Dark Light of Mine (31 page)

"Good manners, Mr. Case," Underborn said.  "You always were a smart student.  Not like Nathan Spelman and the bullies he associates with."

Approximately one point three billion questions burst into my mind, each one begging to be answered by this guy, but I buried them all beneath the most pressing items.  I folded my arms on the table.  "What will it take to make you call off the hit on my dad?"

"I assume you know of my fees?"

"A little.  Something like whatever is most precious to the buyer."

"Yes.  That which they treasure the most.  A rather simple arrangement."

"How do you even know what they value the most?"

"My associates are excellent at profiling and discovering such things."  He steepled his fingers and smiled.  It looked really creepy knowing he was a school teacher, for god's sake.

"And I assume you know what I value most."

He turned his gaze to Elyssa.  I wanted to jump across the table and throttle him.

"In your dreams," I said, barring her with my arm as if it might stop him from looking at her.

"In this case, Mr. Case," he said with another oily grin, "Or should I say, Mr. Slade, the payment has already been met."

I jumped up from my chair sending it toppling over backwards and pressed my clenched fists against the table.  "What did you do?  What have you taken from me?"  Fear and anger used my heart as a punching bag.  I was two seconds from charging him.

"Calm down, Justin."  He motioned me to sit.  "I have taken nothing from you except your time."

I wondered if he had some magical way to suck years from me even though I was supposed to be immortal.  "Time?"

"I placed the original bounty on your father.  I also placed the tracker on your father and gave the information to certain parties of interest."

"You what?"  My shout echoed in the room.  A feeling of helplessness overcame the anger and I had no idea what I could do against someone like this.  Against someone so underhanded and evil.

Elyssa gripped my wrist, probably thinking I was about to attack Underborn.  "Justin, please sit down."  She looked at me with pleading eyes.  "Please."

Somehow, I found my chair, righted it, and took a seat.  I ran my hands through my hair and gazed forlornly at the wooden table.

"I did this for good reason, Justin.  I had to know what kind of man you are.  How you would respond to certain stimuli.  In effect, I tested you."

"Didn't I already pass your lousy English exams?"

He laughed.  "Your dark sense of humor is one of the things I like about you, not to mention your ideas of justice and desire to do the right thing not just by you, but your friends."

"You've been psychoanalyzing me?"

"Consider this your trial for the troubled times which lay ahead, young man."  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.  "While I find you a rather admirable subject, you're also lacking in important areas, namely strategizing.  You tend to ram headlong into things without thinking first.  This is why you and Miss Borathen are quite the package deal."

I glanced at Elyssa, confused.  Her expression, however, changed to one of understanding.

"You see," he continued, "she shores up your weaknesses and plays off your strengths.  Where you are the doer, she is the thinker, the planner.  You two must stay together."

I gripped her hand.  "I don't plan on letting her go anywhere."

"You must understand I'm not the only one who's aware of this.  There will be others who want to separate you.  They know how much you value each other and to what lengths you'll go to protect one another.  They can make you do things you'd never do otherwise."

"You're an assassin.  A killer.  Why should you care about any of this?"

"For the very same reasons others care.  Something ominous lingers on the horizon and all my information so far points to you as being pivotal in preventing the annihilation of life as we know it."

I laughed.  Laughed until I wanted to cry.  "Are you kidding me?  More of this foreseeance mumbo-jumbo?  Maybe you and Vallaena Slade should hook up."

"She can be one of your most powerful allies," he said, nodding.  "But do not let her smother you.  And whatever you do, don't accept her protection—at least not in the way she now imagines it.  You need to cultivate her and others, use them for the fight to come."

I wanted to get up and leave.  This was ridiculous.  "All I care about is you removing the death mark from my father.  I don't need that threat hanging over me."

"I will, but first you must convince him to marry Kassallandra."

"What?" I shouted.  It was becoming a habit with this guy.  "In case the almighty Underborn didn't know, he's already married to my mom, thank you very much."

