Luke ran his hands up her thighs and over her hips. His cock jutted between them, and Celia stroked it slowly, smiling when she felt the lift of his hips under her. When he put his arms up over his head, those big hands gripping the spindles of her headboard, something inside her twisted and tangled. Her throat went just a little dry.
She leaned forward to kiss him, his cock a warm length against her belly. She opened the drawer of her nightstand, pulled out the box of condoms she’d bought on an admittedly spontaneous whim and was as grateful for now as she’d been for the clean sheets. Luke’s gaze went from hers to the small package in her hand, and a small smile tugged the corner of his mouth.
“Now’s the time when we assure each other we don’t do this a lot,” Celia told him as she tore the wrapping.
Luke’s breath hissed between his teeth, and his tongue caught there too. “I don’t do this a lot.”
“Me neither,” Celia breathed as she eased the condom down his length.
She moved to slide him inside her before he spoke again, and after that neither of them seemed quite capable of finding more words. She didn’t always love being on top because the angle could sometimes rub her in the wrong places, but tonight it worked just fine. Just as Luke had found the perfect rhythm for her downstairs, Celia found what worked just right now. They moved together, no fumbling, nothing awkward or out of place. It was one of those truly first-rate, effortless fucks, rare like a blue moon, and Celia savored every second of pleasure Luke’s body gave hers.
And he worked it, those nice white teeth denting his bottom lip as his brow furrowed. He’d let go of the headboard so he could slide a hand between them, his knuckles giving her clit the best and most beautiful pressure every time she slid all the way down his cock. She was going to come again, and it was sweet, it was unexpected and delightful, it was…
“Fucking gorgeous,” Celia gasped as the first wave washed over her.
Luke groaned, his last couple thrusts ragged, but that only made them better. His cock nudged her at a different angle in the last moment, sending another wave of pleasure through her and just as perfectly as everything else about this night had been, Celia collapsed onto his chest with a happy, sated sigh.
When she woke in the morning, she found he’d left a flower in the dent his head had made on her pillow. She recognized it as one of the daisies from her half-assed garden out back. She found another on the dining room table. A third by the front door, and when, hoping against hope she opened the front door, a final flower rested on her front porch.
But Luke himself was gone.
“If Lukey hadn’t been so busy getting his winky wet, maybe we’d be out of here by now.” Terry snorted into a hanky before tucking it back into his pocket. His face was black with dust except for the now pale patch around his nose and mouth. It gave him a comical appearance, though Luke felt like doing anything but laughing.
“We’ve waited longer for you to finish taking a dump than you waited for me this morning,” Luke said. He’d only been about fifteen minutes late, and even then had found the rest of the guys busy chowing down on the egg sandwiches none of them had thought to buy for him.
“I’m sure it’s this way.” Pete sounded too uncertain for Luke’s comfort. “I’m sure of it. See, I marked the wall right here.”
He tapped the wall. Luke leaned forward to peer more closely at it. In the light from his flashlight, it was possible to make out what looked like some sort of scratches that might have been the marks Pete claimed he’d left, but after five hours in the dark, Luke wasn’t sure he trusted his eyes. He definitely didn’t trust Pete’s memory.
“Shit. Shit, shit.” Jeff slid down with his back against the wall to sit with his knees bent up to his chin. He buried his face in his hands. “Shit.”
It was the first time he’d spoken in the past hour. Always the most taciturn member of the team, he could also always be the one counted on in a crunch. If he was losing it, Luke thought, they should all be worried. The fist of unease punched him in the throat, leaving him sick. He covered it by swigging from his canteen, but the water tasted gritty and made him cough.
“I left it right here! I swear to Jesus, it was here.” Pete stabbed at the spot on the wall. His headlamp swung wildly, making the shadows dance and turning Luke’s stomach even more. “I left it right there. You can see where it was.”
“How the hell would it get erased?” Terry honked into his handkerchief again. “We’re the only ones down here!”
