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

by A L Hart

  When I neared the structure which appeared to be standing upright by the wind alone, I sat there, my hands clenched around the steering wheeling, teeth locked, eyes burning.

  It was small, nothing more than a hovel. The wood was weathered by rain, snapped and caved at every other panel, and there was a sheet hung up across the threshold, acting as a door.

  Danny was out of the car and moving into the shack without a second thought.

  But I stayed rooted. Praying to that force I’d encountered in the garage, praying that what lay inside was not as horrible as the surroundings led me to believe.

  “He’s alive,” Jera promised from the backseat, calm, composed.

  It was only when she exited the car that I forced my legs to comply, to step out onto the dead grass that billowed around the shack before mending into flattened dirt.

  Above, the skies were still clear, the moon still in absentia, the world sleeping as I struggled to quiet the many questions threatening, knowing they would do nothing more than break down whatever strength had led me here. Where Danny had been living for who knew how long. And that money he’d been saving up, had he used all of it for—

  I shut the thoughts down.

  Not the time.

  I started towards the entrance, back straightening.

  If his brother really was ill, there was a good chance it had nothing to do with dark energy and everything to do with the environment the boys had dwelt in, their circumstantial conditions and could well be treated by a human, capable doctor.

  Inside I discovered the world hadn’t answered my prayer. Rather, it’d heard it and decided to deliver the exact opposite of it.

  Around me, the shack was filled with apparatuses of all sorts. Metal pipes leading into the ground yet seemingly connected to nothing, pails lines against one side of the wall where above, hooks were nailed into the wood and from them hung pairs of clothing, sizes mirroring Danny’s, the others slightly smaller. The floors had been lined with loose wooden planks and off in one corner, there was a tote filled with toy dinosaurs, Power Rangers, Transformers and the nose of multiple remote control cars poked up out of the dingy bucket.

  There was a small space beside it where two cups, two bowls and spoons and forks sat atop a cutting board propped on two glasses—like a kitchen table. There was light emitting from one corner of the shack, just enough for me to see the dark, crawling body of a centipede as it crept from one of the bowls.

  I looked away quickly, spying the source of the light in the third corner of the shack.

  Danny knelt there, a jar candle lit and posted on the back of a plastic crate. The firelight danced over the boy’s freckled face. And that of his brother’s.

  Ethan lay on what looked to be a pallet, a mattress, then a heap of blankets.

  The closer I drew, the more the dread inside of me knotted, cementing.

  Pale. Gaunt, freckled cheeks. Ethan was a skeleton with a heaving chest. Blankets were tossed over him in the November chill, rising and falling just barely, the hitches uneven. Purple rings lined his eyes, making his age indiscernible, but if size was any indicator, the boy was definitely no older than Danny.

  When I stood at the edge of the bed, I felt it then, and my heart sank farther than before.

  Dark energy. Swarming in the boy restlessly. Thriving. Potent.

  Vicious.

  “Hey Ethan, look,” Danny said and I couldn’t tell, but I hoped his eyes were shining from the candlelight. “I brought the boss, the man you wanted me to.”

  “Peter,” Jera whispered. I didn’t know when she’d moved beside me, assessing the scene in silence enough to mask her presence completely. “That boy doesn’t have much time. We need to hurry.”

  I looked to Danny, who didn’t appear to hear, then down to Jera. “Here?”

  She shook her head. “The shop. Not out here in the open. You’ll use a lot of dark energy and though HB is busy for now, should they dispatch agents here, I doubt we can keep the boys from getting caught up in the crossfire.”

  It made sense. The shop was only twenty minutes away.

  Still.

  Ethan’s breathing was shallow and ragged, the idea of moving him felt risky.

  Jera had the boy in her arms in the next breath—

  One of the blankets moved. Not a blanket, a dog. It rose from the blankets, teeth bared, growls aimed at Jera, who looked to be contemplating torching it.

