Darkest Hour (17 page)

She shifted from one side of the window to the other, trying every angle she could see, but the view didn’t change. There was nothing out there except plains. How was that possible? Where on Earth could they be?

She recalled the view from Kress’s penthouse and realized it had been exactly the same. She had been so preoccupied with the meeting and finding out what they wanted with her, she hadn’t noticed the strangeness. But the only difference between these views was that Kate’s sat at ground level. Only about four feet stretched from the bottom of her window to the grass below. So she could easily climb out the window, even if she had to break the glass.

But where would she go once out? There was nothing out there for hundreds of miles. Nowhere to even hide.

She backed away from the window, shaking her head. Had to be some kind of illusion. More magical trickery. Before she could think on it any more, she heard the soft click of the bedroom door opening. She spun around. Too fast. Dizziness piled onto her. The floor tilted under her feet. She kept just enough control of herself to stagger to the bed and flop onto the mattress instead of hitting the floor.

Mica hurried into the room and reached to help Kate.

Kate swatted her away. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Mica lifted her eyebrows. Her lips twisted to one side. Then she said, “Just got here, love. Haven’t heard a thing.”

With her cheek mashed against the bedclothes, Kate smelled detergent, a gentle, spring like scent that reminded her of the endless grassy plains outside. “Don’t give me that. I know you guys have me monitored.”

“‘Fraid you’ve got the wrong impression. This is your room. We don’t snoop on our people.”

Kate clung to the sheets. The whole bed seemed to corkscrew through the air like a wing-clipped jet plane. Any minute, she’d crash. Closing her eyes only made the spinning worse. “What do you mean
my
room?”

“It’s yours. Just like the clothes in the dresser, which you done a good job getting some on. You’re tougher than you look.” She scrunched her face. “But you’ve pushed too hard. Now you’re getting blood all over the sheets.”

Kate rolled her eyes back—she didn’t dare move her head—and saw the red smears across the sheets by her arm. The bandages barely did a thing to stop the blood flow now. Her arm looked as though someone had wrapped it in strips of gauze dipped in red paint.

“Let me help you get back to bed proper.” Mica bent to take Kate by the good arm.

Kate kicked out, her bare heel connecting with Mica’s hip.

Mica shuffled back and rubbed at the spot Kate had kicked. “Ow, there. What was that for?”

“Stay away from me.”

Mica tilted her head so that it lined up with Kate’s. “What in hell’d I do to you?”

A laugh bubbled out from Kate’s very core. Once loose, she couldn’t pull back. Her whole body shook with laughter. Each new burst jolted the pain in her arm and threw another spin through her head, but she couldn’t stop herself. It took some doing to speak through the laughter. “Are you serious?”

Mica stared at her, blank.

A hot rage cut through the laughter, stopping it dead. “You fucking killed me,” Kate screamed.

God, was she losing her mind? Her emotions spun almost as fast as her head. After the angry outburst, she felt her insides drop. The urge to cry overcame her. She clenched her teeth and squeezed the sheets in her fists, willing herself to keep the tears in. While she managed, a sob still coughed out between her lips.

Mica raised a hand to touch Kate, thought better, and folded her hands across her belly instead. “Easy, love. Take deep breaths. I’ll get someone to mind that bandage.”

“No.” Kate barely recognized her own voice. The taste of mucus filled her mouth. She hadn’t let any tears fall, but she was still crying, damn it. “I want out. All I want is to go home.”

“No you don’t,” Mica said. “Ain’t nothing to go home to. This is your home now.”

Each word made sense, yet Mica still sounded like she was talking gibberish. This can’t be her home. Why would she ever want to live with these people?

“You’re right pissed about us kicking your bucket then tipping it back straight. I get that. But don’t let all that go to waste.”

Kate looked at her arm again. Blood everywhere. It was hard to even see the bandages under it all. More blood rolled through the folds in the sheets. The fingers of that hand had turned numb, only the faintest tingle in the tips. Even if Mica held the door open for Kate and waved her on her merry way, Kate wouldn’t get far in this condition.

