Darkside Sun (4 page)

Chapter 5

I hastily jammed some clothes into my backpack, folded the book in a blanket, grabbed my cell from my bookshelf, and rushed out into the hallway. Hugging the bundle to my chest, I dialed the cabin.

It rang three times before Dad answered, bright and cheerful. “Heya, sweetpea, why up so early on this lovely Saturday morning?”

God, I loved him. It wasn’t really early, but I’d never been much of a morning person. “Dad.” My voice sounded frantic, but I couldn’t rein it in. “You need to listen to me very carefully, okay?”

Something creaked in the background. I imagined him jackknifing up in the ancient chair in his home office where he managed his business as an electrician. “What’s happened, Addy? You sound scared.” He’d dropped the doting father voice and adopted the stern one that would probably greet a boyfriend with a shotgun if I ever managed to find one worth bringing home.

I sped along the beige hallway. “I’m coming home for the weekend. Until I get there, I want you to go and work somewhere else, okay? Please?” I’d never seen the walls come apart at anyone else’s house but ours, so I didn’t want him anywhere near there until I figured out what to do. Logic told me it had been happening for years and nothing had gotten him yet—that I knew of—but now that I knew what the wraiths could do, I wasn’t taking any chances with my only family.

“Tell me why. Do I need to call the police?” No accusation, no “have you gotten yourself into trouble with the law?” questions. Just good ol’ practical Dad.

I made it to the stairwell, held the door open for a few girls rushing up the steps, and started down once they swept by me. “This has nothing to do with the police,” I whispered, “and I can’t explain now. Just … can you please go to Uncle Oliver’s or someplace until I get there?”

“You’re scaring me, Addison.”

My full name. I’d scared him, too. “I’m sorry, but it’s important. You know I’d never ask if it wasn’t, right? I know how busy you are now.”

“Okay, okay, fine, but you call me every half hour until you get here. If you don’t call, I’m calling the police, because I can hear trouble from here.” He paused, and I could almost hear him thinking. “Why don’t I come and get you?”

“No, it’s okay, Dad, really. I’m not in danger.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I didn’t take it back. “I just need to know you’re not at the house right now. I’ll explain everything when I get there, okay?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, all right. I’ll go to Uncle Ollie’s, but I mean it, Addison. Every step of the way. You call me every half hour until you’re back in my arms.” I sprinted down the steps and made it outside, inhaling fresh, spring air, and instantly felt a little better. “It’s okay, Dad. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see. I’ll see you soon.”

“I love you, sweetpea.”

“Love you, too.” I hung up and raced down the sidewalk toward the parking lot where my rust bucket of a Honda Civic waited for me. We’d assembled the car together using junkyard parts and a basic frame and engine he’d bought from a guy down the road.

Dad had raised me, fed me, loved me, taught me, everything all on his own, and I never felt like I was missing out not having a mom around. She’d wanted to abort me, but Dad talked her out of it. I’d overheard a conversation he’d had with Grandpa on the phone when I was four. Dad’s words had been ringing in my ears ever since and probably would forever.

“Glenna gave up her rights to my child the day she told me we’d be all better off if Addison wasn’t born,” Dad said in a gruff whisper, his hand cupped over the receiver. His broken heart carried in the words, like shards of glass in the rain. “Why are you letting her get to you? She wanted to kill her own child before she was born, Dad. When she abandoned us at the hospital the day Addy was born, I decided that was the last time she would hurt us. Who can do that? What sort of person do you have to be to look into those innocent eyes and walk away?” Sniffling. Dad was crying. “Bring her up to me again, and I’ll cut you out of my daughter’s life, too, and be done with everything that reminds me of Glenna.”

Tightness surrounded my eyes as tears threatened to fill them. Even after all this time, my mother’s rejection sat like a festering wound in my soul. I didn’t know her, not even what she looked like. She hadn’t seen me other than the day I was born, and I never wanted her to. And still a part of me missed her just a little bit, as if maybe she’d held me once and my body remembered it, remembered the touch of my mother.

She was still out there somewhere, and even if I knew how, I wouldn’t look for her. She could go lick a stump for all I cared.

