Darkside Sun (14 page)

The second I let go of that wonder, though, my predicament finally hit home. After tonight, I’d never get any older, and everything I knew would change.

He secured my other hand.

I tugged against him, my panic growing again. “Why aren’t you talking?” I asked when the silence stretched on. “What are you doing back there?”

“I’m here. Calm down.” He returned and wrapped a thick leather belt around my waist, securing the tarnished brass buckle. My feet came next, and I had to open my legs farther than I might have liked to accommodate the more rigid shackles.

Intense, he’d said. “Why will I be trying to get away? Pain? Fear?” I wasn’t sure which of those scared me more.

“Shhh.” Those neon blue veins pulsed to life beneath his skin, in time with the too-fast beating of his heart that I could somehow hear. Or maybe it was that pulse that accompanied travel through the Shift. We hadn’t gone anywhere, though, so I wasn’t sure. His tattoos spread down his body like bolts of lightning. A moment later, the illumination spread up the walls, over the ceiling, running into runes carved in to the stone. I might have been even more terrified if it hadn’t been so beautiful.

It was beginning. Whatever he was going to do would be done soon. And I was chained to a sacrificial altar in a white dress.
Oh God, oh hell, oh damn.

“Just look at me,” he said. “And slow your breathing. Watch me. Let me be your anchor on this journey.”

“Please don’t leave me.” Why did I say that? It was true, though. He would keep me safe, I knew it. My mind pulled out of its downward spiral, my pulse slowing to a trot. Weird, but what in my life wasn’t?

“I’m not going anywhere.” He met my gaze briefly, intensely, before returning his attention to the ritual.

I watched his hands gliding over my body, not touching, but as close as he could get without making contact. His dark hair and Middle-Eastern complexion, along with the scrolling lights under his skin, made for a startling contrast. Were his lights warm? Would I feel anything if I touched him while those luminescent veins glowed? I hadn’t felt anything when it happened to me, so probably not.

His left hand lingered over the center of my chest while the other one continued to wander. It reminded me of an old lady I’d seen in a convenience store passing her hands over the scratch lottery tickets trying to “feel” which one was a winner, like it would zap her with static or speak to her soul or some junk. I hoped Asher’s senses worked better than hers. She’d bought a dud and lost her five bucks.

His eyes opened at the same moment he went still. His other hand hovered just south of my groin, closer to my right thigh than my left. “Your strongest chakras are different than the rest of ours,” he said. “I’m glad I checked. Everyone else was the crown and the throat, but you’re the heart and the base. Your base seems to be manifesting a little lower, though.”

Thank goodness for that. The base chakra was smack dab in the girl goodies. The thigh was bad enough, if he had to touch me there given the way my body reacted to him. I wondered what was going through that mysterious head of his. In case he was as nervous as I was, I changed the subject. “You call yourself a sensei, which is Japanese, but chakras are Hindu, mythological metaphysical representations of a person’s life energy. And the dagger is Mayan. This room seems more ancient Rome than anything else. How many cultures does the Machine pull from?” Maybe I was attracted to neat old things for a reason?

“Many. Now no more talking. I need to move your dress. If I’d known I’d need access to these chakras, I’d have had you take it off, but I’m not willing to unchain you now.”

If he untied me now, I wasn’t sure he’d get me back on the table willingly, which was probably why he didn’t want to unchain me. Smart. I liked that; however, my nerves would have preferred he was an idiot.

Dagger in hand, he pressed it to the table and leaned over me. His striking eyes glowed along with the patterns under his skin, and the jade starbursts stood out even brighter than normal. Seeing him that way sucked all of the worry out of my head. In the end, I trusted him to not make this any weirder than it was.

“I need to make small nicks on your inner thigh and on your chest. I’ll make matching ones on my palms.” He held them up to show me.

I blinked at him, swallowing a giggle, my standard scream camouflage. “What are we going to be, some sort of blood brothers … sisters … whatever?”
Lovers
, my inner voice added. Insanity. He’d been mostly mean to me since we met, so why did I even want that?

Head bobbling he said, “More like blood warriors. The breaching of the flesh creates the small weakness my power needs to … taste what’s inside, metaphysically speaking, to mingle our energies.”

