Chapter Twenty-Two

  Memories of Murder

  A treasure hunt into someone’s mind may seem like a grand old time, but it was more akin to slogging through a bog trying to avoid the river snakes than tip-toeing on a beach looking for diamond rings.

  There was the danger of a mind lost to madness, as he expected the Nocturne’s to be. A very real possibility was that it could simply be terrifying, a veritable haunted house of horrors. This had been the case, in his experience, was a vast amount of serial killers. Especially those who’d tempted the dark arts. It had a way of eating the mind.

  Instead of madness in the Nocturne’s mind, he found beyond the meadow and trees, a place of ordered servility.

  He’d walked onto a farm.

  Something from a child’s imagination. Like a picture from a children's book that can’t survive the real world, but it can survive the dreamscape.

  The Nocturne’s mind was frightening because it was so…normal. It wasn’t the mind of a madman serial killer.

  There were cows and sheep grazing in the fields. And chickens pecking through the dirt. Barns and green pastures. A small, white farmhouse near a grove of trees.

  With the front porch light on.

  There was someone sitting in the rocking chair. A small figure, drinking from a mug, draped in a white fleece shawl.

  Wesley walked briskly for the house, his heart racing faster the closer he got. The figure, which appeared to be an old woman, had no face. But still she drank from the mug.

  She raised an arm and pointed with a skeletal hand toward the door but Wesley didn’t move. He couldn’t look away from the milky white shawl. He recognized it but he couldn’t place it…

  Then she began to scream.

  Not like an old woman should. This was like a dying animal. The sound was eerie enough to make Wesley stumble back, a kind of visceral fear jolting him.

  Birds joined the woman, chirping and crying. When he turned around he saw hundreds of crows flying in a great dark curtain around the house.

  Reaching out a hand, he tried to touch one but a flashing of talons made him withdraw his hand. Distant pain welled somewhere in his mind as blood streamed from a gash on his palm. So, he could feel pain here but it was dulled.

  Wesley, against better judgment, but with little choice strode to the door and yanked it open and stepped into the foyer, leaving the screaming woman to her porch.

  But when the door slammed, he wasn’t in a farmhouse.

  He was in his childhood room.

  Wesley blinked, stumbling back into the wall, his shoulder hitting a picture, which fell, breaking against the floor.

  He did not bend to pick it up. His eyes were instead stuck on the bed and the small form that was sleeping there. It was him. He was looking at himself.

  Thunder rumbled out beyond the pane glass window above the bed. Rain fell in buckets, each drop threatening to break the window.

  Or at least that was what Wesley had always thought whenever it had rained this hard.

  From somewhere else in the house, there came the sound of footsteps, hurried and uneven. The little form in the better stirred but didn’t wake.

  No…no…no…

  Wesley knew what night this was. He did not want to be here. Not tonight.

  “No,” he said aloud, remembering this was only a memory in the mind palace of a madman. “You will not do this to me.”

  There came a distant scream…

  And still, young Wesley did not wake.

  Then another scream, this one louder, more bone chilling.

  Wesley flew out the door, leaving his young, slumbering self to the safety of the small room. He ran for the study, where he knew his mother had been killed. Lighting cracked above him, illuminating the path through the skylights better than the dim, century old lights did.

  There were raised voices now. And they were arguing…

  Wesley cleared the stairs four at a time and came upon a confusing scene. His mother, suspended in the air of the study, her back bent painfully. His father, whose face was bloodied, held a blade in one hand and his wand in the other while tears streaked from his bloodshot eyes.

  The Nocturne was pressed against the bookcase, lifted off his feet by some kind of…dark shadow. It was the best way he could describe it because it wasn’t an entirely corporeal thing.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  It was some kind of spirit.

  Wesley had never seen something like it. Not a ghost, not a poltergeist either. It was dark seeded, whatever it was.

  There was fear too. Palpable through the memory. The Nocturne was terrified of this thing that had him.

  The whole thing was like some horrible painting, a moment of terror caught still.

  Wesley looked around, sure this whole thing must be conjured up. He was searching for the falsities. The things the mind couldn’t make up to total purity. Usually they were small details. Little blurred spots. Words on the spines of books spelled incorrectly.

  To Wesley’s horror, he found none.

  Something else had been there that night. Whatever the story had been, his father had lied. It was not as simple as he’d made it seem.

  The scene played on as if there had been no pause. As if this new character in the murder of my mother was not a shocking revelation.

  The Nocturne began chanting, his voice a rasp as dark claws raked his chest, taking their time to break through the armor there, turning his dark cloak into shreds.

  A bright light burgeoned above them like a little sun…

  It hung above my mother’s contorted body, starting out the size of a bead and growing to the size of a football.

