They walked out into the sparsely furnished front room, where Nicola immediately went to inspect a dark-screened laptop. When she turned it on, it showed only a password-prompt screen. She frowned. “Not Windows. Hmmm.” She tapped a few keys, swore, and then quickly shut off the power.
“Nicola?”
“She’s got this thing suicide-encrypted.” She blew out a breath. “If I try to force a log-on, it’ll fry the hard drive.” She reached down and unplugged the laptop, rolling up the cords. “I’ll have to spend some quality time with this later.”
He glanced through an adjoining door. “Her bedroom is in there.”
Nick followed him in, and then stopped to shine the light around the four walls of the room. The light revealed that the two windows had been bricked in, and the inside of the bedroom door had three sturdy locks on it.
“Okay.” Nick closed the door and switched on a lamp. “What the hell is all this?”
Gabriel went to one of the windows. “This brickwork is not new. It’s been in place for some time.”
“Same with the locks. So who makes their bedroom into a fortress?” Nick wondered out loud.
“Someone who was very frightened,” he said, trailing his fingers along a line of mortar. He turned and looked at the cup sitting on the bedside table. He went over and picked it up, and saw several dead ants floating on the contents. He sniffed the rim of the cup and detected a powerful chemical. “This is tainted with something.”
Nicola joined him and sniffed it. “Diazepam. It’s a sedative.” She sniffed again, more deeply. “Whoa. There’s enough in here to knock out a small elephant.”
He arched a brow. “You know this how?”
“Back in the day I knew better than to take on a posse of holy freaks by myself,” she said mildly. “So when there were more than two, I drugged them.” She heaved a sigh and glanced around. “But why was this chick sedating herself? You think she was a major insomniac?”
“I don’t know.” He sent out more of his talent, summoning the smallest inhabitants of the house. “But I will ask.”
His lover’s eyes flashed up as a pebble-size gray spider on a nearly invisible thread of silk descended between them. Others climbed down the thread to cluster with the first. “Spiders. Why does it always have to be spiders?”
He smiled a little. “Because the two roaches nesting in the closet infested the house only last night.”
She shuddered. “Okay, spiders are fine.”
Gabriel placed a hand under the spinners, who abandoned the web line and landed on his palm. In his mind he both saw them and saw his face through their eyes as his talent expanded.
Arachnids were unique among the millions of other creatures Gabriel thought of as the Many; the carnivorous hunters had evolved to become in a sense the Darkyn of the insect world. They also did not sustain a hive mind as most insects did, but instead tasted the experience-memories of other spiders through minute traces of chemicals they exuded onto their webs. A spider had only to check the web to remember, and any who encountered another’s web would be able to read from it the experiences of the former occupant.
The seven spiders on Gabriel’s hand were siblings, and had inhabited the woman’s home since hatching that summer. Their mother had left behind many memories in her web: the arrival of the human female, her occupancy of the house, and some of the strange things she had done alone at night during the first month.
“She brought the bricks and locks with her, and installed them the first week she was here.” Gabriel sifted through the spiders’ collective memories, seeing the same one repeating over and over. “She would bring her laptop in here before she locked herself in.”
“A homemade safe room,” he heard Nicola murmur. “She probably didn’t have enough money for an alarm system. Had to be a way out, though.” She paced around the room, then bent and lifted the bed skirt. “Now, why would someone put a rug
under
their bed? Watch out, baby.”
Once Gabriel had stepped aside, Nicola pushed the bed to one side, exposing a dusty rag rug. She pulled it up, revealing a rectangular section that had been cut out of the hardwood floor and then fitted with hinges and a latch and replaced. She popped the latch, opened it, and used the flashlight to inspect the interior of the space below it.
“Opens down into the crawl space under the house.” She sat back on her heels. “This had to be her escape hatch. Why put it under the bed, though?”
Engrossed in chemical memories, Gabriel hardly heard her. He learned that the woman had been aware of the spiders, had never disturbed them. He found one vivid memory trace, of her standing on a chair to inspect one web. Her lips formed words the spider didn’t understand, but he did.
You can catch all the mosquitoes you want, little sister.
True to their nature, the spiders remained ever wary of the new tenant, but in time they began cautiously moving in and out of the room when the woman left the door open during the day. That was why they had witnessed other odd incidents: men watching the woman and taking photographs of her through her windows, one picking the lock on the back door and searching the house while she was gone, while in the kitchen a second mixed a packet of white powder in the canister of hot-chocolate mix the woman kept there.
The siblings had also witnessed the men returning later that night, entering her unlocked bedroom, and taking her limp body from her bed.
“She was drugged by her abductors, and fell unconscious before she could secure herself in here,” Gabriel said as he released the spiders and watched them climb up the strand of silk. “These men, they watched her long enough to learn her habits and see her vulnerabilities.”
“She was right to be afraid.” Nicola eyed the bricks. “I know we can’t mess with anything in here, but I really wish I could tear down those damn things.”
After years of torture, Gabriel had been crucified alive and left to die in a sealed room. It had been Nicola who had found him, who had used a sledgehammer to break through the bricks of his eternal prison in order to free him. Gabriel’s cool detachment, brought on by communing with the spiders, disappeared under the fierce rush of love for his woman.
Forced to become Darkyn against her will, Nicola had had every reason in the world to despise their kind, and yet she had risked everything—even her life—to save him.
He came to stand behind her, his arms encircling her narrow waist. “When was the last time I told you how precious you are to me?”
“It’s been a good three, four hours.” She rested her hands over his. “I didn’t mean to remind you about when we met.”
