Shadowlight (22 page)

Only one minor problem had spoiled what should have been the ultimate state of perfection: He was starving.

Almost from the moment he had killed Ted Evans and left GenHance, a voracious hunger, unlike anything he’d ever felt, began to gnaw at his insides. Logic told him that his increased physical abilities would require more calories, but by the time he reached Jessa Bellamy’s apartment complex he felt as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. He’d ignored the grinding hollowness inside him as he snapped the neck of the complex security guard and went to her building, but after questioning and dismembering two of Bellamy’s neighbors he’d been unable to stop himself from seizing what food he could find in the second’s kitchen and eating until his jaw ached.

The hunger quieted enough for him to finish his interrogations and search Bellamy’s apartment, but once he’d gone back on the road it had started in on him again. Stopping at a convenience store, he strangled the clerk before loading up the passenger seat of Kirchner’s SUV with boxes of candy bars, racks of chips, and liter bottles of soda.

He hated eating all that sugar and junk as he drove out of the city—his new body deserved better—but if he didn’t meet the demands of his altered metabolism, he suspected it would start eating him from the inside out.

A pity Genaro’s transerum had such a serious flaw—one Jonah would have to address if he were to sell the stuff overseas. As soon as Lawson tracked down Bellamy and took care of that unfinished business, he would return to GenHance and have the old man do whatever it took to eliminate the unwanted painful side effect.

Fortunately his enhanced mental abilities were working with impressive efficiency. It had taken him only minutes to pick up Bellamy’s trail; she had left Atlanta and traveled east. He wasn’t entirely sure how he knew that she had; he only felt her drawing him to her. His sense of her remained bright and steady, as if she were a beacon only he could detect. There were others with her as well, at least two, but he felt only the vaguest sense of them. It didn’t matter to Lawson who had given her refuge; they would die just as quickly as all the others.

Then he would have her to himself.

Jessa Bellamy wouldn’t have to die right away, he decided, sorting through the many enjoyable fantasies about hurting women that he had dreamed up over the years. If her body proved to be even half as resilient as his own, he could keep her alive and hurt her for a very long time.

Flashing red and blue lights glared in his eyes, and in the rearview mirror he saw a highway patrol car speeding up behind him. Quickly he groped through the pile of empty wrappers beside him, found and stuffed two king-size Snickers bars into his mouth as he pulled over onto the shoulder, and put the SUV in park. He ate another four while waiting for the trooper to walk up to the driver’s-side window, which he rolled down.

“What’s the problem, Officer?” he asked.

The trooper’s silly hat tilted down as he peered inside. “Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

“Only some Pepsi.” Enjoying himself a little, Lawson held up one of the empty liter bottles. “I might be on a sugar high, but I don’t believe that I was speeding.”

“Can you tell me your name?”

Now that he had been transformed into the first true superhuman, he could never answer to the name Bradford Lawson again. He needed a new title, one that would tell this ignorant mortal and the rest of the mortal world what he had become.

“Apollo,” he said. “I’ve become the god of the sun and light.”

The trooper put a hand on the hilt of his service weapon and shuffled back. “Step out of the vehicle, please, Mr. Apollo.”

Lawson opened the door, releasing a small flood of candy wrappers and chip bags onto the ground. They crackled as he stepped on top of them.

“I have the worst case of the munchies in history,” he explained. “Not because I’ve been smoking pot, of course. A god doesn’t need that sort of thing.”

The trooper nodded and pointed to the front of the car. “Place your hands on the hood, Mr. Apollo, and spread your feet apart.”

Cops these days simply didn’t have a sense of humor, Lawson thought as he assumed the position. When the trooper moved to stand directly behind him, he threw his head back, smashing it into the man’s face. By the time the trooper uttered his first howl of pain Lawson had picked him up and tossed him over the hood of the SUV. He sailed fifty feet and landed with a thud, rolling until his body lost momentum and flopped over onto his back.

Lawson picked up the flashlight the trooper had dropped, and switched it on, focusing the beam toward the spot where the mortal had landed. As he moved past the shoulder, his left foot plunged down into a hole in the ground. An angry buzzing exploded all around him, and a swarm of furious bees engulfed him.

Not bees,
he thought as they zipped past his eyes, and he saw their distinctive colors.
Yellow jackets.

