The Dark Rising (8 page)

“He’s a demon!” Grandma shouted, and she sent a burst of power toward him, attempting to knock him away from Babs, who was still screaming.

Vance didn’t even flinch when the shock hit, absorbing it with ease while my dad desperately tried to pull Babs from his strong grip.

I reacted swiftly, jumping onto Vance’s back and began hitting him.

“Stop it Vance!” I yelled, pounding on him as I tried to bring him back to reality.

The others in the room were scrambling to get around the table to help, each of them firing an onslaught of magic at Vance.  He didn’t even seem to notice their attack.

I started screaming into his head through our link.  “Vance!  Let go! Please don’t do this!” I begged.  I reached down in front of him trying to pull Babs hand away from his mouth.  Still he seemed unfazed.

“
Do
something, Portia!” my dad hollered.

“Like
what
?” I yelled back.

“You’re the most powerful witch here! 
Think
!” he responded in frustration.

I did the first natural thing that came to me, even though it chilled me to the bone.  I placed my hand against Vance’s back and slammed the biggest, thickest ice shard I could muster through his heart and out the front of his chest on the other side.

He released Babs almost instantly, jerking with a gurgle and he fell to the floor, taking me with him.  The blood pooled quickly around him, but I ignored that, reaching to retrieve the two fingers on the ground.

I moved over to where my dad was holding a sobbing Babs, his hand over the wound to try and stop the bleeding.

“Can you fix them?” my grandma asked from over Dad’s shoulder.

“I’ll try,” I said, really wishing all of this magic stuff could’ve come with a manual of some sort.  This trial and error was the pits.  “Give me her hand,” I added to my dad.

I placed the amputated pieces next to the spots where they belonged, and held them there, while I let my healer’s magic flow in a white light from me into her.  The tissues around the injuries quickly began to respond, knitting her appendages back together right before our eyes.

“Thank you,” she moaned, when I finished, sagging in relief against my dad.

“Get them all out of here,” I said over the top of her to Grandma.  “It isn’t safe.”

“It should be okay now,” Hal spoke up.  “He seems pretty dead to me,” he added, nodding his head toward Vance, whose entire blood volume was seeping across the floor.

“Yeah, well looks can be deceiving,” I replied back to him.  “He won’t be dead for long, so if you value your life I suggest you leave.”

Hal acted like he might want to argue with me for a moment.

“He received the Awakening!” I shouted at him.  “He’s immortal!  Or did you not understand that part of everything?  You need to leave now!”

Hal swallowed hard.  “What about you?” he asked worriedly.

“I’m the only one here he can’t truly harm.”  I felt bad for sounding so gruff.  “Thanks for your concern, but please, all of you go now!”  I looked around at everyone.  “Leave the house and go somewhere Vance wouldn’t hunt for you.  I’ll do my best to contain him.”

“She’s right,” my dad said.  “Everybody out!”  He turned to me.  “Be careful, Pumpkin.  None of us knows what we’re dealing with here.”

“That’s true,” Grandma agreed.  “There’s never been a demon who has received the Awakening before.  His powers will most likely be astronomical.”

I nodded in understanding.  “I know,” I replied, turning to glance at Vance.  “As if his powers weren’t strong enough already.”  I ran a hand through my hair before I turned back to them.  “Please go.  I have no idea how long it will be before he wakes up.”

“Good luck, honey,” Dad said.  He put an arm around Grandma and ushered her out.

Then I was alone.  Alone, with my demon husband that is.

“What else can possibly go wrong?” I questioned out loud to no one, my mind unable to process everything.

Numbly, I began picking up the scattered contents around the room, while I waited for Vance to come back to life, trying to figure out where things were going to go from here. 

I wrapped the crystal bowl and the athames in the table cloth, carrying them over to the corner with me, where I slid down the wall to sit on the floor.

Staring at him, I noticed his eyelids were open a little bit.  His irises still held the red filled stain.  The skin near his eyes had a reddish/black coloring which gave them a bruised appearance before it lightened as it spread out farther away. 

