Darkness Returns (35 page)

…all of
this.

“It’s time,” Jessie said.

Teresa wrinkled her brow and gave Jessie a
You just don’t get it
look. “Your right, sweetie. It’s time I put you down.”

Jessie held out her hands. They trembled. A shredded ribbon of doubt remained twined around her heart.

What if this didn’t work?

What if it sent her to some version of hell?

What if it did work and she got to stay?

That last was the most frightening question of all, because it mean going on in this world without the last person left who believed in her humanity.

Her father’s pale, unmoving face had twisted in death and frozen in an agony Jessie had seen on him only once, when Mom died. Her damn eyes blurred up with tears again at the sight. Then she felt something cool across the back of her neck, like a comforting hand.

Teresa began her approach again, cocking her arm back over one shoulder so she could swing it down into Jessie’s chest.

Jessie wouldn’t give her the chance.

The soft touch on her neck worked to untie that last piece of doubt, especially because she knew it was Mom’s hand. The ancient soul had said there was nothing left of Mom inside of Jessie. He hadn’t said anything about the world at large.

Jessie spread her hands out to either side and looked Teresa square in the eye. “You ready for this?”

Teresa growled and charged at Jessie with the stake raised.

Jessie answered the attack with one word.

“
Return.
“

Because the ancient soul inside of her had finally convinced her. The Chosen had to choose, and she chose to believe.

I am the Chosen One.

Moving too fast, Teresa slipped in the blood and landed hard on her ass. For an instant, she stared back at Jessie with a question in her eyes. If Jessie had been texting on her iPhone, she would have framed the question with three simple letters—”WTF?”

But it wasn’t about her fall. It was about Jessie.

Jessie’s skin glowed. Her dark veins drew back like vines growing in reverse.

Un-growing
, Jessie thought as she watched her skin tone return to its former, mortal hue.

She felt a tug at her back as if by a giant and angry puppeteer pulling the strings on a puppet he no longer liked. Her wings ripped loose from her back and dropped to the floor. That wasn’t exactly right, either. They hadn’t been ripped from her. She had
shed
them.

She ran her tongue over her teeth and didn’t find the sharp point of either fang.

Was this possible?

She wondered only because it was natural to wonder such a thing. But she never honestly questioned it. She knew from the moment she said the word
Return
what it all meant, how it would go moving forward, and who she would be for the rest of her life.

They all thought I would trigger The Return.

I
am
The Return.

“Is she fucking dead yet?” a voice shouted down through the saferoom’s hatch.

The stake fell from Teresa’s grasp. It made a hollow
tock
against the bloody tiles. Her eyes filled with an intensity that bordered on the insane. “You…you’re cured.”

She could call it whatever she wanted, Jessie didn’t care. But it wasn’t a cure, it was a return, lowercase
r
, thank you very much. One return performed. Her first, but not her last by far. No, there was still no cure for vampirism, but the demon inside of her went to wherever demons belonged. So had Gabriel’s Millions of Ancient Voices. She listened for them inside herself and heard nothing but her own heartbeat and the hum of her mortal soul.

Trying to explain that to a freaked out Teresa, however, would take too much time. An illustration would work better.

“Return,” she said and four of the six dead wolves in the room turned to a glowing blue mist and evaporated. The remaining two got the glowy mist treatment, but when the mist cleared, they were only a pair of mortal men.

Teresa’s gaze roamed from one end of the room to the other as if Jessie had simply hid the missing wolves instead of sending them…well…back. But when Teresa’s eyes returned to Jessie, she held up a hand, palm out. She understood perfectly now.

“Wait,” Teresa said.

“Return,” Jessie answered, and the mist puffed around Teresa and then fell away.

She didn’t look any different, but they both knew her sense of smell wasn’t so keen anymore. Nor would she be running on all fours again.

Teresa’s eyes watered. One tear ran down her cheek. She turned her wet gaze from Jessie, to Craig, and back to Jessie. “What have I done?”

