“Here,” I interrupted, reaching for my cup. “Will tea do?” I shook the cup three times, and peeled back the lid. Alcoholic dregs slid slowly back down the sides. “Now it’s wine. See? Nothing special.”
Brittany wasn’t fazed. “It was always wine.”
I reached for Xia’s cup angrily. She graciously traded me for the wine and snickered.
I repeated the trick, this time showing Brittany the tea first. When I showed her the transformed liquid, she glared at me with cougar-like intensity.
“You dare mock God?” she screamed loudly enough that half of the cafeteria stopped to stare, and the other half, wondering why the whole place just went silent, stared too.
“Yup,” I replied, as matter-of-factly as I could. I wasn’t upset or annoyed anymore. This was actually sort of fun.
Brittany took one step backward and pointed a finger at us. “He will judge you,” she said, shaking uncontrollably. She glared at us a moment longer as if trying to leave us with a lasting impression of guilt before she then turned and stormed off.
“Too bad she didn’t cry,” Xia said, chuckling, once Brittany was out of earshot.
“If she would have, I might have felt bad. I don’t mind religious people, it’s the hypocrites I can’t stand.”
Xia took a sip of wine, her eyes deviously questioning.
“Brittany, for example,” I continued, “really, really, enjoys her fornication.”
Xia’s brilliant smile flashed before her mouth burst open into uncontrollable laughter. “How could you possibly know that?” she chided.
I grinned back. “The wind told me.”
Xia hiccupped and then held up the glass of wine. “Just for future reference, I would have preferred a cabernet.”
Sixteen
We talked long after our lunches were finished. I couldn’t remember the last time I had so much fun. I couldn’t help but laugh as the wine loosened Xia’s tongue and her reservations began to crumble. She told me a rather elaborate story about her arrival to the US when she was two, which included details so minute and hilarious that I knew they had to be made up. For the past year and a half she had been living in Florida, going to a small private university, but had taken this last semester off to return to Japan to do some humanitarian work.
The walk back to the dormitory was brilliant. I don’t know if it was the fact that she couldn’t walk straight or if not walking straight was an excuse, but Xia pulled my arm over her shoulder and held on tightly to my waist the entire walk. The closeness was refreshing, even more refreshing than the scent of lilac shampoo that the wind picked up as it blew gently through Xia’s hair. I think I was as intoxicated by her scent as she was from the twenty-four ounces or so of wine.
We entered the elevator in the lobby of a very quiet dorm building. After I pushed the button for the third floor and made some joke about us going to the penthouse, Xia shifted herself so that her arms were wrapped tightly around me and her head was resting on my chest.
“Hmmm,” she sighed. “Let’s take a nap.”
I reeled over the suggestion and my hormones surged powerfully enough to make me dizzy, but real-life was quick to bring me down. “I have to go to work soon.”
“Just for a few minutes,” she cooed.
I hummed in agreement as the elevator doors slid open.
Cold air shot into the elevator as if someone had left a window open in the middle of an arctic winter. At first I thought the air conditioner must have been stuck at the lowest temperature setting, but once Xia moved away from me I felt how cold the air was—too cold to be coming from any air conditioner. My next exhale was visible.
I glanced down at Xia whose face was confused.
I took a step out of the elevator into a hallway that was lit only by a flickering florescent emergency light directly above my head. Xia carefully approached from behind. My immediate reflex was to keep her behind me by blocking her path with my left hand. The hallway had never had any windows, but usually, even without the lights, beams of light would mark the doorways that were the entrances to each room. I quickly doubted my own sense of time—but I quickly assured myself that it was still mid-day.
I listened intently but couldn’t hear anything except a faint high-pitched ringing in my ears.
“Hello?” Xia yelled so loudly that it made me jump. My left hand instinctively went from her waist, where it was holding her behind me, to her mouth. I stole a look at her and shook my head in warning.
Something was definitely wrong. I hadn’t noticed it sooner because I was so happy with Xia that I missed the gentle warnings that reverberated through the air. Now, I felt like I was standing in the middle of an earthquake; everything was buzzing frantically.
I took one step into the darkness. The carpet sloshed under the weight of my foot. Unthinking, I turned to examine the bottom of my shoe in the light. At first, I thought I had stepped in tar, the substance was so black in the dim light, but as a drop of liquid rolled off my shoe and onto the carpet below me, I saw a faint glimmer of rusty red.
Xia was no longer looking at me, but at the red stained carpet. Her face turned white before she sank to the floor.
Seeing her face caused panic to bubble up inside me and I found myself all-too-conscious of the fact that we were standing under the only working light in the hallway, our presence illuminated against the darkness. If something were in the hall it certainly would be aware of us.
I focused on the light above me, pulling the flickering light into my body and concentrating them in my hand. “Luthos,” I yelled, and brilliant light flashed from my outstretched hand. The spell only lasted as long as a flash of lightning, but it was long enough to sear the image of the hallway onto my retinas.
