Taste the Dark

by Tibby Armstrong

  Katana moving in blurred strokes, Akito grimly faced the next shade, determined not to be caught unawares again. He’d fulfilled his purpose on the terrestrial plane, and his ties to the Morgan meant that there would be no going back to his former life. The afterlife he fought for now was the only existence worth living.

  Chapter 7

  Akito’s coat flared around him as he spun and kicked, using his body and sword, both, as weapons. Lyandros kept the warrior in his sights as first one monster, and then the next, succumbed to the flashing steel blade. Either too old or too dumb to care that its existence was about to be snuffed out, the remaining shade danced in and out of range of Lyandros and Akito.

  “Don’t underestimate this one, Akito.” Seeing an opening, Lyandros swung his xiphos in a downward diagonal. White rent the shade’s torso, but missed the pulsing red of its stomach. The shade elongated, seeming to come at them from all directions.

  “What the bleep is going on?” Akito shouted from the other side of the thing’s now-mammoth presence.

  Lyandros feinted and bobbed, using his sword to keep the shade at a safe distance. “The more souls a shade has consumed, the larger and more powerful they become.”

  There were few shades as powerful, and Lyandros had fought this one before. Recalling the previous occasion on which they’d tangled, he gritted his teeth. He’d battled the thing for hours, finally escaping into the cathedral where he’d hid until morning light had dispersed the spectral form from the doorstep.

  “Thanks for the newsflash.” Katana glinting on Akito’s down stroke, the warrior sliced off a hunk of oily shade flesh. It fell to the ground in a sizzling mass.

  The shade roared and reared before swiftly knitting back together. Akito came under a furious rain of attacks, but met each strike with an upward deflection. A skilled blow landed close to the well of digesting souls. The shade skittered backward in alarm, leaving an opening to escape.

  “Retreat,” Lyandros commanded.

  Mindlessly, Lyandros ran, Akito with him, toward Parkman Bandstand on the Common’s southeast side. A slithering, chuffing sound dogged their heels, and Lyandros increased his speed. As they closed in on the classical white columns, Lyandros had no time to contemplate that he was about to enter his ancestral home for the first time in two decades. In fact, he had little time to consider anything at all. Desperate, he ran headlong through the hidden door in the bandstand’s base. Metal and granite’s momentary chill made him gasp.

  Akito popped through after him, momentum and force of will slamming him through the opposite tunnel wall before popping out again with a breathless “Fu-uck.”

  The structure’s foundation shook with the shade’s impact, but the mora’s longtime wards held. A few more shuddering quakes tested the boundary magic, sending purple sparks into the tunnel. The door bowed visibly, but bounced back again to reclaim its original shape. Eventually, silence fell.

  Lyandros’s stare locked with Akito’s. “All right, warrior?”

  Wide eyed gaze tinged with shock, Akito regarded him before breaking into nervous laughter. “That was fucking awesome.”

  Lyandros unwound his posture, sheathing his sword. The warrior would be all right.

  “Shit.” Shaking his head, Akito laughed some more. “Gods be damned. That was something.”

  “It was.” Despite himself, Lyandros found a smile lifting his lips. He felt alive from the tips of his incorporeal fingers to the base of his tailbone, and all of it had been Akito’s doing. “Thank you for encouraging me to fight.”

  The warrior’s laughter trailed off as their gazes locked, but his smile remained. “Thank you for showing me how.”

  “It has been a long time.” Lyandros spoke slowly, thinking of other things he hadn’t done in a long, long time.

  Akito’s smile took on a sensual tilt. “How long?”

  Apparently, they no longer spoke of battle. Lyandros lowered his lids and stepped closer. Akito licked his lips, tilting his head back to expose his neck. Fangs fully extended, Lyandros held Akito’s gaze and felt his own darken.

