Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1)

by Rachel A. Marks

  She stands, only leaning a little, and goes into the bathroom and through another door on the other side. After a second she comes back with some jeans, a T-shirt, and another hoodie (a really thick one, with a fur-lined hood). She sets the guy’s clothes on the foot of the bed. I guess she must have a brother.

  “There are towels in the bathroom cupboard.” She’s motioning with her hands as she talks, looking distracted. “And there’s a razor in the medicine cabinet you can use. Should be some shaving cream in there, too.”

  I want to jump at this chance to get clean, but it’s all so freaking weird. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

  She frowns at me like she doesn’t understand the question. “It’s no big deal. If memory serves, you had a hell of a night last night. Kinda my fault. You should shower, relax . . . eat some of my dad’s food. He’s not here to care.”

  Ah, I see. Daddy issues. “Last night you said your parents are in Paris.”

  “Just my dad. With his new girlfriend. Mom escaped him long ago.” She scoffs, “He told me the trip was for work, but he packed way too many T-shirts. And the girlfriend was all giddy when she came over for the good-bye dinner. Bitch.” She frowns at the wall, then turns back to me. “So do whatever you want. My dad’s house is your house.”

  I glance at the nice clothes, then at her, trying to decide. I have a good hour and a half before Ava leaves for practice.

  “I’m gonna go shower in the master bedroom,” she says. “For, like, an hour.” She sighs and pulls clothes from the closet, then leaves without another word.

  I stand in the middle of the room for a second—but just a second—before I slip my shoes off, my hoodie, my shirt and pants, leaving them in the middle of the floor. Then I go look for the shaving supplies.

  I’m not sure how long I’m in the shower—the hot water feels so damn good. I wash my hair three times with the mango shampoo and scrub my skin until it turns red. I’m going to need new bandaging for my hand, but I don’t care.

  When the temperature of the water finally turns lukewarm, I step out of the glass enclosure, reveling in the billows of steam around me. I grab a towel and bury my face in the cotton, captivated by the spring smell. It’s like drying myself with a cloud.

  The teeth marks on my hand are almost completely healed now. Apparently demon bites aren’t like regular bites, because I know I don’t have any super healing powers.

  And then I notice something else. My mark. It’s different. The part that winds up past my wrist is halfway to my elbow now; it’s grown thinner vines and more shapes and curves.

  I stand there staring at it, completely stumped. Could the demon bite have done something to it?

  Damn. More questions. Wonderful.

  I decide for now to stick it all in the dusty file called “My Screwed-up Life.” There are plenty of more pressing things to worry about at this point—like Ava approaching her twelfth birthday.

  I wrap the towel around my waist and open the bathroom door, heading for my new clothes. My feet stop. So does my heart.

  Rebecca’s lying on the bed, on her side, looking at a magazine. In her underwear.

  Her fucking underwear.

  She looks up and smiles. “You must’ve been really dirty.” Her eyes travel over my torso, and she bites her bottom lip as the heat of her intention fills the space between us.

  I make myself study the floor, but it’s too late. The image of her is burned in my brain: hair falling in damp strands around her face like amber seaweed, black lace panties against milky white skin, a smooth belly with a monarch butterfly tattoo on her ribs, just below her breast.

  And . . . God. Oh, God.

  She’s a virgin.

  This girl is offering herself to a stranger, and she’s a virgin.

  Someone who’s had sex carries soul marks on their neck, chest, or shoulders—a palm print for each partner, like a brand.

  Rebecca’s skin is white as snow.

  I grab the clothes off the bed and go back into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.

  Shit shit shit.

  It takes a million deep breaths to get control of myself. I lean on the counter and think about demons and guts and blood. I can’t get dressed until the horrors overwhelm the burning—which takes way too long for my own comfort.

  When I come back out, Rebecca’s fully clothed.

  I’m sort of relieved.

  She won’t look at me, though. She’s pissed again.

