Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1)

by Rachel A. Marks

  I clench my fingers into a fist, but I don’t step away.

  “Did you feel that?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I feel so much, always so much.

  She takes my hand and brings it to her side again, resting it on the violets. I look at the purple flowers between my fingers and feel the heat of her skin, the way it slides beneath my palm, soft as silk. And that vibration moves through my arm again.

  Her breath quickens.

  I find myself moving closer as her blue eyes go wide with wonder. My heart stutters and my chest aches with some unknown need.

  “Are you doing this?” I ask. Are you making me want this?

  “No,” she breathes. The smell of her turns to spice, sharp and warm, and I know I’m sensing her now, even through the block in the house.

  We stand like that for an eternity, still as statues on the outside, but inside I’m running, running toward a place I’ve never been. I should be terrified. But all I feel is strength. Rightness.

  And then Kara moves, her hands skimming up my chest, testing the boundaries. Her palms slide to my shoulders, her fingers tracing the line of the muscles in my arms, down to my waist. She grips my shirt, stretching it a little, waiting for me to tell her to stop. But I watch her lift it, let her pull it up, raising my arms, and I even take the last of it off myself, dropping it to the floor.

  We breathe, staring at each other.

  The vibrations move between us. My left arm buzzes with them. I think she’s doing it. Whatever’s happening, it’s her.

  I reach up and brush my marked knuckles across her cheek, amazed at the feel of her, the way her eyes seem to see everything, the way she pulls me into her. I can’t seem to remember why I shouldn’t kiss her. And kiss her. And . . .

  I kiss her, taking her face in both hands, skimming my thumb over her jaw as she leans into the touch, reaching out to curl her fingers around the back of my neck. I have to remind myself to breathe. I need more of her. The emotions roll over me in a rush, a tangle of sensation and movement, heat and sugar and heady aromas.

  I grip her tighter.

  Her nails dig into my shoulders. My hands slide down her spine. The kiss deepens, goes on forever, until I can barely see sense. I explore her shape, the feel of her ribs, the textures and taste of her skin on my tongue as I kiss her neck, her shoulders, her chest. As I draw trembling gasps from her lips, she grips me so hard it hurts.

  Our bodies mesh. Our breath mingles in frenzied desperation. Nothing else exists except her. Her warmth. Her spice. Her.

  I whisper her name into her neck, pressing her against the wall.

  She rocks against me in answer, and the poster behind her rips at the edge, falling to the floor. I kiss her harder and fumble for the waist of her jeans, not sure what I’m doing. My fingers tremble against the denim.

  I need everything. Everything.

  But as I pop the button of her pants and the sound of the zipper scratches the air, she goes still, whimpering. Her body shivers against mine like a frightened animal, and everything turns cold. Guilt rears its head as our lips part.

  Disoriented, I stare at her pain-filled features, and my palm slides down her arm, trying to reassure her, reassure myself she’s real and what I think just happened actually did.

  She bows her head, forehead resting against my chest, breath coming in stops and starts.

  Then realization falls over me in a rush, and I’m aware that I wasn’t acting fully on my own a moment ago. I didn’t see her ice-blue energy tangle around me this time, like I did at the club, but I could feel it. And there’s no way that was natural. There’s no way I could lose it so completely with someone I’m not even sure I like.

  I wonder when everything changed. I wonder when she took control. And I wonder why the fact that she used her strange power on me doesn’t bother me. Not even a little.

  It all was so real, so urgent, so much like my own feelings.

  A small sound comes from her, another whimper, like she’s in pain. At first I think I hurt her. But then her shoulders shake, and she presses harder into my chest and begins to weep. And weep.

  I hold her against me while the bitter tang of it all swirls around us. Dark sorrow in her bones and her skin, years and years of pain and hurt. She pours it over me in salty tears and waves of energy.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  “Shhh.” I run my hand over her hair, attempting to comfort her as my body comes back to earth in a crash and I try to figure out where it all went wrong.