“Going somewhere, Plaid?” Professor Green’s voice snapped me out of my mental wandering.

I halted and let out one of those embarrassing squeals that should only come out of little girls. Leaning against the hatch of my silver Civic, he stared back with those sentinel eyes. They seemed to be looking deeper than my skin, cold and calculating, yet somehow inviting me closer. Did sentinels see differently than normal people? Could he see past my skin? I shivered.

It took a little work to find enough air to push through my voice box, but I did it. Yay me. “How did you know I’d come here and which car was mine?” I asked, feeling silly the moment the words left my lips.

“If you were any more predictable, you’d be dead.” He’d traded in his preppy look for arrogance in badass chic. Dark jeans so fresh and neat they had to be pressed, not a speck of fade or wear. Black V-neck T-shirt that made his shiny black hair appear more severe, more raven’s wing. With his ever-present shadow beard, he appeared devilishly divine. And terrifying, let’s not forget that.

I asked the one question that kept creeping around my head. “Did you kill Kyle? Did he find out what you were and that’s why he’s not around anymore?” If he’d killed Kyle, I really could be next. My voice of reason told me Green wouldn’t have handed me the book only to murder me, but stranger things had happened.

He grinned. Knowing and secretive. “You’ve read the bible, yes?”

Not all of it, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “I read your stupid book. That’s not an answer to my question, though.” I moved back a step, relieved he didn’t follow. I liked that extra distance even if my instincts knew it was only an illusion.

He cocked a brow, challenging. “You read the book, so what happened to Kyle?”

“Look, I’m freaked out, and if I don’t call my dad in the next twenty-five minutes, he’s going to call the cops over what I wouldn’t tell him over the phone. Tell me and get the hell out of my way. I don’t have time for twenty freakin’ questions with you.” I thought about asking how I might tell if Dad ever had a wraith in him, but I didn’t want to bring the possibility to Green’s attention just in case he put Dad on his hit list.

The sense of amusement never left Green’s face, but behind it, anger peeked out. “You have been a busy little beaver, haven’t you?” Mockery, fury, boredom, it was all in his voice. “You let me worry about Daddy Dearest. Now, answer the question. What happened to Kyle?”

If he wanted me to figure it out, I wouldn’t like the answer. What he’d said finally slipped through the tension to my nerve center. “Wait, what do you mean, let you worry about Dad?”

My face must have given something away, the struggle of my fight or flight, because he said, “You can’t run from me, so don’t try it, or the trouble you’re in will only get worse.” Arms crossed over his muscled chest, he cocked his head in challenge. “Do you believe me?”

I nodded too fast, shaking out a few stray strands that stuck to my sweaty brow. “Are you really immortal?”

A pause stretched on before he said, “Yes.”

Holy shit.
“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one in body, but I’ve been around quite a while longer.”

It couldn’t be true, could it? Maybe he was just trying to scare me again. “What do you want from me?”

He opened the back door of my car. How did he do that? My keys were on the lanyard around my neck. “Get in,” he said.

I glanced around, hoping for someone to help me, but at that hour on campus, most people had barely gone to bed. I so did not want to be in a small space with the bogeyman of wraithkind. The muscles in my legs tensed to jettison me away. “What will you do if I don’t?”

His jaw flexed. Those toy-soldier eyes grew colder, if that was possible, and still I wondered how his hair would feel wound around my fingers. Stupid hormones.

He didn’t move away from my car, and my curiosity began shouting questions only he could answer. I believed him when he’d said that I couldn’t outrun him, so I made myself move forward. When I neared him, he snatched the book from me and jutted his chin toward the open door. I got into my car and cradled my pack on my lap.

I jumped a mile when he smacked the door shut. A moment later, the other door opened, and he climbed in the back seat with me. Without the book. He must have put it back in his weird, shifty library.

Locked in with hot Professor Psycho, a giggle brewed in my throat, and one note of it escaped before I covered the rest with my hand. Laugh or scream. Why did my life always seem to come down to that?

He smiled at me, more man than sociopath for once. My heart gave a wild thump. “Do you always laugh when you’re terrified?”

I cleared my throat. A frown pinched my face. “I’m not terrified of you,” I said with all the force of a whisper in the wind.