“So you’re going to pass your energy into me so you can take inventory of what’s in my mind?” It was hard to be skeptical of mystical crap while tied to an altar with a man glowing at my side, so I decided to just go with it. My weird-shit-o-meter just found a new notch, that’s all.

He positioned the dagger deep in his palm, his index finger along the blade. For precision, I thought. His other hand pulled the neckline of my dress down just a little, not enough to flash him anything other than my bra. “Hold still. Just a little nick, but it’ll still sting.”

“‘Hold still,’ he says to the girl chained to an altar.” I’d meant it to break the ever-growing tension, but it came out too wobbly to be anything other than a whimper from a rabbit about to be prepared tartare.

His lips curved into a smile—unnerving with the delicate curling lines glowing in his face—and I remembered why my IQ kept plummeting around him. “Okay, you really need to stop talking now,” he said.

I shut up as he moved the blade down beside where his opposite hand pressed me hard into the table. Little helpless sounds tumbled up my throat as I began yanking on the chains holding me.

I turned my face away and cried out as the tip of the dagger bit deep. The resulting pain made me wonder if the tip of the blade had come out the other side of me.

“All right, that one’s done. Calm down, or you’re going to pass out.”

“And that’s a bad thing? That freakin’ hurt!” Oh, no, I didn’t sound on the edge. What the hell was I thinking, letting him tie me down?

Warmth touched my knee, and I screamed, thrashing harder.

“Listen to my voice; breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.”

Yeah, like that was happening when my great gulping didn’t get the job done.

Leaning into me, holding me still, he pulled up my skirt with his free hand, careful to leave me covered and only exposing my right hip and some of my inner thigh. I wanted to read his expression, but he’d angled himself away. What was he hiding from me? Anger? Desire? Disgust?

I stopped wondering when he lowered the blade to me again. Pain rocketed in both directions from the cut on my inner thigh like fire racing along a wick. I groaned. I didn’t scream. Yippee. When he turned the dagger on himself, I closed my eyes, only catching hissing breaths as he cut each of his palms.

Some sort of sweet sound rose through the silence, like the hum of a church choir across a quiet lake in the dead of dawn. It grew and heated the air, vibrated it, sang in and around me, through me.

It came from Asher. As he sang in a foreign language, his voice held that low, haunting quality of a monastery choir, radiating emotion that could bring a person to tears. Not because of sadness or joy, not completely, but because he wore his heart in his voice and made anyone listening feel whatever was in that heart. And his was overflowing with some heavy, soulful stuff.

He hummed as he placed one hand down over my heart and pressed the other one on my thigh, the contact wet from our mingled blood. My body seized. Asher’s presence, so large and hot, filled me, and my soul tried to find an escape. There wasn’t one. I screamed, not because of pain or fear, but because that large something forced the air out of me.

Asher lit up my mind like a million candles in a black room. I cried inside, because I couldn’t seem to find my body, lost in his presence. Memories rolled through my mind, endless scenes of my life. I had enough darkness in my past it should have frightened me, made me queasy, but watching a horror movie with someone else was always less terrifying than watching it alone. So I—we—watched my life roll by inside my head like a fast-forward movie. All we needed was the popcorn. And maybe some Prozac.

In my mind’s eye, I blinked up through sleepy eyes at Dad. He was holding me as a baby. He was crying, jerking with those silent sobs men make when they don’t want anyone to know they’re crying. Not sad, though—but bright with joy. My eyes stung. It wasn’t a memory I knew, buried so deep in my mind I didn’t know enough to look for it. The day I was born? Nah, couldn’t be. People didn’t remember those things, did they? We sped through my first encounters with the rifts, my endless tears and shaking, my many nights hiding in terror in a closet or curled up outside Dad’s bedroom door.

The scene switched to my green bedroom at the cabin in Bracebridge where I’d lived my whole life, but the hand balling my blanket to my chin was little, maybe my six or seven-year-old hand. A woman stood over my bed in the dark. Only her silhouette gave suggestion to her form. Long, straight hair, slim at the waist and round at the hips. Like me.

