“Troy?” I called out.
“He’s gone,” a cold voice bounced back.
“What did you do?” I swallowed glass, knowing the man was behind it.
“Oh no, it’s what you did,” he replied, his smug tone sickening.
I tried to lift myself from the hard floor.
“I said, where is Troy?”
“I told you, but for some reason you don’t believe me. He knows what you are and he is hesitating, wondering if it’s all worth it.” His words, like stone, grated the inside of my brain to mush.
“Liar!” I yelled, pulling against chains.
“You give me way too much credit… Ava.” A slight pause before he said my name. And by the way he said it, there was no doubt in my mind who was responsible for the state I found myself in.
“Enoch…” I said in a low, repulsed growl, its poison a dripping, suffocating fluid down my throat.
“That is one of my names, yes.”
“How are you alive?” I shot back, ignoring his smart-ass comment.
“The same way you are,” he simply said.
“Where are they? Where is my sister, and Arriana?”
He never answered.
“What do you want?” I bit back.
“Only what is owed to me.” This was said matter-of-factly.
I could not bring myself to think of what he was possibly on about. I lifted myself in order to stand, one slow, dragging limb at a time. I heard the unmistakable clang, the dull, cold chime of metal chains scraping on the hard, stone floor as I moved.
“What could possibly be owed to you?” I asked hesitantly.
“Everything!” he shouted, suddenly before me. His swift movement, release of breath and a rush of warm air on my face, forced me to stumble backward.
“You don’t scare me!” I tried to convince him, but my high-pitched tone must have given it away.
His mocking chuckle vibrated into my bones. Through the darkness, we stared each other down. He was inches away from me. I could feel the space between us shatter, and suddenly he was at my throat.
“What is…” I choked out, but just as suddenly as the iron grip came crushing into my windpipe, it released me.
I staggered on my feet with one hand resting on my knee, the other stroking the life back to my esophagus. I coughed.
“Show… yourself,” I squeezed out.
The sound of metal on wall screeched through the air from behind me. I laughed.
“You’ve changed,” I whispered.
I tried to focus my eyes, tried to penetrate the darkness.
But, his intention was to show himself quicker than it would take my eyes to draw on my powers, enabling me to see through the dark. I gasped as the black wall gave way to the soft glow of the entire room. I was in some sort of dungeon, chained to a wall by my hips and wrists. I pulled against them hard as my eyes fell on the disaster before me. Enoch, only it wasn’t. I closed my eyes, I was no fool to his games anymore. His magic had no effect on me, as long as I was aware that he was able to thrust things into my mind. I knew his tricks, and that knowledge made it easier to resist the push of his controlling venom.
“This is not real.” I smirked, behind closed lids.
The minute I said it, I knew it was indeed real. I could smell it all. The burn of energy in the room. The metal, the icky, blue substance holding the shells of bodies inside giant, glass cylinders lining the walls. But how did I know he wasn’t pushing me? There was no pull. Not like the times we stood in Arriana’s cottage alone, when he had thrust thoughts and doubt about Troy and the others into my mind. The times he had pushed my own thoughts to make me believe I wanted him. As much as there is a push, you can always feel the pull the pusher needs to inhibit your thoughts. Opening my eyes, I stared at the beings in the pods, their skin almost transparent, organs red, purple and black, not beating beneath the surface of their tissue-thin skins. Enoch stalked closer with loud thumps resonating on the ground, his blistering, blue gaze cutting into me. I kept my gaze on his, eyes I once admired, adored even, eyes that held me captive with lies and deceit. My heart thumped. The rest of him had changed. Surgically gutted into his tanned, robust chest, his right arm a solid, golden metal and a mechanical shiny plate covered one side of his chest, right into where his heart should have been. With his metal fingers he held my face, staring into my eyes. The hatred spilled through them – a pure, blue inferno. This is how he was alive; he was no longer just flesh and bone. He was mechanical on the outside, as much as he was on the inside.
“Are you ready for this Enoch?” I smirked, cheeks burning beneath his grip. Suddenly, as he released my aching jaw, a brutal force pulled against my restraints and I was shoved into the wall behind me. I did not feel the crush of bones, in fact, I had taken the attack on my body very well, withstood it even. I rubbed the life back into my cheeks where his claws had cut me. I laughed while standing. Enoch chuckled and swayed to a twisted tune inside of his own head.
