A Toiling Darkness

by Jaliza Burwell

  It took a couple of moments, but they all took his advice. I stayed standing, cautious, as Kalen walked towards me, his eyes never leaving mine. They were no longer black, his pupils were back to their normal size with the dark brown surrounding them. His eyes seemed endless; they were the kind of eyes women got lost in.

  “Why did you enter like that? We felt you long before you came through the door,” I said. I knew why but I still needed to ask. I needed to know if he figured out who I really was yet. I needed him to say it. I still expected him to look at me with recognition and betrayal in his eyes before his fury took over and we fought again.

  “I felt her here. She was here, had to be.” Kalen ran his hands across his face, clearly frustrated. He plopped down on a stool, his feet easily touching the ground. I hopped up on mine and let my feet dangle. Some of the patrons looked at us, curious about the man and wondering why he was talking to me so easily. Maybe I affected him just as much as he affected me. He always seems quick to answer my questions if he could. A very rare trait to have in this world.

  “Her being the woman you have to kill?”

  He nodded. “Akhlys.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  I had to work hard not to give myself away, schooling my face to be the perfect nonchalant one I could manage. It should have been easy and it has always been. Just not recently. He glanced down at his hands, clenching them. “I almost had her the other night too.” His voice was barely a whisper—filled with desperation and pain.

  I don’t know what it feels like to be a slauve, to be held back by someone’s orders. I never want to know either. Can you imagine being chained inside a dark dungeon, a window your only taste of freedom? You’re so close to it too, close enough to taste and feel it on the fringe, only a few feet away. And yet you’re shackled to the wall, with barely any slack, and when you reach out to that freedom, your fingertips are only inches away. Inches. Just thinking about it was frustrating. I’ve been a prisoner before, more times than I can count, but freedom was always easy to obtain. But when you’re a slauve, your body is the very prison that holds you shackled. Frustration is too easy of a word to use. It doesn’t do him justice.

  “Do you think you will be able to kill her?” I asked.

  He stared at me, and took a deep, resigned breath. “She deserves to die. I met her last night, got a sense of who she is. She needs to die.”

  “You sound so sure,” I mumbled. Though, he really didn’t. It was more like he was trying to convince himself of that.

  Kalen went to say something. He closed his mouth and shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re a couple hundred years old, right?” He paused for a moment, trying to form his question. “Living that long, is it tiring?”

  I shifted in my seat, surprised by the question. I didn’t know how to answer it—wasn’t even sure if I knew the answer.

  “I’m sorry,” he tried to back off from the question. “I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. Just forget I asked.”

  “Too late to forget.” I sighed and looked into my mug. The tea was cooled off now.

  “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay. It’s a pretty loaded question. I’m just trying to figure out how to answer.”

  I stared at Kalen, took in the lines on his face and found myself wondering who he was before he died. He was young no doubt about that, but he also had some kind of experience. There was a look in those eyes only a man who fought with life and lost a couple of times could have.

  “I take it one day at a time,” I finally responded. “That’s all I can do.”

  “Do you get tired?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How do you keep going?” he asked. So persistent.

  “Why are you so curious?” I asked, finally too uncomfortable with the barrage of questions. I ask myself the same thing every day and still didn’t have a satisfying answer. When life enjoys knocking you down and works hard at trying to keep you on your back, how can you keep getting back up each day?

  You just do. Sometimes it hurts too much, but you still need to crawl out of bed and live. We are all programmed to do it—to live.

  He shrugged. “I don’t understand what it means to live a long time. I can’t even imagine it. She seemed so lonely and lost. Some of that came from what she said, but most of it was how she fought. Kind of like on autopilot. She fought because she had to, not because she wanted to.” He shrugged and rubbed at his face. “I don’t know, she just seemed tired.”

  “Well, I imagine she is tired.” I spoke slowly, picking through my words. I felt an urge to just come out and tell the truth. But the fear in telling him kept my mouth cemented shut. He had only one choice and that was to kill me. I was the key to his shackles. I was the one who kept him from his freedom.

  “Darkness? Are you okay?” Kalen leaned forward, worried. His face was only inches away now.

  I nodded. “Yeah...yeah, sorry, just got lost in my mind.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “How badly do you want to kill this woman you seek?”

  He thought about it for a moment, straightening back up. “It isn’t that I want to kill. Truthfully when I saw her, I had to fight with myself, unsuccessfully, but I still fought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I lost control of myself. My body moved all on its own and fought her. I just sat in the back seat.”

  “Don’t you want to be free? You should probably be more proactive in your fights with her then.”

  I reached out and touched his chest. His sweater was thin and soft, more of a piece of cloth to help him blend in with his surroundings then to keep him warm. Fall was just around the corner now but it was still hot outside. The warmth of his body seeped through the sweater and into my hand. I could feel his heart as it pounded against my hand, slow and steady.

