by A L Hart
The three of us were in the construction-riddled office space, training. Of course it wasn’t for the upcoming infiltration mission Ophelia and I had, but the original goal we’d set from the beginning: healing others afflicted with dark energy.
Jera, having woken just when Walsh had been leaving, had been suspiciously helpful. So much so, that when the knock from the front came, she came to her feet in that fluid bout of soft gracefulness.
I flinched at the severed connection. We’d been sitting in our usual triangle, me concentrating my dark energy on Jera’s, having found her bloody, crimson ribbons and latched on to them in a bid to draw the energy from her. The dark vines inside of me now extended invisibly into the place she’d once been.
“I’ll get it,” she said.
I watched her, mouth twisted, eyes narrowed. Either she was serious about stepping up in her role around here or she was implementing some sort of silent vie for control.
“It’s past 8 Jera and we’re closed. Whoever it is, leave them.”
“Tsk, tsk,” she chided. “It may very well be a paying customer looking for your services, and one might think you’d be on board with tending to them after hours by now.”
Ophelia and I shared a look.
With Jera breathing down our necks, we would have to come up with an alternate plan for actual training and taking on more cases wasn’t exactly working in our time-constrained agenda.
We followed anyway.
It was night out, the streets quiet unless you listened for the consistent bump of Shabby’s Bar. The overhead light above the entrance’s awning beamed down a pale yellow haze over a man dressed casually, dark blue jeans, white t-shirt and relatively worn sneakers. He twirled a set of keys around one finger, glancing back and forth between the shop door and what must have been his car.
Jera was opening the door of her own volition then, a coquettish smile any man should know not to trust cast up at him. Could he see the dollar signs in her eyes quite like I could? “Greetings, human. As I’m sure you’ve discovered, we’re closed for the rest of the week as the shop undergoes its renovations. Unless, of course, you were interested in . . .” She leaned in closer. “The after dark special.”
Smooth.
Because that didn’t make us seem like a local strip club.
I dropped into the nearest stool, swiping my hand over my face. Sometimes you can just feel when the night was going to be a long one. The sensation was riding my bones.
Particularly when the man blinked at her then seemed to turn the slightest bit red as he stuttered, “I-I uhm, I was actually looking for the shaman.”
I’d officially heard it all.
“N-not that you’re not beautiful or anything. Really. Thank you. I’m sure there are plenty of guys who would be lucky to have you.”
Jera pressed her lips, cheeks puffing, suppressing a guffaw. She waved at him, flattered. “Oh no, sir. You’re too kind. Though, what you search for is what I was indicating to begin with. What did you think I was offering?”
The man reddened further beneath the awning lamp. “I-I no-nothing like--I just thought . . .”
When it became apparent Jera would leave him there to wither, I blew out a loud breath and said across the shop, “Please excuse my wife, sir. She’s not been the same since we returned from the hospital. It’s her head, you see, the doctor said she may never know when to shut up again . . .”
Jera shot me a glare, which I returned in kind with a smirk.
The man gave an unsure look between us just as Jera stepped aside. Once the door closed behind him and he came in closer, I pinned his age around my own. Dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a shadow beard that probably lent his image a couple of false years.
I reached over the counter, below the pastry compartment and rummaged in the mini fridge for a water. “My name’s Peter, by the way. And I’m definitely not a shaman.” I glowered at the chocolate milk I came away with. When was the last time I restocked this thing?
“Oh, sorry about that,” the man said. “Name’s Dave. I wasn’t sure what you were based on what the man that recommended me said.”
I leaned farther over the counter, practically barreled over it and glared inside the glass. Ophelia, witnessing how near I was to dragging the fridge out from under the pastry compartment, went around the counter and retrieved a water for me. Then her gaze went to Dave’s.
“Could I interest you in a drink?”
His mouth screwed to the side in visible disgust. “No, but thank you.”
