They had little time left together, he and his beloved, floating softly on an echo of pleasure.
Except they weren’t alone. Something else had sparked into being and glimmered in his mind’s eye. He reached between them to find the source.
There. An unsettled spark.
“Something is happening,” he said, touching her lower abdomen.
Her eyes rounded. She lifted her head to check her naked belly, then shifted her gaze to his face. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. A life maybe. I don’t know much about that.” A lash of darkness twisted up his other leg. He could feel himself beginning to come apart. It was near impossible to hold his form long in mortality. “Be still while I try to stop it. I don’t have much time left.”
“No,” she breathed, her hand drawn protectively to the spot. “No.” She pulled away from him, sliding off the bed to stand at the brink of threatening blackness.
He reached out to her. “I don’t know what it is. What it will be.” A spark could turn into a fire, and a fire can become a changing force of nature. When her resolve didn’t falter, he added, “I don’t know if it should be.”
“If it shouldn’t, then why is it happening?”
“I broke a law to be here. And more to be with you like this. I’ve lost count how many, and I don’t care. But this…this could be the beginning of the repercussions.” The thought had him by the throat: It was one thing for him to endure the effects of his trespass, but for her to bear them, his lovely Kathleen, alone, that was intolerable. He had to end it.
“No,” she said.
Grasping darkness inked up his body. No time. “Kathleen, you can’t know what it is. Or what it will cost.”
“I don’t care. It’s ours. Yours and mine together,” she answered. She met his outstretched hand and flattened it on her pelvis.
He could quash the spark now, be done with it. But her heart stuttered, stopping him. Her eyes filled with new hope, a world’s worth of hope, her smile struggling with a painful joy.
“You don’t understand,” he said. And he did not have the time to convince her. Something terrible would come of this. Her happiness had to come at a price. A darkness born to match that glimmering spark. He should not have come, yet could not regret it either.
“I do, too. More than you.” She pressed the back of his hand. “We’re making something. Something of us.”
The spirit in her eyes never burned brighter. He could not bring himself to diminish it. He tried another tack. “You may not have the time to see it through as it is.”
“I will.”
Her conviction staggered him. “Kathleen, even now your heart falters.”
She met his eyes while taking a deep, controlled breath. “I only need nine months. Nine months is nothing. They’ve been telling me that I only have six for years.”
“Kathleen. Love,” he said, his voice rough, near breaking. He gathered her to him, speaking into her eyes. “Neither of us knows what time you have. Better to end it now. I may be back for you with the sun.”
“You won’t.”
“I have no power over this, Kathleen.” And no power to fight what must surely accompany the life she prized. He caressed the length of her arm for the last time.
“You defied the laws. Now watch me do it.”
“Kathleen…” He could not stop saying her name. He didn’t want to, not as he felt himself unraveling into the icy darkness. His substance dissolved into the chiaroscuro of Twilight, while his Shadow-bred senses reached toward mortality.
The spark. Her joy blooming within her.
And, yes, in a weak film clinging to the corners of the room: a smudge of black spit on the world, to grow and thrive, a horror to match her miracle.
Kathleen! Something terrible, indeed.
ONE
Twenty-six years later…
ADAM Thorne took the graveyard shift at Jacob’s cell.
He was wired with jet lag anyway, his circadian rhythms lagging somewhere over the Atlantic. He’d be right as rain in Korea, where he’d spent the last three weeks following up on a lead with the mystics on Mount Inwangsan. But in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, in a concrete hole under The Segue Institute, his body did not know if it was night, day, or some strange time zone in between.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he tried to focus on the keypad next to the outer security door. Hot lightning burned across the whites of his eyes, and his face had roughened behind twenty-four hours of growth. A bottle of pills promised to take him out for eight hours, but the sleep would be poor at best if he didn’t check in with Jacob first. Do his own time, albeit on the other side of the prison door.