A Toiling Darkness (19 page)

“You can’t kill me,” I said simply,
tampering down on the instincts as they tried to surge back up once
again. I couldn’t let them control me, not anymore.

He smirked and moved his knife around. It
was now stained with my blood, all the way up to the hilt. I was
pretty sure he added a little twist when he stabbed me to do as
much damage as possible. The blood dripped down onto the beige
rug.

“I can certainly try. Doesn’t feel too good
does it? Do you even understand what it feels like to suffer? I can
feel it.” He moved his hand through the air, caressing it, before
he continued. “All the pain and suffering you caused, it stained
you and follows you around.”

“Enough chatting, slauve,” I seethed, my
anger getting the best of me. If he wanted Akhlys, I was going to
give him her, along with everything she is. Everything.

For the first time in nearly a thousand
years, I let go. I dived right into that abyss of power and swam in
it. The curse on my thigh burned, trying to dampen down on my
powers and failing, keeping back only a small amount. It was like
using a cup to scoop out an ocean. Completely ineffective. What did
work was the pain. It originated on the small brand on my thigh and
spread itself through my entire body, cell by cell. I pushed
through it, not caring at the moment.

I knew pain, better than the slauve liked to
believe. I was born out of man’s fear of the night and what resided
in it. The moment I existed, I only ever met animosity and fear.
People lash out if they think they are pushed into a corner and in
my case, whole villages grabbed their makeshift weapons and
torches. I’ve been whipped, beaten and tortured. Men came up with
creative ways to kill me, always failing and in most cases ending
with me surrounded with dead bodies. I became a survivor and I
wasn’t going to let some slauve end me. My instincts wouldn’t allow
that.

El was in there, in the back of my mind,
yelling at me. Whether it was the real him, using the night to
communicate, or just my consciousness making an appearance was up
for questioning. He kept telling me not to do it, to remember who I
was. I pushed his annoying voice to the side and just let myself
go.

My body grew light, expanding beyond my skin
and blacking out the entire room. I became the very darkness I
manipulated. I no longer saw, not with eyes at least. I felt and
tasted everything—the cool rain-spotted windows, the lemon from the
cleaning products used on the mahogany wood, the coarse rug, the
dust particles in the corners of the room, and especially the warm
body of my victim. I could also hear every single living being
within the city as they stalked in the night, making use of the
storm. Before I got too caught up in the vast expanse of my powers,
I focused back on to my victim. A heart pounding against a chest
resonated through me, narrowing down my search for him.

I wrapped myself around the warm body,
trying to suffocate him. A white light glided through the darkness,
cutting me. Hot pain shot through me along with a scream. It wasn’t
a scream of pain, but of desperation, a small plea from my psych to
stop. It tugged on me until I was back in my human form, completely
naked and confused.

And so damn tired. Last time I even did
something like that was when I was with Kay and we were playing
with a tribe that no longer existed. We teased them while they were
out hunting and stayed out too long. Out of the five that were out,
only one survived and only because Kay wouldn’t let me play with
him.

Practice really did make perfect and I
haven’t even tried to do that for far too long.

The slauve stood there, his chest heaving,
his face pallid and beads of sweat fell from his hairline down to
his neck and soaked into his shirt. I glanced down and wrapped the
shadows around me, creating a little black dress. Two new cuts
added to the already infernal pain dispersing through my body. One
of them was on my right arm and the other on my left thigh.

I stared at the slauve.

Who the hell are you?

The fight slowly left me as I grew too
exhausted. My body grew numb from the power strain and knife wounds
marring my body.

“You really are an abomination.” His voice
was gravel, each word painfully scraping against my skin. I
flinched and stared at him in a new and yet old kind of pain.

You’re an abomination!

A monster!

The devil!

You mean the devil’s bitch!

Kill her! End her! Monster! Abomination!

Burn her! Drown her! Cut her up!

Die, you abomination!

“I’m only what humans made me to be,” I
whispered, saying what I always said to others. This time the words
were different. They weren’t cold and empty. No, they were full of
agony, and the slauve heard the emotion. He stiffened and looked me
over, a confusion so familiar falling over his features. Something
wet trailed down my cheek and I wiped it away, expecting blood or
sweat. Instead I found tears.

I was no longer the woman I was before El
got his hands on me.

I couldn’t go back to being that woman
again, even if I wanted to. Not when the man in front of me called
me an abomination and the word felt like a skewer in my heart.
Abomination—a word I heard thousands of times. The word had hurt at
first and then I grew unflinching and numb to it. Not anymore
apparently. I began to care about what Kalen said and thought, and
now the word held the power to hurt me once again.

I didn’t even notice how important Kalen
became to me. He managed to slip into my heart and make a place in
there, right next to El, Eithna, and in some twisted way, Kay.

I couldn’t help it; I let out a small laugh.
It sounded childish to even my own ears. Another hysterical laugh
came out before I clamped my hands over my mouth. Then my body
began to shake as I swallowed back the laughter.

Kalen stood on the other side of the desk
that somehow managed to survive when nothing else did. His
expression was completely blank, his head tilted to the side as he
watched me mentally break down.

Me. Darkness. Having a goddamn breakdown for
the first time ever.

Finally, having enough of my antics, he
lifted his blade and made a small move as he prepared to
attack.

I shook my head furiously and pulled the
last remaining power I had left together and somehow, some way,
managed to wrap the shadows around me.

When you don’t have a specific destination
in mine while moving through the shadows, it becomes a game of
roulette as you hope you land in a safe and appropriate place. All
I thought about was the need for someplace empty and dark,
someplace I could be myself and safe. I ended up in the tallest
building in New Rheems, with a good view of the harbor and city
below. I was on the top floor, the large office completely empty
and lights off. The rain pattered against the window like a spray
of bullets. Lightening went off right outside, lighting up the sky
with flashes, revealing the angry clouds that were still coming in.
The storm was going to last the night, and go into the morning.

