Blood Rage, page 23
And our earth tun ceald lyk death
My back itches—in response, in fear, in discomfort, I don’t know. But I do know that as I read, the words abruptly ring closer to home than I want them to.
“I don’t know what happened to you when the creature marked you, child, but I know what I saw when I touched you. Darkness. Yellow eyes.”
“Like sunflowers,” I mutter.
She nods. “This thing, whatever it is, is known.”
“But what does the passage mean?”
When Fiona next meets my gaze it’s with pity in her eyes. She moves that sheet to the side and picks out another. This is a different hand, and the paper is slightly less fragile but still old. The corners are torn in places, and a large rusty stain down one edge reminds me far too much of blood.
Still, I read.
Mark’d, that hapless gent doth weep by the moon
Not a one by his side for fear
Evel swells lyk fog ’bout him
Anger a dark shadow on our kin
We might not but slay him an in so fierce a task
Free him from the burden
“Fiona…”
She pushes one last piece of paper in my direction. This one is the smallest of them all, but the writing is bold and clear, as though someone pressed hard with their scribing implement.
Slain
As lyfe did leave that mangled frame
So too the mark did pass
Skies above split with godly fyre
An gentle rain wash’d clean
Saved by sacrifice
Evel be held at bay
Ice seems to replace my blood. I shake my head once, then again. And again. Suddenly I’m standing, I’m slapping at the table, sending papers and knick-knacks flying in every direction.
Norma cries out in alarm, flapping her way around the kitchen with her customary cries.
But I don’t care. I can’t stop. Again I slam the table, and it shudders beneath the blow. Again. Again. Again.
“Danika—”
“No,” I cry out, slapping my hands on the now empty table. “No. No way. There has to be another way.”
The whole time, Fiona doesn’t move. She allows me to toss her belongings all over the kitchen, merely watching as I rage. Maybe she’s scared, maybe she’s not, but she is definitely pitying now, and that irks me all the more.
“Say something,” I demand. “You have to say something. Surely this isn’t it? Isn’t there more?”
“I did look,” she says at last. “Of course I did, child. But this is all I have to go on. A few notes here, a scrap of text there. They don’t even have a name for the creature doing this to you.”
“But they do suggest killing me?”
At the word kill, Norma drops down onto the table. She hops back and forth to catch my gaze, making careful eye contact as soon as I allow it.
“Dan ka? Ika ni?”
Those new words again. Or at least to my ear they seem new. But my pet is distressed and doing her best to comfort me in mine. I lift her to me for a brief nuzzle against her beak. She croons, but I can’t hold on to her, my hands are too itchy, too twitchy. I plop her on the table again and fight to control myself.
Fiona lifts one maimed hand. “I don’t think that’s their suggestion, child, no. Or rather, they say only that that was the choice they made. We don’t have to make the same choice.”
“And if we don’t? If this mark stays on me and we can’t get rid of it, then what?” I scan the floor for the paper and give up almost at once. “Then the minions call down their master and…everybody dies?”
“We don’t—”
“Cold like death, it said. If this thing, whatever it is, comes into my body, it destroys the world.” She winces, but I press on. “Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but I don’t know how else to read all that.”
“Child—”
“Fiona.” I lean low over the table to see clearly into her eyes. “Are these old diary entries suggesting the only way to get rid of this thing, before it gets worse, is to kill me?”
She meets my gaze firmly and clearly. With a long deep breath she nods. “Yes. That appears to be the message.”
I sit down. It’s that or fall.
“Dan dan?” Norma whispers. Her voice is low and hollow, so unlike her that when she crawls into my lap, I don’t have the heart to fend her off.
I hold her, she holds me, and together we listen to Fiona speak.
“This thing is so old it doesn’t have a name. If the writings are to be believed, it feeds off anger and fear, all those things I felt in you when we touched.” Fiona lifts her hands slightly. “I told you I felt hunger. And now, I believe that’s what this is. The creature hungers for all those negative emotions and puts out a call to bring it in. Worse still, the mark on your back is a beacon or sign to this creature, from a minion, that you are suitable for purpose. I would say, with a human body to use, this master entity would have a much easier job of feeding on the emotions it craves.”
“But all those people, all those women. One of them must have seen something or found something to get rid of the mark. Right? Surely they didn’t just murder everyone they found with these marks on their skin?”
A single tear slides down Fiona’s cheek. “Child, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But there’s nothing more. I searched and searched. I even called out at this unseemly hour, asking my peers what they knew.”
“And?” My voice is reaching dangerously high levels.
“One psychic in Brazil told me of a child in the nineteen sixties who appeared one day with marks on his arms. He had been playing in the woods when a creature with yellow eyes touched him. The next day the child fell into the sea on a fishing trip and drowned. So she told me.”
Her hidden meaning is clear. “A kid? They drowned a kid?”
“This entity brings fear with it. Any and everybody I’ve found who came across it has decided it couldn’t be worth the unknown fate to leave the host alive. They sacrificed anybody they found for the greater good.”
“Host?” I screech. “So this thing is a freaking parasite?”
