I sat upon the edge of a blackened tor with my bare toes curled on the sharp rocks. Below stretched a fallow plain of black stone, craters dotting the expanse, each filled with a spark of ethereal light. The sparks danced upon the plain like will-o'-the-wisps trying to entice me from my mountain perch, but I stayed put. Shattered pieces of existence drifted despite the absence of wind. They hung like broken bits of mirror frozen in time, reflecting images beyond my sight. The fractals wove tired patterns through the infinite dark and rose toward the starless sky, revolving to show snatches of monochrome worlds. Some fizzled and dissolved without a sound as they were consumed by green-hued shadows.
Aside from the wisps below and the acrid green within those broken visions, the realm was utterly colorless.
"I'm dreaming," I whispered as I lifted an arm from its place on my lap to touch one of the passing fractals. Like a mirror fragment, the edge was deceptively sharp and it cut my fingertip. I withdrew and blinked at the single bead of black dribbled past my knuckle.
"Are you truly dreaming?"
I twisted to see a tall figure part the gathering darkness. I remembered him. The memory was hard to recall, as though I had to tug it toward me from a great distance and it fought my efforts with fierce determination. "You..." I said to the towering creature, flashes of a past dream fluttering about my consciousness like the beating of so many fragile butterfly wings. If I tried to catch the flashes, they would disintegrate beneath my touch.
The creature's eyes burned like dying suns.
"I've seen you...before." The flashes coalesced, and I knew I'd seen him before, in the strange delusion I had dreamt with the blue-eyed Darius and the turbid version of my living room.
"Have you, now?" He took a seat upon the crag at my side, kicking his booted feet into the cold air. I wanted to move but my body remained where it was, unflinching. Like a gargoyle carved upon the crown of the scorched tor, I remained in place.
The shadows swept outward from the creature's broad shoulders in a rippling cloak of untouched midnight. There were...things within the cloak, things undulating and chattering, forms only visible when a passing reflection of light blinked across the seemingly boundless mantel of darkness.
I looked away, unable to stomach the fear twisting knots in my gut.
The creature leaned back upon his palms, his smoldering stare fixed upon oblivion. I followed his gaze and felt the rippling cloak fall upon my shoulders as well. I couldn't see them, but I felt the clawed talons of the creature's minions waver upon my flesh, upon my heart. They whispered words I could not understand.
The titan shifted only to touch one of the fragments as I had moments before. The piece didn't cut his fingers. Instead, the vision within the looking glass grew cloudy with unfiltered light. The light grew in intensity until the fragment shot skyward, leaving behind a glittering trail of brilliant starlight. It was beautiful, but it disappeared in an instant and left me bereaved in a strange land with an even stranger monster.
"The Song is different," the titan confessed, as though I was supposed to comprehend what he meant. His words were laced with slow, tired lassitude. "It has been ever since he entered it."
"He?" I asked, not understanding what the monster meant.
Those unearthly eyes wavered, then blinked. Something in the distance struck the ground with a tremendous calamity, but the event went unseen in the sightless void. "You're a curious one, aren't you?"
Dazed, I nodded. Questions teemed and quaked beneath my skin—but I could not lend my voice to them. Speaking what few words I could was exhausting.
The monster drew his sharp nail along my cheek, following the contours of the bone. "That's okay. I am curious, too."
"What...who are you?"
The monster smiled. His gruesome teeth shone like porcelain daggers in that otherwise handsome face. "Oh, no one of consequence." My ears roared with adrenaline and fear. The darkness grew, sweeping higher and higher until the creature and the desolate realm disappeared, leaving me with the ghost of his touch and the echo of his indulgent laugh. "Let me see what's behind those eyes of yours."
My subconscious answered his command. Every bad dream I had ever had flit behind my eyelids in a hurricane of color and blaring motion. I relived murky childhood recollections of bogeymen in my closet, teenage reveries of broken hearts and bad exams, and a ceaseless array of dreams in which I drowned over and over and over again.
Finally, there was the warehouse. Pain clouded my senses and weakened my vision. Tara was crying my name and the members of Exordium Insaniam reveled in her misery. "Tara!" I yelled, wanting to join her, to hold my sister within the protective embrace of my arms—but I couldn't find her. I couldn't see her, but I would have done anything to spare her from the fate I knew would claim her regardless of my actions.
On and on the cult chanted the lilting summons. "Rath'le forsuile valas farath, Balthier!"
Tara screamed my name, begging for my help. Begging me to save her life.
I only begged the nightmare to let me go.
"Sara!"
I woke sweat-soaked and gasping for air, lurching upright in my rumpled bed. Early morning light touched the bedroom window and filled the room with its soft, cleansing glow. The sparrows shrieked in the neighbor's cypresses. I could hear the bang and rumble of a garbage truck making its rounds as it lifted and dropped the cans left astride the curb. Tuesday. It's Tuesday morning.
A figure stood at my bedside. I almost yelled before recognizing Darius' peeved expression. His face had reverted to his typical age, having somehow shed the lines and wear he had adopted the day before. The shadows formed beneath his eyes and the red color of his irises were reminiscent of the bizarre monster in my dream, enough so to momentarily confuse me—but the Sin of Pride was nothing like that monster. Darius had impatience and fire in every aspect of his physiognomy, whereas the monster was...cold. Indifferent. Absent.
