Darkness Calls (23 page)

“I’m no slave,” I said.

“Then they’ll kill you,” she whispered. “Or try to control you.”

“Not me.” I strode forward until I stood face-to-face with the old woman. “Not Grant. Not anyone on this world.”

Grief ravaged her face. “So we said, when the Aetar first came.”

Mary swayed again, placing her palm against her eye. Her grip on the pendant loosened. Grant tried to hold her close, but her knees buckled.

“They’re coming,” she whispered, and let go of the necklace.

I caught the old woman as she fell, and lowered her gently to the floor. She was still conscious but mumbling nonsense, her eyes distant, farseeing. Mind swimming free again. Just a little crazy. But not
that
crazy, I realized.

Grant knelt awkwardly beside her, utterly stricken. He let go of his cane, and both his hands hovered over the old woman, trembling. Like he was afraid to touch her.

Zee jerked backward against my skin, all the boys swimming with unease.

“Damn,” I whispered, trying to process everything she had said. If it was lies, Grant would know. But from the look on his face, everything she had said was true. As true as she knew it to be.

“Maxine,” Byron called urgently. I glanced at Grant, but his focus was still on the old woman. I pushed away, moving quickly across the apartment. I did not see Byron until I was in the doorway. He stood at the top of the stairs, hands clenched into fists. Killy was still unconscious.

I joined him, and looked.

A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the wall. Shadows so thick I could not see his face. I knew him, though. I would have known him anywhere.

“Old Wolf,” I whispered.

“Sweet girl,” he rumbled, and slid down the wall to his knees.

CHAPTER 14

M
Y mother never spoke about the men in our family. Their existence had the quality of a fable, or myth; no woman in my bloodline discussed the father of her child. Not ever. Not in the journals they kept, not in the lore. Even sex was a taboo subject. I had to learn about it from reading books in the library or snatching glimpses of Cinemax on hotel television late at night while my mother was out hunting zombies.

Made sense, in retrospect. Sex and men led to babies. A baby meant death, murder—a hard good-bye.

My grandfather sat at the bottom of the stairs, legs stretched in front of him. I sat at his side. We held cups of hot tea. I did not drink, but Jack sipped his with great care. A long scratch covered the side of his face. He needed a shave, a shower. His messenger bag was gone. No sign of the shotgun. He trembled every time he took a breath, and I listened to the rattling in his chest with unease.

“I was told you had been captured,” I said.

“A lie,” Jack replied quietly. “But had he found me, he might have released me, anyway. Torture is a limited pleasure for my kind. To hurt us, you must find the heart of what keeps us sane, then take it.” A grim smile touched his mouth. “So I, like a fool, came seeking you.”

I leaned against him, ever so slightly. “He’s already done a good job tracking us. At this point, I don’t think it matters where we go or who we’re with.”

“He plays,” Jack murmured. “He tests and toys, and marvels at what we are, and what we have become. All of us have changed, my dear. Your bloodline. Me. Grant, too, is a quality that should not be.”

I frowned, wondering what he meant by all that, but before I could ask, I heard movement at the top of the stairs. Grant, gazing down at us. His gaze darkened when he focused on Jack. “Killy is awake.”

“We’ll be right there,” I said, but he did not acknowledge me. Just backed away, still watching the old man with disquieting thoughtfulness.

Jack didn’t seem to notice, but I suspected that was out of self-preservation. “Is this Killy the young lady you just dragged screaming from my home?”

“She had an interesting reaction to Mary,” I replied, standing slowly. “How long do you think we have?”

“Moments or hours.” Jack rose with me, sighing. “No longer than that. He never had patience.”

“Or a sense of self-preservation. He’s reckless.”

“Reckless or desperate, or perhaps a little mad.”

We started climbing the stairs, leaving our teacups on the step. I offered him my arm. He took it with a faint smile, which faded when I said, “I know what he did. Before, to one of my ancestors. I know he arranged her murder.”

Jack stopped climbing, and stared at me—his expression unfathomable. I thought for certain he would ask how I had discovered that crime, but instead he said, “It was the final act. It was why I finally arranged his incarceration.”

