Darker Things (The Lockman Chronicles #1) (14 page)

Sure enough, as they rounded the corner and started up the steps, a breathy howl chased after them.

Halfway up the staircase, the specter, back to his green phosphorescent self, rose up through the stairs as if in an invisible elevator.

Lockman and Jessie jerked to a halt.

“You cannot outrun me.”

Lockman growled and threw the tire iron at the thing. The metal rod flew end-over-end and passed right through the specter’s translucent torso.

The specter laughed.

“I don’t have to outrun you,” Lockman said. “You can’t possess me, and if you go near Jessie, I won’t cooperate.”

The specter’s face distorted, the humanlike face replaced for a moment by something grotesque. There and gone so fast, Lockman couldn’t pick out details, but he was left with a subliminal unease.

“If not for our coming ascension, I would rape your soul and your daughter.”

“You’ve got a serious incest fetish, huh?”

“Jokes will not save you. And it will not stop us.”

“Stop who from what?”

The specter smiled. “Those of us who deserve life will taste it again.” The glowing shape dissipated into what looked like a green storm cloud. The cloud broke apart into a mist. The mist swirled around them, blowing their hair, and then it streamed out of the stairway, chased by a freight train scream.

Jessie covered her head and started rambling off movie titles again, half of which Lockman didn’t recognize.

Lockman squinted through the whirling wind and stared in the direction of the specter’s retreat. “I don’t think he’s done with us.”

Something smacked across his arm. He turned and Jessie punched him in the chest. When he didn’t react, she punched again.

“You can be as mad as you want, but the fact is, you’re still alive and he’s gone for now.”

“You prick. You righteous prick. What if he—”

“I wasn’t going to let him.”

“And Ryan. Oh my god.” She turned and trounced back down the stairs before Lockman could protest.

He followed her down. “We don’t have time—”

“Shut up.”

He hung back while she went to Ryan and crouched at his side. She stroked his hair, revealing a smear of blood from the boy’s scalp.

“Did you kill him?”

“I can see he’s still breathing from here.” He took a step forward. “I know you’re upset, but we have to go.”

“I’m not running around anymore with you. I’m tired of it.”

“The whole reason I left was to avoid putting the people I care about in danger. That didn’t work. But I’m still not going to let you or Kate get hurt.”

She glared at him over her shoulder. “I thought you didn’t have a choice. They
made
you leave.”

He took a deep breath. “Half true. I could have taken Kate with me. My boss offered me to take someone. I told him there wasn’t anyone to take. He wasn’t supposed to know about Kate.”

“But he did?”

“He’s the one gave me up to the PI. He must have known about Kate, about you. And that you would lead Dolan’s men to my door. It’s backwards. He could have told Dolan and left you and Kate out of it, but I won’t know the details until I talk to him myself.”

She shook her head and looked down at Ryan. “You think it’s true? You think he’ll wake up crazy?”

“Probably.”

“Don’t sugar coat it.”

“Not one of my skills.”

She snorted, barely hanging onto the stone face she’d put on. “I noticed.”

“We have to go.”

“I’m not going to leave him like this.”

“We can call an ambulance on the way out. Jessie, we need to get back to your mom.”

Her back went stiff. “Why?”

“You know why.”

She hung her head. “Finding you really messed things up, huh?”

“I’ll fix it. I promise.”

“Just you? Against…” She waved her hand toward the ceiling. “…all that.”

“Behind all that is one man. I stop him, none of these things will have any reason to come after you or Kate.”

“But they might still come after you?”

“If I piss them off enough. Me and the supernatural never did get along very well.”

Chapter Twenty

“What do you think that thing meant about the ‘ascension?’ Sounds like something out of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
”

Lockman completed the left turn that took them into Kate’s neighborhood before answering. “Been mulling that myself.”

“You don’t have a clue, huh?”

“These things, supernatural beings, follow their own brand of rules. But they all have one thing in common. They were almost universally brought here, to our world or plane of existence, or whatever, by some malignant means.”