“Right.” He crossed his arms again, turning to face me, his back against the door. Being close to him in his office was bad enough, but in that small of a space, it was so much more intimate, my fear warring with the secret admirer in me. God, I was losing it. “Now, tell me what happened to Kyle,” he said.

The answer had been pinging the back of my brain. I didn’t want to listen, not yet. “You bricked him into a wall in your basement?” I huddled against my door, face mostly hidden behind my pack.

He laughed, deep and throaty. It was a laugh my dad might have given, or one of the good ol’ boys down at Tim Horton’s sharing hunting stories over a double-double. “I think he’d hate me less if I’d done that to him.”

The answer he wanted crawled up into the light, and I shook my head. It didn’t go anywhere. “He’s working for the Mortal Machine.” My tone was even, detached. If I didn’t think too hard, I wouldn’t worry about the next question he’d ask. “He’s a sentinel now, like you.”

“Right on the first, wrong on the second. Not all who are chosen are powerful enough to be sentinels.” Elbow propped against the back of the seat, he shifted closer, leaned nearer still, until all I could see were the bright jade starbursts in his glacial eyes and the midnight hair that slid farther down his forehead. I wanted to brush that hair back, to keep it from shielding those beautiful, alien eyes from me.

I shivered, pressing myself harder against my door. “A soldier, then. What’s the difference?” I didn’t want to admit to skimming through that part in the bible.

“Sentinels have the power to sense, hunt, and destroy the wraiths, as well as repair the rifts they make coming through to our plane from theirs. Think of soldiers as the support personnel. They gather intel on possible wraith-infected people, because with so few sentinels, we’re having a hard time keeping ahead of the influx of wraiths as it steadily grows worse. They also manage weapons, technology, and provide cleanup and cover-up services if a sentinel has to cleanse a host, which is what Kyle is now doing for us. His power falls low on our scale.”

Cleanup on aisle blood. Nice. “Murder, you mean,” I said. “And how about pulling a wraith out? Doesn’t that kill the host anyway?”

“Cleanse,” Green said, “not murder.” He said it in a way that made me think it was an old argument, one he made so often he finally believed it himself. “And no, if we’re lucky, the host will survive the extraction with no ill effects once we wipe the memory. It’s only the higher caste wraiths we aren’t powerful enough to pull out, but sometimes the weaker ones claw their way so deep, it’s impossible to get it out without causing major brain damage.”

I sat up straighter. Seriously? “Pin a flower on it if you want, Green, but ‘cleansing’ is still murder. You can’t just go around whacking people, or you’re as bad as the wraiths. There has to be another way.”

Although his face remained neutral, I got the feeling I’d struck a nerve way down deep in that psycho heart of his. “Don’t judge what you don’t yet understand,” he said. “The wraiths are intent on taking over this world so they can live again, destroying every soul on Earth to make it happen. Even if some of us survive, there’s no telling what the dead’s plans are once they regain their bodies. They have no morals, no conscience. We do what we have to. You’ll understand that soon enough.”

“I don’t want to understand. In fact, I don’t want anything to do with you or this Mortal Machine business. Just tell me how to stop seeing, and I’ll be on my way. This has nothing to do with me.” Did it? Then why could I see the wraiths and rifts when nobody else could? Was I like Green?
No, hell no!

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.” Amusement returned to dance across his features like a summer breeze giving life to a morning-still lake. “Now, ask your questions.”

There were so many I didn’t know where to start. “How do I already know and use most of the words and terminology in the book? Like veil and rift?”

He shrugged, but his expression made me think he wanted me to make a connection I hadn’t yet made. “They’re the most accurate words to describe the anomalies, I suppose.”

My chest tightened at some thought that was trying to break through, one I held off. “Yeah, I guess that could be why.” Remembering what happened when I unlocked the book, I asked, “Why was there a sudden windstorm in my room when I read the title? Because it ate my blood? Also, last night was the third instance I lost time yesterday, and I want to know why.”

My pack disappeared. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and yanked me forward. I ended up straddling him on the seat, my palms pressed against the rock of his chest. Whimpers and shallow breaths heave-hoed from my lips.