Beyond the Black Door

by A. M. Strickland

  Somehow, the sight was heartbreaking—both the room I was in and the darkness beyond. However lonely Jidras’s soul struck me as, it was nothing like Vehyn’s. I’d managed to forget how wrong that place was until I saw it side by side with something so pathetically human. The darkness was lonely too, no doubt, but it was loneliness raised to an ungodly intensity—a cavernous emptiness, a bottomless craving.

  I didn’t want to be here anymore, standing between these two places that together struck such a chord of sadness and longing through my own hollow core. Definitely not how I thought I’d spend my eighteenth birthday. But Vehyn wouldn’t let me leave until he was satisfied, I was sure. And maybe I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  I opened the drawer. I had to tug hard, and it gave with an unpleasant, woody screech.

  “There’s nothing inside,” I said.

  “Try again,” he urged.

  I turned, shooting him a glare. Curiosity could only carry me so far.

  “Close your eyes and concentrate.” He was as patient as I was impatient. “Focus on how you want this place to talk to you, to divulge its secrets. Souls can hide themselves, even when you walk through them. I’ll help you do it, but it’s a skill you might find useful on your own someday. This is a gift, Kamai.”

  This was what I had been needing to learn. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I thought of my father—yes, he was my father, wasn’t he?—and how I wished I could understand him better.

  Why do you hate me? was the thought that flashed, unbidden, to my mind.

  When I opened my eyes, I had to swallow a gasp. There was a ratty woven blanket on the once-naked bed, blue and yellow, with matching stained pillows. There was an old figurine of a soldier on the desk, chipped and worn, its hand empty where it might have once held a sword. There was also a brass picture frame, tarnished like everything else, encircling a painting of my mother. The portrait was beautiful, and yet the paint was flaking, her skin seeming to fall away in decay. I flinched from it.

  “Look in the drawer again,” Vehyn said. “The hidden places hold the deeper secrets. This is how you truly soulwalk.”

  It sounded more like soul-searching, but I didn’t say that. So many nehyms that had looked so empty—what more could they have shown me? Had my mother known how to do this?

  I looked at her wise smile in the painting. Of course she had, and I simply hadn’t been ready to learn such things. I knew she hadn’t completed my training, that she hadn’t taught me everything—she’d told me as much. And now Vehyn was teaching me in her place. As with mostly everything to do with him, I felt a churning mixture of giddiness and trepidation.

  I looked in the drawer. There was a stained brown leather journal.

  “And that, my dear, is the prize,” he said.

  I held my breath as I touched the cover. Did this mean souls could simply be read like books, if one had the knowledge and power to figure out how? The thought of my having such access to a person’s inner world was dizzying.

  “Read it.”

  I followed his command, cracking the cover as if I had no control over my hands.

  I loved her so much. I thought … I thought if she perhaps had greater reason to stay … I swapped out the herbs she was taking, put something in their place that tasted identical but that had no effect.

  I was wrong. Not even a child made her stay. That is the type of woman she is.

  I slammed the journal shut. My hands trembled on the cover. My breathing came in sudden gasps. I almost couldn’t believe the words—the meaning behind them. But no, I’d read enough to understand.

  “Kamai?” Vehyn’s voice, behind me, giving nothing away, unlike the book.

  “Don’t,” I rasped.

  It was clear enough what had happened. My mother hadn’t wanted me. Jidras—I would never call him my father again—had used my conception to try to tie her to him. I knew it was true, just as I’d known this was his soul. It simply fit.

  His own words, spoken the day I’d met him, floated up like an echo: I’ve had nothing to do with you, no part in your upbringing. And that was how she wanted it, so blame her if you feel like blaming someone.

  I hated him … and I realized with burning clarity that I didn’t blame my mother. Not at all. Maybe she hadn’t planned for me, but there were ways to rid oneself of a child. It would have been her right, especially after her body had been so used against her. Instead, she must have left with me, found her way to Hallan somehow, and raised me, for the most part, without a father.

