She smiles and shakes her head. “Of course not. It’s the loveliest feeling on earth.” She takes my hand in hers and brings it to her side. “Feel.”
My palm lies flat while she presses it tight to her skin.
A few seconds pass, and something moves under my fingers, making Mom giggle. “See? She’s saying hello.” Tears fill her eyes, and she presses my hand closer.
“She?” I ask.
“Your little sister.”
A shiver of excitement works over me. “Really?”
Mom nods, and tears spill out. They’re happy tears that sparkle and shimmer on her cheeks like glass. She’s happy—I’m not sure she’s ever been happy before. I want to hug her and hug her until we both disappear into the warmth. Until my heart bursts into a million pieces.
“You’re a big brother, Aidan.”
I nod, my throat starting to hurt.
“Soon she’ll belong to you, and you’ll get to care for her and watch over her. You’ll keep her warm, and you’ll keep her safe from all the darkness, won’t you?”
I nod again. “I’ll always watch over her.”
“Yes,” she says, sounding tired. She kisses my head, wetting my brow with her tears. “You’ll keep her hidden from all the lions.”
THIRTY-THREE
I open my eyes, a weight instantly settling on me.
I turn to Ava’s bed.
She’s not there. Her bag’s gone, too.
I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes.
Something cold slides against my chest.
I look down, blinking at a gold medallion on my sternum. The other amulet Sid gave me—the one I threw at his feet yesterday afternoon. It’s on a chain. Around my neck. I can’t stop staring at it. I sit there for a long minute, my mind totally blank.
Then I notice a square of paper on my lap. I pick it up, unfold it, and read in Ava’s handwriting: Don’t be mad. I know immediately what it means: she did a spell to bind the amulet to me.
I don’t bother getting pants on. I jump up, open the door, and yell over the banister, “Ava!”
Lester peeks into the entry from the kitchen. “Oh, shit, did she not tell you again?”
“Where did she go?”
He looks back into the kitchen like he’s considering his escape route, then says, “She went to the grocery store with Rebecca and Holly to get dinner supplies. I can call them.”
I curse under my breath and go back into my room. Ava’s a missing person, technically kidnapped. What’s Holly thinking? The ice cream shop and the grocery store?
If that’s even what they’re doing . . .
I look down at the amulet now dangling from my neck. It’s so small. Looks like a useless trinket you might find in a Cracker Jack box. Did Ava really bind it to me? Could I actually be invisible to demons now?
I touch it with my finger. There’s only one way to find out.
Someone knocks. I put my jeans on and grab a shirt and my phone before I open the door. It’s Lester, a worried look on his face. I walk past him into the hall, shoving my phone into my pocket.
“Do you need anything?” he asks.
“Yeah, a tracking device for my sister,” I say, starting down the stairs.
He follows me. “Where you going?”
“To find her.”
“But . . .”
Jax comes out from the kitchen as I open the front door. “Sid wants to download with you, man.”
“Where’s the grocery store? The one Holly goes to?”
Connor comes into the entry behind Jax. “Gelson’s, off Franklin. But that’s quite a walk from here. I can give you a lift.”
“I can handle it.” A walk will help me clear my head so I won’t strangle Ava when I find her. I can always grab a bus if I need to.
As I make my way to Franklin, I watch the shadows for creepers, looking for the Boss Demon that’s been following Rebecca, but I see nothing—not one single otherworldly thing. No ghosts. No time slips. No demons. Just dilapidated yards and miles of cracked sidewalk.
Of course, now that I’m looking, I won’t find anything.
I’m out of the neighborhood and in the shadow of some taller apartment buildings when Kara’s Camaro pulls up beside me. “Get in,” she says. When I ignore her and keep walking, she speeds up, turning in to a parking garage. I consider crossing the street and going down an alleyway to try and lose her, but before I get a chance, she comes running out of the garage. “Aidan, wait. Please.”
I walk for half a block as she follows me before I turn, and she nearly collides with my chest.
“Now you want to talk?” I bark, sending her stumbling back. “It’s a little late.”
She blinks up at me and opens her mouth, then shuts it again.
“What?” I ask. “No biting comeback this time? No snark left?”
“Don’t just run off,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “It’s not safe.”
“Didn’t you hear? I’m The One—the Bringer of Fire, in the flesh. Whatever the hell that means!”
“Aidan, please.”
“Please, what? Don’t you want to make fun of the insanity that has become my life?”
“I just need to talk to you.”
I turn to yell at the passing cars. “At last! She wishes to speak, folks! It’ll all be cleared up now!”
A homeless man cheers from the alley across the street.
Kara points behind her, growling, “Just get in the freaking car and stop being a bitch about everything!”
I bite back a laugh and study her for a second: her squinting eyes, her tense neck muscles, and the smell of exasperation spilling off her skin. She’s caught up in this as much as I am. And as infuriating as my life is right now, she’s living her own drama.
“Answer me one question,” I say. “Just one explanation, and then I’ll get in your car and go wherever you want.”
