Greys IV - Chains

Chapter 20 - Blackout

It only took three attempts, just one long night, to make the shadowy void appear. Which made each of us feel foolish for not thinking of the solution weeks sooner.

Ailech didn't like pulling from me, though he admitted he did like the feeling of using his ability on others now, tasting their power as he gained more of them, gained more control over them. He said it didn't feel the same when he touched my power though. He said the parts of me he took hurt, like holding metal as it heated until it glowed in your hand. He said there was an emptiness that scared him, and then, deeper yet, a darkness that called to him, trying to seduce him like a siren. He could feel its hunger, he knew it only wanted to consume - him, everything, anything.

His first try wasn't near enough to keep my power under control, to keep me aware and conscious of the pyre I unleashed. We had to take a break afterward so Ailech could heal the burns I had given Malachi, as he refused to wait from a safe distance. The second time, Ailech overcorrected and pulled too much. I passed out from his power instead of my own and we took another break as my boys waited for me to wake. But the third time was the charm, the Goldilocks middle ground. It happened just as it had in my vision, down to the mound of trash disintegrating from a single touch of my rolling darkness.

It was beautiful. It was the most intoxicating drug, the greatest high I had ever felt. It was power and protection and a deep, endless well of calm. It was hunger, it was destruction, but it was also peace, empty and quiet and...free. Between my Shift and the beautiful darkness, I didn't feel any pain, any loss for a moment. I was as deep and reaching and silent as the void that called me, that twinkling midnight sky that coalesced in my hand. It spoke to me, called me by my name like it was beckoning me home. And after my initial introduction with the dark, after it flowed through and filled and fought me, it settled, like it recognized who I was to it, what I was. I could feel it, touch it and draw from it, and though I still didn't know the power's depth, when I closed my eyes I could see it sometimes, feel it's calm comfort, it's protection. A promise.

I let it twist between my fingers like smoke on the drive home, my eyes forever watching it, mesmerized by it. Other times I made it slide like the softest of strings, tickling and weaving around my wrist, and finally, I turned it to delicate links, the fine chain of a necklace as I let it settle at the hollow of my throat. I recognized the feeling, my familiarity with the darkness, almost immediately. It was what I had fallen into every time the fire broke from me in the past months. What I had always mistook for unconsciousness was really the dark blanket catching me like a web, holding me, covering me.

As much as my mind fought the foreign and rare feeling, a small seedling of happiness, of excitement began to cautiously unfurl in me. The blackness was the perfect answer to calm me, to give me self-control even as I controlled it. To give me the strength I lacked, and had lacked ever since I woke up to a world without my Pair, without James, without a heart or a reason to keep looking to a future.

Ailech pulled me from my revelries as we parked.

"You don't think maybe you should...put that away, or limit it? Maybe only take it out when you need it? Dire circumstances and all that. What if it...deteriorates you? Your mind?"

"It won't."

Malachi answered before I could.

"Nyx lived with a taste of it for decades, and though he certainly wasn't a beacon of purity, I knew him for years and he wasn't mad. And obviously neither was Bezaliel, just...distracted, and he used the dark for millennia. All things in moderation, mage, or don't they teach you that anymore?"

Malachi winked at Ailech, who rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath.

"The fact that you're the one saying that gives me very few assurances."

I was almost to the door when I felt it, I paused and Malachi looked confused for the edge of a second before he suddenly stopped short too, frozen like a nocturnal animal caught in a spotlight. His lantern eyes went wide for a moment as his face slackened, then his jaw set, and a deadly calm settled over him, a tension I could feel in the air. I watched as his eyes shuttered and darkened, though he wasn't using his Shift. In the span of a moment he went from playful teasing mischief to cold stone, looking like he had when we first met, a well of violence hiding behind a pretty face. I felt his anger building, straining against its bounds. He was so full of it, I could sense it even without his Gift pushing it on me. And I knew why.

'Mother's here."

He spoke low, his voice rumbling like a storm on the horizon. Then he opened the door.

» ✦ «

She was different from the only other Fallen, and Irin, I had ever met. She almost seemed...normal. Not normal like the people asleep in the motel rooms surrounding us, but normal compared to Baraqiel, normal compared to the evil, inhuman creature I had been expecting. Malachi had made her sound insane in his fleeting words of her, certainly at the very least self-serving and heartless, but I knew how deception ran deep in my kind, so I refused to see her as she seemed: harmless.

She was beautiful, with long waves of deep brown hair left wild to flow over her shoulders and around her waist to end at the slight swell of her hips where she sat on the hard twin bed. Her eyes seemed to be every color, or change depending on how the light hit them. At first I thought they were hazel, but then I saw smoke swirled with blue and a brown so light it almost resembled Malachi's, even a muddy green once. Her lips were full, her face round, with large eyes and glowing fair skin, giving her a youthful look despite the unnumbered years she had been walking the Earth. She looked barely older than me.

Her presence wasn't at all like Baraqiel's either. She seemed so...benign.

She watched us placidly as we entered, as we watched her. Me with cautious curiosity, Malachi with a perfect mask of nothingness, like he didn't know her, like she was a stranger, not even a flicker of recognition in his yellow eyes. But Ailech had the most out-of-character response, his eyes were slits of deep green stone filled with hate. His teeth were clenched and I saw the tension in his face as he fought to stop his lip from curling into a snarl, from showing his teeth in an animal gesture.

The Fallen before us didn't seem to care about Ailech's anger though, or Malachi's apathy, as she kept her kaleidoscope eyes on me.

"You must have questions, my daughter. I am sorry you are cold. Does it remind you of the Vampyre? So many deaths for only two lives. Feeling him must be difficult, seeing him broken, the suffering there under another with poisoned blood. The dark has such a lovely shimmer though, like those eyes. But such a high price for power."

Her sentences didn't make sense to me, didn't connect, like they belonged in separate conversations. Her voice drifted in and out, singsong as it melodically flowed to a cadence that tickled my memory, but she was still much more lucid than I had expected.

"I want to know why. Why you left me if you knew what I was, what you had. Why would you give up that kind of power?"

I honestly didn't care for the reasons most abandoned children had when faced with their long lost parent, but it didn't make sense, and something about that irked me. Why wouldn't she do the logical thing? Why wouldn't she use me to further her own life like she had done with Malachi.

"Why, to survive, of course."

Sorry so short! I will add to this & such but I had to get it out not too late 😉

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