Page 98 of Marked By Shadows

A branch cracked somewhere nearby, making me pause and search the darkness. At least my eyes were mostly adjusted to the low light. However, it meant that wind moving brush made everything look like shadows. After a minute or so of nothing else, I began forward again. That distant light still not moving.

Several horrible thoughts flickered through my overactive brain. What if Alex was already dead? What if that light up ahead was just his body laid out for me to see? What if Freya had taken him, slaughtered him, and planned to do the same to me? Even if I escaped, I’d never trust again. It sounded like a long and lonely life to live. I had to pause, focus on my breathing for another minute or two, before pushing myself forward.

Not far from the light, perhaps a couple dozen meters, my skin began to prickle like ants crawled across it, fire trailing across my skin in a thousand needle pricks. Alex would have seen it, whatever it was. All I got were a million tiny cuts that made me feel like I should have been oozing blood. I stared out into the dark edges of the woods and the distant trees, almost demanding to see something, anything that would explain how I felt. Even face-to-face with that monstrous nightmare Alex had called Death would have been a more welcome sight than the vast stretch of nothing.

Not close enough to reveal the light, or anything ominous like wavering in the darkness. Too hard to see it anyway. There was no movement, no shadows, no people. I was alone. Always so fucking alone. I’d dared to hope that with Alex I wouldn’t be. I glanced back and thought I caught a glimpse of the child again. Fuck. Was it playing with me? Leading me on this chase? Why?

If it had Alex, what did it need of me? Perhaps just to show me what it did with him? I didn’t want to see him used as some sort of puppet. Could it control more than one person at a time?

I’d been a puppet before, led around by the strings of other people’s expectations. First by my father, who still tried to pull strings to this day, and then by Tim, now by some unknown member of the group or even a paranormal monster. What the fuck did they all want from me and why couldn’t they do it themselves?

In that moment the rage welled up again, so long had I shoved it down, that it seemed to bubble out of me like lava from a volcano explosion. I spun around, cursing the darkness and the anvil of shadows covering the long stretch of woods. The one light, a good twenty or thirty meters away, did nothing to illuminate all the spaces between the trees.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” I growled into the darkness. “You bring him back. He’s mine. You already had him, used him up. I haven’t even finished fixing that, you worthless monster! You want to control someone so bad, take me! Give him back and take me. I’m the useless one, buried in my fucking past full of mistakes and disgrace to my family. I’m the one walking around like I’m already dead and letting everyone pull my strings. Should be easy right? Just do it!”

Alex had been the hero. Fighting and surviving battles for a country that abandoned him when he’d survived. He took care of Lukas and me, and gave everyone an edge of humor and joy that seemed impossible to sustain these days, even when he struggled himself. I remembered him dancing around the cabin, or wrapping his arms around me to deliver kisses, or his tiny smiles during his focused concentration while he sewed. The world had so few left of the pure in heart like Alex was. This monster, cold, heartless demon, whatever the fuck it was, couldn’t have him.

A whoosh of wind staggered me back a few feet and everything dropped into silence. No noise from the woods, the wind, or even my heartbeat, which had been slamming through my ears only moments before, but a vacuum of sound. I blinked and there it was, standing in front of me.

A black-eyed child.

Not the shadowed edges of something like I thought I’d seen in the video, or even a vague outline like that night we’d found Joe in the road. This was solid, almost glowing in the darkness, yet monochrome. I was sure if I reached out, I could have touched it and it would have felt solid. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, only that it was a mix of grays except for the eyes, which were pools of gaping darkness. If the form of a child was supposed to make it feel less threatening, it failed miserably.

It stood only a meter or so away, expression bland, while my skin burned, crawled with that nasty sensation of bugs, and dripped with sweat like I was bleeding. And maybe I was. Bleeding from all my pores sounded like a gruesome way to die, but maybe it would be fast. Faster than dying of loneliness.

I swayed before the child, barely able to hold my feet, body trembling, hand clutching my phone to my chest, though I couldn’t feel it in my grip, just the pressure of my hand closing down hard, an ache of muscle. My lungs wouldn’t move more than a tiny fraction, leaving my air supply low, and vision swirling.

The child stood in absolute stillness like a statue, not looking at me, but into the distance where the single light remained. The wind didn’t rustle their hair and they took no breath that I could tell. All I could focus on was the dark pools of their eyes.

