Blood Possession (30 page)

Shelby’s answering laughter was hearty and unrestrained. “You mean no one looks more girly, wizard!”

The two males collided playfully, arms reaching up to lock each other’s heads in a simultaneous wrestling hold, bodies circling in an attempt to gain physical advantage. They had wrestled like this a thousand times over the years, and there was nothing strange or otherworldly about their coming together now. It all seemed so easy.

So pleasant.

As if Nachari had simply walked from one side of the creek to the other to meet his twin.

There was just no great transition.

And now that the pain and fear were gone, there was no hesitation or regret, either.

They wrestled until they were winded and their ethereal bodies were covered in dirt. Until a pair of distant but distinct—and gravely serious—voices interrupted their play: “Nachari!” The urgent tone grabbed both of the twins’ full attention.

“Oh gods,” Nachari said, chastising himself for getting distracted, even for a moment. He spun around, searching the meadow. “Niko? Jankiel?”

Niko’s voice rose with alarm. “Nachari, Napolean has already bled out! He has already died, and Ademordna has stepped out of his body!” He was speaking as a medium.

Nachari spun around warily. “Where is the demon?”

The grief in Jankiel’s voice was inconsolable. “The dark lord has already reclaimed possession. I’m afraid it may be too late to save our king.”

“No,” Nachari lamented. “No!”

Dear Celestial gods
, what had he done?

Nachari scanned the meadow, trying desperately to see what he needed to see: the cot containing the body of his Sovereign. Everything was blurred in subtle, shadowy form. Not dark—just not clear.

Shelby held out his hand. “It is an acquired skill, brother.”

Nachari took Shelby’s hand, and the land around them fell into immediate focus. Together, they jogged to the side of the king’s body. Napolean looked so…still…lifeless.

Harmless.

And then his eyes popped open and a dark, evil presence regarded the twins as two orange balls shone from behind the king’s pupils. “I win. You lose,” the malevolent voice purred.

Napolean’s body sat up on the cot—or at least it did on this side of the world—and he licked his lips as if tasting a delicacy.

“How do you figure?” Nachari asked.

The body laughed, and it was alarming—hearing Napolean’s pure voice being used by such a wicked being. “You’re dead, wizard, and I still have the king.”

Nachari stared at the evil lord gloating before him. He scanned Napolean’s body, taking careful measure of every chakra—the colors of his aura—assessing any breaks or holes in the energy. The dark lord’s essence was firmly planted in Napolean’s body. In fact, it had taken such firm hold that the fit appeared almost seamless.

Almost.

But not quite.

Just below the heart chakra, there was a weakness—a break. A place where the goodness of the male who had animated the body for so many centuries had not completely given way to the absolute and irretrievable hold of the darkness. Napolean’s integrity and his growing love for the human woman, his
destiny,
were still imprints in his heart, and that was Ademordna’s vulnerability.

Nachari exchanged a quick glance with Shelby, who nodded almost imperceptibly. In the blink of an eye, both brothers extended their fangs, released their claws, and leapt at the dark lord—Nachari from the front, Shelby from the back. They struck his chest with unbridled force. They impaled his breastbone, dug up and under his ribs, and clutched at the black demon heart for all it was worth.

“Now!” Niko and Jankiel’s voices rang out in their ears, and both brothers wrenched back with all they had—twisting the false heart from opposite directions—yanking, turning, and jerking it free from the possessed cavity.

The blood turned thick and gooey, and worms began to crawl along Nachari’s arms, each maggot sinking sharp, jagged teeth into the wizard’s skin like a frenzied parasite. The demon lord shouted his rage as his form broke free from Napolean’s body, and a pure, pink heart began to grow—and beat—in the place of the diseased one.

As Napolean’s pure heart took firm root once again in the body of his birth, the possession came to an end.

And then suddenly, they had a much greater problem.

