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Own only original stuff; not doing this for profit; suing would be pointless.
The little bitch would die! She had decided that, the moment she had found Crystal, broken and beaten in the alley behind the arcade.
From where she had knelt beside her, she could still hear the faint sounds of cheering and laughter as Liam and Anna hammered it out against C-55s and BU-12Bs on two BGC-Knights, while Sonya and Angela screamed insults at one another with as little real animosity as usual, and the others milled about, waiting for other games to be free, and all keeping an eye out for one another. It was useless to try overtly to watch their leader's back — she was as likely to flatten anyone who suggested she couldn't cope with anything that came her way, especially now.
Crystal's helpless whimpering had stopped as she had reached a hand to her shoulder, then the blue eyes had opened to look up at her. For a moment they had regarded one another, her own emerald gaze frigid with the promise of revenge. Then she was on her feet, flying back towards the arcade, screaming for the others.
That had been a mere ten minutes ago.
She had not waited for the ambulance: she could not afford to wait. She had headed straight for Fagen's, hoping to reach the drug-hole before they realised the mistake they'd made in pushing her this far, and went to ground for the duration.
She had been lucky. Gema and her little party of thugs were still there, probably waiting for Harrison to call to let them know what she and the others were doing, after he had finished with Crystal. She had found that idea amusing. Harrison would never talk again. Rianna, and Michael should be just about finished with him by now; just about.
It had been easy. All she needed to do was to remember little, fiery Crystal's helpless broken form, and that she was dealing with drug-trafficking, gutter-licking filth, and she didn't have to hold anything back.
She had smashed the first of the hired help (a Korean, she noted fleetingly) into the brick-work of the club's entrance with such force that the impact had shattered his spine like kindling. Kicking the semi-automatic from the hand of a huge jamaican with a snap that smashed his wrist to pulp, she leapt, flipped and landed, slamming the Maori who was still in the act of turning to help him, bodily through the plate-glass door, flicking out the tiny stiletto even as she followed, driving the fine dart-like blade to the hilt through his spinal chord just below the neck before twisting it free, and diving over him, already running before his body had tumbled to a stop. She was through the club and out into the darker passages behind, almost before the panic had begun. Then there was the dimly lit stairway, and the voices from the room at the smaller passage's further end.
Racing for the closed door, she had slammed it open, leapt through, and hurled the blade into the throat of the first of Gema's personal guard, even as he looked up in stunned surprise, turning only to smash the other over a table and through the window on the room's further side to plunge screaming to the alley below, before she was beside Gema, another blade already at her throat.
"Lock the door," she snarled softly.
The little bitch ducked, trying desperately to twist towards her, a knife in her hand. Dropping her own blade, she slammed her to the table and slapped the knife to the further side of the room. Something cracked, and Gema screamed. She ignored her, pivoting to the door in time to flick her last blade through the left eye of the gunman in the doorway.
"You should have used that, you know," she commented conversationally, as she retrieved his weapon and the tiny knife, pitched the dying body from the room, and slammed and locked the door.
"Now then, where were we?" she inquired almost pleasantly, moving to Gema's groaning form, pausing to retrieve her other blades and re-sheathe them, before dragging the dealer-hit-girl up by her hair. "Oh yes; I was about to slit your throat."
There was a crash at the door, then another, and a moment later it burst inwards. She smiled as three blades flew, and three men screamed and fell. Then the fourth entered with a pistol in his hand.
"Put that down," he snarled quietly, jerking a finger at the last blade she held to Gema's throat.
"We'll go together, your little pay-mistress and I," she said calmly, her eyes never leaving his face, her own expression utterly devoid of fear.
"If that's how you want it. Doesn't matter to—"
The knife opened his neck before he had finished, embedding itself in the door-jam behind him. He screamed, a thin gurgling sound, even as she whirled, pausing only to crack Gema's neck with a quick twist of her hand.
Flipping over the table, she landed, snatched her blades from the three dead bodies and the door-jam, then spinning she leaped for the shattered window.
"Jesus! Fr***in' bitsh," Came a gurgling, horror-stricken slur from behind her.