  She cries until her tears are used up, until the connection between us becomes something else, a soothing link I don’t think I’ve ever felt before: peace and stillness. After a while she goes limp, leaning into me more, falling asleep standing up.

  I take her to the bed.

  She’s unsure at first, ashamed, looking at her hands rather than at me, so I lie down and pull her to my side. She settles after that, nestling her head into the crook of my arm, her hand on my chest, over my heart. We breathe and feel the rhythm of each other’s pulse through skin and bone. And soon we both drift off into sleep.

  I drop my backpack onto the floor and head for the fridge, pulling out the carton of milk before I hear the crash—the sound of glass shattering and a deep thud.

  My body goes still as chills fall over me in a rush.

  A cry comes from the walls. Mom’s room.

  Muffled words and another crash.

  I drop the milk. It spills onto the yellowed tile to the rhythm of the thud . . . thud . . . thud in the walls.

  Everything goes still. My cheeks are wet with tears. My heart is the only sound left on earth as it crashes like thunder against my chest.

  Mom’s bedroom door opens, and one of her boyfriends stands there. The smells of violence and terror and wrongness spill out from behind him. He adjusts his belt, his knuckles stained with blood. Then he sniffs and wipes his nose with his shirt.

  “What’re you looking at, you little prick?”

  I can only shiver and stare past him at Mom’s fetal form in the bed.

  He growls, grabs his jacket off the back of the couch, and heads for the door. “See you next week,” he sneers as he walks out.

  When the latch clicks, I run to her side. I stare down at her on the bed, not sure if I can touch her. There’s so much pain coming off her. It weighs me down, presses at me.

  She wraps her hand over mine, and I see pink scratches, a smudge of blood. “I’m okay, Aidan. Don’t worry. Mommy’s okay. Just a disagreement is all.”

  A whimper escapes my throat as a million questions circle in my head. “I’m sorry.”

  A tear slips down her bruised cheek.

  All the men that come here seem to hurt her and make her cry. Why does she let them?

  “Why did my daddy go away?” I ask without thinking. “Didn’t he want to protect you?” I wish I was bigger so I could punch the men away myself.

  Her brow creases in pain, and I’m suddenly sorry I brought it up. I should know better.

  Her voice shakes as she says, “He tried, but he couldn’t stay.”

  “Where did he go?” Maybe I can go find him.

  She shakes her head, biting her lips together.

  And something comes to me, something a girl said to me yesterday at school. She kissed me on the cheek and said she loved me because I told Mark to stop pulling her hair. So I ask, “Did you love him?”

  She goes so still I feel like even the people outside are frozen. And then she stops crying. She sits up and moves to kneel in front of me, biting back the pain.

  “I loved your father like a fire, Aidan. He was a part of me, and I was a part of him. It will always be that way. He would protect me if he could. I promise.” She kisses my cheek with her swelling lip
. “And he gave me you. You’re just like your father. Brave and good. Never forget that.”

  She stands on shaky legs and wipes the tears from her face. “And those men won’t be coming anymore. Mommy’s going to have another baby.”

  I stand back and gape at her thin tummy where I know babies usually grow. “Really?”

  She nods and begins pulling the rugs off the wood floor and tossing them in the corner. Then she goes into the closet and pulls a large box from the darkness with a symbol on the curved top.

  Hidden is what my insides tell me it means.

  Out of the box she takes candles and chalk. A bowl and some bottles and a fist of dried plants. Then she moves to the center of the room and begins to draw on the floor. A wide circle, large enough to hold two of me lying down. Then she goes back to the box and takes out a tattered book.

  Placing it open on the floor beside her, she begins to write inside the circle, copying the book’s secrets onto the wood.

  “Things will be different now,” she says, “I promise. Mommy’s going to protect us all.”

