Stay the Night

Chapter One

At midnight on April seventeenth, Luisa Lopez silently celebrated her twenty-first birthday by looking into the future.

Her visions had begun five years ago, shortly before four men had attacked her as she came home from night school. They had dragged her into her own apartment, where she had been beaten, raped, and nearly burned alive. Luisa had foreseen the attack two days earlier, but until it happened she had thought her visions were only nightmares. It wasn't until she woke up in the hospital burn ward that she knew the strange things she saw in her mind were real.

At first Luisa didn't know the people in her visions. The one she saw most often, the beautiful, angry lady doctor, had been taken away to operate on a man with white-streaked hair and no face. She had also helped some of his strange friends: the crazed warrior, the golden-haired killer, the green man, the girl knight, the swan lord, and the smiling thief. Sometimes Luisa caught fleeting glimpses of two others, the feral king and the shadow prince, but their futures were never revealed.

Luisa had been frightened when she began meeting the people from her visions, but they had never harmed her. The lady doctor, Alexandra Keller, had come to the hospital to operate on her face, and had given Luisa's mother the money for her treatment. The swan lord, Valentin Jaus, had brought Luisa to this rehabilitation hospital to continue her medical treatments and to keep her safe.

It had not been easy living with the visions, as well as with what had been done to her. In the first, worst weeks Luisa had wanted to die, and tried several times to kill herself. It wasn't until she began to dream of the shadow prince that she found a reason to live.

As he struggled, Luisa had done the same, holding on to life, enduring what the doctors did to her in order to heal her injuries. Sometimes it seemed worse than the attack. She accepted the visions she had of the secret war between the immortals who called themselves Darkyn, and their enemy, the zealot Brethren, but that wasn't easy either. There were nights she woke up weeping, sometimes screaming.

The most pitiful part of having her gift was that Luisa couldn't warn anyone. Who would believe that a poor, ignorant girl from the projects saw the future? Even if she could convince the immortals who had helped and protected her that her visions were real, as was what she saw coming for them, they would try to change it before it happened. Luisa already knew the events could not be changed; any interference by her or them would bring about the end of the world.

So Luisa remained silent and watchful, and took what comfort she could from her faith. Each night she prayed to the God whom both the Darkyn and the Brethren had abandoned, and asked Him to watch over her and His lost children.

Tonight her vision was of the smiling thief with eyes the color of violets. He stood watching a red-haired woman sitting in a crowded room. In front of the people a man stood talking very fast and gesturing toward an old painting. The vision faded almost as soon as it had begun, but Luisa felt exhausted, as if she had watched it for hours.

She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Luisa saw the shadow prince walking through a forest, touching nothing, his dark face grim. She trailed after him as she did in every dream, watching and wondering but never trying to intrude on his solitude. She sensed his emotions, and knew that the only time he was at peace was when he was alone.

He stopped walking. You should be asleep.

Luisa froze. He had never acknowledged her presence. I'm not very tired. Then, very tentatively, she asked, Are you okay?

You have surgery tomorrow. He moved closer, his eyes never leaving hers. It's your birthday.

She shrugged.

Everyone forgets I still have them, too. He didn't smile, but his expression softened a few degrees. Happy birthday, Princess.

She would have laughed, hearing someone else call her that. Where are you?

In the mountains. He seemed to lose interest in her as he looked around him and saw a pool of violets growing alongside a fallen, lightning-struck tree.

He wouldn't touch them. Luisa knew from watching him all these months that he was afraid of touching anything. You won't hurt them. Unless you want to.

The sky turned as dark as his thoughts. I hurt everything I touch.

A blinding light filled Luisa's head. Visions hardly ever came to her when she was dreaming, but this one smashed through her thoughts like a bulldozer speeding out of control.

The shadow prince turned around. What is that light?

A vision. She couldn't keep him out of her head; he was seeing everything through her eyes. He saw the girl throw herself in the furnace, and the other immortals standing guard as she burned. The vision whisked them away from the glassworks and hurled them over the land to an old abandoned building, and through its empty corridors, and into a tiny room. A man in dirty clothes and a funny pointed hat was using a blade to saw through the covering of a grass-filled mattress on a bed of ropes.

The man pulled out handfuls of grass until he grinned and grabbed something inside the mattress. He pulled out a bundle of leather and, after glancing at the window, put it under his sweat-stained shirt. He ran out of the room, through the silent halls, and jumped onto the back of a crude-looking cart. An older man driving the cart slapped the reins on the back end of a donkey, which pulled the cart across the grass and onto a dirt road.

