2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 (21 page)

I couldn’t stop the tears before they dripped down to hit him in the face. I watched roll down the tip of his nose. “Why, then? He could have killed you.” He might have anyway, I silently added.

“His reaction was… much worse than I thought.” Ethan’s words were barely more than disturbances in the air. “I didn’t think he would become so confused. I just knew that whatever happened to me, this is one place where you would be safe.” He looked over at the inert Nephilim. “And you will be.”

“What, because he’s unconscious?” I sniffled. “What happens when he wakes up? He’ll try and kill Logan again?”

Ethan smiled faintly. “He can certainly try. You saw how well that went for him. He may be insane, but Asheroth is far from stupid.”

An extra Nephilim descendant with gifted blood and a target painted on his back, I thought darkly, but didn’t say.

Logan knelt down beside us. He caught me up in a one-armed hug. “Hey,” he said, ruffling my already hopelessly bedraggled hair. His brown eyes were still so dark they were almost black, and fissures of deep red still radiated outward from the pupils.

“Hey yourself.” I melted into his hug. The desire to let him be my big brother and take over was strong. But I felt desperate and wild and angry. So instead of facing any of my feelings, I stuffed them down and made a joke. “In our next lives, I want the super-strength and pretty lights, and you can have the creepy Shadows, ok?”

He laughed a little before he saw Ethan’s exposed chest and inhaled sharply through his teeth. “Oh, damn, you look rough. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Ethan shook his head sharply in the negative. “I’ll be fine here.”

I kept my silence. Logan had most likely just saved our lives. Even if Asheroth had come to his senses before he killed me, he’d definitely saved Ethan’s.

But in doing so he’d manifested the absolute last thing any of us needed right now. Another Nephilim descendent with gifted blood was just another reason for Belial to attack. My brother checked me over and I answered when asked direct questions, but I could only stare in mute shock as he poked and prodded a visibly battered Ethan.

The stakes had just gotten a whole hell of a lot higher for me. I had not just a town to protect, but my brother too.

I watched the two men in my life talking in low voices and caught myself wondering not if turning myself over to Belial’s forces would be the best thing for the town, but rather, how I could best go about it.

Jack. I’d talk to Jack. I’d try to find him tonight, instead of waiting for him to come to me. I had managed once before.

Only then did I realize that Asheroth was gone.

Chapter Twenty-One:

Shared Purposes

I didn’t feel safe in the house until I found the rose.

It had already lost a couple of petals by the time I made my way down to the bedrooms on the lower levels. A note, written in an elegant, flowing script on heavy folded paper, taunted me to make myself comfortable, and to ‘please forget all about the home invasion.’

The house was as much a contradiction as its owner. The upper levels were open and airy. They consisted of a series of large rooms that ran together without doors. The walls were white, the furniture sleek and modern. With the exception of the single broken window, it couldn’t have looked less like Asheroth lived there.

But when I found a heavy open door with a security keypad beside it leading down into narrow darkness, I knew this had to be a dungeon level I’d been worried about. Of course it would be where Asheroth kept the bedrooms.

Only a couple of doors were barred; the rest were open and comfortable. They didn’t have any windows and the doors had heavy locks, but the rooms themselves were large and well lit.

The middle bedroom out of five or six had a huge bed with snowy white covers. One corner of the coverlet was turned down, and on its pillow rested the familiar orange-red rose that had been a favorite of my ancestress. Asheroth had given me one once before as a kind of peace offering. I could only hope that’s what it meant now. I placed it on the nightstand and went to look for things we needed, like food and first aid.

Later, with Ethan tucked under the snowy white coverlet, I slipped into the hall with Logan.

“Did you find anything?” I asked again. “Food? Medicine? Anything at all?”

Logan shook his head. The skin around his left eye had already darkened, but he insisted it didn’t hurt. It was hard to get upset when I compared him to battered Ethan. “I don’t think there’s enough to keep a mouse alive here.”

I sagged against the wall. “We’ll have to do something then. One of us will have to get supplies in the morning.”

“Me, obviously. The whole point of all this was to keep you here. Because of the vengeful forces of darkness hunting you? Remember them?”

