2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 (18 page)

“Ok then,” Ryan said doubtfully. “Um.” Finally, he looked at me. “Do you mind if I check your pulse? I’m still not sure you shouldn’t go to the hospital. Just, you know, to be sure.” I bit my lip and nodded. Strong fingers took my wrist in his while he stared down at his watch.   

“Well?” Ethan asked testily. Ryan dropped my wrist and leaned back on his heels, watching me through narrowed eyes.

“Fine,” he said after a long moment. “Her pulse is a little slow, but not what I’d expect after her, um,” he cleared his throat. “Ordeal.” He and Ethan locked gazes, and some invisible message passed between them.

“What?” I demanded, finally forcing myself free from Ethan’s iron hold. I pulled the jacket close around me, like the shield it actually was. “What do you mean, my ordeal?” I looked from one man to the other. Neither would meet my eyes.

“He’s gone. The one who had her,” Ryan said quietly. “I smelled fresh blood on her, and violence; the one who had her reeked of dark magic, but the forbidden kind. Blood sacrifice.” A low growl came from his solar plexus. “I do not know where he went, or for how long, but you had best be on your guard. I’ll let my people know, and trust you to alert yours.”

Ryan excused himself.  As the sun framed him from behind, I remembered who he reminded me of. Dylan, the hospital intern who’d been so kind to me when Logan was there. They could have been twins.

“Shifter,” Ethan said, as if reading my mind. “He’s flickering too much to know what kind. But it’s something with really sharp teeth.” He grimaced. “It’s really hard to stay calm while something with sharp teeth and claws performs CPR on your girlfriend.”

I could have lived a long, happy life without that piece of information. “I see what you mean about not ‘outing’ people,” I agreed. I looked at the wrist Ryan had just released. “Exactly how big were these claws?”

But he ignored me. Ethan leaned in towards me, his face that of a man on fire. “Caspia, I don’t have to tell you how bad this is. I should have seen this; I should have kept you safe.” Mutely, I shook my head. I could see the echoes of my once-avenging angel. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, I should have known long before he did, but he turned away from me before I could.

“There’s something else,” I said at last.

He looked sharply at me. “Before I came to you, the universe was simple. Light and Dark. Good and evil. I was Light, and my actions were good.” River bright eyes, fragile as flakes of jade, burned into mine. “But humans don’t live in a bisected world. You… your world… is made of shades of gray. I look back on an eternity of black and white choices from my shades of gray world and I don’t like what I see, Caspia. I don’t like what I was, what I did. I think I understand Asheroth and his madness a little better, now.”

“You’re scaring me.” I pulled at him, wrapping myself around him.

“Don’t be.”

Was this the real curse of being mortal, the real reason people died? Not because our bodies gave out with age, or caught diseases, or stopped working? I wondered if it wasn’t the weight of life itself that brought us down in the end. Death by inches, bought by the slow unfolding of pain-filled knowledge? The realization that, no matter whom we loved or how well or for how long, we all walked into death alone, with only our experiences for company?

A new shadow loomed over us, long and slanted in the afternoon sun. Logan stood watching us with his body squared and arms crossed.

“You’re all right,” he said, as if he expected no less of me.

I nodded and struggled back into Ethan’s jacket. There weren’t enough buttons left to close my shirt properly. If my brother noticed, he didn’t say anything. “Were we right?” Ethan asked cryptically.

Logan nodded very slightly. “It’s possible,” he said at last. “Likely, even.”

“Damn,” Ethan swore softly. He scanned the buildings surrounding the Quad quickly.

“What are you guys talking about?”

Logan pulled me into a loose hug. “We know who’s been hunting you, Cas. And we know where to find sanctuary,” he whispered into my ear. Then he let me go, and brushed strands of my hair off my forehead. “But we can’t talk about it here, ok? You’re going to have to trust us, because things are about to get a little weird.”

My heart slammed against my ribcage. All I could manage was a quick, jerky nod. I let them pull me off the Quad and towards the visitor’s parking lot, Ethan on one side of me and Logan on the other.

In the car, total silence reigned. Ethan sat behind me with one hand on my shoulder the entire time. The words “hunting you” and “sanctuary” kept echoing around in my head. So did Ethan’s pronouncement: “I don’t like what I was, what I did.” I didn’t ask where we were going, and the landscape passed by in a blur.

