Taste the Dark

by Tibby Armstrong

  Muscles in Akito’s arms briefly tightened as he tested Lyandros’s hold. Lyandros pressed downward, allowing Akito to feel the full measure of his weight and his arousal. The warrior shifted, and Lyandros nearly groaned.

  Akito shifted again, this time without violence or intent to thwart. “I give.”

  “Your word.” Lyandros demanded. “You will not attempt to interfere again.”

  “My word.”

  Lyandros loosed his hold and stood.

  Akito came to his feet, his gaze going automatically to the bed. “Why is it I’m a spirit if I’m not dead?”

  The question, Lyandros took as a good sign. It signaled acceptance and a desire to orient the mind toward a deeper understanding.

  “There is a place between life and death. You may think of your soul as a skilled acrobat, balanced on a very fine line.”

  “Lucky me,” Akito muttered.

  “Yes,” Lyandros agreed, though not with Akito’s irony. “Lucky you.”

  A spate of silence fell. Hushed sounds filled the hospital, signaling the lateness of the hour.

  “Look. Can we get out of here?” Akito turned from contemplation of his body. “I need to think, and I can’t when I’m staring at…” He motioned toward the bed. “That.”

  Lyandros glanced at the darkened window. “It is not safe.”

  “Not safe?” Akito snorted, gesturing between himself and Lyandros. “We’re already dead.”

  Lyandros approached the window and stared out over the city’s lights. Dot-like in the distance, they resembled a pointillist painting stretched over the landscape. “Come here.”

  Akito joined him at the window and they stared down at a janitorial crew. Visible through the glass panes of the office building across the street, they worked along, unaware and mortal. Scanning the streets, Lyandros found what he sought and pointed a finger.

  “Do you see that?”

  Akito leaned forward, looking down. A shambling dark figure pulsed, eating up light and increasing the darkness where it stood. A pedestrian instinctively skirted around it, subconsciously discerning the dangers of the spot where the creature stood.

  “What is that?” Akito pressed his face against the glass.

  “Kakó pnévma,” Lyandros said, his Greek a dark whisper.

  Akito pressed closer to the glass. “Is there an English word for them?”

  “There are many names for them, but the simplest is shade.”

  “Do they do something?” Akito peered out the window, clearly transfixed. “I mean besides look creepy?”

  Lyandros, fixated on the pulsing darkness, pressed a palm to glass he could not feel. “They feed on the souls of the dead.”

  Akito whistled low. “So how do you fight them?”

  “Generally? I try not to.”

  Pulling a face, Akito faced him. “You’re afraid of them?”

  Lyandros snorted. “Hardly. Neither do I have a wish to find myself at the bottom of their soul stomachs, my spirit slowly digested.”

  “I don’t know…” Top knot tilted to the right, Akito regarded him. “They don’t look all that hard to fight. What do you have to do? Sprinkle holy water on them or something?”

  This pulled a bark of laughter from Lyandros. The sensation, so unfamiliar, rattled him, and he quickly sobered. “No. A sword though the stomach is generally enough.”

  “Oh.” Akito’s grin stretched, a tad too feral for Lyandros’s liking. “I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind a good fight right now.”

  Lyandros considered the darkness beyond. Its velvet coolness, broken by the city lights, beckoned. He had once been one with the darkness. Vampires shunned the daylight. It made them slow and tired, and hence vulnerable to the hunters who preyed their kind. As a spirit, he realized, he’d become separated from his lineage. Desire hummed through him—an awareness of both the man in the room with him and the power life had once held.

  “Would it make a difference to you,” Lyandros began, knowing Akito deserved to have the full picture of the situation, before committing to the course of action on which he seemed hell-bent. “To know that those shades were once like you and me? Spirits who walked the earth in search of eternal rest?”

  Akito’s gaze skipped to the window and back to Lyandros. “What did they do?”

  “You mean to deserve such a fate?” Lyandros guessed.

  Akito nodded. “Yeah. I mean, they had to have been bastards to go that evil and gross.”