“I have some very fond memories of that night.” He brought one hand up to cup her breast, caressing it as he used the other to release the button of her jeans. “One is how soft and giving you were in my arms.” He slipped his hand into her panties and parted her with one long finger. “How heavenly you felt when I touched you.”
“I was?” She caught her breath as his fingertip pressed in. “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty heavenly.”
“You didn’t know what I wanted to do to you.” Gabriel eased her jeans down over her hips, exposing the sweet, tight curves of her pale bottom. “Did you?”
“I was too preoccupied at the time.” The scent of juniper rose from her skin with delicious warmth, blending with the fragrance of evergreen radiating from his. She reached behind and opened the front of his trousers, her fingers curling around his stiff shaft. “Stuff like this kept distracting me.”
“You felt like wet satin under my hand, just as you do now,” he whispered against her ear. “I wanted to be inside you so much.”
“Your problem is that you’re just too damn polite.” Nicola released him, shoving her jeans down to her calves before she bent to brace her hands against the bed. “I remember you wouldn’t let me do this.”
“No.” Gabriel fisted his penis and guided it to her, closing his eyes as he felt the delicate lips of her sex enclose the dry, tight head. “And I swore to myself I would never trespass here.”
Her thighs shook as she clenched around him, trying to draw him in and hissing with impatience when he clamped his hands on her hips to hold her in place. “You’d better start trespassing. Right now, pal.”
Gabriel smiled as he slid his hands up, stroking her breasts before he followed the tight muscles of her arms down to her hands. As he entwined his fingers with hers, he sank into her, bringing another long, soft sound from her throat. When the curve of her buttocks pressed into his belly, he put his mouth to her ear. “So now you know. This is how I wanted to take you that night. With you beneath me, trembling as you are now. Eager to feel me inside you.” He drew back, and then surged into her again. “Needing more.” He went deeper. “Wanting more.”
“Oh, God.” Her hips jerked as he brought her hand and his to feel the slick, hot juncture of their sexes, and pressed the heel of his hand to the swollen, exposed pearl of her clit. “Don’t hold back this time.” She turned her head, shifting her curls away from her left shoulder. “Gabriel, please.”
He kissed the lovely line of her throat, pushing into her as he rubbed her clit and sank his
dents acérées
into her flesh, tasting the cool, spicy nectar of her blood. The twin penetrations brought her over the edge, and he drove into the center of the tight contractions around his penis, fucking her through her pleasure and feeling the dark satisfaction of their bond, of the delight only he could give to her, only he would ever feel her take.
He held himself inside her as he took his mouth from her throat, and used his hands to keep them joined as he turned her onto her back. “I want to see your eyes,” he said as he began to work in her again. “I want to see you come for me again.”
“You won’t have long to wait.” Her voice shook as much as her hands as she latched onto his arms. “I love the way you make me feel. I love this.” Her eyes went wide as he brought her over again. “Gabriel. I love you.”
The words she rarely said slammed into him, smashing through everything he was and making him more than he thought he could ever be. As his body drove into hers, he felt the fire of that love healing him again, erasing more of the hidden wounds he had carried for so long. Never had he dreamed it could be like this, not even on that terrible night when she had found him, and as he pumped his seed into her, he lost himself in all that was Nicola, all that they were together.
She held him for a long time, drawing him onto the bed with her and kissing his mouth with dreamy absorption. “You really should have done that the night we met, you know. You were way too polite.”
“Perhaps I was.” He nuzzled her throat, and as she turned her head to give him better access, he felt her go still. “Nick?”
“Something’s taped under the nightstand.” She reached out to the small bedside table, feeling under it until she pulled off a book with strips of tape across the top and bottom of the outer cover. “Well, what do we have here?”
Gabriel reluctantly withdrew from her body and settled her against his side. “A book.”
She opened it. “Better than a book. A journal . Hmmm. Starts off like a letter: ‘Dear Paracelsus, If anything happens to me, I hope you’ll be the one to find this.’ ” She glanced at him. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Paracelsus was a well-known physician and alchemist who died in the sixteenth century,” Gabriel told her. “And before you ask, no, he was not made Darkyn.”
“Lucky him.” She flipped through the handwritten pages, pausing now and then to read. “Okay, it looks like she mostly wrote stuff about her work. Wasn’t all dog-catching. Caught a coyote, relocated a gator, rescued a kitten down a well, yada yada yada. Wait, here’s something.” She read for a few moments, and then blew some air over her lower lip. “Whoever this Paracelsus guy is, it seems like he wasn’t around. All she did was work or spend her nights here, alone. Had a hard time coping with the solitude, too.”
He felt a twinge of pity. “Perhaps he was someone she met on the Internet?”
“Maybe. She doesn’t give too many details on anything. Must have been afraid someone else would find it. Here’s the last entry, dated a few days ago.” Nicola frowned. “She was planning to move after the first of the year. She was afraid of something. Seriously afraid.” She flipped the page over. “Oh, shit.”
“What is it?”
“There’s another reason she was locking herself in here every night.” She handed him the journal.
Chapter 13
L
ike every building in the town, the small hotel appeared old and well built from the outside. The interior, crowded as it was, kept out the cold and seemed reasonably secure. Lilah openly admired the thousands of objects the townswoman had used as decorations, especially a small red wagon filled with shabby stuffed toys.
“Look at this one, Walker.” Lilah pointed to a bear with an eye missing and honey-colored, patchy fur darkened by years of being handled by small, grimy hands. An old metal button stitched inside the tuft of its left ear bore the image of a tiny elephant. To Annie, she said, “Isn’t this a Steiff bear?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the older woman said, her voice gruff. “I just like them. Now, I’ve got a room on the second floor with a nice view overlooking Main Street—”