Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:15:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Richard Garcia <invertedbeast@yahoo.com>
Subject: Darkness Evolves chapter 5

DARKNESS EVOLVES
Chapter Five


Daniel talked about the meeting at Uncle Walt's all the way home.  The
problem of how to measure how fast Darkness is falling had really grabbed
his interest.  He seemed almost as into it as Walter was.  It seemed funny
to me that during the conversation no one had asked the one question that's
most important: what's going to happen when it all comes back?  Witches and
the Dark-gifted will all get a lot more powerful, but so will the demons.
Who knows what they will do?  Things could get really, really bad.  I
didn't say anything because there's nothing any of us can do about it.
Maybe that's why Amber didn't mention it either.  But I bet she'd thought
about it.

We got home and I fixed sandwiches for lunch.  The fridge was pretty empty;
it was time for another grocery run.

"What are you going to do this afternoon?"  I asked Daniel.

"I think I'll do some work in the studio," he said.  "Why?"

"I need to get some groceries.  I can do it while you're working."

After everything that had happened lately, I didn't like leaving Daniel
alone.  His mother, and the S.E.C. thing and the traffic light malfunction
-- they had all been aimed at him.  He hadn't shown any signs of being
worried by them.  In part that was an act to reassure me.  I wasn't
reassured; I was scared.  But I'd done all that I could to make our home as
safe as possible.  While he had been out hunting, I had walked three times
around the perimeter of our property, counterclockwise under the full moon.
I had lain down as strong a boundary of Darkness as I could cast.  If I
left now and got back while Daniel was in his studio, that would probably
be okay.

"All right," he said.  "You need some cash?"

"Sure."

He pulled three twenties and a ten from his wallet and handed them to me.

"What should I get for dinner?" I asked.

"Don't care.  Whatever looks good."

"Okay."

The bad feeling hit me when I was less than a mile away from the house.  It
was like the oncoming-traffic feeling, but different.  This was tighter,
more focused.  It wasn't like standing on a street corner with cars moving
around me.  It was more like standing on a train track.  The track looked
clear in both directions, but I could feel that flutter in your stomach
that reminds you a train could come roaring around the bend at any moment.

Actually, it was worse than that.  It was the certainty that the train was
coming and that I had to get off the track.  Except that I didn't know what
the train was and I didn't know which direction the track ran.

I needed to find out.  I turned off the street into a parking lot that I
was just passing.  It was the entrance to Oak Springs Preserve.  The
parking lot is the trailhead of a five-mile hiking trail that loops through
the preserve.

Except for one unoccupied jeep, the lot was empty.  I pulled into a corner
tucked away behind a large tree and turned off the engine.  Then I closed
my eyes and opened myself to Darkness.

Suddenly the feeling was much stronger.  It was another attack on Daniel,
and it was coming fast.  I didn't have time to get back to the house, or
even to call him.  Terror and rage swept through me with dreamlike
slowness.  They didn't burn; they froze.  I shaped chunks of icy Darkness
into a bridge leading to Daniel.  At the end of the bridge was a
rectangular window of light.  I moved up to it and peered out into his
studio.

Daniel was standing in front of me puttering around with his brushes,
getting ready to start painting.  I was looking at him through his latest
project: the portrait of me.

"Daniel," I said.

His head came up, eyes wide.  "Joey?  What the fuck!  How'd you get into
your painting?"

"Daniel, listen to me.  You have to leave the house right now.  Run into
the preserve.  Get as many trees between you and the house as you can, then
meet me at the trailhead.  Go right now -- as fast as you can.  Run,
Daniel!"

He stared at me, frozen.

"RUN!" I screamed.

Finally he moved.  He bounded away from the painting and out the patio
door.  Though the window of canvas I watched him run across the lawn toward
the trees.  He had entered the preserve and was almost out of view when I
saw him pause and start to turn back toward the house.

He should have kept running.

A shockwave of sound and light threw me into my body.  I was back sitting
in the car.  For a second it was totally silent, like the whole world was
holding its breath.  Then the car shuddered to the reverberations of a
sonic boom.  Something big had just blown up.  Our house.

I re-entered the shadows and reached out for Daniel.  Without the psychic
connection of my portrait it was a lot harder.  He was alive, I kenned, and
wounded.  How badly I couldn't tell, but he was mobile and was heading
toward me.

I got out of my car.  The sky was partly overcast.  Everything had gone
quiet after the boom, but one by one the birds starting chirping again and
the forest seemed to return to normal.  It hadn't.  Nothing was ever going
to be the way it had been before.

Daniel was still coming toward me, but he wasn't moving fast.  He wasn't
doing well.  I cleared off the back seat of my car, sweeping old score
books and CDs and other junk onto the floor.  From the trunk I took a jug
of distilled water and an old quilt that Daniel had put there.

A plume of thick black smoke was rising above the trees in the direction of
our house.  I caught a whiff of something acrid in the air.  In the
distance I heard the scream of a siren.  I waited.

By the time my brother staggered into the parking lot the acrid smell had
grown strong enough to sting my eyes and I'd counted six sirens.  Daniel
looked like an extra from a zombie movie.  He was barefoot and his feet
were scratched and bleeding.  Along one side of his body his clothing was
torn and his skin was lacerated from running through the thick underbrush.
That was his good side.

If a demented chef had attacked my brother with a paring knife and then
thrown him into a locker-sized oven for braising, that's how the other side
would have looked.  Daniel shuffled into the parking lot and stopped, like
a wind-up toy that had wound down.  The charred side of his face was so
messed up that he probably couldn't see out of that eye.  The glassy gaze
of his good eye was fixed on the ground in front of him.

I ran up to him.  "Daniel," I said.  He didn't respond.

I touched his good – better – arm and with a start he looked up.

"Joey."  His blistered lips shaped the words, but no sound came out.

As gently as I could I draped the quilt over his shoulders and guided him
to my car.  He fell through the open door across the back seat.  I got the
rest of him in and closed the door.  Then I crawled into the front seat and
reached over to trickle water from the jug into his mouth.  He managed to
swallow a couple of times and then started coughing.  It was a deep,
hacking cough.

Another emergency vehicle sped by the entrance to the preserve.  We had to
get out of there.

At the street I turned in the direction opposite the house and started
driving.  We passed another fire truck and a van with a TV station logo on
it.  I didn't know where I was going, but I knew we needed to get away.  I
couldn't take Daniel to a hospital or even to my cousins.  We had to hide.
I drove for half an hour, winding my way into a seedier side of the city.

The place I found was a cheap one-story motel just off the freeway.  I
parked the car and fiddled with the blanket until it covered Daniel
completely.  He didn't move when I did it, but at least he was still
breathing.  I went into the lobby.  A fat middle-aged man sat behind a
counter watching a baseball game on TV.

"I need a room," I said.

The man glanced from the TV to me and then to the clock on the wall.  It
was only three-thirty.

"Gotta be an adult, son," he said, his eyes sliding back to the TV.

I pulled out my wallet and flipped it open so that he could see my driver's
license.

He looked at it and grunted.  "How many nights?"

"Just one."

"Don't take checks.  Am Ex, Visa or Master Card.  Or cash."

"What's the total?"

"Just you?"  The man suspected I was a junkie, or maybe a hustler with a
john.  He didn't care, as long as I didn't cause him any trouble, but if I
were up to something illegal he would charge extra in cash and pocket the
difference.

"Me and a friend.  We've been on the road for twenty hours.  Need a place
to crash and clean up."  I gave as much push to my words as I could.  I
wanted him to believe my story.  "You got something in the back, away from
the traffic noise?"

"Can't get away from the traffic noise," the man replied, his interest
subsiding.  "Total's forty-five.  Room's got two full-sized beds."

He slid over the registration pad.  "Sign in here."

I checked in as Joe Miller.  He'd never notice the difference.  Then I gave
him fifty dollars from the grocery money.  He slid back a five and a key to
the room and turned back to the TV.

I drove around to the back of the building and got out to unlock the door
to the room.  It looked pretty much as I had expected: cheap and dingy.  I
went back to the car and stood beside it, listening through Darkness for
any signs of attention.  There was none; no one was watching.

I opened the back door and lifted the blanket.  "Daniel," I said, "you need
to get up and come inside."

He didn't move.

"Daniel, please, you have to help me.  I need you to do this."

He groaned.  His good eye fluttered open.  The pupil was wide and
unfocused.

