Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  In the softness of her mother’s voice Lumina found her meaning, and numbly nodded her head. Magnus would be buried in Wales. She wouldn’t leave his body here in this godforsaken city; she’d take him back to the caves and find a spot to bury him, a beautiful spot on a hill overlooking the ocean, where she could visit him every day. Where she could mourn.

  Shaking violently, an unholy howling inside her skull, Lumina rose unsteadily to her feet. She looked around, numb, heartbroken, staring blindly into faces both human and animal, all of them blinking in the first light of day they’d seen in decades. Someone in the crowd said a name in an awed murmur, and it was the same name her mother had called her:

  Hope.

  Lumina nearly laughed at the absurdity of it, at the sheer, colossal wrongness of it all. There was no Hope. The girl and the dream were both annihilated. At least for her. All that was left was a vile, pounding emptiness, ashes and bones and death.

  She Shifted to dragon, ignoring the collective gasp of the crowd. She gently picked up the body of her love in her massive gold-tipped claws, then launched into the air, pumping her powerful wings hard. She vaulted into the sky through the gaping remains of the cathedral’s roof. She didn’t notice the throng on the city streets below her, soldiers and citizens staring in wonder at the new, harmless sky, at the red dragon soaring into the endless nexus of blue. She didn’t notice the smoking remains of the Enforcement helicopters, or wonder what the future would bring.

  For her, there wasn’t any future. There was only the past, where Magnus—her heart, the beating pulse of her soul—lived on.

  She flew, high and fast, unable in her grief to notice one other small, but vitally important, detail:

  The body she was transporting to its final resting place in Wales had stopped bleeding.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Faces. So many faces. Every one familiar, even through the blinding haze of light. Weightlessness, the heady scent of wildflowers, a feeling of wonder. Warmth. Music.

  Peace.

  It was so beautiful here, wherever here was. So tranquil. He never wanted to leave.

  He moved toward the light, toward the faces, happy now, at ease. Effortless motion, gliding without resistance, formless yet whole. He raised his hands in front of his eyes, and they were made of the same light as everything else, incandescent, pulsating right through his skin. He laughed, and it was music. Plashing fountains and birdsong and all that dazzling, glimmering light . . . all of it so exquisitely beautiful. So real.

  A whisper made him pause. It was a voice . . . a woman’s voice. Lovely, yet ineffably sad. The voice was familiar, but not. The name it called was familiar, but not. A puzzle. It bothered him, a little at first, then more and more as he perceived the raw note of anguish reverberating through that voice, the endless, aching pain. The pain was out of place in all this loveliness.

  Looking around, he wanted to find the source. He wanted to comfort the owner of that voice. He wanted to offer solace to such unutterable longing . . .

  Suddenly he wanted that more than anything else in this new, magnificent world.

  He turned away from the light, and a solid resistance arose inside him as he did. It hurt to turn away, but that voice hurt him even more. It called to him, urgent, pain like a hot welter over the center of his chest. A shocking kaleidoscope of images hit with breath-stealing intensity: the dim gleam of pale skin, the curve of a bare hip. The elegant arch of a neck, lit by candlelight. Hair like spun gold, lucent eyes fringed in a curve of black lashes. Laughter like the pealing of bells, from a mouth he wanted, needed, to kiss.

  A face. That face, even more lovely than all the ethereal beauty around him.

  Fire.

  Hope.

  It left his lips soundlessly, but the lovely voice that had been calling out in such longing, such wretched pain, fell silent when he thought the word. Carnivorous hunger arose in him, a need to see that face, a face he loved more than anything else in the whole of his existence. A need to hear that name she’d been calling out with such depth of sorrow . . . Magnus.

  His name.

  With the force of a wrecking ball, it all came back to him. His past, his life, the endless labyrinth of searching for something he’d finally, finally found, only to have it ripped away from his hands.

  Lumina. Hope. Two names that meant the same thing to him: love. She was his home and his home was her, not this dazzling place. It was empty without her. It was nothing without her.