“Like, what?” she asked with a laugh in her voice. “Sacrificing virgins?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.” He turned onto Kate’s street, slowed to give them a chance to finish the conversation. “Blood sacrifice is the most efficient way of summoning and controlling those forces. Not all of them can be controlled once they’re here, though. There are plenty of vampires out there, for example, some of them made by the vamps that were brought here initially.”

“Brought here? Brought from where?”

“Most people familiar with these things refer to it as another dimension or an alternate reality. If you talk to a physicist about it, he’ll get into all the different possible worlds parallel to ours. But I think most of the scientists are full of shit. This isn’t science, its mojo. Magic. Stuff people shouldn’t be messing with.”

He pulled into Kate’s driveway and cut the engine. He watched Jessie try to process what he was telling her. He saw the next question rising in her face, knew what it was maybe before she did. The patterns were predictable. For those that got past the impossibility of the supernatural, the follow-up questions held pretty close to standard form.

“How come we can’t conjure up some mojo of our own? If there’s a dark side, there has to be a light side, right?”

“I told you these forces defied rational explanation. Believe me, people have tried to find the so-called light side for hundreds of years. There’s no such thing. Mojo is bad, period.”

She shook her head. “Good and evil. Heaven and hell. Ying and Yang. Everything has an opposite. There has to be good magic.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the opposite of zero?”

“Not…zero. Nothing verses something.”

“I didn’t say ‘nothing.’ I said ‘zero.’ The number. It has no opposite.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I don’t make up the rules.”

“No. You just buy into whatever
they
told you. Even though
they
are the ones that screwed you over.”

“That thing that killed Ryan’s mom by making her smash her own head into the floor? How can there be any good in that?”

“If there are demons, there are angels.”

“Those are just names. Names mean nothing. Call them vampires because they feed on the blood of humans and burn in sunlight. But take away all the mortal literature, and what you’re left with is a vicious animal that doesn’t belong among us. I don’t care what you call it. It does not belong.”

Jessie stared out her window, her slouched posture telling him she didn’t like what he said. He didn’t blame her. Knowing that mankind had managed to pull pure evil into our world to the exclusion of its opposite fucked with your head. It went against everything kids were raised to believe. God verses the devil. Good guys versus the bad. The truth: there were bad guys and there was everyone else.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. “Your mom will be glad to see you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Don’t doubt it. She loves you very much. It’s written all over her face.”

She shifted in her seat, looked at him. “You don’t know my mom. All she cares about is turning me into a little automaton like her. Be a good girl who does what she’s told.”

He shook his head. “For a thirteen year-old, you are both really smart and really stupid.”

“Nice.”

“I might not know Kate as well as I used to. But I know what’s at her core. That doesn’t change. She’s doing her best.”

“What about you?”

“Open ended question.”

“What’s at your core? Are you doing your best?”

“I could have done better.”

She popped open her door. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

After her door shut, Lockman sat for a moment in the silence.
I have a daughter,
he thought as if he had only just discovered this.

Then he remembered the fear and pain in her eyes when he told the specter to take her, pretending not to care.

He got out of the car.

Jessie stood halfway up the approach to the front porch. Night had settled thick and full, the sky darker here than it ever got in LA. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t want to face the dragon lady alone. I need you to vouch for me.”

“Not about that. About earlier. In Ryan’s basement. I should have never challenged that thing and put you at risk.”

Her eyes shifted. She crossed her arms and shrugged. “No big. You were bluffing, right? You had it under control.”

“I didn’t have anything under control. I gambled with your life. I won’t do that again, no matter what.”

“What about the greater good?”

“I’ve been burned by my own people. The greater good can go to hell.”

She smiled, just barely. “Cool.”

They stepped onto the porch together. He opened the door for her and let her walk in first.

“Mom?” Jessie shouted once inside. “I’m home and ready for my grounding.”

