A Perfect Darkness

“M
r. Bromley, there's no need to fling yourself out of the window.” Amy Shane covered her cockatoo's cage with his obnoxious bright orange blanket before he started squawking, like he did whenever she was on the phone. “I have a ninety-five percent retrieval rate.” Her love life might be nonexistent, and her plan to eat healthier was feeble at best, but she was damned good at saving people's data.

“My presentation is on that drive,” her client said. “My only copy, I know, I'm an idiot for not backing it up, and then to drop it—” He let out an agonized groan.

She returned to the second bedroom of her apartment, cracked open the laptop case and studied the damp interior. “And how did it end up in a pool—You know what, I don't want to know. Is there anything else on the drive that you need?”

“There's one folder titled ‘Upcoming Issues' that's rather important. Just business documents, but of a, ah, sensitive nature.”

She knew he was lying about the folder's contents.
Whatever it contained held significant emotional relevance…and the potential to embarrass him. She didn't want to know that. She didn't want to see the green glow that told her he was hiding something.

She plugged the hard drive into her computer. “I'd better get working on it.”

“You'll call—”

“The moment I know what we've got,” she assured.

“I hope so,” he said, his voice and glow emanating anxiety; if she didn't retrieve his data, she might have to do some suicide counseling. Wouldn't be the first time.

It was bad enough seeing people's glows—what she later learned were called auras—when she was physically with them. That had started when she was a kid, seeing her teacher's yellow glow and knowing the woman was sad, and then doing the really dumb thing and trying to comfort her. Which freaked the woman out and taught Amy a more important lesson than math or reading: seeing colors that indicated people's moods or intentions was weird.

In the last few years they'd gotten pervasive. Everywhere she went she saw that smoky mist. Oh, how people lied and hid their pain, and how that deceit made her distrustful. That was why she worked out of her home and hardly saw anyone. Except now she was seeing glows through the frickin phone!

She uncovered Orn'ry's cage. He made happy clicking sounds, and his crown of white feathers sprang to attention when she opened his door. “Okay, you can come into my office now.” She held out her arm, and Orn'ry climbed aboard. She sat down at her worktable, and he climbed up to her shoulder. She liked working
to alternative rock cranked loud. For Orn'ry's sake she slipped on her headphones.

Orn'ry pecked at the earpiece. “Stop it,” she growled. Then he pecked her nose.
“Ow!”
She shooed him off, and he fluttered to his stand. He wasn't called ornery for nothing. That's how he'd ended up at the animal shelter where she volunteered. No one could stand him, and he languished, destined to become a breeder parrot. She couldn't bear that thought, and besides, she'd come to like the little bugger. More interestingly, he'd come to like her, too. She would have adopted half of the animals at the shelter if her apartment complex allowed more than caged pets.

A quick Internet search revealed that Mr. Bromley was a U.S. congressman. She returned to the drive. “Please don't let me find anything really scuzzy on here,” she said to herself. “I don't want to be known as ‘the whistleblower' all over CNN and the Internet.” Her policy was never to read clients' files unless something screamed,
Sick and illegal.
Fortunately that hadn't happened yet.

She reached for her mug of coffee amidst the clutter of computer parts. The few who saw her work space were always amazed that she could function in it. She told them she had a system, which was sort of a lie. It was more like, if everything was out in the open, she'd eventually find it.

An hour later she popped chocolate-covered cranberries into her mouth as she unearthed bits of data. “Come on, baby, oh, yes, that's it. There's the sensitive folder, but where's the presentation?”

Orn'ry always murmured when she talked to herself, which made her feel not so alone. She opened
Upcoming Issues
and found pictures and text documents with innocuous names. She double clicked on one, hands over her eyes, peeking through the cracks of her fingers. If it was something disturbing, she didn't want it seared into her subconscious.

“Yuck.” Well, she now had an idea of how the laptop might have ended up in a pool. At least the woman draped over a diving board wearing nothing but high heels was way older than legal age. She would bet that the woman was not the senator's wife, and had no interest in confirming her suspicion.

“Immoral maybe, but not creepy or illegal.”

Her body usually started craving sleep at about three in the morning, and at four her scratchy eyes said,
Enough!
Mr. Bromley was in California, and since she was in Annapolis, Maryland, she had a couple of hours in the morning to jump back on it before his meeting.

She was going to transfer Orn'ry to his cage, but he was asleep, his shoulders hunched, the feathers at the side of his face fanning his beak. She left him there and dragged herself off to bed.

She was never too tired to hope for one of her dreams, the ones that woke her in panting breaths and damp with perspiration. A man whose face was always in shadow, touching, kissing, loving her. The same man in every dream. She grinned. Even in her dreams she wasn't a slut.

She
had
seen his body, all of it, lean but muscular, olive skin, with a head full of dark, soft waves. In these dreams, she loved and was loved, there as never in her life. She was safe to let herself go. The only way he would break her heart was if she stopped dream
ing about him. Four months ago she had never felt an orgasm. Now she experienced the shattering of her body and soul every night. What an amazing realization, that she could physically experience what she dreamed about.

She slipped through the hypnagogic state of sleep, where she sometimes heard voices, and dove into REM. Deep in an ordinary dream, her eyes snapped open, her heart thrashing against her ribs. She hadn't heard a thing, couldn't see a thing, but she knew someone was there.

Her second thought—after,
Oh, shit, someone's in my room!
—was:
What can I use as a weapon?
Clock. Brass table lamp with sharp corners. Bingo. Her hand darted out to grab it and collided with hard flesh. Before she could scream, he was on top of her, his hand over her mouth.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he said.

Oh, God, he was going to rape her and kill her and cut her up in pieces.
This can't be happening. Fight! Kick!
But he was on top of her, his weight pinning her down. Panic squeezed her chest.

He shifted to the side, reaching for something. She heard a
click
. Knife? Gun?

Light flooded the room. She blinked in the sudden onslaught. Her eyes focused on the man in front of her. Gorgeous, with gray-blue eyes and brown hair, he didn't look like a crazed rapist killer. But that didn't ease her fear any more than his words of assurance did.

It hit her then. He made no attempt to hide his face.
That's because he doesn't intend to leave a witness.
Whimpering sounds emanated from her, as though
a small animal was trapped in her chest. She quieted them, because, dammit, she wasn't going to go down like a mouse beneath an eagle's talons.

He leaned close. A gold cross on a chain dangled before her eyes. The sight of it was surreal. A cross on a killer. If he tried to kiss her, she'd spit in his face or, better yet, tear off his lip with her teeth.

His mouth hovered just above her cheek. He spoke in a low, soft voice that would have been soothing if he wasn't a terrifying intruder. “Amy, my name is Lucas, and there are things I need to tell you. I'm sorry, really sorry, I had to do it this way. I didn't have time to gain your trust. Am I hurting you?”

She'd swear by the concern in his eyes that he cared about her comfort. He pressed his hand over her mouth only as much as necessary. She shook her head. Her heart pounded so hard she thought it might explode.

“Good. I'm here to talk to you about your father's supposed suicide.”

Her brain scrambled to process his words. Her father's suicide.

Gunshot coming from her house!

Spray of blood.

Shallow breaths.

His eyes wide and fearful, pleading,
Save me. Save me.

“Daddy, no!”

Twenty years ago, but it felt like yesterday. She'd found him in the garage that horrible day after hearing the gunshot on her way home from school. The man who claimed he loved her killed himself where he knew she'd find him. Her sole provider made no arrangements for his five-year-old's care.

The bigger question was, why was this possible rapist and murderer talking about her father's suicide? Unless he wasn't a rapist and murderer. She must be crazy, because he didn't feel like either. That's when it hit her: his glow wasn't like any she'd seen before. Not one color but all of them, like static on a television.

