Darkness Hunts (DA 4) (26 page)

It was a conclusion she must have agreed with. “I am called Malin.”

“And what do you want from me this time, Malin?”

“We want what we have always wanted—your cooperation.”

“And as I seem to be saying a lot lately, it isn’t like I have much of a choice to do anything else.” I considered the shimmer that was her presence. “How did you get past Azriel?”

“The distance the reaper kept between you was foolish.” There was a hint of smugness in her voice. The Aedh might be unfeeling creatures, but they were
not
above feeling superior. “He did not realize the danger he had placed you in until you were in our grasp.”

And he couldn’t rescue me, either. For some reason, earth inhibited a reaper’s ability to track souls, so being this deep underground meant that not only would Azriel be unable to find me, but our chi connection wouldn’t work.

If he’d been frantic when I’d been confronted by the hellhounds, I could well imagine his state right now. And he’d no doubt blame himself for my capture. But even if he had been close, he wouldn’t have been able to stop this kidnapping. They’d wanted me, and one solitary reaper could not have stood up to the number of Raziq currently in this place. No matter how fierce a fighter Azriel was, it would have been six against one, and the death I’d feared at the train station would have been real and devastating.

“Look, my father sensing your damn device was
not
my fault. I didn’t warn him. I did what you asked.”

“We realize this. The device placed within you was somewhat hurried in its creation. I plan to rectify this now.”

Horror crawled through me. “Rectifying” was surely just another word for pulling me apart to adjust the thing in my heart. I’d lived through that once. I wasn’t entirely sure I could do so a second time.

“My father is no fool, and he’s managed to remain one step ahead of you lot all along. He’ll expect changes to be made to the device.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Then what is the point of making the adjustment?”

“It will provide a nice piece of subterfuge. He’ll see what he expects to see, and will not go looking for any other changes.”

Any other changes? I was
not
liking the sound of that at all. My voice shook slightly as I said, “Meaning what?”

“Meaning I plan to interweave the strands of our beings.”

I could only stare at the flame-lit shadows in horror. Weave her being through mine? What the hell did that mean? How the hell was something like that even possible?

“When you can pull apart the atoms of a being as easily as a human might a tapestry, such a task is relatively simple.”

“But—” The rest of the sentence got stuck somewhere in the thickness of my throat. I swallowed heavily and tried again. “But what does it actually
mean
?”

“It means that not only will you carry the threads of your father’s heritage, you will also carry mine.”

Was “thread” the Aedh word for DNA? Is that what she was going to do—insert her DNA into mine? What the hell would that do to me? Make me more Aedh? Make me more like
them
?

“Yes,” she said. “And no.”

“Well, that fucking answers the question, doesn’t it?”

She didn’t react to the anger in the statement. No surprise there, I guess. “You will become more fully Aedh than you currently are, and your skills will therefore be stronger, but it will not affect your overall humanity.”

The way she said “humanity” made it all too clear that she meant “emotion,” and
that
was a huge relief. As much as I’d enjoyed being with Lucian, I didn’t want to be like him emotionally. Hell, the only thing
he
seemed passionate about—aside from sex—was revenge.

“But won’t my father sense such an insertion?” I was his daughter, after all, and he could trace my whereabouts thanks to that fact. Surely that same connection would inform him that something had been altered within me.

“Your father cares as much for the human part of your nature as any Aedh ever does. As long as that is retained—however minor it might be—he will not notice the change.” The tone was still smug, and yet oddly kind. Like a parent talking to an obtuse child.

I guess if she intended to weave her DNA through mine she technically
could
be considered a parent.

“But he can read my thoughts as easily as you lot. It’s illogical to think he won’t know.”

“Which is why you will not remember exactly what we have done,” she replied. “In fact, we bet your life on this.”

Fuck, they were going to alter my memories. Then the rest of her words sank in and my gut began to churn even harder. “What do you mean, you’re betting my life on it?”

“Hieu will not risk our regaining control of the keys, so if he
does
notice the insertion, he will kill you.”

Maybe. Maybe not. After all, my father seemed overly determined to get the keys for his own nefarious reasons, and I was his only way of doing that when he had no physical form here on earth.

But then, what did I really know about the man who was my parent? He’d been one of the Raziq, had worked with them to create the keys. They surely had more of an insight to his character than I did.

“How will this insertion help you capture my father?”

“As you have noted, your father has always been one step ahead of us. Now that he knows of the device, he will work on a way to mute it.”

“Yes. And?”

“By threading my DNA through your lesser being, I will be aware of your movements, no matter where you are. If the device within your heart becomes subdued, I will still be able to find you.”

I stared at the energy of the Raziq, and felt ice crawl through me. There was more to this than that. It would
do
more than that.

“If the keys were so damn important, how the hell did you lose them in the first place?”

“We did not expect treachery.”

I snorted. “More the fool you, then. Treachery comes with any attempt at power.”

“The keys were meant to end our servitude to the portals by closing them permanently. They were not a means of power.”

The person who had control of the keys had control over the gates to heaven and hell—how could that
not
be considered a means of power? Hell, maybe
that
was the real reason Hunter wanted the keys. It wasn’t about the high council using hell as their own private prison—a stupid idea if ever I’d heard one—but rather yet another means of Hunter solidifying her power base.

“Can I remind you that it’s the reapers who have been guarding the gates? The priests who were actually supposed to guard them died out long ago.” Or rather, had died out or become Raziq.

“Just because we no longer serve or guard the portals does not mean we are free from them.”

Another statement that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

God, I thought, dropping my head onto my hands. Why in hell didn’t someone wake me? Surely this couldn’t be happening. Surely it
couldn’t
be real.

But it was. And it was a nightmare from which there was no escape. I very much suspected that not even death would help me. After all, beings who could unravel the threads of humanity could command a being to life as easily as they could kill.