Napolean Mondragon, the sovereign lord of the house of Jadon, was free once again to return to his people, his
destiny
, but Nachari Silivasi was still in the spirit world, standing face to face—toe to toe—with the unrestrained, immortal demon, Ademordna. The maggots, which were microscopic fragments of the dark lord’s blackened heart, leapt from the hands of the twins—back into their familiar, immortal, shadowed form; and then the shadow grew in height until it stood at least ten feet tall, the evil growing darker…and darker…until, at last, it shimmered an inky, iridescent black.

Ademordna’s features were so repugnant that it burned Nachari’s eyes to look upon them; and then the dark lord’s tongue began to slither about his mouth, like a snake on a vine, wagging its tail in some gruesome, erotic parody. He was hideous yet handsome at the same time—clearly not human or Vampyr.

Nachari instinctively reached for Shelby, using their familiar telepathic line of communication, but there was no answer to his call. He spun around, his senses flaring out. “Brother!”

Still no answer.

“Shelby!”

The demon cackled loud and abrasive, and the meadow shook. The surrounding trees grew arms in place of their branches and began to reach out for the wizard, clawing at his flesh with jagged fingers.

Nachari fell into a low, fighting stance, rotating to the balls of his feet—he was ready to strike or defend at will—and then he closed his eyes, calling on his second-sight to see what was truly there.

“Your brother is no longer beside you,” the dark lord hissed on the cold tail of a foul wind. “What did you think would happen once you made things right—as it were—dear wizard?” The words dripped with venom. “You returned the king to the land of the living, and myself—the dark lord Ademordna—to the throne of the abyss.” He groaned, and fire shot out of his mouth in a steady stream like the red-hot flames of a blowtorch.

Nachari felt for the truth of the dark lord’s words—demons were notorious for lying—but this one was telling the truth.

“Shelby is
dead
…despite your pitiful desire to believe otherwise,” Ademordna purred with satisfaction. “His eternal soul has been retrieved by the Valley of Shadow and Light”—he rubbed his chest as if the words suddenly brought enormous pleasure to his wicked heart—“and good for him, really. He was such a generous soul…when he lived.” He whistled a discordant tune, and the notes fell upon Nachari’s ears like fingernails against a chalkboard, the reverberation crawling up and down his spine like blades cutting into the vertebrae.

Slowly, incipiently, Ademordna reached out with a sharp claw to scrape the underside of Nachari’s chin. Nachari tried to avoid the demon’s obscene touch, but it was as if he were powerless to move. It was like being caught in an awful nightmare, where every step is mired in quicksand, and any effort to move or resist becomes herculean…and pointless.

“Ahh.” The demon lord rolled his head back and forth on his shoulders, allowing long locks of oily hair to sway back and forth, each strand undulating like a writhing serpent along his shoulders. “How I wanted the king…” He sucked wind between rotting teeth. “How I wanted his sons…” he moaned. “But to feed for all eternity on the light of a Master Wizard—a soul so pure it would trade its life out of duty for another…” He gyrated his hips against the oppressive, humid air. “Mmm, yes. It will do.”

Nachari swallowed a lump in his throat and looked around, warily.

Shit.

And more shit!

Ademordna wasn’t lying.

Nachari had died on that cot, despite the fact that his body still breathed. And the world between worlds—where Shelby had met him, laughed with him, and helped him to exorcize Napolean’s demon—was no longer where he stood.

He felt the ground beneath him ooze.

Demonic power gushed about his feet, and, as the sludge passed over, his skin, his toes, and ankles—even his bones—collapsed beneath its weight…disintegrating, painfully decomposing…only to regenerate and break again.

Perpetual suffering.

Perpetual injury.

Endless death, eternal agony, and punishment…

Nachari Silivasi was in the domain of the dark lords of the underworld. He was standing in the heart of the Valley of Death and Shadows. He had traded his soul for Napolean’s, and Ademordna had accepted the trade. The moment the demon had relinquished the king’s body, he had been cast back into his own private hell…and Nachari had gone with him.

