Available Darkness Box Set | Books 1-3

by Platt, Sean

  So here he was, imprisoned in eternal purgatory, longing for an end to his pain.

  He knew better than to believe in such human constructs as Hell, but Jacob still felt as if he were stuck in his own version. He was tired of this world and its people: narrow-minded, petty creatures with limited intellect. Still, the creatures served their purposes. They were wonderfully fun to torment, and the pleasure of a good hunt was universal, regardless of the animal.

  Frankly, Jacob was amazed humans had managed to get so far as a species — not that they hadn’t had some help along the way from his kind.

  Jacob allowed himself a bittersweet smile as his memories drifted back to his first home, the true one. The spiraling snow-capped mountains, the lush green and blue forests, and the sky at night — a dizzying array of colors and shapes. He also longed for Otherworld’s denizens, a rich diversity of species that made Earth seem like a fish tank in comparison. To think that he would never lay eyes on another allutroch or gnebblewok only pushed him closer to despair.

  He stared again at the pavement fifty stories below.

  Given his weakened state, he wondered if the fall would finally do it. His foot inched forward, hovering in the air with a mind of its own. He laughed at the thought that his body was willing to do what his mind had not found the strength to carry out.

  Perhaps, I should listen to my body.

  His right foot was floating in midair, fifty stories above probable death, when a vibration from his pocket suddenly buzzed above the wind’s cry.

  He laughed again.

  Cell phones, always interrupting me from important tasks!

  He looked at the screen. It was Davis, a man he’d not heard from in more than a year, a descendant of one of the Pioneers. He wouldn’t be calling to exchange pleasantries.

  No, this was important.

  Jacob turned, jumped from the ledge down to the rooftop, and sat.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Davis,” The man on the other line sounded excited. “I found him!”

  Jacob said nothing. The words had paralyzed him with something he’d never felt before: hope.

  “I found John.”

  Forty-Three

  Hope

  Saint Augustine, Florida

  October 2, 1999

  Morning

  Hope lay in bed, mentally tracing her fingers over John’s angular jaw, across his chin, and over his soft lips as his breath rose, fell, and whispered between them.

  Soft morning light crept across the bed, making her feel ridiculous for her mini-breakdown hours earlier.

  The painting, which she’d started without any thoughts of what it was or where it would eventually go, had taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It was a non-commissioned piece and not something she planned to show at her friend Sergei’s gallery. She initially thought the new direction was some unrealized artistic desire bubbling up and pushing her to explore beyond her boundaries.

  As the painting progressed, however, she started to sense another power at work. Night after night, she was continuously pulled from her sleep, unable to rest until she returned to the canvas, adding bits and pieces, compelled to lay fragmented images across the canvas as though she were obsessively divining the will of the gods.

  She’d never felt so out of control and without direction save for the first painting she’d ever professionally shown, Dusk Wanderlust. The one that drew John into Sergei’s art gallery when it opened in the historic district of Saint Augustine nearly two years earlier. That painting seemed to draw her and John together as one; this one seemed more ominous. She wasn’t sure why, but Hope felt it somehow threatening to shred them.

  The angel didn’t originally start out looking like John. He appeared on the canvas as a rather generic, golden-haired heavenly being. Before that morning, there was also another person in the painting — the broken body of a red-haired woman, her body draped in black. A dark tattoo of a shooting star stained the pale flesh along the nape of her neck.

  Hope wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was positive the angel had murdered the woman.

  Then, last night, she was roused from her sleep with a sudden, burning desire to scrub the canvas with changes. Without realizing where her mind was moving her hands, she’d endowed the angel with her lover’s face.

  Two hours later, sweat matting the hair on her forehead, she dropped her brush and succumbed to the first of her tears. Shaking, she knelt down, retrieved the brush, and quickly painted over the dead woman’s body in violent strokes of indigo and violet.

  Something wretched was bubbling to the surface of their lives. She could feel it burning beneath her skin and in every cell of her body. Well, at least, in the night’s inky shadows.

  In the morning, under the down covers of a warm, soft bed, that fear seemed as out of place as a grandfather clock in a nightclub. John had talked her down from the ledge last night, helping her examine why she was so upset. She didn’t tell him about the woman in the painting because some part of her felt it had something to do with infidelity and she didn’t want to seem insecure. Hope knew without doubt that John was a faithful man.

  During his examination of the painting, he suggested that perhaps she was getting nervous with the looming milestone of their two-year courtship. Two years was an impressive feat for either of them in the relationship department, and as the anniversary approached, she often felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop — the moment where things would go bad, as they always had before. It was almost as if she’d convinced herself that she didn’t deserve a happily ever after.

  “Look around you,” he’d said, squeezing her shoulder blades beneath his large, strong hands. He turned her around, pulled her into his embrace, and absorbed her tears. “See the world as it is, not the things you fear might happen. You deserve to be happy.”

  While other men in her life had analyzed Hope only to determine what was wrong with her, John never searched for what was wrong. He simply told her what was right: always them and their love.

