Her stomach dropped. Palms sweat. She bit the corner of her lower lip, something she never did.
He looked hard, rough around the edges, but not in an overbearingly masculine way. She sensed softness, almost felt it. He was muscular, but not because of a gym—he’d earned his honestly.
Lisa’s vision funneled to this stranger. Others no longer mattered. She barely heard the music. Didn’t feel her feet on the floor. She’d dreamt of him, not of him, not exactly, but of someone who looked and smelled and seemed just like him, and she’d dreamt of him often enough to be concerned, concerned and excited, excited and overwhelmed.
She met his gaze, met it and kept it without faltering, without hesitation, without a second thought.
CHAPTER FOUR
1.
Jack Harlow stared, a moment, at the woman in front of him. Short, auburn hair; eyes of jade—or brown, he couldn’t be certain. Sexy black dress that hinted more than it revealed. Fit. Subtly curved.
And absolutely devastating.
He could not tear his gaze away. Whatever other thoughts he’d had . . . they all vanished. Blood paused in his veins. Mouth dried. He lost the ability to speak, couldn’t even put a solid thought together.
There might have been a bar, a street, and a city beyond that, country, continent, and world, but not then. That moment, the galaxy condensed to the five-foot, six-inch beauty before him.
He opened his mouth, found no words, closed it again.
She was perfect.
There’d been girls in the past, short relationships that were entirely physical. But he’d never been stricken before. Never felt protective. Jealous. Possessive, even.
They stared at each other for an impossibly long time. Ages ended. Cities and mountains crumbled to dust. The universe imploded to a single atom and exploded again. Time warped, catching Jack in slow motion. Caught, yet unconcerned with escape. Trapped—spellbound—in a moment of pure, unadulterated bliss.
She broke free of the spell well enough to manage a single word. “Hi.”
He smiled. Jack Harlow rarely smiled. “Hi,” he said.
“I’m Lisa.”
“Jack.”
“Hello, Jack.” She smiled now, too, brilliantly and gorgeously. She lifted her arm slowly, to shake hands, to introduce each other the way thousands of strangers did every day and night.
A sense of nervous awe washed over him. Jack Harlow had never been nervous, and never awestruck, in all the length of his memory.
Eyes still locked, he accepted her hand. It was warm—no, hot to his touch. Soft but solid. And, in his hand, right where it belonged. She glanced down at their grip. Neither let go. The cold air on where they’d touched would be unbearable.
When she looked up again, still smiling, not releasing his grip, Jack’s breath caught in his throat. Her eyes flashed from brown to green again with the movement.
2.
Nick Hunter had nailed three of the bastards tonight. But half an hour past midnight, he hadn’t found any others. It was entirely possible there had only been the three, that they’d resided here long enough to leave their stench everywhere, but Nick doubted it.
The warehouse district had nothing else.
He sat on the edge of the roof, legs dangling, looking out over Orlando. Downtown stretched a few blocks east and south; the surrounding streets were more suburban in nature. He liked it. Cozy. Quiet. A good place to vacation, perhaps take a week off, see what real people were like.
He liked to dream.
He sometimes wondered if he hunted the wrong places. What if trolling the East Coast of the United States left them free to do what they liked in China and France? Did Italian vampires have free reign over Milan? He’d never been west of the Mississippi. Never any need. He killed as many beasts as he could find and never ran out.
Granted, some nights he found nothing: an abandoned nest, the grisly remains of victims, even a self-immolated beast. But he always found clues, hints, suggestions.
His was important work.
This was his turf.
This city sprawled in all directions. In Nick’s experience, the creatures tended to gravitate toward urban areas. More meat. Less publicity. Unless the town was small and isolated enough to be completely controlled—he’d heard of that, but never seen it.
He scanned the streets, though from here he could make out no details.
Ultimately, hunger drove him from the warehouse and into downtown. He’d get a slice of pizza or something before continuing his hunt. The bars would begin closing soon, and the creatures would come out to feast.
