DARKNESS EVOLVES Chapter Six
"Get up, Daniel," I shook him.
It was well after dawn. The noise from the highway was pretty loud, but that wasn't what had woken me up. The danger was back. I could ken it like the sound of a locomotive's whistle, far in the distance. Sometime in the night the track had been realigned and we were back on it again. The train was headed our way.
"Wha ... " Daniel's eyes fluttered, then abruptly snapped open. "What the fuck?" He sat up. "Where are we?"
"We're in a motel room. What do you remember from yesterday?"
His brow furrowed. "I was painting. Your portrait told me to get out of the house, so I did. Then the house blew up. Shit! Did our house really blow up?"
"It got hit by a plane."
"Plane! A plane flew into our house?"
"Yeah, a commuter jet."
"Fuck. So where are we?"
"We're in a motel, Daniel. We need to leave."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"It's found us again. I don't know how, but it has."
"Whoa -- bro, slow down. What's found us and why's it looking?"
"It's a demon, I think. It changed the lights in the street. And it sent an email to your mother about us. It froze your accounts, too. I thought we'd have some time here, but it found us again. Something bad is coming. We need to go."
"Right." Daniel got out of bed and stood naked, peering around the room. "Where're my clothes?"
"Your pants are in the bathroom. Sorry, but they're still damp." I'd had only partial success washing the blood out of them. Luckily they were so paint-stained it didn't matter. The t-shirt was too shredded and charred to be wearable.
Daniel walked into the bathroom and flicked the light on.
"What the fuck!" he yelled.
Oops. I should have warned him about that. I got up and went to the doorway. Daniel was standing in front of the mirror, staring at himself.
"What the hell happened to me?"
"It's okay, Daniel." I went up and hugged him. The hair on his chest tickled my check.
"You got hurt when the plane crashed," I explained. "I talked your body into healing itself, the way it does whenever there's a full moon. I thought it would be better if everyone thought you were killed in the crash, so I also got it to make a disguise for you. It's just a little bit of your bear-wolf mixed in with your normal self."
Daniel examined himself in the mirror. He was completely healed, but that wasn't what he was looking at. His skin and eyes were now much darker and his hair was wiry and black. He had more of it too, all over his body, including a week's worth of beard. He looked vaguely middle-eastern. He was still a hot man, but if you hadn't met him before you wouldn't recognize him as Daniel. For the first time in my life, my brother and I looked like we might actually be related.
"Yeah," he grunted, "All right. Am I going to look like this from now on?"
"Just until the next full moon. When you change back you'll look like yourself again."
"Okay." Daniel pulled on his boxers and pants. He picked up his shirt and regarded it with dismay. "I can't wear this."
"I know. Come on Daniel. We have to go."
Daniel took a final look at himself in the mirror. "This is just too freaky," he muttered.
Outside the sun was up but the parking lot was mostly empty. I don't think the place did much over-night business. No one saw us run to my car.
"Shoes," Daniel grimaced as he slipped into the driver's seat. "You don't have any of my shoes, do you?"
"No, Daniel. Sorry."
"All right. Where are we going?"
"I don't know. I don't know how it found us so fast. No one knows that we're here."
Daniel reached down to pluck my cell phone out of the dashboard cup holder.
"Have you used this?"
"No. It's been there all night."
Daniel was up out of the car and ten feet away, at the edge of the parking lot before I knew it. He dropped my cell phone onto ground, picked up a chunk of asphalt that had broken off, and smashed it down on the phone. He pounded the phone to smithereens, then swept the fragments off into the weeds encroaching onto the parking lot.
"Okay," he said, a few seconds later when he slipped back into the car, "just point me whichever way feels safest."
We pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the street in the direction Darkness whispered was off of the train track.
"Your cell phone was on," my brother said conversationally, "wasn't it?"
"Yes, Daniel," I said. "But I didn't call anyone."
"You don't need to. They can still be traced. Maybe even when they're off."
"Oh. I didn't know that."
"Figured. But that could answer the question of how it found us. If the demon can change traffic lights and cause an airplane malfunction, it can probably track a cell phone."
He frowned. "It's not your demon is it?"
"No, Daniel."
"Okay. How are we doing?"
"Good." The sense of danger was rapidly decreasing. We'd cleared the tracks. "I think we're okay for now."
Daniel drove until we hit an intersection with a run-down looking strip mall on one corner. He pulled in and parked on the far side of the lot.
"Think you can get me a shirt there?" he asked, pointing to a store marquee that said THRIFT-TOWN.
"Sure," I said. "Maybe they have some shoes, too. What size are you?"
