Darkest Hour (15 page)

And Kate.

He hadn’t exactly lost her. No. He had sent her away. The look in her eyes when he told her she could never see her daughter again found its way into almost every dream Lockman had, the very definition of a haunting memory. Whenever he thought of her, wondered where she was, what she was up to, it felt like his heart sprung a leak and poured blood into his belly. He tried to banish thoughts of her altogether. So far without any luck.

He raised his chin, stood straight, and looked Adam in the eyes. “I’m with you. Let me out of here.”

Adam took time staring back at Lockman as if he could see into Lockman’s mind. He must have found what he was looking for. He grunted softly and poked at a keypad by the door. A second later there came a metallic
snap
. Adam pulled the door open and stepped aside.

Lockman stepped into the hall leading between the cells, gave his cell one last glance over his shoulder, then faced Adam. “What’s next?”

“We have to bring Teresa down from the edge. She’s talking about a full-scale assault and we don’t even have a target to strike.”

Lockman’s muscles tensed. Full-scale assault meant taking Jessie out. He knew that’s what Teresa intended. “Even if we knew where to find her, we can’t just head out and obliterate Jessie.”

“We have to convince Teresa that Jessie is still important to the war.”

“Good luck with that. You all never had
me
fully convinced about this Chosen One stuff.”

“You doubt she is special?”

“I make it a habit to doubt everything,” Lockman said with a smirk. “But Jessie’s special to me, and that’s good enough. Winning over Teresa, who wanted to stake Jess from the beginning? Totally different story.”

Adam stroked his chin like a giant, green Confucius. “I may know of a way to change her mind.”

“I’m listening.”

Kate woke up in the mural.

She floated above the massive canyon splitting the earth, angels and demons swarming around her, clashing with swords and spears, claws and teeth. The air smelled of sulfur and blood. The sound of clanging metal and tearing flesh underscored the countless variations in pitch to the screams all around.

Kate didn’t know what kept her suspended in the air. After a second of thrashing her arms and kicking her legs, she found some control over her trajectory. The large, swinging limbs motions as if trying to swim, kept her floating in place. If she made subtle moves, though—a tilt to her arms, a cant in her feet—she could turn and sail like a kite. Not exactly flying, but able to dodge the combatants and change her view of the battle.

No one seemed to notice her. Demons would flap by without turning a glance her way. Angels soared toward her as if she didn’t exist and they would have collided if Kate hadn’t learned to get out of the way. Then, one time, she didn’t move fast enough, and a pair locked in combat whisked straight through Kate as if Kate were a ghost.

I’m not really here,
she thought.

But this wasn’t a dream, either. The heat from the gorge below felt too real. All the smells and the ashen taste in her mouth too vivid. This was something more than a dream.

She thought back to what had happened before she found herself in this place and remembered lying on the marble floor in the center of the pentagram. Remembered the feel of her blood being drawn out of the cut in her arm and into the grooves of the engraving. The blood flowed out of her so quickly she hadn’t had a chance to fight.

Then she recalled Wertz’s words right before she fell unconscious.

Just lay there and die.

So was she dead? Or was this some place in between?

A splash of lava shot from the crevice below and engulfed Kate.

While the angels and demons passed through her with no more substance than a breeze, the lava burned. The liquid rock weighed her down. The spray fell back toward the Earth and she fell with it, spatters of hot liquid clinging to her naked skin, searing her while not marring her.

Like molten fingers, the lava drew her down into the crack. The lava had cooled and lost its light. She continued to plummet, down so deep that all turned pitch black. She couldn’t see. The dominant sensation that of falling. The air snatched out of her lungs.

Something cold touched her chest.

A second later, electric pain shot through her whole body, emanating from whatever touched her in the dark. At some point she had stopped falling. She felt hard, smooth ground against her back.

The shock came again.

Her body convulsed.

A flash of light touched her eyes, then went immediately dark again.

A third shock.

Her nerves felt as if an army of rats gnawed on every inch.

Light touched her eyes again. A couple flickers. Then gone.

A frantic male voice came through the dark with a slight squeak to it. “God damn it. Why isn’t she waking up?”

“Told you, you waited too long, ya crank.” This was a woman’s voice, the accent familiar but still strange. “Go her one more.”

“All right. Charging, charging...
clear
!”

Another pulse of electric agony cut through Kate, making her feel as if she might burst out of her skin. The smell in her nose reminded her of this time from her childhood, when her cat had peed on an electrical cord. The spark had left a burn mark on the carpet. The next day, little Katie didn’t have a pet cat anymore.

This last jolt shook something inside of Kate. Afterwards she felt a hard knock in her chest as if her heart had punched her breastbone. Her lungs took in air all in a rush as if they hadn’t had any to start with.

As her eyes fluttered open, Kate realized all at once that her lungs hadn’t had any air. And that knock in her chest hadn’t been a punch, but the first beat after a long break. She had died. They had killed her.

And now they had brought her back to life.

Mica and Wertz knelt on either side of her, staring with wide and worried eyes. Wertz held a pair of defibrillator paddles that looked like medieval shields in his small hands. Between the gnome and the pixie’s heads, Kate had a view of the mural. It looked different. Had more angels joined the fray? Had some of the demons been crawling back
into
the crevice before? Obviously, no one had repainted the thing. She couldn’t have been dead that long. She couldn’t pass the seeming changes off as her imagination, though. Maybe they had moved her to a different room.