Adam had been lingering a few feet away in the passage they’d just come out of, but now he pushed past Luke to search the wall. He looked hollow-eyed and grim-faced when he turned around. “Someone else is down here. I’ve thought so for about the last hour or two. Someone’s messing with us, guys.”
“What do you mean, someone’s messing with us?” Luke took off his helmet long enough to rub his forehead with a bandanna. This cave, like every other he’d ever been in, maintained a steady cool temperature year-round, but they’d been pushing themselves hard to get back to the surface and the exertion had made him sweat.
“Just what I said. I think it’s those bastards from GeoCom.”
The team had been “lost” for only the past ninety minutes, when one of Pete’s marks had led them in the wrong direction down a corridor they hadn’t explored. Then another. Pete had been the one to notice it when the space got drastically smaller and tighter, leaving room for only one man to get through the tunnel when every other passage they’d been in today had been big enough for at least two of them at a time. All of them had been trained in cave safety, but none of them had been prepared for anything more than the most casual of explorations. They were there to check out the area, take some samples and make a simple map for the survey team that would come later to go deeper, explore more, if it were determined this cave held anything of value.
“How would they even get down here before us?” Luke asked.
Terry snorted. “Like I said, if you hadn’t been late—“
“Terry,” Luke said evenly, “shut up. Okay?”
“Shh.” Adam whirled, his light sending white flashes across the blackness. “Listen. You hear that?”
Luke hadn’t heard anything but Terry’s disgusting snot-blowing, but Jeff got to his feet to face the dark corridor they’d all come out of fifteen minutes ago. “I heard it. Shit, Adam. You sure it’s GeoCom?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Maybe not who,” Jeff said, voice quivering. “Maybe…what.”
That busted the rest of them up into guffaws, even Pete, who could be notoriously without a sense of humor.
“C’mon, Jeff. We’re no more than forty, maybe even thirty, feet under the surface, and I guarantee you once we figure out which tunnel to take, we’ll be out of here in twenty minutes.” Adam shook his head. “It’s the GeoCom guys messing with us, erasing the marks and making the new ones. That’s all. There must be something good down here they’re trying to keep us away from. Hey, assholes!”
Adam’s shout echoed through the tunnel, loud and sudden enough Luke took a step back with a wince.
“We know what you’re doing, so cut the shit!”
No answer, though it seemed like they were all straining for one. Nothing but the trickle of water dripping from one of the cracks in the ceiling and another honk from Terry’s nose. Luke took a few steps forward, his headlamp parting the dark. He put a hand on the wall to guide him and closed his eyes, not wanting the unsteady light to distract him from listening.
At first he heard only Pete’s mutters and the scrape of someone’s boots against the rocks. But then, yes. Further down, past the tunnel they’d all come out of when they’d turned around after figuring out the chalk marks were wrong. A small scraping noise. Stealthy, sneaky.
Sly.
In all the years Luke had been doing this sort of work, he’d been hit on the head with falling rocks, shit on by swarms of startled bats, even been turned around
a few times just like this. He’d seen caverns hundreds of feet below the earth with ceilings four stories high and he’d crawled through tunnels so tight he’d had to push himself one shoulder at a time. Until now, though, he’d never, ever been afraid of anything that might have been in the dark.
Adam was probably right. Just the GeoCom guys messing with them, getting the jump as he’d told Celia the night before. This business could be cutthroat and if what they’d found down here already today was worth even one-tenth of what Luke guessed it might be, it might be well worth GeoCom’s time to try and sabotage the MineSys operation.
And yet…something didn’t feel right about this. GeoCom had a rep for underhanded business, but Luke didn’t believe even the most hard-core member of the opposite team would put anyone in danger. Besides, the farmer who’d found this cave had been convincing about the fact he’d called MineSys first—said he’d seen them written up in one of his magazines.