For now, the streets were quiet. Friday, Saturday, they might get a little more crowded with officers directing traffic at the corners, kids passing out bright flyers for clubs or concerts.
Finding pizza was easy. Cheap and greasy and decent.
Wandering the streets, however, bored him. He detected nothing, saw no telltale signs of activity, smelled none of their awful residue—at least, nothing recent. They’d been here, walking these streets, passing for human while feeding on blood. Everyone seemed normal. No pale faces, no elongated eyeteeth, no misshapen features.
He knew several types; while the ugly beasts he’d slain earlier were common, he would still recognize the ones that had been more fortunate in their transformation. Passable as human, they had an easier time at their own hunt.
It wasn’t until half way till dawn, after the streets had cleared of all but a few stragglers, the clubs had closed and the barkeeps had gone home, that Nick Hunter gave up on downtown and turned his attention to the outlying residential neighborhoods.
There were a lot of houses out there, apartments and condos, parks and schoolyards, all-night diners and convenience stores. There was plenty of ground to cover. Too many crevices into which a beast might crawl.
3.
It hadn’t taken long to leave the club.
Neither Jack nor Lisa had any real control. An urgency overcame them, a sense of now or never. As if fate had always meant for them to be together—as if they’d been designed as a single piece, split apart and dropped separately on earth—but now that they’d come together, their time would be short.
They both felt it. Neither could explain it. They surrendered to it.
Love simply didn’t have a place in a life like Jack’s.
Lisa, too, never believed in love. Not in its truest, purest form.
Passion was undeniable. But for the first time in two lives, it was secondary.
4.
Lisa never told Liz she was leaving. Never had the chance. Too many people, music too loud, lights too low—she simply had to get away.
They’d walked the five blocks to her place, talking the whole time. She couldn’t remember specifics about their conversation, nor generalities. Jack Harlow—she remembered him.
Lisa woke briefly at dawn. Her sleep had been untroubled. Jack slept close to her, softly breathing, still covered with a sheen of sweat. The perfume of sex filled the room. She rolled over, phoned the office, and left a message saying she’d be out today, and maybe tomorrow. Then, it’d be the weekend.
When she hung up, Jack kissed her shoulder.
There’d been no awkwardness. Each seemed to know, intuitively, how to please the other. They were relentless. And Lisa, finally, definitively and unquestionably, understood the difference between making love and fucking.
She didn’t want it to end.
5.
Jack Harlow, for the first time in many, many years, thought about stopping.
He barely remembered the time before he’d started wandering. Parents. Sister. A house on Long Island. Friends, classmates. A car, a driveway, a lawn to mow and a dog to walk. Bowling Saturday mornings when he was fourteen, parties when he was sixteen. Pals, girlfriends, partners in the petty, insignificant crimes of childhood. Working on the Mustang. Putting it together, over and over again, repairing this piece, replacing that part. Then the highway. Open road beneath wheels,
wind in hair. Sun behind him, and the cities, the towns, the people he’d met. Friends? Not in years. The road to heaven was tarred with asphalt. Pockmarked by the various things that bumped in the night.
But those things existed everywhere. There was no outrunning them, no escaping, no place where he could be free. He’d been chasing an idea that didn’t exist, his own Eldorado. But maybe the poets and bards had been right; perfection existed. Here. Now. No matter what eyes may watch. No matter what hid in the shadows.
Jack Harlow had run long enough. Maybe unknowingly, he’d always been running here, to Lisa. Lisa Sparrow. Her very name refuted the darkness he’d always known.
Was it possible to stop? Trade the road for a home? The Mustang for a roof? Well, he’d keep the car. But he was willing to surrender the dark, the Sight. Give it or throw it away, he didn’t care; he didn’t need it. What had it done but erase his roots?
Next time a ghost spoke to him, he could ignore it. A vampire winked? Turn back to the bar. Wouldn’t happen, not anymore. He’d never really been part of that world; always, he’d been outside—just like all the rest of his life.