Jessie fought back the urge to tackled Teresa and rip out her throat. As a mortal again, she didn’t have the tools for that kind of fight. Luckily, she had a whole rack of tools that did a fine job of killing things without a hint of mojo.

Watching her step to avoid stepping in as much blood as possible, Jessie went to the gun rack and pulled off a Browning 1911-22, the same kind her dad had first taught her to shoot with. Like circles. Everything coming back. Everything returning to its start.

She took aim with the pistol.

Once more, Teresa held up a hand and pleaded for her to wait.

“What the hell’s going on down there?” the grumpy dude outside the saferoom shouted. “I’m coming down.”

“Don’t,” Teresa called.

Too late. An extremely hairy guy dropped straight through the opening and landed in a crouch. His eyes scanned over the scene before him and he quickly shifted into a wolf and bound toward Jessie.

One hand still holding the gun on Teresa, Jessie reached out toward the oncoming wolf and said, “Return.”

In mid-leap, the wolf turned into an electric blue mist and then disappeared.

“Kinda neat,” Jessie said, trying not to notice how close she stood to her father’s ravaged corpse. “You can tell which ones are originals and which got turned by whether they disappear or not.”

“And now you can kill me in cold blood right now, no problem, huh?” Teresa asked.

“Cold blood? Fuck that. My blood is boiling.” She pointed down at her dad. “He was your friend. He fought with you,
for
you. And for what? Because of your sister? You would use your sister’s memory like that to justify killing one of your best friends?”

Jessie thumbed the hammer back on the pistol.

“I should just kill you.” And her finger curled real tight on the trigger like she meant to. “But I think your furry friends upstairs are waiting for some answers.”

Teresa’s eyes widened. “You can’t make me go up there.”

“What the fuck?” a new crabby voice called down. A female this time. “What did you do to Paul?”

“Do not come down here,” Teresa said.

“What the hell’s going on? I can smell your fear clear out here. Just fucking kill them already.”

Jessie took the pistol in both hands and spread her legs in the proper shooter’s stance Craig had taught her a gazillion years ago on some other planet. “I need to say goodbye to my dad and I’d rather not have you hanging around for it.”

“Jessie, if I’d known—”

“None of us knew, you bitch. But some of us believed. Craig believed. In me. Now here I am, finally back to my old self, and he’ll never know. He’ll never know that everything he fought for came true today. And that’s on you.”

“If I go up there, they’ll know I’ve changed. They’ll kill me.”

“Not seeing how that’s my problem.” The cold edge in Jessie’s voice even freaked herself out a little. Not that Teresa didn’t deserve it. “I want alone time. Maybe if you talk fast enough, you can tell them I’ll return them if they want.”

“What do you mean,
If they want
? You’re going to give them a choice?”

“As long as they don’t force me to make it for them.”

Teresa shook her head. “I thought The Return was supposed to send them all back…poof.”

Jessie snorted, rolled her eyes. “You should know by now that nothing in this world is
poof.
Everybody’s predictions and prophecies don’t matter. As my step dad and fellow ex-werewolf used to say,
You git what you git and you don’t throw a fit.
“ Jessie shrugged. “This is what we git.”

“If that’s true, you have a lot of work ahead of you.”

“Let me worry about that.” She jerked her head toward the open hatch and steadied her aim with the gun.

Teresa took her sweet time getting to her feet, like a three year-old putting off bedtime by moving in slowmo. Jessie remembered doing that with Mom. Thinking about that sent a pang of loss tolling through her, and reminded her of the loss she had yet to face.

When she reached the ladder, Teresa turned back to Jessie. She had tears streaked all down her face. “I’m sorry.”

“Not yet.”

Teresa set her jaw and climbed up the ladder.

Then the shouting started. Then growling and barking and frantic pleading from Teresa as she fumbled for words to describe what just happened. She didn’t make it far into her explanation when her words turned to screams.

Jessie waited, forcing herself to listen to Teresa die, not for the sake of any kind of satisfaction—Jessie actually found herself feeling sorry for the woman—but because that was when the wolves would come down for her.

