Darkmoon (#5) (The Cain Chronicles) (13 page)

“Is this about Abel?”

“This is about
you
, Seth,” Rylie said. “You and me. I need space. That’s all.”

“You know I’m just looking out for you,” he said, softer than before. “You mean everything to me. If something happened to you, or the babies…”

“I’m not going anywhere. Okay? I just need space.” She sighed. “You’ll be happy to know that I decided to let Brody be my bodyguard after all. I think he’s someone good to have around when things are getting dangerous.”

“So you don’t want space from everyone. Just me.”

She rubbed her temples, where a headache was beginning to throb. “Maybe I do.”

Seth opened his mouth. Closed it. Paced a few more steps, and faced her again. When he finally managed to speak, his voice was so quiet that she could barely make it out over the breeze. “I’ll move your belongings into Gwyn’s room.”

He stormed away, leaving Rylie alone with the icy pond and the snow drifting from the sky.

Another moon passed. Yet another
night that Rylie spent with the pack—and Abel—instead of Seth.

He felt like he was going insane.

The first hints of spring were starting to appear. Rain and snow mingled, freezing the hills one night and melting them into a muddy mess the next. Seth spent a lot of long hours in bed, awake and alone, and watching lightning illuminate the clouds. He couldn’t seem to sleep with Rylie in another room. He wanted to be able to hold her while she was asleep, and know she was safe. Having Brody guard her door at night wasn’t good enough.

When he wasn’t worrying about Rylie’s new distance, he had plenty of other things to keep him distracted. H.R. 2076 had passed the House. Now it only needed to pass the Senate and get presidential approval—and the president had already made his support clear. Which meant that laws that could destroy the whole pack were just one step away from passing.

He went out for a run the morning after the moon with a radio strapped on his arm and new sneakers laced tightly. But the radio didn’t help his mood, either. Every one of the morning shows was talking about further riots—not just in Greenville now, but in Denver, and Las Vegas, and Boise. It was getting bad everywhere.

Seth turned off his radio and ran in silence.

Once he got moving, he couldn’t seem to stop. He did a lap around the fence and then broke out onto the highway. There was nothing but him and the road beneath his feet, his breath heaving in his chest, and his fists pumping at his side.

He wasn’t sure how long he ran, but when he made it back to the house, everyone else was awake and moving, too. Rylie and Bekah were doing prenatal yoga in the living room. It was turning into a real event: Stephanie and Crystal were there, too, stretching and posing and laughing about the names of the positions.

But when Rylie saw him watching from the doorway, her smile faded.

Seth tossed his radio into the trashcan and went out again.

Levi was talking with the rest of the pack in the back yard. None of that was Seth’s business—let Abel deal with them.

He blew past them without stopping.

How was it possible to be surrounded by people and yet feel so lonely? Seth couldn’t share his thoughts with Rylie or his brother. Gwyn was still too distracted by her crumbling body. And the one person he considered to be a real friend, the guy who had been best man at his wedding, Yasir, wasn’t even responding to calls.

Seth finally stopped running when he reached a hill overlooking the house. He pulled out his phone and called Yasir for what had to be the twentieth time since the wedding.

He only got the answering machine.

“Goddamn, Yasir,” he yelled into his phone. “Where are you?”

He hung up and flung the cell phone into the snow. It didn’t matter if he had it anyway. Yasir hadn’t called him back since the wedding, and he wasn’t going to call back now.

Seth started jogging up the other side of the fence, but he stopped when he saw a girl walking toward him. It was James Faulkner’s apprentice, Brianna.

“Hi,” he said, eyes narrowing. “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m looking for you, actually,” she said. “I’ve been curious to get a closer look at you, but you’re always busy with something.” Brianna tried to step close to him, but Seth stepped away before she could get within arm’s reach. “Why can’t I read you?”

Seth took another step back. “Wait, what?”

“You’re not a witch or a werewolf. I always know.” Brianna pulled her head scarf off and tucked it halfway into a pocket so that it hung near her hip. “I’m not very powerful, but that’s something I’m good at. Reading people. Well, reading creatures. You can’t really call demons people. So what are you?”