He waved his hand as though swatting an inconvenient fly from the air.  "Spawn do not recognize unions with humans.  Your father's first task must be returning to his true family and raising his status from lowly Castratae back to Anae, gaining the power he should rightfully hold and uniting two major families through marriage."

"He would never in a million years betray my mom.  He's obsessed with finding her and my sister, something I'm sure you know with all the fancy dossiers you probably have on us."

"He must.  If the great families are split, there's little hope for the future."

"How about uniting the Slades to the Conroys?" Elyssa asked.  "If that hurdle could be overcome, it might form an even better alliance."

I gave her a surprised look.  She really was the thinker.  "Yeah, what she said.  We can find another way to unite my dear demonic family."

Underborn gave an adamant shake of his head.  "Impossible.  The politics of that unfortunate situation would never allow it to work."  He stood up.  "Let me show you something.  Wait here."  He walked to a nearby filing cabinet, shuffled through it, and pulled out a red folder.  Walked back to the table and set it before him as he sat down.  "This contains the little I know of Foreseeance 4311."

"You have a copy?" Elyssa asked, leaning forward to get a better look.

"I have fragments, lifted from the lifeless fingers of a courier who worked for the ones who wish to keep all knowledge of it out of the hands of the Conclave."

"Great, more of this garbage," I said.

"You know about your dark light, don't you Justin?" he asked.

A sliver of uncertainty crept into me.  "How do you know about that?"

"Has it come to you in dreams or visions?"

"I had a stupid dream."

"We both did," Elyssa said.  "I am his light in the dark."

Underborn nodded.  "You are indeed, my dear.  You will be with him when the end comes."

She gasped, falling back into her chair as if all the weight in the world had just been dropped into her lap.  "Please tell me it doesn't mean—"

He shrugged.  "As with anything related to foreseeances, there are many shifting variables and even more uncertainties.  'The end' could refer to a new beginning, death, or any number of other circumstances.  I wish I could say for certain, but I do know that you must be with him at a critical moment or all may be lost."

I snorted.  "Much as I'd like to be with her twenty-four-seven, there's the little problem of her parents."

"I'm well aware of that issue."  Something seemed to flash in his eyes, though what emotion only Underborn knew.  "Thomas Borathen has a long memory and a deep hatred for spawn.  After Thunder Rock, I can hardly blame him."

Elyssa's eyes lit with interest.  "What do you know about Thunder Rock?"

"I know far more than his official report says."

"How?"  Her eyes narrowed.  "Far as I know, he never told a soul what really happened there, except maybe my mom."

"What the heck is Thunder Rock?" I asked.  "I remember you and Meghan talking about it."

"My father and thirty other Templars were ambushed by spawn there.  Everyone but him died.  His official report was heavily redacted so nobody except him and the Templar Synod know what really happened."

"That's not entirely accurate," Underborn said.  "I was there."

"You?" Elyssa said, eyebrows rising.

"You were just a little thing at the time," he said, smiling.  "And I was known as Kevin Sorenson."

"You?  Kevin Sorenson?  My father's second in command died along with everyone else."

"Even I thought I was dead."  His eyes took on a thousand-mile stare, looking right through us for a moment before coming back to the present.  "Sometimes, I think I am."

"Considering what you do now, maybe you're dead inside," I said.

"Perhaps."  He leaned forward, his dark eyes penetrating.  "When you feel your soul being devoured while you lay helpless, it makes you realize there are worse things than death."

I grimaced and shuddered.  "If your real name is Kevin, how did you come up with such a cockamamie name like Underborn?"

"Because, young man, in the depths of that quarry lake, far underground, I was reborn.  I emerged from the encounter a new man with a new mission.  The Templars represent the order that comes in the light.  I am the order that comes in the dark."

"Details," Elyssa said.  "I want to know exactly what went down that day."

