Kindling the Darkness

by Jane Kindred

  “It doesn’t work that way. You made a commitment, and Darkrock expects you to honor it.”

  Oliver folded his arms. “You know I can’t do that. You know why I left.”

  “You made one bad call.”

  “One bad call that cost Vanessa and two other men their lives.”

  Artie studied him. “Interesting thing is, it should’ve cost you yours. We’re all curious how you walked away from that inferno.”

  “Because I was the one who burned that shithouse down.” Oliver could feel his pulse pounding in his temple. “Vanessa and the others were dead. We’d been ambushed. So I threw a CS canister into the nest and got the fuck out.”

  “And we all felt for you, man, but that’s the job. You knew it going in. Vanessa knew it. She was prepared to face the danger every time we went into a hostile situation. Every time, you take a chance you aren’t coming back.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the deal. I’m not coming back. I’m done.”

  Artie set his cup on one of the tables. “I think you’re aware of what’s been going on in the area. Some vicious monster’s been having a field day, leaving bodies in its wake. We understand it’s here. And we need you to help us find it.”

  “What makes you think I can find it?”

  “Because you’ve got yourself a little help, don’t you?” Artie smiled. “Very attractive help, in the form of one Lucy Smok of Smok Consulting.”

  Oliver tried to keep his expression neutral. “A local group hired her to hunt the thing, yes.”

  “And you belong to this local group.”

  Oliver didn’t answer.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Benally. We’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide how you want to do this. If this Smok girl is everything she’s rumored to be, she should have this in the bag. It’s your job to make sure she captures the creature alive. Darkrock has plans for it.”

  “For God’s sake.” Oliver tried to tamp down his mounting outrage. “Do you have any idea what you’re dealing with here? This is nothing you’ve ever seen before. Lucy’s gone up against it twice now, and she still doesn’t know what it is, but from what I can tell, it’s nearly killed her both times.”

  “So it’s Lucy already.” Finch grinned. “Nice.”

  “From what you can tell?” Artie frowned. “Are you saying you didn’t see it yourself?”

  Oliver cleared his throat. “She’s not big on keeping me in the loop. Both times, I’ve just seen the damage after the fact. I’ve tracked it, but I haven’t seen it personally.” He paced away from them, realizing they were already sucking him into Darkrock’s orbit. “This isn’t what I do anymore. And Darkrock’s making a huge miscalculation if they think this thing is something they can just capture and put to their own use. It’s intelligent and malevolent. And very powerful.” Somewhere in the past two days, he realized, he’d come around to Lucy’s point of view. The creature needed to die.

  “Which is precisely why Darkrock is interested in it. This is an unprecedented opportunity to catalog a new species. Rumor is it can change form at will. That kind of ability could prove extremely useful. Revolutionary, in fact.”

  “It’s not going to be terribly useful if it kills everyone in the facility. If you can even tranquilize it long enough to transport it there.”

  “You just let us worry about that. You make sure Lucy Smok doesn’t kill it first. We want you to stick to her like a rat in a glue trap. No more of this ‘after the fact’ bullshit. The Smok enterprise has gotten in our way before. If she destroys this thing before we have a chance to study it, Darkrock leadership isn’t going to be happy. There’s talk of eliminating that problem.”

  “Is that a threat? If I don’t take care of Lucy, Darkrock will?”

  “It’s whatever you want it to be, Benally. If the prospect of something unfortunate happening to Lucy Smok seems like it’s a threat to you, well...that’s for you to figure out, isn’t it?”

  And just like that, he was in again. Even if he managed to disappear, he’d be leaving Lucy at Darkrock’s mercy. Not to mention the undergrounders. And Colt.

  As soon as Artie and Finch had gone, Oliver headed back out on his “beat.”

  His earlier instincts proved to be right. As he circled back around toward the Bartlett, he caught sight of her watching from the shadows across the street. He’d probably made a mistake keeping close. He’d only drawn her attention to it.

  She saw that he’d seen her. Even though he couldn’t see her face in shadow beneath the hood of her jacket, he knew she was staring straight into him, as if she had night vision. There was something about her that seemed slightly to the left of human, now that he thought about it. Could Smok Biotech be doing the same kind of work Darkrock was? Was Lucy biologically enhanced?

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” Her voice carried across the empty street. Oliver almost laughed. It was such a film noir kind of moment. The femme fatale watching him watching her. The dialogue straight out of a movie from the 1940s.

  “You tell me,” he murmured. And he was certain from her posture that she’d heard him.

  Lucy took her hand out of the pocket of her leather jacket over the dark hoodie—she was holding a crossbow in the other—and crossed the street. “A little late for you to be out prowling, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t call it prowling. Is that what you’re doing? Prowling?”

  Lucy’s eyes were inscrutable within the hood. “I’m doing the job your council is paying me to do.”

  Oliver wanted to be objective about her. There were too many variables he wasn’t sure of. What Smok International was about. How Lucy might be enhanced. Whether she meant real harm to the people he’d come to think of as “his” undergrounders. But Darkrock’s implied threat had gone straight to the heart. She meant something to him. Already. And Darkrock knew it. They wouldn’t have been able to manipulate him without that knowledge.

