The Darkening (Immortals)

by Robin T. Popp

  Heather opened her eyes and looked at Lexi and Darius in turn. “Let us begin,” she said quietly.

  Pulling a black taper candle out of the cauldron, she held it up. “I have dipped this black candle nine times into white wax before covering it again in black. This represents how your attacker tried to hide his or her curse from you. Next, I will inscribe an uncrossing spell on its surface.” She picked up a small needle and began writing on the candle, working quickly from the base of the candle to the top. When she was done, she lit the candle, let a few drops of wax fall into the cauldron and then quickly stuck the candle in the wax.

  “Thy will I see and spells I bind. I banish you and all your kind. Thy work is done, there is no more. We vanquish thy power forevermore.” Heather repeated the chant nine times, and when she finished, they sat silently until the candle burned down completely. Lexi wasn’t sure what she expected to happen—or to feel. She looked expectantly at Darius, but his expression was unreadable.

  At Heather’s slight nod, Lexi let the fire in her hands go out and watched as Heather thanked the Mother Goddess for being there, got to her feet and extinguished the Goddess candle. “So mote it be,” she said. She picked up the moonstone and fastened it around Darius’s neck. The stone lay against his chest, where it was nearly lost in the tattooed artwork behind it.

  Heather then went to the east corner and began dragging her foot along the circle of salt, this time moving in the Widdershins, or counterclockwise, direction. When she was once again back in the east corner, she turned to look at them and smiled. “The circle is now open.”

  “Do you remember anything?” Lexi asked, getting to her feet just as Darius was. At his perplexed look, she clarified. “Of your past; of what happened last night?”

  When he shook his head, Lexi cast a quick glance at Heather, who merely smiled. “It would be great if it worked that way, but highly unlikely. Give it time and keep that moonstone with you.”

  She blew out the four white candles and led Lexi and Darius out of the room. “Can you stay for lunch before you go back?”

  Lexi felt a tinge of guilt. “I thought it might be better if Darius stayed here with you. That way, he’d be in the protection of the Coven of Light.”

  They’d stopped walking, and Darius was giving her a strange look. Heather did a better job of hiding her curiosity. “Darius is, of course, welcome to stay here with me,” she said, giving him a smile. “However, I think if that had been the Goddess’s intent, he would have appeared to me in the first place.” She held up her hand when Lexi opened her mouth to argue. “Besides, if he runs into trouble before his memory returns, he’s better off being with a fire-wielding werewolf than with me.”

  Darius said nothing, and Lexi knew there was no point in protesting. So she followed after them to the kitchen, where Heather, a vegan, fed them a fresh salad. Afterwards, Lexi hugged her friend good-bye, and then she and Darius got into the Yukon and headed back to the city.

  Along the way, Lexi stopped at a fast-food place and ordered four cheeseburgers and two Cokes. Once they were back on the highway, she dug in the bag, intending to pull out a burger and hand it to Darius. She stopped as a thought occurred to her. “You eat meat, don’t you?” she asked him. He was, after all, an Immortal, living with the gods and all that. Maybe they had some credo about eating only plants.

  He had been staring at the bag, but now looked up at her, a quirky smile on his face. “Yes.”

  Smiling, she pulled out a burger and handed it to him. “Here you go—I think you’ll like this. It’s called a cheeseburger.”

  He took it from her and stared at it for a second while she pulled another from the bag. She used her knee to steer for a moment while she unwrapped her burger and then she bit into it, immediately feeling better.

  “I love Heather and would never want to insult her,” Lexi said around a mouthful, “but there’s a limit to the number of fruits and vegetables I can eat. It’s just not possible for a werewolf not to be a carnivore. It’s our nature.”

  She glanced at Darius and saw him unwrap his burger. After only a slight hesitation, he took a bite.

  His face lit up. “It’s good.”

  She gave a slight chuckle. “I thought you’d like it.” After that, the drive back to the city was done in companionable silence as they both finished eating.

