The Book of Black Redemption

by A L Hart

  Warmth closed in my hand and when I looked down, I saw Jera’s fingers laced in them. “You are aware it’s cold, right?” she prompted.

  “Right, sorry.”

  “Also—”

  I sensed it. Inside the shop, something spiraled through the air. On reflex, my wings snapped closed around us, something sharp colliding against the impenetrable skin and falling to the floor. Followed by another.

  Until Jera struggled from my arms and made it across the hall in that blinding speed of hers, the one thing that had yet to degenerate in her state.

  There was a gargled noise, the sound of a struggle, before a body was thrown into the dim lighting near the door. Jera stalked back towards us, eyeing the boy toppled on the floor, blond hair buzz cut on the sides, curls lopping into his face, a thin mohawk tail trailing slightly past his nape. When he seethed and lifted his head, I stumbled back.

  “Danny?”

  “Boss?” he asked equally as confounded.

  Slowly, my wings retracted. “What are you . . . what?” I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask. Gone was the round, freckled cheeks I remembered. There was something hard in his eyes, and the contraption in his grip? It strongly resembled a crossbow.

  Danny gritted his teeth, pushing to his feet as Jera stalked back to my side, neither interested nor surprised by the events. Or was that a hint of fatigue I saw in her grey palettes?

  “What happened?” I finally formulated.

  “What do you mean, boss?”

  “Well, for starters, you tried to stake me.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m still getting the hang of this thing,” he said proudly, setting it back on his shoulders and shooting me the bright smile I remembered. “Nat and I are set for training with it in a couple of hours.”

  Natalie, of course. Was she the one who’d stepped in when I stepped out? Wasn’t she always? At some point in my life, I was going to have to repay her for all the selfless things she’d done. But . . . “Why crossbow training? Was self-defense not enough?” Had Nat graduated to full blown paranoia?

  “It’s safer than a gun, and it’s effective against them.”

  “Them? Vampires?”

  “Vampires, boss,” he agreed.

  What was going on? What had I missed in four days? “Vampires tried to attack you?”

  “A’yup. They and all the others like to do that.” He turned and headed back into the shop, where only then did I notice not everything was the same. The furniture for instance, it was newer. Arranged the same only darker, sleeker. The coffee machines lining the bar area were no exception.

  Danny plopped up on one of the stools, watching me with an uncanny gleam in his eyes. There was awareness moving within them. A tongue-in-cheek, quirky smile seeming ready to be offered at any moment as he regarded me. Then his eyes flicked to Jera’s and the smile surfaced.

  “Witch, lady,” he acknowledged. “Or demon, I should say.”

  “Pest,” she returned.

  “Why would vampires try to attack you?” I steered us back.

  “Not just me. Everyone. At night, as soon as the sun goes down, they come out to play, boss. They have since the mild shortage in their food supply.”

  “Shortage? It’s been four days, what kind of shortage could happen and why?” Did we run out of time? Did I not get to close the gates in time? Jera’s hand in mine grounded me once again before I the panic rose to a hyperactive paranoia.

  “Four days?” Danny sat back, feet swinging. “Mmm, more like four and a half months. More and more humans became sick with dark energy, and I guess vampires can’t feed on those infected? Which are, like, a lot, a lot.”

  “Four . . . months?” I looked to Jera.

  “When you jump through a portal, it doesn’t always spit you out congruent with the timeline you left.”

  “How many?” I asked, turning it over in my head, looking to Danny. “How many are infected with dark energy?”

  “Well over a million,” he said somberly, looking away. Then, brightly, “But those who came here, I assured them that you were off fixing things, boss.”

  I stared at him. I saw his lips moving, but all I could think of was what Inoli had said. I couldn’t heal everyone on a large scale, and those who were infected with the dark energy were bound to meet a gruesome death.

  And apparently . . .

  Apparently that was well over a million.

  Ch. 12

  He caught us up on everything, and what he had to say only seemed to become more and more dreadful by the minute. People across the United States were most affected, the third worlds second. The only ones who managed to somehow come out unscathed by dark energy were those in the United Kingdom. London, to be exact. And due to the largely uninfected humans in that capital, there was a massive expunge of the vampires, HB eradicating and driving them to out by the thousands. Which posted most of them in the US, where apparently there’d been a bit of a bump in HB’s efficiency due to an incident in Arizona.

  He’d received all of this information from Vincent, which made since. The vampire archivist originally hailed from that sliver of the world, his family having been something of nobility.

  It wasn’t until there was an attempt on Danny’s life that Natalie saved him—and proceeded to demand to know everything. Which he’d told her. It was her, Danny, Vincent and Elise that managed to keep the shop functioning—though Danny stressed his prime involvement.

  It hadn’t taken long before Natalie’s self-defense classes became a notch above hardcore as Vincent taught them everything they needed know about what it took to take out those like him. Now the crossbow made perfect sense.

  “Coffee?” the boy offered, but that only drew both our eyes to the long string of coffee mugs hanging from the bars awning.

  We all feel silent then. Ophelia, she’d put those mugs up. Each one belonged to one of the customers I’d helped, a friend. If Lia really was Jinxy—then why had he bothered to do something so . . . human?

