Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition) (60 page)

Cain turned at the whisper of Justin’s jeans sliding over the nubby material of the couch. His shiny blueprints of vengeance were shredding around him. The white man might not even find him tonight. The girl wasn’t going to live much longer and if he wanted her for his consort, he’d have to take her soon. Even if the white man wasn’t there to watch. And now this fool looked to be sneaking off.

Damn! Couldn’t trust nobody. Well. He’d serve as a nice appetizer before the main course.

* * *

Dennis brought the car to a halt some ways back from the cabin. He’d insisted on reclaiming the wheel when they hit the dirt roads.

“No offense, man, but you ain’t the world’s most experienced driver and these roads can be bad-ass mothers in the winter when nobody’s usin’ ‘em.”

Paul hadn’t protested. And Dennis had sure been right. If his kidneys had still been subject to shaking, they’d have shaken out.

“I can get closer,” Dennis said.

“I know where the cabin is now, I don’t need you any closer. Now you listen. I want you to stay here.”

“
Here?
No way, man!”

“Here, goddamn it, here! You’d just be in my way!”

“But there’s two of them!”

“You can’t do shit against Cain, Dennis! And as for Justin, do you have a gun? A knife? Could you use ‘em if you did?”

“I could if I had to.”

“Maybe, if you had ‘em. But you don’t, do you?”

Dennis shook his head.

“And
you’re
not a ninja in drag, are you?”

Dennis shook his head again.

“Then stay here!”

Paul disappeared and left Dennis staring into the silent darkness.

Suddenly the darkness wasn’t silent anymore. The screams rolled out from the cabin, oddly neuter in gender. Definitely not Paul or Cain, which left Justin and Ria, but he couldn’t tell if the screams were masculine or feminine.

And why would Justin scream anyway? Suddenly Dennis remembered something. He got out of the car and ran down the crunching gravel of the road as fast his running shoes could carry him.

* * *

Paul materialized behind Cain’s back. Justin’s screams would’ve disguised an approaching elephant herd. Cain bent the boy backwards, his mouth approaching the vulnerable neck. Justin’s arms flailed wildly and something grayish white and speckled with blood waved in the firelight. A broken bone. Without thought, Paul made the medical translation. Compound fracture of the ulna, the point protruding some two inches out of the broken skin.

Paul didn’t know or care what Justin did to provoke Cain’s fury. It provided him his edge and he wasn’t wasting a minute of it. He cast out like a speed swimmer kicking away from the wall of a pool and materialized by the fireplace.

He reached into the fire for one of the smaller burning logs. He wasn’t depending on wood alone. He wanted fire, too. Then he saw her from the corner of his eye. Ria’s body, thrown in the corner. Broken and bleeding and burned.

Too late. Oh, God, too late. He almost started toward her but a cold, detached voice speaking from the base of his brain stopped him.

If she was dead, there was nothing he could do. And if she wasn’t, then she would be, very soon, unless he sent Cain back to the dark. He reached into the fireplace again, just as Cain, momentarily sated, dropped Justin’s body.

* * *

Dennis crept around the rear windows of the cabin toward the largest bedroom on the right hand side. His father kept a .38 pistol in the nightstand and always ignored Dennis’s pointed observation that the first thing any winter thief looked for was firearms. The cabin had never been vandalized until tonight though, and Dennis was the vandal.

He reached up, tore the screen off and smashed the glass of the pane. He thrust his arm inside to the window lock. God, it was stiff. The broken glass caught on the quilted sleeve of his jacket. Dennis jerked and scored a long gash across the back of his hand.

He didn’t have time to worry about it. He grunted and tried again and finally felt the catch give. The first thing he’d do this spring was spray all the goddamn window latches with WD-40. There. Finally.

He jerked the window open and climbed in just as the screams faded into nothing. He heard the hard
klump
of a falling body.

The drawer of the nightstand clattered to the floor when he jerked it open. Where the hell? There. His fingers identified the cold, oily feel of gun metal while his eyes adjusted to the shadows. Not loaded, of course. His father kept the ammunition on a shelf in the closet, like he thought any intruder would politely wait for him to retrieve the ammunition and load the gun.

Damn, his fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. Finally he grasped the fully loaded gun in his hand. He crept to the bedroom door.

Justin’s body lay in an inert heap on the floor. Cain’s gigantic figure moved silently toward the fireplace. There was something in his hands, but Dennis couldn’t make out exactly what. He moved toward Paul, who stared at something in the corner.

Oh, God. Ria’s body lay in the corner. Paul seemed to collect himself and reached into the fireplace, but he’d never make it. He’d never turn in time to avoid Cain’s great hands, raising over Paul’s back. In horror, Dennis identified the sharpened stake, aimed directly at Paul’s heart.

“Look out!”

Dennis fired. A flower of red bloomed on Cain’s back but Dennis knew better than to think the bullet had any more effect than a bee sting. But it did get Cain’s attention.

“
What de fuck?
” Cain swung his head around to check his rear and Dennis fired again.

Paul lunged for the fireplace and retrieved a burning piece of hickory. The flames scoring into his hands didn’t faze him.

Dennis fired again and again, until the chambers were empty. Cain’s body sprouted flowers of slowly spreading red from the ineffective bullets. He grinned at the boy.

“Worl’ jest full of do-gooders, now ain’t it? Well, you jest got to wait yo’ turn, boy.”

Dennis smiled. Paul stood behind Cain. He raised the flaming wood high, aimed between Cain’s shoulder blades. Cain’s words cut off and turned into a gurgling scream as the burning wood plunged into his back. The material of his shirt caught fire and blazed.

