Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light

by Tanya Huff

  Daru pushed through the crowd of tenants gathered in front of Rebecca’s door and stepped into the room.

  “Oh dear god.”

  The apartment looked as if a major battle had taken place. Broken plants and shattered pots were scattered about and a fine layer of dirt covered everything. The couch had been shoved almost to the opposite wall and a large, bloated body in a purple gown lay beside it, the position too boneless for anything living. Rebecca crouched in the corner by the radiator, knees drawn up to her chin, eyes squeezed tightly shut, rocking back and forth.

  Daru stepped over a toaster, and knelt by the body on the floor. Her fingers sinking deep into the rolls of fat, she probed the neck for a pulse. Nothing. Daru noted it without surprise. Over the years she’d seen a number of corpses, but none had looked as dead as this woman. She wiped her hand on her thigh, for the skin had been both cold and clammy, then reached out and tugged the purple fabric down over dimpled legs. Death has little enough dignity, she thought, knowing full well what the police opinion of her action would be. Tampering with the evidence was not highly thought of.

  Then she went to Rebecca.

  “Ah. Ah. Ah.” With every panted breath, Rebecca gave a little cry; a confused, wounded sort of sound.

  “Rebecca? Rebecca, it’s me, Daru. Open your eyes, honey. Everything’s okay now, I’m here.”

  Rebecca gave no indication that she’d heard. Her cries began to grow louder and her rocking more violent. Suddenly, she threw herself sideways and Daru barely caught her before she slammed her head into the radiator.

  “Hey, kiddo, relax, it’s over now. It’s all over.”

  Roland reinforced Daru’s grip and between them they held Rebecca immobile.

  She fought to get away and her cries changed to shrieks of, “No! No! No! No!”

  “What about slapping her?” Roland suggested, shouting to make himself heard.

  “Too risky. It might frighten her more. We’ve got to calm her down. Reach her somehow.”

  Roland frowned and tried to remember why this all seemed so familiar. A long, long time ago—No, he corrected, less than a week. It just felt like forever.—Rebecca had panicked. He stood, dragging Rebecca and Daru with him. “We’ve got to get her outside.

  “What?”

  “Outside. Look, don’t argue, trust me. This has happened before.”

  Daru shot a horrified glance at the body.

  “Not that!” Roland snapped, giving Rebecca a little shake. “This!”

  With no better ideas, Daru helped Roland maneuver Rebecca’s almost dead weight out of the apartment, through the crowd of open-mouthed onlookers, and down the stairs. By the time they reached the first floor, they could hear sirens approaching.

  “At least one of those lamebrains had the sense to call the police,” Daru grunted as they struggled to get Rebecca past the shards of glass. “Now what?”

  “Here.” Roland moved off the concrete path and onto the grass. He turned and shoved Rebecca up against the trunk of the tree.

  Her cry cut off in mid-wail. She took one great shuddering breath, collapsed against the rough bark, and started to sob, sinking slowly to the ground.

  Roland knelt and gathered her up in his arms, murmuring all the comforting nonsense he could think of.

  The first of the police cars pulled up. And then the second.

  Daru went to meet them. This she would handle.

  “Sastri? Daru Sastri? Of Social Services?” PC Patton couldn’t believe her luck. Of all the people to be at the scene. “I’d like to have a few words with you about a friend of yours. A Mr. Evan Tarin.”

  “Now?” Rumor around the Department had it that Daru’s eyebrows could slay with a movement. She used that movement now.

  PC Patton felt herself flush. Beside her, she heard Jack fidgeting. “No, not now,” she muttered.

  By the time Daru allowed them to bother Rebecca, the body had been taken away, witnesses’ statements had been recorded, and the carving knife had been removed as evidence.

  “Rebecca,” PC Patton kept her voice pitched low, the voice she used for small children. “Rebecca, I need to ask you some questions.” Sastri had told her something of Rebecca’s background and she’d promised to go carefully. “I’m not an ogre!” she’d snarled. Sastri had apologized.

