Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2)

by A. D. Koboah

  I returned to the lake later on that morning. But despite the peace I felt, peace I thought had been denied me forever, sleep failed to find me. I missed Luna desperately. I was still so ashamed of myself but I had already decided to brave Luna’s anger and return to ask her to forgive me.

  So it was a while before I realised there was movement by the lake. By the sounds they were making, it clearly belonged to a human being. I swam up to the surface and was shocked to find Luna, asleep on the grass, the ragged jacket I had worn during part of my years in the wilderness held to her chest.

  She had come looking for me? She must have been livid with anger still to have made this long walk on her own in this heat. Looking at her like this, I desperately needed to protect her from everything that could harm her or cause her even the mildest discomfort. But I had to begin by protecting her from myself. I had to take better care of her than I had done so far. I thought of Julia and how I had fallen short in so many ways as a husband. And she had been so tolerant and forgiving of it all.

  In less than a week, Luna had become everything to me. She had breathed life into the barren world I had inhabited for so long and I would never give her another reason to regret her decision to stay.

  I picked her up, careful not to wake her. She slept deeply and my jacket fell from her grasp. That jacket was another reminder of what I had been before she found me. So I left it behind and took Luna back to the mansion, determined to leave behind the ghoul I had been in the wilderness of despair.

  When I returned to the mansion, I materialised in the red velvet bedroom and soon realised that another surprise was waiting for me at the front of the mansion. I could hear it moving among the Queen Anne’s lace. I placed Luna on the bed. She was clearly exhausted because she didn’t stir at all. It was difficult to let her out of my sight, especially after so many nights away from her, but I went to my room and changed my clothes. I made a quick detour to the kitchen before I went outside.

  Yes, I wasn’t mistaken. The brown mare from the night before was grazing in the field in the fiery sunlight. She lifted her head when I appeared and came to me as she had done before. I stroked her and gave her the lumps of sugar I had retrieved from the kitchen. On a whim, I decided to keep her. When I moved away from her and toward the back of the mansion where the stables were, she followed.

  “Yes, I believe you want to stay,” I said.

  I stayed outside with the horse, and cleaned out the stables, making it habitable for her. She seemed content with her new home and made no move to get away from me.

  I stayed outside with the horse as the sun began to set, and my body awoke to the night and the dark power sustaining it. I felt incredibly blessed because I was sure I had another chance with Luna. I was no longer a killer and her mind was now closed to mine. Soon it was dark outside and when I heard Luna stir, I entered the mansion to face her wrath.

  I stood at the bedroom door, listening to her quick, agitated breathing. I finally worked up the courage to announce my presence.

  “Luna.”

  Complete silence descended on the room and it seemed she was holding her breath.

  “Avery?” She released the breath in a shudder.

  I poked my head around the door. “Please, Luna. Do not start shouting until I have had a chance to speak to you.”

  “I ain’t gonna shout. Just get in here.”

  I entered slowly. She just stared at me, looking exceptionally beautiful. She appeared even smaller in the enormous bed, her eyes revealing hidden depths and an emotion that was hidden to me now I was not hearing her thoughts.

  I expected anger and that she would demand I take her back to the plantation. But instead, I received utter forgiveness. She was quiet that night, not quite herself, and I could not fathom why she did not greet the news that I could no longer read her thoughts with more joy. She looked so fragile and defeated in some indefinable way, yet without her constant stream of thoughts, I was lost.

  She was more a mystery than ever. However, without the distraction of her often turbulent thoughts, her face was even more captivating. The slightest lift of her lips, the light and shade of her eyes whenever some strong emotion passed through them.

  I had been listening to the minds of others for fifty years and had long forgotten the simple act of reading expressions. If I had been able to correctly read her expression, I would have seen that Luna was overjoyed to see me, but sad as if she had lost something very precious.

  Chapter 18

  She stayed with me at the mansion, and life, joy, and peace were breathed back into me just by being in her presence. I no longer existed on the peripheries of the living world, I walked among men now, although I was all too aware that I was not, and never would be one of them. It seemed I had been brought out of Lodebar. But it wasn’t a king who rescued me and paved my way to the world of the living, making me forget those crippling years in the wilderness. No, it was not a king, but a beautiful slave.

  But we still had our disagreements, especially when it came to the brown mare, which I named Julia. I had made the mistake of giving Luna horse riding lessons only to refuse to let her ride the horse when I saw how reckless she could be once she was upon it.

  That was when she subjected me to the most excruciating silences. She could sit in the drawing room for over an hour in complete silence. She wouldn’t even give me her eyes in those moments and stared steadfastly at the table before her.

  “Luna,” I said, determined not to give in to the anguish I felt. “This is ridiculous. Ignoring me, behaving in this manner, will not make me relent.”

  Still that silence and it was beginning to strip away at my nerves along with my resolve which was surely coming undone the longer I was subjected to her silence.

  “I tell you, Luna. I will not tolerate this juvenile behaviour, so stop it right this moment!”

