Authors: John Urbancik
The trail didn’t lead specifically to a door, unfortunately, but left him just five from which to choose, which made it easy: only one had any noise inside, a radio playing softly.
He knocked.
He didn’t have to. The locks here were simple, the doors flimsy.
He glanced up and down the hall. No responses, no creatures hiding in the corners, no strange scents or sounds, nothing to indicate he wasn’t alone—which meant nothing.
Jack opened the door cautiously. Nick might have pushed it open at the first sign of movement, smashing Jack in the face and maybe knocking him out. Despite the urge, he didn’t.
“Hunter,” Jack said.
Nick grinned. Met Jack’s brown eyes. “You got lucky with that truck.” Without waiting for an invitation, he stepped in and shut the door.
“Who?” the woman asked. The thing had scratched her pretty badly, Nick noted, but not horribly, nothing that would scar.
“Nick Hunter. We never got a proper introduction downstairs.”
“Lisa,” she said.
“So,” Jack said, locking the door. “I hate to say this, but I’m not safe to be around.”
“I noticed,” Nick said. He winked at Lisa. “I thought I’d steal some of the glory.”
“An errant zombie, ogre, a living shadow,” Jack said. “So far. That’s just a beginning. There was a ghost, too. Claire. She’s gone now. Took out the shadow.”
“So you have allies,” Nick said. “Good.”
“Had an ally,” Jack said. “I don’t know what to do next.”
“Isn’t that obvious?” Lisa asked.
Nick glanced at her, fairly certain of what she was about to say. “What?” Jack asked.
“Stay here,” Lisa said. “Wait until the sun comes up. It’s . . .” She looked to a clock. “It’s after two.”
“Almost five hours before sunrise,” Nick said. “Long time.”
“First,” Jack said, “I need to know something.” He looked at Nick with steady eyes, fearlessly, a man who had seen too much to be frightened by it—worried, yes, but not for himself.
“Of course,” Nick said. “I’m
gonna
help.”
“Help?” Lisa asked.
“I’m a hunter,” Nick said. “Makes my job easier, if they come to me.”
“I haven’t seen a vampire yet,” Jack said.
“I’ve decided to expand.”
“You said you didn’t like my spotlight.”
“Right,” Nick said. He nodded toward the open computer. “These other things out there, I know nothing about them.”
“And you just want to kill them all?” Lisa asked.
Nick glared at her. “The things I kill, honey, if given half a chance, would suck you dry in a way you might or might not enjoy and leave you for dead. But you wouldn’t be dead, not exactly. You’d wake with that same insatiable thirst. Predators. And we, we’re the prey. Kill or be killed.” He grinned. “I choose the first.”
5.
Jack Harlow hadn’t considered his computer an item of importance. But now that Nick had mentioned it, Jack realized his files carried data on more than two hundred species indigenous to the dark, including some of their weaknesses. He’d learned some of it from various websites that had proven useful. There were few of those. Now, however, was the perfect time to access one.
“Internet?” he asked Lisa.
She pointed. He unplugged her laptop, connected the line to his, and opened the web browser. Someday, he’d arrange for something more mobile.
As the machine worked, he looked from Lisa to Nick, then back to Lisa. He could trust her with his life, he was sure of it; Nick, however, had made his intentions clear.
“Some things work frequently,” Jack told Nick. “What kind of sword is that?”
Nick withdrew the blade from a sheath hidden under his jacket. “Knife,” he said. “Silver blade. Marble handle.”
“Silver?” Lisa asked.
“Inherited,” Nick said.
“Silver’s good,” Jack said. “Useful against most types of vampires, lycanthropes, other things. The zombie downstairs, any blade would’ve worked.” He glanced at the screen, called up the website. “It was beheading that mattered there.”
“Nice to know,” Nick said. “Bullets are silver, too.”
“Good.”
“And I have more weapons in my truck,” Nick said.
Jack clicked a few buttons, typed
imp
, and waited.
No results. Nothing useful.
“Damn,” Jack said. That had been his best source. He tried another site, then a third, finding only references to impatient, impotent, impartial, important, and impress. Jack shut down the computer. “This isn’t helping.”
“What, then?” Nick asked.
Jack thought a moment. Claire had entered his life just before all this started; what else had there been? Two nights ago was so far away. There was the bald stranger snorting the ash of his victim; the Asian vampire winking at him; and the ghost in the bar.
“Stories,” Jack said. He closed the computer, looked at Lisa, and said, “I’ve got to go hear a story.”
“I’m going with you,” Lisa said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“It’s too dangerous,” he said.
“No more so than sitting here,” Lisa said. “Anyway, you might need protection.”
“I’ll handle that,” Nick said.
Her eyes never left Jack. “From him,” she said.
Jack sighed. “I don’t know what else might be out there.”
“But you’ve led them here,” Lisa told him. “Pointed them straight to me. I’m not going to sit here and wait for them.”
“I work alone,” Nick said.
“You’re already not alone,” she said.
“Stop,” Jack said.
Everyone looked at him. He inhaled, long and deep, making them wait before turning to Nick. “Give her a knife,” Jack said. “And arm me, too, when we get a chance. It’s me they’re after, anyway.”
After a long moment, Nick shrugged. He flipped the knife in his hand and, holding the blade, gave it to Lisa.
“Good,” Jack said. “Hunter, how well can you see through the dark?”
“I see fine,” Nick said, “but I can smell a vampire a block away.”
6.
