“You worry for your sister, the tainted one.”
Anger sparks to life in my gut. What did he just call her? “Her name is Ava. And she’s not tainted.”
“Her blood, that is what I’m referring to. Not her soul. But you must leave that alone, Aidan. Your mother’s sin cannot become your own.”
“Sin? My sister is not a sin. Her life is not a sin. She’s a human girl who deserves a chance at a normal life, which she’s never had because her mother was so strung out on casting magic that she went bat-shit crazy and then sacrificed herself to save that sin that you want me to leave behind.”
“You misunderstand me. I mean the sin your mother committed by believing she was a god. Her life should have been one of peace and joy with you, but she spent it casting out, trying to change her fate through manipulation. Love is the only way to truly change things. And love does not harm, it only heals. I know your mother was in pain, but she chose poorly.”
The words are honest and harsh, cutting through me like a knife.
“I hear in your voice what you yearn to do,” he continues, “but you need to leave that behind. Don’t bring her back, Aidan. You mustn’t.”
“I have to.” My throat goes tight. “I made a promise.”
He nods slowly. “I understand. Then I will say what I must and go. These are the words HaShem has spoken: Forgive the father of your flesh, or you will be cast among the ashes. Acquit the mother of your blood, or you will drown in her sorrow. Release the sister of your soul, or you will find your hands holding her heart’s blood.”
He stands silent for several seconds and I take it all in, breathless. Let go, he seems to be saying. Let go of this road I’m on, this path to save Ava. How can I? Leaving her to her fate . . . that’s impossible.
“I know these things aren’t what you wanted for the future, but we don’t control life, we merely live it, searching for Grace. You’ve been given a large weight on your shoulders, but it’s meant to be there, for the glory of HaShem. Not for your own devices. So know that your powers will only bring back human life that your own existence caused to be snuffed out; it will only fix that which you’ve broken in your birth. And each time you resurrect another, you give of your own life. Nothing is free. The life that was taken for a purpose cannot be saved by you. That soul will rise to paradise and wait to be made whole again.”
I stare at him, realizing that means my power has the potential to fix what my own existence has broken, as much as it’s meant to fight Darkness. All these things I’ve messed up with my life, with my birth, there’s a way to mend some of it.
Which means there’s still a way for me to save Ava and help Kara.
“Good-bye,” he whispers at last, his voice full of unspoken things. “There is much I wish we could speak of, but for now I must obey. Know that I see you, that I am not ashamed to call you my son, Fire Bringer. Know that my heart is heavy with yours. Forgive me if you can.”
And then he begins to fade, his body turning ghostly and translucent, until he disappears entirely. I can only watch the empty spot on the shore where he’s been standing. My father. The man who I resurrected from dust. And I know I’ve already failed him. Because I can’t do what he wants. I can’t leave Ava to her fate, I can’t let go. I have to try and save her.
FORTY-ONE
Aidan
Just as I’m walking back through my great-grandmother’s yard, a vehicle turns off PCH and heads up the road toward the house. A green Jeep.
Connor?
He speeds up when he spots me and pulls over along the road, slamming on his brakes with a loud squeak. Then he jumps out and comes at me with his arms up in surrender, like he’s worried I’m going to run away.
“I walk forward to meet him. “What’re you doing here?” I ask. “I’m not going back to the house.”
“I need your help with that job in the Valley.”
“The wraith?” I ask. “But we took care of it.”
He shakes his head. “Mrs. Foster just called a half hour ago. It yanked her son into the attic.”
Oh, shit.
After telling Hanna’s driver I don’t need him, I get in the Jeep with Connor. We head south, taking the myriad of freeways to the 118, working our way inland to the Valley, getting off on Balboa. It isn’t until we’re sitting at the Chatsworth intersection that Connor speaks. The silence allows the emotions from from the encounter with my father to roil through me. I keep seeing him, his face a mirror of my own, his presence so demanding yet so still. My father. The man I’ve both feared and wondered about for so long. And I still have no idea who or what he really is. I should have read his soul, I should have asked a million questions I didn’t ask. I keep hearing his words, his prophecy about me, I hear his voice and it’s almost like I should recognize it from somewhere else—I’m grateful when reality breaks back in.
