He reached out to her. “I don’t know what it is. What it will be.” A spark could turn into a fire, and a fire can become a changing force of nature. When her resolve didn’t falter, he added, “I don’t know if it should be.”
“If it shouldn’t, then why is it happening?”
“I broke a law to be here. And more to be with you like this. I’ve lost count how many, and I don’t care. But this...this could be the beginning of the repercussions.” The thought had him by the throat: It was one thing for him to endure the effects of his trespass, but for her to bear them, his lovely Kathleen, alone, that was intolerable. He had to end it.
“No,” she said.
Grasping darkness inked up his body. No time. “Kathleen, you can’t know what it is. Or what it will cost.”
“I don’t care. It’s ours. Yours and mine together,” she answered. She met his outstretched hand and flattened it on her pelvis.
He could quash the spark now, be done with it. But her heart stuttered, stopping him. Her eyes filled with new hope, a world’s worth of hope, her smile struggling with a painful joy.
“You don’t understand,” he said. And he did not have the time to convince her. Something terrible would come of this. Her happiness had to come at a price. A darkness born to match that glimmering spark. He should not have come, yet could not regret it either.
“I do, too. More than you.” She pressed the back of his hand. “We’re making something. Something of us.”
The spirit in her eyes never burned brighter. He could not bring himself to diminish it. He tried another tack. “You may not have the time to see it through as it is.”
“I will.”
Her conviction staggered him. “Kathleen, even now your heart falters.”
She met his eyes while taking a deep, controlled breath. “I only need nine months. Nine months is nothing. They’ve been telling me that I only have six for years.”
“Kathleen. Love,” he said, his voice rough, near breaking. He gathered her to him, speaking into her eyes. “Neither of us knows what time you have. Better to end it now. I may be back for you with the sun.”
“You won’t.”
“I have no power over this, Kathleen.” And no power to fight what must surely accompany the life she prized. He caressed the length of her arm for the last time.
“You defied the laws. Now watch me do it.”
“Kathleen...” He could not stop saying her name. He didn’t want to, not as he felt himself unraveling into the icy darkness. His substance dissolved into the chiaroscuro of Twilight, while his Shadow-bred senses reached toward mortality.
The spark. Her joy blooming within her.
And, yes, in a weak film clinging to the corners of the room: a smudge of black spit on the world, to grow and thrive, a horror to match her miracle.
Kathleen! Something terrible, indeed.
CHAPTER 1
Twenty-six years later...
Adam Thorne took the graveyard shift at Jacob’s cell.
He was wired with jet lag anyway, his circadian rhythms lagging somewhere over the Atlantic. He’d be right as rain in Korea, where he’d spent the last three weeks following up on a lead with the mystics on Mount Inwangsan. But in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, in a concrete hole under the Segue Institute, his body did not know if it was night, day, or some strange time zone in between.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he tried to focus on the keypad next to the outer security door. Hot lightning burned across the whites of his eyes, and his face had roughened behind twenty-four hours of growth. A bottle of pills promised to take him out for eight hours, but the sleep would be poor at best if he didn’t check in with Jacob first. Do his own time, albeit on the other side of the prison door.
Adam coded into the security room. A slight smell of rot hit him as the steel-reinforced door slid open. He frowned and braced inwardly. With a jerk of his head, he dismissed the guard, wondering how the man withstood the constant funk up his nose.
Signing on to the master security console, Adam caught a glimpse of Jacob in the video monitor: he lay on his side, arms wrapped around his naked belly as if to ward off cold or in an expression of acute modesty. He’d once chaired the board of Thorne Industries. Now he was cornered like a lab animal in a sterile white box. Overly thin and pale, Jacob was frightening only in the sense that no human being should ever be caged and starved like he’d been for the last six years. But then, Adam didn’t think Jacob was human anymore.
Adam dropped four inches of files on the console before him. Might as well get some work in before he crashed.
