Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL)

by Thea Harrison

  He turned to the alpha wolf. You have fulfilled your promise with honor. Go in peace, brother.

  Warrior, the wolf said.

  She stuffed her hands against her mouth, filled with excitement and wonder for she had heard both of them as clearly as if they had spoken aloud. Even if she felt like she had lost her mind, she wasn’t creating everything that she was experiencing. The wolf looked at her.

  She said, I’ll never forget you.

  He paced forward and nosed her hand. Then, before she could stroke his head, the wolf whirled to leap into the forest. The pack poured after him.

  When the last of them had disappeared, she looked at Michael. “My name is Mary. I have two hundred and ninety-five dollars in cash. I haven’t used my checks or credit cards since I was attacked.”

  “Good.” He regarded her, his hard expression thoughtful. “And don’t worry about money. I have plenty. We need to go.”

  She walked with him to his car and climbed into the passenger seat.

  * * *

  THE INTERIOR OF the Ford was worn but spacious and comfortable, with old-fashioned bench seats and much more modern installed seat belts. The backseat was piled with things that were unidentifiable in the darkness, but the front seat was clear. The car smelled faintly of engine oil, leather and the faint clean scent of aftershave.

  She tucked her purse and the plastic bag of snacks between her feet. They were now the sum total of her worldly possessions. After she put her seat belt on, she rummaged in the bag for a bottle of water and the chocolate bar.

  Michael twisted to look over his shoulder, and he backed the car onto the paved road. She caught a glimpse of a large red-tailed hawk perched on a low-hanging limb of a tree and craned her neck to stare as it launched into flight. It was soon swallowed by the dark night.

  After a few minutes they approached the entrance ramp to Highway 131. Michael took the northbound ramp. The car accelerated to just under the speed limit and held steady. She sagged back in her seat with a sigh and unwrapped the chocolate bar.

  The duality in her emotions continued. As afraid of him as she was, she was also intensely relieved to be on the road again. Losing her independent transportation worried her, but leaving her car behind meant that they also left her license plates behind, and she became a little more difficult to track.

  They traveled in silence. Apparently you-can-call-me- Michael was a man of few words. He drove with competence and appeared relaxed, but she noticed that he checked the rearview mirror often and his expression remained a closed vault.

  He didn’t offer to turn on the radio, and she didn’t ask. She looked out the window at the moonlit landscape and the occasional traffic, sucking on her candy. She didn’t offer him any chocolate, and he didn’t ask.

  In the privacy of her own mind, she admitted that it was a relief to sit passive for a while with someone who seemed strong and capable, who wore a gun and knew how to use it and who appeared to understand the dangers they faced. At the same time her bruised, hypersensitive nerves jangled with awareness of the tough, dominant presence at her side. She could not get beyond her fear of him, or the threat that he had made.

  Hawks, wolves, wind spirits and the strange haunt of inexplicable dreams. Two grotesque men and casual murder. The vision at the Grotto. Her house in flames. She was dying.

  Why was she dying?

  She was walking and talking like a normal person, but something was terribly wrong with her. She didn’t need to take Michael’s or her daemon’s word for it. Deep in her bones, she could sense that it was true. It felt like she had torn something open, some unseen spiritual ligament, and it was vital in some way to her existence. In the meantime everything she thought she knew about the world had crumbled into dust.

  She said aloud, “It’s like all my life I’ve lived in some kind of painting. There was a lot of color and detail, and the painting seemed to make sense, but either somebody has smashed the frame or I’ve fallen out of it somehow. Now I’m in a totally different reality. The color and detail seem similar, but everything’s changed. I can’t go back into the painting. It’s two-dimensional, and I don’t fit. I don’t even know how to try. But I don’t understand this new reality either, or how to survive in it.”

  The atmosphere in the car changed. She could sense his attention sharpening on her as she spoke. She paused, but he said nothing.

