Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3)

by A. D. Koboah

  Was she the one who had been able to call me out of the streams of time?

  Then I heard the cry again, and once more felt that wrenching of the soul I could not ignore. As if in a trance, I moved closer to the cluster of women. When one of them placed a baby in the arms of the dark-haired woman, I finally saw the threat that had been pulling on my soul for as long as I could remember.

  It was a child, a male child, his face flushed with feeling as he wailed, no doubt bewildered by the sights and sounds of this hard, bright world after the comforting dark of his mother’s womb.

  How could a mortal—a baby—have called to me so strongly?

  Now I was near him I realised why the pull had tormented me, a pull that was gone now. I looked on in shock. This baby had been able to call to me because my soul was linked to his. This type of a bond—when two souls melded into one another to form a single bond which could never be severed—was known to the Timeless Ones, but it was rare.

  Only love could bind two beings in this manner.

  I stared at the baby, a smirk on my lips. This must be a trick, for how could a mere mortal hope to capture the heart of a goddess?

  I moved closer to the mother and child whilst the others in the room bustled around them, passing around and through me, completely oblivious to my presence.

  The baby was quiet now, feeding at its mother’s breast. Again I felt a ripple of disgust at the primitive existence of humankind. Yet unable to tear my gaze away from the baby, I looked into its future.

  I watched his life unfold before me. I saw the many moments he spent in this room as a boy sitting on his mother’s lap whilst she sat in the chair by the window, sorrow lining her face as she thought of the man who had captured her heart and treated it so carelessly. All the while he sat staring at his mother, his vivid blue eyes filled with love and also a quiet empathy unusual for a child so young.

  I watched as he grew into a quiet, serious boy and even saw his first day at school, how tall and thin he looked as he stood at the school gates trying to evince a courage he did not feel. I was there to see him standing at his mother’s graveside, his sensitive, handsome face pale with anxiety regarding the future.

  I remained with him as he lay that night in his room staring up at the ceiling, his eyes filled with the sorrow he would not allow to form into tears. His lips were slightly parted as if in astonishment at the death he still could not fully accept, dark circles under his eyes.

  I could not tear my gaze away from him, his sorrow and loneliness pulling at some part of me I had hidden away even from myself. I wondered then if I should reveal myself to him and show him the realm just beyond seeing that awaited him so he would be comforted by the truth: Death was not something to be mourned. Death should instead be met with joy for it led to paradise.

  I sighed instead. I had always been scornful of the Timeless Ones who developed attachments to humans, no matter how fleeting. Although this was only an...attachment, not the type of bond that had the power to call me to this boy, I had to find out how the trick that had brought me to him had been achieved and return to my time.

  Despite that I remained with him in that dark little box, observing his sleepless vigil along with his grief, until dawn.

  I moved to his bed then and placed a hand against his though he could not feel my touch. He looked toward the window in that moment at the brightening dawn peeping through the gaps in the curtains. I could not explain the elation that surged within when he turned his gaze toward where I stood, or the pang of distress that replaced it when he looked through and beyond me.

  I removed my hand from his.

  A Timeless One developing an attachment to a human never bode well for either them or us.

  Reluctantly I left the human boy looking through the gloom toward the draped window and the breaches of light struggling against the darkness he lay in.

  I left that period in his life and walked into a rain swept landscape and a day turned a spent grey by slate-coloured clouds.

  I let out a gasp when I beheld him, vibrant and virile against the grey surroundings. He was a man now. He stood before me dressed in black, completely oblivious to the rain, his glistening dark hair pushed away from his face, his skin dewy and flushed. I stared up into a face that was beautiful beyond anything I had ever seen and which made my heart lurch only to quiver against my chest in submission.

  His vivid blue eyes seemed to meet mine for a split second and it felt as though I could not breathe. But of course he couldn’t see me. He was looking beyond me to two dogs frolicking in the rain. A dazzling smile broke across his face. He moved away and called to the dogs. He ran after them leaving me trembling as I watched him come to a stop and then call the dogs again.

  I was a god. Power, the omniscient, it was all I knew. Yet in that moment I had known what weakness was. I had felt it in that fleeting moment when he looked into my eyes.

  It was then that I finally accepted this was no trick. His soul had been able to call to mine because he held my heart long before he came into being.

  Yet his future was clouded with danger and pain. In his otherwise unremarkable life, I saw a seed of evil which would draw him into a darkness that would destroy him. I felt a flutter of anxiety at what awaited him and realised for the first time that the war currently taking place among the Timeless Ones would eventually spill out into human existence in the creation of creatures like the one that laid a snare to capture him.

  Without my even being aware of it, the decision had been made the moment I heard his call. Even if the decision had not already been made, I knew I could not let him fall into darkness. I had to be with him, it was what my soul—and his—demanded.

  It was forbidden for one of the Timeless Ones to mate with a human, so it meant I had to become mortal.

  And this is how a goddess became a slave.

