Darkbound (The Legacy of Moonset) (7 page)

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The Abyssal Princes are the worst of what hides in the Abyss. Born from the collision of chaos and cunning, they have become an abyss themselves, full of incessant hungers for destruction and degradation.

The Princes of Hell

Nick was at the table the next morning when I came downstairs. I bypassed the idea of breakfast and pulled my keys off the table where I’d left them. “Going to the gym before class,” I said quickly on my way to the front door. “Quinn’ll have to give them a ride.”

“I’m sure he’ll be thrilled,” Nick said, all casual and unconcerned.

My mood was good on my way out of the driveway. The visit with Charlie had effectively countered the guilt I’d had because of what I said in front of the others. Even the weather seemed in good spirits, as the sun burned away
the lingering cloud cover and beamed down over the city. Snow was already melting a steady trickle down driveways and into puddles in the street. I felt it in the air. A fresh start.

My morning routine was a fast-paced version of a regular workout, my eyes continually on the clock. Stomach crunches, curls, and ten-minute forays on the elliptical. I couldn’t spend more than an hour without being late for school, and the day was already going so well that I didn’t want to jinx it, so I showered with plenty of time left before the first bell.

All of that changed once I stepped foot inside the building. Everything was back to normal; no one was staring or being especially creepy. But even still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being hounded.

There were dozens of connecting and crisscrossing smaller hallways between branches of the main couple of buildings. But every time I started heading towards my first-period class, which was a building away, traffic congestion sprung up out of nowhere. The more I tried to push my way through, the thicker the crowds seemed to get.

I headed down a side hall, cutting back the way I’d already come, only to have the same thing happen again.

Hallways started to blur together, and the more frustrated I got, the more I kept turning down random, open hallways.

It got to the point where I was so turned around and so focused on the bell that was going to ring
at any second
that I stopped recognizing any of the hallways at all. Like I’m pretty sure I took the stairs down at least three times, and the school only had two floors.

Then, finally, just before the first bell, everything around me grew quiet like oblivion. The sound around me stilled until there was nothing but me: the raised but steady pulse of my heart, the quickened breaths entering and then exiting my lungs.

I stepped across a threshold and the moment of quiet popped, a warm rushing in my ears like water that had finally worked its way free. When I looked around, I realized I was in the auditorium again.

I saw it again out of the corner of my eye. The curtain. Fluttering. Any other time I would have noticed and dismissed it, attributing it to a draft or a heating vent kicking on. But every time it moved, something crawled on the back of my neck, like a scorpion dancing before the sting.

I came down the steps and crossed the auditorium to the stage. Something was lit up underneath the curtain and flickering like a fire.
Moving.

As I reached the stage’s edge, I grabbed the material from the bottom and pulled them back. A symbol, lines all curving in towards the middle, spinning slowly and languidly like a whirlpool that had all the time in the world. One of my knuckles brushed against the edge, and that was all it took. My body reacted to it, trembling as I lost control of my hand. My fingers reached out and brushed against the tip of it, then centered over the middle as I pressed my palm against the glow.

The world rippled. Fell away. I fell
through
worlds,
though it was more accurate to say that the worlds fell around me. I never moved. Reality broke apart in waves like it did in the movies when a character experienced a flashback. Or maybe it was like a pond after someone skipped a rock across the surface. One minute I was in the auditorium, trying to figure out why that symbol looked so damn familiar, and the next I was … in the auditorium.

Only it wasn’t the auditorium. There was a stage, but it was a thousand times more extravagant than the one I’d just left. There were chairs everywhere. Dozens of them. But not exactly chairs. They were too … ornate.
Thrones
. I was surrounded by them. Some were gaudy, golden monstrosities. Others were carved out of bone, or emeralds, and one was leather, smooth and dark with brownish stains that turned my stomach.

My knuckles sizzled with the brief contact even as my palm burned the symbol into my skin. It kept moving, lazily spinning the same slow path across my lifeline. There was an awareness to it, a sense of
hunger,
or
need.
A vortex that wouldn’t be satisfied until it drank the oceans dry. Even then its thirst would not slacken. That feeling was in me now, churning against the bones in my hand.

Whoever had been in charge of the redecorating had gotten into Lewis Carroll’s private stash because it was … something dreamed up in the creepy side of Wonderland. The curtain had been pulled back and tied against the walls, revealing the blood and guts that would become the framework for the school’s play. There were giant sheets of paper taped against the walls on either side of the room, brief sketches of scenery, or supplies still needed.

That was where the real ended, and the surreal began. The thrones, for starters. They’d replaced all the prison-block gray metal folding chairs. Someone had sketched out a tree in black on one of the walls, but now the drawing bulged out from the wall, the paper growing out as the tree took shape and became a three-dimensional monstrosity, erupting from the wall like a tumor. The tree shifted and swayed under a nonexistent wind. Papers hanging off the branches rustled with a breeze that didn’t exist. And from a hollow near the base, a pair of yellow-and-gold eyes peered out. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.

The worst of it was the fencing. Someone had started putting together a series of boards into a typical yard fence, probably for the Kansas scenes. But hanging off one of the boards was … I wasn’t even sure what to call it. It looked like a desiccated, road-kill version of the Scarecrow. Leather for skin that still had patches of hide to it, yet shrunken and damaged after a summer in the sun. The fingers tapered off into shards of something that looked like glass, and the eye sockets were deep, cavernous things lined with dark fur. But despite all the things that made it
not
human, it looked incredibly lifelike. I expected at any moment for the Scarecrow’s liquid glass fingertips to slice through the marionette strings and for it to begin its career as the world’s creepiest puppet. I was almost afraid to look away, because I was certain that even if I wasn’t watching
it,
it was watching
me.

