Page 17 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
After another long, uncomfortable silence, he asked, “You up for some cake?” Without waiting for a response, he rose and opened the refrigerator.
She listened to him move around the kitchen, getting plates and silverware, pouring liquid into glasses, then turned to find him standing at the table over two mugs of milk and a sheet cake large enough to feed a party of two dozen.
White frosting and sugar flowers and candles, and right smack
in the middle a huge “Congrats!” scrawled in pink script. She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. For just a moment, his rugged face looked sheepish.
“It’s a combination birthday and congratulations cake.”
“Congratulations? For what?”
“The Pulitzer, Jackie. I haven’t seen you since before you were nominated, remember?”
The faintest hint of recrimination colored his voice. For a moment, she felt guilty that she could only bear being in this house, with all its lurking goblin memories, once a year. Flaws and all, he was still her father, but every time she saw his face all she saw was . . . him.
She couldn’t even think her brother’s name. Her mind flinched away from it like a battered dog expecting a kick.
“Right. Well, that’s really nice of you, Dad. Thanks.”
“Anything for my little girl.”
The layer of rage simmering beneath his light, conversational tone reminded her exactly of how her mother sometimes used to sound: brittle and bottled up, ready to blow.
Jack’s father lit the candles. She blew them out. Then they ate their pink and white squares of cake at the table in the cool, weighted silence of her dead mother’s kitchen, the air all around them thick with the presence of ghosts.
Sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest exists within the country of Brazil.
Vast, lush, and ancient, it’s a place where beauty and savagery exist in equal supply. Scarlet macaws perch preening on the boughs of moss-draped emerald branches while electric eels and green-and-black-banded anaconda slither silently through languid, piranha-rich waters below. There are vampire bats and squirrel monkeys and poison frogs that excrete toxins through their flesh; there are 150-pound rodents called capybara that are hunted by caiman, a reptile that can reach twelve feet in length. High up in the dense, leafy canopy, where the tropical sun filters through in brilliant shafts of emerald green, toucans call with a sound like the croak of a frog, while down on the perfumed beds of fallen leaves and bracken that cover the muffled twilight of the forest floor, leaf-cutter ants and rhinoceros beetles that can carry 850 times their own body weight scuttle about in endless pursuit of mates and food.
Another animal lives in this verdant paradise of jeweled leaves and pristine sky, of towering trees wreathed in mist and the constant musical chatter of the birds that inhabit them. Like many of the animals of the rainforest, this one is a predator.
A predator with that most important of animal survival skills: camouflage.
A muscular, four-legged killing machine with a coat so glossy black it shone midnight blue, and eyesight so sharp it could cut through the dense forest gloom like a scythe, Hawk carried the thumb-size memory card from Jack’s camera carefully in his mouth, in a small pouch he’d made from a folded plastic baggie and a few pieces of tape. This part of the rainforest wasn’t accessible by foot—human feet, to be precise—and the going was slow. Over the tangled gnarl of buttress roots and the mossed bulk of fallen trunks, around dark pools of standing water and the swift, snaking fingers of murmuring streams, he made his way primarily using his sense of smell. Though he knew the jungle where he’d been born and raised almost by rote, he took a different path home every time he returned from the city, and it was his nose that led the way.
It wouldn’t be long now. The scent of a large group of carnivores told him he was close.
A cry from high above pierced the late afternoon humidity of the forest, and Hawk paused in mid stride, lifting his gaze to the sky, visible through a small break in the towering canopy. In the uppermost layer of the rainforest known as the emergent, a harpy eagle soared briefly into view. Falling still, Hawk closed his eyes and concentrated.
As abruptly as he’d frozen, he was flying. Seeing through another pair of eyes, breathing through another set of lungs, his body left behind in suspended animation on the forest floor.
He felt a lurch in his stomach as his mind adjusted, then the familiar sensation of wind on his face, streaming warm through his tail feathers.
He made a slow, looping turn, scanning the emergent for signs of anything amiss. Glistening green treetops carpeted the landscape for miles, interrupted only by the serpentine black channel of the Rio Negro far to the west, the river he’d traveled up in a rented boat from Manaus before he’d abandoned it and continued on foot deeper into the forest. He spotted the sheared tip of the giant kapok tree that marked the edge of his colony, and pumped his outstretched wings twice, turning his beak to the wind and letting an updraft of heated air lift and cradle him as he crested the rise of a hill. Riding the wind for a moment, he luxuriated in the freedom, delaying for one last, lovely moment the inevitable return to “real” life.
Then with a simple exhalation, he released the eagle and came rushing back into himself, still standing motionless on the forest floor.
Hanging upside down from a nearby branch by his tail, his wise old-man face scrunched up in concentration, an adult male howler monkey was staring at him in curiosity.
Hawk snarled an unmistakable warning, and the monkey went screaming away into the trees. He flattened his ears against his head in a vain effort to soften the piercing shrieks; the primates were named “howlers” for good reason.
He headed off once again, trotting with easy agility over the tangled, thorny floor of the forest.
“Ah, the lone wolf returns,” said the Alpha Alejandro with an unconcealed sneer. He lifted an overfull wineglass in contemptuous salute as Hawk entered the Assembly gathering place.
Cold and sharp as an icicle, a spike of hatred stabbed through Hawk’s heart.
Cocktail hour already, you degenerate?
