by David Wright
In the chaos, Jacob escaped through the portal. Caleb, determined to kill him, followed.
John saw his brother go after Jacob, but his first priority was saving Abigail, who was locked, fittingly enough, in the casket he woke in.
By the time John got to the woods where she was buried, Abigail was gone, though.
She’d been taken by the Guardians, who left a note for John to meet with Duncan Alderman.
Duncan met with John and informed him that they’d sent people into the portal, but nobody has returned. He asked John to work, temporarily, for Omega and help track down any and all Harbinger agents so they can try to figure out how to get Caleb back, or at least prevent an invasion from Otherworld.
John said he doesn’t want to be Omega’s assassin. Duncan said if he won’t, they’ll turn Abigail into a soldier for them. She has already demonstrated remarkable feistiness.
John agreed, so long as Abigail was set free, and they continued to leave Hope alone.
John secured Abigail’s safety and asked Larry to look after her until such time that his job is over.
Now, we pick up one year later with Available Darkness: Season Two…
* * * *
EPISODE 7:
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 sway from the angry breeze above as she and her daughter walked their dog down Crestview at dusk.
Even though it had been more than five years since they swapped city for suburb, there were some instincts born on concrete that 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 street, 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. There were a few neighbors on their lawns trading gossip over their fences, many of which were of the white picket variety.
Yet, even with nothing out of place, Emilia couldn’t shake the bad 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.
“OK,” Kayla said, slowing her gait and pulling 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, just surfacing into view.
Emilia reached into her jeans, curled 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 that they were being watched.
She felt vulnerable and exposed, out on the street at dusk, even though she shouldn’t have, surrounded 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 Emilia’s sudden desire for home.
Mocha moved to the sidewalk, and Emilia hoped the damned dog was finally ready to do his business. Mocha sniffed, then 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 dog.
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 also inserting another annoyance into Emilia’s world.
Leo was gone, but his mark, like the dog’s territorial pissings, remained.
It could be worse. Just 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 to gather ahead of them, at an almost alarming speed as an icy wind started to scream.
Something’s wrong. Get back home.
“Come on, Honey, ” she said to Kayla.
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 and toward the oncoming storm.
“Mocha!” Kayla screamed, chasing her dog.
Emilia’s heart pounded in her chest 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 several more 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, racing through the sky.
Tornado!
The wind howled, growing angry, as the highest branches began to violently whip through the air. Thunder boomed and lightning crashed, all too fast, as inky clouds swirled through the street and cast 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 came at just more than a whisper ahead, though Emilia couldn’t see her through the darkness.
She pressed on into the swirling chaos as chunks of hail and God-only-knew what kind of debris pelted her. “Kayla!”
She squinted, trying to see through the chaos, churning like a freight train above and around her, continuing forward.
In the distance she caught sight of Kayla, running down the street one moment, straight into the thick fog. The fog then billowed forth and then back on itself before being sucked into a sudden vortex that appeared in the center of the street for just a moment, and then was gone just as quickly.
And in its place was a perfect circle of light suspended in the air just a foot off the ground and 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 which revealed an impossibility on the other side — her street replaced with rolling woodlands basking beneath a brilliant sun.
Kayla and Mocha were nowhere in sight.
“Kayla!” Emilia screamed, racing toward the giant window. As she drew closer, she realized it wasn’t a window, but a hole in the world.
What the hell?
Emilia slowed as she approached, hearing and feeling a buzzing, growing in volume as it vibrated around the hole. The forest on the other side was deep, lush and as real as anything she’d ever seen.
Emilia felt like Alice, staring through the Looking Glass.
This can’t be real.
“Kayla!” she screamed, moving closer as she 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.
&
nbsp; So I’m not the only one seeing this. I’m not crazy.
Emilia stepped as 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 the hole;, she’d seen her rushing in the fog, before disappearing completely. Perhaps, Emilia told herself, her daughter 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. Emilia 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 the height of the hole — like a zipper.
As Emilia slowly rounded to the hole’s other side, her heart leapt in her throat as her eyes fell on the forest again, this time from a different angle. In the sky, she saw the sun lighting a soft blue horizon with a wicked flicker of orange.
Emilia saw something surface through the tree line.
“Kayla!” she cried out, inviting her daughter into her parted arms. “I’m here!”
The 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 was 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 suddenly a blur of fast-moving darkness, soaring toward Emilia. Two seconds later it was standing just at the edge of the hole, its bright blue eyes almost glowing as they stared inside 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. She glanced back just in time to see the dark shape fully emerge from the hole and step onto her street.
Emilia spun from the asphalt, stumbled onto her neighbor’s dewy grass, then ran through her yard, desperate to lose the thing before it found her. She never saw what tripped her, sending her to the ground and under a blanket of black.
