The End of Darkness (21 page)

An hour later, she popped chocolate-covered cranberries into her mouth as she unearthed bits of data.  “Come on, baby, oh, yes, that's it. There's the sensitive folder, but where's the presentation?”  

Orn'ry always murmured when she talked to herself, which made her feel not so alone.  She opened 
Upcoming Issues
 and found pictures and text documents with innocuous names.  She double clicked on one, hands over her eyes, peeking through the cracks of her fingers.  If it was something disturbing, she didn't want it seared into her subconscious.
 

“Yuck.”  Well, she now had an idea of how the laptop might have ended up in a pool.  At least the woman draped over a diving board wearing nothing but high heels was way older than legal age.  Amy would bet she was not the Senator's wife and had no interest in confirming her suspicion.

“Immoral maybe, but not creepy or illegal.”

 Her body usually started craving sleep at about three in the morning, and at four her scratchy eyes said, 
Enough!
  Mr. Bromley was in California, and since she was in Annapolis, Maryland, that meant she had a couple of hours in the morning to jump back on it before his meeting.  
 

She was going to transfer Orn'ry to his cage, but he was asleep, his shoulders hunched, the feathers at the side of his face fanning his beak.  She left him there and dragged herself off to bed.

She was never too tired to hope for one of her dreams, the ones that woke her in panting breaths and damp with perspiration.  A man whose face was always in shadow, touching, kissing, loving her.  The same man in every dream.  She grinned.  Even in her dreams she wasn't a slut.

She 
had
 seen his body, all of it, lean but muscular, olive skin, with a head full of dark, soft waves.  In these dreams, she loved and was loved, there as never in her life.  She was safe to let herself go.  The only way he would break her heart was if she stopped dreaming about him.  Four months ago, she had never felt an orgasm. Now she experienced the shattering of her body and soul every night.  What an amazing realization, that she could physically experience what she dreamed about.
 

She slipped through the hypnagogic state of sleep, where she sometimes heard voices, and dove into REM.  Deep in an ordinary dream her eyes snapped open, her heart thrashing against her ribs.  She hadn't heard a thing, couldn't see a thing, but she knew someone was there. 

Her second thought—after 
Oh, shit, someone's in my room!
—was: 
What can I use as a weapon?
  Clock.  Brass table lamp with sharp corners.  Bingo.  Her hand darted out to grab it and collided with hard flesh.  Before she could scream, he was on top of her, his hand over her mouth.  
 

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he said.

Oh, God, he was going to rape her and kill her and cut her up in pieces.  
This can't be happening.
 
Fight!
  
Kick!
  But he was on top of her, his weight pinning her down.  Panic squeezed her chest.  
 

He shifted to the side, reaching for something.  She heard a click. Knife?  Gun?  

Light flooded the room.  She blinked in the sudden onslaught. Her eyes focused on the man in front of her.  Gorgeous, with gray-blue eyes, and dark brown, wavy hair, he didn't look like a crazed rapist killer.  That didn't ease her fear any more than his words of assurance did.  

It hit her then.  He made no attempt to hide his face.  
That's because he doesn’t intend to leave a witness.
  Whimpering sounds emanated from her, as though a small animal was trapped in her chest.  She quieted them, because, dammit, she wasn't going to go down like a mouse beneath an eagle's talons. 
 

He leaned close.  A gold cross on a chain dangled before her eyes.  The sight of it was surreal.  A cross on a killer.  If he tried to kiss her she'd spit in his face or, better yet, tear off his lip with her teeth.  

His mouth hovered just above her cheek.  He spoke in a low, soft voice that would be soothing if he wasn't a terrifying intruder.  “Amy, my name is Lucas, and there are things I need to tell you.  I'm sorry, really sorry, I had to do it this way. I didn't have time to gain your trust.  Am I hurting you?”

She'd swear by the concern in his eyes that he cared about her comfort.  He pressed his hand over her mouth only as much as necessary.  She shook her head. Her heart pounded so hard she thought it might explode.

“Good.  I'm here to talk to you about your father's supposed suicide.”

