by A L Hart
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But you have to take into account that I didn’t expel that explosion of lightning until after the men had closed the nuller at my neck. At peak strength, I can wipe out entire countries.”
Which was why HB wanted her.
And yet, I still wasn’t convinced.
“Why, Peter?”
My gaze fell. The reason was ridiculous in light of the stakes. I didn’t want to send my dark energy into her to . . . feed. “You once said you weren’t designed to hurt others. Well, as crappy as it is, I wasn’t either.”
Even with Jera that night. The dark energy in me had demanded I shred into her, snap those horns clean off her head and rain down misery, but even in the apex of rage, I’d been too weak to bring myself to harm her. It wasn’t even a moral dilemma. I just . . . couldn’t.
Everyone had emotions, everyone had a past. Odds were, they’d been hurt before and the thought of adding to that pain was sickening. Especially when we all had the ability to help mend it instead. Why choose bad when there’s the option for good?
Ophelia’s hands tightened around mine, urging my gaze to hers. “Would you like to know something, then?”
It amazed me how the twins could resemble one another down to the length of their elegantly straight nose and arrangement of their irises, yet harbor something so different inside.
When Jera sometimes abandoned her mask of humanity in favor of the ancient being she truly was, her face would change, and I’d see those desolate ruins of smiling teeth and bones and deadly wisdom.
Yet now, as Ophelia’s soft, silver gaze abandoned her mask of humanity, melting into her true age, I could count all of the stars I’d glimpsed earlier, clustered in the temple of those grays, and in the warm illumination was an iridescent wisdom. Badges of good she could only have earned through innumerable trenches of bad. Gazing into them actually became painful, injecting a fear that should I linger too long, I might accidentally stumble upon the meaning of life itself.
I looked away and cleared my throat. “What?”
“It’s because of your reluctance to inflict harm that I know, no matter what happens, you won’t hurt me.”
This time—I almost believed her.
We started over. I went through the process, sliding into the mindset required, until I was nothing more than an empty shell with a deplorable ball of darkness hovering in my middle.
“Keep your awareness on your source at all times,” Ophelia instructed softly into the empty shell. “And then I want you to venture towards my own. I told you its location. Now all you have to do is come in contact with it. When you do, your dark energy will scent mine, and if it is as ravenous as I presume, it will come for it. Let it.”
“Does every immortal’s dark energy want to eat their neighbor’s?”
“No.” I could hear the smile in her voice.
I still didn’t like this, but I did as instructed. I focused on the warmth of her hands and pushed my mind to encounter something more, something deeper.
Just as Vincent’s dark energy had been ambient ribbons of blue flowing throughout him, Ophelia’s trace of dark energy were ribbons of pink, twining beneath her skin. Making up her anatomy like the arteries you’d see in a doctor’s office. Mentally, I walked the path of them slowly, doing as she’d said by staying mindful of my own black orb of energy.
Her source was behind her heart, enclosed in a chamber. Which meant if I was at her arms, I merely had to follow the ribbons up to her shoulders, over to the hollow, sweet pulse at her throat, where the ribbons thinned and danced joyously despite the nuller. I trekked downward, where the veins of carnation thicked, their colors becoming transparent and tainted with tiny veins of black. I was nearing the heart.
The cancerous ball at the pit of my stomach stretched, uncoiling in vicious vines. Sensing.
“Don’t stop, Peter,” Ophelia commanded.
Practically sweating now, I ventured farther, down towards the thumping organ vitalizing everything within her. I could feel her power spiraling out, saturating her. I could feel those ungodly volts that made up her ability raising the hairs on my arm the closer I inched. This woman was made of more than dark energy, but electricity itself.
Behind the heart, I told myself.
The chamber is behind the heart.
The ribbons were tightly knotted around the organ, but I could feel their tails curling back into something much grander.
Okay. Alright.
Deep breath. Jera had said once before not to be afraid of the unknown; learn it. That was what I had to do now. Package the fear and throw it into a deep, black vault.
I did.
And then I peered behind Ophelia’s heart.
Instant regret.
I whipped around so fast and vomited so violently, lights sparked behind my eyes. Shivers ran along my skin like tiny pricks, my scalp and fingertips buzzing. My stomach felt worse than Liz’s abominable chili ever had the honor of inflicting, something sweet decaying at the back of my tongue.
Ophelia, having been much faster, had the trash can tucked beneath my mouth, her hand stroking my curls as every last bit of dinner came back up.
I’d felt Ophelia’s hair-raising volts along her ribbons, but glimpsing the source of what was practically a cup of captured lightning was nothing like glancing at the sun. It was like peering into an abyss of sheer, unfathomable energy.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I should have seen that coming.”
I shook my head, the putrid scent wafting back up to me. “It’s fine,” I rasped as I carried on projectile vomiting.
Minutes later, sitting miserably before her once more, I said, “Again.”
She looked at me under her curls. “Are you sure?”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, blinked away the disorientation and nodded. “We have to get it down.” The sooner we could carry through on the infiltration mission, the sooner we could all have our freedom.
