Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set (23 page)

CHAPTER 15

“I
was on the phone with Eggy, seeing if she'd had anything she could put together about this thing you said about the computer program,” Reg said from his place on the condo's deck. “She hasn't, by the way, though there were a couple cases of computers being possessed by former owners and stuff like that. Nothing about a program that makes hallucinations with physical manifestations, though. And then... Shit. That.”

He pointed. This time of year, there weren't many people on the beach, not like if it had been the height of summer, but you still had a few dog walkers and joggers and shell seekers strung out along the sand. All staring out at the way the ocean had retreated, not a normal low tide but much, much farther than that. Several sandbars had been exposed. Some flopping fish.

“Is it what I think it is?” Jase asked around the tightness in his throat. “Shit, Reg. It is, isn't it?”

Chelle, face drawn, touched his arm to turn him to face her. “What's going on?”

“It's what happens before a tsunami,” Reg said. “The water pulls back, way back, because the wave is gathering.”

“We don't get tsunamis in Delaware,” Chelle said.

Jase took her gently by the upper arms and looked into her face. “Chelle. Did you write about a tsunami?”

She let out a choked gasp. “Oh my God, Jase, I never wrote about it, but I did make some notes about it in one of the plotting folders. I never researched it or anything. It was a ridiculous plot point I was thinking of using to beef up word count. It never went anywhere—”

“But you put it in the program.” His stomach twisted, dropping.

She nodded and looked out again to the vast expanse of sand the retreating sea had left behind. “Yes. It was in there.”

“What did you do with the program?” Reg asked.

“I deleted it,” Chelle said.

Reg shook his head with a frown. “Right to the trash? You didn't run an uninstaller?”

“No. I didn't know I had to,” Chelle said with a look at Jase.

“Yeah, he wouldn't, either,” Reg said. “Shit. We have to do something about this. And fast.”

“We'll take my car. C'mon.” Jase grabbed his keys and headed for the steps, Chelle and Reg on his heels.

The gorilla stopped him at the bottom of the stairs with a single punch to the gut that sent Jase to his knees. With a roar, the ape then grabbed him by the back of the shirt and shook him until his teeth rattled. When his head connected with the wooden railing, everything went dark for a moment, though he could hear Reg and Chelle both shouting.

When he came to, it was under a stinking, sweating pile of fur. He couldn't move. His head hurt like a sonofabitch. He blinked, catching sight of Reg to one side and Chelle to the other. Together the two of them rolled the gorilla off Jase and got him to his feet.

“I think we're in some trouble,” Reg said. “Girl, you'd better start remembering every story you ever wrote.”

* * *

Watching Reg take down the gorilla with a single shot to the head had been awful. And it was all her fault, Chelle thought as she helped Jase take a seat on the bottom step. She'd done this.

“We have to get to my laptop,” she said. “Before anything else starts.”

“It's already started,” Reg said with a jerk of his chin toward the shadows coalescing at the end of the street. “More zombies. Shit.”

Chelle recoiled. “What? Oh. No. God.”

“At least they're the slow kind,” Jase said as he got to his feet with a wince.

“Of course they're the slow kind,” Chelle said. “That's the only kind of true zombie. The kind that can run fast, they're not zombies.”

Reg snorted and holstered his gun to grab up the car keys from the sandy grass where Jase had dropped them. “I'd love to debate this with you, but right now I think we'd better get our asses in gear.”

She hadn't thought about the mess a pack of shambling undead would make when a car ran through them, and she'd certainly never written about it in any great detail, but it was a giant, disgusting mess. Chelle watched them scatter in a spray of guts and teeth and rotten flesh, then waved away the sudden rainfall of glittering light that lit up the inside of the car and faded as they drove away.

“It's the same thing,” Jase said from the passenger seat. He'd argued with Reg about driving, but only for half a minute. He still looked as though he was hurting, and no wonder. An eight-hundred-pound gorilla had knocked him around like a rag doll. “If we shone the black light, we'd still see that glow. All the cases. Definitely from the program.”

“We'll get there in time,” Chelle said with more confidence than she felt.

She screamed, though, when the shrieking pterodactyl scraped its claws along the car roof, tearing open the moonroof to peer inside. Its long beak snapped, missing her by inches. Then it dropped a dog onto her lap.

The dog peed.

But at least it was alive.

