Token of Darkness

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Also by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  DEN OF SHADOWS

  In the Forests of the Night

  Demon in My View

  Shattered Mirror

  Midnight Predator

  THE KIESHA’RA

  Hawksong

  Snakecharm

  Falcondance

  Wolfcry

  Wyvernhail

  Persistence of Memory

  Token of Darkness is dedicated to two individuals who shall remain unnamed here, whose passing strongly inspired this story. One was very dear to me, and one was a complete stranger. So many people move in and out of our lives, often affecting us in ways we do not fully recognize or understand. By extension, we can never realize what effect we have on others, even those we have never met.

  That being said, Cooper’s story owes thanks to:

  My editor, Jodi. Her insight has been invaluable these past eight years as we have worked together to refine Nyeusigrube and the stories within, from the golden age of shapeshifters in the Kiesha’ra Series to the modern Den of Shadows.

  My agent, Tom. I don’t know what I would do without him. Probably curl up in someone’s basement, writing stories no one would ever read and occasionally wondering if I was supposed to get a royalty statement at some point.

  My fellow writers and my tireless beta-readers—especially Mason, who did a sixteen-hour-long session of beta-reading “boot camp” when I was panicking about how I could revise the first-draft mess I had on December 1 into an actual novel. Thank you to Bri, Zim, Ria, and Shauna, and to my sister, Rachel, for her support when I was preparing the revisions for submission.

  The Office of Letters and Light; all the individuals and groups responsible for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org); and Bri, ML to Nyeusigrube. In 2006, NaNoWriMo helped me get past the worst writer’s block I have ever experienced; NaNo07 produced Cooper. 30 days. 50k. Hurrah!

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

  But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”

  This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—

  Merely this and nothing more.

  Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

  Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.

  “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;

  Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—

  Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—

  ’Tis the wind and nothing more!

  Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

  In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.

  Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,

  But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—

  Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—

  Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

  Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

  By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.

  “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

  Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

  Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

  Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

  —from “The Raven,” by

  Edgar Allan Poe

  PROLOGUE

  The darkness was alive, and it was hungry. Cooper didn’t know how he knew that, but he did, the way he knew things in nightmares: it was hungry, and it would devour him if it could. The shadows twisted like vines and snapped like dogs at his heels, solid enough to menace but not enough for him to struggle against them.

  He had been lost, and then the darkness had risen around him, and now he couldn’t find his way back.

  At least the shadows weren’t focused on him. They had other prey. He needed to get somewhere safe before they noticed him again—before they turned their attention away from the girl.

  The shadows had torn her apart. She was shapeless, faceless, as she struggled with them. How had she come to be there? The air seemed to weep for her, the mist coalescing into heavy drops of rain.

  Insanely, he dove forward, trying to chase away the creatures that harried her. They nipped at him, but as he tried to close his arms around the girl and help gather her together, he felt himself being yanked backward, into a shell that was too small to fit inside.

  An explosion of lights and noise told him he was awake. He opened his eyes to find the girl there, fighting with the shadows that still surrounded him. She clawed at them with her hands until they faded into the corners of the room.

  Trembling, she reached out to touch his cheek.

  “Necromantic golem.”

  Cooper gave a start. He had been lost in reverie, the content of which had fled his mind the moment Samantha had spoken.

  “What?”

  “Necromantic golem,” she repeated. “I’m just saying. It’s an option.”

  Cooper looked down, and realized he had nicked himself with the knife when she startled him. The cut wasn’t bad, but he pulled his hand and the knife away from the counter and the compulsively neat apple slices sitting there.

  “You’re going to have to clarify for me,” he said as he washed the cut and reached for a bandage. “And get off the counter.”

  “I’m not technically on the counter,” she objected, “and I should think it would be the natural answer to our situation.

  Cooper shook his head and studied Samantha as he carefully cleaned up after his mishap.

  She was petite, standing only a little over five feet tall. She had straight blond hair with silver highlights that looked natural, along with a few streaks of teal that didn’t. She was cute, actually, bordering on sexy, a fact that did not seem to be lost on her. Today she was wearing a short, pleated skirt—black with neon pink splotches—and a green and orange striped peasant-style blouse. Beneath the skirt, she wore gray paisley stockings, torn at the bottom to expose most of her bare feet.

  Her eyes were … well, it was hard to tell. They were prismatic. Looking in them almost gave Cooper as much of a headache as today’s outfit did.

  Cooper had asked Samantha about her clothes at some point over the summer. She had told him she didn’t decide what to “wear”—her clothes were no more solid than she was—but admitted that she “liked bright colors.” Very bright, apparently.

