Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  A collar.

  “Funny how nobody ever checks behind the bathroom door,” he mused, kneeling in front of her to fasten the collar tightly around her neck. The clasp fused shut with a sound like a door being closed. The pain in her chest was so great she could hardly breathe. Her arms didn’t seem to be working; she couldn’t lift either one of them. Or move her legs.

  “Even when they know there’s someone in the house, when they can sense something’s wrong, they’ll search every room, but won’t bother with more than a peek into the bathroom.” He sighed, as if disappointed her father hadn’t put up more of a fight.

  Shot, she realized numbly. He shot me. She wondered if he’d hit her spinal column, paralyzing her.

  But no. Her right hand twitched. She pressed her fingers into the throw rug beneath her, concentrating on its knobby texture, putting all her remaining energy into that one—ungloved—hand.

  The man touched a finger to the almost invisible device nestled inside his ear canal. “Target acquired,” he said nonchalantly, as if this was something he did every day. He recited the street address to whomever was listening, all the while watching her face. He listened for another moment, then nodded and dropped his hand from his ear, disconnecting.

  With the serious, detached expression of a scientist, he gently touched the back of his hand to her face, brushing the slope of her cheekbone with a knuckle. Beyond her pain, she noticed he was handsome, in a cold, carnivorous sort of way. Like a shark.

  “Just goes to show you,” he mused, examining her skin, her face, her hair, “appearances can really be deceiving.”

  “Yes,” said Lu, reaching up to grasp his wrist. “They sure fucking can.”

  His eyes widened. This time it was his turn to scream.

  Smoke. Heat. Fire, crackling hot. Scalding wind whipping her hair into her eyes, her braid undone, her hands slick with blood, her tears dried to salt on her cheeks. Lu stumbled down the stairs, a maelstrom of burning ash and howling wind surrounding her. Soot clogged her nose and throat, suffocating her. The house groaned—a hollow, echoing baritone as the wood support beams began to collapse—a sound underscored by the high, wavering screams of sirens.

  She stumbled from the doorway and fell into the street. Dragging herself to her knees with a gargantuan effort of will that required her to grit her teeth against a tidal wave of pain, she ignored the gaping neighbors, the shouts of alarm and fright, the sound of heavy feet pounding closer.

  The Schottentor gate. The white rabbit. We’ll get you out.

  She didn’t bother to look back; she knew the men in black were there. She could judge their distance by the footfalls, their breathing, and the chink of metal beneath their coats, sounds that seemed unnaturally loud to her ears, even above the collapsing inferno of the home where she grew up. It was as if only the most important noises were reaching her ears, picked out and enhanced by some inherent ability she’d never before used, a latent talent designed for situations precisely such as this.

  If her hearing was sharper, her agility had been reduced by double the amount.

  Her legs were jelly. She didn’t know how she was moving, only that she was. That she had to. To stay put was to die, or be caged, or something far worse she didn’t dare consider. Not now. Now the instinct for self-preservation had kicked into high, powerful gear, and Lu was running for her life.

  She made it to the end of the block just as the first of the fire brigade screeched around the corner. Directly behind followed the black-and-yellow Peace Guard vehicles. Flashing lights and sirens and the stench of burning rubber, the babble of voices, the world slipping sideways then righting itself again as she bit down, hard, on the inside of her cheek. She forced herself to keep going even though pain like a spear of fire stabbed through her chest. Her vision faded at the edges. Her body broke out in a cold sweat.

  The Schottentor gate. The white rabbit.

  She had to make it. She would make it.

  Gasping, stumbling, she ran blindly, using her sense of smell to avoid places there were people, skirting streetlamps, keeping to the shadows as she went. Even injured and half blinded by pain, she could make it with a bit of luck. She knew how to hide, knew how to melt into darkness, knew all the hidden corners of this city she’d been slinking through all her life. Only a little luck, only a little—

  Another set of feet pursued her. Quieter, far more swift than the rest. Up on the rooftops, somewhere—

  She glanced up and to her right, catching a flicker of movement, a shadow that vanished as she passed under a footbridge. When she came out on the other side, the shadow was gone.

