Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (50 page)

I hid a smile behind my napkin, a
smile that soon fell away. I realised I owed her a debt of
gratitude for snapping me out of the zombie-like trance I had been
in for the last few years. Even thinking about it concerned me
deeply now.

Every day without Luna was pain, like
walking through broken glass. But I realised that there was
something unnatural about my grief. I could see it now. My feelings
would have been the same, but it was as if there had been something
dragging me down. It kept me from dealing with my grief in a normal
way, and caused me to retreat so far down I was hardly aware of my
surroundings. The only other time I experienced that sensation of
being dragged down was at the chapel, when I had been captured by
Master John and lay waiting to die.

Troubling.

At the end of the month, I rewarded
Mallory with a holiday to the Caribbean. I asked Bernice to come
with us, knowing it wouldn’t be the same for Mallory without her.
Bernice came and I had to look at her pinched expression and hear
her thoughts as she inwardly moaned nonstop about the heat, the
mosquitoes, and anything at all she could think of to complain
about. It was surprising, therefore, that on the journey home she
gazed out of the airplane window, her thoughts clearly and
truthfully revealing she’d had such a pleasant holiday and would
miss the Caribbean.

I shook my head, deciding that I
wouldn’t even begin to try and understand that woman.

Mallory soon returned to
her affectionate, sweet self thereafter and I realised all she had
wanted, and needed, was my attention
.

I dreamt I was in the clearing by the
chapel door. I saw Mama as clearly as the day Luna’s mortal life
came to an end. But this time she was on her knees with her head
bowed, her back to me. A low moan escaped her.

I was awake, startled as I stared at
the ceiling, the low ache making my limbs feel like lead, not the
only thing bothering me. I got out of the bed. She had shown me
Ebony, a young woman who was directly descended from Lina. But she
had shown me little else. It was almost as if I had been torn out
of the dream before she could show me the rest. I glanced at the
clock opposite the bed. It was nine twenty-five a.m. It would not
take me long to reach New Orleans. But I was still troubled by
Mama’s distress and how little she had been able to show me. Ebony
was an extremely successful artist, but that was all I knew about
her. I decided it would be a good idea to go and see her mother
first and find out a little bit more about Ebony.

***

I was outside a small two-storey
house. I received a few stares as I made my way to the front door.
This wasn’t a part of town where you saw many whites. I knew the
house was empty before I reached the front door, but for
appearances sake, I knocked on the door anyway, deep in thought.
Footsteps approached shortly after.

“
It’s about time you got
yourself over here.”

I turned around. Augusta, Ebony’s
mother, stood behind me. She was a petite, plump woman who was only
a few shades darker than I was. Her long wavy hair had been pulled
away from her face. She was carrying two grocery bags.

“
I beg your pardon?” I
said as she approached.

She thrust the two grocery bags at me
and I grasped them as she pushed past me to the door.

“
Well, ain’t you supposed
to be our guardian? Yet my Ebony’s been suffering and you’re only
here now?”

She opened the door and held it open,
pausing to glare at me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get inside
so I can put them groceries away.”

I followed her into a small, spotless
kitchen and placed the groceries where she pointed. I finally found
my voice as she began unpacking.

“
Madam, I think you may
have mistaken me for someone else. My name is—”

“
You hush with that lie. I
know who you are. I would’ve known you ain’t what you pretending to
be even if I hadn’t read Luna’s journal.”

“
You mean you have some of
Luna’s psychic ability? But I thought it had died out with
Lina.”

“
That kind of power never
dies out. We all got some of it to some extent. My Ebony’s got a
big dose. It’s just that some of us don’t know that we got it or
how to use it. And that’s probably for the best. In life good
things always has its opposite. And that kind of power can be
dangerous, too. But I guess you know that already.”

I nodded. I wanted to discuss the fact
that the witch line had continued past Lina, but that dream of Mama
was like a dark shadow hovering over me and I was more than
troubled now.

“
What has happened to
Ebony?”

She sighed. “Well, I’d better make us
some iced tea, ‘cause we got some serious talking to
do.”

***

I had, in fact, done almost no talking
at all, merely listened as Augusta told me all she knew of the
trouble Ebony was in. It was evening now, a warm, sensuous evening
that belonged entirely to this part of the world. I was outside
Ebony’s home, one of those beautiful old houses in the Garden
District of New Orleans. I had spent the rest of that afternoon
with her mother and what I found out was worrying. I saw all of
these men and women as an extension of Luna and the bond we had
shared. They were the children we never had. Any misfortune that
befell them hurt me deeply. I entered Ebony’s home.

I moved through the dark house. All
the rooms were neat and orderly, but they had the stale, dusty air
of rooms that had not been used in some months. Ebony was in one of
the upstairs rooms. I entered the room and what I found tightened
my chest. This room was markedly different to the others I had
passed. The walls and floor were black and it had only two items of
furniture in its centre: A chair and a mattress. It was clear she
used only this room. There were used plates carefully placed to one
side. Books had been stacked to knee high against every wall.
Ebony, a small fragile-looking woman with a deeper complexion than
her mother, lay asleep on the naked mattress, mumbling gently in
her sleep. She wore double layers of clothing although it was a
warm night.

I noticed something odd about the
walls and moved closer. The walls hadn’t been painted black, but
something had been written over the walls in black ink. I peered at
it, my brow creasing. Then I moved to another wall and stared at
it. No, I wasn’t mistaken. She had written the twenty-third psalm
over and over again, covering nearly every inch of the wall. It was
the same with the floor. And the books stacked against the wall?
Bibles of different sizes and translations.

