Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (35 page)

No, Elka would never forgive her.

But she understood her.

Never forgive.

But always admire.

Chapter Sixty-Two

E
ARL OPENED HIS EYES AND
found himself already standing.

The fucking unicorn who had paralyzed him knelt in front of him, panting. Her horn still had that multi-colored glow, but it had lost some of its brightness. The amount of blood gushing from around the knife looked like something out of one of those horror shows Kit loved so much.

Thinking of Kit made him tear up. At the same time rage made his belly bubble and churn like vat of toxic sludge.

“You fucking bitch.” Spittle flung from his lips. “Git outta my head. You already ruined my life. I ain’t got nothing more to give.”

Earl heard a hush and realized it came from inside his head.

There’s no point in being angry, Earl. What’s done is done.

“Stop it. Git outta my head.”

I have one more thing I need you to do for me, then I’ll leave you in peace.

“I ain’t doing anything for you.”

But he didn’t have a choice. He felt her rooting through his mind like a purse snatcher going through his latest score. She read thought after thought, tossing aside each one that didn’t hold whatever she sought.

The sensation Earl felt while she did this wasn’t like anything he’d ever known before. Kind of like a tickle in his head, and an itch at the back of his brain. Something else too. He couldn’t quite explain it. Best he could do was compare it to the feeling you get when you have one of those dreams where you’ve left your house without any clothes on.

Finally, Elka locked on a thought she liked.

Earl would have scowled if Elka hadn’t frozen his face. He couldn’t even twitch an eyebrow, let alone move his lips. Bitch had basically shut him up.

But what she found tipped off Earl to what she had planned for him.

She’d dug out the location of the underground complex’s infirmary.

Slowly, she rose to her feet. She led the way, pulling Earl behind her as if by a leash. No matter how hard Earl fought, he couldn’t resist her commands.

You wouldn’t want to anyway, she jabbered in his head. The second I let go of you, you go back to being paralyzed.

She could read his thoughts, so he didn’t need to speak. Good.

Suck my cock, you twat.

She did that lip flutter like a horse, only hers sounded a little like a laugh.

Her steps grew more labored as she made her way through the tunnels. Her breathing sounded like a broken air conditioner. And that blood came off of her so thick she left a trail along the floor that Earl was forced to shuffle through.

As much as Earl wished she’d collapse and die, she made it to the infirmary.

It wasn’t much. The room couldn’t have been much bigger than Dolan’s bedroom. Enough room for a pair of examination tables, a row of glass cases along one wall, and a sink and cupboards on the wall kitty-corner to the cases.

Most of him was numb, but he had enough control of his senses to smell a ghost of antiseptic among the dry, chalky dust. One of the fluorescent bulbs of the ceiling lights buzzed and flickered.

Elka left him by the entrance while she trotted along the cases, peering in each as she passed, then examined the labels on the cupboards. Satisfied by whatever she found, she turned around and made Earl move again.

He went to the medicine cases first, opened one up, and took a bottle of Dilaudid. He went to the cupboards next. He gathered a hypodermic needle, two boxes of gauze, and three roles of medical tape. He unloaded the supplies onto one of the examination tables.

A light on one of those arms with the moving joints in them hung above the table. He flicked the ON switch but the light didn’t come on.

Forget it
, Elka said.

She had him go back to the cupboards, and this time he collected a needle, the kind of thread doctors used to stitch a wound up, and a box of latex gloves.

I’ll make the needle slip. I’ll let you bleed out.

Elka made that horsey laugh again.
That’s impossible, Earl. Sorry.

Some more of the glow in her horn faded. The color had drained from it too. The light was plain white with some sparkles in it.

Better hurry, bitch. Looks like you ain’t got much time.

She responded by making Earl slap himself. It didn’t hurt any. He was too numb for that. But he knew she didn’t do it to hurt him, just make him feel like a fool.