  He reached up and wrapped his hand around mine. I closed my eyes and metaphysically looked at him. His soul watched me, wary and cautious. It still knew who I was, but it either gave up telling Kalen or it was just like Kalen, personality wise—both of them willing to look past all the rules and orders that would weigh down any other slauve.

  The last slauve was so determined to do what Eithna wanted. I’m not a hundred percent sure what her orders were, I just know the slauve did it, powerless to fight back. He wanted to make Eithna happy, all in hopes that he will be released from the curse. Slauves tend to be determined to become free. So why wasn’t Kalen just as determined?

  “I do want to be free but not at the expense of someone else who only wants someone to accept her.”

  My eyes snapped open and I drew away from him in shock. I didn’t realize how close I was to him until I repositioned myself on my stool. I was practically in his lap. It explained why I could feel his words as they vibrated through his chest.

  “What makes you think she just wants to be accepted?”

  He hesitated, not sure if he wanted to say anything more on the topic. Finally, he spoke, his words low and careful. There was a lot of cautiousness in our conversation tonight, both of us not wanting to say anything wrong. “Because she has the same look that you do.”

  I gave him a weak smile, trying to downgrade how much those words affected me. To think he was so intuitive. “Are you saying I’m a desperate, lonely child?”

  I didn’t realize how many emotions he was allowing me to see until his expression went blank; his eyes empty of the warmth they held. I wondered if we had similar blank expressions on our faces right now; both of us trying to be so careful with the other.

  “I don’t think desperate is something you’ve ever been.”

  Don’t die. Please don’t leave. Please.

  I was pretty desperate once, when the one human I cared for with everything in me finally passed away. Old age. Mother Moon never wanted to be more than who she was. She allowed herself to grow old
and die, and I got to watch it. I was pretty desperate way back then.

  I stood up. “We all have our moments. Trust me.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, standing up too.

  I glanced over my shoulder and took him in. Standing there, he looked like an abandoned puppy. I knew what it felt like to be put into a world without anyone to guide you. All you could do was fumble around and hope that when you screwed up, you didn’t get killed. Then, if you lived, you learned from the mistakes and don’t do them again. It was the best anyone could do.

  “How are you getting along?” I asked.

  He looked down at me, then at the floor. “As good as I can, I guess.”

  Meaning he wasn’t do too well. I nodded, accepting his lie for what it was. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  I turned and walked out. If he wanted to follow me, cool. If not, then he doesn’t and he can just keep fumbling around, trying to learn about this new world on his own. Maybe he’ll find a good Samaritan like that necromancer. Not that I thought that necromancer had any good intentions. I doubted it. Everyone wanted something.

  Chapter 18:

  The abandoned school building was long with two floors. The gate in front was rusted and almost off its hinges. The sun was completely gone, the crescent moon high in the sky, casting very little light, making the building ominous. The ominous look helped keep people away. There was also a high magical ward to alert the occupants of anyone going through. We stood just outside the ward.

  I reached out and stopped my hand just before the ward. The energy from the ward sent out a lick, getting a taste of me. It snapped back into attention when it decided I was an enemy. I lowered my hand and eyed the ground.

  “Why are we here?” Kalen asked, standing next to me.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Nothing has stopped you before.” He smiled a little.

  I couldn’t help it, I returned it with my own little smile, and then let it slip from my face. He shifted a little, but stayed poised. His little movement made me want to smile again. He was bracing himself for my question, like it was a fist instead. I let it loose. “How can we be monsters, or as you like to call us, things, when we’ve been in existence just as long as humans?”

  “You guys feed on humans.” I noticed he still considered himself a human and included me with the monsters.

  “And you feed on cows. You don’t see us killing you for slaughtering thousands of cows a day.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “No? So your life is more precious than a cow’s? I’m sure a cow wants to live just as much as we do.”

  The smile was tugging at the corner of my lips as I held back my laughter. Instead, I stayed strong on my assessment. Kalen probably thought I was making him out to be a fool because his face darkened. I guess he did feel like I punched him instead.

  “How are we on this ridiculous topic? We have humanity, we are capable of caring for others.”

  “So compassion makes you human?” I asked. I really couldn’t figure out how his mind worked. One thing that has always been true when it came to humans is my lack of ability to think like them. Our brains were wired so differently and trying to figure them out became a little hobby. Kalen was just as hard, maybe even harder to understand than the humans.

  I was seriously interested in how his mind worked, in how he is able to put humans up on a pedestal and then scorn beings for being who they are. I wanted to tear that pedestal down, show him that it all comes down to survival. Humans, beings, animals—we all just wanted to survive. “The woman you’re looking for, do you think she has compassion?”

  “No, she doesn’t.” There was a note of anger seeping into his voice.

  “And yet she seems lonely and hurt? You want to kill her, but you pity her at the same time. You’re full of hypocrism.”

  “I can’t help how I feel.”

  “No, you can’t.” I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my words. He noticed it too because he frowned, not getting why it was sad. “You’ve drawn a line between humans and beings.”

  “I’ve seen what they can do, what they do without a second thought. Of course I drew a line.”