Lockman winced. “Probably not the best way to play this.”

Instead of an angry or worried Kate marching into the room, the house was so quiet Lockman could hear the occasional snap and pop of it settling.

“Oh shit,” Jessie whispered.

“Maybe they stepped out for a moment.” He moved by her and into the kitchen. No sign of struggle. The light over the sink was left on. A couple lamps on in the family room. The TV playing with the volume low. “Kate?”

“They were taken, weren’t they?” Jessie stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living room. Her skin looked pale except for the shadows under her eyes. Lockman realized she must have washed the rest of her makeup off. None of the black gunk marred her sweet, round face. If she could cast off the look of someone who had, literally, seen a ghost, she might have looked like a regular kid.

“TV’s still on. Lights are all on. That sound like something they would do if they went out?”

“My mom is an energy freak. No way she’d leave all those things on. Maybe Alec. But if she thought I was coming back with you…”

Lockman nodded. No way Kate would have left this house until she knew her daughter was safe. “They were taken.”

“There you go,” she said, her voice thick with tears, “sugar coating again.”

He crossed the kitchen and, without thinking, took her in his arms and hugged her. “I’ll get them back.”

She cried against him, whole body shaking. He held on. He knew they shouldn’t hang around, but he wouldn’t rush her. She’d been through enough.

She pulled together quicker than he expected. “Thanks,” she said. “We have to go, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“What will happen to them?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what Dolan has planned. So far, none of this makes sense.”

“Where to, then?”

“Regroup. Rearm. And pay my old boss a visit.”

She nodded, so much strength behind her eyes it made Lockman quit breathing for a second. An amazing kid. Unpredictable. Unreasonable. Irrational. But amazing.

She deserved her normal life back.

She would have her normal life back.

Chapter Twenty-One

Kate lost all sense of time after the hood went over her head. The masked strangers had guided her out of the house and put her and Alec into the back of what she was pretty sure was a van. They had to sit on the van’s floor. Her hands were bound with a plastic zip tie behind her back. Each hump in the road the van hit threatened her to tip her off balance and onto her side. She leaned against Alec for support, and he did the same against her, so they managed to make the trip without rolling over. The ride itself felt like an age. The hood and her hot breath trapped inside started making her claustrophobic.

She didn’t ask for them to remove the hood, though. She didn’t want to see them. If she didn’t have any faces to identify, they wouldn’t have to kill her. At least, that’s how it worked in the thrillers she read. Only, how often did that work out?

This wasn’t a thriller. This was real. Cold comfort for anyone who watched enough news.

Eventually, the van had stopped, the engine cut, and she and Alec were pulled from the back.

Now she sat somewhere musty, with an echo that made every foot shuffle sound like the batting wings of a giant moth. Based on the hard, cool feel against her back and the metal seat she could feel with her bound hands, they had her on a metal chair. Alex sat nearby. She could hear his breathing and had heard him grunt when they sat him down hard.

Their captors’ footsteps clopped away, leaving them in silence.

“Babe, you okay?” Alec’s voice sounded strained, as if on the verge of screaming. She appreciated him holding back his fear, she only wished he was better at it.

Her heart pumped hard in her chest. Her throat felt thick. “Why are they doing this?”

“I thought you might know.”

“Me?”

“That old boyfriend of yours shows up, says Jessie’s in danger, then armed men whisk us away. Who is he?”

A valid question and one she realized she didn’t have the answer to. She exhaled slowly and smelled a bitterness on her breath.

The echo of footsteps traveled toward them. Several sets of feet. With the echo, impossible to determine how many approached. Her breath felt twice as hot and smelled twice as bitter under the hood. Her heart ached it beat so hard.

Eventually the footfalls came to rest. Kate imagined a line of masked men with big guns staring at her, lifting their barrels, prepping to cut her and Alec down like a firing squad.

A deep voice that sounded like it belonged on the radio spoke instead. “Split them apart and question them separately.”