Alex wondered about these things, wanted to give them definition, as though putting them in a labeled box would help ease the terror of them. I had a box for them too, a large one that didn’t erase the fear. Yokai. Demons. Not of this world, but wandering among us.

Every instinct I had told me to run, only I wouldn’t, not this time. For Alex I would stay, let it do what it would, as long as it meant giving him back a normal life. Even if it wasn’t with me.

I gasped at that thought. So far gone for him and not realizing it until that moment. I’d never believed in instant love. Attraction sure, and Alex hit all those buttons, but love? I was a cynical bastard on the best of days. Yet he still made me smile. Even before coffee and when the world kept throwing shit my way. He hugged me and made the world right. It would be okay to be gone if I couldn’t have him. Better that way maybe.

I flashed back to that day on the mountain trail. The noise, the silence walloping me into stillness, the waver in the road, the pain on my skin, and the darkness. Almost like the child’s eyes, so deep, endless, welcoming. That day hadn’t been filled with thoughts of the man I loved. No. I’d been seething with irritation and anger. Planning to recreate my life, start over, reinvent myself because I hated everything I’d become.

For the first time I reflected back and could remember in detail how I felt that day, that deep well of black reflected something inside me like a mirror. Revealing the self-loathing. Anger at my own weaknesses. And an almost suicidal level of depression. All balled up into a glowing mass of throbbing pain inside me. Shoved down, pushed aside, while I tried to move on from all of it, without really acknowledging any of it. How much work had I done, pretending to heal my trauma, only burying it instead? Going through the motions of moving on, I was a fraud.

This was why my skin broiled whenever they were near. Not some sixth sense, but an arising of self-hatred putrefying my soul. They awakened the darkness inside me, things I couldn’t ever run from because they were part of me. A lifetime of failures. Reflected them back at an intensity that made me want to run screaming from myself. Worthless, pointless, useless.

I squeezed my eyes shut like that could somehow block the pain.

Had Alex seen that too? Probably. Nothing about me seemed to surprise him. And maybe he had seen all the flaws, but what had he said? That he loved me anyway?

I recalled the night in the car when we’d found Joe. How his words had cracked something inside me. Opened up some sort of sense of peace. A dream that I wasn’t really alone. He had said,when I look at you, I see Micah. Who teases me, and makes me smile, who dances with me, and is patient when I ask stupid questions about a world I wasn’t part of for a long time. And who creates magical things to cast away the fear and anxiety and build a new future. I’m thrilled that you let me be a part of it. Whatever this future is you’re building.

I was more to him than a sex toy. More than a pretty thing to look at or a way to make money. He didn’t expect me to follow his rules or respect him just for being older. He watched me cry, held me while I bled, and gave me back all the passion I threw his way. He seemed to like that sometimes my brain was a storm of ideas, jumping from one to another, and my silence never bothered him.

Until I rid myself of all this self-loathing, how could I be worthy of him? Was that why it kept taking him?

When I opened my eyes the world around me sparkled with new illumination like I’d taken off sunglasses to reveal the truth, not only about myself but about the entire world. Shadows lessened, and structures and shapes outlined in colored lights. Even the child pulsed with a faint orange radiance. Fire. Hadn’t Alex said it was fire? The djinn of legend were beings of fire.

Energy snapped and fizzed in my free hand. I looked down to find a ball, a glowing hunk of what appeared to be steaming shit. It weighed a ton, and was hard to hold up, yet looked like nothing at first, until the colors became shapes of memories, and swirling feelings, all those unwanted terrors, self-hatred, and loneliness. All gripped in my fist like I was unwilling to let it go. Why would I hold onto something so awful? What was it gaining me, other than weighing me down? I stared at it wondering why my instinct was to keep it. And that’s what my gut said, keep it, we’d worked hard for it, and it was ours. But what was the point? Letting it weigh me down wasn’t going to bring Alex back to me.

If I wanted to move forward, I’d have to either let it go or learn to work past the weight of it. If I let it go, would it release me? Could I finally move forward? Or would it always be an anchor keeping me in place?

Wasted energy, I thought, staring at that glowing pile of shit. All of it was a waste of energy, life, power, and love. This constant fear that had ensnared me for the last two years, only finally easing when Alex came into my life and brought his sunshine. What he’d broken in me was the cycle of self-loathing. Chiseled away pieces of a wall to keep out pain, and covered me in warmth.