The End of Darkness

by Jaime Rush

  Erica slogged through the sand and searing sun. Her hands ached, her body ached, and her mind ached every time she thought about what had happened twenty minutes ago. She thought she was heading back to the trail, but she'd obviously lost her way.

  The area was strewn with enormous rocks, and she walked in their shadows to get relief from the sun. A sound caught her attention and shuddered through her. Any noise would set her off now, but this one sounded like a roar. Not a flesh-and-blood animal roar though. She searched the horizon. Were there more of…of whatever that man had been?

  She edged closer to the rock and peered around it. In the near distance, a man raced across the top of a low, flat rock. Her heart hammered at the sight of him. Magnus. Hell, she'd forgotten all about him. He wasn't the Heart Ripper. Maybe he could help her.

  Magnus reached the edge of the rock, braced his hand on it, and jumped easily to the ground several feet below. In cut-off jean shorts, sneakers, and nothing else, he ran the back of his arm across his forehead as he turned and climbed back up. Then he raced across the surface and jumped off the other end and out of sight.

  He seemed to be playing. Or practicing for a race. But he radiated fierce determination by the hard set of his mouth and eyebrows. Not the charmer she'd met. His movements were jerky and sharp. No, let's not approach the angry man tearing around the middle of nowhere.

  She walked closer to the rocks, staying in the shadows. Fear squeezed her chest at the sound of footfalls coming closer. She flexed her arms, the newly scarred skin tight and painful over her shoulders. She’d never had to use Lightning twice in a row. Would it work?

  Would it kill her?

  A black puma raced around the end of the rock and came to a stop yards from her. Not a normal cat, its body was made of churning blackness, the same as that smoke. Before she could stifle her scream, he morphed into…Magnus?

  “Dammit,” he muttered, shaking his head and making his curls bounce. “You startled me.” He gave her a contrite look. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you didn’t see that.”

  She pushed out the words, “Get away from me.”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “I didn’t think so. Look, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A strangled laugh erupted from her throat. “Like your friend didn’t hurt that man.”

  If she didn’t know better, if she hadn’t seen him turn from beast to man, she might believe his puzzled expression.

  “I don’t have any friends here.” His eyebrows furrowed even more. “Someone's hurt?”

  She started backing up. “Just let me leave, and I won’t hurt you.”

  He blinked. “You won't hurt me?”

  “I've got a weapon. But we don't have to go there. I'll forget what I saw, and you forget about seeing me. Who’d believe me anyway?”

  His gaze shifted to something behind her at the same moment her back came up against a hard body. With a yelp, she spun and stumbled away from another man. Two of them! No way could she summon strength to zap two more. Her throat closed in fear.

  This man didn’t look scary, with dark blond hair slicked back, even in the breeze. Still, she sensed a tightly-coiled tension in him, a fury in his gray eyes.

  “Copeland! Where are--?” A woman stepped into view, paused at the sight of them, and ran over to stand next to the man. Like the Heart Ripper and the second man, she appeared to be in her early thirties, her white-blond hair ruffled from the breeze. Her sharp blue eyes scanned both her and Magnus.

  “Are these the two you saw, Lanna?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze settled on Magnus and became almost predatory.

  Copeland held out his hand toward them. “Yes, I feel what you were talking about.”

  Erica shrank back, not wanting him to feel anything that belonged to her. She bumped against Magnus and reflexively jerked away when he reached to steady her.

  “Don’t move,” Copeland ordered. His gaze shifted from her to Magnus. “Which of you tried to kill my brother?” He pointed to Magnus. “You?”

  “Killed? I haven’t killed anyone lately.”

  Lately?

  Erica turned to Magnus. What kind of game were they playing? He was obviously one of them. Admitting that she killed that awful man would be a bad thing. Wait a minute. Hadn't Copeland said ‘tried to kill’? Which meant the creepy bastard wasn’t dead.

  She injected a confidence she didn’t feel into her words. “I don’t know who you all are, but I have someone waiting for me at my car so I’d better get going before he gets worried.”

  She started to walk away, her breath stuck in her chest.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She jerked out of Copeland's grasp. Before she could say a word, Magnus moved closer, his face a tight mask. “Get your hands off her and let her leave. I don't know what you're into here, but I haven't hurt anyone and neither has she.”

  He was defending her? Or pretending to. Of course, all he'd seen of her was a woman afraid of the light so he'd think she was harmless. Needy. Ugh. But why pretend he wasn't with these two? If that creepy guy turned into a black beast, and so did Magnus, it had to mean they were all the same. She really had to get away from these people.

  She flexed her stiff hands and nodded to Magnus. “He's right. We're not involved in whatever it is you're talking about. If I don’t return within a few minutes, my friend will call the police.”

  “Which friend?” Copeland flicked his gaze to the man beside her. “This one? Or the one who’s dead back there?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  Copeland narrowed his eyes at her. “Oh, I think you do.”

  How could he possibly know that?

  “You both will have to come with me. We have much to talk about. Like who you are, and how you shocked my brother's heart. Or how your friend here did it.” He latched onto her arm, clenching his fingers.

  Magnus muttered, “Not bloody again,” and yanked the guy’s hand away. “I said, let go of her and bugger off.”

  Copeland merely smiled. “And what will you do to stop me?”

  Blackness vibrated around Magnus, and his deceptively boyish looks turned into a dark scowl. He was morphing to the puma again.

  Copeland raised his hand and waved it in a circle. A fiery sensation swept through her, and all she saw was a red flash. Fire! She was surrounded by fire. Then everything went blindingly white before she lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER 5

  “We’ll get the answers we need and then we kill them.”

  Magnus stirred awake to those words. He felt completely shattered, like he'd not only been hit by a truck but then run over several times.

  “What I don't understand,” the man—Copeland, he suspected—continued, “is how they're Callorian.”

  The people from the other dimension? Well, that explained the man's ability to blast them. Pope, their Callorian ally and sort-of family, had said there were others out there.

  “They're not fully Callorian,” Lanna said. “But they definitely hold the essence. It baffles me, too. Maybe they'll open up to me. I'm nicer than you are.”

  Magnus opened his eyes and immediately found that his arms were manacled above his head. The bar stool he'd been propped up on fell as he tried to jerk away from the wall he was leaning against. He stopped it from banging on the floor with his foot, but that's when he realized his ankles were manacled too. Fear chilled him like a dunk in a barrel of ice water. He was in what looked like a small jail cell in the corner of a mostly bare basement. He saw no windows or exterior doors, only an odd steel door that was rounded at the top. In the corner, a set of concrete stairs went up. What he didn't see were Copeland and Lanna. Hadn't he just heard them or was it a dream?

  Copeland's voice echoed from a vent in the ceiling. “See what you can find out. I'm leaving in thirty minutes.”

  “You mean we're leaving.”

  “You have to stay here with Neste
r. And to keep an eye on our prisoners.”

  “You're leaving me out of the robbery? That's not fair.” Lanna's petulance was clear. “We've been planning this for weeks. Can't we do it tomorrow?”

  “We don't have time to wait. You know that. We need to grab as much cash as we can if we're going to set up new lives here.”

  Magnus's restraints were attached to the stone wall, and no amount of pulling even budged them. He summoned Darkness, knowing his lion would have a lot more strength. Except…he couldn't Become.

  Copeland’s first words echoed in Magnus's mind: Get answers and kill them.

  Them.

  Magnus found Erica lying on the concrete floor a few feet away. Stilling the panic that she was dead, he watched for the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Yes, alive. Since the cell was only set up for one prisoner, they'd used a standard handcuff to secure her to one of the bars. She was coming awake, too, going through the same process of realization that he’d just done.