  But then Danny grabbed it. “No, Tathri. Bad dog! They’re helping him.”

  The dog whose hair was matted and moppy like a Puli’s, stared Jera down with mismatched eyes, licked its muzzle once, then settled.

  Jera dismissed it, taking the boy who was practically sticks and bones towards the SUV with haste. Danny and I followed, and I tried not to frown when he brought the dog with him.

  When we got back to the shop, Jera was out of the car before either of us and entering the shop with what felt like a trained calmness only acquired from experience.

  When she passed the staircase leading up to the bedroom, I stopped her, “Where are you going?”

  “The office,” was all she said, and I was in too much of a panic to object or demand reason. Even when she entered the room, laid the boy down briefly on the lounger, and shoved everything off the new, black polished desk carelessly—yet setting the desktop on the floor with just enough gentleness not to break it.

  Then she propped the boy up on the bare wood and looked at me expectantly.

  The nerves inside of me had reached a new record of dishevelled, strung to their breaking point as I was faced with the solid moment of truth.

  Ophelia and I had been practicing before on how to get me to retract my wings, how to get me to rewire her dark energy’s makeshift and enable her to act on offense. The practice ended there.

  But we’d lied to Jera, telling her we were practicing on how to heal the odd cases we received, and now that the time had come for me to put training I hadn’t done to the test . . .

  Jera’s gaze darkened. “So was it all a lie, Peter?”

  I swallowed, staring at the boy in rags who radiated dark energy, the substance invisible yet seeping into me full force. Mocking me. Behind me, I felt Danny’s eyes on me.

  My hands trembled—but I only allowed them to for a moment. I would answer to that wrong another time. For now, I dredged up what I could remember of the lessons and information she’d offered me.

  I needed something with Ethan’s DNA, the same as Jera had said I needed of Elise.

  After a quick glance over the boy’s dirty rags, I settled on the brown locks that were slightly longer than Danny’s. Without hesitation, I strode behind the desk, removed a strand from the boy’s unconscious body—willed the tremor away again—and leaned back against the wall behind me. Closed my eyes, rushed through the preliminary motions of centering myself and searching for the boy’s dark energy in the single strand of hair.

  The spurt of fuschia light flared to life inside my mind, the energy pulsing from the strand in gentle waves, its shades reminding me of magenta and lilacs and something . . . astral.

  I set the peculiarity aside, dumping myself into the color, the energy, pushing the black coils inside of me to wrap around the fuschia and learn it. Memorize the frequency in which it pulsed to.

  The only problem was I had no idea how to recognize whether or not I’d learned the frequency. By the way the boy appeared to be perspiring by the minute, I didn’t have time to ponder it.

  I dropped the hair. So long as I understood the essentials of what was flowing through the boy—fuschia, a low-hum of energy that sang a soft tune of ironic, vibrant life. I pressed my lips together, took a deep breath through my nose and let it out on a six second count.

  Then I closed my hand around Ethan’s, knowing Danny and Jera watched every motion.

  The same principle I’d deployed with Ophelia had to be prevalent here. Send my dark energy’s vines into Ethan’s domain. Search for traces of his dark e
nergy, and if it was as Ophelia had said, then my own naturally sought to devour another’s dark energy. So long as I could find the source, I could allow it to consume all which plagued the boy.

  I urged the vines forward.

  I understood why Jera had wanted me to learn the dark energy’s frequency first.

  Finding Ethan’s was a thousand times easier when I’d encountered it before. It was as if the fuchsia ribbons sensed my presence and found me, so that my awareness moved along their frequency smoothly.

  Ophelia’s dark energy source was located in her chest.

  Mine in my stomach.

  Where would Ethan’s be? I searched his palms thoroughly, my vines lapping at the ribbons coiling throughout his palms down to each fingertip. When I found no source, I ventured back up his arm, searched every crevice of his shoulders, armpits. Nothing but the throbbing beats of dark energy emitting into me.

