The Rising Read online

  Natalie wanted to get lost in Will’s embrace. She felt so amazingly safe when she was with him. Not only was he a genius, he was unbelievably strong; his muscles were like steel. And she’d seen him move faster than any human. She wondered what it would be like to have such powers—to feel like she was really a worthy match for Will. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to be a demon. If Will was half demon, then how bad could it be?

  Will breathed in the scent of Natalie’s hair. Having her in his arms sent waves of pleasure rolling down through his chest and into his stomach. She turned her head to look up at him, and her ear brushed across his face. They were, in that moment, so incredibly attuned to their senses that they could feel each other’s heartbeats.

  “Will?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It feels so good to be with you. To be together.”

  “I know.”

  She looked into his eyes and found heaven. Neither of them blinked. Instead of speaking further, they held their breath and lingered in the moment, tasting it, feeling it, being with it totally. Natalie felt like they were somehow melding together, all the unspoken words between them dissolving, their souls merging, dancing slow and close. Their cheeks touched, but they didn’t kiss. Natalie couldn’t help herself and asked: “How long . . .?” How long can we stay like this?

  “Shhh . . .”

  Will brushed his lips against her cheek as he made the sound and a tingling sensation spread from her face to her scalp and then trickled down into her body like a thousand raindrops. She held Will and breathed him in. In truth, she didn’t want to hear the real answer to her question. She only wanted to hear, “Forever, forever, forever.” The thought of any other words spilling from Will’s lips—anything, no matter how innocent, that might contradict her core desire—would kill her right there on the spot. So when it looked like he might speak, she made the sound.

  “Shhhh. You’re right. Let’s not say a word.”

  He understood. They wouldn’t have this conversation now. Not when they were on top of the world, the handsome prince and his beautiful princess gazing out over their kingdom, their bodies close together, the heat between them fierce, overpowering, relentless and growing. Will knew that Natalie wanted him to kiss her. Right here. Right now. He hadn’t since they’d escaped Mount St. Emory back in Harrisburg. And a dull ache to do so lived inside him every minute of every day. But he was afraid. For her. For him. For what it would mean for humanity if he let his guard down so much. He told himself he must remain strong and vigilant, and above all he must stay in control. Natalie sucked in some jagged breaths through her nose—she’d forgotten to breathe again, something she often did when touching Will—and her body shuddered as she felt a lightness lifting her head into the sky.

  Will’s lips found her forehead and he rested them there, kissing her, kissing her, for a long time. Her eyes fluttered closed. She felt like someone had poured warm liquid into her skull and it was slowly flowing down through her body. She tightened her arms around him and her mind was singing, Come in, come in, come in! I want you so bad! She was going to kiss him on the lips, and this time, he was going to let her. She could feel it. She tilted her head up. Her lips parted. And then:

  “Hey, you two,” said Emily as she completed her circular journey around the deck. She’d really wanted to give them more time, but she was starting to stress out, the dark dreams coming at her from the shadows. Still, she felt guilty for it now, seeing the way they were looking at each other.

  “Um . . . I can take off if you want, get a cab back home. It’s no problem.”

  Natalie squeezed Will’s hand. They all knew that they would never let Emily go traipsing off by herself.

  “No,” said Will. “We should stick together. We’ll all go.”

  As they were leaving the observation deck, Will thought he saw a flash of lightning and heard thunder. But when he scanned the sky, it was clear. The sounds and images seemed to be coming from inside his head, and they were faint, distant, and otherworldly. Maybe it was a memory. Or maybe it was his seventh sense, his ability to read tiny meta-communications all around him, the unspoken, nonverbal cues that passed between people and animals, even plants. He could even sense minute chemicals emitted and exchanged, as well as atmospheric alterations. Now he was struck with a strong feeling of foreboding. It was definitely time to leave. They climbed into the elevator and stood silently as the car descended, making its five-hundred-foot journey to the ground in just under a minute. As the doors hissed open, Will stepped forward protectively, moving out of the elevator and quickly scoping out the lobby. All was quiet.

