Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (32 page)

Thankfully, we did not need to be
around the inhabitants of that town often and we deliberately kept
them confused about our identities and gave different names, often
altering what they saw so we appeared to be different people. We
did this, created an extended family in their minds, along with
children, so we could continue to live at the mansion as long as we
could, and assume the identity of a fictitious child, or relative,
years later to hide the fact that we were unnatural beings who
would never die.

On one occasion, we came across one of
the slaves owned by the town mayor. She was a woman in her late
thirties who had borne many children for the man and worked long
hours for him. The work had crippled her, leaving her with a limp.
She had a nervous air around her and was childlike around others in
some ways, so great was her fear of whites and the power they held
over Negroes. When she came across us on the very rare occasions we
ventured into town, her face lit up with awe and admiration when
she saw Luna, a Negro woman who was well-dressed and clearly had
the respect of the white man who was known to be her master. Luna
was immediately drawn to her by the intensity of her thoughts and
the clear admiration she held for her. The woman smiled timidly
when Luna turned to stare at her. The smile disappeared when she
saw the clear contempt in Luna’s eyes. I could see it was more than
contempt, it was rage at what she saw of the life the woman led,
and the brutality she endured that left her cowering around others.
But she seemed to be especially angry at the woman herself for
being weak and letting them break her spirit, as she saw
it.

That anger followed us when we left
town and Luna remained silent and moody. At times like that, I let
her be. She went out on her own that night, something she rarely
did at that stage, and I did not try to follow, understanding that
she needed to be on her own. At dawn, I returned to the mansion to
see her waiting in the field of flowers as she used to do when she
was human, her expression troubled.

I sat down beside her and we watched
the sun make its way over the horizon.

“
Where did you take them?”
I asked after a few moments.

“
New York. I didn’t think,
I just got her and her children and took them to New York. I...I
just couldn’t let her go back there and...and...”

I pulled her close to me and she laid
her head against my shoulder.

After a few moments she pulled away to
gaze at me, tears shimmering in her eyes.

“
Did I do the right thing,
Avery? She...she’s so scared of everyone and everything. I left
money for them, but I don’t know if she can look after herself and
her children.”

“
She’ll find a way,
Luna.”

“
Will she? There are some
things, some experiences that people never come back from.
There...there is so much wrong with me, Avery, so much that Master
John and his father destroyed. I don’t understand why you even fell
in love with me, and why you continue to love me, when I’m just a
slave.”

It felt as if my heart was tearing
into two as I stared at her. Her face was lit by the light of the
coming sun, her skin turned to dark gold, her eyes jet-coloured
glass shinning with tears.

“
I love you because you’re
my everything. There will never be another like you,
Luna.”

I pulled her to me and found she was
shivering. I held her tighter, remembering the evening I came
across her praying in the chapel.

“
They can’t hurt you now,
Luna. No one will ever harm you again.”

She looked up at me, a soft smile on
her lips even as tears slid down her cheeks. She kissed me gently
as the sun broke over the horizon, bathing us in gold. Then we
entered the mansion to seek refuge from its glare.

But this contempt she sometimes showed
toward other blacks was puzzling, and perhaps is why she strove to
change the way she spoke. The colourful, comforting speech and
idioms I loved slowly vanished. It was so gradual I barely noticed
it was disappearing. Every once in a while it crept back into her
speech in a word, or a turn of phrase, and I realised it had been
absent and I missed it. But whenever this happened and she became
aware of it, she reprimanded herself mentally and crushed the stray
word so it never resurfaced again.

And it was not only Negro slaves that
had her animosity. Once, during our travels, Luna came to a stop in
the middle of a busy street and gasped out loud.

I faced her, puzzled, and we turned in
unison to the person whose thoughts had elicited such a reaction
from her. It was a smartly dressed Negro male in his mid-forties.
He was a wealthy free man of colour, but what drew Luna’s attention
to him was the way in which he had accumulated his
wealth.

He owns slaves!
Luna hissed in my mind.

I had never seen her like this before.
She was distraught and also angry. So very angry.

“
Let us leave here, Luna,”
I said out loud.

She continued to glare at him, wounded
and angered beyond all understanding.

“
Luna, please,” I
whispered.

She managed to tear her gaze away from
him and followed me off the busy street.

I was relieved. Luna’s anger always
unnerved me, whether it was directed at me or not, and I was
thankful we were leaving that town within the hour and would not
see the Negro slaveholder again.

Our love was unique and precious, like
a beautiful rose. But the thorns from this rose were particularly
sharp, especially since our thoughts were open to the
other.

For decades Luna harboured anger
toward me at what she saw as my betrayal when I abandoned her. Over
the course of our union, it began to manifest itself frequently in
emotional outbursts that sometimes lasted for hours. In the
beginning, I appeased her and kept telling her I was sorry and she
would eventually calm down. But after a few years, resentment began
to creep in and I often remained silent during her tirades. But, as
unfortunately happens with mind-readers, every so often one is
slower to conceal what the other might overhear.

We were in the drawing room one night
and she had been shouting at me for the past two hours.

“
I spent the rest of my
life aching for you but you were
gone
. I nearly died without ever
getting to see you again.”

I remained silent,
seething inwardly, having long lost patience with her tirades,
especially since I had an eternity of more to look forward to. But
what really aggravated me during these moments were the latent
thoughts behind the words. She saw my selfless actions as a
betrayal. And the latent thought behind it?
White people always betrayed you.

