Dark Things

by Sukanya Venkatraghavan

Genres: Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

Somewhere on Prithvi, a mortal survives a supernatural attack. In the dark realm of Atala, an evil goddess prepares to do the unspeakable. And a Yakshi finds herself at the heart of an other-worldly storm. Ardra has only known life as a Yakshi, designed to seduce and kill men after drawing out their deepest, darkest secrets for her evil mistress Hera, queen of the forsaken realm of Atala. Then, on one strange blood moon night, her chosen victim, Dwai, survives, and her world spins out of control. Now Ardra must escape the wrath of Hera, who is plotting to throw the universe into chaos. To stop her, Ardra needs to find answers to questions she hasn?t dared to ask before. What power does the blood moon hold? Is the sky city of Aakasha as much a myth as its inhabitants ? the ethereal and seductive Gandharvas and Apsaras? Who is Dara, the mysterious monster-slayer, and what makes Dwai impervious to her powers? A heady concoction of fantasy and romance, Dark Things conjures up a unique world wrought of love and sacrifice, of shadows and secrets, of evil and those who battle it.

Release date: January 27, 2016

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 337

Sample

1

Someone once told me a beautiful story. A princess had been cursed to sleep forever and could only be awakened by true love’s kiss. Then, one day, a prince came along and kissed her, and they lived happily ever after. I liked the story, though I didn’t think it was quite that easy to wake up from curses of that kind. But I liked the idea that a kiss could bring someone back to life.

Because, you see, usually when I kiss someone, they die soon afterwards. I live in the exact opposite of a fairytale. I kissed the man who told me the story. He kissed me back passionately, as if it was the last thing he’d ever do.

Turned out, it was. He died a few hours later. So, now do you understand? The story amused me. But I couldn’t believe in it. It is easier to believe in the curse of the evil witch than in the kiss of true love.

Just like it is easier to believe that monsters and ghosts exist than Gods do.

Of course, monsters exist. They roam the earth. They scope the sky. They haunt the underworld.

And monsters don’t look anything like monsters. They look like you and me. In fact, they look more like me than anyone else.

What do I look like?

My mirror – the little thing made of some ancient metal and mercury – tells me I look like dark magic. Sometimes, when it is in a charitable mood, it says I am pretty, like a vial of poison. Beautiful, like blood. Tempting, like a secret.

Sometimes my mirror will tell me what colour my eyes should be that evening. And, at other times, it will just cloud over and not speak to me at all.

I was wearing soulful brown eyes that day. The kind that make men want to rescue me.

He was tracing the twisted flickering of my lashes on canvas in a manner no man had, in even the deepest moments of passion.

‘Maybe strangers see your soul the way you yourself don’t. That’s what happens when you flirt with serendipity,’ he said as he sketched me, his long fingers smudged with charcoal. This was right after I had said the drawing looked nothing like me, even though it did.

There was no place for serendipity in my life. It was pretty straightforward. I had rules and timings, and consequences if those rules were not followed.

But it had rained that day. I liked it when it rained. It washed away the borders of my life, however temporarily, and I could allow time to stretch itself out just a tiny bit.

So, when the sky decided to storm loud and heavy, I found myself running for shelter. I liked doing normal human things like running from the rain when I could. At other times it was a fun game, dodging lightning and riding rainclouds.

I ran towards the nearest shelter I could see – a few tents in the middle of a ground that sported a large banner with the words ‘Art Festival’ on its gate in bright lettering. I hurried into the compound, with its gaily coloured tents and stalls where people were selling things or making them. That’s when I saw him.

He was sketching an old man, his long fingers moving nimbly across the canvas. I paused in the rain and watched him until he began to sketch a little girl. When she left clutching her drawing in her little hands, a delighted smile on her face, he sat back for a moment, looking satisfied.

Following a strange impluse, I walked up and sat down. He looked at me for a few seconds and then picked up a pencil.

I let him sketch me because I was curious. For once, I wanted to know how someone saw me, and not the other way around. I watched his dark hair fall over his eyes as he traced the pencil on the canvas.

‘Are you finished?’ I asked after some time had passed. He seemed to be taking longer with me.

