The Company of Darkness (21 page)

Ethan went back to his new apartment still buzzing on the inside with the need to track Cady down.  It was more of a room, really, with a tiny bathroom tucked into one corner, which stank of disinfectant and worse, but he didn’t care.  He’d stayed in shittier places before, it hardly mattered. 

From the bottom of his bag, he produced a folded map of the city and spread it over the bed, smoothing out the frayed edges.  Sigils lined all four corners of the paper, all that was required was to speak the incantation and focus on his quarry.  The words fought him, as they always did, making him break out into a sweat as he uttered the last phrase, the pop in his ears letting him know the casting was successful. 

Only there was no telltale glow on the map.  Cady was either not nearby anymore or being shielded.  Both were equally frightening.  If the Company had taken her, it was out of his hands.  All that was left now was to wait until they returned her to her old life and try to reassemble the ruin of his. 

“What are you waiting for, reaper?  Find her.”
Ash’s voice was impatient in his head.

Ethan spun around, his eyes wild.  He could’ve sworn he heard…

“Who knows what they could be doing to her at this very moment, what tortures to induce her to talk.”

“What the fuck.”  Ethan shook his head, trying to clear it.  “Am I going insane?”

“You heard me, didn’t you?”
  Ash was near giddy at the realization. 

“I heard…”  He wasn’t ready to concede that the demon was actually talking to him.  Aware of his actions, sure.  Influencing his emotions, maybe.  But actually communicating with him in his own head?  “Fuck, I am losing my mind,” Ethan muttered.  “I need to call in, I need help.”

“Don’t you dare!  She needs us, and I can’t do a single thing without you.”

“Ash?”

“Who else would it be?”
Ash scoffed in the corners of his mind. 
“Honestly, none of the others are even aware of their surroundings, let alone how magnificent Cady is.”

Was this how it started?  Hearing voices?  How long before he suffered a complete psychotic break?  He’d never heard of a bound subject being able to converse with a host before.

“Yes, well, you can hardly judge me by that rabble’s standards, now can you?”

And now Ash was privy to his thoughts too, unbe
fucking
lievable.  “I don’t understand how this is possible.” 

“Nor do I, but that isn’t important right now, Cady is.  She’s in grave danger. I can feel it, can’t you?”

“I feel…”  Ethan hardly knew what he felt, everything was all jumbled inside.  How much of his emotions or even his thoughts were influenced by the demon?  “You’re the one doing this to me.  Cady isn’t in any danger, even if the Company does have her.  They don’t harm innocents.  You’re the one screwing around with my emotions, making me this, this, this… mess.”  Ethan sensed a flare of annoyance at his words. 
Good
, let the bastard feel upset for a change. 

“I knew yours was an inferior intellect, but extend your brain a teency bit, won’t you?”

Ethan did his best to ignore him, Ash didn’t know what he was talking about.  “They won’t need to hurt her.  At the most they’ll question her and probably mess around with her memories a little.  Then she won’t remember me or you and… and then she’ll be safe.”  And that would be that.  It was for the best. 

“No, they won’t let her go,”
Ash insisted. 
“She’s special, they’ll find a use for her.”

“What do you mean?  They don’t snatch people up off the streets, they’re very selective in their recruits.  They don’t need her.”

“You’re proving my point for me.  Any shaved ape can be taught the basics of magic and they can swell the ranks with all the muscle-bound oafs they want, but when they find someone with real power – that’s worth pursuing.”

“Real power, what are you talking about?”

“You were there, you saw her.  You taught her yourself how to wield the power.  Surely you felt it, she’s an adept.  It’s only a matter of time before your superiors notice it as well.”

An adept.  Was that why she’d taken to casting so easily?  He’d started to think her connection to the demon was because of Ash’s blood, but what if it wasn’t?   What if it was because of some other anomaly within her that made her especially attractive and conversely resistant to their influence?  No, that wasn’t right.  She hadn’t been immune to Asherik’s compulsion until after she was infected by his blood.  But maybe that blood had awoken something latent within her? 

