Darkling (14 page)

I grab his wrist and shove but he is stronger than me. Gritting my teeth, I press with all my might but the tip of the blade is digging into my chest. He starts to laugh as he presses down harder. Then his laugh turns into a gurgle.

My face and torso are sprayed with a shower of warm liquid. His knife slips and slices across my abdomen. Warmth rushes out of me. Blood. My blood. His blood. He grabs at something sticking out of his throat and I realize it’s the tip of a knife. After gasping for a few breaths, he collapses on top of me.

Victoria is standing behind him, her eyes wide. His blood is dripping down my face and I have to blink as I catch my breath, staring up at her. My abdomen is just now beginning to burn.

“We have to leave,” Victoria whispers.

She dashes out of view and I can hear her gathering our belongings. I struggle out from under the dead man and shout when the muscles of my stomach flare in fire upon using them. It takes me a moment to catch my breath once I’m out from under the corpse, but Victoria is already at my side. She kicks the dead man over and scowls as she retrieves our sack of gold.

I climb to my feet, clutching my abdomen. Blood is slicking my hand, trickling down past my belly button, staining my trousers. I’m alarmed by how fast it’s leaking from me. Victoria shoulders our pack then moves to rush out only to stop once she sees my wound. She lets out a surprised gasp.

Tenants are sticking their heads
out of their doors. We cannot linger. I hold out my other hand and Victoria takes it. Together, we once again flee.

The woods are before us.

“That’s when we came here.”

The voice is mine.
Tristan’s. No, I’m not Tristan, I remind myself as the images fade and the whispers quiet. I am Willow. Tristan is speaking to me now. His voice is soft.

“We ran for days. Well… we tried. My wound slowed us. I became fevered. I was able to tell her what plants could help me. She took care of me. When I was stronger, we found this glen and decided to stay. So I built this house for us.”

I am listening, but I am also moving each of my limbs one at a time. Reminding myself that I am me. That I’ve never really seen such a city. Such rooms, such people.

The candle shadows are still flickering above us. Tristan’s hand is warm in mine. I turn my head to look at him, but his gaze is on the ceiling. As I study his profile, I realize I will never be able to think of him the same way again. I know too much. And now that he remembers, he knows too much. Or at least, he knows. I take a deep breath and let it out shakily.

I let the memories he just shared with me trickle through my mind as I try to make sense of them. I find myself distracted by the line of his nose, the curves of his lips, the darkness of his lashes. And I realize with a start that I am like her. I want him. I have always wanted him.

I
force myself to look away from his profile. My heart is beating as if I’d just run. I’m not like her. I can’t be. But I am. He really is the most handsome man I have ever seen. I was too focused on the task at hand before to have paid much attention to my own thoughts, but like Victoria, one look into those mischievously vulnerable eyes and I was lost.

Closing my eyes, I am filled with disgust. I could never become so drunk on him as Victoria had, could I? So wound up in my passion and lust that I forced him to remain with me against his will? That I hurt him just to be with him?

I’m yanked out of my mind as he pulls my hand up to his chest and envelops it in both of his, hugging it. I can feel his heart slowly beating. His heart that still belongs to her. The woman who is doing exactly what she said she would – trapping him inside of her to keep forever.

My guts wrench and for a moment I worry I’ll be sick. Of all my thoughts and theories about the corpse, I never once thought that we could be similar.

Tristan’s chest rises and falls beneath my hand locked in his. I’m afraid to look at him. Afraid he’ll cast some spell on me. Afraid I’ll cast some spell on myself. Afraid my wanting of him will be my failure. He is still her pawn. He is still a victim that I need to protect. A spirit that needs my help as a Listener. A man who needs my help as another human being. And she is an abomination.

I think of how ill she made herself with her love for him. So lovesick that she couldn’t even rouse herself to enjoy him, even when he was at her side. Tristan had considered her unbalanced, but he too was blinded by his affection for her. Victoria was more than unbalanced, as is evidenced by what her spirit has become. She was unhinged.

