Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3)

by A. D. Koboah

  “Where?” I had asked.

  Rage flared at my stupidity. I had asked him—asked him—when I could easily have broken through the flimsy mental wall he had erected and seized the answer.

  But I had asked him. I loved him. I trusted him. All I had seen was sadness in those eyes I had longed to gaze into for thirty long years of my mortal life.

  I had placed my hand in his and walked willingly, utterly defenceless, into betrayal.

  And now he was gone.

  Even now, it was all I could think of—that he was gone and may never return.

  I rose to my feet, trembling with emotion and pain from the assault I had endured.

  I would not let him do this to me.

  I rushed back into the mansion.

  I would be the one to leave this night. Let him be the one to sit here all alone wondering if I intended to return to him.

  I staggered into the bedroom. A coat of his hung from one of the wardrobe doors, stopping me in my tracks. I stared at it, remembering the first time he walked into the drawing room in his new clothes, too crippled by those desolate years to know what to do except that he had to find a way to reach me. Fresh tears filled my eyes at all he had endured in the wilderness and how difficult the walk back toward his humanity had been.

  “No,” I said aloud. “No.”

  What chance did I have if even looking at a coat of his weakened me so?

  I moved to the coat and tore it from the wardrobe door. I tried to tear it in two before realising, to my mortification, that I was too weak to do it. I reached for scissors and cut it in half letting it fall to the floor. Then I pulled the wardrobe open and emptied it of his clothing, cutting and slashing until every single item he owned lay strewn across the bedroom torn to shreds.

  Then I packed every single thing of mine.

  It took ten trips back and forth in my weakened state, dragging heavy cases out of the mansion and across the field of flowers. I now stood alone at the road, frightened, my anger slowly being suffocated by the pull in my stomach. I looked back at the mansion. The darkness lay like a wreath around it, caressing the oak trees. I had come to this mansion with only the clothes on my back. So had he. We had grown so much together, acquired so much wealth, built an empire of riches together. Together we had ensured my family, and his, had also amassed wealth. How could I leave it all behind?

  My weakened body, the half-healed wounds they had inflicted told me not only how, but that I must. He had left my body weak, but I still had my mind. I called to some human minds some distance from the mansion and woke them. They would be here soon to take my belongings from here. I would stay concealed in a cellar of one of their homes until nightfall and then make my way... Where? I had nothing and no one but Avery.

  This strengthened my resolve. It did not matter where. I just had to cross this hurdle and then decide where I would go.

  Tears streamed down my face when I turned my back on the mansion and looked at a dark shape on the road as it moved towards me. It was the first step to a new life from Avery and the bondage of his love.

  ***

  London 1922

  Acidic rage had brought me to this house, but now I was here I stood transfixed staring at the simple, elegantly furnished room, much like the rest of the quiet, yet grand home.

  For a moment my attention was pulled from the room and to voices below. Pain licked at me with tongues of flame, but once more the room I was standing in—his mother’s room—drew me away from the rage and I turned my attention to it again.

  I had never stepped foot in this room before, yet I had the strong sense that I had been here before. My sixth sense was shrieking its insistence of this. Everything in this room felt familiar. I ran a finger along a jewellery box on the dresser knowing it had mattered a great deal to his mother. Not even Avery knew how much, yet I did.

  I turned to the bed, my skin cold, and I almost expected to see his mother laying there, her face greasy with sweat and twisted in agony whilst others huddled around her. The image was so clear it could have been a memory.

  How was that possible?

  Whatever the reason, being in this house was like having a dam between me and the rage and pain I had carried ever since leaving Avery. For the first time in decades, I could see not only my actions clearly, but the emotions behind them. It was as if my emotions had been a thick cloud keeping the truth hidden from me. And the truth was I loved Avery and he loved me wholeheartedly. Nothing else—those years when I wondered at his seeming abandonment of me, the ambush at that grove—none of it mattered. It also allowed me to see that something else had been fuelling those negative emotions. The Other. It had been keeping me from returning to him all along.

  Before the shock of that revelation could fully reverberate through me, the dam was broken by the sound of the front door slamming shut. Waves of rage broke over me. Rather than materialising outside to him as he hurried away from the house, I let rage bleed through me as I listened to her quick, light footsteps ascend the stairs. Moments later, the bedroom door was thrown open. She rushed in, looking virginal in white, her slender arms exposed, her brown hair pulled into a bun, a soft smile on her lips. She was pretty, pure and sweet and this almost made tears spring to my eyes.

  A sharp gasp escaped her when I moved out of the shadows into view. At first her eyes widened with surprise then all the colour drained from her face. The colour came rushing back as she blushed with anger, her mouth curling into a sneer as she lifted her head to peer down at me, although anguish shone still in her eyes. I gazed at her, seeing someone very different from the sweet adoring girl Avery saw.

  She’s come back. Her thoughts were like darts. How dare she come back after she put him through so much?

  I felt anger rise and before I knew it, I was across the room and before her. I slapped her, using only a fraction of my strength. She crashed to the floor and looked so much like a floppy, broken doll that for a moment, fear touched my chest. Then she moved, bringing her hand to her cheek as she turned to look up at me. I expected to see fear when her eyes met mine. I only saw contempt.