  He was nothing without her. He would not—not—give her up.

  As soon as the certainty of it solidified within him, the world tilted and spun, flashing lights and falling stars and a sense of falling down, down, into nothing. Into darkness.

  An eternity of darkness. And then . . .

  Light again, but different this time. Diffuse. A sly, sliding flicker glimpsed through a blurry screen. Music again, too, but also different. Not instrumental, but natural. What was it? It was so familiar, he’d heard it before . . . water. Yes, flowing water, murmuring, sighing, splashing over rocky streambeds, dripping down stone walls, thundering over sheer cliffs to fall into deep, clear pools below.

  He felt the same sense of peace, though. The same wonderful feeling of wholeness had followed him from wherever he’d been. It almost made up for the unholy hardness of the thing at his back. That discomfort, along with a creeping chill that accompanied it, was what finally convinced him to sit up.

  When he did, Magnus was met with a scene of such impossible absurdity, his first impulse was to laugh. It was a good thing he didn’t; by the look of horror and shock on everyone’s faces, that would have been a bad move.

  Row upon row of chairs, filled with silent people dressed in black, in a dim, rock chamber, illuminated only by candlelight. Vases overflowing with flowers, their scent perfuming the air. A burning cone of incense in a silver thurible near his feet, exhaling a sinuous fume of smoke along with spicy notes of bergamot and sandalwood. Beneath him a long, rectangular outcropping of rock, elevated a few feet above the stone floor. And on his lap, the black shroud that had covered his face and body, rucked to folds around his waist as he’d sat up.

  Holy hell. He’d just interrupted his own funeral.

  Into the astonished hush, he said in a voice thick and scratchy, “Well. I always knew I had good timing, but this is ridiculous.”

  A sound below him caught his attention. He looked down, and there knelt his love at the base of the altar upon which he sat. She stared up at him with wide open eyes, her face pale as stone, trembling hands over her mouth. She made the sound again—a high, small whine of heartbroken disbelief—and it shattered him.

  Magnus reached down, dragged Lumina to her feet, and crushed her against his chest.

  “How? How?” Her voice was a rasp. She shook violently in his arms.

  Magnus took her face in his hands and looked deep into her eyes, smiling. “Did you think a silly thing like me dying could keep us apart?” His smile faded, and his voice became a low, vehement whisper. “Nothing could ever keep me from you, Lumina. Nothing. Not even death itself.”

  She burst into tears.

  Then, chaos. Everyone jumped from their chairs. Cries of joy and disbelief echoed off the cave walls. They were swarmed. Xander and Morgan, Demetrius and Eliana, Christian and Ember, Hawk and Jack, Honor and Beckett and everyone else, the entire tribe, jostling and shoving, shouting and reaching out to touch him. The Seeker, returned from the dead.

  Resurrected from the dead . . . by love.

  “I don’t understand.” Lumina kept repeating it, a litany that Honor finally answered.

  “You must have Gifted it to him. Like you did to me.”

  Lumina turned to look at her sister, still uncomprehending, her face wet, her green eyes tear-glossed, little jerking hiccups wracking her body. “Gifted it?” The words were hoarse and disbelieving,
like the sound she’d made when she’d looked up at him, arisen from the dead. Honor batted them aside like one would an annoying fly.

  “I told you before you left, dummy—I wasn’t the one who took Caesar’s immortality. That was you. And then you Gifted it to me. You shared it, get it?”

  Lumina stared at her, frozen, not getting it. But a pulse of understanding went through Magnus, palpable as a fist squeezing his heart, and it was as if a door had been opened and a great wind rushed through, and he could finally see. What he saw was the future.

  Ah. Yes.

