Evermore (The Night Watchmen Series Book 5)

by Candace Knoebel

  There’s an eerie silence that’s so deafening it nearly chokes me. There’s no chirping birds. No wind or rustling leaves. It’s nothing at all like I remembered when I found my mother. Then again, I wasn’t trying to hide myself either. It’s lonely, empty, like a hug from a shadow, and it makes the deepest parts of my soul want to cry.

  There’s a scarecrow in the middle of the field, its eyes and belly picked out, hay spilling from its center while crows roost on its arms. The sky is just bright enough to provide light, but there is no sun to be seen. It doesn’t shine here. There’s just a blank coldness left, stripping color and beauty.

  I stumble forward, gripping the talisman, praying this works as I call her name. “Sanura?”

  “Come to ask about him?” a deep, sultry voice says from behind me.

  I spin and find a woman a few inches taller than me, skin darker than coffee and eyes equally as dark staring back with arms crossed over her chest. Bright pink scars are raked across her skin and face. Her hair is shielded underneath a ratty bonnet wrapped around her head. She’s wearing rags, patches of mismatched cloth sewn unevenly together, the edges covered in mottled spots of dark brown and crimson.

  I know it’s Sanura without asking. I can tell by the talisman swinging around her neck… the same one I hold in my hand. I have agonized about this moment for weeks now, planning how it would go and what I would say to the last detail, but my tongue has seized up and my brain turned to mush, and all the planning and worrying has amounted to this—a frozen look on my face.

  Her keen eyes drop to the talisman in my hand. “Why do you have that?”

  The expectant look in her eyes shakes up the words lodged in my throat. “I came to make you an offer,” I say, backing up as she inches toward me, eyes sharp and alert like an animal’s.

  Her head tilts ever so slightly. Intrigue, or maybe indignation, glitters in the inky depth of her pupils. “You think you can bribe me? Did he send you here?” She gives a pause, as if she wants an answer, but then she speaks again, erasing any chance. “I’ll make this short and sweet, just like I did with all the others.”

  She lifts her chin, showing her neck. There are bruises spaced on either side, and small veins popped beneath the skin. My fear is replaced by a numbness so cold it feels like my blood has been replaced with ice.

  “He killed me,” she says as she levels her gaze back on me. “Choked me on his own front porch. And you think I want to go back to him?” She shakes her head. “No. My head is clear in death. He is a monster, a killer, and I have no plans to be found.” She stalks forward, pushing me further until my back brushes up against the edge of the cotton field. “But you already know that.”

  “He killed you because you cursed him.” My voice sounds strangled and nothing at all like the confident woman I entered this Dwelling as. If she would only stop moving toward me like this. Cutting me down, inch by inch, with her lethal gaze.

  “I did,” she agrees, stopping just in front of me.

  I can smell her… smell the blood on her as if she had just taken a bath in it. See the demons playing a game of tag in her eyes.

  “And you want my help, don’t you?” she asks, head tilted to the side as her eyes graze over my face. Her gaze is appraising and shrewd, filled with experiences I’ll never understand. “Think I’m just going to give up my Grimoire because he told you a few things about me?” She dismisses me with a flit of her hand. “Go, before I get angry. Tell him the same thing I told all the others—he made his choice. Now he has to live with it.”

  She turns from me as a fog rolls in from the denuded forest line, pulling her away from me.

  Desperation snaps my tongue awake. “I’m not here because I want to help him. I’m here because I want to kill him.”

  This gets her attention.

  She stops, turns just enough to offer an ear.

  “You could help me kill him. You could have your revenge.”

  In a blink, she’s in my face, leaning close, sniffing me out with teeth bared. “You smell like fear,” she points out. “Why are you scared, little girl?” She looks confident and evil, demonic as her teeth gleam under the sun. She wants to upset me. Make me feel uncomfortable. Twist my confidence until it can’t stand straight anymore.

  Every muscle in my body tightens, refusing to bend under her aura as I stiffen. Build walls around my fear, boxing it up and closing the lid. I step toward her this time, forcing her back a step, eyes leveling on her. “Do you want your revenge or not?”