  They got in the BMW and when Natalie reached to turn the radio on, he shook his head. Picking up on Will’s anxiety, she and Emily were silent. He drove with the windows down so he wouldn’t miss anything happening around them, the night air rushing in and swirling around them like cool caressing fingers.

  Suddenly Emily’s head jerked to the right. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” asked Natalie.

  “I thought I saw something.”

  “We’ll be home soon,” said Will. He didn’t think Emily had really seen anything, but his bad feeling still hadn’t gone away.

  But Emily had seen something. Or rather, someone. It was a tall older man in a tattered coat, and he was stalking them. As they drove, he moved like a ghost, floating, his long coattails flapping in the wind. When they stopped at a light he dropped down onto the BMW from an overpass—WHAM!—his boot heels denting the hood, his horrible eyes glaring.

  Emily screamed as her blood ran cold. Barely flinching, Will sped up and then braked hard, and the man was thrown backward like a slingshot and disappeared as though swallowed up by the asphalt. Will knew better, knew the creep wasn’t dead—he’d seen the man’s ugly hooded black eyes—and so he goosed the throttle while keeping his left foot on the brake. When the tall man rose up like some apparition, Will released the brake and the Beemer sped forward like it had been blasted out of a cannon, running the tall man over. Now both Natalie and Emily’s shrieks pierced the night air. Will stopped the BMW and powered up the windows, then slammed it into reverse and sped backward. Ka-thump! He ran over the tall man again. Natalie spoke.

  “Will! What if—?”

  “What if nothing!” he shouted.

  His instincts had been right. Even after being run over multiple times the tall man, an ancient demon, stood up on spindly legs, his jagged broken hipbone jutting out like part of some weird exoskeleton. His neck was broken and his head was hanging, bowed as if in prayer. Blood flowed freely from a hole in his neck. But he righted his head and took a few steps forward, holding up his mangled hands like lobster claws. His wicked face was like a mask that had been tacked to his skull. He could barely move and Will suspected that, at least for the moment, he wasn’t a threat. But the tall man did have something to say—his jaws were moving grotesquely—and cautiously Will rolled down his window to listen. The tall man fell toward them, collapsing on the street. He looked up at Will with hateful eyes.

  “Parricida!” he rasped, as black blood seeped from the hole in his neck. He sucked in a bloody breath and then spoke again, his croaking voice haunting, accusing, condemning.

  “Parricida!”

  Then, with a final death rattle, the old demon disintegrated into sparkling particles of light, tiny red droplets that leached into the asphalt. Natalie and Emily caught their breaths. Will was staring at the spot where the demon had dissolved, his mind going a million miles a second.

  “Will?” whispered Natalie.

  Will kept staring, thinking. Natalie’s heart hammered.

  “What language was that?” she asked. “Do you know what he said?”

  “It was Italian,” said Will. “Or maybe Spanish. Parricida means someone who kills a parent.”

  “Uh, can we please get out of here?” asked Emily. She was pressed as far back into the back seat as she could get, pale and shak
en.

  “We’re gone,” said Will, and he stepped on the gas. Ignoring stoplights, they were up the hill and pulling into the mansion driveway in two minutes flat. Natalie was looking at Will, trying to read him. They pulled into the garage, and when the doors closed behind them and the double security shutters came down as well, Will turned and looked at her.

  “He was accusing me of killing one of my parents.”

  The notion circulated in their brains.

  “Does that mean you . . . inside the mountain . . . the battle . . . your . . . father? Could the Dark Lord really be—”

  Will and Natalie had never spoken about Will’s newfound heritage. It was a fact so terrifying in its implications that they had a silent agreement to let it lie. Hearing her say it aloud now was like hearing it for the first time all over again. But that paled compared to the hope that wanted to grow in his chest. What if Will’s dream at the rest stop, his vision, had been true? What if the Dark Prince was dead? What if Will had killed him in the battle inside Mount St. Emory?