Her brain scrambled to process his words.  Her father's suicide.  

Gunshot coming from her house!

Spray of blood.  

Shallow breaths.  

His eyes wide and fearful, pleading, Save me.  Save me.

“Daddy, no!”

Twenty years ago, but it felt like yesterday. She'd found him in the garage that horrible day after hearing the gunshot on her way home from school.  The man who claimed he loved her killed himself where he knew she'd find him.  Her sole provider made no arrangements for his five-year-old's care. 

The bigger question was, why was this possible rapist and murderer talking about her father's suicide?  Unless he wasn't a rapist and murderer.  She must be crazy, because he didn't feel like either.  That's when it her: his glow wasn't like any she'd seen before.  Not one color but all of them, like static on a television.

Wait a minute.  Had he said her father's 
supposed
 suicide?  
 

He obviously saw her curiosity. “If I release you, you won't scream?  I'd rather not continue the conversation like this.”

She shook her head, and he freed her.  She scrambled away from him, feeling the grooves of the headboard bite into her back when she slammed into it.  

He sat back on her bed, his hands on his jean-clad thighs.  The hair at his neck curled from dampness.  “You don't have to be afraid of me.”  

She almost laughed.  “A stranger breaks in, and I'm supposed to be 
cool
 with that?”  
 

“Amy, we're not strangers.” 

The way he looked at her, with a soft smile and his gaze reaching right into her soul, corkscrewed her stomach.  She pushed beyond that puzzling statement.  “What do you know about my father?”

He reached over and turned on the stereo in her alarm clock.  Evanescence's powerful song, “Bring Me to Life,” filled the room, the tune she cued to wake her this week.  

“Why'd you do that?” she asked, her words crammed together.  What was he going to do that he didn't want anyone to hear?

“Just in case someone is listening.”

“The walls aren't that thin.”

“Listening equipment can pick up conversations from over a hundred yards away, through walls thick or thin.”  

“Listening equipment?”

He leaned forward and for a bizarre moment she thought he was going to kiss her.  His mouth grazed the shell of her ear and whispered, “My two friends, Eric, Petra, and I discovered that someone is watching us.  They call us Offspring.” His breath caressed her ear.  “You're one, too.”

“Me?” she choked out. 

“It's how I finally found you. The Offspring we know about have two common links: we lived near Ft. Meade, Maryland, during the same time period, and we each had a parent who died either by suicide or accident within a year's time.”  He gave her a moment to absorb, looking toward the window and the darkness beyond.

She pressed her hands to her temples, trying to make sense of it.  “Someone is watching you?  Me?” When he nodded, she asked, “Who?”

“We don't know. Probably some facet of government, which is why we can't go to the police.”

“Do you have any…proof?”

He looked toward the window again.  “Not yet.  We need to find other Offspring so we can put the facts together and figure out what's going on.  You're the first one we contacted.”  He leaned close once more.  “I know you have a lot of questions, or you will once you get your mind around all this.  We need to meet somewhere tomorrow where we can talk more. I can't stay here much longer, in case they're watching you.  They may suspect I'd come here, which makes it dangerous for me, but I had to warn you.”  His expression grew dark.  “You can't tell anyone what I've told you.”

“Warn me about what?”

“Someone you trust is going to betray you, and someone is going to die because of that betrayal.  It might be you.”  She shivered at his warm breath in her ear as well as his words.

The depth of his concern baffled her.  He looked at her in the way someone who had loved her for a long time might look at her.  All she really had to go on was the way her father looked at her, and that was such a distant memory. And he hadn't really loved her enough after all.  Except Lucas said 
supposed
 suicide.
 

“How do you know?” she asked.  “About this betrayal that's going to happen?”

“I'll tell you tomorrow, that and everything we know.” She saw the regret on his face when he said, “I hate that you're involved in this.  We don't even know what 
this
 is yet.”  He released a long breath.  “Be prepared.  Everything you think you know is going to change.”  His body went rigid as he turned down the radio and cocked his head to listen.  
 

“What is it?” Then she heard a soft 
crack.
 

