Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1)

by Rachel A. Marks

  Have I finally found someone I can lean on? As he gingerly bandages my wounds, I find myself wanting him to really know me. Like a dad knows his son.

  The idea makes my chest ache, as does thinking of my real father, so I just ask, “What have you found?”

  “I’m not sure of it all yet, but I have found an address where your mother may have grown up. It’s on the beach, in Malibu.”

  “She told me stories about growing up on the ocean. She loved the sea.”

  “Well, I’m hoping to get the names of the residents from my contact tonight or tomorrow. I just wanted you to know that I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll know the truth soon, son. I promise.”

  When I get up to my room, I open the door, and Ava and Holly are sitting on the floor, huddled together near the bed, talking. Ava’s head snaps up, and her hand moves behind her back, hiding whatever she was showing Holly.

  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to knock?” she asks with a frown.

  “Nope,” I say.

  Holly’s eyes grow. “Whoa, what happened to you?”

  Ava’s frown deepens. “Did you get in another fight?”

  “Demons don’t like being trapped for all eternity,” I say, tossing off my shoes and lying on the bed. “They tend to fight back.”

  Ava stands and slips whatever she’s hiding into her bag and shoves it under the bed. “Demons? Really, Aidan, you need to be more careful.”

  “No, what I need to do is sleep,” I say, rolling over, too exhausted to find out what secrets Ava is sharing behind my back.

  “It’s only six o’clock,” Holly says. “Not much of a party animal, are we? And you left your girlfriend here all day. You need to go hang out with the poor thing.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I say.

  “Well,” Holly says, “she won’t be for long if you keep up that ’tude.”

  I growl into my pillow.

  They gather their things and leave the room, Ava taking her secret with her. I wonder if I should warn Holly to be careful. Ava isn’t in the best place right now. And what if her powers manifest? Holly would freak.

  My head hurts from all the worry and demon fighting. I’ll think about it after some sleep.

  I wake in a rush in the middle of the night and sit up in bed, feet finding the floor before I can tell what jolted me. My cuts burn, but I push the sting away. I have to sit for a second, blinking at the darkness, listening, before I feel it again, a quake in the air. Slight, but there.

  And then a muffled cry comes from the wall—from Kara’s room. She’s having a nightmare. The conversation with Holly about Kara’s night terrors comes to mind. But why would that affect the air?

  I take a deep breath and make myself lie down again, even though I want to go check on her. I’ve done enough already to mess shit up with her. And after today we might finally be in a better place. So I squeeze my eyes shut and hope it’ll pass. I can’t let myself think about how she felt in my arms, the peace that settled around us, the small hum of her pulse in her skin. The night we were together . . . I haven’t slept that good in forever.

  “Aidan?” Ava says, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Yeah.”

  “I know what you’re doing. I can hear your brain arguing with itself all the way over here. Why do you like her so much?”

  “Go back to sleep, Ava.”

  “I wanna know.”

  “Are you gonna do a spell to dig it up if I don’t tell you?”

  “Probably.” I hear a smile in her voice.

  I think for a second, and then I just say it. “She’s different than other girls. She’s tough, but not in a mean way. She does have this crust around her, but it’s all a facade. It’s how she protects herself. And I want to see deeper into her, to know her. Because she’s strong and complicated and . . . I don’t know. It’s lame.”

  “What about Rebecca?” she asks. “Is that how you feel about her?”

  I close my eyes, not wanting to think about any of it anymore. I need to go back to sleep. “I don’t feel anything you need to worry about, Ava. Let it go.”

  “It’s not the same, I know. But Rebecca is pure and soft. Why would you pick Kara over her? Kara’s so . . . well, Kara.”

  I roll over and cover my head with my pillow, groaning. Between the burning of my cuts, the sounds of Kara’s nightmare, and Ava’s pecking, I’m about to jump out the window.

  “I think she’s done something to you.”

  “Ava! Stop. Kara hasn’t done anything.”

  There’s silence for a few beats, and then she says quietly, “You’re not going to kiss her tonight. You may as well just go back to sleep.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “Aidan,” Mom says, “look.” She points with a charcoal-stained finger at the pen mark on the doorframe where she measures my height. “You’re a giant already.” There’s charcoal smudged on her face too, from her frantic drawing session last night. She must’ve had another vision. She always stays up scribbling strange images of ocean caves and cliffs when she’s had one of those.

  I turn and study the ink mark she made over my head. “Was my dad tall?” I ask. I know she carries a sore in her heart that he left behind. But I want to know about him. Is he real?

  Maybe he’s not. Maybe I’m not. Sometimes Mom looks at me like I’ll disappear any second.

  Now she’s staring at me with a faraway look. I ask so many times about him, and she usually gives me a sad look or an angry look, but she never gave me a look like this one before.

  “He felt tall,” she says, her voice hollow. It sends a chill over me. Like the voice she makes when she’s in the circle. “Like a king or an emperor.”

  “Was he a king, Mom?” I ask, suddenly afraid of the answer. Would he come and take me away from Mom and Ava someday? Take me to some faraway land?

