Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 03 - Dark Legacy (5 page)

Within moments,
the wounds closed, and Noah’s blood pressure stabilized. Miles, however, looked
worse. It took great effort for him to stand, and he stumbled to the car and lay
in the back seat.

Noah, feeling much
better, got up and went to Miles. “Can’t you heal yourself?”

“No,” he said,
breathless. “We can only heal others, not ourselves.”

“I need to get
you to a doctor.”

“I just need to
rest. Let’s just go home. Please.”

Noah started the
car and headed north. But as he re-entered Abbeville, he felt he needed to take
action. He went back to the old woman’s house. Both cars were still there.

“Miles?”

There was no
answer from the back seat.

Noah parked the
car and ran to the front door, rang the bell, and then repeatedly knocked
loudly. The blond woman, Mary, came to the door. She looked perplexed at first.

“Miles,” said
Noah.

She saw the
blood on his shirt and jacket. Her eyes widened, and she brought her hand up to
her throat. “Where is he?”

He motioned for
her to follow him to the car. He opened the door, and it looked like her heart
sank. She climbed in next to him and patted his cheek. “Miles,” she murmured.
“Miles.” She felt his pulse and then noticed blood seeping through his shirt.
She ran to the house and came right back with some matches and a white candle. She
removed his shirt, lit the candle, steadied it on the arm rest in the front
seat, cupped her hands and bent over the flame. She inhaled deeply, and when
she took her mouth away, the flame had disappeared. She placed her mouth over
his wounds and exhaled. Miles moaned, and the flame returned to the candle.

She sat with him
for a few moments, repeating the process several times until Miles was more
alert. He looked up at her with grateful eyes, and both he and Mary shared a
look of unrequited desire. They held hands and smiled at each other. It lasted
for a couple of minutes. Noah looked away, not wanting to be obtrusive. He
turned and noticed the old woman was at the door, watching them, her eyes cold
and hard.

When
they pulled into Miles’ horseshoe driveway the headlights spotted a small,
hunched figure on the front steps. They realized it was Nadia. She was crying.

Miles rushed to her side, putting his
arms around her shoulders. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Mama and Papa! They’re dead!” She
buried her face in his chest and sobbed.

Miles brought her into the house and
made her an herbal tea. He and Noah sat with her while she told them that her
parents died in a car accident on the way to the airport in France. Noah felt
like an intruder on something so private and emotional.

When her hands stopped shaking, Miles
called the convent to tell them that she was at his house. And then he called his
friend in Paris to get more details.

It was just Noah and Nadia in the living
room, on opposite ends of the unlit fireplace. Just a couple of lamps casting a
soft glow in the large room. He didn’t know what to say. He opened his mouth a
few times to say something but then closed it. What could he tell her? That
everything would be okay? That he was sorry?

She sat and stared at the floor, her
hands wrapped around the mug with chamomile tea. With the stony silence in the
room, he couldn’t help but overhear the conversation in the next room, and he
found he could even faintly hear the person on the other end of the line. She
had a strong French accent.

“Charmagne, it’s Miles. Nadia is here.
She just told me.”

“Oh, Miles! I tried to reach you all
day.”

“I’m sorry. I just got home. It was a
long day, but we got the grimoire. I’ll call Ben in a little while and tell
him.”

There was a long pause on the other end,
and then she said, “Well, that would certainly be joyful news if not for the
tragedy that took place today.”

“Of course,” he said, his voice soothing
and heavy with grief.

“And … Eve lost the baby.”

“I know,” he murmured.

She hesitated and then said, “They’ll
have to be cremated. The accident was horrific, from what I was told.”

Miles had no words.

“Is Nadia … well I don’t believe she
would be all right, but how is she?”

“How you’d expect her to be. I’m having
her spend the night tonight. I just called the convent to tell Sister Alice she’s
here. Tomorrow, we’ll decide what to do, but of course she’s welcome here for
as long as she wants.”

