Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  There would be hell to pay for ignoring his commands.

  He’d been spared the total barbecuing suffered by a good portion of his men due to pure luck. The desk he’d been sitting behind in the Hospice Administrator’s office had been made of industrial-grade steel, and when the thing calling itself Lumina Bohn had turned the air to fire, a gust of heated wind had preceded the blaze. Fortune had been on his side; he was thrown against the wall, the desk was blown apart, the steel desktop had wedged itself between him and the she-devil, and he’d been saved.

  Or at least not altogether roasted, as his men had been.

  “PHOOOOOOONE!” the Grand Minister howled, eliciting a kindly cluck of comfort from one of the nurses running alongside his gurney. She patted his shoulder.

  “Everything is going to be fine. You’re safe now. We’ll take care of you,” the nurse said gently, patting him again.

  This one he’d kill himself.

  He continued to scream and thrash all the way down the corridor and into the surgical suite. He screamed as the doctors lifted his body from the gurney to an operating table, screamed as they cut his melted suit from his flesh. Finally, just before someone leaned in to cover his face with an oxygen mask, one of his men burst into the room. He shoved the staff aside, toppling them like so many toy soldiers.

  “Escaped!” Hans spat, ignoring the cries of outraged medical personnel around him. “Vanished near the waste treatment plant. She must’ve had help.”

  The Grand Minister reached out and curled his hand around the lapel of Hans’s jacket, jerking him down with the strength of a much younger man. He’d been badly injured so many times before the pain was like a visit from an old friend, and he welcomed it. Pain kept the mind sharp. Pain reminded him what the stakes were.

  Pain was a tool that could harden a man’s will, and the Grand Minister’s will had been honed to lethal solidity.

  “Get me Thorne,” he hissed into Hans’s face. He was instantly obeyed as Hans withdrew a cell phone from his pocket. While the room fell into shocked silence and stillness at the mention of Thorne’s name, Hans hit a button, then held the phone to the Grand Minister’s ear.

  It rang once. The call was answered, but no greeting came over the line. There was never a greeting. Only that heavy, ominous silence waited, its chill and darkness that of a tomb.

  “We’ve been wrong all along!” he rasped, his throat raw from screaming. “It wasn’t that bitch of a Queen of theirs who brought us down in Manaus. It was her daughter.”

  The silence on the other end of the phone throbbed. Then the man who ruled what remained of the world spoke only two words before he disconnected.

  “Find her.”

  His energy spent, his path now clear, the Grand Minister slumped against the operating table. Hans pocketed the phone, and just before the nurse he was soon going to kill lowered the oxygen mask to his face, he whispered hoarsely to Hans, “New directive. Divert all resources to finding the Aberrant Lumina Bohn. All resources!”

  A hiss of pressurized air, a murmur of voices, the sensation of weightlessness, then sinking. Then Hans spoke, and the Grand Minister faded into unconsciousness with a savage, satisfied smile on his face.

  Hans said, “Already on it, sir. We’re getting an intermittent signal from Ritter’s collar; he must have tagged her at the father’s house before she escaped. If the signal holds, we’ll have her in a matter of hours.”

  SEVEN

  “You’re saying she burned the house after she was collared? Is that possible?”

  “It’s the only explanation. There’s no way the mog from Enforcement survived the fire long enough to tag her. The entire building was in flames in seconds. It was the same at the Hospice. He shot her, collared her, then she lit him up.”

  “But that would mean . . .”

  “Yes. Especially since she was able to scan me after the collar was already on. The technology doesn’t seem to have any effect on her at all. For that matter, neither do the flames. She came out of both buildings totally unscathed. Not even a singed hair. And the reports I’m getting indicate the only burn injuries at the Hospice were the GM and his men. The other injuries were all secondary, caused by shattered glass or other objects propelled in the initial explosion. It’s almost as if her Gift is . . . sentient.”

  A pause. Then the first speaker, a woman, said to the second, “Well, look who we’re talking about here. If Honor’s any indication, anything’s possible.”

  An even longer pause. Finally, reluctantly, the second speaker, a man, replied. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.” The voices fell silent, and only the faraway music of water dancing over stone remained.

  Lu opened her eyes.

  She was in a dim, cool chamber with smooth, rounded stone walls, lit only by a few candles sputtering in niches that cast flickering shadows over everything. There was no furniture save the feather mattress beneath her and a small wood table nearby. The air smelled like damp rock, hot wax, and creatures who weren’t human, and the sound of running water was underscored by a constant, melancholy drip that seemed to be coming from . . . She looked up.

  Hanging from the ceiling directly above loomed a forest of long, sharp teeth.

  Lu bolted upright, rolled to one side, and became tangled in the mess of heavy blankets that were wrapped around her. She fought them off and got her feet beneath her, but failed at the effort to stand when she sank deep into the mattress, pillowy and insubstantial as clouds. Off-balance, she pitched forward. Just before she fell flat on her face, she was caught by a pair of strong, steadying hands.

  Breathless, her palms erupting with heat, Lu looked up into the face of the man who’d caught her.