* * * *
CHAPTER 1 — 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 as he stared at the bank of monitors displaying news coverage of the event, interviews with frightened residents and Homeland Security officers explaining, without any actual explanation, to the public 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 even close to the fact of what happened — the portal had opened, an extraterrestrial and magickal event. The Army had been called in immediately to erect a large tented barrier around the portal, to prevent prying eyes from seeing inside, and anyone else from accidentally walking through the thing — on this side, anyway.
While the first portal, created a year before, was contained within the walls of Jacob’s compound, and hidden from the public, this one had split open in the middle of a suburban neighborhood to spill its terror in plain sight.
Within an hour, jittery, blurred cell phone video footage caught by neighbors was being played on all the TV channels.
Everyone wanted to know what in the hell this “thing” was.
Experts were trotted out on TV, 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 nobody 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 erected within the barrier, which showed 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 even left in Harbinger who could 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 trying to unload a lemon. The next minute, always behind closed doors, he was an intense, brooding, control freak on the edge 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 stop 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 create 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, he said, “Really? What does she remember?”
“OK, set up an interview in Unit Seven. Make sure no one sees her.”
Mathews ended the call and dropped the phone back in his pocket, “The woman who was passed out has come to. She said her daughter is missing and someone came through the portal.”
“Came through?” John leaned forward.
“She doesn’t remember much. So we’re going to question her in the Seven truck. See what she can tell us.”
“Jesus,” John said, heartbeat gathering speed from dread of something bad, like his brother Jacob, coming through. But there was also a bit of excitement at the thought that his good brother, Caleb, lost in the other portal last year, might have found his way back. “Do you think it’s Caleb?”
Mathews said, “I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”
Omega had people sitting watch on the first portal for a full year, waiting for anyone — or anything — to come through. They even sent three of their people in, though none returned. It was six months since anyone had attempted to cross through the portal. John wondered if maybe one of their men had finally made it back, and if so, what would they have to report?
Mathews said, “Assuming the worst, Jacob’s mounting forces, and has sent someone through the portal. If so, we’ve gotta find whoever crossed over — before shit gets bad.”
**
Mobile Command Unit Seven was Omega’s designated interview truck, a 30-foot vehicle outfitted the same as their other units, but with an interview room where they could question witnesses and hostile suspects out of sight from others.
John stood in the corner of the windowless interview room as Mathews pulled out a chair for the woman, Emilia Serraben, so she could sit at the table across from him.
“Can we get you anything?” he asked, so pleasant he was almost saccharine. “A drink or something to eat?”
“No, thanks,” she said, blowing her red nose into a white tissue. “I just want to find my daughter Kayla.”
“That’s why you’re here,” Mathews smiled, continuing his calming, caring facade. “I’m going to ask you some questions which will help us get to the bottom of this.”
“What is that thing? Have you seen it before?” Emilia asked, her eyes brimming with tears, desperate for solace and clearly hoping Mathews would offer her a branch to grasp — anything that might help her believe her daughter was safe.
“We have our best people on it,” Mathews said, lying through his teeth. “We hope to have your daughter back as soon as possible.”
John swallowed his disgust, loathing Mathews’ manipulation of a scared and shaking mother, but also fully aware that th
ey had to mine as much information as possible from her to help them find whoever stepped through the portal.
Emilia explained how she and her daughter were walking their dog when a storm appeared from out of the blue. Next thing she knew, her daughter was racing into a fog. The fog vanished, leaving behind a “hole in the world,” but no trace of the girl.
“Do you think it’s possible she didn’t go through? That she’s still out there somewhere, lost?”
“Anything is possible,” Mathews said. “And we have more than two dozen agents and police officers out there combing the neighborhood to find out. We will find her, Mrs. Serraben, I promise you.”
His smile was pure comfort as he extended a hand to Emilia. She took it, and Mathews squeezed, then lowered his voice, “You told one of our agents you saw someone come through the portal. Can you describe what you saw?”
She withdrew her hand to blow her nose, then shook her head. “It all happened so fast, everything is a blur. I didn’t get a good look who or what came through. One minute, I was standing, then the next, I was flat on the ground. I came to in the back of the ambulance. That was when one of your agents asked me to speak with you.”
Mathews said, “You said ‘who or what’ came through. Are you saying it might not have been a person?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I think it was a person. It was tall like a person, and standing upright. But it was so fast. At least it seemed that way, but I don’t know if that’s because of the hole, and the person only seemed fast…” Emilia’s voice cracked. “Or what.”
The woman sounded less certain by the word. Mathews continued encouraging her to recount the story, repeatedly, using different words each time, hoping to elicit some small nugget of information, but he was getting nowhere. She was scared for her daughter and growing more restless by the moment, looking past Mathews and John, at the door, wanting to go search for her little girl.
