Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (51 page)

“
Augusta, there is more.
There is something very...odd about the way she died.”

“
Well, I worked that one
out. Why else would you be sitting there looking as if you’s about
ready to wet your pants?”

“
Have you ever had dreams
of this place before?” I showed her a very brief image of the
outside of the chapel.

She drew in air sharply and the colour
seemed to drain from her leaving her skin looking ashen. For a
moment I thought she was going to collapse.

“
Augusta?” She met my
gaze, hers slightly cloudy.

“
I used to. Before I had
Ebony. They stopped the day she was born.”

The significance of that statement
left both of us silent.

“
How did she die?” she
finally asked.

“
Something killed
her.”

“
The thing from
that
place?”

“
I...I cannot be sure. I
thought it had been beaten, that it did not have the power
I...I...saw tonight. In fact, I do not understand how this could
happen.”

“
It uses our power,” she
said abruptly, as if a sudden spark of inspiration had come to her.
“I always said my Ebony had gifts. It has its own power, but it
can’t do nothing unless it’s through a living person.”

“
I need you to talk to as
many of the family as you can. Find out if anyone else has been
dreaming of the chapel. There is also something else you need to
know.” I inhaled and was suddenly speechless, unable to find the
courage to tell her the rest.

“
Just
say
it!”

“
Her...her body. It did
not leave very much of her remains...intact.”

She took a breath and her composure
seemed to crumble. But she held on to it although a tear slid down
one cheek.

“
So she
suffered.”

“
Not for long. She
protected me. She was able to use her gifts to throw me out of the
window, and she prevented me from re-entering until...”

It seemed she barely heard. She was
looking off to a distant place.

“
Is there anyone I can
call? I would rather not leave you here on your own.”

“
Lawrence. I’ll call him
and tell him his sister’s with the angels now.”

I rose as she moved to the telephone
by the fridge. There being not much more for me to say, I made to
leave. She stopped me when I got to the kitchen door.

“
Mr Wentworth. You make
sure you find out what this thing is and send it back to hell where
it belongs.”

“
I will not rest until I
do.”

She nodded and turned back to the
phone.

I left the house.

I stood outside in the deserted
street. It was quiet outside but, as always, my vampiric hearing
picked up signs of life. Couples caught in the throes of
lovemaking, heavy snores, gurgling noises made by the indoor
plumbing in the homes around me as well as the breathing of
multiple bodies in deep slumber. I caught fragments, ghosts of
disjointed thoughts and dreams through the night air and Augusta
clearly as she connected to her son. I chose not to remain and
listen. I escaped the town, moving swiftly until I was away from
the claustrophobic homes and in the clear, empty open spaces of the
Louisiana countryside. I stopped by one of the bayous and stood in
the ghostly moonlight beneath the weeping foliage. Glancing up at
the moon, I realised that for the first time in my life, I was
completely alone. There were no visions of Luna to keep me moving
forward through a wilderness of despair. Mama and her wisdom,
strength and insight seemed far from me too. And Lina was long
gone.

In that moment, my loss
overwhelmed me. Whether she was the young frightened woman I had
chanced across praying at the chapel, the angry, vengeful vampire
spinning out of control, or the subdued, contrite woman that had
visited me, her remorse and love laid bare like an open flower
trembling in the breeze, I desperately needed Luna. I was so
woefully unprepared and inadequate to deal with this new threat and
lives depended on me. I wanted to curl into a ball and weep. But
there was no time for it. Lives had already been lost. I ran back
to the mansion
.

It took years to discover fully what
had been happening. Another three members of the Marshall family
died horrifically during that time. I was always too late to save
them. Along with what Augusta was able to find out, I did some
research of my own, visiting as many of the family as I could,
often guided by images of family members Mama sent me and, at other
times, dreams or intuitions the family members I spoke to were able
to give me.

From what I had gathered, the entity
from the chapel was trying to be reborn through one of Luna’s
descendants. It usually began by trying to possess them. When that
failed, it drove them to madness, or despair, or killed them
brutally. The first sign I was able to find of this dark thread
that had interwoven itself in the bright fabric of the Marshall
families’ lives, were the random disappearances of family members
who were isolated from the fold or had somehow gone astray. There
were also the odd suicides. Looking through the information I had
gathered, I realised that the disappearances began during the years
Luna had walked out of my life. That was also no coincidence. It
had used that period when she had been distracted by her own hatred
and anger to begin attacking the family.

Luna had been able to control it. Her
descendants were not aware of what it was, or of their latent
powers, and so could have no idea where to start or of how to
subdue it. And it had grown stronger over the years.

Thrown into a new wilderness, a valley
which held untold depths of cloying dread, I remained present for
Mallory’s sake and continued to take care of her. Soon she was away
at college. I spent every second I could spare researching the
supernatural in order to try and find out all I could about exactly
what the entity residing at the chapel was, and how I could
vanquish it.

It was 1983 and Mallory had turned
twenty. She was home from college for Christmas. She had spent the
last few Christmases with Bernice, who no longer worked for us, and
so it was a pleasure to have her home for Christmas that year.
Especially since it would probably be the last Christmas we would
spend together. I could deceive the people around me, changing
staff regularly and it was easy to acquire false documents and
assume different identities as the years passed. But it had been
over eleven years since I had come across Mallory outside the
mansion, and I had not aged in all those years. It was only a
matter of time before her highly intuitive mind began to notice,
once again, that I was “different.” I did not want her burdened
with the secrets of the undead. So I had to ease her out of my life
and be alone once more.