  She draws back, eyebrows pulled together as she tosses my words around. I think maybe she might listen. Maybe she’ll give in, but then she shakes her head. “You should go. This place is no place for you.” She turns just enough to show the forest twisted in, gnarled like arthritic fingers behind her. There’s a small, rotting hut just behind the web of trees with smoke billowing out of the dilapidated chimney. Wooden planks covered in algae and limp-hanging moss, sagging under the weight of the secrets it must hold.

  This is where she must hide. Surrounded by scraps of rusted metal and haphazard stacks of rotting wood. Trapped inside a collapsing box wrapped in smoke and enclosed within a dreary forest.

  She turns to leave, but I latch onto her arm, stopping her.

  “You have to help me,” I say squarely, evenly.

  Her eyes drop to my hand, displeasure pulsing around her dark irises. Her lips curl like a crazed animal, baring her crooked teeth. “You want answers. You want truth. You want pain.”

  Without warning, she grabs my arms and a spike of electric pain crackles down the middle of me. My eyes roll back into my head as images flood through the barrier of my mind, carrying me on its current.

  “This… this is truth,” Sanura says as she pushes her thoughts into my head.

  I’m being dragged through memories as the Dwelling shifts around us, the edges falling away like peeling paint, replaced by high, candlelit walls with grand tapestries and a spiraling staircase. Men in dated clothing and women dressed in servant rags carrying trays of food and platters of beer as they all sit around a table shouting and jeering.

  Sanura drags me through the kitchen and down into the servant’s quarters until the voices become a distant crest of sound pulsing above. I see her in a room no bigger than a linen closet as she tends to the little boy I had seen in my dream. He’s crying, blood pooling from a wound on his knee, and I can’t help but move closer until I’m sitting next to him, wishing I could hug him. Wishing I could whisper to him to never follow the pale white boy into the woods.

  She’s soothing him, rubbing his face, murmuring comforting words as her hand covers the wound. It is then I notice an eye peering in through a small hole in the door. When she removes her hand, the wound is gone. A second later, there’s a loud crashing sound just outside the door. She jerks the door open, only to find a pale, wide-eyed little boy on his butt with a broom laying across him. Mourdyn. He’s already asking questions, on his feet, trying to push his way through, when Sanura hisses at him and shuts the door.

  She doesn’t let go of me as the world falls around us again like shattering comets raining down on us. The house falls away—the walls, the paintings, the loud laughter, shifting and rearranging likes pieces in a puzzle until I’m standing near the well deep in the forest, watching as Sanura cry into it for that same little boy as Mourdyn stands back, watching with the twisted gaze of a predator. There’s no remorse, no regret, only pride in the pain he’s caused.

  She’s screaming at him when she sees his smile. Marches up to him, her hand swung back, ready to strike, and he braces himself. Flinches. Clams up. He even whimpers when she lets go and smacks him clear across the face. Angry tears fill his eyes when he looks at her. When he points to one of the other little boys and somehow manages to lift them in the air with magic, threatening to do the same and worse if she doesn’t show him how to use magic. Threatening to out her to his father, who will surely have her hung by the end of the night.

&
nbsp; I beg for her to let me go. Scream through my mind to Weldon for help, but she’s somehow blocked me.

  “You messed up by coming here,” she says, dragging me away from the forest as it chips away again, shifting into another time.

  I see Mourdyn as a young man, pale skin nearly translucent under the light of the sun, dragging a male hunter by a collar wrapped around his throat through the woods. Watch the man dig his hands into the leaves and twigs, trying to grab a hold of something that will keep him from meeting whatever fate Mourdyn has in store for him as he begs and cries for Mourdyn to stop. Horror surrounds me as a young Sanura steps out of the hut I just saw, holding a hatchet in her hand and wearing a sharp smile on her face.

  “You brought me a present,” she says to Mourdyn. He drops to his knees in front of her. There’s a dark fog that surrounds her. She inhales it with every breath.