“Listen.” Connor sounds hesitant. “This thing happened—I guess it was a moment—and . . . well, I kissed Rebecca. Twice.”
My gut flips over, but my brain fills with relief. It’s like half of me is angry at his words and the other half wants to hug him. What the fuck is wrong with me? I don’t know what to say. “You and Rebecca kissed?”
He just looks ahead at the road. “You’re pissed.”
Why would I be pissed? Why am I pissed? I love Kara. I breathe for Kara. I’d bleed for Kara. “No,” I say. But I need to be honest. This is Connor. “Maybe it’s the damn fated souls thing, but . . . I feel a little like you just told me you made out with my girlfriend.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
He pulls onto the street and parks in front of the house, then eyes me like he’s waiting for me to freak out.
“Do you like her?” I ask.
“I kissed her. Yeah, I like her.”
“No, I mean, do you care about her?” Because I have to wonder if he even knows her. She’s been hanging around less than a week. Of course, they have been thrown together a lot while everything’s been going to hell the last few days.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I think I might. She’s so . . . ridiculous. But there’s something about her, you know. She’s got me all messed in the head.”
“Yeah.” Girls tend to do that.
“I’m just not sure.”
“Of Rebecca?”
“I’m not sure if I’ve got the balls to share her.”
The words seem to hover around us before they disappear into the air. I hate how tangled up it’s all gotten. I have to believe that my heart isn’t a bastard, that it’s not lying to me. Because if there’s one thing in my fucked-up life that I’m sure of, it’s how I feel about Kara.
I follow Connor up the street to the neighbor’s house where Mrs. Foster’s been waiting for us. She must’ve been watching out the window, because she comes out into the yard to meet us halfway up the walk. “Thank you so much,” she says, her voice strained as tears fill her eyes.
“Is your son all right?” Connor asks.
“He’s got a bruised-up arm, but he’s good. Just scared. We all are—terrified, really. I just can’t stand this anymore, I can’t. My poor little Jeffrey.”
“We’ll do everything we can.” Connor says. “I promise. Just sit tight.”
Mrs. Foster gives a jerky nod.
Even before we get to the door of the house, I smell it again. It’s sticking to the air, like rotting insides. Death is now owner of this land.
“How could this have happened?” Connor asks. “I thought we got it. Didn’t you see it die?”
“I thought I did.” Maybe I’m getting rusty. After reading the damn ossuary, and resurrecting my father, I was definitely off.
“I have rowan ash.” I pull out the glass bottle from my pocket and hand it to him. “Rub it on your face to confuse the thing.”
He unscrews the lid and dumps a small amount of the black powder into his palm. “And then what, we have tea and cake?” He rubs the ash on his cheeks, under his eyes.
“We need to figure out what went wrong last time.”
“Let’s just see what the hell is going on before we leap to any conclusions.”
I shore up my inner walls as we walk into the house, my ears ringing. The first thing that hits me is the smell, putrid and sharp, even stronger than before. Then the ringing in my ears gets louder, making me squint from the irritation in my skull. I feel like I’m in a plane, under high pressure.
“Whoa,” Connor says as he comes in behind me.
The front room is disgusting. There are food containers spilled across the carpet, substances on every surface: cottage cheese, mustard, Cheerios . . . like the contents of the kitchen had an orgy.
“This thing’s been busy,” I say.
He puts the back of his hand under his nose. “That smell. It’s everywhere now.”
“Whatever it owns, it marks.”
He groans. “I’m about to mark a few things with last night’s dinner if we don’t hurry.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out my Star of David. “Here, put this on. It’ll balance you out a little.”