Jack Harlow believed, truly and with all his heart, that he could simply stop for the promise, even just the hope, of love.
6.
When they finally got out of bed, near noon, Lisa made pasta. Jack stared out the window, hands behind his naked back. From here, downtown appeared to be an oasis of concrete and glass within a scattering of trees, the small Lake Eola in the foreground. “Nice view,” he said.
“Thanks,” Lisa said. “I didn’t paint it. Just pay for it.”
“Good taste, then.”
The phone had rung three times; she’d ignored it each time, but had eventually checked the caller ID. Liz, Liz again, and Out of Area. Liz had left messages. Concern, probably. “Didn’t see you leave last night,” or maybe, “Saw you go off with that guy . . .” She’d listen later.
Lisa settled for studying Jack’s back. Well-toned, not overly built, no scars or blemishes, not quite smooth but definitely not rough. It had felt good, like flexible marble under a layer of silk. But his shoulders were tense.
This was it, she thought. Confessional. He’ll fish a wedding ring from his pants. Killed his last girlfriend. He was really gay. (No way she’d buy that after last night.) Only in it for the night? Ready to push off already, hit the road, find another city by sunset and another woman’s bed in which to lie?
She believed none of it.
Perhaps he waited for her confession. Husband away on a conference. Jealous boyfriend who’d phoned three times already this morning.
The water was boiling; she emptied the pasta box.
“How often do you see the sunrise?” Jack asked.
“Almost every day,” she told him.
He chuckled; she didn’t hear it, but saw it in a ripple down his back. “I mean, how often are you up late enough to see it?”
“Almost never.”
“I see it almost every night. My clock’s wrong,” he said.
She didn’t quite know what he meant; was this some way of telling her she’d been one in a long line of lovers, that the instant attraction she’d felt had not been shared? Or was his confession darker than that, deeper, more unique?
Darker, whether for good or bad, fit. He was not typical, in any way. Quiet, perhaps. Went with the tall, dark, handsome motif. Dangerous even, but not to her.
“It’s not my choice,” Jack said, “but I seem to be a night creature.”
“If you were a vampire,” she said, “the sunlight through the window would have vaporized you by now.”
He turned, nodded. “Maybe. Depends on the type.” He paused. “I think I want to become part of the day again. Walk in the real world for a change.”
The sauce and pasta cooking nicely, Lisa went to Jack and snaked her arms across his waist from behind, rested her cheek next to his, and whispered, “What is the world in which you’re walking now?”
“Dark,” he said. Nothing else. Hitman? Assassin? Secret agent? Lisa was intrigued, not scared, but she knew she should be.
“There’s something about you,” Jack said, folding his hands over hers. “Something that makes me believe I still have choices.”
“You always have choices.”
“I’ve always chosen how to react, not how to act.” He turned, kissed her lightly.
After a moment, Lisa asked, “So what are the options?”
“I could run,” he said. “Keep my life the way it is.”
“Can you really?” Lisa asked.
He tilted his head, those eyes burning into her, and said, “No, not really.”
7.
After lunch, they slept—for real. Despite Jack’s assertion that he wanted to walk in the light again, his body still operated on that wrong clock. The same since his seventeenth birthday.
He dreamt of fields of flowers, but the sun was always setting, twilight thick on the air. The dreams meant nothing, echoing his fears.
Lisa had told him something about herself, where she worked and where she’d grown up, her friend Liz who had left two messages today. But Jack had no work to speak of, and no friends. Not even among the dead.
When he woke, the sun had dipped beneath the skyline. The visible, western sky was bright with short-lived pinks and purples. Even the clouds, still fluffy, were colored.
Lisa breathed easily beside him.
He didn’t know how to step out of the dark. He’d walked it so long, it was insinuated into every pore, every muscle, every sense. Could he really work a job for more than a week? He never had. No bank account. No paychecks—cash only. No home address, no need for one. His license listed a Long Island home that wasn’t his anymore.