“And the boys? Tracker, helping raise her baby? Oturu? I would have liked knowing that.”

“There is too much history,” Jack said heavily, beginning to climb the stairs again. “Too much, my dear. Ten thousand years of stories in your blood. All you can truly know is yourself.”

Easier said than done.

Killy was still on the landing, a pillow under her head and a bottle of water on the step above her. Byron sat with her. He tensed when he saw Jack. He had never been able to relax around the old man, nor could Jack look the boy in the eye. Seemed to me that he pretended the teen did not exist as he stared down at the woman, whose eyes fluttered open to stare directly into his face.

“Hell,” she said hoarsely. “Another one.”

Jack’s nostrils flared, and grim amusement passed through his gaunt face. “I could say the same about you.”

“He won’t hurt you,” I said quickly, sensing some alarm in her gaze.

Killy tried to sit up, and Byron reached out to help her—stopping just before he made contact. He could not look at her face, but I thought it was shyness that kept his gaze down. A restrained, quiet, and terrible shyness.

“I should have ditched you folks,” she muttered. “Self-preservation, my ass. I’m safer on my own.”

Maybe, maybe not. “How’s your head?”

She stopped trying to stand and gave me a look that would have been tough—even fearless—had the muscles around her left eye not begun twitching furiously. “It burns,” she said slowly. “I don’t know if it will ever stop. Where that woman has been, what she has gone through, can’t exist.”

“You saw it?” Jack asked carefully.

“She projects it. I can feel the edges even now. Like . . . razors are growing in my brain.” Killy shuddered, rubbing her arms. “I saw death. I saw her kill. I saw her with a woman and baby, being hunted. She was younger then. That old woman was young like me. I saw other babies—”

Killy stopped, her hand flying over her mouth. She looked down, sucking deep breaths into her lungs, and Byron hugged his stomach, rocking slightly as he watched her. Jack also looked ill, but for a different reason. I saw memory in his eyes. I recalled Mr. King’s words.

I looked into the apartment and found Grant watching the old man. His gaze was cold, hard. Remembering the same thing, no doubt.

“I knew some things about the world,” whispered Killy, behind her hand. “I thought I knew enough.”

“Jack,” said Grant quietly. “We need to talk.”

The old man rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose we do, lad.”

Grant turned and limped deeper into the apartment. Jack followed. Killy did not seem to notice, but Byron watched both men, then me, with solemn, knowing eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “This is not something you should have been involved in. I know . . . everything happening seems strange—”

“I’m not alone,” interrupted the boy softly, then hesitated, as if that by itself should be explanation enough; and it was, I understood. “Strange is okay.”

It was not okay. He deserved better, but I had nothing to offer. I could not send him away. I knew things about Byron that he did not.

I knew he was not entirely human.

I squeezed his shoulder, gently. “Take care of her, kid. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I entered the apartment. Found the men in the kitchen. Mary was no longer there—in the bedroom, maybe. I thought I heard a soft humming melody behind the partially closed door.

Grant stood beside the table, one hand gripping the back of a chair. Jack leaned against the counter, arms folded over chest. Both men, watching each other warily.

“I think it’s time for some answers,” Grant said. “In fact, I insist.”

“You insist,” Jack murmured, and ran his hand over his mouth, the circles under his eyes deepening as though beneath his skin lived nothing but shadows.
“It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.”

“Stones have been known to move and trees to speak,” I continued, picking up where Jack left off—a recitation from
Macbeth
, which my mother had insisted I study. Part of my education into human nature.

“What is the night?” Grant added, softly. “What is this, Jack?”

“Almost at odds with morning,” he whispered. “Almost at odds with everything this world has dreamed. Such words, it dreams. Your Shakespeares and Michelangelos, and your clever Einsteins. And earlier, earlier still, such lovely feats of brilliance that this was and is the golden empire we had dreamed, only its treasures were of the mind, and my kind did not stay long enough to value all it offered.”

