Darkside Sun (30 page)

“Yeah, like that’s a newsflash. Why do you want the wraiths here?”

Eyes closed, he twisted his head left and right, his jaw contorting as if in pain. “I feel their despair, ever since I became sensitive more than two hundred years ago when Izan brought me to this very room and inducted me. Did you know it was him who, in his infinite wandering, inadvertently brought them to our reality? How do you like your savior now, hmm?”

Izan brought them here? But … there had to be more to the story. My mind chewed over why Marcus would want to open the doorway. They were dead, so … shit. “You’re trying to create a new heaven for them. They can live again, through us.” At his peaceful smile and nod, I asked, “Then what does that make you?”

“Why … God, of course.”

“You bastard!” Asher bellowed. “I’ll kill you!” Another jerk of his arm crumbled some of the stone around the chain that held his shackle. Had Marcus not given him a full dose? The shaking of Asher’s body made me think he was running on pure adrenaline and rage, which was somehow overcoming the drugs.

Marcus twisted his head and whirled around. While he strode over to Asher, I shouted, “Stop! Just shut up, Asher. Goddamn it, don’t hurt him!”

More chains grew out of the floor, snaking around his ankles, and another grabbed his other wrist. I choked on terror. Dammit, why had I let that shit chain me up?

Instead of raising the gun, Marcus cracked his fist against Asher’s jaw so hard the sentinel crashed against the wall, the sick sound of his limp body impacting the stone echoing in my ears. He dangled from the chains, one of which he’d partially ripped out of the wall.

I tried to see if his chest was rising and falling, but Marcus blotted out the world as he tucked something into the back of his dark jeans, put a knee on the altar, and swung his other leg over to straddle me. “He always did have a big mouth. I’ve been waiting decades to shut him up that way. Now, open your power to me, Addison, the way you did at the club. Unlike the rest of you, that was positively extraordinary, an even greater payload than your mother had by a hundred miles. I do see the family resemblance now a little in the facial structure. Now, open to me, and I won’t have to hurt you.”

My mother was the former Architect of the Machine? Why couldn’t I remember her name or what she looked like? Had she hidden me away in the true reality so Marcus wouldn’t find me? Who was my father, and was he also part of the Machine? How did they meet? My brain cramped, searching for answers I didn’t have since I couldn’t seem to remember anything farther back than the day of my induction.

I refocused on the crisis at hand. “How do you know my mother?”

He leaned down, a curl of his hair falling onto his brow above those still-peaceful eyes. “Izan hid her from me, or I’d have freed the Fallen the first time I attempted this. He probably led her to your father, too, and when she was stupid enough to spawn a child, Izan thought Asher would keep you out of my reach. He succeeded for a while, but my will is stronger than any of yours.” Marcus began passing his hands over me, looking for my chakras just like Asher had once done.

My lungs took off at a sprint. Why wasn’t Asher making any sound? He couldn’t be dead, but if he was hurt that badly, I needed to move my ass. Had the chamber locked everyone else out as well as me in? “How does the chamber work?” Maybe if I kept the slime-ball talking, he’d forget about hurting me. Yeah, and the sky would soon turn pink with purple polka-dots.

“Unlike most of the others, I can lock it up with a thought, use it as a prison, reconfigure the walls, among other things that have come in handy over the years.” So that was how he’d locked the guardians into wherever he’d let the wraiths loose on them. Bastard.

“So how did you learn that? From the wraiths?”

“No more talking, Architect.”

“What does an Architect do, exactly?”

He growled and gritted his teeth before unclenching them. “You are the knowledge keeper and the key designer of the Machine. You make sure every part is in the right place, the mechanic of sorts, as well as hold us to the laws that have now been forgotten thanks to me. Not that you’ll be needed once this is done. In fact, none of you will.” He laughed as if just getting the punch line of his own joke.

Wow, no pressure or anything. “So what do you think the Machine will do when it’s running right? If we can learn to trust our conduits and wield the power of emotion?”

