Disclaimer: This story is based on the Dark Series by Christine Feehan. The two main characters and the main villain as well as the plotline are mine, but otherwise supporting characters and the overall plot is a part of her series.
A/N: Hi all! Enjoy! This one's a doozy!
Chapter One
The rain beat down upon the windows in waves of cold, fingers creeping along the cracks of the house, yearning to gain entry. The storm clouds had rolled in unexpectedly, the local forecaster had explained, looking at their Doppler Radar with befuddlement. The news infiltrated the house as a hollow echo, drowned out by the roar of thunder overhead. Rachel turned a dry page in her book patiently, reading every word before letting her thumb push it aside. Strewn lazily over the leather cushions of her large plum couch, her hair spilling in splashes of blonde and red over her blue-rimmed glasses, she was perfectly content with her day off from work and welcomed the storm. They always calmed her and she slept more soundly when she felt the air change with a gale approaching.
The large house had always welcomed the furies of the skies with elegance. Framed in windows, the living room was Rachel's favorite lounging space during such evenings. It was easier to forget her work strewn about the coffee table, the counters, her bed, her car when the rain caressed her windows. When working on such a gruesome crime scene, the rain soothed her aching brain like a hot springs could sore muscles.
Her current investigation was becoming particularly nightmarish. Four victims had been identified and two remained unknown, all killed by a fiend the bureau was calling Jack after the Ripper from London. Nothing was left behind for them to examine at any of the five crime scenes she was working on. No prints, no scuffmarks, no hair or blood – in fact, no blood was left. The victims were sucked dry, their throats ripped as if by monstrous claws. Even stranger was the killer's peculiar distaste of the womb. Each of the four women slaughtered had not only been drained of blood, their throats gutted, they had also been eviscerated, intestines and womb torn from their stomachs and shredded in rage.
Usually a gruesome crime scene didn't phase her composure, but these had made everyone sick. The killer didn't care where they were as long as they were alone, and the one time he had struck at a couple was in an alley in a demolition site. The team had a suspicion that the couple had been enjoying a private moment when Jack struck. The female victim in this case was the only one that hadn't been pregnant.
Rachel was lucky the storm came at such a troubling time.
A breeze flitted through her living room from the crack she'd left open in the sliding glass doors. A smile tugged at the corner of her lips as she said, "Come in, my friend. I don't mind a draft in my house." She reached with her toe over the couch and pulled the door open just an inch farther to let in more fresh air.
Realizing she had begun thinking about her work again, Rachel reread the page she was about to turn with a little sigh of exhasperation. Leaning her head back on the pillow, she listened to the rain for a few moments to relax her annoyance. Blowing a few choppy strands of hair from her face, she began reading once again.
As the news went into commercial, its trumpeted theme sounding with patriotic flare, something outside seemed to thump against the wall of the house. Rachel finished the paragraph she was reading and looked up from her book out the glass doors in front of her. The world beyond her back patio was pitch-black, caught in a tidal wave of Nature's rage. She listened closely to the trees being whipped by the rain and the banshee winds howling passed her home. Without much enthusiasm, Rachel lazily pushed herself off the couch and padded over to the backdoor window in thick striped socks to see what had fallen.
She pulled her sweater over her thin fingers and folded her arms across her chest as she opened the door and looked out into the backyard. The rain pelted her face and glasses as she looked about her with a thick blanket of unease settling over her stomach. She rubbed her elbows nervously and hugged herself tightly as the feeling spread through her body, the hair standing up on the nape of her neck. With wide, jumpy eyes Rachel ducked back into her home and locked the door. She stopped and grabbed a kitchen towel from the counter, took off her glasses, her eyes closed tightly while she regained her composure. She wiped her glasses clean and replaced them on the bridge of her nose with a determined breath. She lived in a big house by herself. It was natural to be creeped out sometimes. Still, no matter how hard she tried to shake the feeling, she knew that if she took off her glasses and gazed about her home, she'd find something disturbed.
Rachel reached for her overturned novel, placed carefully on the back of the couch in an attempt to casually shrug off the dread growing in the pit of her stomach when she noticed her sliding glass doors. She always kept them a crack open during the rain so she could listen to the sounds and smell the crisp air. Just a few inches to help her relax for the night. She never – never – opened the screen door. She usually never even unlocked it, using the backdoor to get into the forest paths that shadowed the view of her backyard. Slowly, as quietly as she could manage, she crept close enough to see that the screen door hadn't been opened. It had been shredded to pieces.
Rachel's eyes strayed to the photographs littering her coffee table. Throats and stomachs ripped open, torn – shredded with claws. She could almost hear the terrible cries and screams that would have echoed through the crime scenes had the murdered not been robbed of their vocal chords before it was too late. She picked up one of the photographs and held it up to the window, comparing the gnarled flesh with her destroyed screen. Her eyes widened with terror as she realized just what danger lay in wait for her.