  “Thanks for the shower,” I say.

  She runs a brush through her hair in jerky strokes. “Are you gay or something?”

  I bark out a laugh. I can’t help it. “No.”

  Her shoulders tense. I see in her eyes that there’s only one other reason I’d reject her offer—she’s not pretty enough.

  I let myself step a little closer. “Screwing me won’t help you feel any better.”

  She sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the floor. “I just can’t pretend anymore. I don’t want to be alone. I feel like doing something insane.”

  I try to convince my body it’s best to walk away. This girl is bad news—a ledge I’m heading straight for. The free fall would be amazing—the landing, not so much. It would be so easy to sit beside her, comfort her, kiss her, touch her until I can barely breathe. Until I can’t stop.

  So I say what I know will jerk us both awake. “You were almost gang-raped last night.”

  She flinches. “What?”

  “I found you with three guys hovering over you in an alley behind the club. They were talking about who would get you first.”

  She shivers, and her eyes search the room, like she’s looking for something to prove I’m lying.

  “You’re running straight into hell’s arms, Rebecca.” I gather my old clothes as she sits there hugging herself. I tuck the old rags under my arm, grab my backpack, and move to the doorway of her room. “Thanks again for the shower and the clothes.” I start to walk away, but hesitate for a second. I turn back and say, “Be careful,” before I leave her life for good.

  I head for the stairs and start down, feeling frustrated and confused. I’m walking away, but I don’t want to. If God loves me, he better let me get laid eventually.

  I’m lost in thought, landing on the last step, when a new smell hits me like a wall in the face.

  Sulfur.

  My heart starts to gallop, beating at my ribs so hard I’m pretty sure it’s leaving bruises. I scan the entry hall, and then I see it. Only a few feet from the base of the stairs: burn marks on the marble floor—three crossing lines, each ending in a symbol of power. A sigil.

  A demon was here.

  A large one.

  There’s no way this is related to the smaller one from the alley last night. This sigil is from some serious demon mojo. I close my eyes and breathe in the air, feeling for the creeper that might’ve left it, trying to tell if it’s still close and how long it stood here, but I don’t sense anything. Just the leftover buzz of lust between me and Rebecca from a few minutes ago.

  Whatever was here, it’s gone now.

  FIVE

  I used to have a bike, but it got stolen. I miss it. Now it’s all skateboarding, buses, or my own two feet. No way I’m taking that monster they pretend is a subway, in earthquake central. From Rebecca’s, it takes me more than a half hour to get to Ava’s neighborhood by bus—worst possible way to travel. The thing stops every eight feet even on a good day, not to mention all the traffic heading through downtown. It’s not like Ava’s place is that far. Probably would’ve been faster to walk.

  I’m in a pissy mood all around. Leaving Rebecca like that makes me feel like a bastard, and the idea of a demon that close to her turns my stomach inside out. It wasn’t even an underling staking territory. By the smell and the look of the marks, the thing was at
least midlevel, if not higher. Maybe even a body-hopper.

  My skin goes cold. How the hell didn’t I feel it when it was there? How the hell could I leave her open and vulnerable like that?

  I can’t save the whole world, I know this. But the realization never stops the ache. What else is this curse good for if I don’t use it to help people?

  Ava’s newest foster house is the nicest one she’s ever lived in. It’s breathtaking, actually. Like a museum. She calls it the Taj Mahal. But it’s more like a Spanish-style hotel, if you ask me. It’s a sprawling single-story home, with cream stucco walls and a red tile roof, wrapped in pink and yellow climbing roses and night jasmine.

  I sneak around to the back and find our tree—an old willow at the far corner of the property, down a little ravine, out of view from the house. Demons and monsters don’t like trees. They like metal and jagged edges and death. So Ava and I stick to the grass and the trees as much as we can when we meet. The longer it’s been in the ground, the better—fifty-year-old trees work perfectly. Not always easy to find in LA.

