Nameless: The Darkness Comes (26 page)

Chapter Forty-Nine

It hurt me to see the ones I loved damaged like this. Seth chased away, Reed Taylor broken, Mouth angry and helpless. All of these people, brought together involuntarily because they cared about me in one way or another. Each, in their own way, only wanted to help.

“Luna,” Mouth said, and he sounded worried.
“Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking?”

I reached for his hand, smiled.
I ran my fingers down his cheek. “Thank you for everything. I hope you know how special you are to me.”

“Luna,” he said warningly, but I had already turned
away. “Reed Taylor, I…”

There wasn’t anything more I could say.
His gorgeous greens that had gone frightened and worried and were now narrowed with resolve. He was perfect. He was my everything. How can you explain that to someone?

“I love you,” I said simply,
and then turned to the Tiptoe Shadow. “Demon,” I screamed, and spread my arms wide. “Taste the Mark. I invite you in.”

“Luna, no
,” Reed Taylor shouted, but the swirling, crashing noise of wind and thunder drowned everything out. It ripped at my clothes, tore at my hair. I squeezed my eyes closed.

“
The Mark,” shrieked the Tiptoe Shadow. His voice was horrifyingly close to my ear, and I gasped. “She’s mine.” I felt the long fingers disengage themselves from my neck.

I couldn’t take it any longer. I was dangerously close to losing my nerve.
“Do it. Do it now,” I screamed, and glared at the shadow. His long tongue lolled out of his face, licked his chops. It was long enough to wrap all the way around his head.

“With pleasure,” he rasped, and his fingers spread, plunging firmly into
the Mark.

I shrieked, lau
nched up onto the balls of my feet by the pressure and the pain. My eyes were wide, wild, and I couldn’t control my arms, my legs, my heart. I couldn’t close my mouth or stop the sounds coming out of my throat.

“
Mmm,” moaned the shadow and drove his hand in deeper. I felt him push into my brain, into my lungs. His darkness flowed through my veins, forcing my blood to cling to the walls of my arteries in horror and self-preservation.

Reed and Mouth both shout
ed, waving their arms and trying to get my attention. I saw Reed Taylor try to wrench himself free of the shadow’s hand, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t move. All that existed was agony and the hatred that coursed through me. Reed Taylor had been right: it was hatred the Tiptoe Shadow thought of as love.

The wind hissed and roared, filling my ears as the demon’s thoughts filled my head.
I saw myself as a little girl, tasted my own fear. It tasted just
right,
tasted so
good…

I fought to keep myself at the surface.
I couldn’t go through all of this and have the demon divert me from my purpose. Demons lie, don’t they? Twist things and make things seem different from what they really are. Panting, I battled with my trembling hand, struggled to slip it inside my pocket and pull out my folding knife. I flicked it open with my thumb, realizing dully that the crazy voice in the wind I kept hearing was my own.

Your father had tried to kill himself, oh yes, but,
mmm
, it didn’t work, you see. He didn’t know. Didn’t know the secret. Didn’t know there must be
love
and
want
and that
desire
, but more than that, there must be blood.

Blood.

Blood,
the invisible presence had repeatedly told me that day at work. I’d drawn that extra vial of blood, slid it into my pocket…but what was I supposed to do with it? I remembered the look on Mouth’s face when he realized what I held. His anger when he exploded the vial. So angry. Far
too
angry. How could that small vial possibly affect him?

I’ll show you, Luna You.
Mmm,
I’ll show you why.

I didn’t want to see, but I did.
The images poured into my brain and twisted my stomach. Oh no.

Oh yes.
So close. And now,
mmm
, it is too late.

The knife stopped inches from the side of my neck.
So even if I do this, even if I kill myself right here, right now…

I won’t,
mmm,
go with you. I’ll move on to New You, and other puppets. Oh, they will be so sad. Putting you in the dirt where things will grow on your skin. I’ll creep behind them and run my fingers down their spines. Forever.

Despair.
Anguish and hopelessness flooded me. If I had managed to take you with me, I thought, using the blood…

You would have destroyed everybody in the line under me, yes
, Luna You. And he loves you.

I dragged my eyes to meet
Mouth’s. His gaze was serenity in the chaos, his robes whipping around his wispy frame. The sorrow in his eyes surpassed anything I had ever seen. He saw my realization and the corner of his mouth quirked slightly.