“This is the part where someone drops a house on me, isn’t it?” I muttered under my breath. Across the room, from the stage itself, there came a chortling sound that sounded like the stripped-down essence of laughter. Bubbling brooks and tinkling piano keys, summer breezes and applause.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. But the creature sitting on the edge of the stage did not.

At first it was hard to say what I was looking at. At a distance, I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it was immediately obvious that whatever it was, it wasn’t human. White hair hung down past its waist and trailed to the floor beneath the stage—not just hair that was white, but hair that
glowed—
woven moonlight given form.

In a psych class a few schools ago, we’d done a section on how people perceive faces, and how important facial symmetry is to our subconscious opinion of attractiveness. The idea was that most people had an instinctive standard of beauty, recognizing immediately the symmetry of someone else’s face. But it was also the flaws in someone’s appearance that made them stand out, made them noticeable.

The creature in front of me didn’t have any flaws, unless not being on Illana Bryer’s Christmas card list was a flaw. A perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect chin. It was like my eyes slid off whatever they saw, because they couldn’t process what they were seeing. A face too handsome to be handsome, too beautiful to be beautiful, and yet too terrifying to be terrifying.

Time passed. It was impossible to look away, impossible not to want to
see.
I didn’t even know what I was looking at. My eyes burned, and it was only after I forced myself to blink that I realized how dried out they’d gone. How long I’d been staring. And just like that, the spell—or whatever the creature was doing to me—thawed.

“What are you?” I finally managed to ask.

His voice was husky. Melodious. But definitely masculine. “Don’t you know?”

Despite growing up as a terrorist cell’s wet dream, I’d had very few encounters with monsters. Bailey and I had already been evacuated by the time the wraith came after Justin and the others. But now her warning rang in my head again.
“
One of them escaped. He’s
here
now.
”

One of the creatures that Luca had been working so hard to free. One of them had managed to escape. “You’re one of them. An Abyssal Prince.”

A short nod.

“You tried to kill us,” I said, already starting to inch my way back the way I’d come. Not that it would do much good. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be allowed to leave until he let me.

“That’s not quite how I remember it,” the creature said. His words were strange, I could feel
wry amusement
dripping from the words themselves, as though his words were so heavily layered with meaning that they spilled out of the air waves that carried them. It was so overpowering for a moment that it completely shut me down. I pushed down the smile I’d drawn at his words. The warmth in my chest, and the embarrassment at his attention. My emotions were a violin, and he’d barely pulled the bow across the strings. He’d barely said anything at all.

“What’s your name?” I asked, falling back on rote conversations that didn’t require conscious thought. My brain was buzzing in the aftermath of his voice—I never wanted to hear his voice again, and for him to speak forever at the same time. I knew I was in danger, but knowing it and being able to
do something about it
were two vastly different things.

The creature opened his mouth, and there was a pointed pause, as if the words were on the tip of his tongue only to evaporate before they could be whispered into existence. “Names … I remember names.” His eyes turned towards me, violet and big.
Mourning and regret,
his words said. I whimpered. “Naming things. Deciding what they are; what they will be. Words to lock them into shapes that make sense. Names are glass cages, aren’t they?”

Irrationally, I thought of Jenna.
“
Of course her name is Meghan. I’ve never met a Meghan who wasn’t a bitch.
”

The creature nodded just as the memory faded, hands spread to reinforce his point. I shivered. He was in my head. He knew what I was thinking. But his voice was a lullaby, and kept my fear far enough away that it could not rule me. “Are names prisons where you came from?” This was one of the creatures that had nearly killed us—that Luca had almost died trying to summon. But back then they were creatures of green flame with voices that hissed and popped, not bodies that were a touch too human and yet not human enough.

“All names are prisons. Are you not defined by yours? Named for a man raised up in the wake of patricide.”

I startled with a shock and turned away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Macbeth killed his father and was in turn killed by Malcolm. You are a prisoner to both name and history.” He pulled one knee up and rested his cheek on it, looking to the side now instead of straight at me. “And yet, I miss it.” The more he talked, the more his words buzzed in my ears and kept me from thinking too clearly.
I just wanted to talk to him, right? There was no reason not to talk. Just talk.

“But you just said that names are cages.”

“Not all cages are infinitesimal, you know. Some are as large as worlds. But even still, one shouldn’t forget that a cage is still a cage.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked again, this time more delicate.

He shook his head, but still wouldn’t look up at me. I almost missed it. His looks were a sharp knife that cut at me, kept me off my game, but when they were hidden from me it was an ache in my mind, a desire my eyes held independent of the rest of my body. They wanted to keep looking on him, feasting on the awkward, alien beauty of the Prince, even if I knew it was wrong.

You wouldn’t be so calm if he looked like one of the wraiths that attacked Justin.
It was true. I knew enough about looks—my own got thrown into the mix often enough—that I knew I was being stupid. I certainly couldn’t trust this … demon, just because he had a pretty face. And yet I still was. I couldn’t help it.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I know you think of me as a monster. But I don’t
feel
like one. Do you think that makes a difference?”

A strange thrill arced through my veins. My body was hot, all of the sudden. So hot, sweltering, smiling. “It matters what I think?” That he would think of me like that, the one who never mattered, the outcast even among the outcasts. That he would care what I think. How had I gotten so lucky?

The creature smiled, a tentative, shaky sort of smile. Like it would fall away at any moment and reveal the crushing emotion that was hiding behind it. Anger, contempt, despair. Whatever it was, it was certainly sharp and deep. “All the difference in the world. In all the worlds.”