Jera noted it at the same time as I did, but did nothing more than lift a brow. It really was the little things, that one gesture making me aware something was suddenly off about the succubus. In any other scenario, she’d have remarked on witnessing someone else’s discomfort, or at the very least, tried to amplify it.
She merely stalked behind the counter with her sister and leaned forward, propping her elbows on the surface, her chin on her hand. Studying him as keenly as she had the others.
Which was what I should have been doing, I realized.
This was my chance to reach out, examine another’s dark energy. If I could figure out the man’s affliction before he revealed it, that meant I was making progress.
The only problem was, when I extended the dark vines from the pit of me, searching silently, all I picked up were the pale pink ribbons of Ophelia and the bloody crimson threads of Jera. From Dave, I got nothing but a quiet buzz of existence.
Lips pursing, I dug deeper.
But the man was speaking again, interrupting my concentration. “But you are him, right? The man who can help me with my . . . problem?”
Frustrated, I took a long drink from the water bottle and nodded. “Depends on the problem.”
He took a deep breath then, finally seeming to settle in enough to take a seat on the stool near me. “The problem isn’t with me but a friend of mine.” He turned a sidelong glance at me. “A close friend. Recently he returned from a trip from Dubai and he hasn’t been the same since. He goes out all hours of the night. Drinks uncontrollably. And . . .” His face scrunched, the words sitting on the tip of his tongue, frameless. “It’s like he’s at war with himself. Daily.”
None of this sounded like dark energy more so than a personal, human problem. Then again, based off of the past cases, that was the origin of dark energy’s manifestation in humans. I’d yet to tell the twins of that discovery, having wanted to verify it first. For once, it would have been nice to know something they didn’t.
Dave folded his hands atop the counter, unfolded them, then repeated the action nervously as he said, “Peter, I want to ask you something.”
I nodded him on, hoping I’d have the right answer.
“Have you ever been torn between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing?”
Inside, I sighed. Of course I had. It was part of being human. But more than that, lately it was becoming a part of who I was on a daily basis. It seemed everything I encountered lately was set on high stakes, a threadbare line of good and bad. My nod was a shallow one.
Maybe he saw the true depth of it in my gaze. He leaned in closer. “I’ve watched him go through with this for five years. Constantly maneuvering between that blurred line, lost. And I didn’t know something was wrong until someone directed me to you. Told me to look into something called dark energy.”
The man in the shadows. Once again, he was whispering my name to others.
I took another sip from my water, slowly, turning his words over, but coming away with nothing better than, “Go on.”
Dave shook his head, hands now wringing each other. “And I believe my friend might be infected with this substance.”
Jera wandered from behind the counter over to the door where she pulled down the blinds. The lounge’s windows had been tarped up again, leaving us in the synthetic, warm glow of the shop’s overhead fixtures.
I looked back to Dave. “Infected how, where?”
Mor
e hand wringing. “I don’t know, man. His whole body? His mind? I can’t say, but because of whatever’s in him, it’s like he’s become a whole different person.”
Jera disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to look to Ophelia for help.
The woman adorned a lazy, low-lidded expression as she rest against the back wall, watching the man over the counter. “He does questionable things, you mean?” Ophelia asked quietly. There was an awareness beneath that hooded gaze. That same penetrative, almost feral look Jera wore naturally.
What was with these women?
Dave wet his lips. “At night, yes. He goes out and he does things and when I try to pull him in, when I try to steer him on the right path, he fights me with everything he’s got, and let me tell you, a man with a single-tracked mind is not a man you want to stand in front of.”
“And what is this singular objective he has?” Ophelia whispered then, the grays of her eyes darkening, and inside of her, I felt her dark energy surging.
Beside me, Dave whispered, “To kill.”
I barely dodged the sailing blade of silver as the knife sliced through the air.
The wings at my back snapped from that anti-physical plane within my back, spreading to their full expanse and knocking over everything in its path.
Jera was a darting blur behind the counter and I realized she was the one who’d thrown the knife. She leapt over the counter with that snake-like agility, another of my kitchen knives in her hands as she closed her hand around Dave’s throat--just as he whipped out a gun, aiming it at Jera’s stomach in their close proximity.
