Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  Honor’s icy glare narrowed. “What the hell is a Smaug?”

  Lu folded her arms across her chest. “Ever read The Hobbit? No? Well, Smaug is the dragon in the story, described as ‘a most specially greedy, strong and wicked wyrm.’ I think it’s appropriate.”

  Honor’s eyes widened. Her voice rising, she said, “A worm? Did you just call me a worm?”

  Lu was just about to retort, “Don’t forget the greedy and wicked part!” but a faint, odd noise distracted her. She looked to the sky, listening hard.

  “What is that?”

  Honor heard it, too, her gaze fixed on the horizon. “I don’t know. Nothing good, though.” She stepped closer, pressing her shoulder against Lu’s, the argument forgotten.

  They stood there together in breathless, rigid silence for a moment, every sense open, their ears straining to filter out the wind whispering through branches, the birds singing in the trees, and Beckett’s faint laughter, a teasing echo that had the blood again rising in Honor’s cheeks.

  The steady whop-whop-whop of blades cutting through air, the mechanical noise of gravity being beaten into submission . . . Lu knew that sound.

  Together, Lu and Honor whispered, “Helicopter!”

  They shared a look of horrified comprehension, then bounded down the hill at a flat-out run.

  SIXTEEN

  By the time they reached Beckett and the rest of his group, they’d all heard the helicopter, too. They stood in the long shadows of the pines, faces upturned, tense and silent. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.

  Sayer, the petite, raven-haired girl Beckett had been chasing around the tree, said nervously, “We should get back into the caves.”

  Beckett nodded, still looking at the sky. “Yes, you should. Take Kali and North with you. Dash and Oz, make sure the girls get inside, and let everyone know we’ve got Enforcement on our tails. Get battle ready.”

  “Enforcement?” whispered a horrified North. She was taller than Kali and Sayer, just a few inches shy of Beckett’s height, with almond-shaped green eyes that dominated her face. “How do you know it’s Enforcement?”

  “Who else would it be?” said Beckett, then pointed suddenly, his face hard. “I was right; look.”

  Cresting a jagged black range of mountains in the distance was a trio of black helicopters. They turned, following the line of the peaks, and even from where she stood, Lu could see the bright yellow sun emblem painted on their sides.

  “But how?” cried North.

  “My collar,” Lu whispered, reaching up to touch her throat. “There must have been a tracking device in it.”

  A ripple of panic went through the group. Suddenly Magnus appeared as if from nowhere, stepping out from behind the massive trunk of a nearby tree. He said, “Everyone follow me,” and began to stride quickly toward the entrance to the caves, a small, black opening in the side of the hill.

  But he was brought up short when Honor said, “That won’t be necessary.”

  Everyone turned to look at her, but she was still staring at those helicopters, drawing inexorably closer.

  “There’s only three of them.” She glanced at Lu with an odd, wild gleam in her eyes.

  Magnus walked slowly back, and stood in front of them. “You’re right. It’s a scouting party,” he said. “If they were sure we were here, they’d have sent an entire battalion.”

  “They’ll have thermal imaging cameras,” interjected Oz, sounding even more nervous than Sayer had. “If they do a ground scan—”

  “They’re not going to get that far,” said Honor softly, still looking at Lu. “Are they, sis?”

  Everyone fell quiet, looking back and forth between the two of them, and Lu had a bad feeling about what Honor might mean. She said, “If these three go off grid, the IF will know something happened. They’ll just send more.”

  Honor didn’t even blink. “Yep. But it will take them a while because they won’t be sure what caused them to go offline. Could be weather interference, could be an equipment malfunction, could be a million different things. The IF will wait awhile before they send another search party, maybe even a few days. Whereas if they get infrared readings on close to a thousand warm bodies living in the caves of Ogof Ffynnon Ddu, the entire Federation will converge on this island faster than you can say, ‘Smaug is obviously the smartest dragon.’” She paused for a beat. “And the prettiest.”