  Panic suffused her expression as she jerked fully awake, more so when she realized she was cuffed. She stood, her legs shaky, sliding the cuff along the bar as high as it would go. Her gaze flew to him. “Why are you restrained, too?” She was obviously confused to see him in the same position as herself. “Did they turn on you?”

  A door opened at the top of the steps, and Copeland came down, Lanna following. She looked unhappy. Magnus tried to sort through what he'd overheard. They were planning a robbery. And she'd said they were Callorian. He and Erica. What the hell?

  Copeland assessed the two of them, his gaze stopping on Magnus. “One of you tried to kill my brother, and I want to know who and how. You both have something in you that interests me greatly.”

  Magnus wasn’t feeling particularly cooperative. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.” Copeland unlocked the cell door and stepped inside, Lanna right behind him. “There's something different about you. I'm sure you've realized it by now. You have a special ability. Yet you are mostly human from this dimension. Magnus McLeod, you will tell me how you came to have this. And how you came to Hold Darkness.”

  They knew his name. Of course, after he'd zapped him, they’d searched his pockets and found his wallet. He didn’t let on that hearing his name had any effect, but it bugged the hell out of him. He focused on the fact that they knew what Darkness was.

  “Special ability? Well, I'm especially good with the ladies. I can keep a hard-on for hours. Is that what you mean?”

  Copeland flicked a glance to the manacles. “You’re in no position to be coy.”

  “Coy, hell, I'm answering your question. What do you mean by Darkness?”

  “You don’t get to ask the questions.” Copeland punched him in the stomach. Magnus didn’t have time to tighten his muscles and took it deep. “Care to share now?”

  Yeah, right after he upchucked all over the guy’s black leather shoes. Pain radiated through his stomach, doubling him over.

  Copeland seemed pleased with his big show of strength. “I suppose you don't know what it's called.”

  “Is that supposed to be an apology?”

  “Hardly. You can summon a dark energy we call Darkness to change your form. Don't deny it. I saw you try earlier. You cannot do it now, however, as the metal of your cuffs won't allow it. This is a detainment system for my brother when he goes mad. The metal curtails your ability, one you will now share with me.”

  Magnus studied the metal, seeing that it had a sheen to it he'd never seen before. And he realized he'd not picked up anyone's thoughts either. All right, he'd give the son of a bitch an ability. “I can astral project, send my soul to another location.” It wasn't something he used often.

  “And what about Darkness?”

  He would never give away Jessie's existence. “I walked in on a fight between two men a couple of weeks ago. I tried to intervene, and one turned into a black beast and tore my throat. When I came to, I was whole, only my dried blood to prove that it hadn't been some horrible dream. But I felt different after that. If something riles me, my body starts to turn into something else. I don't know what it's called or what it even is. I thought it was something like werewolves, where I've been infected. What is it?”

  Erica was listening intently to every word he said, the horror of it clear on her expression.

  Lanna started to answer, but Copeland cut her off. “It's a dark energy, as I said. There are some who have tapped into it. Apparently one healed you. Where did this occur?”

  “Minnesota, on a camping trip.” He wanted them nowhere near Annapolis. Near his brother, Jessie, or their friends.

  Copeland turned his attention to Erica. “And what about your girlfriend here?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. We don’t even know each other.” He wanted to make that clear so the asshole wouldn’t use her to torment answers out of him. He would not give away that they'd had whatever it was they'd had.

  “I don't become a dark beast,” Erica said.

  “No, but you have a special ability, don't you?”

  “Yeah, I write fiction. I create terrible people who murder for fun and then I kill them off.”

  Lanna stepped up beside Copeland, slipping her arm around his. “You both have the Callorian essence. How can it be that you don’t know each other?”

  Copeland slid out of her grasp, a subtle rebuff. “Too much of a coincidence to believe. Especially as we caught you together.”

  Magnus looked at Erica again, her messy blond hair, lean face, and haunted blue eyes. She was keeping her cool, he'd give her that. But she clearly had no idea what they were talking about.

