Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (23 page)

Yes, I wasn’t mistaken. The brown mare
from the night before was grazing in the field in the fiery
sunlight. She lifted her head when I appeared and came to me as she
had done before. I stroked her and gave her the lumps of sugar I
had retrieved from the kitchen. On a whim, I decided to keep her.
When I moved away from her and toward the back of the mansion where
the stables were, she followed.

“
Yes, I believe you want
to stay,” I said.

I stayed outside with the horse, and
cleaned out the stables, making it habitable for her. She seemed
content with her new home and made no move to get away from
me.

I stayed outside with the horse as the
sun began to set, and my body awoke to the night and the dark power
sustaining it. I felt incredibly blessed because I was sure I had
another chance with Luna. I was no longer a killer and her mind was
now closed to mine. Soon it was dark outside and when I heard Luna
stir, I entered the mansion to face her wrath.

I stood at the bedroom door, listening
to her quick, agitated breathing. I finally worked up the courage
to announce my presence.

“
Luna.”

Complete silence descended on the room
and it seemed she was holding her breath.

“
Avery?” She released the
breath in a shudder.

I poked my head around the door.
“Please, Luna. Do not start shouting until I have had a chance to
speak to you.”

“
I ain’t gonna shout. Just
get in here.”

I entered slowly. She just stared at
me, looking exceptionally beautiful. She appeared even smaller in
the enormous bed, her eyes revealing hidden depths and an emotion
that was hidden to me now I was not hearing her
thoughts.

I expected anger and that she would
demand I take her back to the plantation. But instead, I received
utter forgiveness. She was quiet that night, not quite herself, and
I could not fathom why she did not greet the news that I could no
longer read her thoughts with more joy. She looked so fragile and
defeated in some indefinable way, yet without her constant stream
of thoughts, I was lost.

She was more a mystery than ever.
However, without the distraction of her often turbulent thoughts,
her face was even more captivating. The slightest lift of her lips,
the light and shade of her eyes whenever some strong emotion passed
through them.

I had been listening to the minds of
others for fifty years and had long forgotten the simple act of
reading expressions. If I had been able to correctly read her
expression, I would have seen that Luna was overjoyed to see me,
but sad as if she had lost something very precious.

She stayed with me at the mansion, and
life, joy, and peace were breathed back into me just by being in
her presence. I no longer existed on the peripheries of the living
world, I walked among men now, although I was all too aware that I
was not, and never would be one of them. It seemed I had been
brought out of Lodebar. But it wasn’t a king who rescued me and
paved my way to the world of the living, making me forget those
crippling years in the wilderness. No, it was not a king, but a
beautiful slave.

But we still had our disagreements,
especially when it came to the brown mare, which I named Julia. I
had made the mistake of giving Luna horse riding lessons only to
refuse to let her ride the horse when I saw how reckless she could
be once she was upon it.

That was when she subjected me to the
most excruciating silences. She could sit in the drawing room for
over an hour in complete silence. She wouldn’t even give me her
eyes in those moments and stared steadfastly at the table before
her.

“
Luna,” I said, determined
not to give in to the anguish I felt. “This is ridiculous. Ignoring
me, behaving in this manner, will not make me relent.”

Still that silence and it was
beginning to strip away at my nerves along with my resolve which
was surely coming undone the longer I was subjected to her
silence.

“
I tell you, Luna. I will
not tolerate this juvenile behaviour, so stop it right this
moment!”

She looked up at me then.

“‘
I tell you, Luna. I will
not tolerate this juvenile behaviour, so stop it right this
moment,’” she mimicked, a defiant gleam in her eyes.

“
My goodness, you sounded
just like me,” I said, a smile lighting up my face.

“‘
My goodness, you sounded
just like me,’” she mimicked again and I burst into
laughter.

Clearly my reaction was not the one
she had been hoping to provoke because her lips tightened and she
stared at me intently for a moment before she spoke
again.

“
Avery, please,” she
pleaded, her manner coy as she battered her eyelashes at me. “I
promise I ain’t gonna ride dangerously ever again. Please,
Avery.”

I had absolutely no intention of
letting her anywhere near that horse and I was not going to let
those deep dark eyes staring imploringly at me, or that tiniest of
quivers troubling those lips, dissuade me. I opened my mouth to
tell her this.

But her eyes, those eyes.

I sighed.

“
Of course, Luna. Whatever
you want.”

“
Thank you, Avery,” she
murmured, a triumphant smile on her lips as she got to her
feet.

I sighed again, already imagining the
torment she would put me through once she got back on that
horse.

Over the course of my two hundred and
eighty-two years on this Earth, I have listened to the English
language change, hearing the meaning of words slowly become
corrupted and then lost altogether. I have also heard slang invade
and butcher a much loved language. But every once in a while, I
have come across a word that electrifies with its accuracy. The
slang word “sap” is one of them. Yes, I was a complete sap when it
came to Luna.

***

And so the days passed and my love for
Luna continued to grow. And I was able to win her trust as I found
out one warm, languid afternoon as we sat by the lake in the
woods.

My thoughts had been on a whipping I
had seen many times in her mind and of the reason for the
whipping.

