The End of Darkness (6 page)

She stepped away but kept that heated gaze on him. “It's only for a couple of days, until…” She gave Copeland a knowing look.

The idea of being her pet held appeal only because it would give him a chance to escape. He was more concerned about what she hadn't said.

Copeland grabbed Erica's hand, pushing her sleeve back to expose a forearm covered in fine scars. “Interesting scars, Erica.” She tried to pull away but he held her firmly as he turned her palm upward to reveal a red mark right in the center. “There are people, our people, who can wield a power called the Flare. It's a shot of high voltage electricity that comes from the palm.” He rubbed his thumb over the red mark. “If you were wholly Callorian, your body would tolerate that kind of energy. Your feeble human body cannot. It's very painful when you use it, isn't it? It was painful when you used it on my brother.”

Her mouth tightened. She wanted to say something, but not the answer he was seeking. Interesting. Did she try to kill the bastard’s brother? Could she be deadly? When she'd seen him turn from Darkness to human, she'd said, 
Just leave me alone and I won't hurt you
. Which had seemed a humorous threat at the time. Magnus had pegged her as lonely and insecure, but there was a lot more to her than that. He hadn't noticed the scars, but then again, they'd been naked in the dark. Pope had an ability like that, before he'd been psychically handcuffed. 
 

Copeland released her at last. “The man we found dead wasn’t Callorian. I'll wager you were with him when my brother attacked. He has a nasty habit of pulling out people’s organs.” He made mock tsking sounds. “It's an annoying predilection to say the least. It must have been quite disconcerting to see your friend, perhaps boyfriend, having his heart wrested from his chest. Was it still beating while Nester held it?”

Her reaction gave away her knowledge of the macabre event Copeland described. Admirably, she held onto the control he was trying to crack.

“That’s what I thought.” He grabbed her chin so hard, his fingers dug into her skin. “So you electrocuted him, didn’t you?”

Magnus pulled against his manacles. “Let her go!” Darkness pulled and twisted inside him, but the cold metal remained tight against his wrists—his very human wrists. He saw the remnants of horror on Erica's face at watching his efforts to transform. 

Beast
. He didn't have to hear her thoughts to know that's what she was thinking when she looked at him.
 

Copeland released her, but his gaze was on Magnus. “I know why 
you’re
 here. The Darkness pulled you, called to you. That's what happened to my brother. He found where Darkness is seeping out of the earth and started taking it in like a drug. It's making him quite crazy.”
 

Something 
had
 called to Magnus. But the Darkness wasn’t here; it was in the other dimension, according to Jessie's dad, who had tapped into it years earlier. Then he had come here through a portal. 
 

“It did pull me here.” Magnus had to word what he said about Darkness carefully, since he was playing dumb. 

“And it turns you into 
monsters
.” Erica was looking at Magnus on that last word. 
 

The alarm on Copeland's watch beeped. “I have to go.”

Lanna's face hardened, but she held in whatever it was that she wanted to say. Her job was to get more answers out of them. She followed Copeland up the stairs, arms crossed over her chest.

As soon as the door closed, Erica asked, “Who are you? 
What
 are you?”
 

“You got us into this mess, and you’re hammering 
me
 with questions? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
 

“What do you mean, 
I
 got us into this?”
 

Magnus nodded toward the vent and leaned as close as he could. “Lower your voice. They can hear us through that vent. Or at least I could hear them, so I figure it works both ways. Come closer so we can talk.”

She actually reared back, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. 

“Do you want answers or not?”

She did, enough to relent and lean toward him.

“You tried to kill that bloke's brother with the Flare he was talking about. Some kind of power you’ve had since you were, say, a teenager, I bet. When I came up on you, you held out your hand like you were going to zap me into tomorrow.” He looked at the crisscross scarring across the back of the hand he could see. 

She shifted so her body blocked her hand, but her eyes had widened at his words. This lass could kill. It raised some questions of his own. But first he had to gain her trust, because she wasn't going to tell him a thing before that.