She frowns at me. “What?”
“What is it you’re supposed to do to me, Kara?”
She shakes her head. “You’re an ass.”
“Don’t I have a right to know?”
Her keys suddenly seem very interesting to her. “I was going to explain everything to you.”
“Well, here I am. I’m all ears. Talk to me.”
She glances around. “The car’s double-parked.”
“Kara, stop avoiding.”
“It’s one of my many talents.”
“I’ve seen your talents at work.”
Her nostrils flare.
“I’m not under any illusions anymore that you like me,” I say. “Obviously you were playing a part: make the sucker think I’m attracted to him. Make him think I want him. Like a game. I just don’t understand fully why you went along with it.”
Her chest rises and falls, like she’s running out of breath. “This isn’t a game.”
“Not a game? Okay, a con, then. Sounds like the apple doesn’t fall—”
She socks me in the stomach, sending every ounce of oxygen whooshing from my lungs.
I hunch over, holding my palm up before she uses her knee on a second target. “Okay, okay.” I cough, trying to find air again. I may have deserved that.
“I wish I’d never met you in that club.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about . . .” I look at her, not wanting to say the words. I can’t seem to stop hurting her. “I shouldn’t open my fat-ass mouth when I’m pissed.”
“Can we just go?”
I shake my head. “I came out here to find my sister, and on the way I planned to check something.”
She gives me a doubtful look.
“This.” I pull the amulet from the neck of my shirt.
She squints at it. “You let Sid bind it to you?”
“It wasn’t Sid,” I say. “I’m not letting it go to waste, though. If there’s some chance I’m finally hidden from the demons, it may solve a myriad of problems.”
“Fine, I’ll help you. First we check on your sister and then we test it,” she says.
I glance back at the parking garage. “I thought you were double-parked.”
“I lied.” She smirks at me. “But it’s gonna cost me twenty bucks to park in there, so you owe me.”
“I think you trying to control my brain with your sex powers should keep me in the up column of our relationship for a while.”
Her teeth clench. “I told you, I never used my abilities on you.”
“Of course not. And you never lie to me.”
“I thought you could tell when people lie. Are you getting rusty with me, freshman?”
I look her over, wondering, and mumble, “Maybe.”
She seems to consider this for a second and then says, “I can prove it. Right here. Now.”
“Prove what?”
She moves a little closer. “That I wasn’t lying; I never used my powers on you.”
My heart speeds up. “And how do you plan on doing that?”
“Like this,” she whispers, moving closer, her breath warm against my lips.
The air around me shifts, her energy suddenly filling every atom, her eyes sparking to life like the sun reflecting off the ice. I reach out my hand as if it could ward her off and try to step back, but as I blink, my body goes suddenly still, mind blank . . .
Where am I?
She’s pulling away, her hand sliding down my arm, back to the steering wheel.
Steering wheel?
I’m in the passenger seat of her car, The Carpenters spilling from the speakers as we drive down what looks like Franklin Avenue.
“You back?” she asks, giving me a tired look.
My head spins as I try to grab hold of a memory of how I got in the car and what she might have said, done, to me. I study my mark, trying to see if it’s grown, looking for some sign of what happened.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I didn’t rape you or make you rob a bank or anything. I just suggested we take a drive. Oh, and you may cluck like a chicken for no apparent reason at some random moment in the near future.” Her lips curl into a smirk.
“You . . .” I try to gather my thoughts. “That was your hypnotic thing? Like you did to the teacher at the school.”
“Do you believe me now? My ‘sex power,’ as you call it, isn’t something I enjoy using. Ever.”
My pulse slows a little as I study her. She looks worn down and sad, and the usual sweetness of her energy’s turned dull, now smelling more like the city after the rain. “I believe you.”
She clears her throat like my eyes on her are making her uncomfortable. “So now that we have that settled, let’s go get your sister and find a way to test that amulet.”
THIRTY-FOUR
We get a call from Connor as we’re pulling into the Gelson’s parking lot. Ava’s back at the house. He promises to lecture her as if he were channeling me. I’m too pissed off to talk to her right now anyway. I need to cool down.
Since Ava is safe, I ask Kara to take me somewhere to test the amulet. “Anywhere you’re sure there’ll be some demon action,” I say. It’s not until we pull onto a long drive and through a wrought iron gate that I realize we’re in a graveyard. A graveyard. Seriously, Kara? Graveyards are a sure bet for activity, but it’s not always safe activity.
We head up an incline, passing rows and rows of headstones in all shapes and sizes. Old trees speckle the grassy hills surrounding us, with clusters of flowers dotting the grass, but other than that it’s green as far as the normal eye can see. My eyes, however, spot hundreds of small lights hovering over the ground. The dead.
“We’re bound to find something here,” Kara says, pulling along the curb to park.
“No shit.”
She puts the emergency brake on and gets out. I follow her into a section farther back to the east, where the headstones are older. The orbs in this section seem stronger, brighter. They float around us, just off the ground.
