The Dark Gate

by Pamela Palmer

  Jack slowly lowered his hands, wishing someone would saw his head off and end his misery once and for all. “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  Charlie propped his feet on the coffee table and clapped. “Proves nothing except the man can act.”

  “It’s not an act,” Jack swore. He eased himself down onto Myrtle’s footstool.

  “I’ve seen it, little brother,” Harrison said with quiet steel. “I’ve seen him in action. The entire audience rose up against us like a scene from some horror flick.”

  “You really believe this crap?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Charlie’s expression slowly changed from rigid skeptic to determined warrior. He pulled his feet off the table and stood. “All right, then. I’ll take care of him.”

  Jack scoffed. “All he has to do is open his mouth and you’ll be controlled.”

  “Then we’ll wear ear plugs.”

  “We?” Jack asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “My colleagues and I have a little experience with terrorists here and there.”

  “Special ops,” Larsen said, voicing Jack’s own thought. She’d crossed one leg over the other, and now swung her foot back and forth as she cut Charlie a look that defied him to deny it.

  When he neither denied nor confirmed her suspicions, she went on. “This is no garden-variety terrorist. If he turns you, you’ll be a heck of a lot more dangerous to us than the cops.”

  “We won’t be turned.”

  “You can’t know that,” Jack said, pressing his fingers into his scalp. “You don’t understand what’s he’s capable of, Rand. You can’t possibly understand until you’ve seen him in action. And for your sake, I hope that never happens.”

  “Well, you’re sure as hell in no shape to run this operation.”

  “Charlie,” Harrison warned, then turned to Jack. “I think we should let Charlie and his team give it a try. With earplugs and holly, it might be enough. If they can get past the enchantment, they’ll get the job done. They’re the best, Jack.”

  “And if they fail?”

  “Then it’s up to us.”

  And God help them if they not only had the entire M.P.D., but a crack terrorist special ops team gunning for them.

  They wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “Do it, Jack,” Henry said. “Get it over with.”

  Jack had spent all afternoon testing one thing after another on their human-size guinea pig—all to no avail. So far the only thing that worked was holly.

  Nothing was going right. Harrison and Larsen had spent the afternoon staking out the police station in a last-ditch effort to catch the Esri and head off the night’s events. But the guy never showed his face. The only activity at the station today seemed to be the round-up and arrest of dozens of young women. If and when this nightmare ever came to an end, the M.P.D. was going to face a public relations nightmare…or worse. If they didn’t succeed in stopping the white bastard, those girls were going to disappear tonight and never return.

  Jack clenched his jaw until his teeth ached. They had to stop him. He picked up the last knife, this one made of pure gold. “You ready, buddy?”

  Henry nodded wearily, drops of sweat rolling down his temples. “Do it.”

  Jack nodded at Larsen who was back from the stake-out and now helping him. She untied the small cord that held the holly twig at Henry’s wrist. They’d earlier discovered the twig itself worked rather than the leaves, so they’d stripped off the prickly appendages, much to Henry’s relief.

  With the holly gone, Henry’s eyes slowly lost their humanity. Within seconds he was struggling with the ropes that bound him, hand and foot, to the sofa.

  “Release me, Jack.”

  “No can do, buddy.” He stood and moved behind Henry, taking a deep breath, hating what he had to do. He lifted the knife and pressed the tip into Henry’s shoulder, just far enough to draw blood.

  Henry roared.

  Jack looked at Larsen who was standing in front of the big cop, watching his eyes. “Any change?”

  “No. None.”

  Jack felt defeat pull him down like a drowning sailor. He pressed the holly to his friend’s neck. Immediately, Henry quieted.

  “Are you through stabbing me?”

  “Yeah.” Jack sighed. “That’s it. That’s the last idea. If there’s any other way to break the hold he has on you, I don’t know what it is.”

