by Platt, Sean
John’s stomach turned at the thought of exploiting a child in such a way. Particularly a child who had lost so much to abuse by monsters. He wondered if they were feeding her people, getting her hooked on feeding rather than only doing it when necessary, making their own little monster they could control.
He met Duncan’s cold eyes.
“What happened to you? What happened to the man who risked everything to keep two boys alive? The man who raised Caleb and kept him from becoming a monster? Is that part of you finally dead?”
“Caleb has gone to the other side. And I’m too old for sentimentality. All I can do is protect this world as best I can, the only way I know how.”
“Why are you here, then? You already have your next assassin; what do you want from me?”
“I’ll offer a trade. You work for us; we let Abigail go.”
“Work, or kill?”
“They’re really the same, aren’t they? You work for us, stay in our program, and help. If you do this, you can’t see your friends again, including Abigail. You’re ours, completely and fully until we close that portal and neutralize every Other threat here.”
“What happens to Abigail? How is she supposed to get by? How do I know you’ll leave her alone?”
“You have my word.”
“Your word? What good is that?”
“We haven’t touched Hope, have we? Even though you didn’t live up to your end of the bargain.”
John sat up in his seat. “I tried to die! I was sold out.”
“Relax,” Duncan said, “I figured something went wrong when I saw you all over the fucking news. As for Abigail, she can stay with your friend, or we can find a family for her.”
“No families. If I do this, she stays with Larry.”
“Fair enough,” Duncan said. “So we have a deal?”
John stared out at the water. “Do I have a choice?”
“We don’t choose our fate. Our fate chooses us.”
The exchange happened two nights later. Duncan’s agents escorted Abigail to the cabin. The van opened, and she leaped out, clutching Teddy and running toward John with open arms.
He swept her up and held her tight, hugging her so tight he was afraid she might pop.
“My angel!”
“Did they hurt you?” he asked.
“No, I hurt a few of them, though.”
John laughed. Abigail giggled — and it killed him that he might never hear that giggle again.
“Did they tell you why you got to come back?”
Abigail looked confused. “What do you mean?”
Fuck.
“Listen, they weren’t going to let you go. They wanted to turn you into an assassin. That’s why they grabbed you. It’s what they tried getting me to do.”
“Then why’d they let me go?”
“I told them I’d work for them instead — if they set you free.” John thought of lying, but there wasn’t a point; she would see through it. They were too tuned in to one another.
“What?”
“I have to go away for a while, and you’re gonna stay with Larry until I’m done.”
“No! You can’t leave me!”
“I’m so sorry,” John said, wiping tears from her face. Agents beckoned at the van; time to go.
“I have to leave, Abigail. But I swear, I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
She collapsed against him, crying out.
Larry came to her side as John pulled away.
Rip the bandage off quickly to lessen the pain.
“I’m sorry.” He bent over and kissed her on the cheek. “I love you.”
John turned away, unable to look at her any longer, for fear his heart would shatter. She reached out, but Larry held her back, hugging and hushing her, saying, “It’ll be okay,” over and over.
John climbed into the agency van and looked at the ground as the agent closed the door. Abigail screamed, and he fought the urge to look back as the van rolled forward.
John closed his eyes, tears flowing freely, trying to cleanse her pained expression from his mind. There were many things in his life he’d forgotten. Many more he was yet to forget. The image of Abigail’s face as he gave her the news would haunt him forever.
Epilogue
Frank Sanderson woke to the sound of pounding at his door. He fumbled in the darkness, hands hunting for the alarm clock on his nightstand. Bright red numbers: 3:49 a.m.
“Who the fuck?” he murmured, his mind running through a list of people who might want to pay him a visit in the ass crack of night. Probably one of Tony’s men looking to shake him down.
Frank grabbed the pistol from the nightstand and approached his front door, gun at his side.
“Yeah?” Frank flicked on the light switch, but the porch stayed dark.
Damned light, always out when you need it.
“Mister, I need help,” a young girl’s voice. “My mommy crashed her car, and she’s not answering me. I think she’s … dead.”
“Holy shit,” Frank said, opening the door. “Where is she?”
He glanced past the girl and into the silent black street. He looked back down at the girl, wearing a black hoodie with her face in shadows.
“Where, I don’t see … ”
His mouth dropped open as she lowered her hood.
“Hello, Uncle Frank,” Abigail said with a huge smile, holding up the bulb she’d unscrewed from his porch light.
Frank stumbled back. “What? Abigail?”
“Did ya miss me?” She slammed the door shut behind her and threw the light bulb into shards at his feet.
Her wild eyes promised death. Frank raised his gun and fired a shot at her gut. Two, then three, all of them missing.
He staggered back into the dark. The girl kept coming forward. Frank stumbled all the way into the kitchen then spun around to flee out the back door, where he was greeted by a heavyset man with wild hair, dressed in all black.
“Where ya going, Frankie?” the man asked with a deranged smile. “The party’s just started.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
In AVAILABLE DARKNESS: BOOK TWO, DARKNESS ASCENDING
Prologue
February 2013
Anchor Harbor, Washington
Something was wrong.