Shelby, on the other hand, had returned to the Valley of Spirit and Light, where his soul would remain forever. It was a matter of degrees. Shelby was truly dead—his soul was already at rest—and as such, he could not enter the shadow of the abyss: He had already been claimed by the light.

“But you…my beautiful, exceptional wizard…” Ademordna circled Nachari and crooned to him like a baby. He reached out, snatched a handful of his hair, and sniffed it, causing blackened blood from his nostrils to seep out and soak the strands. It burned Nachari’s scalp like acid. He licked a dollop of the blood from behind Nachari’s ear, and Nachari jerked his head away in disgust. The saliva ate at his skin, but he refused to cry out. “You are neither alive nor dead, Nachari Silivasi. Your soul was traded before it was appointed.” Heckling, Ademordna gripped Nachari’s shoulders with both hands and clamped down hard, breaking the fine clavicle bones in two.

Nachari gritted his teeth against the pain and fought not to faint.

He would not give the demon the satisfaction.

His eyes rolled back in his head as he struggled to maintain consciousness.
Dear celestial gods,
was he really going to spend all of eternity in the Valley of Death and Shadows? Away from his brothers? Never again to see Shelby? Sentenced as Ademordna’s prisoner…forever? Had his eternal soul really been the price of Napolean and Brooke’s freedom? Had he truly made the
ultimate sacrifice
for the house of Jadon?

Even as he asked, he knew the answer.

Yes
.

And his heart wept for Nathaniel and Kagen—for Marquis.

Dear Gods
, for Braden.

The dark lord rearranged his molecules then, shrinking his giant form down to a human size, to stand as a man—albeit a giant, enormously powerful man—before Nachari. He held up both hands in a casual gesture. “Should you desire to try and escape, I will wait…and watch…with great enthusiasm.”

Nachari looked around him. The sky was black—not dark with iridescent beauty like on the earth—but black as in absent of form and light. There was no horizon, only vapor and mist so that nothing could be seen beyond a couple hundred yards. All was smoke and mirrors. Dark illusion and fog. This place did not contain the body—it imprisoned the soul.

The land and the vegetation were solid, but not with the intelligent energy of creation like on the earth; rather, with the cold, inky presence of evil—of creepy, crawly, scream-in-the-night-from-terror electricity—the kind that made one’s stomach churn and the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up. There was nowhere to go. All space was but a portal, looping in an endless circle of evil…of perpetual night.

Nachari drew in a deep breath. “Is any other form of death possible here?”

Ademordna laughed raucously. He seemed genuinely entertained by the question. “Ah, yes, wizard: Suicide would be so much easier, would it not?”

Nachari didn’t show any emotion, although he wanted to rip the demon’s heart out—again—to take them both out of their misery…together…permanently. But it couldn’t be done. Ademordna was already dead.

And so was he.

“No, Silivasi; I have something far richer planned for you.” Ademordna smiled—a look at complete odds with his twisted features.

Nachari closed his eyes and prayed, hoping somewhere, somehow, a celestial god or goddess would hear his petition. He reached out for his brothers—for Niko, then Jankiel, for Napolean—just to know that the king still lived, that his sacrifice had not been in vain.

No one answered.

Ademordna extended his arm—two decrepit hands flexed and contracted with demented grace—and then he covered Nachari’s eyes. “See your future, wizard.”

The world spun in dizzying circles, and Nachari felt as if his body lifted off the ground—but he couldn’t be sure. Then just as suddenly, he was transported to a castle where all kinds of demonic creatures and animals roamed the halls. He ended up in a great stone chamber, a throne room, staring down at his own naked body, manacled to a cold slab of stone. The stone sat beside Ademordna’s throne, and he knew that he was to be displayed for all time as the dark lord’s trophy—the prized soul he had stolen from the house of Jadon, the pure one, the magic one—as an eternal show of power…darkness defeating light.