This place was exactly what I needed. I
could be here, in the dark, and be alone. I could watch the storm
and heal without worry.

I slumped against a wall, stared out the
window that took up the entire wall, and allowed myself the freedom
to hysterically laugh.

I mentally shook my head at the irony of it
all. I spent my entire existence keeping everyone away and Kalen—a
slauve created to kill me—got through my defenses in only a matter
of days while it took even El a good two weeks before I even tried
to consider that maybe what he said and did was okay.

I laughed and laughed until my sides hurt
and then I couldn’t stop hiccupping and my sides were on fire. I
couldn’t even remember why I started laughing in the first place.
None of what happened was funny. I think I even brushed against
death tonight. To think I was emotionally numb for so long, only to
break down so easily by a slauve calling me an abomination.

Oh, that was the cherry I needed to top my
day off. I banged my head against the wall.

And then did it again and again until I saw
fog.

Fucking abomination, huh?

Religion is an interesting concept and one I
don’t poke at, even with a fifty-foot pole. It shapes how people
think, what they believe in, and how they should act. Religion
controlled people and led to war, massacres, persecutions, and more
pain and suffering than anything else in the world. El explained it
to me once and I couldn’t deny anything. Everything he said was
true. His explanations answered questions I searched for, for a
very long time. I’ve had humans try to use their religious symbols
and texts against me countless times.

When the Bible or Koran or even the Pyramid
texts from Ancient Egypt didn’t work, I became an abomination, a
problem they couldn’t find a solution to. The only thing all the
different religious figures agreed on was that I shouldn’t exist,
that no god or goddess would create someone like me because it
would only be cruel. I’m not human, I’m not meant to exist and
therefore I’m not any god’s creation. So what was left but to call
me an abomination?

Back then, I didn’t agree with them. I was
simply someone trying to exist, trying to carve a place for myself
in a world that didn’t want me. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Even Kalen
came up with the same conclusion.

The same fucking word.

My body was going numb both mentally and
physically. My wounds were still bleeding and if I didn’t stop it
soon, I was going to bleed out. I wanted to just close my eyes and
let myself drift off to sleep. Instead, I closed my eyes and
focused on the poison crawling through my body. I took deep breaths
and forced myself to relax. It took who knows how long because time
became inconsequential as I looked within myself.

There it was, little particles of poison
moving in my blood stream, causing a surprising amount of damage. A
tear here, a scrape there, and then my body working overtime to
heal those cuts and bruises. The kind of poison that was working so
effectively against me made me want to laugh again. Good thing I
was too tired to go into another fit of laughter. What made so much
damage to me was magic of the light—an irony I couldn’t ignore.

Only a witch would be able to make such a
poison and a powerful one at that. It involved harvesting the
light, subjecting it into reality, quantifying it, and then using
it as a basis for the poison. What better way to defeat the
darkness than to use the light? Brilliant. And so damn simple. If I
was a lesser being, I would have died the moment his blade came
into contact with me.

I stared at the white light. It was off
though. Light magic was yellow, even red. But not white. It felt
like light magic, tasted like it, and worked like it, but it wasn’t
quite it. That was something I needed to think about long and
hard—just not right now.

I focused even more on the white light
traveling through my body and leaving a path of destruction in its
wake. Sweat gathered across my skin, sending shivers to follow
their trail as they traveled down. My breathing hitched and I
grunted as I forced the light to surface on my skin. A scream tore
through the empty office and I was barely aware that it came from
me as I did one last final push. Giving birth naturally to a child
would have been less painful than this. Not that I would ever know
for sure.

The poison created a path of scorched flesh
as it made its way outside. Eventually, the sounds of beads hitting
the linoleum floor mixed in with the scent of burnt flesh. I
slumped against the wall I had propped myself against and watched
as the beads of light rolled around the floor. They lit up the
floor with a beautiful white light as they moved around and it was
mesmerizing in a way.

I carefully went to pick one up and pulled
back in a conditioned response as it burned my index finger. The
little beads were burning hot which explained the excruciating pain
and exhaustion. My body was working overtime to heal my body.

I slumped further back against the cool wall,
completely drained. Was it possible to grow numb from exhaustion? I
couldn’t even lift a finger, let alone get back to my apartment. I
nodded off just like that.

Cool hands pressed against my cheek and I
blinked open my bleary eyes and stared right into vivid hazel eyes.
Kay was bent over me, his face empty of any emotions as he checked
over me carefully.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my mouth
dry. I licked my lips and tried to sit up. I must have fallen over
last night after I fell asleep. Normally I was a light sleeper, any
movements would have woken me up. In this case I passed right out,
dead to the world around me. A baby could have taken me out with
its rattle while I was out of it.

Kay cocked his eyebrows. “When the repairman
was having trouble turning on the light, I figured you were here.
Only your powers would prevent a security company from figuring out
how their back-up generators and alarm system didn’t reboot after
the storm ended.”

I blinked, looking around the room slowly,
confused, until I looked out the window. It had to be early
morning, the sun fighting for ownership of the skies, bringing with
it a passionate fire that has always been the focus of the fine
arts. The sky had cleared up, the clouds drained and still
dissipating, or moving on after depleting their supply of rain.

Kay helped me stand up slowly. A quick body
check showed the wounds nearly healed and my body not so
surprisingly sore.

“Lord Kay, we need to leave,” a male voice
whispered impatiently. I glanced off towards the door and found
Frey standing there, his hands in his designer jeans and his hair
ruffled. He lifted a hand and ran it through his small curls in
agitation.