Darklight

by Forrest, Bella

  The vampires exchanged a thoughtful look, as if speaking to each other in their minds. I was pretty sure they couldn’t do that. But not entirely sure.

  “No one has raised any red flags yet,” Dorian said.

  Kane nodded, seeming not to mind the current lack of evidence. “Nothing interesting. There are always low levels of darkness in any community,” he said, his tone neutral. It surprised me to hear him utter more than one sentence. “But those don’t make us hungry. This place is bland. Nothing like some of the cesspool ‘cities’ we’ve been in.”

  Ah, there was the Kane we knew and loved.

  I pulled out the map. "Okay, at this point, per Bryce’s agenda, we should find our lodging. We can fine tune any last details for tomorrow there," I said with confidence, always more comfortable with an agenda. Nailing down the next day’s details would be stress relieving.

  "Aye-aye, Lieutenant," Kane replied, only a little sardonically. I was a little grateful for Kane’s bitter humor, as it served as a distraction from my mental background of worry.

  To my surprise, our lodging was not a house, but a barn.

  "Rustic," Zach said, looking genuinely pleased, after he swung the door open.

  They'd jazzed it up a bit with moveable plywood walls and some torn linen drapes, but the large space had clearly housed animals until a day ago—my nose was certain. Hay stuck out from the floorboards. The main room contained a rickety table and a few thin-legged chairs, and the plywood walls fit together to make two small "bedrooms." Each held two cots.

  We entered and set down our bags on the cots. By silent agreement, we emulated the layout of our facility in the desert, the vampires taking one room and Zach and I setting our things in the other. I felt a twinge of disappointment, but professional Lyra nipped that right in the bud. This mission was about proving the vampires’ ability and saving children, not about me indulging my desire to spend an evening with Dorian, talking late into the night.

  “The evening shift patrol officers are going to drop off food for us,” I told my brother, having been reminded of that detail by a gurgle in my stomach.

  I heard Kane sigh heavily behind the plywood. I wondered if it was in response to my mention of food or if he was just being… Kane.

  I took a seat at the tiny table and drafted a report of the afternoon's surveillance on a legal pad. Zach shuffled around, studying the barn's interior. He did this every time he settled into a new place—a trait he picked up from my dad. They had to know the nooks and crannies; maybe it made them more comfortable.

  I clicked our walkie-talkie on. The officer who'd dropped us off carried the other. He was our primary point of contact should we need anything.

  "Old school," Zach noted with a hint of wonder, wandering closer. "Way fancier than the ones we had as kids, though."

  "Yeah," I said, smiling. "We could've gotten nicer ones, but Mom and Dad didn't want to spend money on something you were just going to strap firecrackers to again."

  "Don't act all innocent, Miss Prissy Pants," Zach replied with his crooked grin, easing down into a chair next to me. "You were an accomplice to that crime." He hadn’t called me “Miss Prissy Pants” in a good long while. I still lovingly hated it.

  Dorian creaked open his plywood door and came out to join us. He took the chair beside me, leaning over to read what I'd written. I wondered if he’d heard the silly childhood story Zach had just related. My head buzzed when his forehead neared mine.

  "Dorian, you ever tried a 3 Musketeers?" Zach asked, offering the candy bar. His eyes narrowed the slightest fraction.

  Dorian waved a hand at it, giving Zach a tight smile. "I'm good. Thanks."

  "Don't know what you're missing," Zach replied through his chewing. He sounded friendly, but a slight intensity tinged his studiously casual tone.

  "I think I'll survive," Dorian said, with a flash of annoyance. Maybe, but for how long? Zach and I exchanged a look, and he gave me a tiny shrug. His experiment had failed.

  Kane cautiously made his way from their room, too, feigning disinterest even when he joined us at the table. I looked around at our strange group. We were unusual, and perhaps some of us were crankier than others, but I was much more comfortable hanging out with these guys inside our little barn than walking around in that odd, pensive village.

