Darkness Becomes Her

by Jaime Rush

  You have the rope. That’s your guide out of here.

  Another breath, another step. She had taken twenty of them, counting each one, when she felt it. She couldn’t quite name it, other than a sense of familiarity. Comfort.

  “Daddy?”

  Not spoken aloud, yet she heard the word echo through the “flesh.”

  Nothing.

  “Daddy!”

  Louder this time.

  “Allybean?” Disbelief saturated the word.

  She didn’t have a heart here, strictly speaking, but it constricted anyway. “Daddy!”

  She moved now with more purpose, sliding through the gaps, waiting through compression, another step. Following the feeling. Ahead, she saw a chamber, between the gaps. She didn’t wait for the out breath anymore; she pushed through, grunting with the effort.

  Breaking through, she stumbled on the uneven floor. The space was no bigger than Lachlan’s living room, the walls that same sluglike material. The bumps in the floor reminded her of the roof of a mouth. She searched, expecting to find him right away. Where was he?

  “Oh, God.” Her gaze had skipped over him the first time. What she saw, it was too bizarre, too terrible to comprehend. “Daddy?”

  “Allybean, what are you doing here? Please tell me you’re a hallucination. I’ve had them before, but not so real and vivid and beautiful.”

  Her nickname, again. It sent a warm wash of emotion through her. As she took him in, though, it was followed by nausea. Her knees went to gelatin. All she could see was the front of his face and the tips of his fingers and toes. He was embedded in the wall. Embedded.

  She took a tentative step toward him. “I’m real. I came here for you.” Then she ran the last few steps, stopping in front of him, still not believing she’d found him. “You’re alive.”

  “My soul is here, but I’m not alive. You have to get out of here. This place will swallow you.”

  Everything warm fled. “That’s what’s happening? It’s swallowing you?”

  He couldn’t even nod, though he tried. “How did you get here?”

  She raised her hand. The rope wasn’t wound through her fingers anymore, but she still had a grip on it. “A dead Scotsman, if you can believe it. I just found out Russell put you here. He’s using your body. Now I’m going to get you out.”

  She reached for his fingers but they slipped out of her grasp. Not enough of them sticking out to get a hold on. She dug into the “flesh,” and though it felt slimy, it was solid. “What is this place?”

  “Russell created it. It’s supposed to be a jail, but like everything Darkness, it has a life of its own. He hung me up here, but the walls started absorbing me, little by little.”

  “That’s horrible.” The thought of him being here, slowly devoured . . . She shuddered. “You’ve been suffering for so long, Daddy.” Tears washed over her voice.

  “Time here, outside our bodies, feels different. How many years have I been gone? Quite a few. You’re a grown woman now.”

  She saw pride in his eyes, and it warmed her. “Fifteen.”

  “Years. I seem to remember they felt like a long time, but then not long at all.” He let out a ragged sigh. “I should have told you more, but you were so young.”

  “About Darkness, you mean?”

  “Yes. I knew you had it, but I hoped . . . prayed it wouldn’t manifest.”

  She searched for something to use as a shovel. There were small stones, and she grabbed the flattest one. “Tell me now.”

  His fingers flexed. “This is going to sound unbelievable.”

  She kept digging around his hands, grunting with the effort. “You’re from another dimension.”

  His eyes widened. “How . . .”

  Tiny dig marks. Dammit, that’s all she was getting. Everything here felt physical to her. Even she did. But she couldn’t put enough strength into it. “I’ve met others who have DNA from . . . I can’t remember the name of the place.”

  “Surfacia. These others, are they hunting you?”

  “No, helping me. They don’t have Darkness, don’t even know what it is. One of them is from there. He was sent by their government to hunt you and Russell down, but they wouldn’t tell him what it was. He sensed it in me. Russell is hunting me down. He went to prison for killing Mom. They thought you did it.”

  His eyes darkened. “I’m so sorry, Allybean.”

  “It’s okay now. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “You can’t. I’ll tell you about Darkness, and then you must go.”