  Anger sparked. She said, “If you’re not crazy, then I’m not crazy. I heard you speak to that wolf. I heard that wolf speak to me. Someone burned down my house. I saw it on the news along with other people in a restaurant, so I know I’m not making that up. Hundreds of hawks attacked two men who murdered four innocent people right in front of me. Those men called me by name. They were kidnapping me. Those hawks were the only thing that kept me out of their van. These things happened. I have the bruises to prove it. And I resent like hell that I might need you, but you might kill me for some mysterious unknown reason. As far as I know, maybe you’ll kill me on a whim—maybe just because you get indigestion and you feel cranky and trigger-happy tonight. By the way, you never thanked me for that sandwich you took without asking. And if I’m already dying, which you say, I don’t know why you’d even bother to kill me unless you just get cranky and trigger-happy sometimes. Maybe you’re the crazy one, and I’m the one who’s sane. Did you consider that, Mister Enigmatic?”

  As she twisted in her seat to glare at him, a startled smile flickered across his face. By the dashboard’s dim illumination she caught how the brief smile shifted the planes and angles of his face into something quite different from his former grim endurance. He glanced at her, his light eyes glittering like a flash of bright gems glimpsed under a shadowed cloak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She waited again, but he fell back into silence. “That’s it—you’re sorry?” she said after a while. Bitter anger scalded her words. “Thank you, everything has become crystal clear, and I feel so much better now.”

  “I’m thinking,” he said. The trace of a whip was in his voice.

  She shrank closer to her door, her temper chilling. Great, Mary. Release all your stress on the guy with the gun. You know, he really might kill you just because he’s got indigestion. How much more of an idiot can you be?

  It was time to force some conciliatory words out of her mouth, whether she actually felt them or not. She said, “I shouldn’t have said all those things. It’s just that I’ve—”

  “You’ve had a rough day, I know,” he said. “I should never have said anything about killing you. It was a cruel and useless thing to say, and I’m sorry. Let’s just say I’ve had a rough day too and try to get past it, all right?”

  She mulled on that and found it unsatisfactory. She said, “Is it true?”

  The fleeting smile was gone. In its place was something darker, much more savage. “Yes,” he said. “But you didn’t need to know it.”

  “But why?” The thin-voiced plaintive question hung between them.

  “All I can do is repeat myself,” he said. “There are some things that are worse than death. Someone is hunting you. If he captured you, what he would do to you would be far worse than death.”

  She rubbed her face and forced herself to focus. “There were two men who tried to kidnap me.”

  “They were dangerous in their own way and destructive enough, but ultimately they’re unimportant. They’re just tools for the person you need to worry about. If he had gotten hold of you, you wouldn’t have escaped, hawks or no hawks.”

  She shuddered at the thought of someone worse. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know what name he goes by these days. But he is quite old, powerful, inventive and wicked. I’ve dedicated my life to his destruction. So has Astra, the woman that I’m taking you to see.”

  “The Grandmother.”

  “Some call her that.” His voice had turned measured and expressionless, giving away no hint of his own thoughts or opinions.

  S
he remembered that she was thirsty, opened the bottle of water and drank. After she’d had enough she hesitated then held the bottle out to him. He took it. “Why do I feel that you and the—wind spirit, as you called it—are right and I’m dying?” she asked. “Aside from some scrapes and bruises, there’s nothing physically wrong with me. And what did you do to me, back there by my car?”

  “As far as the difference between you dying, and me killing you goes . . .” He blew out a short sharp gust of air, an exhalation of frustration, and she tensed in dread. “If I killed you, I would only be killing your body. What you’re suffering from is much more serious than a wound of the flesh. Somehow you’ve taken a wound of the spirit. If you expire from the spirit wound, you will be destroyed. Gone. You won’t exist any longer, so you could never be reborn.”

  Spirit and body. Death and rebirth. Her lips felt numb. She rubbed her mouth. Gretchen had talked of spirits. “Are you talking about reincarnation?”