“What about the device in my heart? What are you going to do to that?”

“Little more than mute its power and make it a less tangible presence. Hieu will still sense it, but only because he already knows it exists within you.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Do what you have to.” My voice was flat but not truly steady. It couldn’t be when I was all too aware of what was about to happen. “It’s not like I can do much to stop you anyway.”

“That is refreshingly compliant of you.”

I snorted. “Fighting you bastards didn’t achieve a whole lot the last couple of times, did it?”

“No, but it is in your nature to fight regardless of the wisdom of such an action. We were expecting nothing less.”

“Which just goes to prove that even those of us with thick heads get sick of constantly knocking ourselves out against brick walls.” I rubbed my arms, and felt a flicker of warmth run through my fingers. I glanced down. The Dušan’s eyes glowed with deep, angry fire. She might not be able to react against whatever the Raziq were about to do, but she was here, with me, and they could neither remove nor alter
her
. And suddenly I didn’t feel so alone.

“Then let us proceed.”

As she spoke, dark energy began to swirl around me. I braced myself, expecting the worst, but this time was very different from the last. Maybe it was simply a matter of accepting rather than fighting, but it didn’t rip through my body, tearing me apart cell by cell, until every atom felt like it was on fire and screaming in agony.
This
was more like a slip into Aedh form. The energy wove through me like a summer storm, powerful and yet oddly warm, numbing pain and dulling sensation as it invaded every muscle, every cell, breaking them down and tearing them apart, until my flesh no longer existed and I became one with the air. Until I held no substance, no form, and was little more than thousands of tiny particles floating aimlessly in the air.

Then I felt it.

A sharpness, like a knife being inserted into flesh. Pain rippled through my being, a burn that got fiercer, brighter, sharper. Silver flickered across the edges of awareness. The foreign line of particles was finer than a hair, but bright, shining, and cold. They wove through the tapestry of my being, stitching themselves to me and forever altering what I was.

Then the dark energy began putting me back together, piece by piece, until I was again on the stone, quivering and shaking and gasping for air.

For several minutes I didn’t say anything.
Couldn’t
say anything. The change into Aedh might not have been of my choosing, but it still affected me exactly the same.

In some way, that was a comfort. They may have altered strands of my DNA, but I was still reacting as I always had. At least for the moment.

My skin rippled as the Dušan crawled around my forearm, her claws creating tiny pinholes into my skin with each movement. I glanced down at her, and her head whipped around, her gaze meeting mine. There was displeasure and anger rather than concern in those dark violet depths.

I rested my fingertips against her gleaming body, gaining some measure of calm from her warm presence in my skin, then glanced up to the shimmer that was Malin and the other Raziq.

“Now what?”

“Now we return you and wait for your father to contact you.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Have no doubt that he will. Hieu wants those keys as much as we do.”

“Only
he
doesn’t want to basically destroy humanity by permanently shutting the gates.”

“No,” she agreed. “What Hieu wants would be far worse.”

Trepidation crawled through me. Her words all but echoed my earlier fears. “And what
are
his motives?”

“Dictatorship over all realms.”

“As in heaven, hell, and earth?”

“Yes.”

Fuck
. Which didn’t really seem an adequate response to
that
bit of news.

Of course, given who was relating it, maybe I should be taking it with a grain of salt. They wanted my help to capture him, after all, and maybe imparting this bit of mind-blowing news was little more than an extension of their revised plans.

“Believe what you want,” Malin said. “It is not important to us.”

And with that, the dark energy swept around me again, shifting me from flesh to Aedh in the blink of an eye. It didn’t re-form me in Stane’s bed, but somewhere dark, cold, and wet.

It was rain, I realized, after staring at it running down my arms. I was kneeling in the rain. Why the hell did they dump me in the middle of a storm?
Because they didn’t want to risk a clash with Azriel, even with greater numbers on their side
.

I sat back on my heels. The madman in my head was reacting less severely than usual, enabling me to at least look around without feeling like I was about to pass out.

Not only was I in the middle of a storm, but if the height of the moon was anything to go by, it was also the middle of the night. Obviously, I’d been in the hands of the Raziq for longer than I’d thought.

A heartbeat later, a hurricane hit, blasting my skin with heat. Azriel dropped onto his knees in front of me, his fingers cupping my cheek as his gaze met mine.

There was a whole lot of anger in those blue depths. A whole lot of guilt.

“I’m okay,” I whispered, wishing he’d just wrap his arms around me and hold me like he never intended to let go. It might be a lie, but it was one I suddenly needed, if only for a few minutes.

“You are
changed
.” The words came out tight.

“It didn’t hurt. Not this time.”

“
That
is not the point.”

No, I guess it wasn’t. And like the last time, it couldn’t be undone. Not by him, and certainly not by me.

“Just take me home, Azriel. Please.”

He swept us across the fields even before I’d finished speaking, but when we reappeared, it was in Stane’s room, not mine.

“But—”

“No,” he said, his voice sharp, almost vicious. “I allowed you to be taken once. I will
not
risk it a second time.”

And I, for one, wasn’t about to complain about that, even if I’d rather be home. I stepped back and rubbed my forehead wearily. “The Raziq won’t snatch me again.”

“I didn’t mean the Raziq.”

I stared at him blankly for several heartbeats, then fear struck anew and I began to shake again. God help me, with everything else that had happened, I’d forgotten about our faceless madman.

But he was still out there, still after me.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cope. Damn it, why wouldn’t everyone just leave me the hell alone? Was that too much to goddamn ask?

Azriel caught my hands and tugged me into his embrace. I closed my eyes and leaned my cheek against his chest, listening to the rapid pounding of his heart. It felt like heaven. Like I was home.