‘A sketch is always unfinished,’ he replied. ‘It just depends on when I choose to stop.’

I glanced at the canvas, still unfinished but brimming with life. My life. My face… Only this looked like me in another lifetime, with a soul that actually functioned.

‘You’ve got my eyes wrong,’ I told him instead.

He took a step back, frowning at the charcoal face on the easel, and then turned to look at me.

‘I haven’t got them wrong. I just see them differently,’ he said, his black pearl eyes boring into me.

I accepted his theory in silence. My charcoal eyes had a compassion my real ones did not. He had infused them with a soft light that made me uncomfortable. I have seen my eyes, all my eyes, in all their emotions. None of them are soft.

I relaxed my pose for a minute and looked around at the people milling around, a whirring, humming blur of colour and noise. A lot of people looked towards us, drawn by the tall artist and the subject. And as always they lingered, looking at me as if I had cast a spell on them.

He asked me to resume my pose and I turned back, angling my face just as he wanted. I watched as my hair flowed down my shoulders with long single strokes of his pencil. He tilted his head to a side and looked at his drawing. Not like a painter, I thought. More like a writer, rereading his words. I peeked over his shoulder and gasped.

He had pinned me down on canvas. I wanted to stay there forever, in a charcoal eternity of how he saw me.

‘Done,’ he said finally.

The charcoal me stared back unflinchingly, as if she was the keeper of my secrets.

‘I like her.’

‘Do you want her?’

‘No, I already have me. You keep her.’

With that I walked away with a smile. He came after me, leaving his stall, his long hands buried in the pockets of his jeans as he smiled boyishly, the setting sun behind him infusing him with a golden aura. Like a God who walks the earth, I thought, and then laughed inwardly at my private joke.

I walked away. I had to. I liked this guy.

I wandered about in the rain until it was time for my assignment. As the reflection of city lights in muddy rain puddles twinkled, I felt a strange sense of longing. He wasn’t the first guy I had walked away from. But he was the first guy who had seen kindness in my eyes, even if it was only in charcoal. As if he could see deep inside me, even though I myself had never been able to understand who I really was.



Serendipity, he had said. I thought of the word as I set my eyes on him at the hotel. Somehow, he looked taller in the dark of the night. I couldn’t help but gaze at his long beautiful fingers, the ones that had sketched me with such surreal grace. I liked the face he had given me earlier in the day. It was a face I would cherish for a long time. I wondered what he had done with the sketch, whether it was still hanging on the cloth wall of the stall at the art festival.

Of course, he didn’t recognize me. I was on assignment, after all. Sporting my favourite look – pale skin, green eyes, long black hair and a figure that was slender, yet full – I looked very different from the woman he had met this morning. I even had a tiny mole just above my upper lip. I felt my imprint, the frangipani-shaped magical tattoo on the inside of my wrist, glow faintly in anticipation.

He smiled at me, a slightly puzzled look in his black pearl eyes. I could see his lashes – long, curling lashes – sweep up and down as he blinked slowly, and a strange magic unfolded within me.

I wanted to pick him.

I didn’t want to pick him.

See, this is why I hate coincidences.

I returned his smile, haughty with a tinge of flirtation. Then I walked past, just slightly brushing his hand. I had to make contact. I couldn’t bewitch him without touching his skin. Strangely, as we touched, for a fraction of a second, I felt a tug. Like someone had latched a hook onto my core and pulled.

In fact, my core, the thing that kept me alive, was tingling. Lust glided through my blood, a shimmery opaque creature with crumbly wings.

I want to pick him.

I don’t want to pick him.

Because if I do, he will die.

I could have walked away. He would feel the bewitching for a few hours but it would eventually fade. If I didn’t do anything about it, it would flee quietly from his bones and he would wake up the next morning feeling a little disoriented and dull. And that would be it. He would live. I could make that choice.

And yet, my core felt a desire for his secrets. I wanted them. Beating, pulsating, dark, untold, unknown, unspeakable… I craved for them.

I wanted to pick him.

