Captive of Darkness (Heart of Darkness Book 1)

by Debbie Cassidy

  Veles tore at the creature with his talons.

  “No, stop!” I rushed toward them, intent on helping the bird, but the bird was no longer a bird; it elongated and expanded and then it was a man. The man gripped Veles’s wrists to ward off the attack, but Veles, in his primitive rage, threw him off easily.

  The man rolled to his feet, his inky black hair blowing back from his alabaster skin as he made to attack Veles again.

  “No!” I stepped in between the two males. “Enough.”

  Veles paused, his lips a snarl, his eyes bloodshot. “Hurt you.”

  “No. You won’t.” I bridged the gap between us, grabbed his face, and kissed him.

  He jerked away, trying to pull free, but my grip was stronger than I could have anticipated, and my lips remained on his, willing, begging Narina’s gift forth. Please. Please, give him back to me. Give him back.

  His mouth softened against mine, and he stopped fighting. Yes. Was it working? Heat rose up my throat and bloomed in my mouth. My lips tingled and then Veles was kissing me with an unleashed passion that buckled my knees and spun my head. He kissed me as if I was his air, as if it was his last act on this earth, and then he shoved me away, hard.

  I staggered back, tripping over my feet, but sure hands arrested my fall and a smooth voice whispered in my ear.

  “Now, I did not see that coming, and I usually see everything.”

  I jerked away from the speaker, from the man with the obsidian eyes and hawkish features.

  “Wynter, get away from him.” Veles beckoned me.

  “Didn’t you just shove her away?” The tall man cocked his head. “Hmmmm …”

  “Let go of her.”

  The man looked down at me. “Would you like me to let go, Wynter?”

  I blinked up at him, at the decidedly sharp features, the intense dark eyes, and the raven’s wing hair. Raven’s wing.

  “You’re a bird.”

  “Ouch. A bird? A bird?” His tone rose incrementally. “I’m not just any old bird, I’m the Raven.”

  “A raven.”

  “No, the Raven, and a thank you for saving your neck wouldn’t go amiss.” He released me and huffed. “No, I guess not. You never were one to show gratitude.” He adjusted the cuffs of his black knee-length coat. “Scuffed. Hmmm … we’ll have to see to that.”

  “You’re Jet, aren’t you?”

  “The name you chose, not the name I was given, but yes. Yes, I am he, in the featherless flesh.” He winked. “And I see you finally found your way to your destination. It was touch and go there for a while, but Dagda had faith.”

  “Wynter.” Veles beckoned me again.

  “It’s all right. He’s not dangerous.”

  “And how can you be so sure?”

  “I just … can.”

  The Raven smiled. “Perceptive as always.” He waved his hand toward the tower behind me. “Shall we? Tales await and revelations simmer. Exciting times. Hmmmm.”

  “What is this place?” Veles took several steps across the flagstones toward the tower and then stopped.

  “This is the crossroads,” the Raven said. “Now, no more questions, only answers. Coming?” He shot me a cheeky grin and then bounded up the steps and through the doorway.

  I looked to Veles, who had his gaze averted. His jaw was clenched as if in pain. It was obvious what he was thinking about. He was hurting because he’d tried to and wanted to hurt me.

  I stepped closer to peer up into his face, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Don’t. It was my fault. I knew the risks, and I made you come with me anyway. I knew what could happen to you, and I pushed it.”

  He tucked in his chin. “I came even though I knew what could happen. I could have killed you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Because Narina gave you the seed.”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  His gaze flicked over my face. “You don’t know what it is?”

  A gift. A piece of the glade for you to carry. Give it to Veles if he begins to slip. If he begins to forget.

  Why couldn’t you just give it to him?

  Maybe I could have a long time ago, but my heart lies elsewhere now and so does Veles’s.

  It didn’t mean what I thought it meant. It couldn’t, because my heart lay with Finn.

  I pushed the memory back and shook my head. “Not really. She just said it would help.”

  His expression shuttered. “Thank you anyway.”