Rachel forced herself to calm down enough to look around her. Nothing else was out of place in the living room, not even a footprint plagued her thick, dark carpet. Her wide eyes scanned the whole first floor, which was basically one large space. A picture fluttered down from the balcony and landed on the couch next to her hand. With a startled jump, she snapped her head to look at the picture without picking it up. It was the most eerie picture in her whole case file. A red haired woman's mutilated face and neck. Nearly all of the woman's skin was crimson and glistening in the flash of the photograph save two puncture wounds on her neck which looked to have been licked clean. Rachel gulped looking at the photograph. Rumors had run amok in the lab about a vampire, but she had been determined to prove it was some sort of tazer or homemade nail gun that had made the wounds. Rachel's gaze drifted to the wide sightless eyes of the woman as they screamed out of the picture, warning and pleading for help. Those blank, terrified eyes looked straight at Rachel's with a gaze no dead woman should ever hold.
A creak in the floorboards of the third-story balcony made her almost jump out of her skin. The balcony railing was just above. If Jack really was above her and looked down into the living room, he'd see her immediately. She swallowed nervously, the lump in her throat making it exceedingly hard to breathe. With slow, deliberate steps she walked around the couch, keeping an eye on the top of the spiral stairs across the room. She pushed her waves of hair behind her ears and moved along one of the walls toward the guest room as quietly as she could manage. Her heart pounded in her ears, making it impossible for her to believe she was quiet. She felt like whatever stalked her could taste its rapid pace. She began to notice her heart's rhythm in her wrists, her neck, her chest, her ears… It was petrifying. Not allowing her body to succumb to fear, she ducked into the dark bedroom and ran to the closet panting softly as the laboring of her heart took a toll on her body. She felt light as a feather and out of control. Her hands shook horribly as she searched the coat closet for a weapon. She found a pair of scissors and a baseball bat. With the experience Jack seemed to have with sharper means of killing, Rachel chose the bat to hold in her hands, stuffed the scissors in her back pocket and left the closet reluctantly after a few deep breaths. She had to get to her cell phone charging in her bedroom. She lived in the middle of the woods with no close neighbors. Somehow, she knew that if she left the house, he'd get her. Jack had yet to kill in a house.
Rounding the corner of the guest bedroom, Rachel peered cautiously into the living room. Thunder clapped loudly above the house and the larger windows rattled softly as the roar permeated the foundations. She clutched her bat with white-knuckled fists and held it close to her body but above her shoulder, ready to strike. She felt a bead of sweat fall down her temple and wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her sweater hurriedly before clutching the bat once again.Dismissing the living room, she inched her way to the spiral stairs to her right. They lead to the library of the third floor, right in front of her bedroom door. Avoiding the creaks and groans she knew intimately in the staircase, Rachel made her way stair by stair to the third floor landing. Evil seeped from every poor of the library and she constantly thought that something was breathing down her neck, pouring down her body like thick, black oil. The sound of her heart beating became painful to her ears. She almost wished it would cease its persistent thrashing. It felt as if the strength of the beat would crack her ribs and push them from her skin.
Shuffling across the floor, avoiding the weakest points in the floorboards, Rachel wrapped her fingers around her doorknob and opened it silently, grateful that the door didn't whine in protest. She peeked her head around the corner of her door and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, tiptoed into the master bedroom. She let her grip on the bat loosen as she grabbed the phone from her rounded pappasan chair. As she straightened, she felt the breath on her neck again, too real this time. She spun and fell away, ripping the chord of her cell phone charger from the wall and landing hard on the floor.
"I like how you've been studying me. Obsessive," the intruder hissed, filling the doorway with his looming, depraved bulk. Rachel couldn't take her eyes off his mouth. His grin was filled with stained, bloodied knife-like fangs. He held his 'S's with a pleasurable sizzle and cackled like a jackal as she backed away from him, her bat still hanging in her hand. As he came closer, the light from her scattered desk spilled over his person. Jack was a hideous man, yellowing, pale and sickly with taut skin stretched over his face and hands. He drooled a little blood with a wretched grin and grated his talon-like nails against the doorframe. A sharp pain in Rachel's backside reminded her of the scissors in her back pocket. She dropped her phone with a clatter and reached for the scissors cutting through her jeans.
"At least I don't look like a bleached out football," she said softly, fear and anger driving her clenched voice from her throat. With this, Jack began once again to laugh uproariously, taking a step. Two steps.