***

“Miles, of
course we appreciate all you’ve done for Nadia and for the convent, but I just
feel it’s best for a growing young girl to stay with us. Your life is … well,
it’s a little too dangerous, wouldn’t you say?”

He looked like
he didn’t want to agree, but he nodded anyway.

Nadia sat there,
uninterested in the conversation or the food that she pushed around the plate
with her fork. They were having dinner in the beautiful dining room. A stained glass
window was embedded in the ceiling. Noah figured it must have been really
pretty when the sun was out and colored shadows danced on the white linen table
cloth.

Noah wasn’t very
hungry at the moment. Sister Alice from St.
Geneviève’s
convent came to
Miles’ house to get Nadia. She said she had run away after they told her about
her parents.

“I would feel
much better if she stayed with us for the time being,” insisted Sister Alice.

“Why don’t you
ask her what
she
wants?” said Noah.

Sister Alice
pursed her mouth into a thin line and Miles seemed half amused but tried to
hide it.

It was the first
time Nadia looked up from the table. Her eyes met Noah’s briefly before gazing
downward again. But in that brief moment, he felt she looked grateful.

“Nadia?” said
Miles, his voice soothing. “What would you like to do, sweetheart?”

She shrugged and
opened her mouth to say something, but before she could speak, the stained
glass window shattered into thousands of pieces, and a winged creature landed
upright on the table.

Miles fell back
in his chair.

Nadia’s hands
flew to her face, blood already trickling from the glass that sliced into her
skin.

Sister Alice,
who also had cuts on her face, ran to Nadia to protect her.

Noah shrank from
the table, his back against the wall.

The winged
creature—a male with dark red skin and wings with silver streaks—spied Miles,
hopped off the table, and picked him up by his throat.

“The grimoire!
Where is it?!” it growled.

Noah gathered
his courage and tackled the creature. It released Miles, who slumped to the
floor.

The creature
threw Noah through the dining room window. He landed in the shrubs outside.

Sister Alice
tried to usher Nadia into the next room, away from the danger, but Nadia pleaded,
“No! We have to help him!”

The creature
whirled around to her, its hungry red eyes taking her all in. Before it lunged,
it let out a great roar and sank to its knees. Miles had his hands raised, his
eyes keenly focused, his face growing paler by the second.

Noah climbed
back into the dining room, grabbed a knife off the floor and stabbed the
creature. Severely weakened, it collapsed in on itself, looking like leathery
flesh laid out over bones.

Out of breath,
Noah said, “What the hell was that?!”

Miles sank once
again to the floor, breathing heavily. Sister Alice rushed to him. “Nadia,” she
said, gesturing toward a pitcher of water on the table. Nadia handed it to her,
and she grabbed a napkin off the floor, dipped it in the water, and applied it to
Miles’ face.

There was a
thundering crash that came from the living room. Noah ran there to find two
more winged creatures ransacking the room. The bookshelf and the table on the
far wall were knocked over, papers scattered everywhere.

One of them
spotted Noah and immediately went on the offensive, flying toward him and
crashing him into the wall of the foyer. Noah yelled in agony as he felt his
shoulder dislocate. He reached up with one hand to claw at the sickly yellow
skin of its face. With its free hand, it pinned his other arm against the wall,
and then it did something peculiar; it smelled him, deeply inhaling his scent.
It eyed him with keen interest for a moment, and then the other creature called
for it to leave. It dropped Noah to the floor, and the two of them flew out the
living room window as Miles made his way into the foyer, leaning on the
shoulder of Sister Alice.

“Are they gone?”
he asked Noah.

Noah groaned in
agony on the floor near the staircase. Miles and Sister Alice laid Noah flat
out on the floor, and Miles pushed Noah’s shoulder back into the socket. He
screamed, and Miles laid his hands upon him. Within seconds, Noah’s pain had
subsided, and then Miles passed out.

***

“They were
nephils.”

Noah froze when
Sister Alice told him. Was that what he was? One of them? He was more disgusted
than ever to know that whatever flowed through their veins flowed through his.

