The Book of Broken Creatures: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 1)

by A L Hart

  Ophelia was reeled from her reverie with a small sneeze, in which she then gave an apologetic look, gearing up all of her attention to the items.

  “Now you’re going to want to be careful with these,” Vincent cautioned. “Some of the information here was founded decades ago, some of it a measly ten days ago. Nevertheless, still valuable.” He started with the long scroll I was eying.

  When he unfurled it, it turned out to be a map. Yellowed with age, black lines faded, its complicated design resembling a cartography of multiple locations.

  “This here is the most recent map of HB’s compound down in Wichita. Renovations are implemented routinely on the upper levels, but as for the lower ones, those where they secure their captives and database, those floors rarely change. Particularly because Wichita’s compound is one of HB’s lessers. Therefore, the layout of the sublevels can be deemed accurate while those of the upper levels, you’re going to want to approach with an open mind, as there’s a very real chance it’s nothing like what’s displayed here.”

  Ophelia and I bent our heads over the map.

  “An acre?!” I practically screamed. “Their smallest compound is an acre large? Tell me that’s just how much land it sits on.”

  Vincent shook his head sadly. “Might you recall what I told you about the impossibility of getting past their heavily secured perimeter? I may have spared you the small detail of the compound’s size.” At my glower, he added, “Elise is a nurturer of hope. She’d have scolded me plenty had I crushed yours.”

  Unbelievable.

  I glanced back to the map bitterly. Doubt sidled in its crippling hands.

  “This is nothing,” Ophelia said, catching my eyes. By the steadiness of hers, I saw she actually believed it. “Jera and I have infiltrated larger, more lethal domains.”

  Spoken as though breaking and entering was a pastime activity.

  When Vincent too turned his curiosity on her, she explained, “It’s as you said, this is one of the smallest compounds HB owns. There must be a reason for that, the greatest one being the immortal population in Kansas simply isn’t as saturated as those in perhaps Chicago or New York. When Jera and I came to this world, we witnessed the abundance of our kind in both of those capitals. Wichita is perhaps half, maybe even a fourth of them. Because of Kansas’s low immortal population, they wouldn’t exhaust their forces here. Which means, while their perimeter may be heavily secure, it’s not secured by manpower but—”

  “A security system,” I guessed.

  Ophelia nodded. “I’m sure you remember the incident with the escalator at the mall, Peter.”

  Now I nodded. The thing had stopped the second Ophelia had stepped onto it.

  “My ability involves the expulsion of heavy amounts of dark energy. But in your world, for some reason, it manifests on a frequency similar to that of lightning, or electricity.”

  “Like the storm that first night.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Which means—”

  “I can easily disable their security system,” she said, smiling proudly.

  I found myself returning it, the most optimistic I’d felt in days.

  No sooner, the smile fell. There was one flaw with Ophelia’s plan. “That nuller on your neck significantly reduces your dark energy’s discharge. And not only that, but you can only expel the lightning when it’s in defense.”

  The look she gave me said otherwise.

  “Right?” I prompted hesitantly.

  “Not if you learn to use your gift. Properly.”

  The words hung between the two of us as we regarded one another.

  Properly. All of this time I’d just been skirting the edges of it, using it for miniscule things such as sensing other traces of dark energy around me and trying to retract my wings. I’d all but given up hope of learning to use it to fix those who stumbled into the shop.

  “Well, if he can fix my wife and I, then I’ve no doubt he can accomplish this,” said Vincent.

  Though I was every bit a fraud at this point, I actually felt the vampire’s words. Believed them. For one reason alone: I had to. The compound was massive and I was an untrained, irrelevant speck in comparison. The only way we could get past whatever electrical security they implemented was by sheer force—which we didn’t have the manpower for—or by disabling all or some of the security measures at the exact location we needed to enter.

  Which brought me around to our second problem.

