Last Rites (Darkling Mage Book 6) Read online

  But it felt as though my bond to the Dark Room had deepened even further. I could see beyond the mists now, finding that I wasn’t always surrounded by total darkness. The corridors around me weren’t just formed out of huge shrouds of shadow. Taking my time, looking closely, I saw that there were walls. Corners. Instinct had guided me from point A to point B in the past, so that I would never collide with anything.

  Yet knowing they were solid, I still never touched them. Look, but don’t ever touch, I told myself. Something in the back of my head told me that it wouldn’t end well.

  Strange as it may sound, in the distance, I once caught a glimpse of something that must have been a tower. The implication that the Dark Room had its own terrain, its own sky – that it truly was a realm separate from our reality, and not just a transportation chamber – both thrilled and terrified me.

  The shuddering mists seemed gentler, somehow. Quieter. Those ever-present clouds of darkness and odorless smoke that roiled and curled at my ankles, reaching tendrils for my skin, had felt tamer, more docile in the time since I’d wrenched control of the Dark Room away from Other Dustin and Yelzebereth. Their tranquility, naturally, only made me nervous. The calm before the storm, you know?

  And in those exploratory excursions, the main difference was that I never had a destination in mind. In the past the Dark Room had always just been a vehicle, a transition point, the express train from this part of our reality to another. Exploration was a different thing entirely. Once I even considered bringing in sheaves of graphing paper, to draw myself a kind of map.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Carver had told me. “The nature of the Dark Room is to be amorphous, always shifting. There’s very little rhyme or reason to its architecture. Its features alter with each of your visits. You already know that.”

  And damn it if he wasn’t right. Carver had been really supportive about my interest in discovering the Dark Room. In fact, he encouraged me to visit as often as I could. He said that immersing in the very elements and environments that tied us to our powers would only deepen our mastery.

  It was why he always let Sterling gallivant wherever he liked come nightfall, why he was so confident about letting Gil expose himself to the light of the full moon. In Asher’s case, it meant hanging out in a graveyard. Creepy, but whatever works, right?

  So yeah, no map, no graphing paper. What that meant was doing my best to negotiate the corners and corridors of the Dark Room, letting my mind and body adjust to its ever-changing topography. Going with the flow, in essence. I’d never made it as far as the tower in the distance – in fact, it seemed to move further the closer I came to it.

  For that matter, I’d never made any real headway in the many times I’d visited fully with the intent of charting out the Dark Room. No landmarks, no rooms or caverns to discover. Just long, twisting passages in some great, unending labyrinth.

  But that night, it seemed, was fated to be different. That night, I found one end of a golden piece of thread.

  My heart puttered. What the hell? That had never happened before. The Dark Room’s contents were always uniformly, well, dark. Its very nature was to be devoid of color and life, of any other objects apart from the shivering mists. The thread, glimmering and gold on the ground, seemed to mock me. It tempted me. Like a moron, I followed its trail.

  Don’t you start with me, now. Imagine you were in my place. All that time I spent in the Dark Room, and then this? I picked up one end of the thread, parts of me quivering with anticipation. I wound the string around my hand, gathering more of its beautiful, enticing gold.

  The thread was warm. It bore a soft, strange glow, so alien, yet so tauntingly familiar. I was just wondering where I’d seen it before when I felt a tug from the other end. My chest thumped. Gold. Could it be Mammon? The demon prince of greed?

  The force pulling on the string tugged harder. Desperately I fought to untangle the length of it that I’d looped around my fingers, but the thread only tightened, threatening to cut off my circulation. I cried out at the pain, the sound of my voice going dull and numb as it entered the strange, dead air of the Dark Room.

  Another strong, sharp pull came from the other end of the string. This time, it pulled me with it.

  I shouted, as if anyone could hear and help me, as the deceptively delicate golden thread yanked me bodily across the labyrinth at top speed. My feet tangled under me as I ran after it, terrified of having my arm ripped out of its socket by the force, and when I couldn’t run fast enough to catch up I tripped and sprawled all over the Dark Room’s floor.

