That Last Onset Page 22

  Graham shook his head. “You’d never be able to handle all that power in the real world. You’ll have to stay here in the Spiritus Mundi. And to do that, you’ll have to get Kieran and Eve here.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Azazel.

  “It’s going to take a lot of power,” said Graham. “Dark power.”

  * * *

  Azazel slumped against the edge of the doorway. I sat on the ground, disgustedly tearing up hunks of grass and tossing them on the ground.

  “You two have the power of Darkness,” said Graham. “You’re the only ones who can summon it.”

  Graham said the best way to get Kieran and Eve to the Spiritus Mundi was through their dreams. Azazel had determined that since Kieran used to have her dreams, she should be able to use that to get to him. And Azazel used to dream about Agnes a lot. We surmised that Kieran did too. In fact, Kieran had apparently killed Agnes in one of his dreams about her. We figured that since Kieran’s and Eve’s powers were so intertwined, pulling him through would pull her through too. Agnes was a creature of Darkness. We had the power of Darkness. Technically, we should be able to make her do our bidding. But for the life of us, neither Azazel nor I could figure out how to summon the Darkness. We’d tried everything we could think of.

  My head hurt. Azazel was exhausted.

  “Maybe we’re just not in tune with it,” Azazel said. “Should we try killing someone? Graham if we shoot you, will you really die?”

  “I’m already dead,” said Graham. “But if you kill me, I won’t be able to appear to you anymore, and I think you might still need my help.”

  “Darn it,” I muttered. “I was kind of thinking that strangling you might be fun.”

  “Okay,” said Azazel, sounding excited. “Just go with that, Jason. Think about strangling someone. Does it make you feel...powerful?”

  “I feel the exact opposite of powerful right now,” I said.

  “Think, you two,” said Graham. “How did you used to summon your power? Before Kieran and Eve took it, I mean?”

  “I had this image thing,” Azazel said. “I told you that. I uncapped this bottle of foaming liquid, and it took over my limbs. But that’s not working.”

  “Together,” said Graham. “How did you do it together?”

  “We never figured that out,” said Azazel.

  “No,” I said, getting to my feet. “But we did have a theory, remember?” I strode over to her, gathering her in my arms.

  She gasped, gazing up into my eyes. “Oh,” she said softly. “The kissing.”

  “Yeah.” I lowered my lips to hers.

  Azazel’s arms wound themselves around me, drawing me against her. I let my fingers wander over her hips and waist, and I assaulted her mouth with mine. She responded in kind, kissing me back furiously. We might have kept kissing like that for hours, if Graham hadn’t cleared his throat.

  “Um, guys? I think it worked.”

  Reluctantly, we pulled away from each other. Agnes was standing next to Graham, her arms folded over her chest.

  “What are the two of you up to?” she asked pointedly.

  “Not your problem,” I said. “You gave us power over Darkness, right? And you’re an aspect of the Darkness. So we’re kind of like your bosses now, aren’t we?”

  She made a face and pointed at Graham.”This is your fault, isn’t it? What kind of ideas have you put in their heads?”

  “Never mind about that. We have a job for you,” said Azazel.

  “Can you still get into Kieran’s dreams?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why do you think I was using that Nancy woman to communicate with him?”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “This is great. This is just great.”

  “But,” said Agnes, “maybe the Light aspect of me could do it. You met her in the Light’s test, didn’t you?”

  “We, um, sort of shot her,” said Azazel.

  “That might not matter,” said Agnes. “If you can get back to the room where you left her, there may be enough residual energy left to use her essence to get into Kieran’s dreams.”

  I turned and looked at the stone building we’d come through. I really didn’t want to go back.. “We’ve got to go back in there, then, don’t we?”

  “You’ve already beaten it,” said Agnes. “It won’t be difficult to backtrack.”

  “Will all the bodies still be there?” Azazel asked, cringing.

  “Probably,” said Agnes.