It always amazed him how so little progress could generate so much work. He picked up the first file and opened the manila folder. A detailed spreadsheet of numbers blurred before his eyes. Budget can wait. He closed the file again and exchanged it for another. Inside was a stack of papers so thick as to require a rubber band to hold them together. A Post-It was stuck to the top.
I thought this might interest you. ~C.
Celia Eubanks was a research fellow at Johns Hopkins and an old family friend. He focused on the text of the document, titled, An examination of common motifs described in near-death experiences, by Talia Kathleen O’Brien.
Near-death. That wouldn’t do him any good.
A shuffle hissed out of the speakers in the console. Jacob was moving in there.
“Ho, Adam. Good to have you back.” The voice was nonchalant and familiar at the same time, coming in crystal clear over the monitor.
Adam ignored Jacob. Early on they’d attempted to test how he knew who was beyond his cell walls, each a foot-thick plane of reinforced steel, to determine which of his senses exceeded human parameters and by how much, but Jacob had caught on and started messing with their data.
Adam scanned the 316 pages of Ms. Talia O’Brien’s dissertation. Dense text filled the pages, broken up by a chart or two. Deep reading. She could have chosen a larger point size for the font. He’d be blind before the end.
“You could answer me. Our mother taught you better manners than that,” Jacob said in his usual condescending tone.
Mom would be weeping for both of us.
Adam forced his concentration away from Jacob and into chapter one, the section where Ms. O’Brien laid out her theory and her method of analysis. He liked the way her mind worked, her odd angle of inquiry. She did not assume near-death experiences were real, but neither did she suggest they were false. She positioned herself outside the stories and looked for common threads. She noted patterns between them to analyze how the living conceived of death, and not death itself. Death as a concept, an idea entertained by a subconscious grappling with mortality.
“Adam, it’s just that I am so hungry, I can’t even think. I may be ready to try some soup. Or a sandwich. What do you think? Just a little bite to give me something to go on.”
You don’t want a sandwich, Jacob. You don’t even remember what to do with one. You just want the person who brings it to you, even if it is your own brother.
But any kind of dialogue with the thing that had his older brother’s face and memories would be pointless. Whatever came out of his mouth since his change was a manipulation of the truth, contrived to keep Adam in hell. Nothing to learn there.
Adam focused on the study. Chapter two related the author’s interactions with her sources. She’d managed to get a wide age range, which was laudable. Selected experiences had been transcribed and included in an appendix. Real work went into this.
Life after death.
Adam frowned. He hadn’t pursued this approach; perhaps it was time he did. And this—he flipped to the front—Talia O’Brien came at the subject from a neatly objective point of view. He’d have to check her out. See if she was safe to come on staff at Segue.
“God, Adam, I don’t know why you have to be such a shit about this. All I want is a sandwich. You could at least answer me. Answer me, goddamn it!”
Adam flipped thro
ugh the dissertation, past her analysis, to her conclusions. Something caught his eye, made his stomach tighten. He skimmed back again. There. On the bottom of page sixty-nine. Footnote 3b. A source claimed to have met an individual named Shadowman.
A memory stirred, a long-ago rant from a gleeful Jacob, his eyes bright and wild, voice shrill. “Shadowman can’t reach me!”
Jacob’s face had been bloody, their father limp on the floor at his feet.
Adam braced against the flood of pain the recollection triggered and stuffed the vision back in the small box in his head. Shut it. Tight.
He blinked hard to restore his normal sight, shook off the heat that had suddenly slicked his skin, and forced a cleansing breath.
In the intervening years, he’d searched the name Shadowman exhaustively, attempted to question (and goad) Jacob further, but had come up with nothing. Nothing.
Until now.
Adam’s heart hit his throat. Shadowman. Ms. O’Brien’s source had conversed with him, and Shadowman had returned her from death back to mortal life.
I’ll be damned. The Shadowman.
A strange sensation welled up in him, pushing at his chest, buzzing in his mind.
