Dark Sun Rising

by K M Martinez

Cori O’Shea stood at the center of the pit with her sword raised. She had taken her helmet off, and stared contemptuously toward the Kale section.

  Chapter Nine

  “Why don’t you mind your goddamn business?” Mel said hotly.

  All Gabe had done was ask her about the gateway stone, and he only did so because he was concerned that she could get hurt just by having it. Hell, she’s gotten hurt already.

  He had tried to tell her what he’d overheard the night before about the Eighth Clan and how Sapienti O’Shea thought she might be in danger, but when he’d made the bonehead move of mentioning Cori O’Shea, Mel wouldn’t listen to another word.

  “Hey, don’t take your bullshit out on me!” he snapped. “I didn’t do anything to you!”

  They were in the medic tent with Thrash, who was a bit loopy from all the drugs the doctor had given him. He had a dislocated shoulder and a deep gash that ran from the top of his shoulder to the middle of his chest. The doctor had popped his shoulder back and stitched him up.

  When it was clear that Thrash would be just fine, Tío Luce, Tía Alice, Tío Jorge, and Grandma Mari had retired for the night, Tía Alice with a heated look toward Mel, which did nothing for Mel’s mood. Victor, Smeagol, and Charlotte went to go get something to eat, but Gabe had stuck around to bring up the stone. It was just the three of them, and Thrash had dozed off.

  “Fuck off, Gabe,” said Mel.

  “I mean it, Mel. Don’t take your shit out on me. I’m just trying to help.”

  “You want to help? Stop worrying about the stone, and start worrying about how we’re going to get through the rest of this Agora in one piece. Because in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a shift happening out there, and it’s not for the good.”

  Gabe wanted to say it was all related, he was sure of it, but he was interrupted by Thrash’s scream of agony.

  “Thrash!” Mel shook Thrash awake.

  He looked shaken. “It was so hot,” he said. “So, so hot.”

  “Hey, you’re okay,” Mel said, holding his hand. “You’re all r—”

  She froze with an odd look on her face.

  “The woman. She almost killed me,” Thrash said.

  “No, Cori banged you up a little, but she was nowhere close to killing you,” Gabe said.

  “She almost killed me,” Thrash said, then screamed in pain. “She’s pulling me! She’s pulling me back!”

  Thrash made to get up, but Gabe pushed him down.

  “She’s pulling me! Don’t let me go!”

  Gabe struggled to keep Thrash on the cot. His cousin was kicking and swinging his arms. “Help me out here, Mel!” Gabe snapped over Thrash’s screaming. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Mel was running her hands down Thrash’s pants. “Shut up and hold him still.”

  The Ferus doctor came running in, and all Gabe could think was Where the fuck are the Kale doctors? Charlotte, Victor, and Smeagol must not have gone far, because they came running in as well.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Victor yelled. He grabbed a flailing leg.

  All of them were trying to hold Thrash down now, but he wouldn’t calm down. “She’s pulling me! She’s calling me back! She’ll burn me! She’ll BURN me!” he screamed.

  Victor's face was unreadable, which meant he was scared as shit or angry as hell. Gabe was leaning toward scared as shit.

  The Ferus doctor appeared with a syringe in his hand.

  “No,” Mel said firmly, still running her hands down Thrash’s calves. She pulled his sock down, then removed something from within it. “Keep that syringe away from him.”

  “Ms. Mendez, I have to calm him down,” the Ferus doctor said. He tried to grab one of Thrash’s arms.

  “I said stay away,” Mel growled.

  The hair on the back of Gabe’s neck stood up. Mel had a look of pure rage on her face, and her eyes had taken on a gold hue. Her lips curled back, baring her teeth, and instinctively he bared his as well. He was absently aware of Victor doing the same.

  The doctor seemed to shrink in on himself and backed away.

  What was that? Gabe thought as the fire inside him receded.

  Mel looked like she had retreated both mentally and emotionally. Her eyes had returned to their normal brown.

  Thrash, thankfully, had calmed down as well. Breathing heavily, he stared at the canvas roof of the tent.

  “You all right there, cuz?” Gabe said.