Chelle was losing her mind. All of this, everything she'd ever written or researched or used in a possible plotline in the multitude of files and folders in that program—all of it was coming true. Right here and now as they drove through the streets of Bethany Beach.

Civil War soldiers fought robots in the town square. The totem in front of the police station had been toppled by a dead-eyed pack of dolls in lacy dresses that swarmed like a school of fish, devouring whatever lay in their path. A carousel horse galloped past, kicking up stones.

And the water, she thought. The water was coming.

“Drive over it!” she cried at the sight of an enormous snake stretched out along the street. It was consuming its own tail. She didn't remember ever writing about such a thing or even researching it, but there it was.

She was never going to write again.

By the time they got to the house, she'd broken out in a chill sweat. Hands shaking. Yet determined, she followed Jase and Reg out of the car and into her house, where she flipped open the laptop to find a black screen.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she breathed, dragging a finger along the trackpad. “Battery's dead. The program must've been sucking up power while we were gone. The charger's there on the chair—”

Reg found it and brought it over, plugged it in. The computer beeped, slowly coming to life. Chelle moved over so Reg could get at the keyboard, pulling up her trash can to get a look at the file.

“Where was it saved originally?”

“I found it when I was deleting some old letters and emails,” she said. “It was in my archives folder.”

“Got it.” His fingers flew over the keyboard.

At the front door, a dragon hissed, staring in at Jase, who let fly with a string of curses and jerked the curtains closed. He turned to them. “Guys, hurry it up.”

“No uninstall file,” Reg said. “But there's a bunch of junk left behind from when you deleted it. Do you have a cleaner program or something like that?”

“I don't think so!”

From far away came a rumble. The ground trembled. Chelle and Jase looked at each other.

“Hurry, Reg,” Jase said, too calm considering they were listening to the sound of the impending wave. “Hurry the fuck up.”

Reg slammed his fingers on the keyboard, then let out a triumphant shout. “Got it. Shit, yeah. Should've known from the start. It's a GOLEM, yeah? And how do you kill a golem?”

Chelle had no idea. She knew vaguely of the legendary monster but few details. Jase knew, though.

“Erase the first letter written on its forehead,” he said. “
Emet
becomes
met
.”

“Truth becomes death,” Reg said. “And...done!”

The front glass door exploded into a myriad of splinters. The dragon roared. Flame flooded the room.

But only for a moment, and then all that was left was that glittering light that slowly settled and faded, leaving the three of them staring at each other.

Reg held out the flash drive. “I changed the file name, which basically rendered the program inoperable. Crashed it. Then I saved it to this drive and uninstalled all of it from your laptop. But I'd wipe the hard drive if I were you. Do a complete reinstall.”

Chelle nodded. She still felt as though the world were tipping and sliding away beneath her feet, but at least they weren't being swept away by a wall of water.

“What are you going to do with the program?” she asked.

“Vadim will probably get Eggy to study it. And then destroy it,” Reg said. “Either way, it's going to be safe and can't cause any trouble.”

He caught sight of Jase's look and tucked the flash drive into his pocket. “Look, I'm going to go outside and grab a smoke while you two say your goodbyes.”

“You don't smoke,” Jase said.

Reg dropped a wink at Chelle. “Take your time.”

When he'd gone through the front door, she stood. Her palms felt sweaty, so she wiped them on the butt of her jeans. She cleared her throat.

“So. You're done, heading out of town right away, then?”

“I'll have to get to Florida and make my report,” Jase said.

Silence.

“And then?” Chelle asked, kind of hating herself for being the one to pose the question.

She was in his arms before she knew it. His big hands warm on the small of her back. His mouth, kissing her. Oh, how he kissed her.

“And then,” Jase said into the kiss, “I thought maybe I'd swing back up this way.”

Her fingers linked behind his neck as she tipped her face to his, smiling against his mouth. “Yeah? And then what?”

“I figured we could see about that happy-ever-after,” he told her. “Isn't that how this story is supposed to end?”

It was the best way a story could end, she thought and kissed him again and again and again.

* * * * *

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ISBN-13: 9781488004605

Bound by the Night

Copyright © 2016 by Harlequin Books S.A.

The publisher acknowledges the copyright holder of the individual works as follows:

Dark Heat
Copyright © 2016 by Megan Hart

Dark Dreams
Copyright © 2016 by Megan Hart

Dark Fantasy
Copyright © 2016 by Megan Hart

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