"Eleven."
I grabbed my wallet and went into the store. I found a worn denim long-sleeve I thought would fit Daniel for $1.99. There weren't any shoes, but I saw some new sandals that looked okay, so I got them for $2.99. The total was five and some change. That was good, because after using the grocery money to pay for our motel room last night there wasn't much left. I hoped Daniel could figure out what to do about that.
When I got back to the car Daniel was sitting with his hands on the steering wheel, staring ahead.
I opened the driver's side door and handed him the shirt. "Here, Daniel."
He got out of the car and slipped it on. It fit fine. I put the sandals down on the ground and he stepped into them. He stared down at his feet, still silent.
"Daniel, what's wrong? I'm sorry they didn't have any shoes, but I thought these would work okay. They aren't okay?"
"They're fine."
When he looked up Daniel's face was scrunched in pain. His dark eyes were shiny with unspilled tears.
"I heard on the radio," he whispered. "Our house is gone, bro. It's all gone. Everything. My studio and all my paintings and your clarinet. All of Dad's and Mercedes' things. Our home. And my accounts have all been frozen. We don't have anything. It's like our whole lives have been taken from us."
I stepped in and put my arms around him. Daniel pulled me in tight, like I was the only thing keeping him from being swept away with the rest of his life.
"The universe doesn't give a fuck," he muttered in my ear.
When Daniel's depressed that's his mantra: the universe doesn't give a fuck. It hadn't always been that way. I don't know if he ever believed in God, but I know that when he was young Daniel thought the universe loved him. Things happened over the years to strip that faith away.
The first was when he was in seventh grade. I was only four at the time and don't remember, but Mom does. I'd found it in her memories.
A stranger had tried to grab him when he was skateboarding in a parking garage. Daniel got away, but his shirt was ripped and it scared the shit out of him, `cause he knew what the man wanted. It turned his life upside down. The possibility that a stranger would want to hurt him -- him specifically -- was something that had never occurred to Daniel before. Suddenly the universe wasn't so loving.
They never caught the guy. Dad signed Daniel up for self-defense lessons. That's when he started in martial arts. Mom never told anyone, but she threw a curse that probably killed the bastard.
After the attack Daniel started to pay more attention to how his looks affected the way others treated him. Most teenagers do some playing around with their appearance, but he'd gone overboard. He grew his hair long and matted it in dreadlocks; he shaved it all off and went bald. He wore outfits like flannel shirts with seersucker pants and hand-stenciled bowling shoes.
Doing all that just made him seem like a cool artist type and it always looked great on him. It really annoyed some people, as if he were intentionally pointing out how he could look fantastic even dressed like that.
In high school he went through a sullen phase and sort of shut down. He stopped talking much, which sometimes made others think maybe he wasn't that smart. It's not fair if someone so good-looking is also smart. He'll still do it sometimes: act spacey around people he doesn't think much of because they haven't earned the right to know who he really is.
When Dad died and then Mom went crazy it was another huge shock to Daniel. He lost his father and his stepmother, and was saddled with the raising of his ten-year-old half-brother. The universe didn't give a fuck about him.
I'd told Daniel's mother that I hadn't seduced him, and that was true. But there was something else that I hadn't said. When Mom told Daniel to look out for his baby brother -- just before she unleashed her vengeance on Charolotta -- it wasn't just a mother's teary request. It was a Darkness-powered command. She ordered him to take care of me. For the past eight years Daniel's been my satelles. My brother's a good guy and he loves me, so he would have seen to it that I was cared for even without her command. But Mom hadn't wanted anyone to come between Daniel and his responsibilities to me. That's why none of his relationships have ever lasted.
Then the werewolf attacked him and gave my brother the moon gift. And now something that dwells in Darkness had reached out and destroyed his home. The universe really doesn't give a fuck about Daniel Meltzer.
My brother's been so good about trying to give me choices. That's not something the pervert or the Estrellas or the Darkness ever did for him. I could probably give him some of his choices back. Mom's shade could help me find a way to convince his beast half that I'm not its mate. Then he would go back to feeling towards me the way he did before he became a werewolf. I could do that, but I won't. I'm not as generous as he is. My darkfather taught me lots of things, but sharing wasn't one of them. Daniel's mine and I'm not giving him up.
But because of me he'd lost a lot, so I owed him. He was hurting and I knew what would help: my big brother needed to feel needed.
"What do we do now, Daniel?" I asked.
"Good question." He gave me a final squeeze and stepped back. I pretended not to notice as he knuckle-wiped the tears away.
"Okay," he took a deep breath. "I need to understand the big picture. Why are we hiding?"
