Into the Darkness

by Nora Ash

  It disturbed me. Especially because some small part of me still wished he would have followed through with his threats of bending me over the sofa and having his way with me.

  At that particularly thought, I decided it was time for a shower. Preferably a cold one. And after, when my body was hopefully done committing mutiny, I could try to figure out the mess my article had left me in.

  I didn’t get a chance to sit down and decide how I could best go about following Lightning’s advice, because just as I was toweling off my hair, Trish called.

  “Kat!” she bellowed when I picked up. I cringed and tried to suppress the memory of the way Lightning had called me Kittykat.

  “Hi, Trish. What’s up?”

  “What’s up? Oh, only that my bestie nailed an interview with the city’s hottest commodity! You’re a rock star, Kathryn! Congratulations.”

  I smiled wryly as I made my way to the kitchen on bare feet. My loft studio was high off the ground, and with the closest high rise of equal height to my building being far enough away that I could walk around naked without anyone seeing me through the windows that lined the entire outer wall. Unless they used their superhuman powers to scale the building and climb in my kitchen window. I gave said window an annoyed frown.

  “Thanks. It’s not that big a deal, though. He wasn’t exactly the best interviewee. Did you see it? He was such an ass.”

  She laughed into the phone. “He could have been reciting the movements of the stock market and people would have gobbled up every second of it. And your article? Wow! Didn’t know you had it in you, Kat! Will you be following up with the mayor’s office for a quote? You could really use this to launch your career, if you work it right.”

  I huffed. Yeah, I could have—if doing so wouldn’t end with me floating downriver. It was so infuriating to know I had a hold of the end of the long, tangled thread that could lead me into the heart of St. Anthony’s corruption, yet if I followed it, I would die. Once again, the criminals feeding off the city’s population had won.

  Trish seemed to pick up on my hesitation.

  “Is something wrong, Kat?”

  I paused, biting my lip as I contemplated whether or not to tell her about my late-night visitor. I was pretty sure doing so wouldn’t be what Lightning would class as smart, but I could really use some level-headed input about this whole mess before my head exploded.

  “Kat?” she prompted when my silent debate with myself had apparently gone on for long enough. “What happened?”

  She sounded exactly like she had the time in college I’d bombed a test and she’d had to talk me down from drowning my sorrows in a pitcher of stale beer. The memory made my unease settle somewhat. This was Trish—my best friend, and even if life had moved in different directions for us, I could still trust her to talk me through this.

  “Lightning came by my apartment last night.”

  “What?!” Her shriek pierced my skull and I held the phone out from my ear. “Oh my God, Kat. Oh my God! What was he like? What did he want?”

  I suppose I couldn’t really blame her for the excitement, but I found it pretty hard to align the elation in her voice with the events of the prior night.

  “He wanted me to give up my source for that article. Only I didn’t have one. I just posted a lot of what-ifs, questions, and… I think I’m in some serious trouble, Trish.”

  As I told my friend what had happened—leaving out the disturbing part where I’d been about ready to throw myself at Lightning and ravish him, and the way he’d bitten me to mark me as his—she grew silent on the other end of the line. When I was finally done, she heaved a sigh into the phone.

  “Fuck.”

  I couldn’t really argue there.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “I think he meant that he would try to protect me, but I’m still sufficiently terrified that if I had the money I might leave the city today. And—”

  “And you want to investigate this further, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I opened the fridge to look for something to eat. Preferably something covered in chocolate. I’d always been a stress-eater, which my softer-than-average figure bore testament to. “I know, it’s crazy, and I’m not going to, but…”

  “But a lead like this is every reporter’s wet dream. Even if they are a blogging reporter,” Trish finished when I trailed off.

  I ignored the comment about my chosen career path—if you could even call it that—and pulled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d made the day before out of the fridge. “I guess. But Lightning was pretty damn clear—if I keep writing about this, I’m…” I didn’t have the stomach to say dead.

  “What if you didn’t write about it?”

  I frowned at my sandwich. “I wasn’t planning to.”

  My friend sighed again. “What I meant was—what if you didn’t write about it yet, but gathered more evidence quietly? Once you have something that will stick, you come to me. My network knows how to protect its journalists, and for a story as big as this could get—they would extend it to a freelancer I worked with, too.”

  The “I worked with” part didn’t escape my attention, and I had to bite back a snarky retort. Trish was brilliant, but she did have a tendency to get kind of pushy about claiming credit for work we’d both contributed to back in college. But this wasn’t college. This was so much more serious, and her idea did sound good. Maybe I could help dig out some of the corruption in St. Anthony without risking my life. The thought of what this could do for my career, even if I did share credit with Trish, admittedly also stirred at the back of my mind.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Four

  The problem with gathering evidence about anything involving the superhumans, whether quietly or otherwise, was that there was nowhere to go for actual facts. Everything that had ever been written about them was largely speculation, and the scant photos and videos featuring any of them didn’t give much away, apart from proving beyond a doubt that they certainly were more than human.

