Arianna Rose: The Arrival (Part 4) (27 page)

“I know them better than I know you,” she fired back automatically. 

His eyes widened briefly, a natural reflex too quick for him to suppress.  And in that reflexive moment, he revealed a secret.  He let slip that a mighty river, full and strong, carved a chasm through his core, gushing and overflowing with toxicity.  Arianna glimpsed it, the pure, unadulterated hatred teeming within him.  It splashed like acid across his face, corroding and corrupting handsome features.  For a split-second, she swore she saw an entirely different being, a monstrous creature.  She swore she saw Darius for who he really was. 

The split-second ended almost as quickly as it began.  His face resumed its usual countenance, one she could only see now as artificial.  “Arianna, I am not the enemy here,” he said soothingly.  “I am your friend.  You have been traumatized,” he started, but she stopped him mid-sentence. 

“Yes, you’re right,” she humored him.  “I am going to go outside and look around, clear my head a bit while I’m out there.”

He frowned at her news.  “I’ll go with you,” he proposed.

What’s out there, Darius?  What don’t you want me to find?
She thought. 
I see you!
Her brain screamed. 

“No, that’s not necessary.  I want to go alone.”

Arianna did not leave room for negotiation.  She went directly to the bathroom, leaving Darius with his mouth agape.  She closed the door and dressed, then marched past him out the front door and into the clearing. 

The night air had grown chilly.  Fog blanketed the area and clung to trees and shrubs.  The woods appeared haunted, crawling with ghostly curdled shapes that dove and lunged at every turn.  But spectral mist did not frighten Arianna at the moment, reality did.  She looked over her shoulder as she dashed past limbs and leaves, sagging as if bearing the weight of snow rather than vapor.  She’d expected Darius to follow despite her firm refusal to allow him to join her.  But the woods were silent, unnervingly so.  Perhaps he stalked her, loping behind her with what she now thought of as predatory grace, soundless and deadly. 

The hairs on the back of her neck rose.  The creepy stillness of the forest unsettled her to her core, almost as much as Darius’ suddenly glaring duplicitousness unsettled her.  She looked all around her, searching for something, anything that would clear Dane and Jason.  But all she saw were skeletal branches, gnarled and knobby tree trunks, spiky brush, and skulking wisps of fog. 

Pain hammered at the backs of her eyelids.  Tears threatened.  Her life, the life she’d patched together like a quilt and held dear, had fallen apart at the seams when Desmond left after his father’s death.  He’d gone to Agnon’s compound after sensing his untimely passing and returned a different man.  Though she could not blame the late warlock for her lover’s transformation, she could not shake the sense that there was a unifying thread connecting them. 

And a single name crept into her thoughts: Darius.  Darius’s name glared like a neon sign and eclipsed reason.  His sudden appearance just after Desmond’s interlude with his mysterious cousin, Beth’s murder, somehow, the events related to Agnon’s death, and Agnon’s death was somehow connected to Darius.  She could feel it.  She did not know why or how, just that a common fiber bound them. 

She closed her eyes and reached out with every part of her, allowing her energy to guide her. Sounds became sharper, smells richer and her senses more keen as she tried to figure out where Darius had gone when he’d come outside, allegedly searching for clues.  She inhaled deeply, could almost smell him.  But his scent was different.  Earlier it had been fresh, like the sharp scent of verdant grass and sunshine.  Arianna still detected those notes.  Only now, a new note dominated: violence.  A woodsy musk tinged with the metallic, iron-rich odor of blood hung heavily in the air
and fused with the crisp scent she thought she knew.  She looked all around her at the still, black night, at land that chopped and rocked like a violent sea, and half expected to see Darius materialize, sweating and spattered with blood. But she did not.  Instead, the landscape and the smell caused a memory to float to the very edge of her consciousness, so brief it almost slipped by unnoticed.  Arianna latched onto the image.  Darius had said there was nothing out in the woods, nothing that could be found, likely because he hadn’t been looking for Beth’s killer at all.  It might as well have been written on his face.  He did not give a damn about Beth or finding her killer.  For all she knew, Darius was her killer. 