The fact that he managed to say this with minimum sarcasm reminded me how far things had spiraled out of control. “You should stay. If Asheroth shows up, you’re the only one who has a chance at fighting him.” 

What I was really thinking was that Logan was at risk now, too, but he just rolled his eyes at me. “Asheroth won’t hurt you, Cas. Just throw yourself over Ethan or something.”

I buried my face in my hands. “Yeah. That will totally work. I’ll try that with every threat we encounter from now on.”

He rubbed my shoulders roughly. “Hey now. Just get some rest. We’ll worry about the morning when it comes.”

For the first time in over a decade, I let my brother tuck me into bed. I stared at Asheroth’s rose, its petals almost black in the darkness, and thought of Jack.

Please come, Jack, I chanted softly, thinking of his strange tattoos like some people count sheep. Please, Jack. I don’t know where else to turn.

***

I don’t know how long I slept before I managed to wrestle control of my own dreaming. It was nothing like being summoned by Jack and walking straight into a mirror version of the waking world. I opened my eyes to an insubstantial place made of mist and wind. Lightning flashed far in the distance. I found it difficult to walk in a straight line, as if the rules of physics didn’t quite apply, so I stayed where I was and hugged myself in the t-shirt I’d borrowed from my brother.

Some people called this lucid dreaming. It meant that I’d managed to become self-aware while I slept, and it was as different from Jack’s perfect Dreamtime as crawling was from ballet. I was cold. Leave it to me to have cold foggy dreams. Logan’s t-shirt barely skimmed my thighs, but it was all I’d had to sleep in. Asheroth kept as much clothing on hand as he did food. At least I’d brought my clothes with me. I’d had plenty of dreams where I’d realized I was doing something important, only to realize I’d been naked the whole time.

Not naked. Half a point for me, then.

But how to find Jack? I spent several frustrating minutes concentrating on him, hoping thought alone might be enough in this place. When that didn’t work, I started to wander a bit across the spongy, unsteady ground, yelling his name.

Nothing.

I would have collapsed on the ground in frustration, but I wasn’t sure it actually was ground. I walked a bit more instead, and as I did, things began to look more familiar. So much so that it began to really bother me. Where had I seen this before? A world shrouded in mist, with lightning flashing off in the distance?

I suddenly felt lonely and cold and like I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life. I thought of Ethan, battered and sleeping in a soft warm bed.

And then I had it.

I had dreamed this place the first night Ethan came to me. I’d been drawing with Shadows, before I even knew what they were. Drawing dark shapes in the mist that stayed after I’d made them. Ethan held me around the waist and warned me. At the time, I’d been more concerned about the fact that a total stranger was appearing in my dreams and putting his hands on me. But the warning… there had been a warning.

“You’re not supposed to do that yet. It will draw their attention,” he’d said in my dream.

I’d dreamed of them before I could actually summon them, or even knew they existed. Even since the first time I’d set eyes on Ethan, some part of me had know the Shadows were dangerous.

I shivered in the damp mist. Had everything been building to this conflict since that very first day? The idea could make me panic, if I let it. But right then, I needed to draw some attention. So I did what I remembered from my dream, and began to draw. With Shadows.

In this mist world of mine they stayed exactly where I left them. I decided to approach it like any drawing. Both Jack and Ethan seemed to think this was a good approach for me. First, I experimented with a series of lines to get a feel for the way the Shadows would interact with the mist. They came eagerly, obediently; I summoned without fear this time, and without the intention of harming anyone. Perhaps that made a difference. I felt some of that same excitement I always did when confronted with any new blank canvas. The difference was that this was a living canvas with unknown consequences.

After a series of practice lines and scribbles, I tried writing words. They actually hung, suspended, in the mist exactly as if written on a chalkboard. I wrote names: Jack and mine, wondering if that would summon him. When that didn’t work right away, I moved on to basic shapes. And then I had an idea that seemed to come out of nowhere. Very carefully, with attention to detail, I sketched out one of Amberlyn’s paper cranes.