  NINETEEN

  I open my eyes as voices from the hall filter into my consciousness. Kara’s still curled up against me, her hand resting over my heart. Her dark hair spills over my bare chest in a tangled mass. I want to get a look at her bruised face, but she’s turned away from me.

  Someone knocks on the door. My body tenses as I think of who it might be and what they’ll see if they come in. I lift my arm from her back and glance at my shirt on the floor and then at her, her form still as death. If I’m quiet, maybe whoever it is will go away.

  No such luck; the door opens.

  Connor peeks in. “Kara, time to—” He stops, and his eyes go wide.

  I’m frozen, caught, and he stands there, looking at Kara’s face, her bruised skin, her half-naked form. His shock shifts to anger, then rage. His lips tighten and his nostrils flare.

  And he charges.

  I barely have time to move Kara off me before I’m being swung at.

  He misses as I duck my head and roll off the bed, but I’m unbalanced and he’s pissed. His knee catches me in the gut as I try to slip out of the way.

  Kara grips her head and starts to sit up, holding onto the wall. “Connor, stop,” she says.

  But he lunges again, pushing me into the dresser. “What the fuck did you do to her?” He swings.

  I dodge, and half the stuff on the dresser gets knocked to the floor by Connor’s arm. Something shatters, and Kara groans.

  I shove back while Connor’s unguarded from the swing and yell, “Calm down! Let me explain.”

  But his rage bubbles like thick oil. He comes at me again, and I punch at an opening, hitting him square on the side of the face, sending jarring pain through my hand and up my arm, reminding me of where my knuckles have been.

  He stumbles back, stunned.

  “What the hell, Connor?” Kara rises from the bed on shaky legs to shut the door and almost trips on my discarded shirt. I reach out, catching her as I shake the impact of the hit from my hand. That kid’s got a steel skull.

  I kick the door shut as Connor growls, “Get your hands off her or I’ll slit your fucking throat.” His eyes are full of crazy, and I totally believe him. He’d happily slice me in half to protect Kara.

  “It’s all right, Connor,” she says, moving away from me as much as she can without letting go of my arm for balance. “It wasn’t Aidan that kicked my ass; he just brought me home.”

  Connor sneers. “Sure he did.”

  “What the hell?” I say, exasperation spilling over. “I get it. I do. But I just brought her home and that’s all.” Sort of.

  We glare, daring each other to make the next move. I can see he’s not buying any of it.

  His jaw jerks after a few seconds, and he folds his arms over his chest, looking resolved. “She gets hurt on your watch, that’s on you. Doesn’t matter if it was your fists that did the pounding. Your ass is mine.”

  “Just go, Connor,” Kara says, grabbing his arm and pulling his large form closer to the door.

  “I don’t trust this asshole, Kara,” he says through his teeth.

  “No kidding,” she says, giving him another shove.

  He points at me as he opens the door and then walks out, slamming it behind him like an exclamation point.

  “He didn’t mean it,” she says, moving back to the bed. “He’s just pissed.”

  I release a tight laugh. “Really. I barely noticed.” I rub my stomach where his knee met my gut. “Look, I’m sorry. You two obviously have something going on.”

  She shakes her head. “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?” I ask, as if I have a vested interest. Which I don’t. But I can’t keep my stupid mouth shut when it comes to this girl.

  She sits down on the bed. “He just . . . I . . .” She covers her face with her hands and grumbles through her fingers, “I don’t know. It’s a long story.”

  I pick up my shirt and pull it over my head. “I get it. It’s complicated. Friends with benefits, or whatever.”

  She laughs. “Hardly. No, Connor and I . . . we never . . .” She motions, like I know the rest. And I do. “We’re really just friends. He’s like a brother to me.”

  “A very protective brother.”

  She looks up at me. Her left eye is rimmed in purple, her cheek swollen and pink. Looking at it makes my chest ache. I kicked a guy’s ass to protect her last night, so I can’t really blame Connor—he’s known Kara a lot longer than me.