Moonlight spilled in the window behind her, casting her face in darkness. She, too, was crying. Unlike Dad, her tears weren’t happy ones. The sounds she made cut through the night and made my heart hurt. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice thick with sorrow. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

I tried to break free of the memory, certain it wasn’t mine, but Asher swept around me like a warm wind as if to say,
“I’m here. You’re not alone.”
Before I could wonder who the woman could be, my childhood rolled forward like a train without brakes. Dad reading
Pinkalicious
to me every night until he could recite it from heart. Dad taking me skating on the pond behind the house every winter, though we spent more time shoveling snow than actually skating, with much laughter and snowball fights. Dad taking me to gymnastics class in town every Saturday even though it cut into his fishing time in the summer, not that he ever complained. Dad struggling through the birds-and-the-bees speech and dealing with my first period.

I felt myself smiling out there in my body until my mental scrapbook landed me on the steps of the United Church in town. I remembered the day as if it had been burned into my memory. The sky rolled with slate clouds.

My childhood friend, my one and only, Evangeline, lay dead inside the church. It was her funeral, and I was twelve. A hunting accident, they’d said, but I’d snuck up to that white coffin and lifted the lid while everybody else wailed in a large huddle near the back of the church. She didn’t look like my Evangeline, but a pasty white-blue that appeared more like poured wax than a person. A perfect little hole destroyed the perfection of her forehead. Hunting guns didn’t make holes like that. Even at twelve, Dad had taught me enough about guns that I knew they’d lied.

The memories came hard and fast, then, every heartache, piece of happiness, embarrassment, desire, and hope I’d ever had came back to haunt me—us. I could sense Asher’s agitation growing with my own as we both relived the heat and passion of our desperate exploration of one another only minutes ago.

All at once, the drift of memories shifted, the tide coming in instead of out. I felt like I’d stepped into a firestorm, and after my confusion settled, I realized it was Asher’s rage licking me with imagined flames. How did he exist so full of anger boiling just under his skin? No wonder he had a short temper.

New images flashed through my mind just as fast as my own had, only they weren’t mine this time. Asher cowering on an old shag carpet, bleeding from his mouth, arms, and feet. A man—his father—stood over him with a belt wrapping his knuckles, the buckle glinting silver in the light spilling in from a doorway.

A woman cried somewhere else in the house, a low piteous sound of the long-abused, the broken and hopeless. She’d been teaching Asher her language in secret and had gotten caught, Asher’s guilt over it eating me up on the inside as it often did to him. He had intervened when his father had punished her and taken the beating himself. By the cold acceptance on his boyhood face, I knew it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

The scene shifted. Asher, older now, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He gripped a knife that dripped blood onto the carpet. His father lay a few feet away in a large pool of crimson. Asher’s mother, who appeared Middle Eastern, lay broken in the corner with nothing short of gratitude in her bruised eyes. He’d killed his father to save his mother. The last shred of innocence gone. The boy became a seasoned man, fully infected by his father’s rage.

Asher as a teenager standing guard alongside men with old-fashioned guns, dressed like old-time movie gangsters, his dark blue mortal eyes already holding that frosty edge they had now. Other than his mother, nobody had ever raised their hand to him in kindness, only to hurt. His secret desire in life was to feel safe, but he learned young that there was no such thing. Monsters didn’t solely live beyond the veil, but on this side, too.

I wrapped his essence harder around me, clung to him, and this time it wasn’t me who needed the comfort, but him. And I wanted to give it, to suck all of the heartache out of him into myself. I wanted to show him the comfort of gentle arms and make him laugh as he should have as a child.

My body seized harder. Yes, I had a body, and it let me know it wasn’t happy with whatever was happening to me—to us. The thrumming heartbeat pounded against us. Distantly, I could hear him screaming. Not a girl scream, but one of those male roars that only accompanies some profound horror or loss. Somehow, I’d made him see his memories, too, ones he’d desperately tried to forget and probably had until I’d dredged them up again. And somehow I knew that wasn’t supposed to happen.

Asher roared, “Get out of my head!” and stood rod-stiff over me as if he couldn’t move away. His jerking reminded me of someone who’d inadvertently grabbed on to a live wire and couldn’t let go. Breaths huffed out of him, and the pulsing of his veins and the runes in the ceiling went nuclear until I couldn’t see him.