DarkWalker by John Urbancik Page A

her cheek, then her lips. “Half an hour,” he said.
    He took the keys to the apartment and locked the door on his way out.
    The hall was empty. A few spots of blood, nothing noticeable. The next cleaning crew would take care of that.
    He descended in the elevator. The downstairs hall, with its tiled floor and mass produced art, was just as clean.
    Outside the glass doors, blood stained the ground. Not human blood—this was blacker, easily mistaken for oil or even water. No one had reported anything, apparently. Jack didn’t see the severed hand anywhere.
    The streets were unusually quiet. Nearly barren. A small breeze had risen, chilling his back.
    He didn’t want to leave her again, but he didn’t know what he was dealing with. If the claws carried poisons, Lisa might be dying. He doubted it; those had been designed to tear and rend. But if he’d seen one before, maybe he could . . . what, fight it? Destroy it? It was long gone, and the knifeman with it. It wouldn’t come back.
    He hadn’t gone fifty feet when the next streetlamp flickered and went out. Twice in one night, as if he interfered with the flow of electricity.
    He kept walking.
    His Mustang was on the opposite side of downtown, maybe ten blocks west and a few more north, but by the time he reached the far end of the lake, Jack heard footsteps.
    They echoed his own, but imprecisely. Off to the right, toward Lake Eola and the path which circled it. He saw nothing. No one. Too many bushes and trees in the way.
    He quickened his pace.
    Past the lake, a few small stores faced the street: a locksmith, a bookshop, a restaurant where people still dined outside, laughing and drinking.
    The footsteps were to his left now. Across the two-lane street, the double yellow lines. Houses behind that sidewalk, and trees, and plenty of places to hide. The echoes stopped when Jack stopped.
    Maybe they were normal sounds, his own feet bouncing off of curved metallic objects, or cars, or 200-year-old oaks. He didn’t believe it.
    He crossed Magnolia, a one-way, three-lane street, where trees gave way to buildings. A lot of cars were parked along here, and in a private lot at the corner. He passed the library, a parking garage, a few clubs, a tattoo parlor.
    The echoes came from above now.
    He turned down Orange , the main thoroughfare of downtown, and passed a row of clubs. Pretty people in designer clothes lined the sidewalks, partitioned from the rest of the world by velvet ropes, let in one at a time by an overly muscular Hispanic man in a tuxedo. A crowd of Goths gathered near another bar, the same where the vampire chick had winked at him.
    There, in the window (which was not a window at all, painted black on both sides) , a shimmering ghost stared at him. He had tried to tell Jack stories the other night.
    He watched Jack approach with an expression resembling sorrow, or maybe pity.
    “Back for my stories?” the ghost asked. “A drink, perhaps?”
    “Nothing,” Jack said.
    The ghost squinted, as if trying to look at Jack more closely. “Ah, but you have changed.” No one else heard or saw the ghost. It was a private showing, just as it had been the night before.
    Jack stopped alongside the window, lowered his voice so as not be overheard. “Shouldn’t you be off haunting something?”
    “Oh, I am, really,” the ghost said. “But you can’t fault a man for curiosity. Kill a man for it, certainly, that’s been done. Oh, I could tell you stories.”
    “So I’ve heard.” People walked behind him, most ignoring him entirely, some sparing a second look. Jack pretended to be examining the flyers posted on the window: advertisements for bands, techno nights, parties.
    “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” the ghost asked. “Someplace you haven’t been before. I can tell. You’re the opposite of what you were. Attracting rather than repelling.”
    “If you have something to tell me,” Jack said, “something so important you came to the very edge of