He takes it. “It’s time for some hands-on Aidan action, man. My holy water mixture obviously isn’t going to do the trick.”
A crash sounds from the back room, glass shattering.
“I think it heard you,” I mumble.
We walk toward the hall, heading for where the noise came from. “We need to learn more, get a peek at where it was locked up.” I haven’t felt anything yet about this thing’s state of mind or its history, but I’m waiting for the knowledge to fill me any second. A wraith is a person’s ghost, after all. Even if it is a twisted one.
I get three steps down the hall and the light from the bedroom window blacks out, as if the sun disappeared. The temperature drops in a rush, tiny icicles forming along the edge of the ceiling.
Another crash sounds. Before I can make it to the nursery ahead, something flies from the bedroom to my left, cracking against the opposite wall. A million shards of blue glass spray out. The slivers hit—arm, cheek, neck—and the heat of blood and pain rises to the surface of my skin.
“Enough!” I yell as I ignore the sting.
The sunlight comes back with a pop, the temperature suddenly back to normal. I steady myself and walk the rest of the way into the nursery. The wraith isn’t gone—the smell of it still burns in my nostrils.
Connor comes into the room behind me. He glances at my face and arm. “You’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
The room is covered in those silver ghost webs again, even more of them than before. Whatever we did last time definitely didn’t work.
Connor pulls on the string hanging from the attic’s trapdoor, bringing it down, then unfolds the ladder. He starts to head up, but I stop him with a hand on his arm. “Wait.” Blood rolls down my thumb onto his shirt. “Let me go first, just in case.”
He relents and I go up, feeling like I’m climbing into the belly of the beast. I gag on the dank air, choking a little, before I can shove my stomach back down my throat.
“You okay?” Connor asks from below.
I give him a thumbs-up and climb in the rest of the way, holding my breath.
Connor’s head pokes up from the hole and then disappears in a flash, the sounds of his coughing and gagging rising up instead. “Ah, dude, that’s rank shit up there.”
I can’t stand up all the way in this section of the large space, so I stay on hands and knees, crawling over the creaking floor, wondering why anyone would come up here, ever. The surroundings stick to my skin, thick and full of energy and supercharged molecules. I feel the spirits of dead animals, tiny ones, in the crevices and dark corners, their tiny carcasses like warnings to whoever might enter. All these years, decades, half a century. And he’s been trapped; trapped in wood and stone and mortar; caged, just as he was in life.
And I realize, I’m finally feeling him, the ghost that’s now the wraith.
He worked hard, he worked and worked and drew blood for them, he took life to save his soul from the light, he hated the light. It stung his skin, it reminded him of things he couldn’t look at, things he didn’t want to feel. Bits and pieces, that’s all he was.
The awareness, it pours through me, like a dark river of fractured images and thoughts. Sanity is nowhere to be found in the shards of misery and demented logic of the twisted consciousness left here. The shadow side of who he was. A keeper of bones. Hands that drew blood. Teeth that tore flesh. Because it was the only thing that would stem the pain of what was broken inside of him. The tiny lives he took patched his soul back together. His dark, dark soul.
A little girl, her braids tied with bright-pink bows.
He loved darkness.
She looks up at him, takes his hand.
He wanted to become darkness.
He feels her tiny fingers in his and can’t wait to show her the doll he bought her.
He was darkness.
I jerk from the flood of knowledge and release my held breath through clenched teeth. I close my eyes, locking up my inner walls as tightly as they’ll go, and beg God to let me get my hands on this bastard. Then I wait a second as I let the air back into my lungs a little at a time. I shiver deep in my bones, despite the thick heat of my surroundings. I don’t want to feel anything else from this thing. No more.
The air is full of blood and decay. It fills my chest, congealing as I cough again. I fight it as I make my way to the door of the compartment, where the wraith was locked in. It’s wide open. I close it enough to see the front, with the three locks and the carved word I saw in the video: dybbuk.