Lips compressed, she ceded.
After undergoing the same process, I vomited a second time. Then a third time. And by the fourth try, the sun was rising and I was simply dry-heaving, my body jittery as though I’d downed five cans of Redbull.
“I think we should call it,” Ophelia said, rubbing the space between my shoulder blades.
I shook my head the same as I had all the other times. And like those times, I demanded, “Again.”
There was more I needed to accomplish than dismantling the hunter’s compound. There was more than the lives I needed to erase from their database.
Ophelia watched me and understood.
I’d asked something of her earlier.
Her tutelage. Teachings that went beyond assisting creatures that came into the shop asking for help. I needed to get stronger so that when the time came, when that demon thought to challenge my ownership of this shop and when she thought to brand me her pet, I wouldn’t be defenseless.
Jera had mocked my strength time and again. I’d convinced myself she was wrong.
Tonight had me trading sides. I was pathetic. I couldn’t get a reign on what was supposed to be a basic ability. What was the point in having this power if I couldn’t tame it?
“It takes time,” Ophelia murmured. “Especially if you want to become stronger than my sister.”
Like a stubborn, impatient student, I insisted, “Again.”
Ophelia relented, but the concern never left her eyes.
I shrugged it off, closing my eyes, following the steps. When my mind neared her heart for the fifth time, I took a deep breath. My own heart was racing and beating to an irregular tune due to the series of purging and likely the inadvertent shock therapy received from nearing her energy chamber.
At the same time, the cancerous ball had snaked one tiny vine up from its cluster and pierced it into my racing heart.
Healing it.
Because it wouldn’t let me die. Not when it too would follow.
Just like
Jera.
I scraped the thought from my mind. Focused on the heart in front of me. The pure one.
I paused, brows furrowing as an idea surfaced. What if I changed up tactics a bit?
Rather than glance behind heart with fear of holding back the cancerous energy inside of me, I invited some of it forward.
Let it glance first. Like a war game, my dark energy nothing but a pawn, a shield.
Ophelia’s hands tightened around mine, sensing as my vine of the dark substance entered her, walking along her ribbons like a beast in a chicken coup. But I didn’t sense fear in her emotional tower. More like preparation.
I found out why.
This time, when I peered behind her heart—the second I laid eyes on the crystalized, sparkling chamber wedged behind veins and cartilage—that snaking tendril of dark energy I’d poised in front of my mind’s eye attacked.
Mercilessly.
A virus splattering onto the crystal chamber, coating it in black tar, trying to probe through the walls and drain every last ounce of dark energy inside of it.
I watched. Then kept my voice low as if I might startle it. “Should I pull away?”
“No,” she whispered back. “I’m going to open one of the doors. I’m going to let the both of you inside the chamber.”
Terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
What happened to immortals if all of their dark energy was consumed? Exsanguinated humans typically died.
“And then I want you to learn the lay of my chamber, the energy,” she went on evenly. “And when you find that which hinders my offense ability, I want you to use your vine of dark energy to disentangle it, rewire it to behave the way we desire it to.”
Reluctantly, I nodded, not that I understood half of what she meant. How do you rewire dark energy? Was it like programming a computer with code? Not that I understood half of that either.
How useless was I . . .
“Good,” she said.
I knew the moment she opened the chamber because all of her ribbons of dark energy simply vanished inside of the port, as if a gigantic black hole had opened in the compartment.
It left me and my tendril of dark energy staring at the sharp, sinister aperture.
“Well?” Ophelia wondered.
I’d thought the tendril would charge into the opening with alacrity, feast on every high strung pulse of relentless spurt of energy there was, but I’d swear the vine just turned and looked at me like ladies first.
I set my lips. Here I’d thought the dark entity within me was this fearless predator, ready to posture and attack anything in sight.
Maybe this should have been a warning sign.
And maybe if I had any other option, I would have retreated. Being as it was, I shouldered past the vine, pushing my awareness into Ophelia’s chamber without giving myself a chance to bolt.
Pushing my senses into the opening was the easy part.
Handling the sudden influx of emotions was like standing under acid rain. She’d meant it when she said dark energy felt like emotions to her, because gone was the feeling of forking lightning. Enter a funhouse of joy the size of Texas. Weeping despair the expanse of the Pacific. Anger lashed its harrowing winds down against my mind, and the spritz of rage and fear were like the harsh waters of a hurricane. Ophelia’s dark energy chamber was one chaotic geostorm.
But I dug my metaphorical heels into place. I was here looking for one thing. And I would look for hours if that was what it took. I would learn each nook and cranny of this crystalized chamber. I would learn her dark energy, what prevented her from using her ability offensively, and I would somehow, some way, alter her design.
I never got the chance to search for it.
All around me, the chaos of emotions came to an abrupt halt, silence burrowing into my bones. And then the sound of something scuttling.
There was something else in this chamber with me.