  But I knew where Danny’s head was.

  And so I filled him in on our expeditions, told him how what we perceived as four days had been four months for him, and most important, I told him about Tathri. I didn’t know where the Imperial Beast was or what his endgame was (outside of killing Jinxy). But I told Danny what he meant to the creature. How he remembered what the boy did for him, and that all in all, he wanted nothing more than to protect him.

  “Don’t need protecting, boss.”

  “You’re eleven.”

  He grinned wide. “Twelve.”

  I ran a hand through my hair, letting it all sink in. I’d opened a portal, was back in Wamego, four months had passed here, and there were millions of humans whose fate was practically sealed. And the number was hiking the longer the cracks remained in the gateway.

  “How?” I turned to Jera. “How do I patch up the cracks. No one ever filled me in on that part.”

  She shrugged. “Was no need to.”

  “Well there is now.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I’m asking! We have to go back, Jera. We have to do what we were originally supposed to do.” Not only that, but there was also the part where Tathri was sure Jinxy’s goal was to destroy both worlds. The longer we stood here, the more people got infected, and if time was any indicator, being in the Shatters for one day equated to one month here, and the spread of the dark energy was above three hundred thousand each month.

  One day in the Shatters, three hundred thousand deaths bound to ensue.

  Inoli had made it fairly clear there was no grand way to heal infected humans on a large scale. Only one by one, and at most, two by two. But over a million?

  I was pacing now, Danny watching me with a calmness that shouldn’t have been in someone so young. I didn’t tell him the part about Ethan and how Tathri had gotten in the boy’s head, had him live out a hundred years of life elsewhere. Mostly because I hadn’t told Jera close to anything about what the Imperial Beas
t had told me, and she too was watching me slowly digress into a panic.

  “You need the blood of all Imperial Beasts to heal the cracks in the gateway,” she said then.

  “Their blood? How . . . where—”

  “Breathe, Peter.”

  “I am!”

  “No, you’re losing your head.”

  “Jera, thirty minutes ago I was fighting a dragon. Of course I’m losing my head! I’m surprised it hasn’t happened literally!”

  She smirked at this.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Slightly.”

  “How many Imperial Beasts are there?”

  She shrugged again. “Less than one hundred? No one’s really sure of their origin, aside from the fact the Maker made them the same as he did the rest of the immortals.”

  So she really didn’t know that Imperial Beasts were fragments of the Maker’s emotions, personality, hardship. And it wasn’t reassuring, seeing as there were countless emotions out there. Who knew how many the Maker had pulled from himself?

  “How are we supposed to find them if we don’t even know how many there are? Also, don’t they . . . die and hibernate in people until they’re strong again? What if half of them are dead somewhere? Ahhh . . .” A groan escaped me as reality set in harder.

  “I don’t know how I opened the portal,” I said. “We can try again after we get Niv, but we can’t waste time training for it. If I can’t open the portal—” And since I couldn’t teleport to another world. “—we’ll go and ask Inoli.”

  I remembered Danny then. I couldn’t leave him alone a second time. Especially not with this vampire problem going on. Let alone running the shop.

  “You’re good, boss. Vincent took care of documentations and he helps keep the shop running. Not more than me, of course, but well enough. Natalie, though, you have to get her to stop breathing down my neck.”

  “She does that.”

  “I can handle things here. I have for four months and I will keep on until you come back. You are coming back, right?”

  There was the dependent, concerned adolescent I remembered. “Of course I am. But first, Jera and I have to pick up Niv and convince her to return with us.” My mind was scrambled, impatient. I felt as if a clock was ticking in my blood, each second pulsing with a deadly energy I couldn’t expel.

  We needed to go. We had to hurry and fix this. All of this. I held my hand out for Jera so that I could teleport us, which was becoming a very addictive, convenient habit. It beat driving any day.

  Jera hesitated, then cleared her throat. “Actually, perhaps we should sleep. We’ll need our strength.”

  I studied her a moment. I was fully prepared to go to Niv’s, convince her to come with us, try to open the portal and if that failed, head to the Sanctuary out in Texas. But the dilapidated grey of her eyes and the loose way she held herself . . .

  I was so used to her invincibility. She was the demon of fire, and with each passing second I was watching that fire die down. I may have been energized, but she had a clock of her own ticking. And those seconds were draining her bit by bit.

  With a nonchalant nod and tight smile, I nodded. “You’re right. I am pretty tired,” I lied. “I wanted to suggest it, but thought you’d be against it.”

  She gave a small smile, playing at the bracelet I’d gifted her on her wrist as she slid from the stool.

  But as we said goodnight to Danny, all I could think about was how good I was getting at lying to her.

  Ch. 13

  When morning came, I felt dread above all others. Not a new day, new events, only tired expectation. I’d never felt more out of place in my own skin. Surreal. Unnatural. I was back in my bedroom, Jera and I getting ready in silence. I was tying my shoes, she was brushing her hair. Two mundane acts when today’s agenda would be everything but.

  It was one thing to promise to bring the faery-giant back to the Shatters with us, but if Niv didn’t remember her own parents, what would make her up and come with us?