Sister Alice
kneeled beside the couch where Noah had placed Miles, who was still passed out.
She left a cool cloth on his head and held his hand. Some of her
silver-streaked brown hair fell away from her habit and clung to her forehead.
Nadia sat curled up in the wingback chair on the other side of the coffee
table. She hadn’t said a word since all the commotion.

“Is he going to
be okay?” said Noah.

Sister Alice
nodded. “He didn’t have his holy water with him, so it was a lot harder on him
to heal you. That and draining the life of the other nephil was too much for
him. He’ll be okay, though.

“I think they
got the book,” said Noah, looking around the living room. “I saw Miles put it
down on the table over there when he came in. It’s not there anymore.”

“I don’t know
anything about this book you’re going on about, but maybe it’s for the best that
they have it. At least it’s one less thing to attract the Dark Side here.”

“How can you say
that? Father Ben said—”

“Oh, that man!
He sees things—visions—and then tells Miles, and then trouble happens.”

“Um, I was under
the impression that trouble comes anyway. He just let’s you know ahead of time
so you can do something about it.”

Sister Alice
pursed her lips and scowled down at the floor. “Nevertheless, I’m taking Nadia
back with me tonight.”

Noah looked over
his shoulder at Nadia who just stared at the empty fireplace. She looked
broken, and he supposed she was. “Good idea,” he told the nun.

Monday, Noah
went to school as usual. Coming home, as soon as he rounded the corner of his
street, he saw a police car parked in the driveway and his mother talking to an
officer. Panicked, he ran the rest of the way home, conscious to run at a
normal pace. When he got to the driveway, he saw what the problem was. Someone
had written JOIN US on the garage door.

“Noah, honey,
how was school?” Selena sounded entirely too nonchalant.

“School? Mom,
our garage was vandalized.”

“Probably just a
prank, love. Some red paint. Someone’s idea of a joke.”

But Noah knew it
wasn’t paint. He could smell the blood from where he stood.”

Selena eyed him,
silently telling him to keep his mouth shut.

A police officer
approached him. “You have any pranksters at your school?”

“Nah, I don’t
know anyone who’d do that.”

“All right,
then.” He turned to Selena. “Not much we can do, but you might want to install
a security camera. When you paint over this, they might come back to mess with
it again.

“I’ll do that.
Thank you.”

The police left,
and Selena and Noah went inside the house.

“Mom, that was
blood.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you
tell the cops?”

“Cee Cee saw it
before I did. She had come over to drop off a little gris gris bag for me. She
told me not to get the police involved, that she would talk to Miles. But ol’ Miss
Rita from next door insisted on calling the police to report vandalism. She
said she didn’t want someone coming to her house to do that. And then she went
on a tirade about what this neighborhood is coming to.”

“Mom … I don’t
think we should stay here tonight.”

She smiled
reassuringly at him. “Baby, it’ll be okay. Cee Cee performed a protection spell
around the house. We’re safe in here.”

“If it’s what I
think it is, you don’t know what those things are capable of!”

She whirled
around and eyed him. “Don’t I? I know exactly what they’re capable of, Noah.”

“Oh … I forgot.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Mom. But you know what these things
are. We can’t—”

“Noah.” A dull,
tired ache showed in her eyes. “I spent too many years of my life living in
fear after what I went through the night you were conceived. Now, I don’t
regret having you for one second. I love you more than life itself. But I’m not
going to be afraid anymore. And I don’t want to teach you to be afraid.” She
touched his cheek. “We’ll be okay, baby. Nothing can get in this house. Nothing
can hurt us.”

Noah wasn’t so
sure, but he smiled for her, anyway.

***

The neighborhood
was quiet. At 1:30 AM, most everyone on the street had gone to bed—everyone
except Noah. He lay awake in his room, the light from his bedside lamp the only
light in the house. He wrestled with the decision to tell his mother about her
heritage. Maybe if she had his abilities she could protect herself if something
happened. But he didn’t want her to have Miles’ life. He wanted her to stay
away from danger, not run toward it.