  High above the city on the top of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the message on the district’s rotating megascreen had changed from “One World In Harmony” to a flashing red “ABERRANT ALERT,” with her name and picture beneath, followed by the words, “Wanted For Murder. Armed And Extremely Dangerous. Notify Peace Guard If Spotted.”

  Murder. The word sent a sweeping chill of guilt through her.

  How many had died at the Hospice?

  Liesel. Oh God, Liesel . . .

  She ran through a cobweb maze of dirty alleys and cobblestone lanes, gulping warm night air, the city a tintype haze of silver and bronze and glimmering gold around her. She skirted the city center, keeping to the residential areas though it wasn’t a direct route. Just as she was sure she would collapse, she spied the ghostly glow of the grow light fields in the distance, illuming the night sky.

  The vast tented area where the only fresh vegetables and fruits to be had in New Vienna were grown under mile-long rows of artificial lights was situated on the east bank of the Danube, outside the city walls, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire. Beyond, where suburbs and schools and shopping centers had once stood, was the uninhabited Wasteland. Legend had it packs of scavengers roamed there, vicious as rabid dogs, but in all his years of working in the fields, her father had never seen them.

  Father. An animal sound of anguish tore its way from her throat, and she stumbled and fell.

  She knelt in the dirt a moment, panting, crying, until she could finally breathe again. When she stood, she realized with a start she was almost to her destination. The waste treatment plant was only yards ahead, hulking dark behind a chain link fence, its rows upon rows of high windows bright with light, its tall stacks chugging steam into the sky.

  Lu limped forward. She couldn’t hear her pursuers anymore; had she lost them? No, she realized with dawning horror as she dragged herself across a dark street, just missing getting smashed by a passing electric trolley, mercifully empty of passengers. She couldn’t hear them because she couldn’t hear anything.

  The only sound now in her ears was a high, tinny buzzing, and that was all.

  We’ll get you out. We’ll get you out.

  Her left leg had gone numb. She dragged it behind her, clinging to the chain link fence, forcing herself forward. It was an eternity. It was a never ending fight, a slog of left foot, right foot, pulling, dragging . . .

  Then she saw it, and sobbed in relief: the Schottentor gate.

  It was there, just beyond the plant, hidden beneath a tangle of overgrown shrubs, a break in the tall expanse of solid, curving stone that comprised the city wall. It was deserted, dark, one of the lesser gates kept always locked.

  With her final dregs of energy, Lu limped past the plant into the dense shadows created by the stand of ancient trees that flanked the wall. Her heart felt as if it was going to give out. Her lungs burned like fire. Her vision was watery, at best, and she knew she had only moments left before she would lose consciousness.

  But the rabbit? What, and where, was it?

  And who was waiting to help her? Who was watching? There was no one here, no one—

  Her gaze fell on a small patch of wall that had been cleared of the dense thicket of vines. There, high above her head,
was a crude spray painting, crude but perfectly clear.

  A white rabbit. Looking down.

  Lu fell and crawled the final few yards, rashing her palms on the sharp gravel, tearing her trousers, skinning her knees. The buzzing in her ears grew to a sound like a hive of angry hornets, but she didn’t stop, not even when she thought she saw something move from the corner of her eye, not even when the spear of fire in her chest flared up anew and became not one, but a thousand brilliant points of burning pain.

  There was a break in the thicket. A space, no wider than her shoulders, a hidden place where the mess of tangled vines and leaves and overgrown shrubs opened to reveal a passageway. A low black tunnel through the ancient stone, concealed by the mass of old growth. You’d never know it was there unless you were right on top of it, and even then, you might miss it.

  A few more feet. Just a few . . . more . . . feet.

  A hand reached out and grabbed her.

  She tried to fight, but she had nothing left. Pain had leached all the fight from her body, so when the hand became two and flipped her onto her back, she didn’t resist. She just gazed mutely up at the man who stared down at her, waiting for him to do whatever it was he was going to do.