His smile wasn’t pleasant this time, but the snarl of a tiger poked too many times with a stick. “Time to say good-bye to your physical existence. I’d like to say having the entire frozen realm’s dead passing through your body won’t hurt, but that would be a grievous lie. Once they come through, I’ll open the Shift to them, and they’ll finally be free.” Glancing over at Asher, he said, “And lover boy over there will be the next to be eaten by a wraith. So much for true love conquering all.”

I couldn’t help but yank against the chains, little helpless sounds falling from my lips, but I succeeded only in cutting up my wrists. Where was Izan? Was he blocked from the chamber by Marcus’s powers, too?

“Open the box, Addison,” Marcus ordered. “Give me your storm. Give it to me, or I’ll cut it out of you.”

Jesus.
What am I supposed to do?
Did anyone know where we were? Was Remy trying to find us? No, I would not sit back and wait to be saved like a total nancy. Tired of being afraid, of running from the monsters, I let my anger boil up. As I considered my options, I noticed the change in my storm hadn’t gone away but had continued to evolve even though Asher wasn’t touching me. If my energy pool had been deep before, it stretched down a hundred miles beyond that now, swirling in a controlled spiral, waiting to be unleashed. I could work with that.

I stared up at the psycho glaring down at me, and I smiled.

His grin fell. “You’re going to make me cut you, aren’t you?”

I spit the words at him, “Do what you gotta do, ass wipe.”
And I’ll do what I have to.
I sifted through everything I’d learned from Izan over the last few weeks, somehow calm in my anger. Anger was better than fear, and I ate it up like an aged steak.

One idea popped out of the chaos. I’d pushed the wraith out of Xavier. I’d pushed the poison out of Asher. Would I be strong enough to push Marcus out of himself? Oh, yeah, that might just work with the new surging universe of power at my disposal, wherever it had come from. Without a better plan, I threw caution to the stale air and grinned wider. The connection was different with blood as I’d discovered with Asher, better, stronger. I needed Marcus to cut me.
Shit
.

Concern flitted across his features before he sighed and sat up, flipping the dagger into his palm with frightening skill, which was what he must have stashed in his jeans earlier. I should have known. “I guess we do this the hard way, then. So be it.” He emptied out the good ol’ country boy until nothing remained but cruelty.

Okay, maybe this was a bad idea. “Give it your best shot, dickface.”

I expected him to cut me a little like Asher did, but he launched the knife up to the hilt in my shoulder. Pretty sure it hit bone. A scream cannonballed up my throat. Pain ripped through me, burned along my veins and bones until I wondered if flame would soon shoot out of my fingertips and toes. After ripping the knife back out, the pain arching me off the altar, he cut himself and pressed his palm against my wound. He began chanting in that ancient language Izan had spoken to me while I was trying to save Asher.

Hold on
, I thought to him.

Tears streaked down my face as I swam into my head again, crawling up to tread water on the agony. I could feel him in me now, Marcus’s soul, the part of life’s miracle that was intangible and unmistakably him.

“Do not fight me,” he said, panting. Blue veins crawled over his body before lighting up the room. I eased the lid off my box just a little so he’d know I’d done it. He groaned, marking my success. “Good girl. Let it go, let it spill into me. We’ll create heaven for the Fallen.”

I caught his gaze and let him see my fury. “Or we’ll send the would-be God to hell along with them. I warned you about hurting Asher, but you didn’t listen, so now you die.” I unleashed my power and poured it into him as the ceiling vanished, leaving a dark circle of frozen night as the veil disintegrated. My new storm, tasting subtly of Asher, raged around and through us both.

White forms crowded into the opening above me, swirling and bucking, waiting to devour my energy and live again. I held the wraiths out with concentration. If I passed out before I got the job done, they’d be on me, and life as we knew it would end. Asher would die before I could love him the way I’d begun to believe he loved me. I’d killed one wraith, and they knew the danger of my energy now even as they were drawn to it like wasps to a bug-zapper.

What Marcus didn’t know would soon kill him. I could be the doorway, but I could also be the final nail in their coffins. If my nerve didn’t break first. Or my body. I should have been mortified by what I was thinking—taking a life. But what was the life of one sociopath against a world of people? Against the man who loved me? Choices, choices. There really wasn’t one in this case. Kill or get dead. I’d once asked Remy how many people a person had to kill to get those cold, pitiless sentinel eyes. “
Enough it kill the soul,”
he’d said
. “It diff’ for all us. For you, I think only take one.”

