Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) (20 page)

Betrayal.

“
I need you to come
somewhere with me, Luna,” he had said, his hand outstretched, the
sun peeking over the horizon emitting a distant peach glow and the
promise of light and life for the world beyond.

“
Where?” I had
asked.

Rage flared at my
stupidity. I had asked him—asked him—when I could easily have
broken through the flimsy mental wall he had erected and seized the
answer.

But I had asked him. I
loved him. I trusted him. All I had seen was sadness in those eyes
I had longed to gaze into for thirty long years of my mortal
life.

I had placed my hand in
his and walked willingly, utterly defenceless, into
betrayal.

And now he was
gone.

Even now, it was all I
could think of—that he was gone and may never return.

I rose to my feet,
trembling with emotion and pain from the assault I had
endured.

I would not let him do
this to me.

I rushed back into the
mansion.

I would be the one to
leave this night. Let him be the one to sit here all alone
wondering if I intended to return to him.

I staggered into the
bedroom. A coat of his hung from one of the wardrobe doors,
stopping me in my tracks. I stared at it, remembering the first
time he walked into the drawing room in his new clothes, too
crippled by those desolate years to know what to do except that he
had to find a way to reach me. Fresh tears filled my eyes at all he
had endured in the wilderness and how difficult the walk back
toward his humanity had been.

“
No,” I said aloud.
“No.”

What chance did I have if
even looking at a coat of his weakened me so?

I moved to the coat and
tore it from the wardrobe door. I tried to tear it in two before
realising, to my mortification, that I was too weak to do it. I
reached for scissors and cut it in half letting it fall to the
floor. Then I pulled the wardrobe open and emptied it of his
clothing, cutting and slashing until every single item he owned lay
strewn across the bedroom torn to shreds.

Then I packed every single
thing of mine.

It took ten trips back and
forth in my weakened state, dragging heavy cases out of the mansion
and across the field of flowers. I now stood alone at the road,
frightened, my anger slowly being suffocated by the pull in my
stomach. I looked back at the mansion. The darkness lay like a
wreath around it, caressing the oak trees. I had come to this
mansion with only the clothes on my back. So had he. We had grown
so much together, acquired so much wealth, built an empire of
riches together. Together we had ensured my family, and his, had
also amassed wealth. How could I leave it all behind?

My weakened body, the
half-healed wounds they had inflicted told me not only how, but
that I must. He had left my body weak, but I still had my mind. I
called to some human minds some distance from the mansion and woke
them. They would be here soon to take my belongings from here. I
would stay concealed in a cellar of one of their homes until
nightfall and then make my way... Where? I had nothing and no one
but Avery.

This strengthened my
resolve. It did not matter where. I just had to cross this hurdle
and then decide where I would go.

Tears streamed down my
face when I turned my back on the mansion and looked at a dark
shape on the road as it moved towards me. It was the first step to
a new life from Avery and the bondage of his love.

***

London 1922

Acidic rage had brought me
to this house, but now I was here I stood transfixed staring at the
simple, elegantly furnished room, much like the rest of the quiet,
yet grand home.

For a moment my attention
was pulled from the room and to voices below. Pain licked at me
with tongues of flame, but once more the room I was standing in—his
mother’s room—drew me away from the rage and I turned my attention
to it again.

I had never stepped foot
in this room before, yet I had the strong sense that I had been
here before. My sixth sense was shrieking its insistence of this.
Everything in this room felt familiar. I ran a finger along a
jewellery box on the dresser knowing it had mattered a great deal
to his mother. Not even Avery knew how much, yet I did.

I turned to the bed, my
skin cold, and I almost expected to see his mother laying there,
her face greasy with sweat and twisted in agony whilst others
huddled around her. The image was so clear it could have been a
memory.

How was that
possible?

Whatever the reason, being
in this house was like having a dam between me and the rage and
pain I had carried ever since leaving Avery. For the first time in
decades, I could see not only my actions clearly, but the emotions
behind them. It was as if my emotions had been a thick cloud
keeping the truth hidden from me. And the truth was I loved Avery
and he loved me wholeheartedly. Nothing else—those years when I
wondered at his seeming abandonment of me, the ambush at that
grove—none of it mattered. It also allowed me to see that something
else had been fuelling those negative emotions. The Other. It had
been keeping me from returning to him all along.

Before the shock of that
revelation could fully reverberate through me, the dam was broken
by the sound of the front door slamming shut. Waves of rage broke
over me. Rather than materialising outside to him as he hurried
away from the house, I let rage bleed through me as I listened to
her quick, light footsteps ascend the stairs. Moments later, the
bedroom door was thrown open. She rushed in, looking virginal in
white, her slender arms exposed, her brown hair pulled into a bun,
a soft smile on her lips. She was pretty, pure and sweet and this
almost made tears spring to my eyes.

A sharp gasp escaped her
when I moved out of the shadows into view. At first her eyes
widened with surprise then all the colour drained from her face.
The colour came rushing back as she blushed with anger, her mouth
curling into a sneer as she lifted her head to peer down at me,
although anguish shone still in her eyes. I gazed at her, seeing
someone very different from the sweet adoring girl Avery
saw.

She’s come back.
Her thoughts were like darts.
How dare she come back after she put him through so
much?

I felt anger rise and
before I knew it, I was across the room and before her. I slapped
her, using only a fraction of my strength. She crashed to the floor
and looked so much like a floppy, broken doll that for a moment,
fear touched my chest. Then she moved, bringing her hand to her
cheek as she turned to look up at me. I expected to see fear when
her eyes met mine. I only saw contempt.

