Darklight

Bella Forrest

Description

I celebrated when vampires were declared extinct.Those monsters had preyed on humanity for millennia, committing senseless, brutal murders. Like the rest of my colleagues at the Occult Bureau, I looked forward to a world where we could all sleep peacefully at night and roam the streets without fear-where incessant cover-up jobs were no longer required to keep the public calm and unaware.But the end of vampires wasn't the end of our problems. It was only the beginning.Other blood-sucking creatures began to lurk in the night. As soon as I turned twenty-one, I became a ground agent at the Occult Bureau because I wanted-no, needed-to join the fight.And then Dorian Clave burst into my life. Vampires like him were killers who devoured humanity's inner darkness until shadows danced beneath their skin. Yet there was more to him than that.He showed me that light cannot exist without the dark - and that trying to fight this balance would have consequences our human minds couldn't even comprehend.Because sometimes darkness needs to exist.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781690749295
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019
Hot Pancakes Ltd
www.hotpcakes.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CHAPTER ONE

I focused on the five dark silhouettes perched atop the Ferris wheel of Navy Pier Park. The ride was closed for renovation, but crowds of tourists bustled on either side of its boarded-up enclosure: a steady stream of warm targets.
“Team A, be ready,” I breathed into my comm, and glanced to my teammates behind me within the wheel’s perimeter. Six helmeted heads nodded back, their hands tightening around silver barrels.
“Team B is going in,” came the low, confident voice of my brother and second-in-command.
A large helicopter whirred overhead, drawing closer to the wheel and slowly circling it.
I glanced at my watch. “Greta, you should be in position.”
“Yup, and waiting for your command, Lyra,” the clipped voice of Team C’s leader replied.
“Start the haze,” I said.
The hiss of decompressing gas filled the cool spring night, and Greta boomed through a megaphone: “Please evacuate the pier. This is an emergency. Head for the children’s museum. You will receive further information there. I repeat, please evacuate the pier.”
Beyond the enclosure’s walls, a semi-dense fog billowed from the ground, covering the crowd. Shouts and cries rang out, followed by a stampede of panicked footsteps. I refocused on the wheel’s apex, ignoring the guilt that panged in my chest at the sounds of alarm and confusion. The smokescreen could be inconvenient and frightening, but ultimately it would prevent the tourists from being targeted.
The silhouettes started shifting, clearly noticing the helicopter and the commotion. I caught the rustle of an opening wing.
Placing some distance between myself and the base of the wheel, I raised my gun, and my colleagues did the same. “All right, Team A. On my count. Three, two, one…”
I aimed for the largest shadow and fired, my entire body vibrating from the force of the bullet’s release. I heard the creature’s rasping cry, as guttural and grating as a vulture’s, followed by four others as my teammates hit their marks.
But the shadows barely jerked. Instead, their massive wings shot out, and they launched into the air so fast that I lost them in the darkness.
It was far from my first encounter with the strange avian species, but I still shivered when the light from the nearby Wave Swinger attraction touched their sleek, ink-black forms. In many ways, each resembled the common stork-long and graceful, with an extended beak, broad wings, and thin, dangling legs. But these weren’t the kind you’d see carrying babies on greeting cards.
At least three times larger than the biggest earthly stork, they soared through the sky like dark omens, propelled by unnatural speed and a craving for blood. Their talons resembled an eagle’s, while their beaks were sharp and strong enough to puncture metal-they could suckle a human dry in three minutes if they found a main artery.
There was a reason we called them “redbills.”
“Zach, get to work!” I yelled.
Gunfire exploded from the helicopter, peppering the birds with artillery. It took more than a single shot to bring them down-even with bullets specifically designed to deliver their death.
“Spread out!” I ordered my team. “Don’t let them dive!”
The redbills began to circle the aircraft. The chopper was their greatest source of aggravation, and, judging from the way their beaks angled toward it, they were preparing to strike back. I leapt onto the wheel’s frame and pulled myself up the metal skeleton for a better angle. I fired a round at the largest predator.
“Focus on the biggest!” I shouted. “But don’t let the others get close enough for a snatch-n-fly.” Rookie mistake of the year.
My team fired, angry streaks of laser-blue cutting through the darkness. At least ten bullets struck the creature from my team’s direction, in addition to a round fired by one of the chopper’s gunmen. The redbill’s wings beat violently but held its flight. I’d never seen one so large, and with its massive size came extra resilience.
After another onslaught, it finally floundered, an unearthly shriek ripping from its throat and spurts of dark blood raining from its body. It backed down, swerving shakily toward the water at the end of the pier. It would probably be underwater in moments.