I turned with a calculated sway of shoulders and hips. My hair whipped around me like a gentle rainstorm and my eyes glinted with magic. The bewitching had worked, so the moment I turned, he did too. I could see his black pearl eyes, that had earlier in the day held wry amusement, were now glazed over with my magic. I felt a hand grip my elbow. I turned to look at him.

‘I’m sorry, but have we met before?’ he asked uncertainly.

I was surprised. How did he know? Recovering quickly, I replied, ‘Do you say that to every pretty girl you meet at a party?’

‘No, just the ones I’m sure I’ve met before…’

After a moment, he shook his head as if dispelling the thought. ‘I’m Dwai,’ he continued.

‘Dwai? That’s an interesting name. Is it Indian?’

‘Very much so. What’s yours?’

I told him. It didn’t matter what name I gave. He wasn’t going to remember it anyway. And tomorrow he wouldn’t be alive to mention it to anyone.

‘That’s an interesting name too.’

‘Are we going to stand around talking about our names all night?’

His lips twisted into a wry smile at my question. I ran my finger lightly up his arm, deepening my bewitching. He hooked his arms around my waist and pulled me closer. I brushed my lips against his.

The more I touched him, the deeper he would fall under my spell.

When we pulled back, I batted my eyelids and the lights in the hotel corridor went dim.

Before I could say, ‘Let’s go get a room here,’ he grabbed my hand and started to walk. I began scanning for his secrets. I was thirsty. I wanted one. Any one.

Give me something… Which friend of your mother’s seduced you when you were fourteen? Who did you run over on the highway while driving drunk on New Year’s Eve ten years ago? Come on…something, anything.

But I got nothing. It was like hitting a brick wall. I couldn’t even penetrate the first layer, get to the easy ones. This one kept his mind locked very tight. I was intruiged.

We walked down the dim corridors until he led me out of the main entrance and down to the gates, into a waiting cab. His place was a short ride from the hotel, he told me. I was surprised at myself. I almost never let this happen. I stuck to hotel rooms as far as I could. Private homes could be tricky. You were never sure where you might find traces of old magic. But I didn’t feel like resisting. We held hands in the cab and I squeezed his palm tighter in the hope that I might get something.

Still no luck. Strange. It wasn’t easy to resist my magic.

He turned to look at me, his crooked smile in place, and for a second I wondered if the bewitching had worked at all. Then I looked into his eyes and I was certain my magic was melding slowly with his blood. But for some reason my core was uneasy. I fought off the feeling and smiled back instead.

His home was dark. He fumbled for the light switch, his fingers clumsy from my bewitching. The light came on, ochre and bright. I dimmed it a little. He didn’t notice. I realized that people in the building opposite his could look in through the window and I cast my eyes towards the curtains. They slowly drew close.

His face was lined with strange shadows from the fragmented light. It made me think of someone else. No, not right now. I moved closer to him and his eyelids flickered almost as if he was struggling with my magic. I reached out and placed a hand on his chest.

‘What are you doing to me?’ he murmured. I didn’t reply. Instead, I kissed him. As he pulled me closer, I could feel his heart beating against my chest. His black pearl eyes had deep copper-flecked irises. I closed my eyes and reeled us both in into my bewitching.

2

Something was wrong. I knew this as soon as I closed the door of the apartment behind me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had left him spread-eagled on the rug, his dark lashes curled upwards, almost touching his brows. His mouth had been curved in a smile. I had watched him for a while before leaving.

If I knew what regret felt like, I would say it was this.

Dwai…short for what I will never know. I couldn’t find it inside him. In fact, I didn’t know what I had found really. See, the thing is, once I took someone’s secrets, they became a blur to me. I could only remember them for a flash of a second. Then they were gone. Which was usually a good thing except, this time, I was curious about my prey. I wanted to know more about him, but the information was locked inside of me. Only one person had that key.

I thought about how it had felt, being with him.

Like diving deep down into the ocean, I thought. I had felt my core hit the flat, hard surface of the water and then sink into its inky depths. Millions of creatures had flitted around me but I hadn’t been able to clasp my fingers around even one. I had swum deeper and deeper, and all I had felt was nothingness. How was this possible?