  Her stomach knotting as she watched the helicopters fly closer, Lu asked quietly, “So what do we do?”

  Honor replied with one of her cold, cold smiles, sending a shiver of dread down Lu’s spine. “What we do best.”

  “Which is?”

  A sudden, freezing wind whipped through the trees with such force it bowed their highest branches. Honor’s chilling smile grew wider. “Wreck shit.”

  Magnus said, “Beckett, get back to your lab and destroy that collar. And take everyone with you.”

  Looking at Honor with a strange, conflicted expression, Beckett replied, “I’m not leaving.”

  “It wasn’t a request!” snarled Magnus, stepping closer to Beckett. “Get everyone inside and take care of that collar! Now!”

  Beckett’s nostrils flared as he stared hard at Magnus. The two men stood chest to chest, Magnus standing a few inches taller, but Beckett broader in the shoulders, until Sayer took Beckett’s hand and tugged at it.

  “Beck. C’mon.” She shot a worried glance at Magnus, then gave another, sharper, tug on Beckett’s hand.

  “You should listen to Magnus,” said Honor softly, staring at the sky, the wind whipping her hair into a cloud of glinting gold around her shoulders. “He knows firsthand how things tend to go a little sideways when my sister and I lose our tempers.” She flicked a glance at Sayer, then at Beckett, then at their joined hands. Her gaze returned to Beckett’s face, and she said, harder, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  A flicker of emotion darkened Beckett’s eyes, and for a moment he and Honor just gazed at one another. Then he said quietly, “Someone always gets hurt when you’re involved, Honor.” He turned his back and dragged Sayer away by the hand, and the rest of the group followed him, setting off for the entrance to the caves at a trot.

  As Honor watched them go, a low rumble of thunder echoed through the hills in the distance. The wind grew stronger. A roiling black mass of thunderclouds appeared in the sky, crackling with hellish purple veins of lightning.

  “Is that you?” Lu whispered to Honor, watching the sky darken in fascination.

  “You should see me when I’m PMSing,” Honor replied in the same hard tone she’d used with Beckett. She’d finally stopped watching him when he and his group disappeared into the caves. “Which is pretty much all the time,” she added, which made Magnus snort.

  “Go inside, Seeker,” said Honor. She took Lu’s hand and held it tightly.

  “Not a chance in hell, Ice Queen,” he replied in a tone that clearly broadcasted how serious he was. He came and stood beside Lu, and she looked up at him, into those dark, beguiling eyes. Holding her gaze, he murmured, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Honor said, “Suit yourself. But don’t blame me for your bruises.”

  Magnus glanced at Honor, frowning.

  That’s when the first of the hail began to fall, hurtling down from the sky with such force the golf ball–sized chunks of ice bounced high off the ground with a sound like the clatter of hooves.

  “Control, this is Tango Aztec two-niner-six-four Alpha, over.”

  “Go ahead, Tango.”

  “We’re experiencing severe weather conditions en route to target. Request permission to land until flight conditions are more favorable, over.”

  A crackle of static. “Describe your situation, Tango. Control is getting interference with your readouts.”

  Interference? The helicopter pilot and his
copilot shared a glance.

  “Tail wind at twenty-eight knots, low visibility due to heavy fog, temperature currently at—” No. That couldn’t be right. The pilot frowned at the digital readout; according to his instrument, the outside temperature had dropped thirty degrees in the last minute.

  “Tango, repeat your last transmission, please, we’re having trouble with your signal.”

  The pilot knew the temperature gauge was malfunctioning. It had to be, because at the rate it was dropping, the fuel lines would ice up—

  Bam! Bam! Bam! The pilot started in his seat, shocked by the enormous white balls raining down on the windshield.

  On the console, a red warning light blinked on at the same time an alarm shrilly sounded. There immediately followed a grinding, hollow groan from the rotors, and a violent shudder shook the cabin.

  “Oh, shit!” shouted the copilot.

