Out of the Dark Read online

  He said nothing, stunned that she’d bothered to check up on him. At how easy it had been for her. How stupid he’d been not to be more careful.

  “I don’t always burn the evidence. There are other ways to hide it, but burning…feels the best.” Saying it out loud that way sounded crazier than anything else he’d told her. Psychotic. “It’s the only way I’m sure they can’t come back.”

  She tugged her lower lip between her teeth, her brow furrowed. “You could chop them into little pieces.”

  Luke blinked. She didn’t look like she was yanking his chain. “Takes too long. Too messy.”

  “Ah. Right. Makes sense.” Celia nodded. “Sounds gross.”

  “Celia,” Luke began, thinking there had to be a way to make sure she wasn’t just humoring him. The only thing worse than having her think he was some psycho maniac who believed he killed and burned monsters would be having her not believe they were real.

  She cut him off. “I don’t know why I believe you. Maybe it is some twisted thing inside me that always goes for the guys who are the most likely to run off, but at least your excuse is original. Freaking scary as hell, but original.”

  “It’s not an excuse. It’s real.”

  “The attack was real. I know that.” She paused with another small smile at what must’ve been his look of surprise. “The internet, Luke. I looked everything you told me up on the ‘net. It’s exactly how you said it happened, though the paper says the cave-in was from natural causes, your injuries from that. But do you know what else I found while I was searching?”

  He shook his head.

  “Two days after your cave-in, a farmer two towns away reported three of his cattle had been mutilated. Half-eaten. Speculation was coyotes or even a mountain lion. They’re rare in Pennsylvania, but they’re around. I read one report on some wackadoo site that said it was probably aliens. Nobody claimed it was blood-sucking ghouls from underground…but I figure that’s just because nobody thought of it.” Celia drew in a sharp breath. Her smile this time looked a little pained. “You never told me where you were, all those times you called. But like I said, all it takes is time and a good search engine.”

  “You believe me?”

  “I don’t know, Luke,” she told him. “Everything about it says I shouldn’t trust you. In fact, I should be calling the cops, not feeding you meat loaf and whiskey at three in the morning, or taking you upstairs to my bed.”

  Another flash, this time of her kneeling in front of him. His ears burned. A low noise escaped his throat, and she did that head-tilt thing again to look him over. Her tongue touched her upper lip for just a second.

  “When I was down there, in the dark,” Luke said, surprised he could speak with his throat gone so dry, “all I could think about, after getting away from them, was making sure there weren’t any of them left alive. So that nothing like that could ever happen to anyone else. To you.”

  Her lashes fluttered, and her lips thinned for a moment. She was, he saw with some alarm, trying not to cry. He was out of his chair so fast it rocked backward and hit the floor with a clatter. She was in his arms a second or two after that. He meant only to reassure her that he meant what he’d said, but just as she’d met him at the door with her mouth, Celia kissed him again now.

  “Take me upstairs, Luke.”

  Eight or even six months ago, he might’ve been able to lift her for a minute or so, made his way a few stumbling feet to a bed. Months of physical effort had honed his muscles, corded in his arms. Tightened his thighs and belly and chest. It wasn’t anything he’d worked at on purpose, not the way he’d once spent hours in the gym trying to push his body into making a six-pack. This new strength meant he could scoop her up, one arm under her thighs, the other around her back, and take her in several long strides down the front hall to the stairs. Then up them. Then to her bedroom, her mouth fused to his, her hands already sliding under his T-shirt.

  She cried out when he fell with her onto the bed. Her back arched as he pushed her T-shirt up over her belly and found the soft skin with his mouth. She smelled so good, tasted so sweet. He could only think about getting his lips and teeth and tongue against her. His hands tilted her ass up, her boxers already down her thighs. He found her pussy with his kiss. He drank her in.