  “Maybe you’d like some help with that.”

  “Help?”

  “This thing seems to be pretty elusive, even for you. Maybe the two of us together would have more luck.”

  She was quiet for so long that he almost asked her if she was okay. “I thought you wanted to give it therapy.”

  Oliver burst out laughing. “Therapy?” Where had that come from?

  “You were pretty adamant about shifters being these misunderstood creatures that didn’t mean anyone harm.”

  “I never said this thing didn’t mean anyone harm. It’s pretty clear that it does. That’s why we called you in.”

  “So you’re prepared to do things my way? You’re not going to get in the way when I try to kill it?”

  Oliver had walked right into that one, because keeping her from killing it was precisely what he had to do. “Have you considered that maybe it can’t be killed? I mean, you said you hit it with lethal force and it just kept going. Did you hit it tonight?”

  “One shot, yeah. I didn’t get to use my arrows.” She indicated the crossbow at her side. “They’re Lucien’s actually. They may be more effective than the bullets.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Maybe I could use someone to distract it long enough for me to get off a shot.”

  “You mean someone to act as bait.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Sure. Call it bait.”

  He couldn’t quite figure her out. Was she mocking him or offering to work together? Either way, he needed to buy some time to come up with an alternative to killing the beast that would make sense to her.

  Oliver studied her. “So, do you still not sleep?”

  Despite her otherwise relaxed body language, her fingers curled and uncurled around the barrel of the crossbow in an unconscious gesture of conflict. “Why?”

  “I’m wide-awake, and I have a feeling that’s not going to change in the next few hours. I thought we could
discuss some strategy over coffee.”

  She gave him another of those noncommittal shrugs. He took it for agreement.

  At the shop, he realized he’d left the coffee cups sitting out from Darkrock’s visit. As he scooped them up, he felt Lucy’s eyes on him, but she didn’t comment. While he started up the coffee maker, Lucy sat on one of the ottomans. The crossbow was still clutched in her hand.

  Oliver glanced up from the counter. “You expecting to need that in here?” He nodded at the weapon.

  Lucy looked down at it. “I suppose not. My case is in the car.” She set it on the couch next to her. After a moment of watching him brew the coffee, she finally pulled back her hood. The shock of her cropped hair struck him all over again. It highlighted a change in her since yesterday that he couldn’t put his finger on. She’d been stoic and hard to read before, but it was like she’d gone deeper. They’d been intimate—extremely intimate—and afterward she seemed to have revoked a level of trust.

  The coffee was ready.

  Oliver poured two cups and brought them on a tray with cream and sugar to the table next to Lucy. “I wasn’t sure how you took it.”

  “Black.”

  Of course she did.

  As he sat on the edge of the couch opposite, Lucy watched him over the rim of her cup. “You had company tonight.”

  He stiffened. Had she been watching him? Oh, right. The dirty cups. “Yeah, some old service buddies dropped by.”

  “You were in the service?”

  “Marine Corps. Semper Fi.” He raised his cup in a salute.

  “How long ago was that?”

  His mouth twitched with a sardonic smile. “Are you trying to guess my age?”

  “Why would I want to guess your age?”

  Oliver drank his coffee, starting to regret that he’d suggested this. But there was a reason he had. “So, about the creature, I know you’re set on killing it, but maybe we should rethink that, given how hard it’s proving to be to kill.”

  “So therapy, then.”

  He smiled despite himself. “Not therapy. But doesn’t Smok have some heavy-duty drugs that could knock it out first? We could hunt it like big game, hit it with the trank, then track it and wait for it to go down.”

  Lucy leaned forward on the ottoman, resting her elbows on her knees, the coffee cup still in her hand. “Is that what Darkrock wants you to do?”

  Goddamn. Oliver swallowed a mouthful of too-hot coffee. How did she know about Darkrock? Unless...

  He set down his cup carefully. “It was you. You told them where I was.”

  “Told whom?”

  “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “You expect me to believe Darkrock didn’t know where you were?”

  “I don’t expect you to believe anything. I would like to know what you know about it, however. How did you learn about Darkrock?”

  “I’m the CFO of Smok International. Of course I know about Darkrock.”

  “I meant...” Oliver paused. Was Darkrock part of Smok’s operations? Had Smok, in fact, created it? Could they be simultaneously working for Lucy and working against her? “How long have you known who I am?”

  “Since this morning. I ran a check on you through my research department. Standard operating procedure.” Standard operating procedure after she slept with someone?

  “And your research department shared that information with Darkrock.”

  Lucy’s jaw was tight. “We don’t share anything with Darkrock. If your people found out I was looking into you, it’s because of their own flags on such searches. It’s not like we’re using Google.”

  “They’re not my people.”

  “Are you denying that you work for them? You just admitted you were Oliver Benally. And they were obviously the ‘service buddies’ who dropped by tonight. Was that before or after you stalked me?”

  Oliver got up and paced away from her, trying to employ his breathing technique. “I haven’t worked for them since 2012. Since...” He turned to face her, thumbing the back of his ring. “Not since my wife was killed.”