His veins had turned a blackish gray, tinged with red also.  I could see them creeping up from under his collar, around his neck, and up the sides of his jaw towards his temple.  One red streak ran from his temples to the outer corner of each eye.

I glanced over his brow, which was slightly furrowed above the bridge of his nose, and two small bumps, I assumed must be horns, bulged beneath his hairline at the top of his forehead.  Horns might have been stretching the term a little bit.  They were more like nubs, of what appeared to be, bone and tissue.

His teeth, well, I had a hard time with those.  The edges of every one sharpened into fang-like points, which were still easy to see despite the fact they were covered in Babs’s blood.

I didn’t know what to do about any of this. 

Vance was feasibly the most powerful person on the planet now.  He’d already been a magical prodigy to begin with.  Then he had assimilated his father’s powers, along with all of the magic his dad had stolen from other witches and warlocks prior to that.  He’d been dangerous then, and that had been before he received the Awakening. 

I remembered back to Scotland, when he had been fighting Douglas for his life.  He’d drunk Douglas’s blood.  The realization hit me then.  I must not have ever truly stopped his demon conversion.  I’d only slowed it down.

It all made sense now.  He had been able to perform the demon kiss on his father.  His withdrawals had quit after that.  Those powers must have fed the cravings, stopping the reactions he’d been having.

Douglas and Fiona had been feeding him blood through the champagne on our honeymoon.  Then Douglas had drunk Vance’s blood at the ritual, right before Vance attacked and drank his.

 The blood exchange had been made, and the process started all over.  The Awakening must have helped to regenerate the conversion right along with the cellular repair.

I refused to lose him again.  Not this way.  To know he was alive, but that he was evil?  I couldn’t bear it. 

He was immortal, the demon conversion fixed into his cell structure.  There would be no way to cure him.

The tears began to well in my eyes.

 I sat there, in still silence, while I watched the ice shard I had shoved through him began to work its way backward, out of his body the same direction it had gone in.  Soon it fell out onto the floor with a clunk, and the hole in his chest started to rapidly close.

I wasn’t scared of him.  After all, I was immortal too, though not nearly as powerful.  But I was afraid for him, for us, for our future and what this would mean.

His eyes registered consciousness then, and I heard him suck in a breath of air.  He lay there for a moment before he made a move to sit up.

Once he was sitting, he slid away from me, until he was able to lean up against the wall opposite me.

I stared into his demon transformed face while he looked at me, realizing even now, he was still the most handsome man I had ever seen.  I loved him, in spite of everything.

I shuffled through his mind and I could tell he was temporarily weakened from blood loss.

“When did you first know?” I asked him point blank.

He stared at me with his glowing eyes for a moment before he answered me.

“I was sure when your grandma pricked her finger,” he spoke, in a slightly raspy voice.

“What do you mean, sure?”

“I noticed something stirring earlier, the first time I kissed your neck, though I didn’t know at the time what it was.”

I remembered now, him sucking so hard on me I knew it would leave a mark, and it had.  That had been before I had given him the memories.

“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, feeling angry with him.

“I thought I could control it,” he said with a shrug, “Once I had seen the things in your memory.  He … I’d controlled it before.  I figured this must be the same thing.”

I couldn’t fault him with that.  He wouldn’t have experienced the prior feelings and cravings he’d had.  He only witnessed them from my point of view.  There was no way he could have told the difference in his desires.

“So what do we do now?” I asked him.

“About what?”

“What do you think?  You’re a demon!” I shouted at him louder than I had intended, my frustration getting the better of me.

I stood up and began pacing in my corner of the room.

“Why does that have to change anything?” he questioned me.

I stopped to look at him, my jaw dropping a little.

“Well, for one, you and I are now at complete opposite ends of the spectrum here.  We’re basically sworn enemies.  I can’t let you wander around, feeding on every helpless witch or warlock you might encounter.”

He slowly got to his feet, before leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

“You couldn’t stop me if you tried,” he countered, with a sardonic grin.

“What?” I questioned, quickly realizing he must be experiencing the mental changes that came with the blood lust.

I also knew he was right.

He pushed away from the wall then, walking toward me, and I stood my ground as he crossed over.

