Shrouded in Darkness (Shrouded Series) (7 page)

Sinking down in his chair, he focused on the numbers and equations in front of him. Concentration and determination were critical to unraveling Miracell. He’d get his answer or die trying. He laughed bitterly. That last thought came too damn close to the truth.

As he reached for another breath mint, a frigid breeze brushed against his skin. He stilled, his hand suspended in mid-air. The heater was on. He’d made sure, keeping the room regulated for the experiments he had to conduct. Shivering, he pushed away from the desk with a foot. The chair rolled and swiveled over the hard, linoleum floor as he turned.

A man in a bulky, down jacket stood in front of the laboratory’s closed door. Malcolm. He’d slipped inside without Jake realizing.

“Hello, Jake.”

The air locked in Jake’s lungs for one, two...three seconds. Then he expelled it into one harsh sigh. He sat unmoving, as frozen and brittle as the trees outside.

Malcolm stepped further into the lab, and a beam of moonlight glittered off a gun. “Shocked? You shouldn’t be. You knew I’d catch up to you.”

He noted Malcolm wasn’t holding a revolver but a semi-automatic. It was a gun that could rip through the lab in seconds, tearing through flesh and bone and anything within its path. Jake had no weapon, no form of defense other than himself. Granted, it might be enough, but there was also the chance of getting hit with one stray bullet. That one bullet would kill him.

“Have you come to kill me?” Jake asked from his chair, curling rigid fingers over the plastic arm rests.

“Believe me, I’d like to. Would actually enjoy it after what you put me through. But, no.” Malcolm nodded to the semi-automatic in his hand. “I thought it smart to bring it along. Call it self-preservation. Or a healthy dose of common sense. After all, I’m not dealing with a normal man.”

“A gun? You think that’s going to stop me? I’m not so easy to kill now, thanks to you.” Bitterness hardened his voice. “If I wanted to, I could kill you right now.”

“But not before I get a couple of bullets in you,” Malcolm coolly replied. “Anyway, you won’t. You had an opportunity back in Boston and didn’t take it. You don’t have the stomach for it, Jake. You never have. That’s the difference between us. I’m not a coward.”

“At least I’m not a murderer.” Jake dug his fingers deeper into the plastic armrests. “Twelve people. All dead. And I was almost one of them.”

The moonlight couldn’t peal the shadows from Malcolm’s expression, but Jake sensed a stillness, almost a weariness settle over the other man.

“Yes, well. That was an accident.”

Jake’s lips thinned. “Come off it, Malcolm. You left us for dead. The only reason I made it out alive was because I was in another wing of the building and you and your friends miscalculated how much it would take to level the place.”

Malcolm sighed and shook his head. “You weren’t supposed to die. You weren’t supposed to even be there. You were far too important to the whole project.”

“That’s why you stabbed me with Miracell?”

“So I lost it. What do you expect? All I could think of was getting back at you when I walked in on you and found out you’d destroyed a critical portion of the formula. I saw the syringe and reacted.”

“I get it now.” Jake’s voice thickened with sarcasm. “I was far more important than the others. So important that I deserved a slow and painful death.”

“Oh, yes. I thought you had it coming. Then I realized injecting you with the formula was better than any plan I’d imagined. It was the best shot to insure the formula’s survival. Miracell’s always been your brainchild, your baby. With any other scientist, it could take months, even years to get to where we were before the day of the blast. But with Miracell in your system, you have no choice but to reconstruct what’s left of the formula and identify an antidote. That is, if you ever hope to become a normal, functioning human being again.”

Hatred twisted Jake’s gut, hatred for everything he had once believed in, and hatred for Malcolm and everything he stood for.

“And John? Was he supposed to die? That crash of his sure as hell was no accident. He started talking, didn’t he? And you didn’t like it. So you decided to shut him up for good—”

“Enough.” Malcolm waved the gun in an arc. “I didn’t come here to talk about John.” Malcolm reached over and flipped the light switch with his free hand. He nodded to the computer at Jake’s side. “It looks like you’ve started. Good. I want to know how far you’ve gotten.”

Jake blinked at the sudden light that flared within the barn. “Turn it off. Margot’ll see it and wonder what’s going on.”