  She did deserve to be happy, and had to stop worrying about things she had no control over.

  Even though they’d been together for two years — her longest relationship by at least fourteen months — they had never settled into the mundane routine that seemed to poison the wells of so many relationships. She sometimes wondered why John seemed so different from all the others. She was far too cynical to believe in things like fate or soul mates. But her inner romantic, the one who existed at her core despite all the shit life had seen fit to throw her way, secretly believed that John might be the closest thing to a soul mate she’d ever know.

  They were poles apart, but their differences worked in harmony. While she was anxious, frenetic, and prone to emotional flights and dives, he was calm, laid back, and maybe the most evenly tempered person she’d ever known. He was like a human anti-anxiety pill, she often joked. They had a few things in common, though, including a love for reading and art, and were equally at home discussing philosophy or why there would never be a better show than Seinfeld.

  John was also the first person who ever took such a deep curiosity in knowing everything about her, from what she was like as a child (a clumsy, scrawny introvert) to the consistency of her dreams (incredibly rare) to her deepest fears (being unable to conceive a child) to what inspired every one of her paintings. John was like a scholar with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the subject of her, no matter how uninteresting she felt that subject was.

  Perhaps the biggest reason their love was so intense, even after all this time, was that to Hope, John was still mostly a mystery.

  He worked as a cook at an upscale Italian restaurant a short walk from Sergei’s gallery and didn’t talk much about his life before moving to Florida. With any other man, she would suspect such reticence indicated an unseemly past filled with debauchery and selfish deeds.

  But John was different.

  He grew up in more than twenty foster homes after h
is parents died, drifting from state to state, never establishing roots in any of them. He spent his time working and reading and sometimes composing music on piano, though he never played for another soul. He had no friends, family, or meaningful relationships. John was, in some ways, a blank slate, a guy who seemed to have been waiting for some spark to bring him to life. She was that spark, he confessed during one of their few discussions of his mysterious past.

  Despite his claims to the ordinary, there were times, such as this, when Hope lay beside him in bed watching John sleep, feeling that there was far more to him than she would ever know. A deeper man somewhere inside, a John who had yet to look her in the eye. She suspected that he’d suffered some great hurt that made him the way he was, so remote and distant to everyone other than her.

  She moved closer, wanting to touch him without waking him. John’s eyes opened, his left eyebrow arched.

  “Are you watching me sleep?” A smile broke through the surface of his tired face. It wasn’t the first time she’d been busted.

  She slid toward John under the sheets, her hand sliding under his shirt and finding his warm chest, her leg wrapping his groin. His cock stiffened, and she smiled.

  “Well, good morning.” She climbed on top of him and reached down to slide him inside her, surprised by her wetness.

  “Wow,” John said, still smiling, “it is a good morning.”

  The doorbell shattered their moment.

  “What the hell?” Hope climbed off of John, cycling through possibilities of who might appear on their doorstep at such an early hour.

  John threw on some jeans and darted downstairs.

  He peered through the front door’s peephole and glanced back at Hope, standing at the foot of the stairs with the phone in her hand, just in case she needed to call the cops.

  She didn’t — they were standing at her doorstep.

  “It’s the cops,” John whispered, confusion on his face.

  He flicked on the porch light and opened the door. Hope, suddenly by his side, wrapped her arms around his right one.

  “Hi, I’m Detective Avery,” said a tall, dark-haired cop with a hawk’s nose and raccoon circles under his eyes. “This is Detective Johnson.” He gestured toward his partner, a thin black man with a receding hair line, salt and pepper behind it.

  “We’re wondering if either of you have seen this woman?”

  Avery held out a photo. Hope’s throat closed, her stomach nearly falling through the floorboards. Staring back at her was a glossy image of a red-haired woman, a shooting star tattoo leaving a trail of ink across the nape of her neck.

  Forty-Four

  John

  The officers could have hit John in the head with a sledgehammer, the ringing in his ears wouldn’t have been any different. He stared in disbelief, his senses on fire.

  The photo, it was her, the girl in his dreams. The girl he had murdered and fed from.

  No, it was a dream.

  It can’t be …

  His brain buzzed, heart pounding three times the usual beat. His stomach was rocking like a raft in a storm. John struggled to hide his recognition and horror from the police, hoping they weren’t picking up on his internal reactions. It was a mask of innocence he’d perfected over the years, one that had saved him countless times. John tried not to stare at the frozen face in the glossy picture, the woman who haunted the blurry frames of his dreams.

  I thought I was cured.

  I thought —

  He felt his mask wanting to shatter, threatening to reveal a savage monster laying in wait.

  “Have you seen her?” Detective Avery repeated.

  “Can’t say I have,” John lied, pretending to wipe sleep from his eyes. Hope’s fingernails dug into his flesh as she pulled herself closer to him.

  “Her name is Rebecca Ashby; she lives one street over. Went missing two days ago,” Avery said. “We’re asking around to see if anyone’s seen her.”