“You can’t stop me,” he said again, and he shoved me roughly up against the wall.

“Really?” I returned, placing my hand over his chest where the gaping hole had been only minutes ago.  “I already killed you once today.”

“Yeah,” he said and he reached out to run one of his hands over my hair.  “Ironic though, isn’t it?  I’ve been dead twice now in the last twenty-four hours, yet here I stand, right in front of you, alive and well.”

He reached down and grabbed both of my wrists in his strong hands, pulling them out as far away from my body as possible, pinning them to the wall behind me.

I realized then, I was his next intended victim, and I flicked my fingertips out at the tablecloth that held the wrapped athames.  The weapons ripped out of the cloth, heading straight for his back.

I didn’t see, or even feel, him flinch a muscle, but the knives hit some sort of unseen barrier, and clattered to the floor.

A low, sound of quiet rumbling laughter welled up from inside him.

“Oh, Portia,” he said and his eyes traveled over my face in anticipation.  “When are you going to realize?  You’re no match for me.”

He dipped his head in and I screamed out when his teeth ripped through my tender flesh at my neck.  I started calling all the items in the room to assault him, to no avail.  He deflected every single thing while he drank my blood with relish.

My strength was quickly leaving my body and soon I sagged weakly against the wall.

He released my hands, grabbing me up around the waist with one arm and holding my throat to his mouth with the other.  I flopped like a rag doll in his embrace.

I knew I was going to die this time, even though I knew I would come back.  I could read plainly into his head.  He intended to drink every drop.

And he did so, with relish.

Someone was calling out to me from the distance.  I tried to grasp on to that sound, but everything was so foggy.

“Portia,” the voice called to me again.  “If you can hear me, open your eyes.”

I fought to lift my heavy eyelids, trying to do as the familiar voice was instructing me.  When I finally succeeded, Krista’s concerned face slowly came into focus.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered, my mind flitting back over the images of Vance attacking me.

Krista waved her hand in dismissal.

“I’m not magical anymore.  He won’t be interested in me.  Besides, he left a while ago,” she replied, gazing at me with a worried look.

“Where’d he go?”  My eyes flickered around the room.

“I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head.  “I stayed in the car so I could watch the house from down the street.  He ran out and took off on his motorcycle.”  She reached out to me.  “Do you think you can sit up now?  You’ve been out for several hours.”

“Why so long?” I wondered out loud.  “Vance recovered in less than an hour after I attacked him.”

Krista shrugged.  “It’s part of his demon anatomy I would guess.  Unfortunately, demons are stronger than regular witches.  Add that to the other powers he’s assimilated and you have one heck of a warlock.  He’ll be hard to stop.”

I accepted her outstretched hand, and she pulled me up, helping to lean me up against the wall.

“Did everyone else get away all right?” I asked.  I was extremely weak, and the room spun out of control in my vision.

“Yes.  Your dad was sending them to an undisclosed location,” she answered, and I closed my eyes for a few seconds.

“You should’ve gone with them,” I said, looking at her after the wave of dizziness had passed.

“I thought you would need me most right now,” she replied with sympathy written on her face.  “I’ve lived with demons for a long time.  I know more about them than anybody here does.”

I realized she was right, and her wealth of knowledge would be useful to me.

“So now what happens?” I questioned, trying to wrap my head around everything.  “Is he lost to us forever?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“It depends on how he handles things,” she replied to me honestly, for which I was grateful since now was not the time for sugar coating.

“What do you mean?” I asked, having to concentrate to keep myself focused.  Fatigue was sinking deep into my bones.  I just wanted to sleep.

“Well, he’s new to the conversion.  He’ll start going through some crazy cravings.  It’ll kind of be like he’s on drugs.  When the bloodlust is in control, he’ll be awful.  He will say and do hurtful things to anyone or anything he feels like reacting to.  After he feeds, he’ll go into a sort of remission.  He’ll be sorry, almost apologetic, and he’ll swear he’ll never do it again.  Then he’ll begin to get antsy when the cravings start to come, until he is overcome by the bloodlust.  Then he will become the hunter once more.”