  I close my eyes and picture Ava, her strange, knowing smile, her liquid blue eyes. Then I picture where I am and push out, I’m here. We recently figured out we can do this, connect to each other without words, but it only seems to work if we’re close enough, maybe a block or two away.

  The morning sun is warming the air, so I pull off my newly acquired hoodie. Maybe I should ditch it. It reminds me of Rebecca, of the way her hair felt against my palm. And I can’t let people in, I can’t let myself care. I have to stay focused.

  As I start to toss the thing over a nearby branch, something catches my eye—a name along the inside of the neck.

  CHARLIE M.

  In bold block letters.

  I run my finger over the name and get a flash of the woman who wrote it: Hispanic, wearing a maid’s uniform. She smiles and folds the jacket up, putting it back in the drawer. There’s someone sitting on the bed behind her, a young man. He says something, joking, and she smiles, rattling off words in Spanish to him. I recognize him from the snapshots in Rebecca’s room.

  Charlie, I hear Rebecca say again, just like she did when she snuggled into my chest on the ride to her house.

  Charlie with his arm around her while she looks up at him in admiration.

  Charlie, her brother.

  But something happened. And Rebecca’s alone. Something—

  Ava appears in a small cluster of orange trees that rim the west side of the yard, stopping my thoughts. She pauses and plucks one of the oranges from a branch and puts it to her nose. “You can smell the sunshine,” she says.

  I shake off the revelation of Rebecca’s Charlie and give my sister a smile. “Oh, yeah? How’s it taste?” There’s nothing I can do to fix whatever happened to the boy now.

  Ava tosses me the fruit, then sits at my feet, looking up at me with her wide grey-blue eyes. “You look tired.”

  “I am.”

  Her shoulders sag. “Me too.” The eagerness she had in her voice last night is gone.

  A weight settles in my chest. “I’m working on a solution. I swear,” I say, sitting beside her on the ground.

  “It’s getting harder again. To stop stuff.”

  My pulse speeds up with her worried tone. “Did something happen last night, after we talked?”

  She shrugs. “I just don’t want to mess up again, you know . . .” Her voice catches a little and fades to silence.

  “The Marshalls’ deaths weren’t your fault, Ava.” They were mine. I wasn’t watching her. It was too easy to ignore stuff back then—to feel like I deserved a normal life.

  The night it happened I was making out with Lindsey Sawyer from chem lab on that leopard-print beanbag, trying to decide which of my foster brothers to ask for a condom. I was so sure that I’d finally found my chance to join the World of Real Men, when the Man of the House banged on the bedroom door.

  I had a phone call.

  It was Ava, babbling that she’d had a vision. She’d seen blood on the picture of us with the Marshalls and thought I might be in trouble. But it wasn’t my blood she saw.

  By the time I got there, it was too late. Ava was in the middle of the room with her adopted parents’ dismembered bodies around her, their blood in her hair and on her cheeks.

  “I sent them away,” she said, her voice sounding far off.

  I looked over the carnage in horror. For a split second, I thought the darkness had gotten her. I thought Ava, my baby sister, had done it. Cut her loved ones to ribbons. Then she whispered, “The dogs were so big, Aidan. They came with a man who had black eyes.”

  Hellhounds. Thank God. Relief flooded me. It hadn’t been her. I hadn’t lost her yet. The beasts must’ve come with the killer. I still don’t know how she got rid of the hellhounds before I showed up. But I know she protected herself with a circle of the Marshalls’ blood.

  I look at her now as she stares into the orange trees, the slim line of her neck and shoulders, her pale skin, so unlike mine. My half sister. Her hair is white fire in the afternoon sunlight. She looks so much like our mom, Fiona. So not like me.

  “Ava, don’t listen to that darkness,” I say. “You know the truth.”