The walls, the floors, and the ceiling were all smeared in sticky red. A body with indistinguishable features was lying in an unmoving heap at the end of the corridor. The trails of blood on the walls suggested it had been smeared, not splattered, and the carpets ran red so uniformly that I knew numerous bloody carcasses must have been drug off to some unknown location.
Xia must have seen the hallway too because she was now poised tensely against the wall, half hidden by the shadows. The muscles in her hand were so tight that it looked like she was reaching out with shaking claws instead of hands.
We couldn’t stay here. I tapped the elevator button swiftly, but it didn’t light up.
Xia’s eyes pleaded with me. She was holding her breath as I tapped the button again and again. Nothing.
I muttered profanity under my breath.
I took Xia’s outstretched hand and tried to pull her into me—my pathetic attempt at trying to make her feel safe. She didn’t move.
Her lips slackened, and when I realized she was trying to say something, I moved closer. Her mascara was running in wet streaks down her cheeks. “Nicholas and Quon,” her mouth moved.
Suddenly I was running, Xia in tow, directly into the darkness. The moment she said the names, a surge of adrenaline spurred my feet into action. The sticky carpet didn’t help my feeling of being unable to get to them fast enough, every step was like getting stuck in a puddle of thick syrup.
I could see the shadowy outline of the wall that made out the end of the hall. Our room was the first door around the corner. I was in such a frantic state of mind that I only slightly noticed the air get colder as Xia and I leapt over a bloody body and burst through the unlocked door into the room.
My eyes had to adjust to the strange way the light came in through the blood-covered window. So much blood—the scene here was no different.
Xia gasped at the same time that I saw Nicholas—a red silhouette against an even redder backdrop.
Nicholas sat rigid on his bed, his knees pulled up to his chin, rocking slightly back and forth. I could see his dark eyes as they glowed red in the dim light, but they didn’t look at us, only through us.
“Nicholas?” I asked softly, taking a cautious step forward. “Are you okay
?”
His naked legs were covered in blood up to his knees, but it wasn’t until I got closer that I noticed his heaving chest and twisted face were as well. At least he was breathing.
I ran toward the bed. “Are you hurt? Xia, get a blanket.” I tried to pry his hands from around his legs so that I could lower them and find where the blood was coming from. When I touched him, he was colder than the air around us.
His face turned slowly toward me and his eyes finally fell on mine. His expression instantly softened, but only slightly. His body remained tense. With his muscles flexed, I couldn’t pry open his arms.
“I’m just glad you’re alive,” I said feeling relief. I stared directly at him, trying to use the strength in my eyes to get him to respond. “Who did this?”
Nicholas’s face tensed again and his brow furrowed. His lips stretched into a straight line. I could see the strain in his neck muscles as he attempted to unclench his jaw.
“I did.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly because the words came out with a gurgle of blood that spilled out of his mouth. He started to vomit uncontrollably. The tension in his body exploded and I took a few uncontrollable steps away from him.
Nicholas’s eyes pleaded with me to understand as the force with which he was heaving threw him off the bed. He coughed up blood between gasps for air.
He was now on the floor on all fours, his chest and back rising with his raspy attempts to breathe. His entire body was smeared with blood.
“He’s still here,” he managed to choke out coherently, stronger than I would have expected, enough to make me flinch.
That was all he needed to say, and I understood. “None of this is your blood?”
Nicholas didn’t look up at me, he was too busy staring at the floor trying to decide if he was finished throwing up, but he shook his head.
“No. Not mine...” His stomach twisted again, and more blood lurched out of his mouth.
The whole scene was proving too much for Xia. I saw her collapse in my peripheral vision and her back rolled as she followed Nicholas’s lead, spewing red liquid—not blood in her case—just wine.
“… need… get…” Nicholas mumbled as he rolled onto his back and painfully stretched his limbs.
I crossed the room and helped Xia to her feet, giving her a reassuring squeeze as I stared into her pale face. Her eyes were full of fear and questions, as I’m sure were mine, but there was a sense of profound control behind them, and I had no doubt I could count on her. I pulled a blanket from my bed and wrapped Nicholas’s body. When I finally got him to his feet, I turned back to Xia.
“We should probably go somewhere warm and safe… public. Then we can sort out what happened.”
She nodded her head once in acknowledgment and took one step toward me before I felt large, strong arms grab me from behind and pull me away from her.
I hit Nicholas’s hard body at the same time he pressed his back onto the wall. I looked down to find his arms around my waist, the muscles tense like when we found him. I could feel fear ripple through his body.
“Nicholas!” I cried. “I can’t breathe. Let me go.”
But he didn’t. Instead he just whispered in my ear, “He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming.”
My heart skipped a beat as everything went eerily silent. I thought I was screaming at Xia to get down, or hide, or who knows what, but any sound that came out of my mouth was instantly swallowed up by a more forceful presence—a silence that had a life of its own. I saw Xia dash toward us as the door burst open and all light was drawn from the room.
This demon, for I assumed it could be nothing else, had no human form. It was a void—a void that devoured all sound and light. Its presence filled the room so densely that it pushed out all the air. Nicholas was clenching his arms so tightly around me that pain was shooting through my hip and the lower half of my body was starting to tingle from lack of blood. Of course, he couldn’t hear my petitions to release me.