  She certainly looked like she was sitting on the counter, but of course it didn’t matter. She could as easily have been standing in the counter, or on the wall or the ceiling. She did things like that sometimes, defying the laws of physics without seeming to notice or care.

  If she had been alive, it probably would have been considered a health hazard when she walked through the food, but since she was a ghost and not dripping ectoplasm, it was only annoying. And only to Cooper, because no one but him seemed able to see her. Even when she lay in the middle of the pastries display case as if it were Snow White’s glass coffin, everyone else was oblivious to her presence, including Cooper’s father, who owned the shop.

  “Seriously,” she insisted now, apparently not ready to let this idea drop. “Golem.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I assume you mean for you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And I assume you mean I should make one, so you can … take it over, or whatever.”

  “It’s not posses
sion if it’s a golem, since they don’t have souls, right?” she said, making him wince at the way her voice echoed when she got excited. “And it’s not a zombie or anything since you’d be making it and not using a dead person.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to sit on the ceiling anymore if you actually had a body,” he pointed out.

  She paused, chewing her lip, then shrugged, and fell halfway through the counter before finding her feet on the floor. “I wouldn’t be able to sit on the ceiling, but I’d be able to … to curl up on a cold night, wrapped in a blanket, with a mug of raspberry hot cocoa. So, what do you say?”

  “I say I don’t know how to make a golem, necromantic or otherwise.”

  “You use clay, duh!”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” he asked. “Clay. Okay. And then … ?”

  “Then … then … I want a body! I’m sick of this non-corporeal crap. Check out the library’s occult section. Check out Harry Potter. I don’t care!”

  With the last outburst, Samantha flickered like a candle flame going out and disappeared. Cooper shrugged and turned back to see if the apples were salvageable. He wasn’t worried about Samantha. She often disappeared, and always came back.

  Maybe he should have been concerned about himself since he was the only person who could see her, but he wasn’t. He knew better than to tell anyone else about her, though; they would probably lock him away in a padded room somewhere. Could he really blame them?

  The fact of the matter was, he was being haunted by the color-coordination-challenged ghost of a teenage girl. She had appeared by his bedside when he had woken in a hospital last July, and neither of them knew why.

  He finished cutting the apples and started laying them into tarts. The work was soothing, mechanical. His father was in the next room, kneading bread dough; occasionally, his soft humming reached as far as this room, but mostly it was quiet, the way Cooper liked it. He appreciated the routine of waking up at four in the morning, getting to the shop by four-thirty to bake bread and pastries and brew the coffee before they opened at seven. Then—at least on weekdays, like today—he hung up his apron as his father spoke to the first of the morning’s customers, rolled down his sleeves, and trudged fifteen minutes to school.

  Before this summer, he would have laughed at the guy he was now: quiet, reserved, and living very much in his own head, instead of constantly surrounded by outgoing friends who only managed by sheer luck not to get kicked out of every public place they entered.

  It was only the fourth day of his senior year of high school. It was going to be a long year, and not because the day started when he had already been awake for more than three hours … often longer. …

  The problem was, he couldn’t find it in him to care about this year. He used to care about things, people. His room, his stuff. His friends, especially the other guys on the Lenmark Ocelots football team, including John, who had been his best friend since sixth grade. He had barely seen any of them since the end of the previous school year. Then there was his car, a 1993 Dodge Colt hatchback—more than a decade old with more than a hundred thousand miles on it, but it rode like a dream, like his dream, like freedom.

  Cooper didn’t have that anymore, either, and he didn’t miss it, even yesterday, when he had walked from his father’s coffee shop to school in a fine drizzle. His father had offered to let him take the family car, but he hadn’t minded the cold or the rain or the way it made Samantha sparkle as it fell through her.

  Necromantic golem. Maybe he should look into that. How, he wasn’t at all sure. He didn’t know if Samantha’s idea was possible, but then again, he didn’t used to believe in ghosts. He knew a few people at school who claimed to be witches, but most of them seemed to be more about earthy religion or pissing off their parents, and he was pretty sure they would respond negatively if he asked them if they had any recommendations for how to deal with the undead.

  He probably shouldn’t start at the school library, either. That seemed like a good way to get pulled into the counselor’s office for an emergency meeting.

  “Cooper, you’re late,” his English teacher announced as he walked through the door, and slipped to the back of the classroom.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, and reached in his bag for his copy of The Color Purple, only to realize he had left it at home that morning. His teacher shook her head with a sigh before turning back to discussing the book.

  Cooper’s mind wandered. Necromantic golem, indeed. Maybe he could start with myths?