Emilia wasn’t sure exactly what that something was, but a chill or a scent or a feeling curled through the air like a whiff from distant fire. She could almost feel it bleeding from the creaking branches, whispering in the angry breeze as she and her daughter walked their dog down Crestview at dusk.
It had been more than five years since their move to the burbs, but some instincts born on concrete never left and barely faded, even after you traded asphalt for grass.
Like the inescapable feeling that something horrible was about to happen.
Emilia looked up and down the block, casting her eyes across both rows of overpriced, two-story homes and equally exorbitant vehicles lining either side of the street. Nothing seemed out of place. Lights were on, families were eating dinner and kids were playing outside. A few neighbors were trading gossip on their lawns, leaning over their picket white fences.
Yet, even with nothing out of place, Emilia couldn’t shake the vibe.
“Stay close, honey,” she called to Kayla, her 7 -year-old daughter, who was walking Mocha, their pain-in-the-ass Chihuahua two houses ahead.
“Okay.” Kayla slowed her gait and pulled back on Mocha’s leash. The Chihuahua tugged back hard, wanting to go faster, probably so he could piss all over the fire hydrant a half block up.
Emilia reached into her jeans, wrapped her fingers around the zapper Leo bought her the year before when that sex offender moved in down the street, then looked up and down the avenue, guiding her eyes from window to window. They weren’t near the offender’s house yet, but Emilia couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.
She felt vulnerable, and exposed, out on the street at dusk, even though she shouldn’t have, surround
ed by the sprawling lawns of Luxury Lane. The temperature seemed to suddenly drop, maybe 10 degrees, agreeing with the wind’s sudden momentum and swelling her desire for home.
Mocha moved to the sidewalk, and Emilia hoped the damned dog was finally ready to do his business. Mocha sniffed and pulled away.
Nope, not there. He has to get to that damned fire hydrant down the street.
“Come on, dog,” Emilia said through a sigh.
Kayla laughed. She loved the stupid little barking rodent, and didn’t care if the tiny beast took 25 minutes to eliminate. Kayla was patient, like her father. Of course, it was easy to be patient when you saw your kid once every two weekends and didn’t have to care for the world’s most annoying canine.
Emilia never wanted a dog, but if it was a maternal must, then she wanted a real dog — a big, sturdy animal to protect them. Not a hyperactive rat. Which is probably why Leo went out and bought Mocha for their daughter’s sixth birthday. He got to be the good guy, and give his daughter a “cute” dog, while inserting another annoyance into Emilia’s world.
Leo was gone, but his mark, like the dog’s territorial pissings, remained.
It could be worse. Be glad he’s gone and you got Kayla.
Emilia forced herself to smile, thinking of her annoyingly happy friend Susan’s constant advice, “Always smile and never forget to count your blessings.”
Emilia counted her blessings; she was healthy, had a job and a happy, well-adjusted child. But she still couldn’t shake the creeping dread. As if the weather were reading her mind, smoky clouds began gathered ahead at an almost alarming speed. An icy wind started to scream.
Something’s wrong. Get back home.
“Come on, Honey. ”
Mocha started barking like crazy as Kayla turned. “What is it, Mom?”
Mocha ripped himself from Kayla’s grip and tore into a run, dragging the leash behind him as he raced up the street toward the oncoming storm.
“Mocha!” Kayla screamed, chasing her dog.
Emilia’s heart pounded as she called after her daughter, a dozen horrible scenarios racing through her mind — from the dog getting hit by a car to Kayla meeting the bumper’s front instead, plus another several she couldn’t bear to think on, lest she tempt fate into turning them true.
“Kayla! Stop!”
Emilia screamed louder, but her daughter kept running after the dog.
Emilia followed, racing as fast as she could as the clouds above turned swollen and black, rolling through the sky.
Tornado!
Wind howled, growing angry, as the highest branches began to violently whip the air. Thunder boomed. Lightning crashed, all too fast, inky clouds swirling through the street and casting her quickly shifting world beneath a pall of dark fog.
Emilia couldn’t see her baby girl. She ran forth, screaming, “Kayla!”
“Mom?” Her daughter’s call was a whisper ahead, but Emilia couldn’t see her through the darkness.
She pressed on into the swirling chaos, pelted by chunks of hail and God-only-knew what kind of debris. “Kayla!”
She squinted, peering through the pall, churning like a freight train above and around her.
She caught sight of Kayla in the distance, running down the street and straight into the thick fog. It billowed forth and back on itself before being sucked into a vortex that appeared in the center of the street for a moment, before it disappeared.
In its place was a perfect circle of light suspended in the air a foot off the ground, measuring maybe 20 feet in every direction.
The world was still, so calm that Emilia could hear her breath as she approached the disc in confusion, awe, and fear. The disc, she discovered, wasn’t made of light, nor was it a disc so much as a window revealing an impossibility on the other side: her street replaced with rolling woodlands basking beneath a brilliant sun.
Kayla and Mocha were nowhere.
