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Chapter Thirty
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Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-One
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONEI wasn’t stupid enough to think I could shout out the demon’s name a time or two and have it collapse at my feet. But it was certainly hurting enough that I could scramble through the ragged hole in the stone and escape that ancient room. Their names have power. Exactly how much, I wasn’t sure. But it was enough, at least for now.I used both hands to pull my body through the hole, and then I shakily got to my feet. I still felt the ground heaving and hoisting under me, but I leaned against the wall while I got my bearings.“Lydia?” I called. “Sweet Girl?”The cries were faint, but they were definitely her. I looked around me in shock. Instead of the nice, postage-stamp-sized backyard I had expected, I was standing in the middle of what looked like The Black Forest. Not to mention it was suddenly the middle of the night when it should have been closer to 3:00 pm. How could this be?I needed to stop thinking about it before my mind broke. Demons liked the dark an
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Two
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWOI thought I had experienced despair before. Finding my father swinging inside of our very own home nearly broke me. Finding Seth in the bathtub drove me closer to the brink than I had ever been. I didn’t think it could get any worse than that, really. I thought your mind had a threshold, and once you hit it, you were somehow immune to the horror. Like the universe would somehow say, “Congratulations, my dear, you have officially hit your allotment of misery. Now destruction will pass you by.” I thought if I was tough enough, and dealt with everything well enough, and kept a positive attitude, well, as much as possible, then somehow I would be rewarded. Everything would end up all right. Evil will fall and good will prevail, and there will be some glorious shining prize at the end of this terrible game, something that will make it worth the constant struggle that we call life.But I was wrong. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. No reward for living a good l
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Three
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE“Luna?”Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard my name. I didn’t wonder who it was. I didn’t care.“Luna, tell me what’s wrong.”A warm hand slid through my hair, over my scalp, down my arms and legs. Checking for broken bones. Checking for damage. It slid over the Mark, and I heard the demon hiss and pull away. I almost missed its chilling touch. It cooled the nearly unbearable heat between my shoulders.“Luna. I need you to look at me. Can you sit up?”I couldn’t remember how to speak. Something to do with my tongue and moving my lips, but then I thought of the demon speaking through the wolf’s cavernous mouth like an old record being played on a phonograph. I began to shudder. I was quickly pulled into a sitting position, held close to somebody’s warm chest.“I’m here. I have you. You’re safe.”The wolf demon snorted and I winced. “You’re never safe, Luna. We always know where you are. We always know what you are doing. We will follow you until the en
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Four
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURMouth flowed up to me as soon as I was off the property.“Luna, I’m so glad to see you.” He ran his eyes over me, lingering on the cuts, scrapes, and the blood. “You made it out.”“Barely!” I doubled up my fist and swung right for his face. My hand passed through, and I was batting harmlessly at the air.“What’s your problem?” Mouth didn’t even sound like himself. “I feel horrible you had to go in there alone, but I hoped you’d understand that once I go in, I can’t come back out. I couldn’t . . . and then this troublemaker shows up.” He jerked a thumb toward the beautiful redhead at my side. “Here, of all places. I would have kept him out if I could’ve, but . . . ”I swung at him again. Anger is so much safer than pain. “You sent me into a frickin’ nightmare! I saw such horrible things, and for what? Nothing! I’m still no closer to finding Lydia. I hoped she’d be there, but she wasn’t even in that awful house!”Mouth suddenly looked sick. I didn’t think that w
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Five
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVEI didn’t think I had a destination in mind, but soon, I found myself parking my bike near a rocky cove near the water. The sea always calmed me. Its homicidal anger made me feel like I was mellow in comparison.I climbed down the rocks, careful not to slip and knock myself out. The way my day was going, that was a fairly likely scenario. Something reached out with soft, black tentacles, and I kicked it with my boot.“Uninvited,” I told it. It withdrew.Mom had also loved the sea. It’s one of the only things we had in common. She was soft and delicate with a quiet, gentle voice, not like me at all. She was everything I wished I had been.She had died when Seth and I were still pretty young. Cancer. It didn’t creep up on her like you always hear about. It came hard and swift and took her almost before we realized it. So fast she didn’t have time to harden. She just wilted like a flower without enough water. Strangely beautiful and tragic at the same time.Someth
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Six