I guessed I’d soon find out.

“What are you doing?” Marcus gritted out, his fear spiraling around me like hoar frost.

Between rasping breaths, I said, “This little fox is showing you her teeth.” I force-fed him a keg of my power, emptied a hundred-mile-wide ocean of energy into his soul. Pushed and rammed it in so hard and fast, he didn’t have time to do anything but scream. I joined him, more a battle cry on a sparring mat than a wail of pain. It was inhuman, merciless, and not a sound I ever wanted to hear out of my throat again, but I let it come as I filled Marcus’s body with everything in me.

His screaming cut off abruptly when white mist rose above his back, no form except a face that was still open with a wail. When I went to crush him with my energy, my vision faded. I didn’t have enough left to close the veil and kill him. Out of options, I pushed harder against him. He drifted up to the gaping hole into the other side, and as he passed through it, the other wraiths scattered. It took two of us to open the path, apparently, and when Marcus’s connection to me broke, the rift was mine to control.

With his physical body dead-weight on top of me, I imagined the opening knitted back up, and it began to weave together, the fabric sewing itself up using my energy as the thread and trapping his soul on the other side. I found it kind of pretty. Sophia would have liked seeing my mad sewing skills. Where was she? Was she all right? She’d be safe now, I thought.

Empty of almost everything, my heartbeat slowed. I lay unmoving in my shackles, the altar cold and hard beneath me. Sluggish beats sluiced blood through my veins. Damn. Another of those tidbits I should have known and didn’t. Empty it all, and there was nothing left to survive on, apparently.

Hello, farm, I hope you’re pretty this time of year. Let me just get out my pocketbook.

My heart gave a mighty kick as shouting crashed into the room. “Addy!” Remy bellowed, and quieter, I thought I could hear Asher. A black film slid over my eyes. Hair tickled my face, scented with spicy cologne and sweet whiskey. The shouting grew distant and surreal. It would have been a nice dream if I didn’t hurt so much.

“You stay with me, Addison,” Asher’s voice called from across the universe, and Marcus’s weight disappeared from me. “Hear me. Stay with me. Please!” He sounded panicked, anguished.

He was alive. I’d saved him. My heart felt like singing with its last beat.

Chapter 35

The steady thump of a heartbeat against my ear eased me back to consciousness. I cracked my eyes open to find myself lying in the crook of Asher’s arm, his other hand stroking my hair along my back. His warmth, sweet scent, and pulsing energy soothed me. I could have fallen asleep forever in bliss.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “I must have died, because this has to be heaven.”

He flinched, withdrawing his hand from my hair. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You’re not dead, but you gave it your best shot.” I thought he was trying for humor, but the exhaustion and pain in his voice suggested he probably wasn’t exaggerating.

So he was really holding me? In a bed? A smile slipped across my lips. “How long have I been out?”

“Just a couple of hours. I stitched you up and injected you with a pain killer, but you’ll be sore when it wears off.”

I slid my hand up his chest, snuggling harder against him, terrified he might panic and leave. I wasn’t sure if he meant for me to find him caring for me this way or had intended to be gone before I woke up. Remembering the events of the day, I realized Asher must have been angry with himself. “There’s nothing you could have done, you know. No training or strength or smarts that would have prepared you for this, so don’t blame yourself for anything.”

His arms tightened around me, but I didn’t dare move so I could see what his expression held. “It was my job to keep you safe, and I was completely useless.”

“Marcus has been planning this for the last sixty-five years, and he has all of the secrets of the Machine and we don’t. This was my fight, anyway, and you kept me alive long enough to fight it.” I slipped my fingers between the buttons on his black shirt to reach his skin, wishing I could rip the thing off him.

He sipped in a breath, turning his head to press his lips against my temple. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.”

“What do you think Izan intends to do with us once the Machine is working again? You don’t think he really intends to use us as a weapon, do you? And what happens now? I’ve been so bent on finding the traitor, I haven’t really stopped to consider what would come after if we got it done.”