He went on. “Let me guess. Your mother or father died while working for the government in a covert program.” 

She maintained a guarded expression but gave him a subtle nod. 

“Aye, it's all beginning to make sense now.”

“What is?”

“Why I was drawn to you at the bar.” The same way he'd been drawn to Jessie. He thought it was his imagination. “When I walked past you, didn't I feel different from all those other men you pick up?”

She winced. 

“Sorry, that didn't come out the way I'd intended. But let's be honest; neither one of us is unused to the idea of sleeping with a stranger, eh? We both needed something the other could provide. Hell, I don't even know your last name. Which is?”

“None of your damned business.”

She had a tough shell, but something in her blue eyes said there was a good reason why. It was the same pain he'd seen after their disastrous encounter. She wasn't after a tumble in the sack for fun. He still felt bad for spoiling it. 

“Look, Erica, we’re on the same side. We—”

“We are not on the same side. You’re some kind of beast that can rip out a person’s heart while it’s still beating!” Her voice cracked, broke, and her body trembled. 

“So you admit to at least seeing the guy. Copeland's brother killed your boyfriend, and you zapped him.”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend; he was a preacher out to find the mysterious smoke. I tagged along. You can’t imagine what it was like, seeing his heart in that man’s hands. The blood. The gloating look on his face. Then he saw me.” Terror painted her expression. “And he said, 'More.'“

How the hell did he keep getting tangled up with women who were in trouble? First Jessie, who’d nearly gotten him killed, and now this lass, who’d inadvertently gotten him imprisoned. Still, the need to protect her pulsed through him at the thought of her facing a monster like that.

She thinks you're a monster, too. 

He said, “I don’t blame you for zapping him. It saved your life.”

She hung her head low. “I should have done it faster to save Graham.” 

He gripped the chain that held the cuffs to the wall and pulled it from every angle. No give. “I saw my mother get killed, and I thought the same thing for a long time. 
If.
 If I’d moved faster, done something, maybe I could have saved her.”
 

She looked up at that, shock on her face. “Your mother died in front of you?”

He nodded. No need to say that it was his own brother who had pushed a sword into her stomach, locked in a mental time warp and fighting British soldiers. His addiction to astral projection made him temporarily crazy. “You can’t change the past, no matter how many times you relive it. No way could you have seen that coming. Then I probably scared the hell out of you again.”

“I assumed you were one of them. Not a stretch, considering.”

“I suppose not. But the truth is we have more in common than you want to admit. We have special abilities because of that program I mentioned.” He studied the chain, searching for any weakness in the links. “If I knew your last name, I could tell you for sure.” 

After a few moments, she said, “Evrard.”

He knew it, and a few seconds later it came to him. “You're Jerryl’s sister?”

Something frosty flowed through her eyes, even as she looked surprised. “You know my brother?”

“Of him. He worked for Darkwell, the man responsible for the deaths of almost everyone in that program. Of course, Jerryl didn't know that,” he added at the shock on her face. “I'm sure he thought he was on the right side.” Magnus worked on the bolt that held his cuffs to the wall while he talked. “It was the government, after all. But Darkwell was corrupt.”

“When my father called to tell me he was dead, he went on about some secret project Jerryl was involved in. He missed the irony that our mother died doing the same kind of thing, leaving behind a whole lot of questions.” Her expression opened just a little. “You know about the program?”

 “Aye. My father was in it, too. Darkwell recruited people with psychic gifts to spy on our enemies. Dad studied slime molds and was especially fascinated with 
pwdre ser,
 the slime that meteorites leave behind. One day what he collected was actually the remains of someone from the other dimension.”
 

 “Dimension?” she asked. “Like a parallel dimension?”

“Exactly. It's called Surfacia. This bloke accidentally flew his aircraft through one of the portals between dimensions and crashed. His brother cleaned up the site, but apparently he missed some. My intrepid father found it and ended up ingesting his Essence. He discovered it enhanced the psychic abilities he already had. Darkwell then gave it to the program's subjects, who eventually went crazy and had to be terminated before the public found out. You inherited that Essence—and, I suspect, the bloke's ability. Recently, Darkwell started recruiting the subjects' offspring to resurrect the program. I'm sorry to say your brother was killed because he worked for the man behind that program.”

