His Kiss of Darkness
Page 1
His Touch of Ice
by Kody Boye
His Kiss of Darkness
By Kody Boye
Copyright © Kody Boye 2015. All Rights Reserved.
Cover art and design by Corey Hollins
Copyedited by Elizabeth Fry
Interior formatting by Kody Boye
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the proper written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Prologue
Blood, water, ice—the smell of dirt beneath my fingers.
Pain, panic, pneumonia—the taste of sickness between my lips.
Death, destruction, chaos—my name within their minds.
I run.
The world around me is a blur. Trees flash before my eyes. Branches lash my face. Dirt grinds into the soles of my feet and cold air stabs my naked flesh. An anger—so primal and furious it is unlike anything I have ever felt—drives me through the thicket in the early hours of the morning. I cannot think, only feel. Only hunger. Only starve.
The wind whistles in my ears, a wordless voice in the night I understand perfectly.
Go, it says.
So I do.
I run.
I break through the copse of trees and come across the lovers in their tent, fervid in their passions and rampant in their need, their moans a carnal hunger pulling me toward them as if I were affixed to them with wires.
Instantly, compulsively, I react.
Within moments their screams fill my ears as I ravage them with my teeth, reveling in the smell of their blood. .
The man is dead within moments—his carotid torn, his flesh between my lips. The woman, though—he was her shield, and those brief moments of violence allowed her escape. She tears through the opening in the tent and runsinto the night, screaming, calling for help, for someone, for anything.
And there I am—
Clawing.
Eating.
Feeding.
It is only through the blood pooled alone his flesh that I see the crown of antlers upon my head, the elongated fixtures of my face, of my teeth, of the bloodied hands that reach up to reveal the talons that tip my wicked fingers,
And it is then that I realize who I am, what I have done.
The scream is hell incarnate—the baleful loon within the night.
It is the Wendigo.
Part 1
“Jason?” a voice said. “Are you awake?”
I opened my eyes to view a west-Texas sunset bleeding across the horizon. In shades of blue, pink, purple, magenta, scarlet, tangerine and rainy-day grey, it stretched for as far as the eye could see until it ended in a blood-red sun. There, darkness shrouded the sky—the end of the world threatening to haunt my never-ending nightmare.
Lying there, I could only think one thing:
What had I done?
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom beneath the canopy of gnarled juniper trees—to finally regain sense of my surroundings and realize that this was, in fact, the real world. When they did, I saw a figure—whom at first I couldn’t identify, then slowly came to realize was the man who started this whole thing.
The man at the club.
The man in the bed.
The man who wrapped his hand around an intruder’s throat and froze him into a block of ice.
His name was Guy Winters—my life, my love, the only reason I still existed, the only reason I believed I’d killed.
A flash of blood crossed my vision.
A horrible scream entered my ears.
A gasp escaped my throat and I reached out to touch the man that hovered above me. “Guy,” I managed.
“You’re awake,” he said.
The relief in his voice was strained.
Something was wrong.
“What,” I started, then stopped, unsure if I wanted to know.
“Happened?” Guy asked.
I nodded.
Sighing, he pressed a hand to my face and ran a finger across the stubble along my chin. “Some bad shit, Jason. Some really bad shit.”
It started for no apparent reason—the pain, started in my feet, wove up my legs, stabbed into my hips, and ascended my spine before reaching my shoulder blades and opening like black wings. When it finally hit my head, a supernova lit the inside of my eyes and blinded me.
The pain was so great, I couldn’t have screamed if I tried.
Instead, all I felt was the muscles in my jaw moving—my mouth opening in a silent, agonizing howl.
Jason!
The name stabbed into my head.
A chill erupted along my arms.
The floodgates opened.
What resistance had existed evaporated, and in its place nodules of relief cascaded across my body and froze my trembling muscles.
The light disappeared.
The pain stopped.
I regained control of my senses.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Guy inches away, his eyes glowing like an Aurora Borealis in the arctic north.
The man had left.
In his place was the Kaldr.
“Hold still,” Guy said, his breath visible despite the sweltering evening heat.
“What… what’s happening?” I managed.
“You’re recovering from the change.”
“What change?”
You know what change.
I closed my eyes and tried to drown in the feeling washing over me.
Peace.
But no matter how hard, or how desperately, I wanted, I couldn’t help but see the woman flee, screaming as I ate her boyfriend alive.
This time, my scream was real.
It ripped from my throat, my person, the very fiber of my being.
Then everything went dark.