  I’d told Ophelia I had no intention of killing anyone and she’d been in mutual agreement, but even though HB’s agents were significantly less than those of other cities’, they still had far more trained agents than just the two of us. We’d agreed it was a bad idea to bring Jera—or notify her of this entire ordeal, for that matter—because not only would the woman go on a killing spree, be it intentional or not, but Ophelia and I acknowledged that while HB may have wanted Ophelia alive to dissect and study, they would happily kill Jera (and myself) on sight.

  “There’s only two of you,” Vincent said, voicing my concern.

  Ophelia’s mouth twitched into something like a smile and it was perhaps the darkest look I’d ever seen on the woman. “That will not be a problem. So long as we have the element of surprise, I can be in and out of the compound in nothing more than fifteen minutes. My agility isn’t what it used to be without the collar, but between what I know and what Peter can do, I see no way for this to fail.”

  “What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked.

  Ophelia looked at me from under her lashes. “When I disable the security system, I’m going to discharge a dangerous level of dark energy; I want you to hold onto me. Like before, it’s going to supercharge you. We already know you possess the ability to make others vanish. That alone should make this ten times easier.”

  “But I don’t know how I did that.”

  “We have time to teach you. You don’t have to master it, only learn it enough to accomplish what we need.”

  The doubt was setting in again.

  “If that fails,” Vincent said, looking between us. “There is another option.” From the briefcase, he pulled out a photo and placed it sideways on the desk.

  We both eyed what may have been a woman at some point but was now something else entirely. Pallid features stared back at the both of us. Oily green eyes, an obsidian, dark cut mouth and a bizarre fall of fiery and silver hair curling over the features in wild, unkempt disarray. The apparition set my bones on ice and sent something curdling in my stomach.

  “This is the being who owns a club out in Wichita,” the vampire revealed. “She is arguably the most dangerous immortal in these parts as well as the strongest. You can ask for her assistance in this infiltration but the price will be steep, unless she directs you to another.”

  I stared at the photo a moment longer. No part of me ever wanted to come face to face with whoever this woman was. “What is she?” I asked, not bothering to mask my slight revulsion. It wasn’t that she was hideous or ghastly. Just . . . wrong. As though I were glimpsing a transient creature God accidentally created.

  “Why, she’s one of the faery-kind,” Vincent said.

  Across from me, Ophelia paled. “A last resort,” she assured.

  Vincent nodded. “A last resort.”

  Oh yes, their vaguity definitely didn’t concern me.

  With that, the meeting was over. He left the map in our hands, having us promise to protect it with our life as it was the only one. I put it upstairs in a chest on the top bookshelf, the one that housed Mom’s favorite jewelry.

  Downstairs, Ophelia was waving Vincent off, and I only just caught the sleek black car as it disappeared down the street.

  She turned to me. The radiance she emitted, the steady, quiet confidence, made me believe we might actually have a shot at this.

  “When do we start practicing?” I asked.

  She gave one glance to the kitchen and whispered, “When she’s asleep.”

&n
bsp; I pictured the twins in my room upstairs. I pictured that protective hold Jera always enclosed her sister in when they slept.

  But then I remembered how hard it was to wake the demon up once she was in deep sleep.

  I nodded. “Got it.”

  *****

  It wasn’t like I slept these days anyway.

  While the notion in theory was terrible for one’s mental and physical well-being, I’d yet to experience a decline in either area except when the day brought me in Jera’s company.

  But in the absence of her, at 3 am in the night time, I sat wide awake at one of the booths, staring out the lounge’s large scaled windows, up at the night’s sky.

  I counted their stars, wondering which was Liz’s. She’d always been a woman for adventure. If there was something new on the horizon that she hadn’t tried, she would immediately book a first class ticket to the center of it. Something like an immortal infiltration mission would have sent her jumping through the roof. It didn’t matter that she was thirty-two, out to pursue such a scientifically grounding career in medicine. Her heart had always been wild, imaginative, and so impossibly blinding, I was beginning to wonder if maybe that was why mine had always been gray.