Wait a minute. Had he said her father's
supposed
suicide?

He obviously saw her curiosity. “If I release you, you won't scream? I'd rather not continue the conversation like this.”

She shook her head, and he freed her. She scrambled away from him, feeling the grooves of the headboard bite into her back when she slammed into it.

He sat back on her bed, his hands on his jean-clad thighs. The hair at his neck curled from dampness. “You don't have to be afraid of me.”

She almost laughed. “A stranger breaks in, and I'm supposed to be
cool
with that?”

“Amy, we're not strangers.”

The way he looked at her, with a soft smile and his gaze reaching right into her soul, corkscrewed her stomach. She pushed beyond that puzzling statement. “What do you know about my father?”

He reached over and turned on the stereo in her alarm clock. Evanescence's powerful song, “Bring Me to Life,” filled the room, the tune she'd cued to wake her this week.

“Why'd you do that?” she asked, her words crammed together. What was he going to do that he didn't want anyone to hear?

“Just in case someone is listening.”

“The walls aren't that thin.”

“Listening equipment can pick up conversations from over a hundred yards away, through walls thick or thin.”

“Listening equipment?”

He leaned forward, and for a bizarre moment she thought he was going to kiss her. His mouth grazed the shell of her ear and whispered, “My two friends, Eric, Petra, and I discovered that someone is watching us. They call us Offspring. You're one, too.”

“Me?” she choked out.

“It's how I finally found you. The Offspring we know about have two common links: we lived near Fort Meade, Maryland, during the same time period, and we each had a parent who died either by suicide or accident within a year's time.” He gave her a moment to absorb what he'd said, looking toward the window and the darkness beyond.

She pressed her hands to her temples, trying to make sense of it. “Someone is watching you? Me?” When he nodded, she asked, “Who?”

“We don't know. Probably some facet of government, which is why we can't go to the police.”

“Do you have any…proof?”

He looked toward the window again. “Not yet. We need to find other Offspring so we can put the facts together and figure out what's going on. You're the first one we contacted.” He leaned close once more. “I know you have a lot of questions, or you will once you get your mind around all this. We need to meet tomorrow, somewhere we can talk more. I can't stay here much longer, in case they're watching you now. They may suspect I'd come here, which makes it dangerous for me, but I had to warn you. You can't tell anyone what I've told you.”

“Warn me about what?”

“Someone you trust is going to betray you, and someone is going to die because of that betrayal. It might be you.” She shivered at his warm breath caressing her ear as well as his words.

The depth of his concern baffled her. He looked at her in the way someone who had loved her for a long time might look at her. All she had to go on was the way her father looked at her, and that was such a distant memory. And he hadn't loved her enough after all. Except Lucas had said
supposed
suicide.

“How do you know?” she asked. “About this betrayal that's going to happen?”

“I'll tell you tomorrow, that and everything we know.” She saw the regret on his face when he said, “I hate that you're involved in this. We don't even know what ‘this' is yet.” He released a long breath. “Be prepared. Everything you think you know is going to change.” His body went rigid as he turned down the radio and cocked his head to listen.

“What is it?” Then she heard a soft
crack.

He looked at her, fear in his eyes. “Trouble. Protect yourself. Tell them I just broke in and I haven't told you anything. You're scared to death of me.” Footsteps pounded across her living room floor. He pulled a piece of paper from his jeans pocket and curled her fingers around it. “Hide this.”

Three men dressed in black burst into her bedroom. The man in front aimed a gun at them. “Freeze!”

Lucas's hands flew up as he stepped in front of her. Despite his surrender, the man squeezed the trigger. Not a loud report but a
whoosh.
A stream of blood squirted on Lucas's collar as his hand flew up to the
wound in the neck. A second man stepped into the room and walked toward Lucas, who barreled toward him with his head lowered and shoulders hunched like a bull. He knocked the guy against the door frame, the man's skull hitting the wood with a thud.