A Breeding Darkness (Complete)

(29)

Joon stirred under her touch, turning to look up at her. For a moment, they just stared at each other, their faces cut with shadows that danced. Joon's eyes still turned down, mournful as ever, but a slow smile crept across his lips, lighting up his face. Lucy wasn't sure she had seen such a look of relief on his face before. For once, he looked as if he had nothing to worry about. Because Lucy was there. She had come for him.

She smiled back and pulled him into a sitting position, before enveloping him in a hug. She rested her chin on his shoulder, feeling his heart beating against her chest.

"I knew you'd come back," he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. "That thing showed up and said it would fetch you for me." He nodded at the creature, which had settled down in a crouching position, its arms dangling at its side as it watched them.

"All the walkers appear in the same place," it said. "I waited there."

Lucy, ignoring it, was more concerned with just how pale and ashen Joon's face was. She wasn't sure if it was just that she hadn't seen him in a while, or if he had gotten worse in the time she'd been gone. But it didn't look good.

"Were you hurt after I left?" she asked. "What about the old wounds?" Sitting back on her haunches, she pulled down the bandages around his neck. The Denizens' claw marks were putrid and leaking a black ooze. The same ooze that snaked up his veins, now all the way to under his jaw and into his scalp. Lucy's mouth parted in shock at the state of his wounds and how bad they had gotten in such a short amount of time. She remembered what the creature had told her before taking her to Joon. He was poisoned, and his time was running out.

Joon reached up, cupping her hand in his and pulling it away. He didn't let go of it as he moved it down to her side, though. "Right now we need to focus on finding the source of the darkness," he rasped.

Lucy sighed. "No, getting you back to the real world and taking care of whatever is happening to you is the most important."

This time, the creature spoke up in place of Joon. It shuffled forward, still on its haunches and seemingly unconcerned despite its next words. "The darkness must be contained, or else the dark creatures will continue to breed and infest your world."

"But we can wait until Joon is better," Lucy said. "Surely they won't overrun everything before he's got a little bit of rest and medicine in Krov Korol."

The creature stared at her. "The poison coursing through his veins cannot be stopped until the darkness is contained. The creatures that did this to him, they are Nightmares. They are what the once peaceful creatures of the Heart were, until the darkness seeped into them and changed them. They spread the darkness, and it is now in his blood. And yours."

Lucy swallowed as she felt her foot throb in pain. She hadn't looked at the wound since she had first realized it had followed her to the real world. Frankly, Koshmar's summons had quickly taken over her attention, not to mention the shadow creatures and Gregor's death. She really hadn't thought much of the pain in her foot beyond a vague annoyance and discomfort. But now she noticed that the throbbing had moved up into her ankle, and a vague sense of nausea was every present.

Joon's brows drew together. "You were marked? I thought you said the Dreamwalkers were healed of injuries they received in Zerkalo?"

Lucy nodded. "We're supposed to, but this one never healed." She leaned down to undo her boot and reveal the half-moon bite marks on the top of her foot. They had mostly stopped bleeding, but the same black ooze seeped into her sock that was staining Joon's bandage. Her veins stood stark against her skin, and she swallowed hard as she realized that her future was about to take a dark turn.

"What is this?" Lucy asked, looking to the creature. She gestured to her foot and Joon's neck.

The creature tilted its head, and for a moment Lucy wasn't sure it was going to reply to her. But then it spoke as calmly as it ever had. "It is what has been changing the Heart. You were given yours through injuries, but it is the same disease that spreads through us all." Here it moved closer to the lantern light and pointed toward its chest. In the light, they could see through the misty form as if it was skin in front of a light source. Beneath, Lucy saw that what she had taken for a humanoid form was actually a dense tangle of black veins. They coursed through the creature's body, all winding toward where a heart might have been in a human. Except on the creature, it was an empty space. Still untouched by the black veins.

"Once it reaches your Person, that is when you become like the creatures that attacked you. Something Else."

Lucy felt her skin crawl at the thought of the black veins spreading through her and changing her. Taking from her what made her her, until all that was left was some sort of shadow creature with white eyes and a sickly laugh.

Joon, also looking shaken by their shared imminent future, stared at the ground with a crease between his eyes. He clenched and unclenched his hand. "So we are fated to be destroyed, one way or another," he said.

The creature shook its head. "For the girl, yes. For you, master, you are fated to destroy us all."

Both Lucy and Joon looked up sharply. The creature stood up slowly. Its arms extended and it slowly swept them around, drawing their eyes to look at all that surrounded them. "You wonder about this world, do you not? Why it exists and where it comes from?"

Lucy nodded, but glanced at Joon. He stared at the creature, a mixture of emotions on his face. There was the confused and worried Joon she'd expected, but also, almost as if it was buried deep, there was another Joon. She wasn't sure at all what that one thought. It was barely noticeable, and she wondered if she saw it right at all, but it made her skin crawl and she looked away quickly.

The creature hissed. "A royal bloodline is strong. Blood is not what runs through a prince's veins, but instead history and a connection to his land. He and the land are one and the same. When he dies, his son or daughter takes his place, continuing the bond with the land. It's a sacred pact, a unification. The same is true for our master. But, when our master came close to that eternal end, he nearly broke that bond. No heir. No continuing bloodline. The land had no way of staying with his family. So the land created a shadow to give him something to rule even in death."

"What?" Lucy asked.

The creature stared at Joon, though it answered Lucy. "You cannot think of it in the terms of your limited logic. Just trust that, because of his near death, our world was created. The Heart. Where all his history collected and circulated. A shadow of his life."

"I don't remember any of this," Joon whispered, and she believed him. His pain was evident across his face as he struggled to recall a life that had disappeared from him.

"Our master may not remember, but he touched death as a child."

Lucy drew in a sharp breath. Her memory flashed before her of his dark eyelashes dripping water in dazzling diamond drops as his guards fished him away from the cold embrace of the river.

"Around eight years ago?" she asked, thinking of that day. The one that had changed her life forever.

The creature shrugged. "I do not know the passing of time. Only that it was a long time ago."

Lucy tightened her grasp on Joon's hand, looking into the face that had grown so much since she had seen it when they were young. 

The day she'd first entered Zerkalo. 

The day she lost her own life.

"Eight years ago, I died trying to save you," she said.