The notion scrabbled her, shivering across her skin like thousands of insect feelers.

Did Darius kill Beth?  The question nearly staggered Arianna, fury ripping through her body as visions of death and gore blanketed her thoughts and gave birth to a slew of possibilities.  Darius could have killed Beth then sifted back to the couch without her knowing.  He’d been insistent that Arianna sleep.  The scenario bloomed, rippling like a wave in a placid pond.  It certainly made more sense than one of Beth’s bother’s murdering her.  Beth had been the only one living among them who had questioned Darius, and publically at that.  She had not masked her dislike for him.  It all started to make sense.  The only issue that remained was eye witnesses placing either Dane or Jason leaving Beth’s cabin shortly after her death.  But she did not believe either Dane or Jason capable of killing his sister.  But Darius was another case entirely.  The thought of blood on his hands resonated deep within her.  She continued to probe with her powers, prodding and exploring the ether until she picked up on his trail, a trail of power that existed like a glimmering wave of twilight, wispy and intangible.  She followed it, her heart racing, for less than thirty steps before it ended abruptly.  Frustrated, she balled her fists and slammed them against her thighs.  The trail vanished without a trace.  She was forced to think that he had sifted from exactly where she stood.  

“Where did you go next, Darius?” she asked the forest and heard her voice echo with the strain of a thousand eerie cackles.  But it did not offer an answer beyond its distorted return of her voice.

She closed her eyes and delved deep; summoning every bit of energy she could invoke and felt herself fade.

When
Arianna opened her eyes, she saw an ashen fortress rising from the colorless landscape of Ellsworth Land and realized where she was.  Desmond had once described this place to her.  It had to be Agnon’s stronghold; it looked exactly as Desmond had depicted it. 

Cold slapped every square inch of her body, stinging and prickling like thousands of needles pricking her at once.  She hugged her midsection and felt confident Agnon’s citadel stood before her.  She opened the front door and stepped inside. 

She found herself in a mudroom, the space austere and unusually clean, but a scent hung in the air, metallic and unmistakable.  Blood.  The coppery sour stench filled her nostrils.  She followed it as it hooked its acrid talons into her and towed her along.  From the mudroom, she went directly to a living-room area and saw the source of the smell.  Crimson smears, similar to the ones at Beth’s cabin, defaced the walls in a macabre mural of gore.  But unlike the scene at Beth’s, a broken body was nowhere in sight.  She scanned the room, hand covering her nose and mouth against the pungent stink, and noticed that a massive hearth stood at the center of the wall beside her, a fire blazing inside.  She quickly reached out with all her senses, probing for the slightest hint of another being like her present, but felt nothing.  Whoever started the fire had left not long ago.  Her gaze returned to the red marks.  The pattern of them, the almost deliberate nature of the smatterings, were achingly familiar, like the brushstrokes of a sadistic artist, one whose work she’d seen before. 

Realization hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, crystallizing all that was before her.  Darius.  Darius killed Beth, not Dane or Jason.  Darius had done it.  And he’d killed Agnon too.  Love loss did not exist between her and Agnon.  She hated the bastard but assumed her time to tangle with him would’ve come, and if he were to have fallen battling her, his death would’ve be a righteous one.  He would not have endured what the walls bespoke had happened to him.  But that time would never come.  Agnon had been struck down brutally. 

Arianna closed her eyes and could see the monster Darius was, lurking beneath the mask of civility he’d cultivated so meticulously.  A frothing swirl of anger burned in her gut.  And with the frothing swirl came insight.  Desmond’s face flashed in her mind’s eye over and over again.  But she had yet to make the connection between Darius and Desmond, though she was sure they were interconnected somehow.  Had Darius brainwashed Desmond and that was why he’d bedded his cousin and betrayed her?  Or was she simply grasping at straws to excuse dishonorable, unforgivable behavior?  Uncertainty made her temples pound.