I looked up at the sky that was still troubled and stormy. I could fly and lose myself in the clouds. Anything to avoid this uncertainty I was feeling.

I tried to lift myself into the air but sank back to the ground. Mild panic rose in my chest. What was happening to me? I had never failed to fly before. Summoning up all my strength, I tried again. This time I managed to rise into the atmosphere, even though my core was still shaky.

You can fly without wings, of course. I did. But I liked picturing a pair of shiny dark satin-feathered wings rising out of my shoulder blades like smoke in the sky.

Being what I am, however, I don’t need wings. Being what I am, I can also shape-shift. Steal your secrets. And kill you.

I am a daughter of the night. A keeper of dark things.

Secrets are dark things. They don’t exist in the light. They glow faintly in forgotten corners, in mysterious mind-nooks, in lost memory maps. Secrets are the shadows of the soul.

Often, I am your last and best-kept secret. The one you die with, the one that killed you.

3

The sky was tinged an odd scarlet. The moon looked swollen and poisoned with red. A blood moon. I don’t remember ever having gone out on a blood moon night in the five hundred years that I have been around. Strange, because there must have been quite a few.

We had been doing this for a very long time. Five centuries, to be precise. That’s a long time to be seducing and killing, for holding someone else’s secrets in your core, for however brief a time, before they were retrieved. By her. My mistress.

It was for precisely this reason that I now had to head back to the place I called home as fast as I could. I could feel the pull of the moon tonight. It carried with it an unsettling magic. A strange feeling rose in my chest, an odd vibration. I tried to ignore it but it was like a bee, buzzing around inside me.

I began to fly lower because I wasn’t sure I could stay airborne for long. The odd thrum inside me was now like a dragon’s heartbeat. It must be what I had taken from him. It had to be. But this had never happened before. Not in five hundred years. I must have done something wrong. But what?

It was a little after midnight. The air was still and the streets were empty but for a few stray cats and dogs who stared at me as I floated through the air above them.

Except…

The feeling came out of nowhere, as it had for more than half-a-century now. My skin prickled.

I was being watched.

I tried to rise higher in the air and fly faster but failed. Whatever or whoever this was couldn’t fly, this much I knew for sure. Shadows took on forms and I looked around. There was no one there, neither monster nor man. And yet I knew I was being followed. I had to stay in the air. I had been lucky enough to escape once but I might not get a second chance.

Whoever this was wasn’t giving up on me.

In the distance, I could see the old house that held the portal back to Atala. When I reached the building I lowered myself to the ground but not without a quick look around. I felt the presence still lurking around me.

The old house had lain unused and abandoned for over fifty years now. The portal was the tiny window right next to the broken door. If a human looked in through the window, they would just see the dusty insides of a forgotten house. For Yakshis, however, the window was a gateway to Atala.

The rats around the house saw me and scampered away, their noses twitching. I climbed into the portal with a quick glance behind me and, after walking down a dark corridor for what felt like ages, I was finally at the gates of my home.

Atala, a dark realm tucked away under Prithvi. Atala, beautiful, like a magical creature that has never seen light. Atala, home to the darkly ones, the dire creatures, the night sirens.

I paused outside the magnificent gates into the Palace of Vishara. The two skulls on top of each gate turned their bejewelled sockets towards me and a familiar chill ran down my spine. Even after hundreds of years, there was no getting used to this. They turned to face each other and nodded slightly. I had clearly passed their inspection. The bone and iron gates, fashioned like two great hands clasping each other, opened. One had to pass through them quickly or they would close, the fingers impaling you in certain death. I stumbled past them and into the darkness that was Atala. In the distance, the Palace of Vishara gleamed like a goblin’s eye, oval-shaped and ominous. My home.

I walked through the grounds, the smell of blood in the air. It was the frangipanis. No, not the kind you find on Prithvi. These were carnivorous. After all, blood wasn’t hard to find in Atala.

‘Ardra!’

I turned. It was Vina, one of the Yakshis and my best friend in the palace. She hurried towards me, her long black hair trailing behind her lovely face like a sheet of wind.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked. ‘I’ve looked everywhere for you!’