  Celia’s fingers skated over the bristles of his hair, then traced his ears, skittered along his shoulders. She parted her legs wider for him, giving him complete access, and Luke took it. He found her clit, tugged it with his lips and listened to her answering groan. He used two fingers to slide inside her, curling gently. She was slick already. Hot. His cock filled as he imagined how it would feel to push inside her.

  But first…this.

  He spread her open with his thumbs to lap at her clit; another groan rumbled out of her. He thought she said his name, but it was lost in a sigh. He tried to remember what sort of pace she liked, how hard or soft, how steady to keep his stroke. He lost himself in her smell and taste, her heat, the smoothness inside when he slipped in a couple fingers again.

  She came faster than he expected. The beat and pulse of her clit and contractions around his fingers were hard and strong, and her hips bucked. Luke let his lips just brush her as he slid his fingers free of her heat.

  When he looked up at her, Celia was blinking, her hair tumbled over her face. She’d pushed up on her elbows to look down at him. “Condoms,” she said succinctly, pointing to the bedside table.

  He remembered. He got one from the box, realized he still wore all his clothes and tossed her the package before stripping as fast as he could. She watched him, admiration clear on her face, and when he moved toward her, she gripped his cock with one hand to sheathe him with the rubber.

  Things stuttered for a minute, but only for that long, until she looked into his eyes and lay back to pull him on top of her. He guided himself inside her, and it was better even than he’d remembered. Tight pussy around him, her mouth on his, her heels hooking over his ass. Her nails digging into his shoulders and the whisper of her voice in his ear.

  “Now, Luke.”

  During these long months there’d been days when he’d forgotten to shower, to eat, been unable to sleep. Fucking would’ve been out of the question, too much effort for his overstressed body. Still, through it all, the memory of her touch, her taste, her scent had never left him. He’d thought about seeing her again. Of making love to her, spending hours mapping her body with his hands and tongue. Of some kind of elegance, or at the very least skill, not some haphazard fumbling like a kid getting to home base on prom night.

  She gave a low, throaty chuckle that set the hairs on the back of his neck to rising. “God, Luke, fuck me now.”

  He moved inside her. Celia arched again, then tilted her hips to take him deeper. She gasped, biting her lower lip. Her hair spread out beneath her on the pillow and she breathed out. Her nails dug deeper; she would wound him, leave her mark, and of all the scars he’d gained this past year, Luke knew he’d never get rid of the ones Celia left.

  He didn’t want to.

  She’d gone down on him earlier and given him the best head he’d ever had, but it was like his cock had forgotten it had ever been satisfied. Now his orgasm built and built, and he tried to hold off, to make it last just a little longer. To maybe at least give her the chance to come again.

  Celia groaned and clutched at him. He couldn’t feel her pussy contracting on his dick, but he could remember how it had felt on his fingers, and when she choked a small series of cries, he knew she was coming again. The thought of it tipped him over the edge, and he hurtled into an abyss of pleasure so intense he thought he might very well have died and gone to someplace beyond.

  Only for a couple minutes though, before the real world swirled back into existence around him. He’d collapsed on top of her, and though she wasn’t protesting, he moved to the side to keep from crushing her. She sighed when he did, and turned on her side to look at him.

  “I’ll always let y
ou in,” Celia said, and Luke believed her.

  Celia’s mother was a mistress of laundry folding, and she’d passed the skill along to her daughter through hours of instruction. As a kid, it had irked Celia to no end to have her mother unfold a blouse or, God help her, a fitted sheet over and over again, making Celia re-do it until she had it right. As an adult, though, folding laundry was the only household chore that gave Celia any real sort of satisfaction—sure, it was an infinitely unending task the way all housecleaning was, but there was something so calm and sort of, well, Zen about taking an entire basket of clothes and folding them all into small, tidy squares that fit neatly into dresser drawers.