When I awoke that evening, Mallory was
waiting for me in the dining room.

“
Good evening, Mallory,” I
said when I entered, distracted by a letter that had arrived from
England.

“
Good evening, Uncle
Avery. Can I speak to you for a moment?”

My gaze was on the letter before me. I
turned around, moving back toward the door. “I’ll be back in a
moment.”

I was walking down the corridor before
I realised what had just happened. I rushed back to the dining
room. She was sitting at the dining table dressed in jeans and a
royal blue jumper, looking expectantly up at me. I stared at her in
surprise for a few moments before I moved to sit opposite
her.

“
You can speak?” I
said.

She nodded. I had been hearing her
mental voice for so long that I hadn’t realised how beautiful her
real voice was.

“
But why...?”

She sighed heavily, her mind on her
hazy recollections of those days spent with her mother’s corpse,
the mounting dread that weighed down her heart whenever morning
came and her mother had not awoken. The only thing she remembered
clearly was the intense feeling of safety she experienced outside
the mansion when I picked her up and carried her inside.

“
It was silly, really. But
I knew you could hear me and it was a way for me to be close to you
because no one could hear me but you. But I wanted to talk to you
today, I have done for years. I know you can make me forget about
this conversation, like you’ve done before, but you don’t have to.
I’m not a child anymore, Uncle Avery and I want you to know you can
trust me. And I get scared sometimes, that I’ll wake up one morning
and you’ll be gone and I won’t even remember you. I don’t want that
to happen. You’ve been there for me, so let me be here for
you.”

She exhaled deeply after her little
speech. I reached for her hand.

“
I would have never done
that...well, not in that way. But you remaining close to me...it
may not be good for you.”

Anxiety flittered across her features,
but she nodded, although she appeared to be greatly
unhappy.

“
Mallory, you mean a great
deal to me. I don’t want to push you out of my life. But I need to
think about what would be best—for you.”

She stared at me carefully and the
anxiety passed away. Perhaps she already knew what I had not
decided yet, that I would not make her forget the conversation we’d
had, or push her out of my life.

I got to my feet. “We’ll talk more
later.”

“
There is one thing I’ve
always wondered about,” she said. “When I was twelve something
happened. Did it have anything to do with the woman who came to see
you that time? Luna?”

Even hearing her name after so long
brought heart-wrenching pain. I nodded. She said no more, just
stared at me.

“
We’ll talk more later,” I
repeated, kissed her on the forehead, and left the room.

The image of Henriette’s broken body
entered my mind as I moved down the corridor, but it was not enough
to rid me of the stubborn, selfish joy that had asserted itself. I
did not have to push Mallory out of my world. I needed her. I could
not be alone when there was so much darkness ahead.

When she returned to college after the
Christmas break, I left Louisiana to continue to look for a way to
vanquish the chapel entity. I searched for witch after witch, but
none of them knew what to do and most were too afraid of whatever
this thing was to attempt to exorcise its hold on Luna’s
descendants. Auria was the only hope I had of discovering what this
being was. But although I searched the world for her and the son
she had spoken of to Emory, I never found her.

When I ended the search for Auria in
1994, another five of Luna’s descendants had perished. Unless I
could find a way to stop this thing, they would all meet horrific
fates at its hands.

An article I had seen in the paper
that day seemed trivial in comparison to the problem of the chapel
entity, but I decided to pack a bag and go to New York. Another of
Luna’s descendants, Ella Marshall-Simmons, had been receiving death
threats of late and it had been reported that an attack had been
made on her life a few days ago.

Ella was the owner of a global
cosmetics company. She was a strong, mercurial businesswoman who
had received her fair share of intimidation on her rise to the top.
I knew this because I had dealt with some of her more serious
opponents. She was not a woman who showed fear of anything. So it
was unusual that she had let this story become public knowledge.
Mama usually warned me whenever there was a serious threat of any
kind to one of her descendants and I had not had any dreams of Mama
for the last month.

It was odd, but I got on a plane
anyway and made my way to New York. I got there before dusk and
remained outside the mansion on Fifth Avenue, searching the
thoughts of its residents and keeping a close watch on anyone
entering or leaving the premises. Most of the residents of the
mansion had gone to bed by midnight. But Ella remained in her study
on the ground floor. I materialised in one of the living rooms on
the first floor and went to the window, where I could look out on
the street below.

I was asking myself whether or not it
was a waste of time being here when something changed. The air in
the room seemed to quiver. I spun round in time to shimmer to the
other side of the room before a large vase of gardenias I had been
admiring only moments ago, smashed into the wall a foot away from
where my head had been.

I gazed at the smashed vase, at the
scattered gardenias, water slowly sinking into the plush red
carpet. I sighed and waited.

Good evening, Mr
Wentworth.

The voice in my head was strong and
clear. It could only be Ella’s.

What is the meaning of
this? You have Luna’s journal, so you know who I am and that I mean
you no harm.

There was nothing for a few moments,
only the sound of the clock ticking, then her reply.

Come on down to my study,
Avery.

“
Said the spider to the
fly,” I muttered before I let the room disappear in a swirl of red
and black. I entered her study moments later.