  She cried out when I grabbed her by the hair. I dragged her over to the chair by the window, and threw her in it. She sat staring at me, her mouth tight with anger.

  Whore! she spat mentally.

  The word was like a sharp slap and I made a move toward her again. I stopped myself before I could reach her frail, human body.

  He will never pick a pathetic little thing like you over me! I spoke in her mind.

  I had the satisfaction of seeing her face crumble and tears spring to her eyes. She refused to let them fall and continued to gaze at me with contempt.

  I returned to the shadows to wait.

  Avery would never choose her over me.

  Would he?

  ***

  New York 1973

  I knew I was outside and that it was late afternoon. But everything else about the day had fallen away. I wasn’t aware if the day was infused with sunlight, beset by rain, or if I walked through a blanket of soft white snow. All I knew was the excruciating ache in my bones and the quivering weakness in my limbs. I walked through the pain—and the rage—the acidic fury entwined with a bitter desperation as I sought out faces in the crowd. A tall athletic honey-coloured girl swept past me. Maybe she had what I needed. I held onto the image of her face. But there was nothing. Nothing. I moved onto another. A short dumpy woman in a maid’s uniform. My heart leapt. Could she be the one? I stared at her intently, but still got nothing. The anger rose again, momentarily bringing me to a stop. I choked it back and moved on, catching another face in the crowd and then another. Eventually I stopped looking at just their faces and began to search their memories, looking for anyone they knew who could give me what I needed. But there was nothing. And the thing all those faces had in common? They were all Negro. They were all women.

  I walked through the pain, through the rage, through the mounting desperation until the day e
ventually fell away and night rose to smother the land. The pain in my body fled along with the day and I was reborn, as had been the case every night since Avery turned me into a daughter of the moon. But the rage that had been eating away at me for what seemed like an eternity, remained.

  I had given up my search a few hours ago and was now sitting atop an office building with my feet dangling over a long, brutal fall down to the streets below. On nights like this, when the anger threatened to eat me whole, the only thing that could numb it for even a few blissful minutes was the kill. In those moments I could pour all my toxic rage out in wordless, visceral violence. My victim’s screams became a pain-drenched lullaby that soothed and lulled the rage to sleep. Their fears—their pleas—like being rocked against a mother’s tender bosom. The one thing almost all my kills had in common was they were all white males with blond hair and blue eyes.

  I took a deep breath and tried to still the rage. In all the years and of the thousands I had killed, not one death had been able to completely take away the fury which had lived in me for so long. All it did was create pain for countless others. Unlike Avery, it was never the faces of the dead that haunted me. It was the faces of the living, the family with an irreplaceable hole torn out of it, the friends and even acquaintances who would feel the loss, even in the smallest of ways. All so I could beat back the rage for a few moments. It was a poor trade and the reason I had stopped. That and Avery.

  Avery.

  I got to my feet. I couldn’t deal with the rage and thoughts of Avery—of what I had done to him. Not tonight. I moved into the ether and materialised in an alleyway beneath the building. I could hear what sounded like a party a few blocks from here, the soulful tones of The Temptations drifting to me through the densely packed urban landscape. I considered making my way there, blending into the crowd and continuing my search. And all at once, the tears came: tears of rage, frustration and an overwhelming hopelessness.

  It was fruitless. I wouldn’t find what I needed there or anywhere else. I stood there crying and shaking, completely lost in the deep ocean of emotion. Again the sweet call of the kill came to me, but I repressed it. Instead I decided to face the very thing that had me walk through pain in the hopes I would find something that was now utterly lost to me.

  Mary. My sweet Mary. She had meant so much to me and yet whenever I tried to call up her image all I got was her name because I could no longer recall her face. Over a hundred years had passed since I last saw her face and it had slowly been worn out of my mind like water smoothing away stone. So for the past few years I had roamed the streets, searching for a face that would maybe set the memory alight and I would see her again. So far I had found nothing.

  It frustrated me because when Avery had first taken me away, I had missed her. I had missed everyone I left behind, but he eclipsed them all and I rarely thought of them, so absorbed was I in my love for him. Anger pulsed through me whenever I thought of how easily he had become everything in my world. But I had to stop directing my anger at him. Mary was lost to me forever. And the rest were slowly being erased: Mama, Jupiter, Lina, Baby Mary and Dembi. I clung to their memories but Mary, Mary’s was gone.

  And the most painful thing? I could remember Master John and Master Henry vividly. Every line in Master John's face, the light of the candle in my cabin as it caught his soulless, ice-coloured eyes, his scent, the sound of his voice and the cruel rub of his laughter. I could remember every single second of my time with him. And yet when I tried to remember Mary, it was like trying to catch smoke and watching it slip through my fingers.

  I glanced up at the night sky, at the moon above. I longed to be as distant from my pain, and the pain I had caused so many—especially the one I loved the most—as the moon was to the Earth. I continued to linger in the dark alley which smelled of urine along with the musty scent of beer, because there was nowhere for me to go. I had countless homes around the world. But home for me was, and always would be, a grand red brick mansion in Louisiana and the beautiful man I had walked away from.

