Utter blackness fell as Talia screamed.
The dark didn’t hide anything from her. It never had. Shadows only deepened color, and textures took on added dimension. Total darkness revealed a realm of sensation as seductive and terrifying as any fertile imagination could conjure.
So she witnessed it all.
Her scream was edged with a strange power, burning up her throat to rend the world. It ripped the dark shadows of her shelter, shredding the layers of her protection into wisps of smoke that quivered as if harried by turbulent, angry wind. The shape that came out of the wind, emerging from the center of the hell storm, was darkness incarnate, monstrous eyes glowing with purpose. He could only be Death, the heartless devil who’d taken both her mother and her aunt. He was shaped like a man, wrapped in an absence of light, and therefore readily visible to her. He grasped a glittering arched blade. Already twisting in the air, the scythe came down.
The blade did not discriminate. The metal met no resistance as it cut through the couple locked in a gruesome mockery of a French kiss. Grady dropped like dry, boneless matter. A husk. Melanie fell with greater weight. She hit her knees, eyes open and surprised, then toppled sideways with a rough exhalation.
Talia staggered back, her scream redoubling.
The next swing of the scythe took the woman across her belly. She toppled like an old scarecrow. The immediate stench of decay that lifted from the bodies cramped Talia’s stomach with nausea, as if they’d both been long dead already.
Death finally turned on her. Cloaked in blackness, its body swirled in a century of stormy shadow. The blade angled out to the side and caught light where there was none to be had. Death reached toward her. His dark hand caressed the plane of her cheek.
Talia’s scream strangled in her throat. Choked. Vanished into a suffocated whimper.
And so did the cloaked nightmare.
Talia hugged herself, her fear drenching the room in blackness, but she could not stop shaking. They were earthquake-level shakes, rippling up from a tectonic shift at her core. She struggled to remain standing, bracing a hand on a wall as the heavy metal insanity from next door echoed the white noise of her inner confusion.
The door to the apartment cracked. Help at last? Help too late?
The silhouette of a man pushed the door open and met resistance at one of the fallen bodies. He shoved harder, and when the door wouldn’t budge, he trip-stepped over the obstacle. “Robin? Grady?”
So, not help.
Talia let no air escape her and drew none to sustain her. Had to be another one of them. The monsters with bear-trap teeth.
He felt along the wall for the light. A lamp was already on, but Talia kept the dark battened down, hard. Bit her lips, too.
No matter what happened, she would not scream. Not ever again. Not allow that…that other devil into the world.
The man, tall, with swarthy skin and long black hair, moved deeper into the room.
“Robin?” He left the door open.
Talia spotted her purse on a chair across the room, out of reach. It held money, ID, her plane ticket. Not that she’d be going to Berkeley. That dream had died with Melanie.
Instead, she made for the door and silently slid out of the apartment. Then she flew down the concrete walkway that led to the apartment building’s outer stairs.
“Son of a bitch!” The shout exploded behind her, from inside the apartment.
She had taken the darkness with her. The man had just seen…everything.
She ran, leaping down the stairs to the parking lot by twos and threes, a billowing cloud of blackness seething on her skin.
A dark SUV idled next to the building, driver waiting. She turned away from it, tucking herself behind a low wall that marked the perimeter of the building’s parking lot.
The stairs rang low and metallic as rapid footsteps descended.
Had to be him. She quieted her thudding heartbeat by holding her breath.
An automatic window hissed nearby.
“You see the girl?” a man demanded, not six feet from where she crouched.
“No. Nobody,” another man answered, drawling and lazy.
“Fucking carnage up there. Grady and Robin are dead.” Anger and disbelief roughened his voice.
Talia hunkered in her concrete corner. Her head pounded in time with the blood in her veins, and a residual whine from a memory of the band’s music set her teeth on edge.
“That’s not possible.”
“They were dead,” the man insisted.
“But He promised…”
“I know what He promised, and I know what I saw.” His words tumbled over each other in his urgency. “They’re dead and the girl’s gone. I swear she was there when I went in, but I couldn’t see worth shit. She’s got to be hiding here somewhere.”