Nameless: The Darkness Comes (24 page)

Chapter Forty-Seven

Seth was crouched over somebody on the floor. My heart sunk.
It’s Reed. It’s Reed. It’s Reed.

“It’s Sparkles,” Seth said, squatting beside her.
She looked like she was barely conscious. Her demon twined around her arms and legs. “I heard her moaning in the back room. She doesn’t look so hot.”

Understatement.

I narrowed my eyes at the sight of her and spit on the ground. “What’s she doing here?” My eyes widened. “Wait, if she’s here, where’s Lydia? Is she here, too?”

Seth shook his head.
“I didn’t see her.

I
knelt by Sparkles, tried to make her eyes focus. “Sparkles! Where is Lydia? Lydia?” Her eyes rolled. I slapped her in the face, but she didn’t even react. Even her demon was moving slower than usual. Groggy. Snapping at me blearily, almost blindly.

What was going on here? Suddenly I had a thought.
I yanked up the sleeve of her shirt. Fresh track marks. She was using. Disgusted, I let her arm fall to the ground with a thud.

“You’re useless,” I spat.
“You’re a waste of a person and a mother. You deserve everything you get.”

“That’s enough,” Seth said.
He sounded tired.

I turned my anger on him. “How can you be so calm?”

“I have to be calm or I’m going to lose my mind.”

I turned my back on him and Sparkles.
I was out of here. I marched back to Mouth. He was the answer to all this.

“My offer still stands,” I said.
“I need to find Lydia, and you’re going to help me. Ride around in my soul and blow this joint.”

A strange giggling in the background unnerved me.
It was the demon masquerading as my father, swinging gently back and forth from his rope.

“He’s here,” Mouth said.
I had never heard him sound frightened before.

“Who’s here?”

The grotesque body in the middle of the room laughed louder, more manically.

“He’s come for you, Luna,” the demon in my father sputtered. “He’s waited so long.” His mirth caused the rope to spin in a slow, jerking circle.

My shoulders tensed.

“Mouth,
tell me who’s here?”

The Mark
scorched anew, forcing a sound of pain between my lips. The laughing demon suddenly started screaming, shrieking, wailing. His skin, my father’s faux skin, started blistering and bubbling. I couldn’t stand it. I staggered away from both of the demons, toward the door. The knob turned easily under my hand, and the squealing abruptly cut off. I tasted bile.

“No!” Mouth called.
He struggled to yank himself free from the spikes. “I warned you. It’s too late.”

Reed Taylor stood there, looking tired and pale.
I took an automatic step toward him, but something stopped me. His body language was off. The way he stood was unnatural, like he was being pulled upward by strings.

“Something’s wrong with him,” I breathed.

Mouth nodded grimly, and I bit my lip, hard.

“But that’s him, though, isn’t it? I mean, he’s real, even if he is all jacked up.”

“That’s him.” Mouth’s voice was very soft, and full of something strangely like pity. I looked at him.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Look closer.”

I didn’t want to. It took everything that I had to force myself to clench my fists and study what I saw in front of me.
Reed Taylor’s handsome face was white and slack. Dark spikes ran from his red hair, spearing upwards. I realized what I was seeing, who I was seeing, and I hissed.

“So you understand,” Mouth said quietly.

“I understand.”

The darkness flowed from Reed Taylor
’s scalp up into a long, thin arm. Too thin. Bone-shatteringly thin. The very stuff of nightmares, or at least
my
nightmares. The arm connected to a shadow so large that its head projected onto the ceiling. The shadow turned toward me and I thought my heart would stop. I tried to breathe normally. I bit my tongue to keep myself from shrieking. I knew if I started then I would never, never, never stop.

The shadow
giggled.

“Ah, Luna! It has been,
mmm
,
such
a long time!”

The voice was higher than I remembered, squeaky and broken in all the wrong places. As it spoke, its head rotated to the side so far that I braced myself for the sound of snapping bones.

Everything in me screamed to run and hide. The shadow pranced its way closer. It tiptoed on impossibly small feet.

“And how is the brother,
mmm?
Still a
coward?
Learned from his bargain, girl?” It sniffed the air. “Oh! I can smell him. He smells like such lovely things. Despair. Shame. Oh, yes, guilt and misery.”

It turned his eyeless face back to me.
“And you. I missed you,
mmm,
yes. Little girls and fears are so delicious. But yours, oh, yours were always the sweetest. So delightful to lead down waterways and into the dark places. There was magic there, Luna. Tell me, do you still see magic in the water? Look
closer,
Luna, and see what you find! Put your face right down into the water and—”

“Shut up,” I said.
My fists were clenched at my side. “I’m sick of your voice. I’m not six years old anymore. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

“Watch it,” Mouth breathed warningly.

I pointed at Reed Taylor. “I want him. Give him back to me.”

The Tip
toe Shadow cackled in delight. “You want the puppet? My new friend? Oh, but I think not,
mmm.
I was lonely without you, Luna. No one to whisper to. No one to run my fingers across in the night. I needed,
mmm
, someone to play with, and someone came. He’s a lovely one, don’t you think? And he knows things. A great many things. He knows where the New You is.”

The New You
?

Lydia.
Reed Taylor knew where Lydia was.

The shadow
moved its great arm, and I realized with horror that his fingers were boring through the top of Reed Taylor’s skull. This was how it was controlling him. It danced Reed Taylor closer to me. His left leg turned in awkwardly and his heavy boots dragged on the ground.

“Stop it, you’re hurting him
,” I yelled and rushed forward.