When next I woke, everything was dark. And, as far as I knew, I was alone.
Where am I? I asked.
Everything was a blur. Austin, meeting Guy, seeing a man die and escaping into Hill Country—
The Kaldr.
The Howlers.
Getting bitten, then turned into something unimaginable.
Still delirious and reeling from the effects of the last few days, I trained my eyes on the copse of trees ahead of me and tried to determine where I was.
Was I still near the abandoned house?
Was I anywhere near the Kaldr?
“Guy?” I asked.
A flock of sleeping grackles exploded above me.
Their cries sent ripples throughout the night.
“Shit.”
I pressed my hand into the solid earth and waited for my body to gain sense of the world before pressing myself upright.
There was no resistance.
I wasn’t tied up.
I was free.
Which could only mean—
I shook my head.
The images kept threatening to come back, thrusting me into the depths of madness.
The humid air bit at my skin.
I looked down.
I was completely naked.
Which mea
nt—
“No,” I whispered, pulling my knees to my chest. “No. It isn’t. It can’t. It—”
Something rustled in the nearby bushes.
I was on my feet almost instantly.
“Who is it?” I asked, reaching out to steady myself on the trunk of a nearby tree. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” a voice said.
His eyes appeared before he did—glowing, piercing through the night, marking him for what he truly was.
I sighed as he approached. “Guy.”
“I’m sorry I left you here alone,” he said as he stepped forward, adjusting his hold on the object he carried in one arm. “I wouldn’t have left if I’d known you would struggle.”
“Where were you?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He pressed something against me. “Put these on.”
It took a moment to realize what it was. Jeans, a T-shirt, a pair of underwear and a set of tennis shoes—I lifted my eyes from his conquest to stare at his face and paled at the thought. “Where did you get these?”
“Put the clothes on, Jason.”
“Goddammit, Guy. I said where did you—”
His hand against my face silenced me.
I blinked.
His palm, his fingers, the sudden, unnerving aspect of winter surrounding his being—
It could only mean one thing.
“Tell me where you were,” I said.
“Put the clothes on,” he replied. “Then I will.”
I busied myself dressing and tried to refrain from saying anything as Guy watched something through the nearby trees, his statuesque appearance and unmoving gaze speaking of caution. Once—when the belt slipped from my hand and caused the metal clasp to clang against the rocky earth—he jerked, but otherwise did not move.
Something was wrong.
For him to be so on edge—for him to just be standing there looking out at nothing…
Finally, after what seemed like hours, I slid the belt through the final notch in my jeans and secured the clasp at my waist. “What happened?” I said.
He turned, blue eyes still glowing but with a less vibrant hue now. “I fed,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I fed,” he repeated—without pause, as if it were the most natural thing on earth.
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard what you said. I just don’t understand what you—”
“I went out to the road, waited until I heard a car, then limped out like I’d been in an accident.”
“Oh God, Guy. Please tell me you didn’t—”
His gaze didn’t falter.
I swallowed.
“Didn’t… what?” he frowned, the clip in his voice indicative of accusation.
“Kill them.”
He laughed—the sound enough to lower my inhibitions but not enough to put me at ease. “Are you kidding? Jason—we’re in enough shit as it is. You think I’d actually kill them?”
“I don’t—”
A rush of nausea washed over me.
I leaned forward and gripped my knees.
It took all I could muster not to throw up.
“You all right?” Guy asked, stepping forward.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked.
“You don’t remember what we talked about earlier, do you? Before you blacked out?”
“You said something about a… a change.”
“Yeah. The change. I’m surprised you’re even up and about. Most freeze solid when they’re undergoing the metamorphosis from human to Svell Kaldr, but I guess since… you… well.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“About what?”
“Did I kill someone?”
He blinked. When he opened his eyes, the luminescence in his eyes all but gone. “Jason—”
“I know something happened. What, I’m not sure, but… I keep having these… memories. Flashbacks, I guess, of a man… and a woman… in their tent…”
Sighing, Guy turned to the trees and crossed his arms over his chest. The subtle draw of his breath against an otherwise-silent night was like daggers along my spine—tracing, inevitably, the cruel aspect of my misfortune. I was just about to demand an answer when a second sigh from Guy froze me in place.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I remember everything,” I replied, this time unable to fight the bloodstained images that assaulted my conscience. “Well… most everything, anyway.”
“I didn’t want to believe it when it first started, but when I finally accepted what was happening, I couldn’t stay here. There was no way I could’ve stopped you. You were too strong, too… gone. You ripped the bungee cords right off the tree. So I went as far away as I thought I could. Then I waited.”