After what they had done to her, they expected her to still help them? Live here? Mica made it sound like a privilege.

The anger rose again and burned out the sobs clogging her chest. A new strength filled her. She pushed herself up to a sitting position and glared at Mica.

The ballerina music box on the dresser tinked to life, slowly at first, so that each pinging note did not quite add up to a song. Then faster, until the song became recognizable—music from
Swan Lake
.

Mica and Kate both turned toward the plinking music. The little ballerina twirled on top of the music box in an infinite pirouette.

“Are you doing that, love?”

“Me?” Kate’s heart pounded in her chest as if she had just quit after her three mile jog—a daily routine lost to her old life before Craig’s reentrance. The skin under all those bloody bandages prickled. “I can’t...”

Only she could. All at once, she knew she could. She could do more than that. She could—

The music box flew off the dresser as if kicked by an invisible foot. It sailed across the room and struck the wall. The box broke open at the hinge. The ballerina shattered. The pieces fell to the carpeted floor. The box played a last few, slow notes, then went silent.

“Well bend me over and fuck me sideways,” Mica said. “It worked.”

Kate turned to Mica. The dizziness was gone. She could stand. She did. “What did you do to me?”

“We woke up your mojo, sweets.” Mica stared at the debris from the music box as if it had religious significance. “Be damned if we didn’t.”

A sound pulsed in Kate’s ears, low and heavy, like a bass beat and a hum. Her heart continued knocking in her chest at a burst-worthy rate. She could smell her own sweat and blood. With only a thought, she pushed Mica up against the wall.

The drywall cracked around where Mica’s shoulders hit. She looked like she was struggling to move away from the wall, but she couldn’t.

Kate wouldn’t let her.

“Better take it easy, love. Mr. Kress won’t like you hurting his fave pixie.”

“I have power,” Kate said as both a question and a threat. All she had to do was think it, and she could hold this woman who had kicked a door off the hinges and across the room against the wall. “Now you’ll have to let me go.”

“You don’t get it.” Mica’s voice sounded strained, as if she couldn’t breathe. “You ain’t a prisoner.”

“Really? I can leave at any time?”

Mica’s face had turned red. Her cheeks puffed. Her eyes bulged. She didn’t answer.

Kate realized she was still “pushing.” She not only had Mica pinned, but she was crushing her chest. She tried to ease off, but found she couldn’t finesse this new power like that. As long as she kept pushing, she kept crushing. She had to stop all together.

When she did, Mica sucked in a massive breath that sounded like a howl going down her throat. On the exhale, she lifted a fist to her mouth and lurched toward Kate. Kate was too distracted by thoughts about this power she had to recognize what Mica meant to do. Then Mica opened her hand, palm up, and blew sparkling dust into Kate’s face.

Kate felt a rush go through her similar to the feel of going down the first hill on a rollercoaster. Her whole body seemed to lift right before she tipped backward. As she fell onto her back on the bed, she glimpsed her arm. The bandages had turned to ratted shreds and most of the blood had disappeared. A section of her wound was exposed. Some of the flesh had closed into a puckered scar.

Before she passed out, she tried to counteract the effects of the pixie dust using her new power, but she had no idea how to target such a thing. Pushing Mica back had been a primal act, intuitive. This last magical effort, however, used what remained of her blood and zipped up the rest of the wound.

She drifted off into pixie sleep with a canted smile on her face.

I have power.

Chapter Twenty-One

Scraps of the six hours they spent in the War Room trying to work out their next move ran through Lockman’s dreams. He might as well never have left the War Room, because he continued hashing things out in his sleep—if you could call it
sleep
. Since he had entered REM, technically he had slept. But when his alarm on his watch woke him at five the next morning, he didn’t feel the least bit rested.

He woke disoriented, heart rate accelerated, because he didn’t immediately recognize his surroundings. The brick walls. The exposed wooden beams across the ceiling. The faint scent of earth. Then his memory caught up. Last night he had come down into Jessie’s room, looking through her things in search of some sign of where Gabriel might have gone. He had found a diary under her mattress and felt no qualms about sitting down to read it. Not when it might lead to getting her back and safe.