  “Danny,” I said slowly, fixing my concentration to the boy in front of me. “Can you tell me anything about what’s wrong with your brother?”

  There was a silence, save for the pants huffing from the dog he carried.

  “Anything,” I urged him.

  “I don’t know, boss. He . . . sometimes he got these headaches.”

  That was all I needed to know. I bypassed everything else—the throat, cheekbones, eyes—

  “Wait, Peter,” Jera said calmly, but I detected the underlying urgency immediately.

  I stopped.

  “Danny,” she told the boy. “Go wait in the hall.”

  “But—”

  I had to focus on deep breathing and staying in tune with the rippling dark energy of the boy, which meant I couldn’t object when, one moment Danny was protesting and the next I heard him pounding on the shop’s door.

  “Hey lady, let me in! Let me in! He’s my brother!”

  I heard the door lock.

  Then Jera’s voice was directly in front of me. “Ophelia said when your dark energy latches onto another’s it makes an attempt to consume it, yes?”

  I gave a slow nod.

  “Hm.” It was one sound, and in it was everything unpleasant and bad.

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I searched. “We need to remove the dark energy from him.”

  “If it’s in his head, then the dark energy will have mended with his light energy.”

  “How many energies are there?!” I growled, knowing the agitation was misplaced.

  “Two. Immortals contain dark energy. Mortals contain light energy. Before Kyda, I’ve never particularly dealt with a human infected with dark energy, but assuming it follows the basic assortment of an immortal’s, the dark energy is laced throughout the boy in threads, ribbons, clusters. If it has mended with the light energy near the boy’s brain and you accidentally consume both the light and the dark, then this mortal will be as good as dead.”

  I felt the panic threaten to surge again, my connection to Ethan’s body wavering.

  “You have to separate them.”

  “Now you tell me.” If there were two energies inside of humans afflicted with dark energy, then had I attempted to heal Walsh, I’d have likely killed him. Had Ophelia not known this?

  “Focus, Peter.”

  I tried. My awareness was still stationed just above what must have been his cheekbones, almost to his eyes. This had to be the right location, the drum of energy having intensified into numerous whipping glares, reaching out to me as though craving the touch of my own.

  “How do I discern the dark from the light?”

  “By first staying your dark energy. Don’t approach his mind with it in such close proximity.”

  My hands were sweating wrapped around the boy’s colder one, nerves fried to where I was following along numbly. I withdrew my dark energy from the boy but kept my awareness near his eyes, paces from where those fuschia threads beckoned.

  “Now examine the dark energy.”

  I did, mentally circling the cluster of it and sensing the same low hum of energy—something pulsed from within it. Something black and . . . sick.

  All at once, I didn’t know what was light energy, dark energy and that.

  What I did know, without a doubt, was that this mass was responsible for the boy’s state. It sat there, a black pearl feeding poison into everything around it, yet hiding behind the innocent flails of purple ribbons. It festered, expanding twice its marble size, then shrinking back. As if it were breathing—or feeding.

  The fuchsia ribbons clustered around it, some of their tailends descended downward from the cluster. Downward into something faint, barely there. Like an evaporated mist of happiness, vapored joy, an eternal glen of warmth sprawling in all directions.

  Light energy.

  Just as Jera had predicted, the light energy was in close proximity to the boy’s brain, but what more, it was so deeply entangled with the dark energy’s ribbons and that pearl of death that I felt as though I were looking at a knotted nebula of nerves, hundreds of them, tied, wed, inseparable, all concentric to the deadly mass feeding from the boy’s essence.

  My palms were sweating so badly now that I thought I imagined when Jera’s hand closed over mine, but moments later she was speaking in a low voice, that same calm saturating her words. “Allow just enough of your dark energy into the boy to get the job done. If you feel it start to consume the boy’s, force it back.”

  That was absurd. She wanted me to get near the boy’s lifeline after having just told me I could potentially kill him?