  Eyes like dark chocolate, rimmed in a thicket of long black lashes. The beautiful bone structure, the full, luscious lips. The face of an angel, mauled by the devil’s claws.

  “They’re just stalactites,” Magnus said gruffly, his fingers gripping her arms a little too hard. “Water drips through the limestone and leaves deposits that over time form a hanging cone. They’re not dangerous.”

  Lu stared at him, her heart still pounding. Stalactites. Not dangerous. She couldn’t get her mind wrapped around the idea that the ceiling teeth weren’t going to chomp down on her; in all her reading and homeschooling she’d never encountered the word.

  The candles all around the room flared bright, sputtering and popping in their niches, a tune that corresponded with the itch in her palms. His tone drier, Magnus added, “Please don’t light me on fire. I’d prefer not to look any worse than I already do.”

  For a long, frozen moment they stared at one another, until Lu released a breath that felt as if it had been punched from her lungs. She threw her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck. “Magnus!” she whispered, her voice choked.

  God, it’s really you!

  He reacted as if he’d been slapped.

  He stiffened, dropped his hands to his sides and recoiled. “Don’t touch me!” he snarled. He leapt to his feet, eyes flashing with fury, and turned away, every movement jerky and awkward. He stalked out of an arched stone doorway a few meters away, leaving her staring after him in shock.

  “Note to self: Magnus has personal space issues,” Lu muttered, oddly crushed by his reaction. They’d been intimate, in every way that two people could be! Well, without actually being intimate, that is. Physically.

  Then a terrible thought arrested her; had her dreams been only one-sided? Had he not actually participated in them, the way she had, all the kissing and touching and . . . the rest? For some reason she’d always assumed the dreams were as real to him as they were to her, two minds touching across time and space, but maybe the encounters had all been in her own head?

  But no, he’d come for her—he’d found her! He knew her, just as she knew him, she’d seen it in his eyes when she’d fi
rst said his name. That telling flare of emotion, quickly smothered, but definitely there.

  Then what could it be?

  She sucked in a breath, horrified by the thought that maybe he wasn’t joking when he asked her not to light him on fire. Could he think she would hurt him? Could he be . . . afraid of her?

  Lu looked down at her ungloved hands in horror. Of course he was afraid of her. He’d seen exactly what she was capable of.

  She suffered a moment of excruciating shame, so familiar from all the years of odd looks and whispers behind hands.

  “Don’t take it personally. He’s had a few rough decades,” said a low, cultured voice from the doorway.

  Lu looked up. There with crossed arms and a slight smile stood one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen.

  Tall and curvy with a mass of long, dark hair she wore in a loose ponytail over one shoulder, the woman was what her father would have called a “kiefer auftakt.” Jaw dropper. She wore tight leather pants, a belted, finely cut tunic of wool, and knee-high boots, all of it black. Though a slight softness of jaw, laugh lines at the corners of her electric-green eyes, and strands of silver threaded through her hair suggested she was somewhere in her early fifties, she was stunning. All easy grace and regal bearing, with a face a master artist would have loved to reproduce on canvas with oils or carve into marble.

  She exuded that wild, nighttime scent like Magnus did, only hers was sweeter, more brown sugar than spice. But her eyes held the same sharpness, the coiled tension in her limbs, the same animal readiness. As beautiful as she was, everything about her screamed Danger!

  Clearly, she wasn’t human.

  In response to Lu’s gaping inspection of her, the woman raised her brows.

  “Sorry,” said Lu, realizing how rude she was being. “You’re just . . . unexpected.”

  The woman’s smile vanished. She smoothed a hand over her hair. “I know. I look a mess.” She looked down at herself, and her expression soured. “Twenty-six years and I’m still missing my wardrobe at Sommerley.” She sighed and once again looked at Lu. With a shrug, she said, “Well. One does what one must. Keep calm, carry on, and be grateful some other female learned how to weave and sew or I’d be wearing nothing but a fur pelt, because there’s no way in hell I’m doing anything so domesticated.”

  Lu was stumped for a reply.

  “Morgan.” She approached with an outstretched hand, and stood waiting while Lu rose unsteadily to her feet. They shook hands—Lu tentatively, because she never touched without gloves—and Morgan nodded. It felt as if something had been decided.

  “How’s it feeling?” Morgan jerked her chin toward Lu’s chest.

  With a gasp, Lu remembered. Her hands flew to her chest and she looked down, tugging aside the Hospice jacket she still wore, pushing aside the tank . . .

  Nothing. There were bloodstains on the shirt and jacket, bits of flaky dried blood still clung to her skin, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be a scratch on her. And, she noticed for the first time since awakening, she felt no pain at all.

  She stared at Morgan. “I don’t understand. I was shot. I know I didn’t imagine that.”

  “Of course you didn’t imagine it,” replied Morgan gravely. “And those weren’t just any bullets you were hit with; judging by the way you reacted, you were shot with a special T.”

  In response to Lu’s blank look, Morgan said, “Toxin-laced ammunition. Powerful nerve agents, specifically. Anyone else would have been completely incapacitated for weeks.” Her smile was bitter. “They make those just for us.” Her gaze dropped to Lu’s neck, and her eyes darkened. “That will have to come off.”

