Darkest Hour (24 page)

The moment of truth.

Didn’t sound like an apt phrase to Lockman. More like the moment of craziness. His gut turned to stone at the mere thought of walking through the scientists’ contraption. His luck, they’d end up teleported to the moon.

No backing out now, though.

The machine hummed to life before an audience of over eight-hundred. Many of them hunkered in the trucks, the trucks running, plumes of blue exhaust blooming from their tailpipes. Others on foot around the transports, weapons ready, to form a perimeter as they arrived. Lockman remained on foot as well, Adam at his side. He and a few of the other ranking members would take up the rear. Another difference from the old days, where he would have found himself on the frontlines, one of the first to charge in.

Leadership had its rewards. Everyone else became cannon fodder for your protection.

“Maybe I should head in with the lead group,” Lockman said, knowing Adam’s response to that idea.

The ogre grunted. “Shut the fuck up.”

A more terse response than expected. Still, Lockman shut up. Too late to change the plan anyway. A flash, like lightning, filled the arch in the machine. Another several strobes quickly followed, accompanied by an ear-jabbing crack. Then the light became solid, filling the arch like a glowing sheet of glass. But unlike a window, Lockman couldn’t see anything on the other side. A complete whitewash stood between them and their destination.

Adam shaded his eyes against the light with a hand. “Move out,” he shouted.

The front crescent of troops on foot strode toward the light, about a dozen of them, and hesitated as a group for a second, turned to silhouettes against the glowing sheet stretched across the arch. The second passed. All twelve hefted their rifles and stepped through.

Lockman’s jaw ached; he clenched his teeth so hard.

No screaming. No flying sparks or explosions.

They passed through the light and disappeared.

Lockman and Adam exchanged a glance. Lockman could tell from the ogre’s face that, despite all his pep-talking and support of the plan, even he had expected something to go wrong.

“Looks like we’re good,” Adam said.

“We’ll see.”

The whole group continued to move forward through the arch. The transports next, driving through as if pulling into the Lincoln Tunnel. Still, nothing blew up or caught fire or so much as broke down. The scientists standing by to one side of the machine, including Obstermeyer, all wore self-congratulatory grins. Lockman expected them to start black-slapping each other any second.

When it was their turn to go in, Lockman never hesitated. If he could command all those ahead of him to go through, he could go through himself. Adam apparently felt the same way, as he tracked alongside Lockman up to the light, both of them squinting. They carried matching rifles. If Adam hadn’t been two feet taller and green, he and Lockman could have been twins.

The mermaid in her electric chair, the Golem, Dixon, and the shape shifter still in her little girl form—who in hell knew why—did not move forward as quickly. The hesitation told Lockman a lot more about their character than any of the arguments they’d had around the table in the War Room. Dixon’s fear didn’t surprise him. Those that shouted the loudest usually were trying to drown out the voice of doubt squawking in their souls. But Alexia and the shape shifter? The golem?

Did they sense something to make them pause?

Lockman didn’t have a chance to ask. He kept on moving and stepped into the portal, clutching his rifle a little tighter. He should have asked, though.

Because what he found on the other side changed everything.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Kate followed Kress’s directions on how to get out of the building, getting twisted around only once in the maze of hallways and stairwells on the way. Finally, she came to a hall that led to a set of double doors trimmed in gold and painted red. The hallway itself had no decorations, made of cinderblock walls painted a matching red to the doors. A red carpet with a golden pattern woven through it ran the length of the hall. The strangest feature, though, was how the hall looked at least a hundred yards long.

Had to be some kind of optical illusion. It made Kate dizzy to look at.

Where was she?

What was this place?

She shook off the questions and started down the hall. None of that mattered. She needed to get the hell out. End of story.

The hundred-yard walk ended in five steps.

One moment, the doors at the end looked tiny enough to fit a dollhouse. The next, Kate found herself almost smacking face-first into them. When she looked over her shoulder, the hall stretched at least a hundred yards behind her.

The doors themselves hummed like an old-fashioned humidifier. When she placed a hand on the surface, she felt a vibration buzz through her. She reached tentatively for the handle to one door, half-expecting to receive a shock. All she felt was that same vibration, though.

What happens when I open this door?

She recalled the endless grasslands seen from Kress’s penthouse and out her bedroom window. A trek through miles of nothing stretched before her. No wonder Kress had so happily told her how to reach the door. She had nowhere to go.

But she couldn’t stay here. Not any longer. Not after all they had done to her.

What about finding Jessie?

She clenched the door handle. She knew how to bleed. She could figure out the rest on her own. Maybe she could even use magic to somehow travel as well. Only one way to find out.

Kate opened the door.

The blare of car horns sent her heart into a mad rattle in her chest. The city smells—rotten trash, exhaust, a hotdog stand—blasted her, almost as harsh as the traffic noise. She recognized the view before her, but couldn’t reconcile it in her mind with the hallway stretching behind her. This was the view from the front door of her apartment building in New York.

People walked by on the sidewalk under the streetlights without any reaction to the woman at the top of the steps coming out of a hallway too long for the building she stood in, even those who glanced in her direction. But how could they not see...

Kate looked over her shoulder and gasped.

The hallway was gone. The doors had even changed. No sign of the place she had come from remained. She stood, by all evidence, in the doorway to the lobby of her apartment building.

A woman hugging a paper shopping bag climbed the steps and pushed past Kate and into the building. Kate watched her walk to the elevator and hit the button to go up. The woman must have sensed Kate staring. She glanced in Kate’s direction, then averted her eyes and hugged her bag tighter.