  “Hardly.” A rueful smile lifted Lyandros’s lips. “Though I suppose some of them might have been less honorable than others, both in life and death.”

  It certainly did seem that the darker a person was when they passed over, the quicker they devolved into a shade. It was rumored that Hitler’s shade had caused blackouts in East Berlin for decades. Some even said that the fall of the Berlin Wall had only been possible once his shade had been vanquished by a valiant team of ghost hunters.

  “So, what makes them?” Akito asked.

  That question, at least, Lyandros could answer easily. “Time.”

  “Time?”

  “We all lose our connection to the present—to the physical plane—and become mired in what we once knew. Nostalgia and the familiar beckon, and we stop seeing what is in front of us, instead focusing on the past and what was.” He’d noticed it with himself more and more of late—the tendency to while away hours and days dreaming of home and family, and a life that would never be again. “Focusing on the present keeps us tied here, and our souls fragment more slowly.”

  Akito blinked. “Souls die?”

  “Souls only survive when they are in their natural habitat—in the heavens.”

  Akito pointed an accusatory finger at Lyandros. “You want me to go back to tell Tzadkiel where you are! So, he can open the gates of Gemini to you!”

  Guilt, hotly laced with shame, trilled over Lyandros in an uncomfortable pulse. “That is not the entirety of my reasoning, but it is partly the case. Yes. Though I would not wish it for you if it did not seem to be the gods’ will.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” Akito said, chortling darkly. “I’m not going to be your messenger boy. I don’t owe you anything.”

  Lyandros bristled. “I do not—have not—asked it of you.”

  “You can’t force me to live,” Akito growled, teeth bared.

  They stood, nose to nose now, wills visibly clashing in the sparks that emanated from their touching auras. Purple against blue. Lyandros searched the warrior’s gaze and discovered a challenge worth testing.

  A slow smile stretched his face. “Neither do I need to allow you to die.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Akito said.

  Leaving the room, Lyandros decided to give Akito the battle with the shades he craved. If conflict were what Akito needed to find the will to live, then Lyandros planned to see to it that the warrior faced more challenges than Odysseus himself. Because, one way or another, both of them were going home.

  Chapter 6

  They left the hospital, sticking to the lights. The vampire had explained it was easier to see the shades in the light. Akito wasn’t as focused on things that went bump in the night as on his disconcerting physical response to the man walking next to him. The expression on Lyandros’s face was one of grim determination. In profile, his jaw had taken on a blade-like aspect, as if his entire being had been weaponized to the purpose of forcing Akito to bend to his will.

  “Like hell I will,” Akito muttered.

  He’d had enough of that shit with the Morgan, and he wasn’t going back. The next time he bowed to someone else’s whims it was going to be because no one less than a god mandated it. Akito figured jumping off that bridge meant he now owed allegiance to only himself. If a man couldn’t control his own destiny after that kind of sacrifice, when could he?

  At the intersection of Charles and Cambridge Streets, Lyandros headed toward Longfellow Bridge. Akito, in the process of turning toward the Common, glan
ced over his shoulder and frowned. The vampire made it several feet across the road before he noticed Akito wasn’t following.

  “I’m not going back to the bridge,” Akito called.

  “You will be safer there until I can show you how to navigate this plane.” Lyandros returned to the sidewalk. “We can stay in my tower.”

  Nausea rolled through Akito at the idea of returning to the scene of his demise. He might have left the physical plane on his own terms, but it didn’t mean the experience had been pleasant. No way did he want to see the yellow police tape that undoubtedly still fluttered in the breeze.

  “What makes you think I want to be safe?” Akito notched his chin in a show of bravado.

  “You wish for a taste of battle now? Fine.”

  Pivoting, Lyandros walked away, his long strides eating up the pavement with renewed vigor so that Akito had to trot to catch up. When Akito drew abreast of Lyandros again, the Justice Giver did not look his way. Just because Lyandros wanted to move on to Gemini didn’t mean he was a bad guy. Akito couldn’t give him what he wanted, but he could at least be grateful for the vampire’s guidance.