  John shook his head, trying not to oversell his ignorance.

  “No,” he turned to Hope. “How about you, honey?”

  Her face was a sheet, as if she were the one with something to hide.

  “No,” Hope shook her head after too long of a pause, “I mean … she looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her in the neighborhood, but … no, I don’t think I’ve seen her in the past few days. What happened?”

  Avery’s head tilted slightly, as if he were somehow picking up on and trying to process whatever Hope might be hiding. John looked at Detective Johnson, feeling a slight chill as the officer met his gaze. John glanced back at Avery, certain that something bad was about to go down. A current of energy gathered in his fingertips, The Darkness threatening to rise.

  The Darkness he had buried for more than two years, the power he thought he’d managed to bury for good, was now right there, ready to explode from his body and annihilate his enemies.

  No, not now.

  If The Darkness broke free, then no one was safe. If Hope touched him, she’d be reduced to ashes.

  No, no, no, no.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing.

  Slowly … in and out … focus.

  Avery said, “Her roommate reported her missing. Last time anybody saw her was Wednesday night at Harry’s Pub, where she works as a waitress.”

  “Ah, that’s where I must know her,” Hope said. “But no, I haven’t seen her recently.”

  Avery glanced at her for what seemed an eternity.

  The Darkness swelled beneath John’s skin, begging for release.

  TAKE THEM, TAKE THEM NOW.

  The truth was suddenly impossible to ignore. John thought he’d buried his curse, but it was only dormant, waiting to turn its whisper into a wail. Only it hadn’t been dormant, not if he had anything to do with this missing woman. Between the blurry map of John’s dreams and the two officers standing on his front porch, the truth was like sunlight.

  He’d gone to the bar, spotted his victim, followed her home, and pounced, predator on prey. He dragged her into a side street and into the underbrush where he swallowed every drop of life inside her. In the dreams, he’d seen flashes of her memories as he fed. He thought he’d imagined it. Had hoped he’d imagined it. But now on the doorstep, in front of the police, those memories spilled into his waking life. No, no, stop. With them, Darkness swelled as John struggled to keep his face a solid mask while suppressing Rebecca’s memories and emotions coursing through him.

  Stop, stop, stay here, in the present, John. Focus.

  “Well, if you remember anything or see her, give me a call, will ya?” Avery handed Hope his card.

  She reached out and took it, her hand slightly shaking. John hoped the tremble was subtle enough to miss the officer’s notice.

  The cops thanked them for their time, then left.

  “Good luck,” John managed to say as he quietly closed the door.

  The Darkness receded alongside the dead woman’s memories. John felt Hope’s stare before he saw it. Then he turned and saw her wet eyes.

  “She’s the girl,” Hope said.

  “What?”

  “In that … painting, with you. She was in the painting. You were floating over her. You had … killed her.”

  Forty-Five

  Hope

  Hope trembled, unable to draw sense from her scrambled thoughts.

  John stood at the foot of the stairs, dumbstruck. “What are you talking about?”

  “In the painting, the woman in the picture, lying on the ground. She was dead!”

  “There isn’t a woman in the painting,” John said.

  “I painted over her! That’s why I was so upset last night! I painted you as a … killer.”

  John stepped forward and wrapped his fingers gently around her arm. She flinched. Only a moment, but long enough for him to notice. He took a step back.

  “Wait a second; you don’t think I killed that woman, do you?”

  “No!” Hope shook her hea
d. “But I painted her, John. I saw her. Now she’s missing. What does that mean? How could I have known that? I don’t even know her!”

  “Maybe it was someone else in the painting.”

  “She had the … same tattoo!” Hope choked mid-sentence making “same tattoo” sound like a separate thought. Tears streamed down her face.

  She hated crying.

  John reached out again, arms open. This time, she collapsed into his embrace. While Hope didn’t really believe that John could be responsible for killing someone, some part of her — maybe the same part that somehow foresaw the girl’s disappearance — was still wary of him for reasons she couldn’t understand. Yet strangely, another part — the one being comforted in his strong embrace — didn’t care if he admitted to being a murderer. At that moment, in his arms, he could have confessed to anything, and it wouldn’t have made a molecule of difference.

  “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for this,” John said, his breath warm on her head as he pulled her close. “Maybe you recognized her from the neighborhood, or at the bar? And the artist in you homed in, even if your conscious mind hadn’t. You stored it away and served it up while painting. We’ve talked about how stuff like that happens with artists, right?”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” It felt like a good explanation, but didn’t feel right. There was something else at play.

  “It’s a coincidence. She’s been missing for what? Two nights? She’s young. She’s probably out partying or something and forgot to check in with her roommate.”

  Hope pulled away and looked up at John. “Do you think so?”

  “I don’t know what else to think. That’s what makes the most sense.”

  They stood at the foot of the stairs, their embrace tightening as though a taut caress could alter truth. At first, Hope thought John was simply offering her comfort. But slowly she realized that there was something else there, too. John seemed afraid — but of what?