‘I…’ I started. The thrum in my core was drowning out everything else.

‘Yes, yes, I know, you have a habit of wandering off on your own. But something has happened. Again.’

‘What?’ I asked, my core pulsating wildly. Did she know I had gone out to take secrets and that something had gone wrong? I was ideally supposed to be making my way to the Retrieval Room now, where Hera would be waiting for me.

‘One of the Yakshis…she’s been missing for a couple of days. And…’ she drew in a deep breath, ‘the slayer…he found her. They found her burnt bits in an alley.’

I went cold. The thought of the slayer coming after me was paralyzing. No, said a voice inside me, he let you go once. He wouldn’t come after you again.

‘That’s horrible,’ I said, my voice sounding strange even to my ears.

‘There was no sign of him, of course. And only last week three vampires were killed. He’s really on a rampage.’

Vina kept talking animatedly as we walked down the passage towards our chambers. When we reached, I made an excuse to get away. I had to get to the Retreival Room and something told me that she musn’t know I had taken secrets that night.

I continued down the corridor until I reached the large ornate doors I was looking for. Reluctantly, I opened them and stepped inside.

To my utter surprise, the huge throne was empty. Where was Hera? She had never missed a retrieval before. She must know I have secrets with me – she always does.

Unsure of what to do, I slowly tiptoed into the room where our secrets were retrieved. It was a large space with pitch-black walls and no windows. A single chair adorned the centre of the room, a stark throne made of ancient metal.

The thrum in my core returned. Dark shapes on the wall sprung myriad arms and legs and crept across the floor towards me. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out everything, including the beast in my core.

She isn’t going to come, I realized. What the hell is going on?

I paced across the room uncertainly for a few minutes and then swiftly turned on my heel and headed back towards our chambers. As I entered, I saw some of the Yakshis huddled together, weeping. Vina was with them, talking animatedly. She barely noticed that I didn’t join them, choosing to climb into my blood red pod and lying down instead. My hand mirror was by the pillow and the strange creature within peeked out warily at me.

‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Everything is fine.’

‘Of course it is,’ it replied lazily.

I turned my back to the mirror and shut my eyes. I could hear the babble of the Yakshis outside my pod.

Why hadn’t she come? I must have made some mistake. Was it not my night to go out?

I fell asleep with uneasy dreams of long shadows, blood-stained Yakshis and deep black pearl eyes with a hint of a smile in them.

4

When I woke, there was no one in the chambers with me. I felt a strange hollow feeling in my core, as if someone had stuck a spade into me and dug something out clumsily. Had the secrets been retrieved? No, that wasn’t possible without her.

I slipped out of my pod and, ignoring my mirror that was making snide noises, made my way to the common hall. A huge statue of Lord Mara, the God of lust, stood in the corner, but there were no Yakshis to be seen anywhere. I couldn’t tell if it was day or night but that hardly mattered in Atala. Here, it was always dark. I looked out of one of the tall bejewelled windows and saw the sun skulking behind the shadows of the dark purple sky that hung over the palace. Yes, Atala had a sun, but it was always in eclipse. It looked charred around the edges, always burning but forever shrouded in darkness – a big black orb that neither gave light nor life. The sun was always positioned right over the Palace of Vishara because that’s how she liked it.

She…Hera. Queen of Secrets. Of dark things and everything unspoken. The Empress of Atala.

I was afraid of her. I didn’t know why but I had always felt like she hated me.

I dreamt of her often. Snakes in her hair, dead suns in her irises, she would rise above Vishara and swallow the sky. I would stand and stare at her as the snakes hissed and lunged for me. I always ducked and moved away just in time but in that sliver of a second, I would look down upon my heart and find a gaping hole there. Before I could scream, I would wake up. I always woke up before I could scream.

Did Hera not care about her Yakshis? Would I die if the secrets were not retrieved? Could they retrieve secrets after the keeper was dead? Why did my core feel empty? I didn’t know. We were not encouraged to ask questions in Atala.

And then I remembered. She sought me out especially on full moon nights but never when the moon was red. In fact, as far as I knew, no Yakshi had ever gone out on those nights.