  Chapter 11

  Lucy’s stomach dropped, and she straightened, resting her cup on her thigh. “Your wife?”

  “We worked together at Darkrock. The last mission we worked was a disaster. Some vamps took out every member of my team. Including Vanessa. That’s when I left the operation.” Oliver’s expression was grim. “I should have left earlier.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lucy’s eyes were drawn to the ring he was playing with on his right hand. It was a wedding band, and she hadn’t noticed.

  “Not as sorry as I am.” He seemed to realize he was playing with the ring and moved his hand away, smoothing his palm along the hair at his temple.

  “So you just walked away.”

  Oliver shrugged. “You don’t exactly walk away from Darkrock. I burned down the vamp nest and let people think I’d died in the fire with the rest of the team. And they had no idea I was still alive until today. So...thanks for that.”

  She studied him, trying to decide whether this was part of his cover. Maybe the whole story had been invented for this very eventuality. If it had, he was an excellent actor. His eyes looked haunted. Whether the rest of his story was invented or not, she decided there had definitely been a Vanessa.

  Lucy dismissed an odd little twinge at the idea that he’d loved someone so deeply that he still wore his wedding ring. What was it to her? Nothing. He was nothing to her. If anything, he was a threat to her. Which did nothing to dissuade her body from tossing her brain a little reminder of how intimately it now knew his. She needed to focus on the problem at hand. Despite what she’d told him, if Darkrock knew she’d run a search on him, it probably wasn’t because of a flag. Her research department’s searches were undetectable. Which meant she had a mole at Smok Biotech. The prospect was chilling.

  “So you’re not working with Darkrock.”

  There was a slight hesitation before he answered. “No. And they aren’t too happy about it.” He was holding something back.

  “Do they know about the creature I’m hunting?”

  “I have to believe they know something about it, but the subject wasn’t discussed.”

  “And you just happen to have come up with the idea for us to team up and try to subdue it instead of killing it right after they came to see you.”

  “You know I was never a fan of killing it. But I’m becoming a fan. I just don’t know if it can be killed, based on everything you’ve said. If only we could figure out exactly what it is and where it came from.”

  Lucy had been thinking the same. She wasn’t going to make any headway with the hell beast until she had more information about it. And the only way she was going to get that was from Lucien. The problem was reaching him. Only Theia could bring him out of the underworld, and Theia spent most of her time in the underworld with him. It was time to talk to the Carlisles. If anyone knew how to reach Theia, it would be Theia’s sisters.

  Lucy set down her coffee. “I might know someone who could give us some answers. I’ll see if I can track them down.” She stood and picked up the crossbow.

  “Right now?” Oliver looked surprised. Had he actually thought she’d come over here to have sex with him again? Unbelievable. A couple of orgasms—admittedly above-average ones—and he thought he’d be irresistible to her. He had delusions of grandeur.

  “By the time I get back to Sedona, it’ll be almost four, and I need to get cleaned up and put on something more suitable.” She’d worn jeans again to hit the mine, and she was beginning to feel like a schlub.

  “So you’re really not going to sleep.”

  “With you? No.”

  She’d left him speechless for the moment, but he recovered by the time she reached the door. “I wasn’t offering.”

  Lucy spared hi
m a look over her shoulder before she went out. “Yeah, you were.”

  * * *

  Oliver stared at the closed door. Damn. She was something else. He couldn’t help smiling to himself, as infuriating as she was. It was just as well. He had business to take care of, too. Now he had two reasons to visit Polly’s Grotto. To find someplace for Colt and to find out what Polly might know about the connection between Smok International and Darkrock. Because he was convinced there was one.

  He headed upstairs to shower, pausing as he undressed to peer closer into the mirror. There was a fresh mark on the skin below his left shoulder. A knot of scar tissue from a close-range bullet wound. Lucy had gotten off one shot—in the beast’s shoulder. It was just as well she hadn’t stayed the night.

  As he’d expected, the Grotto was still open from the night before when he arrived. Apparently, the 2:30 a.m. last call didn’t apply here. Oliver wasn’t sure what the protocol was for getting the hostess’s attention, but he didn’t have to wonder for long. Something about him had already put him on her radar.

  As he hovered by the entrance, a little overwhelmed by the underwater theme of the place and its fluttering blue-and-green light patterns that moved in waves across the walls and patrons alike, a partially shifted were-tiger approached him.

  “My mistress requests your presence in her booth.” The voice was deep and raspy through the tiger’s larynx.

  Oliver followed the were-tiger’s glance to a woman in a sequined green gown, with hair that looked like seaweed spun from pure gold that somehow floated about her head despite it being not in water but in air. She lifted her champagne glass to him with an inviting smile.

  He made his way to her booth, where a second glass was waiting for him. “I take it you’re Polly.”

  “And you are positively delectable. Welcome to my grotto, son of Gwyn.”

  “Sorry, son of whom?” Maybe they’d mistaken him for someone else after all. “The name’s Oliver Connery.”

  Polly twirled her hand in the air as she sipped her champagne. “Who cares? The more important question is what are you? And the answer to that, of course, is something nobody expects.”