The Fell of Dark

by Caleb Roehrig

  “Say stop when you need to,” Gunnar purrs against the beat of my jugular, while Jude sinks his fangs into his own wrist, breaking the skin and drawing blood to the surface.

  “Swallow as much as you can,” he advises me. “It’ll make the experience last longer for all of us.” He presses his slippery flesh against my mouth, and my tongue lights up with it, an irresistible current of energy pouring into me.

  I knew what to expect, and yet it still takes my breath away, this heart-pounding taste of forbidden fruit. My body warms as I drink, my own blood stirring as it meets the magic, electricity spiraling through my limbs.

  Gunnar’s hand finds its way under my shirt, lifting it over my head as I release Jude’s wrist, and his touch against my bare skin is a million feathers—it’s a hard rain, a lightning storm—and a sound presses from my lungs. The air sharpens, candlelight climbing to the ceiling, as bright as their eyes. My back arches when Gunnar’s teeth pierce the flesh on one side of my neck, the pain momentary and somehow exquisite, and Jude whispers just beneath my ear, “No matter what happens Friday, tonight only has to be about us.”

  He bites down, then, and as they drink, swallowing in time with the beat of my heart, the electricity jumps from my body. Tendrils of my expanding mind flow into the two vampires that feed from me, their thoughts spreading open like petals at the softest touch. Their memories and emotions run through me, a current that swirls and eddies, volatile and aching and filled with want. Jude’s hand slides across my skin until it reaches Gunnar’s, and their fingers interlock, pressing against my bare chest.

  It’s love and hunger, a temporary truce, a moment where they both relinquish the past and choose bliss. Tonight is about us.

  Warmth pours out of me, lifting us up, and we float toward the ceiling.

  33

  Just before sunrise the next morning, after doing me one last favor, Jude and Gunnar depart. Despite the fact that they won’t recall where they were, they will remember everything we discussed—and everything we did. I’m finally certain I can trust them; they could have bled me dry, feasting on the magic that fills my veins, but they controlled themselves. And with even their most carefully hidden feelings now written indelibly in my memory, I know they’ll do what I’ve asked.

  I sleep late into the afternoon and then spend some time reviewing my plans yet again. One of the requests I made of Hope and Adriana was to leave a series of notes around Fulton Heights with a message for Rasputin: I’m willing to meet your terms, but first you need to prove that my parents are alive and unharmed. With a dummy email address at the bottom, I scribbled out enough for them to tack up all over town—school, Sugar Mama’s, Colgate Center, the abandoned factory, and even my front door.

  Rasputin isn’t the only one who needs to get the message, and scattering a few breadcrumbs is the only way I can think of to get everyone following the trail.

  As the shadows grow long, the sky turning lavender above the water, the streetlamps blink on against the gathering dusk—and I finally leave the apartment. Head down and collar up, I strike out for the nearest library. Vampires roam the city—my radar strong enough now for me to detect even their moods—but none of them are here for me.

  It’s twenty minutes until closing when I hunker down at a public internet terminal and sign in to my new email account. I could use my phone for this, but I’m far too paranoid at this point. Five groups want to get their hands on the Corrupter, the newest of which is a century old, and all of them have had plenty of time to prepare—to hack my GPS or plant a source capable of tracking my cell usage … I’m not taking any chances.

  My inbox contains a single email, a blank message with an attached video. Although I try to brace myself, there’s no way to prepare for what I see when I open it. My parents, pale and wild-eyed, still dressed as I last saw them, sit side by side on plain wooden chairs. They don’t look hurt—but they don’t look well, either, their bodies rigid with fright. On either side, they’re flanked by vampires with matching, blank-eyed expressions of cruel glee, and my finger trembles as I press play.

  “Auggie…” My father’s voice cracks as he says my name, and I start to weep, just like that, struggling to be silent. “We’re okay. We’re alive and unhurt. We’re being treated well.”

  “If you pledge your loyalty to the Order of the Northern Wolf tonight, they’ll let us go.” My mother stares into the camera, her pupils so wide her eyes are completely black. They’re being mind-controlled. “Come alone to the old metro station on Culver Avenue after midnight tonight. Please, Auggie. Please save us.”

