Page 113 of Stalk the Dark
“No, Orina, listen to me. You need to focus. Breathe.” He dropped to his knees and cupped my shoulders. “Think.”
I shook him off. “No! He played me. Played us all. This is a game to him. Human lives are a game to him. He killed them for sport.” I wrapped my arms around my waist and doubled over because all I could see was her face, her terrified face. “She was filled with life. Filled with hope. She was trying for a baby…a family…She might have been pregnant already and I promised…I promised to protect her. I fucking swore it and now she’s dead.” Sobs stole my voice. I sucked in breaths, desperate to wrangle in my emotions so I could find my words once more. “I failed. I failed because I trusted him. I believed he could be good.” I looked up at Hemlock’s face blurred by my tears. “But there isnogood in him. There isnotempering. No managing…None of it…” I sat up straighter as the reality hit me, sweeping a cold numbness across my senses. “I can’t do this. I can’t stay here. I’ve got to go.”
“What do you mean?” Hemlock asked.
“I don’t want this. I don’t want to be his watcher. I can’t. I can’t stand by and watch as he kills over and over again.”
The tears returned with a vengeance. Useless. Fucking useless.
Ordell crouched beside me and wiped my face with a handkerchief. “Orina, do you remember when I said that we would tell you things if they became crucial for you to know?”
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, forcing myself to breathe, to calm down. “Yes, I remember.”
“Well, there is something you need to know. About Ezekiel and…and about us.”
“Not here,” Hemlock said. “Let’s get to Betsy.”
Half an hour later,we were tucked inside Betsy. Hemlock had draped a blanket over my shoulders, and Ordell made me a cup of tea.
It was cramped but cozy with the three of us in the back, and the downer from adrenaline had left me exhausted. I’d succeeded in tucking away the bloody images that filled my mind and locked away the echo of terrified screams. My chest still ached with guilt and loss, but my gut told me if I was going to prevent more of the same, then I needed to don myarmor and listen to what Hemlock and Ordell had to say.
I set down my cup. “Tell me everything.”
“You know about our curse,” Ordell said. “That we’ve been here before. Helped past watchers…Well, the reason we’ve done that is because Ezekiel…He’s our brother.”
I stared at them, dumbfounded. “What?”
“I know it’s difficult to believe. We don’t exactly look alike, but we had the same father, different mothers,” Hemlock added.
“Go on…”
They exchanged glances, probably wondering why I was so calm about this. But then Ordell continued.
“Several hundred years ago, we made a pact with an ancient deity called Loviator to save our people. We broke that pact and were cursed for it. But before that, we were given abilities to help us fight the threat against our people. I was given the ability to communicate with animals and commune with nature; Hemlock was given the ability to channel the weave and harness miasma, a special kind of magic that exists in the atmosphere. Ezekiel was given the ability to control shadows, telekinesis, and mind walking, but only if he drank blood. A small sacrifice to pay to protect our people. We were happy for a time after that. We bore sons who carried our abilities in their veins.”
“Druids, witches, and vampires came from us,” Hemlock said.
Fuck…That meant?—
“We’re the firsts of our kind,” Ordell confirmed. “Loviator gave us many years with our gift, time in which we did not age. Time in which our people prospered. But as the time to pay the price grew closer, we knew we did not want to pay it.”
“What was the price?”
“Our souls,” Hemlock said. “We did some research and discovered that Loviator was not a benevolent deity and that she’d been locked away for her crimes against creation, and we’d unwittingly found a fracture in her prison from which to summon her. We decided that we needed to lock her away for good.”
“When Loviator returned to claim her price, we were ready to seal her away,” Ordell said. “But something went wrong, and Ezekiel was locked away with her. It took us a year to find a way to fracture her prison again and draw Ezekiel out, but we succeeded. We got him back and stopped her from stepping into our world. However, before we sealed her away for good, she cursed us.” He broke off to add more tea to my cup. “You’ve seen my curse. Once a month I become a true beast with no control over my primal self. Hemlock’s connection to the weave was altered, turning him into a conduit for immense power, but every time he uses it, he risks detonating.”
“Pain is the only thing that brings it under control,”Hemlock said. “Pain, because sheisthe goddess of pain.”
“Pain is what she used on Ezekiel,” Ordell said. “You see, a year passed for us, but for Ezekiel…He was with her for over a century. Her plaything. We can only imagine what she did to him. He never told us because part of his curse was to forget. Forget his pain, forget us, and forget his humanity.”
Was I expected to forgive him for his crimes now? Forgive him for killing Agatha and countless humans? I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t. “Is there a way to break this curse?” Once again, they exchanged looks. “Tell me.”
“Ezekiel needs to find his humanity again. Right now, he feels very little, experiencing emotions through the pain and devastation of others, through their desire and longing. He…mimics it.”
“Then why not just tell him that? Tell him the truth and what he needs to do to be free.”
“Ezekiel may not remember us or what Loviator did to him, but he’s figured out that he’s cursed. The few times that we told him who we were, it broke his mind and cut our time with him short. We learned it was safer to keep this information to ourselves and hoped that it would give us time to heal him.”
