Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3)

by A. D. Koboah

  “I knew you were not what you seemed to be when I first tasted your blood. But I didn’t know fully until Mallory told me about Avery’s lost love.”

  I nodded and saw an image of what he had seen the first time he drank my blood. A smile spread across my lips.

  “Does Avery know?” Shadrach asked.

  “I think a small part of him does. But whether or not I will tell him everything? I don’t know. Our past relationship wasn’t always a smooth one. He was wracked with guilt over the things that happened to me when I was a slave. I also don’t know how to tell him his actions may have made it easier for one of my descendants to kill me.”

  He stared at me, fascination in his eyes.

  “Will you be here when we get back?” I asked, already knowing the answer to my question.

  He tensed and his eyes once more resembled the windows looking inward on darkness I recalled so vividly before Mallory came into his life. He stared ahead at the field of flowers.

  “I have to leave. Avery may have forgiven me for turning you into a vampire. But he would never forgive me if I did it to Mallory. Neither would she, although I doubt she’ll forgive me for going away, either.”

  “She probably already has.”

  He allowed his gaze to meet mine once more and nodded, taking some comfort from my words. He smiled then.

  “Who could have known when I awoke that night and heard you outside my shack that it was the beginning of something that would completely change me? I have a degree of peace now whenever I think about my mother, and something I never thought I would find again: love, although I will have to love her from afar.”

  I smiled. “I’m going to miss you.”

  He pulled me to him and kissed me on the head.

  We moved away from each other when Avery pulled up on our left in one of his convertibles. He hopped out of the car and moved to us. He was wearing one of the shirts I had tried to throw away on my first night at the mansion. When he noticed my gaze on it, I smiled.

  “You look great, Avery.”

  “Really?” His eyes twinkled with amusement.

  “Of course. You always look great.”

  He smiled and pulled me to him. In his arms I could hear his soul, what sounded aeons ago in the wasteland that had been my home, like the caress of a violin calling to my soul. It answered his call for our souls were in tune with one another in a lullaby that would endure for all eternity.

  “I still don’t know why you guys are travelling by car when you can get to your destination so much quicker without it,” Shadrach said.

  “It’s the journey that matters, not the destination. I want to savour every second of it.” I turned to Avery. “I’ve also found lots of clubs along the way we can go to. So I can teach you how to dance.”

  “Who told you I can’t dance?” he said with a smile.

  “There’s dancing, and then there’s dancing, Avery.”

  “We’ll see.” He placed a kiss on my lips and stroked my hair. “I might even teach you a thing or two.”

  I laughed, moved out of his embrace and got into the car. As Avery got in, Shadrach came around to the passenger side and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  As we pulled away and drove out of the grounds, I turned to wave at Shadrach standing alone outside the mansion. I stared at him until he disappeared from sight.

  Soon we were out on the open road whilst night wreathed the sky with velvet and diamonds. A full moon hung above turning its radiant face on us as we drove into the night. I stared up at it, in awe of its majesty and its many secrets, remembering a time when I walked upon its surface.

  I had survived the last few months on small amounts of Avery’s blood, which was enough to keep me alive and strong. I no longer craved human blood. Remembering what I used to be, the knowledge of the divine, meant I could not drink human blood for I would not be able to stop before the kill. For a goddess, birth and death were the same. So no, I would never drink human blood again. Especially since I remembered Akan’s memories of all those men, women and children the Enwa sacrificed to the goddess of the moon. There were countless others like the Enwa who had shed blood in the goddess’s name. So I would never willingly take the life of another.

  I turned to Avery and placed a kiss on his cheek. He faced me and sought my lips in a kiss that ended far too soon, but I had many more of such sweet gifts to look forward to.

  I thought back to what Shadrach had seen when he first tasted my blood. He had seen me as I was when I was a slave. I had been standing with my back to him in the field of flowers at dusk gazing upon a sunset that had turned the sky a blistering ochre. I had turned to face him and smiled before returning to gaze out into the distance, waiting for my beloved to return whilst night crept in all around me as tender as a lover.

  Hidden in my bag was the journal I had written towards the end of my first mortal life. Sitting by the light of a lamp whilst the empty house slumbered, I had felt compelled to write that journal and document the month I had spent at the mansion with the unique being who had captured my heart. I thought I had been writing that journal for my daughter, Lina, to explain why I was choosing to abandon her a second time. I realise now I had been writing it for myself.

  My entire mortal and immortal life had been coloured by my self-hatred. When I found that journal two years ago and read it, I fell in love with Avery all over again. I had also, through the pages of that journal, learned to love myself as I had been in the past. A flawed, deeply splintered slave who had dared to fall in love, and in doing so, reclaimed her stolen humanity.

  I sighed as we drove on into the night with no particular destination in mind. Our days of waiting were now at an end. We could be together forever now and nothing would ever part us.

  THE END

  Afterword

  And so we’ve come to the end of The Darkling Trilogy and I want to thank you all for coming this far with me.

  I also want to talk a little bit about what inspired some of the female villains in the trilogy. The name Alayai is a combination of two names. One of these is the name of the late great Aaliyah.

