Darkest Hour by Rob Cornell Page A

reach from his hand on her shoulder. Next thing he knew, he was sailing through the darkness, the air knocked from his lungs by Jessie’s kick to his midsection.
    He banged his elbow when he hit the floor, sending spurs of pain up and down the same arm Jessie had wounded the night before. He sat up on the floor and cradled his arm. He gritted his teeth and tried to coast through the pain until it subsided.
    “Oh, god.” Jessie crouched at Lockman’s side as quickly as she had kicked him. He couldn’t see her, but he felt her hand on his back and the general presence of her body beside him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe I did that.”
    “Help me up.”
    She got behind him and lifted him to his feet easily.
    When he regained his balance, he faced the general direction of where he thought she stood. “I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t want to. I let my feelings get in the way. That allowed me to forget what you are now. And you’ve played it pretty cool all along. Until last night. We all got a hard reminder.”
    “I’m still your daughter. I still have feelings of my own.”
    “I know.”
    “Then don’t keep me cooped up here. I can help. Can you imagine what I could do to the vamps? With my immunity to silver and religious icons? Take me to Alaska. So what if there’s no sunlight? They don’t stand a frickin’ chance against me.”
    Lockman pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’m going to turn on my light so I can make it to the stairs.”
    “Aren’t you listening?”
    “I heard you.”
    “Well?”
    He took in a heavy breath, smelled that cold meat smell again. Definitely coming from Jessie. “You remember one of the first things I told you about mojo?”
    “It’s all bad,” she said in a typical teenage bored voice.
    “Last night, your mojo stopped working. What did you have to do to get it to work again?”
    Her sigh echoed in the dark basement.
    “You used my flesh. My blood. Your father. Don’t you understand what that means?”
    Silence except for a small shuffling of her feet on the cement floor.
    “If you could maintain the level of power you showed last night, you’d be right. The vamps wouldn’t stand a chance. But what price will you have to pay in order to do that? A piece of your father’s flesh will only go so far.”
    “It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said.
    She didn’t sound convinced herself, though. Maybe he had gotten through to her, a little at least. “I’m turning on the light.”
    He heard her footsteps walk away from him. After a second of silence, he tapped his phone’s screen and lit the way.
    Jessie had returned to the corner by the furnace. She stood there with her nose in the corner like a delinquent student in a time out.
    Lockman stayed put a few seconds longer in hopes he might come up with something comforting—and convincing—to say. Everything that came to mind sounded more like warnings or accusations. He gave up and headed upstairs. Just before he closed the basement door he thought he heard Jessie crying.

Chapter Nine
    Kate’s closet-sized apartment shared a wall with a neighbor obsessed with bass drums. Almost twenty-four/seven the man—or woman; Kate had never met the person—played music that seemed entirely composed of bass rhythm with the rare hint of horns or guitar, and twice she thought she actually heard some singing.
    This quaint New York feature made Kate’s life especially difficult because the only job she had managed to find when she first arrive at the city was working the night shift at a twenty-four hour convenience store. It meant trying to sleep during the day. Which meant, as neighbor to the true “Ace of Bass,” she needed to wear earplugs when she went to bed.
    This was why she did not hear the pounding on her door until the person doing the pounding kicked the door clean off its hinges and barged in with a gun about three times too big for her small hands.
    Kate had reached that