Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (46 page)

A flame-haired child was standing at
the gates with her back to me. My heart seemed to stop with a sharp
twist and that awful night in the woods from so many years ago came
flooding back.

Fearing a ghost had come back to exact
its vengeance, I took a step back. The noise made her spin around.
I was expecting to see the same face and it was a few seconds
before it registered that I was looking at a completely different
child. She had long red hair, but it hung loose instead of in
bunches. She was thin, pale, dirty and had cuts on her legs. She
shivered in the moonlight. Fear contorted her features and she
stumbled away. I stood there as she disappeared into the gloom and
it was a few moments before I regained my senses. I disappeared and
materialised a few feet from her. She screamed. But before she
could run away, I grasped her arm and reached into her mind to
soothe her.

Her screams faded away and she stood
breathing heavily in the night air. I picked her up. There was no
resistance. She was slack and pliable as the other red-haired child
had been when I drained her blood. The difference between then and
now was that I was shaking as much as she was as I took her back to
the mansion.

I was so shaken I could not speak. I
placed her in front of the fire with a blanket over her tiny form.
Then I made her a sandwich and a warm drink. I got myself a large
brandy before I sat down in front of her. Then I did what I was
dreading and read her mind to find out what she was doing alone, in
the middle of nowhere, at night. Thankfully, she wasn’t a ghost.
But what I discovered was grim.

Her name was Mallory and she was nine
years old. A week ago she awoke to find her mother cold and
lifeless in bed. She tried to wake her and eventually gave up, and
merely laid in bed beside her. When the little bit of food left in
the house run out, she left the house to look for help, finding her
way to the mansion.

There was no need to control her fear
now as the warmth of the mansion, along with the food, had calmed
her down. She ate half of the sandwich before pointing to the other
half, staring up at me. I saw her thoughts clearly. She wanted me
to go back home with her and give her mother something to
eat.

I sighed and rubbed my
forehead.

“
Mallory...I...she...she’s
dead, Mallory.”

She shook her head vehemently and
crossed her skinny arms over her chest, tears springing to her
eyes.

No
. She stood up and took hold of my wrist, trying to pull me
toward the door.

The image in her mind was not of the
corpse I had seen when I searched her thoughts. It was of a live
woman.

She’s sleeping,
she insisted.

Not knowing what to do, I picked her
up. Perhaps she needed to see the dead body again.

I took her back to her home, an
impoverished little house miles from the nearest neighbour. She
remained silent as we stood over her mother’s bed, still holding
the sandwich she had wrapped in tissue. The putrid scent of the
corpse filled my nostrils, flies were already gathered in the tiny
room.

How she had stayed here for so long
confounded me and it chilled me to see empty packets of biscuits on
a table by the bed.

“
She’s gone, Mallory. You
have to say goodbye to her. She’s gone.”

There were no tears on her thin, drawn
little face as she stared at the dead body. Nothing at all from her
thoughts. After a few moments, she got down and placed the sandwich
by the corpse. She came back to me, and when I picked her up, she
merely lay her head against my shoulder.

She was fast asleep by the time we
returned to the mansion. I entered her sleeping mind and made her
forget those harrowing days in that house alone with the dead body.
I also made her forget me. Then I drove her to the nearest police
station and left her in their care.

A few days later, I called the
authorities and made enquiries about her well-being. She was fine,
physically, I was told, but had still not spoken a word to anybody.
According to neighbours, she had distant relatives in Texas that
they were trying to trace, and she had been placed in a foster home
in the meantime.

I put the phone down, still deeply
shaken by finding Mallory outside the mansion. The face of the
other red-haired girl never left my mind during the remainder of
that week.

Two weeks later, I was awakened from
my daily slumber by movement outside the mansion. I already knew
what I would find, but the sight of Mallory sitting outside the
mansion peering through the gates still brought a chill over me.
And it was hard to dismiss the insistent and irrational thought
that she was a ghost come back to haunt me for my past
sins.

When she turned and saw me standing a
few metres from her, she bolted to her feet and tried to run
away.

“
Mallory.
Wait!”

The sound of her name brought her to a
stop and she stared at me quizzically, fear in her light brown
eyes. I reached into her mind and released the memory of me I had
locked away. The tension melted away from her face instantly and
she ran toward me. She stopped short just before she reached me and
merely stood staring at me.

Inside the mansion, she went straight
to the chair by the fireplace where she had sat before. Once the
fire was lit, she settled back into the chair and fell asleep. I
telephoned the authorities. They were having trouble finding her
relatives and she was not settling well into the foster
home.

I watched her as she slept in the
chair. Whether the decision I came to was made out of loneliness or
guilt, I decided I would look after Mallory.

It was easy to manipulate and deceive
the authorities into believing I was one of the distant relatives
they had been trying to trace, and a few days later, she came to
live with me. I hired a childminder who was to have sole
responsibility for her.

In the beginning I kept my distance
from Mallory. Every time I laid eyes on her, a chill came over me,
the other child I had murdered in the woods over two hundred years
ago quick to come to the surface.

Whenever I arrived home in the
mornings, she would be waiting by the stairs biting her nails, her
pale face devoid of emotion, her eyes dark and serious. The moment
I uttered a good morning, she disappeared down the hallway and a
twinge of anguish found its way into my heart. In the evenings, she
often came to whatever room I was in and stood by the door watching
me. Whenever I faced her and tried to make conversation, she darted
out of sight.