  Lanna studied them. “I don’t sense any attachment between them.”

  “You’re gullible,” Copeland bit out. “You saw the way he stepped in to protect her.”

  Lanna walked up to Magnus, giving him a sweeping once-over. “I think he’s just that kind of human. Something we don’t see a lot of.” She drew her finger from his collarbone down the center of his bare chest. “I want to keep him.”

  “Lanna,” Copeland growled. “Get your hands off him. He’s not a pet.”

  She stepped away but kept that heated gaze on him. “It's only for a couple of days, until…” She gave Copeland a knowing look.

  The idea of being her pet held appeal only because it would give him a chance to escape. He was more concerned about what she hadn't said.

  Copeland grabbed Erica's hand, pushing her sleeve back to expose a forearm covered in fine scars. “Interesting scars, Erica.” She tried to pull away but he held her firmly as he turned her palm upward to reveal a red mark right in the center. “There are people, our people, who can wield a power called the Flare. It's a shot of high voltage electricity that comes from the palm.” He rubbed his thumb over the red mark. “If you were wholly Callorian, your body would tolerate that kind of energy. Your feeble human body cannot. It's very painful when you use it, isn't it? It was painful when you used it on my brother.”

  Her mouth tightened. She wanted to say something, but not the answer he was seeking. Interesting. Did she try to kill the bastard’s brother? Could she be deadly? When she'd seen him turn from Darkness to human, she'd said, Just leave me alone and I won't hurt you. Which had seemed a humorous threat at the time. Magnus had pegged her as lonely and insecure, but there was a lot more to her than that. He hadn't noticed the scars, but then again, they'd been naked in the dark. Pope had an ability like that, before he'd been psychically handcuffed.

  Copeland released her at last. “The man we found dead wasn’t Callorian. I'll wager you were with him when my brother attacked. He has a nasty habit of pulling out people’s organs.” He made mock tsking sounds. “It's an annoying predilection to say the least. It must have been quite disconcerting to see your friend, perhaps boyfriend, having his heart wrested from his chest. Was it still beating while Nester held it?”

  Her reaction gave away her knowledge of the macabre event
Copeland described. Admirably, she held onto the control he was trying to crack.

  “That’s what I thought.” He grabbed her chin so hard, his fingers dug into her skin. “So you electrocuted him, didn’t you?”

  Magnus pulled against his manacles. “Let her go!” Darkness pulled and twisted inside him, but the cold metal remained tight against his wrists—his very human wrists. He saw the remnants of horror on Erica's face at watching his efforts to transform.

  Beast. He didn't have to hear her thoughts to know that's what she was thinking when she looked at him.

  Copeland released her, but his gaze was on Magnus. “I know why you’re here. The Darkness pulled you, called to you. That's what happened to my brother. He found where Darkness is seeping out of the earth and started taking it in like a drug. It's making him quite crazy.”

  Something had called to Magnus. But the Darkness wasn’t here; it was in the other dimension, according to Jessie's dad, who had tapped into it years earlier. Then he had come here through a portal.

  “It did pull me here.” Magnus had to word what he said about Darkness carefully, since he was playing dumb.

  “And it turns you into monsters.” Erica was looking at Magnus on that last word.

  The alarm on Copeland's watch beeped. “I have to go.”

  Lanna's face hardened, but she held in whatever it was that she wanted to say. Her job was to get more answers out of them. She followed Copeland up the stairs, arms crossed over her chest.

  As soon as the door closed, Erica asked, “Who are you? What are you?”

  “You got us into this mess, and you’re hammering me with questions? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What do you mean, I got us into this?”

  Magnus nodded toward the vent and leaned as close as he could. “Lower your voice. They can hear us through that vent. Or at least I could hear them, so I figure it works both ways. Come closer so we can talk.”

  She actually reared back, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  “Do you want answers or not?”

  She did, enough to relent and lean toward him.