“
Luna, when I used to look
into your thoughts, I noticed that the ones of your child and the
whipping did not come to the surface often. Why is
that?”

She turned sharply to stare at me, her
eyes dark and hooded with emotion I could not decipher. Her bottom
lip quivered.

“
Somebody who don’t like
talking about they past shouldn’t be too quick to get in everybody
else’s business, Avery!”

I let her be. After a few moments, she
relented and told me her confusing and conflicting thoughts
regarding that painful memory and why she told her mother to take
the baby she had given birth to away.

“
She be his,” she spat,
referring to Master Henry. Her brow was furrowed, her voice shook
and she trembled slightly in the humid air. “His child, his
slave
. His blood and
mines runs through her, tying me to him and what he did and kept on
doing for years. Us! Forever, in
her
. How can I loves something that
be made from his unnatural lust for the child I was when he got at
me in the woods that day?”

Despite the strong negative emotion
regarding the baby, there was one thing she had not known. The
child had survived.

When I revealed this to her, she
become still, her eyes brimming with unshed tears.

“
So she be alive?
And...and
free
?”

I did not know that for sure, but the
possibility seemed to be enough for her. She placed her hand over
her mouth and began to cry, long held tears that up until that
moment, had not had the opportunity to reveal
themselves.

I vowed I would find the baby girl for
her, and I meant to search the whole of North America if that is
what it took to find her.

As dusk fell over the lake, I got to
my feet and reached out a hand to her, only to withdraw it again
when I remembered my place, so to speak, and the careful distance I
placed between us physically. But surprising, she grasped it before
I could pull it away and I helped her to her feet. It was the
second time she had willingly touched me and joy thrilled through
me along with that merciless of afflictions. Hope.

I held on to her warm, tiny hand as we
made our way back to the mansion, joy filling every part of my
being.

But that joy was to be short
lived.

When we reached the mansion, Luna
entered and I was just about to step inside when I heard a chuckle
at my ear.

Mama?

I stopped and looked out into the
quickening dusk.

I hadn’t heard her in so long, I had
almost hoped she had decided to finally listen to me and leave us
be. But the image she pushed into my head quickly made me see how
wrong I had been and that I had greatly underestimated the
witch.

I was seeing through her
eyes and she appeared to be staring at the ground outside her
cabin. Her hand came into view and she drew a crude series of
pictures in the dirt. She drew a cluster of trees and then what
appeared to be a mountain. At the top of the picture she drew a
matchstick house and two stick figures beside it, a male and a
female. As I watched, she drew a line, a path, through the trees,
past the mountain and came to a stop by the house and the two stick
figures.

Then, very slowly and
deliberately, she drew a line under the head of the male figure and
erased it.

Her laughter bounded through my
mind.

You can run, Asanbosam. I
will follow and I will not come alone
.

The laughter trailed in my
mind. I felt chilled to the core by what had just occurred, not
only because she knew where we were now, but because there was
something different in her tone, something
missing
.

I entered the mansion and bolted the
door behind me.

I left Luna much earlier than usual
that night and rushed to the Marshall plantation.

I heard the sound of the witch’s
laughter as I neared the slave quarters. She was alone in the
cabin.

What have you done?
I gasped.

Her mind was never an easy one to read
and this time it was locked to me completely, not only locked, but
there was something blocking even her scent and the faint traces of
emotion that normally emanated from her. It was as if there was no
one there, only a void where she should have been.

Mama Akosua, what have you
done?

She laughed aloud again and threw an
image at me. As always whenever she entered my mind, she revealed
more than she meant to.

At first I saw Luna at the
mansion on her own pacing back and forth, wringing her hands. She
came to a stop at the window and stared outside with her hands to
her head, anxious flames ablaze in her eyes. Then I saw Mama Akosua
at her cabin, overcome by waves of pure, deep unrelenting anguish,
the emotions she had felt at the time.

I bristled when I saw the next image,
the only one she had intended to show me.

It was dark and Mama
Akosua was alone in the underground room in the chapel. She had
been there all night calling and calling. Just before dawn broke,
the sconces on the wall near the gold altar burst into flame. She
had not resisted the entity that had been haunting the chapel when
it entered her, or as close as it was to possessing her as it could
get.

It was around her now, attacking her
in every way it could conceive of, trying to work its way into her
soul and possess her completely. She would not be able to resist
such an onslaught for very long.

Mama Akosua, please, you
have to banish it before it completely takes possession of your
soul.

She laughed again and I realised that
the image had merely been sent to distract me. The air in the woods
around me had grown colder and it was now completely silent. Then I
heard breathing at the side of my head. The memory she had shown me
of the nest of vampires in the jungle, and the way her grandmother
had found and captured them, leapt into my mind.

I turned into the ether and fled,
racing away from the Marshall plantation as fast as I could. Her
laughter echoed round and round in my head even when I reached
Louisiana. I had seen enough of her thoughts to know she was going
to see Master John in the morning to tell him where we could be
found. He had never stopped looking for Luna since the night I took
her away, so I knew he would agree to journey to the
mansion.

Mama Akosua was strong enough to kill
me without the added power of the entity that resided in the
chapel, so in a matter of days, when they finally reached us in
Louisiana, my unnatural life would come to an end.

I raced back to the
mansion.