  That was why Jidras had hated her—and why he hated me now. But I was fiercely proud of her, the person she had been. She would take a child from someone who would use a child to get what he wanted. And even if she hadn’t planned to have me, she’d loved me as if she had. That was the type of woman she had been.

  And now I knew for sure what type of man Jidras was.

  It made me wonder, all the more, what type of man Vehyn was to show such a thing to me, on this of all days. No, not a man. Maybe I had forgotten what he was:

  Inhuman.

  “Why?” I asked quietly, my eyes still closed.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, sounding innocent.

  “Why now? You must want me to hate him bitterly. You must hate me.”

  “I simply wanted you to have the truth. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “You haven’t given me the truth about anything yet,” I spat, rounding on him. “Until now. So it must be only for your purposes, your own gain. Is it because I said Jidras wants me to marry? You want me to despise him so much that I would do anything to thwart his wishes? You want me to feel unwanted, not just by him, but my mother too? Only wanted by you?”

  I’d felt it in occasional flashes—Vehyn’s possessiveness.

  “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” I continued, “so callously, so cruelly, so selfishly—and on my birthday!”

  His eyes narrowed. “What did you expect? Romance?” His voice was mocking, sharp. A knife’s edge. But then it gentled. “Kamai—”

  “Don’t!” I cried, throwing the journal back in the drawer and slamming it closed. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t come near me.”

  I expected him to be mad, but a slow smile spread across his face. “I’m afraid you can’t escape me.”

  “Is that so? You can’t leave your dark hole. And I don’t think I’ll be coming back.”

  He kept smiling, unconcerned at my outburst. “I can wait for you to get bored in there and come back here. I’ve waited for you long enough. A little longer won’t hurt.”

  A shiver crawled down my spine. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I didn’t want to know. “Don’t bother waiting.” I closed my eyes, pushing myself to wake.

  Vehyn’s voice sharpened. “Kamai, wait.” He spoke in anger, in threat, and yet there was something else in his tone too, but I was sick of listening to him. “I said wait.”

  By then it was too late to realize he was warning me. Because when I opened my eyes in the waking world, I wasn’t in my bed.

  I wasn’t even inside.

  I was slipping on rain-drenched tiles under the heavy darkness of the night sky, instinctively scrambling for purchase before I even realized what was happening. But my wet grip wouldn’t hold, and then I was falling—off the roof and down to the courtyard four stories below.

  11

  HIDDEN STREΝGTH

  My hand caught the gutter at the last possible second. The clay fixture cracked and gave slightly under my weight. I was hanging, for the moment, right alongside Jidras’s master bedroom window on the fourth floor. Rain pounded down around me.

  I had wondered how I was in his nehym. Now I knew. I’d been as close to him as I’d always needed to be, right outside his window. Vehyn didn’t have some hidden power to open up souls for himself. But he had a hidden power to make me sleepwalk. I must have crawled out the attic’s dormer window.

  Some vague part of my mind registered that I was soaked t
o the skin—I must have been outside for a while. The air wasn’t too chilly, but the rain was. Wet like this, asleep on a cool clay roof while drenched, my fingers had gone numb. And now they were slipping.

  “Please,” I whimpered, to no one in particular. I wouldn’t have minded if Jidras had thrown open his window and reached for me. It was amazing how quickly hatred shied away in the face of death.

  But the window didn’t open. I slipped some more.

  Then I felt the shove. It was like someone bumping into you in a hall. Except this was in my head. I wanted to push back, but something told me that the effort would distract me, I would fall, and I would die.

  And then I heard the voice: Kamai, reach up with your other hand and reinforce your hold. Now.

  It was a very familiar voice. Apparently, Vehyn could not only make me sleepwalk, but speak directly into my mind when he felt like it.

  Stop complaining and do it.