I turned a corner and saw Vina and Mantri in deep conversation. Ugh. Vile, oily, creepy Mantri was Hera’s Chief of Guards. Well, I suppose anyone would be creepy if they had two heads of which only one talked and the other looked like it had been stitched on with its mouth sewn shut. Sometimes when I looked at his heads and I watched one talk, I felt like the other one was struggling against its stitches, trying to undo them. His shapeless form smelled like old cabbages and cockroaches lying dead in dusty corners. Only Vina talked to him voluntarily because she wanted to remain in his good books. You could get away with a lot if you had him on your side. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stand him, and I knew the feeling was mutual.

I was about to back away slowly when Vina looked up and saw me. She made a subtle gesture asking me to join them but I shook my head. I didn’t want to deal with Mantri right then.

I began walking aimlessly until I left the main palace hallways and reached the open ground outside. I wasn’t really sure where I was going but I wanted to get away from the palace and be alone with my thoughts. I looked up to see a flock of mrig pakshis flying across the sun, creating a ripple of silver and gold around it with their golden heads and silver bat-shaped bodies. Half-bird, half-bat, they belonged to Atala, as strange as the land they inhabited with their mewing cries and featherless wings. I paused to watch them fly around the curve of the sun and disappear, perhaps into the Black Dwarf Sea that surrounded Atala. Wine-coloured and uninviting, the sea was where planets came to die. No one had access to the jewelled beach except Hera. It meant there was no way out of Atala, unless she wanted you to leave it.

The birds reappeared suddenly in the cloudless Atala sky and I started to follow their path. I walked on, crossing the grounds into the gardens of Vishara, abloom with jewelled plants and ghostly trees that seemed to whisper in the wind. Sometimes I would pause, trying to fathom what they were saying, trying to talk to them, but most of the time they only rambled on like senile old ladies, the wind carrying their whispers far and wide. Today, however, I walked on. There was a sense of foreboding in my core that I couldn’t understand.

After a while, I heard a noise and stopped. It was only then that I realized where I was. Lost in thought, I had turned the corner where the garden gave way to a large thicket of trees surrounding a tower. I wasn’t supposed to come here. This was the forbidden part of the palace – no one but Hera was allowed here. I stood transfixed for a few seconds. And then I heard it. A whisper. But this wasn’t the trees; this was something else, something more sinister. It sent a chill down my spine and something inside me screamed. I felt a rush of emotion unlike anything I have felt before. Fear, it’s just fear, I told myself.

I stepped behind a tree and forced myself to steal a glance upwards. The tower window was open and I thought I could see a figure behind the iron bars. I should have run then, far away from whatever this was. But a horrid fascination had gripped me and I stayed. A soft, strange rustle came from the tower. Perhaps whatever it was had sensed my presence.

‘Run!’ urged my brain. But something kept my feet glued to the ground. Another rustle set off an odd flutter in my core. I drew in my breath. What was this thing? Could it see me somehow? Would Hera find out I had come here? The thought of her finally woke me from my reverie. I turned on my heels and raced across the grounds towards the palace, finding my way back to my chambers. I climbed into my pod and sat there, my breath coming in rasps and my heart thundering. What was that sound? Who did it belong to?

I wasn’t sure how long I stayed in my pod. At some point I fell asleep. Slinky, crawling eerie creatures skulked across my dreams. Hera towered over Atala, snakes in her hair, a one-eyed raven on her shoulder. A mrig pakshi flew above her and she looked up smiling. She flicked out her tongue, long and forked, and caught the bird. In a flicker it disappeared into her mouth. And then there was that sound again. It brushed all over my dream like a vulture’s wing…

I woke up with a start.

5

There was one other recurring dream that had haunted me for years – more a memory really. I will never forget how those blue eyes, bright with fury, had speared into me as I wondered what it would be like to die…and how rapidly the anger in those eyes had changed to puzzlement and then wonder. I didn’t die that day, but even now, almost half-a-century later, I see those eyes in my dreams and when I’m awake, I can feel his presence around me. I still don’t know why he let me go that day.

It had been a particu. . .