  “I’m not leaving without you.” She chipped harder, her arms aching.

  “In Surfacia, we had to suppress our emotions. Emotions are energy. All of those negative emotions accumulated and became a huge, dark mass hovering in a subdimension. Darkness.” His fingers flexed again. “Can you scratch my nose? That’s the worst, I think. I don’t need food or water, but sometimes I have an itch.”

  She obliged. “So Darkness is a mass of negative energy?”

  “Yes. Russell and I found a way to tap into it. We needed power, and it seemed that Darkness would give us that power.”

  “Power to do what?”

  “Obliterate the Collaborate. The government. They’d killed our father. Justice is different there. There is no jury of peers. If they suspect you’re lying, they SCANE you. It’s a mind probe, and usually means either death or a vegetative state. Our father was arrested and underwent a SCANE. He was lucky; he died.

  “Revenge united Russell and me for the first time since he’d been born. You see, I blamed him for our mother’s death. His birth caused a fatal hemorrhage. He craved my attention, approval, but I . . . I couldn’t give it to him.

  “There were rumors about Darkness, about sorcerers who could tap into it, manipulate it. With that kind of power, we could destroy the government, destroy the SCANE machine. We found a way, feeling it pour into our bodies as though we’d freed the devil. We worked with it, forming it into destructive power. We had good intentions, but things went wrong and we failed. We managed to wreak havoc, but that was all. So we escaped here through a crack between the dimensions.”

  “Why did Russell want to hurt you?”

  “Stop, Allybean. You’re hurting yourself.”

  The tips of her fingers were raw, bleeding. “No.”

  “We both fell in love with the same woman once we settled here. Your mother. I managed to charm her away, and we married, had you. I worried about passing on Darkness, but I convinced myself it wasn’t genetic. I could feel it in you the day you were born. Not as strong, and I hoped not as dangerous. Darkness makes us like animals—territorial, vicious. Russell felt that I stole his mate, and he would do nothing less than take my life to get her back. I can’t blame him, because I felt the same way.”

  Jessie paused, covering her mouth. She’d felt the cat, hissing and growling inside her when Doris and the girls were flirting with Lachlan. “Russell can turn into a wolf. Can you?”

  “That’s what we focused on becoming. They’re cunning, smart, and strong. You can become what you want.”

  “He can make dogs from his Darkness. They’re separate from him, and he sends them after us.”

  Even without much of his face showing, she could see the puzzlement in his expression. “I didn’t know it could work that way. I left you in a mess, didn’t I? But I’m not putting you in any more danger. You have to go. You’ll be trapped here.”

  “I have a rope to lead me out.” She looked down and gasped. “It’s gone!” She’d been so busy trying to free her father, she hadn’t noticed it fall from her hand. She spun, searching for it on the ridged floor. It was moving away, as though someone, or something, was pulling it into the fleshy organs with every breath. Only two inches were left. She dove for the end. Another inch slipped away. She grabbed at the final inch. It slipped in her bloody fingers. She clutched it as the next breath tried to pull it completely in.

  “No, you don’t, you disgusting bea
st.” She jerked it when the breath expanded the crevice. An inch. One more.

  “Go!” her father yelled. “Get out of here now.”

  When she had several inches wound around her fingers, she turned back to him, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “When it swallows me . . . I’ll go on. Don’t worry about me. Leave, now, while you can.”

  There was still a tug on the rope, the Void trying to pull it from her. A sound snagged her attention. Other than the breathing, she’d heard nothing until now.

  Then, someone calling from a distance: “Hello? Is someone there?”

  “There are others trapped in here?” she asked.

  “Go!” her father said. “And never come back.”

  She waited for the gap to open and slipped in. She turned and saw her father one last time before moving inward. Clutching the rope, she pulled herself along as though climbing up a mountainside. It felt like a year before she emerged through the slit and into the open. She sucked in air that her body didn’t need. Openness, thank God for openness.

  “Och, did the thing swallow ye?” Olaf’s face was scrunched up in disgust.