Jack Harlow didn’t trust the hunter; but he could’ve killed Jack and taken the computer if he wanted it. Was that why the dark suddenly turned on him, because he’d seen too much? No, the imp. He didn’t know how, or why, and he didn’t know if it could be reversed, but learning about the imp was the only way Jack could help himself.
Claire hadn’t been the only ghost to offer stories.
Stories that’ll blow your mind
.
In the elevator, they were quiet and tense. Even here, indoors, the darkness had thickened. The bright lights of the downstairs lobby provided no solace; rather, the fluorescents accentuated their vulnerability.
Jack’s eyes were excellent at night. He could look into shadows, and almost peer around corners. Very little could hide from him; they had never bothered trying before.
Outside, the air had chilled—naturally, or mostly so. No phantoms met them. Nothing barred their path. They left the apartment, walked three abreast with Jack in the center. The street was quiet. Even the crickets had desisted. Clouds, gathering above, seemed iridescent, reflecting the lights of
Orlando
.
From every shadow, behind every corner, eyes watched. There, a cat, that black cat he’d seen earlier. An owl perched atop a fencepost. Vagrants in the park, on the path surrounding the lake. They were creatures of the night, if not of the supernatural sort, and they, too, had an interest in what was happening.
7.
Lisa Sparrow had ceased to exist.
The woman she’d been had died. Lisa would not have gone off into the night, near
, with two total strangers (okay,
one
total stranger and one almost stranger who had secrets that were, frankly, difficult to accept). But what else could she do, let Jack go off on his own? Not going to happen.
If he left, there’d be nothing for her to do but wonder. Think. Worry. Imagine. One thing she didn’t need was to be left alone with her imagination, not after that thing—that
imp
.
No, better to risk the night and maybe die,
knowing
, than sit and wait in uncertainty. What were the possibilities if she had stayed behind? He’d return in the morning, battle-weary but alive? Never at all? Worse, what if weeks, months later, he knocked on her door, changed, beaten, now something unimaginable?
Her life had never been about
reacting
; she’d done far too much of that tonight.
It had started with Jack; there was no suppressing the sudden, overwhelming urge to know him, everything about him. And learning that he watched the dark, that he walked freely amidst the source of nightmares—somehow, that didn’t bother her.
The knife felt strangely comfortable in her hand. Heavy, but cold. It extracted the heat from her fingers. Rather than leaving her numb and rubbery, however, it made her more alert.
She watched every shadow.
She listened to every sound—as few as there were.
They were surrounded. The night closed in on them, bringing all manner of animal, person, and unknown. Even the rats—she saw three of them (she’d never seen three, not at a time, not out in the open) in the underbrush, sitting and staring, their long gray bodies almost black, their tales naked, their eyes steady.
Nothing moved. Yet. She guessed it was a matter of time. She’d entered a world that existed on the fringes of her own. She would follow Jack to the corners of the earth, and he might actually go there.
She tried to clear her mind, tried to concentrate on their mission. What was it, exactly? To listen to a story? She imagined the teller would be a psychic, a shaman, perhaps a witchdoctor from
Haiti
or
New Orleans
. It was all real now. Bigfoot, aliens, super government conspiracies, Dracula, Big Brother, even the gods of
Mt.
Olympus
. In the real world, where the former Lisa Sparrow lived, none of this stuff existed except in fairy tales.
Eyes wide, the new Lisa Sparrow wrote nothing off as fancy. Dreams were messages, mirrors portals, and frogs princes. The rainbow, should she live to see another, led directly to a leprechaun and his gold. And Jack Harlow, who had come unpredicted into her life, became not just a lover, but a guide to all the things of the dark.
1.
This was the right thing
to do. It had to be. The compulsion to hurt Jack was unnatural, and unlike him. He walked with this couple like he belonged. In a way, he had more in common with Jack than any other living person on earth.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. His heart pounded. From every direction, a set of eyes were trained on them, following, stalking. This wasn’t hunted, or even hounded, so much as it was marked and exposed.
The quality of night had changed. Clouds veiled the moon entirely, but glowed with the reflected lights of the city and should have given them some light. Instead, the dark tightened, the air thinned. The staccato of their feet reverberated loudly, bouncing off buildings, parked cars, the trees between them and the lake.
An unnatural silence lay underneath their own sounds. An occasional car passed on a cross street; none came close. The fountain splashed, but distantly.
To Nick’s heightened senses, their heartbeats rocked the night; no other creature made a sound. Heads turned silently as they walked by. There, in the trees, birds watched, and rodents, cats, people.
The people concerned Nick the most. They were vagrants, in mismatched clothes, carrying paper bags or pushing shopping carts. They were not lined in pairs or groups. They sensed the wrongness in the air, though maybe not as strongly as Nick felt it.
Nick glanced over his shoulder. The apartment building, a couple of blocks back now, dwindled in the distance. Did something stand on its roof, only to step away when Nick noticed?
Ahead, the sidewalk was clear. Unless something hid behind a parked car, there were no immediate threats. Relax? Nick couldn’t relax in the dark under normal circumstances. These were suicidal.
He looked down, checking the computer in the corner of his eye. Jack carried it in a bag that offered little protection. Anyone who wanted the machine could simply take it—slice Jack’s wrist and take the whole hand, if he must. He pushed back against the intrusive urge to hurt Jack. It came from outside him, so Nick could resist it.
The crowd that had formed where the ugly tattooed man met the truck had thinned. Most of the cops were gone, and also the truck, though the mangled car remained. The driver, leaning against a tow truck, talked on his cell phone. The guy with the towing company logo on his back hooked chains under the car.
“Where, exactly, are we going?” Lisa asked.