Out of the Dark Read online

  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.

  The rush and roar of the ocean pounded at his ears for a hard minute as Luke’s world rocked. He fumbled for his phone and punched in his sister’s number. He hadn’t called her in what, four or five months? Hadn’t wanted to interrupt her life. The stink of blood finally overpowered him, and he stumbled into the living room to get away from it as the phone rang and rang and rang. He was just about to hang up when the click of an answer came.

  “Who’s this?” said the unfamiliar male voice.

  Luke said nothing.

  “This is Seattle PD. Who’s calling?”

  “I’m trying to reach umm…Susanna Kent,” Luke said, voice thick, mind racing. “Or her husband? It’s about their automatic renewal—“

  “They won’t need it,” said the cop. “Don’t call here again.”

  Luke stared at his phone after the call disconnected, then turned it off and put it into his pocket. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He wanted to pace the floor, he wanted to tear something in half. He wanted to kill the fucking thing that had done this…he stopped dead in the center of the living room rug.

  As best as he could tell, the original hive had scattered, but only within Pennsylvania and to a couple bordering towns in Ohio and New York. Never farther than that. How the holy fuck did they get all the way to Seattle?

  Unless he was actively on the hunt, Luke did his best to block out the ever-present hum of the hive. He was never sure that they could hear him, though he suspected if they knew he could listen in, even just the smallest bit, they would have been able to reverse the talent and hone in on him. Now, he concentrated on that faint itch at the back of his brain. The not-words, the thought-sounds. He focused on everything he’d ever felt from one of them.

  His guts surged into his throat and he spat to the side to keep himself from vomiting. Pain twisted through him. He went to his knees, hands on his belly as agony ripped at him. He focused, harder, sending out a grasping hand of thought determined to snag what he’d been doing his best to push away for so long.

  Not they, he thought, seeing his sister’s face again, but this time through something else’s eyes. It. One left. He’d finally managed to almost do what he’d set out to accomplish, the complete annihilation of the creatures that had taken him into the dark. There was only one left, and it had killed his parents. It had slaughtered his sister and her family. And it would do its best to hunt him down and do the same to him as what he’d done to its family, would do to it when he had the chance.

  Luke forced himself to his feet, the world still spinning. The pain in his guts spread upward into his brain, squeezing like a fist. The whispers grew louder, still no language he could determine except for the occasional flare of what might’ve been…his name. His fists clenched. He shook his head. No.

  He had three thoughts. The first, find the last creature and destroy it. The second, fire. No matter how horrible it would be to burn his childhood home—his parents—it had to be done. And finally, the most insistent thought: