Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) Read online

  “It was a pleasure, Dallas.”

  “I just need you to take me home so I can get my teddy, and then I can come and live with you.”

  He appeared completely speechless, and for the second time that afternoon, pulled himself away from his thoughts and focused on me completely. I thought I saw blind panic in his eyes.

  “Dallas, I...you.... I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  I felt my chest clench with anxiety for the second time that afternoon. I stared up at him in bewilderment, wrenching anguish at his words, making it difficult to breathe.

  “But...but...I promise I’ll be good.”

  “It’s not because of that, Dallas. I would if I could, but you belong at home with your parents.”

  Tears rolled down my cheeks. “But I don’t want to be with them. I want to be with you. I’ve been w—”

  “Hush, Dallas.” He knelt and pulled out a white handkerchief. He gently wiped away my tears. “You belong at home with your mother and nanny. She’ll be here any minute now to take you home.”

  Panic fluttered in my chest. He was right. I could already sense her getting closer. I grabbed his arm, the waves of anguish cresting.

  “Please. I’ll be sad if you don’t take me with you.”

  He smiled a weary smile that told of unrelenting sorrow. “You won’t remember me, Dallas.”

  He bent and kissed me on the forehead.

  I was alone.

  I looked around me for the teenager in the green shorts who had been standing behind me only moments ago. Not only was she gone, I was now by the fountain. I looked about me, that anxiety about to overwhelm me again when I heard someone scream out my name.

  I turned to the sound of the voice and saw Alessandra running through the throngs of people toward me. Her perfect black eyeliner now ran in jagged tracks down blotchy, red cheeks, the black and red making her face look even paler by comparison. Her hair stuck out at crazy angles as if she had grabbed fistfuls of it while in a frenzy. She reached me and pulled me to her. She held me tight for what seemed to be the longest time before she pulled away to peer at me. Her eyes flashed with anger even as they filled with tears.

  “You are a naughty, naughty girl. Do you know that? Mama mia! Why did I ever agree to be your nanny?”

  She pulled me into a tight hug once more.

  Filled with a sadness that seemed as deep as the widest chasm, one I could not even understand or explain, I could only cry silently into her shoulder.

  After a few moments she was able to let me go. She smiled through her tears and pulled out a grubby tissue.

  “You silly girl. Look at you.” She wiped at my face. “Next time, you listen to me, okay? Now let me buy you this ice cream and we can go home.”

  At the mention of ice cream, the sadness rose to an agonising peak and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of debilitating loss, but I did not know why. At the fresh onslaught of tears, Alessandra picked me up, stroking my hair.

  “Okay, I’ll take you straight home,” she said.

  She carried me home, holding onto me tightly the entire way.

  My mother was waiting for us when we returned. She’d had to leave an important family meeting at my grandmother’s when she received a call from the bank about what had taken place there. Alessandra was sacked. I was too miserable to pay attention, the tears that streamed down my face continuing long into the evening and even as sleep stole over me that night.

  I awoke the following morning to my sixth sense tingling. I peered sleepily around the spacious, sugary pink bedroom at the white shelving units heaving with toys—dolls, teddy bears and assorted pink hat boxes filled with more toys. I sat up when my gaze fell on a pretty pink dress with ruffles along its edges hanging by the window. I got out of bed and reached for it, knowing instinctively that it came from a little shop in London, just like another blue and yellow dress I had found by the window a few months ago.

  I could not understand why the sight of the dress made hot, thick tears well up and roll down my cheeks, or why the churning misery that had been with me since the trip to the park intensified. But it did, and once the dam of tears burst forth, it was difficult to contain.

  It was how my mother found me a short time later, sitting on my bed clutching the pink dress, engulfed in tears.

  She came to an abrupt stop in the doorway. Her large brown eyes, ringed in red, had dark circles beneath them. Her hair, which was usually pulled back into a neat bun, hung in stringy, uncombed tendrils around her shoulders. She squeezed her eyes shut, the same way she did whenever I threw a tantrum. A shuddery sigh escaped her. She turned and left the room without another glance at me.

  One of the maids entered the room minutes later, clearly having been sent by my mother to “see to Dallas.” Her face was tight with tension, her eyes alight with the fear that none of the staff were able to hide.

  Alessandra returned later that day.

  She took me to the park that afternoon and was probably unaware of how tight the grip on my hand was throughout the walk. She didn’t release my hand, or loosen her grip on it, even when she bought me ice cream and then led us to a bench overlooking the fountain.

  Again, I did not know why, but that misery overwhelmed me again. The ice cream in my hand, rather than abating it, brought forth fresh despair. Tears filled my eyes and slid down my cheeks.

  Alessandra glanced at me carefully for a few moments.

  “You don’t want it, do you?” she said, her tone gentle.

  For some reason her words sparked some unknown reminiscence from a well too deep and murky for me to see through. The tears flowed faster. She took the ice cream out of my hand and rose, pulling me with her. She deposited the ice cream in a waste bin as we moved away from the bench. As we walked away from the fountain, the anguish clutching at my chest eased.

  We wandered aimlessly through the park. It was a long while before she spoke again.

  “Look at you. You are so scary with your tantrums. But behind it all, you are just a lonely little girl.”

  The too-tight grip on my hand increased as we turned to go back the way we had come.

  She took a deep breath before she spoke again.

  “You were right. He was only using me. He is not married, but he may as well be. I do not know how you knew, but you have saved me a lot of money, not to mention heartache.” She seemed to be talking to herself now. “Yesterday I asked myself why I ever agreed to take this job. When your mother offered it to me along with so much money, I was happy. Things have been difficult in America and I know nobody here. And so I thought this job would mean I would have a little friend. How could I know you would be such a little... How headstrong you would be.”

  She stopped and knelt before me, watching me wipe away tears with my arm.

  “To you, I’m just another nanny—well, I’m not even a real nanny, just someone your mother saw handing out leaflets and hired because you scared the last one away. This job is the only good thing that’s happened to me since I came to America. I don’t know how long I’ll work for your parents, but I’ll be your friend if you let me. And neither of us has to be lonely; at least for a little while.”

  I merely stared at her, confused at this approach from a woman I had hated since she came and whom I had been determined to be rid of. I was unsure how to respond when, out of the blue, like a memory rising to the surface unbidden, I saw an image in my mind’s eye: A brief glimpse of a woman’s face. Her skin was like warm honey, her eyes golden brown, her smile a soft caress.

  The image stunned me and I was lost for a few minutes in the beauty of that face and the kindness I could feel behind the woman’s eyes and smile. It brought an odd comfort along with a strange, bittersweet yearning.

  I had never seen this woman before, but I knew it was my sixth sense letting me know I could trust Alessandra. And that my loneliness would be eased if only for a little while.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Alessandra’s gaze sn
apped back to me in surprise. Then genuine joy warmed her face. She wiped away my tears before she rose and we moved on.

  “What should we do tomorrow? Should we come back here or go somewhere else?”

  Although misery still sat heavily against me, I smiled up at her. “You can choose.”

  As we made our way to the entrance, my gaze was drawn to the fountain. The anguish spiked once more and the tears threatened, but I did my best not to succumb to them.

  Alessandra was true to her word and the antagonism that marked her first week was soon forgotten. In fact she soon began to dote on and spoil me to such an extent that even my grandmother, who herself spoiled me shamelessly, thought excessive.

  But even with Alessandra around, I found myself experiencing moments of crippling misery. That loneliness, although pushed to the background, never really left me. Every once in a while I would wake up to see a dress hanging by the window. For some reason it always made my heart clench and tears spring to my eyes. The gifts ceased a few years later when I was too old for such little girl dresses. I kept them all, although even looking at them made my heart fill with longing.

  It was many years before I saw him again, the mysterious being whose pain was like a living thing growing steadily wider and deeper with every year that passed. On each occasion he sent me away, not allowing me to have even the blessing of the memory of his face. And I was cast adrift once more in a world of the ordinary—the existence of so many—with only an inkling of the other world of supernatural beings moving amongst us like shadows behind a veil. All while those monstrous footsteps drew steadily closer.

  And then everything changed for me.

  Shortly after I turned twenty-one my aunt, Rose, was found dead. It was unclear exactly what killed her, but like frightened, wide-eyed things clambering to get away from what they feared, my family eagerly accepted what they were told. Her death had been an unfortunate accident. Not suicide or the grisly murders we all lived in fear of. An Accident.

  I couldn’t accept her death had been an accident. Every inch of me screamed in protest at the thought of it and I vowed I would find out the truth and bring whoever was responsible to justice. Yet even as I made that vow, helplessness swooped in on me like a large, pitiless bird of prey. Because, like everyone else in my family, I already had a sense of what had killed my aunt. I had always been aware of its presence hovering in darkness and had heard the echo of its footsteps in the emptiness from which it sought to escape.

  Frightened, drowning in grief, my days and nights lost all meaning. Night after night I took to the clubs in the hope that the shocking, crude music would banish the haunting silence that had descended on my world. And that the countless glasses of alcohol, which made everything sway and tip before fading to a nondescript blur, could numb the pain and loneliness.

  Months later and the aching loneliness was still there, pain tightening its screw a little more each day.

  And then an awakening brought a glimmer of light into the ceaseless night my life had become.

  The night the awakening occurred I returned from a club sometime after five a.m. in the morning. I stumbled into my room and collapsed on the bed, my head spinning and nausea threatening.

  I lay there in the dark, the apartment as silent as a grave, my thoughts on my grandmother and aunt, the only two people on this Earth who I felt had ever truly loved me.

  Tears filled my eyes as misery overwhelmed me. They were dead now and all that was left was emptiness. At that moment my loneliness completely smothered me and I wept silently, my stomach seeming to twist and turn so it felt as though there was a pull emanating from my abdomen.

  I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, I was standing in woodlands on the Holbert plantation, the trees looming over me like benevolent, gnarled giants blocking out almost all of the sky. But the trees could not fully block out the sun which cut through the canopy above to splash against the woodland floor. In what must have been a dream, I appeared as I was in the waking world, my mahogany complexion sunned to a smooth, liquid brown, my straightened dark hair falling to my shoulders. My feline features were the same along with my full, plum-coloured lips. I was exactly the same but different in so many ways. And in this place—this dreamscape—knowing was returned to me.

  Before me was a hazelnut-coloured mare. It stood in a beam of sunlight, its ears pricked, its eyes as dark and mysterious as night. Recognition, along with a heavy knot of emotion, suffused me as I stared at it.

  Abruptly it turned and moved away from me only to come to a stop. It turned its head towards me, as if waiting. After a few seconds it moved on again. I stood there in the deep silence of the woods for a few moments. Then I followed.

  It led me to the clearing at the farthest edges of the Holbert plantation and came to a stop at the edge of the trees. The daylight cutting its way into the woodlands abruptly turned to dusk, and the chapel loomed before me beneath a searing sunset, washing the clearing in sultry reds. The malevolence I had sensed when I first entered the clearing a year ago in search of Luna and Avery was alive and prowling like a restless tiger.

  Mama Akosua was sitting in the clearing with her legs crossed. Her delicate feline features were similar to my own and the thin rows of scars on her cheeks and forehead were stark against her mahogany skin. She didn’t look up when I walked over and stood in front of her. Before her was an earthen pot along with a small cloth bag. The blade of a knife glinted in the emerald grass. Like the brown mare, she had been waiting for me.

  She looked up, her gaze as shrewd as it had been in life.

