A Feral Darkness (44 page)

      
Before she felt the surge of darkness.

      
A sharp spike of fear stabbed through her and right into the ground, and again triggered the strange tremble of response. Parker gave her a knowing look, one that said he'd seen her fear, and he shook his head with that frightening grin still in place beneath the mustache—that good-old-boy mustache that she'd never be able to reconcile with his nature. He should at least have some sort of pretentious mustache-goatee combo.

      
Fine,
she told herself numbly.
When he gets here, maybe you can talk to him about that
.

      
For he was coming, and she had the feeling it wouldn't be for conversation. As he eyed the bank and the shallow, navigable water between himself and the island and then Brenna's side of the creek, she had the feeling he fully planned to haul her away, back to his place—where he'd hold her, or feed her to the dogs, or give her to his boys, or simply keep her out of the way while he did as he pleased on her land, watching the rabies problem grow out of control.

      
She could shoot him.

      
She couldn't.

      
Not so coldly, so brutally. Not with a rifle she'd started carrying against feral dogs.

      
She could run
.

      
Yes. She could outrun him, surely—

      
But not the darkness. Not whatever the darkness had done to Sunny. And she'd felt that darkness hovering moments earlier, she and Druid both. Druid still, the way he'd gone to crouching against the ground, frozen in fear, utterly unable to decide which direction might be the safest.

      
None of them.

      
That's when she found her hands shaking, her knees shaking, her whole body trembling with fear—

      
No, not her body. Not shaking
that
hard. That came from the outside, not the in. And Parker felt it too; she saw it in him, his condescending confidence interrupted by the inexplicable; it was his redirected stare that aimed Brenna's attention in the right place, that and the way he hesitated on his way down the sheer-cut bank to the stepping stones of the creek.

      
Down where the water had flowed away without being replaced, trickling away to leave nothing but tiny pools caught between rocks, the spring peepers along the banks caught startled and out in the open, a few cold crawdads crawling in befuddlement around what should have been their watery domain and quickly scuttling backwards into rocky crannies when they realized how they'd been exposed.

      
Exposed, like Brenna sitting on the hillside, clutching Druid's collar in one hand and a rifle she couldn't bring herself to use in the other.

      
Parker's smile renewed itself. "Looks like someone's going to make this easy for me."

      
The darkness, he thought, as did Brenna, so gapingly astonished at the sight of the drained creek bed that she could barely think.
Use the rifle. Pick it up and point it and pull the damn trigger.

      
She didn't have to kill him. She didn't even have to hit him. She only had to drive him off. It didn't even matter how mad she made him in the process—they'd gone beyond that. Now, it was only a matter of when they'd finish it what he'd started between them. Now...or later.

      
Later, when she knew more. When she was ready.

      
As if she'd ever be ready.

      
But Parker was ready. Parker was about to set foot in the exposed creek bed. If she saw correctly, he was deliberately aiming for one of the unhappy crawdads.

      
She pulled Druid into her lap and wrapped the leash around her leg. Then she picked up the rifle up and sighted on the ground at Parker's feet. The smell of gun oil struck her nose like an acrid punctuation.

      
"Ooh," he said. "Scary. So convincing. Your finger's got to be on the trigger to have any real threat behind it, Brenna."

      
She didn't like the way he said her name. She moved her finger to the trigger.

      
Still undecided.

      
But saved, then, as they both heard the new rumble of sound in the earth. She lifted her head from the smooth cool wood of the rifle stock as he halted in mid-stride; for all his previous snide confidence he now looked just as baffled as she felt, and nearly as alarmed. Druid gave several sharp barks...and they held no fear. They were an announcement of some importance, and he was on his feet now, braced against the reverberations in the earth but not with that look of crouching panic. His ears pricked forward and alert and very intent, and he stared up the creek—which remained empty of water as far as Brenna could see.

      
Maybe because he stood in the creek bed, Parker understood first; maybe his connections with the darkness gave him some advantage when it came to puzzling out things that couldn't possibly be happening in the first place. But Brenna had done no more than rise to her knees, the rifle drooping, looking right and left and even behind, when Parker lunged for the bank from which he'd come. He clawed his way up, digging fingers and toes and knees into the mucky soil, and as he threw himself over the top Brenna finally saw it—a high wall of water, tumbling toward them at amazing speed.

      
It filled the creek banks to the top and overflowed along the way, spilling over the top with the force of a tidal wave. Parker didn't even try to get up once he reached the pasture; he rolled, gained quick ground before finding his feet and sprinting another fifty yards away. The water rushed by them, completely overtaking the small island as Parker stopped and turned and glared.

      
The roar of it obliterated his words but couldn't obscure the acrimony with which he shouted them, or the way his face distorted with the enormity of his rage.