I bit my lip and grabbed hold of his burned arm.  Daniel let out a thin,
high-pitched scream and jerked upright.

"Come on, Daniel.  It's just a few steps.  You need to get out of the car."

Somehow I got him out of the car and into the motel room.  He whimpered the
whole time.  He collapsed on the bed, still wrapped in the blanket.  I
closed and locked the door and pulled the curtains.  Then I crawled onto
the bed next to him.

Safe.  We were safe and no one in the world knew where we were.  But now
what?  Daniel was hurt bad.  The cuts probably weren't too deep, but the
burns really looked serious.  When he came out of shock he'd be in a ton of
pain.  His right eye was likely permanently blinded, or would be if he were
just human.

But my brother wasn't just human.  He was moon-gifted.

If Daniel could survive until the next full moon, his body would heal from
anything.  That's what Fellers had told him, Daniel said, at their last
meeting.  Mom's memories confirmed that.  But we'd had a full moon barely a
week ago; the next was over three weeks away.  We couldn't wait that long,
not when someone was trying to kill him.

I could do something about that.  I couldn't heal him, but I might be able
to get him to heal himself.  It's a trick Mom had heard about that only
works with the sea- and moon-gifted.  If I could do it he'd be fine by
morning.

Slowly I settled myself down on the bed next to him.  I closed my eyes and
tried to synchronize to Daniel's ragged breath.  Being related made what I
was trying to do easier because we had a blood connection.  If we had been
full brothers it would have been even better.

There's no lightblind way to explain what I did then.  I could say that I
convinced Daniel to heal himself, but that's not right.  Daniel was
unconscious, and he couldn't do this anyway.  If I said that I talked his
body into healing itself that would be closer, but still not right.  The
closest would be to say that I asked his Dark gift to wake up and do what
it did after every full moon: reshape him back into his healthy human form.
That's still not right, but it's as close as I can come in words.

After an hour I managed to get the process going and his gift took over.  I
lay beside him for another hour, then got up and carefully stripped
Daniel's clothes off.  I dampened a face towel and washed the blood off of
his body, then tucked the blanket around him to let him percolate.  Since
there was nothing more to do, I turned on the TV.

I flipped through the channels until I found a local station.  We were a
major news story.  Minutes after takeoff, a Gulfstream commuter jet had
taken a nosedive.  The pilot had attempted to direct the plummeting jet
into the Oak Springs Preserve, with the hope of minimizing loss of life
when it hit.

Twenty-two people had been on the plane -- eighteen passengers and four
crew -- and they were presumed to all be dead.  Based on the video clips
of our house that was a pretty good bet.  The jet had fueled up before
takeoff.  As one young reporter eagerly reminded viewers, jet engine fuel
can burn hot enough to melt steel.

There was still no information on who had been at home when the plane hit
it.  They knew the house was owned by Daniel, who the reporters called "an
up-and-coming local artist."  Every ten minutes or so they flashed a
picture of Daniel they'd downloaded from his website.  Steve had taken the
picture a couple of years ago at an exhibition opening.  Daniel was
standing in front of one of his paintings wearing a pressed white
short-sleeve dress shirt with a narrow black tie and black suspenders.  His
head was tilted forward and he was smiling sardonically.  He looked so
great that I'm not surprised they kept showing it.

After a couple of hours I turned off the TV.  Outside it was dusk.  I
checked on Daniel and then ran across the street to a convenience store to
buy a sandwich, some chips and a Coke.  When I got back I sat on the bed
beside Daniel.  As I ate, I tried to think about things the way he does and
plan ahead.

Based on what the newscasters were saying, it might be a while before the
lightblind authorities sifted through the wreckage and figured out that
Daniel and I weren't at home when the plane hit.  Right now no one knew
where we were or if we were alive.  That was good.  For the time being we
should try to keep it that way.

Hiding, though, was not something my brother would be good at.  His looks
drew too much attention; he was too memorable.  So he needed a disguise.
Maybe I could get his Dark gift to make a few changes as it was putting him
back together.  I turned off the lights and settled down beside him on the
bed.  Slowly I got back in tune with his gift.  We lay there together
through the rest of the night.  At some point I fell asleep.


InvertedBeast@yahoo.com