  Light had a habit of blanching other shades around it.

  But gray was gray. Be it dark or light. The color had always branded me. So even if I wanted to pin the blame for my stagnation on Liz’s thirst for life, the truth would always come tumbling back: her light hadn’t paled mine. My own darkness had.

  But now I was feeling it again. The feeling of toeing too close to the brightest star in galaxy, feeling its rays of potent life brush against my skin, except this time, I didn’t feel as if I was fading into the gray.

  I felt as if those colors were staining me. Adding shades to my palette like never before.

  The source of it, I noted, counting somewhere in the hundreds now, was Ophelia. Her light wasn’t quite like Liz’s. It wasn’t a fiery yellow outshining the sun, but a pink so magnificent, anything that touched it would be inevitably drawn closer and closer, until it took on a color all its own.

  Was Jera ever stained by her sister’s flare? Was that why she herself burned the most deadliest of reds?

  There was likely no one answer to the reason why Jera was the way she was. All I knew was that earlier, talking and planning with Ophelia had reminded me of Liz’s radiance. Only this time, rather than feel myself paling, I felt my colors changing.

  “Peter?”

  I turned towards the woman of my thoughts. “She asleep?”

  Ophelia nodded. She was in her cotton blue night clothes, black curls somehow darker in the night light. But the silvers of her gaze shone brighter than the stars I’d been gazing up at. “We can practice in the office, if you’d prefer?” she offered.

  That was probably for the best. There was no telling what would happen, and at the very least, the lounge was one area I couldn’t risk tarnishing.

  In the office, we pushed the desk and chairs back against the walls, rolled up the rug and clicked on the sole light source: the desk lamp. It barely reached us as we sat in the middle of the floor, legs crossed, knees touching.

  “It will not be like last time,” Ophelia said matter-of-factly, wasting no time. “Tonight you’re going to search for the source of my dark energy.”

  I nodded studiously. “And the objective here is to enable you to use your ability at your own will, right?”

  “In a sense.” She scooted closer and held her hands out for mine. When I placed them in her palms, I instantly felt the black coils inside of me squirm, branching out, searching for hers. “As you know, all immortals contain dark energy, some more than others. Immortals are born, not created. And from birth, we have a main source of dark energy in which our immortality stems. Similar to a human’s heart. It’s vital. It’s our lifeline. The dark energy becomes one with us so much so that it begins to dictate every aspect pertaining to our bodies. Think of it as our blood.

  “The Maker was a being of endless power. One of his most magnificent feats was his ability to come in contact with the dark energy inside immortals and alter it. Because the dark energy became one with immortals, it became so that our thoughts, our emotions, every cell inside of us, operated under dark energy. Thus, when you’ve the ability to alter dark energy, you’ve the ability to alter the very design of an immortal. Think of it as a child’s building blocks. Picture a man crafted solely of them. When you learn to use your ability, Peter, changing an immortal will be similar to taking apart these blocks and rebuilding them into a new design, be it their physical bodies, their subconscious mind, down to what makes them them.”

  I now understood why the twins regarded my ability as godlike. Someone capable of compromising another being down to their very essence? Remaking them? That was a god.

  Something about this placed a chunk of unease at my core. I tried to disregard it, pull the frown from my face, but instead I found myself asking, “You’ve met this Maker, right?”

  There was a moment before she answered. “Yes.”

  What must that have been like, to come in contact with someone of such aptitude? I suppressed a shiver. “Why didn’t he alter you, make you able to use your gift at your own will?”

  Another pause. And then her voice chilled me. “Because I was a danger to his assets.”

  “And you’re not anymore?”

  “No.”

  So much more hung on that single word, something she would never want to tell me. Something I knew better than to fish for.

