Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) (14 page)

He just stared at
me.

“
You...you think it can
find a way out...through me? But it won’t be able to. I’m stronger
now. I’m a vampire.”

“
That is probably the
stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say, Dallas. Do you really
think you’re the one who killed that girl? And in the drawing room
with Mallory? Was that you? It was controlling you, Dallas. Can’t
you see that now? You think you’re invincible, but what do you
think a vampire is? What do you think drives it and keeps it
craving blood? Evil, that’s what. A part of you is evil now and you
may be able to suppress it, but it will always be there and through
that evil this thing that’s been haunting your family and killing
them can find a way through. It will keep worming its way into you
until it completely eats you away. And there’s nothing I’ll be able
to do to stop it.”

He was silent as the
knowledge sank through. I took a few steps back in bewilderment and
sat down on the bed. It was a long moment before I
spoke.

“
I’ve always known there
was
something
. I
mean, I’ve felt it all my life. We all have. And that dream I had
the day I got here—”

“
What dream?”

Before I could shield my
thoughts he caught an image of the dream I’d had of myself lying in
a coffin, my face as empty as that of a discarded
mannequin.

He blanched.

“
Avery?” I got to my feet
and took a few steps toward him.

It was as if he hadn’t
heard me. In his distress he had completely lost the control he
kept over his mind. All he could see was the image of me lying in
that coffin along with another image which made pain streak through
him. The image was of me—no, it couldn’t be me he was seeing. It
was Luna, a heavy silver chain around her neck as she hung from the
roof of the chapel. That was how she had died.

“
Avery!” I closed the
space between us and placed my hands against his head, forcing him
to look at me. It was a few moments before he focussed on
me.

“
I’m right here, Avery.
Not in some coffin. It was just a dream. That isn’t going to happen
to me, okay?”

He stared long and hard at
me, his face still blank. Then he nodded. To my surprise he hugged
me, lifting me off my feet so his head was resting against
mine.

He held me like that for a
few moments, tremors racing through him. He held me so close his
lips almost touched my cheek. I felt heat between us. I was sure he
felt it, too, because rather than pulling away as I expected him
to, his lips were moving closer to mine. The heat between us
drawing them closer.

Before our lips could
meet, he froze and then pulled away, placing me back on my feet. He
wouldn’t look at me, the emotion still playing across his face, his
thoughts flitting between the image of me lying in a coffin and
Luna dying slowly and painfully.

I reached for him, but he
immediately backed away and his thoughts were closed to me once
more.

“
Just sit down a minute,
Avery, and let me get you a drink or something. Some
coffee?”

He glanced at me briefly
and then sat on his desk.

“
Yes. Thank you,
Dallas.”

His face flamed with that
anguish again, and in his heightened emotional state the control he
kept over his thoughts grew lax and I heard them once
more.

Dallas and her terrible
coffee. What if I’m not able to save her?

A soft smile touched my
lips.

He thought my coffee was
terrible?

I went to place a hand
against his face, but remembering the way he had backed away from
me, I let it hover around his shoulder instead.

“
I’ll be right back with
that coffee, Avery.”

I left the room. I heard
the beep of his cell phone when I was halfway down the stairs and
assumed he was making a call to someone. All I could think of was
that moment in his arms and that heat between us that made me feel
as if I were being welded to him. I took a moment to still the
fluttering in my chest before I moved on.

I returned to find Avery
standing at the foot of the bed before a wooden box. His face was
drawn and that dread was still in his eyes. One of the swords that
usually hung above the fireplace in the drawing room was in his
hand. He sheathed the sword and placed it next to the wooden box
before he reached inside it and pulled out some silver
knives.

“
Where are you going,
Avery?”

“
I have to find a way to
stop it. I can’t just sit here and let it...”

His voice trailed away and
he just stared ahead, his face creasing in anguish.

“
But how?” I
asked.

“
There might be someone
who knows what this thing is. My maker, Auria, was the one who
summoned the chapel entity. Her—”

“
Auria? Are you crazy?
She’ll kill you after what you did!”

He faced me, his eyes dark
with confusion.

“
How do you know about
Auria?”

The breath caught in my
throat for a few seconds, but I spoke before the confusion in
Avery’s eyes could deepen.

“
The same way I’ve always
known things.”

His attention returned to
the box.

What I had told him was a
lie. It wasn’t my sixth sense that had told me about Auria, his
maker, as it usually only gave me incomplete fragments of a
picture. What I knew about Auria felt as if it had always been
there. A whisper I only had to turn to in order to hear. I knew it
all, the things she had done to him and that he had tried to kill
her. Thinking about it was like walking along a well-trodden
path—like reflecting on the memory of numerous conversations I’d
had on the matter; conversations which could only have been had
with Avery.

The revelation made me
feel as if all air had been sucked out of the room, but I had to
put it out of my mind because Avery was still intending on finding
Auria, who would surely kill him.

“
Avery, you can’t go and
find Auria.”

“
She’s not the one I need
to find. Her son Arnaldo is. I’m meeting another vampire who may be
able to tell me where I can find him.”

“
I have to go with
you.”

“
No!” he said a little too
loudly, turning to face me. “No. I don’t know if this person can be
trusted or what I’ll face once I get there.”

“
This guy
Alfonso—”

“
Arnaldo.”

“
Arnaldo, he won’t tell
you anything. But he’ll tell me.”

That knowledge
had
come from my sixth
sense.

Avery frowned at me. He
was silent for the longest moment, then he nodded.