  In the darkness, where harsh breaths and moisture should have carved the silence, only darkness and the eerie blue glow of their ghostly auras disturbed the air. Far off, the sound of dripping water punctuated the moment, eventually bringing Lyandros to a keener awareness of his surroundings. Tearing his gaze away, he peered past Akito into the darkness. Inside the mora’s tunnels there was an unnatural stillness. The last time he had been home, he’d been alive. He recalled the hum of activity and fall of booted footsteps, and frowned. There were no sentries and no torchlight. He took in the mud and refuse littering the once pristine space. In all his years away, though he’d imagined a great deal, he’d never imagined this.

  Exploring, he ran his fingers along the seal at the door’s edge. It remained unbroken. Who then, had come into his mora’s home and wreaked such havoc? And where were his people? His family?

  Facing the warrior, Lyandros folded his arms over his chest. The posture conveyed power, he knew, though he adopted it to hold burgeoning hysteria at bay. “Where are my mora?”

  “They don’t live here anymore,” Akito answered.

  Obviously.

  Not trusting his voice, Lyandros made a continue motion.

  “Uh…” Gaze darting around the chamber, Akito shifted from one foot to the other. “How much do you know?”

  A stone bench lined the back portion of a niche in which the sentries had once stood. Lyandros sat without looking behind him. “Assume I know nothing.”

  Akito rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. When he looked up, it was with a resigned exhale. “So, you know about the hunters going after Tzadkiel and killing Isander?”

  “Gods.” Lyandros deflated, curving his hands over the edge of the bench for support.

  When he’d read of the hunters’ gruesome deaths in the newspaper headlines soon after his own demise, he’d assumed his brothers had lived to perform the deed. What then, had happened? Stricken, he lifted his head and let his expression speak for him.

  “Tzadkiel was hurt pretty bad.” Akito cleared his throat, looking away. “It took him decades to heal enough to return.”

  Shame melted Lyandros’s posture, and he sagged against the wall. The tiny spark of hope he had protected within him guttered and disappeared. He’d not returned home, he realized, because while he pictured his family alive and whole, a part of him had still lived. In the knowledge of his family’s struggles, he experienced the bewildered newness of his own death all over again.

  “The mora almost lost everything to the Boston coven in an epic battle between the fae and witches over New Year’s,” Akito rambled on, and Lyandros only half listened. “It was pretty intense, but, um, the mora pulled off a retreat. Basically, the coven owns the Common now.”

  Lyandros looked around the wreckage in the mora’s entryway with new eyes. White shapes resolved into bones littering the floor, and he almost smelled the blood and decay that must have thickened the air.

  “How many of the mora were lost?” Lyandros put on his military face to cushion himself from shock’s clammy grip. The traditional number was 300, but it ebbed and flowed with circumstance over the millennia.

  Akito shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “How many remain, then?”

  “About thirty?”

  If Lyandros hadn’t already been sitting, his knees would have buckled. A buzz invaded his senses, building into a rushing sound. Long moments passed before he could think, much less speak. When he did, his whispered “So few?” seemed to get swallowed in the darkness.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Akito’s soft apology made Lyandros sigh

  “Why should you be? It isn’t as if you had a hand in this.”

  “I—uh…” A vague hand flap accompanied Akito’s shying gaze.

  Lyandros narrowed his eyes. “Are you leaving something out?”

  “No.” An emphatic headshak
e accompanied Akito’s denial. He shrugged. “I was just saying I was sorry for your loss.”

  One brow arched in an expression Lyandros recalled his brothers teasingly calling his Justice Giver sniffing out a lie face. He dragged himself to his feet, fighting the twin weights of weariness and shock, to face off with the warrior. Akito held his gaze, expression steady. Irritation hummed through Lyandros, dispelling the morose haze. Either the man had pulled an excellent last-minute poker face, or he was innocent of any crime. Truly, Lyandros couldn’t tell. When was the last time he’d been unable to read a lie? Emotions ran too high at present, clouding his judgment. He shelved the problem for later.

  “Come,” Lyandros said.