  I pulled myself out of the silky cobwebs of his time and returned to the moon. Already away from the sight of his face, so far from the lullaby his soul sang to my own, I felt the loss keenly. The cold, dark emptiness of the moon, which had previously been my sanctuary, was a wasteland.

  The decision had been made.

  I closed my eyes and called forth the power of the universe, of the moon, the sacred power at the heart of my being. I knew where I would go. The human female I had chosen to be my mother came from a powerful line of humans called witches. They carried a limited form of the power of the Timeless Ones. Entering the world through this woman would ensure I would not be completely helpless in my mortal form.

  When it was done, I opened my eyes.

  Floating in the almost liquid darkness cupping the moon, I saw her, my mortal incarnation. My beloved’s soul would recognise mine, and so long as our paths crossed, he would be inescapably drawn to me no matter what form I took. Yet I had created her in my image, although something that had never been known to me shone in her eyes as she gazed upon me: fear, even as awe unfolded across her face like a flower opening itself to the sun.

  It was done. I lifted my head to the darkness and all that I was—timelessness, knowledge, power, the divine—bled from me and there was only darkness.

  Chapter 30

  In the present I had been released from the chains of my mortal body. Now I could exist in the fullness of what I was.

  I whispered a command to the darkness and it faded away. The underground chamber blazed into being.

  The entity in its hideous rendition of my mortal body sat at the altar. Any pity I may have felt for the child this thing used to be—a child who had been forced to wear the mantle of a goddess and carry all the burdens associated with that role—was gone. Its laughter shredded the silence in the underground chamber whilst my body lay prone before it, the gold staff protruding from my back. Blood seeped into the earth around my body whilst the dead gathered around bearing silent witness.

  The entity’s laughter faded away and its face froze into a mask of fear. Rage quickly replaced it, its eyes
like black cauldrons of hatred when it glimpsed what it could perceive of my true self, standing by my mortal body.

  A staff through the heart would have killed a vampire, but I was more than a vampire. So although wounded, I was not dead. Instead the shock of the wound had allowed me to leave my mortal body, as I had done long ago in sleep in order to swim through the mists of time and tell my beloved to wait for me. But I did not know if my mortal incarnation would remain alive long enough for me to do all that needed to be done and return to it.

  With only the power of thought, I hoisted the chapel entity into the air. It had no tangible body, but with a mere thought, I could make it feel pain.

  It went rigid and screamed. Gut wrenching screams as I visited every single one of the deaths it was responsible for, along with hours of torture its victims had endured at the hands of Auria, Emory and Onyx in a single, fluid burst of pain. Its screams were terrifying to hear—raw wrenching screams of unimaginable pain. I released it and it crumpled to the floor where it remained, a sobbing, broken shell of what it had coveted for millennia.

  I knew where I would send it, a place of inconceivable darkness. A hell dimension where hideous beasts resided. Even now I could see the seams between our world and theirs unravelling and the air around the entity rippled. I saw some of the inhabitants of the hell dimension from which the entity had escaped when Auria summoned it. Some looked like men, with long pale limbs and large, bright, glassy eyes that filled most of their faces. Others were hideous beasts, one a multi-legged, amphibious-looking thing crawling on its stomach. They reached for the entity.

  I turned away from it and back to the souls of the dead. I once more held my hand out to the Negro ghost. She was smiling now, the anguish and sorrow gone. When she grasped my hand this time, it felt solid. I held out my hand to another and looked around me at all of the faces of the dead. I pulled them to me like a fistful of petals, and the underground chamber—along with the broken figure of the entity, which was fading away back into the darkness—disappeared from sight along with the hideous beasts tugging at its edges. I carried the souls of the dead with me and released their spirits into that place of perfect happiness which we all know is whispering at the peripheries of our mortal lives.

  Only one spirit remained, that of the woman I had called Mama during my first earthly walk. I saw her as clearly as I’d seen her when her spirit had summoned my true self in what I had seen as a dream. Although she could join the others, such was her devotion to me that she meant to linger, as she had done for centuries to ensure I could return to him.

  I gazed upon her face for the longest moment, taking in her smooth, dark skin which glistened as if she stood in soft sunlight. I drank in her onyx eyes and the rows of scars on her forehead and cheeks. I had lived for millennia before I chose an earthly existence, but had never known the true love of a mother until she became mine. I memorised every line of her face, and although a part of me wanted her spirit to remain with me always, she had earned her rest so I urged her to join the others. Her sojourn was at an end and she could be at peace.

  I was alone now in a place where the past was indistinguishable from the present and the future. I was everywhere and nowhere at once, the scene before my eyes fluctuating, splitting, blooming before me.

  I saw a mahogany-skinned female dressed in black, racing across an empty vermillion landscape under a flame-coloured sky, her feet barely touching its surface.

  I also saw Avery in dark, ghostly woodland, his black clothing and white necktie tattered, his hair long and tangled, his eyes hollow wells of sorrow as he continued his lonely wanderings in the hopes he would have even a glimpse of the being that had called to him and told him to wait for her.