  “Yes, or at least some form of it.” He glanced at her. “We don’t exactly lead typical lives.”

  “We.” Her hand migrated upward. She rubbed at her dry eyes. He was grouping her with himself, and with this woman named Astra. Who were these people? Who did he think she was? Did he believe they were some kind of soul group that chose to reincarnate and live their lives together? Disorientation yanked at her. She felt unmoored and drifting, like she was coming apart at the seams.

  He continued, “If your energy is dispersed, you—the spirit essence of you—will be gone forever. There would be no rebirth for you, no chance at another life. So you see, there is the physical death. Then there is the real death, the permanent one, from which there is no coming back.” He took a deep harsh breath. “What I was doing to you when you woke up . . . picture an arterial wound, only it’s a spiritual one and you’re bleeding to death. I gave you an infusion of my blood, or my energy, in the real sense. It’s strengthened you and we’ve gained some time, but it hasn’t closed the wound or stopped the bleeding. For that, we need the woman we’re going to see. She understands far better what has happened to you. She has the skills to heal you.”

  The physician in her took over. “Wait, to use your analogy, if you killed me,” she said, “wouldn’t my spirit still bleed to death, so to speak?”

  “Actually,” he said in a tired voice, “in some ways your spirit would be easier to heal if you were dead. You could make the journey north to Astra in a matter of moments. She could heal you. You could rest and then you could be reborn. But there are . . . other reasons why that isn’t an attractive option.”

  Outrage held her frozen for a moment. Attractive option. How about like I don’t want to die, you son of a bitch? Is that one of your reasons? Struggling with her unruly emotions, she wrapped her fingers around the edges of the jacket he’d lent to her.

  Finally she managed to say, “I’m pretty tired of being scared.”

  “I know it’s asking a lot but try not to worry too much, at least about that,” he said. “As long as you are with me, I can infuse you with energy when you need it. When we get to Astra, she can heal you. You won’t die of that wound if we have anything to say about it. And we have a lot to say about it.”

  “Astra,” she murmured. She was not just tired of being scared. She was also just plain tired. She leaned her head against her window. Astra, in Greek, meant star. “Do you know how I got injured in the first place?”

  “What I know is that it happened a very long time ago,” he said. The caution had come back into his voice. “Lifetimes ago. It might be better if you tried to remember what happened for yourself.”

  Somewhere along the line she had stopped being quite so terrified of him.

  That might or might not be a good thing. She simply didn’t have the reserves to sustain such an exhausting emotion. Whether or not she believed anything he said was a different matter. She shelved that for another time when she could think about it in private. For now she suspended disbelief and tried to absorb what he chose to tell her.

  “I went to visit the Grotto at Notre Dame University today,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Notre Dame is in South Bend, right?”

  “Yes. Anyway, I—well, I prayed for help, and I had a vision,” she said. “This lady told me I had to remember who I was, and that I needed to find her. She said I needed to travel north. At the time I wondered if she might be the Virgin Mary.”

  “Maybe she was,” Michael said, surprising her. “But from what you’re telling me, it sounds more likely that she was Astra.”

  Wait—was he saying that the Virgin Mary could actually exist? She stared. Concepts were coming at her too fast. Was she intrigued or disappointed that her vision might not have been the Holy Virgin? She caught up with what he said. “Astra could do that, make some kind of bodiless visitation?”

  “Astral projection? Yes. But it’s exhausting, especially across long distances. She would only do it in an emergency, and if she was safe enough to recover from it afterward. She’s too important to risk.”

  “Astral . . . But . . . How would she know to find me?”

  “You’ve been blazing like a beacon in the psychic landscape ever since this afternoon. She might have traced you that way. I focused on finding you in the physical realm. I couldn’t afford the time or the energy on an astral projection.” He shook his head, took one hand off the steering wheel and rubbed at his neck. “We’ve been afraid something like this would happen. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  Blazing like a beacon since this afternoon. She remembered the sense of something vital tearing open and shuddered.