  Her brow creases in focus, as if she’s trying to see him again through the fog of time. Her white-blond hair glows with light from the candle behind her, and the smell of sage drifts from her skin.

  “No, not a king,” she says with a sad smile. “Or an emperor.”

  She turns and walks away, forgetting about the measuring, forgetting about me. “He was just a man.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning, the moment I step out of my room, I run into Rebecca.

  Her hand flies to her mouth as she notices my scratches. “Oh my God. What . . . ?”

  I shake my head. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just a . . . cat.” I back away a little. I don’t want her caring about me. Not like that. Not now. “Listen, now that you’re here, Sid says he can help you. If you want. He has a special, um, blessing he can do to help your sadness and stuff.”

  God, what am I doing? I suck at lying. But then again, how can I explain that he is going to use magic to bind a protective amulet to her aura that will make her invisible to demons? I don’t think she’ll stick around for that.

  “Oh, Sid can help,” Rebecca says. “Well, that’s good.” She doesn’t know what to think; I can see it in her eyes.

  “Yeah, so I just have to talk to my sister, and then we’ll go find Sid, and he can fix this so you can go home.”

  “Leave? Today?” She glances down the stairs, a worried look on her face.

  “Um, sure. Or tomorrow. It’s gonna be okay.” I pat her on the shoulder like a lame-ass, then hurry past her, toward the bathroom, away from the conversation.

  Ava’s coming out, her hair all braided with ribbons and twisted on top of her head. Her eyelids are covered in blue shadow; her lips are pink with gloss. “Holly said I could use her makeup,” she says like she’s worried I’m going to be mad at her.

  “I need to talk to you.
” I nod to our bedroom. I’ve decided something in the last twelve hours. I’ll give one of the amulets to Rebecca, but I’m not going to take the other one for myself. Ava needs it more than I do, the way things are going. I can fight my own battles. She can’t.

  After we shut ourselves in our room, I sit with her on my bed. “I have something for you.” I take her hand and press one of the amulets into her palm. “Sid gave it to me and said it’ll keep you safe from them. It could mean no more demon attacks on your birthday. No more running.”

  She looks down at the amulet. “What? But how?”

  “We’re going to do a spell, lock it to your aura. It’ll hide you from them.”

  Her eyes snap to mine. “Aidan . . . casting magic? But you—”

  I wave her shock away. “I know, I hate it. It terrifies me. But I love you more than I hate it. And right now, losing you scares me more than anything in this whole wide world. You need to be safe. This is the best way. The only way I can see, really. We’re running out of time and options. I don’t trust the wards on this house. It’s too much property to keep hidden entirely. And I have a feeling whatever’s been chasing us all this time is fairly powerful.”

  She rolls the amulet in her palm. “A bonding spell. That’s it?”

  “That’s what Sid says. We’ll do it today. As soon as we can.”

  “And he just gave it to you?” She bites her lip, looking troubled.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Well, I’ve seen this before. And I wasn’t wearing it.”

  “When?”

  “That spell I did when I saw Rebecca. She was wearing it around her neck in the vision I had.”

  I fold my arms across my chest. “Well, there are two of them. She’ll take the other one.”

  “Two?” Her mouth opens in realization. “But what about you?” She starts to panic when she sees I’m not budging. Her eyes search mine. “Aidan . . . it’s not right.”

  “It is right. You said so yourself; you saw it in a vision. Rebecca’s wearing one. And I’m with her, right?” She just keeps staring at me with those ancient-looking eyes until I can’t stand the silence. “It’s right,” I say again. “So get dressed and then come down to the backyard so we can do this thing.” I turn away before I change my mind and take back everything. I’ve made a choice. And it’s the right one.

  I’ve gained a level of respect from Jax, it seems. He’s still buzzing about what happened yesterday, blathering to Lester about it when I walk into the office looking for Sid.

  “Hey, there he is,” Jax says, holding out his arm like he wants to side-hug me. “The man of the hour.”

  “Did you really glow?” Lester asks, looking my skin over.

  “I didn’t see anything glowing,” I say as Jax catches hold of me.

  “Oh, he was glowing.” Jax squeezes my shoulder to his. “This badass actually held on to a demon with his bare hands, like he was wrangling a beast.”

  I was.

  I pull out of Jax’s arms. “Have you guys seen Sid? Is he up yet?”

  “Him and Connor and your goth girlfriend are in the shed together.” Then he winks.

  I scowl at him, and Lester whacks him on the bicep. “Seriously?” Then he turns to me. “I think Sid wants you to meet them out there. He said something about you going with them to some church thing.”

  “Yeah, to repent,” Jax says. “You big sinner.”

  Before I head out to meet them, I stop in to say hi to Finger and sit beside him on the couch for a second. It’s more for me than a charity chat. The kid settles my nerves, and all this talk of my glowing marks and the demons is making my insides frantic.