  Which meant that my quiet investigation came to an abrupt halt before it ever really began.

  The truth was that as long as Lightning didn’t climb in my window and offer up anything, I had no chance of unveiling whatever it was I’d stumbled across.

  I sighed as I clicked through image after image on Google for the third day, without having any clue how to proceed with my research. Many of the pictures were of Lightning, and I had the unkind thought that he possibly enjoyed being on the front cover of magazines more than your average vigilante.

  He did look good in all of them, though. Tall, lean, and carved from rock, with every single muscle in his torso and legs clearly defined through his trademark suit. I stared at a picture of him standing in front of a fiery background, smiling. I remembered when it had been taken just over a month ago. He and Red Rider—the hero who dressed in all red and generally stayed in the south end of the city—had saved several people from a burning building. He seemed as composed in that picture as he had while I’d attempted to interview him. There was no hint of the darker side—the side I’d experienced as he swathed my mind in lust.

  A shiver traveled through my body and ended with a zing in my clit. I groaned and clamped my thighs together in an effort to resist the urge to touch myself.

  Goddamn that man! Since he had messed with my mind, I’d found it very hard to concentrate without getting the need to go find my vibrator. In the beginning I had been worried that some element of his mind control was still lingering, but as the days progressed, it became painfully clear that it was more of a Pavlovian response from my traitorous body. Whenever I spent too much time looking at pictures of the masked hero, or thinking about the way his teeth had felt against my nape, my pussy would ache with need, as if yearning for it bad enough would make his cock materialize inside of me.

  The fact that Lightning’s obscene display was the closest I’d been to actual sex in a very long time probably didn’
t help matters, either. Looking for a boyfriend when you were a chubby introvert in a city obsessed with all things superficial was not exactly easy.

  Lightning hadn’t seemed the least bit concerned about my not-exactly-model-sized body, though. Quite the opposite, if his remark about liking “curvy women” was anything to go by. Of course, he might have just been full of shit and looking to manipulate me. He certainly hadn’t stayed behind to finish the job after he’d released me from the mind control.

  I rubbed at the back of my neck where he had bitten me. The skin there tingled in a way that made my nipples hard, as if the ghost of his mouth brushed against it every time I thought about how it had felt to be so completely under a man’s control. Great. Even though my original fascination with Lightning had been quelled by his sexist attitude, it would seem that my hormones had no problem reducing me to a drooling idiot.

  Some serious reporter I was. Taken out of the game by my own ovaries and a fear of being found out before I’d even done anything noteworthy. Trish would have uncovered something useful by now, if she was the frontrunner for this story. Heck, any real reporter probably would have.

  I huffed at that particular thought. As much as I loved the relaxed atmosphere of being a small-time blogger, I couldn’t deny that thread of envy lurking somewhere in the shameful depths of my subconscious. Trish had always been better than me in college, more driven, so it was no wonder her career was so much more high-powered than mine. There was still just that sliver of me that wished I could prove to myself that I was as capable a reporter as she was, just once.

  It was probably that sliver that made me get up from my desk, grab my purse, and head out the door before my cautious side could kick in.

  I should have planned my field trip better.

  Heck, planning it at all would have been a step up from my rash decision to do something, anything.

  The murky streets of St. Anthony’s industrial quarter were dimming even more as the sun set behind the old brick buildings. My pulse was throbbing in my throat when darkness descended around me, leaving only the lights from the skyline to illuminate my path.

  No one lived here, and most of the buildings had been closed down during the last gang war, the companies opting to find less crime-plagued cities to operate their business from, which meant I found myself in an odd quietude. I was so used to the general noise of the city twenty-four-seven that the relative silence now felt disconcerting. I could hear my own footsteps and the sound of glass breaking underneath my shoes.

  I muttered a curse under my breath and pulled out my phone so I could use the light from the display to see where I was going. I’d chosen the industrial quarter for my impromptu excursion because it was where the first incidents of a supernatural serial killer had taken place back in the Sixties. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, but it was the best place I could think to search for any sort of clue. Or at least feel like I was doing something, other than drooling over pictures of Lightning.

  While researching online, I’d come across a few references to the industrial quarter being the turf of a superhuman who had skinned his victims alive, and how he was the reason the first heroes had put on masks to help fight the crime our police couldn’t handle. He had reigned for three years before the other superhumans killed him, which had also happened somewhere in the industrial quarter.

  It wasn’t that I expected to trip over his hidden lair—the police had scoured the area before and after his death without any luck—but maybe I could find… well, anything that could point me in the direction of modern day’s supernatural crime.

  Of course, looking around in the daytime would have probably made things a lot easier, I realized as I peered up at the dark storehouses. Using my phone to illuminate them ruined my night vision, so I put it back in my bag and tried to calm the anxiety stirring in my gut.

  No one was here, not even gangs anymore, as there was nothing left to steal. All the warehouses had been stripped of any valuables, and so even most criminals stayed away. Still, my instincts kept muttering louder and louder about all the things that could lurk in the dark corners as I slowly made my way through the dirty streets, stepping over broken glass and fallen bricks for every other step.