She combed both hands through her hair and held her head for a moment, willing answers her way.  And they came in visions.  Jarring images jerked, playing out roughly before her eyes like a movie flickering bumpily on an ancient film reel.  What she saw made her gasp.  An image of Agnon being murdered blinked and wavered followed by clips of Desmond being tortured.  Interspersed among gruesome picture after gruesome picture, a secondary scene rushed forth then receded disjointedly.  Amitt surrounded by darkness, her dress hiked up as her breathing hitched in sexual ecstasy.  A single cohesive element unified all the images playing out in her vision and
was presented as a face, a familiar face. 

Darius’ gleaming eyes and sun-kissed skin, the genetic gifts he disguised himself in, stared at her in every ghoulish excerpt. 

“No, no, no,” she heard herself whimper as the reality of her life crashed into her with tidal wave force.  She fought the surge vehemently, trying to focus, to concentrate on keeping her emotions in check.  Breathing deeply to steady herself, she felt an all-encompassing energy engulf her, tether itself to her, and pull hard.  She began walking on legs that felt commanded by a force separate from her own.  She crossed the room, made her way into in a state-of-the-art kitchen.  She went directly to an oversized pantry closet and grabbed a large key from a hook on the inside of the door as if she’d done it hundreds of times, then opened a cabinet beside it and retrieved a flashlight.  She gripped both tightly as she left the room and went directly to the first door in the hallway off the kitchen and opened it.  Beyond the door was a wide stairway.  She quickly descended it and learned that it led to a finished basement.  Stark black tiles shimmered in the bright overhead lighting.  The soles of her shoes moved soundlessly over their surface as she strode toward a door in the far corner. 

With each step she took, her grip on the key grew tighter and tighter until the metal threatened to puncture her skin.  Her fingers trembled as she clumsily manipulated the single key into the massive padlock securing it.  Sweat stippled her brow.  She brushed it away with the back of her forearm before twisting the key in the lock and removing both.  After a deep breath, Arianna pulled the door toward her.  Its hinges bemoaned its weight as she leaned back using every ounce of her might to yank it open.  When finally it yielded, a yawning pit of darkness stretched before her, fading into nothingness.  The sight gave her panic.  Her thumb fumbled with the switch on her flashlight, hand trembling and clumsy as she tried to slide it forward, but nothing happened.  She shook it several times, batteries rattling loosely, before a weak beam of light crawled across the floor and revealed a narrow swath of glistening, gray stone.  But inky shadows pushed it back, smothering it.  A part of her wanted to turn back.  Perhaps it was her remaining shreds of common sense.  Perhaps it was something else entirely.  Regardless, she did not heed the warning.  She crossed the threshold. 

The scent of wet earth and mildew slammed into her chest like a fist, but not nearly as hard as the low vibration of energy slithering from the dark, sinister and strong.  She took several more tentative steps.  The blackness reached out to her, tugging her with dusky fingers, and terror overwhelmed her.  Her breathing became short, shallow pants, her heart thundering so madly, she half expected the unsteady beat to echo endlessly down the never-ending tunnel of gloom.  But it did not.  It ended where it began, inside her.  Taking a deep breath to steel herself, she reached out a hand and felt her fingertips brush against a damp stone wall.  She walked, keeping constant contact with the wall for fear she would be absorbed by the void.

With one hand clutching her flashlight like a lifeline and the other skimming the wall, she focused on the faint shaft of light before her.  Each step sloped downward, leading her deeper into the cavernous bowels of Agnon’s lair.  Overhead the house rumbled as if in protest, trembling as though the area were experiencing aftershocks.  She braced herself, stopping for the moment and placing her body flush against the rocky wall.  A breeze stirred, gently at first, but Arianna could not imagine where it came from.  Then a high-pitched whistle pierced her eardrums before an unearthly din howled past her, resonating through the endless hollow.  The sound beat against her skull with such force she thought the bone would crack.  Her pulse sped dangerously and her fingernails broke as they dug into grit, readying to hold on as a gale-force gust tried to sweep her away.  But the gust never came and the sound dwindled spookily as it grew distant.  When she’d plastered herself to the wall, she’d banged the flashlight against it and the light had dimmed.  The utter darkness, the strange throb of energy and pounding in her ears from the shrieking disoriented her and destroyed her sense of balance.