An hour later Pete could no longer insist he knew the way because every single one of his chalk marks had been erased, some but not all replaced by others drawn in sneaky, similar fashion so that it was hard to tell they were fakes until the group navigated down some passage or stumbled into a cavern that none of them recognized. It was unprofessional and stupid for them to be lost this way. Ridiculous.
It was terrifying.
Worse was Jeff’s mumbling, getting louder and louder, about how fucked they were. Adam’s constant looking over his shoulder. Terry’s sniping. They’d been a good team, but now they were falling apart.
“Everyone,” Luke said suddenly. “Just shut the hell up, okay? Stop. We’re going to get out of here. If nothing else, Farmer Fuhrman up there knows when we came in, and if we don’t come out in a few more hours, he’s going to call someone to find us.”
“Great,” Terry said. “Just a few more hours.”
Luke had never wanted to punch another man in the face as much as he wanted to clock Terry. But just then Pete let out a hoarse cry of relief. He slapped the wall of the tunnel they’d just come through, crawling on their bellies.
“This is it! This is the way! I remember for sure because I stopped to take a piss—“
“Damn it, Pete,” Adam broke in.
Pete didn’t pay any attention. “This is the way! I know it!”
“Just like you knew the last four times?”
Luke couldn’t hold back any longer. He shoved Terry by the shoulder. “Shut up, Terry. Listen to Pete so we can get out of here.”
“When I find those GeoCom shits,” Adam muttered, “I swear I’m going to kick their asses.”
“I just want a shower and a cold beer.” Jeff sounded way perkier than he had, already following Pete through a low-ceilinged corridor.
“I see light!” Pete hollered.
Luke looked up, searching for the light, and instead found nothing but more darkness.
He’d fallen so fast and hard he didn’t realize it at first, but then the pain exploded in him. Not just from the thud of his body against the rocks as he plummeted through a hole in the cave floor that hadn’t been there moments ago when the others crossed it. Slashing, ripping agony tore through his ankle, then his back. He opened his mouth to scream. Something leathery and foul, reeking of spoiled meat, shoved inside to choke him silent. The pain and pressure in his ankle released, but then a hot wind blew over him as the sound of something flapping hummed in his ears. Flapping like wings. He pushed back, scrambling over hidden terrain as his headlight bounced wildly. He hit a wall and a cascade of rocks and dirt fell over him, making him cough and choke again.
He’d fallen about twenty feet into a cavern so vast from side-to-side his light couldn’t even touch the sides of it. The hole through which he’d fallen—no, not fallen. Been pulled, his mind said. He’d been yanked through that hole by his ankles, which throbbed and ached. He lifted his pant leg to look at the blood oozing from four puncture wounds just above the top of his boot. He spat, then again, to clear his mouth of the horrible taste. He looked up to the ceiling, noting how the hole that had been big enough to fit his entire six-foot-two frame had filled in, leaving a mounded hill of dirt, debris and boulders that would’ve made a convenient ladder up to the cavern’s roof…if there’d been any sign of an exit left.
Dust had covered his headlight, but the helmet had protected his head from damage. Looking at the size of the rocks that had thumped down all around him and feeling the ache from where one or two of them had punched him in the back and shoulders, Luke knew he was lucky he was still conscious. He wiped his fingers across the light, clearing it, but it flickered when he touched it. The glass felt cracked. He’d fallen on his pack, the extra flashlight digging into the small of his back. He rolled off it to dig inside. Found his water bottle, the protein bars he always packed. A first-aid kit he’d need to use on his ankle in a few minutes. But for now, he needed light.
He could hear the faintest sound of shouting, and another slew of rocks and dirt slid down from the place he’d come through the floor. Still no sign of the hole. He shone both lights up and up, across the ceiling, searching for any hint of light or sign of the place he’d fallen through.
“Holy shit.” Luke tried to say it aloud, but his throat would make nothing more than the hoarsest croak.
