Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  She couldn’t get it out. Her own throat was closing; tears began to slide down her cheeks. Then Nola broke down and sobbed into James’s chest. He held her, looking over her head at Lu with an expression she couldn’t decipher.

  “Nola’s grandmother was killed in a car accident many years ago,” he said. “Her son James was in the car with her; he was eight at the time. I was named after him.”

  There was a winch tightening in degrees around her chest. Her heart began to pound like it was trying to claw its way out of her chest. “I’m sorry,” Lu whispered, her voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. You’ve done nothing wrong.” Magnus stepped closer to her, gazing down at her with his own indecipherable expression. She looked up, pleading at him with her eyes. She needed his arms around her, needed the comfort she knew he could give, needed to hear him say it again, that it wasn’t her fault. She just needed . . . him.

  So she closed the small distance between them, wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, and buried her face in his neck.

  He stiffened, but didn’t pull away. There was a breathless moment she was certain he would, but then—oh miracle—his arms came up hard to encircle her. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “It’s all right,” he whispered, his deep voice the softest, gentlest stroke of sound. “It’s all right: I’ve got you.”

  I’ve got you. It broke the final shred of her restraint. She sobbed, her body wracked with a shudder. Both sobs and shudders kept coming, and soon Magnus was stroking her hair, murmuring comforting words she followed the shape but not the substance of, letting his voice wash over her, his heat warm her, his strength support her, until she was crying in earnest, letting everything out. He picked her up in his arms and carried her back to their bedroom. He closed the door behind them with his foot, and gently laid her on the bed.

  He went to the bathroom and ran a washcloth under cold water, and brought it back to her with a box of tissues that he set on the little table beside the bed. Then he wiped her face with the cloth and dried it with the tissues, and made her blow her nose.

  “Who knew you’d be such an ugly crier?” he whispered, brushing the hair from her forehead. He gazed down at her with such tenderness it almost made her break out in a fresh round of tears.

  “I don’t ugly cry,” she sniffled, not believing it for a minute because she could feel the way her face had distorted, but not insulted because she knew he was teasing. Hoped he was teasing.

  “You’re right. You don’t ugly anything. You couldn’t be ugly if you tried.”

  The way he said it was so sweet, such softness from such a hard man, that Lu forgot for a moment all her hesitations and the walls he’d erected between them, and reached out to touch his face.

  He snatched her hand with lightning speed, curling his fingers around her wrist. He held it suspended in the air between them, the look of softness in his eyes from seconds before replaced by an icy, furious look that might have made Honor proud.

  “Don’t.”

  It was all he said, but Lu felt the pathos behind it, the years and years of suffering and self-hatred. She felt it, and her heart wept for him, for whatever burden he carried, and wouldn’t share.

  “Please let me touch you,” she begged.

  The fury in his eyes was matched in his voice, though he kept it low. “You’ve touched me more than any other living thing in the last twenty years. That should be enough.”

  Was he talking about physically touching, or something else? She couldn’t tell. She didn’t care. “It’s not enough, Magnus. I want more. I want more of you.”

  Her words affected him. His eyes flashed, the hand around her wrist began to shake. He said hoarsely, “Why would you want me? I’ve got half a face!”

  “That doesn’t make you half a man!”

  He loomed over her, pressing her back against the bed, capturing her other wrist now and pinning both over her head against the pillow. He was angry and his anger was shaking him, sending tremors through his chest and arms, flooding his face and neck with color.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying! You have no idea what kind of man I am, or the things I’ve done, or the things I’m capable of! You don’t know anything about me at all!”

  He made a sound that was part growl, part wretched cry, his teeth bared, his eyes wild. He looked for a moment like an animal, and Lu remembered that Morgan had wisely advised her how to treat a wild animal: gently.

  So as gently as she could, Lu told him the truth.

  She looked deep into his eyes and said, “I know that underneath all your sharp bristles, you’re kind, loyal, and honorable. You’re smart, and capable, and there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to protect the colony, including sacrificing your own life. So that makes you selfless, and the most courageous person I’ve ever known. And I know that even though you’re all these wonderful things, you don’t think you deserve even the smallest happiness. You punish yourself as much as you can, you deny yourself any kind of pleasure, even smiling, and whatever it was that happened to make you that way, you can’t forgive yourself. Or you won’t. Either way, you hate yourself, Magnus. And knowing that breaks my heart.”

  His expression was stunned; his eyes registered the depth of his anguish. He turned his face away and moved as if to withdraw, his grip loosening on her wrists, but Lu reached out and gently placed her hands on either side of his face, turning him back to her and holding him there.

  “I won’t bring it up again. Not because I don’t want to know, but because it’s obvious you don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to have anything to do with giving you more pain than you already have.” Her voice grew smaller. “And I won’t say this again either, but you should know that I think you’re beautiful, Magnus. I’ve always thought you were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Look at me! I’m not beautiful!” he hissed, his voice strangled, his body frozen above her.

  “You are to me.”

  He made a sound low in his throat and closed his eyes. Because he wasn’t moving away and he’d allowed her to keep her hands on his face, Lu took a chance and did the thing she’d been wanting to do since she’d first done it in Beckett’s lab, in front of everyone.

