by Nazri Noor
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Penumbra is the prequel to the Darkling Mage series, and sheds some light on why Dustin is the way he is.
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This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
OBLIVION HEART
First edition. December 20, 2018.
Copyright © 2018 Nazri Noor.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-7916-1995-4
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
About the Author
Chapter 1
I blinked my eyes against the harsh lights beaming from above me, whirling in place as I negotiated the tiny space I’d carved for myself in the throng of bodies that surrounded me like an ocean of limbs and legs. I’d never seen so many people, all gathered in the same place for a singular, glorious purpose: worship.
My first instinct was, of course, to shadowstep, to escape the horde by entering the Dark Room, the dimension that would get me from point A to point B with as little hassle as possible. Shadowstepping had become so natural to me that it was coded into my fight or flight response. And fighting, here among all these zealots, was not an option.
Hi. My name is Dustin Graves, and I’m at a pop concert.
Or I was, rather. God but I’d never seen so many people crammed into the same place, and we weren’t even technically at the concert yet. We were just hanging in the parking lot, waiting for the initial crowds to cram the Gridiron warehouse that was the venue for the evening. It was a strange move, picking an abandoned warehouse in Valero’s industrial district, but Mona, rising star of the pop music scene, was known for being just a little bit quirky.
There were dozens of people around us, smoking, milling about, or picking up late dinners from the food trucks that had very cleverly decided to set up shop outside the venue. I’m not all that great at gauging crowds, but the warehouse would have fit two hundred, and it showed in the number of people still lining the Gridiron’s sidewalk. I was glad we decided to take a rideshare instead of driving over after all. Parking would have been impossible.
We, in this case, being myself, Sterling, and Asher. Now, I can assure you that I’m in no way a music snob, and I can probably enjoy a little bit of everything, especially if it has a catchy beat to it. But bubblegum pop? Mona – first name only, no last name – made music that seemed designed to appeal to teenage girls.
Her music videos always had pink sets and props, featuring her in elaborate, cutesy costumes that were as adorable as they were sexually inoffensive. Which, granted, was refreshing as far as modern pop music goes, but it made me wonder why someone like Sterling liked it so much.
“She’s a goddess,” Sterling said, blowing smoke through his nostrils, working through what must have been his third cigarette of the night. We’d only been there for half an hour, mind you.
I wrinkled my nose. I was just trying to enjoy a hotdog, you know? One of those pricier artisanal ones, too. With ketchup crafted from heirloom tomatoes straight off the vine, buns baked with flour milled by the very buttocks of the gods themselves, and dogs made from cows that were raised in isolation tanks, already brined and tender. That kind of shit.
I had no way of verifying the food truck’s claims – the Happy Dog, likely a subsidiary of the same company that owns the Happy Cow and the Happy Boba – but it looked and smelled delicious as hell. I bit into it, finally, its blend of creamy, tangy condiments and a burst of meaty juices rocketing into my mouth, and okay, sure, maybe I moaned a little, but yeah. Totally worth the price.
Asher had picked up a Happy Dog, too, which wasn’t surprising considering he was probably the most impressionable person I knew, despite bearing the mantle of necromancer, perhaps the rarest of arcane talents known to the magical world. The poor kid did spend a lot of his life locked up in a cultist commune, though, so I guess it came with the territory.
“A goddess?” he said, eyes wide, a dollop of mustard already threatening to swan-dive from the tip of his hotdog.
Sterling rolled his eyes. “I mean, not an actual goddess, but she’s just so damn good. She’s just radiant, and captivating, and – God, you’ll see what I mean in a minute.”
“Tell me something.” I swallowed another mouthful of hotdog, wiping at my lips with the back of my hand. “I didn’t peg you for the kind who would enjoy Mona’s music. I mean, aren’t you guys more into stuff like industrial house music, or like angry dance music? Maybe death metal?”
Sterling’s expression remained deathly still, but the ember of his cigarette burned menacingly as he took another puff. “That’s prejudiced, Graves. You’re prejudiced.”
I scoffed. Here we go again. Asher finally took a bite of his hotdog, cleanly chopping a third of it off in one go, watching the two of us as he chewed in silence.
“You think vampires are all about being dark and mysterious, that we just like music about death, and being depressed, or angry, or just, like, songs that you can break stuff to? So prejudiced. Mona’s music transcends genres, man. Her songs are about love, and friendship, and living life to the fullest.”
“Which is why I’m wondering why you, of all people, like it.”
“Shut up, Graves. You didn’t have to come.”
“I didn’t, but you made me, remember?”
Sterling narrowed his eyes, stubbed out his cigarette on the sidewalk, then lit another one. I thought I knew what chain-smoking was, but then I met Sterling. Vampires were immune to human disease, though, so really, the guy literally smoked like a damn chimney, or, well, a cigarette factory that was perpetually on fire.