When they did, she returned them all.

Only one of them remained on this plane. A woman, actually a girl not much older than Jessie. When she looked down at her mortal body and realized she couldn’t turn back into a wolf, she looked at Jessie with tears in her eyes and said, “Oh, my God. Thank you. Thank you.”

After the girl climbed out the trapdoor and Jessie was finally alone, she looked down at her dead father and wept.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Jessie knelt beside her dad’s body and cradled his head in her lap. She cried and shivered, the opening in the back of her shirt that had accommodated her wings letting in the cold, recycled air of the saferoom. She stroked Lockman’s hair, sniffling, eyes burning from tears and the terrible visions that refused to stop playing—the sight of her father getting ripped open by wolves.

“I’d started to think you were immortal,” Jessie said, voice thick and stupid sounding to her ears. “I always envisioned us as the last ones standing. I never thought they could get to you…”

Her throat closed as sobs made her whole body hitch.

Could it really end this way, after she had finally reached the potential everyone had predicted for her, received a power that could really make a difference to the world? No more fighting. No more dangerous operations. Just a simple command.

Return.

A morbid pull wanted her to look down at the damage the wolves had done to him. She fought it and stayed focused on his face. The more she ran her hands through his hair and stroked his forehead, the less agonized his expression looked. A trick, of course. Her mind’s way of helping her cope. She accepted the gift without regret. She wanted to form a final picture in her mind of her father that she could carry happily—or at least somberly—for the rest of her life.

Trying to use magic to…raise him…crossed her mind. She knew it wouldn’t work. Perhaps she could power a shambling representation of Craig, a gutted Frankenstein monster, but she couldn’t fix him for real. In fact, she wasn’t sure what kind of magic she still possessed. Her vampirism cured, the souls set free, she was just a kid again. Well, except for the tiny detail of her ability to return supernaturals to their natural place.

One of her tears dripped onto Craig’s face.

If this were a movie, the tear would begin to glow, the damage to Dad’s body would knit itself closed, and his eyes would flicker open, at which point he’d smile and say something pithy that made them both laugh, then hug, then swelling background music to indicate to the audience that the end of the movie had arrived and everyone was going to live happily ever after.

None of that, of course, happened.

She used her t-shirt to wipe the tear away.

“I can’t do this without you. I don’t want to.”

She felt a cool pressure on her shoulder.

When she turned her head, she saw nothing but the rest of the saferoom, yet the pressure remained on her shoulder.

“Mom?”

The pressure increased for too brief an instant, then faded.

Jessie gritted her teeth. As much as she would have liked to stay her with her father until she starved to death, she didn’t need vamp senses to hear the shouts and screams throughout the rest of the facility.

She placed a hand on her father’s cheek. “I have to go now.”

He would understand. He would have kicked her out of the saferoom himself at this point.
Quit yer stalling and go evaporate those wolves
, he would have said.

She felt another ghostly pressure, this time on her other shoulder. This touch felt firmer, warmer. But when she looked for a source, she came up empty again.

“Dad?”

The warm pressure turned to a squeeze, then it, too, dissipated so that she had to wonder if she really felt anything or she was having a breakdown.

No. No breakdowns. You’ve now lost both your parents, but you lost them in a fight that put you on the winning team. Honor them. Do the work you’re meant to do.

She gently rested Craig’s head back on the floor. She stood, wiped the tears out of her eyes with the heels of her hands. She gave herself one last snuffle and a final goodbye, then she climbed out of the saferoom, spent only a glance at Teresa’s body and rushed out of the room when she found her detached head—dead eyes wide and horrible—staring at the ceiling as if she saw something up there right before the wolves ripped her head from her shoulders.

That image burned into her soul, Jessie got straight to work.

Four hours later, Jessie had returned every wolf in the building. Many of them disappeared, but a surprising amount returned to mortal form. Some thanked her like the girl in the saferoom. Many tried to attack her, but with those from the Agency free of the werewolf threat, the attacks were short lived.