“Get off,” he shouted, swatting and whirling as he tried to get away from the stinging insects. Their tiny bodies bounced off his face, neck, and arms; they burrowed into the openings of his shirt and trousers to attack the rest of his body.

Lawson hated being stung, and began to sob as he fell to his knees. He toppled over and lay there for some time, his entire body ablaze with hot, needling pain. Things grew fuzzy, and then dark.

Sometime later he came to and sat up. Dead yellow jackets fell from his shoulders onto the ground, and he smashed them with his fist. There didn’t seem to be any more of them flying around him, but there were countless tiny, still bodies covering the ground.

He struggled to his feet. The transerum had protected him again, and he breathed in deeply as he felt no pain from the thousands of stings he had sustained. He kicked at the dead insects, grinding some of them to mush under his heel before he staggered over to see to the trooper.

He looked down at the cop’s ruined face. “I wasn’t …” His blood pounded in his ears, hot and heavy, and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. “Why did … you … pull me over?”

The trooper turned his head and coughed out more blood.

Humans could be more annoying than yellow jackets, he thought as he lifted his leg and rammed it down on the man’s right knee. The resulting scream didn’t entirely drown out the satisfying crunch of bone. “I can break … the rest of your bones … easy.” Why was it so hard to remember words? “Why … did you … stop me?”

“Weaving,” the cop choked out. “Weaving all over the road. Can’t drive like that. Hurt someone.”

Hurt someone? The words buzzed around his head like the yellow jackets, tiny and mindless and stupid. But they also cleared his thoughts and calmed his labored breathing as they reminded him of who he was now.

Why would he care if he hurt anyone? A god did not have to concern himself with the inherent weaknesses of mortals. He was stronger than them, ten times more intelligent, a new and vastly superior life-form. No one would ever again cause him pain or humiliation the way Jessa Bellamy had.

He could see her in his head so clearly now. Every detail of her treacherous, beautiful face, every arrogant look she had given him. She would never be satisfied with her attempt to cripple him, he knew, especially not now that he had ascended to a new level of existence. No, in her jealousy and ugliness she would want to harm him again—even try to kill him—as soon as she could.

“She sent you after me, didn’t she?” Lawson bent down, seized the man by the throat, and lifted him off the ground with one hand. He bit the side of his neck, digging his teeth in deep before he ripped out of a chunk of flesh and spit it out. “The lying bitch swore out a complaint against me.” He shook him a few times. “You were going to serve me with another restraining order? Was that it?”

The trooper didn’t answer, his head lolling back and forth over his left shoulder.

“I never touched her.” Lawson licked his lips and tasted the man’s blood on them, and felt a new sensation surging through him. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. She’d have seen. All my secrets.” The sound of his own voice crooning comforted him as he put the limp body on the ground and straddled it. “Couldn’t have that.” He ripped open the front of the trooper’s uniform shirt and tore away the front panel of the protective vest beneath it. “The old man hates me for being young and strong. She’d go to him. Make him fire me.”

Sometime later Lawson rose and walked over to pick up the flashlight he had dropped by the yellow jacket nest. He switched it on, but the bright beam of light hurt his eyes. He tossed it away, and then felt pain in his hand. Two bone shards were embedded in his palm, and he plucked them out before he walked back up to the road and got in the SUV.

Things had changed again, but he felt at peace with himself. Without saying a word, the trooper had explained everything that had gone wrong.

Now it was right. So right that it filled him with an indescribable emotion. All the work he had done at GenHance had been noble, and his heart had been in the right place, but ultimately the scientists had failed. All of their theories and conjectures had been wrong. Lawson wondered what Genaro would make of it when he told him.

The transerum contained no flaw, but rather a new imperative, one that had caused the final transformation of the mortal who had been Bradford Lawson, and the sacrifices that would have to be made to his glory.

Now he was truly Apollo, the god reborn to walk among men.