  “How long were you looking?” she breathed. Was he talking years?

  “Lifetimes,” he said. The brief reply blasted away her assumptions and shook her to the core all over again. “We know our enemy has been looking for you too, but it’s been like you’ve been hidden behind a veil. We’ve gotten brief glimpses of you and your life, but we never got quite enough information to find you until today. Today it felt like you ripped past the veil yourself. My guess is that’s what reopened your spirit wound, because you couldn’t have been bleeding like this your entire life. If you had been born like this, you would have died in a matter of days.”

  “That beacon you mentioned. Is that how those two men were able to find me? No,” she said, in answer to her own question. “That doesn’t make sense. My house had to have caught fire before I prayed in the Grotto. The blaze was too far along by the time I saw it on the news.”

  “It could be that your house isn’t connected to this,” he said. “Maybe the fire is just a coincidence.”

  She heard the lack of conviction in his voice, and she was not reassured. “You think it’s more likely that your enemy was closer to finding me than you two were?”

  “Anything’s possible,” he replied. “Especially that.”

  “Why burn down my house? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to wait until I got home? It’s not,” she said in a caustic voice, “like I’ve had a clue about what I’ve been doing, or what’s really going on.”

  “We don’t have enough facts yet to answer that question. But if your house fire was arson, most fires are started to hide something. It could also have been set to draw you back home, although that reason on its own seems excessive when all someone would have to do is wait for you to return.”

  “I saw the fire on the news. I had contacted the police and was starting to return home when those two men attacked.” She rubbed her shaking mouth. She whispered, “What they did was excessive. There was no reason for it. They didn’t have to kill those people. They were brutal because they liked it.”

  “Our adversary is like that. He enjoys cruelty, and he feeds on pain.” His profile had turned harsh, the bones of his face slicing through the shadows thrown by the dashboard lights. “When he creates his tools, he destroys something essential in their souls. They can still function but they no longer have a moral code
, or creativity or any real free will, or whatever it is that makes them human.”

  She closed her eyes. What kind of creature had the power to destroy someone’s soul? It was appalling, too much. She had to give up on the puzzle for now. She thought she ought to give up on all of it and try to rest. Her body and soul, or spirit, as Michael had said, felt frayed almost to tatters. Even though she had fallen into that black pit earlier, it had only been for a couple of hours. Her dreams had been so restless and vivid she had gained no real refreshment from it.

  Her dreams.

  A sudden flood of memory brought back the dream of the wounded woman. Like the sacred poison dream, the wounded woman was another recurring dream that she’d had throughout her life. Blood-shot and filled with disturbing imagery, she had tended to dream it only in times of great stress.

  And her dreams . . .

  Her breathing roughened, became erratic. Michael’s jacket no longer provided welcome warmth but became a stifling restriction. She couldn’t get enough air inside her lungs. She fumbled to unlatch her seat belt and struggle out of the jacket, and she began to claw her way out her T-shirt.

  “Okay, easy,” Michael said, his voice sharp. “You need to take deep, slow breaths. Try not to fight it.”

  She heard his words but not their meaning. All her attention was focused inward where an immense heat blazed up. She was burning to death. She felt suspended in time as though she had waited all her life in a silence so profound it seemed to roar, waited to hear the first sonorous clang of a terrible gong.

  Remember who you are.

  My dreams are real.

  And she was racing back in her mind to the small child she had been, and what that child had said to upset her mother so badly, she had learned to bury it and eventually forget, and how ever afterward her mind would slide away from that memory because it was such a bad, bad thing. . . .

  Mommy, I had the strangest dream, she had said.

  I dreamed I was human.

  Unspeakable loss welled up inside her again, only this time it was deeper and stronger than ever before. This time it wasn’t held at a distance or tucked behind a veil. It roared into her like a tsunami, and she cried out and doubled over from the force of it.