  “If you don’t, they’ll kill us.” My father hesitates. “They’ll start with your mother, and they’ll … take her apart slowly.”

  “Please save us,” my mother repeats—and the video cuts off.

  I sit there, sobbing quietly into my hands, for so long that a five-minute warning comes on over the library’s speakers. Out of everything I’ve gone through, this is what almost breaks me, what almost makes me forfeit my ridiculous scheme and give in to Rasputin’s demands. Even though my parents would die anyway, at least it wouldn’t happen because of my hubris.

  Quaking so badly I can barely find the right keys, I manage to type a response:

  These are my terms: On Friday night, two hours after sundown, you will come to the west picnic grounds at Colgate Woods, and you will bring my parents. When I see them with my own eyes, alive and unharmed, I’ll take the oath. If either of them has so much as a paper cut, or if you go anywhere near my friends in the meantime, you will die in agony. I have access to more of Azazel’s powers than you think. Don’t bother responding to this message.

  After I hit send, it takes nearly all the time I have left to get myself under control, but I finally write one last message to Adriana, delete my account, and leave the library.

  * * *

  The next day and a half pass like a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel full of broken glass, my hands constantly sweaty, every moment a new opportunity to second-guess my strategy. To hate myself for terminating any chance of further communications with Rasputin. It was the smart thing to do, I know that—my only leverage lies in my refusal to negotiate, my depriving him the chance to send me a video even worse than the first.

  He needs me, I keep telling myself, and I laid out my conditions plainly. No matter how angry he gets that I didn’t jump at his command, he wants control of the Corrupter more than he cares about hurting my parents. When he tries to reply to my email and it bounces back, he’ll see that there’s no point in lashing out at me by deliberately violating the terms, because I’d never know. I repeat it over and over … but I’m not very convincing.

  Even if Rasputin thinks rationally, there’s still plenty of horrible things he could do to my parents that won’t leave a mark. He could break their legs, heal them with vampire blood, and then break their legs again—over and over, all to punish me for my insolence. Just thinking about it invites a panic attack … but if I give in to his demands, the world would be irrevocably doomed, and my parents along with it.

  My clock is ticking loud enough to have an echo by now, and I’m beginning to feel the entity that’s Rising inside of me—something moving just out of sight. The witches didn’t say exactly what hour I should expect the Ascension, and I exist in a state of constant panic that it will happen too soon, that my big gamble will turn up snake eyes in the end.

  On the other hand, they obviously need me present to perform their ritual—whatever its true aims are—and their understanding of how the future unfolds is precise enough to have accurately predicted my movements a week in advance. Maybe if they chose not to tell me something, it means they didn’t need to. Given the many ways my night with Jude and Gunnar differed from the visions I’d had of that same event, I’m finally starting to believe destiny might truly be malleable; that Brixia was telling the truth when she said only fools believe in fate.

  Maybe the coven can defeat Azazel after all.
>
  Maybe.

  On Friday evening, an hour before sunset, I clean the apartment, set the key on the kitchen counter, and then leave the building for the last time. My hands trembling and my gut tied up in frigid knots, I’m finally on my way back home.

  34

  Part of the Cook County Forest Preserve, Colgate Woods is one link in a chain of nature areas that meanders throughout Chicago’s suburbs. Crisscrossed by streams and walking paths, it’s a convenient escape from city life, and a vast clearing on its west end—at the base of an overgrown slope separating it from the former industrial sector of Fulton Heights—is a popular spot for picnics. Public and accessible, it’s officially closed after dark, and the only light available comes from the moon.

  This is the location I’ve selected for the Corrupter’s final showdown.

  The sky is clear and the air is glacial as I watch from the trees, everything clicking into place. Detecting the vampires that gather in the darkness requires no effort now, ghostly whispers scurrying back and forth across my skin, and I stick to the shadows, aware of how quickly the dominoes will fall once I show myself. Undead blood—from a vial Jude filled on Wednesday morning—pumps through my veins, amplifying my senses.