She sidled up to the examination table and directed Earl to come close to her. She compelled him to snap on a pair of the gloves. Next, he loaded up the needle with some of the painkiller and injected it near the wound.

She bucked and kicked out with a hind leg. The kick hit the base of the arm to the light attached to the table and knocked it loose.

The light’s bulb shattered on impact with the floor, and the arm hit with a dull clang.

Once she settled, she had him gather up a huge stack of gauze pads. With his free hand, Earl gripped the knife and gently pulled it loose.

This is where you die
, he thought, even as he dropped the knife on the table and applied the pads to the wound. They soaked through almost instantly. He grabbed more and pressed them on.

He went through a full box of the pads before he had the bleeding stopped.

It should have bled more. She shouldn’t have been able to survive all that blood loss. But Earl had noticed while he worked that her horn began blazing again. The color came back. A sparkly mist hung around it. The air smelled like cake frosting.

Something had kick-started her magic again. And now she used it to start healing herself.

He held the gauze on for another five minutes before Elka had him remove it.

The wound was still there, still looked pretty deep, but it didn’t bleed near as much. By the time he finished stitching her up, it hardly bled at all.

He dressed the wound with fresh gauze and used the tape to hold it in place, though the tape didn’t stick so well on her hair.

She still had all that blood on her. Earl wondered if she would ever get the stain out. He supposed so. But at the least, he hoped the wound left behind a scar.

All finished, Earl and Elka faced each other by the table. The table had a mound of bloody gauze with a pair of bloody latex gloves on top.

This where you kill me, Earl thought.

Elka chuffed. I’m done killing.

But she didn’t let go of his mind. She guided him out of the infirmary. Back through the tunnels and eventually to the hall with all the windowed rooms where he had locked her up.

So you’re gonna put me in one of them cages? What’s the point? I ain’t going nowhere when I’m fucking paralyzed.

I’m not locking you up.

She led him halfway down the hall. At one point, they passed a room with starved vampires trapped inside. Their red eyes in their emaciated faces followed Elka and Earl as they passed on by.

If Earl had feeling in his body, he would have shivered.

They stopped in front of the room Earl had locked her in, but she didn’t lead him into it. Instead, she turned, gave him a long look, then pulled out of his mind and let him drop to the floor.

He felt no connection to the rest of his body. It was like he was a just a head looking up at the track of lights along the ceiling.

“What are you doing? Just gonna leave me here to starve?”

She clopped around him and headed back the way they had come.

He couldn’t watch her go. He could turn his head to either side, but he lay parallel to the hall, so no way to look at her.

“Come back here, you bitch! Kill me. Have some fucking guts and kill me.”

Eventually, the echoing
tock tock
of her steps faded to silence.

Well, not total silence.

He could hear things stirring in their cages.

Earl’s breathing got away from him. He grew light-headed as he lay helpless and gasping.

Was that it? Leave him here to listen to all those
things
while he starved to death? Did she think it would scare him?

What’s so scary about a bunch of locked up monsters? She ain’t done nothing worse than if she’d left me anywhere else in this place.

Then the lights in the hall went out.

Earl’s breathing quickened. He lolled his head back and forth and blinked his eyes over and over, trying to get them used to the dark. But the darkness was too thick.

Without sight, his senses rearranged themselves so that his hearing grew sharper.

The stirrings became clearer. Now he could hear a wet, puckering sound. Something tittered in the dark, the sound muffled by its cage, but plenty loud enough to turn Earl’s face cold and make his scalp prickle.

But none of those noises frightened Earl half as much as the one that came next.

A short buzz and the following snap of every latch on every door unlocking at once.

The bitch must have found the control room. It had rows of monitors fed by cameras all throughout the complex. It also had master controls to power and lights. And similar controls for the electric locks.

Hinges creaked. Things slithered. Tiny feet pattered across the floor. Hungry gasping echoed down the hall.

Then a whisper.

“So…hungry…”

He heard the monsters closing in on him.