  She takes the orange back from me and tears into the skin, spraying the sweet juice on her legs. “The truth. Even you can’t say what that is for sure when it comes to me.” She rips more skin off in a huge chunk and then tosses the orange into the dirt, like it’s upset her. “Before it happened, I was trying to see how long I could levitate my pencil instead of doing my homework. Then I saw the blood on the picture . . .”

  My muscles tense, but I try to stay calm on the outside.

  “You shouldn’t use your . . . talents,” I say. “But we don’t know if that’s the reason they found you.” We’re still not sure how the demons find her. Maybe it’s her energy, maybe it’s something else—something our mom did. But I want to be careful. I need her to be more careful.

  The year the Marshalls died, Ava had more visions and incidents than ever. She burned up a rosebush after its thorns tore her favorite sweater. She found her rabbit dead in its cage and shattered all the windows in her room with her grief. Her powers were never as out of control as they were that week, before her ninth birthday. I should’ve known something was coming.

  I scoot toward her, taking her fingers in mine. “I love you, Peep.” I kiss her hand and pull her closer, until she’s snuggled against my chest. “I’ll protect you. I will.”

  “I don’t like hiding from what I can do. It feels wrong.”

  Helplessness presses in. “I know.” Ava’s never run from her abilities like I have. She sees them as a part of her, like her nose or her fingers. She just doesn’t seem to believe as strongly as me that using them might put her in danger—or bring her to the same end as our mom.

  “Things are happening again,” she says. “And it’s a million times stronger.”

  “What things?”

  “Two days ago I broke the TV in social studies because a girl was making fun of my shoes.” She wiggles the oxfords on her feet, looking for all the world like she’s telling me about how she skinned her knee. “I have control now, more than last time, but it’s like I don’t want to control it.”

  “You should’ve called me. You know what this means.” There’s no more time. If she’s manifesting like that, unwilling to control herself, then things are going south again. I have to hide her. But how?

  She nods and picks at a fingernail. “I know. I just wish I knew why the demons want me so bad.”

  So do I. Mom told me again and again that I’d eventually need to protect my sister, but she never said why.

  On Ava’s third birthday, the demons came for her. But it was my mother who was taken from us instead, her heart clawed from her chest. I watched her blood pool underneath her d
ead body in the shape of the demon’s sigil. And as the wolflike demon hunched in the circle, like it was waiting for something, a mark appeared on Fiona’s forehead.

  Sacrifice, it said. One for another. My mother’s life for Ava’s.

  Three years later, on her sixth birthday, Ava told me that a man stood beside her bed while the dark of the moon passed. If I had to guess, I’d say he was an angel, protecting her; no one close to her died that night.

  On her ninth birthday, no angel came, and the Marshalls got ripped to bits in front of her.

  This is year twelve, and the dark of the moon falls on her birthday again. I can’t count on an angel showing up to guard her. I see more and more demons every day in the shadows, but I haven’t seen an angel in years. Ava’s going to have to depend on me this time.

  And I’m useless right now. A clueless idiot who gets mixed up with strange girls and knows nothing about the source of his own abilities, let alone how to help his little sister with hers.

  “I had a dream last night about Mom,” Ava says, knocking me back to the present. She wipes her hands on her academy uniform skirt.

  My skin turns cold, and I want to say, so did I—and the night before, and the night before, and the night before—but instead I say, “Oh.” I’ve never told her that I dream of Mom, too. I only dream memories. Ava dreams new moments with her, like she’s making memories even after death.

  She sounds defensive when she adds, “I know you don’t like it, but I had to ask her about what happened to you last night. And she answered me. Sort of. I think.” In addition to being able to move things with her mind, Ava also has Mom’s gifts—she has visions and sees things. Things to come, things in the past. Especially about our mom.

  I don’t say anything, I don’t scold her, so she continues, “She was on the beach this time. A really lovely beach with white flowers. And there was this cave. She kept looking back at it like she belonged there or something. But it made her sad.”

  The scene sounds like one of Fiona’s drawings.