  He was saying something. She couldn’t make it out, and it didn’t really matter. All she was interested in was his face. He looked familiar. But no—she would’ve known him. She would’ve remembered this face if she’d seen it before.

  It was ruined.

  The entire right side was deeply scarred, with whole chunks missing and a vicious gouge that ran all the way from one side of his forehead to the opposite cheek. His nose had been broken and never properly fixed, he was missing half an ear, and his chin was notched, not a natural cleft, but as if a piece of flesh had been purposefully cut out.

  But he had a superhero’s jaw and beautiful soft, dark eyes, in spite of the horror of that face, and Lu found herself smiling up at him. With the last of her strength, she smiled.

  What was he saying? It was a single word, repeated over and over. She concentrated on his mouth, on his lips—full and surprisingly sensual, a startling disparity against that face—and just before she sank down into the warm, welcoming arms of darkness she realized what it was he was saying.

  Hope. He was calling her Hope.

  Then, mercifully, there was nothing more.

  FIVE

  Gentle rocking. Warm wind caressing her face. The hollow, repetitive plunk of wood slapping water, a smattering of moisture on her cheek. Lu inhaled and smelled damp earth and river and the musky, pleasing scent of a man, very near.

  She’d never smelled anything like him. A lush mix of forest floor and spice and moonlight, his scent was rich, exotic, and tinged with danger, nothing at all like the human men she’d spent her life surrounded by.

  Wild, she thought drowsily. He smells like a wild thing hunting in a nighttime woods.

  She fought to open her heavy lids, swimming up from the blackness that had claimed her . . . how long ago? When her eyes blinked open, she found more darkness, but not quite as opaque. High above, dark shapes moved swiftly past, whispering, a sly rustle, the music of a breeze stirring leaves.

  Tree branches, arching gracefully overhead. It was still night, but a faint glow of crimson glimmered on the eastern horizon, promising dawn.

  Where am I?

  She was so tired. Her body was so, so heavy. And her mouth, God, her mouth was baked to desert dryness.

  “Water,” she whispered in German, her lids fluttering closed. “Please.”

  She felt the man’s attention snap over, heard his fleet step as he quickly came beside her and knelt down. If he smelled different, he moved differently, too, not even disturbing the air as he passed through it, silent as a ghost.

  Then a hand—strong, calloused—cradled her neck.

  “Drink.”

  The soft command was spoken in English. She could tell nothing about him from that one syllable, but understood in spite of the fog in her brain that she was at his complete mercy. Whoever he was, he could do whatever he pleased with her, and she’d be unable to resist.

  But his scent . . . it did something to her. It was almost comforting.

  She drank greedily from the flask he held to her mouth, too exhausted to examine that ridiculous notion.

  When she’d had her fill, she turned her head. He withdrew his hand from beneath her neck. Though she tried again and again, her lids refused to open. She felt his fingers brush her forehead, pause briefly at the pulse beating jaggedly beneath her jaw.

  She tried to push out with her mind, to see this stranger’s thoughts, determine his intentions, but came up against a solid resistance. It was nothing she’d ever experienced before, smooth and cold, like putting her hand against a dome of ice. She pushed harder, concentrating, without result.

  That couldn’t be right. She frowned, pushing harder still, searching for a chink, any tiny crack in the ice—

  Was that low sound a chuckle? No, not quite. More like a noise of satisfaction, nearer to one of Liesel’s grunts.

  At the thought of Liesel, Lu’s concentration snapped. She whined, high and soft, in the back of her throat. The man shushed her softly, murmuring something in a mellifluous language she didn’t know, but somehow, impossibly, understood.

  Sittu, heleti. Salamu itti manaz pani.

  Sleep, My Lady. You’re safe with me.

  You’re safe with me.

  She managed to drag her lids open long enough to see his face above her, a dark, featureless oval, only the shine of his eyes visible. Then, in a brilliant burst of color that flared the night sky into a prism of sapphire and gold and green, the first of the Thornemas Day fireworks erupted in the distance with an echoing boom, and his face was illuminated.