Jack’s shoulders sagged, and when he looked at me, briefly, there was a grief in his eyes that reminded me of every time he had ever said my grandmother’s name. “I was a fool. I thought things could go on as they were. I wanted that so badly, to have a chance with you. As normal people do, my dear.” He hesitated. “I hoped no one else would notice Grant.”

Grant slid his fingers through mine. “So someone has. Why the extreme reaction?”

“Extreme?” Jack smiled bitterly. “Is there anything extreme about eradicating a disease, or protecting life against a natural disaster? You do what you must. You destroy what can hurt you . . . or you harness it.”

“Grant is a man,” I protested. “He’s not a force of nature.”

“Isn’t he? My kind are victims of their own existence, little more than energy. And you, lad . . . you manipulate energy. You could manipulate
us
. You could
kill
us, with nothing but a whim. And not just us, but any living creature. You have that power.” Jack gave the man a chilling look. “Lightbringer. You, who can force light into any heart. Light
or
darkness.”

Grant twitched. “Don’t call me that.”

“In the priesthood you were called
Father
. What I just named you—
Lightbringer—
is more of the same. It is part of your identity, whether you acknowledge it or not.”

I shook my head, frustrated. “You’re skirting the essentials. There were others, like Grant. What happened to them?”

Jack hesitated. Grant said, very quietly, “You murdered them.”

Sickened me to hear those words said out loud. Horrified me when the old man did not deny it. My grandfather. My grandfather, who only looked human. But worse, I was not surprised. I had already tasted fragments of the truth—out in the dead circus, the forest—and the pieces began falling into place. I watched Jack shudder and swallow hard, as though ill.

“We were desperate,” he said. “We had no sense of right and wrong. Morality came later, after watching human-kind, and living in their skins.”

Grant stood so still, pale, his knuckles white and straining. Breathing heavier than usual, as though his lungs strained. I was afraid for him. He looked unhealthy. My imagination conjured cold breezes wracking his chest with pneumonia; or blood vessels bursting in his brain from the strain of using such force on Cribari.

Unbonded.
Mr. King’s voice, hissing a trail of unease into my brain.
Untaught.

“Jack,” Grant said, his gaze searching the old man’s face. “How desperate could you have been?”

“More than you can imagine,” he said, brokenly. “We needed the bodies. And the Lightbringers . . . would not share their people. Nor could we hide from them in human flesh.”

Instinct crept—and memory. “You told me they were the first. First of what?”

Grant gave me a sharp look, but I ignored him, unable to tear my gaze from Jack. I was watching him die, I thought—in little pieces, each word he spoke cutting him to the bone. He closed his eyes, turning his face from me—and I knew, in that moment—I knew what he was going to say.

“They were the first humans,” he whispered. “Found on one world. One distant, now-dead world. All humans, my dear—every human—is descended from them.”

“No,” Grant said roughly. “Impossible.”

“We stole their bodies,” Jack told him, relentless, with a growing heat that was desperate—frantic to confess, to unburden. “We bred them, molded their flesh. And when a particular breed of human was conceived, a world was found through the Labyrinth, and seeded with that strain of flesh. Allowed to evolve, and
become
. Time moves differently in the Labyrinth. What took millions, billions, of years, we could have instantly, merely by opening and closing a door.”

Jack finally looked at me, his gaze ancient and terrible. “Humans were brought to this planet as nothing but proteins and molecules. Thrown into the hot sea and left to gestate. Part of the lab, the farm. The
grand
experiment. A reservoir for bodies.”

My brain felt numb. I thought I might be sick. “You told me your kind brought humans to this world to escape the demons.”

“Truth. But there were humans already here, my dear, and those we brought with us were more . . . advanced. They formed an empire in the south, but it was destroyed during the war with the demons. The survivors scattered.

“But
you
,” he went on, staring at Grant. “The Lightbringers were long dead before that. Guardians, truth-sayers, judges, warriors. They were all those things, and more. And we killed them. We hunted them. We erased every memory of their civilization, and those we did not murder, we enslaved.”