Chapter Eighteen:

Strange Passage

Wrapped in dark thoughts, I didn’t notice where we were driving. I felt strangely detached. My brain kept replaying events and images. Angels killing Nephilim descendents. Dr. Christian’s voice in my head, his arms holding me immobile against him. How monumentally stupid I was. How badly my stupidity might have endangered Ethan, Logan, and even Amberlyn. Hell, even the whole town. By the time the car rolled to a stop, I had a dull headache and my stomach rolled with nausea.

“Where are we?” I asked, cranky and worn out. I didn’t recognize my surroundings at all. Ethan and Logan had been silent the entire trip, giving me nothing to go on. When we rolled to a stop, Logan slammed his car door with grim fury. I slipped from the car, following them slowly as I tried to place my surroundings.

Whoever lived here really liked privacy. The street was wide and bordered with huge lawns and patches of dense trees. It looked well tended, but there were absolutely no houses or other signs of habitation. I looked all around but couldn’t see any driveways besides the one we’d parked in. I felt Ethan touch my elbow, guiding me up a gray flagstone walkway to a gate that was at least as tall as our apartment ceiling.

“What now?” Logan asked, stealing the words straight from my throat. He’d come to stand at my other elbow, his solid bulk pressing me against Ethan. The two of them kept me firmly between them. They hadn’t stopped since we’d left the Quad. At first, I’d found it comforting. Now, it was beginning to wear on me.

“We go in. Or try to.” The tall stone gate had a door made of thick metal bars sunk deep into it. Ethan let go of me long enough to push on the heavy metal bars with all his weight.

Nothing happened.

“Let me try,” Logan offered. He gave me ‘the look,’ which I recognized from a lifetime as his little sister. It promised terrible punishment if I messed up his plans. When we were very young, ‘the look’ meant he’d put gum in my hair if I told on him. Later, it meant I kept my mouth shut when he snuck out, or he’d humiliate me in front of every boy I might ever like.

“Ok already,” I said, spreading my arms wide open to show my innocence. “I’m not going anywhere.” Both boys began to throw themselves against the security gate with single-minded determination. I watched them use brawn instead of brains until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

That’s when I noticed the slowly thickening mist coiling around us while they grunted and shoved. It was delicate and cool against my skin. I stared at it, fascinated. I was used to dark, hungry Shadows exploding across my skin with little or no warning. This mist seemed almost friendly in comparison. Damp cool air, white and swirling, curled around my ankles and tugged on my outstretched fingers.

“Not. Going. To. Budge,” Logan panted, still pushing against the door with his considerable strength. Why did boys get to a point where brute strength was their only answer? Ethan paused to examine the lock itself, looking for a trick to the mechanism.

The air between us became thicker and harder to see through. “Um, guys?” A tendril of mist, thicker than the rest had been, wrapped itself around my wrist. “Should we be worried?” The finger of mist wrapped around my own didn’t seem like something alarming. I tugged back, and it coiled more thickly around my finger.

“It started right about the same time that we touched the gate,” Logan said. “Any chance this is another security measure?”

“I didn’t think even he would be so paranoid as to activate the mist wall. Unless it’s arrogance,” he said thoughtfully. “That would fit. Or,” he looked thoughtful. “All of the Guardians have done so.”

“Is it dangerous?” I asked.

“Not once you’re inside it,” Ethan said cheerfully. “From the inside, it’s the best possible defense.”

The mist had grown heavier, turning a deeper gray as it thickened. “You could let me try,” I suggested quietly. Very quickly, the mist was changing from something pretty and soothing to something heavy and ominous. “Unless either of you have another plan. And throwing yourselves against something that’s clearly not going to budge does not count as a plan.”

Ethan reached for me. I felt his hand like a cuff, just above the silver bracelet. “I don’t want to stand out here in it any longer than we have to. But we also don’t know how it will react to Shadows.”

“Because they’re made of darkness,” I said more softly than I meant to.

A rough thumb found my pulse point and stroked it through the wing clasp. “But you are not. Just be careful.”

