Called by Darkness

by Sean Fletcher

  She left these words hanging in the silence, punctuated only by Barnabas’ loud purring.

  “I think we’re done,” Colson said.

  Asher hefted the crystal skull. “Thanks for this. Oh, and, er, sorry about the damage.”

  “Easily replaced, my dear,” Hilda said, waving his words away. “And try not to die wherever the Duke sends you next.”

  I nodded, still not quite sure what I thought about her. She definitely wasn’t an ally, but she wasn’t an enemy either.

  I followed Asher and Colson out, but sharp nails attached to too-long fingers wrapped around my arm. I jerked around, senses on full alert.

  “Hey, watch i—”

  Hilda stood an inch away from my face. Her pupils were gone, her eyes now completely white. She tilted her head, bringing herself closer, and my skin prickled. It didn’t feel like she was looking at me, but rather into me.

  “Something blocks my scrying,” Hilda said, and the small part of me that wasn’t one second from blasting her with a spell was relieved that it was still her voice. I tugged on my arm, but her grip only tightened. “I see…he makes it hard to see.”

  I stopped moving. He. The voice. She couldn’t be talking about…

  “No, wait!” I said as Asher and Colson took a step closer. I turned slowly back to Hilda. “What are you seeing? Who’s making it hard?”

  “He is. It is as I thought. Spirits have returned to our city, things that many believed were long dead. Old conflicts will be made new, vengeance will be sought, and blood spilt. That is who even the Duke fears. He fears that. He fears her.”

  Hilda leaned closer, her white eyes filling my vision. “Beware his power. Beware his promise. I can feel it’s you they want.”

  “Who wants me?”

  “I cannot see. But they want you. They seek you. And they will have you.”

  Chapter Ten

  I could still feel where Hilda’s nails had dug into my arm as we walked back to the Duke’s.

  Asher, Colson and I talked a little about her parting words, but our guessing always wound up at dead ends and long silences. So somebody wanted me? No surprise there. As kids of two of the most famous supernaturals in New York, maybe even the world, I was sure there was a long line of unsavory characters who wanted to get their hands on me or Asher, if only to get to our parents.

  Maybe I should have felt scared. Anxious. Throwing nervous glances over my shoulder, the whole bit. Honestly, though, I was kind of used to it. Not the it-feels-like-everyone-in-the-world’s-out-to-get-you feeling, but I’d been a front row spectator to the kind of attention—good and bad—my parents received on a regular basis that all of it had kinda stopped being a big deal.

  It’d become a bit of a bigger deal lately, but still not a big deal.

  After another round of Guess-who-wants-you-dead!, Asher eventually gave up prodding me for anything else I might know. I wanted to share something that could help, but I was at as much as a loss as he was. There just wasn’t much to tell.

  At least, not much I wanted to tell.

  Because I had a sneaking suspicion I knew who Hilda had been talking about. The him, the one who’d blocked her from seeing inside me. It had to be the same entity I’d felt in the alleyway, the one who’d spoken in my head. But who was he? Where was he?

  I took a rushed look around at the street, half expecting a glowing pair of eyes to be staring back. Was he following me right now? Or even worse…

  I placed another hand over my heart. There were curses we’d only just started studying, dark magic that could send a victim into hallucinations. Vivid visualizations. Madness. Maybe that’s what the woman had done. Maybe she’d activated something within me, or made the voice I’d heard during combat class worse. Yet if she had, why had the voice stopped her? Maybe something had gone wrong? Maybe it’d backfired. Heck, I still wasn’t totally sure I had a curse or not. With some of them, you didn’t know. Not until it was too late.

  The thought made me cold.

  “She didn’t kill you,” the Duke said when we were escorted—no dancing this time, thanks—through the Bone Yard and up to his glass box. It was nearly daybreak. The club had mostly emptied out, leaving a few lingerers at the bar and some kid sweeping the dance floor. Another guy was scrubbing at a suspiciously dark spot with a rag. I hurriedly looked away as we approached the Duke.

  “She didn’t kill us.” Asher thunked the crystal skull down in front of the Duke harder than necessary. The grin remained on his face. “I feel like you may have left out a few details about what you wanted us to do.”

  “You’re not dead, so quit complaining. She still have that cat?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  “He’s not that bad,” Colson muttered.

  The Duke shook his head, the cloth-like mask that covered his grinning, skullish face furrowing in annoyance. “One day, that beast isn’t going to be enough. And then where will I get my best potions?”

  “You’ll think of something,” I said. “We did what you asked, now tell us what you know.”

  The Duke snapped his fingers. Creepy butler delivered a chilled shot glass. The Duke poured himself some of the clear liquid from the skull and downed it in one go. I almost wished we’d poisoned it.

  “Right. Now I actually have to answer your question.”

  He snapped again and creepy butler closed the door. A hush fell over the room, like we’d been cloaked in extra muffling spells. I straightened. Either this was how the Duke always did business, or, like Hilda had said, whoever we were talking about seriously scared him.

  The Duke leaned closer. “They call themselves the Society of the Fallen Star. The Society for short. Or Fallen Star. I don’t really care.”