“I hope he burns in hell.”

“No doubt Darkwell will for everything he's done.”

“I mean my brother.” She turned away, which was good because Magnus couldn't have been more shocked by her response. 

He wanted to know why someone would hate their sibling that much, but he didn't have time to delve into her troubled psyche. “Do you remember anything when they brought us here?”

“No.” She followed his gaze as he scoured the cell they were in. “A blinding flash went through me as hot as fire and then nothing until I woke here. You?”

“The same.” His gaze lighted on the toilet and sink in the far corner. How they were supposed to use them while manacled, he didn’t know. He had good aim, but really. “We’re in a basement, I think.” 

“Why would they have a jail cell in their basement?” The implications of that shadowed her eyes. “Only people who regularly kidnap and torture others would have something like this.”

“I can't think it has anything to do with the robbery they're planning.”

“Robbery?”

“I overheard them talking about it as I came to.”

“Oh, great, so they're not only aliens from another dimension but common criminals.” She shook her head. “We are so screwed.”

“Well, no need to give up just yet.”

She shook her manacled hand. “Oh, don't worry, I have loads of hope.”

Her hopelessness and fear tugged at him. No matter how hardened she was, he'd seen her vulnerable side, the pain in her eyes when she'd asked him to leave her motel room. He'd been inside her in the most intimate way and yet hadn't connected with her. That bothered him. 

There were a lot of things about her that bothered him. One, however, surged above the rest. 

“You being out there in the same area I was, at the same time…that 
is
 a coincidence that's hard to believe. What were you doing out there?” He studied her carefully masked face. “You were following me. Why?”
 

She clamped her mouth shut, avoiding his gaze. 

“Were you going to punish me for calling out another lass's name, zap me with your Flare? Are you some kind of psycho revenge bitch?”

“No.” She shook her head.  “I was madder at myself than you, in any case.”

“Why?”

“It's not important. None of it is now that we're going to die.”

“You were stalking me then? You became obsessed, couldn't get me out of your mind.”

She laughed though there was no humor in it. “Hardly. And I don't call it my 'Flare.' I call it Lightning.”

Now he was sure she'd been following him, but he was also sure she wasn't about to tell him why. Though it bugged him like a chigger itch, he focused on questions she was more likely to answer. “Why didn’t you use it on Copeland?”

She flexed her hand, staring at her palm. “I can't use it twice in a row, apparently. And it's painful. But this cuff is made of the same metal yours is.”

“How well do you know how to use your power?”

Something fierce lit her eyes. “Very well.” 

He had no idea what he was getting into with her. But he wasn't going to let her give up hope. 

CHAPTER 6

Erica was in the grip of a drug-induced nightmare. There was no other explanation. She'd had sex with a hunky stranger who laced her drink with LSD, and she was now lying inert on her bed while he did God-knew-what to her body. And that was far better than this version of reality. 

She could believe that if she couldn't feel the bite of the cuff around her wrist, the scrape of the stone wall at her back. If this didn't feel so dreadfully real. 

A lone set of footsteps sounded down the stairs, and her whole being tightened. Lanna came into view with a bright, anticipatory expression and stepped up to the bars. Erica wondered if the woman always had that carnal light in her eyes. At least she seemed to when she looked at Magnus. Lanna unlocked the door, stepped inside, and locked it again. 

“I’m sorry that my husband hit you the way he did,” she said, walking close to Magnus. He said nothing, regarding her warily.

She pulled a tube from her pocket, her gaze on the ripped muscles of his stomach. “Black Lavender, from my dimension. It’s amazing for healing pain. You’ve got a bruise,” she said, pouting. “He’s a mean man. So Callorian. But you, you’re much more 
human
.” She feathered her fingers across his abs. “You’ve got 
heat
.”