DEATH (The Justice Cycle Book 1) J Kiefer (ebook reader .txt) 📖

bent over the side of the railing and found Dana resting up against the house. She had her legs pulled up to her chest and a small wisp of smoke meandered up from a half-burned cigarette.

“When did you start smoking?” Steve asked. He put his hands on the top of the railing and vaulted over it, landing next to Dana.

She looked at the cigarette in her hand, shrugged, and took a drag. “I don’t.”

Sitting down next to her, he reached for the cigarette. She handed it to him, and he took a long drag and exhaled, reveling in the relaxing effect it had on his brain. He handed it back to her, but she ignored him. He shrugged, took another drag, then flicked the butt onto the driveway. “You gonna be okay?”

She hugged her legs tighter. More tears welled up in her already red eyes. “I doubt it.”

Steve felt a twinge of pity for her. That made it a bit easier for him to feign concern. He knew that he had to pretend to care long enough not to arouse her suspicions. He placed his arm around her and drew her close. She resisted at first but eventually gave in, letting her head come to rest on his shoulder. Steve said nothing for a long while as he sat there holding her. When he finally felt that he had shown enough concern, he brought up the subject of Jared’s death.

“I still can’t believe he is dead.”

Dana said nothing but continued to sit quietly next to him.

“It all happened so fast and the whole night is still a blur to me. Any word on what the police found out?” he said, doing his best to keep the anxiety he felt out of his voice.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Steve,” she said, pulling away.

Shit, he’d moved too soon and now she had closed up. He decided to take a different approach.

“I just wish I could have spoken to him one last time before he died. You know, to tell him I love him and all.”

She sighed heavily. Another tear tracked down her cheek. “Yeah.”

Steve waited for her to add to that sentiment, maybe tell him what he needed to hear. He didn’t want to spook her a second time by asking too many questions too quickly. But he was getting impatient.

“You were the last person to speak to him. Did you get to finally tell him how you felt?”

Dana turned on him angrily. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it!” She jumped up to her feet. “He died in my arms, Steve. I watched as the light left his eyes.” Her voice cracked and she began to cry again, like women do.

Steve stood up and put his arms around her, pulling her close. “I know, I know. I am sorry. I just miss him.”

She sobbed in his arms as he held her. Damn, she was too upset right now for him to get any definitive answers from her. It was okay, he had time. When everything finally calmed down, he would try again. At least he had a believable excuse to stay upstate. No one would question why he stayed, and his bandmates would understand his prolonged leave of absence. He could stay up here as long as it took for him to get the information he needed. He would find out what his brother had told her right before he died, and if she even had a hint of what had really happened, he would kill her too.

Twenty-Nine

All there was, was darkness, complete and total. It was like nothing he had ever known or believed possible. Not darkness as in night or a shuttered room, for even in those places there was some small measure of light. Here, it was as if light itself had never been.

Had he ever known light, or did he just imagine it? The darkness smothering him was all he knew. It swirled around him, pressed in on him, a dank sea threatening to drown him. Just when all that he knew had nearly faded, a glimmer of hope sparked in his heart. It was faint and barely noticeable, but it was there, nonetheless. He grasped at that hope, refusing to be consumed.

The oppressive darkness suddenly shook and raged around him as brilliant tendrils of illumination tore through it, obliterating great swaths of blackness. The light was nothing more than a glimmer, no brighter than the faintest of stars in the night sky, but it shone with such power and force that the darkness fled from it. In the complete blackness, all he could see was that light. It grew in intensity and chased away the shadows and the despair that had almost claimed him.

He reached out to it, grabbing hold of it the way a drowning man reaches for a life-preserver. He knew he had to reach it before the darkness claimed him. He knew it with every fiber of his being. If he did not, he was sure that everything he was, had been or ever could be, would be lost. With an internal fortitude that he never knew he possessed, he pulled himself from the clutching coils of the writhing darkness and embraced the tiny star.

His eyes opened to... darkness.

But it was different.

His senses had returned. Even if he couldn’t see his surroundings, he could feel them. Before, there had been nothing, as if he were floating in a formless void. But now his fingers touched silk. His hands felt something solid. It was soft and padded like a pillow but on something solid. He tried to move but found he was constrained on all sides. He couldn’t shift his body more than a few inches in any direction. He reached his hand up and it struck something hard. Where was he?

“Hello,” he said hesitantly. His voice sounded strange and unfamiliar.

“Hello?” he repeated, louder this time. The voice he heard startled him. It was