  Things are all right, though, when I think about it. They definitely could be worse. Sure, Ava is keeping secrets from me—sharing stuff with Holly she obviously doesn’t want me to know about—but she’s almost twelve. Aren’t preteens supposed to rebel? I know I did. And it’s probably good for her to have an older girl as a confidant. She still hasn’t used her powers yet—that I know of. We only have to get through a few more days before D-Day, and we have a place where we’re safe until then.

  Plus, Sid is helping me find out more about my parents, and he’s making sure Rebecca and Ava will be protected. I have help. I’m not alone in this anymore.

  Really, things are looking up when you think about it.

  After a few more minutes of watching Finger kill zombies, I feel better and ready to figure out what’s next.

  “Thanks, man,” I say, patting him on the back before I rise.

  He makes a sound of approval and kills two zombies with one swing of his bat.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “They already did the protection thing on Rebecca,” Holly says as I come into the kitchen. “You totes missed the boring chanting.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table flipping through a magazine.

  “Where are they?”

  “Still outside, I think.” But before I can walk out the back door she asks, “When you’re kissing a girl, what are you thinking about?”

  My hand freezes on the door handle and I turn. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s for the quiz.” She points at the page with the tip of her pen. “What do you think about when you’re kissing?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t, like, think?”

  “I don’t talk to you about it, that’s for sure.”

  “Whoa, bad boy on the loose.” She leans back in her chair, looking me over more closely. “It’s just a question. Like, what did you think about when you kissed Kara?”

  How much I never wanted to stop. “This is not a conversation I’m having with you.”

  “Suit yourself.” She grins wide and leans back over the page, circling a number. Then she waves without looking up. “Ta-ta, grumpy.”

  I walk out of the house with the sound of Ava’s violin beginning a sad tune upstairs. It follows me into the yard, making my nerves wake back up again. Or maybe my nerves were poked by Holly. It doesn’t matter; they’re at attention either way.

  As I walk to the shed, the muted energy of the property lifts a little, letting me feel a tug coming from the white shack where a strange man sleeps every night.

  The door is cracked open.

  It’s empty when I peek inside. Wherever the others are, they aren’t here. The dank smell swirls around me, drawing me in. But I pull back, fear rising at the same time. As I move my head the door shuts, the latch clicking tight. The red circle painted on the door seems to blur and shift and then solidify again as I look at it.

  I touch one of the crimson lines on the edge.

  A flash of pain sears through me. The marking on my arm sparks with red lights, and electrical current hits me even as I step back, gasping.

  All I hear is the sound of Ava’s violin and my racing heartbeat.

  And I suddenly know without a doubt, with everything in me, that I need to get in that shed. I need to see what’s inside it. I pull on the handle, but the door doesn’t budge in spite of the fact that I can see all the metal locks hanging unlatched. Desperate, I search the ground and grab the first thing I see, an old rusty pipe, and I whack the door with it. It takes three hits, but on the third the silver handle falls to the side.

  The door creaks open again.

  I fix my inner walls tightly in place, take a deep breath, and slip inside.

  The space is very small—the size of a closet. The air feels heavy, like I’m underwater. All I see at first is the darkness, with the shapes of Sid’s bed and the altar at one side. As my eyes adjust, I realize my foot is touching the chest Sid was digging in the other day when he gave me the amulets.

  I search the space for a light and find a small gas lamp beside the bed. There’s matches sitting on a stack of books right beside it. I pull a stick from the box and strike it, lighting the lamp.


  As I lift it, my surroundings are revealed.

  I nearly drop the lantern.

  Over every surface of the walls are more of those same circle spells like the one painted on the door. And I’m very sure now that they’re painted with blood. The symbol repeats over and over, grounding, grounding, grounding. And in the gravity of their energy, I weigh a thousand pounds. The feeling makes me want to run, but I stand firm and lift the lamp higher to study the altar.

  I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I know I’m looking for something.

  Or maybe something’s looking for me.

  The altar was once a wine cabinet. Through the glass doors below, I can see rolls of paper instead of bottles in the circular spaces. The surface is coated in melted wax, dried blood, and burned paper. My mouth becomes a desert looking at it all. The skull of what looks like a cat sits to the side, with a symbol for slyness on the forehead. A bowl rests in the other corner filled with tiny bones that I’m hoping are from a bird. There are vials of various liquids and dried things. I don’t want to know what.

  My walls are up tight as they can get, but I still feel the death, the loss. Something horrible happened to make this place. But what?

  Urgency fills me as I kneel down and open the chest, the desire to run growing stronger. My fear tells me this is where the answers are. I move several scarves, pants, shirts out of the way, and my hand finds vials, a stack of thick books, what I think might be rolls of money, and a larger, hard, square object that I can’t get a good look at.

  I lift the light closer and move a shirt out of the way. And uncover a stone that must be more than a thousand years old. Assyrian lines the top.

  Bringer of Fire.

  A chill works over me as the knowledge sinks in. It doesn’t say Aidan, but I know these words are my name. It’s about me. Just like my mom told Ava: The father’s place is another time, the son is becoming; Fire Bringer.

  Everything around me goes still for a second.

  I can’t stop looking at the words. I touch the stone with a shaking finger.