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX“So?” Seth said to me. He looked better than he had the last time I’d seen him. They must have slipped some perky meds into his breakfast. Now if only they’d give him some pants, things would be almost perfect.“So I had a showdown with Sparkles’ demon, but she wasn’t there. And Lydia wasn’t there either.”His face fell. “You didn’t see Lydia at all?”I chose my words carefully. “Well, I thought I saw Lydia, but it turned out to be a demon instead. Wearing, you know, Lydia’s form.”Seth’s face went red. I wanted to smile because it was something that used to happen to my father, and Seth hated that it was passed on to him, but I wisely abstained. This girl has some brains, I tell you.“Tell me what happened.”“Trust me, big bro, you don’t want to know.”“Tell me.”His voice sounded like rusty metal, sharp and dangerous. I told him with as little detail as I could. It still made my voice shake and my hands clench, however. I watched Seth turn red and white in
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Seven
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENThey grilled me forever. Then they grilled Seth. Being the estranged ex of a missing woman made him a natural suspect.“I’ll answer any question you have,” he said, dignity rolling off him in waves. “Just let me fetch some pants first.”After they left, I grudgingly headed to work. I wanted to call out more than anything, but Seth was taking an involuntary leave of absence from his job, and the medical bills were gonna start rolling in. Besides, working with needles might sooth me.Yeah, that was a nice thought, but stabbing didn’t make me feel any better. I was kind. I slid the needle under my client’s skin with grace and decorum.It sucked. Literally.I wanted to stab something good and hard. I wanted to find a demon, knock it to the ground, and demand it take me to Sparkles. As soon as I got off of work, I was going to do some sleuthing of my own. I’ll track her down, show up on whatever doorstep she was haunting, and kindly ask for Lydia back. Who could r
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Thirty-Eight
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTI was sitting at the kitchen table staring at my ill-gotten vial of blood when the phone rang.“Hey,” Seth said. “I made a few phone calls today. I think we’ve been going about it all wrong. We’ll never get Lydia back this way. We’re going to have to make some changes to the plan.”I tossed the dark red vial from hand to hand. From the look of things, Bradley Guzman had an iron count that would make Nathan Stark blush. He also needed to hydrate more, but it didn’t seem in my best interest to track him down and let him and the demon know.“What plan? The fight at OK Corral plan? Where I heroically find Lydia and snatch her away from the jaws of Demonic Sparkles?”He sighed. “Yes. That plan. How’s it working for us so far?”I growled.“Exactly.”“So what does the new and improved plan entail?”He suddenly sounded very weary. “We have to look as stable as possible. Can you do that? Act like a fine, upstanding citizen? I’ll try not to kill myself, and you don’
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Nameless: The Darkness Comes Epilogue
EPILOGUEI wish I could say I had imagined everything. For once, I wished that I was crazy, but that isn’t how life ends up. I’ll tell you how it ends up: It finishes out in its own fine way.After Seth bailed out of the House of Horrors, he headed straight for the police department. Half of what he said didn’t make sense, but they managed to piece together something about the mother of his child being totally strung out and unresponsive, and his daughter was missing, and demons were frickin’ everywhere. “Demons everywhere” is usually code for “Holy crap, everybody has gone nuts in that crack house” so they loaded up their gear and came. They made Seth wait outside while they came in and found me sobbing over Cecilia’s boyfriend, who had overdosed on heroine. Poor little me, I was absolutely traumatized by seeing death so up close and personal, they thought. They carted Reed Taylor off and took Sparkles away in an ambulance. Then they turned their attention to Seth and me. Good, hard
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Fifty
CHAPTER FIFTYI opened my eyes and gasped. The stabbing between my shoulder blades was too much to take. Every nerve was raw, a silver blade raked down each centimeter of skin. It felt right somehow, like hitting somebody on the head and killing them felt right, like running your car into a retaining wall felt right.“Let me die let me die let me die!” I screamed. I writhed on the floor, trying to cover my head and curl my body into a protective ball.“I have you,” Reed Taylor shouted to me over the noise. Wind roared and howled. No, not wind. The Tip-Toe Shadow. The shadow and somebody else.Mouth.My eyes were rolling up in my head. Reed Taylor gently shook me.“Luna, stick with me. I have to tell you something, okay? Okay?”My lips were pulled back from my teeth and my body convulsing from the agony, but I struggled to meet his gaze, blinked.He tried to smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Baby, I’m sorry. About everything. All of it. But I have to tell you something very
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Nine
CHAPTER FORTY-NINEIt hurt me to see the ones I loved damaged like this. Seth chased away, Reed Taylor broken, Mouth angry and helpless. All of these people brought together involuntarily because they cared about me in one way or another. Each, in their own way, only wanted to help.“Luna,” Mouth said, and he sounded worried. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking?”I reached for his hand, smiled. I ran my fingers down his cheek. “Thank you for everything, Mouth. I hope you know how special you are to me.”“Luna,” he said warningly, but I had already turned to Reed Taylor. “Reed Taylor, I . . . ”There wasn’t anything more I could say. His wild hair, his gorgeous greens that had gone frightened and worried and were now narrowed with resolve. He was perfect. He was my everything. How can you explain that to someone?“I love you,” I said simply, and then I turned to the Tip-Toe Shadow. “Demon!” I screamed and spread my arms wide. “Taste The Mark! I invite you i