“How did you—”
The memory of the woman screaming cut through my sentence.
“Find out?” I managed to finish, after I saw her naked figure disappear into the pitch-black night.
“The truck isn’t far from here,” Guy said. “It had Amadeo’s signature all over it, so it was pretty easy to find. I thought I could wait it out—get some sleep, pray to God you wouldn’t kill anyone. But you know Texas. It started getting hot, so I dug around until I found the spare key hidden under the seat. That’s when the radio came on and they announced the manhunt.”
“What?”
Guy shook his head. He pressed a hand to his face and made a move to turn away from me, but stopped before he could look beyond the trees, which I now realized faced the long and winding I-16. I hadn’t realized how close to civilization we were, how close we could be to getting caught.
How close we could be to people.
In the moments following the revelation—which not only confirmed that my nightmares were real, but that I was an insurmountable force of nature that even Guy dared not face—I took a moment to allow everything to sink in before stepping forward. The distance between us was comparable to Heaven and Hell and back again. I knew that, by approaching him, I was tempting what could be a disastrous fate.
He was scared.
I knew he was.
I could see it in his eyes, hear it in the way he talked, feel it in the way his body trembled as I approached.
When I finally stood mere inches from him—when, even in the darkness, I could look at his face and see the slightest movement upon of lips—I reached out and touched him.
He didn’t recoil.
Instead, he closed the last few inches between us before bowing his head into my shoulder.
“Jason,” he whispered.
“We’ll be ok,” I whispered back, trailing my hand from his neck, to his shoulder, then his lower back. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know you won’t.”
I sighed.
Something in his voice told me it wasn’t me he was afraid of.
It was the Wendigo.
We made our way to the truck and headed out on I-16 without any mention of where we were going. Guy’s attention set on the road, my thoughts lost on the situation at hand, we wove along the darkened interstate in silence—the night our only solace, the miles behind us our only reassurance. The radio I had left on but never bothered to turn off sputtered in an attempt to play classic rock, but little more than static reverberated from its tired speakers.
Eventually, it became too much.
Guy—either annoyed or frustrated with the fading frequency—slapped at the dashboard until the radio went quiet.
“You could’ve asked me to do that,” I said.
“Yeah,” Guy mumbled, his voice almost indistinguishable over the hum of the engine.
“Where are we going anyway?”
“East.”
“Where east?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I bit my lip and kept silent. It was too dark, his gaze too focused. Even if I’d wanted to see anything, the most I
could hope for was the shroud of stubble framing his lips, and even then that wouldn’t tell me much.
Sighing, I adjusted my seatbelt across my chest and turned my gaze to the darkened lands beyond the road.
He wasn’t going to talk. That much was obvious.
I wouldn’t let it go for long, though. Maybe it wouldn’t happen now, or even within the next few hours, but eventually we’d have to have a discussion—about where we’d go, about what would happen, about how we would deal with the impending consequences.
I was changing.
We couldn’t run forever.
Eventually we’d have to face this head-on.
In the meantime, I couldn’t do anything.
With that knowledge, I closed my eyes, drew my feet onto the self-warming seat, and tried to muster the courage to fall asleep.
It didn’t help that each time I tried, I saw a pair of red eyes looking at me.
“We have to stop,” Guy said.
I opened my eyes just as a crash of thunder shook the inside of the truck. “What?” I asked, blinking, lifting my head from its place against the frigid window to look at him. “Why? What’s going on?”
“We’re almost out of gas,” he replied, adjusting his hold on the steering wheel. “And we’re almost to Nacogdoches.”
“What?”
“Yeah. My thought exactly.”
“Can we put it off?”
“I wouldn’t have said something if I thought we could.” He frowned as I leaned forward to try and read the gas gauge. “Jason, what’re you—”
“We can’t stop,” I said, panicking as a road sign indicating our proximity to town came into view. “There’s too many people. We might be seen.”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“Why the hell weren’t you paying attention to the gauge?”
“Maybe because I’ve been freaking out the entire night?” he replied, swearing as the person behind us shifted lanes, then picked up speed to pass us, causing water along the road to splash up and along the window shield “Goddammit! Fucking asshole!” He laid on the horn and flipped the person off.
“We can’t stop,” I repeated, trembling, the air in the cab suddenly too cold and inhospitable for life. “They know who we are. Where we’re coming from. Where we might be going. Someone’ll see us and it’ll all be over.”