Darkbound

by Scott Tracey

  Sara Bexington (S)

  Personal Interview

  I couldn’t say why I ended up at the hospital. After seeing the looks on Justin and Bailey’s faces, I left. Fled, really. I felt like a traitor, maybe because I was a traitor. All of us fought, but I think it was the first time any of us had really expressed how desperately we wanted the bond between us broken.

  I think I was the only one who felt that way and that made it worse.

  I had no intention of following Illana’s orders, but when I left the school, the hospital was where I ended up. Their world wasn’t mine, and I wanted nothing to do with it. So maybe one last job and then I could call it quits.

  Maybe you just want to know how to walk away, my mind supplied.

  The nurse directed me towards a waiting room on the third floor. Instead of the soothing colors of pale blue and yellow on the lower floors, these floors were a stark, unflattering white with mahogany-colored furniture. It looked less like a hospital waiting room and more like a warehouse break room.

  There was only one person in the waiting room, surrounded by a half-dozen empty coffee cups. The television focused on an audience that didn’t have anywhere better to be than a lackluster talk show, while a generic man in a suit interrogated a couple on a stage. The volume was off, so I couldn’t hear whatever fake reality the fake couple was fighting about.

  The man’s head was turned towards the television, and I could see that his eyes were open, but they never moved to follow the action. Had he fallen asleep with his eyes open? Was he dreaming about these strange people with their silent problems and wondering how they’d invaded his mind?

  The man himself looked grizzled—a face that hadn’t shaved in a week, clothes that probably hadn’t been changed in at least that long. At a glance, he reminded me of the crazy Moonset cultist that had popped up when we first moved to Carrow Mill. There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on—something off, but the closer I got the more it slipped away.

  “I know who you are,” the man said, stirring from his slumped position. What was that saying, he looked like forty miles of bad road? He was more like forty years spent on those same forty miles, until they’d ground out every bit of hope and light in him, and left him a vagrant in his own skin.

  “Everyone knows who I am,” I replied.

  “Yeah, but I know what you are,” the man said with a slow, cruel smile.

  At least it was exactly the kind of family reunion I’d been expecting. “Nice to meet you too, Uncle Charlie,” I said, keeping my words to a bored monotone.

  “You just going to stand their gawking?” he huffed, fumbling through his obstacle course of coffee cups, trying to find one with that last precious sip still intact.

  “Not exactly how I expected this to go,” I walked around his mess, finding a seat across from him.

  “How’d you think it would go, tough guy?” he asked, squinting down at his cups.

  I leaned back, crossed my leg on my knee, and stared at him. “Well, for one thing, I thought you’d be drunk.”

  I guess I could see the resemblance a little. But if I was going to look like that in twenty years, I might as well hunt the Prince down and get him to put an end to me now.

  He chuffed out a breath that turned into a hacking cough. The tips of his fingers had a yellow, almost orangeish tint to them. Smoker. And from the sound of his cough, at least a couple packs a day.

  “Probably would be drunk,” he admitted, “if the coffee here wasn’t so foul it would spoil good whiskey. You know how foul something’s gotta be to make whiskey go bad?”

  “Never had the pleasure,” I said blandly. What was I even doing here?

  A couple of nurses came off the elevator, chatting quietly as they came up on the nurses’ station. I watched them for a few minutes, effortlessly going about their jobs. What would it be like to just drown yourself in normalcy. To wake up every day, head in to your job, and just … exist. Neither one of them had to worry about dead parents or being hunted for sport. They didn’t know anything about wraiths, or the Abyss, or Maleficia.

  “Guess the old bat finally convinced you to come gawk at your poor, broken blood, eh? Can’t imagine there’s a lot of sights that make a Moonset bastard look good by comparison.”

  The more the man talked, the more his foul odor crept towards me. I shoved my hands in my pockets after wiping them on my sweats. “Not really interested in what you have to say,” I fired back. “Has Luca woken up yet? Said anything?”

  “You think if he said anything that I’d still be here?” The man laughed until he choked. The coughing fit lasted longer this time, ending with him hacking up something that he spat into one of the empty coffee cups. I half-expected the cup to start sizzling.

  I knew from the rumors going around that Luca didn’t have a great home life. And it didn’t surprise me that my uncle was a bastard. But I couldn’t wrap my head around Charlie’s presence here. “Why are you here?” I asked, half-demanding.

  “Because that’s what you do, boy. When you’ve known this day would come. When you knew it was a mistake to let her keep the baby, because she was still grieving and couldn’t understand that bad blood is bad, no matter how hard you pray.”

  Bad blood. His. Mine.

  “No wonder he turned out the way he did,” I said thickly.

  “What’d you say t’me?” Charlie leapt to his feet and threw himself forward with a speed I didn’t expect. He charged, thinking I’d fall back or run away. In that instant, I knew everything I needed to know about Luca’s childhood. When I braced myself instead of running, he fumbled. The wash of confusion slapped the stupid right off his face. This is what it was like for him. Submission. Fear. Like a dog that didn’t know any better.