  And that – well, that was just another uncomfortable first. The ground was knobbly and cold, like pebbled stone, but it was slightly slick, and wet. Worse – so close to the floor, with my cheek making contact, I swore I could feel it moving. Pulsing, like the hide of some great, reptilian beast.

  But yeah – I figured I’d have enough time to worry about that later, if I survived Mammon, or a monster, or shit, the fucking minotaur itself basically dragging my battered body all over the ground. This was it. A half-man, half-cow was going to tear me to pieces and eat my innards for its carnivorous man-cow breakfast. What a way to die.

  I held onto the end of the thread for dear life, one hand caught in its web, the other struggling in futility to untie its living knots – when all at once it loosened and let go. I tumbled over the ground, my hands instinctively going up to cover my face.

  Not the face. Never the face.

  The air shot out of my lungs as I slammed painfully into the floor. I moaned, my entire body no doubt covered in bruises, my clothes disheveled, my hair a tousled, awful mess. I groaned as I groped at myself, checking that I was still in one piece.

  One nose, two arms, two legs, two balls, and Little Dustin, all intact and accounted for. I sighed in relief, choking once from the sudden, stabbing pain of what must have been a bruised rib. Good. If Little Dustin – I mean Not So Little Dustin – was safe, I was all good.

  My vision swam from the impact, the bright lights of my strange new surroundings ringed in hazy, pale haloes. Wait. Lights? Among them were three pairs of eyes, which twinkled as they watched me. My heart pounded.

  Was it Hecate, separated into all her three bodies? No. This wasn’t her. I clambered away on my hands and feet, blinking rapidly, squeezing my eyes as if that could work away the blurriness. Spitting out bits of gravel, I looked up into three very similar, yet subtly different faces.

  “Dustin Graves,” said the Sisters. “We need to talk.”

  Chapter 5

  I looked around myself, thinking that maybe the fall had just jarred my brains enough to cause some kind of minor hallucination. Nope. The calliope music was real. As were the bright, twinkling lights, the stalls and booths filled with games and attractions. I was back at Madam Babbage’s, only there were no customers.

  “Was all that really necessary?” I looked each Sister in the face, biting back my anger. “Does anyone want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  One Sister raised her eyebrow. “This is an intervention, Dustin Graves.”

  I grunted when another picked me up by the scruff with powerful, perfectly manicured hands. “We talked about this,” she said, smoothing down the creases in my jacket, then recoiling in mock horror. “You’re a winter palette.”

  My frown should have been answer enough, but she stared at me, waiting for a response. “I still don’t know what that means,” I mumbled. “Between saving the world and trying not to die, it’s been really rough making time to look at fashion magazines.”

  The third Sister glared at my jacket, then held one hand over her mouth, like she was trying to stop herself from vomiting. “What that means in practical terms, dear Dustin, is that you should avoid dressing in colors that don’t suit your season.” She wrinkled her nose. “Or in fabrics that look like they belong at the bottom of a hamster cage.”

  Heat flared across the back of my neck, the blood rushing to my temples. This was the jacket
that Herald gave me. I looked good in it, and it was comfy, and that was all that mattered. Also, Herald gave it to me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Clotho – Lachesis – whatever, whichever Sister you are. This happens to be a really nice jacket, and it was a gift from my – ”

  “It’s Atropos,” the Sister said drolly. “And do go on. A gift from your?” She raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth curled into a taunting grin. Like she knew.

  “Never mind that,” I said, the blood gathering around my cheeks.

  “You’ve gone and done it now,” the second Sister said. “Made him blush. But at least it makes his skin tone a better match for that hideous jacket.”

  “Now, now, back to serious matters,” the first Sister said. “This is an intervention in every sense of the word. I don’t believe that we’ll be able to help your dress sense at all at this point, but perhaps we can at least assist in – other areas.”

  “Yes,” said the second Sister.

  “Oh, yes,” said the third. That was when the three of them parted, giving me a better look of where we were, exactly.

