Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (13 page)

I was all too aware of the fact that
this was an abomination—a demon presiding over the grave of a
righteous, God-fearing woman. But I said those words in all
sincerity over her grave. And I suppose I spoke them for myself
too, wanting to believe that Minny was right, that there was hope
and perhaps God would give me the peace I knew was forever lost to
me.

Then I watched the sun disappear
completely into the horizon and night creep into being all around
me. The thirst became overwhelming. I stood alone in the darkness
surrounding me. It wept with its many secrets and with the atrocity
it had been witness to when I slaughtered nearly every living thing
on the Foster plantation.

Then with one last look at this
peaceful spot which would be Julia’s resting place, I turned my
back on it and looked into the night. Fear touched me for the first
time. Her grave was the last thread of my humanity and now I was
looking into the unknown, a void that stretched forth for an
eternity.

But I wasn’t completely bereft. I had
only the clothing on my back and three things to hold on to. A gold
cross, and a child’s heartbeat which I had somehow heard amidst the
blood roar which had consumed me. That had to be proof of God’s
mercy. I also had the image of the beautiful darky and those three
words.

Wait for me.

So I disappeared into the
darkness, leaving behind everything that I was
.

How do I begin to describe those years
in the wilderness? How do I describe the agony of existing in a
void where my only hope was almost certainly an illusion born out
of shadows?

I had been torn out of the
land of the living and plunged into a world of never-ending sorrow
and darkness. Darkness not only surrounded me, I
was
darkness. Fearing
the light of the sun and that of a human gaze, I spent my nights
wandering the land aimlessly, keeping to the shadows and the
anonymity of the woodlands. My mind numbed by grief, my soul dying
a long, slow, torturous death each time I left the safety of the
woods to claim the life of another.

The power to hear the thoughts of
others had been weak and fleeting in the beginning. But as the days
passed, it became stronger, assaulting my mind and senses each time
I came near humans. I remained in the shadows, but the lives of
those around me reached me in the most intimate of ways.

I not only heard the thoughts of the
mothers that were sold away from their children, I experienced it.
I experienced the violence against the helpless, the rapes and
murders. I also experienced the corrupted thoughts and triumphs of
the slaveholders who had long sold their souls when they suffocated
the voices of their conscience to trade in flesh and blood. Deep in
the woods, in its dark heart surrounded by its silent weeping
trees, I found respite from the lives of those around me. But all
too soon, I was called back to the world of the living by the need
for blood, to a world I both hated and coveted. Hated because of
its violence and injustice. Coveted because it was as surely closed
to me as the tomb I longed for.

And in this world of darkness, Avery
Wentworth ceased to exist.

Summer soon gave way to a jubilant
autumn, the trees dripping with dark gold leaves, the ground
beneath my feet showered with those radiant offerings making me
feel as if I were walking along a trail of gold. Then winter swept
the land clean of the boastful autumn, leaving it a pastoral
wasteland. I thought the Foster plantation, along with the burning
field strewn with corpses, the magnificent sneering mansion a fiery
glare against the Mississippi night sky, was long behind me. But
the victims it swallowed in a festival of flame came back to find
me. I could be moving swiftly through the ether, the winter
countryside in all its morose beauty flitting past. Then their
faces would assail me, bringing me to an abrupt halt, the frigid
slumbering plains swirling into view all around me whilst remorse
shuddered within.

The first face to find me was that of
Phillis. Her features impassive, dangerous emotion lurking behind
her eyes as she carefully glanced toward the window and the wooden
structure beyond. From then on, I always saw that face as it had
been in death with drops of blood marring her smooth brown skin,
her eyes forever drained of the emotion that had made her risk that
furtive glance toward the window.

I did not allow myself to think of the
darky girl during that first year, of that face and those
mysterious raven eyes that had captured my heart. I wandered the
land aimlessly. Alone. Treading a lonely path of despair, my
thoughts repeatedly dancing between guilt and all I had lost. The
first anniversary of Julia’s death found me miles away from the
ruins of the Foster plantation deep within anonymous woodland, my
thoughts on Auria, dark anger surging within. I now knew what evil,
real evil, was. It had stood before me glittering in jewels and a
gold gown, smiling at me with mirthless glee and cold, soulless
eyes. I now not only knew what evil was; I was evil.

I held my hands up in a sickly vapid
stream of moonlight that reached me through the dense woodland
canopy. These ghostly white hands were capable of unimaginable
strength and destruction. The faces of those terrified slaves as
they sought to escape me swam before me along with the countless
others I had slaughtered since then. There was the promise of a
legion more of these bloodied, gasping faces if what Auria had said
was true and I lived forever. That thought ran through my mind
countless times leaving a well-trodden path of pain and despair. I
was evil. Evil. The devil incarnate.

Evil
.

The woodland abruptly disappeared,
almost as if a hand had reached into the present and snatched it
away, and I was standing in burnt orange sunlight in the ruins of
the chapel I had fled.

I spun around and she was there, her
image divided, one image staring down at the ground, the other
looking up at me, joy and tears in her eyes when she gazed upon
me.

Joy and tears.

I moved to kneel before her like a
humble pilgrim and gazed into those raven eyes, my heart soaring at
the sight of her and the promise I saw within the depths of those
eyes. I reached tentatively for her face but could not touch her.
Her full sensuous lips curved into a smile but her eyes still
shimmered with tears. There was urgency in her words when she
communicated with me again.

I’m coming. Wait for me.
Wait for me.

I was alone once more in the
woodlands.