I moved to where she lay and gazed at
her sadly, admiring her hands, which were long and slender like
Luna’s.

Drugs, her mother had told me. She had
been dabbling in drink and drugs ever since her late teens. It
seemed as if she had beaten it. But then, a few months ago, she
began acting strangely, isolated herself from everyone and they
suspected she had descended back into the lure of drugs once
more.

Abruptly, she gasped and then bolted
out of sleep staring straight at me. Terror flamed in her delicate,
soft brown eyes as she stared at me, her mouth working as if to
scream, but no sound came out.

“
Ebony, I’m a friend,” I
said as gently as I could. “You have a sixth sense, like your
mother, you should be able to tell that I am a friend.”

Her features relaxed as the truth of
my words infused her mind and the terror began to
recede.

“
You’re not
him?”

“
Who?”

She reached for a Bible that had been
placed under her pillow. The page was already open on the
twenty-third psalm. She began reading it, mumbling it under her
breath.

I knelt before her. The pungent smell
of her body odour filled my nostrils. It was clear she had not
bathed in a few days.

“
Who?” I asked
again.

She glanced up, mildly surprised at
finding me there and gazed at me in confusion.

“
I don’t know if it’s a he
or a she.” She appeared distracted, as if any moment away from her
Bible was squandered. “I don’t think even he knows. It’s been so
long since—”

She stopped abruptly, appearing to
have forgotten about me again and was listening for something. It
was only then that something struck me. I had been around drug
users and the drug, like so many other chemicals humans ingested,
could often be smelt in their blood. I didn’t smell that on her. I
had chosen to respect her privacy when I entered the house and had
closed her mind to mine, but there was clearly something keeping
her from focusing on her surroundings. So I looked into her
mind.

What I saw there made me go
cold.

I saw the underground chamber in the
chapel. Corpses were nailed to every wall and were hanging from the
ceiling. Their faces were frozen in the same mask of terror and
there was blood everywhere. The sconces surrounding the gold altar
were lit and the flames were moving, dipping and leaping
unnaturally as if they had a malignant will of their
own.

I recoiled from the vision and backed
out of her mind at the same time she screamed. She clutched at her
throat, as if terror had just yanked her under water.

“
Ebony,” I grasped her by
the arms. “Calm down. I told you. I am a friend.”

Even as I said those words, I realised
she was looking past me and that her blinding terror had nothing to
do with me.

“
He’s coming. He’s
coming!” she screamed, wrenching herself out of my
grasp.

She scrambled on her knees to one of
the stacks of Bibles and knocked it down, reaching for the Bible on
the bottom. I straightened as she abruptly faced me, the Bible
clutched to her chest.

She was still, her gaze lucid as she
stared at me.

“
You,” she whispered. “It
wants you. It wants you dead.” The horror returned as quickly as
before and she got to her feet. “It’s here! It’s here. You have to
leave! Now!”

“
Not without
you!”

I went to grasp her, to pull both of
us out of the room when she screamed again.

“
Noooooo! He’ll kill
you
!”

Before I could touch her, she pushed
me. Behind that push was a torrent of telekinetic energy. I was
flung back with such force that when I hit the window, its casing
cracked beneath my weight and I was thrown out of the
house.

Her screams reached me before I hit
the ground. Piercing shrieks of unadulterated pain that dug into
me, making my stomach contract in anxiety. Chaos appeared to erupt
within the room I had been thrown out of and I heard the sound of
things being smashed as if a herd of wildebeest had entered the
room in my absence.

I was on my feet and into the ether.
The room was flowing into being around me when I found myself
thrown out of it again. This time when I hit the ground, it had
gone silent. As bad as the screams had been, the silence was much
worse. Panic surged within me and I was on my feet
again.

This time, I was able to enter the
room. The scent of steaming fresh blood filled my nostrils before
the room finished coming into being around me. The sight that
greeted me was one of the worst I have seen in my long years on
this Earth.

The black walls and floor were
splattered with blood. Even worse, what was left of Ebony littered
the floor. Next to my foot was part of her jaw. Half a hand lay to
my left. There wasn’t a part of her that was larger than my fist in
the gore that splattered the walls and floor.

I shimmered out of the room into the
humid night air, but I could still smell the bloodied room I had
left behind. Never had the scent of blood filled me with such
nausea as it did now. I dove into the nothingness.

***

Augusta glanced at me for a long
moment when she opened the front door.

“
It ain’t good news, is
it?”

I shook my head. She let me
inside.

She waited silently in the chair by
the fridge in the kitchen after I sat down. I took a few moments to
try and compose myself. It seemed a lifetime had passed since I had
been in this very room, although it had only been a few
hours.

“
She’s dead,” I said
abruptly, there being no other way to give her such devastating
news.

She didn’t move, her bottom lip
trembled and it appeared as if she fought back tears as she
nodded.

“
She’s with the angels
now.” Her voice wavered as she spoke. “My baby’s at peace
now.”

I let the silence gather for a few
moments, wishing I could leave the suddenly too-small kitchen and
the weight of her unexpressed grief. But I had to tell her the
rest. I had to try and find out as much as I could about Ebony’s
life, and that terrifying image of the chapel I had seen in her
mind before she pushed me out of the house, probably saving my
life.