Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition) (3 page)

Justin Dinardo rode his dirt bike through the darkness, down the narrow path toward
Cochran Short Route. He ran onto the blacktop and rode on for a mile and a half, where he pulled off into the overgrown lot of an old, rotting country store. He rode around the structure and opened the back of his waiting Tacoma pickup, lowering the long piece of 4x4 that he kept as a ramp for the dirt bike. It was an old routine for the small-time teenage drug dealer, retrieving stashed merchandise from buried deposits scattered throughout the woods of Stone Creek Swamp for resale.

Now it was performed with a new companion
. Dennis Billings was history.
The dirt bike safely stored, Justin got in behind the wheel and turned to the occupant of the passenger seat.

“Big score tonight,” he said. “Lots of jack.”

“
D
at’s good.”

Justin pulled the Tacoma out of its hiding spot and turned back to the highway.

“Cain?” His voice was low and respectful.

“Wh
u
t?”

“Where do you go? When you’re not with me?”

“
Dat
ain’t none of yo’ business
, boy. Yo’ business doin’ wh
ut
you tol
d
and bringin’ in
da
t—jack.” Cain chuckled to himself. After overcoming his amazement at finding
more than a century passed and the world as he knew it gone forever, he’d settled back and enjoyed. And made plans.

“But don’t you know? Don’t you realize? What you could do?
By now, I mean, it’s been over a mon
th, you could—”

“I gots my own reasons an’
dey
ain’t none of yo’s, boy. You watch yo’ mouth.”

“I want
a
help you,” Justin persisted cautiously. Wouldn’t do to irritate Cain. “And I can’t do that if you won’t tell me what you want.”

Cain gazed into the passing shadows as the Tacoma approached the entrance to I-16 and slowed.
The things this world now held!
He’d never have believed it.
But whatever
else it held
, he knew it still held the man he sought, the man he wanted, the man he intended to find. Wherever he was.
He’d use this fool, already the source of his spending money and creature comforts, to do it.

“I wants this town,” he said.
Justin shivered in anticipation, seeing himself at Cain’s side, his trusted advisor. “It be mine, mine by right. Almos’ had it one time and
now ain’t nuttin’
goan
stop me. But
d
ere be somethin’ I gots to tend to first.”

“What’s that?”

“
D
ere’s a man I gots to find. Fancy white doctor, Devlin be his name. He the man wh
u
t put me in
da
t cave, wh
u
t stole
di
s town and all
d
at time away from me. I
goan
find him. And he
goan
pay.”

“But it was so long ago—”

“
An’ I be sittin’ right here in di
s thing never thought about in my time. An’ if I here, he here. Somewheres. An’
dat’s
why I’s waitin’.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cain snorted. The fool.
He was drunk with visions of
himself in possession of
Cain’s marvelous power to fly disembodied through the air, to feast in the woods
o
n hot and pumping blood, to cast his gaze into another’s eyes and enslave a soul.

Cain wanted to take him.
Just sitting next to him in the truck, Cain smelled the del
ectable aroma
of human blood. No
game animal would ever
compete with that.
Not now, though.
If he did, he’d never be content to hunt the woods again. No, then he’d surge through the sprawling city streets in a frenzied, bloody orgasm advertising his presence to the world
, hi
s
anonymity shot to shit.

Besides, to hunt humans indiscriminately created rivals
. Rivals
who would rise, fully renewed, possessing the same powers Cain was still exploring and mapping.

He
didn’t want r
ivals. He wanted slaves. When his time came round again, after h
e’d made his
enemy
sorry he’d ever been born,
he
’d be
selective,
feast fully and completely only on those poor-spirited souls
he
recognized as followers.
All others, he
’d
drain to unconsciousness and then break their necks.

This fool? No. Too smart by half, far too much like Cain himself. He’d only semi-drain him.
Then he’d snap his neck
. Cain
loved the sound of snapping bones. In the meantime, he’d grant his useful, adoring tool some small crumbs of satisfaction.

“Yo
’
time’ll come, boy. After I find
him. After he dead, finally and really dead, an’ son, he
goan
be prayin’ to die.
Den
you and me, we’ll take dis
town like it ain’t never b
een took befo’. But till we find
him, wh
ut you want? Whu
t satisfy you?”

“I want Dennis Billings to lick the soles of my shoes,” Justin said
.
“Right after I walk through dog shit. I want him to be sorry he ever even thought about crossin’ me.”

Cain laughed.
The fool talked his language.

“Well, I thinks we can manage
da
t
, boy. Won’t be no trouble a’tal. None
a
’tal.”

Justin grinned
. T
he pickup skipped lightly, carrying its cargo of madness down I-16.
That cargo, caught in visions of grandeur to come, didn’t notice.

Chapter
Four

Six nights after the official housewarming and opening of Bishop & Knight, Attorneys at Law, Ria stepped out of her apartment and went downstairs to finish up work on
the
brief she’d spent most of the day drafting.
She stood motionless in the office alcove.