  Rebecca lifted her head from Roland’s chest and scrubbed at her face with the palm of her hand. “You’re the police,” she said, sniffing. “The police are our friends.”

  “That’s right. The police are your friends.” So-called normal people should be this cooperative. “And I need to ask you, what happened in your apartment tonight?”

  Rebecca’s mouth twisted and her eyes filled again but she answered the question reasonably calmly although all in one breath. “She knocked on the door and I answered and she said I should be locked up and she had a knife so I threw the juice at her and now I don’t have any and she dropped the knife but she still tried to hurt me then the Darkness ate her.”

  “The Darkness ate her?”

  “Uh-huh.” She buried her face again.

  PC Patton stood. “You heard?” she asked her partner.

  PC Brooks nodded. “It matches what the witnesses said pretty exactly. Except that last bit. Darkness ate her. I wonder what that means.”

  “Beats me.” PC Patton turned to Daru. “You know?”

  “I have no idea,” Daru told her truthfully. She didn’t add that she intended to find out.

  “Well Homicide says it looks like a massive coronary.” PC Patton nodded her head in the direction of the three shirt-sleeved men standing on the sidewalk. Without a murder to attend to, they were catching up on personal business. “So I guess we don’t need to worry about it. Are you going to stay with her tonight?”

  “If she doesn’t, I will,” Roland spoke up.

  PC Patton nodded down at him. You can trust a man with eyes like that, she thought as they walked back to the patrol car. He looks like he’s been through hell and survived. Dresses strangely, though.

  “She didn’t recognize me,” Roland said, wonder in his voice.

  Daru snorted. “You don’t look the same.”

  Roland shrugged and lifted Rebecca to her feet. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go inside.”

  Rebecca hiccuped. “Darkness ate her, Roland.”

  “I wonder what she means,” Daru murmured.

  Over Rebecca’s head, Roland’s eyes met hers.

  “I wonder where Evan is,” he said.

  “We still didn’t talk to her.”

  PC Patton yanked the steering wheel around and the patrol car squealed onto Dundas Street. “I know.”

  “I think we should tell the sergeant.”

  “Tell the sergeant what? We don’t have anything to tell him.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “We’ll talk to him after we talk to her.”

  “I don’t know, Mary Margaret.”

  “I do.” She outmaneuvered a streetcar, the sudden acceleration pushing them both back in their seats. “Just leave it, Jack.”

  This was the place. Anyone who could See could have spotted it, for a pall hung over the three-story Victorian house. Evan had been very careful in following the Dark Adept’s trail to this lair, using only a tiny fraction of his power, barely enough to do the job, not quite enough to give him away. Therefore, it had taken many hours to do a job he could’ve done in seconds, but he hoped that meant the Darkness remained unaware that it was discovered.

  He sent a probe into the house and found only one life—dark but human—and ample evidence that he had come to the end of the trail. Pushing his hair back off his face, he strode up the walk and rang the bell. He heard it echo throughout the house, then heard footsteps approaching.

  “Yes, can I help you?” Gray hair, pale blue eyes, and startlingly black brows. An assured voice, carefully modulated but devoid of emotion, even of curiosity.

  It took all of Evan’s control to not flare up and tur

n this man as far to the Light as he now was to the Dark. Instead, although his hand trembled with the need to hold himself in check, he reached out, touched the man on the chest and returned him to what he had been before the Dark Adept had begun to warp and destroy. He left him, however, the memories of the Darkness and of what he had nearly become.

  Eyes wide, the man gagged and ran from the door.

  Evan entered and closed it quietly behind him. Silently, he followed the path of Darkness up the stairs and into what had once been a large and attractive bedroom. It wasn’t quite as bad as the hotel, but then the Darkness had been here a shorter time.

  Suddenly the balance shifted and he nearly cried out, so intense was the shock. He did cry out a moment later when, projected from her now distant apartment, Rebecca’s terror hit him. Tears streaming down his face, he stood rooted to the spot while his heart tore slowly in two.

  I am sorry, my Lady, but if I must sacrifice you to destroy the Darkness, I will.