Rowan’s attitude toward Jessa gradually became less hostile, although she remained mostly distant or sarcastic, depending on her mood. Jessa quickly learned to avoid the girl when she was working in the communications room or cooking in the kitchen, the times when her temper was prone to flare fastest. She also refrained from asking questions or becoming too personal with the young housekeeper. She did refuse to let Rowan continue to wait on her, something she thought at first might provoke a confrontation. Yet when she told Rowan she didn’t want breakfast brought to her room, all Rowan did was produce an old battery-operated clock radio and tell her to be in the kitchen at six a.m. or make her own meal. Jessa immediately tried to listen to the radio—a local broadcast would tell her where she was—but the small speaker produced only crackling static.

Matthias didn’t bring up the subject of vampires again, which was a relief, as Jessa didn’t know how to respond to his wild conjectures without further insulting him. Instead he allowed her to use his computer equipment whenever she asked, delivered a stack of paperback novels (none of which was newer than six months, she noted) to her room, and otherwise left her alone. When she asked whether she should return the books to him, he told her they belonged to Rowan. Later she saw him reading one of the books from the collection in the children’s library room, and caught the faint movements of his lips as he silently sounded out some of the words.

Why would a grown man, even one who couldn’t speak English perfectly, collect and read children’s books when he owned one of the finest private libraries she’d ever seen?

Although he knew about her ability, Matthias didn’t try to avoid having physical contact with her as Rowan did. Each day he seemed to find some excuse to touch her casually, whether it was passing a dish to her at the table or taking her arm to guide her in a different direction while walking with her in the tunnels. For the first couple of days Jessa stiffened each time, anticipating a return into the shadowlight, but no matter how prolonged the contact was between them it never took over her consciousness. Instead, something else invaded: an unfamiliar but pervasive blend of warmth and comfort that danced along her skin and brought all of her senses to an acute state of awareness.

Jessa had enough experience to know what was happening. Her physical attraction to Matthias grew stronger every day; her body responded to him more often on a purely feminine level. The fact that he could touch her without triggering the shadowlight removed the primary obstacle that had kept her celibate since her ability had changed, and the needs that had remained sullenly dormant for so long were now wide-awake and demanding more.

Every touch, no matter how brief or casual, had always been an ordeal for her. Now Matthias had changed all that, turning any physical contact into a kind of furtive aphrodisiac.

She didn’t understand why she was so strongly attracted to a man about whom she knew so little. She still couldn’t place his accent, or the strange formality of his English. He didn’t speak like someone who had trouble understanding the meaning or the grammar; he spoke as if he came from a completely different world. His habits—eating with his fingers, rolling paper instead of folding it, and the way he sometimes watched with full concentration as Rowan used the food processor or the can opener—also made him seem out of step with the real world. And why would a grown man read, much less enjoy, children’s books?

Then there was his relationship with Rowan, who was certainly more than his housekeeper. Jessa had first suspected the girl might be his lover, but Matthias showed her nothing more than a decidedly paternal brand of affection. She never caught them in an intimate moment, and while they might have been sneaking into each other’s rooms every night, why would they hide it?

To keep herself occupied with something other than these perplexing observations and Matthias, Jessa spent hours on the computer checking through the contents of the hard drive for any files on the Takyn. To her disappointment she found nothing stored on the system but the files Matthias had shown her on GenHance, some Asian card games, and the service provider program they were using to gain access to the Internet.

She didn’t want to rely on what Matthias had shown her, so Jessa began checking news sites and researching GenHance’s business activities since the corporation had been founded in the late eighties. While GenHance had a sterling reputation, very little real information existed about Jonah Genaro and his company. Most of what was published by the media was taken mainly from press releases issued by Genaro’s own public relations department. Part of this was due to the fact that Genaro owned GenHance outright and, despite its size and diversity, had never offered up shares to be publicly traded. That made the corporation one of the largest privately held businesses in the world.

An old profile written by Forbes about Genaro, whom they identified as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, filled in a few blanks.

“Genaro inherited ninety billion dollars from his Italian grandparents,” she told Matthias one night over dinner. “Originally it was left to his parents, but they died in a car wreck in New York when he was sixteen. Their will specified that the family money was to be divided equally among their brothers and sisters and their children, but every other member of the Genaro family died in a boating accident three years later. They took the family yacht to sail over to one of their homes in Greece, but the engines exploded on the way there. No one radioed for help, so the boat burned and sank before anyone could get to them.”

“He probably had them killed,” Rowan put in as she finished clearing her plate.