  Honor rolled her eyes, folding her arms across her chest. “Your greatest power isn’t that you can take other people’s talents, other Ikati’s Gifts. It’s that you can give them away again, to whoever you want. While still keeping them yourself. Kind of like the world’s best sharing software.” Her lips pursed, and she gazed at Lumina with disapproval. “How do you not know this?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Wait,” Beckett cut in. He stood just behind Honor, one hand resting lightly on her waist, and Magnus knew by that simple, proprietary gesture their relationship had gone in an entirely different direction since he and Lumina had left for New Vienna. “So, what you’re saying is . . . Hope can . . . she can . . .”

  “Gift it to all of us,” Honor finished Beckett’s thought when he faltered into stunned silence. “Yes. I mean, if she wanted to.” She shrugged, as if the thought had never occurred to her before, but then blinked, looking around at the crowd, who had now also fallen quiet. Her voice very small, she said, “Oh.”

  Oh indeed. Judging by the expression on her face, the same pulse of understanding that had just run through him was running through Honor. Their eyes met, and they shared a moment of profound silence, broken by another pulse of understanding, evidenced in the form of a ragged gasp.

  “Room . . . spinning,” Lumina croaked, sagging against Magnus. He caught her before she fell, lifting her easily into his arms. He felt surprisingly strong for having just survived a trip to the afterlife.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he said, looking down at Lumina in his arms, “how long was I dead?”

  “Almost an entire day,” she whispered, clutching his shirt. “We were just about to bury you.”

  “Hmm. In that case, I’d say my timing is better than good; it’s impeccable.”

  Lumina rested her head against his shoulder. “I picked out a really nice spot,” she whispered. “Good view. Lots of sun.”

  She stroked his neck, her touch reverent, and he followed her gaze. At the end of the gold chain around his neck glittered her dragon pendant, winking at him in the candlelight in its friendly, serpentine way. He knew with absolute certainty that he’d never take it off. The woman he loved more than life itself had put it there, and there it would stay forever.

  Magnus brushed a kiss over her forehead. Full of wonder, his heart bursting with love, he said, “Too bad I’ll never need it, since I’ll be spending eternity with you.”

  His words produced a fresh onslaught of tears.

  Then Honor said, “Um, that’s not completely accurate.”

  Magnus looked up at her. She smiled at him with a kind of ecstatic, childlike glee. “You’ll be spending it with us.” She sent a pointed look at her sister, then made a small motion with her finger, a circle that encompassed the room and everyone in it.

  The urge to laugh arose again, and this time Magnus didn’t fight it. He threw his head back and gave himself over to it. The joy he felt was simple and total, bright as a starburst, growing even brighter when Lumina smiled up at him through her tears and began to laugh along with him. Then they were all laughing, rampantly happy, ridiculously, impossibly, alive.

  Magnus began to push through the crowd, Lumina as light as his own heart in his arms. The laughter followed them all the way back to the small, spartan room he called his own.

  Hours later, sated for the moment and lazily heavy in the afterglow of love, Magnus pushed to his elbow and gazed down in adoration at the woman lying on the rumpled sheets beside him. With mussed hair and a sleepy, satisfied smile, she reached up and drew her finger down his cheek, the softest caress.

  “All the sun burns healed,” she whispered, tracing her finger over his jaw.

  He grasped her hand, kissed her fingertips. “Lucky for you, or you’d be spending forever staring at Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Her brow furrowed. She moved her head on the pillow, getting a better look at him. “But your scars are still there, from when you were in that prison. Wonder if it’s because they’re from before you first Shifted—”

  He stiffened. “How do you know about that?”

  The words came out harder than he’d intended, but she simply smiled. “Gregor MacGregor.”

  A snarl ripped through his chest before he could stop it. Bizarrely, that made her laugh. She curled into him, nuzzling his throat, sliding her foot between his calves. “Who, by the way, isn’t as bad as we thought.”