  The Dark Adept whistled as he turned up the path to the house, the very picture of a successful young executive. He’d enjoyed himself this evening; as he saw it, he couldn’t lose. Whether Rebecca lived or died, the Light would be more than occupied with the need to stop his tool. And what a tool, a lifetime of delusions and imagined slights honed into a weapon. Her virginity was an added bonus, taken only because she treasured it.

  He pushed open the door and started up the stairs.

  “Master, above you!”

  The warning came barely in time. The Dark Adept threw himself below the blaze of glory, the very proximity twisting him in pain. He snarled up into the face of the Light, and vanished.

  Evan came slowly down the stairs, his aspect shining out around him.

  “Twice now,” he said to the man who trembled and whimpered and hid his eyes, “you have freely chosen the Darkness. A second chance is not given to many. You will not get another.” He clasped his hands together and the sword of Light rose up from their joining.

  The only illumination in Rebecca’s apartment spilled in through the windows, the ambient glow of a city night. Rebecca had been given a mug of warm milk and put to bed. Daru lay stretched out on the couch, her braid trailing on the floor. Roland sat in one of the kitchen chairs, picking out a lullaby on Patience. When Evan appeared he stood up slowly, and more slowly still put down the guitar.

  “Welcome back,” he said.

  Evan’s face lit up. He’d truly thought he’d never see Roland again. “You also,” he said, joy wound about the words.

  Roland refused to return the smile. “Where the hell were you?” he demanded. “Rebecca needed you.”

  “I know.” The joy was gone. “I felt her fear.”

  “And you didn’t care?”

  “I couldn’t come.”

  “I suppose you couldn’t come when I needed you either?” Roland pushed past him and flipped on the light. Evan glowed too much in the darkness, became too unreal, too hard to accuse.

  Daru muttered a complaint and sat up, rubbing her eyes. She saw Evan, saw the expression on Roland’s face, and decided greetings could wait.

  “Well?” Roland grabbed Evan’s shoulder and yanked him around. “Where were you when I was … I was …” His voice broke and he dashed away a tear. “When I needed you …”

  Evan spread his hands, the silver bracelets chiming softly. “Not even to save you could I leave my fight against the Darkness. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it!”

  “The strongest steel,” Daru said quietly, “goes through the hottest fire.”

  “Yeah?” Roland whirled on her. “Well, no one ever asks the steel how it fucking feels about it, do they?” He snapped his head back to face Evan, knowing that Evan was right, knowing he couldn’t expect to count for more than every other life threatened by Darkness, but also knowing it hurt anyway. “Then what about Rebecca?” he asked.

  “I understand, Roland.” Rebecca’s voice came tentatively from the door to the bed alcove.

  Roland’s anger deflated. “So do I, kiddo,” he sighed. He met Evan’s eyes. “Really.” But he didn’t try to hide the hurt.

  Evan nodded, acknowledging the pain for that was all he could do, and turned to face Rebecca. “I would have come to you if I was able,” he told her.

  She smiled. “I know.”

  “Well,” Daru tucked her legs up, making room on the couch, “you’d better sit down, Evan, and we’ll fill you in on what you missed. Unless you already know the details.

  “No, I don’t.” He came and sat down, pulling Rebecca with him and tucking her in the circle of his arm close against his heart. One by one, beginning with Roland waking up in the alley—by unspoken agreement, no one asked him what had gone before—they told him about the events of the night.

  “And then when the police people left,” Rebecca finished, “we came upstairs and Daru made me wa …” She frowned in puzzlement toward the window. The others turned.

  Tom sat on the window sill looking inordinately pleased with himself, a squirming piece of Darkness in his mouth. He leaped down, padded across the silent room, and dropped his burden at Evan’s feet.

  A cage of light appeared around it.

  “Thank you,” Evan said gravely to the cat.

  Tom yawned.

  “What is it?” Daru asked, peering down at the shifting black blob.

  “Just what it looks like. A piece of Darkness broken off and given a limited life.” “It’s alive?”

  “Oh, yes. And there’s no more of it here than in the hearts of many people, an amount easily overlooked. I imagine the Dark Adept used it as his eyes and ears.”