"We're hiding from the demon. It knows that I'm out here, but right now it doesn't know were I am. And it doesn't know that you're still alive."
"It can't just find us, like, psychically?"
"No. I'm blocking that. It has to use lightblind tools."
"Hmm," he started to rub his jaw, then stopped when he felt the stubble. "How long did you plan on hiding?"
"Until we know where it is."
"You mean who it's possessed?"
I nodded.
"And that has to be someone close to us?"
"Yes."
"Could it be my mother, or is that too easy?"
"It wasn't in her when we talked to her."
"Walter?"
"Not him either, or Amber."
"Damn." He thought. "How quickly can it jump in and out of people?"
"I don't know. But I don't think it would be jumping around a lot. Also, I could tell if it had ever possessed one of them."
"And it can't just hover somewhere outside of a body?"
"No. Darkness is dwindling, Daniel. Demons used to be spirits that could exist all on their own, but they can't any more. They need something physical to hold onto, to keep them from fading."
Daniel's mind was racing. He's good at figuring out puzzles. I love watching him think. Sometimes his thoughts move incredibly fast: bing bing bing, a lightening chain of deductive reasoning. It's so different from how I ken things.
My brother reached out to touch where the silver cross lay beneath my shirt. "But the physical anchor doesn't have to be a person, does it?"
"It doesn't have to be, but if it's not alive the demon gets weaker. Demons feed off of us, our feelings and thoughts. They can still feed off a group, sometimes -- like at a church service or on a battlefield -- but usually it's just one person at a time."
Daniel nodded slowly. "Okay, so they need human emotions and they need a physical anchor. Do those two have to be the same thing?"
"What do you mean?"
"The demon's messing with our computer networks. Could it actually be living there?"
"You mean inside a computer, Daniel?"
"Not just a computer, a computer network. Hell, how `bout the whole goddamn Internet? Could a demon live inside the Internet? It may not be alive, but there's an awful lot of human feelings and thoughts flowing through the Internet."
A shiver shot through me. I thought back to my walk through the darkened jungle and the something that had stirred overhead, blocking out the light. Daniel had nailed it. A demon had possessed the Internet.
"You're right, Daniel," I nodded. "A demon could live inside the Internet."
"Shit. Do you think it is?"
"Yes."
"So that means it's everywhere." He shook his head. "That doesn't help any, does it?"
"Yes, it does." I felt Daniel's insight moving through me, realigning things into a new pattern. "I don't know how yet, but I know it does."
"All right." He sighed. "Now what?"
I shrugged.
"How much money do we have?"
"Nineteen dollars." I'd counted it when I bought the clothes.
"We need more cash. If the demon's in the Internet, we can't use credit cards and we can't go to an ATM to get more money. We need to stay away from security cameras."
"I can fuzz cameras," I said, "if it's just one or two."
"Really? That's cool. But we still can't go to any banks. We're going to need some help. What if we used an old-fashioned pay phone to call Amber? Shit," he sighed, "forget it. We can't even do that. She'll answer on her cell and it could listen in on the call. If I were looking for us I'd be monitoring the phones of everyone we know."
He was right. We had to hide someplace no one would expect. And we'd need help, from someone no one would expect. From the depths it floated up.
"Chris Berkman," I said.
"What?" He stared at me.
"You know someone named Chris Berkman."
"Shit -- that's right. How did you know?"
"I just do. Call him, Daniel."
"Jesus, Joey, I don't know. We've only talked once. What do I say?"
I shrugged. "Tell him there was an accident at our house and we need a place to stay."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, Daniel. It will work. I'm sure of it."
Daniel scanned the strip mall. "Over there," he pointed. "It looks like there's a pay phone over there. Let's go try."
There was a phone and it was working. Daniel put in two quarters. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and punched in a number.
After a few rings someone answered.
"Hello, Chris? This is Daniel. You may not remember me, but you tried to give me your card outside the gym a few weeks ago."
The guy on the phone said something.
"Yeah, Daniel the swimmer."
The guy said something else. Daniel grimaced; he cleared his throat. "Well, actually, I'm calling to ask if you could do me a favor. I just had a bad fire at my house and my little brother and I need a place to crash tonight. Do you think you could put us up? I know that's a lot to ask from a stranger and I totally understand if -- what? You will? Really? That's great! When can we come over? Okay, no problem. What's the address? No, I'll remember it. Great. We'll see you at six. Thanks, man."
He hung up and looked at me. "I can't believe he said yes."
I could. Chris Berkman: I felt the pieces all lining up. He was exactly who we needed.
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