In the midst of her leap, she half turned, the stolen semi-automatic already up and firing, in time to see the man, blood pulsing between his fingers as he clutched uselessly at his neck, stagger up, the pistol still in his hand. Her feet hit the sill, and she hurled herself forwards, somersaulting towards the alley below. Then there was a crack from behind, and her world exploded in a brilliant, fiery red, even as she plunged towards, then through the street, to fall, choking back a scream of shock, into the oblivion beyond.
** ** **
Darkness Chronicles
An anime-Manga Cross-over
** ** **
Book I:
Part I: The Gathering
Chapter II:
** ** **
When he was a boy, Johnathan Liam O'Reilly had loved the journeys home late at night, after another visit to one of his seemingly innumerable relations. Curled up snug and warm under a travelling-rug on the back seat of the family Rolls Royce, he would lie still, eyes almost closed, listening to the soothing rumble of the tyres on the road beneath them and the gentle purr of the big engine, and drift in a half-dream, watching the patterns that danced upon the very edge of sleep, half-aware of his parents' quiet talk, and imagining the never-quite-defined brother or sister he had always wanted to be settled at his side, or waiting in the huge, too-empty house for his return. They would hurry to bed without complaint, but after the light had been turned out, they could stay awake far into the night, and talk of Middle-Earth or the land of Narnia, or some Blytonesque mystery or adventure; and perhaps one day they might even find some hidden way that led still to Loth Lorien or the Shire or the hidden valley of Rivendell, or perhaps a secret door into the world of Aslan, and to the fair castle of Kair Paravel, or the magnificent, terrible city of Tashbaan. The days would drift by in endless contentment, and nothing could break their friendship, or destroy their happiness.
He would wake a little as the big car drew into the long, tree-shrouded driveway, stirring still more as he was lifted, still more than half asleep, to be carried into the quiet, echoing house and up the wide, curving stairway to his huge yet cluttered attic domain, a domain that should have been the nursery for a large and merry family of children. Then alone in the dark he would lie awake, listening to the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall (one of four the house possessed), and pray silently and with almost desperate fervour to the Lord and the holy Virgin, that a brother or sister might somehow be there when he awoke the following morning, or that at least there might be some new boy or girl at school with whom he could share dreams no one but uncle Rory seemed to understand, and for which the other children laughed at him, and called him mad Paddy, or threw things, and stepped on his school-bag and took his lunch when he was not able to stop them.
How he had hated them then, not simply for their teasing, but for the fact that they would not even try to understand him, and that they liked all that stupid screaming thrash and rap and other noise, and Star Trek and Star Wars and other stupid, rotten American stuff. And it was all such utter rubbish that no one but an idiot could possibly like it; and they were all just too stupid to understand anything, and sometimes he wished desperately that a Black Rider would simply appear to carry the whole rotten lot of them off to some black pit from which none of them would ever come back.
Things would be different, uncle Rory had tried to reassure him, when he began at thirteen in his new school. But then his uncle and his parents had had a "falling out" as his mother put it, and Rory O'Reilly had gone back to Ireland, and for years Johnathan had thought his uncle had forgotten him. It was only very recently that he had learnt what had happened: that the quarrel had concerned both his uncle's decision to re-marry at last after the tragic death of his first wife (and his brother's wife's elder sister) when Johnathan was still very young, and what Rory O'Reilly considered Michael's and Elizabeth's neglect of their son. Even worse to Johnathan's mind was the fact that he had discovered his parents had refused to allow him to receive any correspondence from the man his mother, at least, still would not forgive.
With his uncle gone, things had seemed simply to go from bad to worse. Johnathan had always been small for his age, and at thirteen he had discovered he needed glasses, and that, contrary to his father's assurances, his growth seemed to be slowing rather than hitting the spurt for which he had been waiting for what seemed to him as long as he could remember.