  “Finn is inside, we should …”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, are you coming? Hmmm?” the Raven called from the threshold, his shoulder propped up against the arch. “Time’s a wasting.”

  Veles took my hand, tentatively, as if expecting me to pull away. Instead, I wrapped my fingers around his. Hand in hand, we hurried across the courtyard and up the flight of stairs. The Raven retreated into the building, and we followed him into an entrance hall made of marble and gold. The walls were a connection of silver cogs that turned this way and that, and there was no ceiling, only row upon row of balconies that twisted and turned. A winding metal staircase rose up as far as the eye could see. The structure was stationary—the only stationary aspect of the tower, it seemed—with wide platforms jutting out at each floor. Platforms that would merge with each balcony at a specific point if you waited long enough for the outer wall to rotate.

  I looked to the Raven, who was busy brushing imaginary flecks of dust off his jacket.

  “What now?”

  A pitter-patter drew my attention down to the ground to see a tiny white mouse scampering my way.

  “Roxy?” It couldn’t be. I’d lost her in the sea of souls, and yet there was the black spot on her paw and the particularly cocky curl to her tail. I crouched. “Roxy, is it really you?” I laid my hand on the ground, and she climbed up onto it. I lifted her up to my face. “Is it you?”

  She sat up and stared at me, as if to say, and who else would it be?

  “How do you know this creature?” Veles asked.

  “She came with me from the human realm. I thought I’d lost her in the sea of souls.”

  “And yet she’s here,” Veles said reflectively.

  I stared at the mouse, at her beady little eyes that seemed to glint silver, and then she scampered up my arm and down my torso before leaping to the ground. She paused to look up at me and then ran around the staircase and into the darkness beyond.

  “Wait, Roxy!”

  “Oh, she’ll be back,” the Raven said. “She’s simply fetching our illustrious host.”

  Sure enough, a tall, cloaked man appeared from the darkness beyond the staircase. “Raven, you look well,” he said, even though his attention was on me. “And I see you brought guests.”

  His tone was nonchalant and creepily familiar. It was the voice from my nightmares, the one that had reverberated in my head as I’d been drowning in the sea of souls. Finn may have prompted me to enter the chasm, but this man had been drawing me here for years. The gleam in his eye and the tightness of his features spoke of suppressed emotion. Possibly excitement?

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Wynter Ashfall. My name is Dagda.”

  “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

  Roxy peeked her head out from over his shoulder and twitched her nose at me.

  “Oh, we have friends in common. Roxy has told me all about you, and the Raven has been nothing if not complimentary about your … assets. We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

  “Who are you?” Veles’s tone was chilling. “What is this place? Answer me now, or I will rip out your tongue.”

  “Brutal much,” the Raven said. “And wouldn’t the ripping out of the tongue be purely counterproductive?”

  Veles shot him a scathing look.

  “Destiny is a strange thing,” the robed man said. “We knew that Wynter, when she came, wouldn’t come alone, but you would have been the last companion we would have picked for her.”
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  “Better than Berstuk,” the Raven said. “He marked her, did you know?”

  Dagda’s eyes narrowed. “Games upon games, it will serve him no purpose. She is not made for the likes of him.”

  My head was spinning, trying to make sense of what they were gibbering on about, and it seemed that Veles had had enough also.

  “Answer the question,” Veles snapped.

  Dagda inclined his head. “I am the keeper of the cauldron, the staff, and the harp. I am the sentinel of time and season, and this is my home. You are Veles, the god of Death, the ruler of Nawia, and self-professed heartbreaker. We were friends once.”

  “Then you know. You know what happened, don’t you?” Veles said. “Are you responsible for it all?”

  He took a menacing step toward Dagda, but Dagda threw back his head and laughed, a full belly laugh that stopped Veles in his tracks. But all his mirth did was anger me. None of this mattered. The cryptic words, the insinuations, none of it mattered to me.

  “Stop. Just stop with the mystery and the crudding laughter. I came here for Finn. You have him, and I want him back. Now.”

  Dagda’s expression sobered. “Yes. I know what finally brought you to us, but I’m afraid I can’t give him to you.”