While Jack's face was upturned with maddened joy, she threw the scissors with all the force she could, adrenaline guiding her throw. By sheer luck, they embedded themselves in his abdomen. Jack's voice changed little from his laughter to his howl of unexpected pain, but his face became a grotesque mask of rage, his eyes settled like red embers on Rachel's apprehensive features. With a snarl, he withdrew the scissors and snapped his jaw together audibly before pulling his hand back for a return throw.
Rachel's eyes widened and she scrambled for the door that led to the staircase to the second floor. She pulled herself around the doorway and slid on the wooden floor with her socks. The storm outside began to rage with incredible strength, unrelenting. As thunder and lightning flashed through the house, rumbling the earth and windows, Rachel felt the rain suffocate her, the fresh air tease the strength from her. Turning at the landing and continuing towards the kitchen and living room on the first floor, Rachel felt something sink keep into her back, below her shoulder. The thud as the scissors buried themselves to the hilt into her ribcage knocked Rachel off her feet. She reached forward with her hand, pulling at the carpet with her trembling hands. As she was getting to her knees, she felt a heavy boot push her back down to the floor and the point of the scissors push deeper into her body with a sickening splurge. She could feel the life seeping from her, could feel herself choking from within her lungs, coughing up blood. The world was becoming hazy. With a maniacal laugh, Jack lifted Rachel's head by a handful of hair and waited only a moment before smashing it against the wall of her cabinets. The wood splintered under the pressure and she could feel the pots and pans scatter at impact. Her glasses snapped in half and fell to the carpet, useless. Jack dropped her head and listened to her gurgle and moan, watched the blood seep from her precious little mouth.
"I'm going to enjoy sucking you dry. You stink of them, but your blood smells spicy," he said with obvious excitement. He ran his tongue over his crooked, gruesome incisors and a shiver of anticipation ran down his spine. The kill was so superb, and she was going to be the treat of the century.
Rachel looked up from the carpet, his voice drowned from her ears. The world was black, like it always was without her glasses. They pulsed next to her, broken in half but still retaining their magic. The weavings of a large, intimidating spell hung glittering in the air above her, sparkling in her starkly dark world. Rachel could feel them. Smell them. Taste them. Reaching a hand toward them, she felt her eyes become dangerous, her fingers reaching for the strands of energy clinging to the air, blowing lightly in the breeze. With some difficulty, she pulled herself up another inch from the carpet, wincing as the scissors in her back cut a deeper whole in her lung.
"What are you doing, you little bitch?" Jack said with obvious irritation. He grabbed her head by the neck pulling her up closer to him. She grinned, her unseeing eyes looking right through him as he lowered his head to her neck.
"Killing you," she whispered. His teeth began to pull at her skin when she clasped the strand of weaving above his head. The change in the atmosphere was drastic, the surge of power right before an explosion, rippling through the air. Jack snapped his head up, and dropped Rachel's aggressively. She rolled on her side and saw the impression of the killer's head as it hit the net of magic above them. With one swift motion, she pulled the strands of power around his neck and tightened them. The strain of his body against the magic was immense. She pulled with all her force, crying, gasping, trembling, the magic cutting through her fingers and palms, making her bleed down her arms and across her chest.
"Dradhti nahm ongoriyem," she said as she reached up with the last of her strength and pulled one more strand into her fingers. Acid seeped from Jack's neck as he howled, caught in the net of magic and thick pools of the substance fell to Rachel, eating away her clothes, burning her flesh. Jack clawed at the magic, but was unable to touch it, to pull it away. He fell to his knees and began to rip at Rachel's arms and chest, spittle and blood oozing over the walls, her face, the carpet. She snarled at him without seeing him and expertly tied the second strand into a knot, slamming it into the ground. Slowly, the magic began to retreat into the carpet, pulling tighter on Jack's throat. Rachel, unable to do anything else, began to crawl away from Jack as his face was pressed against the floor. She heard the bones crack in his neck as the magic continued to constrict and pull. His voice was reduced to a gurgle by the time Rachel reached the backdoor. She reached forward for the handle, but found it opened and unlocked. She collapsed in a heap on the floor, her flesh burning, her life ending. The world became still around her, her heart fading slowly. The persistent pounding had nearly stopped and she suddenly regretted wishing that it would cease all those moments ago.
Rachel's black world glittered with the magic she wove. She reached out peacefully to a strand and played with it in her fingers, the pain having receded as death came creeping in. As she let her hand fall back to the carpet, she felt a leather shoe beneath her fingers instead of the thick thread of her floor. It shifted and she felt something calming and powerful look into her eyes. A strong hand brushed against her jaw and she felt her eyelids grow heavy. Her laboring heart and lungs seemed to find a steady beat on their own even as she felt her little remaining strength disappear.
A/N: Let me know what you think! Koi