Darkest Hour

by Rob Cornell

Chapter Eight

  “Step back from the door. I’m coming in.”

  Lockman waited a handful of seconds, then opened the door to the basement. Only a bit of sunlight filtered through the back entry to the farmhouse, but they didn’t take chances. No point getting burned if she could avoid it.

  He expected to find her still on the stairs, though. Instead he stared down at an empty staircase that disappeared into the dark about three quarters of the way to the bottom landing. She had lights down there. He didn’t know why she wasn’t using them.

  “Jess?”

  The blackness seemed to swallow his voice.

  He called to her again.

  “Come on down,” she said finally. “And don’t forget to close the door behind you.”

  “I can’t see a thing. Turn on a light.”

  “Hurts my eyes. That thing you zapped me with really messed me up.”

  He didn’t know what to say about that. He could apologize, but she wouldn’t buy it. And he couldn’t sell it. The moment he had learned how much influence Gabriel had on her, the professional in him had taken over. With that amount of power she had displayed, they couldn’t take any chances.

  “Will you please come down?”

  Lockman pulled his smart phone from his pocket and used the illumination from the screen to guide him down the stairs without tripping and breaking his neck. When he reached the landing, he swiped the basement with the bluish light emanating from the phone. He stopped on Jessie, whom he found crouched in the far corner by the furnace.

  She ducked her head down against her knees and moaned. “Dad, the light.”

  “This little bit bothers you?” he asked and pointed his screen at his feet.

  “Yes. Please turn it off.”

  “The light barely reaches you.”

  “It hurts my eyes, damnit. Don’t you even care?”

  He turned the light off and the basement dropped into total darkness. Without his sight, other senses ramped up to compensate. He smelled something like cold meat, though he didn’t know what that could be. When they had first acquired the farmhouse, the basement looked like what you imagined it would in a hundred year-old house. Cobwebs, dust, and the musty smell of old things. But they had scoured the room when they prepared it for Jessie’s use. The basement had probably never been as clean but for the day the house was built. If then. When they got done with it, the basement had smelled mostly like bleach.

  Something made him wonder if this new meat locker smell belonged to Jessie—the equivalent of vampire BO.

  “How long have you been up?” he asked.

  “A while, I guess. But my head hurt too much to get out of bed right away.”

  “Why don’t you lay back down?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had dreams in that bed last night.” Her voice shook. “Terrible dreams.”

  Again, Lockman found himself without an adequate response. Any comfort he tried to offer would sound frivolous or disingenuous.

  “You know I can see you? In the dark.”

  “Yeah.” He was familiar with vamp night vision.

  “Do you hate me?”

  Lockman winced. He felt a pinch in his gut. “No. I don’t hate you.”

  “But I disgust you.”

  “Why are you saying these things?”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Jess, stop. Have I ever treated you like I thought any of those things?”

  “I saw the way you looked at me last night.” Something shuffled along the floor in the dark. “And you tazed me in the head. Not really something you do to someone you like.”

  He caught himself grinding his teeth. He had to make a concerted effort to stop. “I made a judgment call.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” Her voice sounded closer. Maybe five feet out in front of him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You found out Gabriel was inside of me—”

  “I knew about that.”

  “But you forgot. I didn’t talk about him and you let yourself pretend like he wasn’t here.”

  She was a little closer still. Maybe within reach. Lockman stretched out a hand. Grasped nothing but air. “Why didn’t you say something? You could have let me know what he was up to.”

  “The only thing he’s been up to is giving me real answers. Like right now. He says you probably would have locked me up if I’d told you he was training me.”

  The idea that Gabriel was right there, polluting Jessie’s soul, made Lockman’s skin burn. “Training you?”

  “How to use my power. Ways to cope with the vampirism. He knows a lot of stuff about the supernatural.”

  “You talk about him like he’s your friend. That man is straight up evil, Jess. You can’t trust him.”

  “He’s just a voice in my head. I can block him whenever I want. I don’t think he can do much harm from where he’s at.”

  Lockman took a measured breath. This conversation had him nearly jumping out of his skin. He wanted to grab Gabriel around the throat and throttle him. But he wasn’t an actual person anymore. If Gabriel came back, it would mean taking over Lockman’s body. And what about Lockman’s consciousness? Less substantial than a breeze. He would not exist anymore.

  “You can’t underestimate him.”

  “You think I’m weak.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “You don’t think I have control. Like he’s going to pop out of me or something. I’m just the dumb kid, right?”

  “No. That’s not it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Her voice came from right next to him. He turned toward the sound, reached out and found her shoulder to grab. Her body felt miserably cold.

  That’s because she’s a walking corpse.

  No. That was movie stuff. Real vampires had significant differences from Hollywood’s take. A mistake many mortals made when they got their introduction to the paranormal. Like the scientists with their paranormal hypotheses, people could think they knew more than they really did about a creature if they used their fictional counterparts as research.

  “Jess, this is all a lot to take in. We’re concerned about your safety.”

