Page 10 of Walking in Darkness

She gulped, her head shifting away, her chin quivering as she struggled with the truth.

“I don’t want you to be afraid for me,” I murmured.

She turned back toward me. Sheer adoration and devastation burned through her expression. “I could never not worry about you. You’re mydaughter. My beautiful, talented, amazing daughter.”

She choked on the last word.

Mom paused for a minute before she seemed to gather up the courage to step into territory she was afraid to traverse. “It’s real? The things you told me when you were a little girl? About that place where you would go to play, and your best friend you’d meet there? Pax?”

His name left her on a whisper of reverence, and her gaze drifted behind me to where he waited in the car.

My heart squeezed in a fist. “Yes. He’s real. It’s all real.”

More tears streamed down her face. “The wounds ... they came from that place. How?”

She nearly begged that.

“There’s still so much about it that I don’t understand myself. How I was chosen to go there. To fight there. But what I know is, there are things beyond us that most cannot see. Battles for our spirits. Battles for our souls. There are beings who seek to protect and those who seek to destroy. And somehow my soul was called to protect. I go there every night ... since the day I turned sixteen.”

She sniffled, and the rock of her head was filled with remorse as she came to an understanding. “The first time I thought you’d hurt yourself.”

“Yes.”

She shuddered. “And when you fight there ... they ... hurt you?”

I kept squeezing her hand, wanting to give her encouragement. Solace. For her to understand I was okay.

At least for now.I ignored the voice that echoed through me.

“Yes. They can burn me, but they can’t kill me.”

She hesitated, then whispered, “Are they, like ... demons?”

My shoulder barely hitched. “I guess that’s what they could be called. They’re spirits, and their only purpose is to bring calamity to the world. And somehow ... someway ... those like me have been given the power to fight them in our sleep. To take some of the burden off the world. Without us ...”

I trailed off, not even wanting to consider how horrible the world would be if there weren’t Laven there to intervene.

She breathed around a soft cry. “I wish ... I wish I could understand. I wish I could see.”

“I would never want you to.”

Silence stretched between us before she forced out, “Please help me understand what happened to your father. He just ...”

Her eyes squeezed closed for a beat before she said quickly, “All of a sudden, he wasn’t the same person. One moment he was worried about you, terrified and pacing the floor the same way I had been ... And the next, he was this cruel, vicious person. Wicked. It was like the man I knew was no longer there.”

A shiver rolled through her. Without a doubt, she was tormented by the memories.

“One of the evil ones took his mind hostage. Used him against me to lure me back here. They want me dead.”

The words felt harsh.

Blows that hit the frosty air.

I wanted to shield her from them, but I also needed her to understand the severity of what we were facing. After what had happened last night in Faydor, the terrifying thought that the Kruen could use my family again still held fast.

Revulsion rolled through my mother, and a soft sob hitched in her throat. “I can’t—” She inhaled a shaky breath, her grief palpable. “Is he still a danger to us?”

“I don’t think so.” Hope heaved out with the words as I thought of what I’d felt last night. When I no longer could hear or feel the wicked voices that had captured my father’s heart and mind.