  “Great,” I said. “Well, let’s go.”

  “Hold on,” said Graham. “You can’t go until we’re sure Kieran and Eve are asleep. We’ll have to change this portal to reality to watch them. The minute they’re snoozing, you two go.”

  * * *

  Azazel hid her face in my shirt as we walked past the lifeless body of little Aerin. I looked. I felt like someone needed to. I knew that she wasn’t actually a child, that she was an incarnation of the Light’s attempting to screw with our heads. I felt as if I had to see it anyway, to remind myself of what we’d had to become to fight off these crazy forces. If I kept it in the forefront of my head, maybe, even though we were summoning the Darkness, I could keep myself focused.

  The maze we’d come through, where we’d gone through the Light’s tests, was a hollow graveyard. Flies gathered on her body, alighting on nostrils and fingers. I could smell the stench of freshly spilled blood. But it was quiet—appropriate for a tomb.

  We hurried through the room where Aerin had been killed, not spending time to notice the blood stains on the couches where our future selves had viciously annihilated each other, and came through on the other side, in the room where we’d left Agnes.

  Agnes sprawled on the couch, her arms askew, her face gaping at the ceiling. There were flies on her, their wings humming as they alighted on her bloody forehead.

  “So,” said Azazel, “what now?”

  “The Dark Agnes wasn’t very clear on that, was she?” She’d said something about using residual energy left over from Agnes’ death or something. “Do you feel any residual energy?”

  Azazel arched an eyebrow. “No. Are you seriously asking me that?”

  I glanced down at the tarot cards, still in their layout. They looked normal and undisturbed, despite the fact their owner had been executed. “Should we use these cards?”

  Azazel picked one up. “I don’t know how to use tarot cards.” She studied the card and then held it up to me. “The Lovers. Do you think Agnes was right originally, when I met her in Italy? That you and I were the lovers?”

  I squeezed her against me and kissed her temple. “Well, I do love you. Madly.”

  “Madly is right,” she said. “We’re both completely nuts.” She grinned at me.”And I love you too.”

  Which was amazing. Even now, I was awed and floored by the fact that she could love me, even though I definitely didn’t deserve it. I took the card from her. “There’s always been this undeniable attraction between us, no matter what happened. Do you think it was Darkness? Did we have a choice?”

  “Does anyone have a choice in love?” Azazel asked. “Does anyone decide who they’re going to fall in love with?”

  She had a point. Falling in love wasn’t like shopping for the best television set. You didn’t read reviews and weigh options. It just...happened. “But our love has been so...”

  “Turbulent? Violent? Unhealthy?”

  I snorted. “All of that.” I tapped the tarot card against the palm of my hand. “I get that falling in love is a force that you sometimes can’t fight against. But staying in love is different. And if we saw what we were doing to each other and the world, shouldn’t we have made a different choice then?”

  “Maybe,” said Azazel. “I did try to leave you.”

  “I did too,” I said. “I’ve been gone for five years.”

  “You think the Darkness is forcing us to stay in love?”

  “I think...” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “I think when
all of this is over, if it ever is over, I want to know what it’s like to be together without the world falling apart every three seconds or someone wanting us dead. I think we always spent so much time on the defensive that even when there wasn’t anything threatening us, we were looking for threats. I think that’s why we were always so jealous. Well, I shouldn’t speak for you. I think that’s why I was.”

  Azazel put her arms around me. “I think we were young. I think now that we’re older, we realize that, more than anyone else, we can trust the other.” She gazed up at me. “Don’t ever question how much I adore you. I would never consciously hurt you.”

  I brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “And I’ve always wanted you to be safe and happy. You’re the reason I do everything.”

  She raised herself up on her tiptoes, grinning, and put her lips against mine.