It hung in the mist, a flat version of its colorful counterparts that littered my apartment, Andreas Academy, and just about any other place we went together. I felt a powerful longing for my absent friend. With a few more strokes of my fingers and some reminders from two semesters of sculpture classes, I added enough form and depth to make it three-dimensional. And then, for no reason I could explain, I thought of Amberlyn and blew on the crane, exactly as if blowing out a birthday candle.

When it began to wave its wings and flutter like a live thing, I almost tripped getting away from it. As I struggled for balance on the uncertain spongy mist-floor, the Shadow-crane flitted around exactly like a cross between a crude butterfly and a paper airplane.

“Congratulations,” said a familiar voice behind me. It was not the voice I wanted to hear. “You’ve made your first Shadow-shape. That’s very dangerous, Miss Chastain. Now there’s no way your little town will be safe. There’s nothing Belial won’t do to claim you, and nothing the Realms of Light won’t do to eliminate the threat you pose.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve made more threatening play dough creations.”

Dr. Christian laughed. “Charming, as always.”

“So you aren’t dead,” I said flatly. I didn’t turn. His was the last face I wanted to see, the last voice I wanted to hear, and the last creature I wanted to deal with. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been watching the mist wall,” he said. “When you disappeared from town after our last encounter, I knew this was the only place you could go. Besides,” I felt him behind me, his hand coming to rest briefly in the hollow of my spine. I spun away, outraged. He gestured at my writing and the shapes I’d made. The little Shadow-crane flitted around in the mist, sometimes visible, sometimes not. “Such activity does draw attention. You might as well have put up a sign.” His smile showed teeth, too many and too white.

“You’re still his creature, then? Belial’s?” I squared my shoulders and tried to ignore the fact that I was wearing one of my brother’s Indie rock t-shirts and it barely covered the tops of my thighs. “He didn’t slaughter you after your last epic failure?”

 “I am still the one who is going to bring you to him, bound and gagged if necessary, yes,” he replied in iced tones.

I swallowed hard. “Good.” He barely managed to mask his surprise. “I was hoping I might find someone else, really, but you’ll do.” I tried to loosen my hands from the fists they’d automatically curled into. Last chance to back out, I thought, then remembered Logan’s changed eyes; the charred remains of the coffee shop; Amelie’s back as she walked away. “I want all this to stop. I want you to leave my town alone. I don’t want you or Belial or anyone who works for him to bother a single person or place within its boundaries ever again. If you do that, if you swear to it, then I will come with you.”

Dr. Christian’s smile was sickening, but his words were surprisingly soft. “I’m glad you came to your senses before I had to crush this city. I don’t like hurting people, Caspia.”

“What the hell do you think is happening to the Nephilim gifted Belial’s kidnapped, then?” I snapped, incredulous. But he just shook his perfect blond head.

“You’ll see when you come. Things aren’t always as they are represented, Caspia.” But I stalked away so he wouldn’t see the way my eyes had begun to water. I looked for my Shadow-crane, but I couldn’t see it anymore.

“One more thing,” I said at last. “The little girl. Caroline Bedford. The one you took from her father’s house. You let her go when you get me. There’s no room for children in this.”

For once, the look in his eyes didn’t make me feel slimy when he nodded his agreement. Instead I saw… what? Pity? Respect? Coming from Dr. Christian, I didn’t know. “Just get beyond the mist wall. Through the forest, surrounding the estate,” he said at last. “As soon as it’s full dark. South would be ideal, but anywhere though the forest should get you beyond the city limits.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “They’re watching very closely, and the security here is….”

“Try hard.” He examined his spotless fingernails for dirt.  “Should you not appear, we will wait again the next night, and the next. But every night that you do not appear will be bad for this town, Caspia. You must know we have other enemies as well; as long as we wait here for you, Whitfield and everyone you love will be caught in the crossfire.”

I paled. Crossfire. Logan. 

And then he was gone, leaving me alone in the mist of my amorphous dreamscape, wondering what the hell I’d just gotten myself into.

I didn’t have to worry long. As easily as punching through a wall made of paper, a familiar tattooed arm appeared in the mist and latched onto my forearm.