  “Can you hand me that tank top?” she asks, pointing to the pile of dark grey on the floor.

  I pick it up and hand it to her. As she slips it over her head, I can see that she’s obviously stiff and uncomfortable. “Thanks.” She looks at me through her hair, subdued and embarrassed. I’m not sure why since we slept all night with nothing but skin between us.

  “How’s your face feel?” I ask.

  She touches her cheek gingerly. “This isn’t anything new. I’ll be fine.”

  “You keep saying that. I don’t get it. Why would you let guys do that to you?” My words come out a little too forcefully, childhood memories sharpening my feelings. “You seem stronger than that.”

  “I’m anything but strong. More like cursed.”

  “I seriously doubt that . . .” But the words fade from my tongue as I notice the mark on her neck through her hair. The mark on her soul.

  “Trust me. I’m cursed—thanks to the man who spawned me.”

  Chills work over me. I know about parents and curses. “What happened?”

  “Dad wasn’t much of a nurturer. He figured out I was more useful to him as a tool than a daughter. So he sold me off.”

  My God. “He . . . sold you?”

  “Not at first. At first I was a good piece of his game—it was always about what was good for the con. For a while, I was tiny and cute and made him seem sympathetic—a single father and all, just trying to get by.” She laughs bitterly. “But after a while it got thicker and darker, and soon he was in it too deep. I was just a good girl who thought it was a fun game—until my eleventh birthday when he took me to a medicine room in Chinatown and asked the man there to bless me with the spirit of attraction.

  “It burned. I’ve never felt anything like it. With all the smoke and chanting—you haven’t heard a spell till you’ve heard it in Chinese—very creepy. And after that, nothing was ever the same. Men would offer hundreds of dollars just to pet my head for a minute. I was a gold mine. And eventually the world became his as I was passed from rich man to rich man.”

  My stomach rises, and I have to lean on the dresser. “Kara . . .” But there’s nothing to say; no words can fill that darkness.

  She acts like I didn’t speak, her chin high, determination set in her shoulders. “F
or three years, there were so many faces. So many nameless, soulless faces. But Daddy wasn’t very good with keeping money. It slipped through his fingers like sand. The man had no self-control at all.

  “And the blessing that medicine man put on me had a bit of a side effect. Attraction is a funny thing, apparently. I didn’t just draw in men. I could feel energy. In everything. Pulsing. Pushing at me.” She shivers and hugs herself.

  Then she glances at me, a pleading look in her eyes. “You know, don’t you? That smothering feeling from so much coming at you?”

  I nod. Boy, do I ever.

  “One night when I was fourteen,” she continues, “my dad was especially down on his luck. I think he owed some bookie fifty grand—or maybe that was just the first payment. They were threatening to cut a few pounds of flesh from his oversized midsection as a down payment if he didn’t pony up.

  “So when a man came into the club and offered him six hundred grand for me outright—no questions, no names, no strings attached—he jumped at it. He didn’t care that he’d never see me again.”

  She laughs, sounding a little off kilter.

  “I should’ve been relieved, I guess. I mean Dad treated me like shit. But it crushed me when he passed me off like that, because I couldn’t even pretend that he cared anymore.”

  I move to her side, wanting to touch her, to comfort her, but I decide against it.

  “I was handed over to a bald guy who looked like a carnival worker from the twenties—Sid. I was terrified of him at first, but in the end he was my savior. He brought me here with Connor. And soon we had Jax and Holly, then Lester and Finger. And now you.” She gives me a sad smile. “It’s been three years, and no one unwanted has touched me since. I’m safe.”

  “So the thing you do . . . like with that man in the school . . .” And me. “That’s part of your curse?”

  “Actually, it’s not. When Sid brought me here, he reversed the curse.” She lifts her shirt a little and motions to the tattoo on her side. “He did a spell and flipped the curse on its head. The next morning this tattoo appeared.”