And then I spot a flash of white inside the small space. Along the far side. I pull my phone from my pocket and tap the flashlight app.
The light reveals the brick wall, the wood floor scratched and splintered, and then it falls on the white shape. A doll of some kind, its glass eyes wide.
Next to it lies a pile of white sticks.
No, those aren’t sticks. They’re bones. And I see a skull where the head would be. Small. Next to the doll. A child’s skull.
My stomach rises, but for a whole different reason than the smell. My heart squeezes tightly in my chest.
“Oh, God,” I breathe.
“What’s wrong?” Connor asks, still hanging back by the trapdoor.
I can only shake my head as I realize what all those memories and thoughts meant. He was a kidnapper, a murderer. This is one of his victims.
The image of the little girl with the bright-pink bows in her hair comes back to me. There was something about her . . .
Connor is suddenly behind me. “What’s going on?” He’s holding a rag over his mouth, muffling his voice.
“There are bones in there.” I motion to the cupboard.
“The guy’s body?”
The ache inside sharpens as the words emerge: “A little girl.” But her spirit isn’t here. Whatever happened to her, her soul’s at peace.
“Shit.”
I crawl closer and reach inside, gritting my teeth as I move aside a bone to grab the doll.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I need to know how they trapped this wraith in here, so we can do it again.” I take the doll by a leg and bring it into the light. Its clothes are dusty and faded with age. Its porcelain cheek is smudged with filth. The pale-pink lips are cracked down to the chin, eyelids bobbing lazily up and down over the blue glass eyes with the movement of its head. Damn, this thing’s creepy as shit.
“Yikes,” Connor says.
I let myself open up to read the energy, the memories of the object. The consciousness of the wraith spills back into me in a rush, images of blood and fingers and small blue eyes, and I have to clench my muscles and lock my insides down to make it stop. “Fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need you to read this,” I say, holding it out to him.
He stares at it but doesn’t take it.
“I c
an’t read it without feeling everything else,” I say. “It’s too much.”
He reaches out and takes the arm of the doll. “You might have to help me,” he says through the rag over his nose.
I nod, unsure what he means, but figuring I’ll know in a second.
He closes his eyes then, the hand that’s holding the rag lowering to his knee. His eyelids start to shiver. His fingers tighten on the doll’s limb. He sits for several seconds before his skin begins to turn pale and go slick with sweat. His lips are violet now and his teeth chatter. As the beats tick by, he shakes harder and harder, and my nerves turn raw.
I tap him on the arm. “Connor, hey.”
His head tips back, dark circles appearing around his eyes. He’s still shivering, still locked in.
My pulse picks up, realizing now what he meant when he said I’d have to help him. He’s not coming out of it. I grasp harder, shaking his arm. It’s rigid as steel. “Connor!” I yell.
Still no response.
I grip his chin, pulling his head forward. And slap him as hard as I can.
“Shit!” he gasps, dropping the doll and bringing his palm to his pink cheek.
“Sorry,” I say. “You didn’t respond to a tap.”
He works his jaw. “Damn, this job sucks.”
I look to the cupboard, thinking of the girl’s bones inside. “Yeah.”
“The memories in that thing are rank.”
“What’d you see?”
He shakes his head and runs a hand down his face. “It’s not worth repeating.” His fatigue is palpable. Those shadows around his eyes make him appear ten years older. His cheeks are even sunken in. “I’ll just say that the wraith’s spirit was once in the doll, and that’s how the previous owner got it in there—must’ve had an exorcist help them or something. Except they didn’t seem to know the bones were in there, too—poetic justice, I guess, the guy’s soul having to be imprisoned with the remains of his last victim. They put the doll in the cupboard and locked it in there, which also locked the wraith in there.”
“How long ago was it locked up?”
Darkness Fair (The Dark Cycle Book 2) Page 24