And to reiterate my point, I’m sure it’s just as surprising to you that a vampire could be into bubblegum teen-pop music. I didn’t hold it against him, just, you know, you look at a guy who sucks blood to survive and beats up people for a living, and he’s got this longish hair and dresses exclusively in leather jackets and silver jewelry, and there’s a disconnect there, somehow.
Yet Sterling was incredibly insistent about taking us along for the Mona concert. He’d watched her website like a hawk, snapping up three tickets for the Valero stop the very moment she announced tour dates in California.
Gil, our resident werewolf, couldn’t come, likely because he was so busy with his girlfriend, and our boss, Carver, was so far removed from modern human life that there would be way too much to explain to him about concerts and contemporary music in general.
Plus he was always so busy with his experiments, more so since the incident with the homunculi, when a drop of my blood had been used to create dozens, if not hundreds of clones. I had to wonder if he was
up to something.
Naturally, that left me and Asher. Now, Asher Mayhew was basically best friends with Sterling, and was eager to savor any experience of the outside world he could snag. He was going to come along by default.
As for me? Carver said that it’d be good to have a little fun outside of the Boneyard for once – that’s what we called our interdimensional office slash apartment. Plus I’d heard about Mona from entertainment sites and social media, and I’m not exactly one to turn down a chance to check out live music, so there we were.
“Right,” Sterling said, finishing his cigarette. “You meat bags need to finish the rest of your meat bags. Mona gets on in ten minutes. We may as well head inside.”
And so we did. Damn, that was a good hotdog. And damn were there a shit-ton of people in that warehouse. Not just the dozens of teenage girls I was expecting to make up the bulk of Mona’s audience, either. Lots of dudes in their twenties and thirties, at a casual glance, and a smattering of older men and women. Sterling might have been on to something about Mona’s music transcending, well, just about everything.
With Sterling taking the lead, we managed to muscle our way to the front, close to the stage, which in a different setting might have been called a mosh pit. Do you get mosh pits at pop concerts? I guess I was about to find out. I flexed a little, looking around myself, ready to bump up against or get physically rough with sixteen-year-old girls.
Hey, they could have been dangerous. You never know. The girls traveled in packs, wielding merchandise, glow sticks, and signboards. One held a sign with “Moanin’ for Mona” written across it in huge, glittery letters. She smiled at me, the kind of knowing, conspiratorial expression you share with someone who loves the same things that you do, and I smiled sheepishly back.
The opening act was a local DJ who had brought his own dancers. He played some upbeat electronica, not at all a bad warmup for the night considering it got the warehouse a hell of a lot more excited. And warmer, too. I tugged on my shirt to kind of ventilate, regretting that I’d worn a jacket. I looked over at Asher. He was already sweaty, some of his hair sticking to his forehead, but it looked like the kid was having the time of his life.
I couldn’t help smiling. Bloodsucker and all, it was really cool of Sterling to take Asher – well, both of us – out for the night. I was having fun, too. And then darkness fell, and the crowd went into a hush as Mona took the stage. The lights went up again, and God, but Sterling was right. Mona was a damn goddess.
She stood center stage in a poofy pink dress, socks up to her knees, her feet in schoolgirl Mary Janes. Sleek-straight platinum blond hair spilled down her back, trailing perfectly with the curve of her spine as she hummed the first few bars of her first song. A heart-shaped pair of white, feathered wings strapped to her shoulders trembled in the booming bass of her opening number. On her head, a crown of silvery flowers that looked very much like a halo lit up her already angelic face.
Not gonna lie, I was screaming my lungs out by the end of the first number. There was a hypnotic quality to Mona’s music. Maybe it was the cadence of the percussions, the simple repetition of her lyrics. They say that it’s the same phenomenon that accounts for the ecstatic qualities brought about by Buddhist mantras, or the similar power of repeating chants and phrases in some shamanic traditions.
Whatever, I’m just making up excuses for the fact that it took all of two minutes for Mona’s soothing voice to set its pink, seductive hooks right in the meatiest part of my soul. The stage lights exploded into an array of hypnotic, rhythmic patterns, stars and pillars and grids of white and pink and green. Mona spread her fingers as she hit a chorus, and laser beams burst right out of her hands, from some mechanism nestled in her palms. I screamed myself hoarse. Fuck, don’t ask me to explain, it was awesome.
We must have been eight, nine songs deep into the concert. I found myself singing along to the tracks that I actually knew, like “Unfollow My Heart” and “Block You in the Morning.” I looked over at Sterling, who was pumping his fists, accurately singing every lyric right back to Mona, and actually crying. Like, full tears, streaming down his face. I realized then that I hadn’t had so much fun in ages. Just pure, stupid fun. I threw an arm over Asher’s shoulder, pulled him in, and together we yelled out the incredibly inane chorus for “A Million Subscribers Can’t Compare to You.” Sterling was right. Mona was out of this world.
