Lailah (The Styclar Saga) (40 page)

I couldn’t reach her; she was already moving toward the Pureblood, whose attention was now firmly placed on her.

I tried to find Gabriel, but it was as though he had blocked me—I couldn’t hear him and he couldn’t hear me. I watched helplessly as he fought with the smoke, his body glowing as he tried to overcome it.

I shouted for her, but she didn’t listen to me as she glided toward Zherneboh. The edge of his top lip rose and he snarled, finally turning.

She stopped about forty feet away from him as he revolved back to the now shrinking black smudge that levitated in the distance. He stretched out his clawed hand in front of him as he grew the gateway.

The smoke began to evaporate as Gabriel’s light won the struggle; he coughed and spluttered, but he was okay.

I called to him, but he didn’t even look at me. He was desperately scrambling to his feet, falling as he tried to get up.

The air shifted behind me. Azrael had appeared. He was with Ruadhan. My lovely Ruadhan. I tried to shout to him to leave, but the words didn’t leave my lips. I couldn’t let him be ended. And as the fondness I felt toward Ruadhan filled my consciousness, I remembered Gabriel’s light and his love.

I was on my feet. I didn’t know who to go to first, and I stood rooted to the spot, my attention swerving to the scene behind me.

Through the battering of the blizzard, I observed Azrael heave Ethan’s discarded sword from the ground, tilting his head from side to side as he considered it. He drew a small gold box from his pocket. Whatever was inside glowed as he smothered the tip of the sword with the substance.

I twisted my body back to the girl; though the backdrop was a perfect white, she was still shrouded in shadow. I flew across the snow as she began gliding forward. I lined myself up with her body as I reached her and we stood side by side. I had to know who she was and I had to convince her to help us.

“Please!” I cried.

But she just continued forward as if I didn’t exist.

I grabbed for her shoulder, but my hand moved through her as if she were made of air. I stopped as short, sharp memories of her flashed across my mind.

She came to a halt before Zherneboh, whose attention was now embroiled in harnessing the diminishing gateway to the third dimension. I watched him ooze black ink from out of his palms, which floated toward the smudge, cascading into its center. It began enlarging in size. Then the realization of what he was doing hit me. He was going to take her through with him. But why?

Inhaling quickly, I turned to find Gabriel.

As I did, the girl in the shadow reflected my action and turned to meet me.

I froze.

Glowering back at me was me. She wore my face, only she had sharp canines resting slightly over her lower lip and her eyes were enormous black holes, boring into my own.

I bounced backward, in shock, as did she. I moved my hand in the air and she did the same. Confused, a thousand questions ran through my mind. Why was she mirroring me?

As my thoughts whirled, a forceful cracking disturbed the stillness and my attention became transfixed on the sword that struck from behind, fissuring its way through her shoulder blade, piercing straight into her heart. The blade broke through the sternum and punctured the front of her form.

Zherneboh let out a harrowing screech.

I lunged forward to the girl and as I did, she seemed to melt into me. My eyes fixed on the sword that was now perforating my own chest. Shaking, I brought my hands to clutch either side of the blade; it was then that I saw the tattooed markings covering my arms and the loose curls cascading down my face, coal black.

The truth was undeniable. The girl in the shadow wasn’t mimicking my face.…

She had always been me.

There was no other explanation. She was an extreme darkness that had been hiding inside me all this time, patiently waiting to take over.

I jolted forward as an explosion of light soared from behind me. I felt Zherneboh’s presence in me disperse as he left this plane; Gabriel had pushed Zherneboh back through to his own dimension, sealing the gateway.

As he faded away, the tattoos running the length of my arms began to shrink, disappearing slowly. The sharp daggers boring through my knuckles began fading away, until my skin was white and clean once more.

She was dying.

I turned around and lifted my face to find Ruadhan, his hand still held in midair where he had gripped the hilt of the sword, and Azrael positioned several feet behind him.

“Cessie?” Ruadhan’s voice quaked. “No, love! No!”

He reached to wipe a tear from my cheek, and pulled away, his hand covered in blood. “You said it was a Pureblood!” Ruadhan screamed. “You said she was safe!”

