Page 53 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
Horror.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped, releasing her so quickly the cool night air was a shock against her breasts, so recently pressed into the heated expanse of his hard chest.
He stammered, “I’m sorry . . . I-I don’t know . . . it-that won’t happen again.”
Though he was avoiding her eyes, his expression told her he was mortified. He stepped back and clasped his hands behind his neck, as if to keep them from going anywhere else.
“Okay,” Jack whispered, her head still spinning. “That’s good.” She nodded, confused and off-kilter, but unwilling to admit that it wasn’t good, especially since he seemed so aghast and ashamed with himself.
She pushed her feeling of disappointment—stupid, stupid—down and away, hoping it would never reappear.
Because judging from the way his face had gone white and he was blinking like a baby bird who’d utterly failed his first attempt at flying and now lay stunned and broken on the sidewalk, that wouldn’t be happening again.
Without another word, he turned and walked stiffly away, and Jack was forced to decide whether to follow him or stay in the jungle. Alone. In the dark.
She followed him.
After fifteen minutes of silent walking, they broke through the trees and, at long last, Jack got her first glimpse of the colony, filled with supernatural creatures, which would now be her home.
Magical. Enchanted. Spellbinding. Dazzling. Unreal.
All those words and an onslaught of others passed through Jack’s mind in a jumbled blaze as she stood, stunned and open-mouthed, at the edge of the forest, gazing up into the trees.
Because that’s where the colony was:
Up.
Above her head for as far as her eyes could see stretched a suspended city, hidden cleverly within the network of ancient branches. Hundreds upon hundreds of sculpted wood structures—as organic and natural as the trees themselves, appearing as if they’d sprouted from the very trunks that held them—floated as if on air.
Illumed with thousands of flickering lanterns hung in windows and branches and on the suspension bridges linking one tree and structure to another, it was the most astonishing thing Jack had ever seen in her life.
It was the most beautiful thing Jack had ever seen in her life.
It was an architectural masterpiece.
She felt dwarfed by it, by its beauty and the sheer genius of its creators. She’d been to the Vatican once when she was on assignment in Italy, had stood in the vast, echoing silence of the central nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, and had felt exactly these same feelings.
Awe. Reverence. Utter humility in the presence of such grandeur.
The forest floor beneath the suspended city had been cleared of the underbrush that made the trek through the rest of the jungle so difficult, and the base of each tree had been landscaped with orchids and bromeliads and pygmy palms, all the colorful confusion of the jungle tamed and shaped to please the eye. At the base of one of the trees ahead of her, Hawk had stopped and was looking back at her with a flat, empty expression.
His voice matched his face when he spoke. “Come on. They’ll be waiting.”
They?
With trepidation that equaled her amazement, Jack stepped forward into the beautiful, terrifying unknown.
His dead father was having what could politely be termed a conniption inside the confines of Hawk’s skull.
Idiot! Moron! Stupid fucking weakling!
Doing his best to ignore the shrieked hysterics that always echoed in his brain at times like this, Hawk doggedly trudged onward from the edge of the colony, leading Jack to the place he knew the entire tribe would be gathered.
Where they always gathered on nights of the full moon.
Ummum Nanna was the monthly festival of the moon at its apex. His isolated tribe here in the rainforest had kept the old ways of celebrating the Earth and her great magic through the generations, and they had festivals for everything. Full moon and flood season festivals, vernal and autumnal equinox festivals, the winter solstice and midsummer festivals, birth, death, and wedding festivals . . . it went on and on ad nauseum. Hawk pretty much despised the lot, because enforced togetherness featuring singing, dancing, and ritual chest-pounding was his idea of hell on Earth. He already heard the singing, felt the pulse of the drums. He wondered how drunk everyone was . . .
How drunk Alejandro would be.
