Darkness Calls

by Marjorie M. Liu

  I tried to pull away, frightened for him. “What are you doing?”

  Jack remained impossibly grim. “I wasn’t allowed to protect my Jeannie. Or our Jolene. Never even knew she was mine until it was too late.”

  “Jack,” I whispered, beginning to understand. “Jack, no.”

  “He knows my weakness is you,” he breathed. “Just as he knows your weakness is Grant.”

  Tears burned my eyes. I grappled with the old man. “What is Grant? What is a Lightbringer?”

  Behind me I heard a crash louder than the others, mixed with the snarls of the boys. Jack did not look. He would not let me turn. Grief ravaged his face, so raw it burned through my heart, into my bones.

  “The Lightbringers were first,” he said hoarsely, and pressed his lips against the finger armor.

  I felt a sucking sensation on my skin, a liquid heat that squirmed around my finger. Jack pushed me. I fell backward and did not stop.

  I entered the abyss.

  MOMENTS, minutes, hours, days. Time had no meaning in the abyss. Time was fluid, relative, a matter of perception. And I perceived nothing as I hung in the darkness, screaming for my grandfather.

  And then the bubble broke, and I was spat free into a clear night sky with the ground far away beneath me. I plummeted, and glimpsed an explosion of lights: a city, glittering with neon diamonds, more numerous than the stars. The boys clung to my body, but I hardly noticed. Nothing mattered but the sensation of hurtling toward the ground, accelerating past the speed of gravity.

  The world disappeared a second time—winked in and out—and I suddenly found myself on solid concrete. I was still screaming. My gut wrenched. I fell on my hands and knees, shaking.

  It took me a long time to move. Every time I did, I had the very strong feeling I might faint. So I stayed still. I focused on breathing. On not having a heart attack. And when I was finally convinced that the ground would not open and swallow me up, I pushed myself to my knees, joints aching like I had aged forty years in forty seconds.

  Concrete walls surrounded me. I was in a narrow alley that twisted like a crooked hair, and it was as lived-in as any old shoe. Battered doors lined the walls, framed by buckets and locked bicycles, and small wooden tables covered in newspapers. I saw windows cut in the stone, protected by iron bars, and cheap lights flickered shadows from within. I listened to pots bang, and smelled grease and rotting garbage, which were only slightly stronger than the scents of ammonia. Above me, clotheslines strung across the alley were covered in sheets and underwear. Even farther beyond that, a craggy maze of tall apartment buildings filled the night sky so completely I could see only a sliver of a cloud.

  The air was cool and damp. I peered at the newspapers and saw Chinese characters. No date that I could read, but if I was in Asia, the sun should have been up. Which meant I had moved forward or backward in time—either of which was a possibility, given the finger armor’s peculiarities. And I did blame the armor for my sudden shift in locale—though it had never occurred to me to use it in this way.

  Jack, I thought, terrified for him. Goddamn it.

  Raw winked through the shadows and pressed his mouth close to Zee—whispering a stream of quiet, unintelligible words.

  Zee glanced at me. “Big man’s already here.”

  So we were in Shanghai, in the future. Terror for Jack shifted, splitting hairs. “Is he with Cribari?”

  “Just talking. Sharp man hasn’t hurt him.”

  Cribari is working with an Avatar. The Avatar wants Grant. Alive.

  But why the pretense? Why drag Grant across the world, only to talk to him? Grant was just as vulnerable in Seattle.

  “What about Jack?” I asked Zee. “Can you still help him?”

  “Cut blood from Big Tooth,” replied the little demon, carefully. “But got you now, your need.”

  Which meant they had done what they could, and would do no more. Not with me here, exposed. Heading into something dangerous.

  I tried to stand and could not. I realized I still held one of my mother’s knives in my left hand. Gripping the blade so tightly that if my gloves had not been laced with steel, I would have cut my fingers to the bone.

  I could not let go. My fingers would not unbend. Zee grabbed my hand, and the knife, and stared up at me with solemn red eyes.

  “Faith,” he whispered, and took the blade from me, very gently. He reached inside my jacket and slid the weapon into its sheath.