  Why was he focused on this, of all things? He wished he could help Samantha, but the bottom line was, she was dead. He had watched enough horror flicks to know that if you wanted to help a ghost, you did it by telling them to go into the light, or helping them let go, or whatever. You didn’t do it by making them new bodies; that was the way to B movies and red corn syrup.

  Maybe he should talk to a priest? He didn’t know any, but his mother went to the Unitarian Universalist church. Or were ghosts more of a Catholic thing?

  He jumped violently when someone’s cell phone rang across the room, a screaming jangle of noise. His chair skittered backward and crashed to the floor, turning all eyes his way.

  “Sorry,” he said again. He pulled his chair upright and sat back down, trying to hide the fact that he was shaking and sweating, and his heart was racing so loudly he could barely hear the people around him murmuring comments. Across the room, he saw John mouth the words, “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, then hunched down lower in his seat and picked up a pen to pretend to take notes.

  “Okay, everyone, quiet down,” the teacher said. “Put your books away. We’re having a quiz.”

  The whispering turned to grumbled protests. Cooper just shrugged and put away the notebook he hadn’t yet opened. He hadn’t read the book past the first couple of pages, but that was fine. Samantha reappeared after the quizzes were handed out, and reported on the variety of responses from around the room, noting which were most common and so were more likely to be right.

  It wasn’t a good way to start the school year, but if he was going to be haunted, he might as well get something worthwhile out of it.

  “I think I’ve read this book,” Samantha announced as the quizzes were collected. The idea seemed to excite her. “No, I’m almost sure I’ve read this book! I remember it! I mean, I remember what it’s about. But I don’t actually remember reading it.”

  She sounded deflated. Cooper fought the urge to groan.

  The problem with helping Samantha resolve whatever issues were tying her to this world was that she had no memory of who she was, just random details that may or may not have been from her previous existence. She didn’t know why she was relegated to this half-life, without the ability to touch or affect anything in the world. She remembered snow despite not having seen it since her death, and sometimes remembered books or movies. She didn’t have a heavy Boston accent, so probably wasn’t from the city, but she could easily be from any other area of Massachusetts. She was also obviously well-versed in movies, especially horror movies. She knew her own name in the same way; she was certain she was Samantha, but couldn’t recall anyone but Cooper who had ever addressed her that way.

  She and Cooper had sat at the computer for hours at a time this summer, reading all the obituaries for the area in an attempt to find out who Samantha might be. There had been deaths in the accident that occurred immediately before Cooper had met Samantha, but none that felt right to her. And not just because they were men.

  They didn’t even know if her physical description would mean anything. Her basic coloring, height and age usually remained more or less constant, but everything else seemed to change from one manifestation to the next. Samantha said she had no conscious control over it.

  After spending most of the month of August searching, they had kind of given up as Cooper had prepared to return to school. So far as Samantha was concerned, she had been born that July, at the moment when Cooper had woken in
the hospital.

  He knelt down to slowly put his notebook away at the end of class, using it as an excuse to avoid his classmates as they filed out, and so was surprised when he looked up to find a 227-pound linebacker hovering above him. He slammed his head against the desk leg as he tried to stand up.

  “Damn it, John!” he shouted, rubbing the spot he had just banged. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I had to sneak up,” John answered. “You run faster than I do.”

  Cooper fumbled for words while fighting the urge to do just that—bolt. “Look, man, I’m sorry—”

  “No big,” John interrupted. Then he winced. “I mean, of course it’s—” He broke off, and shook his head.

  Cooper shut his eyes for a moment and drew a breath, trying to figure out something to say that would help them to get past this. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge that the “big deal” they were both avoiding talking about had to do with Cooper spending most of the summer in the hospital following an eight-car pileup on the highway the first weekend after school let out in June. It had to do with the fact that, in the blink of an eye and the flash of brake lights, he had gone from being John’s best friend to someone even Cooper barely recognized.

  When he opened his eyes, though, John wasn’t alone. The black mist from Cooper’s nightmares seemed to have risen from the floor. It rippled and crawled up John’s body, twisting around his limbs like something alive. John didn’t seem to see the shadows, but his skin rose in gooseflesh, and he crossed his arms as if he was cold.

  Cooper looked to Samantha, hoping for some kind of reassurance—even hearing that he was hallucinating, and the dark creatures weren’t real would be comforting at this point—but she had backed into a corner and was kicking at them. They didn’t seem to be able to hold on to her, but they stalked around her, snarling.

  John took a step back from Cooper, averting his gaze with an awkward expression. “Anyway,” he said with a shiver that dislodged two of the creatures that had been hunched on his shoulders. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. If you’re not up to hanging out, that’s … that’s cool, I guess.”