  This wasn’t one of those crazed, passionate kisses that made me feel as if I were turning inside out. Instead it was sweet and comforting. But somehow it was even more intense, as if our bodies were melding into each other. I could feel how we were connected, and how much we supported each other. I could feel our love tingling through my limbs. And, even though there was no desperation, the whole world seemed to disappear, and there was nothing left except me and her. I felt right. I felt at one. And when her lips softly disengaged from mine, I kept my eyes closed for a second, just savoring the feeling.

  And when I opened them, Azazel was nowhere in sight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I stood over the body of Graham in the interrogation room at the police station, exactly at the moment after I’d been taken out of the first test of the Light. Graham’s face was purple from strangulation. His swollen tongue was protruding from his discolored lips. I was wearing handcuffs again. I backed away from his body, stumbling over the chair I’d been sitting in. I got tangled in its legs and fell down. As I managed to get back on my feet, the door to the interrogation room opened, and two uniformed police officers came in. They were carrying shotguns.

  One hurried over to check Graham. The other took me by the arm. Their faces were drawn and firm, but I could see the spark of anger and disgust in their eyes. They were handling a monster, they thought. A subhuman prick. I knew what they were thinking. Part of me cared, but another part of me thought it was kind of funny. That part was making me grin. That part was the Darkness. I needed to use it, but I couldn’t let it overtake me.

  Where was Azazel? What the heck had happened? One second ago, we’d been kissing, and now we were back in this test. Had we somehow tripped the system? Would we be forced to go through another series of tests? I hated the fact that recently, everything was so darned confusing all the time.

  The police officer threw me up against a wall outside the interrogation room. My cheek smashed up against cold concrete. I was still grinning. I felt the hard circle of the barrel of his shotgun in my back. “If I pull this trigger, the world would be a better place,” he said. He had a southern accent.

  “Where’s Azazel?” I said.

  “Your fucking crazy killer girlfriend?” asked the cop. “If I had my way, you’d never see her again.”

  “Wife,” I said, remembering what had happened earlier in the test. “We got arrested on our wedding day.”

  The gun burrowed itself deeper against my skin. I could hear him behind me, his breath quickening.

  But then the other cop came out of the room. “What are you doing?” he asked his partner. He had a southern accent too.

  “Nothing,” said the first cop. The gun barrel was removed from my back. I was yanked away from the wall. The first cop pushed me, and I stumbled forward. We walked down a hallway and through a room that must have been some kind of processing center. There were two people getting fingerprinted. I recognized them. Kieran and Eve. They both looked bleary eyed and confused, as if they’d just been awakened from sleep.

  My smile deepened. So it had worked, then. When Azazel and I kissed, we must have triggered the residual power that Dark Agnes had talked about. We’d pulled Kieran and Eve into the Spiritus Mundi. That was good.

  Why were stuck in a continuation of this test, I wasn’t sure, exactly. But one thing was for sure. If Azazel and I couldn’t interact with Kieran and Eve, we couldn’t get their power away from them. So I was going to have to break us out of jail.

  I stopped walking.

  “Move,” said the first cop.

  The persona I had in this test was buzzing around in my brain. I liked him. He wasn’t exactly sophisticated; he was all violence and blood. And he loved Azazel. He was me—at least part of me. I had to keep him in check, but there was no reason he couldn’t have a little fun. “I’m sorry. I just started thinking about something, and it struck me kind of funny.”

  “Move,” the cop said again.

  I raised a finger. “In a minute. I was wondering, are either of you two married? Got girlfriends?”

  The first cop gripped his shotgun meaningfully.

  I ignored him. “See, my blushing bride, she’s really into them damned vampire books. Either of your girls like them things?”

  I noticed that one of the cops taking fingerprints on Kieran had looked up.

  I addressed him. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? These women all have their heads buried in those books, reading about men who want to suck their blood dry, and I gotta tell you, I don’t understand it.” I started to walk around the room. “Why on earth would women all over the world be so in love with a man who’s struggling all the time not to kill them? What is so compelling about that idea?”

  The guy taking fingerprints smirked.