  “My safety?” She chuckled. “I think you’re more worried about your own asses.”

  “Fair enough. We’re thinking about everybody’s safety.”

  She placed a hand over his, sandwiching his hand between her cold palm and cold shoulder. A chill ran up his arm. It occurred to him that they hadn’t had much physical contact in a long while. They probably both knew on a subconscious level that contact would only remind them of how much had changed, and offer little in the way of comfort.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I promise.”

  Lockman swallowed, gave her shoulder a gentle shake. “We’re going to pull you off of missions for a while. Just to be safe.”

  Her hand slipped off of his. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “It is to me. What else have I got to do with my life? Hang out in my basement all day and watch TV while sucking blood out of plastic bags all night? There’s a good time.”

  “We’re not doing this for a ‘good time.’ I just found out we’ve got a city in Alaska that doesn’t have daylight for two months, and vamps are tearing through there like it’s a buffet. This is a war.”

  “That I’ve been a part of from the start. Whether you like it or not, this is as much my fight as it is yours. Maybe more, since I’m a fucking vampire and this is a war against vampires.”

  “I’m not arguing. I’m in charge of this, for better or worse. It’s my call. You’re out for now.”

  She hissed, an inhuman sound that raised the hairs on back of Lockman’s neck. She jerked out of reach from his hand on her shoulder. Next thing he knew, he was sailing through the darkness, the air knocked from his lungs by Jessie’s kick to his midsection.

  He banged his elbow when he h
it the floor, sending spurs of pain up and down the same arm Jessie had wounded the night before. He sat up on the floor and cradled his arm. He gritted his teeth and tried to coast through the pain until it subsided.

  “Oh, god.” Jessie crouched at Lockman’s side as quickly as she had kicked him. He couldn’t see her, but he felt her hand on his back and the general presence of her body beside him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  “Help me up.”

  She got behind him and lifted him to his feet easily.

  When he regained his balance, he faced the general direction of where he thought she stood. “I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t want to. I let my feelings get in the way. That allowed me to forget what you are now. And you’ve played it pretty cool all along. Until last night. We all got a hard reminder.”

  “I’m still your daughter. I still have feelings of my own.”

  “I know.”

  “Then don’t keep me cooped up here. I can help. Can you imagine what I could do to the vamps? With my immunity to silver and religious icons? Take me to Alaska. So what if there’s no sunlight? They don’t stand a frickin’ chance against me.”

  Lockman pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’m going to turn on my light so I can make it to the stairs.”

  “Aren’t you listening?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Well?”

  He took in a heavy breath, smelled that cold meat smell again. Definitely coming from Jessie. “You remember one of the first things I told you about mojo?”

  “It’s all bad,” she said in a typical teenage bored voice.

  “Last night, your mojo stopped working. What did you have to do to get it to work again?”

  Her sigh echoed in the dark basement.

  “You used my flesh. My blood. Your father. Don’t you understand what that means?”

  Silence except for a small shuffling of her feet on the cement floor.

  “If you could maintain the level of power you showed last night, you’d be right. The vamps wouldn’t stand a chance. But what price will you have to pay in order to do that? A piece of your father’s flesh will only go so far.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said.

  She didn’t sound convinced herself, though. Maybe he had gotten through to her, a little at least. “I’m turning on the light.”

  He heard her footsteps walk away from him. After a second of silence, he tapped his phone’s screen and lit the way.

  Jessie had returned to the corner by the furnace. She stood there with her nose in the corner like a delinquent student in a time out.

  Lockman stayed put a few seconds longer in hopes he might come up with something comforting—and convincing—to say. Everything that came to mind sounded more like warnings or accusations. He gave up and headed upstairs. Just before he closed the basement door he thought he heard Jessie crying.

  Chapter Nine

  Kate’s closet-sized apartment shared a wall with a neighbor obsessed with bass drums. Almost twenty-four/seven the man—or woman; Kate had never met the person—played music that seemed entirely composed of bass rhythm with the rare hint of horns or guitar, and twice she thought she actually heard some singing.

  This quaint New York feature made Kate’s life especially difficult because the only job she had managed to find when she first arrive at the city was working the night shift at a twenty-four hour convenience store. It meant trying to sleep during the day. Which meant, as neighbor to the true “Ace of Bass,” she needed to wear earplugs when she went to bed.

  This was why she did not hear the pounding on her door until the person doing the pounding kicked the door clean off its hinges and barged in with a gun about three times too big for her small hands.

  Kate had reached that hazy edge of sleep, right before the full dark plunge, which meant she was just aware enough to register the intruder bounding into her apartment despite the fact she couldn’t hear it. She snapped wide awake and sat up in bed, her heart racing and hands shaking from the sudden adrenaline dose to her system. She cried out as if she had awoken from a nightmare. Unfortunately, it turned out she had awoken into one.

