Dark Harvest (Darkling Mage 2)

“That makes one of us,” Sterling said. “I should’ve ripped pretty boy’s spine out the back of his head.”

“God, Sterling, please.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose. Bastion was okay. He had to be.

“Yes. Please.” Mama Rosa swatted at him with one massive hand. The eponymous proprietor of the Filipino restaurant that concealed our home, Mama Rosa was an excellent cook, and was possibly descended from giants. She was huge, built like a rhinoceros and likely just as violent. She spoke so rarely,

but when she did, even our resident vampire sat up and listened. “Please get out. No smoking, how many times do I have to tell you.”

“You smoke, too,” Sterling said.

“Not inside.” She swatted again, her hand making a meaty thunk against his shoulder. Sterling whined. “Out. Get out.”

Carver tutted. Sterling sulked, then slunk outside, making a show of wrapping his leather jacket tighter around himself. I was pretty sure that vampires were impervious to cold, but apparently they weren’t impervious to acting like gigantic babies. He pulled out his cellphone, face screwed into an exaggerated pout.

“At least we got out fine, and with the goods intact,” Gil said. He nodded at my backpack. “That sword is ridiculous. You don’t want to give that up.”

I nodded. Not a chance, not when Vanitas was both my roommate and my personal bodyguard.

“Indeed,” Carver said silkily. “Far be it for you to surrender the only weapon you have.”

I cringed. Here we go again. He was going to bring up the magic.

“But I’ve been trying,” I said.

“Not hard enough. Well and good that generating fire takes time and practice, Graves, but between your innate talent and my enormous brain, you would think that there would have been more progress.”

I held my hand up, staring hard into the creases of my palm, willing something, anything to happen. Carver sighed.

“Well you can’t expect anything at this point, can you? You’re exhausted.”

“But you brought it up.”

Carver folded his arms, tapping his foot from his table in the corner of the restaurant. Rosa tutted and tapped her foot as well, seemingly in rhythm. Gil gnawed on his raw steak, his eyes carefully avoiding mine.

“And then there’s the matter of the honing,” Carver said ominously.

“You know that’s even harder for me, Carver. That’s not fair. You know the risks better than I do.”

He slammed his hand against the table, the crack whipping the inside of the restaurant into renewed silence. “Then when will you learn?” he hissed.

I took a deep pull on my beer, half to buy time, and half to drown out whatever retort might have tried to make its way out of my body. The honing. That’s what Carver had come to call our process of refining my connection to the Dark Room. The battle at Central Square had seen me unleashing its contents, resulting in both wide-scale destruction and the incredibly painful, incredibly bloody reopening of the scar in my chest.

Carver wanted us to fine-tune that process, to hone my use of my ability, as it were. Instead of fully breaking down the door to the Dark Room, I could open it just a crack, enough to use it surgically. If I could learn to let out just enough of the shadows, I might be able to control them enough to use them as weapons. Given time, by literally sharpening my mastery of the darkness, I could conjure blades made of solid night out of nowhere. Trust and believe, that sounded so insanely fucking awesome that I jumped at every opportunity to practice and give it a shot.

At first, that is. At first. Because I realized the fundamental difference between merely moving through the Dark Room and actually opening the door. One was creepy, and cold, and always made it hard for me to breathe. The other made it feel as if someone was plunging a white-hot dagger straight through my heart.

I rubbed at my temples. This was why I even agreed to join the Black Hand – sorry, Carver’s little brigade – wasn’t it? To learn more about myself, what I could do, and ultimately, what I’d become after Thea not only sank a dagger into my heart, but planted something there. And there was something else I needed to talk to him about, too. There was the small matter of the poison rushing through my system. Fine. I decided to adjust my attitude.

“Soon,” I said, straining to soften my tone. “I’ll learn soon. But listen, can I talk to you somewhere private?” My eyes flitted between Gil and Mama Rosa.

Carver said nothing, but stood up in understanding, marching to the exposed patch of brick wall by the industrial refrigerator. He drew a circle in the air out of pale amber flame, used one of his many rings to prick the end of his finger, then embedded both the fire and his blood into the wall. The bricks slid apart, revealing a portal into Carver’s domicile, our home, what the guys and I had come to think of as the hideout.

We stepped through in silence, and Carver gestured down the hallway of our dimensional apartment-cum-office, which resembled a darkened temple hewn completely out of smooth, gray stone.

“Meet me at my desk,” he said, pointing past the knees of the enormous statue standing in the center of the temple, the sculpture that rose so high into the darkness that I still didn’t know what it represented after months of working and living there.

“We won’t have to,” I said. “I’ll make this quick.”

He folded his arms, cocked his eyebrow, then tapped his foot once, very much like a parent waiting for an apology. I wanted to just roll my eyes, but I caved.