He found friends of a sort at his new school: some few introverted, book-bound boys who would at least talk to him. But they had interests other than his own, and, being an only child, and forced more often than not to play alone, he was no longer capable of any real compromise. Any quarrel (and usually it would come down to some music other than the Irish and Celtic influences he most loved, or their caring nothing for classical history and the epic tales that had become ever more his escape from a world he had begun to despise with increasing intensity, or worst, comments concerning his own physical ineptitude at sports, and hopeless inability to defend himself in a fight) would end almost inevitably with Johnathan exploding in a furious flare of fierce Irish temper, followed by a protracted sullenness that discouraged any real camaraderie.
Johnathan had drifted through his later school years, his thoughts ever more occupied with his own dreams and fantasies, no longer even pretending to exert himself. He under-achieved intentionally, both to avoid notice, and increasingly to spite the too-rich parents who gave him all he wished, save for the praise he secretly so desired, presenting an increasingly sullen face to the teachers, who knew his true potential, but in the main who would not try to understand him.
His only true respite was the school's extensive library, in which he would sit for hours on end, devouring all it had to offer.
It was during his fourteenth year that he first began seriously to build and set down a coherent whole from the many worlds of his vivid imagination, and with them to imagine her: a wild, intense anima to counter his own loneliness, isolation and increasing disillusionment with the world around him.
Joanna Marina O'Reilly became for him, part the sister, part simply the confidante he was certain now he would never have: an invisible presence able to understand his troubles, and into whom he could channel all the frustration and anger he had not the confidence to show.
From the first, she and her reality presented a strangely dichotomous, and in many ways contradictory picture. Hers was a world in which the greatness of the British Empire had waxed rather than waned after the second world war, a world that hearkened back to an era he wished with all his heart had never died. And yet it was a world that stood upon the very edge of ruin as the twentieth century neared its end, and the Empire and its allies raced a brutal, stalinist USSR savagely for military dominance, while a fanatical, Maoist Red China bided its time and hoped each would destroy the other, and an isolationist, nominally neutral U.S.A. watched and did nothing, as the world teetered upon the very brink of cataclysmic nuclear war.
Joanna herself was from the beginning an impossibility, given her circumstances: a magnetic, street-wise virago with a heart laced with pain and grim determination: a martial artist and an accomplished singer and player of a dozen instruments: a fighter and gang-leader, cold and utterly ruthless where necessary, yet fiercely protective of those she considered her friends, and with a savage determination to escape the life of deprivation that was all she had ever known.
The only child of immigrants to a poor catholic area in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst in the Dominion of Australia, she was beaten mercilessly as a small child by parents who could not have cared less about her, until at last on her ninth birthday, when her father had tried to turn the almost daily physical abuse into something more, something had erupted suddenly from the helplessness and the fear, and she had driven a knife at his throat to send him crashing screaming through the bathroom window of their tiny eleventh-storey flat, to a broken, bloody end in the alley behind the tenement in which they lived.
It was that cathartic moment, Johnathan decided, that would forever change her. Gone was the quiet, bookish child who would simply bear and endure, and escape whenever she could. In her place was born a girl of rage and ice, and a primal, indomitable will to survive. From that day forth, he determined, she had set herself to pay her mother back a thousand-fold for every day she had suffered.
By the time Joanna had reached her eleventh year, Marina Elizabeth O'Reilly lived in perpetual terror of her daughter, unable to pretend even to herself that she could control her in any way: surrendering nearly all the money she made from selling herself on the streets, while her daughter's hatred and revulsion were a constant fear from which she could never escape, and a reminder of the ruin she had made for herself.
Meanwhile, Joanna spent her days winning back the self-confidence her parents had tried to take from her, with a frigid, ruthless determination that had every child she knew either in wide-eyed awe, or terrified of her, and almost every teacher desperate for her to be placed anywhere but under their care.
Joanna's twelfth birthday, Johnathan decreed, saw her make her first real underworld kill. He was a dealer five years her senior, who had tried, none too subtly, to convince her that it might be in her interests to sell for him on the streets and at her school, and especially to those stupid enough to think that a 'little guttersnipe like her' could protect them. In fact, she might sell something else too, he had leered. Johnathan took great pains to detail the object-lesson she had made of him: to have him plead and beg and scream for death before she left him and his bodyguard bloody, broken ruins as a warning to anyone else with the same idea.