  They’d tried everything they could think of. They’d plied him with a variety of foods and dusted his skin with everything from the kitchen and medicine cabinets. They’d pressed every metal they could find against his skin and then, when that didn’t work, into his skin until they drew blood.

  Nothing but the holly had worked. Jack’s hope of finding a cure for the enchantment was gone.

  Larsen looked at him as she applied a Band-Aid to Henry’s latest wound, her dark eyes shadowed. “What now?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Dinner!” Myrtle called from the kitchen. “Jack, dear, can you help me serve it up?”

  Larsen got to her feet. “I’ll help, Myrtle.”

  Harrison was in the bedroom on the phone. The man was still trying to keep a computer business running through all this. Charlie was out making arrangements for tonight.

  “I’ll get you some food, Hank,” Jack told his friend. But as he started for the kitchen, he heard a plate crash to the floor.

  “Larsen!” Myrtle cried.

  Jack’s heart lurched. He ran into the small kitchen to find Larsen crouched on the floor in the middle of the broken plate, her arms over her head.

  He knelt beside her and grabbed her by the shoulders. She was shaking. “Larsen, what’s the matter?”

  But she didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to hear him.

  He suddenly remembered the other times—that night in his house when he’d found her on the floor of his bedroom shaking and crying, the two times she’d frozen as he’d tried to make love to her. What kind of demons haunted her?

  He pulled her against him. “Nothing’s going to hurt you, angel. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

  He prayed he found a way to keep that promise before it was too late for all of them.

  Chapter 16

  No. Larsen vomited over and over again, clinging to the cold toilet bowl. No.

  Jack was going to die. They were all going to die.

  Sweat broke out on her brow and ran between her breasts as the sour smell of bile filled her nostrils and poisoned her mouth.

  Another of her death visions, the worst she’d ever had. She’d seen it all: the cops lining the street around Dupont Circle, the hordes of college-age girls clustered under the streetlights. For once she hadn’t seen the Esri, but she’d known he was there, somewhere, orchestrating it all.

  They’d failed. The attempted capture had gone terribly, horribly wrong.

  So much blood. Jack’s blood.

  Tears slid down her cheeks and she began to cry in deep, wracking sobs. Oh, God. She couldn’t lose him.

  She loved him.

  “Larsen?”

  She felt the press of Jack’s broad hand on her shoulder and whirled into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding on tight. She wouldn’t lose him. She couldn’t.

  “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” His arms tightened around her even as cold rippled over her skin, sinking beneath the surface to ride the rapid pounding of her pulse through her veins. She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone. Ever. If they knew…

  She had to tell him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.” Oh, God, what was she going to do? She didn’t have a choice. No choice.

  How could she tell? How could she tell?

  She’d never told.

  Terror, without bounds, without logic, pressed against her on every side until she thought her eyes would bug from her head. How could anyone love her? How could anyone stand her if they knew about the evil that invad
ed her head?

  She was eight again. Her mother and brother dead. Her fault. She’d seen them die and they’d died. Her fault. She was bad. If her father knew, he’d send her away and then she’d have no one. No one.

  Her tears turned to sobs.

  “Larsen, easy. Deep breaths. That’s it. In and out. You’re going to be okay.”

  “Jack…”

  His hands cupped her shoulders and squeezed gently. “Easy, angel. Take it easy. It’s going to be okay.”

  “It’s not,” she said between sobs. “It can’t ever be. You won’t understand. You’ll hate me.”

  His warm hand dug into her hair and pressed her head against his shoulder. “I’m not going to hate you. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s not going to happen.”

  She buried her face in his neck and hung on as the storm raged through her.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart. I promise. Whatever it is, we can handle it. Together, we can handle it.”

  He held her as she cried, as all the years of fear knotted inside her, turning and tightening until she couldn’t breathe. She clung to him, to these last vestiges of comfort. After knowing the warmth of his arms, the aching loneliness would kill her.

  And she would be alone…once she told him.