  Colson grunted. “Sounds a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe they sound that way, but they’re very, very serious. There aren’t many members—call themselves ‘acolytes’—at least as far as I know. I’m running a bit blind on intel. None of the guys I’ve sent out have ever come back. Or they have, but…”

  His skullish face grimaced. He didn’t need to finish for us to get the picture.

  “Who runs it? What do they want?” I said.

  “No clue and no clue. Probably want what all these groups want: power, influence, to make a message known. Couldn’t tell you what that message is, which shows how well their PR department’s working.”

  Even still, I felt we’d gotten the message. This group, this…Society had something against the Academy. Maybe—I glanced at Asher, who was looking at me, possibly thinking the same thing—something against our parents.

  “Last I checked, they hung around an abandoned subway line near the Necropolis,” the Duke said. “A place some call City Hall.”

  “There has to be a dozen tunnels down there!” I said, exasperated. “That’s where the passageways from the caverns and the Necropolis run.”

  “How do we get there?” Asher interrupted before I could rant any further.

  “Take line seven. And then just keep going. At least, that’s as much as I’ve heard. You know, from my guys who are dead now.”

  His skullish smile widened.

  “Thank you for all your help and hospitality,” Asher said, giving the Duke a jerky bow. I wanted to keep plugging him for answers, but for once agreed with cutting our losses. We weren’t getting anything more from him. Nothing good, anyway.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again,” the Duke said as creepy butler opened the door for us. “And maybe you’ll be in better shape than my guys. Took me a long time to put the pieces back together.”

  His laugh followed us out.

  As much as we all wanted to charge straight ahead to the subway, we were beat after playing Find the booze-brewing witch. And since our magic and the Academy’s charms made personal electronics go screwy, we asked (see: begged) Colson’s cousin Ricky to put us up somewhere for the night. He found us a two-bedroom AirBNB a lot of Supes used, a couple blocks f
rom one of the entrances to the seven line. He wasn’t specific what kind of Supes, but I figured it out pretty quickly when I found fur coating the living room carpet, and a big sign on the kitchen table that said: Absolutely NO PETS.

  I managed to get a few hours sleep before I was up and worrying again. Mia, what the witch had said about my mystery man, Mia, Asher and Colson, Mia, and Asher were just a few of the thoughts tumbling around in my head like an errant spin cycle.

  I peered out the window at the city as dawn began to break. At least our hunt for the Society would happen during the day. Not that it’d help. Not if they were underground. And so much time had passed since Mia had been taken. I remembered hearing that the first twenty-four hours were the most critical in any kidnapping. How long had she been with them? And what were they doing right now…?

  A hot tear hit my hand. I wiped it away and double-checked outside my room to make sure the boys weren’t up and watching. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. This wasn’t the time for tears. This was the time to be strong. Fearless. I was sure no great heroes ever let the dark moments get to them. They carried on defiantly, faced the challenge with a sneer on their face and a sword in their hand…

  Another tear fell, and this time I let a few go before rubbing them away with a moderately disgusting sniffle. Because what did it matter if I cried alone? Nobody would know. And I definitely felt a lot better.

  When I was done boo-hooing, I looked down at my hands. Hilda’s words had worked their way back to the forefront of my mind. The him. There was something about it I just couldn’t shake. A sneaking suspicion I had to try.

  I swung around until my feet were perched off the edge of my bed.

  “Okay, uh…body. How’re we doing today?”

  My stomach growled.

  “Fair enough. Uh…” I tried to clear my mind, but it was like trying to shove my entire brain into a tiny closet and having thoughts continue slipping through the cracks. I squeezed my eyes tighter, as though that might help. I remembered a couple witches at the Academy had invited me to their monthly meditation meetings. I kind of regretted not taking them up on that.

  “So,” I said, trying again. “Uh, body, I need you to…”

  What’d I need it to do? I wanted to figure out who the voice was. And the first time I’d heard it was while sparring Asher. I needed that same feeling; the sensation of slipping into a cool, dark pool.

  “That,” I murmured, latching on to the memory of the sensation. “Whatever that is, I want it back.”

  I tried pulling on the feeling, recalling as much as I could about everything that’d led up to it.

  The cool air of the apartment slowly numbed. The hum of the A/C unit grew muffled as a new feeling grew within me, rising from somewhere deep below. In my mind’s eye, I appeared in an endless, pitch-black space, my body sinking through it slowly like I’d just dived off the deep end of a pool and let myself be carried below. My hands reached out toward nothing.

  No! Not nothing. A door had appeared in the vastness ahead of me. My fingers itched to open it. I grew closer, my heart speeding up. I almost swore I could hear the voice from earlier calling to me.

  “Who are you?” I murmured. “What are you?”

  I was so close. My hand closed around the knob.

  I turned it.

  “Talking to yourself. Not a good sign.”

  My eyes snapped open and I nearly toppled forward as a wave of disorientation hit me. A large shape stood in the corner of my eye, and I had to blink a half dozen times to clear my vision.

  “Colson! I didn’t hear you!”