  Just have a little faith, my mother once said. Game isn’t over until you’re dead.

  I exhaled slowly. Zee rubbed his cheek against my arm, while Dek and Mal hummed sweetly in my ear. Bon Jovi. “I’ll Be There for You.”

  Zee helped me stand, clutching my hand and placing it on his warm, spiny shoulder. I rubbed my face, trembling. Raw and Aaz prowled, melting into shadows, reappearing almost instantaneously within nearby patches of darkness, behind me, above, in the nooks between walls and round clay eaves. I heard sniffing, crunching metal and stone. I hoped a stray cat or dog did not cross their paths.

  “Grant,” I said, struggling not to think of Jack, alone in the snow, with only a shotgun. Never mind he was an Avatar, an immortal. His human body was frail, old. And he had been afraid.

  “Follow,” Zee replied. I took another deep breath and stumbled after him into the streets of Shanghai.

  I was in no state to appreciate the change of scenery, though a small part of me did and put it away for another time. I had been a nomad for the first twenty-six years of my life, with no brick-and-mortar home beyond a farm-house in Texas that I visited only a handful of times—the last being the night of my mother’s murder.

  Instead, my mother had been home. Zee and the boys were home. Sometimes I had considered our car to be home. But that was it. I was born into the traveling life, forced to endure it, taught to love it—and until I met Grant, I never thought I would leave it. Never did the possibility occur.

  Even so, I had never traveled past the ocean. I had journeyed only as far as a car could take me, from Canada to South America, and all those places between. My mother had been born in Asia, and had traveled through Europe for the first half of her life—before coming to America, by ship.

  I could have done the same, in reverse. I knew that. Maybe I should have. But my comfort zone, as incongruous as it might be, was a powerful thing.

  I had no idea of the time, but there were people out in the street: impossibly skinny young women dolled up in tights and high-heeled boots, with perfect hair and stylish bags bouncing from their slender shoulders; and men with spiky hair drifting over their eyes and the collars of their jackets turned up. I saw old people ambling, and baby strollers, and children kicking balls on busy sidewalks while parents sat on benches and watched them play. Bicycles everywhere, and scooters, and cars; and the air tasted cold with a taint of exhaust every time a bus rolled past me down the street. It was night, but it might as well have been day. Restaurants rolled with people, and I looked through glass windows and saw tables packed with small dishes of food, and faces laughing.

  And though it was China, it was still the same. Humanity and its comforts did not vary, nor did its sins and dreams.

  I stood out. I saw other foreigners, but not many. No way to blend in, but no one seemed to care. I was just another body on the street, and I relaxed after a couple minutes. No real choice, and I had my hands full watching for the boys in shadows, tracking glints of red eyes and the roll of spiny shoulders from bushes and between the numerous nooks and crannies of battered old buildings. Dek and Mal clung snug and warm against my neck, receding into the shadows of my hair. Purring and singing, with their little tongues occasionally tickling my ears as they scented the air.

  I glimpsed Zee watching me from a quiet side street and veered right, following him. The pop music playing from the stereo of a clothing shop at the corner instantly faded, and I felt swallowed and cocooned by a darkness walled in by tiled apartment buildings, parked cars, and some palm
trees planted in random intervals against low concrete walls. I knew we were perfectly alone when Raw sneaked out from behind a squat blue van and pressed a soft, warm bun into my hand.

  I bit in. Tasted hot and salty and soft, with a center full of turnip and roast pork. I ate fast, stomach roaring with an aching hollow hunger. I needed calories—and the comfort of food in my mouth. I had starved once. I had starved to death a thousand times over in the Wasteland, but the boys had kept me alive, in their own way. Ever since, it had been difficult for me to tolerate the feeling of hunger.

  Raw passed me another bun as I walked, then a small plastic container filled with steaming dumplings. I never stopped moving. Just ate with my fingers, burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I did not ask where the food had come from, nor did I care. With the boys, it was better not to know sometimes.

  Zee hopped up on the edge of a car roof. “Big man still safe. No sign of trouble.”

  I nodded, holding up the plastic container. Dek poked out his head and took a deep bite out of it, then another, until my trash was gone. Mal licked my fingers. “Are we close?”