  “He’s a hunter from one of the tribes from your homeland,” Mourdyn says, head turned up to her. He spits the sentence out like a mouth full of bugs. The distaste for hunters is so prevalent, so obvious, that my skin begins to itch with discomfort.

  She takes the man’s leash and tugs so hard it drops him flat against the ground as he chokes on his own spit. Every muscle, every fiber in my being, trembles with the need to stop her, but reality has grown roots from my feet, locking me in place. Truth wraps cold hands around my throat. I can’t stop this. I can’t help him. This has already happened.

  And then, her steps stop… almost as if she has just realized something. She looks to the leash in her hand, then to the hunter on the ground, and then she swivels around to Mourdyn. He’s watching her closely, studying her every move.

  He crawls forward, lips moving as a low murmur expels from his mouth. A dark stream of magic spreads from the words he spoke suspended in the air. It pierces the black fog around her like fangs, and then fills it, pumping lies and power until she breathes it in deep. Shakes her head as if shaking away a thought.

  He smiles when her eyes open with clarity. When she readjusts her attention back to the hunter. With magic, she lifts his body into the air, and then drops it into an old ivory tub coated with so many layers of dried blood I can barely see the white of it.

  “Filth,” she spits, tying the leash around a tree in front of the hut. “To the Goddess of Blood you must go.”

  Without a word, she draws the hatchet back in the air and brings it down into the top of the man’s skull. I try to look away, but Sanura has a hold of my mind, forcing me to watch.

  The pleasured cry that escapes Mourdyn’s lips as the man’s blood drains into the tub feels like spiders crawling up my spine. Feels like the world as I knew it has been replaced with all that is wrong and twisted.

  Sanura gleams a satisfied smile in his direction. Glides over to him, hips swaying, and then runs her bloodied hands over Mourdyn’s face.

  I think my heart will explode. I open my mouth to scream, but the sound is swallowed by the Dwelling almost as if it’s a living, breathing monster surviving off the terror and pain of others.

  “Hunters are nothing more than a free meal,” Sanura says as she traces her fingers over Mourdyn’s lips. “They don’t deserve to live. They are nothing more than dogs we must put down.”

  Mourdyn is nodding with her every word, following her on his knees as she beckons him to the tub with a slow wag of her finger. He grabs onto her thighs, running his hands all over them before pressing his head against her backside.

  “We must clean him up. Give the scraps to the dogs.”

  Mourdyn nods and takes the hatchet from her, watching her disappear back into the hut.

  I scream when she lets go of my mind. Feel like I’ll never be able to erase the scar she just carved into me. An overwhelming surge of pain forms behind my eyes as they water, blurring what’s before me.

  “You see,” she says, looking back to the hut, her point falling precisely into place. “He used my own magic against me. Used the spells I taught him to warp my mind. To make me do things not even my tribe would do for the sake of the wrath we would face in Hell.

  “There is no escaping this hell he and I have created,” Sanura says with a sickening smirk. “Hunters put me here. They raped my village and brought me to a world I never asked to live in. Forced me to break my back working for a relentless master. Because of them, I watched my son die. Because of them, I will never find him here because I am meant to pay. Because they want me to pay.”

  My insides have turned to stone. I try to speak over my racing heart. Over the threat she just openly made that’s dragged a knife down my spine, paralyzing me. One thought pulses through my mind… one need to right a wrong. She can move us through the Dwelling. Take us further like she just did with her memories.

  I need to try to find her.

  “No,” I say firmly, trying to still my insides, which are swimming in sickness from all the shifting memories.

  “No?” she repeats.

  “That answer isn’t good enough. You could do the right thing. You could end this, but you won’t because you’re scared of him… aren’t you?”

  A smile snakes across her lips. “I guess you didn’t get the point. Let me refresh your memory.” She drags me deeper through the Dwelling, pulling me further away from my lifeline. I can feel Weldon’s grip loosening on my hand. Feel my heart beating slower and slower, nearing that final beat.

  But I didn’t come here to die.