While this passed through her mind in jagged flashes, she gasped and coughed. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt. Her tongue felt like an obstruction in her mouth. She couldn’t get enough air in and out of her lungs fast enough. Lying on her back made it all the harder, so she tried to roll on her side.

Her muscles spasmed. All she managed was to jerk her body up and then roll right back onto her back.

“Easy, love,” Mica said. “I’ll help.” She gently lifted one of Kate’s shoulders and tipped her onto her side.

Breathing came easier. Kate closed her eyes and did nothing else for a while. She didn’t know how much time passed like that and didn’t care. While she lay there, she felt Wertz bandage and tape up her arm. Mica stroked Kate’s back. Everyone real nice to her now after they had killed her.

She didn’t have the strength to question them about what the hell they were doing to her. But when she got the chance, she would make sure to rail not only at Mini-Man and Skunk Girl, she would give hell to the movie star who had stood by watching it all happen.

Just as she made this promise to herself, Romeo Kress’s voice oozed in Kate’s ear like audio caramel. “Rest easy, Kate. I know you have many questions and probably a few choice words.”

Kate tried to say, “You better believe it.” Instead, it sounded more like, “
Rooerrveught
.”

“It would have been much harder to convince you to go through this part of ritual if we’d told you about it in advance. Trust me when I tell you the worst is over, though. You have given blood to the Great Maker and, most importantly, crossed the Great Threshold and come back again.”

If Kress hadn’t addressed her personally, Kate might have mistaken his diatribe as lines from one of his movies. Great Maker? Great Threshold? What did any of this have to do with finding Jessie?

She felt Kress put a calloused hand on her bare arm. “We have awakened the dormant power within you, Kate. The very same power you passed onto your daughter. The power you can now use to find her.”

Chapter Eighteen

“It feels good, doesn’t it?”

The girl still wouldn’t speak to him. A shame, after all the wonderful conversations they had had in the past. All the things he had taught her, like a father really. And wasn’t that partially true? He
was
her father. After all, those were his genes passed down to her. It mattered not one whit that another soul had been joyriding in his body at the time of conception.

Gabriel tilted his head back, putting his face to the sunlight streaming through the treetops. A strange sensation, having cold vampire skin yet feeling warmth from the sun. The flesh would not give up its chill any more than the sun would surrender its heat. Nature meeting the unnatural.

A laugh bubbled through him, from his narrow chest, through his slender throat, out his dainty mouth. Well, maybe not dainty with the fangs and all. Still, this girl’s body held such wonder for Gabriel to explore. Nothing perverted or sexual. He had no time or interest for that. He ran a hand along the skin of his arm. The arm still held scars from its mortal days. Slices across the inner arm, signs of a troubled teen crying out for help by cutting herself. At least, that’s what it would look like to the common mortal. Gabriel knew better. The girl had told him about her early experiments with magic.

How cute.

Gabriel inhaled deeply through his nose—and it
was
his now, no matter what Lockman wanted to believe, the fool. A vampire’s sense of smell rivaled that of a bloodhound, yet it picked up on different things. Pheromones. Emotion. Even ten miles out from the compound, Gabriel could smell the fear building there. Obviously, word had gotten out about Gabriel’s triumph. Their precious Chosen One had turned against them.

“No arguments?” he asked aloud. “No insistence that your daddy will stop me and save you? No threats of your own to offer?”

The girl lay dormant within him like an old memory half-forgotten.

Sad.

He supposed the process of his take over might have disabled her soul’s presence somehow. After all, there were a million other souls and more within this body, all deposited by what those buffoons referred to as the Memory Artifact. These were more than mere memories. Even
soul
wasn’t quite the right word.

The wind carried a change in the scent coming from the compound. They still feared, but a hint of confidence twined with that fear. They still thought they were important, had some influence over the course of events to come.

Fools.

Reverie time had come to a close. Gabriel saluted in the direction of the compound, bidding them adieu, and continued his run toward the smell of civilization—exhaust, fryer oil, overflowing trash bins, the yummy fragrances of mortal men, soon to be extinct, except for those, like Gabriel, who would thrive in the new world.

You’re not a mortal, dumb shit
.

The girl. She had spoken.

Gabriel smiled as he ran, trees whizzing by in brown and green blurs.
Glad to have you back, my dear. And quite right. I forgot that I’m a vampire now.

Don’t get used to it
. Her soul’s projected voice tickled like a feather at the back of the brain.
You’re not staying for long.

There was the fiery little girl Gabriel had grown so fond of, even though her impotent threats had become so predictable. She had no idea, the poor thing. He was not only staying long.

He was staying forever.

Chapter Nineteen

“What the hell is this about?” Teresa asked the second Adam entered the conference room.

The ogre had set up the meeting, just the three of them. The conference room was one of a few they had available outside of their main war room where most of the planning happened. A simple set up—long table with chairs around the perimeter and a magnetic whiteboard mounted to the wall. Nothing else.

“You want to hold a meeting when I’ve got a team ready—”

“Ready for what?” Lockman asked.

She hadn’t seen him come in behind the big ogre and started at the sound of his voice. He skirted Adam so she could see him now, crossed his arms, and waited for an answer.

Fire glared in Teresa’s eyes. She glared at Adam. “You let him out?”

“We can’t just throw each other in a cell every time we have a disagreement.”

“Disagreement? He unleashed Gabriel into the world. Maybe you don’t understand. You never had to face that man. Gabriel Dolan is responsible for some of the most destructive supernatural terrorism...ever.” Her face turned red. The top of her skull could pop off at any minute. She turned on Lockman and pointed. “You should have known better.”