DARK SOULS (Dark Souls Series) (30 page)

“I feel like you’re always asking me if I’m okay,” I said, facing down his glacial stare.

“Because you’re always looking like you’re going to melt down and collapse every second,” he replied, raising his right eyebrow.

 “Why do you even care?” I asked him. I fiddled with the cash register, but I didn’t look down in time to hide the hurt in my eyes.  

“I don’t know,” he said. He tightened his lips and looked over to where Andrea was making recent orders, a scowl crossing his face as he internally argued with himself.

I hesitated before saying anything else. He was like a wild animal let loose from his cage, pacing around quietly but ready to leap for the kill at any given opportunity.

“I hate that you won’t talk to me,” I finally mumbled.

A flash of emotion that I couldn’t comprehend flickered across his face when he glanced back at me, but before he could say anything else, the woman behind him cleared her throat, looking up from her phone just enough to glare at the two of us.

“I’ll uh…black coffee,” he said.

I nodded, avoiding his skin by waving away his dollar bills.

“On the house, really. Consider it my thanks for saving my life. Again.” Sarcasm coated my words. “If you regret it so much, you should probably stop doing it.”

 He gave me one last look before I turned, poured him his coffee and then with shaking hands, handed it to him. 

I stared at the back of Asher’s head as if it were speaking to me while he walked away. That look on his face, it felt so familiar to me. My body stilled as I searched my memories in confusion and tried to place what it was and where I’d seen it before. My mouth parted with shock and despair when I finally remembered where I’d seen that kind of look before: it was how my mother had looked at me before she had said good-bye that one, final time.

“I’m not able to do this anymore, Honeybee,” she had said, her lower lip trembling. “It is torturing me.”

I could barely hold myself together at the thought that Asher could be thinking of saying good-bye, leaving me behind to…suffer.

No, I had to be reading too much into this. It was just a look, a wave of emotion lasting for two-seconds tops. Tortured feelings or not, Asher and I had a connection. He felt it, too. Didn't he?

“Oh no, are you already having a fight with him?” Macy asked as she trotted over to me, stepping in front of the cranky woman who let out another impatient growl.

“Could I just get a double-shot soy latte? And vanilla, the sugar free kind. Not the sugar kind.” She leaned over Macy to get my attention, her frown lines creating deep crevices in her bright pink lipstick.

Macy waited for the woman to depart, and I knew she was studying the woman’s make-up application, silently making a checklist of what not to do when she turned forty.

As soon as the woman turned, flicking her scarf over her shoulder, Macy directed her attention back at me. “What’s happening between you two?”

“What? Oh, no. We’re fine. I’m just thinking of something,” I said, snapping myself out of it by wiping the counter around the cash register.  

Macy laid her hand across mine, stopping my sharp circles and saying softly, “Ems, don’t get me wrong. I love you for all your quirks, I really do. But you’ve been acting so strange lately.”

“Please don’t ask me if I’m okay.” I looked at her then, my voice breaking.

Her eyes filled with concern. “Emily, what’s going on? Please, tell me. I’m your best friend. I can help you.”

I shook my head slowly, fighting the tears that wanted to stream down my cheeks. My lower lip trembled, and I looked down, unable to continue seeing her worried look. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Scrambling now, I turned to the basement door, my back to Macy, effectively shutting out the only person who has ever truly understood me in my entire life and hating every minute of it.

“Emily, come on. Stop, please!” Macy said behind me. I felt her hand reach for my shoulder as I tried to walk away from her and I snapped back, grabbing her wrist before it touched me and, heaven help me, I snarled at her.

“I said I
can’t
, Macy. Just stay out of this.”

My heart breaking at the hurt pooling in her eyes, I turned my back on her for the second time, and this time she didn’t say anything. I walked through the basement door with my head down, trying to control the quaking emotion within me, but I stopped midway when I felt a hot, predatory gaze upon me.

I met Gwyn’s eyes. She chose the lone table in the corner just beside the pick-up counter. She had no drink; she just sat there, her arms crossed in front of her.

