Tainted Night, Tainted Blood (Kat Redding)

by E. S. Moore

  At least the stinging in my back kept my mind off of everything else. It wasn’t until I slid out of the water and toweled dry that things started flooding back.

  I was over the dead woman at least. It surprised me to realize I didn’t feel bad any longer. She’d tried to kill me, would have killed others if given the chance. Why I’d ever felt guilty for killing her was beyond me. If she hadn’t paralyzed me the night she attacked me, I would have killed her then. What were a few days in between?

  I tried not to think about it. If I really looked at my actions back at the Den, I might start hating myself all over again. There were too many important things to worry about for me to start sulking again.

  I wandered into the bedroom, picking up Jonathan’s shirt as I crossed the room. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I was sitting on the bed, his long shirt draped over my shoulders, hanging to my knees. It felt good against my skin, almost like a favorite nightgown.

  I sighed. What was my life coming to? I should have burnt the damn shirt the moment I had taken it off. I didn’t need the reminder. I shouldn’t have let Jonathan fix up my back. I could have used the bath to clean out the wound. I’d done as much before.

  A cricket chirruped outside my window. The night was fading and it would soon be morning. I was going to be stuck in my room for hours, alone with my own thoughts. I needed to be spending that time thinking about Thomas, not Jonathan.

  But it was hard. Every time I thought about my brother, I thought about his rage-filled glare, the way he came at me, intent to kill. There was no doubt he would have torn my head from my shoulders if I had let him.

  Everything I had, everything I believed in, was slowly falling apart.

  The night eventually gave way to day and I couldn’t make myself stop thinking. Nothing I came up with was helpful. I kept seeing the same visions, going over the same thoughts, without ever once coming to any sort of decision. I wasn’t cut out for this.

  About halfway through the day, I realized I was getting nowhere. It was like I had come up against a solid brick wall with no way around. I could beat at it all I wanted, but it wouldn’t get me through to the other side. I knew the answers were there, just out of reach. I needed something to get to them.

  And that was when it hit me.

  I’d spent so long refusing to listen to anything that wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I missed the bigger picture. No one had ever cured someone whose blood had been mixed. It was supposedly impossible. Even Lei wouldn’t know what to do.

  But Lei, like everyone else I knew, was only mortal. We were all limited by our knowledge, by what we have experienced. I needed someone who could go outside what we knew, look down other avenues for answers. The door to the other side of the wall was there. I just couldn’t reach it by myself.

  But I knew someone who could.

  I waited impatiently for the sun to go down. As soon as night fell, I was out of my room, pounding on Ethan’s door. He opened it, eyes heavy. He stared at me a moment, then his eyes traveled down to my toes and back up again.

  Uh,” he said, his voice thick with sleep. He had definitely stayed up too late. He looked back down, his gaze settling around my knees.

  I followed his gaze and felt a hint of aggravation. While Jonathan’s shirt worked fine to lie around in alone, it wasn’t long enough for me to walk around in without wearing pants. I might not be a prude, but that didn’t mean I needed to be flashing so much leg around Ethan. It might distract him.

  “Up here,” I said, snapping my fingers. As much as I didn’t care how much of me he saw, it did bother me he was staring so openly.

  Ethan dragged his eyes to my face. He blinked a few more times as if he wasn’t quite awake, then suddenly his eyes widened. “Oh,” he said, taking a step back. “I didn’t mean ...” He glanced down again and nearly broke his own neck as he jerked his head back up. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I have something to ask of you.”

  “Sure,” Ethan said. He tried to smooth down the wildness of his hair. He was still wearing the same clothes he had been wearing the night before. He smelled of stale sweat and pizza. He must have come upstairs and passed out right away.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. Something clenched in my gut as I spoke. Did I really want to do this?

  Ethan’s brow crinkled. He rubbed at his face with both hands like he wasn’t quite sure he was actually awake. He looked at me, slightly bewildered. “About?”

  I stared into his eyes and wondered how Ethan was able to do this day after day. I knew his life was hard, knew every moment had to scare him to death. I mean, he was living with a vampire. No normal person could do that every day and stay sane.

  I knew what I was about to ask of him was stupid, would probably somehow make his life worse. I knew it would probably cause more harm than good, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t stand to see my brother suffer any longer. If this had even the slightest chance of working, I was willing to take the chance that it would blow up in my face.

  “Kat?” Ethan said. “What did you want?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was no going back now.

  “I want you to take me down into your lab,” I said. It felt like the entire world suddenly stopped to wait for what I had to say next. I scarcely dared to breathe. “It’s time I met your demon.”

  28

  “Uh, what?”

  “Your demon,” I said. “I want to talk to him.”

  Ethan’s mouth unhinged and slowly fell open. He gaped at me, completely at a loss for words.

  “I’ll wait for you downstairs. You have time to clean up, so there’s no rush.” I turned and walked away.

  I went downstairs, sat at the table, then immediately stood up and went to the kitchen instead. I made sure to get a filter this time and made Ethan’s coffee. I figured if he hadn’t recovered by the time he came downstairs, a good jolt of caffeine should do it.