Darkness explodes out of me every chance it gets, I thought grimly. That didn’t happen to people made of sunshine and butterflies. “Right,” I said instead, and drew close to the gate. As soon as I placed my hands on it, I felt the rippling chills pooling in my palms. It wouldn’t take much; the lock was small, and I was right up against it. I felt the nervous energy that made it so hard to stand still when I pulled Shadows.

There was a click. The lock twisted open with hardly any effort from me. Logan pounded me enthusiastically on the shoulder and pushed the gate open.

But something was wrong. The Shadows remained pooled in my hands as the mist got even thicker around me. When it began to form tendrils, thick and white like bare winter branches, Shadows ignited from my palms and snaked up my arms. White mist followed, wrapping itself around me as if chasing its dark twin. The sensation was terrible. The razor chills of Shadows combined with a wet heaviness I knew would smother me if it got thick enough. I tried to force myself to calm down enough to get either one off me.

“It’s attacking her,” Ethan said, much more calmly than I felt. He held me tightly by the shoulders.  He stood behind me and pushed me forward through the open gate. “We have to keep moving. Concentrate, Cas. It’s attacking the darkness, not you.” He propelled me as I tried to focus on his words.

But there was no way to separate the darkness I carried in my blood from the abilities I’d been born with. Of course the mist attacked me. Everything happened so fast. I tried to focus on the Shadows and block out everything else. As if I could ignore the heavy wet fingers reaching for me as Ethan propelled me across gravel and through a passageway.

It always felt as if someone was walking over my grave when the Shadows crawled across me. The mist had that same skin-crawling creepiness to it. I flipped my wrists up. It helped, seeing Ethan’s gift, the empty wings right over my pulse points. I envisioned pulling the darkness slowly back into me, like rewinding an old reel of film in slow motion. It came too easily, like slipping on a pair of plush velvet gloves. I was getting altogether too comfortable with my darkness.

We rushed down a path bordered by overgrown hedges. Mist still clung to me like greedy fingers, but it lost its powerful hold when the Shadows went. The pathway was a new threat, though. Hedges reached out to us as if they could tell we were there, and didn’t like it. Their green branches snatched at us like grasping hands and pulled at my hair and clothes. They were alive and angry, determined to catch us and keep us from reaching the end of the path. Thicker branches snaked around an ankle. Pebbles and roots crunched underneath my feet. I might have tripped if not for Ethan’s iron grip on my shoulders. Logan remained several steps in front of me, punching and shoving at the hedges as they tried to block his way.

He stopped abruptly as the wild, overgrown hedge formed a solid wall right in front of us. There was no way forward, and the branches darted forward, pinning us in.

“That can’t be right,” Ethan murmured, studying the wall of green in front of us as if it was a particularly troublesome section of a crossword puzzle. “Unless…” He walked slowly back and forth in front of it, one corner of his bottom lip caught between his teeth. He stopped in the exact center as Logan and I both pulled leaves and snapped branches as fast as we could.

“Logan! See if you can push through and feel a wall through there.” My brother obeyed, thrusting his arm shoulder-deep into angry greenery while Ethan and I continued to fight against the encroaching hedges. They seemed more frantic now that we had reached the wall.

But they stopped entirely as soon as Logan reached through the overgrown hedges. “There’s something back here,” he confirmed.

As if hearing the call of a silent snake charmer, the vines and branches blocking our way melted away at Logan’s touch. When the overgrown greenery withered away, he stood in front of another gate resembling the first one we’d used. This one was solid gray stone, door and all. It had a very modern touch screen set into the stone next to the door at shoulder level. “That was strange,” he said at last.

“Uh, yeah,” I seconded. “Why don’t you come away from there, Logan? Because any sane person would be leaving right now, instead of standing there like he was trying to figure out how to get inside, and he certainly wouldn’t be dragging his sister along without telling her what the hell is going on.” My voice climbed on the last few words. A pair of birds screeched their indignation and flew away over the hedge. Smart birds.

“It’s ok, Caspia,” Ethan said as he released me. He examined the touch screen closely. “We’ve been here before. You’ve been here before.”

“That does not make me feel better,” I ground out.

“This wasn’t here, though.” Logan ran his fingers along the sides of the touch screen. “I don’t see a key pad… how do you…”