“But I’m not drunk,” she whispered in protest.
The room no longer held their Victorian sofas or their secretary’s desk, and certainly nothing as modern as a computer.

The sofas
looked
Victorian, but they weren’t the ones recently purchased.
The walls weren’t light taupe, either.
They were duck-egg blue.

Th
e young woman sat on the sofa that really wasn’t there
. She
look
ed
just as lovely as she had in the resurrected bedroom in her blue negligee. Soft curls spilled out of an elegant chignon, glowing in
the
afternoon sun.
She sat facing an
older woman with a nose as sharp as a hacksaw. The younger vision held a box in her lap and lifted a white nightgown up out of the tissue.

“Well, it’s just lovely, Mama,” she declared. Charming, yes, but nothing like the blue negligee Ria’d seen in the bedroom.
Safe bet Mama hadn’t picked that number out.

“I thought it quite suitable,” declared Mama. “Most tasteful, and I’m sure Paul will approve.”

Devilish light danced in the slanted blue eyes.

“Well, actually, Mama, Paul prefers me when I’m not in a nightgown,” she said, placing the gift back in the box and picking up her cup from the small table in front of the sofa.

For a moment, the meaning of that comment didn’t register.
Then it did.

“Chloe Duval Devlin! Have you no
shame
at all?”

“Well, he does
.
”
S
he laughed
and shrugged.
“Really,
I prefer him the same way.”

“Ah!” The tall, lean figure passed Ria as though she wasn’t there. He strode over to the sofa and kiss
ed
Mama’s cheek. “And how’s my favorite mother-in-law today?”

Mama looked more than a bit flustered. “Leaving, actually, Paul. I was just leaving.
Chloe, are you and Paul coming for Sunday supper?

“Certainly, Mama, we wouldn’t miss it. Paul, will you walk Mama out?”

The vision named Paul escorted his mother-in-law to the door. He closed it firmly and made it back to the parlor
. He
burst into laughter.

“Chloe, you’re a devil from hell! You almost gave your poor mother apoplexy!”

She rose and flung herself into his arms. “I can’t help it if she doesn’t know what she’s missing,” she said, and kissed her husband soundly. They didn’t fade from sight
. T
hey just disappeared. One minute they were there, the next
,
gone. So was the afternoon light. It was night again.

Ria sat abruptly on one of their own Victorian sofas, miraculously visible again.

“Holy shit!” she breathed.

Ria
ha
d been f
ascina
ted for years by the paranormal. She’d poured over any library book related to the subject as a teenager. S
he culled her memory banks for information stored
from those books.
Ghosts, she recalled, were usually wavy mists,
radiating a feeling of coldness.
Theory held the coldness resulted when spirits drew warmth from their surroundings to acquire energy to materialize.
She’d felt no coldness and the figures weren’t misty. They weren’t exactly solid, either.
They were like three-dimensional projections, actors in a scene overlaid on current reality. They paid no attention whatsoever to her.
She
vaguely
recalled
a theory that claimed
events imprinted themselves in their surroundings, that the proper catalyst made them replay
like hitting the play button on a DVD player. The renovations maybe?

Mama’s
shocked
exclamation
gave her a starting point
.
Chloe Duval Devlin.
And the man was Paul. Paul Devlin.
The first sighting told her he was a
doctor
.
It was an old house.
They had the property records.
And the Washington Library had a very good genealogy section. These people were real.
Or they had been.
She’d find them.

She heard the key in the front door. Johnny.

“Hey,” he said, pausing as he saw her sitting on the sofa. “Whatcha doing down here?”

“Just came down to work a while,” she said.

“All work and no play makes Ria a dull girl. Want to hit Rock-a-Billy’s or Jazz Plex?”

“No, thanks, I don’t think so.”

“Want to come up to my place? Pop popcorn and watch a dirty movie?”

She laughed. “No, thanks. Ac
tually, I don’t think I’ll work,
either. I believe I’ll go start that new book I picked up the other day.”

“You’re no fun at all.”

“Providing your entertainment is not part of the partnership agreement,” she said, and went upstairs.

She tossed and turned most of the night and finally, it was morning. She sped out the door and timed her arrival at the library to coincide with the opening of its doors.

Ria was a good
researcher
.
S
he organized her attack, pull
ed
reference volumes and
began
cross-indexing dates and names
. Two
hours after she began her search, she had them.

“Oh, no,” she moaned softly to herself. “Oh, Chloe, no!”

The Devlin family arrived in Macon in the 1840s with roots trailing back to Stokes County, South Carolina.
Paul wasn’t the first doctor in the family, though he’d been the first to study in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father and grandfather were doctors, too.
The Duval family went back in local history to the 1820s
.
Henry Duval
was a
prominent banker in town in the 1870s and 80s. Chloe’s father, undoubtedly.
Chloe was nineteen, Paul twenty-six when they married in
1883
.
She’d died in childbirth five years later, in 1888.