  I tried to inch my other hand up, but my grip slipped more and I let loose a scream that was lost in the drumming rain. “I can’t, I’m going to fall, I’m going to—”

  My arm suddenly tingled, flushing with warmth. It was almost the same living-stone sensation I had when touching the black door, except it was in my flesh. My hand flew up by its own accord.

  So this was how he’d done it. How he’d made me move.

  But he wasn’t fast enough. Or he was too fast. The gutter snapped out of my grip, and I was dropping, too startled to even scream. The white sandstone passed in a blur—and stopped. My breath hitched out of me.

  My extended hand, the one that felt like stone, gripped the bottom edge of a third-floor balcony. The force of my arrested fall should have yanked my arm out of its socket. Or, at the very least, my fingers shouldn’t have been strong enough to catch my weight. But my grip held.

  His grip held.

  I squinted up at my arm through the rain and then wished I hadn’t. Deep black marks limned my wet skin from my bunched shoulder to the tips of my fingers, curling and spiraling as if the patterns were cast by the lanterns in the black fortress.

  It almost scared me more than the thought of dying. “Oh gods. Oh gods.”

  Your gods aren’t helping you, Kamai. I am. Now grab the edge with your other hand and actually keep hold this time. Without giving me any time to react, he continued: In case you were wondering, it’s much harder to manipulate you when you’re awake. Do please hurry. I might get tired.

  I lifted my other hand. My normal hand. It felt like a numb weight at the end of my arm in comparison to the warm strength in its twin. But it didn’t have to be inhumanly strong. It just had to brace my weight while the other hauled me up on its own.

  It shouldn’t have been possible—none of this should have been possible—but, one-armed, that was exactly what happened: I pulled myself up the balcony rails. Rather, Vehyn pulled me up. Once bent over the railing, my feet perched precariously on the slippery outer edge, I gave up any pretense of coordination and simply tumbled headfirst onto the balcony.

  My strange arm caught me, preventing me from breaking a wrist, or my face. For a few moments, I just lay there on the tiles, breathing, as the rain pattered on my skull. I watched the black marks fade from my skin. The warmth seeped out of my flesh as well, leaving me cold and utterly drained.

  “You still in my head?” I asked. I sounded drunk.

  Get inside, Kamai. You’re in shock. This is your balcony, by the way.

  So it was. I hadn’t even noticed.

  You’re welcome. But I expect your thanks in person.

  I ignored him, lurching to my feet and fumbling at the door handle. Luckily, I’d left it unlocked. I toppled inside, managing only a few more stumbling steps before I collapsed on my bed and dragged the blankets over me.

  I fell asleep instantly. Maybe he helped with that too.

  * * *

  I soon turned up in the clearing. I might have meandered through dreams first, scraping together some real rest, but eventually the currents of sleep took me in the clearing’s direction. Or Vehyn did.

  The black door was there and open. He was standing at the threshold, his muscular arms folded.

  “You bastard.” I didn’t know what else to say. There were too many places to start.

  “I never intended for you to discover this.” He sounded like it was merely unfortunate, not that he was at fault.

  We could start there, then. “You never intended? All this time, you’ve been able to manipulate me like that?”

  “Not before you opened the door, of course, and it’s much easier when you’re asleep, especially when you’re in here with me.” He gestured over his shoulder. He was being remarkably forthright, for once.

  I figured I’d return the favor. “Then I really won’t be coming in again.”

  He didn’t even bother responding. “Kamai, do you realize…” His jaw hardened. “You could have died. Forcing my hand like that—”

  A barking laugh tore out of me. “You mean you literally forcing my hand? And in the process, I accidentally made you admit that you have a terrifying amount of control over me? Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “I saved you. You thanked Nikha for something much less impressive.”

  So he had known about the market and just let me pretend I could keep it from him. And now he was trying to belittle Nikha on top of that. “If you want thanks, you can choke on it. You could have just let me die instead.”

  “But I didn’t want that.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, to spit more curses at him, but nothing came out as his words sank in.

  He didn’t want me to die. It wasn’t the highest form of regard for a human life, but it was hard not to feel grateful after he’d just saved mine—even though it had been in danger because of him.