  Without waiting to see if Akito followed, he made his way further into the stronghold. The rock passageway dripped with moisture, its surface slimy with lichen usually kept at bay by regular scrubbing. Mud slicked the floors, and tarnished oil lamps sprouted cobwebs from their underbellies. At the mouth of the tunnel, Lyandros paused. His aura cast its blue light over the space, reaching as far as the dais on which the War King’s kathédra had once stood. Absent of that gilded throne, the space appeared naked and powerless. This was no homecoming. Indeed, this was no longer a home.

  Akito stopped beside him, taking in the chamber. “The coven used this place to make a zombie army last year.”

  Lyandros blinked. If asked, he might have wagered that no horror would ever surprise him again, so complete was the defilement and annihilation of everything he’d held dear. His attention rose to the balcony space, high above his brother’s dais. A frieze of the Titaness, Themis, holding the scales of Justice in one hand and a xiphos in the other, decorated the curved balustrade. Grimy with mold or soot, her face remained inscrutable in the dim light.

  Akito tilted his head. “Is that where you cast your judgments from?”

  Lyandros nodded. “It was.”

  He and his brothers had ruled as a triumvirate, each with his own role in the governing of the mora. As War King, Tzadkiel had presided over important events from his kathédra, or throne. Their brother Isander, as King Ruler, had stood behind Tzadkiel, golden skeptron in hand, a silent shadow clad in the deepest purple. Though Tzadkiel and Isander often argued hotly, the two had always been inseparable. Isander was the most playful of the three brothers but, in his role, the most challenging. He had to be able to stand up to Tzadkiel and argue a point. Even overrule his edicts if necessary. As judge, jury, and executioner, as well as the interpreter of Tzadkiel’s laws and edicts, Lyandros had always held himself apart. Objectivity was the hallmark of his office, and he had cultivated his role over lonely hours. He’d spent his time on his balcony, above the fray, hearing arguments and delivering judgments.

  “What happened to your tributes?” Akito’s question startled Lyandros out of his reflection.

  “My tributes…” A small frown pulled at Lyandros’s brow. “How did you hear of my tributes?”

  “There’s talk around the mora.” Akito licked his lips. “You were, um, kind of legendary.”

  “They were likely executed upon my death. In a few cases, banished.”

  Akito jerked back. “Executed?”

  Lyandros looked away. “It is the sentence that would have been borne out had I not chosen them for service to myself and the mora.”

  A tribute was a vampire who had given over his corporeal life to the gods in recompense for his offenses against the mora. As a condemned man, without right to property, it was the only gift he had left to give. Lyandros, in his role as Justice Giver, received the penitent’s mystical energy and channeled it to the goddess, Themis.

  Here was another thing against which he’d had to harden his heart—the loss of men for whom he’d been responsible both personally and spiritually. For their deaths, however, he could not allow himself to take the blame. Those who were under the tribute sentence had made the choices leading to their fate, not he.

  Akito removed himself a pace. “It seems a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  Lyandros frowned at the voicing of the very thoughts he’d been battling. “They were lucky to be given a stay of execution…or the opportunity for absolution.”

  “But I thought they were your, you know, harem?”

  Lyandros cast Akito a sharp glance. “They were under my charge. Sex was not the point, and I did not lie with all—” Lyandros began, and cut himself off with a sharp wave. “They were not in sexual service.”

  Akito eyed him, wariness limning his expression. “But you did sleep with some of them?”

  “When it was agreeable to all parties and…suited the crime or the need.”

  “That’s a little…I don’t know.” The color in Akito’s cheeks increased. “I’d always thought the stories were more tall tales than reality.”

  Lyandros twisted his lips into a wry approximation of a smile as he caught Akito’s meaning. “I assure you, none of the recipients of my affections complained.”

  Considering Akito’s embarrassed discomfiture over his tributes, it occurred to Lyandros, that a man who was curious was also a man who might trade something to ease that curiosity. Akito didn’t want to return to his corporeal life. However, if he were Lyandros’s tribute, he would not have a choice. His will would be Lyandros’s own. No difference between them. Even now, in the ghostly afterlife, Lyandros held that right—the right to judge and compel a member of the mora to obey him. The difficulty was, Akito had committed no crime. Lyandros could not and would not judge a man guilty for his own purposes. He would not make Akito his tribute for anything less than an offense against the gods. Fun and games were one thing. Stealing a man’s freedom of choice and honor were quite another.