  “I apologize,” Akito said.

  “Only the gods can decide when you live and die, Akito.” Lyandros kept walking, his attention trained on a fixed point ahead. “Taunt them with your hubris often enough, and they will make you regret your folly.”

  Though he thought he’d done a pretty good job of determining his own fate that afternoon, Akito kept his mouth shut on the point. He and Lyandros walked in silence past brick storefronts, their lights dark. No hint of their reflections shone in the windows. A delivery truck rumbled past. The ground under Akito’s feet remained unmoving, and he noted the strange sensation of sound without vibration. Everything felt so surreal.

  “You trained to be a warrior?” Lyandros asked, finally speaking.

  “Yeah. In a sense.” Akito glanced away, grateful for the subject change and the distraction. “But, you know, not like you would have. It was more classroom and less battle.” At least until Benjamin had started killing vampires with Nyx and Akito protecting his back. Then it had gotten all too real. “How did you know?”

  “Your build.” Lyandros tipped his chin at Akito. “The way you move.” He spared a glance behind them, toward the Charles River, now invisible behind several blocks of Beacon Hill brownstones. “The graceful way you fell.”

  Akito turned his face away to stare straight ahead. “Do you always read people so quickly?”

  “Usually. Judging people is my job. Reading them is a necessary skill.”

  Ahead, on the Common’s edge, a group of dark shapes lurked. Lyandros halted, bringing Akito out of what had promised to be a lust-soaked haze. Squinting, Akito studied the shades for a moment, palming his katana.

  “They’re kind of weird looking, but they don’t look so hard to kill,” he decided. “More like shredding paper.”

  Lyandros’s gaze returned to Akito’s face. “Mistake an old one for a young one, and you will have plenty of time to rue that assessment as your soul is slowly digested.”

  Akito eyed his would-be mentor, askance. “Where did you learn this stuff?”

  “I had a teacher when I first crossed over.” The vampire answered with nostalgia’s velvet wrapped tones. “An old man who’d lived in Boston at the turn of the last century.”

  The idea of Lyandros needing a mentor struck Akito as novel. “Is he still around?”

  “No.” Muscles in the vampire’s jaw flexed, and his attention returned to Akito. “He chose to move on rather than live as a shade.”

  Akito tilted his head to the side. “I thought you said there wasn’t a choice?”

  “It is…complicated,” was the only answer Lyandros offered before crossing the street.

  They made their way around the Common periphery, Akito musing on how a ghost could move on without moving on. Then, it struck him. There must be a way for ghosts to self-annihilate and cease to exist altogether. For some reason, the thought chilled Akito more than the memory of his own physical death. Complete non-existence seemed so bleak. Then again, so did becoming a shade.

  A hundred paces from the T-stop entrance, Lyandros halted. Akito followed the vampire’s sightline to two gray-black blotches. One of them had wormed its way into the space between the two closed T station entrances.

  Attention on the shades, Lyandros’s reached toward the sword sheathed at his back. “Are you sure you want to fight them?”

  Akito grinned, a little maniacal. “Hell, yeah.”

  “Good.” Lyandros nodded sharply, expression grim. “Because they’ve spotted us.”

  Akito withdrew his katana. “What are their weak spots?”

  “Only the stomach.”

  Drawing his sword Lyandros approached the shade, exuding a focused calm that said he’d engaged the creatures often enough to anticipate their moves and counter-moves.

  The shade backed up against the T-station wall where it popped through and disappeared, ending the battle before it had begun. Its companion edged its way across the street to the steps of Park Street Church.

  Akito laughed, teasing, “Your reputation must precede you.”

  Lyandros swore in what Akito presumed was a fluent stream of Greek. “I am out of practice.”

  The building into which the shade had fled was brick and sported small paned windows at the top. Holding his katana at the ready, Akito scanned for the next comer, reluctant to turn his back to the structure or the church. “Will it come back out?”

  “Likely not.” Lyandros inhaled deeply through his nostrils and exhaled slowly, his gaze drifting to the shade across the street.