  I had landed somewhere outside a ring of stalls, which wasn’t at the carnival the night the boys and I visited. They were arranged in a loose circle in the carnival’s plaza, all manned by wildly different figures. Most were humanoid in shape. Some were – not.

  The woman with the winged body of a lion, for example – it was the Egyptian Sphinx herself. She watched me coolly with feline amber eyes that looked very much like Carver’s. Nearby, another woman’s emerald-green eyes peered out of an ornately embroidered garment that covered her from head to toe.

  Across the plaza, a wheel turned of its own accord, suspended by nothing in midair. Next to that was a blackboard that reached so far into the heavens that I couldn’t see where it ended. A piece of chalk scribbled and scratched against it, writing out a maddeningly endless mathematical formula.

  Among them, her hands folded together, a figure sat patiently on what looked like a throne. I checked again. Ah. Of course. Not a throne, but eight massive, segmented legs. It was the spider queen, Arachne.

  Wait. Arachne? I dusted my hands off, scraping dirt and tiny bits of gravel off my palms. “Hold up. Is this a gods-moot? Is this like your version of the Midnight Convocation?”

  “Indeed,” the first Sister said, nudging her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Our own little convention. The entities of fate and probability. We’ve called you here for a reason.”

  The other two Sisters were gingerly gathering the golden thread that they’d used to lure me to them. They wound it back onto a spool, working slowly. I could see why. I’d been asked to bring them a measure of spun gold as an offering once, and that had already cost me a bomb. Man, the things you could have bought with an entire spool of the stuff. My own Happy Cow franchise, even. Ah, but a man can dream.

  I patted myself down, smoothing out the wrinkles in my clothes and sweeping my hair out of my face – I don’t know, making myself presentable, I suppose. There were at least a dozen entities there that I’d never met before. Call me silly, but I still wanted to make a good impression.

  The entities didn’t seem to care either way. They were deeply preoccupied, each of them focused on what I realized were various forms of divination. Some cast bones, others consulted the bloodied gizzards of small animals. One woman sifted through a bag of runes. Another looked at a bundle of sticks, what I’d learned from my time in the underground was a complex Chinese system of divination known as I Ching.

  They paused at intervals, glancing between their instruments and my face as they worked. Their expressions were unanimously grave. As if that weren’t enough, a couple of them even tutted or frowned when they met my eyes. The Sphinx wasn’t even doing anything with her hands. All she did was stare at me, shaking her head in a slow, oscillating pattern.

  And so went the music of the oracle entities – their tools of divination rattling, clinking, and shuffling to the tune of eerie calliope music. The Sisters and I approached the great ring, my heart sinking just another tiny notch each time one of the entities glared up at me with disapproval, or what might have been disappointment.

  We made it to the center of the ring, and the Sisters busied themselves with a different spool of thread, this one glowing with a faint blue light. They tugged at it, measuring, spinning it back onto its spool, then tugged again, clicking their tongues and muttering among themselves the whole while. Atropos looked at me and shook her head.

  Was that – were they looking at my lifeline? The actual thread that represented my very existence? Holy shit. The night had gone from bad to worse. More like worst, actually. I turned in place, and seeing that the entities were still hard at work, made a beeline for Arachne.

  “Hey,” I said. She’d asked me for a lock of the night goddess Nyx’s hair, but had never come knocking to claim it from me. “Arachne. About that favor you asked me. The Sisters literally roped me here, and I didn’t have my backpack with me, which is where I kept – ”

  Arachne scoffed. “The Sisters certainly do have their own way of doing things, don’t they?” She shook her head. I tried not to mirror her by shaking mine in response. Arachne had done very much the same thing to me once, actually tying me up and dangling me upside down in a dark alley. I tactfully and perhaps very wisely kept my thoughts to myself.

  She waved one hand at me, each of her eight eyes quickly flitting to my face, then back to her hands. I realized that she wasn’t wearing her veil. Perhaps she was comfortable enough to wear her true face among her peers. More than likely, I thought, it was a kind of intimidation tactic.