      
Rage at Brenna. For it wasn't the astonishingly flooded creek at which he screamed and gestured, but at Brenna herself, as if she had somehow created this event she couldn't even bring herself to comprehend.

      
Cold water sprayed Brenna's face; only a few drops, but enough to jar her mind from utter vacancy and into denial. This wasn't the Red Sea rushing into place after Charlton Heston for pity's sake, it was her
pasture
, where horses had quietly grazed, where Brenna had romped and played through her childhood. And the creek was that same in which she'd spent humid summer days, splashing and wet from head to toe with cool water. Had she been down there a moment ago, she'd have been washed clear to Lake Ontario. Had
Parker
been there a moment ago...

      
He'd been so sure it was his darkness, making life easy for him—and moments ago, Brenna had thought so as well. Thought herself cornered by man and his dark ally. Or the darkness and its human ally—she wasn't sure which. He'd been wrong.
She'd
been wrong.

      
Druid nudged her arm, his nose wet and cold; she put the arm around her shoulders, glad for his presence. Glad beyond belief that he hadn't flipped, hadn't added one of his fear fits to her already overwhelmed senses.

      
Beyond belief. That was the text of all of this. Beyond belief. For it hadn't been darkness coming to Parker's aid...it had been Mars Nodens coming to Brenna's. No longer just a theory, a vague tingle, a confluence of hints and clues and things that defied other explanation.

      
Mars Nodens in action.

      
Here.

      
Right in front of her.

      
The creek slowed and swirled and began to settle; the island brush reappeared, bent and stripped of leaves, shiny wet. Dismally muddied, Parker approached the scoured bank; he made a few steps toward the foot bridge and halted. Two long tree trunks it had been, with spaced crosspieces of wood—some old, some newly replaced and bright in contrast to the others—and laid across the width of the creek, high above the water. Heavy, sturdy...not going anywhere.

      
Or so Brenna would have said.

      
Except it was no longer there; it wasn't even in sight.

      
Brenna wiped the dripping water from her face and sat back on her heels, knees pointed downhill, to make a rag of her shirt hem and run it around the rifle barrel. She swiped a hand down each side of Druid's face, muzzle to ears, and removed the water sparkling there. There was no haste to her movements; she was here, Parker was there, and never the twain to meet. She didn't have to make the decision to pull the trigger; she didn't have to try to run. And if there was something of a dazed shock in the quality of her movement...then well there ought be.

      
She had to tell Masera. Forget the dog fights, forget what she'd done to him the night before and how they'd stared at one another at the threshold of her house. Never mind the things it had stirred in her, the feelings she didn't recognize and didn't know what to do about. He was the one who could put this into perspective, and who could tell her what to do next. How to protect them from the darkness.

      
If anyone could.

      
Silence slowly overtook the roar of the flash flood, leaving them in unnatural quiet—though not for long.

      
"You shouldn't have done that." Parker stood across from her again. Just as miraculously as it had overflowed, the water was back to normal, gurgling along in altered creek channels. The island, scrubbed clean to the dirt between what brush had remained rooted, was as bare as she'd ever seen it. The upstream edge had seined out an accumulation of debris—sticks, leaves, an old horseshoe, the proverbial old shoe. The stepping stones between it and the bank on either side were clearly exposed, but Parker made no attempt to descend to them. No, he stood there and glowered at her from beneath lowered brows, and repeated, "You shouldn't have done that."

      
Brenna said simply, "I didn't."

      
He laughed, as dark and low as the forces that now shaped his life. "You did," he said, and his gold hair glinted ruddy in the light from the setting sun; it felt like more of an omen than anything she'd seen so far—as if she, in the presence of one miracle, was suddenly able to read omens. "Whether you know it or not, you did it. You and whatever puny little god you first called to this place. Did you even know what you were doing, way back when?"

      
"No," Brenna said, almost a whisper, though she suspected he somehow heard it anyway. "Do you know what you're doing
now
?"

      
A strange, conflicted look passed over his features, so quickly that she wasn't even sure what she'd seen. Hesitation. Doubt. As if in that moment, he actually
thought
about what he'd gotten into, what he was aiding and abetting and causing. As if she'd managed to touch something of him that had once been more human than what lived in him now.

      
And then the anger and hatred returned tenfold, and she had the feeling he'd make her pay for that moment.

      
"I know exactly what I'm doing," he said. "Which means that you haven't got a chance. I want this spring, Brenna Fallon.
Honey
. I want the land it's on. I'm even willing to pay for it."

      
Money, she thought, probably wasn't what mattered to him anymore, anyway. Why
not
pay for it?

      
"And you'd best take me up on that offer."

      
For that instant, she found herself tempted. He was right; she had no idea what she was doing and she had about as much chance of getting through any escalation of power as she had of controlling his darkness. So why not give him the land, that which she'd so recently contemplated leaving behind by choice? Why not walk away, when the rabies and the chaos had already taken hold?