  I kept glancing over my shoulder, but saw nothing but darkness behind me. It was the same eerie sense of being watched as I’d felt in my apartment, but this time, I didn’t call out. Instead, when the nagging sensation grew so strong I could no longer ignore it, I finally decided that it was high time I started making my way back home. While the excursion had been a complete waste of time, I didn’t want to push my luck.

  Lightning’s promised protection had been what made me brave the secluded industrial quarter in the first place, but if the sensation of being watched wasn’t just my nerves getting the better of me, then I really didn’t want to test how effective his mark was.

  I turned around to start heading back, intent on making it home before the night-time TV programming started and maybe calming down my hyper-alert nerves with a mug of hot chocolate. That was when I saw something moving in the shadows some twenty yards away.

  Tendrils of instant and overwhelming fear made my entire body freeze up. I should have started running then and there, but I didn’t—I couldn’t. My mind was now flooded by the torrent of impressions my panicked sixth sense had been trying to get through before.

  I could hear footsteps now, moving closer and closer, quiet whispers and the occasional crunch of glass underneath heavy boots. How long had they been stalking me? And why? It had been three days since the article—three days of absolutely no indication that anyone other than Lightning had as much as raised an eyebrow at my blog. Not to mention that no one could have the faintest idea what I was looking for here—heck, I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  “Lightning? I know you’re following me.”

  My own trembling voice echoed off the deserted buildings. Somewhere deep down I knew it wasn’t Lightning, but oh, how I hoped it was.

  There was no reply from the shadowed road behind me, and no more movement, either. The silence made my spine itch. Slowly, I took a step backwards.

  “Lightning?” I whispered.

  Something shifted just at the edge of my field of vision, and I snapped my head to the left just in time to see a figure peel away from the shadows behind an old dumpster. A man, I could tell as he walked closer. Faint light from the city reflected off the knife he held in his left hand. Then other shadowy figures emerged from the darkness, joining the first. Four more men, all carrying some form of weapons, as far as I could tell.

  My heart slammed into my ribs as I stared at them. Then I did the first smart thing I’d done all night.

  I turned around and ran.

  I’ve never been much of a runner, but when I heard my stalkers giving chase, my feet seemed to fly across the uneven tarmac. I stumbled over the broken bricks and garbage left in the gutters, yet kept moving forward and away from what I knew would be my end.

  “There’s nowhere to run,” a snarl sounded behind me, much closer than it should have been. “Nowhere to hide.”

  Oh, God! The sound of his voice was even worse than their previous silence had been, somehow hammering home their intent. Their intent to cause me harm. My adrenaline, already pumping wildly through my bloodstream, spiked higher, and I pushed my legs to move faster. Away! I needed to get away from these men, whoever they were.

  My panicked thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I looked up and saw the path ahead of me blocked off by a tall, chain-link fence crowned with barbed wire. I didn’t pause to consider my options before I threw myself down the narrow alleyway opening up to the left, my only option for escaping.

  But about thirty yards later, my flight ended.

  I skidded to a stop in front of the brick wall blocking off the passageway, my eyes desperately searching for a way out. There was none. I was trapped.

  No, no, no! I could taste bile on my tongue as
I whipped around to see my pursuers slowing to a walk after rounding the corner to the alleyway.

  “Well, well,” one of them —the leader, I think—purred as he stopped less than six feet from me, flanked by two of the other men.

  “What do we have here? A nosy little reporter bitch out on her own in the most deserted place in the damn city? Odd behavior, isn’t it, boys?”

  I swallowed and pressed my back up against the wall, wishing I could just melt into it. If they knew I was a reporter, then they weren’t just random thugs out to terrorize idiotic women meandering around abandoned warehouses on their own. They were here specifically for me—for what they thought I knew.

  Even though their eyes weren’t glowing, marking them as superhumans, my hands flew to the back of my neck to push my braid away so I could display the place Lightning had bitten me. There was nothing to see with my human eyesight, though I had looked in the mirror more than once, but the way the skin tingled every time I touched it, there was clearly some sort of magic infused there. Hopefully, these men would know what it meant.

  “I’m his! I’m Lightning’s, so back off!” I shouted. Even without the shaky note of hysteria in my voice, the words themselves sounded a lot more ridiculous than they had in my head.

  “Lightning,” the man on the right spat, brandishing what looked like a crowbar. It made a horrible screeching noise as he scraped it against the wall beside him. “No one gives a shit about you, cunt, least of all some high and mighty supe. But maybe if you spread your legs for us before we take you back to the boss, we’ll go easier on you when he asks us to get whatever information he wants from you. What do you say? Wanna keep your fingers?”

  Nausea exploded in my stomach. They were going to rape and mutilate me for information I didn’t have, and as I stared into the cold eyes of my attackers, I had no delusions that I was going to live afterward.

  “Help! Help me!”

  The piercing scream ripping from my throat seemed to throw the men into motion.