  “People tend to want to please you,” Jera answered knowingly. “And the faery filth has more than a few screws loose. She’ll follow you to hell just for the experience if you asked her.”

  I knew she was right, and this was the very reason I was reluctant to go and retrieve the faery. But I’d promised Neer and Valen. They seemed to believe it didn’t matter that she would have to pay a price to travel through the gateways. Who was I to make the decision for them?

  With a sigh, I rose to my feet and held my hand out to her. “Ready?”

  Slowly, a smile touched Jera’s lips and I was grateful all over again that I had someone to go through this with me. Even if soon, I wouldn’t have her at all.

  “Growing fond of your gift, hm?” she teased.

  “Something like that,” I said, when what I really wanted to say was that it wasn’t handy enough. Not when I’d seen what others were capable of.

  I took one moment to memorize this room, listening to the churning of the shop below as life went on as if nothing had changed. For them, it hadn’t. How often I’d taken those moments for granted, a routine life once thought grey when really it’d been safe, simple.

  With a silent sigh, I teleported us directly to the faery’s bedroom. Niv was never one for privacy or boundaries, and it went both ways.

  When we appeared in the bedroom of grand paintings, I was instantly reminded of the werewolf I’d once assisted. While he wasn’t present, Niv was, seated at one of her easels, one paintbrush tucked between her teeth, another in her left hand working at the top of the canvas, and another in her right hand working at the bottom. Ambidextrous, it was a wonder how her images captured such perfection.

  A perfection I had little time to dwell on. I wanted to get back to the Shatters as fast as possible, work to find the Imperial Beasts, Jinxy in particular.

  “Niv,” I said.

  The faery all but flew from her seat, turning around in surprise. “Pablo!” She was dressed in her usual black blazer, a choice of blue jeans, silvery-red hair pulled back from her face in a loose ponytail.

  “Hey Niv,” I said again. “Sorry to just appear like this.”

  “Nonsense! You’re my most valued friend—next to the poor wolfman I unfortunately had to release.” She had a moment of silence before brightening all over again. “Have you come to finally inquire about my art?”

  I frowned. “Um, not exactly.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m here because I needed to ask something big of you. Something you might not like.”

  “Uh-oh.” She dropped the paintbrush from her mouth and the thing clattered to the floor.

  “No, it’s not like that. Just, it’s strange, what I’m going to ask of you. I need you to come somewhere with me. You see—”

  “Alright, let’s go..”

  “I haven’t said where yet.”

  “Or why,” Jera said sourly, displeased with being in the fae’s company, as usual.

  “I hardly care about the where. I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave my lair and procrastinate these paintings.” She glanced up at the ceiling where the constant bump and thrum of the club sounded. “Any excuse,” she emphasized.

  “I really think you ought to hear what it’s about first.”

  “What what’s about?” she asked, green eyes large, clothes paint splattered, red hair carrying spots of purple and blue.

  “Where we’re going.”

  “We’re going somewhere?!” she said gleefully and I felt Jera’s head lop onto my arm as she willed patience.

  Maybe it wasn’t a matter of convincing Niv to go to this world which carried a price to enter, but more so getting her to remember why. It was probably pointless to even stress her out with the details when she would forget minutes later.

  So I said, “Yes. We’re going somewhere.”

  Jera stepped closer to me just as Niv did the same.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Well, that depends o
n if I can open the portal.”

  “Portal, you say?”

  With another nod, I closed my eyes and tried to replicate what I’d done the day before. What had made the portal open rather make me teleport? I’d since learned panic wasn’t the answer to my manifested abilities and it wasn’t some subconscious action.

  What if it was as simple as the fact that I hadn’t wanted to teleport, I’d wanted to escape. When hurtling at dangerous speeds to a rock hard depth, my only thoughts had been to avoid impact. Leave that place entirely without another destination in my thoughts.

  Maybe the difference of teleportation and opening a portal was that one required you to think of another location while the other was a mere imagining of opening a door that led anywhere. And only when encroaching upon its threshold would I be taken there.

  I concentrated then on my dark energy, expanding it out as I focused my thoughts on nothing more than passage versus destination, and when I felt the whirl of cold energy behind me, I couldn’t help the smile I donned.

  “Very humble,” Jera mumbled. “Yet pleasing all the same. I’d hate it if we had to return to that awfully useless dark elf again.”

  With an audible sigh, I shook my head. “Of course you would, Jera. Shall we?”

  I held my hand out for Niv’s and the faery seemed startled all over again yet took it anyway. She really was one with an absence of care. I wondered then how Valen and Neer would feel seeing all in which their daughter had become. If they’d once had a lucid, fierce daughter, would they lament the remnants of her?

  It was only when I had both women in contact with me that I stepped through the dark portal and its red-rimmed edges. This time I felt the mild chill run through me, a pressure building in my head.

  When the portal spit us out on the other side, my sight blackened as it did the first time, total darkness. The only thing to keep me from a panic was the calm Jera exhibited. Right up until she said, “Peter, we have a problem.”

  “I don’t know why but I can’t see whenever I come here. It goes away after few minutes.”

  “Might be best you don’t see this.”