The knife shook in my hand. I heard Reed Taylor scream my name over the wind and rage, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from
Mouth’s.

The Tip
toe Shadow
tsked
inside of my brain. So fickle, girl. Never saw him when you were young. Never saw him when you were older. Never saw him when he stood before you, telling you what he was and how he felt. And now,
mmm?

The demon scraped his long nails over my soul. The layers peeled, split, were torn and shoved aside l
ike pieces of sliced flesh. I saw my fingernails blacken as he ran underneath them.

The demon’s high giggle made my back arch in disgust.
I saw my father thrashing, kicking at the end of his rope. The demon splayed his final thoughts before me. Realization that the demon would merely leave him and float away, that it wouldn’t be taken down like he had hoped, merely slowed down for a while. It would end here, his children orphans, his daughter to be tormented by the being who now grasped him by the hair. His death was for nothing. All of the torture, the second-guessing. Seth’s anger, my loneliness. He had died thinking he was saving us, but he didn’t know about the blood. I had nearly left Lydia the same destitute legacy my father left me.

The knife was pulled from my hand.
I hardly felt it leave my fingers.

I…I’ve made a terrible mistake,
I thought.

The demon laughed.
Your father said the very same thing. But you belong to me now.

He forced his way into my soul utterly, and it was more than I could take.
The bombardment of pain, the ugly memories and thoughts and whims that flooded my being. The Tracing, it burned, it scorched, it ached and hungered for the filthy soul screaming to feed it. By now I was screaming again, too. Then the darkness became too heavy for me. It covered my eyes and my nose and filled my mouth. It became everything.

Chapter Fifty

I opened my eyes and gasped.
The stabbing between my shoulder blades was too much to take. Every nerve was raw, a silver blade raked down each centimeter of skin. It felt right somehow, like hitting somebody on the head and killing them felt right, like running your car into a retaining wall felt right.

“Let me die
, let me die, let me die,” I screamed. I writhed on the floor, trying to cover my head and curl my body into a protective ball.

“I have you
,” Reed Taylor shouted to me over the noise. Wind roared and howled. No, not wind. The Tiptoe Shadow. The shadow and somebody else.

Mouth.

My eyes rolled up in my head. Reed Taylor gently shook me.

“Luna, stick with me.
Mouth managed to pull most of Tiptoe out of you, but it won’t last long. I have to tell you something, okay? Okay?”

My lips pulled back from my teeth and my body
convulsed from the agony, but I struggled to meet his gaze, blinked.

He tried to smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“Baby, I’m sorry. About everything. All of it. But I have to tell you something very important. Can you remember?”

I was trembling so hard that my body kept cracking against the floor. Reed Taylor gathered me as closely as he could.

“Lydia’s safe with a friend of mine. I left a message on your phone telling you where to find her. Cecilia and I,” he said, nodding his head toward her body in back of the house, “we got high together. The needles are in the other room. Tell the police I called you, and when they come, you need to show them everything. Understand?”

I was blacking out again.
He shook me, took my face in his hands and kissed my mouth desperately.

“Listen
. Show them the needles. Show them
our
marks. They’ll give Lydia back. Cecilia’s unfit. I’m sorry I got her back into it, but I did it for you. You and Seth and Lydia.”

My eyes cleared.
I could almost focus them on his beautiful face.

“I didn’t know how else to help. It was the only thing I could think of to do.”

He hugged me, rubbed his scruffy chin in my hair. “I love you,” he said. He kissed my face again and again. “I do. I see what you see, and you’re braver than I ever could have been. But maybe I can stop it.”

He set me down gently, looked at me with the same eyes that made me fall in love with him.

“Goodbye, Luna.”

His face hardened
, and he stood up. I was still jerking on the floor, my jaws clenched together so I didn’t scream the house down, didn’t bite my tongue in two, didn’t start shrieking out the vile visions the demon flooded my memory with.

Reed Taylor put his hand on
Mouth’s shoulder. The demon turned and they exchanged a look. It was a look that terrified me. I tried to reach out to them, but my body wouldn’t respond.

Reed Taylor
pulled a hypodermic needle from his pocket. It was full to the brim. Mouth nodded his head once and flicked his eyes in my direction. He raised his arms to the sky, tipped his head back, and screamed something into the wind. The pressure on the Tracing immediately deepened.