He looked at her, fear in his eyes.  “Trouble.  Protect yourself.  Tell them I just broke in and I haven't told you anything. You're scared to death of me.”  Footsteps pounded across her living room floor.  He pulled a piece of paper from his jeans pocket and curled her fingers around it.  “Hide this.”

Three men dressed in black burst into her bedroom. The man in front aimed a gun at them. “Freeze!”  Lucas's hands flew up as he stepped in front of her.  Despite his surrender, the man squeezed the trigger. Not a loud report but a 
whoosh.
   A stream of blood squirted on Lucas's collar as his hand flew up to the wound in the neck.  A second man stepped into the room and walked toward Lucas, who barreled toward him with his head lowered and shoulders hunched like a bull.  He knocked the guy against the doorframe; his skull hit the wood with a thud.  
 

Next Lucas aimed for the third man who was running toward him.  They wrestled, ending up in the living room and sending her goose neck lamp crashing to the floor.  Lucas was more wiry muscle than bulk, but he had rage on his side.  He jammed the palm of his hand into the man's face, sending blood spurting out of his nose.  Instead of running toward the open door, Lucas faced the second man, who was approaching fast despite the blood trickling down his head.

Lucas wasn't trying to escape, but to take out the men one by one.  With a bullet in his neck.  She sat paralyzed as he dug his elbow into the man's stomach.  The one with the gun, who appeared to be the leader, made no move to help his comrades.  He was waiting for something.  That something became obvious when Lucas's motions slowed. He blinked several times.  Wobbled.  His eyes rolled back, his body slackened, and he crumpled to the floor with a painful 
thump.
 One man limped over as another checked Lucas's pulse and peeled back an eyelid.  After a nod to the man with the gun, the two hoisted Lucas up and carried him out the door.
 

The leader turned toward her and started to say something, but she shouted, “You shot him!”

“He was endangering you.”

It was only just sinking in, that he'd been shot, that he was probably dead because people didn't survive bullets to the neck, did they?  Or if they did they were paralyzed but mostly they died.  “Who are you people?”

“FBI,” he said, flashing his badge so fast she could only see that it 
was
 a badge.  The man whose features were as stark as a mask said, “This guy's been on our radar for months now.  We had to wait for him to break in before we could arrest him.”
 

“Arrest him?  
You shot him!
” she said again, her scream edging into hysterical.
 

“He's a serial killer who's eviscerated fourteen women with a carving knife.”

“He didn't have a knife.”

“That you saw.”  He looked into her eyes.  “Did he say anything to you?”

She was supposed to pretend to be afraid of Lucas.  That he'd said nothing.  She shook her head.

He studied her.  “Nothing at all?”

“He didn't have time.  You—”

“You're lucky to be alive, ma'am,” he interrupted before turning and leaving.

“Shot him,” she finished with a whimper.  She fell limp onto the bed, a cold fog starting from her fingers and stealing over her entire self.  Orn'ry was screeching in her office but she couldn't move.  Trembling followed the cold, tiny seizures sparking through her muscles.  

Offspring.  Her father.  Betrayal.
  Lucas's urgent words careened around in her head.  Then the leader's words: 
serial killer. Eviscerated women.  Lucky to be alive.
  
 

Lucas was right.  Someone had been outside listening, watching.  Watching her.  A violent tremble shook her body.  On wobbly legs she walked to the window and pulled open the drapes, hoping for a glimpse of the vehicle the men had arrived in.  The lights that usually illuminated the parking area were off, leaving the night in darkness.  She heard the sound of a car start and pull away but never saw headlights. 

“Who are you people?”

She became aware of the paper in her hand, now damp from sweat.  She tucked it in her pajama waistband with shaky fingers.  The most bizarre thing was how worried she was for the stranger who'd broken into her apartment and scared the hell out of her.  She managed to reach for the phone and dial Uncle Cyrus.  

He answered on the first ring.  “Amy, what's wrong?”

“A man broke in…then these men…serial killer…they shot him!” Her teeth started chattering and she couldn't utter anything else.