Finally, Kate stepped outside and let the door close behind her. She looked up and down the street and saw nothing to give her doubts she was back in New York, just another ordinary night in the Big Apple. Wherever Kress and his team lived, Kate knew it wasn’t in this city. All that grassland was probably part of the illusion as well. In any case, they had let her go home as promised. She was on her own.

Time to find Jessie.

The sharpest knife Kate owned she normally used for chopping vegetables. She sat on her couch with that knife on the coffee table in front of her. To sooth her nerves, she had Damien Rice playing on the used laptop she owned, the laptop speakers not doing Mr. Rice’s music justice, but it was all she could afford on a tight budget. Light reflected off the blade from the window. The apartment was otherwise dark.

Kate gazed at the blade and could see a strip of her face mirrored back to her, could see the worry in her own eyes. She didn’t know what to do next. Just cut herself and think about Jessie? It seemed there should be more to it. Some kind of ritual. But she had performed no ritual to defend herself against Kress’s team. She hadn’t needed anything special to force Mica against the wall except the slice in her own arm.

Yet Kress had been so ritualistic with her when he had “awoken her powers.” The room with the mural and the pentagram had some kind of significance. Hell, the pentagram had actually sucked the blood out of Kate to fill its grooves.

Kate thought about Jessie’s experiments with magic after her discovery of her own power. All that cutting on herself had led to more meetings with the school counselor than any magical results. Only when Jessie became agitated emotionally did she seem to have an effect.

Emotions had to be a component.

Then again, Kress had appeared so cool and reserved during her awakening.

That’s because he didn’t need his own emotion. He had yours. Your fear. Your pain.

Her heartbeat quickened remembering the experience. She took a few deep breaths and focused on the music. No, wait. If she wanted this to somehow work, she shouldn’t try to calm down—she needed to rile herself up.

So she focused on how she felt, naked on the marble floor, that hideous mural looming over her, the sudden slice in her flesh, the panic as the pentagram drew her blood out faster than her heart could pump it. The dizzying darkness right before death.

She started hyperventilating. This was a bad idea. But now that she had let the images and feelings from that experience flow back, she couldn’t staunch them. They played again and again in her mind. She could even smell her own blood though she hadn’t cut herself yet.

Her lungs squeezed. She swooned. The hyperventilating would make her pass out if she couldn’t regain control. She couldn’t waste this, though, either by passing out or trying to calm down.

She snatched the knife off the coffee table and pressed the blade to her wrist.

If this doesn’t work, you’ll either suffocate or bleed to death.

No choice. If she couldn’t find Jessie, she didn’t want to live anyway.

The blade cut through her flesh twice as easily as a head of lettuce. The blood flow was instant. The pain came a few seconds after the cut. The knife fell out of her hand and clattered to the floor, speckling the carpet with red.

Kate dropped back against the couch and squeezed her eyes shut. Through the repeating imagery of her awakening, she brought to mind a picture of Jessie. She focused in on Jess’s face. A face she hadn’t seen in so long. Tears ran down Kate’s cheeks. What air she managed to draw tasted like iron for some reason.

Jessie.

The picture of Jessie in Kate’s mind wept. She moved her lips, but no sound came from her mouth, like a TV show on mute.

Jessie, where are you?

Kate tried to read her daughter’s lips, tried so hard to know what she was trying to say.

Where are you, baby?

A nauseating dizziness engulfed Kate. She bent forward and threw up. Cramps seized her sides as if her muscles meant to crush her ribs together. The acid taste of bile triggered a second round of heaving. Breathing was impossible. But she kept her eyes squeezed shut and her attention on the vision of Jessie, knowing any second now she was going to fall unconscious. She had to hear what Jessie was trying to tell her. If she couldn’t, she knew the magic would fail, which meant the bleeding wouldn’t stop, which meant Kate would die.

I’m trying to listen, baby. Tell me again.

Jessie’s tear streaked face turned red as she screamed at Kate soundlessly.

A bizarre thought occurred to Kate. Lack of oxygen and blood loss at work, perhaps. Or some magical instinct guiding her hand. At this point, what did it matter?

She dipped her fingers into her wound, getting the tips wet with blood. Then she smeared the blood into each of her ears. She bore down on the image of Jessie and asked one last time...

Where are you, Jessie?

That’s when the words finally touched Kate’s ears. Though the vision of Jessie shouted, the words sounded like a whisper. But it was definitely Jessie’s voice.

Go to Texas
.

Then Jessie filled Kate’s mind with a picture that showed her exactly where to go.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Limbs. Heads. Torsos. Various sizes and shapes. All of them scattered like doll parts across the blood-soaked snow. Vampires everywhere. Snarling. Leaping. Unfazed by the hail of silver bullets pelting them as they continued to rend the army to pieces.

Lockman didn’t know how long he stood in the portal’s glow, watching the carnage, shell-shocked. He had seen films and read accounts of the American’s who had stormed the beaches of Normandy. He knew how some of the men strolled across the sands in dazed wonder at the sight of so much death rendered so bloodily and quickly before them. A human’s brain could only process so much violence before it retreated within itself.

Lockman had seen his fair share of death and mutilation.

This, however, came too fast and too thoroughly for even him to absorb.

Only Adam’s shouting in his ear finally woke Lockman out of his daze. “Pull back. Pull back.”

Some of the troops on foot tried to pull back, but the vampires swarmed in from every direction and picked them off before they made it more than a few steps. Lockman tried to offer covering fire, but his shots had no effect. How could they not? All their rounds were silver. These vamps should have burst into flames and started melting with all the silver getting pumped into them.