The lights aren’t ghosts. They’re spirits. There’s a difference between the two. A person is made up of three parts: body, soul, and spirit. A ghost is a small fracture of a person’s soul, a mark left behind from a horrifying event or something left undone. The spirit is what waits to be merged with the soul—the mind, will, and emotions—and the body again, someday. A spirit is the truth of the person. The core of who they are. As far as I can tell, after death the spirit exists in a place beyond the reach of anyone or anything. Safe, in a sort of limbo.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Kara says, walking along a row of graves, “so can we hurry it up?”
“I don’t see any ghosts or demons to hide from,” I say, looking around.
“Not here. A little farther.” She points past a small family crypt.
“You know where they are?”
“I’m fairly sure.”
We walk for another few minutes in silence and soon come to a fenced-in section. Withered morning glories climb the chain link that’s hedged by dandelions and thistles. Patches of the weeds are dead, but they seem to be fighting to hold on. Several white sticks marked with numbers protrude from the ground on the other side of the fence. The orbs here hover in large clusters, with one or two small ones off to the side that flicker, like they’ve grown tired.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a mass grave?”
I shake my head. The last time I was in a graveyard was the day they buried my mother. Since then, I avoid them like the plague.
“It’s where they bury the forgotten,” she says. “People whose bodies were never claimed. There’s a demon here, I think.”
“Where?” I don’t see or sense anything.
She waves for me to follow her, and we walk along the overgrown fence. We go through a gate, entering the area set aside for the forgotten.
The smell hits me almost immediately. A sharp, pungent shot of sulfur that cuts the air.
Kara doesn’t say anything; she just walks over to one of the numbered markers and turns to look at me. As my eyes follow her movement, they catch on a creature on the other side of the grave. Medium size for a demon, hunched over, with gnarly tumorlike protrusions on its shoulder blades—where wings used to be, maybe? It digs at the ground with its claws, growling under its breath, something that sounds like a repeated phrase. Green pus oozes from its piglike nose. It seems like it’s almost in a trance, focused on something at its feet.
Then I realize I know what it’s saying. Something like, Inside shell, back to shell.
Shell? Body.
It’s a body-hopper.
It doesn’t look like the other body-hoppers I’ve seen, though. Usually they’re more snakelike. This one is obviously missing its host.
Fear inches up my spine like a slow crack in the ice.
This is no weakling demon.
“I can feel it,” Kara whispers, even though it’s not paying any attention to her. “It’s usually right here.”
“You should step away,” I say. It’s only a foot from her. “Come back to me.” I hold out my hand to her, urgency tightening my muscles.
She seems a little surprised by my obvious concern, hesitating before she steps toward me, her foot treading on the grave.
The demon looks up at that. Its chant fades as it spots Kara, and it stares at her like it’s found lunch after a long famine. My worry morphs to terror.
A long black tongue emerges, licking its lips as the demon rises up from its hunched position, garbling under its breath, “Mine.”
It reaches full height, more than six feet, and I grab Kara by the arm, yelling, “Run!” even though in the b
ack of my head I know it won’t do any good. It has her scent now—all that sweet sadness and pain, just waiting to be capitalized on.
We sprint back through the gate and down a small hill, but as I look up, the demon is waiting in our path, only three yards away.
I react without thinking, skidding to a stop and yanking Kara behind me. I begin yelling the first thing that pops in my head: a prayer a priest taught me at the Catholic hospital one night when I was in the ER, the prayer to the archangel Michael. I yell it at the top of my lungs in English, telling Kara to say it with me. “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil . . .”
The demon flinches and looks around. It swats at the air like it’s shooing a fly, but then it keys back on Kara with a growl.
It’s obvious that the thing doesn’t see me. And also that the prayer’s useless.
“Tell it to leave you alone, Kara!”
She gasps for air and whimpers, “Leave me alone.”
“Like you mean it!”
“Leave me alone,” she says more forcefully.
But the demon only hesitates.
“You have to believe, Kara. Tell it to leave you alone in the name of El Yeshuati!”
She shivers against my back. I know she feels my terror. She yells at the top of her lungs, “Leave me the fuck alone in the name of El Yeshu-whatever, you goddamned bastard!”
The demon pauses, looking irritated.
“Tell it to go back,” I say, a small amount of relief trickling through me. “That it has no right to you.”
She pauses as if unsure, but then she yells, “Go back to my father! You have—” She nearly chokes on her words, a small sob escaping. “You have no right to me.”
Her dad. I turn from the demon to look at her. “Kara, what is it?”
She shakes her head, tears filling her eyes. And I realize she’s not strong enough to push it back.
So does the demon.
It huffs out a snarl, steam and saliva dribbling from its mouth. It bares its teeth at her and stomps its clawed foot on the ground. Then it lowers onto all fours, like it’s about to charge. It’s going to shove itself into her skin. Use her like a puppet as it torments her and feeds off her weakness until she does something to silence the pain.
Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1) Page 23