“Are you having fun trying to beat up a girl?” I grimaced.
“You are strong.”
“Ready to find out how strong?”
His dark eyebrow lifted.
I gritted my teeth.
“Is that a promise?”
The malice on his face was almost enough, but the mind-shift apparently needed more, something pure, over-powering as a trigger, and he knew it. He wanted me to shift. In fact, he was forcing it.
I gasped, “You wouldn’t!”
“Wouldn’t I?” he retaliated, grinning.
“Why?” I swallowed back tears.
“There is no why.” The smirk on his face dropped like he meant what I knew he was thinking, that he would hurt them just for fun, for kicks, to feel something other than whatever he was going through. No, I shook my head, I would not empathize with a monster.
“There is always a why!” I spat back. “What did I do to you, and why are you going after the ones I care for?”
“Oh, it’s not just them,” he said, his face unmoved from his personal sinister bliss.
“You can’t kill Troy,” I said forcefully.
“I know that, and I don’t need to. Because you will.” His smile twisted his face into something all-knowing, something dark.
That was enough. I felt the mind-shift, like a match that’s been struck, hovering over the point of ignition.
“Why are you holding back?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “These will be the last words you will hear from me. I will take everything from you!” He bared white teeth, electric-blue eyes gutting me from a few feet away. His words sent me plunging into darkness. The force of the mind-shift was an easy one, and it triggered the blood-shift. My mind was not my own, the sweet, intoxicating cloud of its instinct poured into my awareness, twirling around every nerve inside my body. Ever so slowly, my skin glowed a purple, electric blaze.
I said, “And this will be the last time I see you die.” My face emotionless.
“You are beautiful,” he added, straightening and moving in for the kill. In his eyes, my radiance reflected back. Tears streamed down my face looking at myself like that, through his eyes. I almost doubled over with the revelation that I was the furthest thing from human, and it was repulsing; he had made me the monster he was.
“Yes.” He smiled. “Your existence is why any of this is happening.”
My flame hummed around me, my fear threatening to dampen my shift.
He came at me, and his palm struck me right between the eyes. I yelled as I took to the air. Instinct was crippled by fear, blinded by sorrow, and the mind-shift drained completely as I hit the wall – the blood-shift faded away. Totally submerged in the darkness of the dungeon once more, I inhaled intensely. The blue glow from the tubes ebbed out. I bit back the hate, and shook off the grief I was feeling for the beings in those tubes. To ruin him, I had to be less human. Closing my mind off from Enoch’s threats, the anger came blazing back into one solid, purple, flame erupting through my core,
so hard, fierce and so bright, my restraints melted from my wrists and burned away from my hips. My chest rose and fell rapidly with deep breaths as I tried to steady my pulse, keep my instincts focused, hone in on my mind-shift so it did not take me down with it, hoping I had what it took to stop it before it triggered the blood-shift. His metallic arm penetrated through my flames quickly and he grabbed me by my throat once again, his tight grip threatening to break my windpipe. He chuckled, and a light flickered on behind him. The tubed beings were illuminated by yellow lights, melding with the liquid’s blue haze, and I was drowning in a green hole of bodies. His laughter grew until it sounded like a single shrill tearing me apart. He knew the sight of those beings would affect me; he was in my mind once more. I pushed him out. I searched for a guard against his tricks within, changing my thoughts into my native language once again. I locked him out, and was able to think clearly.
But, he smiled. “I don’t need your thoughts, Ava, I can feel your intentions, I can feel… you. We are the same now.”
I narrowed my eyes, my flames slowly subsiding once again, heavy emotion crippling my powers, fear, doubt. Get a grip, Ava, I willed myself. He is manipulating you, testing your boundaries, learning how to work you.
“Perhaps I should thank you for killing me,” he said with tangible cruelty.