Soon she began greeting me with a shy
smile, and in the evenings she did her homework in the study
whenever I was there. Before long, when I arrived at the mansion at
dawn, she would be standing on the stairs in her pyjamas waiting
for me. Joy flushed through me and I laughed with pleasure when she
ran into my waiting arms. I would make her breakfast whilst she
hovered around me, her little fingers tracing words in the air,
often struggling for the right sign (as she was still learning sign
language.) But more often than not, she spoke to me through images
in her mind.

I took her to school every morning
before retiring for the day, making sure I was awake to get to the
school gates on time to collect her. We were seldom apart before
long, and without my even being aware of it, she had taken away
some of the loneliness that had come with Luna’s absence. I still
thought of Luna daily, but I no longer let hatred mar those
thoughts, although I was still very angry at her. I also began to
think of the other red-haired child less and less.

Another pleasant and
unexpected effect of having Mallory with me was that the bitter
bile that arose whenever I thought of Onyx and the second
heartbeat, soon faded away. And in this way, the world once more
began to be open to me and life pulled me into its tender bosom
once more
.

Life went on, and I can even say it
became a pleasure again now I was greeted at dawn by the smile of a
red-haired child who had become my own.

I returned to the mansion one evening,
a year after Mallory entered my world, laden with presents for her.
Christmas was only a few weeks away and I was looking forward to
seeing the joy on her face when she opened her presents. One of my
staff was waiting for me in the drawing room.

“
There is someone here for
you, sir,” he said. “A coloured girl. She said she is a friend of
yours.”

I vaguely registered the disdainful
way in which he said the word “coloured” but I didn’t wait long
enough to hear the rest of his sentence, for I had seen in his mind
who that someone was.

I hurried out of the room. Once out in
the hallway, I vanished, reappearing in my bedroom where my
father’s swords were. When I dipped into the ether and materialised
in Mallory’s room, I found her sitting on the floor by her bed.
Luna was sitting on the bed behind her, her dark hands buried in a
sea of red hair.

Uncle
Avery
, Mallory signed.
Luna’s doing my hair like hers
.

I barely glanced at Mallory or at the
two rows of plaits on the side of her head. I only had eyes for
Luna.

She was dressed in a jade-green flared
jumpsuit, which had a belt at the waist and a matching jacket. The
front of her hair had been plaited back, the rest was a large
feathery afro. Sadness hung around her eyes as she watched me. I
hate to say this, but seeing her again after so long felt like that
moment when I stood beneath the trees on the Holbert plantation and
saw her in the flesh for the first time. The shock of that
mesmerising beauty and that the dream I had waited for all those
years was actually real.

I quickly closed my mind to hers. But
her thoughts were completely open to me and I saw no walls or
fences to bar my way. Everything was there for me to see, the
murders she hid from me when we were together, those years when she
told herself she hated me whilst following me around the world as I
searched for her. The brief, unsatisfying dalliances with other
men. It was a merciless onslaught, but the thing that lay like a
silken sheen over everything she had done, was her love for
me.

Her fingers, which had been working in
Mallory’s hair, stilled as she studied me. All I could think of was
how quickly she would be able to snap Mallory’s neck before I could
reach her.

“
Mallory,” I said, trying
to sound much calmer than I felt. “Stand up and slowly walk toward
me.”

Mallory looked up at me in
bewilderment. Her eyes widened when she glanced down at the sword
dangling loosely at my side. She twisted her head slowly round to
look up at Luna.

“
I’m not going to hurt
her. She knows that,” Luna said, a hint of reproach in her
words.

“
Mallory! Come
here,
now
!”

She sat up with a start and I was
relieved Luna let her go and sat watching me with a pained
expression as Mallory scrambled to my side. I felt intense relief
when I picked her up, holding her close to me.

“
I’m here to talk. That’s
all, Avery,” Luna said, sadness in her eyes.

Wait here!

I shimmered out of the room with
Mallory and gathered the rest of my household staff, ignoring their
fear and confusion as I pulled them into the ether with me and out
of the mansion. I took them part of the way to the church and
pressed on them the urgency of the situation, commanding that they
get to the church as fast as they could and not leave it until I
came to get them.

The last I saw of Mallory was her
little face looking back at me, her cheeks red, tears streaming
down her face as her minder pulled her away.

When I returned to the mansion, Luna
was waiting in the drawing room at the window. I gazed at the
small, vulnerable curve of her shoulders, remembering those serene
days spent in our bed-sized chests in each other’s arms, closed off
from the sun.

“
What do you want,
Luna?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment.
The room waited. Outside, the evening sank into darkness and the
night called to me.

“
Mallory is adorable. She
is also slightly intuitive. Did you know that, Avery?”

“
Answer me, Luna. What do
you want?”

She sighed before she faced me. At
first she wouldn’t look at me, and she appeared as frightened and
as vulnerable as the morning I brought her to the mansion against
her will. When she finally looked up and met my gaze, her voice was
low and full of sorrow.

“
I love you,
Avery.”

For a few moments I couldn’t speak.
Her words were so unexpected and the thorns from the rose of my
enduring love for her cut deep, drawing blood.

“
What cruel game are you
playing?” I hissed.

“
It’s the truth, and
something I wish I had said to you every second of every moment we
spent together. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for
killing—”

“
Don’t!” I whispered.
“Don’t you
dare
say her name.”