  "Let’s talk about tomorrow," I said, preparing a fresh piece of paper on my legal pad. "We will run our planned interviews with police and civilians, and grab any extras we can, should they become available, focusing on relatives of missing persons. I think a lead could spring from that, and the vampires will get to be near potential suspects. Let’s see if there are any supplemental interview questions we can add to Jim’s list."

  The group threw suggestions at me, and I organized them on the legal pad, my love of categorizing and making sense of things tingling happily. Even Kane offered a few questions, though I rephrased them when I wrote them out to be a bit more sensitive.

  Someone knocked on the barn door. Officer Shelton stood there with a grocery bag.

  "Evening, folks," Shelton said kindly, his mustache bristling. "It’s nothing special, but this should get you through a day or so."

  "Thank you, Officer," I said, setting the bag on a wooden stool beside the door. The snacks I’d grabbed from the store earlier had run out.

  Shelton said he'd check in with us in the morning to see how everything was going, and then left.

  Zach and I dug through the grocery bag. Granola bars, crackers, apples, packaged snacks. In this barn, we had no way to cook unless we built a campfire outside, so this would have to do. Remembering the medic's advice, I grabbed two apples and a bottle of water, which I sipped while swallowing my stomach medication. Zach inhaled three Twinkies.

  The vampires watched us eat for a bit, but soon Kane began jiggling his foot, flexing his fingers. With an irritated sigh, he went back into his room. It had to be horribly frustrating for them to watch us enjoy food when they’d been starving for a month.

  Dorian lasted longer, but he also retreated to his cot while Zach and I finished eating. A flicker of guilt flashed through me. I didn’t like making him uncomfortable, but there was nothing I could do. Zach met my eyes and gave me a little frown, acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation.

  Later, I explored the barn with a flashlight I'd found. Besides that one battery-operated piece of technology, lanterns provided the only other source of light in the barn. We'd set them around the main room, being careful to balance them on the dirt floor or hang them from the rafters. I was extremely grateful the Amish allowed certain battery-reliant devices.

  The outdoor shower was as simple as it got: cloth curtain dangling from a metal frame, a rusty spout connected to a source of groundwater. The closest home stood two fields away.

  The stars shone brilliantly. I'd never seen them like that back home. The heavy darkness might’ve seemed eerie to me if I hadn’t been used to it, from the empty desert surrounding the facility. I stared up at the sky for a while, watching the twinkling Milky Way. The silence out here was almost deafening, with no ambient hum of generators and air conditioning, but I could kind of see the appeal.

  I thought about all the Amish people from this settlement who likely would never see this sky again. I thought about Sike and Carwin in their bandages, and a hole in the sky that led to a world where flame-like lights drifted over desolate mountains. The silence around me began to seem more oppressive and less peaceful.

  At least I was here, trying to make a difference for all of them.

  I headed back into the barn and found the guys sitting around the table, a few lanterns flickering between them, casting their shadows against the wooden walls. It reminded me of childhood summer camps. I’d always loved the way fire flitted shadows across people’s faces. Everyone looked so different in firelight.

  "Kinda spooky atmosphere, huh?" Zach said as I shut the creaking door behind me.

  I joined them at the table. The p
hysical and emotional weight of the day’s activities pulled at my eyelids, but the urge to hang out with the guys convinced me to stay up a bit longer.

  A moment of quiet passed, and then Zach started rolling his fingers back and forth through the tips of the lantern flames, testing how much heat he could handle. Kane eyed him for a moment, then, without a word, stoically tested his fingers on the flame as well.

  I hadn't lit a candle in years. I'd grown accustomed to the glaring fluorescents of the Bureau. There was something disquieting about that.

  “Reminds me of our camping trips up in Wisconsin when we were kids,” Zach said, transfixed by the flame. “Dorian, Kane, you guys ever take trips with your families?”

  “Sometimes we’d spend nights high up in the mountains,” Dorian said, a spark of memory lighting up his eyes.