I’ve been around damaged people before. Their behavior is so drastic and confusing that their families become exhausted caring for them. Though he may not have understood it when she was alive, that’s what Victoria was. Even then she was sucking away his life and energy. Maybe she couldn’t help it in life, but she can now. And she hasn’t changed.

Such people disgust me. I should have more sympathy for the unbalanced, but I don’t. Maybe because I worry I am one myself. I didn’t used to be. But ever since I lost my sister, I’ve been behaving as if I don’t have anything to lose. I’ve been such a fool. Of course I still have something to lose. I have everything to lose, least of all being my life.

I really am unbalanced. Why else would I volunteer to be sacrificed?

I told myself I did it because I’d heard whispers in the woods and thought I could fix things. That was part of it, sure. But there was a part of me I never wanted to acknowledge.
A part of me that wanted to leave the world of the living and join Scarlet. That part made me ignore my family instead of saying goodbye to them one last time after the ceremony. It made me think of Draven as a coward for not saying something that he never needed to say in the first place.

But being here with Tristan has made me forget about that part of me. Maybe because I’m holding hands with someone whose half-dead so I feel like I’m half in the Netherworld already. And maybe I am. I’ve accomplished what I had hoped for. I am lost to my family.
To Draven, my dearest friend. And what’s worse, his last memories of me are of hurt.

Tears blur my vision. I am weak. I am cruel. Why did I think I was better than the corpse? I’m the same.
An animated body, dead to all around her except a half-spirit who’s deader than me.

Tristan hasn’t said anything for some time. I look over at him and his eyes are shut, his breathing even. I didn’t know he even needed sleep. Maybe he didn’t before, but now that he’s more human, he needs rest. I need rest, as well.

Experiencing his memories and fighting off my own has drained me. The fire is dying down. My hand is still resting in his, on his chest. I curl up on my side and tuck my chin into his shoulder, hugging him with my free arm. I let his body heat warm me, and soon I fall asleep.

I am startled awake hours later by Tristan jerking up. “What?” he hisses.

The lamps are still lit. I wince and rub the sleep out of my eyes as I sit up. He looks around, confused, then his eyes settle on me.

“What just happened? Why am I on the floor?”

“You fell asleep,” I say, stretching my sore body. Wood isn’t all that comfortable.

“Asleep….” He runs his hands through his hair, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I haven’t slept in so long.” He grins. “I had a dream. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt.”

“What was it?”

He has that childish look of wonder in his eyes again. A look that I know will draw me in. So instead, I pick at dirt under my fingernails.

“I felt the sun on my face,” he whispers. “We were in a meadow. Wildflowers were blooming all around. And the butterflies, oh, the butterflies were every different color of the rainbow.”

I hope he doesn’t notice that I’m avoiding looking at him.

“But instead of being jealous of them, I thought that they must be envious of me. My time on this earth with a body may be briefer than theirs, but it was long enough to feel the sun. To feel your hand.”

I look at him then. His eyes are smiling. Warm.

“Can you imagine how glorious the sun will feel when it returns?”

I smile a little but can’t hold his gaze long. I am still sickened by my realization last night and don’t want him to see. Don’t want him to know that I am like her.

“Is something troubling you?”

I take a deep breath and let it out. “Tristan, I…” I mean to tell him that I am scared. That I feel safe around him. That I think he’s beautiful. But instead, something bitter comes out. “How could you still love her?”

He blinks. “She’s my wife.”

“She was.”

“From this life, to the next. I showed you.”

“I know.” My hair is falling out of its pins so I let it down and it tickles my shoulders. “But look at all she does to you.”

A line forms between his brows. “She has to hurt me. It’s how she gains her strength. And if she doesn’t have strength, she can’t stay here with me.”

“But she’s not here with you. She’s in the house, sure. But do you ever spend time together when she isn’t hurting you? Do you ever speak?”

He shakes his head. “She can’t speak anymore.”

“She spoke to me.”

Tristan looks away, his hair falling into his face. “You’re a Listener.”

“Not like that. She used her voice. Or what’s left of her voice.
When she tied me up.”

Tristan stares at the wall, his jaw is taut. I look away.

“Do you ever wonder,” I begin quietly, “why she doesn’t use fire as you do to heal?”