  Once the coffee was perking, I went back to sit down, but before I was all the way in my seat, I realized I couldn’t go downstairs to see his demon dressed as I was. I headed for the stairs, unconsciously pulling the edges of the shirt down. It might be long, but it wasn’t long enough.

  I passed Ethan in the hallway. His eyes were still wide, as if I had shocked him so bad his face got stuck that way. I could feel his eyes on my backside as I passed him and headed for the bedroom. There was a thump behind me and Ethan let out a startled “oof.” I glanced back to see him stepping away from the door frame of the hall bathroom.

  I shook my head as I stepped into the bedroom. I gave Ethan a quick little wave and closed the door before he could return it. A moment later, the shower started up and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to make it a cold one.

  I quickly got dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and jeans. Something about visiting with Ethan’s demon made me want to dress in my leather, but I knew it would be a bad idea. I’d much rather be able to move without pain than to look good for a creature I wasn’t so sure I really wanted to meet.

  I was downstairs again before Ethan’s shower was done. As soon as the water shut off, I poured him a cup of coffee and took it to the table. I was pretty sure he took it straight black but brought out the sugar bowl anyway. I’d never seen him put anything into the coffee, but then again, I never really paid close enough attention to know for sure.

  Ethan came downstairs a few minutes later. His hair was still damp, and the collar of his T-shirt was wet. He looked as nervous as I felt.

  “Thanks,” he said as I handed him his mug. He took a sip and started for the stairs without paying the sugar bowl a glance.

  I followed him down into the basement. He stopped at the door to his lab and just stared at it. He took another drink of his coffee, seemed to savor it, and then set the mug down on the table beside the door.

  “So this is it,” he said.

  “This isn’t such a big deal,” I said, tho
ugh I wasn’t convinced of that myself.

  He smiled. “If you say so.”

  He pulled a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. The doorknob fell open, revealing a fingerprint reader. I stared at it, surprised. I’d seen him go into the lab before but never realized he had installed a reader there too. I really needed to start paying better attention to what went on in my own house.

  Ethan looked back at me, his hand hovering over the reader as if blocking off my view. “Are you sure?” he said. “This could be ... unsettling.”

  “You were the one who said I should meet him.”

  Ethan shrugged. “Yeah, but I never thought you’d actually do it. It’s like, you know, that whole I ask, you reject, we move on as we were kind of thing. I never expected you to take me up on it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Open it.”

  He gave a nervous laugh and turned back to the door. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with letting me in, even if he had invited me. This had been his private sanctuary for years. How many times had he summoned that demon down there? How many times before I knew him? I was about to come face-to-face with a part of Ethan I’d never known existed until recently.

  He pressed his thumb to the reader and the door clicked open. He led the way down into his lab.

  The lab, unlike his bedroom, was clean and well maintained. Shelves lined one wall, holding various objects in jars and boxes. I couldn’t tell what any of them were. The boxes were closed and the jars had been painted black. I probably didn’t want to know what they contained.

  A table much like what I used to hold my weapons upstairs stood across the room, and a workbench stood beside it. There were papers piled on one corner, and one of my recently used swords lay in the middle of the table. The walls behind the table held more partially finished weapons on hooks. I’d never seen one of my swords before it had been completed.

  I looked around, expecting there to be a furnace or something, but as far as I could tell, there was no source of heat in the lab. He made my swords and knives down here, not to mention the silver bullets I used. There should have been some source of heat. It made me wonder how much of a hand Ethan really had in the creation of the weapons.

  Finally, my eyes rested on the circle in the middle of the room. It looked to be made of silver, though I couldn’t be sure unless I touched it. It took up a good portion of the room. There was nothing touching the circle, wasn’t anything anywhere close to it other than a single recliner that sat within its confines. It looked well used.

  “Nice place,” I said, my skin crawling. This reminded me way too much of an evil scientist’s lab in some old horror movie. The only thing missing were the wires and electrodes strewn all over the place.

  “It suffices,” Ethan said, moving across the room. He took a wide berth around the silver circle and sat down in a chair beside his workbench. He wheeled around to face me.

  “So,” I said, completely at a loss. “What now?”

  “Now I tell you the rules,” he said. He seemed suddenly serious.

  “Okay.”

  “First, no weapons. I should have told you that before we came down. Beligral doesn’t take well to threats of any kind. I should know.” He looked down, his face reddening.

  I looked down at myself. “Done.” I hadn’t even thought to grab my weapons before coming down. Now that Ethan brought it up, I felt like a fool. I never would have walked into a situation like this before without being armed. I knew far too little about demons to know whether they would have been effective or not anyway.

  “Second, stay away from the circle. Do not touch it, do not cross it. Don’t throw anything through it or reach for anything offered.”

  I nodded. “How do you get things from him then?”

  “He leaves whatever I need behind. If I need him afterward, I just summon him again.”

  “All right,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “No deals,” he said. “Absolutely none, zip, zilch, nada. If he offers to fix Thomas and wants something from you, refuse. I don’t care if it sounds simple, if it sounds like the perfect bargain, do not accept. I’ll make the deals. He is my burden and I will shoulder it alone.”