“I have my eye on you, Chaucer,” she said in a low tone that only I could hear.

I glared at her, but I pushed through the door without engaging her. I had to leave. It didn’t matter I was only halfway through my shift and was possibly jeopardizing my job. There was no way I could maintain my control for another minute in this place.

I needed to release the frustration boiling inside of me, and fast, before I hurt someone.

My darkness was begging me to hurt someone.

***

I headed to the Secret Clubhouse.

There, I could let loose without giving myself away, zipping around as I tore at broken pieces of wood, throwing cinder blocks and feeling the concrete give way and crunch suppliantly underneath my iron grip.

My dark self reveled in my misery, twisting and twirling with glee each time I screamed in anger and tore at the surrounding debris in the gymnasium and threw everything I could get my hands on.

The anger I had harbored against myself and my feelings of ineptitude raged forth, the ground beneath my feet literally answering my grief by shuddering in sympathy.

“Of all things Damos, I leave you for a few weeks, and now all of a sudden you’re the Incredible Hulk?”

I paused just before I was about to hurl the basketball stand, my head snapping towards the familiar voice.

He took a step back, a trait he seemed to have picked up ever since coming across me. “Emily, your
eyes
.”

“What about them?” I said, stalking towards him. “Are they exuding a new superpower that I can’t control? Can I now shoot lasers out of them? Is that my next party trick?”

Derek put his hands out in front of him in defense. “Whoa, Emily. Calm down, please.”

“Yes, we wouldn’t want you to run away and desert me again,” I snapped, the large steel basketball stand I was holding crashing to the ground right in front of his feet.        

He jumped back and tried to compose himself as he looked over at me. “No, I’m serious. You really need to calm down. You’re literally causing the ground to shake underneath you, and you’re certainly making a ton of noise, mightily felling sports equipment and destroying textbooks and all of that.”

“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked, facing him, though he remained a cautious fifteen feet away.

He regarded me carefully. “Your eyes are still glowing that crazy gold-yellow color. Could you possibly temper that so I don’t have to feel like you want to eat me?”

I sighed, the energy suddenly draining out of me as I was once again forced to face my incompetence. “I can’t control it.”

“There now, out it goes. Well done, little one, well done.”

He took a seat on pile of wood I’d ripped in half, delicately seating himself on the smoothest area he could find. “I better not get any ass splinters because of this,” he muttered.

“Answer me, Derek,” I said to him. “Why are you here? Why have you come back?”

He paused as he sat down, pondering momentarily before answering. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since...that night. Trying to figure out what you are and how it’s possible that you landed at my feet. I still don’t know,” he added, recognizing the eagerness in my face at the thought that he might have found something. “And it caused me to wonder. In all the time you’ve spent with me, you didn’t once try to kill me.”

“Because you’re useful,” I said, my voice flat, emotionless and exhausted.

“Yes.”

“And I won’t kill you so long as you remain useful.”

Derek tensed at that, blinking rapidly before he looked down, looking much like the downtrodden puppy that I had felt like with Gwyn. I immediately felt bad.

“You’ve been helping me, Derek,” I said, softer now as I relented. “I’m not sure what would have happened to me if you hadn’t been around.”

He nodded slowly. “When I left you, I was afraid. Truly afraid. No demon has ever spoken of a species like you. I can’t find you in any of our ancient texts. It’s as if you don’t exist.”

I sighed again, my shoulders sagging and feeling the weight of the world. “I’m struggling, Derek.”

“I know you are, little demon. I know it. And, as much as it would be smart of me to just let you struggle on your own and stay far, far away from you, I feel like it would be more dangerous to leave you by yourself. I would much rather be at your side than have you go all rogue on me.” He eyed the ripped, mangled sports equipment beside him warily. “We need to figure out what you are. I think the preservation of our kind depends on it. And you
are
my kind,” he said, catching the look of stubborn refusal on my face. “You need to accept that before we can move forward. I saw what you turned into.”