  Control called over the com again, but the words were garbled, lost beneath the howling of the wind and the blinding crackle of a jagged fork of lightning that exploded in the dark sky not ten meters in front of the aircraft.

  Now truly panicked, the pilot engaged the anti-ice system, but his instrument panel lit up like a Thornemas tree with a barrage of warning lights, madly blinking red and yellow. The gyroscope spun wildly, the vertical speed indicator lurched, the torque meter went off the charts.

  The rotors stalled. The copilot screamed, louder even than the wind. Then with a jolt that flattened the pilot’s stomach up under his lungs, the helicopter dropped like a rock from the sky.

  “This one’s dead, too.” Lumina covered her mouth with the back of her hand. She turned away from the mangled body of the man who had been thrown clear from the smoking wreckage of one of the helicopters, and stood with her eyes closed, dragging fresh air into her lungs, her lips pressed together, blood quickly draining from her face.

  As it had drained from the man’s body to stain his frayed uniform, and darken the grass.

  “Wreck shit,” Honor had said, and that is precisely what had happened. All three of the IF helicopters had gone down in the storm, and everyone on board was killed.

  Lu had felt such a thrill of power to stand there beside her sister, to wield such awful force. Especially on her enemies, the same group who’d murdered her father, the same bunch of mindless disciples of Thorne who wanted nothing more than to see her caged, or dead. It had made her blood sing. It had made her nearly dizzy with wicked glee.

  But then, oh then in the quiet aftermath, witnessing the carnage she had wrought . . . what intense disgust she’d felt. What black, encompassing revulsion.

  At herself.

  Lu knew people died in war. It was a simple, incontrovertible fact that lives ended when battles began. But a thing known in theory is much different when experienced firsthand. Believing in an eye for an eye is all well and good, until you’re forced to stand in front of your enemy’s face and pluck that offending eye out of its socket with your own fingers. Then revenge loses some of its charm.

  “It had to be done,” Magnus said.

  Lu opened her eyes to find him standing just a few feet away, watching her with strain clear in his face, his posture. She hated to see that worry on him, but even worse than his worry was a new thing lurking beneath, a thing that hooded his eyes and curved his lips and shoved an icy splinter of panic into her heart: admiration.

  She didn’t want to be admired for this . . . butchery.

  “Let’s get back to the caves,” said Honor. “We need to make a plan for what we’re going to do next.” She seemed utterly unaffected by the sight of dead bodies, or that she’d helped make them that way, and Lu wasn’t sure if she was envious, or disappointed. How could Honor feel nothing, witnessing this? How could she stand there dusting off her hands like nothing had just happened?

  Her thoughts were interrupted when a low, wretched moan came from the only helicopter they hadn’t inspected yet, lying on its flank about thirty meters away in a shallow depression between a stand of trees and several large boulders.

  Lu whirled around and stared at it in horror. “Someone’s still alive!”

  Grimly, Magnus said, “Apparently so.” From within his jacket, he withdrew a knife with a long, curved blade that gathered the light into a sinister sheen along its edge.

  “No—God! Magnus, just . . . don’t.” He’d been about to head in the direction of the moan, but Lu stepped in front of him, blocking his path.

  “We can’t afford the luxury of mercy, Lumina. There are too many lives at risk to leave any loose ends untied.”

  “They’re not loose ends, they’re people!” She answered before she even had a chance to edit the words, or think about why mercy might mean so much to her now when only minutes before she’d been so bloodthirsty.

  One of his dark brows arched. “No, they’re hunters. Hunters who wouldn’t hesitate to slit your throat if the situation was reversed.”

  “Just . . . wait. He might . . . go . . . on his own.”

  Magnus watched her closely for a moment, his gaze turned assessing. “Do you really think one more, or one less, makes a difference to anyone, anywhere? You think someone is keeping score? That there’s an old man with white hair in the sky looking down and making hash marks next to your name in a book, and that someday you’ll have to answer for every one?”