  “Yeah,” Thrash said. He turned his head slowly to look at Gabe. “I want to go back to the Kale tents.”

  “Sure, cuz.”

  Smeagol and Gabe carefully helped him to his feet.

  Gabe turned to the doctor. “You fucking tell anyone about this, and I’ll fucking kill you,” he said.

  But he got only a raised eyebrow from the doctor. Perhaps the man was used to such threats.

  As they walked out of the medic tent, Gabe could see that the doctor wasn’t the only one he needed to worry would run their mouth. The medic tent was beside the Mayme tents, since most of the doctors were in Clan Mayme, and it looked like Thrash’s screams had woken quite a few of the Mayme descendants, including Siva. She gave Gabe a worried look, and he wished he could go over and soothe her worry, but now wasn’t the time. Instead, he gave her a close-lipped smile that likely did little to reassure her.

  Back in Thrash’s tent, he and Smeagol helped Thrash into his cot. The noise they made bringing him in woke Grandma Mari.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, lighting a lamp.

  “Thrash had a meltdown,” Gabe said.

  “I didn’t have a meltdown,” said Thrash, sounding annoyed.

  “Then what was with all the yelling?” Gabe asked.

  Charlotte sat on the cot opposite Thrash. “What happened, Thrash?” she asked quietly. “I’ve never seen you like that. Ever.”

  Thrash looked up. All eyes were on him. “I can’t explain it. I was here, but I was somewhere else too.” He sighed in frustration. “It was that stupid stone Mel had me hold.”

  Gabe exchanged a look with Victor.

  “Mel’s stone? She had you hold it?” Victor said.

  “Yeah. Last night, before the Opening Ceremony. I had it with me today—I meant to give it back to her before I lost it. Anyway, when I dozed off, something happened. I dreamt I was somewhere else. The land was dead and dry, and hot—so hot it was enough to make a person crazy.”

  He looked at Grandma Mari. “There were Malum. I swear to God. I’ve never been more scared in my life.”

  Thrash’s voice shook, and he ran a hand over his face to compose himself, but Grandma Mari grabbed his wrist and pulled it away. She looked intensely into his eyes.

  “Did the Malum touch you?”

  “No, Grandma.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “They didn’t get a chance. She showed up.”

  “Who?”

  Thrash licked his lips. “I don’t know who she was, but as soon as she arrived, the Malum meant to be somewhere else.” He rubbed his face again, tiredly. “I did too. I tried to run away, but before I knew it… I just felt pain.” He shook his head. “Like I was being burned from the inside out.”

  “What did she want? Why did she attack you?” Grandma Mari was the most intense Gabe had ever seen her.

  “I don’t know,” Thrash said.

  “Did she touch you?”

  Thrash was silent for a moment, eyes wide. Gabe knew his answer before he spoke.

  “Yes.”

  Grandma Mari grabbed her bag of herbs. “Gabe, go get Tío Jorge,” she said.

  “Grandma, am I going to be okay?” Thrash asked.

  “I don’t know, but I mean to find out,” she replied as she began to mix her herbs. “I’m uncertain, but it sounds like your spirit encountered a Lost Soul in Inter Spatium Abyssus. You mustn’t let anyone or anything touch you while you’re there, as there is a chance a Malum will give you illness and a Lost Soul will try to possess you.” />
  “You think I might be possessed?”

  “I’m hoping you’re not, but this mixture will help to see if you are.”

  Gabe stared uncomprehendingly. Did Grandma really believe that Inter Spatium Abyssus actually existed and Thrash had been there? He knew Sapienti Reddy and Sapienti O’Shea believed the gateway stone could open into Inter Spatium Abyssus, and that was why the Eighth Clan wanted it…

  But do I believe it?

  “Gabe.”

  He gave his grandmother a blank look, which earned him some annoyance.

  “Go get Jorge.”

  Gabe turned and ran. He woke Tío Jorge, and they rushed back to the others.

  “The stone, Thrash,” Grandma Mari was saying. “Where is it?”

  Thrash was sitting up. Grandma Mari had drawn a number of glyphs on his chest and forehead. He was also drinking something she had made for him.