  She drank in his warm, familiar scent as she struggled for the strength to strip herself bare and reveal the terrible deformity she’d lived with all her life—not a deformity of the body, but of her soul.

  Please, God, let this be enough. Let them find a way to avert this disaster. Please don’t let this vision come true.

  Larsen shuddered violently and pulled out of his arms knowing she had to tell him. She backed away, putting distance between them, until she leaned against the closed bathroom door.

  The words. Where was she to find the words? No matter what he thought, he was going to hate her.

  Unable to hold his gaze, she closed her eyes. Hands behind her, between her hips and the door, pulse pounding in her ears, she took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “I’m not normal, Jack.” She swallowed hard, the words sticking in her throat. Words she’d never before spoken out loud. “I’ve been cursed with an ability—a terrible ability—to foresee death.”

  The words caught in her throat as remembered images flew at her like wraiths in the night. The spray of blood when her mother’s head hit the windshield, her grandfather’s convulsions as he succumbed to a massive heart attack after falling down the stairs. The scraps of her apple-green dress clinging to the wreckage of her own body.

  Violent shudders tore through her.

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked, his voice hard, without inflection.

  She opened her eyes and met his eyes. Cop eyes. Cold. Probing.

  “I see death before it happens. Premonitions. I think they’re premonitions.” But she wasn’t sure. She’d never been sure she wasn’t somehow to blame.

  Jack stared at her, his thoughts hidden except for the clenching and unclenching of his jaw. “You saw the murder at the wedding.”

  His words brought it all rushing back. Watching her body slam to the ground, then disappear beneath an onslaught of pounding heels, leaving her bleeding and broken.

  Her fist covered her mouth as she began to tremble, her lower lip quivering against the weight of unshed tears. “I died,” she whispered. “I watched myself die.”

  Through a blur of tears, she saw him sink onto the side of the tub. “That’s why your eyes looked so wild when I found you. You ran.”

  “I shouldn’t have. I should have tried to save the others, but I didn’t know I could stop it. I know that sounds stupid, but I hadn’t had a premonition since I was a kid. When I was young, all I knew was that I dreamed someone would die and they died.”

  “You thought you killed them.”

  “Yes.” The tears were flowing freely now. “My mom.” She began to cry outright, unable to hold back the flood she’d damned up for more than twenty years.

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. Didn’t your dad tell you it wasn’t your fault?”

  “He didn’t know. I never told him about the dream. I’ve never told anyone.” She hiccupped, struggling against the tears. “I thought I was evil. If I told my dad, he wouldn’t have loved me anymore. I wouldn’t have had anyone.”

  “Larsen…” He sighed heavily. “You know better now, right? They’re just premonitions.”

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “But that’s just it. They’re not. At the wedding…Baleris sees me watching. If they were just premonitions he wouldn’t be able to see me, would he?”

  Jack rose stiffly. “I don’t know. He’s magic. He can do a lot of things he shouldn’t be able to do.” His brows pulled together. “A lot of things are making sense now. The note in my paper about the Tony Jingles attack. Your just happening to be at the Kennedy Center. And now…you just saw another one, didn’t you?”

  The horror of that vision tore through her all over again. “Yes.”

  “Whose death did you see this time?”

  She blinked back the last of the moisture and stared into those blue eyes she’d come to love.

  “I can’t…I can’t do it twice. All of you must hear it. All of you need to know.”

  His gaze searched her face. “All right. But we need to tell them right away.”

  Larsen raked her swollen lip between her teeth and nodded, then turned to retrace her steps to the dining room feeling like a prisoner facing the gallows. Jack hadn’t condemned her outright, but she’d noted the guarded look in his eyes and the way he’d kept his distance. With a last desperate attempt to shore up her heart, she told herself it didn’t matter. She didn’t need him. Didn’t need anyone. But the lies were too little, too late. And her heart tensed against the pain to come.

