Out of the Dark (8 page)

He came downstairs when she was folding the last T-shirt, still warm from the dryer and no longer smelling of gasoline and sweat but instead of lavender fabric softener sheets. He looked at the meager stacks of his clothes on the kitchen table and ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. She'd lent him a pair of scrub pants, and they hung low enough to expose his jutting hipbones and the line of dark golden hair running from his belly button into the waistband. Now he stood with one hip cocked, his bare toes curled slightly on the kitchen tiles.

“What's this?”

Celia passed a hand over the warm cotton. “I did your laundry. It really needed to be done.”

Luke looked like he meant to say something, changed his mind, opened his mouth again. “You didn't have to.”

“I wanted to. Well,” she said, “not that I wanted to do laundry. Nobody ever wants to do laundry. But it needed to be done, and I was up, so…I did it.”

“Thank you,” Luke said.

Celia'd been through awkward morning afters before. “I made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. And there's coffee.”

Luke didn't move toward a seat, though his eyes cut toward the counter and the coffeemaker. “I should get on the road.”

She'd had a suspicion he'd say something like that, but even so, her stomach sank. “You have time for breakfast, don't you? You have to eat. You can't head off without something in your stomach.”

“I already slept too late….”

“Where do you have to go?” Celia asked quietly. “I mean, is there some sort of schedule I don't know about? You have to punch a clock?”

That earned her a small smile. “No. But I have a lead on a few things up toward Scranton. If I get on the road, I can be there before it gets dark.”

“You could stay here, have breakfast. Then lunch. Some afternoon delight,” she said, teasing. “Another good night's sleep.”

Luke looked with blatant longing at the coffeemaker and the plate of cinnamon rolls. “I really can't.”

“You kind of look like shit,” Celia told him bluntly. “Like you've been riding hard and treating yourself like crap. Tell me how you can do what you do without taking better care of yourself, Luke.”

He fixed her with a long, steady gaze, then looked away as though she'd shamed him. “Celia, this is too much.”

“What's too much?” she asked, not willing to let him slide away from her and uncertain why. It wasn't as if she'd never let a man slide away from her before. Jeremy hadn't even needed a good excuse to leave her, and she'd let herself be left. “The laundry? The food? The sex, is that too much, Luke?”

His jaw set, but he didn't look at her. “All of it's too much. You didn't have to…”

She crossed to him and got up in his face without actually touching him. “I wanted to. All of it. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

“You don't owe me anything,” Luke said, face still turned away.

She knew she shouldn't be angry. After all, she'd given him the right to be a prick when she let him come inside and fuck her senseless after months of those useless late-night phone calls. If she let him show up in her life without warning, it was stupid of her to be upset if he wanted to walk back out of it again the same way.

“You owe me something,” she said. He looked at her then, without moving away, so close the heat from his bare skin lingered on hers. “You owe it to me to take care of yourself. So that when you're out there, doing what you do…”

Her throat closed on the words. What was she saying? What was she thinking? That the monsters were real, and Luke hunted them down? Killed them? Set fire to the remains? Nothing in her entire life had prepared her to believe in this. Not the strange light in the sky she'd seen at thirteen, the glimpse of what might've been a ghostly figure in her grandmother's house when she was twenty-four, not the scarily accurate Tarot card reading she'd had just before the split with Jeremy.

But she did believe it. She believed him. She stood on her toes to brush his mouth with hers, to say against his lips, “You owe it to me to come back here in one piece, Luke. And if taking a few days off now and again, letting me take care of you, makes it easier for you to go out there and find them. To…kill them. If letting me do these simple things for you means you'll be better prepared to do what you do, then you owe it to me to stay here and eat a goddamn cinnamon roll, drink some coffee and make love to me and at least take a fucking nap before you go.”

His arms went around her. His kiss, deep and thorough. He buried his face in her neck, then lifted her so that her legs went easily around his waist, his big hands supporting her ass. Luke looked up into her eyes.

