Page 92 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
When finally she did meet his eyes, her own were filled with dread. “I’ve heard from Honor.” There was a long, terrible pause. “We don’t have as much time as we thought.”
And so they left. They rode as fast as the bikes would take them to their next stop, pausing only to recharge the batteries and wolf down some food, then were on their way once more, betting against the odds they could make it to their next-to-last stop before sunrise. They did, but barely. They were welcomed by more kind-faced strangers, fed again, shown to another cramped bedroom. They slept. And when they awoke, they made love with feverish, desperate hunger, both of them knowing that tomorrow would change everything. Tomorrow would be both an end, and a new beginning.
Tomorrow they would arrive in New Vienna, and the wheel of Fate would spin once again.
PART FOUR
TWENTY-NINE
Sebastian Thorne was a man used to getting his own way.
Even as a child, he’d been fearlessly single-minded, permitting himself only one day a week when he didn’t study his beloved molecular biology. On that day he studied biochemistry instead. He’d developed an unnatural passion for both subjects and could, by the age of twelve, best his professors at school with theories so far advanced his elders merely looked at one another with raised brows and shrugged shoulders, admitting their precocious pupil was an anomaly whom they had little idea how to handle.
Knowing as he did that almost ninety-nine percent of the mass of a human body is composed of just six elements, young Sebastian Thorne became obsessed with the question of why. Why is a dangerous question, even for the most learned and wise of adults, but for a child with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a moral code one could only describe as flexible, the question of why led to a brief but intense interest in religion, and the ultimate meaning of life.
He soon dismissed religion as the tool man used to manage his existential terror of death. God, Allah, Yahweh, Satnam, whatever name you used, in essence they were all the same thing: manufactured punishment and reward systems for weak-minded people. To live without believing in God was, in Sebastian Thorne’s opinion, true courage. Only cowards needed to ascribe divine power to the chaos of the universe, and he was no coward.
He was a visionary. Or so he liked to think.
So religion went by the wayside, as did anything else that interfered with his ruthless intellectual curiosity. He grew to a man, he built a successful company, he married, he had a child of his own.
Then the chaos of the universe paid him a personal visit, and Sebastian Thorne’s carefully controlled world was turned upside down.
His wife fell ill. She was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic defect that caused abrupt, coordinated failure of the major organs of the body, as if a timer had been set,
and counted down to zero. Technology in the form of life support kept her functioning, but in reality his wife was dead.
Several years later, his daughter fell victim to the same malady, courtesy of her mother’s genes.
It was then Thorne was gripped by a new obsession: finding a cure.
On a safari he’d taken years prior in Africa, he’d heard a local legend about creatures who looked like humans, but were stronger, faster, altogether better. More intriguing was their purported ability to change shape as they desired, shifting from animal to human to the mist that was a constant of the rainforests from whence they came. These creatures were called Ikati, meaning cat warrior in ancient Zulu. When his wife and daughter fell ill, Thorne remembered the story, and his search began.
It would lead him down a road that would ultimately devour what little conscience he had to begin with.
He began to play his own version of God, tinkering with human DNA. He recruited scientists and doctors and most important, hunters, whom he sent out into the world to find evidence of the mystical creatures known as the Ikati. He found, to his great surprise, the Church had been hunting the same creatures for millennia, using fanatical assassins who called themselves Expurgari, or purifiers. The irony wasn’t lost on Thorne that he and the most powerful religious institution on the planet had such a thing in common, even if their endgames were different. The Church wanted only to exterminate the Ikati. Thorne wanted to put them to good use, then exterminate them.
So the godless man and the pope became business partners. It didn’t work out so well for the pontiff—he was slaughtered on live television by one of the creatures with a taste for dramatic flair who’d infiltrated the Vatican. Then the Expurgari were slaughtered en masse when they landed in the Amazon the day of the Flash. Shortsighted to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. But the Church wasn’t known for doing things by halves. Good/evil, black/white, saved/damned . . . their entire history was built on a philosophy Thorne liked to call Full Bore or Bust. You were in, or you were out. Shades of gray did not exist, and so the Expurgari went the way of the dinosaur. It wasn’t as if they had an army of willing new recruits banging down their doors, either; by that point, the Church was bleeding the faithful like a hemophiliac after a bad fall.
But for Thorne, things had worked out well. He’d not only captured thousands of the creatures, including their Queen, he’d learned how to harvest their stem cells and manufacture a host of medicines that helped everything from acne to cancer.
It was far too late for his family, though. By the time he’d made the breakthrough, his wife and daughter were long gone.
It was the only failure of his life. In his darkest moments, Thorne sometimes wished there was a God, so he could curse Him, so there could be someone else to blame. But there was no one else. The blame was all his.
Regret can play strange games with a man’s mind.
“What’s the update on the team who went to Wales?” said Thorne, seated behind his massive desk in his massive office, staring at a massive screen on which was projected a massive image of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. What used to be Tennessee, the state where he was born.
Standing at attention on the other side of his desk, his third-in-command answered. “No update, sir. The signal went offline just after the distress call two days ago, and no contact has been made since.”
Thorne wasn’t exactly sure where Three was looking. His cast eye inevitably wandered off like some wayward pet. Combined with the ingrained habit of a former Marine to avoid direct eye contact with his superior, the walleye lent Three a furtive air that Thorne found alternatively fascinating and irritating. Topped by a thatch of wiry black hair, his head was oblong in the extreme, and his mouth was filled with an array of discolored and disheveled teeth. He had a nose that looked as if it belonged on a human-elephant hybrid. Overall, the effect was startling, and Thorne found himself wondering on occasions such as this why he’d never invented a pill to cure ugliness.
“No contact,” mused Thorne, “means no survivors.”
“A probable outcome, yes, sir.”
Thorne strummed his fingers atop the polished wood desk. He’d read the transcript of the helicopter pilot’s last transmission, and was intrigued by how quickly and dramatically the weather had changed during the flight. One minute, their equipment registered nothing. A clear day. Sunny skies. The next minute: a storm of biblical proportion.