She was real. She had to
be.
I’m coming
,
she had said.
Wait for
me
. I didn’t even know what this being was
or why she had come to me. All I knew was that she was powerful and
that she meant salvation. All I had to do was wait. Wait and she
would find me. All I had to do was wait.

***

So I waited. The years mounted but I
did not count them, for time meant nothing in this wilderness or in
the life of an immortal. Night after night I was left with a corpse
in my arms, and with each kill my devastation increased until I
decided I would simply stop. I would not give in to the urge to
kill.

So I left my daily grave and kept to
the woods, trying to ignore the call for blood and
death.

The first night it was as if war
fought within my flesh. But I continued to resist the evil, and
when morning came, I went to ground feeling only marginally
triumphant that I had fought the demon that thirsted for blood and
won, for there was a field of dead slaves, and many more deaths, I
could never take back.

That evening I awoke long past dusk.
My limbs felt sluggish and I was moving much slower than normal,
but I still felt I could resist the blood. I went to ground earlier
than usual, long before the sun was due to return and breathe life
over the land.

A few nights later, and I could not
call the ether to me. Instead of discouraging me, it gave me hope.
I was in physical pain constantly, the same pain I felt when
exposed to the sun, but I welcomed it. Perhaps it meant the
supernatural power was leaving my body and I would become a man
again. Although I was weak, I felt overjoyed by this thought. I
looked out over empty grassland for miles around, sweet joy filling
my soul. A single tree was all that blighted the clean emptiness
around me, the sky above a sultry mix of violets and deep blues,
the waning moon almost hidden. I sat back against the lone tree,
letting my eyes flutter shut for a few moments. When I opened them
again, Onyx was before me wearing the gown Julia was wearing that
fateful evening.

Avery, Avery.

I sprung to my feet and pressed myself
against the tree. She moved closer until we were almost touching,
concern in her eyes.

Surely you know my
voice,
she beseeched.

She reached a hand to my face and I
squeezed my eyes shut. It was a few moments before I could open
them again.

I was alone in the grasslands. There
was nothing at all to suggest Onyx had actually been there, and no
one else’s scent. I sank to my knees in the dirt. The pain was
almost unbearable now, but I was determined I would not kill. I
went to ground not long after, having to dig a hole for myself. It
was not deep, barely three feet, and I lay stretched out in it. I
was able to use my telekinetic power to move the dirt over myself
to provide a blanket of soil, and slept a restless, fitful sleep,
often waking to see Auria’s corpse in my arms as Julia’s had been
the day I had slept with her in her grave.

A week and a half after I decided not
to kill, I knew I had to have blood. I did not care if denying
myself blood killed me, but I could no longer endure the pain or
the maddening hunger. Weak and blind to everything but the search
for a victim, I crawled through dark woodland until thin wisps of
human minds in sleep reached me. I kept on until I saw the outline
of a farm through the trees. I tried to get to my feet, but was
pulled down by the weight of my weakened body. On my knees, I
reached out to the sleeping minds within the farmhouse, too weak to
know whether or not any of them heard and would answer my
call.

I thought I would have to crawl to the
house and find another way to lure someone out of it, when I heard
the sound of bare feet treading carefully in the undergrowth.
Invigorated by the scent of warm human blood drifting through the
air toward me, I pulled myself to my feet, the pulsing pain driving
me forward in anticipation of the feast I had denied myself for
over a week. Then a little girl in a long white nightgown appeared
out of the gloom. She was no more than nine years old and had red
hair, which was tied up in two bunches. She stood in the dark
woodland gazing up at me and I felt her fear through the crimson
mist that had overwhelmed me.

Don’t be afraid—you’re
safe
, I commanded.

Her fear evaporated.

I had never murdered a child before,
and I wanted to send her back. But it was proving a struggle to
stop myself from lunging at her as the demon I had denied for over
a week set my limbs aflame. What it craved was within reach now,
and there could be no denying it. I desperately searched the
child’s thoughts, already feeling the crimson mist taking over.
Thankfully, a pleasant memory was not far from her mind, one of her
slave, Cassie, a woman she loved much more than her own mother. She
smiled in the daze I had induced, thinking about Cassie, a woman
she wasn’t even sure liked her at times.

“
She does love you,” I
said.

It was a fight to hold out against the
crimson mist long enough to make sure her mind was numb to pain. I
gathered her tiny body to me and bit into her pale, fragile neck.
At first she cried out as panic overrode the control I had over her
mind, but then she fell silent. The roar of the crimson tide
overwhelmed me, throwing me out into deepening waves of mindless
euphoria.

Then there was just the dead child in
my arms.

I took her home and placed her at the
door of the farmhouse where the first person to find her was bound
to be Cassie, the slave that had become a surrogate mother. There
were tears sliding down my cheeks, but they were the proverbial
crocodile tears because her blood was still singing through me and
I wanted more.

Strangely enough, I was reluctant to
leave her alone in the cold. I touched her face. She had been so
young, and some of her memories came back to me of the affection
she used to lavish on Cassie. She was always finding little gifts
for her—sometimes a flower, or she would save the last of her
treats and they were always for Cassie.

In that moment, the weight of all that
had been taken away from me almost crushed me. I had been robbed of
so much. Of the chance to bear children of my own and the second
heartbeat Onyx had spoken of came back to taunt me as vicious and
merciless as she had been in life. Would my little girl have had
Julia’s eyes? Her gentle courage and the ability to empathise?
Would my daughter have had the insight to look at an evil like
slavery, and the Negroes themselves, and see it for what it was?
All of these things tormented me because I would never know.
Placing my fingers over the dead girl’s eyelids, I tenderly closed
her eyes and fled.