  “What are we supposed to do with it?” Roland wanted to know, amazed that his voice remained so calm. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stomp the disgusting little thing into the floor or run screaming from the room.

  The Light Adept stretched out his hand, the cage became a sphere and rose about four and a half feet from the floor. “We are going to question it.”

  The blob contracted in on itself with a terrified squeak. “Don’t know anything!” it shrieked.

  Evan continued as though the interruption hadn’t occurred. “And it is going to tell us of its master’s plans.” The cage glowed brighter.

  It would be easy to feel sorry for it, Daru thought, squinting, if it wasn’t so symbolic of the whole problem. Darkness takes over a little piece at a time and we all shrug it off until it’s too late.

  The Dark Adept’s messenger twisted and writhed in the cage, staying as far from the sides as it could.

  Evan waited and the others waited with him.

  “He opens the gate on Midsummer Night,” it whined at last.

  “We know that. Where?”

  Roland strongly suspected that Evan could get a concrete sidewalk to confess using that tone.

  “He didn’t speak of it. Truly. Truly. Truly. The sacrifice must set the gate!”

  “Sacrifice?”

  The piece of Darkness shifted as far away as it could get from the menace in Evan’s voice. “Blood prepares the way,” it whimpered.

  The cage contracted and the Darkness keened as it came in contact with the Light. In a few seconds, only a dazzling mote of glory remained, then it, too, disappeared.

  “Is it dead?” Rebecca asked.

  Evan shook his head. “You can’t kill Darkness,” he told her, “merely banish it for a while.”

  Behind Evan’s back, Roland rolled his eyes at Daru. She shrugged. In her experience, when the world occasionally reduced itself to platitudes, the only response was to go on. “What sacrifice?” she asked.

  “The gate must have an anchor in this reality,” Evan explained bleakly. “Tomorrow night an innocent will die to provide it.” His fingers curled into fists. He spun about and slammed them against the wall. “And I can’t stop him until I know where!”

  Rebecca reached up and caught his hands in hers. “You’ll find him,” she said with absolute certainty. Daru and Roland nodded in agreement, less in absolute certainty than in hope.

  Evan pulled Rebecca into his arms and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “I pray you are right, Lady,” he answered wearily.

  “Is there anything more we can do tonight?” Daru asked.

  Evan shook his head without lifting it.

  “Well, then,” she stood, hanging her purse strap over her shoulder, “I think we’d better pack it in. You want a ride home, Roland?”

  “I thought I’d stay. If nobody minds.”

  Rebecca turned in Evan’s embrace and smiled brightly. “I don’t mind, Roland. You’ve already slept on the couch.”

  “Evan?”

  He looked up. “It’s good to have friends around you.”

  Daru headed for the door, rummaging for her car keys. “Rebecca, you have my home number. If anything, and I mean anything, else unusual happens tonight I want you to call me.”

  “Okay, Daru.”

  The door closed behind her and Evan pushed Rebecca toward the bed alcove. “Return to sleep, Lady,” he told her. “I will join you in a moment.”

  Rebecca nodded and stifled a yawn. “Should I make Tom get off the bed?”

  “No. He has earned his place tonight.”

  “Okay. Night, Roland.”

  “Good night, kiddo.”

  Alone with Evan, Roland didn’t know what to say, where to start.

  The Adept spoke first. “Are you all right? I mean, physically? The shadow realms are …”

  “Yeah, they are.” Roland couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. And I think I’ve earned the right to be royally pissed off. He could hear a song in the anger, but Evan was waiting patiently for an answer so he took a quick inventory, opened his mouth to list damages, and stopped dead. Nothing hurt. Frowning, he thought back; he could remember pain as he knelt beside Daru in Rebecca’s apartment and the effort of getting the nearly hysterical girl down the stairs and over to the tree had almost had him in tears but after that … He could remember no pain after Rebecca had calmed, accepting the sanctuary of his arms. “I’m fine,” he said at last, because he was, even if he didn’t understand why.

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