Darkness Returns (26 page)

He walked past Lockman without another word and left the penthouse.

Lockman stood in the center of the living room, not exactly sure what had just happened, but no less worried about bringing Jessie home. Only now it looked like he would have to handle that goal differently.

Lockman left the penthouse and headed for the command center and the “glass box” as Kress had called it. Maybe taking charge wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He thought of his old boss, Creed, and how he’d handle the situation.

By the time he took his place behind Kress’s desk—
his
desk—he felt a little better.

But only a little.

He scanned the phone for the right speed dial button and poked it, which automatically put the phone on speaker and brought up the dial tone. After only half a ring, Wertz’s voice came on the line.

“What is it, boss?”

“Some things have changed,” Lockman said.

“Shit,” the gnome whispered, but he didn’t sound surprised. “Okay…boss, let me guess. We’re sending out a team to retrieve the Chosen One.”

“Correct.”

“But you aren’t going to play by the rules and insist on leading said team.”

“Correct again.”

Silence for a moment. Lockman thought Wertz might try to argue. Then he asked, “How’s Kress?”

“Hurting.”

“He’s a good man, you know.”

“You don’t have to defend him to me. Want to prove his worth? Show me how good he is at picking his people.”

Lockman could hear the grin in Wertz’s voice. “I’ll have hueys ready in an hour. Might take a little longer to scramble a mystic that can track her.”

Lockman thought a second. “We don’t need mojo. I have an idea where she’s headed.”

“Then meet me on the roof in sixty minutes.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jessie went inside.

Down.

Into the darkness within her.

Where the souls roamed like ghosts in space.

Like last time, none paid her any mind. Though this body belonged to her, as did the real estate inside, a lack of physical boundaries—of physical
anything
made the place a free-for-all. Out of millions of souls, hers was one more wandering speck.

The same could be said for those around her. Anything that resembled corporal reality was merely a conjuration of her own imagination. She couldn’t imagine what she didn’t know. Hence the darkness.

Yet she knew from experience, it didn’t have to stay that way. She’d had plenty of conversations with Gabriel as if they stood together on a street corner or across each other in a corner booth at a greasy spoon diner. She’d pictured dozens of different scenarios whenever they met, though they seldom came this low. No need to mingle with all the other souls when perfectly clear mental territory existed above it all.

No chance of running into hungry souls with shark teeth and blank eyes that sucked at your essence like black holes.

So how to go about this?

Create a world. A familiar world.

She imagined the street she grew up on, the rows of cookie-cut houses on either side, each with matching squares of grass manicured into perfect greenness. She saw her house, recognizable not only by the gold numbers on the diagonal plaque bolted above the mailbox on the façade beside the front door, but by the tan shutters, the shape of the shrubbery, and the bent frame of the screen to her bedroom window from one of the nights she snuck out to meet up with Ryan and pushed too hard to get the screen loose.

Right now, this street resembled a preserved ghost town, like something out of the
Twilight Zone
. Rod Serling could step into frame at any moment and comment on the perfect little town without any people living in the perfect little houses.

Rod wouldn’t get the chance, though.

From memory, Jessie populated her street. The Dawson twins two houses down fighting with plastic swords while wearing identical Batman costumes. Mr. Orson pushing his lawn mower across his front yard for the third time that week, the sweat brought on by the summer sun making his glasses slip down the bridge of his nose. Crazy Allison Cornelissen, dressed like a hooker clown with black and white striped thigh-highs and pink gym shorts that had the word
TASTY
patched on her butt in all caps. Her yellow halter top barely covered the anthill breasts that made her look anorexic whenever she showed off the boney center of her chest that qualified as her cleavage.

While Allison skipped down her driveway to the waiting Mustang, her latest “date” behind the wheel, she waved at Jessie.

That’s when Jessie realized she had cast herself among this mental movie set she’d constructed. And no wings or vampire skin on her, dude. In this place, Jessie could be her old self, wearing Doc Martins and cutoff shorts that hung to her knees and a Nirvana t-shirt she bought at the mall on the fourth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

She waved back, even though she had never waved to Allison Cornelissen, no matter how bad she felt that her parents set her on a certain life path by giving her what sounded like the name of a porn star.