  “I don’t know,” Thrash said. “It was in my sock.”

  Gabe remembered Mel’s strange groping of Thrash. “Mel has it,” he said.

  And she wasn’t there. Come to think of it, he didn’t remember her leaving the medic tent with them.

  “Oh fuck,” he said.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “Where’s Mel?” Grandma Mari asked. She looked more serious, more intense, and more aged than he had ever seen her before. And Gabe knew she was thinking just what he was: that his dumbass sister was off getting possessed by some crazy woman in Inter Spatium Abyssus.

  He just knew.

  Chapter Ten

  The basement level of the family house was made of sand-colored rock, the walls and floors adorned with carvings of glyphs of all shapes and sizes. Some rooms had pentagrams on the floor, with chains sprouting from each corner of the star. Others had chains attached to the walls and large cages hanging from the ceiling. Most rooms held at least one archaic torture device, and on many of the walls hung sharp tools and blunt objects that could be used to subdue a malcontent.

  But the entrance to one room on this level was made of slick black stone. The door was marked with the Kale sun in bright gold—the only brightness in the area, as if it did not belong. Still, the room behind it was unremarkable. It was just a plain round room, furnished with only a single lamp, whose flame danced across dry, sand-colored walls.

  It was here that Mel ran off to when everyone else headed back to the Kale tents.

  Now she sat with her back to the wall, rolling the gateway stone in her palm. She knew that all she had to do was nod off, and she would see that face again.

  She thought through the strange events that had occurred only a couple hours earlier. One minute she was in the medic tent, and the next second she had split in two, one part in this world, the second part in another. That other world was so hot; her lungs burned with every breath. She could hardly stand it, but it meant little to her. Her focus was on her cousin, who was writhing at her feet on the dry, cracked ground.

  The woman knelt next to him, her glowing gold eyes lifting to take in Mel.

  Mel yelled at her to get away from Thrash, but she knew there was only one way to get the woman to stop: She needed to find the stone. She could feel herself searching her cousin, could distantly hear her brother talking to her, could see the doctor approaching Thrash with the sedative—which she knew would have prevented Thrash from fighting off the woman who was trying to possess him.

  She screamed at the doctor and pulled the stone from Thrash. That ended his pain, but in turn she herself had felt the call, the burning in her blood, and the pounding in her heart—the same pounding she always felt during the Opening Ceremony.

  The second that Mel held the stone in her hand, the woman’s power turned fully on Mel, and through Mel she pulled the two of them out from the dry, dead world into another—a world Mel could not see, but knew instinctively held no danger.

  And then she was back, whole, in the medic tent.

  Now, thinking back, she knew what a powerful thing that call was—the call she felt when she was in proximity to the woman. She had to find out why.

  So here she sat, in the bowels of her family’s home, in a place that she despised, gathering up the courage to go back, knowing she couldn’t stop herself from doing so, regardless of the danger.

  She gripped the stone in her hands, laid her head back against the warm stone, and closed her eyes.

  ****

  Softly blowing wind caressed the leaves and branches of the trees. The sky was alight with stars, the moon full and bright. Crickets chirped in a comforting rhythm, and an owl hooted.

  Not what I was expecting, Mel thought.

  She walked up a winding path. It soon opened into a large field. Mel walked to the center and took a slow spin around.

  No one, not a soul.

  “What’s this?”

  Mel turned toward the voice. And there was the woman, looking just the same as she had when kneeling over her cousin in Inter Spatium Abyssus. Gold eyes, black eyelids, the black curving past the edges of her eyes and ending in sharp points at her temples. Long hair, dark, falling wildly around her face. Clothes all in black. And bared teeth.

  “You smell weak like the other. You’re all weak.”

  The woman walked a circle around Mel, studying her. Mel’s fear grew in her belly, but she felt a stubborn insistence to stay put.

  “Do you know how weak you are, human?” The woman spat the word “human” like it was an insult.

  Mel said nothing.

  “Do you speak, human? Of course you don’t. The other didn’t either.”