Before Ophelia or I could close in, the man let out a yell and we watched as Jera closed her hand over the handgun, the metal melting away effortlessly. The temperature in the room became a sana. The blaze in the succubus’s eyes flayed into Dave’s.
“Jera . . .” I said slowly. “Calm down and lower the knife.” I couldn’t have the very heart of the shop going up in flames. Insurance may have covered it, but startup costs would have been just shy of impossible in this current state.
I sought Ophelia for help, but the woman hung back, watching her sister in encouragement.
“Jera,” I said again, sharply.
The woman ignored me, digging the knife deeper into Dave’s throat. “How long?” she asked.
Dave’s dark gaze narrowed, teeth bared as a prick of blood became a trail of it down his neck. “I’ve no business with you, demon,” he spat. “My business is with that one.” He notched his head at me and Jera burrowed the blade deeper.
“Jera, stop!”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, primal instinct refracting in the silver mirrors, a low rumbled growl reverberating from her chest.
She threw the blade on the floor. Then grabbed Dave’s shirt and did the same, flinging him down like a rag doll. The wood snapped beneath the force, then caved in completely as Jera propped her foot on the man’s chest. “This man works with HB,” she accused vehemently.
I froze, my defense and litany of reason collapsing back into my throat as I stared down at him. By the grimace and glossy, palpable hatred suddenly glaring up at us, I saw the truth.
What more, I felt something inside of him.
Little flares of . . . dark energy.
It hit me icily.
His friend with the affliction was . . . him?
But why hadn’t I been able to sense the dark energy before?
The dark cloud was festering inside of him now, filling him out into dark brown ribbons.
“I work for them, but they know nothing of my condition,” he defended. “They don’t even know I’m here and I’d like to keep it that way--”
Jera’s heel pressed deeper and the man clawed at her ankle, words turned to sputters.
“You can’t kill him,” I blurted.
Jera studied me blazenly.
I stood my ground.
I knew what it looked like. This man was probably a spy sent by none other than HB itself to either obtain information on us or take us all out. The latter rang improbable, seeing as he was hardly putting up a fight against Jera and didn’t throw off any kind of skill sets. He could have very well have planted an explosive in the shop without our knowing, and I wondered in a sudden panic--would the wings shield me from a combustion the same as it had from Ophelia’s sudden explosion of dark energy? They’d said the succubus could wipe out nations with the level of her volts, so it was a loose maybe.
Even then, I doubted the man had planted one for one reason alone: his intentions had seemed genuine. As desperate as all of the others. Which then meant I had to wonder.
I looked at Dave closer. “When did you say the affliction started?” I asked him.
The man glowered, then revealed, “Five years ago.”
Without looking away, I asked whichever twin was willing to answer, “Excluding the cases we’ve dealt with, when would you say the dark energy began infecting us?”
Jera’s low growl grew deeper. “I know where you’re going with this, Peter--”
“Five years ago,” Ophelia offered.
“Then would it not be fair to assume that this man may not have wanted to be a murderer of your kind, but that because of your kind he was infected. Poisoned with this need to kill and therefore may have been sought by HB and trained as their personal puppet?”
“Straws, Peter,” Jera said blandly. “You’re grasping at them.”
“Maybe,” I said. My gaze lifted to hers. “But it’s also fair to assume that this man might know how to get that thing off of Ophelia’s neck and more.”
At that last part, I looked to Ophelia.
We may not have shared a sisterly bond of telekinesis, but I saw understanding sidle inside of her gaze.
This man, this blessed deus ex machina, may have been a godsent miracle.
Not to remove the band from Ophelia’s neck, but the opposite, get us another band for Jera to subdue our bond temporarily and, if everything operated smoothly, we might not even need Ophelia to disable the compound’s security system. This man could do it from the inside and we could see for ourselves that we and the others were permanently removed from their database.
