Page 60 of Possessed By Shadows

Chapter 19

Iwanted to break things. I hugged myself instead, hard enough to hurt. My sight faded in and out around me, pops of noise coming and going. Darkness rising and falling with my too fast breathing.

The energy of the room shifted. Building from the normal benign space that was home to that dark and oppressive energy I’d only really felt that day on the battlefield across the world. LikeDeathitself had dropped into our living space to absorb the rage pouring off of me.

Micah often spoke of how his brain could get loud and he needed to purge the noise to think again. This was the opposite of that. Instead of all the endless buzzing of internal noise, a void of silence echoed. As though I stood on the edge of a cliff staring down into a wormhole or something. Everything narrowed to that teetering balance. Emotion overflowing, but unfettered to anything.

The few times in my life I’d encountered that silence had all been at the narrow focus of a gun. Me aiming down, knowing I’d have to kill. It was something I’d tried to bury. That brutal stillness that came before death, when the buzzing of self-loathing for having to do the act, faded into necessity. Kill or be killed. It didn’t really get easier the more it happened, and a decade as a hired killer was a long time for anyone. Death was a quiet place, absence of noise, light, and life, but not really free of emotions. Guilt, pain, fear, and sadness, all rising and building something dark and brutal.

I remembered staring at the thing that wasDeath, a mass of writhing shadows, only beyond it was static. It came to collect, reap what I had sowed. It was not the monster here, I was.

Micah had feared it. Ran in terror. Any sane person would, wouldn’t they? I’d been trained not to run, but to step into the role of Death, and let that hollow vacuum of life use me.

The allure of it tugged at me. Promising peace, or at least an end to the suffering beneath that intense rage. No more worries in the beyond if I gave myself over to it. Not death, I thought, at least not a physical death.

I vaguely recalled meeting those who wereemptyin the psych ward. Physically still on this plane of existence, but the soul dead. How easy would it be to give in to that? Destroy my soul and let the demon or whatever, take over, and free me from all of it. It could use the rage better than I could. I had never been a man quick to use fists, or words, as a weapon. But betrayed and adrift in a red sea of boiling anger, I didn’t know if I could find a way back.

It hurt to breathe. Chest tight, lungs in a vice of pressure, the blackness was easy. Nogo into the lightcrap for me. Though there was a light and it was coming closer. It was too bright, too intense, and I flinched away, curling further inward.

Voices around me babbled, though I couldn’t make out any of it. The light was so close now. I wanted the cool darkness to soothe the rage, not this heat of a burning sun. Losing myself in the static could give me freedom. It might let a demon loose, and that was okay right that minute.

But the light touched me. A single beam at first, feeling like a dagger through the fragile energy of what was left within me. Then it was a hand on my shoulder, focused, gripping, bringing me back to an awareness that I had a body. It wrapped me up in bonds of fuzzy string, binding me to my body, draining the dark pool of emotion like a plug had been pulled. The boiling rage shifted, and I realized it hadn’t really been hot, but icy cold. A frigid wave that drenched me in a chill so deep I shivered.

The light radiated warmth, cracking the ice slowly with a delicate touch. I sucked in a deep breath, feeling my lungs expand painfully. Had I stopped breathing?

I could sort of see, the room coming back in small glimpses around me. My breath came out in a fog, and frost actually coated the tabletop where my hands rested. I blinked at the spread of my fingers across the surface trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The static drifted away, leaving the feeling of hands on my shoulders, some on my back, and the pain of tears frozen on my face.

For a minute or two emotions walloped me in a stream of shifting colors. Even beyond the rage, fear, pain, and despair. Dark things that wanted to take over and drag me back into the abyss, but the heat pressed at me. A warmth like a hug after too long away from home. For a long time, I’d thought that I’d built up a wall to that need in my years overseas. When I’d been discharged, I had a secret hope that someone would be there at the airport to greet me, hug me, and remind me I was a human still worthy of love. But I hadn’t told anyone I was coming back.

And I’d suffered in the absence of anything to ground me until my brother had shown up in the psych ward to spring me from a self-imposed prison. Lukas had wrapped his arms around me, despite the protests of the orderlies, and hugged me hard enough to make me see stars. I’d cried that day too. Reminded of why I’d wanted to go home, to learn to be human again, and not the vessel of a monster.

But it was always going to be inside, wasn’t it?

The warmth kept up its assault, adding layers like the hug, memories of events beyond the darkness. The bad stuff always stayed vivid, overwhelming the good. But I could recall Micah’s smile, Sky’s unrestrained hugs and dancing when she was happy, and even Jet curling up and purring like a motorcycle engine in my lap. The small things, often overshadowed by the pain, were the things that grounded me.

I gripped the table. Spending a few minutes mentally rolling through the things I was thinking and feeling, without lingering too long on any of them. Not unlike the grounding five technique I’d learned in controlling my panic attacks. The table was hard, cold to the touch. The computer sat several inches away, screensaver rolling, but otherwise unharmed. The chair was solid against my back, though the seat cushioned. I remembered Micah had redone the bases himself, changing thrift shop chairs to something with game characters on them.

My sight was still weird. I couldn’t clarify a lot, dark swirls on the edge, not narrowed exactly. I kept blinking trying to clear it, and realized it wasn’t my sight that was the issue. Or at least not just my sight. The room was swathed in shadows that shouldn’t be present in the early mid-morning like this. The rolling bits of black looked like giant slugs, pulsing, and wriggling their way across our space.

“Alex?”

I heard my name. Not Micah’s voice, but I couldn’t get my brain to connect who it was, even while it sounded familiar.

“I’m here,” I said quietly. “Mostly, I think. What happened?”

“You can either be a channel for the darkness or a beacon for the light.”

“I’m doing this?” Was the blackness caused by me? Because I’d gotten so mad?

“You’re more connected than most, but it also means you can take control.”

“Okay. Tell me what to do.”

“We’re going to help you cleanse this, but I need you to listen to me. Follow my instructions.”

“Okay,” I agreed watching the slugs eat up more space. It still hurt to breathe, like I’d been without air too long, or there just wasn’t enough air in the room.

“Do you remember the tree of life exercise?” The voice asked.