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Eight
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHTMouth wasn’t happy. I could tell it by his wispiness. I could tell it by the way his mouth set itself into a firm line.I didn’t care.“Dolly, dolly,” sang the Tip-Toe Shadow, and he ran his long fingers down my hair, twisted them around my neck. They went around several times.“Can . . . can you let Reed Taylor go now, please?”I wanted to sound strong, but the feel of those dark fingers on my skin made my mouth go dry.“Reed Taylor, where is Lydia?”“There’s magic in the water.”Reed Taylor’s voice but not his words. I reached for him, but the demon pulled us further away.“No, dollies. Bad dollies.” He shook us, and I choked, grasping at my neck. Mouth clenched his fists but did nothing.“Hey, knock it off,” I hissed as soon as I had my voice back.The Tip-Toe Shadow giggled. “You want to talk to the puppet? Hear what the puppet has to say? Okay. Okay okay. Oh, it will make you cry. Big, soft, sad tears, and I will lap them from your face, and I will b
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Seven
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVENSeth was crouched over somebody on the floor. My heart sunk. It’s Reed. It’s Reed. It’s Reed.“It’s Sparkles,” Seth said, checking her pulse and breathing. She looked like she was barely conscious. Her demon twined around her arms and legs. “I heard her moaning in the back room.”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 looked everywhere.”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.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
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Six
CHAPTER FORTY-SIXSeth opened the door from the inside.“I don’t see him,” he whispered. “I thought maybe he’d come to investigate the window.”I stepped inside and was immediately assaulted by the stench of rotting meat. Flies buzzed around the room in a swarm, blackening the broken window.“Ugh,” I said and covered my nose with my hand.“What? What is it?” Seth peered around me anxiously. “What do you see?”Something that looked suspiciously like entrails hung from the walls. Spider webs made out of skin covered the ceilings. I noticed my feet soaking in the familiar, bloody carpet.“I see a slaughterhouse. How about you?”He touched the walls gingerly. “This wallpaper is atrocious, but that’s the worst of it. That’s it. It’s not real, Luna. Let’s go.”I nodded and removed my hand from my nose. If it isn’t real, it isn’t real.A small boy swam through the air. He kicked his feet and splashed in nothingness. His dark eyes ran over Seth curiously.“Soul surfer?” I asked and
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Five
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVEThe sun was starting to rise by the time we bailed out of the hospital.“I am so tired,” Seth told me. He yawned as he got into the car. “I can’t wait to go to bed.”“Spill,” I demanded. “You said I wasn’t astute about Reed Taylor. What was I missing?”“Cripes, Luna. You sure you want to do this? You’ll be wound up, and we’ll never get any sleep.”I grabbed the lapels of his shirt and yanked him halfway out of his seat. “Seth Masterson, if you don’t tell me right this minute, I swear I’ll . . . ”“He was high, okay? He was high. Or coming down from it. That’s why he couldn’t bring you in or risk the ambulance. They would have known.My fingers went slack. Seth pulled himself gently out of my grip. “Listen, maybe now isn’t the time to talk about it. We already have a lot on our plates, and there’s nothing you can—”“He’s using again.”“Looks like it.”“After being clean for so long.”“It happens. I’m sorry, Luna.”“Because I broke up with him?”He shrugge
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Four
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR“Oh, Luna,” Reed Taylor said and squatted down beside me. I was too dazed to move. I noticed the blood running from my face and soaking into the porous stone steps. Nice color, good body. I wasn’t as iron deficient as I had told the counselor.“Sorry,” I tried to say, but the word came out funny.Reed Taylor cupped my face gently, turning it tenderly this way and that. I closed my eyes.“I haven’t seen you attacked on the street like this before,” he said finally. I missed his hands when he pulled them away.“They usually don’t . . . ” I stopped talking, tried to touch my mouth. The mere thought of my own searching fingers made me cringe, and I blinked tears out of my eyes.Reed Taylor stood up. “You need to go to the hospital. Is Seth home? I’ll give him a call, tell him to pick you up.”“Can’t . . . you take me?”My words were slurred. I suddenly felt very tired and cold. I shivered, and Reed Taylor looked away.“I can’t,” he said. “And I can’t have an amb
Nameless: The Darkness Comes Chapter Forty-Three
CHAPTER FORTY-THREEMy thoughts were going wild as I drove to Reed Taylor’s house. Anubis had very nearly stolen my soul as well as breaking my face, and I was still cursing myself for that. I had misjudged him. I thought about Seth’s confession about the Tip-Toe Shadow, and my eyes narrowed. I had misjudged everything.Well, if I was so great at misjudging, perhaps I had misjudged Reed Taylor.I pulled into his driveway and felt like pulling right out again. His house was perfect. His lawn, although more overgrown than I had ever seen it, was a thing of beauty. The flower bed was blooming with more flowers and . . . wait, are those actually weeds? Real weeds dared to invade Reed Taylor’s yard? Suddenly, every sense was alert. I slammed the car door and scanned the area. Something creepy and relatively harmless hovered around the backyard, yes, but that wasn’t alarming. But weeds? And the too-long grass? For such a cool, laid-back guy, Reed Taylor usually kept things surprisingly ti