Near-death experiences. He should have thought of it before. Incredible lapse of imagination on his part. Here he’d been consulting wiccans, shamans, and holy men.
Adam pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. “Custo. Track down Ms. Talia O’Brien. PhD student. No—she’s probably been awarded her doctorate by now, out of—” he turned to the title page—“University of Maryland. I expect she’s got an offer and is teaching somewhere. Her field—damn, she’s covered just about everything—but try sociology, anthropology, psychiatry perhaps. Find out what you can about her. Use whatever resources you deem necessary.”
“I’ll get right on it. Any particular reason you’re interested?”
“For starters, her work is outstanding. You’ve got to read her dissertation. Tonight, if possible. I’ll leave a copy on your desk. Let me know when you’ve located her.” Adam had to get to the plane. Frantic energy coursed through his veins.
“Must be good. You haven’t sounded this excited since...well, in years.”
“You will be, too. Read all the footnotes, and you’ll see.” Adam ended the call and stooped to pick up his files. Budget would just have to come with him.
“Talia O’Brien.” Jacob drew the name out. “Sounds uptight to me, Bro. More my type than yours.”
Adam glanced into the monitor. Jacob was on his feet, face belligerently in the camera.
“I know what to do with her,” Jacob said with a grin. He licked his teeth in a gross parody of lust or hunger. Probably both.
“But I found her first,” Adam murmured, turning away. He buzzed for the guard.
Behind him the room shuddered. Adam knew the sound: Jacob kicking at the cell door. Pray to God the reinforced steel held. An unearthly screech followed. Six years and it still raised the hair at Adam’s nape. No bullet or blade could stop that monster.
Talia O’Brien.
Maybe she could help him kill his brother.
CHAPTER 2
The silk of Talia’s interview blouse slid beneath her fingers in a sigh of delight, but she didn’t have time to linger. Her gaze flicked to her bedside alarm clock. 4:12 P.M. Her flight left in a little under three hours, and she’d only marked off half the items on her pretrip list.
White blouse, check.
Warped male laughter filtered through her bedroom wall from the apartment next door. Tuesday night. Right about now, the guys would be getting high for band practice. On cue, a bass guitar bellowed an accusatory, boo, dop, boo, dop-dow. Made the framed painting of one of her mother’s fairy-tale landscapes buzz. Made her teeth buzz, too.
Well, she wouldn’t have to put up with it for much longer.
Talia glided the blouse over her interview suit to latch at the hanger clip of a brand-new suitcase. Just looking at the clothes made her heartbeat skip. Including shoes, panty hose, slip, and two coordinated blouses, the ensemble cost her nearly a month’s rent. On sale. But she didn’t begrudge the expense a bit, not if she got the assistant professor position at UC–Berkeley.
Please, God, let me get this job. Talia’s silent prayer had been going around in her mind and accelerating her heart to near bursting since she’d received the invitation to visit Berkeley for in-person interviews. Please, pretty please, God. Just this one little favor...
“Knock knock.”
Talia turned to find her roommate Melanie at her door.
Oh hell. What now? The last thing Talia needed was a fight right before she had to leave. Tension climbed the ladder of her spine while the electric guitar next door squealed a chaos of rapid notes.
From her sleek, side-swept coif to her pointy heels, Melanie managed an urban sophistication on a student budget. She already had job offers, and she still had a semester to go on her advanced business degree. A perfectly plucked eyebrow arched as she brought up a hand holding a thick gold bar of Godiva hazelnut chocolate. Sweet heaven and rich, delicious sin wrapped in gold foil.
“Peace offering,” Melanie yelled over the band’s noise.
“Thanks.” Talia took the bar, careful not to touch Melanie skin to skin and be flooded with her negative emotional backwash. Talia forced a smile. She hoped the smile looked more natural than it felt. Melanie had been bitchy from the moment Talia moved in eight months ago. But the rent and location had been too good to move again.
