Darkness Descends: A Skye Faden Novel

by Alisha Ashton

  Her brows drew together as she recalled her state of mind.

  “I remember really thinking that, you know? That if I stopped talking, if I accepted that they couldn’t hear me anymore, I would be giving up on them – failing them or something. I don’t know how long I stayed awake. It might have been a day or so, but eventually I must have passed out, because I remember waking up...”

  She muffled a sob as her hold on her emotions began to falter. Her lips were quivering uncontrollably as she continued.

  “I remember waking up and realizing that they were chaining me to the wall. But they were already dead and I just didn’t understand.” She was sobbing now, her voice breaking terribly as she spoke. “I couldn’t even bring myself to fight them. I honestly believed it was a nightmare until they started biting me.”

  Taran clenched his jaw, his insides were twisting painfully with the need to comfort her, but he refused to give in to it. He could not interrupt until she had let out all that she was able.

  “He came in then and set up the ground rules. They were told to feed from me, but never to change me. To amuse themselves with me, to practice every form of pain they could think to inflict until they had mastered it, but never to allow me to die from their torture. I was branded with the coven’s mark, told that I was their property.”

  Her lips were trembling, her nostrils flaring as she stared up at the ceiling, but Taran knew it was not from her tears. This was pure rage forming inside of her at the memory.

  “I thought that having my own brothers doing those things to me was the worst torture I could endure. God was I wrong. The other members of the coven were eventually allowed to use me as they saw fit, with the same ground rules about not killing me. Some were more vicious then others, but every last one of them left their own mark in my skin.

  “After – I don’t know how long – two years maybe? They had a new cell built for me. One large enough to house me indefinitely and decorated in a manner more suited to their gothic, garish tastes. Like a bird with clipped wings, I was literally kept in a gilded cage the size of a room. They even put a swing in there for me, for fuck’s sake. They furnished that damned cage even more extravagantly than the rest of the mansion, too. Evidently, I was their prize to be displayed, their piece de resistance.

  “And once the cage was finished, they started dressing me up like a doll,” she recalled in disgust. “Always in those white Victorian childlike dresses. As if they wanted to preserve the image of me being pure or innocent, despite the things they did to me. Every morning, they styled my hair in tight ringlets and put an exorbitant amount of makeup on my face. They even covered up the bruises and scars that my dresses didn’t hide. They kept after my appearance obsessively. As if they were afraid of me being seen looking anything less than perfect.

  “Little did I know, all of it – the new cage, the dresses, everything – was in preparation for the ‘guests’ I was about to start receiving on a regular basis. Those guests were the fògaraich elders. I found that with age, they learned all sorts of new ways to hurt a person. I dreaded their visits for that reason.

  “For a long while, I lost all concept of time. I had no idea how long they held me for. I was never allowed outdoors or in any of the rooms that had windows. Days, weeks, months, years... they all bled together. I could only judge how much time had passed by the changes in my body. No one else around me aged. It wasn’t until after I escaped that I finally figured out how long they kept me. More than nine years,” she whispered between sobs. “More than 3,351 days of my life were spent caged like an animal, dressed up and played with like a living doll. And the things they did to me? The things they made me do?”

  She sobbed for a long moment, gripping Taran’s hand tightly.

  He held her hand just as urgently, pressing his lips to the back of it and then his forehead. His heart was breaking inside his chest for her. His muscles were rigid, his chest constricting now. It was growing steadily more difficult to settle for simply holding her hand. He had never in his life wished so badly to comfort another.

  “I never... ever... accepted that I would die in that place. I never let them break my will to live. I merely changed my reason for living.”

  Her voice calmed suddenly.

  The tears stopped as she recalled the resolve that had driven her.

  “I swore that I would escape and make them suffer far beyond any anguish they could have imagined for me. I promised myself that – no matter how long it took – one day I would have their blood on my hands and hear them beg for mercy.”

  She looked over at him, her eyes laced with a mixture of madness and fear.

  “Taran... ?” She whispered, holding his gaze for a long moment before finally confessing, “I kept that promise.”

  With that declaration, the walls that she had guarded and upheld for more than a decade came crashing down. She finally lost her grip on the painstaking repression of all of the cruelty that she had endured.

  And he was there. The instant she closed her eyes to sob, she was drawn protectively into his arms. She bawled against his chest as he cradled her. The terrified and tortured 12-year-old girl was at last freed to weep.

  Taran sat on the bed holding her tightly, rocking her, and kissing her forehead as she cried for all of the pain and loneliness that she had been carrying, for the lives of her family, and for the cold and merciless creature that she had become. She had not allowed herself to think on it in years, but with Taran’s arms anchoring her to the real world, preventing her from becoming lost in the memory, she revisited what she could recall of the night of her escape.

  11: Nobody’s Home

  THREE YEARS AGO – PHILADELPHIA, PA

  The road was cold beneath her bare feet.