“I’m not evil.” I shook my head, stubbornly ignoring the laughter of the darkness within me.

“Well, you sure are something. We can determine where you fall on the good versus evil scale later. Right now, we need to figure out your purpose.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked. “My purpose depends on whether I’m meant to be a savior or a killer.”

“It’s rarely as black and white as that. We need to start back at the beginning, when you first started experiencing your changes. And most importantly, Emily, you need to tell me
everything.
”

I nodded as I fell forward and landed on my knees in defeat, but I was grateful that there was someone, even if it had to be an evil demon, that I could finally tell everything to. I was tired of hiding, of carrying this dark secret inside me and struggling to stay afloat.

And if I were really to be honest with myself, Derek was probably the only one who could ever truly understand the darkness writhing inside of me.

I began by telling him about the first demon, Macy’s boyfriend. I told him of the mysterious cold sweat that came over me, the sense of panic and survival washing over me as soon as Rob touched me, and how I felt the burn for the first time.

“Strange,” Derek said. “There had to be a trigger of sorts. Something must have caused you to all of a sudden start experiencing these symptoms, especially after nineteen years of just being an insignificant but tasty human. Sorry,” he said as soon as he registered my glowing glare, “Let’s file that possibility away for now. Continue.”

I then started to tell him about the second demon, though he knew most of that already since he had come across me literally seconds after I had finished her off. I spoke fast, noticing the boredom in his expression as his eyelids started lowering shut. If demons could have Attention Deficit Disorder, I thought, Derek was a prime candidate.

“So the third time, it was a giant, gross, brown blob with fangs and tentacles,” I said suddenly, catching his interest again. I left out the fact that I had saved Gwyn, a human, though I doubted Derek would even care that a human was involved. It was just that for some reason, I still wanted to keep Asher and Gwyn a secret.

“Now, that’s certainly interesting. You caught yourself one of the mid-level demons. A Bogmar. I bet it put up a fight,” he said.

“Yeah, it did.” I remembered being trapped in the slimy, wet, sucking mass. “But here’s the weird part. There was no human host. It was just... the thing itself.”

Derek’s gaze darkened. “Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty sure. Unless it completely morphed inside of the human and absorbed it or something.”

“No, that’s not how we do things,” Derek answered, his voice tight. “When we’ve transitioned into a human, we become an essence of sorts. Well actually, we’re the blue smoke that you lap up with your tongue so delightedly.” He stared at me for a few seconds longer, as if still processing what he had witnessed, before continuing on. “When we need to defend ourselves, we use the human body to form certain aspects of our original selves. Fangs, for example. Another example would be the weapons of defense that we possess on our bodies which we can push through the human’s skin.”

“Gross,” I said, remembering the disgusting nose-spear.

“Your opinion aside,” he continued, “We only form as much as we can without breaking through our human host entirely. We never, ever, form our true selves while inhabiting a human unless absolutely necessary. That would effectively kill the human body, tearing it to shreds, rendering it useless. It’s a lot of work to find another human host, you know. Not every one you inhabit takes.”

“Okay, but you’re saying it’s still possible. This blob—or Bogmar as you call it—could have burst through the human host?” I asked.

“I suppose. Did you see any flaps of skin anywhere?”

I thought back, containing the grimace of disgust at the thought of skin flaps floating around. All I remembered was slime, gook, and tentacles. No human remnants.            

“No. I don’t think I did,” I finally answered.

“In that case, there can only be one reason that demon was wandering around this world in its true form,” Derek said, the skin around his eyes tightening with tension.

“Care to fill me in?” I asked, tired at his constant games and delays in giving me any sort of answers.

“You already know the answer, little demon.” He stood up, avoiding the scattered debris with ease as he came towards me. He paused once he got close enough, leveling his eyes with mine. “The Hunter is getting closer to you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Even with my superhuman hearing, I had trouble catching his whisper.

“The Hunter what, Derek? You really need to start explaining these epiphanies you keep having. It’s impossible for me to predict where your brain goes.”