“Okay,” was all he said, but it was enough.

 

Two days.

She'd convinced him to stay through the weekend and leave early Monday when she went to work. He'd made it all the way until dawn, when he woke with wide eyes and a pounding heart. She'd still been sleeping beside him, her soft breath steady, regular and precious. When he kissed her bare shoulder, she barely stirred, and Luke had slipped naked from the bed to dress in the almost-dark without waking her.

He hadn't left a note, but he had taken the last cinnamon roll on his way out the door, his pack full of clean and fresh-scented laundry folded so expertly he had plenty of room left where before he'd had to crumple and shove everything to get it to fit. She'd been right, he had to admit it. A few days of good food and sleep…and yes, the sex, had invigorated him. Replenished him.

Still, he snuck away from her even though she'd been the one to say it was okay that he go. Not because he was ashamed and not because he thought she might try to change his mind. In between the food, the sleep and the fucking, he and Celia had talked for long, long hours about the life he'd found himself living. It had been an immense relief to unburden himself to someone who believed him. To share what he'd learned about these things that still had no name. To tell her how it felt to kill them, how it never got easier or better, how he never even came close to any sort of joy from it. Revenge was not sweet, Luke had learned. It was a bitter, bitter thing.

He snuck away because the last memory he wanted Celia to have of him was not the word goodbye.

He was forty miles down the road, the sun at last risen overhead and the late September air cool on his skin, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Nobody called him, not ever. He pulled to the side of the road to check and found a text message from Celia.

Call me tonight.

It made him smile and coiled sensation tight inside him. He thumbed a return message,
I will,
and tucked the phone back into his pocket. Then he got back on the road and drove.

 

This was her crazy life, Celia thought as the sound of Luke's motorcycle in the front yard woke her. She hadn't been sleeping very hard, half-waiting for his call, half-waiting for him. It had been just over a month since the last time he'd come back. The time before that, just a few weeks. His last phone call had been the night before, when he'd told her he was only a few hours away, and though he hadn't made any promises, she'd crawled into bed thinking tonight was the night he'd be back.

The last time, she'd given him a key because he'd scolded her so fiercely about leaving one under the flowerpot by the front door. Too dangerous, he'd said, and not just because the things he hunted were smart enough to use keys, but because any criminal could. So she'd made him take a key so he could let himself in and reassure himself the locks worked. She heard the click and squeak of the front door opening, then the soft tread of his boots on the stairs.

At the sound of someone in the doorway, she tossed off the coverlet to reveal her naked skin. “Welcome home.”

She loved the way he laughed, like she'd caught him off-guard even though he should really have known by now how she liked to greet him. She loved, too, how fast he stripped down and slipped into bed beside her. And how he smelled of fresh air and leather, even the faint scent of earth and gasoline something like an aphrodisiac to her.

When he ran his hands up her body, Celia sighed. When he slid one between her legs, she arched. When he moved down her belly with his mouth to lap at her clit, she fisted her hands in his hair, too short for her to get a good grip, and let her fingers slide along his scalp as he feasted on her. She pressed her body to his mouth and rocked with his touch. When he took her to the edge and eased off, teasing her, she muttered a curse. And, when he pushed his cock so deep inside her, she thought she'd never been fucked so good, so hard, so thoroughly by any man.

She loved it.

She loved him.

They didn't talk of love; it was something she knew better than to say. Didn't have to, really, because she gave it to him with her body, the pies she baked because she knew he liked them. The loads of laundry. The way she let him leave her when he had to.

Later, when he'd spent himself inside her and rolled onto his back, both of them sweaty and breathing hard, she turned on her side to study his face and let her hand trace his body all over to see what new scars he wore. Sometimes, she kissed them so she wouldn't cry over them.

When it was time for him to go, she packed him a lunch and made sure he had enough clean socks and underwear. Very domestic, very 1950s housewife. She sent him off to “work” with a smile and kiss, sometimes a squeeze of his ass. It wasn't like anything she'd ever imagined having, but somehow it just felt…right.