  Lu touched the cool metal links of the collar around her neck, but she was much more interested in what Morgan had just said. “Wait—why am I okay then? Did I have surgery? How did I heal so fast? Did you take the bullet out?”

  As they had before, Morgan’s brows arched, two dark quirks that managed to convey she thought Lu’s questions were more than slightly absurd. “No, ducky. You took the bullet out. In a manner of speaking, of course.”

  The two of them stared at one another in silence for a moment that stretched itself out until it was as cavernous as the room. The candles that had settled down after Magnus had stalked out suddenly flared up again, responding to the rising heat in Lu’s palms. She said quietly, “Okay, Morgan. I have questions.”

  Morgan’s eyes didn’t miss the way Lu’s hands had squeezed to fists, or the sudden brightening in the chamber, but she merely nodded, watching her. Waiting.

  If she was afraid, she was hiding it well.

  Lu said carefully, “You’re an Aberrant, yes?”

  Morgan’s eyes flashed. “I am most certainly not! There’s not a damn thing aberrant about me!” She paused to consider. “Well, I’m British so that’s not entirely true, we do have our little peccadillos.” She paused again, the blaze in her eyes undimmed. “But if what you’re really asking is am I human, the answer is resoundingly no.”

  Lu digested that in silence, realizing she’d again been unintentionally rude. Another note to self: Other Abs don’t like to be called Abs. Good to know.

  “How long have I been here, wherever here is?”

  “Southern Wales. And about twelve hours.”

  Wales. Lu saw a pre-Flash encyclopedia picture in her head, rolling green forests and craggy mountain peaks and crystal lakes tucked into valleys between.

  “How did I get here?”

  “Helicopter. Well, Magnus had to take you down the Danube out of the city in a coracle first to avoid the antiaircraft missiles, but you flew out somewhere between Bratislava and Budapest. I don’t know exactly where, but it would have been somewhere remote. The countryside is safer; surveillance is concentrated on the big cities.”

  Coracle and helicopter were more words Lu wasn’t familiar with, but she guessed by context the first was some kind of small boat, and she knew what flying was because her father had once, after too many glasses of eiswein, mourned the loss of the freedom to travel between countries by air. The IF controlled all air traffic, and there were no longer any passenger flights anywhere. Only military or government planes were ever aloft.

  Your father was a missionary before the Flash, traveling from country to country, trying to convert people to his faith. Were you aware of that?

  Lu swallowed around the fist in her throat the thought of her father produced. She wouldn’t allow herself to cry in front of Morgan. She’d save that for later, when she was alone.

  “What day is it?”

  “December twenty-sixth.”

  So from the time she was shot to now, no more than twenty-four hours had elapsed. Which meant that she’d been shot with some kind of super bullet and healed without a trace of injury in a day, a feat that, judging by Morgan’s tone and description, was highly unusual, even for Abs.

  And what did she mean by, “you took the bullet out”? What could Lu possibly have done to remove a poison bullet while unconscious?

  She could get those answers later, but right now there was one critical thing Lu had to determine in order to decide what she was going to do next.

  Holding perfectly still, her attention honed on every tic and blink and telling twitch of Morgan’s muscles, Lu said, “My father died in my arms yesterday. I have no home, no friends, and I’m most likely the target of an international manhunt. I can honestly say I don’t care if I die because I have absolutely nothing to live for, so if you brought me here for something I’m not going to like, I promise you this: I won’t hesitate to kill you or anyone else who tries to hurt me. I won’t go down without a fight.”

  They stared at one another while drop after drop of water fell with a melancholy plink from one of the longest stalactites above to a small pool on the cave floor below.

  “So. Tell me, Morgan. Are we going to b
e friends or not?”

  The oddest thing happened then. Morgan’s eyes misted, a little furrow appeared between her brows. She gave a small shake of her head, and her expression softened until Lu would have sworn what she was seeing was pride.

  “You won’t remember me, of course,” Morgan whispered. “You were just a baby. But I never forgot you. I prayed every day, every bloody day that we’d find you. And we finally did. And Christ on a cracker if you aren’t just like her, all piss and vinegar and a giant set of steel balls.”

  All the little hairs on Lu’s arms stood on end.

  Just like who?

  Morgan sniffed. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She said, “I’m your godmother, pet. Yours and your sister’s. Welcome home.”

  EIGHT

  Godmother. Sister. Home. Those words crashed around the inside of Lu’s skull, pulverizing her ability to hold any other thought. For a moment her vision wavered, the edges of everything blurred, and she realized it was because of the moisture swimming in her eyes.

  “And here I thought yesterday was eventful,” said Lu, numb with shock.

  Morgan swiped at her eyes and gave Lu a brilliant smile. “Oh, thank heavens! How I’ve missed sarcasm! There’s a serious lack of snark in this colony, ducky. Everyone’s as dry as a nun’s snatch.”

  With that unappetizing visual, Morgan crushed her into a hug.

  After a moment in which Lu stood there stiffly with her arms at her sides, still dumbfounded, Morgan suggested, “Pretend I’m Magnus. You didn’t seem to have any trouble figuring out how to get your arms around him.”