And then there was a voice, soft like the wind, gentle like a breeze, “So it is true. Edmund lives.”
The pressure in the room pulled back as the darkness receded. For a brief moment I thought someone must have come to help us because the red tinted light from the blood-streaked windows was slowly returning and I found myself able to swallow a deep breath of air. But I saw rather quickly that the darkness wasn’t actually dissipating, just consolidating. Within seconds, every shadow around the room quivered with life.
Nicholas unexpectedly dropped me. Unfortunately my legs collapsed from underneath me as soon as they were asked to support my weight and I fell face first into a puddle of blood. Then they caught fire as my heart pumped life back into them.
“What do you want? Who are you?” I was finally able to ask.
“Blood,” the shadows quivered as it responded. “I want the blood of all living creatures.”
Nicholas was now inching toward the open door and Xia was curled in the fetal position in the center of the room. I couldn’t see her face but I hoped she was okay.
“And your blood, Edmund,” the creature continued, “your blood will fetch a great price. I will be rewarded handsomely.”
“How do you know me?” I asked, trying to buy myself enough time to get us out of here safely.
“I know of you. The level walkers speak of you. Some have heard rumors but none have been able to enter this world as you have.”
Now I was not only buying time, but intrigued. Still, the answers to any questions I could ask were not worth the risk to the lives of my friends.
“Let me and my friends live and I will share my secret.”
I assumed the sound the shadows made next was laughter, but it sounded more like a hiss.
“I will kill your friends and claim your soul along with all of its secrets.”
I thought I had more time. I thought I would be able to do something to save Xia and Nicholas. I thought I could barter with the demon, but it moved too quickly. The quivering shadows around the room leaped forward, latching onto me. Their touch was so cold my skin burned. Their weight was so heavy, I felt myself collapse under the pressure—but something odd happened: when I collapsed, my body stayed standing, and then took a step toward Xia.
Now I knew what it was like to be possessed. My spirit crumbled under the crushing blow of the demon, and in doing so, I unwillingly relinquished control of my body to it. I could hear its thoughts in my head, screaming so loudly it drowned out my own.
“Such a glorious connection you have, Edmund. What a great, unused power. With my knowledge and your body, I will do amazing things.”
… including killing my friends. The demon didn’t have to say that part. I knew all that it desired.
“Edmund?” Xia asked in fear as I came toward her.
I could feel the lust burning in my eyes, scared to realize that the lust for her body was partially my own, grateful that the lust for her blood was entirely the demon’s. I knew she could see it as well.
“Edmund, no. What are you doing?” she took a fearful step back and I felt the demon relish in her discomfort.
No! I screamed, fighting for control. The demon was now in a body—my body. If someone could just cast an exorcism spell, the first spell I learned as a child in Orenda, all would be well. The demon laughed as I thought this, as I fought to get my own mouth to mutter the words.
I felt Nicholas grab me from behind in an attempt to stop me, but his arms were not strong like they had been a few minutes ago—his tense arms felt so fragile.
“I’ll deal with you next, pet boy,” I said, casting him aside easily.
I expected Xia to run, to cower, or to plead, but instead she stood and firmly planted her feet. “I’m sorry, Edmund,” she whispered as I tried to fight my own hand from reaching out toward her.
“Hecate!” her voice boomed. “Hear your daughter. Deliver us from our enemy.”
Her eyes softened as they met mine and the look in he
r eye told me this was going to hurt.
An ear-splitting howl sounded from behind me. The demon whirled, my body responding slower than it would have had I been in control. As I turned, I was bowled over by a large white dog.
I watched in horror as it ripped into my flesh, its pale blue eyes unblinking, never disconnecting from my own. I braced myself for pain but instead simply felt a slight slip, a crack in the shackles that the demon used to bind my body to his mind.
Shadows oozed out of my skin like liquid and started combining against the dog, but as they did I began to regain control over my own body.
“Xia!” I managed to cry out before being muzzled by the demon again, thrown back into my mental cage that I was fighting so frantically to escape. In my mind I saw two animals: the white dog on the outside clawing its way to the inside, and myself, clawing desperately at the cage in my mind, howling for escape.
Instead of running, Xia bolted to my side and grabbed my hand.
“If you can hear me Edmund, if you can fight for enough control, get us out of here! However you need to do it get us out of here!”
The dog continued to struggle against the shadows but was weakening. I could feel the effort of the demon’s successful defense against Xia’s beautifully conjured assault. All I could do was glance toward Nicholas, but it was enough for Xia to get the message. She called him over and gripped his hand in one of hers, while holding fast to mine with the other.
I hoped my miraculous escape from the demon in my small pickup truck would be enough experience to keep my friends from meeting an icy fate. Had they not been there when I inexplicably emerged in my dorm room I could have died, and I had no idea if someone would be there to save us all where my mind wanted to take us.
And then there was the issue of this mental block the demon was somehow able to cage me into. Would I be able to use his connection to me, and to the world he was from, while caged against my own body?