The
Tiptoe Shadow growled and snapped at Mouth with razor teeth. Mouth didn’t budge, but stood his ground, still chanting his indiscernible words. Reed Taylor bowed his head and injected himself with the needle.

There was a tearing, ripping sensation on my back.
I shrieked, flailing my arms as I tried desperately to flip onto my side, keeping my shredded back and the demon’s protruding hand from touching the floor. And then suddenly the pain was gone.

The pain. The itching feeling.
The open, broken part of my soul that had been the demonic Tracing. It was closed for the first time in months. I covered my face and breathed a sigh of relief. The Mark was gone.

“Wrong
,” squealed the Tiptoe Shadow. It skittered on broken little legs. “Wrong puppet. Wrong puppet!”

Another voice, deep, yelling in a way that made my stomach twist.
Reed Taylor, driven to his knees. The shadow’s long arm twisted out of his back. It emerged from the Mark that, until just now, I had been wearing. Mouth had somehow used his power to transfer my burden to Reed Taylor.

“No!” I scrambled to
Reed Taylor, ran my fingers though his hair, examined the bloody holes in his back. The Tiptoe Shadow’s pointed fingers fit perfectly. I glared at Mouth. “No, no. How could you do this?”

“Step back,”
he said, and wrapped his dark hand around my wrist. He couldn’t get a grip. I pulled Reed Taylor into my lap and rocked him back and forth. His eyes were already pinpricks, his breathing shallow.

“Luna!” Mouth said loudly, and I looked up at him though my tears. His eyes were agonized.
“You have to let him do this.”

“Do what?”

My brain wasn’t working right. I saw Reed Taylor’s agony, saw him being overwhelmed by not only the demon but the Mark. Darkness flowed out of the many holes in his arms. The Tiptoe Shadow thrashed, unable to pull itself away from the temptation of the Tracing, feeding on pain and sorrow in a frenzy even as it felt Reed Taylor’s body dying around it.

“Luna!”
Mouth’s voice had an edge of desperation that pulled me out of my cloudiness. “He’s doing it for you! You have to let him make this sacrifice.”

I didn’t have words.
I simply wailed.

“Stupid puppet! Stupid
, broken puppet!” The Tiptoe Shadow spun on the ground like a top. His eyes found me. “Back to my Luna doll,” he trilled, and Mouth grabbed my hand.

“Come with me
. Now,” he commanded and tried to pull me from Reed Taylor’s dying body. I shook my head, but the demon bent down until we were nose to nose.

“Blood, Luna. Blood.”

“Blood? But…”

“We don’t have time
. You need to trust me.”

I looked into his eyes. Wiped my face with my sleeve,
staggered to my feet, and ran after him. We ran past Cecilia, through the room with my father’s corpse and into a back room. Several used needles were strewn on the floor. The room was dirty and grungy, and the headless demons who were trying unsuccessfully to grasp the needles only made it worse.

“Take one,” Mouth said. His voice was loud in the relative silence of the room.
“You need to collect Reed’s blood while he’s still joined with the demon.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

My knee-jerk defiance took hold.
“I don’t
have
to do anything! I just watched somebody I love kill himself, and now you want me to stick needles into his corpse and—“

“
You can’t take his blood as a corpse. He has to be alive. It’s very specific. We have to contain the shadow, and the only way to do that is to take a piece of him, brimming with life, and inject it back into the host body after its death.”

“You mean siphon his blood while he’s still living, with the shadow inside, and then sit around waiting for Reed Taylor to die?”

“Yes.”

“And then inject the shadow back into him?”

“Yes.”             

“I can’t do it
. It’s too horrible.”

“Reed did this
to save you from that thing, and you’re just going to go all helpless when it counts? You can kill the shadow, Luna. Otherwise he’ll just come for you, and what was it all for?”

Mouth, radiant in his fury.
Robes flowing around him like torrential rains, like licks of flame. His eyes blazed fire. I heard the Tiptoe Shadow squalling in the other room, spitting and cursing and feasting on the soul of a beautiful, lonely, green-eyed man who traded himself for me.

I bent down, picked up a needle.