  But the Dark Lord was not the only parent whose fate Will was unsure of. April was out there somewhere, having followed his instructions and hidden someplace he hoped was safe. But that night’s encounter had just reminded him that nowhere would remain safe for long. Will knew he could not let another day pass without finding her and bringing her to the manor.

  “I’m going to need a couple hours of sleep and then I’m taking off,” he said, getting out of the BMW. Natalie and Emily followed him into the house, the mood somber, old fears once again creeping into their veins.

  Inside, Natalie grabbed Will’s wrist, wanting to know if he thought the Dark Lord could be dead and where he was going and how long he’d be gone.

  “Not right now,” Will said, brushing her off as if he wasn’t even seeing her, and retired to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. As she stood outside his door, she wondered if there would ever come a night when he would leave it open, or better yet, invite her in and close it behind them. She went to her room. In moments there was a tapping at her door. It was Emily, still looking wan.

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  “Of course, come on in.”

  Natalie ushered her sister in and gave her a comforting hug, putting her own problems aside, at least temporarily.

  In his room, Will did his best to calm his charging panic. He would accomplish nothing now by fretting about his mother. He used his training to go into a Zen trance, clearing away the mental debris. But one thought persisted, and it was a hopeful one. If by some miracle the tall demon’s words held the good meaning, the right meaning, if indeed he had killed the Dark Lord, it might mean the beginning of the end of the demon race. And that would mean that he and Natalie could be together. Will dared not hope; he knew better than to celebrate anything until the deed was done. But he couldn’t help but wonder. Was it possible? Was he truly dead and gone?

  What was left of the Dark Lord’s body lay in state 666 cold dark feet under the earth’s surface. One by one, various demons filed past, paying their respects in the traditional demon fashion by hissing and spitting on the ground, the rocky earth around the Master burbling with an accumulation of toxins. After the blast at Mount St. Emory, the surviving demons from the surrounding area had fanned out and gathered up their leader’s charred and lacerated body parts. They’d located the limbs and organs and bits of flesh by sniffing the air. His scent was, to a demon, intoxicating, what they craved: acrid and foul. Now, like an ancient dinosaur skeleton unearthed by paleontologists, his body parts—all those that had been found—were gathered together and laid out, a hideous-looking accumulation if ever there was one. The gory assemblage was gradually becoming joined together as an evil, sentient, sinewy, fleshy red substance wormed in and around it in a grotesque kind of satanic healing fusion.

  A demon approached an underlord, eyes locked on the ground in submission, and whispered: “We are still looking. We are working tirelessly.”

  “Of course you are,” said the underlord. “The future of our very existence depends upon it.”

  “Yes, we know. I beg your leave.”

  The demon nodded and backed away into the darkness. The underlord stared again at the remains of the Dark Lord. In the event that they were unable to locate what they sought, and soon, it was possible that the entire demon race would perish.

  The Dark Lord’s memory was hazy. White. So much white. When a human died or began the first process of dying, they went into the light. For a demon, even the prince of demons, the process was much the same. First came the searing pain, the fire along the spine, then the consciousness tilting like the deck of a boat in a storm. And then the brain melting, like a chunk of ice sizzling in lava.

  He remembered being flung backward by the first shockwaves, blasts of powerful steam, Mother Earth hurling huge boulders like grains in a sandstorm. The massive rocks were Earth’s shrapnel and they ripped into him, slicing and dicing him like a hunk of meat. It was as if he’d been attacked by a mad butcher with rusty knives. His limbs had been torn from his body and blown to smithereens, his torso chopped in half, then halved again and again as more and more granite projectiles hit him. Mother Earth was angry, and she’d slaked her thirst for vengeance upon his body. He’d felt his neck snap and his head being wrenched from his torso—a shame, since he’d only just reattached it after his own son had beheaded him with the dark holy Triad of Power. As the Dark Lord had rocketed up into the sky, burning, aflame, he tried to move, but with his brain no longer connected to his spinal cord, it made things . . . difficult.