He had to get to her before she piqued the Company’s interest as more than his bedfellow.  Cady wouldn’t stand a chance against their magics.  Or would she?  She’d resisted Ash’s compulsion easily enough, but that in and of itself would prove a dangerous lure.  There was no two ways about it, he had to find a way to track her, even if that meant going up against the Company itself.

“Would you stop this mindless prattling and find her!  She needs us.” 

“If you’d shut the fuck up for more than two minutes maybe I could do that!” Ethan snapped back, at the end of his patience.  “Now leave me alone and let me concentrate, or none of this is going to work.”

Ash fell silent then, to his great relief, and Ethan laid out the circle on the floor, large enough for him to kneel comfortably inside.  Next came the careful inscribing of protective sigils, in case the Company should sense someone trying to See her and try to follow him back. 

Ethan knelt within the circle, closing his eyes to gather the stillness around him.  The ancient words began to form in his head, and when he had them fixed in his mind, they tumbled from his lips.  “
Dominus in lucem, mittere signum.  In sapientia tua precor.
”  He began to rock slowly, the words forming their own rhythm as he repeated the chant over and over again until he achieved a kind of trance. 

Into the void slid not a vision of Cady with her fiery hair and pure, clean scent, but another woman.  Long strands of dirty blonde hair escaped the messy bun, falling over her forehead almost to her chin as her head lolled lazily to one side.  The only movements she made were to bring the lit cigarette to her lips, or the flowered glass that held something dark and bubbly.  He knew it wasn’t Pepsi because he’d tried it before and it tasted disgusting. 

The TV blared in the background, overblown organ music swelling as a doctor and his nurse sank into a desperate clutch in his office, but that bored him.  He hated it when her stories were on, they were so dull.  It was better when she passed out and he could switch it over to something fun like
Lost in Space
. 

The pile of rubber bands at his feet had dwindled, coalescing into a hard, round ball, almost the size of a baseball, his brilliant scheme of stickball coming closer to a reality with each band he added.  His stomach growled painfully.  He was used to ignoring it, but Mama was still awake, maybe there would be food this time.  “I’m hungry, are we having lunch soon?”

“There’s the kitchen, your legs ain’t broken,” she said with a wave of a cigarette, never taking her eyes off the small TV screen. 

“Okay.”  Given that permission, he dropped his ball aside and ran to the kitchen, accidentally brushing past her and sending the cup smashing to the floor in a spray of glass and sticky sweet pop.  For long seconds, they gaped at each other, Mama in shock and him in horror before he began to back away. 

“You clumsy piece of shit!” she screamed, launching out of the chair to wipe the droplets from her cheek. 

“I’m sorry, Mama, I didn’t mean to…” he stammered, wincing when his butt hit the couch and he almost fell over.  “I’ll clean it up.”

“What good is that gonna do?  You broke one of our good glasses, and wasted my whole drink!”  She staggered forward, her steps unsteady, but her eyes weren’t dull and unfocused like they were most of the time.  They blazed with retribution and he scuttled around the other side of the sofa.  “Don’t you run away from me, get back here, boy!”

“I’m sorry…”  He edged closer, even as his eyes darted every which way, looking for escape. 

“I’ll show you sorry, you… I’ll show you… I’ll…”  She lunged for him suddenly, her grip surprisingly strong.  He twisted away from the painful sting but she held fast, knocking him back against the couch.  “Hold still, you little bastard.  Hold still, I said.”  He wriggled uselessly as her knee came down on his hip, pinning him.  The searing pain came next, and he screamed as the cigarette pressed on the inside of his forearm.  He lurched violently, but she held him fast, holding the glowing tip to his flesh, her lip curled away from her teeth in a triumphant sneer.  “I’ll show you.  I’ll show you.  Show you…” she muttered over and over again. 