  Kane nodded. Without all the surly reticence, his face looked almost unfamiliar to me. “We’d build fires up there and tell stories when we were younger. Dorian’s brother had the best stories.”

  Dorian closed his eyes briefly. Just watching that expression on his face, I felt shivers go through me. I wished I could take that pain away.

  “We’d tell stories around the campfire, too,” I added, wanting to stay in positive memories a bit longer. “Scary stories. My dad had great ones.”

  “We’d be up all night in our bunks,” Zach said, laughing.

  Later that night, as Zach and I tried to fall asleep, Dorian and Kane spoke on the other side of the plywood. I lay on my side, my eyes open, my ears picking out snippets of their conversation. Zach lay on his side, facing me, but I knew by his breathing that he was still awake and listening, too.

  "We'll figure out what happened to them. We'll find them," Kane said, his voice low from exhaustion or subject matter—I couldn’t quite tell yet. "I’m sure they’re hiding out in the mountains. Not sure how they'd feel about coming to Earth and living like refugees, though."

  Are they talking about Dorian's parents?

  "It's better than the Immortal Plane," Dorian said.

  "You keep saying that. But time will tell, I suppose," Kane replied, his tone sharpening.

  "Even you have to admit things are going well." Dorian matched his tone.

  "It’s a crap situation, but I guess it's better than being dead," Kane said bitterly, any previous kindness vanished from his voice.

  "Your positivity is awe-inspiring," Dorian snapped. Venom edged his voice in a way I hadn’t heard before.

  Zach shifted on his cot. "I think our friends are hangry," he whispered. Then his breathing shifted in the dark, and he sighed. “I can’t imagine starving for weeks. Having to feed your children from yourself, losing even more energy.”

  “I know,” I whispered back in agreement. “It can’t be easy.”

  “It’s bothered me for a while. It doesn’t feel humane, especially with the little guys,” Zach said. He shifted in his cot, his emotional discomfort evident in the movement of his body.

  We fell into silence. Guilt weighed on my chest. The urge to discuss feeding options for the vampires with Bryce pushed into my head again. I promised myself I’d do it as soon as I got back.

  “Just gotta hang on and do what we can for them,” Zach mumbled, sleep sapping energy from his words.

  This barn seemed to hold echoes of missing people. I looked over at Zach in the darkness, imagined only being able to reminisce about his memory over a table conversation.

  I drifted off in the darkness, wondering what it would be like to have no idea where my parents were—or if they were even alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dawn crept through the barn window. Zach’s snore filled the space, contrasting with the silence emanating from the vampires' room.

  For once, I was grateful to be up extra early. As the only woman, I didn't want to worry about a bunch of dudes milling around during my shower time.

  I quietly dug through my bag and grabbed shampoo, soap, and a towel. My mosquito bites from the previous day itched, and I looked forward to soothing them with warm water.

  I slowly opened the plywood door, peeking at the vampires' room. Their door remained closed. I was in the clear.

  I scurried along the side of the barn in the pale light, my bare feet tickled by the dew-covered grass. Farmers and their horses tended fields off in the distance. The cool of the morning nipped my skin, but in a refreshing way. The land around this community was peaceful, despite the fear and grief of its inhabitants.

  I turned the corner and jumped.

  Dorian stepped from behind the shower curtain. Naked. Except for a towel hanging loosely around his waist.

  A shock traveled up my body, embarrassment warring with other, less ashamed stirrings. I juggled toiletries, my shampoo threatening to jump out of my hands.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I said, trying for casual. "I thought you were slee—"

  "It's fine," Dorian said, but I could hear barely concealed laughter in his voice. "Shower's all yours."

  So much for my casual act. I couldn’t help myself; I let my eyes wander down as the vampire stepped past me on the damp grass. His skin was pearlescent, and the ripples that usually traveled his cheeks wandered all over, down his angular chest, abdominals cleanly marked with muscle, and just the top of his hip bones… I tried not to imagine any further. Dorian was built lean, but the perfect amount of muscle covered his bones. Every single thing about his body seemed… taut.

