Hotblood (14 page)

“
I’m going to see if Ethel needs help,” I said as I pushed past my dad, hurrying out of the building before I destroyed something else beautiful. I meant to run to the house but my feet wouldn’t listen and instead I ran as far and as fast as I could through the woods. I ignored my heart pounding in my chest the way I ignored the blood in all the small creatures that darted overhead or in the undergrowth around me.

I hit a wall. One second I’d been running through the trees, leaping over fallen logs and tangled underbrush until I crashed into the wall of trees growing together in an unbroken line. I jumped to my feet and ran along the wall, my fingers skimming the bark’s smooth surface as I ran, circling my father’s world. As I let my feet push me along my mind spun while my lungs began to burn. I thought about Devlin, about Snowy, the new boy Lewis and the Nether, about who I was now, and who I’d been before. There were so many questions and the only answer seemed to be to keep running until I outpaced them all.

That night we roasted sausage and apples over a fire fed by the beautiful piano. I felt sad watching flames lick up the remnants. My life had been like a beautiful, unplayed piano, the potential there for a glorious life full of color and happiness. It was done now. My life was ahead of me and maybe I could sift through the ashes and build something new, something better. I had a Hotblood soul and Nether blood, but at least my life was mine.

“
Dad?” I took a deep breath and said it before I could change my mind. “Why did Devlin take my soul?” My words floated on the silence for a long time.

“
I wish I knew.”

“
Did he just do it for fun? Was it an accident?” That made a certain kind of sense, although I couldn’t remember a time when he’d done something unintentionally.

“
Your brother? No. He told me it was a difficult necessity. He thought he was saving the world.” He grimaced and shook his head. “It was an impossible situation. After he had your soul, I couldn’t do anything to force him that wouldn’t hurt you more. The odds of your surviving one year were very slight. I’ll say this for him, he kept you alive.”

I stared at him. “How did he do it?”

My dad looked up into the night sky, studying things that only he could see. “The two of you share the same blood. You’re both Hybrids of Cool and Wild with the Netherkind intensifying all of your abilities and giving you power over the soul. He could take your soul because he shared the bond of common blood. It makes me sick to think of it, but historically it isn’t unusual. Even soul mates at times sacrifice each other for their personal gain. If Devlin had been selfish, that would explain it, but of course, he wasn’t. He thought he was doing what was right.” He looked into the distance and as he spoke I had to lean closer to catch his words. “Your mother couldn’t stand with me against him and so I had to leave. I couldn’t stay with her while opposing her. It was difficult enough to leave her, but you…” He looked up at me with his gaze intensifying, showing the turbulence inside of him, his eyes like crashing waves. “For ten years I waited for the phone call that would tell me you were dead.” There was silence while I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and he poured himself another glass. “I’ve searched but no one can tell me how he took your soul and how he kept you alive.” His words were clipped, empty, but I could feel the emotion pouring out of him. He was so angry, and helpless with a depth I didn’t want to understand. I stumbled backwards, and knocked over the chair trying to get away from that horrible anguish.

“
Dariana,” he said softly with a look on his face that I didn’t want to see. I turned from him and ran through the garden, the light from the stars enough to show my way.

I ran through the night, letting the pain push me on. When I’d run far enough, I stopped at a tree and scrambled up. At the top I clung to the branch, rocked by the wind until I could nearly think straight. My dad left because Devlin took my life when he took my soul. It hurt that my father had left me, but it would have been worse if he’d been like my mother. I only needed one parent who loved my brother so much more than me.

Devlin had kept my world bearable but only barely. My dad wasn’t uptight; he wasn’t the kind of person who had a lot of unrealistic expectations of people. Apparently, taking my soul was something he couldn’t forgive. Could I? The tears running down my cheeks were hot, angry, frustrated tears that voiced the part inside of me that was sorry Devlin was dead because I couldn’t hurt him the way he’d hurt me. I gasped, shocked when I realized that I felt that. It was wrong; he was my brother, and I loved him. A voice whispered back, if it was so wrong to think something like that, how much worse was it for him to do it?