The girl ate twice as fast as she and Matthias did, Jessa had noticed, and would sit with her hand or sometimes her arm curled around her plate, as if she expected it to be taken away from her. Rowan seemed to have some sort of love-hate relationship with food that bewildered Jessa, yet the girl was never stingy with the meals she prepared, and in fact often nagged her to eat more. Rowan looked up, caught Jessa watching her, and scowled.

“The article said he was in his first year at Oxford when the yacht accident happened,” Jessa said quickly.

“He would not have bloodied his own hands,” Matthias said. “He would have hired someone to do it.”

“How would a nineteen-year-old kid even know how to arrange having his entire family killed?” Jessa asked him. “Never mind trying to do it long-distance from England.”

“He had ninety billion damn good reasons to try,” Rowan replied. “I bet he practiced with his parents first.”

“But he was an only child.” Jessa didn’t want to defend the man who had probably framed her for murder, but she couldn’t accept that Genaro could be so cold-blooded—not with his own family. “He must have loved them.”

“The only things Genaro loves are wealth and power,” Matthias advised her. “He will never have enough to redeem his name.”

“What does his name have to do with it?” Jessa asked, but he merely gave her one of his enigmatic looks before he rose and left the kitchen. Irritated, she turned to Rowan. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what he means.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in Forbes,” was all the girl would tell her.

Rather than sneaking out of her room and searching the tunnels again, Jessa continued looking for evidence under the guise of constantly getting lost. She knew Rowan and Matthias were taking turns watching her through some sort of security system at night, but neither of them seemed to notice how often she took a wrong turn during the day. Her pretense allowed her to discover a great deal about her surroundings. What she thought were dead ends to the tunnels were actually old steel doors that extended into recesses in the concrete walls. From the look of them, Jessa guessed they were fire doors. She noted them as she explored, drawing a mental map of the tunnels, until she found the one she was sure concealed the tunnel that had led to the hatch that led to the surface and freedom.

The discoveries she made during her waking hours kept her quiet and watchful, but each night her caution seemed to evaporate as soon as she fell asleep.

Since the first night, Jessa had been dreaming vividly, always finding herself with Matthias in some familiar place: her apartment, her office, her favorite restaurant. Once, she was whisked off to the pool at her apartment complex, where she dreamed she was making laps with Matthias beside her, keeping pace.

In the dreams his presence never disturbed her; in fact, she behaved as if she had invited him into them. During the pool dream they swam together in sync from one end to the other, and when she suspected he was holding back she kicked off the last wall with all her energy and raced him to the deep end.

He surfaced at the same time she did, but rather than touch the wall he pulled her into his arms. “You cheat.”

“I won.” She twined her arms around his neck. “How did you learn to be such a strong swimmer?”

“When I was a boy I fell off my horse into a river, and I did not wish to drown.” He treaded the water easily as he maneuvered her into a corner. “You are like a fish.”

She grinned. “You’d better be referring to my ability to swim.”

“You are all sleek and shining when you are wet.” He parted his legs to bring her closer, and their bodies pressed together. “You move like the river. Like the rain.”

Jessa felt his hands on her waist and curled her hands over his broad shoulders. “Why do I keep dreaming of you like this? As if you were always with me.”

“Perhaps part of me was.” He glanced down. “I want to kiss your mouth.”

He often told her of his desire for her, but he never did more than touch her or hold her in his arms. It made her heart ache as much as her body.

“None of this is real,” she whispered. “You can do anything you want.”

“I will wait,” he told her, pressing his forehead to hers, “until you want me when you wake.”

“Don’t wait.” Jessa closed her eyes. “Please don’t.”

And then she woke, and Rowan was there, standing over her, not looking angry or indignant.

“Queenie.” The girl tugged on her sleeve. “Come on, it’s just a dream.”

Disoriented from being wrenched from the intimate moment with Matthias, Jessa blindly pushed at her, making contact with only her denim-covered hip, and then snatched her hand away. “I’m sorry.” She knew the girl disliked being touched, and suspected it had to do with something other than Jessa’s ability.

“No problem.” Rowan looked shaken as she backed away. “We all get bad dreams, right?” Before Jessa could reply, she hurried out of the room.

What happened to you?
Jessa thought as she stared after her, and then covered her face with her hands.
What is happening to me?