Howler's Night (3 page)

I wasn’t sure which parts of me were real and which were just imagined. But I guess in the end that didn’t really matter either.

Maybe I did kill Kemen. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe there was a death priest who loved me, but probably not. I could barely even recall my former life. Always I had one memory I clung to that let me know at least one part of me was real: Luc stabbing me.

It’d been real and visceral. A tangible memory because of the scar. I was so grateful to him for it now. Grateful I’d goaded him into doing it. Grateful his demon came out to permanently mark me.

Because at least
that
I knew was real.

“Talk to me, Pandora. The tests are done, and you’ve passed admirably. Aren’t you excited to leave?”

I wondered that I’d never taken the time to learn his name. I cocked my head. He had a mustache.

When had he started growing one?

I blinked. His hair was thinning. He looked like he’d lost a little weight too, and his skin was a healthy tan. Maybe he was running?

He repeated my name sharply.

I jumped, and the manacles on my wrist jangled. “What?”

His lips thinned. “They said you were strong enough for this, but seeing you now, I have my doubts.”

I didn’t like failing him. It bothered me. I scratched at the white dress they’d put me in. No more black, they’d said. Black was for devils. I wasn’t a devil. I was something else entirely. But they hadn’t told me what yet.

I couldn’t remember what he’d asked me.

“Are you ready?” he asked, and then I remembered.

I nodded. “For what?”

“To leave.”

“Oh.” I tapped my broken nails on the metal desk. The walls were so barren. This place held no life. Everything was dead. Just like me. “I guess so.”

I vaguely recalled a moment of sheer terror when the thought of leaving had left me breathless with fear, with the secret knowledge that they’d done something to me that would make me dangerous to those I loved. It seemed silly now of course. I loved no one. The doctor was smiling. His eyes were so blue behind the glasses.

“This will all just be a dream. You will remember none of this. I think you’re strong enough, just”—he swiped at my cheek with his thumb—“go East.”

“Why did you take me?” I asked him the one thing I’d always wanted to know.

The girl across the cell died the other day. The one with the melted face. I saw them drag her out. Her head had flopped lifelessly. She’d told me no one ever left alive. It was why she’d given me the journal. So that I could write it all down. To remember, so that my loved ones would know my ultimate fate.

But I didn’t like remembering, because I didn’t know what was real and what they were feeding me. So I’d written it all down, the truths and the maybe lies; I didn’t know why. But it was the only driving compulsion left to me, writing it all down. Like something inside me knew it could be important even if I wasn’t really sure how that could be. Then last night the journal disappeared from my cell. I knew the guards hadn’t found it, so it made sense to me that I was coming to the end of my journey here.

“To make you strong, Pandora. We cleaned you out and made you new. Don’t you feel like new?” His smile was nice. There was a big gap between his two front teeth.

“I guess so.” I shrugged when he frowned. “Yes?”

He agreed. “Yes, you are. And tonight we will make you like new.”

“Why can’t I remember you?”

“Because you can’t.”

“Will I see you again?” I’m not sure why it was bothering me. Very little did anymore. I felt so empty and numb, as if my soul had been shot through with Novocain. I knew I used to care about things, but this—this weightlessness of being unemotional—it was freeing.

I didn’t wonder. I didn’t love. I didn’t feel.

I simply was.

“No. We will never see each other again, but I have one final question to ask of you, Pandora.”

“What?”

“Who is Asher?”

“A dream.”

“He will find you. He will tell you things that aren’t true. You have to forget him, Pandora. Let him die, and then you can be truly free.”

I nodded. They kept telling me this, and I thought it sounded good. I didn’t really remember the death priest, but he
was
a death priest. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought him into my life. Priests kill Nephilim.

I was really stupid in my other life.

“Okay,” I said.

His smile was huge. “Exactly right, my dear.” He got up to leave.

“Wait.” I held my hand out to him.

“Yes?” He stared at my outstretched fingers quizzically.

“What will you do to me tonight? Will it hurt?”

“All the best things do.” With a nod of his head, he turned and walked out of the holding room.