  In the parking garage, Lexi pulled into the empty Blackwell space and turned off the engine. She turned to Darius. “I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do. I guess we can go back to my place and wait. Or call Adrian?” she suggested hopefully.

  “Or…” He picked up the file folder sticking out between the driver’s seat and center console.“Didn’t Marge say something about an Irish mobster?” He opened the folder and made a show of reading it, though Lexi had no idea if he could understand English.

  “That’s all right,” she assured him. “It’s just a delinquent leprechaun. I can do it later.”

  He gave her a dubious look. “I lost my memory, not my intelligence or my abilities. I’ve spent a millennium hunting down demons, vampires and other sources of evil. I’ve even, from time to time”—he held up the folder—“hunted down leprechauns. If you’ve ever hunted one before, you know how tricky they can be. You’ll be glad I was there to help.”

  “How do you know you’ve hunted demons and leprechauns?” She didn’t doubt it was true, but if he’d lost all his memories, how did he know it was true?

  He cocked his head like he was thinking, and then gave a slow smile. “I just remembered. I wasn’t trying to remember—I looked at the folder and suddenly the memories were there.”

  “Do you remember what happened last night?”

  “No, nothing that recent. Just some old memories of hunting with my brothers.” He smiled again. “I remember my brothers—Adrian, Kalen, Hunter and Tain.”

  “The spell’s working,” she breathed. “Don’t try to force it.” She looked at the file clutched in his hand. The truth was that she had hunted leprechauns before, and the thought of having help was appealing. “All right. You can come with me.”

  She took the file from him and opened it, quickly scanning the known facts of the case and reading them aloud. “Patrick Darby—arrested two weeks ago on charges of public intoxication and lewd behavior. His lawyer secured bond for him, and Darby, in true leprechaun fashion, disappeared.” She paused, flipping through the rest of the papers, looking for more information. “There’s not much here.”

  “Every leprechaun I’ve known loves to drink,” Darius offered.

  “There are an awful lot of pubs around here, so I guess we’d better get started,” she said.

  Apparently the luck of the Irish was with them. It only took three stops before they’d found the right place. Several heads turned their way when they walked into O’Rourke’s. Lexi imagined they made quite a pair. Darius with his tattoo-covered arms and chest, black duster and pants. She dressed in black leather as well, with her long black hair pulled back in a braid. They stood just inside the doorway while their eyes grew accustomed to the dim interior.

  “What can I get you?” the bartender asked.

  “I’m looking for a leprechaun calling himself Paddy Darby,” Lexi said. “He’s in his mid fifties, wrinkled eyes, bushy white eyebrows and thick hair. Know him?”

  The bartender nodded to the far corner. Turning to look, Lexi saw a small man in a bright bottle-green coat, sitting alone at a table with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey in front of him. He was so short that his legs didn’t reach the floor.

  She and Darius moved forward quietly, so as not to alert the little man, who had obviously been drinking for quite a while and was singing loudly.

  “ ‘Oh, the end is nigh, me bonny lass, so here’s a kiss good-bye. We’ll not fare well when they loose the hounds of hell, so lift the tankard high, love and drink un
til ye die.’ ”

  It wasn’t the rowdy drinking song one typically heard in bars. In fact, Lexi thought this one was a bit of a downer. Well, whatever reason he had for being upset, it wasn’t her problem. What was her problem was bringing the little guy in.

  She and Darius approached from different sides, hoping to take him by surprise. She was less than four feet away when he scrambled about on his chair and stood up.

  “Friends and neighbors,” he shouted, lifting his mug in the air. “The end is almost on us. Join me in another round, won’t ye—”

  He fell silent when he spotted Lexi, still quietly moving forward. She saw alarm register in his eyes and knew the instant he decided to run for it.

  She raced forward just as he leapt off the chair and ran to the back of the bar. He was as fast as legend reputed leprechauns to be, and by the time Lexi and Darius reached the back of the bar, he had disappeared down a hallway.