  I watched Aaliyah in The Queen of the Damned and was mesmerised by her performance. There was a scene in which she set a vampire alight and then laughed. I thought her expression (her eyes lit with mirth, her mouth covered in blood) was like that of a gleeful child. This inspired elements of Alayai’s character. Aaliyah’s performance in that film is also one of the reasons for Luna’s descent into evil in Rising Dark. I watched that film again about halfway through writing Dark Genesis and I knew I had to have a powerful, evil female character who had a strong emotional hold over Avery. I created Auria and Onyx but neither of them fit that role. I considered giving Henriette a more prominent role and have Avery turn her into a vampire, only for her to succumb to evil, forcing him to kill her. But Henriette just didn’t have a strong enough hold on Avery’s heart. So I decided it had to be Luna and so the chase across the rooftops of London and the fight that follows, was born.

  I also wanted to name a character in this novel after someone I met recently called Alaya. Alayai’s name was originally Alayi and since Alaya and Alayi are similar, I decided to tweak it slightly to Alayai—though the person I named her after, Alaya, seems like such a sweet person and I doubt she could ever be as spiteful as my Alayai.

  I knew a lot of my readers really, really hate Dallas so I was really nervous about this book and considered having Luna return in a different way. If I had it would have been at the point when Dallas kills Auria and it would have been Luna, and not Maryse, who snaps Dallas out of her trance. In the end I had to stick with what I planned originally although I know some of my readers won’t like it.

  The goddess theme came about because one of my readers jokingly referring to me as a goddess. This idea was consolidated by one of my reviews on Amazon in which the reviewer said Dark Genesis reminded her of the Greek tale of a god who rescues a beautiful maiden. When picking names and set
tings for the novel, the name has to fit and I spent quite a while looking for the right name for my heroine until I came across the name Luna. At the time I thought it was just a name, but now I can see it was the muse leading me to the goddess theme.

  When I started the trilogy, I intended for it to go in a completely different direction and when I introduced Julia, the horse, I intended for her to feature a great deal in the sequel to Dark Genesis. When I made the decision that the series would be three books instead of two, the plot I had for the horse kind of fizzled out. One of my reviewers picked up on the fact that it appeared as if the horse was going to be a bigger part of the novel when it was introduced, but then nothing came of it. This made me think about a way to resurrect the original plot I had in mind for the horse and that is when I came up with Akan and the walled village.

  It seems like I’m rambling a bit but I just want you all to know I appreciate and read every review (good and bad) and that they help motivate and inspire me in different ways.

  So thank you for being my muses.

  Thank you all so much for your reviews, emails telling me you enjoyed my novels and for tweeting and leaving comments on my Facebook page. It really brightens my day.

  And in case you were wondering...Luna and Avery do live happily ever after and if you want to see how things turn out for them—along with a glimpse of an idea I have for a future novel—keep reading for my bonus chapter.

  Avery

  Dome BC-LN 9014

  The night sky was a bland, charcoal-coloured blanket flecked with fake diamonds. I moved down hollow, silent streets through thick, warm air that felt like thousands of cobwebs against my skin. Soulless recreations of grand, Victorian houses crowded in on either side of the street.

  I came to an abrupt stop when a woman tottered out of the dark some distance from me, appearing out of thin air. My heart lurched and the blood turned to ice in my veins when I saw she was dressed in a red gown with a bell shaped skirt and ruffles. Thick, dark, curls cascaded down her back. At the sight of her I was taken away to a lonely church beneath a youthful night, a graveyard to my left almost completely devoured by darkness.

  When the woman turned in my direction, I almost expected to see porcelain skin, a slash of ruby red lips and the icy beauty of my maker, Auria.

  Auria had been dead for centuries and the woman before me, with her dull amber complexion and large, vacant ash-coloured eyes, could not have looked more alien in comparison to my maker. Yet it was still a moment or two before I was able to regain my equilibrium and move on.

  As I neared, the air a few feet behind the woman flashed a limpid blue. Two males appeared out of the lambent air and at her side. They too were dressed in period clothing. One of the males wore green trousers, a matching waistcoat and black jacket. The other was dressed in beige trousers, a black waist coat and jacket. They both wore top hats. They too had large, vacant, ash-coloured eyes and that dull amber complexion. When I moved past all three of them turned to me.

  If the eyes were windows to the soul, then what I saw in their eyes should have sent a chill through me for they were little more than hollow, greedy pits. At the sight of me those pits lit with fascination even as they narrowed with envy, turning their faces into identical puckered, masks of hatred.

  Once upon a time I drew attention from others because of my beauty. Now my appearance attracted attention because it marked me out clearly for what I was.

  Using a flat, pebble-like handheld device, I activated the hidden doorway the trio had just stepped through. There were thousands of these doorways which were used for transportation throughout the city. They were mini wormholes which undulated between normal space and subspace, appearing whenever activated by either a handheld device or by an implant beneath a fingernail, which the inhabitants of this city seemed to prefer. The air in front of me flashed blue and I moved into a shimmering corridor, leaving the trio staring after me.