“Kayla!” Emilia screamed, racing toward the giant window. Closer, she realized it wasn’t a window, but a hole in the world.
What the hell?
Emilia slowed her approach, hearing and feeling a buzzing, growing in volume as it vibrated around the hole. The forest on the other side was deep and lush, real as anything Emilia had ever seen.
She felt like Alice, staring through the Looking Glass.
This can’t be real.
“Kayla!” She moved closer, looked up and down the street to see if anyone else noticed the giant, floating hole in the world. Mrs. Ferguson and Molly were standing in the street, a quarter block away, mouths hanging half to the asphalt.
So I’m not the only one seeing this. I’m not crazy.
Emilia stepped closer, close as she dared, battling every instinct to run into the hole, just as her daughter seemed to do. She hadn’t seen Kayla step through;, she’d seen her rushing in the fog before disappearing completely. Perhaps, Emilia told herself, Kayla was on the hole’s far side, where maybe the street continued.
She circled the floating orb, keeping her eyes on the woods beyond, scanning for any sign of Kayla or Mocha. She finally reached the circle’s edge and saw that the street did continue on the other side, though the floating hole was so thin you couldn’t see it from the opposite end. Just a thin, jagged black line floating like a zipper.
As Emilia slowly rounded to the other side, her heart leaped in her throat, her eyes falling on the forest again, this time from a different angle. The sun lit a soft blue horizon with a wicked flicker of orange.
Something surfaced through the tree line.
“Kayla!” she cried out, inviting her daughter into her parted arms. “I’m here!”
Words were spilled from her mouth before she realized the shape wasn’t her daughter, or her dog.
It was nothing she’d ever seen — something that looked like a man, but wrapped in angry swath of swirling darkness.
She stopped mid-wave, afraid to draw further attention from the whatever-it-was. But she was too late. The creature was a blur of fast-moving darkness, soaring toward Emilia. Two seconds later it stood at the aperture’s edge, its bright blue eyes almost glowing as they stared into her soul.
It reached out, stretching an arm from its impossible world into hers.
Emilia screamed, turned, and tore down her street as fast as she could, away from the darkness, glancing back just in time to see the dark shape fully emerge from the hole and step onto her street.
She spun from the asphalt, stumbled onto her neighbor’s dewy grass, and ran through her yard, desperate to lose the thing before it found her.
Emilia never saw what tripped her, sending her to the ground and under a blanket of black.
One
John
Later that night
Branches swayed in the breeze like bony fingers scratching the wind as John waited in the mobile command unit, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, staring at the bank of monitors displaying ugly news, interviews with frightened residents and Homeland Security officers explaining to the public — without any actual explanation — why an entire neighborhood was being evacuated and cordoned off.
In the first moments following the event, the news anchors pondered the possibilities: terrorist attack, chemical spill, or another in a long line of mass shootings which seemed to punctuate the news every month or three. But none of them came close to the truth. The portal had opened — an extraterrestrial, magickal event. The Army had been called in to erect a tented barrier around the portal, to prevent prying eyes from seeing inside, and anyone else from accidentally walking through, at least from this side.
While the first portal, created a year earlier, was contained in Jacob’s compound, hidden from the public, this one had split open in the middle of a suburban neighborhood and spilled its horror in plain sight.
Within an hour, jittery, blurred cell phone footage caught by neighbors was being played on every channel.
Everyone wanted to know what in the hell this thing was.
/>
Experts were trotted out, calling it everything from a wormhole to a government experiment gone awry to some sort of freak natural phenomena. Wormhole was the most accurate description, of course, though no one could possibly know what John and Omega knew — that this was a portal created by magick, a link to Otherworld, and in all likelihood, the swirling wellspring of a gathering threat.
“So, who do you think did this?” Commander Mike Mathews appeared behind John. “Someone on this side or the other?”
John stared at the monitors within the barrier, showing the portal with various colored overlays measuring the surrounding energy and other stuff John didn’t understand, despite working with Omega for a year.
“I don’t know who on this side could do it. Is anyone left in Harbinger who could even do this?”
“So you think Jacob did this from over there? And if so, can he create more?”
Mathews stared at John as if John was stashing secret knowledge and not sharing. Mathews was a short muscular man in his late 40s, and one of the most deft John had ever seen in shifting gears. One minute he was smiling and working reporters like a used car salesman unloading a lemon. The next minute, always behind closed doors, he was an intense, brooding, control freak on the verge of snapping. John tolerated the man because they worked well enough together, at least so far, but he could see their harmony grinding to a halt the minute Mathews woke on the wrong side of bed.
John sighed. “I don’t know. If he created this, then yes, I’d say he can make more. But isn’t the bigger question, why?”
Mathews’ phone buzzed from his pocket. He turned from John, fished it from his pants, and brought it to his ear. “Mathews.”
Brow furrowed: “Really? What does she remember?”
“Okay, set up an interview in Unit Seven. Make sure no one sees her.”
Mathews ended the call and dropped the phone in his pocket. “The passed out woman’s come to. Said her daughter’s missing and someone came through the portal.”