Could he have those things? Would he know how to use them?
Even in the light of day’s end, he saw nocturnal birds flying across the sky. Three of them. Whippoorwills, which shouldn’t have been so close to the city. Maybe nighthawks. They didn’t look like owls. They flew independent of each other, not in formation like so many other birds. He watched until they disappeared. Two went south, one west. Foraging. Feeding. Living the lives they’d been giving. Maybe Jack had been given a chance to have a new life, different than the one he’d known?
He rose to get a better look outside.
As the sun settled lower, the pink sky darkened to red, the purple to indigo. Clouds thickened. Colored lights illuminated the fountain at the center of the small lake. Streetlamps blazed. People walked in and out of pools of light, oblivious to the shadows.
Even from here, Jack saw them.
A phantom in the park, floating one way then another, ignoring and being ignored; a half-wolf dog straining to break free of its owner’s leash; bats in the trees; a young man who was neither young nor a man stalking the shadows.
Seeing all this, in a single moment after sunset, Jack realized he couldn’t run from his life. No matter how right it seemed, staying with Lisa was not truly an option.
While she slept, he gathered his clothes and reluctantly slipped out.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
A fifteen-minute walk brought Jack to his car. He sat inside, started it, turned on the radio (Billy Idol’s “Hot in the City”), but didn’t go anywhere.
“I’m stupid,” he said to no one.
Second guesses—third guesses? Cause and effect. Was the dark responsible for his life? Would he ever have an opportunity to take control of it?
He took the keys out of the car and wandered—more aimlessly than usual. Goals, aspirations, intentions—Jack lacked all of these. He flowed with the dark’s tide. Tracked things no one else saw. He’d gone crazy the night he’d turned seventeen. No other explanation fit. Did he really believe in the things he imagined? Maybe someone had slipped something into his beer that night, sent him spiraling into a world of cracked hallucinations and paranoia. As if, in all the world, he had been given this Sight. Hubris, that’s what it was: an
infallible belief in his own importance. But he’d never been important, and felt less so now.
Jack thought he’d wandered aimlessly, but when he looked up again, he’d returned to Lake Eola. A few people, couples and small groups, walked around him with barely a glance. He, too, had become invisible, like all the things of the night.
The moon was maybe a day from being full.
The stars were bright, where not hidden by the clouds that covered half the sky. They moved swiftly, covering and then revealing the moon. It was almost the end of October. The dark would soon be busy.
And what did that mean to Jack Harlow? Continued pointless nights recording useless details even he wouldn’t ever examine? No, the only purpose of the records in his laptop was to give the authorities ammunition by which to commit him. A nice room, maybe padded, with white walls and no windows. Three meals a day. Doctors. Orderlies. Until the dark infiltrated the asylum, drew him out, perhaps destroyed everything around him until he escaped for more of the same. Repeat the cycle. In and out of institutions until death—and then, would he become one of the phantoms he’d been watching? The mad ghost, perhaps, watching every shadow—but never engaged by them!
Fate had forgotten him.
He looked up the side of Lisa’s apartment building. She was on the fifth floor. If she looked down, she might see him.
No one seemed to be looking out.
“Stupid,” he said again.
The nearby streetlamp flickered and went dark. Happened to him all the time. Though not a sign of anything, it sent a wave of depression through him.
Jack sat on a bench. Looked at, without really seeing, the lake, the colored lights on the fountain, the spray of water, an owl standing sentinel on the snack shack across the lake.
Full night had descended. He hadn’t noticed.
It was too early for the evening crowd to descend on the bars. Instead, most people were out for an after-work stroll, with their dogs or lovers, enjoying the brisk air, completely unaware of Jack and his world. He preferred it that way. What he really didn’t need was the curious glances of passersby, questions he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, snide comments, taunts, disdain, or pity.
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