  She kissed him.

  But she didn’t start with his mouth; she wanted to show him with her actions what she’d said to him in words. So—slowly, gently, easing forward—she stretched toward him, brushing her lips against his scarred cheek.

  He sucked in a breath. Lu froze, expecting him to bolt. When he didn’t, she closed her eyes, inhaling his scent deep into her lungs. Then she lightly rubbed her cheek against his, and leaned in farther to nuzzle her nose into the soft, warm spot just beneath his earlobe. There she pressed another kiss. A tremor ran through him at the touch of her lips against his skin.

  He said her name, the barest whisper of sound, as she ran her mouth along his jaw. The stubble from his unshaven face tickled her lips. His hands dug into the sheets on either side of her head, bunching the fabric in his fists.

  She slid her hands from his cheeks into the soft thickness of his hair and kissed the other side of his face, his closed eyelids, the bridge of his nose, slowly working her way back to the other side, then down to his neck, to the scars that puckered beneath his jawline. She kissed those, too. His pulse throbbed wildly against her lips. He exhaled, a soft groan that sent a spike of desire all the way through her.

  “Please.”

  His voice was low and wretched, filled with terrible longing and pain. Lu didn’t know if he was asking her to stop or to go on, so she gently pulled his head down and fitted her mouth to his.

  He moaned into her mouth. Lu thrilled at the sound of it, every nerve ending tinglingly alive. He sank his hands into her hair, adjusted his weight atop her so his pelvis pressed down against hers, and kissed her back
, ferociously.

  She loved it. The solid weight and heat of him, the scent of his skin, his taste. The way he couldn’t get enough of her mouth, his tongue invading, demanding, his fingers tightening in her hair as his erection dug into her belly, almost painfully hard.

  He pulled back to gasp, “We can’t–I can’t—” but Lu flexed her pelvis against his and cut him off with another kiss. It went on and on, wild and deep, and would have almost surely led somewhere her body desperately wanted to go had it not been for the sudden, muffled sounds that broke them apart and left them staring at each other, panting and shocked.

  The sounds were unmistakable, ones they both recognized:

  Gunshots.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They leapt from the bed. Magnus threw open the door, and the two of them bounded into the hallway, calling out for Nola and James.

  “Here!” called James from downstairs, and they quickly went to the first floor.

  Nola and James stood in front of the wall of computer screens, watching images of the exterior of the property in black and white; the front and back yards of the house, up and down the street, the entrance to the shed. It was there a group of six men stood with rifles pointed at the door.

  At least, Lu assumed they were men. They had two legs and two arms, but that’s where the resemblance to anything human ended. Each wore an obviously handmade suit of armor cobbled together from an odd collection of metal parts, all of it spray-painted matte black. Only their boots, gloves, and ragged-edged capes were fabric, but what made them look so otherworldly was their headgear. Helmets soldered together with garish seams sported face masks from which dangled foot-long rubber tubes that ended with blocky canisters fashioned to look like skulls or eagles or bears. Some sprouted feathers atop, others were rimmed with claws. All had a pair of soulless-looking glass eyes staring out, reflecting back the lightening sky in glints that made them appear to wink in sinister welcome.

  “Scavs,” said James grimly, zooming the picture in with a dial on one of the keyboards. “They must’ve followed us in.”

  Lu was fascinated in spite of the danger. She’d heard of these wandering groups of survivors who lived outside the cities, scavenging what they could from abandoned homes and stores. Legend had it they’d mutated from exposure to the sun, but it was impossible to determine if this group was mutated, or suffered from nothing more deadly than a seriously impaired fashion sense.

  The biggest one, a hulk with a pair of enormous bat ears on his helmet, whom Lu assumed was the leader from his I’m-in-charge-here stance, cocked his rifle and shot another round into the shed door. The handle promptly exploded into a fine spray of dust, leaving a gaping hole.

  “So much for that reinforced door,” Nola muttered.

  “I suppose I should deal with this,” said Lu. Her stomach sank at the thought of what “dealing” with it entailed. Before she could utter another word, however, Magnus snorted.

  She glanced at him, surprised. With a dour expression he said, “Hold your horses, Wonder Woman.” He glanced away from the camera to meet her eyes, and Lu could have sworn she saw a twinkle of humor there. “I think I can handle this one on my own.”

  He turned and left the room without further comment. After a minute, she said to Nola and James, “Hold my horses?”

  “It basically means don’t get ahead of yourself.” Nola winced as she watched the scav leader lift his big leg and kick the shed door down. “And the subtext was something along the lines of, ‘Please don’t emasculate me in front of company, sweetheart.’”

  Sweetheart? Lu’s cheeks flamed. Nola turned and gave her a look. “What? You think I can’t tell when a man’s in love?”

  Lu almost choked on her own tongue with the force of her denial. “Love! He’s not—he doesn’t—”

  “Of course he does,” Nola scoffed, waving a hand to indicate how ridiculous Lu was being. “And so do you. It’s all over you both.”

  Lu was silent, reeling. Examining her stunned expression, Nola asked, “Not too many boyfriends in your past?”