  I exited onto the lower section of the city. It lay before me, endless ivory-coloured buildings like broken bones thrown in a loose heap. Darkness lay damp and heavy above it, but the maze-like streets and the ivory-coloured buildings could clearly be seen even without my preternatural vision as the air itself provided luminosity, like clouds of chalky light settled around the buildings and streets.

  When I looked up I saw what appeared to be an endless, starlit night sky. It was merely an illusion of a night sky and concealed another level directly above this one. There were three in total.

  I was actually in a city enclosed by a giant dome, much like thousands that existed around the planet and which kept out a toxic atmosphere no longer able to sustain human life.

  The result of numerous world wars that all but destroyed the Earth I had known.

  The streets were empty aside from groups of people gathered in eerie clusters, looking up into the night sky. They were dressed in period clothing like the three I had just left. I saw one or two other inhabitants of the city dressed in dark, formless clothes, fear tightening their facial features, dart surreptitiously from their homes to one of the hidden doorways, not wanting to be out on the streets for too long. It wasn’t surprising, for this domed city was a dangerous place to be, mainly because of those I saw gathered in silent clusters, staring into the air above them with a chilling intensity. Every once in a while one of them would break into laughter, jumping up and down in mindless glee. It was usually one of the males. These males were so very different to the men of old. The men of the past, and those in other domes, protected, led, and built up their community. These males I saw before me were weak, giggling little school girls in comparison.

  In a move to rid the human race of the differences between race and gender that led to inequalities and prejudices the world over, all human beings had been genetically altered so their skin was a dull amber, which appeared a watery grey to a vampire. Their features and physiques had been altered so they were uniform and androgynous. The ones I saw gathered in silence differed slightly to most of those humans. They were a new breed of humans and they stood out from the other inhabitants of this city, not just because they all wore period clothing, but because their heads were slightly small in proportion to their bodies. This was a result of implants which were originally inserted to increase brain function. They had instead ended up taking over all their brain functions, meaning this new breed rarely thought for themselves and their actual brains—which were rarely used, if at all—had become smaller. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover their eyes, and especially their mouths, were larger than their brains.

  The very sight of them elicited a heavy smattering of contempt. Contempt felt the world over. This new generation of human were little more than vermin. And the very people I saw ducking in and out of their homes, terrified of being seen, were the ones responsible for their creation.

  Long ago this community had allowed an abomination to flourish in their midst which led the future generation to believe behaviour shunned by other communities—such as lying, stealing, stalking and voyeurism—were things to be admired. They had also been taught serious crimes such as sexual violence against women and paedophilia had a place within civilised society.

  I took a moment to survey the crowds gathered, staring into thin air. In actuality they were viewing broadcasts through an implant in their brains. I could glean enough of the broadcasts to know they were all of different men and women, huge, vivid, visually alluring, images of their faces hovering in the air above so that whichever angle you viewed them from, they appeared to be looking at and addressing you.

  All these men and women were vampires.

  From being forced to live in the shadows, vampires were now the false gods of this world, especially of the new breed of mindless humans before me. The period dress they wore had nothing to do with a love of history, but was merely in order to pay homage to the vampires they worshipped.

  I felt sadness touch my heart along with despair over what had become of the human r
ace.

  The world had changed beyond recognition. The only thing that remained the same was my immortal beloved.

  My thoughts on the past, I moved down into the bowels of the domed city.

  ***

  When my beloved returned to me that warm summer night of long ago, I suppose a part of me had known she had kept her promise to me the night I turned her into a vampire. Still, it took some time before the guilt, the sense of betrayal at finding love again with another, finally left me. It took even longer for me to realise the woman I had found love with was the one I had spent decades pining for.

  The realisation had crept up on me gradually, like a rose quietly coming into bloom, on that long road trip we took which saw us spend years travelling the world. On some nights we found ourselves bathing beneath a gushing waterfall. Other nights saw us lounging on the bonnet of the car talking long past the witching hour, until the threat of the coming dawn urged us onward to seek shelter from its punishing rays.

  For decades sorrow had been a chaste and jealous lover. When my beloved returned to me and I allowed myself to love again, I soon forgot what the bite of sorrow felt like or that its bitter caress had once been all the world had to offer me. Love had filled my heart and life with its heat. My beloved’s laughter, the sound of her uttering my name, her touch, blocked out the sound of sorrow's whimper. Her raven eyes held me captive so I saw nothing beyond them. Her love for me was an ocean separating me from those years of misery, but although sorrow no longer had the power to reach me, it could send another in its stead: Guilt. Guilt Luna had been replaced so easily by another, especially one who looked exactly like her.

  I loved Dallas. I loved her lively, frivolous personality. I loved the fearlessness with which she lived her life. Yet at times I heard Luna in her words, saw Luna in her actions and even some of her mannerisms. And that made guilt draw ever nearer to me, for it made me wonder if my love for the woman who led me back into the land of love and joy was as pure as I believed it to be.