  She looked down at herself. She’d been slimed. “Get us out of here.”

  She lurched, eyes snapping open, gasping for breath. A face loomed over her. It slowly came into focus: Lachlan. She blinked, tried to orient herself. He was sitting on the kitchen floor holding her. No Olaf.

  “You collapsed the moment you left,” he said. He was studying her. “Then you went deadly still. It was eerie, like you were . . . well, you’re back now.” He’d been worried. She saw the creases in his forehead where he’d been frowning. “Did you find him?”

  She opened her mouth to answer and a great big sob came out. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest.

  He stroked her back. “Cry, Jess. You’re going to hurt yourself holding it in. I can feel you heaving with it.”

  She shook her head.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “That I’ll never stop.” Her voice sounded muffled against his shirt.

  “As far as I know, it’s never happened, someone crying till they died. Go on, then. You’re safe.”

  Those last words did it. She let the sobs come out, waves of tears and awful sounds that reminded her of a dying animal. But with all of that, with the shirt she’d soaked, she felt a release of grief. Through it all, he held her and stroked her back, saying nothing until she’d finally spent her tears.

  “You’re right. I didn’t die from it,” she said, grabbing a napkin from the table. She wiped her face and blew her nose.

  He took her in, tilting his head in sympathy. “I’m sorry. You knew he might not be there.”

  “No, it was worse. Better but worse. He was there.” The whole thing poured out of her. What was in her. The horror of her father being buried in the wall. Leaving him. She looked up at Lachlan, wiping away fresh tears. “I know how you felt now, having to leave your dad there to die. It ripped my heart out.”

  He nodded. “Aye. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do.”

  She shook her head. “No. Getting him back will be the hardest thing I have to do.”

  Chapter 15

  Jessie finally fell into an exhausted sleep. She knew that much, felt her body being lifted, shifting with his movements, but she couldn’t rouse herself. Then he laid her on the bed and pulled the blankets up around her.

  She tried to thank him but words failed to come out cohesively. He brushed her hair from her forehead and left. Thank God her sleep was dreamless, or at least, she remembered nothing as she climbed to consciousness. She’d been asleep four hours. The chair near the bed indicated that he’d sat there for a while, watching over her.

  That tightened her heart in a bear hug. He’d left a note for her on the seat: In the garage. Come out when you wake.

  She looked down at her fingers. Undamaged, no trace of blood. Whatever happened to her sort-of physical body wasn’t real. Not slimed, but still, she got into the shower and washed away the feeling of it. If only she could wash away Darkness. Knowing what it was . . . did it make it better? She’d always sensed she was dangerous to others. Now she knew she was, especially to a man who loved her. After putting on one of her dark, ruffled shirts and black pants, she went to the kitchen. Her stomach growled, and poking through the fridge, she popped grapes in her mouth while toasting bread for peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

  She inhaled the sandwiches, but not quite ready to face Lachlan, or anyone, just yet, wandered to the room where he had gotten his second coat. She wasn’t sure why she was going there until she picked up the stack of framed pictures and sat on the bed. Happier times. Seeing Magnus was painful, all the more so knowing exactly what she’d infected him with. Seeing Lachlan also was painful, for different reasons. He was never as jovial as Magnus, but he’d been happy then. His eyes crinkled into the most amazing brightness, his smile low-key and sexy.

  This room was on the other side of the formal dining room, so it didn’t have doors leading to the courtyard. Instead, it had a window that overlooked the woods. Soft light pooled in through the open drapes, sparkling on the dust she’d sent spinning into the air.

  She turned to the pile of belongings that had to be Lachlan’s. There were stacks of DVDs, some typical guy movies, others decidedly more interesting: Basic Instinct, Chloe, Blue Velvet, Eyes Wide Shut. Sexy movies. She remembered him talking about research. Yeah, she supposed she had used romance novels as a learning tool, too.