I dangled from his grip as it tightened around my throat, feeling him holding on to my life. I tried to numb myself against him, his touch, because him being near me would always affect me in some way. He would always represent my fall. He pulled my face to his, our lips almost touching. I drew him in with my stare. I waited until his lips were so close, his smell repulsing me, our breaths melting into one. I went in for the kill. Thankful for my petite body and gymnastic abilities, I was able to raise my legs between the tiny gap of his chest and mine, and kicked into his metal plate as hard as I ever imagined I could, using all the confusion and anger he was inflicting upon me to propel myself the other way. I screamed as his grip around my throat almost ripped it right out. But my instinct was quick, and a shockwave exploded throughout my entire body, temporarily stunning both him and me. A low buzz, and then he was at me again. His golden chestplate crushed me into the wall, and for a moment I lost all strength. I regained myself, stuck between the cold stone and Enoch’s unrecognizable face. His body threatened to drive me right through the wall. Once again, instinct was quick. My flame raged out alongside a huge, electrical, shockwave – bigger, brighter and with more wrath than before. I had to get away from him. He couldn’t know that he still had an effect on me, and I couldn’t allow it; he was a threat to my entire being. The shockwave penetrated everything in the room. I hit the floor, watching his body slide across the room with a scream of metal against sand and stone. My body adjusted quickly, healing the fine tears in my veins after the bolt had ripped through my flesh. The room spun before me, and then it was only me and those creatures in that chamber. Their pods cracked and slowly leaked from my released shockwave. I imagined those things coming for me. Slowly, it all faded; my flame, my pulse, my fire dying out with a soft sizzle to my skin. I smelled it, my burned hair and singed skin. I knew the smell of scorched flesh. One single memory flashed with recognition. Human bodies dressed in rags, burning in the black ash of a dozen previously sacrificed bodies of the evil Zulu king, lay before me. The day I was taken to the Zulu kingdom by Enoch and his guard. The day I found out he was the son of the evil king and witchdoctor. I swallowed the crushing sadness as the memory faded. Eternally, there would always be something I associated with the past. I pulled from my memories, and I was back in that sickening room bearing suspended, ghostly, white bodies staring back at me. I spat blood to the floor. Enoch, unconscious to my left, his huge body spread across the floor like a lost boy. It brought back a feeling of déjà vu, seeing him so still, expressionless. I had found him like that before, the night after we… I almost gagged at the thought. Not so much the thought of us sleeping together, but the thought of why I had done it – I was power hungry. I had done it to gain abilities. The Shadow-shift seeks redemption in all the wrong places. I have two kinds of shifts. The mind-shift is what I call my instinct, it acts to protect me, all of me; mind, body and spirit. The blood-shift was from bloodline, how it came to be. I just didn’t understand it yet, but I knew that on the day of my resurrection, I was the permanent vessel for its disease. The moment my soul snapped back into my body it was there, and it was getting stronger with every passing heartbeat. I was on all fours staring at the room around me, my stare like poisoned darts on Enoch as he continued to lay unmoved just inches away. I turned my eyes away, he was not the man I once knew. I laughed at myself, loudly. He had never been the man I thought I knew! I listened to the low hum of his pulse as I crept to my feet. I needed to get out of here, desperately needed to find my sister and Arriana while I still had the chance to. I stepped around him, now free from my metal chains, purging everything I might have ever felt for him. I wanted to kick him real hard in the face, like he had once kicked me on that canoe when he’d kidnapped Troy and me. I turned one last time, staring at Enoch, his huge chest hardly moving, sweat rolling down his gorgeous face. Then I stared up at the glass-tubed beings, bubbling beneath the surface of disgusting, saliva-looking fluid. I shook my head – he was an idiot, his metal extremities made him weak against my abilities to penetrate them with an electrical shock. A crooked smile crept across my face, my instinct was clever in every possible way. I kept my mind true to my native language, just in case he was listening in, and took off. I would never underestimate him in any way, ever again. I turned into a dimly-lit corridor made of stone and dirt, and practically flew up a flight of dark, gray stone stairs. And then, pins and needles tingled throughout my entire being. There was an unmistakable voice inside my head, telling me that I was bound to the place I was kept prisoner in. I sensed it, witnessed it as I stumbled into a huge room finding rows upon rows of those tubed beasts. The blue, fluorescent liquid holding the bodies upright, lit the way into another room holding the same doom. An army of… I raised my palm to the cold surface of the glass and looked up at the horrific sight of a pale skeleton coated with a vile, translucent, white coat of skin, dark holes for eyes, and a slit for a mouth. Whatever it was, I was somehow part of it. The pull was unmistakable, the pins and needles that prevailed over my entire body were trying to tell my something. But my instinct tuned them out – this time, it would work against me. My eyes got stuck on the veins running from the thing’s heart, over its chest, shoulder, and into its neck. It had no gender – it just was. Enoch had found a way, he had somehow completed the broken recipe, and with my capture he’d taken what he needed in order to do so – my blood was the missing link. The thing had a distinctive smell, and the unmistakable tainted color beneath the veins glowed. I was bent by the sadness, my actions had once again led to death. But more so, I was bent on revenge and it was staring at me through dark, hollow, twisted black eyes.
