Darkness Returns (6 page)

“Jessie?”

Had her magic already reached him without her having to touch him?

“Yeah, Ryan. It’s me.”

Snap.
The clarity broke. A red-faced rage dropped in its place like a mask. He let loose a primal growl and launched himself at Jessie, hands out in front of him, fingers curled into claws.

She had vampire reflexes. She could have easily dodged him. But shock planted her in place. He raked his hands across her face—one, two, one—three swipes before she finally scrambled backward. She could feel the rents in her makeup where Ryan’s fingers had scraped through. Flesh colored clumps of goop stuck to his fingertips. If his eyes managed to go any wider or more horrified, they might have popped from their sockets.

On top of the damage from Ryan’s clawing, Jessie’s tears further melted the makeup, turning it into sticky paste around her eyes and down her cheeks. She felt as if her face had broken, and someone had tried to glue it back together.

A strangled hiccup popped from Ryan’s gaping mouth. He looked from the gobs of makeup on his fingers to Jessie’s face and back again. “She will ruin everything.”

Jessie reached out to him. “Ryan, wait—”

He screamed, an ear-stabbing shriek that buzzed in the small room like the cry of a jet engine. He backed away until he had flattened himself against the wall beside the desk, pushing up on his toes, hands splayed against the wall and smearing the makeup over the industrial gray paint.

So now he saw the truth.

She was the
beast woman
.

He had suffered enough. He didn’t need to look at her like this. Time to heal him and get the hell out of there. She closed in, ignoring the whimpers this brought from him. She pressed the bloody tips of her fingers to his forehead, closed her eyes, and willed the madness out of his mind.

The air crackled. The smell of ozone filled the room. She felt the magic lifting toward a climax like a culminating orgasm—something she had experienced only once in her life by the hand of the boy she was now trying to save.

Then a dark chill grew in her gut and spread like an ink cloud. Her whole body filled with the cold. The electric prickle of her magic sputtered.

Went out.

Like a shorted circuit.

Just like that.

Gone.

Nothing left but the cold that stuffed her as if she were a scarecrow made with frozen straw.

Ryan screamed again.

Jessie’s eyes fluttered open. She pulled her hand away, leaving crooked streaks of her blood across his forehead like botched warpaint. Ryan’s mouth opened wide enough that Jessie could see his tonsils quiver as he screamed and screamed.

The sound of the door banging open behind her. A pair of strong hands gripping her by the arms, pulling her back out of the room.

Ryan’s wild gaze locked on a point over Jessie’s shoulder. His screaming stopped at once. “You know,” he said.

“What do I know?” Craig asked slowly. Jessie could feel his breath against her neck.

“She has to be stopped.”

“Who?”

“The lady with the light hair.”

“Do you mean—”

Ryan slapped his hands over his ears. “No more questions. No more. Nononononono…” His words broke apart into a fresh barrage of shrieking.

The next moments did not imprint themselves on Jessie’s memory. She went from watching Ryan scream as Craig dragged her out of the room to finding herself back in the van, speeding out through the front gate.

“That went sweet,” Mica said from the back.

Craig said something, but Jessie didn’t hear it. The sun visor still hung down, exposing the mirror. Jessie caught a glimpse of herself. Her makeup had turned to a gooey mess, but enough had cleared so that she could see her real skin underneath. Her ugly, gray and black-veined skin.

Gabriel was gone.

He had taken the bulk of her power with him.

But one thing had not changed.

She was still a monster.

Chapter Six

“He was talking about Teresa,” Lockman growled, feeling his temper coiling in him like a strike-ready viper. It took a fair amount of will to keep from reaching across the desk and throttling Kress.

“The lady with the light hair?” Kress rubbed at the pepper-colored stubble on one cheek. “That tells you he meant Teresa Stevenson? Your old partner, one mortal woman, stands to foil The Return?” He made a face. “Seems far-fetched.”

“Then you’re an idiot. She has all the same training I do, the same skill set. She’s more dangerous than you think.”

“I’m not doubting she’s dangerous. I just don’t see how she could threaten the prophecy. She’s not one of the Dolans, after all.”