  Lu was taken aback by the hardness in his tone, his total lack of compunction. She stared at him with a flame of anger constricting her throat. “If you’re asking if I believe in God, the answer is yes! I don’t think God is an old man who lives in the sky, but I do think it makes a difference in the universe, or whatever you want to call it, every time you cause suffering!”

  He looked, oddly, as if she’d slapped him. It lasted only a second before he regained his composure, the strange pain that had so briefly flared in his eyes now snuffed out.

  “This was self-protection, Lumina, not premeditated murder. Those are two completely different things. You and Honor just saved a thousand lives—”

  “By taking a dozen!”

  “You cannot be sentimental—”

  “Well I am!” she cried, her eyes filling with moisture. “I know you’re right, it had to be done, but screw you if you think I’m not going to feel bad about it!” She looked at Honor. “And screw both of you for not feeling bad about it, too!”

  Nauseated, her heart pounding, Lu turned and headed toward the helicopter without a glance behind.

  Like the other two, it was a shambles of crumpled metal. Only one of its two rotors was still attached, bent and deeply gouged, with electrical wiring spraying out like severed veins. The tail had sheared in half on impact, and the tail rotor had separated with such force it was embedded in the trunk of a nearby tree, sticking out at a crazy angle. Wreckage was strewn all over the ground. Piles of black metal spat flames, smoke and gasoline fumes wafted in pungent gray and iridescent coils through the air.

  Unlike the others, this helicopter wasn’t surrounded by bodies.

  From inside, the moan came again, fainter this time.

  Lu froze, her chest tight, feeling as if she might be sick. The impulse to run away was almost overwhelming, but holding her in place was an equally strong desire to lay eyes on this stranger, this person who’d been sent to . . .

  Sent to what, exactly? A pulse of heat went through her body like a wave, and Lu knew with absolute certainty that she had to get to whoever was making those awful moans, before he stopped making them.

  Because he was more valuable to her alive than dead.

  She closed the final distance to the helicopter in a few long strides, then looked in.

  She recoiled with a gasp.

  The inside of the helicopter looked painted in blood. It was everywhere: on the ceiling, the floors, the seats, the instrument panel, dripping down the walls in gory, long streaks. There
had been four men strapped inside, two in front, two in back . . . and they were all still strapped in. But they’d been crushed, almost as if an invisible, giant hand had seized them, and squeezed. Their skin had burst like overripe fruit.

  By some miracle, the pilot was conscious. Barely.

  Fighting down a throatful of bitter bile, Lu yanked on the pilot’s dented door, and swung it open. His eyelids fluttered. He turned his head a fraction of an inch, and saw her. Lu noticed his eyes were the color of an ancient pair of denim trousers her father had owned: the palest, softest blue.

  “You,” he whispered in German. He wheezed, and a red bubble appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  “Y-you know me?” Lu whispered back. Her hand on the door shook so hard it rattled the frame.

  His eyes glazed. He nodded.

  Of course; the entire Federation must know what she looked like. Her picture would have been plastered everywhere, just like it was in New Vienna, on the megascreen. By now, the image of her face would have been distributed around the entire world. What was left of it.

  Lu pushed that realization aside to focus on what she needed from the pilot. She could see she didn’t have much time. Without another word, she reached out, and gently touched his face.

  She stood like that for a long, silent moment, concentrating, not knowing exactly how this worked, only that it did. The pilot looked back at her without alarm or fear, just that glaze of agony in his eyes, the light behind them rapidly fading. With the faintest of whispers, he said, “Prettier than your picture, girl.” His mouth turned up on one side, then he closed his eyes and died.

  Lu dropped her hand from his face. She stared at him, her body wracked with tremors, her soul in the darkest place it had ever been, a bottomless pit of burning ashes and howling windstorms and boiling lakes of blood.

  She let the door swing shut. She turned, finding Magnus and Hope waiting for her where she’d left them, watching. Then she moved forward as if in a dream, not even flinching when the helicopter exploded into flame and a writhing ball of orange fire engulfed everything around it, including her.