Misplaced grief gripped me, threatening to ball me over. Who did he think he was? He was no better than the people hiding behind the Council. Creating beings he could control. I never believed that the Council were our saviors from the facility back on Earth. All of what I had seen proved that to me. This was too much like the horrors in my mom’s journals. The more I thought about the situation, the angrier and darker things were turning inside me. But, I used human emotion to keep my shifts at bay. I pulled up shame, and relied on it to settle my anger – it was a feeling I had grown accustomed to. What I had seen in that room – the creatures – they were no different from me. And it was no different from what my mother had described in her journals, either. Her nightmares had been real, or they were becoming so. I had to get out and return with help, save those beings from a fate no one deserved. Then it hit me. Letters and symbols from my mom’s journals swirled before me, as if I was projecting them through my very eyes onto the stone wall beside me. I stood in the dark while my fingers quickly pulled the broken puzzle p
ieces together. Shadow army. I gasped. A nervous twitch animating my hand. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew the army could not be released. I turned back, feeling like I had left something behind. Does he have any idea what he has done? The thought ripped and racked through me. I turned back in the direction I was heading and took off, willing myself to leave it all behind, guided only by the blue glow of the tubes lining the walls. My mind raced in a million different directions at once, and I could not turn it off. It was like a plug within me had been pulled and everything I had ever seen, heard or experienced started to file itself inside my head, turning and twisting the very information constantly moving, and shifting it into place, trying to make sense of everything that was and everything that is, so I could know what was to come. Whatever was transpiring, was certain to be a dark place. Taking every single motive behind Enoch’s actions into consideration, I wanted to know why. That seemed to be the number one question throughout my life – why? I came up with nothing more, other than the fact that he was a twisted freak. I would not give him a second thought. My feet catapulted me forward, through one dimly-lit, stone tunnel into the next. My hands grasping stone to hold my body upright, to keep moving forward, to not kill myself over the whys. To get to Maya and Arriana, to come back and destroy the Shadow army my mother wrote about. I drilled it into my head that no matter how many times my body wanted to turn back, I had to move forward. Something, or someone, was pulling me the other way, telling me to go and kill the army, now, but I kept at it, trusting my gut instead. At some point, I became aware that I had gone down a very steep, narrow tunnel, lit by the tube of a single, indigo light high above my head. First, I had smelled it; blood, my blood. I stopped, hardly able to move as the tunnel tapered in. I looked down at my clothes. No blood stains. I frowned, pulling the strange white, cotton dress this way and that. “What the…” I whispered to myself, on finding that I had been disrobed of my gravity suit, instead wearing an old, white frock. My voice carried a small distance ahead. It was then that I discovered I had walked so far down the narrow corridor and for so long, I had scraped the very skin from my shoulders – and I had not, and did not feel a single thing. I scratched my arm with my nail, watched the skin turn white, but there was no feeling. A hollow sensation crept into my chest. I bent my finger back, back and further back until the nail almost touched my wrist. I slapped myself. Pulled my hair. Bit down on my lip until I tore skin. Then I punched the wall so hard, I heard skin pop on knuckles. I stared into white bone beneath mutilated skin. If anyone had seen me assaulting myself in the dim narrow tunnel, I was sure they would think I had gone insane after my change; even I wasn’t sure of myself. Bending my shoulders inward, I twisted my body, gliding sideways toward the other end of the deep, gray, stone trench to avoid scrapping any more skin from my already grated arms. I needed to get to the power source, to shut his entire operation down, and pretend really hard to not to feel ashamed that I was part of it all. But all I really wanted to do after everything that had happened, was to just lie down. The hole inside my