Since barging into the office immediately upon their return, Lockman had remained on his feet. A sudden weariness dropped over him. He gave one of the chairs in front of Kress’s desk a glance, but fought the urge to settled into it. In fact, he would refuse to relax at all until Kress got it in his head that they needed to focus their attention on reining Teresa in. Sometime after their falling out at the Texas compound, Teresa had suffered a breakdown or something. The weight of what had happened to her sister bore down on her harder than Lockman had realized.

Lockman made fists and leaned on his knuckles on Kress’s desk. “She could come after Jessie.”

“Assuming she could penetrate our facility, which is ludicrous and you know it, why would she do that?”

“It’s hard to explain. She sees Jessie as a threat.”

Kress spread his hands out to either side of him. “With Gabriel out of the picture, that threat’s been neutralized. Your friend’s connected. She must have heard about our victory on that front.”

Lockman couldn’t see how Kress could call it
our
victory, when it mostly belonged to Kate. But he wouldn’t quibble on that now. “Gabriel isn’t the issue. Teresa holds a personal grudge against Jessie. It clouds her judgment. And from what I saw in New Orleans, I’m worried she’s looking for an outlet for a lot of pent up rage over what happened to her sister.”

“You honestly believe she’s a credible threat to Jessie?”

“I think she’s smart, determined, and has become unpredictable. I think it’s better to know where she’s at, then to have a wildcard on the loose, distracting us from our real work.”

Kress nodded. “Fine.” He folded his hands and rested his elbows on the edge of the desk. “But I want to make something clear. Something you keep tending to forget.”

Here it came. Lockman rolled his eyes. “You’re in charge. I know.”

“You can’t come storming my office every time an operation doesn’t go your way.”

The coiled viper inside Lockman hissed. “That trip to the hospital was a clusterfuck and a half. And totally unnecessary. We already knew Teresa was a threat. We didn’t need to go ask a crazy kid about it and put my daughter through hell in the process.”

“We don’t
know
anything. I still haven’t bought into your assumption the boy meant Teresa. There are plenty of ladies with light hair in the world.”

“Are you playing dumb to prove a point?”

Kress’s eyes flared. He sat up straight. His lips formed a small O, as if he meant to whistle. Lockman could feel Kress’s gaze like a physical force pressing against his own eyes. “Mr. Lockman,” Kress said with a rasp. “You do not realize who you’re talking to.”

All at once, the viper uncoiled and slithered away like frightened prey. A tremor rippled through Lockman. Water filled his eyes. His stomach felt empty and loose. He felt…afraid. But he couldn’t pinpoint a source of this fear. He’d been on the receiving end of a lot harder stares than Kress’s. The man was in good shape, but he didn’t pose any real physical threat to Lockman. It was almost as if his emotions had been turned by a switch.

Before he could get a handle on the sudden change, Kress tilted his head slightly, and another emotional shift came over Lockman.

His head filled with image’s of Kate’s dead body, the knife in her chest, all the blood… Tears leaked from his eyes. His body felt like too much weight to carry. He almost dropped to his knees.

Kress lifted his chin.

Delirium rushed through Lockman’s blood. He burst into laughter. Gosh, what a goofy look Kress had on his face. Never mind that. What was really a laugh riot was Lockman’s whole life. He wasn’t even a real person, just a quilt of souls sewn together and forced into a terrorist’s body. And his daughter was a teenaged vampire, for Christ’s sake. That was the stuff of sitcoms.

His abs began to burn from all the laughing. He couldn’t stop. How ridiculous! Everything seemed so damned funny.

Kress relaxed his posture. As soon his shoulders drooped, Lockman stopped laughing. For a moment, he couldn’t feel anything, stood in an emotional void, a life-sized doll with a hollow in his plastic chest where his heart should be.

He didn’t need emotion in order for his intellect to work out what had just happened, though. And when it did, the viper returned to its nest in Lockman’s gut. Somehow, Kress had the ability to manipulate another’s emotions. “What the hell are you?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Kress said in a monotone, as if tinkering with others’ emotions disabled his own for a moment. Some verve quickly returned to his voice. “I won’t know what I am until I can go back to where I belong.” He smiled without a trace of sincerity. “I think you’ll agree I’m something special, though. You might want to consider that the next time you question my authority.”