  There was nothing neat or tidy about Luke’s laundry. He had only a few days’ worth of clothes, and it was clear he wore most everything several times before washing. The dirty denim jeans she’d admitted to fetishizing weren’t just dirty but filthy, the hems ragged, belt loops torn or missing entirely. The few T-shirts bore stains bleach might take out, if the shirts didn’t fall apart from the caustic liquid. The elastic on his boxers was loose, his socks had holes in the toes. All of it, all together, made up only half a load in her washer.

  He came downstairs when she was folding the last T-shirt, still warm from the dryer and no longer smelling of gasoline and sweat but instead of lavender fabric softener sheets. He looked at the meager stacks of his clothes on the kitchen table and ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. She’d lent him a pair of scrub pants, and they hung low enough to expose his jutting hipbones and the line of dark golden hair running from his belly button into the waistband. Now he stood with one hip cocked, his bare toes curled slightly on the kitchen tiles.

  “What’s this?”

  Celia passed a hand over the warm cotton. “I did your laundry. It really needed to be done.”

  Luke looked like he meant to say something, changed his mind, opened his mouth again. “You didn’t have to.”

  “I wanted to. Well,” she said, “not that I wanted to do laundry. Nobody ever wants to do laundry. But it needed to be done, and I was up, so…I did it.”

  “Thank you,” Luke said.

  Celia’d been through awkward morning afters before. “I made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. And there’s coffee.”

  Luke didn’t move toward a seat, though his eyes cut toward the counter and the coffeemaker. “I should get on the road.”

  She’d had a suspicion he’d say something like that, but even so, her stomach sank. “You have time for breakfast, don’t you? You have to eat. You can’t head off without something in your stomach.”

  “I already slept too late….”

  “Where do you have to go?” Celia asked quietly. “I mean, is there some sort of schedule I don’t know about? You have to punch a clock?”

  That earned her a small smile. “No. But I have a lead on a few things up toward Scranton. If I get on the road, I can be there before it gets dark.”

  “You could stay here, have breakfast. Then lunch. Some afternoon delight,” she said, teasing. “Another good night’s sleep.”

  Luke looked with blatant longing at the coffeemaker and the plate of cinnamon rolls. “I really can’t.”

  “You kind of look like shit,” Celia told him bluntly. “Like you’ve been riding hard and treating yourself like crap. Tell me how you can do what you do without taking better care of yourself, Luke.”

  He fixed her with a long, steady gaze, then looked away as though she’d shamed him. “Celia, this is too much.”

  “What’s too much?” she asked, not willing to let him slide away from her and uncertain why. It wasn’t as if she’d never let a man slide away from her before. Jeremy hadn’t even needed a good excuse to leave her, and she’d let herself be left. “The laundry? The food? The sex, is that too much, Luke?”

  His jaw set, but he didn’t look at her. “All of it’s too much. You didn’t have to…”

  She crossed to him and got up in his face without actually touching him. “I wanted to. All of it. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” Luke said, face still turned away.

  She knew she shouldn’t be angry. After all, she’d given him the right to be a prick when she let him come inside and fuck her senseless after months of those useless late-night phone calls. If she let him show up in her life without warning, it was stupid of her to be upset if he wanted to walk back out of it again the same way.

  “You owe me something,” she said. He looked at her then, without moving away, so close the heat from his bare skin lingered on hers. “You owe it to me to take care of yourself. So that when you’re out there, doing what you do…”

  Her throat closed on the words. What was she saying? What was she thinking? That the monsters were real, and Luke hunted them down? Killed them? Set fire to the remains? Nothing in her entire life had prepared her to believe in this. Not the strange light in the sky she’d seen at thirteen, the glimpse of what might’ve been a ghostly figure in her grandmother’s house when she was twenty-four, not the scarily accurate Tarot card reading she’d had just before the split with Jeremy.

  But she did believe it. She believed him. She stood on her toes to brush his mouth with hers, to say against his lips, “You owe it to me to come back here in one piece, Luke. And if taking a few days off now and again, letting me take care of you, makes it easier for you to go out there and find them. To…kill them. If letting me do these simple things for you means you’ll be better prepared to do what you do, then you owe it to me to stay here and eat a goddamn cinnamon roll, drink some coffee and make love to me and at least take a fucking nap before you go.”

