Darkside Sun (25 page)

Chapter 29

Two bouncers, one with a giant donut for a gut hanging over his belt, and the other tall and thin, stepped away from the doors as Xavier and I approached. They nodded at him and leered at me. I wanted to cover my cleavage, but with my right hand tucked into Xavier’s, my left wouldn’t be enough to go around and would have looked silly. If two slime-balls leering at me was the worst that happened tonight, I’d consider myself lucky.

Once through the doors, we moved down a narrow, black hallway. The door clapped shut behind us, choking off the sound in the club. The pressure on my ears reminded me of the music room in high school. Soundproof. So nobody could hear me screaming. Well, that was just great.

“Where are we going … sir?” I’d almost said “Xavier,” but I’d never asked his name and he hadn’t told me, had he? Where was Izan? When would he reveal what I’d be doing?

Xavier chuckled, lazy and dark. “Sir. You are very cute,
cariño
.”

Nice that he avoided my question so handily. The way he said it made me think calling him “sir” meant something more to him than just me trying to be polite.

Upon reaching the end of the hallway, just short of a red exit sign, he opened a door and drew me inside. Shouldn’t we have gone out that other door to get outside? My heart pounded harder, and instead of hot, my mercury went south of freezing.

I tugged my arm back, but he twirled me and pushed me against the door as he shut us into what appeared to be an office complete with a messy desk and a leather sofa. “Oh, hold on, now. I really did need a breath of air. I wasn’t, like, coming on to you or anything.” Yeah, like I knew how to do that anyway.

He smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile but one of a man certain of what he would get from me. Or take from me. I got the feeling the wraith making his decisions wouldn’t care either way. “Of course you weren’t,” he said softly, and then went on to say a bunch of stuff in Spanish that might have sounded erotic if I didn’t know a dead, alternate-reality creature was doing the talking. As he leaned in to kiss me, I thought of the wraith with its empty eye sockets and wasp legs. I shoved hard against his chest and rushed to the far side of the room when he stumbled back. My first kiss would not be with a bugman.

“Oh, that’s the game we’re going to play, is it?” He licked his lips. “You are an exciting slip of a thing, aren’t you?” Laughing, he came at me like a freight train. My instincts kicked in, thanks to all of my training. I moved left, grabbed his arm, and used his own momentum to send him crashing into the wall. My exertion shoved the lid off my box just a little, and energy hummed along my arms, through my heart, and sent mini twisters of wind curling out from my hands. Oh, sweet relief.

Xavier had been growling and cursing, but he went still. I breathed out snow as the wraith did something inside of him, as if it had been hiding itself and had crawled the rest of the way into the man’s body. Whatever he had inside him was something way the hell scarier than Mr. Bugman or what had been inside my roommate. Nothing I could see or put my finger on, but whatever malignancy stared out at me induced an urge to scream.

It moved to block the door. “The Darkside Sun has risen,” it said. “We have been waiting long, so long.”

“What’s the Darkside Sun?” I breathed out snow while my heart tried to beat its way through my chest.

“The beacon marking the doorway for the lost,” it said, as if that explained everything. It didn’t. Not a damned thing.

Oh, shit … doorway as in to come through into our world? If this sun had risen and would lead the wraiths someplace, where was it? How did we find it and extinguish the thing before they got a free pass to our reality?

I didn’t get a chance to fire off any questions before Remy and Marcus appeared beside Xavier. Where the hell did Asher get to?

Xavier flung both arms up and cracked the sentinels in the face before I could ask. Roaring, Remy dove at the wraith-man, and the two of them smashed into the door. The panel crumpled outward and hung askew on the hinges. Taka popped in, diving on top of Xavier.

I helped a dazed Marcus to his feet as the other three men grappled by the door. “Where’s Asher?” I noticed Kat was missing, too. She could stay away as long as she liked.

“I think he’s wasted,” Marcus said. “He was stumbling around, so the bouncers took him outside after his run-in with Xavier, and then proceeded to beat the hell out of him.”

“Oh, my God.” My legs tensed to take me to him, but where was he?

Remy threw Xavier across the room.

I yelped as Marcus shoved me onto the sofa so I wouldn’t get clobbered. “Drunk?” I asked. “But he only had one drink, and he was fine when he was with me.” Though he had slurred his words a bit when he was talking to Xavier and lost his footing when he walked away. “Where is he? Is he all right?”