  Lu avoided that question, put a hand to her head, and quietly said, “I actually thought he liked you.”

  “Of course he likes me. What’s not to like?” Nola countered without an ounce of self-consciousness. “But he doesn’t like me in that way, sweetie. You’ve got that all locked up. Oh, shit.” Her attention was glued to the screen that showed the interior of the shed, and it became immediately apparent what had her cursing.

  The Scavs had figured out how to operate the elevator.

  Magnus waited until he heard the elevator lurch to a stop, and the clank of metal chain announce the inner door was being lifted. Unseen behind the wall, he waited until he heard the Scavs move past him down the dimly lit tunnel toward the steel door that led into Nola’s hidden underground compound. Then he placed his palms flat against the wall and concentrated.

  Cement began to disappear beneath his hands, flaking away silently in waves that left a growing mound of stone dust at his feet.

  His Gift of turning solid matter into dust with a touch was the one that had earned him the spot as Alpha of the Wales colony. Though it didn’t work on flesh and the range was limited to whatever he could touch, it had incredible applications, including digging all those perfectly shaped sleeping chambers in the rock. But it wasn’t his favorite Gift, or the most effective.

  Or the deadliest.

  He tunneled silently through the wall between the elevator shaft and the door, then stood in the low light, watching the Scavs assess their next move.

  He licked his lips, not even realizing he did it, still tasting the soft sweetness of Lumina’s mouth. He hoped she wasn’t watching the cameras, because what he was about to do wasn’t going to be pleasant. And though she said she knew him, had even—unbelievably—said she thought him beautiful, she didn’t know him like this.

  He didn’t want her to know him like this. But life is a bitch, and a slut, because she screws everyone. He stepped forward on silent feet.

  “Steel,” grunted the bear-headed Scav to the big one with the bat ears.

  Looking into the small black eye of the camera on the ceiling, Bat Ears tapped the nose of his rifle against the door. “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?” he called in falsetto. His companions snickered.

  A disembodied voice answered over a hidden speaker. “Nobody here but us chickens.”

  Nola, sounding bored. Magnus smiled grimly: She definitely didn’t scare easily. He crept a few feet closer, the curdled stench of unwashed skin wrinkling his nose.

  Bear Head whispered with reverence, “A woman!” The other four began to shift their weight and mutter, but Bat Ears fell perfectly still, his air of jaunty humor vanished. He gazed into the camera a long, silent moment, then removed his helmet.

  Big mistake.

  It was a peculiarity of Magnus’s Gift that he had to be looking directly into the eyes of his victim for it to work. That meant close quarters, which sometimes meant close calls, if those victims happened to be armed, as these six were. So instead of a direct assault, Magnus often had to resort to guerrilla tactics.

  It was guerrilla fighters, after all, who’d perfected the art of the surprise ambush.

  The invisible ambush.

  Magnus gathered the shadows around him, and closed the last few feet between him and the armed group of thugs.

  “What . . . where’d he go?” James stared in confusion at the black-and-white video display. Where only a second ago Magnus had stood, sneaking down the hallway like a burglar—actually it was closer to swaggering down the hallway like a pirate—now there was only blank space.

  “Jack said he was special,” Nola whispered, her gaze glued to the screen. “I have a feeling we’re about to find out exactly what that means.”

  Standing just behind them both, Lu watched in awe as chaos ensued.

&nbs
p; The man who’d removed his helmet to stare into the camera had a gaunt face, matted black hair, and black eyes that hinted at depths of violence that made her skin crawl. One second he was glaring into the camera as if he were going to eat it, the next he whirled around with a shout. His five companions froze, and stood unmoving as their leader clapped his hands on either side of his head and began, loudly, to scream.

  He fell to his knees, then to the floor, writhing and screaming in agony. The other Scavs began to shout over each other, panicked.

  “What the hell?”

  “Luter! What’s wrong?”

  “It’s poison! The air is poisoned!”

  “Nothing’s showing on the readout, idiot!”

  “Then what the fuck is wrong with him?”

  The leader continued to roll and shriek, only now his nose was copiously bleeding. As were his ears. His helmet lay discarded on the floor beside him, blank-eyed and grotesque. He began to sob and beg.

  “Please! Make it stop! Make it stop! OhGodJesusMotherMarypleasefuckingmakeitstop!”

  A tingle of horror swept up Lu’s spine. She knew with chilling, bone-deep certainty that whatever was happening to this man, Magnus was the cause. Remembering what he’d said to her in the bedroom, her chill grew deeper.

  You have no idea what kind of man I am, or the things I’ve done, or the things I’m capable of.

  The man on the ground coughed up an extravagant amount of blood. Lu jumped, hand to her mouth, watching wide-eyed as two of the other men’s helmets were wrenched from their heads by an invisible force and tossed aside. They, too, fell to the floor screaming.

  The other three made a run for the elevator.

  They didn’t get far. All three were thrown to the ground within seconds, their helmets removed and thrown away, their screams rising in horrible harmony with the others. Their noses began to spray blood. Their screams were punctuated by wet, bloody coughs, and Lu knew what was coming next.