  I really, really hadn’t wanted to die. Tears welled in my eyes at the memory, raw in my mind. I should have been angrier. I should have hurled more accusations and insults, more questions at the very least, about this power he’d revealed. But right that second, I was bone-tired and shaken. I just wanted to hold on to the thought that he hadn’t wanted me to die, that he’d saved me. That someone still valued my life.

  I was hugging myself before I even realized it, simply for something to hold.

  Vehyn must have seen the look in my eyes. The door’s frame disappeared and reappeared right in front of me. It should have been frightening. It would have been if I hadn’t wanted him close, but at that moment I did. I sprang onto my tiptoes and threw my arms around his neck, burying my face in his shoulder. Vehyn obviously wasn’t accustomed to me taking the initiative, because his entire body registered the surprise—he stiffened like stone. Then his arms relaxed, and his hands came to my cheeks. He tipped my head back, but only by a few inches so he could peer into my eyes, curiosity written all over his face. The upper half of my body was still leaning through the doorway. I leaned closer.

  I didn’t know what I was doing.

  “Is it romance you truly want?” he asked, his eyes both hungry and searching.

  “I…,” I stammered. “I don’t know.”

  Before I knew what he was doing, he’d bent his head. His lips touched mine. Now it was my turn to freeze.

  His mouth didn’t claim mine. He moved tentatively, testing out my top lip, and then the bottom, biting each one with a featherlight nibble. Briefly, his tongue tasted mine.

  I didn’t reciprocate. Logical thought had stuttered to a halt. Did I want this? I didn’t think so. Did I want him to stop? Not necessarily.

  He pulled back, a slight smile on his face, his lips flushed and shining. “So much for romance. This really doesn’t do it for you, does it?”

  I would have thought he sounded the slightest bit insecure, if not for the fact that he’d stabbed right to the heart of my insecurities. I jerked away, stung.

  “I thought you knew everything about me,” I said, trying for haughtiness and failing.

  “I do, for the most part, but
such matters of both flesh and soul run deep.” As if to illustrate, he braced one hand on my lower back and flattened the other on my belly, spreading his fingers, digging lightly into my dress. It was both intimate and alarming, because I could feel his immense strength even as he held it perfectly in check. He likely could have ripped my guts out if he’d wanted to. “Case in point,” he said, squinting, as if seeing something I couldn’t. “I’m not sure if you like this. It’s hard to tell. I sense both a thrill and a pulling back. When I try to dig deeper, find some hidden desire, there’s nothing there.”

  Nothing there. That was what lurked beneath the surface, when he tried to reach for my depths. Nothing. He thought I was broken, just like everyone else would if they knew my secret. If romance was only a prelude to everything that was supposed to come after, then to indulge it would be feasting on appetizers when all anyone wanted was dinner. I would be fooling myself and other people that I was something more.

  “Perhaps romance isn’t for me.” I tried to make my tone light, but instead it came out bright and brittle. Shame washed over me in a sudden flood. I tried to pull away from him, but his hands shifted around my waist and held me still.

  “Kamai, stop. I don’t mind at all how you feel. It’s … interesting, honestly.” He sounded almost surprised, and that utterly surprised me—until doubt came raging in with my shame.

  “Yes, interesting. Like I’m some freak of nature. I’m all wrong. I don’t feel things like … like…” Normal people.

  “You’re more like me.”

  His admission took my breath away. In the following silence, he gave me time to probe the idea. This mysterious being who’d so fascinated me felt the same as I did, at least insofar as it came to sex. I wasn’t alone.

  And then Vehyn spoiled it. “How you feel isn’t unheard of among humans. It’s entirely normal, if a superior way to be, in my opinion. Since I’m a superior being, how I feel is both different and similar.”

  I squinted at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t imagine ever degrading myself to such a base mortal activity as that. But whereas you don’t feel the hunger for such things, I feel hunger of a different sort.”