I sat there forgotten, staring at the blank wall and wondering if I could count to a million in my head before they came to get me.

I got to twenty-three thousand, nine-hundred and fourteen before two men in white lab coats finally came.

I didn’t fight them when they took me to the torture room. Or even when they strapped me down to the table.

The doctor was back, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “Close your eyes, Pandora. This is probably going to hurt. A lot.”

I closed my eyes, and then something sharp and horrible stabbed straight through my heart, and I screamed as the fires of Hell consumed me, as the souls that’d been stripped from me were shoved back in. But not just Lust and Pestilence—there were more. So many more, and I couldn’t stop screaming…

~*~

Asher

This time when I floated above the Earth, I saw a band of black that glittered with a streak of gold deep in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, but my excitement was tempered by the knowledge that something was wrong with her colors.

There was a slick, oily sheen to her that hadn’t been there before. Something dark and oppressive, something menacing, marred her, and I worried that whatever I’d find, it wouldn’t be Pandora at all.

Pandora

I stared at the sky above me. I was dressed in a white dress. My feet were bare.

I had no idea where I was. I’d woken up in a pile of dirt and leaves, with brambles pushing into my cheek. My muscles snapped and popped, and when I moved, I felt the cold steel of metal on my wrists.

Lifting them up to my face, I stared wide-eyed at the manacles. My skin was bloody and bruised. Blinking, I tried to remember what was going on, what had happened to me.

But as I sat there thinking, my heart began to race because something was very, very wrong. I felt it viscerally, deep in my soul.

Biting my lip, I stared around at the empty forest, straining my ears to listen for any signs of life. I heard chirping, the song of crickets and insects… it was all so normal.

So why did it feel like a mirage?

I wet my lips as my pulse raced out of control.

“Red rain. Red rain.” I moaned the nonsensical words over and over. I couldn’t understand why, but I felt that if I didn’t say the words I would burst.

A squirrel scampered up a tree, and I screamed. I didn’t know why I’d screamed, but the scratching of its claws on wood and the brushing of its tail as it wrapped its little body up the trunk felt like torture. My ears were ringing, my head pounding, and my pulse thundering.

Jumping to my feet, I knew I had to get away from there. Away from the ghosts that were clawing at my back, trying desperately to remind me of hazy, murky things I didn’t want to remember.

I didn’t know where I was or why I was there…

“Why are you here?” My voice sounded uneven and scratchy to my own ears. “Why are you here? Why? Why, Pa…paaa…” I trailed off and choked back a sob because I couldn’t even remember my name.

I thought it started with a P. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it started with a Y.

“Oh, God, help me.” I covered my lips with cold fingertips, cast one last frantic look around the woods, and then I did what I’d wanted to do since the moment I’d opened my eyes.

I ran.

At first I headed east. It felt vital that I should somehow, but even as I thought it, I balked because there were two sides to me now. One didn’t seem to question why going east was so important, and another screamed at me not to listen to the compulsion and go west.

That still voice grew progressively louder, and though I cringed when I did an about face, I followed the instinct that’d guided me for many lifetimes and headed west instead.

I ran and ran and ran. Spots danced in my vision, and the call of the earth around me was ear-splittingly loud. The banging of a woodpecker sounded like an explosion. The sawing of my breath raced through my lungs like fire, my skin hurt, my skull throbbed, and every step I took was so much pain.

I didn’t know how long I ran. But eventually I saw a break in the trees, and I followed the well-worn path straight to a blacktop road.

Roads led to freedom.

There was something back in the woods, something malevolent and twisted. I felt it clinging to me like wet leeches, and the further I moved away from it the easier it got to breathe. So I kept moving.

The road was empty. I kept hoping for a car, a truck, anything, so I could hitch a ride, but no one came.

This was the highway to Hell
.

I stopped running the moment I thought that. Staring down at my feet, I saw they were bloody and raw. But it barely fazed me; it was just more pain. The manacles on my wrists seemed to mock me; there was a story there. I knew there was, but I didn’t know what it was. The more I tried to find it, the emptier my head became. I saw nothing but shadow and darkness when I tried to think, so I stopped thinking.