  Exploring the stronghold—confronted with the wreckage and tattered remnants of a once-glorious past—Lyandros only knew he had to do something. Except, dead as he was, what could he do? The only way he could make this better—make anything better—would be to move on to Gemini where he could entreat the gods personally on the mora’s behalf. Somehow, Akito had to compete his transition and live, whether he wanted to or not, so that Lyandros could see his duty to his mora through.

  Without thinking too hard about where he went, Lyandros exited the chamber with a wave for Akito to follow. Each passage was much the same as the last—full of decay and ruin. Before this day, he would have said that death and everlasting loneliness were the worst things that could happen to any man. Looking around the desolate place he’d once called home, he now knew better. The worst thing that could happen to a man was for the world he had known, and for those he had loved, not to go on without him.

  Chapter 8

  Akito gave a last lingering look at the stone balcony that loomed high above the central chamber. Stories about Lyandros’s judgements, issued from that spot, were favorite campfire tales among the mora. Apparently, the Justice Giver had been shrewdly inventive in his sentences. Difficult to fool and nearly impossible to outmaneuver, his reputation preceded him. While the stories about him tended toward the titillating, there were those that had been downright hair-raising.

  Passing under the room’s southern arch, Akito wondered what Lyandros’s response would be if he knew that Akito had been cast out by the War King for trying to turn himself. Visions of being offered up like a virgin sacrifice bloomed. A public claiming, rough manhandling, and Lyandros’s hot breath in his ear rolled over his imagination. Black robed figures would surround the black granite altar at the room’s farthest corner, chanting in Greek. Akito could almost hear the music now, so real…

  No. Not real.

  Reality.

  At the realization of what Lyandros would do to him if he found out about Akito’s past as a hunter, a kind of etheric sweat rolled down Akito’s back. Curtains parted on memories he’d shoved behind sanity’s thin partition, and the Morgan’s bone-cold fingers skated over his skin. The stone altar morphed to a rosewood stockade. Bile rose, forcing Akito to swallow. He scurried to catch up with Lya
ndros, a prayer on his lips that the vampire never discovered his part in—well, in anything.

  A few hurried paces down the southern passage, he forced a serenity into his gait that he didn’t nearly feel. Lyandros could not, would not, figure out who Akito was if Akito didn’t reveal the truth about himself. There was no possibility that the man would, after twenty years away, suddenly stumble upon the information that Akito had once been part of Benjamin’s vampire hunting gang, nor that Akito had broken the mora’s laws by trying to turn himself.

  Akito rounded the next bend to find Lyandros crouched in a doorway, considering a pile of mangled books. Waterlogged pages, their illuminations faded with the ravages of time and abuse, had clearly once been breathtaking masterpieces and prized possessions.

  “Yours?” Akito guessed, staring down at the haphazard pile.

  Pain flashed, there then gone, in Lyandros’s expression. “Yes.”

  “Benjamin likes to read, too.” The observation slipped out.

  “Is he the man who visited you in the hospital?” Lyandros’s question held an absent-minded air.

  Akito came to a stumbling halt as the vampire stood. Affecting innocence and distraction, he scanned the room as he tried to puzzle out why Ben would have come to see him. It wasn’t like they were still friends.

  “He’s Tzadkiel’s consort. I thought I mentioned it.”

  Lyandros turned, gaze narrowing. “I believe I would have remembered news of my brother’s marriage.”

  Around the room were strewn the trappings of Lyandros’s one-time role as the Justice Giver. A moldering set of robes, an empty scabbard stamped with the scales of justice. What caught and held Akito’s attention, however, were the three niches in the wall opposite the foot of a mammoth bed that dominated the chamber. Man-sized, they sported short-chained iron manacles at both the top and bottom.

  Tearing his eyes from the lurid reminder of Lyandros’s preferred method of meeting out justice, Akito feigned nonchalance. “I’m surprised you didn’t at least try to keep up with the mora.”