He’d been in caverns covered with bats before. The things he saw clung to the roof like bats, they had the same leathery skin as bats, but they were not bats. The size of a fifth grader, human in form but for the overlong fingers and toes that helped them cling to every crevice. Human eyes blinked, shining red in the wash of light from his headlamp, and the creatures hissed at him. A fresh wave of that stink reached him, and Luke put a hand over his mouth and nose to fight from retching.
They moved as one, crawling the surface of the cave. The hissing got louder. Luke got to his feet, hopping on his wounded ankle and hunched from the pain in his back, but dammit, moving. At the base of the pile of dirt and debris that had fallen along with him, he found a severed…paw was the only way to describe it. Thick claws coated in blood. His blood, he thought as the room spun and he fought to keep the shadows from taking him.
Above him, the hissing got louder. It burned his eardrums, poking like pins inside his head. Like voices, but none that he could decipher. Had he been clocked on the head harder than he’d thought? But no, a quick shine of his light up to the roof again showed him the same things. They didn’t recoil from the light this time.
They focused on it.
And then they came down.
All of them at once, burying him in a pile of reeking, leathery flesh and claws that tore at him. Teeth that fought to find his flesh. He hit one of them with the heavy flashlight, breaking the bulb but sending the creature screaming into the dark. Another. Then another. Rocks fit into his fists, became weapons. He kicked and punched. He found his voice when one of them sunk its teeth into the tender webbing between his thumb and forefinger, when the flesh tore, when the thing tore away a chunk of him.
Again and again he fought as the hissing whispers got louder, searing his eardrums. The stink rose, too, until he choked with it. Writhing, Luke hit out again and again. Screams of pain and fury rose around him, not echoing in the cavern but inside his skull. Bones crunched. Blood coated him.
He fought.
He killed.
Later, much later, Luke would eventually give in and agree with the version of the story that said the cave simply collapsed beneath his feet a few feet from the exit. He would stop insisting that something had punched through the cave floor and pierced his ankle with thick talons, the same kind that carved up his back and chest. He would accept the explanation of a blow to the head, coupled with a cave-in, for his injuries. Later he’d smile and nod at whatever the doctors said so he could just get the hell out of the hospital. He’d convince them he believed their “truth.”
But all of that was a lie.
Something had taken him into the dark and tried to hurt him, and he
’d hurt back.
And something was still out there.
A knock at her door in the middle of the night should’ve surprised her, but some part of Celia had been waiting for the past six months to find Luke on her doorstep. She couldn’t have said why. Wishful thinking? Maybe the dreams she’d had about him in all his naked glory, so vivid she’d woken with his flavor still in her mouth and her skin tingling from his touch. Or maybe it was just some inexplicable sense of inevitability that had been with her since the morning after the night they’d spent together, a hovering sense of…not urgency, but something the opposite of that.
Of waiting.
Still, she was cautious when she cracked open the door to peek out. She was expecting to see a grinning Luke, maybe with something silly like flowers or a stuffed toy he’d picked up from the gas station. That, she realized at once, was really wishful thinking. If it had been that man on the front porch, she might easily have teased him with a pout and a shake of her finger scolding him for showing up unannounced. The smile died on her lips when she saw who really stood there waiting for her to open the door, which she did immediately and all the way.
The Luke she’d met at Frog’s Hollow had been loose-limbed and funny, with a lightness about him that had been incredibly appealing. The man standing on her front porch was anything but light. He wore worn jeans, battered and scuffed boots, a dark T-shirt beneath a plaid shirt of black and gray. His brown leather jacket was a total cliché, roughed up and scratched like he’d worn it in a tumble off a motorcycle going eighty around Deadman’s Curve. And, she saw as she looked past him to the snowy yard, there was the motorcycle.
“Luke?” First, a question. Then an invitation. “Luke.”
He came through the door with a hesitating, one-two step, pushing past her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He didn’t look at her, not straight on, and this disturbed her more than the scent of liquor that wafted from him or the scruff of beard on cheeks more hollow than she’d remembered. He leaned, one hand on the newel post and one heavy boot propped on the bottom step.