Azrael smirked triumphantly behind him.

I tried to speak. I ran my tongue along the razor points of my teeth and felt them as they became blunt once more. I dropped to my knees.

Gabriel was at my side first, but he flinched, withdrawing from me as he took in the blade lodged through my chest.

“What did you do to her?” Gabriel shouted, turning to Azrael.

Gabriel’s words surrounded me, but he wasn’t with me; there was no sense of his connection. All that existed now was a void.

“I didn’t do anything. You can all see what she was harboring inside her now. You couldn’t do your job, so I had to do it for you. Albeit by Ruadhan’s hand.”

“I didn’t know…” Ruadhan’s voice was empty, his arms hanging low at his sides; he seemed to sway.

“You created her, how could you…!” Gabriel stuttered.

“Two hundred years I have wandered this disgusting world searching for her mother. I struck a deal with the Arch Angels—I find Aingeal, I find the Descendant. I find the Descendant, I end her existence. Then we could both return home. I’ll settle for my own return, I don’t need Aingeal. I will have the light of Styclar-Plena.”

He spat on the ground where I perched, numb.

“You think they’ll let you return when you are so tainted?” Gabriel said. “You’ve been corrupted by this world, and now you will fall.”

Azrael staggered backward as Gabriel lunged for him. He reached for the back of his neck, and when nothing happened, he seemed to panic.

“How can I save her?” Gabriel yelled as he grabbed him.

“You can’t. The demon inside her is already dying. Look, see for yourself,” he said, gesturing to me. “The demon strikes when Lailah goes beyond her dark Vampire side. Likely her Pureblood lineage morphs through her skin in extreme situations, or of course when there happens to be a Pureblood in near proximity.”

“Azrael—” Gabriel gripped him by the collar urgently.

“When the demon dies, she will just be left with the two sides of her very nature—a hybrid of Angel Descendant and Second Generation Vampire. Zherneboh’s venom will still run through her blood, the darkness fighting inside her against the light. The difference now is that she knows they both exist: the light and the dark. She won’t be able to hide from it anymore, and in her inability to accept both parts of what she is, she will lose her immortality and that frail human body that she was born into will break and she will be ended.…”

I coughed, choking, and Gabriel flashed to my side. Still holding tightly to Azrael, he shouted, “How do you know all this?”

“She was not the first, but she is the last.”

Gabriel’s attention locked on me, and Azrael took the opportunity to break away. As he fled, Ruadhan made chase.

Consumed in such evil, I couldn’t feel my body. Gabriel perched next to me.

“It’s okay, Lai. You will be all right.”

My head throbbed; images of memories I didn’t know I had invaded my mind. Ripping Frederic apart, limb by limb; torturing the Vampires in Hedgerley; and then Bradley’s face conjured in front of me. The image repeated on a loop, until I finally focused in, unable to stop, and watched as I grabbed Jonah from behind, tossing him into a tree, rendering him unconscious while I set about tearing Bradley to pieces. Flecks of black curls blurred across my sight; images of feasting on his blood and remains, before finally turning to the wall; and then the memory dissolved.

I felt my body convulse, her evil coursing through every inch of me.

My eyelids fluttered as I began to remember all the dark acts that I had committed and denied as my own, filling the black spots in my mind.

She was weak now, though she clung to me, her shrieks echoing insanely around my head. I had to push her out, but she was strong and fighting for survival, despite the blade in my chest.

I could taste the ash that invaded my lungs, and I clung to the smell. Then the scene around me distorted. Time fractured. I reached behind my shoulder and gripped the hilt of the sword. Using her supernatural strength against her and squeezing my eyes tightly, I wrenched the blade from my chest, flinging it across the snow.

My blood splattered, forming a red carpet against the white.

I drifted backward, resting on the ground beneath me, staring up at the white flakes that were descending and cooling my face.

As I lay in the cold, the blizzard calmed so that it felt as though I was in a glass snow globe. Time tipped the magical lake and forest upside down, leaving the symmetrical shapes to sway delicately across my vision.

The sword skimmed the surface of the icy lake, and finally the castle with its swans fell into its freezing center.