  She looked up at me then.

  “‘I tell you, Luna. I will not tolerate this juvenile behaviour, so stop it right this moment,’” she mimicked, a defiant gleam in her eyes.

  “My goodness, you sounded just like me,” I said, a smile lighting up my face.

  “‘My goodness, you sounded just like me,’” she mimicked again and I burst into laughter.

  Clearly my reaction was not the one she had been hoping to provoke because her lips tightened and she stared at me intently for a moment before she spoke again.

  “Avery, please,” she pleaded, her manner coy as she battered her eyelashes at me. “I promise I ain’t gonna ride dangerously ever again. Please, Avery.”

  I had absolutely no intention of letting her anywhere near that horse and I was not going to let those deep dark eyes staring imploringly at me, or that tiniest of quivers troubling those lips, dissuade me. I opened my mouth to tell her this.

  But her eyes, those eyes.

  I sighed.

  “Of course, Luna. Whatever you want.”

  “Thank you, Avery,” she murmured, a triumphant smile on her lips as she got to her feet.

  I sighed again, already imagining the torment she would put me through once she got back on that horse.

  Over the course of my two hundred and eighty-two years on this Earth, I have listened to the English language change, hearing the meaning of words slowly become corrupted and then lost altogether. I have also heard slang invade and butcher a much loved language. But every once in a while, I have come across a word that electrifies with its accuracy. The slang word “sap” is one of them. Yes, I was a complete sap when it came to Luna.

  ***

  And so the days passed and my love for Luna continued to grow. And I was able to win her trust as I found out one warm, languid afternoon as we sat by the lake in the woods.

  My thoughts had been on a whipping I had seen many times in her mind and of the reason for the whipping.

  “Luna, when I used to look into your thoughts, I noticed that the ones of your child and the whipping did not come to the surface often. Why is that
?”

  She turned sharply to stare at me, her eyes dark and hooded with emotion I could not decipher. Her bottom lip quivered.

  “Somebody who don’t like talking about they past shouldn’t be too quick to get in everybody else’s business, Avery!”

  I let her be. After a few moments, she relented and told me her confusing and conflicting thoughts regarding that painful memory and why she told her mother to take the baby she had given birth to away.

  “She be his,” she spat, referring to Master Henry. Her brow was furrowed, her voice shook and she trembled slightly in the humid air. “His child, his slave. His blood and mines runs through her, tying me to him and what he did and kept on doing for years. Us! Forever, in her. How can I loves something that be made from his unnatural lust for the child I was when he got at me in the woods that day?”

  Despite the strong negative emotion regarding the baby, there was one thing she had not known. The child had survived.

  When I revealed this to her, she become still, her eyes brimming with unshed tears.

  “So she be alive? And...and free?”

  I did not know that for sure, but the possibility seemed to be enough for her. She placed her hand over her mouth and began to cry, long held tears that up until that moment, had not had the opportunity to reveal themselves.

  I vowed I would find the baby girl for her, and I meant to search the whole of North America if that is what it took to find her.

  As dusk fell over the lake, I got to my feet and reached out a hand to her, only to withdraw it again when I remembered my place, so to speak, and the careful distance I placed between us physically. But surprising, she grasped it before I could pull it away and I helped her to her feet. It was the second time she had willingly touched me and joy thrilled through me along with that merciless of afflictions. Hope.

  I held on to her warm, tiny hand as we made our way back to the mansion, joy filling every part of my being.

  But that joy was to be short lived.

  When we reached the mansion, Luna entered and I was just about to step inside when I heard a chuckle at my ear.

  Mama?

  I stopped and looked out into the quickening dusk.

  I hadn’t heard her in so long, I had almost hoped she had decided to finally listen to me and leave us be. But the image she pushed into my head quickly made me see how wrong I had been and that I had greatly underestimated the witch.

  I was seeing through her eyes and she appeared to be staring at the ground outside her cabin. Her hand came into view and she drew a crude series of pictures in the dirt. She drew a cluster of trees and then what appeared to be a mountain. At the top of the picture she drew a matchstick house and two stick figures beside it, a male and a female. As I watched, she drew a line, a path, through the trees, past the mountain and came to a stop by the house and the two stick figures.

  Then, very slowly and deliberately, she drew a line under the head of the male figure and erased it.

  Her laughter bounded through my mind.

  You can run, Asanbosam. I will follow and I will not come alone.

  The laughter trailed in my mind. I felt chilled to the core by what had just occurred, not only because she knew where we were now, but because there was something different in her tone, something missing.

  I entered the mansion and bolted the door behind me.

  I left Luna much earlier than usual that night and rushed to the Marshall plantation.

  I heard the sound of the witch’s laughter as I neared the slave quarters. She was alone in the cabin.

  What have you done? I gasped.

  Her mind was never an easy one to read and this time it was locked to me completely, not only locked, but there was something blocking even her scent and the faint traces of emotion that normally emanated from her. It was as if there was no one there, only a void where she should have been.