“In a manner.”
I grab great fistfuls of my locs and pull. The pain is sharp but steadying, and I use that moment of clarity to try to think. Think, think, think. There has to be something, anything at all.
“I’ve not finished reaching out,” Fiona assures me. “So long as we have time, I believe we can find a way to get rid of the mark. A cleansing ritual or an exorcism, something like that.”
“I don’t think there is time.” After the pain, some of the fight seems to leak out of me. I think back over the past few days—the creature in my dreams, the yellow eyes springing up out of nowhere, increasingly frequent and more intense each time, along with memories of my past that do nothing but dredge up fear and guilt.
Seems to match up perfectly.
“I’ve been dreaming of that yellow-eyed thing for ages. And every time it gets worse. What if that’s what it means? What if all those dreams are just me getting closer to the master-thing coming to take me over?”
No response.
Then again, what can she say, really?
A sudden shout breaks me out of my thoughts. It comes from the rear door, which, as I look, slowly swings shut.
Fuck.
Was it open the whole time? Was someone out there?
I dash around the table, dislodging a screeching Norma, and hurl myself through the door, out in the night.
The rain has stopped, but the ground is wet and on it, tangled together, are Rayne and Linda.
Linda is screaming and kicking, fighting and punching, while Rayne holds her calmly by locking her arms through Linda’s to pin them in place.
The blond woman rages impotently, her eyes narrowed in fury.
“What did you hear?” I snap.
She spits in my face. “I knew you were evil. I just knew it. You’re going to kill us all with your demon master, I just knew it.”
Rayne jerks her tighter, not to harm her but in an effort to stop her raging. “I got back and found her listening at the door. She jumped like a rabbit when she saw me and tried to run. I only wanted to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Linda yells. “I’ll never talk to you again. Let go of me. Right now, you unholy monster. Get off, let go, let me go.”
The noise is immense. Someone will be out to see what’s going on if we don’t shut her up.
Rayne releases Linda from her police officer’s hold and steps back. “If you’ll just stay calm and tell me—”
“Calm? Didn’t you hear? That bitch has a demon inside her, and it’s going to kill us all. You need to get out of here. You need to go back to that awful city filled with monsters and demons and keep it all away from us, do you understand me?” She continues backing off. “You’re evil. All of you. And if we let you, you’ll murder us all. I knew it. And Bruce…I told him, and he let you stay anyway.”
“Leave him out of this.” A coolness fills Rayne’s voice.
“Oh, we’ll see.” Linda backs off still further, never once taking her eyes off us. “By morning you’ll be gone, do you hear me? Gone or we’ll deal with you ourselves. We have children here. If you have even the smallest shred of decency left, you’ll be gone before morning.”
With that, she turns and darts away, pointy heels sinking into the soft, wet road as she goes.
Rayne turns back to me, her face a picture of confusion and worry.
“What on earth did I come back to?”
I sigh. How the fuck am I going to tell her? How do I even begin to explain what Fiona has found?
I swallow the sudden spiky lump seeming to fill the back of my throat. “You’d better come inside.”
* * *
Rayne stares down at her hands without speaking. She is statue still in that way I bounce between admiring and fearing. Red stains smear her cheeks from all the tears, and her hands still bear the marks of her fingernails from where she pressed them deeply into her palms.
I sit with my head bowed, my hands laced in my lap. If I don’t hold on to them, and myself for that matter, I’ll end up running screaming through the streets.
Beyond the kitchen, in her lower space, Fiona is still making phone calls. I can’t hear her whispered conversations, just the low murmur of urgency in her voice.
“Rayne…”
She lifts her head, a sudden snap of motion. “We can’t tell anyone.”
“What?”
“We can’t tell anyone. Nobody. We need time. We need to give Fiona time to find more help.”
I lift my hands helplessly. “But I have to let SPEAR know. Maury sent us out here for answers, and finally we have some. I can’t keep it to myself.”
A little furrow forms in her forehead. “And what do you think they’ll do with those answers if you hand them over now?”
I gape at her. She can’t be serious. Can she? Does she really believe they would kill me over some words scrawled on paper hundreds of years old?
“We can’t tell anyone yet.” Her eyes are glistening again. “Please.”
“Then what do we do?”
She stands, another burst of motion. “We leave. Immediately. I don’t think we’ll reach Angbec before sunrise, but I’ll sleep in the travel pod. At the very least we need to get away from here before Linda makes good on her threat.”
I snort. “What can she really do?”
“Plenty.” A quick scoot around the table. Now she’s wiping tears from her face, trying to clean herself up. “Start packing. I’ll find the boys and bring them back.”
“You didn’t find them before?”
“No, I found them. But they weren’t doing any harm, so I decided to come back. I’m glad I did.”
Me too, though really, what can Linda do? Sure she might be president of the Moarwell council, but they have no power over us, not really. The most they can do is tell us to leave, and that’s exactly what we plan to do.
I do feel vague worry over Bruce and Kimberly Dixon, but surely Linda will have no reason to bother them if we’re gone. Things can go back to what they were, right?