  Harrison and Myrtle were seated at the kitchen table, eating the casserole Myrtle had prepared. Charlie, who’d just walked in, was dishing himself a plateful. All looked up as she approached.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Myrtle asked.

  No. She never had been and never would be. “I’m fine. But I need to tell you something. All of you.”

  Jack held out a chair for her at the table, but she shook her head. She was too agitated to sit still. Besides, there was something about sitting at the table with them that was too close. Too confined. On her feet she could run.

  No. No more running. She had to tell them the truth. All of it. She owed them that.

  She owed Jack that.

  Jack took the seat beside the one he’d held for her as Charlie slid onto the chair at the opposite end of the table and began to scoop the food into his mouth. All eyes were on her.

  Larsen paced, once more unsure how to begin. The words strangled in her throat.

  “Can I tell them the gist of what you told me?” Jack asked.

  Her gaze met his, the pulse pounding in her throat. She nodded.

  “Larsen’s psychic…” he began.

  “Oh, lovely,” Myrtle exclaimed.

  “She has premonitions of death,” Jack continued. “The latest concerns us all.”

  She stared at him, listening to the simplicity of his explanation, feeling its discordant twang against her own self-perception. Psychic, he said. Not evil. If only she could believe it.

  “Larsen?” Jack prompted.

  Crossing her arms over her chest, she stopped her pacing and faced them, meeting their gazes one by one. Myrtle was beaming at her, Harrison’s expression was closed and unreadable, and Charlie looked distinctly antagonistic, his mouth pinched, his eyes almost angry. They’d thrown too much at him in one day. Magic. Elves. Now this.

  She took a deep breath, fisting her hands beneath her elbows. “The good news is that I know where the gate is—right in the heart of Dupont Circle.” She felt like the accused standing in front of a hostile jury. “The bad news is the plan tonight is going to fail. Completely.”

  The
men’s eyes narrowed.

  “How completely?” Jack asked. She saw the understanding in his eyes, the memory that her premonitions always centered around death. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  Charlie scoffed. “What’s she been smoking?”

  “Charlie…” Harrison warned.

  She met the more volatile Rand’s hostile gaze as he shoveled another bite into his mouth. “I saw you and your team pile out of a red-and-black armored truck.”

  His mouth froze, mid-chew, his eyes widening.

  “There were five of you dressed in black, your faces blackened. You were carrying rifles, or some kind of assault weapons. And knives. Seconds after your feet hit the pavement, your team turned on you. Two knives went through either side of your neck. A third through your eye socket. The fourth member of your team never reached you before your body slid to the ground.”

  Charlie swallowed his food whole as he stared at her, his gray eyes glowing dangerously. “My team wouldn’t turn on me.”

  Harrison turned to face him. “Were you planning to use an armored truck?”

  Charlie surged to his feet. “They wouldn’t turn on me!”

  Larsen’s stomach clenched and she took a step back.

  Jack rose, moving toward her, as if to protect her if the need arose. But he didn’t touch her.

  “You haven’t heard a thing we’ve been telling you,” Jack said, his tone sharp and angry. “The creature is powerful, Charlie. You’re clinging to the belief that you and your team are stronger, quicker, smarter than anyone else. Well, you’re not. He is. And if you don’t accept that soon, you’re going to die.”

  Charlie glared at him, his mouth curled brutally. “Sounds like I’m going to die anyway. At least that’s what she says.”

  “We might be able to stop it. It doesn’t have to go down the way Larsen sees it. She saw herself die almost a week ago, but it didn’t happen. This doesn’t have to, either. But we’ve got to come up with another plan.”

  “Tell us the rest, Larsen,” Harrison said, his voice too calm, like a smoothly flowing river hiding a torrent beneath.

  She swallowed and nodded. “Harrison ran for the Esri, drawing the cops’attention…and fire.” She met the man’s gaze. “You gave Jack the chance he needed, but it wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.”