  Lexi and Darius exchanged looks, but neither knew where to start looking for the man. Then Lexi caught the stench of whiskey on the air.

  “This way,” she said, already moving to follow the trail. There were a couple of doors off the hallway, but the whiskey scent was strongest near the last door on the right, so that was the one she went through.

  The leprechaun was there, panting and waiting to see if they’d find him. Seeing them come through the door must have rattled him, because he began racing around in circles, clearly confused and disoriented.

  Suddenly he stopped his crazy circling and, giving them a mischievous smile, ran straight at the wall.

  “Stop him!” Lexi cried. “If he teleports through, we’ll never catch him.”

  Lexi and Darius leapt at the same time, arms outstretched, trying to catch the leprechaun. Before they could reach him, he hit the wall with a sickening thud and toppled over, like a cut-down tree.

  Lexi stared at the unmoving body, stunned. “I guess he was too drunk to magic himself through the wall.” She moved forward, pulling her cuffs from her belt. When she reached him, she bent over to slip the cuffs around his wrists.

  In the blink of an eye, though, he rolled to the side, jumped up and raced for the wall again.

  This time, he vanished through it, leaving behind a single shoe.

  “Damn it,” she swore, quickly clipping the cuffs back on her belt.

  “Sneaky little devil, isn’t he?” Darius sounded amused. “Still want to go after him?”

  “Hell, yes,” Lexi said, stooping to pick up the little shoe.

  “Then we’d better hurry,” Darius said from the open doorway. “Looks like there’s an exit down the hall here.”

  She hurried after him, down the hall and out the exit.

  Outside, standing in the alley, they looked around. Unsurprisingly, there was no sight of the leprechaun. She strained to hear the sound of tiny, running feet, but all she heard was the blaring of horns and the rumbling of buses from the nearby traffic.

  She walked up to the back wall of the bar, stopping at the spot where she thought the leprechaun might have come through the wall. “What do you think?”

  Darius came up beside her and bent low to examine the bricks. He touched a spot and then pressed his fingers to his thumb several times, as if the little man had left behind a sticky residue, which was now on his fingers. After a second, he nodded. “That’s the spot.”

  She held the shoe up to her nose and took a deep whiff. Memorizing the odor, she stripped off her clothes and, ignoring Darius’s raised eyebrow, handed everything to him. “Try to keep up.” Then she morphed into wolf form.

  Immediately her perception of the world changed. Everything came into sharper focus; the smells were stronger and the sounds were louder. It was always this way when she first shifted, and she reveled in the heightened senses of her wolf form.

  She sniffed the wall and caught the leprechaun’s scent. Then, casting a quick glance at Darius to make sure he was paying attention, she took off.

  She ran down the alley, but when she reached the end where the alley crossed the main street, she had to stop. The odor of exhaust fumes interfered with her ability to follow the scent, and the flow of traffic kept her from moving about to see where the trail might pick up again. Darius must have understood, because suddenly he was there, holding up his hands and stepping out into the middle of the busy street. Car horns blared and irate drivers shouted, but Lexi ignored them all as she trotted around, trying to locate the scent.

  She was about to give up when a faint breeze stirred and she caught a whiff of the familiar scent of Irish clover and whiskey. Giving Darius a quick bark to let him know she’d found the trail, she took off running.

  The scent led down four blocks, past pedestrians who turned to stare because the sight of a werewolf in New York City drew attention, though at least no one was running away from her screaming in terror. Lexi ignored them as she continued down the street, her focus on following the leprechaun’s scent as it mingled with the smells of roasted nuts, hot dogs and car fumes.

  She had to give the little guy credit. Even drunk, he certainly covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. She was starting to feel a little winded and couldn’t help wondering how Darius was doing. A quick backward glance showed he was keeping up.

  When the trail turned down another alley, Lexi knew the little man was getting tired. Without realizing it, he’d just turned down a dead end.

  Slowing her stride to a walk, she focused on her other senses and was rewarded when her lupine ears picked up the faint sound of heavy panting. Her quarry wasn’t too far ahead of her now.