But someone had seen: a small, wiry Japanese man, trained with superb discipline in the Art, who had come to Australia to escape his own past and tragedy, and who drank to hide all he did not want to remember. Horrified at what she had done, he would have called a dominion patrol. But he saw her slip silently into the deeper shadows, and he heard her cry.
So began her training with Hideo-sensei, her first real adult friend, and with it, the building of a fierce, unbreakable morality that otherwise she might have lost.
Like all those of her circumstances, Johnathan's anima grew up too quickly, her reputation for summary justice and unrelenting brutality towards dealers, pimps, whores and any underworld pig-swill that dared so much as look in her direction, soon so infamous that they either avoided her, or set a very high price on her head. She gave no quarter: beating, and when possible with impunity, killing anyone who dared threaten her or her friends, with a savagery and inventive flare that had soon even the worst of the Sydney underworld either too terrified to consider touching her, or wondering how she might be blackmailed or coerced into becoming an asset.
So she grew in Johnathan's mind, a girl just a little older than himself: an avenging bean-sidhe almost eleven inches taller than his own pathetic 5'1": an impossibly, devastatingly beautiful amazon with long, lustrous flame-red hair and blazing emerald eyes: a primal, desperate dichotomy to his own failings and perceived helplessness. Yet she believed herself physically unattractive, and would, save for rare moments and to very few, reveal almost no overt emotion, other than an iron will and a boundless determination to see that no one of the very few she truly cared for suffered as she had done. Supremely confident in herself and her ability to overcome any adversity, she was certain that, no matter what, she would shape her own destiny.
Only when she was alone and far from prying eyes would she allow the mask to falter, to reveal all that the world could never see, seeking desperately through her music and the fighting arts she loved, or in the boundless reaches of her imagination in the small hours when none would see the pain or the tears, something beyond the cruel deprivations of her circumstances.
So, over nearly two years, had grown the anima Johnathan had created, and the finer points of whose history now held his attention as he sat, staring moodily at the note-book Pentium on his lap. He was trying to decide just how much of her story to include in his first true attempt at a coherent full-length fantasy novel, only recently begun, to the further detriment of his final year of schooling. Joanna, of course, would be the character shifted from her world to the universe of magic and gathering darkness: someone far more fitting than himself to be the pivotal character in the story, yet close enough to him still for him to understand that, in every way that mattered, it would be his ideal: the supremely confident self he could never hope to be, that would make the journey.
Not that Johnathan had any desire to be female; indeed quite the reverse. He knew himself already more than hopelessly smitten by his creation; that was part of her appeal, and almost inevitable, given the circumstances in which she had come into being. She had become to him an unattainable, yet longed-for perfection: someone lost and lonely as himself, but who, despite their differences, would understand him, and would, could she but exist, be the friend and confidante he would never have.
Johnathan sighed. His parents were talking quietly in the front of the car, as usual ignoring the small, frail youth with too-thick glasses and quick, nervous movements who had been such a disappointment, but who could for the most part be placated with enough of an allowance to buy virtually anything he could wish.
Johnathan wished that they would just shut up for five seconds. It was proving impossible to concentrate with all their mindless prattle about lord Rutherford's dismissing of his butler, or what lady Madeline had worn to the ball at which he had been forced to waste the evening, and which had put him in one of the worst moods he had known for some considerable time.
Their speculations as to why their son was such a hopeless incompetent when it came to girls, also weren't exactly doing anything to improve his temper. Naturally, no girl had been interested in him, nor could he have cared less about any of the young so-called "ladies" with whom his parents seemed determined to match him, and see one day that he spent the rest of what he was certain would be a thoroughly miserable life. He was a hopeless dancer in any case, and usually an eloquent speaker (if nothing else, his years of reading had given him that), he seemed simply to lose all ability to think or react in a coherent fashion when a girl spoke to him.
"…and I just couldn't believe Johnathan this evening!" his mother was saying, her sharp, annoyed tone making him more furious by the second. "To think that he could be so disgracefully rude, when it was perfectly obvious Mariane was willing to dance with him."