I gather Norma with me and head downstairs first.
As I pass Fiona, she gives me a faint nod, then turns her back. I leave her to the illusion of privacy and enter the room with the bed.
To think, only the night before I had worried about having to spend days down here.
I shake the thought aside, gather up our few belongings, and cart them back upstairs. Norma follows behind, carrying a couple of straps in her beak. She isn’t doing much, but her desire to help is welcome, and I don’t try to stop her. Instead I beckon her to follow up the stairs and across the landing to what I assume is the room the boys were sharing.
Upstairs is as cute and quaint as one might expect a countryside B & B to be. Framed landscape photos or paintings, weird farmyard trinkets, and tools in corners or hanging on walls. The room at the end is closed, but when I open it I find a view through the window down onto the rear car park. It is the right room.
The boys have already packed. Or maybe they didn’t unpack. I’ve no idea, but it is easy to grab their bags too and haul them down with me.
Norma follows, dragging a baseball cap behind her. I think it’s Duo’s. Well, I hope it’s his, because as she comes, Norma gnaws hard on the rim, ruining the fabric and stitching.
I’m only waiting a couple of minutes before Rayne comes jogging back with a wolf in tow. She looks like something out of a fantasy novel—small, lithe, and gorgeous with her loyal animal companion bringing up the rear. As she comes, she scoops clothing off the ground, folding it neatly across her arm to hand over.
Behind, with a soft growl, Solo’s form ripples into being out of the smaller, shorter wolf shape. He’s naked and sweaty, covered in mud, sticks, and leaves. His red hair fires up in all directions.
He takes the clothes Rayne offers and pulls them on without a word, mindless of the grime on them and himself.
“I’m still pissed,” he mutters, “but apparently we’ve got bigger problems.”
“Thank you.” I don’t know if it’s enough, or even if he cares for my gratitude, but I have to say something. “I brought your stuff down.”
Silence. Awkward, thick, and stuffy.
Rayne clears her throat.
I kick at a loose clot of earth.
Solo turns his head a little, his nostrils flaring. “Come on, the van is out front.”
Ah, so that’s where Duo is.
All of us grab some bags and walk around the building, splashing through the few shallow puddles left behind by the drizzle. Norma bounds along after us, darting ahead with her tail bobbing. She pulls up short at the edge of the house and spreads her wings with a gleeful murmur of, “Kar dan dan,” before scurrying forward.
There is Bruce Dixon, seemingly surprised and pleased to catch the chittarik as she hurls herself at him. He croons to her, patting her gently, stroking her back with large firm hands. She wriggles deeper into him.
Guess he must be a good guy after all. Norma isn’t known for her love of men.
Rayne hurries forward. “Bubi? What’s going on?”
He reaches out to one-handed hug her. “Fiona called me. She said you were leaving and that I should say goodbye.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Perfectly reasonable time for you.” He smiles. “Besides, I was already up. Linda also called, yelling some nonsense about demons and curses. I’ve no idea why she’s so upset, but I wanted to check on you. She said you were here, so…” He trails off and lifts a hand in a well, here I am sort of gesture.
“Fiona is right, sir.” I look past him towards the van parked up at the door. Duo is inside, hopping out to start gathering bags. “To say we’ve overstayed our welcome is…well, yeah. We need to go.”
Bruce turns to me, still holding Rayne around the shoulders. “Did you get what you came for?”
I hesitate. The words teeter on the end of my tongue. “Yes. I guess I did.”
“Good. I’m glad you got answers or whatever it is you wanted.” His warm smile breaks something inside me. “I hope that helps you.”
“It will.” My voice cracks, but I don’t let myself stop.
Instead of handing my things to Duo, I take them to the back of the van myself, leaving Rayne to have a private moment with her father.
Chapter Twenty-four
I sit in the back of the van, hands trembling, head bowed, Norma in my lap. That racing feeling is in my chest again, but this time it’s much more than adrenaline. This is fear. This is pure, unfiltered, unmatched fear.
I cling to my pet, and she rubs herself against me, pressing in as if fighting to get inside my skin. Her warmth and her stiff scales are a strange comfort to me now, familiar.
“Nika son?”
I sniff hard against the feeling of tears at the back of my throat. “Yeah. I guess so, baby. Home now.”
She wraps her tail around my wrist and settles in more comfortably, her eyes drifting closed moments later.
Oh, I wish I could settle so easily. But right now, I doubt I’ll ever sleep again, much less rest comfortably.
A moment later the front doors open, and both wolf twins help themselves in. There’s no playful game of rock-paper-scissors this time, no light-hearted banter or chatter. The pair of them are stiff and uneasy, sharing more conversation between them with meaningful looks and facial expressions.
I can’t begrudge them their secrecy. Not right now. Not after what I’ve done.
Was I wrong to keep them out of Shakka’s mission? Sure, he didn’t want anybody to know, but I didn’t have to give them details. I could have given them the basics, a retrieval mission as a favour to a fellow SPEAR operative. They didn’t even need to know who it was, much less the history of the spearhead now wrapped in newspaper and carefully stowed in my bag.