  “Minutes.”

  We left the side street, and I found myself walking through another fragment of Shanghai: light-filled, car-filled, a city that obliterated the sky. I saw a glittering oasis off to my left, an island intersection where the road was framed on one side by an enormous half sphere lit up like a neon blue ornament; and from there, two skyscrapers, slanted roofs made of white light and glass. Giant advertisements coated another set of sparkling towers, but that could have described any of the sleek buildings crowding the intersection. Taillights bled red. A wide pedestrian bridge spanned the road, and it was packed with moving bodies.

  Five minutes later, I found the place.

  It was a cathedral. An incongruous sight amidst such modern excess, but it held its own in an area that was dark and still, almost as though it sat within a bubble, just slightly beyond the rest of the city. Red brick, twin spires; a small and humble church. The longer I stared, the more I felt that I was gazing upon the physical manifestation of silence. A place where moments remained caught in time.

  There was a high wall and a closed iron gate with a guardhouse just on the inside. I did not feel inclined to ask for permission to enter. I stayed away from the main entrance and walked around to the left of the cathedral, which was bordered by a landscaped garden that felt like a small park. Apartments also surrounded the church, and a side street that was pleasantly dark. Zee and Raw perched on top of the brick wall. I looked up at them, and they held down their tiny hands. Aaz gave me a boost. Within moments, I was over the wall.

  Two men sat inside the guardhouse, eased back in their chairs, heads tilted at an angle. Talking or sleeping, I could not tell—but they were not looking toward the cathedral’s double doors. I got in easily, and silently, and in moments was tucked within a recess on the side of a massive aisle. It was quite dark, and the air smelled like stone, cold from the earth. On my left was a delicate wooden altar, and in front of me a slender pillar and low, carved balustrade. Beyond the recess, past the aisle, massive drum columns framed my view of long benches and shadowed arches. I heard voices echoing. One of them belonged to Cribari.

  And then, Grant.

  Relief made me weak. All my fear, bottled up so tight, and it all rushed over me in one hard moment. I had been trying not to think too hard. Cribari, ordering my death. Cribari, orchestrating Grant’s journey. Separating us. Trapping him. To what end I wasn’t sure, but I knew it couldn’t be good. Not if an Avatar was involved.

  A memory touched me: Ahsen, before her death. Seeing Grant. Hearing his music. Suffering the touch of his power.

  She had been horrified. Terrified.

  She had been the first to call him Lightbringer.

  Connections, I thought. Cribari. Grant. Me. Another Avatar in the mix. Pieces of the puzzle.

  The boys coalesced from the shadows, scattering like wolves and leaving deep scratches in the aged mosaic floor. Dek and Mal grasped my ears with tiny claws and poked their heads from my hair. I scratched their necks. Raw and Aaz disappeared, but I glimpsed the wink of red eyes from the shadows across the cathedral aisle. Little scouts. Grant’s voice echoed faintly, and I began to peer around the column.

  Zee tugged me back. I knelt beside him, and he pressed his sharp mouth against my ear.

  “Maxine,” he rasped softly. “We must take the sharp man.”

  “Cribari? Because he’s responsible for trying to kill me?”

  Dek growled. Zee whispered, “That, and older. Older still. He is the eyes of the old dark hand, and the debt must be paid. Blood for blood, on our old mother’s grave.”

  Old mother was Zee’s name for the Hunters who had come before. Blood for blood was a call of revenge, and the mention of a debt meant there would be no argument about it. I would not be able to stop them from taking what was theirs.

  “When did you know him?” I whispered to Zee. “Did he try to hurt Mom?”

  He shook his head, pressing the tips of his claws into the stone floors. “Not him, but one just like. Same heart. Gotta pay the debt. Gotta bleed.”

  I had no time to prod him for a better explanation. I placed a gentle hand on Zee’s warm shoulder. “Business first, then do what you must. But not before Grant is safe.”

  “Big man first,” he agreed, and searched my face with a gravity and concern that touched me to the quick. “Walk light in shadows, sweet Maxine. Walk with wings.”