Lockman felt the cool touch of genuine fear. The famous movie bad guy looked a whole lot different now. “What you just did to me,” Lockman said. “You can do it to yourself, too, right?”

“Now you know the secret to my theatrical success.” Kress rubbed his temples. His face turned sour. “You have new orders, Mr. Lockman. Track down your friend and make sure she stays out of trouble. Detain her if you think it’s necessary. But if she truly is a major threat, I’d rather you take more permanent measures.”

The suggestion made Lockman stammer for a second. “She might have stepped off the rez, but she’s still one of our own. I’m not going to execute her.”

Kress sighed. “I’ll rephrase. If she truly poses a threat to the Chosen One, then I order you to kill her. We can’t have some rogue agent’s emotional baggage threatening the course of prophecy.”

Lockman clenched his jaw. He turned on his heel and marched out of the office before he said anything that might provoke Kress to start playing with his emotional dial again.

Mica sat at a desk in the main office space. She stared openly at Lockman, her eyes following him as he passed, that stupid skunk stripe of hers bright white under the harsh fluorescent lighting.

Nice crew you got yourself mixed up with,
he chided himself.

But he didn’t let himself feel too superior for long. He had plenty of rotten decisions on his own roster, all in the name of keeping the darker things at bay. That’s why he’d always referred to them as
darker
things, instead of just dark things. A world like this, darkness was a matter of degrees, and you aligned yourself with anyone who could keep the whole miserable planet from falling too deep.

Lockman shook his head as he exited the command center.

The new Agency already had him thinking like his old self. He hoped to God this Return thing played out. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could handle all the bullshit.

Chapter Seven

Teresa felt like she had put herself on a tour of past tragedies. First New Orleans. Now Vegas.

Wasn’t that long ago they had tried to recruit the Vegas wolves to join the army against the vamps. Considering what had happened to that army, the wolves were probably glad they’d turned down the offer, even though Craig’s daughter had made sure none of the wolves present at that meeting had life enough to do anything, ever again.

As she pulled into the parking lot of Bane Hotel and Casino, Teresa pictured that quivering, guts-on-the-outside thing that used to be a werewolf before Jessie aimed her mojo at him. Teresa’s stomach turned. She got quickly out of the car and breathed in a dry desert breeze through her nose. It eased her churning stomach, but did nothing for her twanging nerves. The clear night had a full moon hanging in it like a giant fluorescent bulb. Most of the stars, however, barely shone through the constant city lights. The dry air sucked the moisture from her nostrils and left her tongue feeling like sandstone against her palate.

She pressed a hand against the bulge under her jacket for comfort.

This is the worst idea you’ve ever had.

But it was the only idea she had left.

She strode into the hotel lobby. The generic ping and jingle that overwhelmed every casino lobby in Vegas assaulted her ears. She winced. Cigarette smoke made her eyes water. Vegas casinos, the last bastion of indoor smoking in the US.

Behind the din of slot machines and video poker, a bass beat thrummed in rhythm to a Lady Gaga song Teresa recognized but couldn’t name. Despite the modern music, most of the casino’s current patrons ranged from middle-aged to downright elderly. February must have been off season for the younger crowd the Bane typically catered to, but apparently nothing deterred the diehard retirees from sinking their pensions into penny slots.

Teresa threaded her way through the slots, then around blackjack tables, and finally into the poker room. Only two tables had games running. The table closest to the lighted archway that led into the room held a variety pack of Vegas tourists around it, from an aged hippy with long gray hair in a braid down the middle of his back to a brown-skinned little guy that looked young enough to be dodging school in order to gamble. All of them around that table wore the worst poker faces Teresa had ever witnessed.

The other game looked right, though. Three men and a woman besides the bow-tied dealer, all of them as relaxed as if they’d sat down to a home cooked meal instead of a high stakes card game. The men had thick hair and lean, muscled bodies. The gal had cold eyes with a starved look to them. All of them looked up from their cards and at Teresa when she entered.