  His arms went around her. His kiss, deep and thorough. He buried his face in her neck, then lifted her so that her legs went easily around his waist, his big hands supporting her ass. Luke looked up into her eyes.

  “Okay,” was all he said, but it was enough.

  Two days.

  She’d convinced him to stay through the weekend and leave early Monday when she went to work. He’d made it all the way until dawn, when he woke with wide eyes and a pounding heart. She’d still been sleeping beside him, her soft breath steady, regular and precious. When he kissed her bare shoulder, she barely stirred, and Luke had slipped naked from the bed to dress in the almost-dark without waking her.

  He hadn’t left a note, but he had taken the last cinnamon roll on his way out the door, his pack full of clean and fresh-scented laundry folded so expertly he had plenty of room left where before he’d had to crumple and shove everything to get it to fit. She’d been right, he had to admit it. A few days of good food and sleep…and yes, the sex, had invigorated him. Replenished him.

  Still, he snuck away from her even though she’d been the one to say it was okay that he go. Not because he was ashamed and not because he thought she might try to change his mind. In between the food, the sleep and the fucking, he and Celia had talked for long, long hours about the life he’d found himself living. It had been an immense relief to unburden himself to someone who believed him. To share what he’d learned about these things that still had no name. To tell her how it felt to kill them, how it never got easier or better, how he never even came close to any sort of joy from it. Revenge was not sweet, Luke had learned. It was a bitter, bitter thing.

  He snuck away because the last memory he wanted Celia to have of him was not the word goodbye.

  He was forty miles down the road, the sun at last risen overhead and the late September air cool on his skin, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Nobody called him, not ever. He pulled to the side of the road to check and found a text message from Celia.

  Call me tonight.

  It made him smile and coiled sensation tight inside him. He thumbed a return message, I will, and tucked the phone back into his pocket. Then he got back on the road and drove.

  This was her crazy life, Celia thought as the sound of Luke’s motorcycle in the front yard woke her. She hadn’t been
sleeping very hard, half-waiting for his call, half-waiting for him. It had been just over a month since the last time he’d come back. The time before that, just a few weeks. His last phone call had been the night before, when he’d told her he was only a few hours away, and though he hadn’t made any promises, she’d crawled into bed thinking tonight was the night he’d be back.

  The last time, she’d given him a key because he’d scolded her so fiercely about leaving one under the flowerpot by the front door. Too dangerous, he’d said, and not just because the things he hunted were smart enough to use keys, but because any criminal could. So she’d made him take a key so he could let himself in and reassure himself the locks worked. She heard the click and squeak of the front door opening, then the soft tread of his boots on the stairs.

  At the sound of someone in the doorway, she tossed off the coverlet to reveal her naked skin. “Welcome home.”

  She loved the way he laughed, like she’d caught him off-guard even though he should really have known by now how she liked to greet him. She loved, too, how fast he stripped down and slipped into bed beside her. And how he smelled of fresh air and leather, even the faint scent of earth and gasoline something like an aphrodisiac to her.

  When he ran his hands up her body, Celia sighed. When he slid one between her legs, she arched. When he moved down her belly with his mouth to lap at her clit, she fisted her hands in his hair, too short for her to get a good grip, and let her fingers slide along his scalp as he feasted on her. She pressed her body to his mouth and rocked with his touch. When he took her to the edge and eased off, teasing her, she muttered a curse. And, when he pushed his cock so deep inside her, she thought she’d never been fucked so good, so hard, so thoroughly by any man.

  She loved it.

  She loved him.

  They didn’t talk of love; it was something she knew better than to say. Didn’t have to, really, because she gave it to him with her body, the pies she baked because she knew he liked them. The loads of laundry. The way she let him leave her when he had to.