I held onto the branch, feeling the wood beneath my hands, remembered the scent of the Netherkind and the warmth of Lewis’s eyes. I had been lost in a place without life or color, but now, it was as though everything were intense, explosion after explosion of sight, sound, smell, that made life real, beautiful, and worth living. It wasn’t the fury; it was being alive. Whatever Devlin had done, for whatever reason, I was alive now.

I clung to the tree, threw my head back, and tried to get lost in the sound of leaves rushing around me in the wind. I didn’t think, I felt, became part of the night, the tree, the rustling leaves and the wind, feeling something inside of me expand that pushed away the anger, the frustrated questions leaving me with a taste of peace. I followed it, listening to the stars, the sound of the night until the wind calmed and I swayed, gently rocked by my dad’s woods.

5 Hunter and Hunted

Weeks passed and the dreams and memories came, some sharp, some sweet until I felt like I had a real history with the child in color and the young girl in black and white. It took time and knitting but eventually they were reconciled with the fury and I was mostly left with myself. My dreams changed over time, mostly fuzzy with clear bright shots of Lewis. The dreams left me feeling slightly giddy and odd when I woke up, but after a few hours, I was where I was, centered as I helped Ethel or watched my dad paint. I spent a lot of time on my own running through the woods in my bare feet leaving my hair loose to tangle in the wind.

Ethel said I looked like a wild animal when I came in, windblown from climbing trees or swimming in the lake. Days ran into weeks, my hair growing longer. Every morning I put on a dress richly imbued with color that I’d never seen before. When I asked, Ethel told me they were old clothes from the trunks in the attic and did I want to go collect eggs and that was that. It was a slight disappointment that they came from somewhere instead of springing up magically. Everything felt like magic, the colors so impossibly beautiful they couldn’t belong to anything called ordinary. As I grew accustomed to the intensity of emotion and sensations that barraged me every once in awhile, I’d be caught up all over again by something, a butterfly, the texture of moss under my feet, and I’d feel astonished all over again. My dad’s world was beautiful. I began to wonder why he’d left it to live in Sanders in the first place.

One night, I dreamed I stood with a grown-up Devlin on the edge of a cliff, watching the world crumble around us. I turned to him, but his face changed, shifted until it was the face of the young man with warm eyes. Lewis. He turned away, and I followed his gaze to the thick darkness that waited behind us. He took a step into the darkness. Even as I reached for him he was gone. The ground beneath my feet dissolved into mist and I was left falling into a darkness that felt alive, swallowing me whole. The Nether’s scream beat through my head filling me with more terror than my mind could cope with. I struggled to escape, but there was nowhere to go; I couldn’t hide from the scream that went on and on and on.

I sat up in my bed and tried to push away the scream that still echoed in my mind. My dad stood by the window staring out into the night. I took a deep breath, holding my hand to my chest. That dream was worse than spirit walking. I’d felt so much anxiety; even now I couldn’t stop my heart from pounding. I tried to slow my breathing down but another scream made me flinch, then I was out of my bed to stand beside my father. I couldn’t see anything but darkness before he shut the window and drew the curtains. He gently led me back to my bed.

“
Is that real? Is it out there?” I sat on my bed and pulled my knees against my body shivering uncontrollably.

“
Yes, it’s real. Are you going to be all right by yourself?”

I looked up at my dad. “By myself?”

“
I’m going to meet it.” He was going to go out and say hello while he left me here alone?

“
No. Are you crazy? You can’t go by yourself to face that monster. Something bad will happen. It scares you, and if something happened to you and it was my fault I’d never be able to live with that. I have enough to live with!”

He held up his hand and I realized how loud I’d gotten. “I won’t be alone. I have friendly neighbors.”

“
If it’s here for me, what can you do?” My heart pounded double time, but I gave him my strongest glare.

He gave me a smile that showed a lot of teeth that looked slightly silver in the moonlight. It must have been the moonlight. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

“
Dad, you can’t leave me here alone.”