Cain tried to turn and pull away from the blazing, unsharpened stake but Paul moved with him, pushing harder, harder.

The scream increased in volume as the spurting red liquid spouted out of Cain’s back in geysers, sizzling as it came into contact with the flames. Finally, it peaked in an astounding crescendo. The end of the firebrand poked through the front of Cain’s shirt and still Paul pushed.

Why didn’t he fall? Damn it, why didn’t he fall?

“Paul!” Dennis shouted. “Let go! You’re holding him up yourself!”

Paul abruptly turned loose of the hickory and Cain’s body crashed to the floor.

“Oh, man!” Dennis breathed. “Oh, man!” He crossed the floor at a run to grab Paul’s wrists. “Your hands, Paul, your hands!”

The skin of his fingers was gone. Nothing remained but bare, blackened bones.

“Oh, God!” Dennis choked back a retch. “Com’ere, sit down.”

“It’s nothing,” Paul said. “Just give me a minute. Check Ria. I couldn’t feel a pulse point right now.”

“But what—”

“Just do it!”

Dennis dropped Paul’s hands with a half-sob and flung himself toward Ria’s body. The door crashed open. Charlie Knight and Johnny Bishop gaped, surveying the bloody, fiery battleground.

“
Oh, shit!
” Johnny pointed at Cain’s giant body. It lost substance before their eyes. The flesh flew off the bones in a flurry of small dancing motes that floated on the air and then disappeared until there was nothing left but a skeleton.

The still burning brand fell against a bare rib and sent streamers of fire into the rug. Johnny ran over and looked for something to give him a hand-hold on the wood that wouldn’t fry his hands. Paul knocked him back.

“For God’s sake,
don’t!
” he shouted. Dr. Knight came from the kitchen with a slopping dishpan of water and tossed it directly onto the flames.

The four rescuers stared down at the mottled bones of the skeleton, the blackened stake protruding from the ribs.

Paul flung himself towards the corner. His hands hovered over Ria, hesitant to touch.

“Paul, your hands!” Dennis exclaimed. “Your hands—” Dennis stopped and stared. “My God,” he said softly.

Paul’s hands were normal, clothed in new and unmarked flesh.

Dr. Knight joined Paul in the corner. “Oh, baby! Oh, God, Ria!”

“My fault.” Paul barely managed to push the words out. “My fault.”

Dr. Knight stared at him a moment, his expression unreadable, his eyes veiled.

“That skeleton. Cain?”

Paul nodded. “My fault,” he said again.

“Wastin’ time,” Dr. Knight said, and bent over his daughter, feeling carefully up and down her body. He sat back again. “Oh, Jesus!”

“Is she—is she dead?” Dennis asked softly. Johnny stood behind them, not speaking.

“Not yet,” Dr. Knight said, and stood up. “But she will be, very soon. Some of the rib bones are puncturing her lungs. I think one’s right at her heart. We’ll kill her for sure if we move her and she’ll die in the next few minutes if we don’t.”

Johnny finally spoke.

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“There’s nothing I can do. But Paul can.”

Paul raised his head, his eyes filled with horror.

“You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“Yeah, I do. I’m saying I want my daughter and you’re the only way I can have her.”

“No! I killed her already, I won’t do this!”

Dr. Knight reached down to grab his shoulders and shook furiously.

“You shut up! You get out of that goddamned hair shirt and stop feeling sorry for yourself! I don’t know how Cain got here but you didn’t resurrect him! And without you,
nobody
could have stopped him! Not the first time, not this time! So there’s no blame here. There’s only the next few minutes to decide if Ria lives or
dies!
”

“You don’t know what living like this is like! You don’t know how it hurts!”

“I know you survived.”

“Don’t you understand? That she’d
never
see another sunrise?!”

“But she’d see moonrise,” Dennis said. “Forever.”

Paul looked down. Then he picked up her hand and turned her palm upward. He stared down into the duplicate tracings of the lines of his own palm.

The lifeline didn’t disappear, it submerged and ran faintly under the skin, all the way down her palm, and then around her thumb and back, circling continuously.

He stared at her face, battered and swollen beyond recognition.

He heard a voice he’d never thought to hear again speak over his shoulder.

“God’s dark angels, son! Both of you!”

“Get out,” he said shortly. “All of you.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Paul walked out of the lake house half an hour or so after issuing his terse command. Ria’s body, drained of all blood, lay carefully arranged and covered on the couch.

“…don’t understand one goddamn thing that’s happened and I want somebody to tell me what fuckin’ planet I’m on right now!” Johnny exclaimed as he approached the group standing by the Ford Explorer.

“Johnny,” Dr. Knight’s voice was weary, drained of all emotions. “You got to take this on faith right now. I’ll explain it all. Later. I just can’t right now. I just can’t.”

“Here’s Paul,” Dennis spoke, alerting the group to his arrival.

“Well?” Dr. Knight raised his head.

“It’s done. She’ll need blood. Tomorrow night. For God’s sake, not human. It’ll be twice as hard to control if she ever tastes human.”

“I’ll get it.”

“What the
fuck?
” Johnny’s sibilant whisper hissed in the darkness. “Has everybody gone stark, staring crazy?”

“Leave it in the mausoleum. Before sunset.”

“No, I want to see her.”

“No. You don’t. You really, really don’t.”

Dr. Knight bowed his head. He’d never heard ice spew when Paul spoke, but he heard it now. He recognized it for what it was. Inhuman. And no human could argue with it.

“I’ll have it there.”

“What about all this? What can we do? I mean, he rose once.” Dennis waved his hands toward the cabin.

Johnny’s running commentary continued under his breath. “Everybody I know is a lunatic. They’ve all gone stark, starin’
crazy
!”