The Darkest Night by Jessa Slade

breath whistled from him, like the sound a descending fiery sword might make as it aimed for her neck. She supposed she should be glad Thorne had taken Fane’s abraxas. She could only hope to appeal to the compassionate angel inside him.
    Just the thought almost made her laugh. Or cry. Crying had been the first thing she’d done in this body.
    She swallowed more of the drink. “No, I guess that’s not quite true. The imp didn’t kill her. She intended to kill herself, and the imp was one of the horde drawn to her anguish.”
    “Why didn’t you…” Fane fell silent.
    “Why didn’t I stop her? I had no ‘I’ then. Just the imp, and it had no thoughts as you would understand them. The tenebrae are only ravening hunger and fury and obliteration. Of course they—we—were drawn to Mirabel and all the pain and grief gouging her. We yearned for a place to be, a place where we could hide from the tenebraeternum, and she had such a vast emptiness inside her.”
    Fane was quiet a moment, then he said, “I want that drink now.”
    Bella reached behind her for the open bottles and poured. He stood as far away from her as he could and still reach the glass. She tried not to let his distance hurt. She was a monster, after all.
    “It happened up here,” she said. “This was a storage room at the time, and Mirabel was a waitress downstairs. It was on the solstice—the bar stayed open all through Christmas back then—and she had bruises from one guy who kept pinching her ass, but he tipped really good. That’s one of my first memories…” She stared down at her drained glass.
    “What happened?” Fane’s soft question loosened her tongue more than the alcohol.
    “I…Mirabel had come up here to restock the booze and to take a pain pill. She kept her drugs hidden behind a loose board over there.” Bella jerked her chin toward an old reliquary tucked into a wall nook. “She wanted to sit down for a minute, to rest her feet, but her butt cheeks were sore. So she stood, looking out over there—” She gestured toward the narrow, mullioned window. “It was snowing a little, maybe enough for a white Christmas, maybe not. Out of nowhere, she decided to take the whole bottle of pills.” Bella paused. “No, not out of nowhere. The tenebrae—we—had been focused on her for awhile.” She forced herself to look at Fane. “And you know what the tenebrae presence does.”
    He nodded and took a long drink.
    “She hadn’t gone home for Christmas in years. She’d just broken up with the last in a long line of shitty boyfriends who’d stiffed her on the rent. She had nowhere to be and no one waiting for her. So she swallowed all the pills, chased them down with half a bottle of vodka. And then she used her box cutter.” Bella dragged up her sleeves and tilted both forearms toward him.
    Slowly, he approached. His thigh bumped her knee, and she inhaled the sweet scent of the Drambuie she’d poured him. He ran one finger down the raised scar on her left arm. “No hesitation marks. This wasn’t a cry for help. She was done.”
    Bella shivered, at his touch or his words or the memories, she wasn’t sure. “If she’d ever cried out, only the demons noticed. And we drank her misery like it was last call.”
    She hurled her glass. It hit the wall beside the reliquary and shattered.
    “Fuck,” she said, apropos of nothing.
    Fane did not even twitch when the glass sailed by his ear. “But you’re here. Which means she didn’t die.”
    “She did. The imp watched while her eyes misted, as if the escaping soul was clawing free of the body, like a diamond scarring glass. The imp—I—wanted more. I wanted all of her agony. I wanted to dance in the light fading from her eyes. I got too close. As her soul left, I felt the emptiness sucking at me. The imp tried to flee, but it was too late. It sucked me right in. And I was born into her. I was born, dying.”
    She shuddered. “The imp got misery in spades that night. I