  Mama Akosua, what have you done?

  She laughed aloud again and threw an image at me. As always whenever she entered my mind, she revealed more than she meant to.

  At first I saw Luna at the mansion on her own pacing back and forth, wringing her hands. She came to a stop at the window and stared outside with her hands to her head, anxious flames ablaze in her eyes. Then I saw Mama Akosua at her cabin, overcome by waves of pure, deep unrelenting anguish, the emotions she had felt at the time.

  I bristled when I saw the next image, the only one she had intended to show me.

  It was dark and Mama Akosua was alone in the underground room in the chapel. She had been there all night calling and calling. Just before dawn broke, the sconces on the wall near the gold altar burst into flame. She had not resisted the entity that had been haunting the chapel when it entered her, or as close as it was to possessing her as it could get.

  It was around her now, attacking her in every way it could conceive of, trying to work its way into her soul and possess her completely. She would not be able to resist such an onslaught for very long.

  Mama Akosua, please, you have to banish it before it completely takes possession of your soul.

  She laughed again and I realised that the image had merely been sent to distract me. The air in the woods around me had grown colder and it was now completely silent. Then I heard breathing at the side of my head. The memory she had shown me of the nest of vampires in the jungle, and the way her grandmother had found and captured them, leapt into my mind.

  I turned into the ether and fled, racing away from the Marshall plantation as fast as I could. Her laughter echoed round and round in my head even when I reached Louisiana. I had seen enough of her thoughts to know she was going to see Master John in the morning to tell him where we could be found. He had never stopped looking for Luna since the night I took her away, so I knew he would agree to journey to the mansion.

  Mama Akosua was strong enough to kill me without the added power of the entity that resided in the chapel, so in a matter of days, when they finally reached us in Louisiana, my unnatural life would come to an end.

  I raced back to the mansion.

  Chapter 19

  Over the next few nights, I repeatedly returned to the Marshall plantation and pleaded with Mama Akosua to banish the spirit from the chapel. I showed her image after image of Luna at the mansion, content with her new life. But she would not accept it.

  Fearing for Luna’s wellbeing above all else, I made frequent trips to the Holbert plantation at night, and during the day, to plant seeds in Master John’s mind, and the minds of anyone else who had influence over him, making them believe the only way to keep the inhabitants of the plantation safe was to free Luna.

  So a few days after Mama Akosua’s visit to the chapel, Master John signed legal documents giving Luna her freedom and plans were made for her to live with Father Geoffrey and Jupiter if she came back to Mississippi. I also finished building the house by the Mississippi bluffs so Luna would always have a home of her own—no matter what became of me.

  But Mama Akosua would not be swayed as the influence the entity had over her increased. It manipulated her fears, and on many nights I arrived at the Marshall plantation to find her in debilitating anguish, believing Luna was dead. If she did not banish the spirit from the chapel, it would soon be completely in control of her, something I could not allow to happen.

  The evening before they were due to set out on the journey to Louisiana, I went to the Holbert plantation as night hovered around a sultry sunset. I stood unobserved in the woods, watching the slaves at work in the cotton field, remembering all those years ago when I first laid eyes on the plantation. I also remembered that fateful evening when I returned to exact my vengeance on its residents, both the guilty and innocent. I had been completely and utterly lost and believed God had forsaken me. But He had given me a way back in Luna.

  Redemption was something I could never hope for, for I had taken far too many lives. But I could try to at least atone for them and it had to start with the one who led me out of
the wilderness. Luna.

  I had to let her go.

  My heart was heavy as I turned away from the dark bodies glistening with sweat moving through the cotton field.

  I returned to the mansion and materialised in the drawing room by the fireplace. I stopped short when I beheld the dining table laden with food. Luna was placing a bowl of soup on the table and she didn’t notice me at first. When she turned around and saw me by the fireplace, she gave me a tired little smile.

  “Luna, I... You didn’t have to do all this.”

  She merely shrugged, that little smile still on her lips.

  I thought of the way she grasped my hand by the lake a few days ago and my despair overwhelmed me again. The smile on her lips slowly disappeared.

  “Avery, what the matter? Avery?”

  She moved closer.

  “I...I...have to take you back,” I blurted out before I could lose courage.

  “Wh-what?”

  “Do not look so, Luna. I am not taking you back to the plantation to be a slave again. I would never do that.”

  I knew she was lost to me already when I moved to place my hands on her shoulders and she backed away. As all my hopes and dreams began to disappear, I told her what had happened to her mother and why I had to take her back.

  The food lay forgotten.

  She seemed to clamp down completely the more I spoke, her face like stone, her raven eyes completely devoid of feeling. She wouldn’t even look at me before long. I still had not mastered the act of reading her expressions correctly, but she showed no overt joy when I told her she was now free. If anything, she seemed...bored.

  It appeared I had been mistaken in thinking she had come to see me as a friend, those nights spent on long walks talking long into the night along with the many hours I spent teaching her to read, ride and use a gun. It was as if none of it had occurred.