Ethan snapped back from the vision fast enough to make his head spin, and he had to concentrate on grounding himself for a few minutes while the question swirled around in his head – what the fuck was that? 

“Like mother, like son, always solving things with violence.” 

“Shut up, that wasn’t my mother,” he snarled, heart still racing as he poured the excess energy into the Earth.  That couldn’t be his mother, it couldn’t be a memory, it was a vision of some other poor kid.  He only had one picture of his mother, and she didn’t look like the same woman at all.  Thick, hornrimmed glasses over curly red-gold hair and a dress and apron, that was the woman from his past. 

He remembered sitting on the beach playing with an orange plastic bucket.  Digging, digging, digging…
Come on inside, your lunch is ready
.  His mother didn’t abuse him, she loved him.  His father… his father was a man in a coat and hat, leaving in the morning and coming home after he’d gone to bed until one day he never came back at all.  He didn’t remember crying about it.  He didn’t remember his mother crying either.  Life went on as if he’d never been a part of their lives. 
Come on inside, your lunch is ready.
 

So who was the other woman he’d seen?  His eyes flicked down to find the faintest scar on the inside of his forearm, its presence bothering him more than he liked.  He’d never thought twice about it.  It could be a birthmark, or an old burn.  It could’ve been a scar from the chicken pox for all he knew. 

She wasn’t his mother.  His mother loved him. 

“You’re wasting time.  Try again.”

Ethan choked back the frustration, ready to put aside the questions he had no answers for to focus on the here and now.  “You can just stop nagging me.  This is all your fault, you know.”

“You’re the one who abandoned her,”
Ash scoffed.

“Because of
you
,” Ethan bit out.  “I had to protect her from you.  She doesn’t want to be with you, she never did.”

“I know,”
Ash said, his voice glum and defeated. 
“I only wanted to love her.”

“You don’t know what love is.  If you loved her you’d let her go.”

“Like you did?”

“Yes.”

“And look where that got her,”
Ash snapped, his tone sharp with desperation once more. 
“Now, stop wallowing and try again.”
 

Only it didn’t work.  Twice more he tried and got nothing but darkness.  No more visions of a childhood he didn’t remember, nothing at all.  He needed help. 

Tucking a thick wad of bills into his pocket, he left the hovel, ignoring Ash’s chatter the entire way down to Gobi’s place, only acknowledging him as he stood in the stairwell.  “Look, keep your mouth shut or this isn’t going to work.  I can’t talk to the two of you at the same time.”

“I’m amazed you can walk and chew gum.”

“Do you want to find her or not?”  The resulting silence was all the answer Ethan needed to proceed up the stairs.  Gobi waited at the door to his suite of rooms, dancing from one foot to the other in agitation.  For once his outfit was less than ridiculous, a thick hockey jersey over baggy jeans. 

“I’ve been trying all night, I got nothing, man,” Gobi reported right off the bat.  Ethan didn’t bother to ask how he’d known Cady was in danger, though he did wonder why Gobi would bother to search for her.  “It’s just a baby crush, nothing for you to lose your cool over,” he added, taking a step back.  “I know she prefers your brawn to my brains.  Doesn’t mean I want her to end up dead.”

Ethan’s mouth went dry.  “Is that what’s going to happen to her?”

Gobi’s hands came up in supplication, backing further into the room.  “Naw, figure of speech.  Sorry, dude.  I don’t know where she’s headed, she’s being shielded.”

That definitely explained why he hadn’t been able to get a vision of her.  “By who?”

“If I knew that, I’d know where to find her.”

Another dead end.  It was enough to make him want to… Ethan’s fist hammered out, punching through the drywall to dent the wall on the other side, relishing the burn across his knuckles. 

Gobi took another step back, an uneasy grin stretching across his face at the display.  “Hey, you ain’t mad about me helping her find you, are you?  ’Cause that was all her, alls I did was help focus her intent and she’s the one who found you.  Not that it did any good.”