  Broken glass buried itself deeper with each step, but she could not feel a thing. She staggered along the dirty city streets, a lone survivor in the darkness. Her eyes stared wide and unblinkingly ahead as her mind fought for its sanity. It felt as if she was awakening from a psychotic nightmare – one that had taken nearly a decade to end. Her arms were crossed over her chest as her body trembled uncontrollably in shock.

  The blood that covered her from head to toe was drying now, offering her bare flesh a layer of protection from the cold night air. Whispered, desperate words tumbled from her lips.

  “No... not going back. Didn’t... no... Not going back... not going back,” she told herself as she shook her head frantically.

  Her own voice was strange to her ears, little more than background noise to her shattered mind.

  Wild hair hung down around her face like a curtain now. Its appearance was a far cry from the angelic ringlets favored by her captors. The Victorian doll-style dress that she had been forced to wear had not escaped the inferno with her. The flames had reduced it to nothing more than a corset and the scorched remnants of a layered underskirt. Its tattered fabric, once white, was now the grotesque color of blood mixed with ash.

  Flashes of what she had just done tormented her. They startled her so severely each time they came that she held her hands up defensively – shielding herself from the memory of the violence of her own actions.

  She could see their faces... God, all of their faces.

  Hear their screams... smell their blood...

  She cried out fearfully as her mind recalled the sight of their hands reaching out to her – the ones she had burned alive.

  With tearful eyes, she looked down at the hands that had unleashed such gruesome retribution, recalling the sight of the ones she had skinned...

  She had used their inability to die by normal means against them. It served to prolong their suffering far beyond anything they could have done to her. Her eyes turned upward to the full moon. It gazed down upon her – the only witness to her vengeance.

  An emotionless tear streamed down her cheek and she brought her hand to her throat slowly. Crying out, she recoiled from the touch. Her eyes grew wide as she recalled that this was the on
e wound inflicted by her own hands.

  She had burned her own flesh so savagely. The memory of it played out in sharp detail in her mind and she sobbed. The pain had been excruciating, yet freeing somehow. His mark was gone, as was he.

  But so much was missing...

  She closed her eyes in confusion and tried – fought to remember the details that were just out of reach.

  How had she escaped? What had led to this?

  The memories would not come. The white light blocked them from view.

  She was terrified of that light.

  She did not know where she was going, could not bring herself to stop walking farther and farther away from that house, that prison she had been locked away in for God knew how long. She had no concept of the year at this point. The last time she had celebrated a birthday she was twelve, now she feared she was in her twenties.

  Before long the streets were familiar to her – and somehow, at the same time, not. Things had changed. The brick of the row-homes was more faded than she recalled. There were strange looking cars parked along the curb.

  A whimper left her throat when she focused on the expiration dates on all of the inspection stickers. The numbers confirmed her fears. It had been at least nine years...

  She walked up the front steps of her house, just as she had the night her world became a living hell. She could remember what clothes she had been wearing. She recalled her terror when she had seen the broken front door. She could hear the sound of her keys hitting the sidewalk as they fell from her hand.

  Her feet stilled for the first time since she had set out hours earlier.

  She could see herself racing up the stairs that night... see herself rushing in to search for her family, only to find the bodies of her parents waiting for her inside.

  The memory faded, leaving her to face the silent reality of what was before her. The windows and door were boarded up now. The front stairs were cracked and weather-beaten. Her mother’s garden was nothing more than weeds growing wildly up the front of the house.

  But this was home, now as twisted and warped as her mental state.

  Somehow, the rest of the neighborhood had gone on living, but this house had been left untouched, even after all this time.

  She felt a lump rise in her throat. No one wanted to live in a home where a mother and father had been brutally murdered, a home that four children had been stolen from as they kicked, screamed, and fought to hold onto one another.

  “I’ve got you... shh...” She remembered Gavin whispering as she wept and clung to him in the back of that van. “I’ve got you, Skye... it’s all right...”

  She sobbed as she recalled his face – the terror for her safety that had been in his eyes as he held her tight.

  And now he was a monster. The brother that she had adored and looked up to all of her childhood was out there murdering innocent people. All three of them were. They had each left several months prior to start their own covens.

  With trembling hands, she pried back the wood from the door enough to crawl inside. The air stilled. In one breath, her lungs were filled with cool night air – the next, a stagnant mixture of death and decay. Her eyes adjusted to the absence of light effortlessly as she slowly stood up straight. This was what she knew now. She had grown accustomed to darkness.

  She let her gaze pass over the room around her as her mind recalled the bright and happy place it had once been.

  The furniture had been taken, though small pieces were scattered haphazardly throughout the living room. A broken bedside table that had once been in her parents’ room, a leg from one of the dining room chairs, a shattered picture frame lay face-down on the floor...

  Mere feet from the cut out sections of carpet where the bloodstains would have been.