“Uh,” he said.

“You’re not an angel,” she went on, fluffing out the flat spot the scarf had left in her hair. “You’re too short anyway.”

Short? Irritation pricked at the back of his neck. “I’m taller than you.”

“Yeah, but angels are
tall
, like James.” She lifted a hand well over his head. She looked like a pixie from head to toe, like she might flit into the sky at any moment. “I think you must be a kopis. I’ve only ever heard about them.”

“Well, yeah,” Seth said. “I’m a hunter, but I don’t think that’s a
creature
—”

“So that explains it. Rylie’s babies. One of them is a werewolf, and one of them is a kopis.”

He stared. “
What
?”

A new voice rose behind him. “Excuse me.”

Seth turned. James Faulkner was walking up the hill to join them, wearing a long woolen pea coat and leather gloves. The contrast of his white hair against the black jacket was striking, especially with all of the new blooms popping up on the hill.

James was preceded by an unsettling feeling of wrongness. Something about him made the back of Seth’s neck itch, almost in a demonic way, but there was also an aching at his crown, a tension down his spine—a mix of sensations that Seth instinctively understood didn’t belong together.

“Hey.” Brianna shrunk into her coat. “What’s up?”

“I think I told you to watch the spell in the cellar,” James said, his voice cool as the breeze.

She shut her mouth, nodded, and hurried away.

Seth would have been grateful that the witch had driven her away, except that it meant he had to deal with James instead. Abel claimed that James wasn’t dangerous to Rylie. And if he could restore Gwyn to life, then all the better. But Seth wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s company. Especially not a total stranger’s.

“Thanks,” Seth said, and he moved to leave.

“Just a moment. I wanted to talk to you,” James said. Seth kept walking, but the witch followed, keeping pace alongside him on the muddy ground. “Am I to understand that you’re the father of Rylie’s twins?”

They hadn’t gotten the paternity test back yet, but Seth said, “Yes, I am. Why?”

“The legislation has me…concerned. Not just the registry, or the possibility of indefinite detention. The likelihood of children being removed from supernatural parents.” James stuck his hands in his pockets, gazed out at the rolling hills of the ranch, and heaved a sigh. “This is a disaster. Thinking of all the families that will be separated, families that may have only committed the crime of existing, is distressing.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“I have a way to hide you, Rylie, your children, and the entire werewolf pack. Permanently. You will all be safe from the Union, the OPA, and any other enemies that you might face.” A smile touched James’s lips. “Are you interested?”

James took Seth driving into
the mountains. The witch had warned him that they would be on the road for quite some time, but when they passed the six hour mark and kept going, Seth started to worry. And he only grew tenser as they entered territory that belonged to the Union. They passed a black sign with white lettering that said they were on private property, and continued on the road anyway.

By the time James stopped the car, they were in the midst of dense trees, and night had fallen again. “Here we are,” James said, stepping out of the car. He grabbed a flashlight out of the trunk.

Seth didn’t have to look hard to see the cameras in the tree. The tiny red lights were a giveaway. “And where is ‘here’? This is Union land.”

“It used to be, yes. Don’t worry about the cameras; they have no signal. Follow me.” James led Seth farther from the road and deeper into the forest. Wet pine needles crunched under their feet. “Tell me, Seth, what do you know of Heaven and Hell?”

Seth thought back to the Bible his mother kept in their childhood home. They had never been very religious, but the book had been passed down by his great-grandparents anyway. Eleanor had a healthy fear of God, but no time to worship. Yet it had been the only book in the house, so Seth read it front to back more than once. It was how he taught himself to read. There wasn’t much mention of Hell in the Old Testament—his favorite part. It did mention a place called Sheol, which Seth understood was a general way of talking about the grave.

“I don’t think Heaven and Hell exist,” he said honestly. “They’re just metaphor.”

“You believe in werewolves and demons, but not Hell? Do you believe in God?”

“Sure,” Seth said. “I mean, I think so. But some kind of afterlife? Death could never be that simple.”