  “Not as bad as we thought? He betrayed us! He’s a dead man! I’m going to track down that son of a—”

  She shushed his outburst with a finger to his lips. “I admit his methods are questionable, but his intentions were good. Eliana told him about Demetrius’s . . .” she glanced up at him, hesitant to speak of the Dream that had foreseen his death, even after all that had happened. “Gregor didn’t tell her, but he had connections to a group of Dissenters inside the Peace Guard. He didn’t know where the prison was, but he knew they would. He also knew the only way to get me inside without exposing them was to make it look like he’d found me himself, and was turning me in.” Her voice turned wry. “I’m sure the enormous bounty helped in the formulation of the plan.” She sighed. “So he hedged his bets. If things went badly for us, he wouldn’t be suspected and neither would his allies, and if things went our way, he’d still have a giant pile of money. But he was trying to save you, Magnus, by sending me alone.” Her voice gentled, and she gazed at him with the softest, warmest eyes. “And for that I count him as a friend, no matter what his other faults might be.”

  “You could’ve been captured,” he growled. “You could’ve been tortured—”

  “But I wasn’t.” Her voice was firm. “And in the end, I did what I went to do.”

  Magnus held himself still. The possibility of success hadn’t occurred to him before now; he’d just awoken from being dead, after all, had just found out he’d never have to go through that particular experience again. The shock of being alive, of seeing her again, had trumped everything else. Slowly, his eyes searching her face, he asked, “So . . . you mean . . . we won?”

  She lifted a shoulder, nonchalant. “Well, if by won you mean did I reunite with my parents, and release everyone from the prison, and not get myself caught in the process, then yes. We won.” She gazed up at him, eyes shining, and Magnus was so thunderstruck he could barely catch his breath, or form words. He supposed there was only one word he really needed to speak.

  “Thorne?”

  Her eyes hardened. “Dead. And unlike you, that bastard is going to stay that way. Permanently.”

  He rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him so they were chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis, her naked body draped across his. He turned his face to her neck. “Tell me everything,” he whispered, flush with awe and love, holding her tight against him. So she did.

  She told him about Dieter, how he and his inside group of Dissenters had taken over command of the Peace Guard once it was confirmed Thorne was dead. She told him about the uprising in New Vienna, citizens turning against Enforcement, how quickly their reign had collapsed when the news media, freed from control and informed by Dieter, disseminated proof that Thorne’s regime had been the true force behind the isotope clouds and the war that followed the Flash, not the creatures that had been so wrongly labeled Aberrants.

  She
told him how Leander had arranged transport by Thorne’s own fleet of planes for all the Ikati who couldn’t Shift to Vapor to escape the city. How he and her mother were on their way to Wales, right now.

  “And the sky is blue there now, just as blue as it is here. As blue as it will be everywhere soon. Dieter accessed Thorne’s mainframe computers; he discovered how the isotope clouds were manufactured and kept in rotation in the atmosphere. They’re going to shut the whole thing down. No more Phoenix Corporation. No more Thorne. No more hiding.”

  The future was rushing at Magnus, even brighter and more beautiful than he’d ever imagined. He stroked Lumina’s hair off her face and gazed up at her, his heart a mad, teeming circus of joy and euphoria and most of all, love. So much love he went hot with it, a whole body fever burn of blazing rapture.

  “Magnus? Are you all right? God, you’re burning up—”

  He crushed his mouth to hers before she finished. His kiss was wild, devouring, and by the end of it, she was panting and laughing, her forehead pressed against his.

  “I love you,” he said, delirious with it. “God I love you. I love you so fucking much it feels like I invented it. Like I’m the first man who ever loved a woman in the history of the universe. Like it was me loving you that caused the Big Bang, and brought everything else into existence.”

  She sobered, a glint of humor in her eyes. “Yeah, I think you’re kind of okay, too.” She slid a hand between their bodies. Nimble fingers curled around the erection already growing between his legs. Her voice breathy, she leaned down to whisper in his ear. “But I’ve been told that demonstrations are more effective than conversations, so . . .”

  The noise he made was part laugh, part groan, all pleasure. Then she kissed him, and showed him exactly how she felt about him, and it was more than “kind of okay.”

  It was flat-out, full-bore, once-in-a-lifetime love.

  And it was forever.