  The woman had jet black hair with a pristine white stripe down the middle. The only thing that kept it from looking like she wore a skunk on her head was the pretty face the hair framed, and eyes a shade of blue that seemed to shine in the shadows made by the drawn shades.

  The woman approached Kate with the gun up and aimed straight at Kate’s face. She wore what looked like a black track suit, the kind that made a whisking sound when the legs brushed together.

  She moved her mouth, but Kate couldn’t hear what she said because of the ear plugs. She quickly pulled them out and tossed them aside. “What? What do you want?”

  “I told you to put your fucking hands above your fucking head.” The woman had an accent. Australian, maybe?

  Kate complied. The barrel of that gun looked as wide as a manhole from her perspective. The thing probably shot missiles instead of bullets. “I don’t have a lot of money.”

  “Don’t want your fucking money.” The woman came right up to the bed and pressed the barrel of the gun to Kate’s forehead. “Cross your wrists over your head.”

  Kate crossed her wrists.

  “Now hold still.” The intruder pulled a plastic loop from her pocket. She placed the loop around Kate’s wrists and pulled on a loose end. The loop zipped closed, the plastic cutting into her skin. The woman backed off and motioned with the gun. “You can put your hands in your lap now.”

  Kate lowered her hands and checked out the zip-tie. Where the plastic dug in she felt a persistent sting. She also felt some circulation loss in her fingers. Five minutes or so and she’d probably lose feeling.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I’m going to say a name. You tell me if you know it.”

  Kate stared back, said nothing.

  “Craig Lockman.”

  This woman knew Craig? Was this some demented stroke of luck? She didn’t know what the woman wanted, but was it possible the woman could lead Kate to her daughter?

  “I know him,” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I’m the one asking questions, love. You dig?”

  Kate nodded. She glanced toward her door, wondering if anyone might walk by and notice the door itself was missing and the woman with the giant gun inside. This was New York. Even if they noticed, they’d probably pretend they didn’t.

  But the glance at the doorway led Kate to then look at the door itself, flat on the floor in the middle of the room. A little kiss of vertigo came over her. This small woman, no bigger than Kate, had kicked the door clear off the frame and halfway across the apartment.

  The woman must have noticed where Kate was looking and what was going through her mind. She grinned, revealing a diamond inset in one of her front teeth. “You like that, huh?”

  “You’re not human.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “Savvy.”

  “So what are you?”

  “Your fairy fucking godmother.” She waggled her gun barrel back and forth. “No more introductions. I have a few more Qs for you. Where’s your daughter? She at school?”

  Kate sneered. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Don’t play with me, coochie. Where’s the girl?”

  “I already told you. I don’t know. Her father took her away from me.”

  That clearly caught the woman off guard. She lowered her gun, shoulders sagged, and she started pacing. “Un-fucking-believable. This is my luck. Romeo is going to pop a gear.”

  Kate swung her legs down and sat on the edge of the bed.

  The movement drew the woman’s attention. She snapped around and pointed her gun back at Kate. “Chill there.”

  “I’m just sitting up.”

  “And did I ask you to, love?”

  “Who are you?”

  The woman stare
d at Kate and clucked her tongue a few times, looking as if she were trying to decide what to do with her. “Why’d he take her?”

  “I don’t know that either. Apparently, it was too much for me to handle.”

  The woman smiled again, showing off her diamond. “Sweet of him to protect the poor civies.”

  Kate’s hands started to throb. She tried to adjust them in the plastic loop and only managed to spike the pain around her wrists. “I don’t understand anything you’re talking about, but if you’re looking for Craig and Jessie, I’m on board to help. You don’t need this.” She held up her bound hands. “And you don’t need that.” She nodded at the massive gun.

  Instead of answering, the woman started a tour of the apartment. She moseyed around the perimeter, checking out the limited amount of furniture while keeping the gun pointed in Kate’s general direction the whole time. It didn’t take long. There wasn’t much to see. The apartment didn’t even have a kitchenette. Kate warmed things up in the microwave sitting on her dresser or she went out to eat. She had eaten more fast food in the last six months than she had the whole rest of her life.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Kate asked.

  “I’d like it good if you stopped talking.”

  “I’d like it good if you took this damn thing off my wrists before my hands turn purple and fall off.”

  The woman smirked. She crossed the room to Kate, drew a switchblade from her pocket, and snapped the blade out. In a brisk sweep, she cut the plastic while somehow avoiding slicing a bit of Kate with it.

  The rush of feeling almost felt worse at first. Then the pain gave way to pins and needles. She rubbed her hands together to help bring back circulation. “Thanks.”

  The woman then surprised Kate by sitting down on the bed next to her. She didn’t keep the gun trained on her either, laying it across her lap instead. “It’s been a shit week, princess.”

  “It’s been a shit year,” Kate said.

  “You have no idea.” The woman leaned toward Kate as if she were going to sniff her. Her crystal blue eyes stared deep into Kate’s. “You got some, but nothing much.”

  Did everything this woman say have to come across as a riddle? “Some of what?”