  I force my eyes to stay open as the world alters around us, nothing more than pixilated shapes converting and then falling away before they ever had the chance to form. Blood and screaming and death. What little bit of power I have, I form into a wisp of myself and will it to find Cassie and guide her back to me.

  “I smell your difference,” Sanura says, her grip on my arm burning through my skin. “The hunter and the witch in you. You could find my boy in here and give him back to me.”

  The Dwelling begins to close around us like a dark shadow settling over the sun. It’s collapsing on itself, and I know if we go any further, no one will be able to pull me back out.

  Words race to my lips as I scream out, “Your son is in a better place, Sanura. He doesn’t belong here in this world you’ve created.”

  Fire erupts behind my eyes. I grit down on my teeth, trying to think through the pain.

  “You aren’t here because of hunters, or witches, or any other being you want to blame,” I shout, trying to slow her down as the images shift so quickly around us now my head begins to spin. “It was because of bad people. An awful man who never cared about anyone but himself. A group of men who didn’t value life. They don’t speak for the whole. You weren’t betrayed by a hunter or a witch… you were betrayed by living beings.”

  I don’t think she likes my words. Fire spreads through my limbs, sticking to my skin like lava as the shadows swirl all around us, closing us into nothing but a vast emptiness. “You will pay for coming here,” she spits, fear and pain curbing the edges of her words.

  A face appears and disappears within the blurring fog of her pace. A wisp of strawberry hair. A name perched on the edge of my lips.

  Cassie.

  “Don’t you want to avenge your son?” I shout, anchoring my feet into the ground to slow her. Feeling like the entire Dwelling will collapse around me at any moment. I must stop her. I need to get to Cassie.

  She stops and is in my face so fast my breath catches. We’re in nothing. No space or time. No light or dark. No cold, no heat… absolutely nothing.

  “He killed your boy, and then threatened to kill the others. He kept you from bringing your son back. And then he took your life,” I say, pleading for her to understand what I’m saying.

  She stumbles back a step.

  “But you can avenge your boy, Sanura,” I say, taking the small lead she’s given me. “You can help me destroy Mourdyn so he can’t do this again. So he can’t find your Grimoire and use it while you’re stuck in this awful place reliving these memori
es.”

  Ghosts swim in her eyes. Her hand touches the base of her neck.

  “If you help me, I can guarantee Mourdyn will never see the light of another day, and your boy will be avenged.” I take her hand in mine and squeeze as my heart thunders in my neck. “You will be avenged.”

  Silence skips by for what feels like a millennium before she speaks. The shadows move closer and closer, the icy cold tendrils reaching out to swallow us whole.

  “I want more than that,” she says, eyes locking with mine. “I want him. Here. Centuries I’ve spent thinking about what I could do to him if he ever found himself stuck in the Dwelling. Centuries I’ve spent preparing all the ways to torture him.” She stops, resolution in her eyes. “I want to watch the light fade from his eyes. And when he goes, I want to bring him here.”

  Move, Faye. Time to go, I hear Weldon say.

  “I can help you do that,” I vow, reaching my hand out as the darkness closes in around us.

  “How?”

  “I have the power to pull you from this place if you’ll only follow me out.” I watch her eyes take flight on the wings of hope. “But I need you to help me first,” I add, determined to scour every inch of this place until I find who I’m actually looking for.

  She looks down at my hand. Takes it and shakes.

  “My friend… Cassie… she’s here somewhere, and I need to take her back with me. She was also cursed and fell victim to it,” I quickly explain, praying to whoever will listen that Sanura will keep to her word.

  “We don’t have much time. The planes are sealing shut. The Dwelling I created is shattering. You aren’t supposed to be here,” Sanura explains as she keeps my hand in hers and pulls us from the shadows, floating us higher and higher away from the inky shadows collapsing around us. “Call to her,” she says as the world begins to form again.

  “Cassie!” I shout, frantically searching for any sign of her.

  Nothing.

  “When we reach the upper level, you’re going to have to do what you promised,” Sanura says, only looking forward. “We have but a short window of time.”