Jessie even smiled when she waved.

The sun felt great prickling over her skin. A reddish hue on her arms spoke of the sunburn to come. She’d always been fair-skinned, sparking a love/hate relationship with the sun since her first major burn. A petty irony considering what the sun did to her now.

In this place, it was back to worries of sunburns and melanoma, though. Actually, she didn’t have to worry about that either.

Because none of this is real. Don’t forget that, kiddo.

Not real. Familiar. And that was the point.

She approached her house as the neighborhood continued to flesh out around her. She stepped up on the porch and lifted a finger to ring the doorbell, laughed at herself, opened the door, and went on in.

She hadn’t expected Alec to greet her in the living room. Apparently, her imagination had taken on the same kind of life it did when she used to write scripts. Details she never planned materialized out of the ether, bits and pieces coming together from her subconscious to make the scene feel more real.

For most of her teenage life, Alec had served as her step-father. Wasn’t till the very end she learned he had really been a werewolf planted into her mother’s life by Otto Dolan with the hope she would someday lead the way to Craig Lockman.

Good plan, seeing as Jessie helped make it work.

Alec smiled at her. The smile looked real. While she’d never got along with him, she could never claim she had the slightest clue the evil inside of him. She hated him like any kid hated their stepfather—not because they’re monsters, but because they try to tell you how to live.

“Hey, Alec,” she said.

“Hey, yourself. You looking for your mother?”

Jessie nodded. “She home?”

His smile curled downward. He shook his head with his eyes rolled back into his head like Jessie was the dumbest kid he’d ever met. “You really think it would be that easy?”

“Girl can hope.”

“She isn’t here, Jessie. She’s gone. You and your dad made sure of that when you vaporized her soul in the artifact.”

Jessie shook her head, trying to imitate his
You are so dumb
look. “A soul isn’t a thing, dweeb. It’s an essence. It can leave traces of itself behind.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, really? How come you know so much about souls?”

The smile felt like a good stretch after a long nap, satisfying as hell. “Because I have a few million of them hanging out inside of me.” She made a gun with her hand, pointed at Alec, and dropped her thumb like the hammer while making a soft
pew
sound.

Like mist in a shaft of sunlight, Alec evaporated.

She strolled through the house from room to room and found no sign of Mom. Of course, Alec had it right. Finding her here would be too easy. She had to…go lower somehow.

Well, duh.

When she found herself standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement, she thought of Ryan. She wondered how much time had passed outside of her. Barely a breaths worth based on her experience. The reason she thought of Ryan was because it was his basement they cowered in as the ghost stalked them after killing Ryan’s mother.

Basements were good places for ghosts.

As she descended the stairs, the staircase itself grew longer. The steps turned from linoleum tiles to dusty, cracked stone. The smell of mold and ancient grout replaced the lilac air freshener Mom used to be obsessed with spraying everywhere. By the time she finally reached the basement floor, all signs of her familiar house had passed away behind her.

She stood in an open chamber that reminded Jessie of Kress’s, only this one was shaped like an octagon instead of a circle, and the walls looked like the inside of a desert cave, sandstone covered with pictographs or mortals doing battle with monsters. Some of the monsters Jesse recognized. A few looked like the real her. Then there were the giant dogs, the green men depicted as tall as they were wide with giant square teeth and fiery orange hair.

Other things looked like nothing she’d seen yet, and she was glad for it. Especially the thing that looked like a ten-foot tall Easter Bunny, only with fangs instead of buck teeth wielding a blade that looked like a meat cleaver for the Green Giant’s not so jolly older brother.

“You came.”

Sitting cross-legged in the center of the octagonal cave, the old soul that had given her the useless advice the last time she came down looking for some mojo to help Kress and his Return hurry it along a little.

“This time,” he said, “you came for the right reason.”

“You reading my mind?”

“Our minds occupy the same space.”