“I don’t know, but I have wondered if Izan has other plans for us once we conquer the wraiths. Now that you’re here and it seems you can talk to him, you’re going to have to ask and judge for yourself whether or not he’s telling the truth. We need to find the pages of the bible, and I think we need to find your mother. But don’t worry about that now. Just rest.”

The magnitude of what we’d done, and what we still had to do, hit me like a fist to the head. I was the Architect, and there were at least a few people in the Machine who weren’t going to accept direction from a rabbit in the grass. “It’s over isn’t it? We really did it.”

“
You
really did it. And there’s one more threat that needs to go before you can get those delicate hands working to fix the Machine, and only I can take care of this one.” The grief in his voice filled my belly with sick heat.

I tried to ease myself up, but he rolled me gently onto the bed, staring down at me with a sad expression.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Izan said there was only one traitor, and I’m pretty sure I just … oh God, I killed him.” I should have felt something after taking a life, but I felt … nothing.

“You did what you had to, and now I’m going to do what I have to.” One corner of his lips quirked up, but his eyes were glassy. “Marcus might have been a conniving, lying dirt bag, but everything he said about me was the absolute truth.” He cleared his throat. “The Machine needs you to be happy and whole the way Izan intended, and I’d only end up hurting you. If I keep letting myself get close to you, I won’t be able to resist finishing the bond we started. Marcus said it’s unbreakable, Addison, and I won’t take the chance that my rage will kill the part of you the Machine needs. You are perfect just as you are. I wouldn’t curse my worst enemy with an eternity with me, so I have to make you forget.”

“Forget what?”

He leaned in and kissed my forehead, to hide his expression, I thought.

“Wait, are you talking about the kisses?” I drew in a panicked breath, clutching my shoulder when pain stabbed me. “Please, Asher, please don’t make me forget that.”

He shook his head, teeth clenched. “I can’t be what you need, and I love you enough to make sure you never love me back.”

“So it’s true? You really …” I couldn’t say the “L” word. I still didn’t quite believe it. I felt it, but didn’t believe it. “We’re supposed to be together, another of those things written into the universe that won’t be denied no matter how hard we fight it, like my inevitable induction into the Machine. Marcus was just pushing your buttons. Tell me you don’t believe him.”

“It’s not written in stone. You’ve seen how the Machine works—when one of us falls, another steps in to take his or her place. I won’t let us be, but not because I don’t want this. I’d give anything to shout at the world that you’re mine, to have you waking up all sleep-tousled from spending the night in my arms, throwing on one of your plaid shirts and sitting in my kitchen while I make you breakfast.”

His grin warmed me further, and he brushed a few strands of hair over my ear. “You’re so at peace when you’re in your element—adorable. I can hardly breathe every time you walk into the room, especially when your hair is down, and it takes every ounce of willpower I have to not take you in my arms, to strip you bare and explore every inch of you. To kiss and nip you while you giggle and sigh and squirm. That’s my vision of heaven, Addison, one I don’t deserve. Back there in the woods, I actually started to imagine we could have a life together while we fight this war. Once I finally had you within reach, it became so much harder to keep my hands off you. You’re not only the wraith’s Sun, but mine as well, and only through you do I truly live. But Marcus reminded me why I hid my feelings for you for so long. I won’t risk you or the Machine no matter how much I want to be with you. With me, it—and you—would only be broken.”

I was choking on shock, but I managed to say, “Izan saw something in you, something you clearly don’t see yet, but I do during those odd times when you allow it. Let me help you see that you’re a good man, my man. And what risk? You’ve taken care of me since forever, and I didn’t even know it. You grump at me, but you’ve never really hurt me.”

Bringing a bundle of my hair to his nose, he said, “My mother was like you, soft of heart, kind to a fault. My father worshipped her when he wasn’t angry. He was always cold and distant to my eyes, but he kept his temper for years until he lost his job. He almost killed her that night. It wasn’t until the next time he raised his hand to her that I found the courage to intervene. Every broken bone he gave me, every drop of blood he spilled, every icy word from him, slowly infected me with his rage.