  Suddenly, the shadow beast began to scream. A horrible, aching screech. Its non-existent skin began to turn to ash, the dark flakes rising.

  With a light pop, the monster was gone and the Nocturne fell, landing on the ground, blood from his torn chest spraying carpet and strewn open books, painting their pages red.

  The spell had been broken.

  And Wesley’s father's rage resumed, his eyes finding the Nocturne. It was as if…as if he hadn’t even seen the shadow…

  The Nocturne barely dodged the first spell, which blew a boulder-sized hole in the bookcase and punched through to the waiting room.

  Smoke billowed, obscuring the room.

  Wesley’s mother fell with a scream just as the Nocturne dipped around the big desk and shot his own spell at Wesley’s father.

  The silvery spell hit Wesley’s mother in the chest and flung her against the far bookcase with bone crushing force.

  The Nocturne, who spared a half-second of pause, which could have been pure shock or horror, opened a portal in the same second and dove through it, disappearing with a pop.

  Wesley’s father on the other hand had become like a statue, staring down at the body of his wife. Who’s eyes were open staring blankly, her neck contorted horribly.

  It was like watching someone trapped in quicksand, unable to move but trying hard to.

  A voice, a child’s voice, came from outside the study, from the balcony, Wesley knew. He knew too what he’d asked that night but in the memory he couldn’t even hear the words. His eyes were stuck on his mother.

  His own pain and rage burned so hot that the memory world became blurry and he was falling straight through the floor…

  And he was back in the basement of the manor…on his hands and knees, retching acid onto the broken stone floor. That had been happening too often.

  The air was harsh, with burning flesh and the stench of blood overwhelming.

  Reality came back to him in a flood. He’d failed. His foray in the Nocturne’s mind had failed.

  Looking around, Wesley saw his father sauntering toward him, hands outstretched.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” he said bluntly.

  Wesley spun to look up at the Nocturne, whose head was tilted downward at him. He’d shown it to him on purpose. The memory.

  He had no time to reflect on what he’d seen. The chains that bound the Nocturne were beginning to break, the metal shrieking.

  “No–” Wesley choked.

  “We tried,” his father said. “I need you to take this, Wesley.”

  Wesley blinked, and turned–only for his father to punch him in the ribs. No…it wasn’t exactly a punch. Wesley doubled over but…it didn’t feel right. It burned, it burned a lot. Too much for just a punch and his father’s hand was still there, fingers fumbling…gliding down his ribs.

  Then the odd sensation was gone.

  “What did you do?” Wesley gasped.

  “I gave you a new rib,” he said quietly, somehow calm among the threatening chaos.

  “Why the hell–”

  Wesley threw up again, cutting his own question off.

  “You have it now. Run. You have to find the First Warlock. He can help. Do you understand?” Wesley was shaking his head. “Go!” he roared, stumbling.

  Everything was happening too quickly. The world shimmered and spun for Wesley, threatening to make him faint.

  A portal opened behind Wesley, he could feel the pull of it. He raised his wand at the Nocturne. The gauntleted hand came up.

  The chains shattered making the world darken.

  And above them, as Wesley’s head whipped back, he saw on the edge of the broken floor above them, the Colonel and his men. They’d been waiting, their spells hammering his father’s shield. They were taking their chance.

  The Colonel's face was hard as stone but his eyes were hungry.

  Wesley tried to warn them but the sound was lost among a rising thunder.

  Then Cecelia appeared from a veil and tackled him backwards. A red spell shot over them into the portal that had been opened. It snapped closed as fire burgeoned in the landscape beyond.

  Then an ice cold hand grabbed Wesely’s arm and started to drag him. He thrashed around, trying to free himself of it but the grip was too strong.

  “Stop it, you fool,” snapped an annoyed voice. “I’m saving your life.”

  It was the vampire girl, Esther, her bloody and bruised form a haunting figure. But there was no malice in her eyes for him.

  Explosions began again and a voice, his voice, echoed like a drum. “You have failed. Your luck has run out. My creatures will feast on your bones lest you give up now. Give me what–”

  A whip-like sound cracked the air, cutting off the voice, and Wesely saw an image of his father advancing on the Nocturne.

  The dome shield shattered in a brilliant display.

  A new portal opened beside the three of them and it blossomed with a weak kind of blue light on the edges. It was like the thing didn’t want to be open or was struggling to stay open.

  Then the same cool hand dragged him again, and they were no longer in the basement. Or amidst the battle.

  Wesely smelled apple crisps like the kind he remembered from childhood. A flash of red light and pain. So much pain he blacked out, the picture of a warm field playing in his mind’s eyes.

  “Father,” was the last thing he remembered calling into the void.