“It’s for after the interview, to celebrate,” Melanie clarified. “I should have congratulated you when you defended your dissertation. It was shitty of me not to, so I’m sorry. I really wish you the best of luck. So...congratulations Dr. O’Brien.”
The music cut off at congratulations. The shouted Dr. that followed did wonders for Talia’s mood. Suddenly she could forgive anything. All her work was going to pay off. Not with money—not in the more esoteric social sciences. But soon—please, God—soon she’d have a great job at a reputable university.
Papers, publishing, grants. Oh, my.
Then her own apartment, though rent was astronomical near the Berkeley campus. No roommates, Melanie’s sudden goodwill notwithstanding, but maybe friends. Who knows? If she were very, very good she might get a real life. She might even pass for normal. Okay, that was stretching the fantasy a bit. She’d settle for inconspicuous.
“Why don’t we break it open and make the declaration of peace official?” Talia said. Just one square would go a long way toward calming her nerves.
“No. It’s for afterthe interview.” Melanie waved away the bar and stepped back over the threshold.
Okay, then. Girl bonding over. But this was nice. Ending on a good note.
Talia tucked the chocolate into her carry-on. No way on earth that delicious bar would survive the wait in the airport, much less until tomorrow evening when the Berkeley interviews, student panel, and campus tour were finally finished.
A new pounding bounced through the apartment. Talia frowned. The persistent thudding did not come from the band next door. It wasn’t quite obnoxious enough, but close.
“It’s the front door,” Melanie said. “I’ll get it. You finish packing.”
“Thanks again. This was really sweet.” But she was already gone. Probably the last time they’d talk, what with the semester winding down to graduation.
Talia turned back to her list. White blouse, check. Camisole...
Broken words filtered down the hallway. An unfamiliar woman’s voice dominated, but a low rumble suggested a man was there, too. Talia tilted her head and listened.
“Who did you say you were?” Melanie’s tone hardened with irritation. She was good at that.
Talia stepped forward and peeked down the hall. Melanie gripped the doorknob and was trying to shut the door in their faces, which was rude in the extreme, even from her. Her body rigid with attention, she planted her foot to block the door from opening more.
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Something was wrong.
“Well, she’s not here. She studies at the library on Tuesday nights to get away from the band noise, but I’ll tell her you stopped by.”
Talia kept back, waiting a beat. No point in spoiling the lie. Whoever it was should be on their way shortly.
The woman spoke again, but was cut off by a sudden rise in distorted music. Talia strained, but she couldn’t make out any words. The band stopped just as abruptly, the drums dribbling down to a halfhearted smack-rat-tap.
“No, you can’t come in,” Melanie snapped. “I said she’s not here.”
A loud crack from the front of the apartment jerked Talia’s heart in her chest. She dropped her notepad and darted down the hall.
The front door stood gaping. Melanie lay twisted on the floor in the center of the room, pushing herself up to a pained crawl. The man and woman were just stepping inside the apartment. He kicked the door closed and then leaned up against it, while she scanned the room, lips pressed into an unfriendly smile.
Talia went cold.
Melanie looked up at her from the floor. “They want to see Talia.”
“She’s not here,” Talia echoed. The wide, frightened look in Melanie’s usually confident eyes made Talia both enormously grateful and nauseated. Her roommate could have just as easily pointed a finger and been done with this. But then again, Melanie didn’t let anyone bully her.
Melanie stood, eyes narrowing as her spine straightened again.
Talia caught the question in her roommate’s expression—You know them?—and returned a shallow shake, No.
Talia had no idea who these people were. They were young, probably midtwenties. The woman was tall and sleek, with rich, dark hair and ample breasts, but an unfortunate lantern jaw. The guy, leaning against the door, was short and square, his shape accentuated by pleated dress slacks and a tucked polo. He sported an outdated side part like a news anchor from the eighties. The two were incongruous, unlikely partners, but for the similar flatness of their eyes and unforgiving lines of their mouths.
Dark and Dangerous: Six-in-One Hot Paranormal Romances Page 60