  He leaned in the doorframe, plastic sack hanging from his hand. “I could tell. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The last of the earlier sensation trickled away and I internally sighed. So close. “You didn’t scare me. I was just…meditating.”

  “I didn’t know you did that.”

  “Yeah, it’s a…new habit.” I sniffed. “Is that…bacon?”

  He took a seat on the other side of the bed and produced manna from heaven, AKA, an egg biscuit stuffed with grease-glistening bacon from one of the chain delis down the street. “Figured we’d need some energy.”

  “Are you like my food fairy godmother, because you always seem to know exactly what my stomach desires.”

  Colson smiled. “We’d best eat up. The Society sounds like no joke.”

  I agreed. We were in way deeper than I’d first thought, even with a kidnapping. For once, the first nigglings of doubt about not going back for the Masters crept into my mind. “We could always go back to the Academy and tell them.”

  “We could,” he agreed.

  There was a long pause.

  “But you don’t think they can help, do you?” I added.

  He looked right at me, in that way of his that told me he was focused on nothing but this single conversation. “Do you?”

  “I…no. They wouldn’t know anything else. And if they did, they wouldn’t tell us.”

  “Why not?”

  “They kept us in the dark about the manticore, and we were involved. Why not this? We might be advanced students, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t give us an all-access pass to everything they talk about.”

  Colson nodded. I tore into my sandwich without shame, devouring two of them before he set the rest aside. “Asher’ll be hungry when he gets up.”

  I studied Colson as I finished the last of my sandwich. I realized that, like many of my classmates, I knew him, but I didn’t know him. He was one of Asher’s best, if not the best, friends. He definitely checked all the boxes for the strong, silent type. Emphasis on silent. I’d never thought too much about him, but watching him now, thick chest and arms towering above me despite sitting, gazing deeply at his hands with his slightly long hair curling around the nape of his neck, I could see why Mia was crushing on him. He was like a giant, slightly rough teddy bear. One who seemed to have a depth of thought people twice our age lacked.

  “I wanted to say sorry. For earlier,” I said.

  Colson’s gaze shifted to me. I realized that, unlike Asher, Colson’s face didn’t give away very much, but looking at his eyes said plenty; the way they flickered left and right when he thought, the way they seemed to draw you in when he listened, pulling everything you didn’t know you wanted to say out.

  “I lost my temper with the Duke, I know,” I went on. “I wasn’t really thinking straight.”

  “You weren’t,” he agreed. Gee, way to be sensitive about it.

  “You’ve got a lot of passion,” he said haltingly, like he was searching for just the right words in just the right order. “You throw yourself a hundred and fifty percent into everything you do. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that means you run face first into a wall and try to keep pushing through.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling. Colson played with his wrapper. “But there are other ways to do things. Other ways to solve issues. That’s what we’re here for. To help.”

  “You mean as partners,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I sighed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just…you’re not the first person I’ve heard that from.”

  I thought I saw Colson give a playful smirk.

  “Mia’s close to you?” he suddenly asked.

  I blinked, confused. “Of course she is. Mia’s family.”

  He nodded as though he’d expected that answer. “That’s how Asher is to me. You’re both pretty similar in that respect. So I understand why losing her might make you hurt inside. But just because you’re hurting doesn’t mean we aren’t either. Take that hurt, that passion, let others help you control it.”

  I pulled my legs closer to me. “That sounds really hard. I’m not sure I’m the best one to do that. I haven’t let anyone see me hurt, not really, not in a while. Not since…”

  I took a deep breath, looking Colson in the eye. Did he know what I was talking about? Who I was talking about? “I
don’t like people too close. And I’m not apologizing for that, that’s just the way it is.”

  “I didn’t say it’d be easy, and I’m not the best person to give advice on it. But that’s why we’re here. That’s why we have partners.”

  “That’s good and all, but I shouldn’t have to need that.” I clenched my fist. “I should just be better.”

  “Why just you? Why does it have to be just you?”

  I looked over at him, temporarily lost for words. I’d never really thought why. It was just something I’d taken as fact and run with, no rhyme or reason to it.

  Colson pulled his leg up and draped one massive arm over it. “All I’m saying is that Asher really does want to help. That’s just the kind of guy he is. Always has been.” He smiled, looking straight ahead, as though he were remembering a pleasant memory.

  “How did you and Asher become friends?” I asked.

  Colson chuckled, shaking the whole bed. “I met him our first year. And I hated him.”

  I was taken aback. “Hated him? But you guys are like…like…” I intertwined my fingers, unable to come up with the right words for their bromance.

  “Tight?” Colson suggested.

  “Best friends forever.”

  “Are you teasing me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hated Asher for probably the same reason you still find him insufferable.”

  “I don’t find him—”

  Colson raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, maybe a little insufferable. A lot. But now you don’t. What changed?”

  “I got to know him.”

  “I…thought I did.”

  He took my wrapper and put it away. “You will again.”

  “And what about you? You and I can be friends, right?”

  Colson eyed me. “Do you want to?”

  “What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I want to!”

  I thought back to the diner, to how nervous Colson had looked when he’d asked how Mia felt about him. This was more than just asking about a simple crush. This was…