  An hour early, the first of Rasputin’s outriders dart past, three of them, their signals weaving through the birch grove on the north side of the clearing as they check the terrain. They look for me, but I’m not worried; they won’t see me until I want them to. When they’ve completed their scouting mission, they retreat—and when the appointed time arrives, their golden eyes flicker to life in the gloom festering among the trees. Two by two more eyes appear, like fairy lights, as a small army of shiftless undead soldiers secure the field for their general.

  “August Pfeiffer?” Wind shakes the branches, and traffic whooshes by on the main road, just out of sight, but Grigori Rasputin’s heavily accented voice still sounds loud and clear across the picnic grounds. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”

  “I want to see my parents,” I call back, and the golden eyes neither blink nor waver at my demand. There are seventeen sets, but I sense twenty-one vampires hiding in the birch grove. “Show me you complied with my terms, and I’ll come out.”

  “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” His taunting voice circles the clearing like a boomerang, the source impossible to determine. He’s using magic. “This little scene is more public than I care for, August Pfeiffer. Too unprotected. I do not wish to walk into a trap.”

  “Neither do I.” We’re all at risk here, and that’s the point. The Syndicate and the League will do anything to stop me from making a deal with Rasputin—and the Brotherhood wants to see me dead no matter what. A meeting at Colgate Woods leaves everyone vulnerable … but there are dozens of escape routes, and few ways to rig the playing field. “The second I come out there, you’ll probably grab me! And how do I even know you still have my parents? How am I supposed to know they’re okay?”

  “If you don’t come out, how am I to know you did not lure me here to be killed?” He counters, his singsong voice still making eerie rounds over the clearing. “But if you insist…”

  A moment later, another voice splits the night, ragged and heartrending. “Auggie, whatever he wants, don’t give it to h—”

  The warning cuts off abruptly, plunged into silence … but not before it has its intended effect. My throat closes, my vision wobbles, and for just a moment I’m six years old again. “D-Dad?”

  “You will see your parents once I see you, August Pfeiffer.” The Mad Monk’s voice contains a wicked smile.

  Freshman year, right after I came out, I had the classic recurring nightmare about being naked in front of my entire class. That sense of total exposure was nothing compared to what I feel when I leave the shadows for the moonlight, drowning in the vast openness of the picnic grounds. I’m radioactive with nerves, visible from space, with an angel uncoiling inside me. More whispers scatter across my skin, a snare closing, and I swallow hard.

  The dominoes are beginning to fall.

  “Okay.” My voice is so thin it could splice atoms. “Here I am. Now it’s your turn.”

  Shapes begin to form around the golden eyes that hover in the trees, bodies emerging from the darkness in unison. Seventeen figures, all wearing identical robes of flowing white fabric, step into the clearing—staring creepily, like those animatronic bears at amusement parks. I brace myself, readying for an attack … and that’s when I hear the squeak and crunch of heavy wheels passing over dirt—when I sense three of the remaining Northern Wolf vampires approaching.

  A wooden cart trundles into view, creaking and unsteady, from the mouth of a dark trail that snakes through the birch trees. Pushed by Rasputin’s remaining stooges, its weathered chassis bears up a sizeable cage, like something meant to hold tigers for a traveling circus—only the trembling, pitiful creatures being held in captivity aren’t animals. They’re my parents.

  “Auggie?” My mother’s voice breaks when she sees me, her face gray, haggard with fear; and I take two frantic steps forward before I remember how much peril I’m in. I’ve got limitless opportunities to lose everything, but only one chance to save the people I love. To save the world. Rasputin wants to break me, to provoke me into charging, and I have to be smarter than that. Even if it hurts beyond enduring.

  Just now, my heart sparking and explosive, I want to mesmerize these zombies into letting my parents go—to turn them against each other in a death match … but I don’t try. Even with vampire blood in my system, I know instinctively that I can’t control this many minds at once. The Corrupter’s hour is approaching, and I can feel him pulling away; pretty soon, this body won’t be big enough for the both of us, and one of us will have to go.