  Veles’s smile was a jagged, lethal thing. “Then we’ll just have to take him.”

  He advanced on Dagda but didn’t make it far before he was flying backward and hitting the ground hard. He rolled back onto his feet with preternatural speed, his intention to attack again written clearly on his face.

  Dagda raised a hand. “Stop.” He never raised his voice, but it echoed around the tower. “This is a waste of time and energy. Let me explain, and then, if you still wish to try and take your friend, I won’t stop you.” He turned away from us, his robe swishing against the ground, and glided into the shadows beyond the stairs. “Come.”

  The Raven slipped ahead of us, preceding us into the darkness. “Hurry, hurry, much to learn.”

  Veles’s expression was stony and resolute. I ran a hand down his bicep. “Let’s go get some answers.”

  I led the way into the gloom, past a rickety-looking chair that was perched against the cog-infested wall and into a room lined with books and knick-knacks. Dagda stood behind a cluttered desk while the Raven lounged in a window seat, and what a window it was. The scene was constantly blurring then altering—winterscape, summer sky, autumn leaves, and the crisp blue of spring. A crumbling city sat on a rise in the distance to be replaced a moment later by metal and gears and strange shapes in the sky.

  “What is that?” I pointed at the window.

  Dagda glanced over his shoulder absently and then his brows shot up and he smiled.

  “Ah, yes. I’m so used to this place that I forget how strange it must seem to others. Those are the faces of the other realities still connected to the crossroads. There were many more, but they are all dead now, devoured by Oblivion.”

  “Psst,” the Raven said. “Getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we, old man?”

  Dagda rolled his eyes. “Thank you, but I think I can handle this.” He lowered himself into the chair behind his desk. “Oblivion is the entity we are at war with. Oblivion is what waits for us beyond the shimmer.”

  “But isn’t this tower beyond the shimmer,” Veles said.

  “No, the tower is within the shimmer,” the Raven said. “Out there”—he pointed at the window—“is beyond.”

  Veles studiously ignored the Raven, keeping his attention on Dagda. “Tell me. Tell it to me from the beginning.”

  “The beginning …” Dagda steepled his fingers beneath his chin. His deep-set eyes were hooded in thought. “In that case, you better have a seat.”

  Veles and I lowered ourselves onto the only other seat in the room, a velvet chaise longue.

  Dagda’s smile was perfunctory. “To understand, you need to know that there are many worlds existing side by side, nestled in their own universes, but my knowledge extends to this universe alone, and to the worlds connected to the crossroads—this clockwork tower.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I can accept that.”

  He nodded curtly. “Our universe is infected by a plague and it is called Oblivion. It seeks death and destruction, pain and torment. It feeds off discord and it grows, decimating worlds in its wake and forever hungering for more. I’m not sure where it came from, or how it slipped into our universe, maybe it was always here lying dormant. Maybe we did something to awaken it? Goodness knows, I have spent long enough contemplating its origins to no avail. What I do know is that it ate its way through world after world while the gods and the immortals sought to stop it. They failed. We all failed. By the time we realized that Oblivion could not be killed, many worlds had fallen and Oblivion was making its way to the central plane, a place we call Faery. Faery touches the mortal realties, the worlds in this universe inhabited by Yav-born. Oblivion sought to claim Faery and thus gain access to Yav, to the mortal souls that we have guarded and toyed with for too long. Many gods had already fallen to Oblivion, because although we could not kill it, it could manipulate us to kill each other.”

  “A meeting was called where all the gods that had survived the fallen worlds convened, and it was decided that we would pool our energy into creating a barrier, a ward of power to keep Oblivion at bay and protect the mortal realms.”

  “The shimmer,” Veles said.

  “Yes. The shimmer. But we knew that we would need a way to power it, and so the immortal gods of the central plane, the Tuatha de Danaan, sacrificed their shimmer, their unique fey light to build the ward. However, their queen, Morrigan, knew it wouldn’t be enough. She knew that eventually Oblivion would break through the shimmer, and so she used her own shimmer to make the ultimate sacrifice. She used ancient magic to bind herself to Oblivion and in doing so tethered it to Faery.” He paused, his throat bobbing, as if pushing down some errant emotion. He cleared his throat and continued.