  As I stood there I came to another realisation. In the end, Master John and his father had broken me. They had won. The anger pulsed again, building against my throat. I knew it would be near enough impossible for me to resist the urge to kill. But a new thought occurred to me. This time I wouldn’t take the life of an innocent. I would go back to Mississippi and find Master John’s descendants and slaughter them all. Cut off the evil and wipe his seed from the face of the Earth.

  Yes.

  I headed south. I may not be able to wipe him out of my memory, but I would wipe the Earth clean of him and the evil that had blighted my mortal and immortal life.

  I moved into the ether, slipping in and out of the shadows as I moved out of New York, the rage keeping pace with me.

  ***

  New York 1973

  The Holbert’s had been in debt before the civil war and had been one of the many families to lose their land and home when the war ended. I lost track of them when they moved out of Mississippi to begin again elsewhere. But I still had not expected to find one of Master John’s descendants in New York. And I suppose I would always imagine them in one of those old, grand mansions of the south which would forever be an embodiment of slavery and the stain it had placed on America’s past.

  Instead I waited on the sidewalk on the other side of the road from an elegant brownstone building, the anger that swarmed within as palpable as the heat shimmering off the sidewalk.

  A short while later, the door opened and a white man in a suit stepped out of the house. His name was Howard Holbert. He moved down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. I did not intend to approach him when I set out for his home, only find out as much about him and the rest of the Holberts as I could. But before I knew it I had crossed the road and was running up behind him.

  “Mr Holbert.” My voice had a hint of a tremor in it.

  “Yes,” he said; his tone sharp as he turned to face me.

  His face softened in appreciation when he saw me, his mouth curling into a smile of pleasure, his blue eyes—the same shade as Master John’s—warming a degree as he took me in. That was the only physical similarity he shared with Master John. He appeared to be in his forties and was tall and stocky, his hair still thick, dark and curly, a heavy moustache covering his upper lip.

  His thoughts washed over me, leering thoughts of the kind I heard whenever I was before most males. His smile widened, and the fear that was slithering beneath at being caught in those cold blue eyes, was difficult to suppress. Anger immediately surged, almost snaking to the surface. It would have seen the heat-baked pavement splattered with blood, but there were simply too many people in sight, the pain the sun wreaked almost making it impossible to speak, let alone act.

  “Hello. What can I do for you?” he said.

  “I...I’m a student of historical studies at the nearby university.”

  “A student? Of history?” He thought he had hidden his shock extremely well. But it hung around his words, the patronising turn of his lips, and screamed at me through his thoughts. “Well, how impressive. It is not often I come across someone with brains as well as exceptional beauty.”

  His gaze lingered on my lips.

  “I hoped to speak to you today regarding one of your ancestors, John Holbert,” I said. “Or, as he was known to so many, Master John. He was once the owner of many slaves on his plantation in Mississippi.”

  His face turned completely blank for a few moments, even his thoughts retreated slightly and he was no longer staring intently at me as if he would devour me with his eyes alone.

  “I’m afraid you caught me at a bad time, Miss...”

  “Wentworth.” Even saying that name brought pinpricks of pain, but it was the only surname I wanted to use, although I'd never had any legal claim to it.

  “Miss Wentworth,” he said. “I’m afraid I cannot help you with whatever assignment you have. Good day.”

  He moved down the sidewa
lk, leaving me staring after him in confusion. I was by his side moments later.

  “You do know who I’m speaking of,” I said.

  He stopped and faced me, meaning to tell me firmly once more he could not help me with my assignment. Instead he found himself momentarily silent, his eyes drawn to the soft mound of my breasts, which had carefully been covered by a white shirt. His wet his lips before his gaze returned to mine.

  “Yes, I do know the man you speak of.”

  I was surprised he had decided to admit this, because it was becoming clearer from his thoughts that he did not want to acknowledge the fact that his family had owned and abused slaves. He found it unpalatable.

  “You are right,” he said. “He was a slaveholder who lived in the eighteen hundreds. He was a hard master and was known to drive many a slave to their death through overwork. But, thankfully, his brother soon took over the running of the Holbert plantation and things greatly improved for everyone. I do believe Peter Holbert was described by his slaves as the best master a slave could have. So much so that many of the Holbert slaves actually lamented the end of slavery, they were so well cared for by the Holberts.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Peter Holbert and his sons were fair men and did not have the sadistic tendencies of Master John or the sexual perversions that saw him make his way to the slave quarters night after night to act out his every depraved fantasy. But they were still slaveholders.

  Howard’s gaze surreptitiously darted to my breasts again, his thoughts filling with crude images as he tried to imagine what I looked like beneath the layers of clothing I wore despite the heat of the day. But all he could do was smile and imagine what he wished he could do.

  That was when an epiphany took place, one that lit up my world and the darkness that had shrouded it for so long. In the eighteen hundreds, white men, whether they were your master or not, could do much more than imagine. They could do as they pleased with you and your body and there was nothing, and no one, to protect you.