  I’m starting to lose my grip on his power, and I’m running out of time.

  My parents clutch the bars of their cage, crying out—but the only sound they make is my name, over and over: Auggie, Auggie, Auggie. The rest of their vocabulary has been stripped from them, certainly by magic, but those two repeated syllables are filled with anguish, love, and desperation. I’m sobbing when the birches give a sudden shake, a figure launching over the treetops, dropping in a graceful arc to land twenty feet in front of me.

  Clad in a black tunic with embroidered occult markings, Grigori Rasputin leers at me with eyes like rolling lava. His followers shift behind him, straightening their shoulders, and a few of them even salute. Twisting his mouth into a smile, he intones, “We meet again. I wonder, will you run away like a scared child this time, as well?”

  “Let my parents go.” I can barely get the words out, my throat hot. “Until they’re out of that cage, there’s no deal, you son of a bitch.”

  “Such spirit!” He gives a condescending laugh, and his acolytes laugh with him, a blood-curdling Greek chorus that falls silent at a gesture from one of his spidery hands. His expression droops into a thoughtful frown. “I think, however, this is a condition I cannot meet. Without your parents under my protection, what guarantee do I have that you will honor our agreement?”

  “Unless you set them free now, what guarantee do I have that you’ll do it at all?” I make a tentative mind-push into Rasputin’s consciousness—but I hit a brick wall. He’s shielded himself with the same kind of magic the coven used. I wonder if he’s bothered to protect the rest of his crew. “No more negotiating!”

  My paranormal radar system is going haywire, my skin crawling from the inside out. Rasputin wants me to take this oath as a guarantee, but if he truly believes the Corrupter is on his side, then all he has to do is grab me right now. Somewhere above us, the planets are gliding into formation, and I probably have just minutes left to pull this frying pan out of the fire. I’m going to need all the luck the universe has to offer.

  “It would seem, then, that we are at something of an impasse.” Spreading his hands philosophically, the Mad Monk shrugs. “We both have something the other wants, and neither of us is willin
g to conciliate.” And then he grins malevolently, his face darkening. “If only there was perhaps something I could do to change your mind…”

  He makes another languid gesture, and one of the vampires that pushed the circus cart reaches into the leather bag that hangs from his shoulder—and pulls out a blowtorch. A spear of blue flame leaps from the nozzle with a hiss, and my mother yelps as she and my father jolt away from the bars, huddling together. Like they know it’s meant for them … like they’re already familiar with it.

  Rage dissolves my reason, a red filter passing over the world, and I plunge my will straight into Blowtorch Guy’s body. The Corrupter’s gravity stirs his blood, and shock flares in his eyes as heat spills through him. Balefully, I growl, “Careful when you play with fire.”

  This isn’t a smart move. This confrontation has barely started, and I’m already throwing the first punch—I’ve already let Rasputin destabilize me, and I don’t know what the fallout will be. As the vampire’s face turns pink, I hesitate, caught between the urge to stop and the urge to finish what I’ve begun.

  And that’s when the next domino falls.

  “Grigori Rasputin!” Eyes blazing and cheekbones canted, Jude Marlowe bursts from a cluster of evergreens on the eastern edge of the picnic grounds. He’s dressed in black and looks every inch a debonair killer. “You have violated the codes and precepts established by the Syndicate of Vampires, and on their authority you are ordered to stand down!”

  The undead cleric rolls his eyes, his shoulders sagging in annoyance. “Oh good. An interruption.” Dismissively, he answers, “I appreciate theatrics as much as anyone, but as you can see, we are busy here. Go play cops and robbers somewhere else.”

  “You led an unsanctioned raiding party that took numerous lives—mortal and vampire,” Jude continues, his voice booming. “Your group’s actions were reckless and unprovoked, and now our entire community is threatened by human retaliation.” He avoids looking my way. I didn’t put him up to this—the Syndics absolutely want Rasputin’s head on a platter—but he only knew to be here because of me. “The Syndicate will not tolerate contempt for its directives, and as the self-declared leader of the Order of the Northern Wolf, you will answer for its crimes.”