M
outh’s cold voice stopped me. “Tread carefully,” he said. His eyes never left the shadow man’s face. “He’s counting on you to get emotional. It isn’t Reed he wants.”

I took a deep breath, nodded.
Reed Taylor’s gorgeous greens were vacant, the corners filled with swirling black. I reached forward and ran my hand down his face gently. Cold to the touch, but so beautiful.

I felt the heat of the Tip
toe Shadow’s gaze. “Why, you
care
for this one?” He shook his hand, and Reed Taylor’s body danced like a broken doll. “
This
one,
mmm
, when he has caused you so much trouble? Oh yes,” he said, and his squeaky voice turned deeper, more sinister, “I know
this one.
I know his consorts: those who think they fly,
mmm
, higher than us. I know.” He suddenly bent over backwards, his head twisting toward Reed Taylor’s face. He ran his tongue down Reed Taylor’s cheek. “He,
mmm,
tastes like you. Is that why you want him back?
‘Come on, Luna, give me a kiss.’”
He opened Reed Taylor’s mouth and shadowy black fingers waggled where his tongue should be. The shadow giggled wildly.

I broke.

“How dare you call my brother a coward? You’re the coward. How dare you pick on little girls, and men that can’t see you, and small boys who are afraid of the dark? If you’re going to fight somebody, fight somebody who can fight back.”

Mouth made a warning sound
, but I was too worked up to care. “Leave Reed Taylor alone, and come after—”

“Luna!” Mouth roared, and I stopped short.
My body began to tremble. I suddenly had the sense that I had almost gone too far, said something that couldn’t be taken back, and Mouth had saved me.

Moving almost faster than I could register, the Tip
toe Shadow snaked forward until he was face-to-face with Mouth.

“You,” he said, and I realized that, until n
ow, he hadn’t even known he was there.

Mouth dipped his head.

“
Why do you stop her? Why do you,
mmm
, betray?”

Mouth bowed his head respectfully.
“I…I don’t betray, master. I forgot myself. She offered to help me and I was…moved.”

The demon’s giggle went higher,
more wild. The hair on my arms stood.

“She? Help yo
u? Then she doesn’t know. Oh,
mmm
, tell me she doesn’t know.”

Mouth, head still bowed, murmured, “She doesn’t know.”

The Tiptoe Shadow screamed with laughter. He wrapped his long, thin arms around himself, and Reed Taylor’s body flopped and shook with the demon’s mirth.

“You’re breaking him
,” I yelled, tears in my eyes. I whirled on Mouth. “What don’t I know?”

He looked away from me. “Do you ever wish,” he said quietly, “that you could take something back?
That you could change who you are?” He met my eyes again. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Luna
.” I whirled at my brother’s voice.

“Seth, don’t come in here
.”

He looked horrified.
“What’s happening to Reed?” I realized he only saw me and a broken Reed Taylor levitating through the air. It must be too horrible to comprehend.

“It’
s the Tiptoe Shadow.”

Seth’s face changed into an expression of horror more grotesque than anything I had ever seen.
I was afraid his heart would stop.

I was sick of this.

“Enough games.” I stormed up to the Tiptoe Shadow. “Where’s my niece?” Fear didn’t have a hold of me anymore. Nothing but rage.

“The little one?” he squeaked.
He wriggled, his happiness an obscenity. My mouth tasted sour. “The pigtails, and starfish hands, and laugh like,
mmm
, bubbles? It had been so long since I had one so small around to play my games, someone to hide under her blankets and pray I don’t exist. But I
do
, you see. I sing songs, all night, comforting, about things that,
mmm
, crawl in the dirt and things that will eat her eyes, and when she cries for Mama Luna, no one comes. ‘We’re all
alone,
’ I tell her. ‘They’ve all
abandoned
you,’ and I open my mouth and catch her tears and they are so sweet, so sweet, so sweet…”

The sound that came out of me was unlike anything I had ever heard.
It was something I expected from the wolf demons, or something that dreamed of sucking marrow from bones at night, but not from me. It was wild and frightening. From the corner of my eye I saw Seth shrink away, but I didn’t care. I rushed at the demon.

“No
, no,” he said slyly. He lifted Reed Taylor into the air as though he weighed nothing. “I will break my toy. Just you see. Do you like toys, Luna? Do you like when they twist and spin and
, mmm,
snap?”

He twisted Reed Taylor’s arm painfully in
its socket. Reed Taylor’s expression didn’t change, but his face went even paler, and sweat stood out on his forehead.

“No, stop
,” I cried. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” The demon looked
shrewd. I’d been down this road before.

“Luna, think of what you’re say
ing,” Mouth whispered. His head was still bowed. “You think he doesn’t know what he’s doing? He’s playing you.”

“Whose side are you
on
?” I hissed and Mouth winced. I turned my attention back to the Tiptoe Shadow, who was nibbling down Reed Taylor’s ribs like a hungry dog. I saw blood.

“What will it take for you to leave him alone?”
I asked. “For you to put him away and give Lydia back to my brother?”

“You ask hard things,” the shadow said.
He pointed at Mouth. “Doesn’t she ask hard things?”

“Yes, she does,” he said respectfully.
He cut his gaze to me, but I deliberately avoided his eye.

“The child says yes,” the Shadow told me, nodding.
“I like my pretty toy. But sometimes…they break.”

He snapped Reed Taylor’s arm
, and I screamed. Seth took a step forward, but the shadow shook his head. “Uh uh, naughty boy. There are more,
mmm
, wonderful things to snap and spin on my new toy.”