  “And which side of the line are you on? What about me? Where do you see me?”

  He didn’t respond and that was an answer all on its own. Truthfully, it hurt a little. I knew which line I should be on and why. Yet, he didn’t have reason enough to put me there on his own. I was automatically on the side with the other beings simply because of who I was. I was a being and therefore I belonged there, on the bad side. It was kind of funny. I was actually getting mad over this. And yet, I’ve done far worse. If he knew about everything then he would have to draw another line between the beings and me.

  “I thought so,” I muttered.

  I turned back to the gate and had to work hard to concentrate. It took so much power in me just to wrap shadows around us. I almost collapsed, and might have if Kalen wasn’t around. I wasn’t going to show him any weakness. The shadows touched my skin, acting as a cool blanket. Kalen took in a sharp breath, surprised and unhappy.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shush. We need to sneak in.”

  Happy with the results and sure that we wouldn’t alert anyone to our presence, I slipped through the barrier and squeezed between the gates. Kalen followed silently. A level five barrier, like the one we passed through, is built to keep anything and everyone unwelcomed out. Of course, since I’m so damn old, I’ve mastered slipping through them a long a time ago.

  A fringe benefit to being an old lady, I guess.

  I didn’t release the shadows until we reached the double doors that led inside. As soon as the shadows receded, the warm air took its place and began warming us back up. I stumbled and Kalen grabbed my arm, keeping me from falling. When I gained my balance, he released me and stepped away.

  “Are you okay? You don’t look so good?”

  “I’m fine, just tired,” I replied. “It’s been a long day.”

  A long couple of days more like it. If I didn’t get sleep soon, my body was going to go into its own little sleep coma to heal and replenish itself. I did not want to do that out on the streets.

  Kalen looked like he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t push me. Good boy. Instead, he looked around the building. It was old, decrepit and looked like it was going to fall apart any second.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “A place created to hide what humanity is capable of doing.” I grabbed his hand and took a deep breath, readying myself for the next part. “Don’t let my hand go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because others don’t take to me as well as you do. I don’t want to scare anyone to death.” I pulled him along as I slipped inside, using the shadows to keep us hidden. I could probably keep this up for an hour or so. Then I really needed to get sleep. I really wanted him to see this though. I wanted to make him think hard about that line he drew.

  The doors opened to a small waiting area, empty. The only sign that the building was in use was the little touch-ups done in the room. There was no dust on any of the surfaces, no spider webs in the corner and no critters skittering about. The room was only a small improvement than outside the building. The overhead lights were on, humming through the room. One of them flickered but stayed strong.

  I dragged Kalen behind me as he looked around suspiciously. I went straight to the other door and pushed it, tugging on Kalen as a sign on the door distracted him. It was one of those building notices, warning us the place was going to fall down anytime and to not enter.

  When we were only a couple of feet into the other room, I took a sharp right and stayed up along the wall, giving Kalen enough time to take it all in as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. Kalen froze at the site and if I didn’t already know what to expect, I might have done it too.

  The room was impressive. It was large, the second floor taken down,
so the room went all the way up to the ceiling. It was just like a warehouse, but instead of being filled with packaged goods, it was filled with sickly beings.

  Rows and rows of beds lined the room and most of them had occupants, each with their own wounds. Ventilation was going strong. It did nothing to hide the stench of unwashed bodies, weakness, and worse, the death and decay.

  I glanced up at Kalen and watched as he scanned the room, taking it all in. He swallowed.

  “What...how?” He fumbled with his words, unable to find the proper words for what he was seeing.

  “There is a secret human group, been around for a while now. They hunt us,” I whispered. Sweat was forming on my skin as I strained to keep us hidden.

  “I thought humans didn’t know about your existence,” he whispered back, picking up on the need to be quiet.

  “They don’t. Only a select few do and they work hard to keep us a secret. Something about mass panic or other.” I waved my free hand dismissively. Frankly, they were a greedy elitist group of hunters. They wanted to kill us, but above that, they wanted our goods and the glory and power they would gain from getting it.

  “And everyone here?”

  “Victims for the most part. I guess you could call this place a hospice. They are all going to die eventually.”

  “How? Aren’t you guys supposed to be hard to kill?” he asked.

  “And how many of us have you already killed?”

  “But all this, by humans?”

  “This is just in this city. These are victims in the truest sense. Not everyone is hard to kill. For some, water can burn, or maybe a dash of sunlight. All the hunters have to do is find their weakness and use it. These beings here have been tortured—used and abused until they were useless and then tossed out like garbage.”

  “Use you? For what?”

  I turned and stared at him. I finally noticed that his thumb was rubbing against my hand as if he was trying to draw comfort from me. “Those diseases you’re so proud of finding cures for or ways to fight them,” I pointed out to the room. “It all comes from them. We do have immunities to some things. Our bodies are capable of fighting back against foreign bacteria, viruses, etcetera. Hunters like to use us for the good of the humankind.”