These thoughts were subconscious, and
she was probably not even aware of them. But they were there. And
they evoked severe resentment in me, especially since I had
suffered so much when I gave her up to be loved and cared for by
another man.

The display also sickened me because I
saw Luna as superior in so many ways—apart from one—when she cried
and screamed over nothing and behaved like the hysterical,
whimpering women I had left behind me along with my mortal life.
And as the cauldron of my resentment burned a thought slipped
through my mental net to the surface.

Oh for God’s sake, are we
back to this.
Again
. Now I’ll have to spend the entire night listening to her
nonsensical rant.

Silence came crashing down on the room
as she spun to face me. Her eyes were still shining with tears, but
her face was hard and cold. Realising she heard me, I could only
stare in consternation, trying to think of something to say that
would explain my comments or at least mitigate them.

“
Luna...I...I—”

She didn’t let me finish. In an
instant she was across the room. She dragged me from the chair with
one hand by the lapels of my jacket and the room disappeared in a
whirl of gold and reds. I only saw flashes of green as we dipped in
and out of the ether at a blinding speed before we arrived at the
lake. Shocked at how fast she had brought us here, I was about to
speak when she picked me up and threw me into the air. I was sent
hurtling over the water and smashed into the lake, quickly sinking
to the bottom.

Furious, I materialised out of the
water to the bank. She was gone.

When I returned to the mansion, she
was sitting in the chair by the fire, the skirts of her canary
yellow dress spread around her in rolling folds of yellow silk. She
was holding an open book in her lap, her neck inclined demurely as
she read in the soft light cast by the fire.

She didn’t look up when I appeared in
the room or when I walked across it to her, dripping and squelching
over the expensive rugs we had spent so long choosing together.
Once I was before her, I stared down at her for a few moments
before I reached for the book and carefully pulled it out of her
grasp. I threw it into the fire. It was only then that she looked
up at me. She didn’t flinch when I slammed my hands down on the
armrest of the chair and loomed over her. When I spoke, my voice
was soft and controlled.

“
Luna. The reason why men
do not hit women is because they are weaker
physically
, a category
you
do not fall into. So
I am warning you. If you
ever
do that again, I will not hesitate to strike you
in turn.”

She regarded me in silence for a few
moments, calm and poised on the surface, a raging inferno on the
inside. Then her eyes narrowed to thin slits.

This time she threw me clear across
the lake into the trees on the other side. I smashed through one,
cleaving it in half, and would have hit another had I not shimmered
out of the air, materialising on my feet below as the tree I had
slammed into came hurtling to the ground a few feet
away.

She was standing on the other side of
the lake, her yellow dress like a candle flame against the soft
darkness around her. When I materialised before her, she had her
hands on her hips, her chin jutted forward in defiance, her lips in
a triumphant smirk as she stared me down, daring me to make good on
my threat.

Of course, the last thing
I wanted to do was
hit
her but I was not only wet, my ego was bruised and I was
furious with her. I no doubt looked a fool standing there and she
clearly thought I had no intention of hitting her. She had to know
that this behaviour was unacceptable. Luna was already much
stronger than me, the vampire blood I had given her along with the
blood of her ancestors had combined to make an exceptionally
powerful being. But despite the fact that the fight that ensued
would see me the worse off, to make my point, I reached out and
lightly, reluctantly, tapped her on the cheek.

I swear, my fingers barely touched her
cheek, so timid and feeble was the ‘blow’ I directed at
her.

But her reaction was horrific. At
first she gasped and put her hand to her mouth in shock, her eyes
widening like that of a frightened, defenceless kitten. And then
she did the worst possible thing she could have done under those
circumstances.

She burst into tears.

Bawled—no, wailed—would probably be a
better description. At first I merely stood awkwardly before her
whilst she wailed, shocked and deeply ashamed of myself.

“
Luna, I am so sorry. I
love you. Please forgive me.”

I tried to gather her into my arms,
but she pushed me away and then proceeded to deliver a flurry of
feeble, open handed slaps across my face and chest. Then she ran
away into the trees with her hands against her face as she
continued to bawl, a glimmer of saffron cutting through the
gloom.

I spent the rest of the night in my
wet clothes apologising and apologising whilst she wept and wept. I
even shed a few tears of my own, I was so exasperated and tormented
by her distress. She was still crying when the sun came up that
morning and we retired to our chest. She finally relented to let me
hold her, and so I brought her close to me, the sad mantra of her
sobs making it impossible for me to sleep.

The following night saw her sullen
with dark, fragile eyes. She had only to look at me and a fresh
wave of tears engulfed her.

She never threw me into the lake
again, but it was at least ten years before she fully forgave me.
It took many more years before mere mention of the incident did not
bring a thin film of water to her eyes.

But as is always the case
with Luna, when I look back at those years, I missed so many signs
that trouble was brewing. I had been so caught up with her distress
that I failed to see the crucial element, the speed with which she
raced through the woods to the lake. It was a journey that was
normally made in a couple of minutes but she had made it in
seconds
. We both knew
she was stronger than me, but I now saw she was a great deal faster
and she had hidden that from me. If she loved and trusted me, why
would she feel the need to hide all that she was? The other thing
was that her rants ceased completely and she never brought up my
“betrayal” again.