“Good point. But then, how come I don’t know what you’re thinking?”

He smiled. “Because I have created my own space.”

“You made your own space in my…wherever? Kinda rude, don’t you think?”

“We’re all trapped here. What choice do we have but to chisel out a place of our own.”

Jessie crossed her arms and cocked her hip. “You talk an awful lot of sense for someone whose best line was
The Chosen must choose
. What happened to all the cryptic?”

His wrinkled old eyes dipped. He sighed. “So you haven’t chosen.”

“Chosen what? I’ve never been given a choice in anything since this whole thing started. Shit, since the second Craig opened his door and found me standing on his porch, he’s been barking orders at me. Then came the prophecy, and that pretty much locked me out of any choice. I’m the Chosen One. I don’t get to choose. I was chosen. You dig?”

The little old man giggled. “Your fire. So warm in such a chilly place.”

“So it’s cold in me? You’re complaining about the temperature of my soulspace. Really?”

“Oh, no,” he said, still chortling. “I gave up complaining four centuries ago.”

Jessie snorted. “Then what do you do for fun?”

His laughter turned brittle, then broke. He folded his hands as if he meant to pray and pressed a knuckle to his lips. He stared into space a while. Jessie thought he had zoned out for good. When he finally spoke, it startled her.

“You won’t find her here.”

A tremor ran through Jessie. She made fists with hands that didn’t really exist, yet she could feel her nails cut into her palms. “There’s got to be something left.”

He shook his head. “The one named Gabriel was a very powerful spirit. Not alone, of course. But his ability to chain the powers surrounding him, use them as if they were his own… I was born in another millennium, yet I have never seen such a thing.”

What tasted like turpentine filled Jessie’s mouth. Her stomach squeezed down to a knot. “You sound like you admire him.”

“Admiration is the face on the coin opposite fear.”

“Oh, good. We’ve got the fortune cookie philosophy back.”

“Your anger won’t change what is real.” He unfolded his legs and stood. This stooped, ancient looking man moved as lithely as a yoga instructor.

Jessie had to remind herself that he was merely a representation of an old soul.

He approached her, rested a hand on her shoulder. His breath smelled like a damn fortune cookie. “The reason I explained the magnitude of Gabriel’s power wasn’t to brag on his behalf, it was to marvel at the strength of your mother. To hold him, to pull him free…” He shook his head. The way his breathing turned unsteady made Jessie’s heartbeat pick up.

“So…what? She was really the Chosen One? That’s the end of the prophecy. And I’m stuck being a plain old, ugly vampire?”

He hung his head. “Until you can get past your self-loathing, you will never see the truth.”

She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t need a fucking therapy session. I need an answer. How do I save him?”

“Who?”

“Ryan. My boyfriend. The kid who’ll never live a normal life because he put himself between me and a damn ghost.” She lanced a finger in the soul’s direction. “Which, to me, isn’t much different than you.”

“You made your way all the way here to help one boy?” The wonder in his voice made him sound at least a few thousand years younger than his real age, though not quite a kid at Christmas.

“I came here to find my mom so she could help. But, yeah. I want to…cure him, I guess. I want to give him his sanity back.”

The old man shook his head. “You’ve come to the wrong place.”

The cave around them wavered. The anger boiling in her begun to dismantle the visual construct she’d created in herself. A deep breath didn’t help much with the acidic roiling in her belly. “She’ll help me. I know she will. And some piece of her still has to be here.”

“You haven’t listened to—”

“Because it’s bullshit. My mom wouldn’t leave me. She would never leave me.”

Either the tears or the breakdown in her imagination turned her surroundings to a blur. She turned away from the old man, couldn’t stand to look at him another second. What was he anyway, but a cliché guiding spirit out of some lame ass sword and sorcery B-movie. She could write better material than this.

“She was very powerful,” the old man said to her back. His creaky voice grated, sent an itchy cringe up Jessie’s shoulders and neck. “But she had to use everything to take him away. If she’d left anything behind, so would she have left Gabriel within you.”