  Books were stacked on top of the dresser. Nothing happy or uplifting here, only a lot of dark drama, as far as she could tell: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Corrections, The Road, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He had also read the classics, like The Pillars of the Earth and the Sound and the Fury.

  She pulled the incredibly soft blanket up over her lap and reached for a stack of music CDs. Some Scottish music: Ashley MacIsaac, Loreena McKennitt, one with bagpipes. The rest were more contemporary, though nothing recent. U2, no surprise. Alternative rock, classic rock, and several mixes he’d burned. She pulled one of those out and set it in the stereo system, which she had to plug in. She wasn’t familiar with the groups on the mix: Staind, Limp Bizkit, Live, or Fuel. Her tastes ran to pop, happy music, like Natasha Bedingfield and Jason Mraz. Or soulful songs that spoke to her, like Sia and Sarah McLachlan.

  She started the CD. The first song was “It’s Been a While.” Not screaming rock, like she’d expected, but soulful in its own way. She listened to the words, feeling them tug at her. It had been a while since he’d been able to hold his head high. Consequences. A man who’d messed up his life. She pulled the blanket to her chest, clutching it in her hands, felt the singer’s pain and Lachlan’s pain. Then the singer sang about how long it had been since he’d seen the way candles lit her face, but he could remember just the way she tasted.

  She shuddered, because she wasn’t thinking of the taste of her lips, but of other places on her body, erotic places where no man had ever put his mouth.

  Another song, by the same group featuring Fred Durst, singing about being outside looking in. She had been a freak, something dark, all her life, the only aberration she’d ever known. Now she’d found someone else who, in a different way, was like her.

  Jessie was totally sucked into the words, into Lachlan, his pain, and the erotic interpretation of the lyrics, when he stepped into the doorway. He wore a black shirt, half buttoned, smelling of car oil, a smear of it on his neck, rubbing his hands with a towel. His jeans were tight, hugging his lower body, in contrast to the loose shirt that hung over his waistband.

  “You had me worried, when I couldn’t find you.” He took her in. “What are you doing?” His question wasn’t interrogative but merely curious. His gaze fell on the CD she held and then went to the pictures on the bed next to her.

  “Seeing who you were. Before.” She got to her feet and w
alked closer to him. The oil smelled good, masculine and capable. “You still are that man, you know.”

  The curiosity in his eyes changed to something liquid, like the ruffled surface of a lake during a windy day. “You can’t say that.”

  “But I can. I know what you’ve done, unless you have other skeletons hiding in your closet. Making illegal copies of music, maybe. Running a red light. Parking tickets, I bet.” She took the cloth from his hands and rubbed at the oil on his neck. His body stiffened at her touch. She showed him the grease stain, then handed the cloth back.

  “I figured out a way,” he said. “The whole time I’m working on the carburetor, I’m thinking about how to make it fair for you.”

  She blinked. “Fair?”

  “Without touching you.”

  It hit her, what he was talking about. Her cheeks flushed and she gave an embarrassed laugh. “I was being silly. Really. Nothing is fair when it comes to men and women. Don’t worry about it.” She waved it off but stopped in mid-motion. “What was the way?”

  He gave her the most sinful smile. “If you’re game.”

  Her heart spiraled, spinning her stomach right along with it. She felt her pulse pounding at her throat. “You said it earlier. I’m not afraid of anything.” Lord, she sounded all breathy.

  “You’re terrified, but you’ll do it anyway.”

  She half expected him to produce a vibrator, having dug through her things. But no, she could see both his hands, now tucked into the front pockets of his jeans. “What do you have in mind?”

  “You do as I say. Your hands, my command. I keep my honor, and you . . . well, you get off.”

  Now the spiraling sensation went right down to between her legs. “You’re going to watch me?”

  “No way. I don’t have that kind of willpower. Clearly. We’ll be back-to-back. No touching or seeing each other.”

  Okay, breathe. Excitement coiled through her, throbbing with the mere thought of it.

  He raised his eyebrow. “I assume you’ve gotten yourself off before, given our earlier conversation.”