“Ah, yes. My ex-wife.” Malcolm’s lip curled, but he turned the light off. “I hope you haven’t been stupid enough to tell her about—”

“Of course not.” Body tensed for any possibility, Jake watched Malcolm edge across the room. “How much does she know?”

“I don’t know. I have a hard time reading her nowadays. Maybe nothing, maybe everything.”

“But she was married to you, wasn’t she? She must know something. She can’t be completely in the dark.”

“She knows only what I want her to know,” Malcolm replied in a hard and ruthless voice. “However she’s also John’s sister.

He could have told her everything that last week. And if he did, let’s hope she’s smart enough to keep her mouth shut. If she so much as breathes a word to the locals or someone in Boston, her life isn’t worth one of her dime store books.”

Rage launched Jake across the room. He slammed a shoulder into Malcolm. The semi-automatic tumbled from Malcolm’s grasp and skidded across the floor without firing. He shoved Malcolm up against a table while digging his fingers into the flesh and muscle around his windpipe. Grunting, Malcolm bent backward over the table, struggling to pull Jake off him.

“Don’t even think it,” he hissed into Malcolm’s ear. “I won’t have it. I’ll not have another death on my conscience. I swear if another person dies, I’ll come after you. Do you understand? Do you?”

Realizing Malcolm couldn’t answer because of his grip around his throat, Jake eased the pressure. “Do you understand?”

“Yeees—”

“Good. Because you can’t hide. You know it. In the dead of night, before you know what’s happened, before you even realize someone’s crept up on you, I’ll have both my hands around your throat, and I won’t let go until I kill you.”

In utter disgust, Jake flung him away. Malcolm tripped over his expensive wing-tipped shoes, awkwardly twisted at the waist and latched onto the edge of the table with one flailing hand to break his fall.

Brushing off his hands, weary and sickened, Jake watched Malcolm straighten. “Get out. Just get out.”

Malcolm lurched sideways and snapped up the gun. With both hands affixed around the handle, he backed up to the door.

Jake froze. “Don’t do something stupid.”

“This isn’t over,” Malcolm said between long, shallow gasps. Semiautomatic thrust forward, Malcolm bumped his back up against the door. “That formula’s mine. I’ve got too much money and time riding on it. One way or the other, I’m going to end up with it.” He opened the door. Thick rays of moonlight rushed the room, highlighting everything in its path and the savageness of Malcolm’s face. “You will find the answer.”

Chin raised, jaw clenched, Jake bit out, “I don’t have to do anything.”

“True, if you want to stay the way you are—some sick freak.”

Jake flinched. “Don’t.”

Having Malcolm say aloud what he’d come to think of himself was far more painful and self-effacing than Jake wanted to admit.

“Don’t, ‘what’? Tell it like it is?” Malcolm pressed on. “How happy can you be in the state you’re in? Granted, you can do things you’ve always dreamed of, travel anywhere or any place you’ve ever wanted to go. But you can’t be anyone. Not really.

Maybe at night you can get away with it. But for all intents and purposes, you’re dead. A freak of science. You don’t exist.”

Malcolm slammed out of the building.

Chest heaving, fists balled at his sides, Jake stared at the closed door. For several, long, agonizing moments as his heart pounded against his ribs, he stood transfixed. Malcolm’s words reverberated inside his head. The truth in them ravaged him. A wave of impotence and frustration crashed over and around him. Only when his ragged breathing subsided, did he turn and shut down John’s computer.

Then the thought rushed out at him and hit him full force. Malcolm. Margot. Malcolm was going up to the house to find out what she knew.

Margot sat slouched over the computer terminal in her den. Extending the right fingers of her hand, she stretched muscles stiff and cramped from inputting book descriptions into her database. She’d been at it all afternoon and evening. She picked up the last book, which she’d found in a little shop outside of Flagstaff, and trailed a finger across its spine. It was a first edition of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad in beautiful condition. The find had made her week.

With gentle hands, she placed it beside the stack of books by the keyboard. Books were her saviors, her escape. Within their pages she could be the hero, invincible, able to slay dragons and fly to the outer limits of space. They’d helped her get through an awkward and troubling teenage period, a divorce and the loss of her job.