Behind me, towering so high above me, its shadows stretched over my consciousness. Breathed down my neck.
I sat in the office in front of Ophelia, my eyes closed, my tongue iced. Body paralyzed. I was caged in my head—in Ophelia’s chamber of dark energy.
From the black nothingness, cold fingers closed around my mind. Pale. Boney.
Fear drenched my insides.
Hot breath grazed by my ear, spiking my heart rate. This wasn’t just dark energy anymore. This was something else. Something so terrible that the big bad inside of me hadn’t dared encroach. I now knew why.
The presence chortled. Actually snickered.
W-what was this thing?—
I am Death, it answered in my head.
We are Damnation.
This is Torment.
I was able to move again. Freedom enough to tremble so violently I heard my teeth rattling in my physical body.
A thousand blades smiled down from the darkness, something running its wet tongue along my cheek, tasting me. Learning me down to my nights spent alone in my head. I was supposed to be learning it.
Who are you, I asked it shakily.
Who are you? It challenged.
Peter.
Are you sure . . .? Another laugh, echoing off the walls of the chamber and raining around us like fallen starlight. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ophelia, Ophelia~. Cheery yet hollow. Golden but black. The voice of many twisted into one of cruel sorrow. When will she learn . . . She. Cannot. Be. Fixed.
Black lightning shattered the world around me.
I was flung across the office, my back cracking against the desk, breath knocked from me as my sight shuddered, gasped, and perspired within the blink of an eye.
That maniacal, low chortle followed me all the way into the blackout.
Ch. 18
When I came to, the world was still dark.
My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see. I clenched something soft. Warm. Feathery.
Blinking, I shifted and felt them, the wings cocooned around me tighter than my own skin. Their leathery texture had grown warm around me, creating a pocket of heat. Faintly I caught a whiff of something charring, burning.
It was a familiar sensation. One dating back to the night of the rainstorm, Ophelia’s blast of lightning—Ophelia!
I employed what little teachings I had on how to control the mammoth-sized shadows grown from my back, tapping into my fear and feeding it to the dark energy, willing it to unfurl the wings from around me.
All I received was a staticy dissonance along my spine.
I rolled onto my side instead, shoving the leather flap manually from around me. The wing snapped out and hit something, light breaking into the half-cocoon. I paid the same action to the left wing, where it was more slow to comply, dragging along the floorboards in hushed rustling.
The charring smell only grew stronger rather than fainter and I realized it wasn’t coming from inside of my cocooned haven but outside of it.
The office unfolded in pieces, my eyes adjusting to the light. It was morning now. And what it revealed left my mouth thinned to a gash. The furniture—my desk—splintered, charred, ruined. The walls, the paper was peeling, the bookshelves having fallen over, its contents scattered all across the room in a seeming path made precisely to lead towards the actual travesty.
Ophelia lay at the center of the calamity, one of the bookshelves collapsed on half her body, her pajamas in tatters.
Jera was over her, flinging the books carelessly off her form, where eventually she hooked her hand on the solid wooden case weighing down on her sister and simply sent it sailing so hard against the wall it shattered into thousands of tiny dust motes.
The room looked as though a tornado had hit it.
“What did you do?” Jera spoke in that low, feral way that echoed with blood in my ears.
I opened my mouth, looked around the room again, and realized I hadn’t heard the words the woman had spoken, rather I’d read the movement of her lips.
I couldn’t hear anything.
Blinking slowl
y, unable to claw my way up from the sludge of discombobulation, I sank down into it, doing all I could to simply manage my breathing.
Jera’s lips were moving again.
My head sagged forward.
That dark ball inside of me was shifting again, vines coiling back towards my spine, upward, where it slid into the tight, intimate pocket of my skull and down into my ear canal.
Seconds later, Jera’s growls hit me on full blast.
“—tired of enduring your incompetence, human.”
Gray storms were cast my way, Jera’s hands inspecting Ophelia’s body.
“Jera,” I slurred, staggering to a wobbly stand. “Ophelia . . .”
I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I only knew what I was seeing, processing. None of it promising. More like horrifying.
The closer I drew, the more deja vu came to haunt me.
Ophelia unconscious, Jera poised over her.
Except, this time, it wasn’t my fault. I knew that. It was that thing’s.
When I stood over the both of them, I saw the ashen shade of Ophelia’s features. Then the streams of blood trailing from her mouth and ears. Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing. Rapidly. The rise and fall of her chest moving in something of a panic.
“What did you do?” Jera asked again. The forced patience was lain carefully over her true rage and I knew better than to answer with the truth. That Ophelia and I had been conspiring to embark on a deadly mission without including her. Training for it.
“She was helping me train,” I said, which, arguably, was a partial truth.
“Train how?”
I met her eyes full on. “There’s an older man who came in the other day. His case was unlike the others. The pills I gave him didn’t work. I asked her to show me how to get rid of the dark energy afflicting him.”
Her gaze darkened and the temperature in the room spiked. “Lies do not look good on you, darling.”