“It isn’t powerful enough.”

“How do you know?”

“It just isn’t,” he snaps, climbing to his feet and crossing over to the ashes in the fireplace. He crouches and begins to prod them back to life.

“I saw what she did to you when she was sick. Do you ever think she might hurt you on purpose?”

Tristan stops poking at the fire.
“Of course not.”

“Sometimes we’re blinded by –”

“Everything she has ever done was because she loved me,” he snips over his shoulder.

I’m silenced for a moment. He’s never used such a tone. “I don’t doubt that,” I say quietly. “But I think she hurt you because she loved you. So much that she didn’t know what to do with such a powerful feeling.
Because she was more than unbalanced, Tristan. You must know that now.”

He lets his knees touch the floor then eases onto his haunches, his expression one of intense concern as he stares at the boards below him. “I know,” he whispers.

“It’s all right to be angry with her. That doesn’t mean you love her any less. But you can’t keep thinking that what’s happening is all right. It isn’t. You don’t deserve that.”

“I
showed
you,” he says, looking me in the eye. “She loved me so much that she killed for me. She would’ve done anything for me.”

“Except let you live.”

Tristan sucks in a breath, as if to argue, but instead looks back at the floor. “You don’t understand. No one had ever wanted me like that before. Not even my parents. And she’s all I have.”

“Tristan?”
It takes a few moments but he eventually turns to look at me. “You have me.”

The forlornness in his eyes begins to ebb as he gazes at me. He blinks and starts to smile. Then all the lights in the house go out.

And I realize what a huge mistake I’ve made by admitting I care about him. She has glimpsed how I feel. I’ve practically handed her the deadliest weapon she could wield.

Tristan is no longer her pawn to play games with me. He is her means to torture me into surrender.

I
leap to my feet, tearing the hem of Victoria’s gown. I hurry over to the fireplace, the only source of light, but Tristan is gone. I glance about, hunting for where he could’ve hidden. She couldn’t have fed on him so much that he lost his body already.

“Tristan?”

His breathing tickles my shoulder and I turn around. Only to yelp. There before me is the corpse. Victoria.

I stumble backwards. Her funerary shrouds are drifting about her, empty sockets boring into mine. Her yellowed teeth look like they’re grinning.

I square my shoulders. “Where is he?”

She clacks her jaw, startling me. Gagging noises, like a vomiting cat come out of her throat. Amidst them, I can make out one word. “Mine.”

“I know who you are.”

Victoria’s bone-hand darts out from behind the shrouds and yanks a strap of the gown off so quickly that I yelp again. My shoulder burns and I grab the strap and yank away to keep her from taking the dress off. I’m bleeding where her long nails have scraped against my skin. Someone cries out in a corner of the house.
Tristan
.

I sneer at her. “You’re a coward.
A selfish coward.”

She clacks her jaws again. Tristan screams and I cover my ears because he sounds like he’s drowning in his own blood.

“Leave him alone,” I snarl.

A rattling sound comes from her chest. She wheezes out a breath and this time she does stink like rotting animal. “Mine,” she manages again.

“What you’re doing is killing my people,” I shout. “My family.”

The corpse cocks her head. “I don’t care,” she wheezes.

Tristan’s noises no longer sound human. I grab a burning branch from the fire and wield it in front of me. She hisses and darts back quicker than I thought possible, slipping into the shadows. I thrust the makeshift torch about but can’t see her. Of course she would abandon her body at the first sign that I was willing to burn it. The fiend.

Tristan’s screaming stops. The lamps come on. I keep the torch in front of me as I spin about, making sure she’s gone. Then I spot Tristan at the top of the stairs. The side of his face is oozing blood out of gashes from his old wound once again and he’s clinging to the bars of the railing as if on a ship in a squall. Casting the torch back into the fire, I start to run to him then stop myself.
The stairs. Her easiest trap.

He is shaking. That much I can tell from here. Holding onto the rails, he stiffly rises. Tristan is about to take a step down when something hits him from behind. He’s too weak to stop himself and falls, hitting each step with a sickening thump.