  “The other was my cousin,” Mel said, matching the woman’s tone. “And you almost killed him.”

  The woman smiled. Her straight white teeth looked bright in the twilight, and a glow grew in her strange gold eyes.

  “Is that why you’ve returned? Revenge? I understand revenge.”

  “No, I’m not here for revenge.”

  “Why not? He was of your blood, was he not? And as you said, I almost killed him.”

  Mel froze. The fear in her belly stirred into something else. “Did you mean to kill him?” she asked.

  The woman’s eyes flashed with something unfathomable, then turned cold. “Who are you to question me?” she said imperiously, baring her teeth again.“Do you know me?”

  The words were simple, but Mel knew they were anything but. To know someone, to know who they were, what they’re capable of… that was what the woman meant.

  “I don’t care who you are, if you mean to kill one of my family,” Mel said.

  If she was her calm, controlled self, Mel would have answered diplomatically, but her blood was pumping again, and her belly was full of fire, and she burned with the probability that this woman might have meant to kill her cousin.

  The woman stared long at Mel. Then she smiled. “Your loyalty pleases me, Melanie Mendez. Be calm. I did not mean to hurt your cousin, and I would not have killed him.”

  Mel saw no deception in the woman’s face, and let her anger go. “Then what were you doing?”

  “He had the stone,” the woman said, looking around. “I felt his distress when it activated.”

  Mel understood. “You tried to save him.”

  The woman nodded.

  “I am limited in what I can do, but I tried to pull him here, where at least his spirit would have been safe.”

  If Thrash’s spirit had been trapped in Inter Spatium Abyssus, the ramifications would have been devastating. There was so much there her cousin would’ve been susceptible to.

  “My time grows short with you,” the woman said. Somehow, she now seemed even more intense. “I know it’s difficult, but you must keep your anger under control. Your anger will push the shift, and we are not wolves; our change does not come easy.”

  Mel didn’t understand, but before she could ask she felt pain on her cheek.

  “Someone is trying to wake you,” the woman said, stepping closer. Mel stared into her gold pupils. “Hear
me. This Agora begins the Year of the Crow. The carrion bird that eats the rotten flesh of the dead. The scraps. That is what the Eighth Clan is. They would watch the world burn so that they can have the scraps. And worst yet, they can be anyone in any clan.”

  Mel felt a pull, a displacement, rack her body with sudden force. It sent her to her knees. She could hear voices in the distance.

  The woman put her hands on Mel’s head and pulled her attention back to her gold eyes. “Trust your family. Trust the she-wolf. Be mindful of the Eighth Clan, as they will try to raise the Gate and break the Orb. Do not give up the gateway stone to anyone. It’s your birthright.”

  Mel felt herself waking. She still had so many questions.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked. “How do you know me?”

  “I recognize my blood.”

  The woman smiled, and Mel was amazed at how a genuine smile could still look savage.

  “Who are you?” Mel asked.

  The woman spoke her name just as Mel woke.

  ****

  “Mel!”

  Mel felt a pail of water dumped on her head. She was on her back, cold and weak, shaking, and her teeth were chattering.

  “Grandma?”

  “She’s coming, she’s on her way,” a male voice said. It had a slight musical tone to it. Someone touched her face with gentle, callused hands.

  Killian O’Shea?

  His voice was soft, and Mel wondered why he was talking so quietly.

  “What’s that glowing through her shirt?” asked a woman.

  Cori.

  Mel felt her collar being pulled down, and the two hissed a breath.

  “Wow,” Killian said. “Does that pendant—”

  “Yes,” said Cori. “That explains how she hides her power from everyone.”

  “How do you sense her then?”

  Cori didn’t answer.

  “She’s burning up,” Killian said. “Let’s take her upstairs.”

  “She needs to be in isolation.”

  “We’re taking her up to one of the bedrooms,” Killian insisted.

  “Did you hear me? I said she needs to be in isolation, down here where I found her. That stone in her hand opens gateways to both Inter Spatium Abyssus and Inter Spatium Caelum. Her necklace is fucking glowing. Who knows where she’s been, what she’s encountered, or what she’s brought back with her?”