  “We shall speak later, sweetling. Arachne has work to do.” I looked at her lap, not at all surprised to find a heap of fortune cookies there. Around the pointed ends of her legs was a growing mound of shattered cookies, among them the discarded plastic wrappers and little slips of paper.

  Arachne took out another cookie from its wrapper, smashing it so violently between two hands that it made me jump. Then she sifted for the fortune, read it, and grimaced.

  “Terrible,” she said, cramming the shards of cookie in her mouth and letting the fortune drift lazily to the floor. She smashed another cookie, and read the fortune from that one. “Awful.” Then another. And each time, she looked more and more aggravated. Oh, good. So even fortune cookies weren’t on my side on this. Just great.

  Still, most upsetting of all the entities was a woman who sat at a booth that was just a few steps fancier than the others, its wooden surfaces gleaming with polish, its ceiling covered in a canopy of fine cloth that billowed with the breeze. She seemed so strangely familiar, though I knew for sure that we’d never met.

  With her deep, wrinkled skin, and the silks that festooned her body, the woman could have blended in with the stall, but her small, twinkling black eyes and generous, tumbling waves of white hair gave her away. That, and her endless mumbling.

  “Death,” she murmured, shuffling a pack of tarot cards, reshuffling it, then selecting one at random. “Death,” she said again, indicating the card she’d only just picked. She shook her head in frustration, her mane trembling as she shuffled again, then slapped a single card onto her table. She bared her teeth, stabbing at the card with one crooked finger, her eyes lifting slowly to meet mine.

  My heart in my throat, I bent over, already knowing with cold dread which card had stubbornly decided to play itself into her hand so many, many times. It was the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, with an image of an armored skeleton riding a pale horse. I swallowed hard as I muttered under my breath.

  “Death.”

  Chapter 6

  “Death,” I muttered. “Really? Is that what the cards have for me?”

  The old woman looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. Something about her spelled immense magical power. I couldn’t tell if she was a goddess, a supernatural entity – maybe even a demon? But I finally realized why I’d recognized her.

  “You’
re Madam Babbage,” I said. “From the signboards. And the website. I thought you were just some made-up character.”

  I realized too late how rude that must have sounded, but it was true. Madam Babbage looked more like a caricature of a person than an actual human being. Her features were exaggerated, her eyes like tiny onyx spheres, her wide mouth set in a perpetual frown.

  If Madam Babbage was offended, she did an excellent job of hiding it.

  “Madam Babbage is my alter ego, stupid boy,” she said, the words rolling thick on her tongue. Her accent sounded so close to something from Eastern Europe. Russian, maybe? “You may have heard of me by my true name: Baba Yaga.”

  My spine stiffened. The powerful witch from Slavic legend, an entity who bested even the greatest heroes of Russian myth. Baba Yaga was one of those rare beings who sat on the knife’s edge between good and evil, order and chaos. She did what she wanted for her own purposes, and the rest of reality simply had to bend itself around her whims and wishes.

  “I’m so – I’m very sorry if I didn’t recognize you. Miss. Ma’am. Madam Yaga.” Shut up, I told myself. Just stop talking.

  Baba Yaga raised an eyebrow at the other entities, who I’d only just noticed had gathered behind me in a semicircle, peering over at the witch’s stall.

  “This is your hero, yes?” she asked glumly. “This stupid boy?”

  “He’s cleverer than he looks,” one of the Sisters said.

  “And very charming,” Arachne said reproachfully. “Our sweetling is very sweet indeed.”

  The chalkboard creaked, but said nothing, because it was a chalkboard.

  Baba Yaga appraised me with narrowed eyes, her wrinkles deepening. I stood there and clenched my teeth, taking my criticism like a big boy. Again: I’ve seen the consequences of pissing off just one entity. Just the one. Amaterasu, Dionysus, Arachne – I didn’t want that list growing longer. I most certainly didn’t want the entire Bazaar of Wonders tearing me a new asshole, or failing that, warping the threads of my destiny. Like I needed more bad luck. I mean, come on.