“Kat’s getting him.” Marcus jumped into the fray, and they pinned Xavier to the floor in the corner. “Come and watch.” Marcus’s voice strained with the effort of containing the flailing man’s arm. Taka wrangled his legs, and Remy knelt on the other arm.

I stood behind King Kong as Kat appeared in the room with her arm around Asher, who could barely walk. Blood poured from his nose and mouth, and bruises bloomed purple around his left eye. She hadn’t been touching him skin to skin long enough to hurt him, had she? Was all that damage really from a fight? He sagged like a sorry-looking marionette whose strings had been cut. She let him drop to the sofa with a scowl of disgust. God, what a bitch.

“Just a second, Marcus.” I rushed over and knelt in front of Asher. “Are you okay?” It was stupid question, but I needed him to speak so I could tell if Marcus had been right about the alcohol. Asher’s eyes were glassy as he tilted up and stared at me, but I couldn’t read them. He did kind of smell like whiskey, but he often did. His lips parted, and low words tumbled from them, but I couldn’t make sense of them.

“Dammit, Asher, I need you right now,” I said.

He coughed, curling in on himself.

By the time my focus swung back to the wraith, Marcus had released his storm, which crawled down his arms in those scrolling blue patterns, only not as bright as I expected. Not as bright as when I’d touched Asher.

Placing one hand on Xavier’s throat and the other on his belly, Marcus closed his eyes. “You have to look inside them, feel for the cold. When you find it, you have to pull it out.” He began to shake.

“Brah?” Remy asked. “What doin’?”

“I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s nothing we’ve ever seen before. Strong, so damn strong.”

I piped in with, “The thing said something about the Darkside Sun, as if it should be in all caps, like a god or something. He said it had risen and would lead the lost to the doorway. What the hell does that mean?”

Taka let out a strangled sound, scrambled up, and started pacing around the room. What was his problem? Did that mean something to him?

A
thunk
sounded behind me. Asher had rolled onto the floor, his gun out. He used his elbows to crawl toward us, blood falling in ribbons from his chin. Jesus, how badly was he hurt?

“No guns,” I said. “Please stop moving until we can get you back to the infirmary.”

The great beating heart filled the room as Marcus glowed brighter, taking us into the Shift. I wasn’t sure why we all went when he wasn’t touching us, but the pulse in the room seemed different, so maybe it was part of the process.

We ended up in a grassy field, Xavier’s office still overlapping the image as if we were part of both realities at once. My head swam with dizziness. Thick white mist billowed out around Marcus’s hands, but it just hovered there.

Blood poured from Marcus’s nose as he shook and gritted his teeth. “Can’t pull it out,” he said. “Sorry, little rabbit, but this one has to go.”

“What? No, you can’t!” I rushed back and forth on the grass, certain I was missing something. I ran through everything Izan had told me the day I met him in the mirror. The Misgiver was a liar, he’d said. What all had this person lied about?

I stopped dead, thinking about when I’d touched Asher while suppressing my storm back in the bathroom. We’d created so much power, it could have lit up Asia. Could two sentinels generate the power to push out the higher caste wraiths? Had the Misgiver somehow killed Taka’s girlfriend to put the fear of touch in all of the guardians to cripple their abilities?

Yes, push, not pull. One of those little “knowings” told me so.

When my attention returned to the room, Remy had his gun in hand. He stared over his shoulder at me, sorrow creasing his brow. “Sorry, Addy. Wasn’t supposed to go like this. If we known, woulda picked another victim.”

Victim. Yes, Xavier was probably a good man without his wraith and didn’t deserve to die.

I put my hand on Remy’s shoulder. “You have to let me try first. Please.”

“If my brah here can’t—”

“Please,” I said again. The traitor couldn’t be Remy, could it? Was that why he didn’t want me to try? No, no doubts. I had to show them what I could do before I could figure out who was who and what was what. Izan meant for me to do this, had trusted me to figure it out. Whatever would happen to me would paint a target on my head and draw out the traitor.

Remy gave a curt nod and moved aside, keeping his foot on Xavier’s shoulder. I knelt beside the club owner, who’d stopped struggling and gazed up at me with hunger. Not the bedroom kind, but the teeth and swallowing kind.