Now there was Johnny to cope with. Everyone had loved her brother. Even with only five years separating them, he’d been the one she’d run to as a child, the one she’d strove for approval while going through college, studying for the bar. Not her parents, never her parents. By the time she’d hit her teen years, she’d long since given up on proving herself to her mother and father. She wasn’t the boy, the brilliant child, but a gangly, awkward, very average girl. Then she’d turned eighteen, it didn’t really matter what her parents thought. They’d died in a boating accident off the coast of Baja, California that year.

Strange that she’d never been jealous, but Johnny was just that type of person. One could never stay angry with Johnny for long. And he’d always been there for her, championing her at every turn in her life.

To her deep regret, the one point of advice she’d never taken from her brother was Malcolm. Johnny had never liked him, but her brother, one to always have explanations grounded in fact, couldn’t explain why, other than a gut reaction.

She fought back the sudden ache in her throat. She’d cried far too much already.

Sighing, she rose from her chair, all the while rubbing at the crick in the nape of her neck. The sun had long since slipped over the horizon, leaving the house in complete darkness.

She reached over to turn the desk lamp on when a light from outside flashed between the curtains and disappeared. Frowning, Margot turned away from the untouched light and walked over to the large window. With some caution, she pulled the thick velvet drapes aside.

Someone was driving down the road, which wound through her property to highway 46. The car was unfamiliar, some type of recreational vehicle, but it had a longer, bulkier frame than Joyce’s Land Cruiser. It couldn’t be Jake. His vehicle was a small pickup, nothing like the one crawling over the snow-incrusted road. Headlights blinked through the trees, then vanished as the car turned onto the main road to the highway.

Strange that they hadn’t come to the house. Unless, they were up to some mischief on her property, but Margot quickly discounted that. She wasn’t living in a large metropolis anymore but a small town in the mountains with a fraction of the population.

They were probably lost, she finally decided as she smoothed back the drape.

A noise, a metallic click of some sort, echoed faintly from the front of the house.

“Jake?”

She walked into the hall and found the front door closed along with the one to Jake’s bedroom. He was still gone for the day.

“Johnny? Is that you?”

Silence.

“Are you trying to tell me something? Is that it? Are you here for a reason?” Slowly, she turned in a circle. No ghostly appearance made itself known. “I wish I knew what you wanted. Or why you’re here.”

She sighed in frustration before going into the kitchen and getting a glass of wine and something to eat. When she finished dinner, Jake still hadn’t come back for the day.

She both dreaded and anticipated seeing him again. These last few days, she’d begun to look forward to his company, until, that is, she had slammed into his very male and very naked body last night. The feel of his skin against her hands still burned through her memory.

It had been so very long since she’d been held, kissed or caressed by a man. Her reaction could well be because she’d been celibate since Malcolm, and Jake had been that one match needed to set her system aflame. Then again, she was afraid it might be more than physical. She didn’t like this sudden thirst for someone else’s company. She’d finally become completely self-sufficient.

She wasn’t about to turn back now.

Jake’s door remained shut. Curiosity tunneled into her system and pulled her down the hall to his room. After a moment of listening to her own breathing, she bit her lip, snapped on the hall light, then put her hand on the knob. The door opened silently inward. Light from the hall arrowed into the room.

She stepped inside, and, of course, found the place empty. The bed was neatly made. There were only a few signs of his occupancy. A comb on the dresser, a pair of jeans folded across the back of the cushioned chair. And his scent. A rich, masculine, wholesome aroma that curled around her.

On top of the low slung, bedroom dresser, a laptop computer further illuminated the room in a light blue, artificial glow. A screen saver of ocean wildlife shielded the monitor from view. She touched the mouse and row upon row of numbers and formulas lined the screen. Leaning forward, she peered at it but couldn’t make any sense of it. She would have been better off trying to decipher a foreign language.

With a frustrated sigh, she backed away from the dresser and the computer. Her heel hit something hard. She glanced down and saw a dark object protruding from under the bed. Jake must have dropped it. She knelt down and reached out—