The loud chirp of a bird finally tore me from my thoughts. I must have stood there dazed for hours because the sky was gray, and it could be nighttime, or it could be rain.

I sniffed.

What was rain? Was it red? That seemed to make sense.

I could hardly remember. But I smelled the minerals in the air, and I thought that maybe that was rain.

Until a wet drop landed on my nose. And then another. And then another. Until it wasn’t just drops, but a sheet of water pouring down on me from the heavens. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped, and I should have been scared, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

I held my hands up, tipped my chin forward, and soaked it in, and smiled.

Only once I began to shiver did I remember that I couldn’t stop, that I had to keep going, had to get away.

The sky was a deep shade of navy blue when I finally spied my first glimpse of humanity in the form of a blinking neon roadside bar sign that read The Twilight House.

I didn’t stop to consider whether I should go in looking as I did. I was shivering, I was cold, and I was soaked. The bar wasn’t much of a building, really more of a powder blue wood-paneled shack with a rusted tin roof. The entire structure looked worn, except for the neon sign. In fact, it seemed to beckon me inside.

I knew that idea was bizarre, but I swear each flash of light called to my soul, and the panic that’d spread like a riled hornets nest when I’d woken up started to calm.

With trembling fingers, I lifted my hand, gazing around at the gravel lot full of black motorcycles. I was driven solely by instinct at that point. Normally I would never go someplace where I didn’t know what I was walking into, but as broken as I felt, I still trusted that gentle whisper inside me enough to push open the door. The second I did, it almost felt like I’d stepped into an alternate dimension.

The inside of the place was dimly lit, as these hole-in-the-wall places generally tended to be. There wasn’t much in the way of décor, just metal tables lined up along the wall, two pool tables to the side, a dart board on the wall, and a bar to the front that gleamed silver. A group of men crowded around the pool tables.

Several heads whipped up when I walked in and stared at me with flat, black eyes. My skin prickled as I sensed power rippling like hot asphalt beneath their flesh.

The scent of predators blasted over me, and I shivered. All the males, and even the few females, wore the same odor; it was a mix of damp earth, sex, and musk. I realized it was a pheromone they were leaking, and I knew—though I didn’t know how—that none of them were human.

Just like I wasn’t human.

That reality should have come as a shock to me, but it didn’t. Whatever malaise had gripped me back in the woods seemed to be slowly fading. I could now remember my name—it was Ya-El.

I looked at the people in the bar. They wore the skins of humans. They were toned and in varying shades of black—from light tan to darkest ebony, with cat-like eyes that ranged from emerald green to icy blue. Their features bore a feline aesthetic. Each of them had long, shaggy dreds that hung past their shoulders in differing shades of red and brown. With broad foreheads and wide jaws, I couldn’t call them ugly. They were unusual, yes, but alluring and hypnotic as well.

I wrapped my arms around myself and tiptoed toward the bar.

I could feel their eyes on my back as I sat. Behind the bar stood a man who stared at me with a hard, penetrating look in his unnatural, tri-colored eyes of green and blue and red right around the pupils. His features were bold and angular and his skin as pale as my own; he looked nothing like the other patrons. He wasn’t dressed in leathers and chaps like the rest of them were. Instead he wore charcoal gray suit pants and a vest with a snow white tie in a Windsor knot. His short brown hair lay in casual spikes, and something inside of me twitched, like some force or entity that shared my space was undulating slowly awake.

But just as quickly as it happened it disappeared, and I scratched the back of my neck, swiftly glancing down at my bare feet and trying to ignore the fact that my body tingled all over.

The image of his clothes tried to jog a memory loose—of a man I once knew wearing something similar. I blinked as my palms grew moist and my pulse hammered. I couldn’t remember the name of the man or even see a clear picture of his face because it was hidden in deep shadow. The only thing my mind could latch onto was deep brown eyes. But when I tried to study the memory, it blinked in and out of focus like crappy cable on an antennaed TV.