“The Tiptoe shadow showed me, Mouth. What will happen to you if I do this.”

Mouth sighed, looked away.
“I had hopes,” he said finally. He reached out for my hand, and this time is was rock solid. “Stay with me while I fade?”

I took his hand, gripped it hard.
“Absolutely.”

We ran back to Reed Taylor. He was nearly
still. I bent beside him, searched for his vein. Thick scar tissue, marks to work around.

“Reminds me of when we first met,” I whispered to him and withdrew the blood. It wasn’t coming out as fast as I’d hoped.

The Tiptoe Shadow eyed me. “What, what? What is that, dolly? What do you have there?”

I hid the needle behind my back like a child.
“Nothing.” I peered past him at Reed Taylor, who had stopped moving completely. I bit my tongue to keep myself from sobbing.

“Not yet,” whispered Mouth.
He wrapped his arms around me, and I could actually feel them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Luna.”

Me too. It killed me to see Reed Tayl
or there, dying all alone. It killed me that he was doing this because he loved me. And it killed me to think that soon I’d lose Mouth, too.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said, turning to
the demon. “I can’t lose both of you. Would it really be so bad if the Tiptoe Shadow stayed?”

Mouth wiped the tears from my face.
“You’re stronger than this. You’d hate yourself for it in the future. And you’d hate me.”

I shook my head. “I’d never
—”

Suddenly Mouth flung me away. I landed hard on my back, the needle bouncing out of my grip and spinning on the floor.
My skull hit the floor with a loud crack.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, and stared up at Mouth. The
Tiptoe Shadow had disengaged from Reed Taylor’s back and was pacing back and forth like a tiger where I had just been standing. I hadn’t even heard him move.

“You can’t,
mmm,
defy me. You can’t deny me. Girl. Girl! Toys are meant to be broken.”

Quick as a snake and just as sinuous, he flowed in my direction.
I grabbed the needle and darted away.

“Uninvited
,” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

The demon laughed.
“Abra Cadabra. Open Sesame. Just words.”

He lunged again, and Mouth stepped in
front of him, spitting out phrases I didn’t understand.

The Tip
toe Shadow snarled. “You can’t deny me. I made you! I,
mmm
, own you. You are mine.”

His long arms snapped out, wrapped around Mouth and pulled him close.

“Break,”
the shadow said, and squeezed. I heard Mouth choking, struggling for breath.

“Leave him alone
,” I yelled, but the demon didn’t even look my way.

“Oh, so good. So tasty, this fear.
To,
mmm,
kill one’s own, it…” He chirped happily.

There was nothing I could do. I knew it.
I wanted to stand and scream until I couldn’t scream anymore. I wanted to pound my fists into the dark blot where the shadow’s face should be. I wanted to break every bone in its formless body for tearing my family apart, for terrorizing Seth and my father and me, for causing Reed Taylor’s death and, I could see, the eternal destruction of Mouth.

I would kill
the shadow.

Mouth was kicking his feet.
I closed my eyes briefly and zipped past them, over to Reed Taylor’s white, white body. His eyes were open and empty. I felt for his pulse, put my cheek to his mouth and felt for breathing. Nothing. He was dead. I dashed at my eyes and searched for his vein.

“I
’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered. I slid the needle into his vein carefully, carefully, even though he would never feel the pinprick. His blood was thick and red and so painfully, heartbreakingly beautiful. It was full of life and heroine and the very black essence of the Tiptoe Shadow swirling inside. Hope through death. Escape for some of us, but not all.

I injected the small vial of cold blood back into his body, the
n sat cross-legged and cradled his head in my lap.

The Tip
toe Shadow made a strangled sound and whirled around, dropping Mouth. “You! What did you do? What did you
do?”

I didn’t answer him. He gasped and railed and roiled, tried running toward me, but
fell and landed on his toothpick knees. There was a sound like splintering wood, and he screamed.

“Dolly
,” he squealed, grabbing for me with both long hands. “Puppet.” He scrabbled on the floor, mewing pitifully. I touched my forehead to Reed Taylor’s and cried.

Mouth sat beside me, barely substantial.
He looked exhausted. I slid my hand into his. It went right through.

“So this is goodb
ye,” I said. The wailing, groaning sounds of the shattering Shadow Man sounded behind me. He wasn’t worth turning around for.