  “Morrigan was a formidable woman. A warrior and a powerful seer. She came here the night before her battle with Oblivion. She told me that she’d seen her victory, and she’d seen her death, and then she gave me two items to keep safe, a sliver of her soul and her amulet. She told me that when the time came, I would know what to do with them, and then she walked away.” He stared at his hands. “She was victorious, if you can call being possessed by an ancient evil entity victorious. She did what she set out to do, and once bound to Morrigan, Oblivion was indeed trapped in Faery. Its power, although immense, was unable to extend out of the realm. We knew it was only a matter of time before it gained enough strength to break free of the binding, and so we reinforced the shimmer and evacuated the remaining gods to Nawia, the only immortal plane still uninfected in our universe.”

  “Then why don’t I remember any of this?” Veles asked.

  “You did, for a while. But there came a time when it became safer for you all to forget,” Dagda said. “When the shimmer began to fail—”

  “Fail?”

  “Yes, the shimmer of the fey wasn’t enough, and after a century it began to die. Oblivion was still a threat, gaining in power, and so we reconvened at your home, and we agreed there was only one solution. We agreed to use fresh human souls.”

  Veles shook his head. “No. I would never have agreed to that.”

  Dagda’s smile was mirthless. “It was your idea.”

  “No.” But this time there was less conviction in his tone.

  “Yes, and we all agreed to it. I built the riders and cast the spell, and we cut a path to Yav, creating a place where we could reap fresh souls.”

  My stomach was suddenly queasy. “Justice Falls. My home.”

  “Yes. It was a horrific decision, but it was a case of a few souls to save the many… at least it was meant to be. We couldn’t anticipate the effect this decision would have, so we agreed it would be safer if you were all to forget what lay beyond the shimmer. If you all thought of Nawia as your home and the riders as a
part of the natural order, we hoped that you would be content, happy even, until … until a permanent solution was found.”

  “Happy?” Veles’s lip curled. “Have you any idea what it’s like out there?”

  Dagda winced. “The effects of living in a place reserved for the dead was unforeseen. The effects of taking souls before their time was unforeseen. The world is in imbalance and the fabric of Nawia is slowly unraveling,” Dagda said. “Yes, I am aware, and soon Yav, the very place we sought to protect, will be affected.”

  When no more souls were born, humanity would become extinct. Oh, God. It was all falling into place, except …. “I don’t understand how any of this is connected to me? Why do you know my name? Why are you waiting for me?”

  “I told you Morrigan had prophesized I would know what to do with the sliver of her soul when the time came?”

  My scalp prickled. “Yes, so?”

  “Well, the time came. I watched Faery, and I saw the change in Oblivion and I realized the moment it took her heart, the moment it became truly vulnerable, and I knew … I knew it was time for her to be reborn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His smile was dry. “You know what I mean, Wynter. You’ve always seen more, felt more, known more. Your instincts, the little voice in your head. Did you not feel it when you killed the Baku? The power in your hands. The power in each blow.”

  I shook my head. “No.” This couldn’t be.

  Veles was staring at me. “You killed them.”

  I shook my head at him, holding out my hands, expecting to see them tainted with blood once more. “I … I don’t know how.”

  “It’s who you are. A warrior queen with the gift of prophesy. You are woven from the sliver of Morrigan’s soul, which Roxy carried into Yav all those years ago. You are all that is left of Morrigan, and only you can kill Oblivion by ripping out its still-beating heart.”

  There was silence in the wake of the revelation; the only sound was the thump of my pulse in my ears. It couldn’t be true, even though deep down it felt right, like the missing piece of a puzzle had been found. But I was no hero. I was no warrior. I was a girl who wanted to find the boy she loved and go home. I was the girl who wanted to close her eyes and pretend none of this was real, to pretend that this place wasn’t a weight settling over my shoulders like a familiar cloak.