“I’ve seen what happens to a woman like you who falls for a man like me. And I am a monster at my core, just like he was. You were right about that.”

“You’re not your father, Asher, and I’m not your mother. How can you think you’re like him? Even if you used to be, didn’t you feel the change in you after you let your walls down back there in the woods? That rage might be in you somewhere, but I can help you let it go, change it into something that will help the Machine. And if I can kill Marcus while chained up, then I think I can handle your temper.”

“I’ve done things, terrible things then and since that destroyed who I might have been. I’m not useful for anything but a hired gun. You deserve someone who will make you happy. I’ve ruined everything I’ve ever touched, and you would be no different. So this one time, I’m going to be a man. I’ll act as your conduit while I keep my distance and leave you untainted by me, and find the courage and strength to let you go when Izan finds a better match for you.”

My own anger rose, and I let it show in my face. I struggled to sit up, but he swung his leg over mine, holding me down gently. “I’ve seen further into your soul than I think you have,” I said. “You are
not
like him. You did what you had to, to protect your mother. Someone like him wouldn’t have done that, or have watched over me like my own personal guardian angel. And as for those other things, you did them while you were lost, trying to find your way out of a life your dad left you with. You feel remorse now, and that’s enough for me. You don’t get to choose who I spend my eternity with, and I want you. I love you.” I hadn’t realized it until the words came out of my mouth, but it was true. Maybe some part of me knew he’d been with me all along, recognized his scent and his presence from all the times in my life he’d stood next to me when I couldn’t see him. “You are my safe place, Asher.”

A growl rumbled from him. “Don’t say that. You’re a pure soul, like your father, and that’s what the Machine needs to undo what Marcus has done to us. It’s my duty to keep you that way.”

Holding a finger over my lips that had parted to argue, he let out a shaking breath and swung his leg over to straddle my hips. “And now I’m going to kiss you once more, and then you’ll forget that I adore you and every moment I let slip that showed you I do. And since all pretenses are off, you have the most incredible eyes I’ve ever seen. Every time I see them, I’ll remember this moment when there was nothing but truth between us.” His next kiss was savage in its need, deep and desperate as he moaned. I spread my fingers into his hair, held his shaking body as he held mine.

We were light and darkness, beginning and ending, two halves of a whole that would never be right apart. Why couldn’t he see it? He had to have felt our cogs clicking together before Marcus came and ruined everything. How could I prove to him that nothing else in my life had ever been so right? That Asher wasn’t the evil he thought himself to be?

The kiss went on for an eternity that was probably seconds, and it wasn’t nearly long enough.

My lips were swollen and wet, both from the kiss and my tears that fell freely. “Say my name,” he said. “Let me hear it on your lips just once more. It kills me every time you call me anything else. Say it, Addison. Say it for me, please.”

“Asher,” I said. “Asher, don’t. I need this, you have no idea how much. I need you! The Machine needs us. Don’t let Marcus win. He knew your fears and played them. Listen to me!”

His hidden tattoos rose to the surface, glowing deep blue. Strangled by panic, I shoved against him, ignoring the burning ache in my shoulder. “Let me go. Please, don’t! You promised you’d never leave me!”

He held my face in his hands. “And I won’t. I’ll always take care of you from the shadows where I belong, even while I make you hate me. I’ll find someone who will cherish you the way you deserve. Watching you fall in love with another guardian will be the hardest thing I’ll ever do, but I’m going to do this one thing right if it kills me. Good-bye, Addison. I’ll always love you.”

His power slammed into me like a concussion wave. I tried to lock my mind up tight, but it was like trying to stop a broken dam with a finger, he just kept pouring around me, through me, filling me up like a large hand into a small glove.

I clung to the memory of our first coconut kiss on the dock, but he shattered it, sent it glittering out into white fog like pieces of a broken mirror. Every little moment I caught him staring at me, my stuff at his house, and finally, everything he’d just said to me, spiraled out into that nothing.

The last thing I felt before rolling under was Asher’s tears raining down on my face. And then he took those from me, too.