He was startled
to hear a loud rustling followed by a thud in the backyard. He got up and
looked out his window. The streetlight from the corner created deep shadows on
the small lawn. He couldn’t see anything near the fence line, so he watched for
a minute, cautious of the slightest movement.

Opening the
window a crack, he tilted his head, cocking his ear. He found that he didn’t
have to strain to hear anything. Normal sounds like distant television sets,
the Bullers arguing from the next street over, and the occasional car passing
by seemed they like all came from the backyard, clear as a bell.

The breeze shifted
a little, and he caught some kind of scent—a sort of sweet animal scent that he
recognized from Miles’ house when they were attacked.

He heard
something just then, a soft scraping sound on the wooden fence. He thought it
could be a tree branch, but what he heard next chilled him to the bone. A soft
whisper, so soft he might have thought it to be in his mind, said, “I know you
can hear me. You and I are the same.” It was a woman’s voice, sultry and
enticing.

Without warning,
something big and white took off from the deepest shadow of the fence and flew
out of Noah’s line of sight. It was so fast he couldn’t make out any shape or
form. All the street lights on his block started popping out, the sound of
tinkling glass filling his ears as the darkness grew. He ran downstairs and out
the front door, grabbing his jacket on the way out. There were no lights
anywhere on the street, the block, or several blocks in either direction. Even
the porch lights were out, and with the new moon, the only light to be seen was
starlight and a faint glow from the other neighborhoods.

And then he saw
it hovering in the sky, halfway down the block. A slender woman, her naked body
ghostly pale, as if carved from white marble. The only color he could see was
her long, vibrant red hair that provided a stark contrast to her skin. Her
great wings flapped lazily back and forth, and as Noah watched her with his
mouth hanging open, she glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes … her eyes were as
red as her hair and her lips that curved up into a coy smile as the winter air
puffed up around them.

She took off,
headed for the river. Noah shook his disbelief and followed her, running as
fast he could with his new-found ability, but she was faster. He lost sight of
her as she turned the corner to access the pier. He waited, sweating and
breathing hard, ears cocked for the sound of wings.

Too many shadows
on the pier. Shadows from docked boats rocking gently on the Mississippi, a
couple of big warehouses, stacks of crates, all casting perfect hiding spots.

Noah stalked as
quietly as possible down the pier, taking precaution to hug the walls of the
warehouses, and then came to a small alley in between the buildings. That’s
when the smell hit him again. It wafted from the draft in the alley. He looked
up, but saw no woman hovering. It was pitch black in between the walls, and he
felt extremely foolish for going in blind.

But something
began to happen the further he walked. He found that he could see, faintly at
first, but soon his pupils dilated, and his eyes found every bit of light they
could, absorbing every photon, until the alley came into focus, but with
exaggerated, sharper colors.

And there at the
end of it, was the woman with the wings. As soon as he noticed her, she flew
toward him with a scowl upon her face and, grabbing him by the back of his jacket,
lifted him off the ground and turned him around to face her.

Noah struggled
to get her to let go until he realized he was about twenty feet off the ground.

“Who are you?!”

She sneered. “I
am Arcelia, daughter of Samyaza.” She looked him up and down. “You are becoming
quite powerful. Will you join us, son of Gadriel?”

“Who?”

“Your father
wants you at his side.” She breathed into his ear, “Everything you desire can
be yours. Join us.”

She let him go.

Noah panicked in
those short seconds, but was surprised that he landed nimbly on his feet with
little pain. It was more of a shock than anything, but he rebounded quickly. He
looked up to the sky, but the woman was gone. Behind him was a homeless man.
Noah thought he was asleep at first, but then he saw congealed blood that had
pooled around him. He turned him over to see his throat had been ripped out and
his head barely hanging on. The blood smelled just like the blood on the door
of his garage. 

Her voice echoed
in his mind:
Join us
.