The monster of my fairy tale was slain and time resumed once more.

Gabriel was reaching for me, but he was too late. He couldn’t compete with fractured time; it made me so much quicker.

When she left, so too did her anesthesia, rendering me paralyzed with pain.

“No!” Jonah’s urgent voice cut through the now still air.

I flicked my eyes open to see Gabriel kneeling over me. A brilliant light balanced gently on the tip of his lips.

“Gabriel, you’ll end her!”

“I need to dispel the demon! I can’t feel Lailah, I have to save her!” he shot back.

“The demon is gone, look at her, look!” Jonah was shaking Gabriel away from me.

“The marks have left her. You’re seeing her the way I do, the part of her that is like me. If you fill her with your light now you might kill her.”

Jonah’s hand was tugging Gabriel desperately away from me. I watched him fall to his knees. He looked lost.

My body convulsed, now agonized. I clutched my chest as a volcano of pain erupted inside me. Tugging off his jacket, Jonah pressed the leather down forcefully against my chest and I let out a scream as he applied pressure.

“If we let her darkness take over, let her stay like me, maybe … if she drinks from me, she might have a chance.…”

“You’ll eclipse her light.” Gabriel’s reply was short and hollow.

“Maybe, but she might go on.…” Jonah said.

“Like this? There must be another way! If she can find her light, if she can somehow accept both sides of what she is, she will survive this!”

I listened in, unsure of what light he was referring to. With every passing second, the part of me that seemed to know Gabriel only drifted further away.

Reaching for the smallest pocket of air that sat in my lungs, I whimpered. My body was shutting down and my mind fell over itself, bewildered and confused.

“I heard Azrael. He said she would never be able to accept. If you love her, let her go. Please let me try.”

I didn’t hear Gabriel protest any further and his silhouette disappeared from the corner of my vision, clearly unable to bring himself to watch.

Jonah was staring at me now, bloodied and bruised. Despite my incoherent senses, I tasted his scent as it rode the breeze.

Jonah pierced the skin around his wrist and laid himself on his side next to me. He didn’t hesitate to raise his bloodied hand to my lips.

As I stretched my neck toward him, I caught his dark pupils gazing down at me and I was distracted for a moment by them. I paused as they grew bigger, anticipating me. I managed to push my nose toward him, a burning rising in my throat but, as I snatched his wrist and pulled it close, something caused me to stop, going against every fiber in my body.

How do you see light against light?

My hand shook, flinching in trepidation.

It was only as the darkness crept forward that for a few moments in time, the faint crack of a bright, shimmering silver contrasted against the void.

I remembered those words and I battled to recall when I had heard them. They were spoken with such softness.…

As my eyes met Jonah’s once more, I gasped as, in the black of his pupils, I caught a glimpse of my reflection shining back at me. Lasting for only the briefest of moments, a miracle of silvers glowed back.

It was in his darkness that I found my light.

I remembered the image in the lake. Lailah.

Suddenly his cinnamon scent was not so appealing. I pushed his hand away from me, remembering who I was. I would not be consumed by the darkness; I would not let half of me become trapped forever.

“No.” I struggled.

“Lai?” Gabriel tumbled urgently as he spun back to me, rapidly dropping to my body.

I looked from Gabriel to Jonah. I recognized who they both were to me, recalling how each made me feel.

One moment Gabriel’s luminous features took up the space in my mind, but no sooner than it had, Jonah’s shadowed face appeared, replacing it.

Back and forth the images flipped, so fast that they became nothing more than black and white, until the flashes of light collided with the shadows in my mind and both elements of what I was burst, allowing the black and the white to merge, creating a fantastic gray matter.

It was surreal; for the first time that I could remember, I felt at ease inside my own skin.

But as I reached for Gabriel’s hand, he looked back at me, his expression empty. It was then that I conceded that Gabriel wasn’t with me. His connection was gone. He couldn’t see me anymore.

I was alone.

Azrael had been wrong; he hadn’t counted on the strength of Gabriel resonating through my being to be able to lead me home. However, as I touched him, it dawned on me that even in my own acceptance, he would never be able to see past the darkness that was part of me. And I couldn’t go on without him.