Darkness Comes Read online

  DARKNESS COMES

  by

  A.C. Warneke

  Smashwords Edition

  *****

  Published by

  A.C. Warneke on Smashwords

  Darkness Comes

  Copyright 2012 by Andrea Warneke

  ISBN: 978-1476251639

  All rights reserved

  Cover design: Alaina Warneke

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  *****

  I am grateful for the love and support of my family, without which this book would not have been possible. Thank you for putting up with me when I was in another world, spending too much time with imaginary characters and giving them life. Thank you for listening to me when I was debating a plot point and, though you had no idea what I was talking about, you smiled and nodded your head, letting me work through my madness to find the perfect resolution. Thank you for being you – I love you guys!!

  Also, infinite thanks to the men and women serving in the military: I am thankful for all that you do.

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  DARKNESS COMES

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  Prologue

  “You’re never going to survive the things I’m going to do to you but you’ll die with a smile on that beautiful face of yours.”

  Malorie Hunter woke with a start, her heart hammering in her chest, her skin damp beneath her black uniform. Hastily, she looked around the room to see if anyone was paying attention to her and froze when she saw Jack Sinclair watching her. Did she make any sounds in her sleep? But, no, he was smiling at her, “Hey, sleepy head; patrol’s in fifteen and everyone else have gone on ahead.”

  “Okay.” She wiped the sleep from her eyes, tendrils of her dream still pulling at her until she no longer knew her own body. It had become a foreign thing to her and she was having a difficult time shaking the images, the feelings, he had invoked.

  Sitting up on the cot, scrubbing her fingers through her cropped, dark blond hair, the small room felt even more claustrophobic than usual. The bare bulbs flickered, barely lighting the dun covered walls and rugs while the wet stink of mildew permeated everything; the cold weather seeped in through all of the cracks and she shuddered. She sometimes wished that she was like other girls her age: getting dressed up to go to homecoming or prom, worrying about finals, hanging out with their friends. Usually, she didn’t have the time to wonder about what might have been but since she started dreaming about him….

  She shuddered again, this time for a very different reason. Pressing her palms against her eyes until the black spots turned white, she tried to get his image out of her head but he refused to disappear. His carved face was inhumanely beautiful: high cheekbones and a harsh jaw, a straight, blade of a nose over sinfully decadent lips. His body was pure masculine perfection of bone and sinew: shoulders that were broad and beautiful, arms and thighs that rippled with lean muscles, a stomach that was taut and flat, he was, simply put, gorgeous. And he had the most incredible green eyes she had ever seen, brilliant and intense.

  His words resonated in her head as she finished prepping her gear. He had done things to her that she had never even heard of before; things she was fairly certain were illegal in most states. And she had responded, burying her fingers in his thick black hair as he… and she….

  “Ready, Mal?”

  She looked up and saw Jack waiting for her, a kind smile on his face. He wore his pale blond hair short, like her father, but he had warm brown eyes and a sweet smile. Nodding her head, she stood up and started to head out the door.

  Her father, Gustav, came and leaned against the door way, his features set in the familiar grim lines of a man twice his age. He was handsome, with the same gray eyes that Malorie had, but he rarely smiled. His gaze moved over Malorie, taking in the various weapons she had attached to her body and he nodded, “Keep your head in the game tonight, Malorie; I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  She nodded, appreciating his gruff affection. “Yes, sir.”

  Gus turned to Jack but he didn’t have to say anything; the two males had developed a strange form of communication lately but she didn’t care. Her thoughts were still lingering on the man from her dreams….

  Chapter 1

  Nine years later….

  Malorie Sinclair sang at the top of her lungs as she drove to the mall for last minute gifts. Her long, honey blond hair was pulled up into a pony tail and her gray eyes sparkled with the merriment of the season, which she was enjoying for the first time in her twenty-five years of life. With all of the seasonal delights she had discovered in the last year or two, she found that she loved Christmas music; the tunes were catchy and she could sing along. Well, more or less. “Da da dada da dum, da dada da dum."

  Faint smudges of color beneath her eyes conveyed the truth of her difficulty transitioning to a normal, civilian life, even though the war ended nearly six years before. She had always had difficulty sleeping; during the war one had to be prepared to fight at a moment’s notice which made it difficult to fall into a deep sleep. So one learned to make do with little sleep.

  If it were only a matter of being able to get to sleep she might have soldiered through. It was her dreams that kept her awake now; with the life she had led, they were rarely pleasant. Except for the dreams featuring a green-eyed man, who had been starring in her more… interesting dreams since she was sixteen. Those were unsettling for entirely different reasons. She had thought that he would have gone away with the end of the war but if anything, he became even more intense.