  “You failed to trust me once. Will you make the same mistake?”

  She’d never given me any reason to trust her, but every reason not to. But just then, I was smart enough to recognize when I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  I complied.

  Like with Ophelia, I only allowed one vine forth, remembering the way it’d behaved the moment I’d laid eyes on her crystal chamber containing unholy amounts of dark energy. It’d splattered all over the chamber, sucking the enclosure for all it was worth.

  One tendril.

  This boy no older than eight, his body already at death’s doors, what was to stop one tendril from devouring all he was worth?

  On the other side of the door, I heard Danny’s shouts, his pounding having grown stronger rather than weaker. His verse was unchanging as he shouted at us that this here, the boy before me, was his brother and how he had every right to be present.

  Maybe it was hearing his fierce determination that gave me my resolve or maybe it was that I had no other choice—either way, I allowed one vine of my dark energy to slip into the boy, pressing it down when it thought to rush too fast, too ravenously.

  It’s Danny’s brother, I told it, as though it were as sentient as whatever had been inside of Ophelia’s energy chamber. He’s our friend. This is his brother. His family.

  I tensed, allowing the vine to inch forward again, constrained under my watch. It moved much slower, up the arms, to the shoulders, the cheeks . . . the eyes . . .

  My dark energy’s hunger bloomed in full force. Ready to latch, devour, kill.

  I pressed my eyes shut tighter, Dave’s image staining my thoughts.

  I wasn’t him.

  I was different. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but save them.

  But my mind, my heart and the energy inside of me were of different realms, entirely different beasts. My mind and heart, it hungered to save the things around me. Had been the very things responsible for my aiding those who’d come into my shop. But the darkness at the core of me, the thing that’d supposedly given me this coveted, mighty power, it thirsted for death and destruction. Murder.

  “Try,” Jera spoke.

  “I can’t,” I whispered, the truth dawning over my courage, damning it to the midnight darkness.

  “And why not?” she whispered patiently, her hand running up the length of my arm, shivers left in its wake.

  There was no answer. Not one I would take pride in revealing, but one that
shamed me.

  I wasn’t strong enough to handle whatever was inside of me when I needed it. I couldn’t say how, but I knew the moment I urged my dark energy into contact with Ethans, I would surely end him. End Danny’s brother. Danny, who’d been living in that miserable shack with nothing but a candle and hope to keep him company in the dark.

  “I’m not strong enough,” I admitted. All of those times she’d mocked my strength and I’d objected . . .

  Jera’s hand was on my cheek, volcanic warm exploding throughout me. “Says the foolish human who thought himself capable of entering a heavily guarded compound with but his halfwits and my sister’s lesser wits?”

  “It was stupid.”

  “You believed you could do it,” Jera said.

  “I hoped I could.”

  “And do you not hope you can heal this boy?”

  My plan at the compound had failed. Saving Dave and his involvement with HB had failed. What was to stop this from failing? Belief in myself? That fairytale notion may have worked on others, but when reality glared at you so prominently, it was impossible to conjure a fable’s courage.

  “Look at me, Peter.”

  My mouth pressed. Ophelia had demanded I look at her as well when promising me she was stronger than she looked. In the end, we’d both been privy to that monstrous beast nestled behind her heart. I didn’t need Jera to feed me some similar, useless encouragement.

  But her fingers threaded through my hair, the tingles along my scalp jarring my concentration. Her hands closed around a mass of the curls, tipping my head forward the slightest—until I felt hers against mine.

  Then her lips against my cheek. Trailing . . .

  I bit down, grounding my concentration on the boy.

  Jera leaned away. “Look at me, darling.” That scent fell over me in dazing smoke, entering my lungs, softening my anxiety.

  My eyes slipped open. The office light came into focus, then the storm clouds of the demon’s gaze.

  “Why can’t you save him?” she asked and I’d have never guessed her voice could reach such a tender lilt, like the lilac scent she threw off.