It was a fool-proof plan.
The advantage we needed.
I looked back to Jera, imploring.
She searched my eyes and I fortified the gaze with steel, something I’d admittedly learned from her. At this, her lips curled in a half-smile, sending a chill down my spine. As if she saw right through the effort.
Despite this, she stepped away from the man, dusted her skirt and propped on one of the stools my wings hadn’t toppled. “Very well. I suppose things around here have been too dull.”
And with the dismissive wag of her hand, our plan was falling in order.
Ch. 22
Jera kept tight involvement on this case, whereas in the previous one, she hardly knew anything about Walsh, a “decrepit human with an attitude,” as she put it. When we set the date for Dave’s return so I could examine his dark energy’s wavelength and we could iron out the specifics of our tradeoff of our deal, I’d asked if he had a number that we could reach him in case plans changed.
I’d done it nonchalantly and luckily, Jera hadn’t seen through to my true intentions, so that when the next day came, Ophelia and I made the call when Jera was upstairs, out for the count. Still, just to be safe, we’d called three blocks away from the shop and told Dave in nonspecific details to meet us once tomorrow night as a cover while Jera was present, and then again the following day, when the woman was asleep and the construction workers defaced and reinvented the shop.
Skeptical and begrudging, he’d agreed to the sudden change of plans, arranging for us all to meet at a heavily populated tea shop uptown.
When Ophelia and I arrived, Dave was already sitting out on the terrace with his order of tea and a bagel. The morning sunlight staved off the November chill, the tables around us filled with others going about their daily lives, oblivious to o
ur conspiracy.
It wasn’t until the two of us joined the hunter that I noticed the incessant flutter of energy wisping around my arms, my neck, down my back. Ribbons of varying colors, all reaching out from around me. They belonged to neither the hunter nor Ophelia.
But to the humans around me.
I kept my eyes on Dave, even as I wondered just how many people were actually infected with dark energy in this city and how long would it be before they showed up on my doorstep. Or in the weekly obituary.
“Why a change of plans?” Dave cut to the point. He still had that fidgety way about him which I was beginning to pin as wont habit, but his gaze was far more honed and alert, probably waiting for one of us to do him in.
The same as I suspected of him.
Ophelia went over our terms and conditions, what we wanted from him and what he would give to us.
When she finished, he said with incredulity, “You’re crazy. That facility is heavily guarded. You’re not getting through those doors, I don’t care what kind of twisted magic you throw at it. And I may be a former agent, but my superiors never picked up on the dark energy inside of me. They don’t even know what’s happening to me or the demon I face day-by-day. Now you want me to jeopardize that by going in and disabling their alarm system? Just what do you think they’ll do to a traitor?”
“You have done inconceivable and unforgivable things to my kind,” Ophelia said quietly. “Forgive us if we harbor no sympathy in our negotiation.”
“Yeah, well, demons never were one to make a fair deal,” he said bitterly, staring into the herbal drink before him.
“You are our enemy.”
“I didn’t choose to be,” he said. “I didn’t choose to have this . . . this monster inside of me. This need to kill. For years I’ve searched for ways to get rid of it, and when I realized there was no one out there who could, I—” Shame lifted his gaze to ours and he said tightly, “I did the only thing I could. I sated it by joining a cause that protects the human race.”
“Protect,” Ophelia enunciated in disgust. “Your people capture those that are innocent, their only crime being existence. What more, you capture those who are still young, they who are oblivious to the dynamics of our world, innocent to what their ancestors may or may not have done to yours, and you murder them.” She lowered her voice at the startled glances. “When you look upon them as you eliminate them by the cruelest means, you have no mercy, no conscious, and worst of all, you walk the face of this world as if you are not the same as us. As if what’s inside of you does not place you in the same category as those whose lives you steal. So do not bring your abhorrent excuses to us. Either you agree or you disagree. And I assure you, if you do not wish to bend to our terms, my sister will find you and will do to you all in which you’ve done to our kind.”