Page 161 of Lock Up the Darkness

“And that’s where what we’re doing out here now comes in.” I breathed out a serene sigh. “I can taste it this time. It’s so close. Freedom.”

The three of them stared at me in stunned silent observation. I wasn’t really surprised. I wasn’t exactly known for looking on the bright side most of the time. It kind of hadn’t come with the whole package that I’d been fashioned into.

But it was different now.

There wasn’t just a spark of hope, a possibility…. I could feel it now. It was real.

I spoke, shattering the silence. “And that’s why you can trust that I have my head on straight with this mission tonight. I want this so badly that nothing is gonna break my focus, nothing is gonna stop me from going all out, and doing whatever the fuck it takes.”

Asher smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “Very good.”

Jonah slapped my shoulder. “Hell of a rousing speech, Pretty.”

And Aurora? Well Aurora beamed at me, her beautiful blue eyes shining at me with that powerful, undeniable, and addicting warmth that I’d come to need from her, the kind I’d never known before.

The urge to reach out to her took me.

But before I could act on it, the conversation shifted now that they were satisfied and reassured by my responses to their concerns, and Jonah asked Aurora, “How do you like the toys I made you? We didn’t get to talk about it earlier. One because you were so stunned. And two because we had to head out earlier than anticipated, because of this storm that came out of nowhere.”

Yeah, it really had. Asher had checked the weather and all that and it had said the slight possibility of light rain, not this downpour we were driving through right now. We’d already had to stop twice due to extremely low visibility through the torrential rain melded with the pitch-black of the winding country roads.

Aurora shifted in her seat and reached down and opened the hollow heel of her boot—something Asher had told us all about, and that I’d thought was ingenious and so her—and she pulled out a shiny silver cylindrical thing that looked a lot like a tube of lip gloss. With a slight flick of her hand a very sharp and very deadly blade sprung free. “I love it,” she told him. “It’s really inspired.”

“And it goes with your own blade,” Asher commented.

She smiled and reached into the inside pocket of her black leather jacket. It wasn’t one of her cropped fashion ones, but real hard leather, the kind she used when she rode. She eased out the other thing Jonah had made for her. Well, in this case, re-engineered and souped up to the max. A Taser.

“I didn’t get the chance to go over it properly with you earlier, but that thing can recharge in moments and it’ll pack a hell of a punch. It can take down a guy my size with no problem, just a brief second’s connection and it’ll put them out cold. I know you prefer to do things the hard way and go all out in a fight, but if you’re getting tired or overrun, this will come in handy in a major way.”

“Thank you,” she told him, with one of her beaming smiles. She patted her chest. “For this vest too.” She looked at us worriedly then. “You’re all wearing one too, right?” At our nods of confirmation, she sucked in a relieved breath. “Good. Good.”

She was on edge. It was the first time I’d seen it, since any of us had, since we’d geared up this morning, then set off for the Strenwell house, or Site A, as we were referring to it on mission.

Asher reached across and laid his hand on hers, giving it a squeeze. “This is an intel-gathering mission. The possible dangers, things going south, everything we discussed and outlined should that occur are precautionary measures. Just me being overprepared.” He smirked. “My paranoia out in full force, basically.”

Wow. He was forging a lightheartedness for her, something I knew he couldn’t possibly be feeling with so much on the line tonight.

If this mission didn’t go to plan, if we lost Amethyst and couldn’t get the intel we needed… I couldn’t even go there. It couldn’t be allowed to be a possibility. This intel we needed from this was, at the weakest, leverage to keep the Head Infidels at bay after Asher had to declare war way too early, and, at its strongest, the key to bringing them down and burning everything to fucking ash at long last.

Without that, we’d have to hunt down Revenant himself, which would be like trying to get a lock on fucking Bigfoot with how good the guy was at staying in the shadows when he wanted to. It would be near-impossible and I couldn’t even imagine the time it would take.

Aurora sank back into her chair upfront.

When Asher went to pull his hand away, she held on. Tightly.

There was a lot at stake for her too.

For three years she’d been searching for her dad and everything she’d done had gone toward trying to bring him back to her. And now, she was so close to achieving that, to acquiring something tangible to make that a reality. It had all happened so fast too, so it was even harder for her to reconcile. But if anybody could, it was her. She had a talent for being able to roll with things that would knock most people to their knees for a long while.

We all fell into a contemplative silence then as Asher continued to speed the car forward despite the onslaught of the storm.

It was the kind of silence, sort of like centering ourselves to focus up, that we always entered into just before we entered the field for any mission that was up there with the stakes.

It seemed that Aurora was in the same headspace, doing the same thing too.

I smiled to myself. It was just another way that she fit well with us.

A good thirty minutes went on by before Asher broke through the quiet, eyeing me in the rearview mirror as he said, “Ten-minute ETA. Do you want to go over your role one last time?”

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