Page 89 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
Wrong wrong wrong. Something was wrong—terribly so—but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
She tried telling herself it was homesickness. She tried telling herself it was nerves. She tried making a thousand different logical arguments to convince herself she was overreacting, but something deep inside her belly argued back that she was in danger.
She’d fallen asleep with that thought in mind . . . and the feeling of doom had crept into her dream.
She was running. A highway stretched open in front of her, cutting through a landscape of floating ash and desolation. Buildings burned, smoke coated the sky, piles of rubble spat flames. Though she was running as fast as she could, the road began to tilt up, rising swiftly, and she had to scratch and claw at the asphalt to keep herself from sliding back, sliding down into what she knew awaited her:
Death.
The road reared too high, sheer as a cliff face. She screamed and dug her fingers and toes into it, but it wanted to shake her off. It wanted her to fall. She fought as long as she could, but the angle was too steep, and there were no footholds, just unforgiving black pavement, bisected by two mocking yellow lines.
Just before her fingers slipped, Olivia looked over her shoulder to see what awaited her at the bottom.
Two tiny babies looked up at her from far, far below with solemn, identical faces. They sat naked on a blanket the color of blood, surrounded by howling winds and firestorms but untouched and tranquil, as if floating inside the eye of a hurricane. Four small arms reached up, pale and pudgy, tiny hands opened, fingers spread wide. A sound came from everywhere and nowhere, an ancient and terrible intonation that resonated with such power everything quaked, including Olivia’s soul.
Laughter. It was the laughter of children, warped into a babble of such force and shrieking frenzy Olivia opened her mouth and screamed in terror.
Then she let go.
Olivia bolted upright in blackness, the scream still on her lips. Grayson awoke, instantly on high alert, and shot to his feet from his position on the pallet beside her. He whirled around with a snarl, trying to locate the threat in the teeming dark jungle.
But Olivia knew now where the real threat lay. It wasn’t in the darkness. It wasn’t in whatever would greet them at the new colony, or in anything they might have left behind.
With trepidation, she turned her gaze to the small, snug pouches that held the twins, perhaps a dozen yards away, nestled beside Leander as he slept under the branches of another tree. He was awake now also, demanding to know what was wrong, but Olivia couldn’t look at him.
She couldn’t take her eyes away from the twins.
They were awake, too. They were looking directly at her. And though she was still half asleep and her heart was pounding so hard it made it difficult to hear anything above the rushing of blood through her veins, she was quite sure she heard the four-month-old girls speak in unison.
“Olivia.”
Just her name, clear as a bell. Only their lips didn’t move.
And they were infants; they couldn’t speak.
No one else seemed to hear it. Leander and Grayson and the guide were focused on her, not on the twins. But she felt certain her ears weren’t playing tricks on her . . . as certain as she now felt that these two children of the Queen and her Alpha were monsters.
Or miracles.
Or perhaps a bit of both.
Hawk was intercepted on his way t
o kalum’s cave by a messenger, a lanky boy of sixteen named Zaca, who had unkempt hair, a long, loping gait, and a thousand-watt smile he flashed at regular intervals. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and wore only a loose pair of tan cargo shorts, which were slipping down his narrow hips. He ran up beside Hawk just as he jumped down from the rope.
“Big Daddy wants to see you.”
Hawk tried not to smile at the ironic nickname for Alejandro. He liked the kid, who reminded him of himself at that age, wild and smart-alecky, though Zaca’s easy smile earned him a lot more friends than Hawk’s scowls ever had.
“The Alpha finds out you’re calling him that, you’re in a boatload of trouble, Z.”
“It’s not like anyone’s gonna tell him!” Zaca scoffed.
“Really? Not even Big Daddy’s big brother?”
Zaca went white. The smile dropped from his face. “I . . . uh . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
Hawk put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, I was only trying to warn you to watch what you say. Things get around. And Big Daddy has a terminal case of PMS, if you know what I’m saying.”