being had grown denser, and I wanted to climb inside that hole, never to surface again. For the longest time, I wondered why my instinct was not able to heal feelings of despair. Was it trying to tell me, show me, or teach me something? I looked down, rubbed the crusty blood from my shoulders. My wounds had healed, this was a new power for me. If you are able to remember correctly, this was the one thing I could not do; heal myself and others – up until what seemed to be that very moment when I was trying so hard to get away from past mistakes which seemed to haunt me. A deluded narcissistic, psychopath of an ex-boyfriend, bent on ruining everything I was lucky enough to hold dear. Running away from a Shadow army I had helped create through allowing their leader to take control of me by shifting out of anger. And now I knew that the blood-shift connected me to him. I should have known, the signs had been there all along! The tunnel eventually opened up, but I was much deeper inside the walls of the fortress, and breathing had become incredibly hard. There was a wall blocking me. I could go no further. I looked up, my eyes taking a few seconds to adjust and see past the beaming light. That’s when I felt the rhythm again. His beat was unmistakable – Troy was near. I had to jump, grab on to the thin, metal railing holding the tubed light, which ran the length of the tunnel, to pull myself up. I smelled my skin singe, but this was one time I was pleased that I couldn’t feel it. As I propelled my body upward, my arms and legs locked onto the sides, I shimmied up the narrow, conduit tunnel running vertically up the entire building. I passed a few more horizontal tunnels and with each crossing, another blue, tubed light joined into the other; I was running out of space as the tubes grew thicker with each level I surpassed. I climbed and the further up I got, the stronger his beat became, like a drum calling for me. My feet matching the rhythm of his heartbeat. It droned into my head, burrowed itself into my chest until my beat matched his and I felt lifted from the very anxiety adding to my claustrophobia inside those vertical tunnels. Grabbing the walls with my arms and legs became more difficult as it thinned even more with each joining tube of light from yet another vertical crossover. I counted about twelve crossings and joints. I was twelve stories up. The energy tube ran up beside me, almost the width of my entire body. I swore. I didn’t want to have to go all the way down again and risk losing Troy’s beat completely. Closing my eyes, I listened carefully for the rhythm of his heart, a rhythm I was so familiar with I could probably find it anywhere, in any time. His beat became audible, we were separated by the stone wall between us. I touched my finger to the very spot where it was vibrating, like he was inside the wall itself. I looked up, not much further to go. I was in the conduit tunnel for sure. What I had thought was a light, was most definitely what was powering up the entire fortress and those tubed beings. I wanted to find a way to destroy the energy lines, but I couldn’t. I mean, I really couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted to, badly, but something was stopping me. Almost like a mind block. I couldn’t kill anything – ever again. It was a guilt that destroyed. I climbed up one more story, positive I wouldn’t make it to the very top at the rate the energy tube was thickening out, almost squashing me to the wall. So, I went vertically with that tunnel and out the nearest metal, air grate above me. I shoved the heavy, iron grate, and moved it so I could lift myself out. I crouched down on the stone floor once I was out. I then moved the golden, patterned grate back over the air vent and closed my eyes, listening for the slightest movement. I found myself alone in a warmly lit, circular, stone room. An orange fire emitted from a black fireplace molded out of onyx stone, the yellow glow spilled into the night air outside. I stared into the fire, a familiar scent, and the familiar green tint in its sting – witchcraft. My lips pressed into a thin line and I turned away from my reflection in the black, glossy surface of the fireplace. I would never be associated with that kind of craft ever again. It had ruined lives. With every kind of magic there is balance. With the dark kind it was a life for power. I walked to a huge, arched window and as I looked down, I wondered what happened to our connection. I was stunned to see Troy looking back up at me.
Evanescent Page 2