  I saw another on a long, lonely quest. A larger, more colourful version of the son he sought. His natural charm and exuberance dampened by grief, guilt and the belief his son was in pain and needed him.

  His name was Leonard Wentworth. I had never met this man, but I loved his son, and it was painful to see him travelling from town to town, spending many nights in filthy, cramped boarding rooms, if even one could be found. His travails, his every thought during the years after Avery’s disappearance, were a lament, a prayer only a goddess could hear: That of the desire to save his son. It was a prayer that whispered to my soul and I knew I could grant it, although not in his lifetime or in the way he expected.

  I was drawn to another in pain and I found myself in woodland as the sun crept into a lonely, dusky dawn. A man with coal dark skin lay amidst the undergrowth, sound asleep. His knuckles were bruised, as was his face. I knew who he was, for my first earthly incarnation had given birth to him. He was Dembi, my son. He awoke with a start, eyes that were so much like his father’s, wild and dark with confusion as he stared around him. His trousers were unbuttoned and the alien scent of another woman clung to him. He got to his knees, his head bowed. He groaned in despair.

  It had happened again.

  He recalled snatches of a female voice. Smooth, dark skin and the feel of short, fat legs clamped like a vice around his waist. He recalled little else, like her name, or where they met. These blackouts occurred often and he wanted desperately to tell his sister, Lina. But how could he make her believe something strange was happening and that he wasn’t in control of it?

  He groaned again.

  He loved his wife so much, how was he going to explain yet more lost hours, the female scent that clung to him, or the mindless violence branding its ownership upon his face and knuckles?

  He looked up, tears trailing down his cheeks, and then went rigid with shock, his gaze focusing on where I stood.

  “Mama?”

  He could see me and I knew now that the chapel entity had been attacking my earthly descendants from the moment I was turned into a vampire, using the males especially—from Dembi to Lina’s sons—to breed children far and wide who were disconnected from the family and so were vulnerable to an attack that would see it reborn again through one of them.

  Dembi stared at me, his anguish raw and deep.

  “Help me, Mama, help me.”

  I couldn’t because to intervene would mean many men and women, who had been born as a result, would cease to exist. Including a certain heroic vampire hunter I had watched die in my arms.

  Tears filled my eyes, but I moved away, leaving my son alone in the woods, distraught and wrestling with pain and confusion in the tepid dawn light seeping through the trees.

  I found myself next in a small home in Louisiana. An overweight white woman with greasy dark hair, who appeared to be in her twenties, sat smoking. Her face was flushed with drink, her expression dark with discontent.

  “Mallory! Mallory! Didn’t I tell you to clean up this mess,” she said, staring at some toys on the floor by her feet.

  Moments later, a thin, red-haired girl entered the room. She remained at the door, her face thoughtful, a hint of fear in her eyes as she stared at her mother.

  “Well, don’t just stand there! Clean it up.”

  Mallory moved into the room and approached cautiously. Her mother watched her with mean, quick eyes. All the frustration and disappointment she felt at her life gathered to a sharp pinpoint of hatred directed at her child. When Mallory got close enough and bent to pick up her toys, she directed a thick, sharp slap at the child.

  “I tell you time and again not to leave your crap in my clean living room!”

  She reached out to slap her again, but Mallory was able to dart out of her reach, her toys in her hand. She rubbed her cheek, fighting back tears as she left the room.

  In the corridor, she let out a breath. She was used to these vicious moods of her mother’s, which rarely lasted more than a few days. She would be back to normal soon, but tears still stung Mallory’s eyes. At times like this she wished desperately for a father, someone to stick up for her when her mother was being mean. She disappeared down the corridor to her room, lost in familiar fantasies of a father who would come and whisk
her away from a life that was smothering her.

  That night I watched her mother as she slept, snatches of her past, present and future spread out before me like the pieces of a patchwork quilt. I looked at the choices she had made which had resulted in the frustration and anger now directed at her child. I also saw what Mallory would be like at the age her mother was now. I saw an overweight woman, her beauty faded, her face drained of all joy and vitality, a child hanging on her hip whilst she shouted at another.

  I stared down at Mallory’s mother as she slept. The power of a goddess was to command all around her. The power of a goddess was that of life.

  She could also take it away.

  So, like a ghoul in the dark, I reached out and drew her life force out of the trappings of the mortal body lying before me.

  Mallory’s mother was soon standing beside me in her true form, radiant and full of love and peace. She stared at the corpse before her as if she did not recognise it. She turned to me, her brow furrowed.

  Why? There was no grief or anger, only the question.

  I showed her all I had seen.

  Sorrow peered at me from her almond brown eyes, which were so much like Mallory’s.

  I was hurting her that much?

  I nodded. You understand?

  Yes, but what will—?

  She will be taken care of.

  She nodded and looked at the door which led down the corridor to Mallory’s room, her eyes shining with tears of love.