Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

By then, however, it was one in the morning and his eyelids were so heavy they seemed to be dragging his head down. His eyes kept unfocusing so he had to roll away from the computer, and the dizziness of exhaustion made him lie down. Ignoring the blankets, he collapsed onto the bed.

The first time he jerked back from sleep, his heart was pounding and there was a sour taste in his mouth. 1:45. He pulled a pillow over his head. He only had a couple of hours left until his alarm was due to go off. He couldn’t possibly dream on only a couple of hours’ sleep.

Cooper Blake was in trouble. Delilah hadn’t decided yet what she planned to do about that, if anything, but it had taken only a moment for her to know that Cooper was in way over his head and sinking fast. It was now the middle of the night … no, well past the middle of the night … and her mind was still on the problem.

Unlike most members and supporters of the Lenmark Ocelots’ football team, Delilah had not gone to visit Cooper in the hospital. She knew about the accident, of course, but though she had many interesting skills, she was no doctor; there would have been no point in her loitering by his side while he was comatose.

She knew Cooper had been unconscious for three days. She couldn’t help hearing about it from the other girls on the squad, the guys on the team, her friends on the school paper, and everyone else she ran in to, all of whom it seemed wanted to offer emotional support, or ask for it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Cooper; he was hard to dislike. He was the kind of person who, when presented with the opportunity to do a good deed, didn’t have the sense to contemplate being selfish instead. A total sweetheart, which meant he wasn’t interesting enough to be her type for dating, but he was fun to keep around as a friend. Indeed, she would’ve been sad if he had died … but he was still alive and kicking, so she didn’t know why everyone had made such a big deal about it.

What that meant, though, was that she hadn’t sought Cooper out in the hospital or at school since his return, and so had no idea how long he had looked this bad. People normally didn’t get that coated in psychic filth without dabbling in heavy magics. But unless Delilah had seriously misjudged him somewhere along the way, Cooper was no amateur sorcerer. She had to look for another source.

If Delilah hadn’t known what Cooper was normally like, she wouldn’t have felt driven to help him. After all, he wasn’t on the team anymore, he hadn’t called her, and he had snubbed her attempt to be nice. Under any other circumstance, she would have said that if he wanted to huddle in his own mystic mishap, that was his prerogative. However, Cooper was so infested with dark power, he probably couldn’t help being jittery, couldn’t help seeking isolation. He would draw back from those he was close to instinctively, even if he didn’t consciously realize his infection was a danger to those around him.

Delilah sat cross-legged on her down comforter and shut her eyes now, centering her awareness.

She knew from experience that there were beasts in the shadows of the world; they had nearly killed her when she was twelve. They scurryed about intent on nothing more than sating their own hunger. They latched on to the weak to feed, bloating themselves until their hosts somehow shook free of them, or died from the infection.

Sure enough, when Delilah opened her eyes, her attention focused not on the physical world but the paranormal one instead, she saw the hungry shadows pacing around her. Ryan le Coire had told her that those few individuals who could see these beasts all perceived them differently; they always reminded Delilah of some kind of centipede or other vile, multi-legged creature, slithering and grasping at everything they touched. They must have caught her scent when she stopped to talk to Cooper.

The sight of them made her skin crawl. She crossed her arms across her chest and fought the instinct to run. Running would give them an opening.

She walked slowly to the window, which she opened fully. The fresh night air would help her focus. She wasn’t strong enough to banish the shadows completely, but if she was careful, she could keep them from making a meal out of her. Eventually they would tire of stalking prey they had no hope of taking down.

It would have been a wild coincidence if Cooper’s current state was not related to the accident, so Delilah opened her laptop, signed on to the neighbors’ unsecured wireless network—their own fault for not bothering to set a password—and looked up the event she had only barely paid attention to at the time.

She skimmed headlines as they came up.

MAJOR ACCIDENT ON INTERSTATE KILLS TWO, LEAVES FOUR IN CRITICAL CONDITION.

WET ROADS BLAMED FOR EIGHT-CAR PILEUP ON I-90.

She read article after article, starting with national press and then focusing on local news outlets, which had given more attention to Cooper instead of chattering endlessly about the celebrity involved in the crash.

From what she could put together, a patch of fog had turned slightly slippery roads into a zero-visibility death trap. One witness said she thought she saw a deer or some other animal in her rearview mirror. She had passed safely out of the fog, but the driver of the car behind her had slammed on the brakes, and because the drivers of the cars behind it weren’t able to see what was happening, disaster had followed.

Delilah had already known that Cooper’s survival had been questionable when he had first been rushed to the hospital. The doctors who performed the emergency surgeries required to save his life were quoted in the paper, calling Cooper’s recovery “miraculous.”

A little more research revealed that Cooper had been driving the car in front. After he had hit the brakes, his car had spun out, and he had been thrown through the windshield and onto the pavement at seventy miles per hour. One article reported that he may have been hit by another vehicle after that.

He should have been dead. No wonder the shadows were following him. They had hooked their claws into him, ready to feast on the remnants of his mortality once he gave up, but then he had denied them. He had lived.

And he still lived.

That meant the papers had gotten the story wrong. This was not just a jock who survived a car accident. Something more powerful than a mere human being had claimed Cooper and kept him alive. For Cooper’s benefit? Maybe, but unlikely, judging by Cooper’s lack of experience with the occult.

Most people were lucky enough to never know the scavengers existed. Healthy individuals could usually break free of their grasp without even realizing they had been bitten, like fighting off the common cold. Even Brent, Ryan’s golden-boy telepath, was completely blind to them, since he had never bothered to expand his powers beyond his inborn knack for reading minds.

Those who worked with greater magics, however, and struggled to make more of themselves the way Delilah did, attracted the shadows’ attention. They had scared her so much the first time she saw them when she was twelve that she had backed off and refused to do so much as touch a Ouija board—until Ryan le Coire picked her out of a crowd during a freshman field trip into the city, and told her she had a great deal of latent power, which he could teach her how to use.

She believed in meeting one’s potential.

So even though it was already two in the morning, Delilah set her alarm for five. There were rituals she needed to perform in the morning, to strengthen her shields before the school day began, to make sure none of Cooper’s shadows could set its teeth into her.

As soon as school was out, Delilah would confer with her associates, and then she would have plenty to say when she spoke to Cooper again.