"It was a dream." I cupped my hands upon my face and breathed into my shaking palms. Already the nightmarish realm faded into abstraction. Soon it would be as insubstantial as smoke, nothing more than a bad thought I would forget in the days to come. "Just a dream."
Again and again, I breathed in and out, savoring the tepid air coursing through my body. I savored the normalcy of it. Normality was highly underrated.
The mattress sagged. I parted my fingers to see Darius, his shoulders slouched and head hung with exhaustion, sit upon the edge of my bed. I'd thought the Sin would leave once he figured I was fine, but he remained, glaring at my carpet as if it had mortally offended him. He appeared somewhat smaller than he typically did, as if crushed by worries and thoughts unfathomable to me. "What did you dream about?"
It was strange that he would ask, but I didn't question the Sin's reasoning or his mood. I tried to describe the vision that had overtaken my slumber, but the details slipped through my grasp like water through a sieve. What bits remained seemed inane, so I refrained from telling Darius about the tor or the sulfurous creature. He would think I was silly. "My sister. I...dreamt about her death."
Darius shifted, drawing his feet upward to perch upon the mattress' edge. "You cared for her greatly."
"Of course I did, she's my sister. I love her—loved her."
"Ah." Darius didn't expand upon that single utterance, but nor did he leave. I stared at him and watched the taut muscles in his jaw and neck twitch with his unvoiced thoughts. The silence grew uncomfortable and strained as I bunched the worn blanket in my cold fists.
"Do you love?" I blurted out, instantly feeling my cheek blush with color. "I mean, do you love your brother? Sethan?"
Darius scoffed and began to laugh, the mocking sound scraping at the inside of his throat.
My embarrassment heightened. "Oh, let me guess; Sins don't have time for petty human emotions." I imitated Darius' somber voice, throwing in an exaggerated hand twist for emphasis.
The corners of the Sin's lips twitched. "If that's what you wish to believe."
I dropped my hand, surprised by his response. "Am I...wrong?" I wasn't sure I should ask or if I should let the subject go. Darius was not fond of discussing his brother.
"Yes, actually." Darius lowered one leg and rested his chin atop the knee of the other. "Sins are capable of any emotion humans are—with far greater complexity. Love, however, is...cheap. Transitory. Consider how humans fall in and out of love every day. For an immortal it is...." His hand rose and fell in a vague gesture as he directed his attention toward the closet doors. The Sin's fingers tapped his knee in rapid succession. "Paltry. Like glass rocks compared to diamonds. Loyalty and devotion are priceless compared to love. Some days I love my brother. For the most part, I hate him. I hate him for what he's done to the both of us."
"I never looked at it like that."
The Sin of Pride exhaled as he laid back upon my bed, crossing his arms over his middle. "It's an impudent question. I was loyal to Sethan. Devoted, even in his stupidest moments. Can you comprehend that? He and I were all we had for millennia. Of the thousands who were tossed from Absolia, he and I somehow managed to survive together. To be brought back together. I was lucky enough to keep my brother from the maw of the void that had consumed so many others, and yet I squandered that fortune. I lost him. I...." A look of pain crossed the Sin's inflexible mask. For just a moment, the person lurking beneath the stoic façade of the Sin peered around the mask's edge. "I failed him."
I picked at the blanket's loose threads as I bit the inside of my cheek. "I could say some prosaic proverb on how it wasn't your fault, but I doubt it would make you feel better."
Darius rolled his eyes and fixed me with an irked stare. The pain and emotion I had glimpsed were gone. I doubted they had ever really existed. "I do not need to feel better. You simply asked a stupid question and received a stupid answer."
"Well, then." I slid out from under the sheets—aiming a well-placed kick to the creature's abdomen as I did so. "Sounds as though someone hasn't eaten. God, you're snarly when you're hungry."
"I did not sleep, nor eat. I reviewed the materials we recovered from Pier until your screaming brought me back here."
"Sorry," I said as I dug in my closet for my robe. It was half-buried under a stack of thick winter sweaters and took a solid yank to free. "Did you find anything?"
"Yes, actually."
Intrigued, I followed the Sin from my bedroom to the kitchen, where the counters and the dining table had been overrun by different assortments of multi-colored documents. Darius had tacked up several pages to the wall separating the living area from the garage, and as I drew nearer, I recognized them as the dossiers of the dead cultists. John Pier's smug face was marred by a large, penned red cross.
Darius took a seat at the table, flicking the folder before him. "The merger acquisition. It could have potentially provided us with the identity of our cagey cult leaders—but they weren't rash. There isn't a single name, title, or label in the entire packet. To be plain, it's worthless."
The Sin shoved the folder from the table. I sighed as the merger papers showered my kitchen floor in a brief flurry of prattling pages. The effort I had expended in retrieving those documents had been spent in vain.
"This, however—." Darius tapped the black datebook. It rested in the table's middle, almost hidden by the rest of the clutter. Of all the items we had removed from Pier's office, the datebook gave the impression of being the most innocuous. "—was very illuminating."