'Willing to dance!' Johnathan fumed silently. The vindictive little cat had been trying to show him up in front of all her friends, just to see him squirm. He had heard the giggles, and seen the pointing. And if his mother thought that he was so damn stupid that he didn't know what was going on…
For a moment he glared furiously at her back, before jerking his eyes back to the note-book.
That did it! He was in just the right mood to give Joanna the additional abilities he had planned for her, far sooner than he had originally intended.
Johnathan moved his hands to the keyboard; and the machine flashed another battery warning, and a moment later, went dark.
"Baka! Baka! Baka! Baka! Baka!" he swore savagely under his breath.
Manga and Anime were a recent experience for him, discovered in part when he had been researching various martial arts disciplines for Hideo, but one that had become already something of an obsession. And being still a strict and practicing Roman Catholic, and so not prone to swear, he had begun to use such terms, especially within his parents' hearing, who were convinced they meant something much worse than they did, and so would become furious for nothing, much to his satisfaction.
With another glare at them (after all, if they had not distracted him, he could have had more written), Johnathan packed the note-book away, and sighed again. He consoled himself with the thought that they were almost home. At least then, once he had bathed and dressed for bed, he could settle in his room, and under the pretence of some homework or other needing to be finished before school camp that was to begin tomorrow, he could get back to the epic again.
* * *
"…and see that you put the clothes outside your bathroom door!" His mother's voice was the cold clipped tones of righteous indignation. "I've told Sonya not to take them if you don't. Then when you have no uniform tomorrow…"
I'm going to kill her! I'm going to kill her so much! She'll be so dead they'll have to find every ancestor she ever had, and kill them too, just to make up the difference, Johnathan thought helplessly.
"All right! All right!" he said, his small weedy voice almost shrilling. "Do you think you haven't told me that every night this week?" he continued in a mutter. "Baka! I said I'd take them down myself; what's the matter with you?"
"Don't you use that tone of voice to me, Johnathan!" she snapped, her own voice, he noted furiously, although not raised nearly so much as his, still managing to carry far more volume and authority. "And stop glaring and muttering to yourself. If you learnt a little courtesy from all that reading, perhaps Mariane might have been a little less displeased with you tonight. Not that I blame her; your behaviour was unforgivable!"
Oh, for heaven's sake, will you just shut up about Mariane! he thought wildly. She's a vicious, narrow-minded, shallow, vindictive, nasty little—
"Johnathan?" his father thundered. "Are you ignoring your mother?"
Johnathan gave up, turned, and shot upstairs. His parents heard the slamming of several doors, then faint sounds as Johnathan banged things, as he prepared for a bath and bed.
"I'm going to kill you both!" he raged helplessly. "I'm going to kill you, and make a pact with the devil to bring you back, just so I can kill you again and again. And then I'm going to…"
He stopped, a little shocked despite himself. And anyway, what was the point? He had better things to do.
Gathering up his pajamas and dressing-gown, Johnathan left his room, restraining himself from slamming that door as well, and made his way to the bathroom, which no one but himself and the few friends who had stayed very infrequently had ever used.
Some half an hour later, and hoping he had used enough hot water to see that at least one of his parents would have a cold shower, Johnathan left the spa, and, just to be sure, spent another ten minutes washing his hair. Satisfied at last as he felt the water beginning to turn cold, he finished drying, and dressed quickly for bed. If he was lucky, he might get an hour's writing done before his mother sent Andrews up to see that he was in bed.
He was not lucky.
Just how old did they think he was, he thought as Andrews left and he settled himself under the blankets. "Nearly seventeen, and they treat me like some baka ten-year-old!" he fumed to himself. "Gods! I wish I was anywhere but here!"
With a sigh, he reached for the note-book again, trailing its supply as he settled himself more comfortably, and switched it on.
"You're going to get a power-boost, my wild bean-sidhe," he said softly as he called up the historical information he had begun recently revising for his anima. "I'm in a particularly bad mood, and you're about to benefit. I hope you appreciate it."
And smiling, he began to write.
* * *
It was so dark, and more deadly cold than he had ever imagined he could endure. Johnathan shivered again, staring through the icy, cloying fog, trying desperately to see his way.