Then the stage was suffused in a silvery light, a kind of effect that washed the color out of the warehouse, but especially out of Mona’s silhouette. Blond hair, black eyebrows, and the pretty pink dress melted into a uniform silvery white, and the combination of the flower crown and wings turned her into the very picture of an angel. I held my breath as she closed her eyes and, without any backup music, sang a few wordless bars.
We’d heard enough of her music for me to say that the girl had an incredible set of pipes, but this new song, one made up purely of runs and vocalizations, was obviously designed to showcase Mona’s talents. As she started climbing up to the higher notes, Mona opened her eyes, and my breath caught in my throat. They were as silver as the stage lights drowning the venue, almost totally white. She sang on, hands clasped at her belly.
Then the screaming began.
Chapter 2
The shouting came from all around us. Mona was still singing her wordless song, the melody rising and building to a crescendo. No, the screaming came from the audience.
The girl from before, the one with the signboard, was on her knees, clutching her head, her mouth wrenched open. Nearly every person in the audience around us was in some state of disarray, clawing at their hair, reaching for their ears, as if they could hear something horrible. Asher and Sterling were fine, but both looked about them with wide, panicked eyes. Then Asher tugged on my shirt, shouting in my ear.
“They’re bleeding.”
And so they were. The crowd, the bouncers, hell, even the musicians in Mona’s band were dripping blood steadily from every visible orifice, bleeding from their eyes and ears and nostrils.
Something in Mona’s song was killing them. Whatever that something was didn’t affect the three of us from the Boneyard. I looked around for the source of the attack. Psionic, probably, considering we couldn’t see any telltale flashes of light or energy that would’ve given away the traces of a magical spell. But what if – the silver light on stage. Was that magic after all? Was Mona doing this? Why would she kill her own fans? What the fuck was going on?
People were dying. That was clear enough. I dashed through the mosh pit, negotiating the writhing, agonized bodies. There weren’t any spots to shadowstep into on Mona’s stage. Wherever the light was coming from, it was doing a great job of blotting out any visible shadows. I vaulted over the railing separating the crowd from the stage – no security to stop me, because even the bouncers were flailing on the ground, bleeding to death. But before I could climb up onto the stage, Mona’s singing stopped.
And without her song, the only sound filling the warehouse was that of a hundred or so of the pop star’s fans screaming, dying, as they hemorrhaged from every hole in their body. I watched as Mona’s face went from blissful serenity to abject terror. She covered her mouth with trembling hands as she surveyed the destruction, her cheeks already wet with tears. This wasn’t the face of a girl who had done any of this on purpose. Maybe it was some kind of freak accident. Was Mona a mage? Why hadn’t Sterling mentioned that?
“No,” Mona stammered, her voice tumbling around the warehouse. Her mic was still on. No one had cut it, because the sound guys were dead, too. “God, no. What’s happening?”
Carnage. That’s what was happening. Someone had thrown on the lights, and it only made things that much worse. The warehouse was flooded in red. Sterling and Asher were nowhere to be seen. I had a feeling that Asher had very responsibly whisked our vampire friend away, to avoid anything unseemly. I should have done the same, gotten out of there fast – but the Lorica moved faster.
The first of the Wings turned up before the last body even hit the ground. Truly, at this point, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them anymore, except that I never recalled the Wings showing up quite that quickly.
Either the massive number of dead bodies – over a hundred of them – had raised some significant flag for the Lorica’s Eyes, or the event that triggered this wide-scale slaughter had created an energy flare that they simply couldn’t ignore. One thing was for sure. Whatever had killed all these people was bad, bad magic.
About twelve men and women popped into existence around the premises. None of them were faces I recognized from the short time I’d spent working for the Lorica. As the organization that governed North American magic and mages, they were the people responsible for policing magical activity, and especially magical crime. They dedicated their tremendous resources to keeping up the Veil, the barrier of secrecy that protected our world from the regular one – from the civilians.
The normals, as we called them. The Lorica were fully staffed and equipped to take care of business, too. The Wings were teleporters tasked with bringing in the rest of the team. Hands were arcane combatants, mages gifted with deadly magic that made them ideal for blasting and burning things. I spotted four of them break off from their transport escorts and spread through the warehouse, combing for threats.
The faint pop that heralded the arrival of another teleporter sounded off behind me, and I whirled to see another man appear on stage. Mona’s shocked shriek bounded around the warehouse when she caught sight of the man, or rather, when he caught her by the shoulder. His voice carried across the speakers, caught by Mona’s microphone.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Take it easy.”
He placed two fingers on her temple. Mona’s eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she collapsed into his arms. The man laid her gently on the stage, then snapped his fingers, calling for the others to assist. Then his eyes settled on me. My muscles tensed, and again I fought the urge to dart into the Dark Room. The man frowned, snapped his fingers again, then reappeared mere inches from my face. I yelped and stumbled backwards.