  A few of the other cops who were milling about the back of the room had taken notice. They were smiling too.

  “You see, apparently, deep down,” I said, “women want men to be absolutely horrible, ferocious killers.”

  A female cop looked up at me with a disbelieving look on her face.

  I pointed at her. “No, no. Now, hear me out. I was talking about this with my girl earlier today, before we took this detour into your fine facility. It’s not as if it doesn’t make a little bit of sense, right? It’s a primitive desire. It’s a desire that’s hardwired into female brains from the Stone Age. Because, see, if you find a man who’s violent and brutal and willing to kill, he’s going to be able to protect you, isn’t he?”

  The woman rolled her eyes, but the guy taking fingerprints actually laughed out loud.

  I continued ambling about the room, heading for the back where the cops were gathered against one wall, each casually gripping a shotgun. “Protection is important. We can dress ourselves up and civilize ourselves and make up facilities like this fine one.” I gestured around at the processing room. “But deep down, there’s something savage in all of us. Now the key for women is not that you’re some kind of indiscriminate killer, who will lay into anything in your path. No, the key is that you’re a raging psychopath, but you would never hurt her.”

  There was an eruption of laughter from throughout the room.

  “I’m serious,” I said, crossing to the back of the room. I was now standing next to one of the men with shotguns. He was leaning against the wall. One hand held his gun loosely. The other held a cup of coffee. “That’s what all women want deep down. They want a man who’s sweet as molasses pie when he’s alone with them. Who will do anything to make them happy. And when he’s away from them, they want him to be a monster.” I turned to the man next to me. “I mean, don’t you think?”

  He laughed, shaking his head.

  “What can I say?” I said. “People might ask me why I lived my life the way I did, or why I committed all those crimes. But I got to tell you, boys. I’m just a romantic at heart.”

  And before the laughter had died down, I’d wrenched the shotgun away from the cop beside me, put a bullet in his head, and had wasted three other men standing next to him. From there, it was too easy. They were confused. They had guns, but they
didn’t have a chance to aim them. I had them all dead and on the floor in a matter of seconds. I was pretty darned proud of myself for accomplishing the whole thing while still wearing handcuffs. The only two people left alive were Kieran and Eve. They peered at me with frightened eyes.

  “Get up,” I said. “This is a jail break.”

  “Um, Jason?” said Kieran.

  “Get up,” I said.

  “Behind you,” he said.

  I whirled right as the gun shot echoed through the processing room. A female cop was shooting with one arm and wrangling Azazel with other. The bullet whirred past me. If I hadn’t turned at that precise moment, it would have hit me. Too close for comfort.

  But I didn’t waste time worrying about it, I simply raised the shotgun I held and blew the cop away.

  Azazel stepped away from the body, looking around at the carnage I’d caused. “You work fast, baby.”

  I winked. “Sometimes. Other times, I take my time.”

  “Kieran and Eve,” said Azazel. “So when we kissed it must have kicked in the Darkness and pulled them here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m not sure why we’re Bonnie and Clyde again, but it looks as if it worked.”

  Azazel got the gun from the police officer who’d been escorting her. She nodded at Kieran and Eve. “You two make yourselves useful and try to find some keys for these handcuffs.” She jingled her wrists.

  Warily, Kieran and Eve got to their feet.

  Azazel was searching the belt on the cop she’d taken the gun from. “So I know we have to get out of here and all, but I thought we were trying to stay balanced.”

  “Balanced?” I went over to the cop who’d brought me in here and hunted on his belt as well. I came up with a small set of keys which I fitted into the lock on my handcuffs.

  Azazel had made a similar discovery. She contorted her hands to free herself. “The Darkness is riding us, Jason. We have to be careful. You have any idea how many people you just killed?”

  I managed to get my handcuffs off as well. “They aren’t really people. And I don’t think you can really die here. If Graham’s right, this is where people come after they’re already dead.”