  She covered her eyes and winced as her mind flashed with the image of their torn-out throats, the terrified looks that had been frozen on their faces. Her father had tried to protect her brothers, even after it was clear that he would never make it. She had known by the trail. He had crawled toward the back door, powerless to stop the blood that was pouring from his throat, but determined to try for them. Death had claimed him that way, his body sprawled unnaturally, as blood pooled out beneath him.

  She stepped forward, so lost in the memory that she half-expected to rush to their sides... only to realize that she could not. They were gone. Dead and buried for nearly a decade now.

  Her brow furrowed in confusion and she rubbed her temples. How could it have been so long ago when it felt like it had just happened?

  On unsteady legs, she ventured further into the room. Slowly, she bent to pick up the picture frame, unable to tear her eyes from the missing sections of carpet. She turned the frame over in her hands, finally managing to look down at it. Numb tears gathered on the broken glass as she traced the faces of her family with her fingertips.

  She made her way to the stairs, wanting more than anything to run up them and hide under her bed. She could hear the voices of her brothers as they argued and wrestled. Leaning against the doorframe of Adrian’s room, she smiled as she watched her memories play out... only to feel the pain of their mortal deaths all over again as the room faded back to the emptiness of reality.

  Loneliness weighed her down. It grew heavier each time she had to face the fact that no one was there. They were never coming home.

  She entered her parents’ bedroom last, a place she had once felt safe. Now all it held was the icy presence of death. The furniture was gone, as with the rest of the house. Somehow, it hurt worst of all to see the emptiness of this room. She opened the closets, finding them bare.

  In her hysterical state, she talked to herself.

  This couldn’t be it... there had to be something...

  As she had done when she was a child, she climbed the shelves, desperate to see if anything had been left behind, if there was any piece of her parents waiting for her return. In the far corner, she spotted it. It took time to get free. She made a lot of noise in the effort, but there it was, there it had waited. The little hammered copper windmill. The music box the boys said was too ugly to keep in the living room. Their mother had stored it away. She had loved it too much to discard it.

  Skye brought it with her to the bathroom, setting it on the floor before looking into the shattered mirror at her shattered reflection. She barely recognized her own face and could not look away. She screamed and cried, her emotions swirling from rage at what had been done to her, to sorrow over the loss of her innocence and youth, to anguished acceptance that the blood-spattered woman staring back at her was truly her own reflection.

  The tub was filled with dust and paint chips from years without use, but she paid it no mind. She turned on the water, barely noticing that it was freezing as she sat down. Slipping back into shock, she spun the blades of the little music box, clutching it to her chest as it began its chime rendition of ‘Windmills of Your Mind’.

  She vaguely remembered to turn off the water as it reached the top of the tub, thinking of how upset her mother would be if she let it over-fill. The chimes sounded strange to her ears under the water. She let herself sink completely beneath the surface to enjoy them...

  Suddenly, there were hands on her, pulling her from the tub.

  Flashlights and panicked voices brought her back from the mouth of madness. Unfortunately, it was back into a world that once again demanded that she fight or die.

  12: The Touch of No Other

  Taran cradled her to his chest, resting beside her on the bed as she slept soundly. He had spent these hours watching her, kissing her face, and smiling at the little noises she made.

  “Cho bòidheach...” he whispered softly, sincerely.

  He ran his fingers through her golden locks of hair before tracing them over her bare shoulder. Tilting his head to the side, he let his eyes wander over her porcelain flesh as it passed beneath his dark hand. He leaned down and kissed her shoulder sweetly, closing his eyes and breathing in her scent
, leaving his lips to linger.

  In all his time, he had never felt so drawn to another.

  Long ago, in another life, there had been a woman he cared for deeply; a woman of kind heart and fair face, a woman that had possessed a love of life that captivated him. He had thought to ask her hand in marriage. He had missed that chance. Many centuries had passed since he could recall as much as her name. In the beginning, when his mortality had first been lost, he had taken countless lovers. Their faces, their voices, their names, they faded from his memory even faster than he had sent them from his bed. None of them had meant anything to him. They were merely a desperate attempt to sate his hunger, to distract him from the reality of eternal solitude. He had used the pleasures of their flesh to ease the pain of watching his loved ones grow old and perish from a distance.

  But this... ? This feeling in his chest as he held Skye and knew that she was safe, that she was taking comfort in his embrace – the touch of no other had brought such peace and love to him.

  Skye murmured his name softly in her sleep, drawing his attention. She nuzzled her face beneath his chin.

  His heart swelled watching her little fingers twirling strands of his long hair. He pressed a kiss to her temple and smiled at the contented sigh she gave in response. As wondrous a sensation as it was to finally hold her, he felt somewhat guilty for it. In her conscious state, she would never allow this. He would have respected those boundaries for as long as she upheld them, were it not for the fact that every time he tried to move away from her, she whimpered and clung to him. It fractured his heart, the way she pressed herself against him so desperately, panic-stricken at the prospect of him letting go, of him leaving her.