He must have fallen asleep in her bed while reading it.

There weren’t many entries. She apparently didn’t care much for, or lacked the discipline to, keep at it regularly. She barely mentioned Gabriel throughout. Most of the entries talked about how much she missed her mother. A few mentioned her old boyfriend, who had been possessed by a ghost and driven insane by the experience. She still thought about him and using her power to bring him out of his insanity like she had with Kate, who had been possessed by the same ghost.

Not a single entry mentioned Lockman.

He didn’t know what to make of that, if anything. He had thought their relationship strong, despite typical disagreements. But not even any of those disagreements had made it into her diary’s pages.

He sat up and swung his legs off her bed. The diary plopped to the floor. It had still been in his lap. He picked it up and tucked it back in place under her mattress where it would wait for her return.

He wanted to head straight back to the war room, but took long enough to grab a couple pieces of toast with a fried egg between them from the mess hall. The mess hall had a team of gnomes working it seemingly 24/7. For some reason, all their names ended with the letter
z
. Gentz, Stutz, Kurtz... Adam had said that it was simply a gnome thing. No one besides the gnomes knew the significance, if any.

Lockman stuffed the last bite of his egg sandwich into his mouth as he entered the War Room. Adam was already there, staring at the fifty-inch touch screen mounted to one wall. The screen displayed a map of the US with known concentrations of vamp activity highlighted in a color that indicated severity. Green meant relatively average levels for those places that commonly had a vampire population—they were there, but you hardly knew it if you weren’t looking for them. Most of the highlights were this color. Yellow suggested heightened activity with potential to threaten local populations if left unchecked. About a half-dozen of these marked the map. It didn’t sound like much, but compared to before the vampire king’s rise and fall in New Orleans, this was far beyond normal. Especially the size of these highlighted areas, which meant large numbers as much as it did increased activity.

They had saved red for any area that might break beyond “high activity” into full-fledged epidemic. If any spot turned red, it meant the vamps had grown so bold and/or numerous as to reveal themselves to the civilian population. In other words, they had traded slinking in the shadows, stalking their prey, to feeding openly and walking among mortals without fear.

None of them expected to see any red on the map. That, after all, was their mission. To stop the vamps from ever achieving that level of dominance.

Lockman choked on that last bite of sandwich when he saw what Adam stared at.

Though small, a section of Alaska had gone red.

Adam must have heard Lockman come in, or the gagging sound he had made because of the sandwich. The ogre turned around showing a face a shade of green lighter than Lockman had ever seen on him before.

“Our team in Alaska...” Adam’s voice shook. He swallowed. Tried again. “We’ve lost contact. But our last transmission suggests the vampires discovered them.”

Lockman managed to choke down the toast and eggs. They left a horrible taste behind. “Why did it go red?”

“Last report indicates an FBI team sent to investigate the large amounts of missing persons was...confronted...by vampires.”

Lockman’s stomach roiled. He wished he’d never made that stop at the mess hall. “The vamps openly attacked federal agents?”

Adam nodded once. “We have no word on how the feds plan to respond or how much they know.”

“Either way, they’ll send backup. Eventually, they’re going to figure out what they’re dealing with. Then...” He trailed off. Who knew how mainstream law enforcement would react to vamps? There was a reason the Agency had been a
secret
branch of the government. Mainstream agencies and civilians couldn’t handle this kind of reality. Problem was, the Agency that had been built to deal with these threats, according to his old boss, had been disbanded. Odds were, they would throw more feds at the situation, maybe pull in military support. None of those guys were trained for this. None of them would survive.

Some of them would become the enemy.

The whole thing would have to end with the Pentagon somehow justifying a full-scale bombing on American soil. Of course, by the time the politicians finally came to terms with the need for such a thing, it would be too late. Vamp numbers would have swollen beyond containment.

The whole nightmare scenario played through Lockman’s mind and made him nauseous.

They had to stomp this out before it grew to that point. Plain and simple. “How long until they get sunlight up there?”