  Time passed. Time stopped. A blanket of nothingness fell over his consciousness. Time started again. He held on to hatred, and it kept him from falling any deeper into the void. Only his hunger for vengeance kept him from letting go. So he held fast, imagining over and over again how he would make his young adversary pay. With exemplary pain. And as much blood as possible.

  Rumbling along on I-90 in their thirty-two-foot Commander RV, Andrew and Martha Hastings and their three children, Zachary, eight, Ben, seven, and little Megan, four, were weary from the final leg of their vacation. They’d roamed far and wide in the Pacific Northwest, and capped it off with a five-day stay in the Columbia Hills State Park. They’d jet-skied and fished and swum in the Columbia River and were just plain tuckered out, and now the whole family was looking forward to getting home to Coeur d’Alene.

  Megan kept whining about having scary feelings, convinced there was a “monster” after them. She had said this for many days on the trip. She said she could feel evil. But her parents didn’t believe her. And Zachary and Ben were too busy watching a horror movie on the onboard DVD player to notice anything. Megan was always seeing and hearing things, so this time seemed no different. Martha scolded the girl, telling her to lie down in the back bay, be quiet, and play with her Bratz doll.

  Truth be told, Andrew thought he might have been having a case of the heebie-jeebies himself. He considered pulling over—Rest Stop 1 Mile Ahead—but he kept picturing sucking down a cold Miller Lite on his own couch. He passed the rest stop going ninety miles per hour, even though Megan was now crying, burbling that there was a monster on the roof. Ben pinched her and told her to shut up. She was always whining about ghouls and ghosts and ogres. And everybody knew there were no such things.

  But the Dark Lord—or a part of him—was indeed in their midst. He fumed at the ignominy of his predicament. But he would find a solution. He had a plan. He always had a plan.

  At 12:01 A.M., Andrew pulled the Commander into their driveway. At 12:15 they were all asleep in their beds. Then a sickly smell permeated the house, and at 12:42, little Megan bolted upright in her bed and screamed. Zachary was standing in her doorway holding a baseball bat. Swing away, little slugger.

  The events that occurred over the next seven minutes were horrific: a young mind haunted by an ethereal, commanding voice; a voice entreating a son to punish the very beings who had br
ought him into the world and nurtured him; a voice whose undeniable power sent the young man into a blind psychotic rage. Megan’s keening shrieks were so visceral that both Andrew and Martha were up and moving immediately, their feet propelling them through the house as though it had been rocked by an earthquake. Their veins pumped panic and their vision was blurred by confusion. They didn’t see Zachary as he leapt from the shadows. But they felt the bat. Until they could feel no more. Zachary’s parents would recuperate, but the local authorities and neighbors would spend many sleepless nights thinking about what had happened in their bucolic town. They kept asking themselves the same question over and over: What could possibly make a child turn so cruelly violent?

  It was simple. The Devil made him do it. He was possessed.

  It was a signal. A call to arms. The Dark Lord hoped that it was enough; surely his minions would recognize his handiwork and would come for him soon. He had failed in the belly of Mount St. Emory, failed to use his own son to unlock the portal of the damned. But he would not dwell on his failure. He was already formulating a new scheme. He sent out black thoughts to his followers. Come to me. Rescue me and I will reward you by swinging the Sword of Armageddon and bringing a painful end to all of mankind!

  Chapter Four: Dreams

  Natalie turned over in her sleep, rolling onto her side, clutching the damp wrinkled sheet to her breast. Her eyes flicked back and forth under her lids. There was Will’s face, smiling, his teeth straight and white. Then a demon flashing down, then Will whirling and effortlessly dispatching the creature with a wave of his hand. They were on a mountain. He moved closer to her. He was wearing a white T-shirt, black cords, and no shoes. She was wearing a pink cotton sundress and was also barefoot. His muscular arms at his sides, his hands hanging loose, he leaned forward, teasing . . . teasing. She felt ribbons of pleasure spiraling around her body.