"How so?" I sat across from the demon, soothing my bedraggled hair from my eyes so I could watch him open the datebook to a bookmarked section. Pier's cramped, hideous handwriting glowed in the morning light.
"He wrote down his meetings with the cult."
I froze, hand still caught in my hair. "No, he couldn't have been that mad."
Darius' brow rose. "Not exactly. See for yourself." He used one finger to shove the small booklet closer to me. I took it in my own hands and flipped through the wrinkled pages. I found that horrid Sunday in August that had irrevocably changed my life. There, lazily penciled between the gray lines, were two vertical lines and a name. 11 Brocklehurst.
"That could be anything," I grumbled, squinting at the tragic letters. They hadn't been created by passive scratches; the marks had left indents in the paper. I turned to the prior page, expecting to find similar markings—but Pier had written more detailed scheduling for some kind of meeting. Prior to that was a detailed listing for a personal gathering, a birthday by the looks of it. The farther I roved through Pier's datebook, the more inconsistencies in his scheduling and penmanship I discovered.
"He marks anything regarding the Exordium with an address?"
Darius took the book from me. "No. A time and a place. Eleven o'clock, Brocklehurst Avenue. Nothing more. No names, no titles. And not all of them are for the cult. I figure Pier was supplying vampires with those blood bags you unearthed, which was how he bribed that fanged parasite into participating in the summoning." The Sin drew air threw his teeth, creating a displeased hiss. "His other entries are always more verbose. Board meeting regarding Ephraim's data proposal, two o'clock, bring dossiers," Darius read the listing aloud before finding a page past the Sunday where I had been sacrificed.
"If some of the inconsistent entries aren't for the cult, then how can we tell which of them are?"
"We can't," the Sin said with his typical blunt candor. "We can only assume."
"You know what they say about assuming."
Darius glared.
"Never mind."
The Sin continued to eye me with suspicion as he clasped the datebook by the spine and turned it to display its contents again. "Look at tomorrow."
I did so. The date contained only the words "9, Techie."
"Is that a name? A nickname of sorts? Some slur?"
Darius' answering grin was snide as he shut the datebook. "While I couldn't discover who bought out G&R, I could discover who G&R bought out."
I was too tired for this. The morning had barely breathed its first gasping breath and the Sin was expecting far too much from my freshly woken mental faculties. I slumped upon the table, crinkling papers below my elbows. "What? How does this help us?"
"It helps me because amongst the copious amount of absolute trash Pier kept in his desk, I found records of G&R buying a small electronics purveyor located in the Greenwood district. It's named Techie-Goods. G&R undoubtedly used the store as a means of moving and distributing stolen goods. I found enough evidence of their thievery for your authorities to bury them alive."
"Techie-Goods...." I propped my chin on my hand, brow furrowed in thought. "So you think the cult will be using the store as a meeting place? Like a lair?"
"As a meeting place, yes. A lair? Don't be foolish. They won't have a set meeting locale. Your cult is clever enough to remain mobile and undetected, leaving no trace of themselves behind. Or so they hope."
I peered at the backslider, watching the bars of sunlight slipping through the vertical blinds grow bolder and bolder with the maturing day. The air conditioner revved and sputtered, disturbing the dense silence crouching over my house. "We have our lead, then. Tomorrow at nine, we visit Techie-Goods."
The Sin said nothing for several minutes. The air hummed between us, curling papers and nudging some from their organized stacks. Crumpled receipts rained from the breakfast bar like hail. "No, Sara. Tomorrow I will go to Techie-Goods. You will stay here."
"What?" I said, straightening in my chair. "What do you mean? Why?"
"Because it's dangerous, you idiot." Darius stood and tucked his chair back under the table. He spoke in a calm, deliberate tone. "You will remain here while I investigate."
"Remain here? What, remain here and wait to be attacked?" I stood as well, my chair smacking the wall behind it. My voice quaked with fear and anger as its volume swelled. I did not want to be left behind. Not again. "They know where I live, Darius! I will not remain here alone. That sort of idiocy has nearly gotten me killed!"
"Careful, Sara," the Sin warned as the temperature in his immediate vicinity spiked and the rest of the house cooled. "I've warned you before to check your irreverence. You can stay with Amoroth, if you wish."
"I'm not an errant child you can hand off when it's convenient," I retorted as my hands balled into fists. "I'm going with you."
"No."
"Dammit, Darius!"
His arm shot out and I flinched, but the creature only gripped my jaw, jerking my face closer to his own. The Sin's eyes blazed with energy stolen from the summer's warmth, and his skin was rough against mine. "You're staying here."
"No—!" I began, but Darius was determined to have the last word. He vanished in a gust of ash before I could voice further objections. The sulfurous shadow left in his absence played across my face in silent invitation before that, too, disappeared.
Infuriated, I slapped the table with an indignant huff. Papers scattered into an unruly mess. My hand hurt, and as I brought my stinging palm to my eye level, I saw red upon my fingertips. My anger was quelled by a rush of sickly chills.
There, on my index finger, was a small cut. A cut I had gotten in my dream.