“
Okay,” he
said.

He stared at me for a few
seconds and I could not decipher anything from his expression or
his mind, which was shut tight against me once more.

I moved to him with the
cup of coffee.

“
It’s going to be light
soon, so we’ll go and meet this guy at dusk. Now drink your
coffee.”

He nodded and took the cup
of coffee from me. He stared at it for a few seconds, a faint, wry
smile on his lips. It disappeared as despair welled up in his eyes
once again. He sat down on the bed and drank the coffee, not
uttering a word of complaint about how terrible it was.

He didn’t protest when I
again slept in his room that day. Jessica’s death still weighed
heavily on me and I did not want to be alone. I guessed he didn’t
either. When I fell asleep the dream was waiting for me.

Akan

The rest of that long,
brooding day saw Akan either pacing in the compound outside his
home or in the woods beyond the walled village, gazing up at the
benevolent screening of tree branches above, dread’s soulless
caress upon him.

In the reverent silence
that sometimes settled on the woods at that hour, he thought about
the child alone in the temple but for the sombre attendants, her
smile when he presented her with the wooden toy. He also thought of
the bravery she had shown in refusing the sacrifice of fifty
maidens.

He knew there was no way
she would be able to survive the ekniwa.

The ekniwa was a sacred
ritual which allowed men to enter a trance-like state where they
could walk between the world of the living and the underworld and
commune with hideous beasts known as the vacoma. The knowledge
gained from this ritual had completely changed the lives of the
Enwa. A bedraggled community of hunter gatherers vulnerable to
illness and attacks from other tribes, they became prosperous
within just a few short years with knowledge of the future, of
medicines, new ways of farming and of how to build sturdier homes
that were better able to withstand the elements. The most
surprising thing the Enwa learned from the vacoma was how to find
metals like gold and copper they never even knew
existed.

However, the price the
Enwa paid for their prosperity came at a price. The beings of the
underworld, although prone to falsehoods and trickery, had related
one message each time the ekniwa was performed. The sky gods were
angry with the Enwa for daring to seek out the vacoma. They would
allow the Enwa to be prosperous for a time, but then would come
days and nights of utter darkness in which death would sweep
through the village to claim the souls of its inhabitants. But the
Enwa believed they could be saved. One of the deities they
worshipped, the goddess of the moon, was the keeper of time. They
had been told the deity would take on human form and spend most of
her mortal life where the Enwa village was situated. But no one
knew when she would take on human form, or even if it would occur
before the Enwa were destroyed. So until Mutata returned with the
false goddess the Enwa had lived surrounded by wealth and
abundance, but with the cruel heel of that prophecy forever pressed
against their necks, their monthly sacrifices a desperate call to
the gods to spare them.

When Akan got to his home,
he found his wife, Rutia, a tall, big boned woman, with slanted
golden brown eyes, kept watching him. Whenever he met her gaze, she
wandered away. He sighed. That woman was meddlesome at best and
could read him as well as a skilled tracker could read a trail
others would have thought long gone cold. She knew he was planning
something. Thankfully she could have no way of knowing what it was
or of how to disrupt his plans.

At sunset Akan made his
way back to the temple wearing a robe over his kilt. One of the
reasons he wore the robe was to spare the child the sight of his
scars. It was also so he would be spared that anguished look of
perceived pain that passed her face whenever her eyes came to rest
on them. The night lay close and heavy and the streets were alive
with the carnival atmosphere that had descended on the village
since Mutata returned with the child goddess a week ago, the
sacrificial stone having lain empty for that month. Torches mounted
on wooden posts lit the village in an almost hellish light. Akan’s
heart was heavy, the two-headed snake trembling within his
chest.

The mood inside the temple
was subdued compared to the carnival atmosphere on the streets.
Akan noticed most of the men gathered avoided looking at the child
lit in the dazzling glare of honeyed light cast by the torches
surrounding the altar. The shadows that had been pushed to the
edges of the temple were deeper now night had fallen. All the
attendants were gathered like numerous messengers of death beneath
the scouring gazes of the effigies of the sky gods. No one enjoyed
the ekniwa—only Mutata, who sat with a serene smile on his lips
when Akan entered, his eyes alive with malice. Akan did not fail to
notice the smile that lit up the child’s face when she saw Akan. He
merely kneeled before her. The snake in his chest tightened around
his heart when he noticed the toy he had given her was still in her
hands.

The ritual began and Akan
prepared the sacred potion to the sound of songs sung by the
attendants, asking for the blessings of the gods and that they take
away their wrath from the Enwa. Unlike earlier in the day, the
child’s eyes were not glazed over with boredom, but remained on
Akan. That smile, the one that sought his approval, on her lips.
Akan’s stomach was in knots and his hands, always steady in the
heat of battle, trembled like that of an old man’s. Mutata’s eyes
kept returning to Akan, but his stance was relaxed. Whatever favour
the child had shown Akan, and that moment of assertion which
prevented the slaughter of fifty maidens, would cease to matter,
probably in just a matter of days. Then he would no doubt go and
find another to be his false goddess.

The moment had come for
Akan to recite the last prayer over the sacred potion and present
it to the goddess. He moved forward and picked up the small bowl,
which was filled to the brim with the dark, thick liquid. His voice
was shaky as he said the prayer, the strong smoky incense that hung
in the temple like lost spirits, making him feel lightheaded. All
the while the child sat only a few feet away, her small golden
brown hands curled around the toy, her gaze on Akan, a smile never
far away.