 

“This is totally unhealthy, you know that, right?” That came from Lisa, who thought marriage made her some sort of relationship expert. “I mean, long-distance relationships are hard enough, but this guy…what, he just swans in and out of your life whenever he's passing by?”

“Something like that.” Celia poured some frozen margaritas from the blender into Lisa's glass, then clinked hers against her cousin's.

Lisa drank and shook her head. “I thought you had a nice thing going on with what's-his-name. Brian?”

“He didn't like my meat loaf,” Celia said, and laughed when Lisa looked so clearly confused.

“The sex must be pretty freaking amazing, that's all I have to say.” Lisa frowned. “But you should stop thinking with your lady bits, Celia. Fucking some…drifter…might be all sorts of sexy, but what's it going to get you in the long run?”

Celia turned the conversation then, by asking Lisa about her new appliances, their house, the puppy she and Denny were thinking of adopting in preparation for babies. She ate nachos and drank margaritas with her favorite cousin while they gossiped about family members and friends, and she went home to her empty, dark house alone.

And when Luke opened her door, she was there to greet him.

Bone-deep exhaustion and Luke had started going steady more than a year ago, but now instead of taking it to the prom, it was expecting him to pony up an engagement ring. That was one marriage Luke wanted to avoid but found himself unable to fight against. The only real thing that kept him going was knowing that at the end of a few weeks' travels, a few lucky kills that were getting farther and farther apart, he had Celia to go to.

Home, he thought as he pulled into the driveway of another familiar house where a woman inside waited for him. Home was Celia's house, not this white Cape Cod in which he'd grown up. He rarely made it back here because although his parents still loved him, and he knew they did, he also knew they thought he was nuts. He'd disappointed them. It might've been better if he had a drug problem, had knocked up a woman or several, if he'd robbed a bank. Hell. It might've been better for them if he'd just died in that cave instead of coming out of it a different man. But he hadn't died, and he wasn't crazy, at least not in the way they thought he was, so every once in a while he made sure to stop by and check on them. Both were retired, and they weren't getting younger. His younger sister Susanna, her husband and kids all lived in Seattle, about as far from Pittsburgh as you could get. His parents had been there for him after the cave-in, at the hospital and during his treatments, but he thought they breathed a sigh of relief when he left them. Truth was, he did too.

He let himself in the back door with a grimace at how easily it opened. They'd passed off his warnings about the locks as part of his illness—in their small rural suburb, crime was still mostly something they saw on the television news. He called out his mother's name as he entered the kitchen.

His feet slipped.

The stench hit him a second later. The thick, meaty stink of old blood. Luke recoiled, reaching for the knife on his belt. He knew already he was too late—the things were fast and silent, but they carried their own stench that faded swiftly enough for him to be certain the only living thing in this kitchen was him. He found both his parents at the table, their throats slashed, bodies slumped over moldy cups of coffee. Two, maybe three days dead, not long enough for anyone to have started to worry about either of them.

Their flesh had been torn, but not eaten. Usually, the creatures made a feast of their victims, stripping flesh and muscle to the bone, methodic in their hunger. For one moment, Luke held out some faint hope that whoever had done this to his parents had been a simple serial killer, even a random burglar who'd been surprised into homicide. But then the footprint in the blood proved his worst thoughts as truth—human in shape, but with freakish long toes and the smaller marks at the tips that came from the claws. The drag of came from the folded wings on either side, scrapes of white in the blood that had gone brown with age, spattered on the floor.

There, on the table between his parents, a photo of Susanna and her family at the beach. Gap-toothed grins on his niece and nephew, his brother-in-law's nose peeling from too much sun. His sister in a floppy hat and a smile just like their dad's. At least, that was what had been in the photo. All that was left now were four torsos dressed in bathing suits, a glimpse of sand and sea behind them.