The book. Luisa closed her eyes to the images and held her throbbing head between her hands. They can't find it. Not yet. They're not ready.

What about this book? the shadow prince asked. Why is it so important?

It's been lost for seven hundred years, Luisa whispered, opening her eyes to look at him. Instead she saw her vision blur and change, the countryside becoming a modern city, the cart on the road becoming a police cruiser. It took her past dozens of armed officers and through shattered glass panels into a smoke-filled room. A man emerged from the smoke and dropped his briefcase next to a pool of blood. But they're going to find it very soon, and she will have to choose.

The shadow prince watched with her. Who will find it? Who has to choose? Why are you so afraid of an old book?

I can't tell you. Luisa backed away from him. I'm sorry, but there's no more—

Time.

Norman dropped the briefcase and walked out of the men's room. In the smoke-filled lobby of the bank, two SWAT officers in helmets and body armor grabbed him by the upper arms and hauled him out through the shattered glass of the front entrance. Flashing red and blue light filled Norman's watery, stinging eyes as they dragged him through a labyrinth of barricading patrol cars. They shoved him between a fire rescue truck and an ambulance before trotting back to the bank.

An end. It's time.

The uniformed cops using their vehicles as cover paid no attention to Norman, and kept their weapons and attention trained on the bank entrance. Two EMTs had hunkered down to work on an unconscious woman, one taking her vitals while the other bandaged a bleeding gash on her forehead.

One of the medics glanced up. "Are you hurt, sir?"

"No." Norman held his lacerated hand behind him and waited until the EMT turned his attention back to his patient. He then walked around the ambulance and out of the parking lot.

An end to this.

It took Norman two minutes to return to where he had parked his rental car, and another forty minutes to drive from there to his motel downtown. Before going to his room, he left the keys in the ignition and his rental agreement papers tucked under the window visor.

Put an end to this. An end. It's time.

Once inside his motel room, Norman locked the door and stripped, folding his clothes as he removed them. He stacked them in a neat pile on the end of the bed. He removed his wallet from his trousers pocket, opened it so that his driver's license was visible, and placed it by the telephone.

Blood dripped from the gash on the back of his hand in big, watery drops, leaving an uneven trail as he went to the tiny desk under the mirror. He used the blank back of his motel bill to write a brief note of explanation, punctuating his sentences with wet, red drips and smears.

Once the note was finished, he folded it and slipped it under his wallet. Finally he took the last thing he needed from his suitcase and carried it into the bathroom.

Put an end to this, then.

Norman saw the ghost of his reflection move across the white tiled walls. Who would believe that he'd never meant to do any of this? No one. He had spent his life upholding the law, but that would count for nothing now.

He still considered the day he'd graduated from the academy as the best day of his life. He hadn't been top of his class like his partner, but he'd done okay. His parents, both high school dropouts from Newark, had been so proud of him.

Norman painted a streak of blood across his forehead as he rubbed it and closed his eyes.

"Empty both drawers," DeLuca said as he tossed the gym bag in front of the teller. The wads of cotton he'd stuffed inside his cheeks altered his voice, just as they had for Brando in The Godfather, but he had to speak slowly or risk choking on them. "Put all the money in the bag."

When the wet-eyed brunette dropped one of the hands she had clasped behind her head to reach under the counter, he parked the silencer's muzzle against the sweet little dimple in her chin.

"Don't touch the buttons." There were two, he knew, parked out of sight where she couldn't accidentally bump them. Either one would set off the silent alarm.

The teller glanced up and then, lightning-fast, focused back on DeLuca's black ski mask.

"I'm watching that, too." He eyed the small electrical box in a corner above the manager's office. Two lights on the outside panel of the box, visible to all the tellers, indicated the current status of the bank's security system. "Keep it green and I know you're being a good girl. It turns blue, I blow your pretty face off."

"Please don't," she whispered. Tear-snot ran, thin and quick, from her right nostril to dribble over her top lip. "I won't do anything. I promise."

DeLuca eased back enough to watch her fill the bag, his satisfaction growing along with the number of stacks she shoved inside. Six weeks ago they'd taken away everything from him: his job, his bennies, and his pension. All that because he'd lost his temper with a suspect. Was it his fault the whiny little weasel had rotten teeth and a glass jaw? Or that his partner had left him alone with the perp with the video running? What about the fifteen years he had put in on the job?