"The short of it is this, my dear:  A rogue spawn by the name of Vadaemos Slade was manifesting and absorbing souls from a number of victims, some supernatural, some normal.  The Templars had jurisdiction but House Slade wouldn't cooperate.  They claimed to be handling it internally.  One of our very few spawn informants told us the rogue was hiding at Thunder Rock.  We arrived in force—thirty-one of us.  We were ambushed.  Only Thomas Borathen and I survived, though I wasn't aware of the outcome until days after dropping into the depths of the quarry lake and awakening in Cahuinari National Park."

I racked my brain but couldn't remember ever hearing of the place.  "And where is this park?"

"Southern Colombia."

"As in the country in South America?"

He nodded.  "The very same."

"How did you end up there?" Elyssa asked.

"A question I have wanted to answer ever since," Underborn replied.  "It took me quite some time to return to the States.  The last thing I remembered was the agony as a crawler tore my soul from my body.  I managed to pull myself into the lake somehow, and, gripping a large rock, let it drag me into the cold dark waters.  I was certain I would never see daylight again.  But death was preferable to having my soul devoured.  Imagine my surprise when I woke up in the jungle."

"They ambushed you with crawlers?"  Elyssa looked horrified.

"And other various demon spawn," he said.  "It was quite a slaughter.  It's no secret the spawn despise the Templars due to their holy origins and would like nothing better than to see them gone.  I'm sure Thomas saw this as an act of war but he's been unable to return fire thanks to the Conclave."

Elyssa's face paled.  "What did they do to the soulless, the husks?"

Underborn shuddered and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed tight against his body.  "I don't know if they ever did anything about them.  Thunder Rock was under quarantine long before the incident ever occurred and it remains a restricted area to this day."

I knew for a fact anything that could make someone like Underborn shudder had to be bad.  "What do you mean by soulless?"

"Soulless are the husks remaining after the soul is gone," he said.  "In most cases, the bodies simply go inert, wither away, and die.  In other cases, what's left of the person goes quite insane.  The problem with soulless Templars, however, is the bodies will not die.  They may wither and lose muscle to the point of being skeletal, but so long as they have the blessing of the Divinity, the bodies are immortal, save extreme injury like beheading or blood loss."

"The spawn didn't eat the bodies?" I asked, resisting the urge to gag.

"I'm sure they mutilated the bodies, but shadow spawn gain no sustenance from consuming flesh," Underborn said.

"Shadow spawn?  I thought you said they were demon spawn."

He nodded.  "Shadow spawn are insidious creatures which can be summoned much like hellhounds, although they cannot keep a physical shape in this realm for long, whereas hellhounds can remain indefinitely."

"Why was this Thunder Rock place quarantined in the first place?"

"If you know anything about The Grotto, you know it was constructed long ago by beings with a far greater understanding of magical theory than we now have."  Underborn motioned at the room around us.  "This place exists on Earth and yet it also exists somewhere else.  We don't know how or why, just that it does.  The Obsidian Arch and its relatives were probably built by the same beings.  Thunder Rock was a granite quarry until the Overworld Conclave realized deep beneath the quarry was a site very similar to the Grotto.  For some reason, however, this site was left unfinished by its creators.  The closer the noms got to the source beneath the quarry, the more they noticed the strange side-effects in reality.  So the Conclave purchased the land, placed it under quarantine, and had the Arcane Council erase the place from collective memory with a dense shroud of spells."

"And that made it a perfect hiding place for the rogue," Elyssa said as something like understanding dawned in her eyes.  "And it's also what transported you to Colombia.  You must have stumbled into one of the arches."

Underborn nodded.  "I've theorized as much but the last time I tried to enter, the quarantine shroud physically kept me out.  I suspect Thomas had the Arcane Council place a barrier spell on top of whatever already exists there."

"This is all fascinating," I said, because it really was, "but how is knowing any of this going to help me win the blessing of Elyssa's parents?"

"What matters is not so much what we think we know about Thunder Rock," Underborn said, "but what you must prove about it that may win Thomas Borathen to your cause."

"Prove?  Prove what?  Sounds to me like you're the one who needs to dig into the incident, not me."

"Thomas believes spawn ambushed him and his people at Thunder Rock.  So long as he has this belief, you will never gain his trust."