She cried out when I
grabbed her by the hair. I dragged her over to the chair by the
window, and threw her in it. She sat staring at me, her mouth tight
with anger.

Whore
! she spat mentally.

The word was like a sharp
slap and I made a move toward her again. I stopped myself before I
could reach her frail, human body.

He will never pick a
pathetic little thing like you over me!
I
spoke in her mind.

I had the satisfaction of
seeing her face crumble and tears spring to her eyes. She refused
to let them fall and continued to gaze at me with
contempt.

I returned to the shadows
to wait.

Avery would never choose
her over me.

Would he?

***

New York 1973

I knew I was outside and
that it was late afternoon. But everything else about the day had
fallen away. I wasn’t aware if the day was infused with sunlight,
beset by rain, or if I walked through a blanket of soft white snow.
All I knew was the excruciating ache in my bones and the quivering
weakness in my limbs. I walked through the pain—and the rage—the
acidic fury entwined with a bitter desperation as I sought out
faces in the crowd. A tall athletic honey-coloured girl swept past
me. Maybe she had what I needed. I held onto the image of her face.
But there was nothing. Nothing. I moved onto another. A short dumpy
woman in a maid’s uniform. My heart leapt. Could she be the one? I
stared at her intently, but still got nothing. The anger rose
again, momentarily bringing me to a stop. I choked it back and
moved on, catching another face in the crowd and then another.
Eventually I stopped looking at just their faces and began to
search their memories, looking for anyone they knew who could give
me what I needed. But there was nothing. And the thing all those
faces had in common? They were all Negro. They were all
women.

I walked through the pain,
through the rage, through the mounting desperation until the day
eventually fell away and night rose to smother the land. The pain
in my body fled along with the day and I was reborn, as had been
the case every night since Avery turned me into a daughter of the
moon. But the rage that had been eating away at me for what seemed
like an eternity, remained.

I had given up my search a
few hours ago and was now sitting atop an office building with my
feet dangling over a long, brutal fall down to the streets below.
On nights like this, when the anger threatened to eat me whole, the
only thing that could numb it for even a few blissful minutes was
the kill. In those moments I could pour all my toxic rage out in
wordless, visceral violence. My victim’s screams became a
pain-drenched lullaby that soothed and lulled the rage to sleep.
Their fears—their pleas—like being rocked against a mother’s tender
bosom. The one thing almost all my kills had in common was they
were all white males with blond hair and blue eyes.

I took a deep breath and
tried to still the rage. In all the years and of the thousands I
had killed, not one death had been able to completely take away the
fury which had lived in me for so long. All it did was create pain
for countless others. Unlike Avery, it was never the faces of the
dead that haunted me. It was the faces of the living, the family
with an irreplaceable hole torn out of it, the friends and even
acquaintances who would feel the loss, even in the smallest of
ways. All so I could beat back the rage for a few moments. It was a
poor trade and the reason I had stopped. That and Avery.

Avery.

I got to my feet. I
couldn’t deal with the rage and thoughts of Avery—of what I had
done to him. Not tonight. I moved into the ether and materialised
in an alleyway beneath the building. I could hear what sounded like
a party a few blocks from here, the soulful tones of The
Temptations drifting to me through the densely packed urban
landscape. I considered making my way there, blending into the
crowd and continuing my search. And all at once, the tears came:
tears of rage, frustration and an overwhelming
hopelessness.

It was fruitless. I
wouldn’t find what I needed there or anywhere else. I stood there
crying and shaking, completely lost in the deep ocean of emotion.
Again the sweet call of the kill came to me, but I repressed it.
Instead I decided to face the very thing that had me walk through
pain in the hopes I would find something that was now utterly lost
to me.

Mary. My sweet Mary. She
had meant so much to me and yet whenever I tried to call up her
image all I got was her name because I could no longer recall her
face. Over a hundred years had passed since I last saw her face and
it had slowly been worn out of my mind like water smoothing away
stone. So for the past few years I had roamed the streets,
searching for a face that would maybe set the memory alight and I
would see her again. So far I had found nothing.

It frustrated me because
when Avery had first taken me away, I had missed her. I had missed
everyone I left behind, but he eclipsed them all and I rarely
thought of them, so absorbed was I in my love for him. Anger pulsed
through me whenever I thought of how easily he had become
everything in my world. But I had to stop directing my anger at
him. Mary was lost to me forever. And the rest were slowly being
erased: Mama, Jupiter, Lina, Baby Mary and Dembi. I clung to their
memories but Mary, Mary’s was gone.

And the most painful
thing? I could remember Master John and Master Henry vividly. Every
line in Master John's face, the light of the candle in my cabin as
it caught his soulless, ice-coloured eyes, his scent, the sound of
his voice and the cruel rub of his laughter. I could remember every
single second of my time with him. And yet when I tried to remember
Mary, it was like trying to catch smoke and watching it slip
through my fingers.

I glanced up at the night
sky, at the moon above. I longed to be as distant from my pain, and
the pain I had caused so many—especially the one I loved the
most—as the moon was to the Earth. I continued to linger in the
dark alley which smelled of urine along with the musty scent of
beer, because there was nowhere for me to go. I had countless homes
around the world. But home for me was, and always would be, a grand
red brick mansion in Louisiana and the beautiful man I had walked
away from.