  Shaking her head to clear the thoughts away, she pulled into the left lane to turn into the mall parking lot and almost turned around. There were a gazillion cars already parked and another gazillion driving around looking for a parking spot up front, filling the air with the smell of exhaust. She would have skipped it but she still had a few gifts to buy and had wanted to make this Christmas extra special for Toby by getting his favorite cinnamon rolls for breakfast; and they only sold them at the mall. Which was crowded with an over-abundance of last-minute gift buyers and their cars. She’d be lucky to find a space within this hemisphere. “I should have come during lunch.”

  Of course, that hadn’t been possible since a huge shipment of plants had arrived; she had to be at the nursery to sign for the delivery and take care of the new foliage. And then there were all of the last minute orders to fill: a few Holiday parties, two weddings, a sweet sixteen birthday. It had been crazy all day, which made the idea of having cinnamon rolls in the morning all the more appealing. Besides, she had faced much scarier adversaries than last minute Christmas shoppers; she could do this.

  Girding her loins, she pulled into the very last spot of the very last row, grabbed her purse and got out of the car and smiled. Two years ago they had been living in Minnesota and the grounds had been covered in black slush and she had to trudge through the messy wet stuff wearing thick, rubber boots and a heavy jacket. This year, she was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a plain, white t-shirt with tennis shoes. Southern California definitely held the upper hand for weather, even if she did, on occasion, miss the snow.

  Just not today.

  Making her way to the mall, she pictured the layout of the mall in her head and made a plan of attack to get in and out as quickly as possible. It wasn’t like she was in a hurry; she just preferred to keep her skills h
oned; one never knew when….

  With a deep breath, she put tactical thoughts out of her head, refusing to a think like a soldier any more. The wars had been over for nearly six years, she was a civilian now; hence the trip to the mall on Christmas Eve, braving the crowds in order to experience a normal Christmas with her father and son. It had taken years to cajole Gus into embracing a “normal” life, and while he would always be prepared for the worst, he did give a little. She just wanted Toby to have a peaceful childhood.

  She smiled as she thought of her young son. He was growing up so fast it made her heart ache a little. At five, Toby was the center of her world; the reason she continued to struggle with normalcy when she didn’t have any idea what she was doing. She was determined that he was not going to grow up as she did, though she felt completely helpless in figuring out how to make that possible. And her father offered little help, insisting that it would be better to remain off the grid, hidden. He was still so protective of them even with the end of the wars; it was becoming a little… stifling.

  But that was unfair; her father loved her and her son, she knew he did. She just wanted something… more for her child and she was going to figure it out no matter what it took. Even if it meant moving out on her own and leaving everything she knew behind. Leaving her father behind. And when she could truly believe the wars were over, that the enemy wasn’t just biding its time until unleashing its fury once more, she would.

  Glancing at her watch, she figured she had a little less than three hours before the stores closed up and she was forced to navigate her way back to her car and out the parking lot. With a rush of excitement, she entered the artificially bright mall and was immediately assaulted with the mouthwatering, nose-seducing smell of cinnamon and cream cheese frosting.

  Groaning softly as she pulled out her phone, she called Gustav Hunter, her over-protective father. Unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, he didn’t answer, so she left a quick voice mail. “Hey, father, it’s Mal. Just wanted to let you know that I am at the mall and by the looks of it, it’s going to suck getting out of here tonight so I’ll probably be a bit late. Give Toby a great big hug from me. Love ya!”

  Clicking her phone shut, she slid it back into her purse, feeling another alien rush of Seasonal cheer. She realized she loved the frenzy of a million shoppers trying to find the perfect gift when the perfect gifts had all been purchased weeks before. She hadn’t always celebrated Christmas – there hadn’t always been the luxury to indulge in celebration - but she found she loved the festive holiday. A small smile played at her full lips; in this world, she could almost believe that monsters didn’t exist, except, perhaps, in childhood dreams.

  She hadn’t realized how many people would be out shopping on Christmas Eve. Had she known, she might have ordered a few things on line and not worry about last minute shopping traumas. But then she wouldn’t have this slightly terrifying, perfectly normal experience and they wouldn’t have cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. Of course, she could have tried her hand at making cinnamon rolls but growing up the way she did, she never really had the chance to learn how to cook, at least nothing edible. One would think that the ability to mix highly volatile chemicals into flash bombs and homemade napalm would translate into the ability to boil a pot of water – but it didn’t.

  Her father had taught her everything she knew, from fighting and survival to chemistry and hacking to everything in between. By the time she was ten, she could build a bomb, hotwire a car, break into high security buildings; anything that was needed for her and her father to be able to fight another day. She was also an avid reader, devouring whatever reading material she came across, from literature to romance novels to instruction manuals. Because of the nature of her father’s work, and hers, she had several fake ID’s and knew how to navigate the world without leaving any evidence that she even existed. It was the things regular folks took for granted that she found difficult, like Christmas shopping. But she would learn, for Toby’s sake.