  “Gonna go for it?” Akito asked, nodding toward the creature.

  Answering with a blithe sword-flip, Lyandros crossed the street, stepping lightly. As he neared the shade, it elongated, growing larger. Lyandros aimed high and cleanly cut off the thing’s head. Liquid sprayed outward, evaporating into steam. Rather than disappearing, however, the rest merely reassembled itself and kept coming.

  “Shit.” Wishing for his short sword, Akito crossed the street. Its lesser length would have allowed him to fight alongside Lyandros.

  Lyandros circled the shade, his form flickering as he passed from behind the oozing specter. “I am merely toying with it.”

  The thing hissed, the sound like oil hitting a hot surface. “Die.”

  Akito faltered. “They can talk?”

  “If you call monosyllabic posturing talk?” Lyandros whirled out of the way when the shade swiped a large, paw-like hand at him. “Then, yes.”

  Globs of black residue stuck to the ground wherever the thing moved. “What are they made of?”

  “The souls upon which they have fed,” Lyandros answered, circling. “The older the shade, the more souls it has consumed.”

  A core of reddish brown throbbed dully at the creature’s center, seeming to beat like a spectral heart. Lyandros slashed and cut, sword flashing, and turned the shade to ribbons. Its tattered form spiraled with its movements. One of those tendrils whipped outward, threatening Lyandros’s head.

  “Behind you!” Akito warned.

  Lyandros spun, his sword a seeming extension of his arm. Forearm poised to block, he drew in dangerously close. Xiphos jabbing upward, he pierced the creature’s murky red middle. A shriek accompanied a pulse of white light that streamed from the dying thing’s center. Wind blew across the Common, rattling branches and threatening to tip over garbage cans in its wake. Even Akito felt the cold breeze pulse over his spectral skin.

  Light gathered into a ball, arced and rebounded, spinning around the shade, until it shredded the thing to dust particles so fine they seemed to coat everything with a sooty residue Akito suspected only he and Lyandros could see.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “The stomach. Where the souls are trapped.”

  Akito, attention on an approaching gang of shades, made a face. “That’s just wrong.
”

  “The souls slowly erode until nothing is left,” Lyandros explained, his gaze following Akito’s. “Are you ready this time, warrior?”

  Gripping his katana, Akito adjusted his stance and nodded, resolute. If nothing else, he wanted to watch Lyandros again. Grace, power, evenhanded economy, and steely reserve flowed from the Justice Giver’s every movement. Fighting back-to-back or side-by-side with a warrior of Lyandros’s caliber was a rare privilege. Then, the first shade was upon him, and Akito had no room to think about the leather-clad vampire.

  His kendo sensei had said Akito had the best fighting spirit of any student she had trained. Hopefully, that counted for something on this plane too, because all five members of the shade gang turned to him in unison. Judging from their undisturbed glide, they ate up war cries for breakfast and couldn’t be more thrilled to see a ghostly pseudo-samurai racing toward them.

  Akito attacked, sword high, its tip back and up. Though the move left him vulnerable, he wasn’t in the game to defend himself—he was in it to win. He swung his katana in lightning strokes, the posture allowing his quick reflexes full sway.

  The blade sliced the first shade from its head through its spirit stomach. It appeared for a moment to hold together, but when it stepped forward, reaching for Akito’s throat, one half of its body remained behind. Akito could almost feel its confusion in the second before the souls it had been digesting gusted out over the Common.

  Lyandros’s “Watch out” compelled Akito’s reflexive duck.

  The vampire used the opening to slice off a hunk of shade.

  Absolute mayhem and a fight for the afterlife claimed Akito with a swiftness for which he’d been unprepared—as unprepared as he’d been for the man whose neat upstroke now saved his hide. No one ever saved him. He was the sidekick, the expendable one. Invisible and unnoticed.

  With one sword stroke, there was a very real danger of incurring a far greater obligation to this man—one Akito was sure he had zero substance or mettle to pay. Incurring a debt to Lyandros, would compel him to pay back the favor, perhaps by agreeing to return to his body.