  One side of his face was illuminated. The smooth, unmangled side.

  The rush of recognition felt like stepping off a ledge and free-falling. Like remembering something she’d forgotten, something important, dizzying relief and elation and the startling urge to laugh and cry at once.

  “Magnus,” she whispered.

  His lips parted. His dark eyes grew fierce.

  Then the fireworks faded, her lids slid closed, and Lu sank back into the waiting darkness.

  When next she awoke, Lu was certain she was dreaming for three reasons. One, she couldn’t hear anything. Two, it was cold. Not just cold. Freezing. The teeth-chattering, body-shaking, curl-into-a-ball-and-want-to-die kind of cold . . . the kind Lu had never felt in her life.

  And three, she was flying.

  Pain was still carving molten pathways along her nerve endings, but her mind was slightly clearer, the pressure in her chest slightly less. She was able to lift her head to try to get a better look at her surroundings, but her stomach violently rebelled against that idea, sending the acid bite of bile into the back of her throat. She clenched shut her eyes again, but the one brief glimpse had been enough.

  She was lying on her back on an unforgivingly hard surface, covered by a heavy piece of canvas, wedged between a wall and the back of two seats. A man was strapped into one of the seats with his back to her, a pair of headphones over his head, his big hands gripped around a wheel that protruded from a console forested with a million colored buttons and digital gauges. From this angle, he could have been anyone, save for the breadth of his shoulders, the thick, corded muscles of his forearms that showed beneath his rolled up shirtsleeves, and the hatched scars marring his knuckles. There was that hair, too, thick and inky black, its shine like sunlight on water, so different from any she’d seen before.

  Never seen sunlight on water, she thought, still groggy. How would I know?

  In front of him was an expanse of curved glass. Far beyond that in the shimmering distance loomed the jagged peaks of a mountain range, emerald and dusky gray in the morning light.

 
Which made no sense whatsoever. If it was daylight, everything should be tainted red. Crimson, crimson everywhere, like an endless sea of blood. Even those clouds that wreathed the highest peaks were all wrong. They weren’t the roiling, angry thunderheads lurking always over New Vienna, casting bloody shadows over everything below.

  These clouds were soft and fluffy, white as goose down. They almost looked cheerful.

  Lu opened her eyes again, blinking into the brightness, desperate for another look at those happy clouds. Could they be real?

  As if sensing she was awake, the man turned his head to look at her, and Lu saw him in profile.

  Not a dream after all. In this light, his scarred face was even more startling.

  “We’re almost there,” said Magnus. His voice sounded scratchy and tinny, as if coming from far away. Why couldn’t she hear him right? She lifted a hand to her head and felt a bun of cold metal over her ear; she wore headphones, too.

  “Protection. For the noise,” he explained, seeing her bewilderment. Those dark, dark eyes met hers, and the snap of connection felt like a plug shoved into a socket.

  Electric. Humming. Complete.

  He held her gaze for a moment, then turned away, the corners of his lips tugged into a frown.

  “Almost where?”

  Either Magnus didn’t hear or didn’t want to respond, because he didn’t answer. He didn’t turn around again.

  SIX

  “A PHONE!” screamed the Grand Minister. “BRING ME A FUCKING PHONE!”

  For the hundredth time since being dragged from the rubble of the Hospice and lifted to the gurney that had rushed him to the hospital where his badly burned body—what was left of it from all his previous entanglements with the Aberrants—was now being hurtled down a corridor on the way to a surgical suite, his screams were ignored.

  Goddamned do-gooders.

  He was going to ensure every one of these pieces of shit was strung up and hanged, their corpses left to rot until even the birds weren’t interested in their dried remains. The EMTs: hanged. The ambulance driver: hanged. The nurses in the ER: hanged. And every single worthless pile of good-for-nothing crap currently running alongside his squeaky-wheeled gurney: hanged. Or maybe publicly decapitated, then hanged from their ankles until their rotted legs separated from their bodies and their headless, legless torsos fell with the unholy thud of dead meat to the ground.