He squeezed my hand. “You’re going to be safe. Everything will turn out…”

I shook my head feeling desperate to make him understand something I could hardly understand myself. “You said we are the choices that we make, right? Well, I choose to face my monsters and if someone’s going to pay for my having a soul, it’s going to be me.” It didn’t make sense, but I felt protective of my father. It was impossible to think of him leaving me safely tucked in bed while he faced my nightmares.

He gave me a long look then narrowed his eyes. I was sure he would argue my fears away, but instead he just nodded slowly. “Very well, but you must not speak to it or do anything at all unless I instruct you to. Is that clear?”

“
All right. I’ll be there to make sure you don’t pay for my crimes.”

He laughed and put his hand on my head to ruffle my hair. It was such a natural movement, one he’d done hundreds of times when I was a little girl, one that reminded me how much things had changed.

In a few moments, we were in the dark hall. “Don’t we need a light?” I asked.

“
No. Keep close to me.”

I nodded but he couldn’t see me in the dark. I kept a hand on his shirt, mostly to remind myself not to bolt back to my room. I felt very small and delicate creeping down the stairs holding onto my father’s shirt tails. Walking out into the dark woods was my choice. What was wrong with me?

Ethel waited at the front door; her low greeting reminding me that he’d said he had neighbors. Once outside we moved quickly down the gravel road. I was out of breath by the time we reached the barrier that surrounded my dad’s compound. The road was the only way in and out. Under the dim light of the moon, I could make out more people joining us as we jogged farther away from the house. I felt alarmed as more and more dark figures joined us. If something went terribly wrong and someone got hurt, I would be responsible. I bit my lip trying to concentrate. I couldn’t let things go wrong.

I stumbled as we left the road and climbed over the bank on the left then slid through the moonless woods. I tripped occasionally, but I held tight to my dad’s shirt and kept on my feet. I should have felt tired but as we got closer, I thought I could sense darkness thicker than the woods ahead of me, a darkness that made me forget my exhaustion. I tripped less when I focused on the darkness that called to me. My father stopped abruptly and someone lit a torch. In a moment the forest was ablaze. I looked around me and saw a multitude of cloaked figures with torches above their shadowy faces. I wondered what kind of neighbors my dad had but there was a scream and the darkness moved towards us. The thick shadow encroached on the torchlight, dimming it as it came closer.

The darkness had taken on the shape I remembered from my dream but the horse creature was looking more catlike the way it was crouched. It lifted a hoof…no, my dad was right, those were definitely claws. It pulled back its lips and screamed. Its red eyes met mine and it knew me. I could see the awareness in those eyes as it stared through me. I was shaking so hard my legs collapsed, and I knelt there in the woods, trying to hold onto myself. Those eyes would have been unnerving enough but what really undid me was the scent of the Nether above it. I’d never smelled anything like that. It was a combination of darkness and death; it was everything that had pulled me into the hunt, only multiplied a million times. It called, so sweet to me, that scent. I dug my hands into the loose debris on the forest floor, trying to smell something, anything, besides the Nether. I took a deep breath and the smell of dirt, of rotting leaves somehow only enhanced his smell. He was Autumn; he was death.

I felt something next to me and turned my head. I gasped as the enormous dog that didn’t belong to this world turned its head and looked back at me. The glowing ruby red eyes returned to the other creature as though I wasn’t of much interest to the hound. I looked around and saw that there were others like it, only smaller and darker than the hound next to me whose coat was the color of mottled silver. My father’s warning about his bloodhounds hadn’t been nearly strong enough. I would have to be sure not to skewer myself on a stick or something. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. This time the smell of the hound dampened the effect the Nether’s scent had on me.

The figure cloaked in darkness spoke and his voice was like everything beautiful I’d ever known. It hurt me to hear it. I looked up as the sounds penetrated my cloudy brain. The words meant nothing to me, but by the tone, he found something about all of us darkly amusing. For a moment I thought he would laugh. I stared at him, the figure taking on a more definite shape as my father walked up to it. I felt my heart beat in my throat as they got closer together. My father’s hair shimmered in the torchlight as he addressed the Nether in a language I couldn’t understand. My father seemed to fill more space as he gestured and spoke, the sound of his voice like a stream, soothing, compelling.