  “The trick in dealing with leprechauns,” Darius said softly beside her, “is you must never give them time to think about what they’re doing.”

  Lexi understood what he was telling her and moved into a trot as she followed the scent down the alley. There was a Dumpster up ahead, and she paused beside it to listen. A scurrying noise behind a nearby overturned boxdrew her attention, and she pounced on it.

  The impact of her foot against the box sent the little man scurrying out. He was so intent on keeping an eye on her that he didn’t pay attention to how close he was to the wall. He hit it with bone-jarring force and for the second time that night, bounced off and landed on his back. This time, Lexi didn’t give him a chance to roll away from her. She pinned him to the ground with her paws, teeth bared and growling.

  Darius appeared and slipped a golden cord around the little man’s neck. “That should hold you,” he said.

  Darius was holding the cord loosely in one hand, and before Lexi could growl a warning, their prisoner jumped up and threw himself at the wall again. This time, some of him actually went through, but his head, neck and shoulders stayed behind, anchored by the cord.

  “Ye can’t hold me,” the little man said in a heavily slurred voice. “I’ll disappear.” His laugh sounded like a cat coughing up a fur ball, and Lexi, even in wolf form, wanted to roll her eyes.

  The leprechaun struggled to loosen the golden cord from his neck, and when that didn’t do any good, he began hopping around, pulling back on the rope, looking much like a bass on the end of a fishing line—mouth open wide as he flopped around on the ground.

  Darius held firmly to his end of the cord and watched the little man’s attempts to escape with unveiled amusement. “He’s not going anywhere,” he said to Lexi. “You can change back.”

  He turned his attention to the sleek black wolf watching him so intently with those light gray eyes. Even in this form, she was stunning.

  He knew he should look away, but he couldn’t resist the temptation of watching her morph. With the air still shimmering around her, she was a vision to behold. Her long dark hair fell around her like a sheer veil, accentuating her figure. His hands itched to hold the full weight of her breasts; his thumbs ached to stroke the dusky rose nipples that had beaded against the slight chill in the air. Her slim waist made the gentle flare of her hips all the more inviting, and Darius let his
gaze travel down the length of her, pausing briefly at the dark curls at the apex of her thighs, and then traveling further down to the long length of nicely toned legs. Darius couldn’t move, lost between awed reverence and thoughts of what it would be like to crawl between those legs.

  “Saints almighty, but she’s a rare one.”

  Startled from his thoughts, Darius furrowed his brows and glared at the leprechaun, who was also staring at Lexi. Feeling Darius’s gaze on him, he looked up and winked. “I wouldn’t be minding taking her for a wee ride.”

  Darius yanked on the cord, jerking the leprechaun forward until the small face connected with his fist. “Don’t look at her.”

  The leprechaun clutched his nose, yelling obscenities. “What the hell? You can’t tell me what to do.”

  Darius raised an eyebrow as he handed Lexi her clothes. Then he turned his attention back to the leprechaun. “I can do anything I damn well please. Now turn your head and give the lady some privacy.”

  “No,” the leprechaun said with the defiance of a five-year-old. He puffed out his chest and took a step toward Darius, but the effect was more comical than anything because he only stood as high as the Immortal’s crotch. Darius saw the leprechaun’s intent clearly, and when the small fist came out to smash him in the balls, Darius slapped a hand to his chest and unleashed Fury.

  The tattooed dragon’s head came to life with a mighty roar, growing larger by the second until it was the size of a pony. The leprechaun’s eyes widened in fear at the sight of the snarling beast with rows of razorsharp teeth. At that moment, fire shot out of the dragon’s nostrils, and the little man screamed, jumping as far back as the cord around his neck would let him—which wasn’t far.

  Lexi, who had changed back to human form and dressed, appeared at his side. Darius spared her a quick glance to see if she was frightened, but he should have known better. Instead she gave Fury a final look before turning to glare at Darius.