  “Maybe Luca never got the chance to tell you. Maybe he never will. But I’m happy to do it for him,” I said, stepping forward. Charles Denton was used to being the intimidating bully. He didn’t like it when someone stood up to him. Especially not someone who had probably thirty pounds of muscle on him. “You’re pathetic.”

  I reached forward, and he flinched back, and I don’t know what he saw in that moment, but something terrified him. “Do you know why you’re so miserable? Because Cyrus has lived in your head every day of your pathetic life. You carved him out a little space and he made himself at home.”

  I would not let myself be dragged down into Moonset’s fate. If the adults couldn’t find a way to make it happen, I would find one myself.

  Or die trying.

  twelve

  The Abyssal Princes are the worst of what hides in the Abyss. Born from the collision of chaos and cunning, they have become an abyss themselves, full of incessant hungers for destruction and degradation.

  The Princes of Hell

  Nick was at the table the next morning when I came downstairs. I bypassed the idea of breakfast and pulled my keys off the table where I’d left them. “Going to the gym before class,” I said quickly on my way to the front door. “Quinn’ll have to give them a ride.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled,” Nick said, all casual and unconcerned.

  My mood was good on my way out of the driveway. The visit with Charlie had effectively countered the guilt I’d had because of what I said in front of the others. Even the weather seemed in good spirits, as the sun burned away

  the lingering cloud cover and beamed down over the city. Snow was already melting a steady trickle down driveways and into puddles in the street. I felt it in the air. A fresh start.

  My morning routine was a fast-paced version of a regular workout, my eyes continually on the clock. Stomach crunches, curls, and ten-minute forays on the elliptical. I couldn’t spend more than an hour without being late for school, and the day was already going so well that I didn’t want to jinx it, so I showered with plenty of time left before the first bell. />
  All of that changed once I stepped foot inside the building. Everything was back to normal; no one was staring or being especially creepy. But even still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being hounded.

  There were dozens of connecting and crisscrossing smaller hallways between branches of the main couple of buildings. But every time I started heading towards my first-period class, which was a building away, traffic congestion sprung up out of nowhere. The more I tried to push my way through, the thicker the crowds seemed to get.

  I headed down a side hall, cutting back the way I’d already come, only to have the same thing happen again.

  Hallways started to blur together, and the more frustrated I got, the more I kept turning down random, open hallways.

  It got to the point where I was so turned around and so focused on the bell that was going to ring at any second that I stopped recognizing any of the hallways at all. Like I’m pretty sure I took the stairs down at least three times, and the school only had two floors.

  Then, finally, just before the first bell, everything around me grew quiet like oblivion. The sound around me stilled until there was nothing but me: the raised but steady pulse of my heart, the quickened breaths entering and then exiting my lungs.

  I stepped across a threshold and the moment of quiet popped, a warm rushing in my ears like water that had finally worked its way free. When I looked around, I realized I was in the auditorium again.

  I saw it again out of the corner of my eye. The curtain. Fluttering. Any other time I would have noticed and dismissed it, attributing it to a draft or a heating vent kicking on. But every time it moved, something crawled on the back of my neck, like a scorpion dancing before the sting.

  I came down the steps and crossed the auditorium to the stage. Something was lit up underneath the curtain and flickering like a fire. Moving.

  As I reached the stage’s edge, I grabbed the material from the bottom and pulled them back. A symbol, lines all curving in towards the middle, spinning slowly and languidly like a whirlpool that had all the time in the world. One of my knuckles brushed against the edge, and that was all it took. My body reacted to it, trembling as I lost control of my hand. My fingers reached out and brushed against the tip of it, then centered over the middle as I pressed my palm against the glow.

  The world rippled. Fell away. I fell through worlds, though it was more accurate to say that the worlds fell around me. I never moved. Reality broke apart in waves like it did in the movies when a character experienced a flashback. Or maybe it was like a pond after someone skipped a rock across the surface. One minute I was in the auditorium, trying to figure out why that symbol looked so damn familiar, and the next I was … in the auditorium.

  Only it wasn’t the auditorium. There was a stage, but it was a thousand times more extravagant than the one I’d just left. There were chairs everywhere. Dozens of them. But not exactly chairs. They were too … ornate. Thrones. I was surrounded by them. Some were gaudy, golden monstrosities. Others were carved out of bone, or emeralds, and one was leather, smooth and dark with brownish stains that turned my stomach.

  My knuckles sizzled with the brief contact even as my palm burned the symbol into my skin. It kept moving, lazily spinning the same slow path across my lifeline. There was an awareness to it, a sense of hunger, or need. A vortex that wouldn’t be satisfied until it drank the oceans dry. Even then its thirst would not slacken. That feeling was in me now, churning against the bones in my hand.

  Whoever had been in charge of the redecorating had gotten into Lewis Carroll’s private stash because it was … something dreamed up in the creepy side of Wonderland. The curtain had been pulled back and tied against the walls, revealing the blood and guts that would become the framework for the school’s play. There were giant sheets of paper taped against the walls on either side of the room, brief sketches of scenery, or supplies still needed.