My team’s focus switched to the next target, a redbill spitting nasty hissing sounds which reminded me uncannily of curses. It darted right up to the aircraft, its powerful beak close to ramming the tail.
Swearing under my breath, I pulled myself higher up the wheel and leaned a little farther out of my comfort zone to get a better shot. I fired, my artillery joining my team’s focused stream. Shots pummeled the bird’s underbelly, but it didn’t falter. It took two intense rounds before it fell away, hissing loudly as it plummeted with a crash into the roof of a snack joint.
“Good job!” I shouted. “Three more to go!”
I released three bullets in swift succession at our third target, then leaned out even farther to attempt a shot at its neck. My finger was on the trigger, pressing-
“Lyra, watch out!”
Something clamped around my waist. My feet slipped from the frame as an impossible force yanked me to the right like I was a rag doll. The gun flew from my hands and the breath left my lungs-then I was flying.
The pier bled rapidly away beneath me, and a mass of shimmering dark water replaced the ground. My eyes stung. I couldn’t hear my breathing over the roar of the wind.
I winced as I felt the cold, painful press of armor against my flesh, as if it were closing in on me, and glanced down. Two blood-speckled claws engulfed my waist, the giant talons squeezing tight.
I didn’t glance up, because I didn’t need to. All but one bird had been in my peripheral vision before I was snatched. Clearly the first hadn’t been as injured as it looked-or it had somehow recuperated and flown back with a burst of energy.
Either way, it didn’t matter. If this redbill squeezed any tighter, it was going to crush me even before its deadly beak could gouge me.
Those realizations hit me within moments, flying disjointedly through my brain as my reflexes finally kicked in. I yanked my knees toward my chest and fumbled in my boots to reach the knives strapped there. I pulled both out and slashed them across the creature’s claws, hoping it would drop me.
Its legs retracted, shifting me into a more vertical position, but the bird’s grip barely loosened. Instead, it shrieked and thrust down with its beak, catching my right thigh. My suit dented into the muscle with a pain like being punched, and I gasped in both pain and anger. If it hit the same place twice, it’d cut right through.
Time for plan B . There was no time to replace the blades in their sheaths. I let them fall, then pulled out a small rectangular pulse patch from a sleeve in my suit’s right shoulder while keeping my eyes on the creature holding me. As the bird thrust its beak down at me again, I jerked my head to the side, narrowly avoiding a second strike. I slapped the patch onto the bird’s right ankle and pressed the center of it, hard. The patch glowed bright blue for a split second, then beeped.
The effect was instantaneous. The creature’s talons loosened as the device sent a powerful surge of energy rushing through its body. My suit was specially insulated, but if it were damaged enough, the pulse would’ve killed me, too. Which was why the patch had been the backup plan.
My stomach dropped as the stunned bird and I hurtled down in freefall, the black, choppy waves rising to meet us at breathtaking speed.
The impact jolted every bone in my body, and though the ice-cold water didn’t reach me through the suit, my skin prickled at the instant drop in temperature. I struggled against the instinct to gasp, preserving the precious air within my helmet.
I opened my eyes to a swirling confusion of bubbles, wingtips, and pale shafts of moonlight, and thrashed to put some distance between myself and the redbill. It was still alive, though it seemed to be struggling to get to the surface.
The surges created by its writhing body made it hard to fumble for another patch-especially with my suit dragging me down. I managed to pull one out and kicked back toward the bird. An insanely risky move, but I managed to catch the tip of its wing as it curved through the water. I held on for dear life, slapped the second patch on with my left hand, pressed hard, and let go.
The violent currents subsided a moment later. Lungs burning, I prayed that the redbill was finally dead while I struggled to remove my helmeted suit, the heart-stopping cold engulfing me as I kicked to the surface. The pulse was over, and I didn’t have the energy to sustain the suit’s weight.
Then again, hypothermia might kick in soon. But I trusted my brother to fish me out before that.
Breaking the surface, I heaved a gloriously deep gasp of air while I reached for my comm and wiped my eyes. Two redbills hurtled toward me from the sky above, their razor-sharp beaks angled to strike.
My heart lodged in my throat, and in one motion I gasped again and dove hard and fast, bracing myself for beaks to slice through the water. I should’ve expected them. It was Bill Behavior 101. The birds saw their companion take down prey (or so it looked from a distance), and they wanted a piece of it. A snatch-n-fly had never happened to me before, so I wasn’t as prepared as I should’ve been. Simulations only took you so far.
I wouldn’t be able to survive this kind of attack even with a suit. The only idea I had was to get as deep as possible, rely on the water to hide me, and resurface far enough from them to get away, all before my lungs gave out. It sounded impos