  You forgot him.

  There was no need for her to utter speech in this place. She reached into the cloth bag, pulled out a handful of salt and sprinkled it in a circle around her.

  Yes, I replied. Thank you—for summoning me. I can remember nearly everything.

  She inclined her head forward in a bow, a small mark of reverence. She looked up again, her gaze intense.

  Good. Then you know what you must do.

  She now placed a mixture of things in an earthen bowl, some herbs, what looked like crystals, cowie beads and more salt from the bag.

  Yes. But how?

  She looked away from the earthen pot and pointed to the trees. I followed the line of her thin brown arm and saw that the woodland around us had been swept away. Instead I saw a tumbled-down shack that was almost swallowed by the surrounding foliage. I knew it was somewhere in Mississippi and that one of its occupants was what appeared to be a sixteen-year-old girl. She had braids and was wearing a yellow summer dress the last time I saw her, the night I found that journal.

  Find them, Mama Akosua commanded.

  Maryse? She won’t do it.

  No, she will not. But he will.

  She went back to the task before her and the woodland slowly ebbed into view again as she lit a match and threw it in the earthen pot. Its contents burst into strange lilac flames.

  How do I know you really are Mama Akosua? How do I know you’re not...?

  I couldn’t finish, only look toward the chapel. The light was almost gone, giving the old, hulking building an air of smouldering evil and of something that whispered of death and decay.

  A hint of a smile passed over her lips.

  You don’t. But you know you must be with him, don’t you?

  I nodded.

  This is the only way.

  She picked up the knife and slit a line down her palm, releasing a thin stream of blood into the earthen pot. The flames leapt up again, seeming to lick at the blood trickling into the pot.

  This is where it began and this is where it must end. You cannot fail.

  I won’t...Mama.

  The chapel, the clearing—along with the knowing that was returned to me in this dreamscape—began to melt away, leaving behind only one thing.

  Avery.

  Chapter 2

  New York 2012

  I was wide awake in the dark bedroom. I sat up with a s
tart.

  I’d forgotten Avery.

  A torrent of emotion overcame me. My throbbing head and nausea paled in comparison to the wrenching pull I could feel in my stomach as memories of Avery flooded my mind.

  Tears filled my eyes.

  I remembered Avery’s cool hand loosely holding onto mine as we moved through Central Park, his face pale in the bright sunshine as I stared up at him, his expression distant, his eyes dark and mournful.

  And the time he found me in a nightclub when I was fourteen, his arm around my waist in a firm but distant hold as we stood outside. His jaw was set in an angry line, his eyes blazing with a blue fire as he searched the dark street for a cab.

  I also remembered the last time I saw him in the clearing at the Holbert plantation. His intense gaze was on me as I stood with my hands pressed against the sides of his head, his eyes reflecting the anguish he must have seen in mine. I remembered the way he held onto my hands a moment too long when he pulled them away from his head and let them fall, the sorrow in his eyes seeming to consume him for a few seconds before he was able to push it back.

  Tears spilled onto my cheeks at the memories.

  I had seen him for brief moments throughout my entire life, and he had always been unreachable, his thoughts caught by something far, far away from me. That last encounter with him was the first time I felt I had his entire attention. And it was as if he couldn’t tear his gaze away from me, his dizzying blue eyes focussed on me with an intensity that made me feel weak.

  I knew I loved Avery—that all-consuming, brutal love I’d had a taste of the first time I held Luna’s journal. I placed my hand against my aching stomach—an ache like a wound which had been with me for as long as I could remember. My grandma and my aunt had been band aids keeping the wound from sight, but it had always been there—that loneliness and the sense there was something very important missing in my life. Something as fundamental as the moon on a pitch-black, starless night.

  I had to go to him.

  Wiping away tears, I glanced at the clock opposite my bed which was just visible in the gloom shrouding my room. It was five-thirty a.m.