  I changed the subject. Barely. “Where is the Maker now? If he’s this great, why isn’t he fixing up the patches between our worlds? Why aren’t people going to him with their problems? And seeing as a succubus’s price pertains to dark energy, shouldn’t he be able to relieve Jera’s?”

  Ophelia shook her head, silvers marred with remorse and trinkets of sadness. “The prices paid when entering and leaving the two worlds may tie into our dark energy, but they’re enforced by something else entirely. Something we cannot undo.”

  I knew by the slight hitch in her tone I was at my wick’s end with questions. But she hadn’t answered the other. “The Maker. Where is he?” I wanted to talk to him if possible. If I couldn’t alter myself, if I couldn’t make myself normal again, then maybe he could.

  “Dead.” Were her eyes glistening?

  Whoever this Maker was, Ophelia must have cherished him. Which didn’t make any sense, because based on how Jera spoke of him upon their first days here, she’d loathed every fiber of his existence. So much so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that she’d been the cause of his death.

  But question time was over.

  Ophelia shifted and composed herself. “It does not matter,” she said. “Nothing in the many worlds ever truly dies. That the Maker’s gift is now yours is testament to that enough. So we should make the best of it. Shall we?”

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I obeyed, and for the most part, I knew the drill. Eyes closed, mind emptied, body relaxed, identify the divide of dark energy and my body’s regular energy, i.e. beating heart, pumping blood, five senses.

  Once I was in the desired state, Ophelia flipped our hands so that mine were on bottom and hers on top.

  “Before, we focused on your wings. Tonight, I need you to focus on the dark energy inside of yourself. Last time, you had difficulty identifying the course of your dark energy, but don’t worry, it’s different for everyone. For me, my main source is located behind my heart in a crystalized chamber. For me specifically, my energy manifests as emotions. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, ecstasy—it’s all compacted within that chamber and flows into my veins just as surely as blood does. But we all perceive dark energy differently. Does this make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said. In some weird, out of this world way, it made plenty of sense.

  But when I searched behind my heart, I found n
othing.

  “For you, because of your wings, I suspect your source is somewhere near your back or the core of your abdomen.”

  I scrunched up my face. Did she mean that black, diseased ball knotting around my middle like a cancerous tumor? When I moved to focus on it, it pulsed once, expelled something noxious and putrid inside of me and made my concentration writhe.

  “What is it?” Ophelia asked. “What you just did, what was it?”

  “I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for,” I said as if speaking it would make it true.

  “Describe it to me.”

  I rummaged in my memory bank for a reference. When I came away with nothing, I was left with adjectives and poor explanations. “Black. Tarry. Like a million veins beating around a ball of death. If you’d ever eaten my sister’s chili, it would be kind of like that. Food poisoning waiting to happen.”

  “It feels like poison inside of you?”

  I gave a solemn nod.

  She was quiet a moment, then, “When you go near it, does it seem . . . hungry?”

  How did she know? Each time that nebulous of gunk had opted to act, it’d behaved as if it wanted to latch onto the nearest thing in the vicinity and devour it whole.

  “Yes,” I said tentatively, not liking the direction of this.

  “Then maybe we should feed it.”

  I peeked one eye open and saw that she was serious, her face completely placid and daring. “That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” I said. I remembered in the kitchen, when the disastrous web at my core had serpentined around my heart when I’d feared Jera might try to incinerate it. I hadn’t been able to say why or how, but I’d known that had she lashed at me with intent to kill, something awful would have occurred in that kitchen. Whatever was inside of me was powerful, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt the woman in front of me.

  “I’m stronger than I look, Peter,” was Ophelia’s fearless response.

  And she looked pretty frail and delicate. She couldn’t have weighed anything more than one-twenty. Even though her strength no doubt rivaled Jera’s, there was the matter of the nuller at her neck. While it may have allowed pieces of her dark energy to shine through, there was no mistaking it, she was weaker than she’d been the first night when she’d exploded into a mass of black lightning.