“You have at least one part of that right.” James peeled off one of his gloves with his teeth and extended his hand toward Seth, palm facing the ground. “Here. I have to walk you through the wall.”

Seth glanced around the dim forest. He saw deer droppings and the shape of an owl in the nearby tree. There weren’t any walls at all. “What are you talking about?”

“Trust me,” James said.

Reluctantly, Seth took James’s hand. The witch stepped forward. There was a soft pop in Seth’s ears, and James immediately released him and put the glove back on.

The forest looked exactly the same as it had before Seth heard that strange, quiet noise. Except now the darkness under the trees was a little bit darker, especially toward the north. “Let’s get inside,” James said, striding toward the shadows.

Inside? Inside where?

Before Seth could ask, James ducked under a tree branch and disappeared into the darkness. It took a moment for Seth to realize that it was a tunnel sloping sharply into the earth.

The tunnel was short, but so steep that Seth struggled to keep from falling. He kept one hand on the wall of dry soil at his side to help maintain his balance. They reached the bottom, and James shone his flashlight on the back of the tunnel to reveal a doorknob.

“Watch your head,” he said, pushing open the door.

There was a large cave on the other side, which seemed to have been converted into some kind of weird office space. A generator in the corner powered a row of computers. The image of a door was carved into the far wall, although there were no hinges or handle. Just an archway with swirling symbols, almost prehistoric in appearance. Caveman drawings.

“What is this place?” Seth asked. “What does this have to do with Heaven and Hell?”

“Nothing. Everything.” James closed the door behind them, sat down at one of the terminals, and began to type. “Here’s what you need to know: Hell is real. Heaven is real, too. There are at least seven levels of each that we know about, and we call them dimensions. The Union has trade routes between them.”

“You said ‘levels.’ Does that mean Hell’s below us? Like, really underneath?”

James shook his head. “No, they’re parallel dimensions.” He glanced up at Seth as he continued to type. “This is common knowledge. All kopides know this.”

“I’m a kopis, and I’ve never heard of this before.”

“I suppose you haven’t spent enough time around other kopides, then,” James said. He flipped a switch on the desk. The generator hummed and shook the floor beneath Seth’s feet. “But while most people know about Heaven and Hell, most people only know about the one mortal plane that we’re on. They don’t realize that there are others. Parallel Earths.”

The cables leading from the desk to the walls began to hum, and an instant later, the primitive symbols on the wall began to glow. Seth only realized that they were meant to depict humans when the symbols walked up the doorway to hunt blocky, pictographic animals.

He rubbed his eyes, convinced that he had to be imagining it. But when he looked again, they were still walking, still hunting.

A line of warm light appeared within the carved frame. The rock shimmered.

“What’s happening?” Seth asked.

James had to raise his voice to be heard over the humming. “You’ll see.”

Light flared, and when it faded, there was nothing on the other side but another cave, just like the one Seth was standing in, although the computers were absent. The generator’s whirring dropped to normal levels. The gold light faded. The pictographic hunters stopped mid-motion.

“Is that it?” Seth asked, creeping toward the new path between the caves. They weren’t quite a mirror image of each other. The other cave was narrower and longer, and no door blocked the path leading out on the other side.

He glanced back at James, who gave him an encouraging nod.

Taking a deep breath, Seth stepped over the threshold.

He had half-expected something weird to happen when he reached the other side, but he felt nothing weirder than when he stepped between rooms at the Gresham ranch. The air was cool and dry. It was equally quiet. After James’s talk of parallel Earths and that glowing light, he had expected something momentous—but it was just an extension of the other cave.

“That’s a long way to go for a prank,” Seth said as James typed at one of the terminals.

“Just a moment. I’m going to make sure the door stays open before I follow you.”

Seth gave a skeptical look at the pictograms. He must have imagined them moving. “Other dimensions,” he muttered. Crazy talk.

James hit a key and followed Seth to the other side. They walked up the path leading out of the cave. Seth smelled the sweet perfume of pollen, and birdsong echoed off of the slanted walls. When they got far enough along to see light, he spotted a few nests built into the nooks and crannies of the rock.