“Where is the Darkside Sun?” I asked.

The wraith grinned with Xavier’s lips. “The dawn is already on the horizon. The exodus has already begun.”

“Over my dead body.” I cringed at my choice of words, hoping it didn’t turn out to be prophetic. Turning, I met Asher’s glazed eyes. “Just hang on, okay?”

He wobbled on his hands and knees, coughing again.

I thought about asking one of the others to take him back to the facility, but a terrible thought occurred to me. What if it had been one of the sentinels who’d beaten him up? Or … Oh, God, had someone put something in his drink? But I had to put on my show before I could get him back to the infirmary. I turned back to Marcus. “Put your hands back on Xavier. Hurry!”

Panting, he slowed his breathing. “Got nothing left.”

“You don’t need anything, just do what I say.”

Marcus repositioned his hands where’d they been on Xavier’s throat and stomach, his strongest chakra points. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Letting the cat out of the bag.
Shaking only a little, I placed my hands over Marcus’s. “Don’t resist the flow. You’re my conduit. We need a ground, like lightning, to take our energy where it needs to go. Let mine flow into you, join with yours, and flow out again. I promise it won’t hurt you.”
I hope.
It would be a crappy time to be wrong.

Taka stared at me as if I’d turned into a many-headed dragon who would soon toast him to a golden brown. Was that a Misgiver reaction? Or Remy’s white knuckles where he knelt beside me? Kat, who paced by the door like a caged lion about to be poked with a cattle prod? What would they do once I did this? Oh, God, what if they shot me?

Marcus nodded, brow raised, but he didn’t protest, only relaxed under my hands. “I’m all yours.” He flashed a genuine and exhausted smile at me, and I relaxed a smidge.

I should have been face to face with Asher. He was my other half, my conduit, and I was his. “Okay, let’s do this.”

Marcus opened his mouth, but I took the lid off my inner box before he got any words out. A scream came out instead. I realized too late I should have only tipped the lid a little, let my energy out slowly since it had been cooped up for so long. It roared out of me and through Marcus.

Everyone in the room lit up. The walls glowed blue, and the ceiling turned into a whitewash. I was a beacon. White ate my vision, and all of my senses flowed through Marcus and into Xavier. So dark and cold, like standing in a subzero night with no moon. I pushed out, down, deeper and deeper into the club owner until I found the coldest point, a frozen marble at the bottom of a warm pool. The wraith screeched at me, diving deeper into the man, digging through his soul to get away from me.

Marcus had stopped screaming, but he slumped over Xavier’s body. I couldn’t see him through the glow, but I felt his movements as if they were mine. I didn’t stop. The wraith needed killing, and I had to push it out before I could finish it off and get Asher the hell away from here.

I filled Xavier with my power. The wraith writhed and screamed before it finally had nowhere else to go but out. It flowed out of the body under our hands like a rush of cold wind.

Releasing Marcus, I jolted to my feet, turned my face up to the hovering tattered mist in the shape of a man with no eyes. Hands raised, I reached for the wraith, not with my body, but with my storm. I took that little creep by the throat, surrounded it with my energy, and squeezed. It exploded in a wash of snow and one final mewling cry.

It was gone. Hot damn, I’d really done it.

My victorious smile flattened when pain shot through my head. My eyes burned as if someone had shoved hot pokers into them. I fell to my knees, wailing, scrubbing at them.

“Addy, Jesus, Addy!” It was Remy. His arms clamped me to his Australia-sized chest. The others were shouting, frantic, amazed, terrified.

“How the hell did she do that?” Kat asked. “I could see the wraith when she touched it.”

“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know.” That from Marcus.

“Open your eyes,
kolohe
,” Remy said. “Come on, yeah. I tell my Sophia I bring you back safe. She may be small, but she hurt me just fine if I don’.”

The pain eased back, but my body still shook. My eyes had changed, one of those inklings of mine told me so. The only question was: to what?

When the sound of Asher’s rasping breaths reached me, I launched away from Remy and came to my knees beside my sensei. I touched his cheek and found him ice cold. Whitish gray had replaced his Middle Eastern complexion. “Oh, God.” I pulled his head into my lap, his blood soaking into the collar of his shirt. “Someone put something in your drink, didn’t they?” I whispered in his ear. “Who did it? What do I do?”