  After an hour or so, she was carrying several bags of gifts and realized that she only had one last stop before she could pick up cinnamon rolls and get the heck out of there and back home, to Toby and her father. Smiling to herself, she contemplated the life they had created for themselves the past two years, the nursery where she discovered she had a gift for growing things and the little quad-plex they rented with its small, communal yard that Toby loved to explore. It was the longest they had ever spent in one place and she hoped that they would be able stay a while longer. There didn’t seem to be any need to move any time soon; there wasn’t much need for someone with her skills anymore.

  As she made her way to the humongous toy store on the second floor, a hurried shopper bumped into her, making her stumble a little. Righting herself, she turned to the man to apologize but he was already half way down the corridor, a strained expression on his face as he clutched his three bags in a white-knuckled grip. Strange; his behavior was reminiscent of the Uprising, rushing to be someplace else. Or it was an open feed, though that wasn’t possible; a feeding was announced weeks in advance, to keep the wary away. To lure the idiots in. There had been no such notice.

  Then why was she alarmed?

  It was foolish to be concerned; one man rushing through the mall did not mean anything; she was just hyper-sensitive. If there was a scheduled feeding, she would have heard about it; she always heard about them. Part of the treaty was the promise of enough advance warning in regards to open feeds with the explicit understanding that victims knew what they risked when they participated and monsters caught feeding at any other time would be killed immediately.

  Malorie laughed at herself as she walked into the toy store, avoiding the pink aisles and grimacing at the vampire paraphernalia. She could never understand how there could be a market for vamp toys: vampire dolls, fake teeth, cheesy costumes; vampires were big business and it made her cringe. Malorie was almost convinced that the rash of vampire romances and young adult fiction were written by vampires to lure people in who would have ordinarily been a bit more cautious of monsters. It was a fiendishly clever plot to make one’s food desire being eaten.

  Rolling her eyes at such foolishness, she made her way to the trucks and weapons. Guns were all well and good when dealing with mortals, but when it came to monsters, medieval weaponry seemed to work the best: swords, maces, staffs. It was probably God’s way of giving the humans a chance back in the day….

  Automatically, the image of a dark haired man flashed in her head, the green-eyed man of her dreams, and her stomach clenched. Wearing clothes that belonged at a Renaissance festival, he was magnificent: a billowy, shirt opened at the throat, torn and stained; dark, paned slopes that emphasized his strong thighs; bare feet.

  He was standing in the middle of a razed village, bodies littering the ground. Rage and sorrow wrapped themselves around him as he dropped to his knees, placing his hands on the broken body of a very pregnant woman. Malorie could smell the burnt flesh, the ruin, and she thought she was going to be sick. But then he lifted his head and she was staring into his extraordinarily brilliant green eyes.

  She could feel her chest rising and falling with each rapid breath she took, her pulse pounding in her head. Her skin was cold, clammy, as his eyes bore into her, deep inside of her. He wasn’t human, he couldn’t be human. But he wasn’t a vampire. She could almost feel his warmth, his heartbeat. In her dreams, in her more… erotic dreams, he was very much alive and blistering hot.

  Until he would open his mouth and his white fangs glistened; until he would bite her and drive her to ecstasy as he drove his cock deep into her womb. Until she cried out in surrender and woke up crying because she wanted to lose herself in a stranger’s embrace. In a vampire’s embrace.

  She had studied enough psychology to realize that her dreams were just her screwed up head creating a man out of the monsters she fought. And the whole sex thing? Well, it had been six years since she had been with anyone…. She
chose to ignore the fact that she had had the dreams since she was sixteen, two years before she ever had sex.

  But she was awake and he was still staring at her with those green-green eyes of his. And he was standing up, walking towards her, reaching for her. Her breath quickened as he came nearer and nearer. She knew she was still in the toy store, but they were standing in the middle of the razed village, the carcasses still warm, still bleeding.

  He was almost on top of her, his green eyes smoldering, his sensuous lips curving upwards in a cruel and promising smile. He traced his finger along her cheek. “The time has come.”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, willing the images to go away, Malorie told herself to snap out of it; a guy having a panic attack didn’t mean anything. She managed to shake off the disturbing image and realized that she was still holding two construction kits in her hands. Blinking a few times to clear the remnants of his image out of her head, to get back to some semblance of normalcy, she studied the two kits: build your own boat and build your own car.

  Deliberately ignoring the sense of a destiny she didn’t believe in sneaking up to bite her in the ass, she focused on which toy to get for Toby. Closing her eyes, she did eenie-meenie-minie-moe; choosing the kit in her left hand, the boat.

  Grabbing a few more things, including batteries, she made her way to the cash register. It was odd that there wasn’t a longer line. It was even odder that there were hardly any customers left in the store at all. It was a toy store on Christmas Eve; where were the parents? She looked at her watch and frowned; it was barely eight; she still had an hour….