  That was where the real ended, and the surreal began. The thrones, for starters. They’d replaced all the prison-block gray metal folding chairs. Someone had sketched out a tree in black on one of the walls, but now the drawing bulged out from the wall, the paper growing out as the tree took shape and became a three-dimensional monstrosity, erupting from the wall like a tumor. The tree shifted and swayed under a nonexistent wind. Papers hanging off the branches rustled with a breeze that didn’t exist. And from a hollow near the base, a pair of yellow-and-gold eyes peered out. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.

  The worst of it was the fencing. Someone had started putting together a series of boards into a typical yard fence, probably for the Kansas scenes. But hanging off one of the boards was … I wasn’t even sure what to call it. It looked like a desiccated, road-kill version of the Scarecrow. Leather for skin that still had patches of hide to it, yet shrunken and damaged after a summer in the sun. The fingers tapered off into shards of something that looked like glass, and the eye sockets were deep, cavernous things lined with dark fur. But despite all the things that made it not human, it looked incredibly lifelike. I expected at any moment for the Scarecrow’s liquid glass fingertips to slice through the marionette strings and for it to begin its career as the world’s creepiest puppet. I was almost afraid to look away, because I was certain that even if I wasn’t watching it, it was watching me.

  “This is the part where someone drops a house on me, isn’t it?” I muttered under my breath. Across the room, from the stage itself, there came a chortling sound that sounded like the stripped-down essence of laughter. Bubbling brooks and tinkling piano keys, summer breezes and applause.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. But the creature sitting on the edge of the stage did not.

  At first it was hard to say what I was looking at. At a distance, I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it was immediately obvious that whatever it was, it wasn’t human. White hair hung down past its waist and trailed to the floor beneath the stage—not just hair that was white, but hair that glowed—woven moonlight given form.

  In a psych class a few schools ago, we’d done a section on how people perceive faces, and how important facial symmetry is to our subconscious opinion of attractiveness. The idea was that most people had an instinctive standard of beauty, recognizing immediately the symmetry of someone else’s face. But it was also the flaws in someone’s appearance that made them stand out, made them noticeable.

  The creature in front of me didn’t have any flaws, unless not being on Illana Bryer’s Christmas card list was a flaw. A perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect chin. It was like my eyes slid off whatever they saw, because they couldn’t process what they were seeing. A face too handsome to be handsome, too beautiful to be beautiful, and yet too terrifying to be terrifying.

  Time passed. It was impossible to look away, impossible not to want to see. I didn’t even know what I was looking at. My eyes burned, and it was only after I forced myself to blink that I realized how dried out they’d gone. How long I’d been staring. And just like that, the spell—or whatever the creature was doing to me—thawed.

  “What are you?” I finally managed to ask.

  His voice was husky. Melodious. But definitely masculine. “Don’t you know?”

  Despite growing up as a terrorist cell’s wet dream, I’d had very few encounters with monsters. Bailey and I had already been evacuated by the time the wraith came after Justin and the others. But now her warning rang in my head again. “One of them escaped. He’s here now.”

  One of the creatures that Luca had been working so hard to free. One of them had managed to escape. “You’re one of them. An Abyssal Prince.”

  A short nod.

  “You tried to kill us,” I said, already starting to inch my way back the way I’d come. Not that it would do much good. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be allowed to leave until he let me.

  “That’s not quite how I remember it,” the creature said. His word
s were strange, I could feel wry amusement dripping from the words themselves, as though his words were so heavily layered with meaning that they spilled out of the air waves that carried them. It was so overpowering for a moment that it completely shut me down. I pushed down the smile I’d drawn at his words. The warmth in my chest, and the embarrassment at his attention. My emotions were a violin, and he’d barely pulled the bow across the strings. He’d barely said anything at all.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, falling back on rote conversations that didn’t require conscious thought. My brain was buzzing in the aftermath of his voice—I never wanted to hear his voice again, and for him to speak forever at the same time. I knew I was in danger, but knowing it and being able to do something about it were two vastly different things.

  The creature opened his mouth, and there was a pointed pause, as if the words were on the tip of his tongue only to evaporate before they could be whispered into existence. “Names … I remember names.” His eyes turned towards me, violet and big. Mourning and regret, his words said. I whimpered. “Naming things. Deciding what they are; what they will be. Words to lock them into shapes that make sense. Names are glass cages, aren’t they?”

  Irrationally, I thought of Jenna. “Of course her name is Meghan. I’ve never met a Meghan who wasn’t a bitch.”

  The creature nodded just as the memory faded, hands spread to reinforce his point. I shivered. He was in my head. He knew what I was thinking. But his voice was a lullaby, and kept my fear far enough away that it could not rule me. “Are names prisons where you came from?” This was one of the creatures that had nearly killed us—that Luca had almost died trying to summon. But back then they were creatures of green flame with voices that hissed and popped, not bodies that were a touch too human and yet not human enough.

  “All names are prisons. Are you not defined by yours? Named for a man raised up in the wake of patricide.”

  I startled with a shock and turned away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”