  I frowned at that. “You are doing this because I want you to. Thomas and anything that comes along with him are my responsibility.”

  “No,” Ethan said, firm. “I won’t do it if you don’t agree to this. I won’t have you trapped like I am.”

  That stopped me. “Okay,” I said. I hated agreeing to anything that might end up with Ethan in more trouble than he was already in. I simply had no choice.

  “I mean it, Kat.”

  “I said okay.”

  He stared at me, then finally nodded. “All right, then. I think that about covers it. He’ll try to get you to do something stupid. Just stay back, don’t agree to anything, and this should be cake.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that but nodded anyway. This was a lot more complicated than I’d expected.

  Ethan rose from the chair. He opened one of the many drawers of his workbench and removed a large piece of sidewalk chalk. He walked around the circle, making a new chalk outline just outside the silver. He was murmuring something under his breath, but I didn’t listen too closely. I didn’t really want to hear what he was saying.

  Once the circle was complete, he stepped back, dropping the chalk back into the drawer. “Can’t be too careful,” he said as he reached back in and removed five candles. At first I thought they were simple tan-colored candles, but as he started placing them around the circle, I noticed the thin red veins running through them.

  I grimaced and tried really hard not to look at them. I wasn’t sure if the candles were actually made of flesh or just crafted to look that way. I really didn’t want to find out.

  Ethan gave me a nervous smile as he continued working. He produced a book of matches from his pocket and began lighting the candles, whispering an incantation with each. The candles seemed to burn brighter than they should and gave off a peculiar scent that made my stomach churn. They really did smell like burning flesh.

  He finished with the last candle and backed away. “This is it,” he said. “If you want to back out now, I won’t hold it against you. This can be intense.”

  “I’m staying,” I said. Ethan gave me a pleading look, almost as if he wished I would back out. “I’m staying,” I repeated, and he nodded.

  “All right,” he said. He wiped his face with both hands, leaving a smear of white chalk dust on his cheek. “Here goes nothing.”

  I expected him to pull out a vial of blood or cut his palm or something, but he only walked to the edge of the circle, head down, and started chanting. The words made no sense to me. They flowed one on top of the other, almost like a song. He mumbled them, which made it even harder to understand what he was saying. I didn’t know if that was for my benefit or if that was the way it was supposed to be done.

  At first, nothing seemed to happen. Ethan just stood there, hands moving slowly in small circles at his waist, head lowered, murmuring those words over and over.

  I stared into the circle, waiting for something to happen. After a few minutes, I began to wonder if my presence had somehow mucked up the ritual.

  The candles flared, drawing my eye. I could feel their heat from clear across the room. The inside of the circle seemed to grow a little darker as the light of the candles grew that much brighter. The air felt thicker, as if there was too much of it. Or not enough. I wasn’t sure which.

  A speck of darkness appeared near the floor within the circle. It was about the size of a quarter and was so dark it seemed as though that part of the floor had simply vanished. I only noticed it because I had been looking directly at it when it appeared. Ethan’s chanting increased, as did the heat from the candles. He was sweating profusely now. The back of his T-shirt was stuck to his skin and it was only getting hotter.

  Slowly, the speck of darkness elongated vertically, almost like a zipp
er being opened. As it expanded, heat poured out. It was so hot my eyes started to burn, but I refused to look away. I didn’t want to miss whatever was about to happen.

  Light flashed in the middle of the circle, nearly blinding me. Five bars of pure white light shot from candle to candle, forming a perfect pentagram. The image hung for a moment and then winked out as the tear opened the rest of the way.

  Something stepped out.

  My mind couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing at first. I saw skin, but it was red, blistered. Something black flapped behind the figure, almost like wings made of pure darkness. The image of the demon flashed as it stepped through the portal, and instead of the red-skinned monster I expected, a man dressed in a suit stepped forward.

  He smiled at Ethan, displaying teeth that were clearly not human. Every yellow tooth ended in a point I knew was sharper than any knife.

  Beligral’s eyes turned toward me. They burned fiercely, red pits from the deepest hells. They bore straight through me, into what was left of my tattered soul. I was pinned there, unable to move, unable to think. It was so hot I could hardly breathe.

  “Well, well, well,” the demon said. He leaned forward on a cane I hadn’t noticed before. I was almost positive he hadn’t been holding it a moment ago. “What have we here?”

  Ethan stepped back from the circle, hair matted to his head. He looked utterly exhausted. “Master,” he said, drawing Beligral’s gaze. I nearly screamed at the word, not liking the implications. “I bring to you Lady Death.”

  Beligral smiled, exposing those deadly teeth once more. He reeked of sulfur. The entire room did.

  “Really?” he said. I shuddered at the sound of his voice. It sounded like two people speaking at once: One sound was normal, the voice he wanted us to hear; the other was like darkness incarnate. It was just barely there, almost beyond hearing. It grated and rolled from a face that I knew was a fake. It turned every word out of his mouth into a sort of blasphemy.