"Please, Azusa-chan! You can't do this!" the cry came again, a faint, thin sound, surprisingly precise in the cloying, stifling dark. "Don't you understand? It's your complement; she's controlling you through her. Azusa; please!"
'How does this fog carry sound like that?' he thought numbly, searching vainly with eyes that could barely see an inch before his face. Damn him losing his glasses!
"I have to find them before Viko closes the gate!" he kept saying over and over again to himself. "I have to! If I get myself lost here again! God! Please; I couldn't stand that; not again! Please; I have to find them!"
But the insane, maniacal laughter tore through the terrifying, numbing cold, and he knew he was out of time.
"Save what strength you have left to scream!" The voice was lost and wild.
Johnathan turned, trying with a last desperation to find a path towards the sound. Then suddenly he knew he was not alone, and in the next instant something hit him, and the world exploded in stars and pain, and he was plunging down, down into a ruinous nothingness that was for ever.
With a choked half-scream, Johnathan tore himself awake. The room was pitch dark, and his heart was pounding wildly, his hands still clutching desperately at the blankets as he wrenched himself into a sitting position, his stomach still clenched in a tight knot of fear.
He had suffered from nightmares and the far more terrifying night-terrors for as long as he could remember, and was more or less used to at least two of the former and one of the latter each month. But this one had been one of the worst he had had for a very long time.
Shifting, he lay down once more and curled on to his side, knowing that the best thing to do was to try to calm down and go back to sleep. But his heart continued to hammer savagely behind his ribcage, and the cloying, nightmare horror of the dream would not go away.
For almost a minute he remained, while an irrational, senseless horror grew on him, and a frozen cold crept slowly down his spine, until at last, both angry and increasingly alarmed, he rolled on to his back, staring upwards into the pitch blackness of the room. His heart seemed to be racing more frantically with every second, and a rising panic was beginning to claw savagely through the horror of the dream.
What was the matter with him? Why couldn't he calm down, or slow his wildly-racing heart.
Then his pulse lurched and skipped in a violent, arrhythmic stumble; and suddenly the horror of a moment before became a nameless, leaping dread.
He was having some kind of heart-attack.
Numb with terror, he froze, helpless panic dread leaping higher and hotter with every passing second, while he remained where he was and did not dare to move. But at last with a convulsive lurch, he hurled the covers aside, and half fell, half stumbled to the floor. He had to get help; if he didn't, he would die.
His breath coming in great ragged gasps, Johnathan lurched desperately for the door, feeling wildly in the dark for the handle. He missed it and nearly fell. Then he was out, reaching for the hall light, even as he tried to shout frantically for help. But the switch clicked in vain, and through his wild panic terror, Johnathan realised just how dark the house truly was. There was no power.
Shaking, numb with fear, he turned, trying desperately to call to anyone who might answer him. But his voice was no more than a choking, broken gasp, and he knew through the cloying, nightmare horror that no one could hear.
Staggering, half sobbing with primal fear, Johnathan lurched blindly along the passage, certain in his terror only that cold water might slow his screaming pulse long enough for him to call somebody. He reached the bathroom, and flung the door aside. But a wave of giddiness and nausea crashed over him, and he clung shaking to the door, sick with the certainty that it was too late. A roaring seemed to be filling his ears, and the numb, frozen cold was spreading like ice through his body, robbing him of all sense and reason, and leaving nothing but blind, all-engulfing horror in its place.
With a last effort, Johnathan lurched desperately into the room. But even as he reached the basin, pain like fire exploded in his chest, and he pitched forwards, his head striking the tap with a crack that seemed to fill the world. Then he was somersaulting into a leaping, soaring oblivion, his world exploding into ice and searing pain as he plunged down, down into a surging, hungry blackness that gaped wide to receive him.
And horror was everything; and he knew no more.
** ** **
Notes:
** ** **
Well, there it is. The main problem with the original Ch. 2, was the end, which was a joke, and the attempt to write some passages too much as the seventeen-year-old Johnathan might have done, which didn't work, and just made the writing look god-awful! Fortunately, it was easy enough to fix, and the thing's a hell of a lot better for it.
** ** **