  He had never said such a thing to me, but he placed his sharp hand over his heart as he spoke, and I bent close to kiss his brow.

  “My little boy,” I whispered. “My best friend.”

  “Until the end,” he agreed softly, and faded into the shadows.

  I still heard voices. I peered around the edge of the recess and was momentarily distracted by architecture: vaulted ceilings with carved spines that filled my vision like the frozen bones of bat wings; and columns that rose like bound silver trees made of stone. I imagined heartbeats inside the walls, as though the ghosts of prayers still lingered, and while the air felt as if it would collapse with shadows, I imagined strength, as well—quiet, solid, and enduring.

  You should be like this, I told myself. Be this.

  Instead of feeling as though the core of me was a butterfly, flitting from one flesh-eating flower to the next. No direction, no clue. Just hopping into the mouth of danger, because that was what butterflies did.

  I did not want to be that stupid. No one in this world could afford for me to be so dumb.

  The front of the cathedral felt very far away, but I saw three men standing beneath a few scattered lights, and one of them leaned on a cane. I debated my entrance—whether I should make myself known at all—but I heard Cribari use a sharp tone, and I gave up. I left the shadows and walked down the side aisle of the cathedral. The heels of my cowboy boots clicked like tiny gunshots. I felt watched, and tilted my head just enough to see movement on the balcony far above and behind, at the back of the church.

  Ahead of me, the men turned. I was too far, and it was too dark, for me to be seen properly—but I glimpsed Grant’s small smile. The sounds of my footsteps, he had told me, looked like licorice spitting sparks of quicksilver, and I thought of that as I walked, and put a bounce in my step as Dek and Mal bled close against me. They were coiled over my shoulders, but growing ever lighter—using the shadows beneath my hair to fade, and hide their mass from sight. Interdimensional trickery; like a bottomless bag they could rest within, emerging only when needed. Their tongues rasped against my ear.

  I was grateful for their soft touch. Father Cribari looked like he wanted to eat some kittens when he finally saw me. Sharp man, echoed Zee’s voice in my head, and it was true. The priest suddenly reminded me of a new nail: functional, capable of causing damage, but not much good without someone to use him.

  I wondered when I would meet the one holding the hammer.

  Father Cr
ibari started walking down the aisle as soon as he recognized my face, and was practically running by the time he reached me. Surprise, surprise, I thought. You son of a bitch.

  Sweat glistened on his brow, and his cheeks were pink. His gaze roved down my body, pricking my skin—and I felt a wave of distaste ride over me like a hard fever.

  “How unexpected,” he murmured, a trace of actual confusion and unease flickering through his eyes, before being swallowed up by that frigid mask. I realized suddenly that he had not been in communication with anyone related to my kidnapping. He did not know they had failed; or, if he suspected, he had not expected me to be here. Not so soon, if at all. Which meant this really was a shock.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s only going to get better.”

  CHAPTER 9

  FATHER Cribari’s eyes narrowed, his skin slick enough to grease a pan. Dark Mother, I thought, and wanted to hear him say those words again, as though it might loosen something inside me. I wished Jack were here, too.

  Grant reached us. His bad leg slowed him down, and he was breathing a little harder than normal. Still dressed in the same clothes I had last seen him in. He looked rumpled, unshaven, though his eyes were bright and sharp. His flute case hung from the strap around his chest. He had brought the gold Muramatsu, and I caught the gleam of it, just over his shoulder. Like a sword, or a single golden arrow waiting in its quiver. Relief swept through me, something close to giddiness. As though I stood in the storm of a small miracle.

  “Darling,” he said. “What ever are you doing here?”

  “I decided to take a walk,” I replied, loving the fierce, hot light in his eyes, “and ended up in China. What a remarkable coincidence.”

  Father Cribari looked ill. I heard feet shuffling, a faint cough, and the third man who had been present near the pulpit appeared from behind Grant. Another priest, dressed in black slacks and simple shirt. I noticed his hands first because they were clutched so tightly across his soft stomach. He had round cheeks, deep brown skin, and black curly hair cropped close to his skull. Large drowning eyes stared into mine.