  "I'll be going now," Dorian said calmly, watching me watching him. I told myself it really wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, I’d been to a beach before. This felt much different than hanging out at the lake.

  Someone had set my skin on fire.

  "Right," I said, a moment too late.

  I turned my head until he'd brushed past me and I heard the barn's front door squeak closed behind him. My entire face and chest tingled from flushing.

  I stood in the grass for a moment trying to calm my racing imagination. Sometimes I felt like I was doing a great job maintaining my professionalism around Dorian, and then moments like this happened. Why did it seem like they came more and more frequently?

  I remembered the time Kane had surprised me by coming out of the shower back in the facility and peered around, half expecting him to pop out of the woodwork as well. The response I’d had to him in a damp state had been much less embarrassing. The image I’d come away from this incident with would probably come back late at night when I couldn’t sleep.

  Well, this has been an interesting trip thus far.

  "I wish I could put bells on those two," I muttered, and stepped behind the curtain to disrobe. I could still feel myself blushing, from my sternum to my shoulders.

  The shower calmed me down. A little. I dried off and dressed before exiting the shelter of the curtain. I wouldn’t be walking around half-naked, that was for sure.

  Zach and I ate our leftover granola bars for breakfast. I chugged water and popped a double dose of my meds. No one talked much that morning. I put makeup on Kane while Zach tried his beauty skills on Dorian. Kane kept blinking and jerking his head as I dabbed at him with the sponge, which made me laugh.

  “You have to hold still,” I said. Who knew vampires could be ticklish?

  “Fine,” he snapped, steadying himself and closing his eyes tightly to brace himself.

  Soon enough, we were out of the barn and making our way to the gravel road. I pulled the walkie-talkie out of my pocket. "Officer Shelton, do you read me?" I asked.

  After a brief silence, the walkie buzzed in response. "Shelton here."

  "This is Officer Sloane. Which officers will be on duty here at the settlement today? We'd like to ask everyone some questions." I waited.

  Shelton sounded as unemotional as he had the night before. "You'll have Wolf and myself there shortly, and then around four we get a new shift. Not sure who. I'll let you know when we get there."

  "Thank you, sir."

  We made our way back to where Shelton h
ad dropped us off the previous day. He and Officer Wolf leaned against their squad car as Dorian and I went down the line of questions on my legal pad. Zach and Kane studied the two men from a few feet away, and Zach scribbled in his own little memo notebook from time to time. The somberness I felt was reflected across the faces of my team.

  The officers had very similar accounts of what they knew about the kidnappings. Usually at night. Usually when someone was outside doing a task before bed or walking home after dark. Almost every single missing person was under forty years old, but they seemed to have nothing else in common. They shared no resemblance or hobbies. Men and women carried equal risk.

  "Officer Shelton, does your team patrol throughout the night here?" Zach asked, his arms crossed, his voice serious.

  "As often as we can. We have our duties in town, too, so our time and staff are stretched thin," Shelton replied in his normal bland tone. "Unfortunately, we can't be here twenty-four seven, but we try to make it work." His voice was so monotone that I couldn’t tell whether he was simply overwhelmed, or whether he meant “We do the bare minimum.” If it hadn’t been for his kind eyes by the road earlier, I wouldn’t consider much of what he said. As it was, I questioned that initial impression.

  "Do the officers bring the squad cars down this gravel road at all?" I asked, anxiously tapping my pencil on the legal pad.

  "We try not to, out of respect for the village," Officer Wolf said. "It upsets the horses."

  "I see. So, you don't patrol the settlement at night with spotlights or anything like that?" I thought I did a decent job keeping my skepticism out of my voice.

  "Only if someone has recently gone missing and we think we might have a chance to catch the culprit," Shelton said.

  “Have you taken any special measures to potentially prevent kidnappings?” After the question left my mouth, I feared my phrasing had implied judgment, despite controlling my tone. Regardless of what I thought of their system, I needed to keep them open to me.