He screamed his throat raw.

His screams turned to a sloppy gurgle as something bit his neck and tore loose a chunk of flesh and tendons.

His damned neck.

One of the few places where he still felt pain.

The pain lasted a long while. Death held off long enough for Earl to hear other things gnawing at other parts of his body, cracking his bones, chewing on meat and muscle, all while the creature he knew had to be a vampire drained the blood through his open throat.

The Dawn

Chapter Sixty-Three

J
ESSIE WOKE TO THE SMELL
of pine and a rustling somewhere off to her right.

When she opened her eyes, she gasped.

She lay in bed in a small room with brown paneling, the kind that was popular back in the freaking Stone Age. On the walls hung framed movie posters for
Chinatown, The Exorcist,
and
Blue Velvet
. A small desk sat against the wall under the
Chinatown
poster. A stack of books—
freaking
text
books
—were stacked on one end of the desks. Parked in the opposite corner was a trio of action figures—Han, Luke, and Leia. She teared up when she saw them.

They had belonged to Ryan.

She didn’t remember taking them. The last time she had seen them was not long before that ghost had possessed Ryan and drove him insane. It seemed like a thousand years ago.

The rustling she heard came from the window by her bed. The window was open wide and the curtains fluttered in a soft but steady breeze. The pine smell, she knew immediately, came from the woods out back.

Holy shit, this is the cabin in Illinois.

But how had she gotten here? Her mind scrambled for recent memories. Pain blossomed in her chest as she recalled her most recent memory.

For a moment it felt as though Elka’s horn still pierced Jessie’s heart.

After a couple of deep breaths, the feeling passed.

The memory didn’t.

She cycled back from there through nearly six years of her life and ended up back on the front stoop of the ratty house in California where she had seen her real dad for the first time.

Tears streamed down Jessie’s face as she picked through those memories. She moved forward in time, stopping at points and sinking so deeply into the recollections she swore she was back in the moment, reliving it.

She stopped traveling through her life when she reached the time where she, her mom, and Craig lived together in this cabin. Her chest ached for a different reason. She found it hard to breathe because if she took too deep of a breath she would break open and cry full out, and never be able to stop.

Their time at the cabin hadn’t been perfect. Not even nostalgia could shine off the hard days. But between the hard days, they’d had good ones too. Still, she could easily weave past the bad days while she remembered the good.

Craig trying to help her with her English homework, an essay on the Christ symbols in Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
.

He had tried his best to help her word her opening paragraph even though he had never read the novel himself. After that, she had assured him he had helped a great deal, and when he’d left, she deleted the opening and started over.

Christ symbols
, she had heard him mutter out in the living room.
Fuck does that even mean?

She’d had to close her bedroom door so he wouldn’t hear her burst into laughter. But somehow his annoyed question gave Jessie the inspiration to go on and finish her essay.

Won her a B-minus. Best grade she’d managed that semester, since it was the only time she’d really put any effort in.

Another memory.

Catching Craig and Mom half-dressed and pawing at each other on the living room couch in the middle of the night when they had thought her asleep. She had come out for a glass of water.

Oh, gross!

And she’d run back into her bedroom.

Or that time she tried to chop wood for the fireplace with Craig and nearly took off her own foot.

Or the time her mom found Jessie crying in the bathroom over some stupid taunts at school. Mom had wrapped her arms around Jessie and hummed a tune so familiar, but she couldn’t name it. Later she would realize it was a song her mom had made up and sang when Jessie was four and had that nightmare about monsters climbing in through the window.

There’s no such thing as monsters.

There’s just no truth to them.

And don’t be scared, little Jessie,

Your mommy’s here till the end.

Her song had only been half right.

Her mom had been there till the end.

Someone in the doorway cleared his throat.

Jessie started, but when she saw who it was, every muscle in her body turned to warm taffy.

Craig smiled at her. His eyes shined as if wet. “It is so good to see you.”