner of my lips, and I taste it on my tongue. Blood. My blood.
Terribilus Omni Sanctuario cernunnos virtutem plebe. Aradai ipse fortitudinem plebe suae! Benedictus Omni, Gloria Patrie! Benedictus Dea, Matri Gloria!
And it’s calm. Eerily calm.
I look up to see the flashing red in Tess’ eyes, and I know exactly where’s he’s gone. And exactly how to end him once and for all.
I lunge toward her and sink my razor teeth into her shoulder.
Tess shrieks in the Mort’s voice.
Desperately I bite at her again on her forearm and again on her neck, calling up shrieks that are progressively more intense. Her hand comes up firmly to my shoulder before I can bite again, and when I look in her eyes, I see it’s her again. Really her.
She stumbles back, but catches herself. After a deep breath, she turns away from me, facing the destruction, then takes off to return to combat. Behind where she stood is Verity, smiling sadly at me, a pile of dead at her feet. She had protected Tess so Tess could help save me. I nod my thanks to her, but it’s not long before my attention shifts to the clearing beyond.
The water lifts me back into my levitation, and my gaze cascades over the remaining enemy. I feel the power thrumming in me. I hear my call—hear the drum beat in the ground, a building crescendo inside of me.
One of the possessed is sneaking up on Tess’ left. She won’t be able to see it, not with the blindness in that eye. And she won’t be able to hear me over the roar of the battle. I plunge toward the possessed and use my Ferrum nature to extract it from the human. The body thuds into the water, and the Mort tries to run. But it’s too late. My fingers are already in its spirit skull, and soon it is nothing more than black particles on the breeze. Tess nods her thanks to me, then refocuses her attention on the Morts that have evolved from our wet chimes.
This ends now.
I zip around the clearing biting every possessed human I can before returning to neutral ground, then I reach out both my hands and pull all the Morts toward me. I pull them from the shadows, I pull them from their battles, I pull them from the human bodies they fight to keep possession of. The clearing is filled with the shrieking cries of Morts and the thudding slosh of
host bodies falling into the ankle-deep water.
Now it’s just me and the Morts. They claw at me, fighting back against my control over them. I clutch the witch’s ladder I still keep in the folds of my dress and begin chanting. The spirit of the Forever Girl is with me, and the power of the triple goddess swirls through me, making her presence known and giving me the strength and energy I need.
“Veni, tenebræ,” my voice trembles low, the Latin words coming out with a guttural tenor. “Veni, tenebræ.”
The Morts slog forward. Through the wall of their shadowy forms, I see William trying to break through.
“Cord! No!”
He’s yanking Morts back. He’s moving two of them at a time, reducing them to black particle that turns the water below a shimmering gray.
“Veni, tenebræ.”
Come, darkness.
I repeat the chant until all the Morts have been extracted from the human bodies. Bodies that now lie drowning in inches of water, waiting to be reborn.
William is low now; the crowd of Morts have swallowed him.
They hover closer and closer, until I can feel their deadly chill, until it’s like ice melting over a Georgia sunburn. I hold tight to this world, not allowing the fragment to push forward.
“No!” William yells again, but his voice is drowned by a sea of moaning spirits.
Soon, they are on top of me, suffocating me, too many for me to fight back, wrapping their fingers around my arms and legs, pulling my levitating body from the sky to the ground below. The water surges away, clearing a circle around me as I land.
If I let my friends fight this battle without me, they could die. Do I sacrifice the lives of some of the people I love in order to save Anna? That was never possible. I had to save them all to save her anyway.
If I die here today, maybe I still would make it back to Anna. Just so long as I do what needs to be done. Maybe that would be enough.
COME, THE DARK: (Forever Girl Series Book Two) Page 30
