Available Darkness Season 1

afraid.”
    “Was it the coffin I was buried in?”
    “No, I didn’t see that. There was something else, a woman, a woman you loved very much. You were holding hands with her at the beach. You told her you would never forget that moment.”
    He stared at the girl, helpless, desperately wanting to draw deeper from her well — a lost soul trying to see what she had seen. He could remember nothing, let alone a woman he loved.
    “She loves you too,” the girl said, shaking her right foot as she spoke, her toes dangling inches over the carpet between their beds.
    Her movement sent a current into the air that escalated between them, fusing their attraction like ore to magnet. Everything slowed. The light of the TV flickered as each frame seemed to pause slightly before lurching forward like a warped record spinning slowly.
    The amnesiac had no hope of stopping whatever was about to happen.
    The girl moved forward, her bare feet hitting the carpet as she moved forward, inching closer to his scuffed leather boots. He looked up and saw her eyes staring straight at him, not through him, as she slowly raised her hands and reached towards his face.
    He tried to pull away, but was paralyzed by the same unseen force which was controlling the girl’s movements.
    The air pulsated in visible waves of purple light surrounding the girl’s hands. He stared at them in awe and felt the rhythm writhe through his skin and then burrow deep into his marrow. Abigail held out her hand, palm open, fingers splayed just inches from his face. Blue arcs of spider web-thin threads of light danced at the tips of her fingers like icy fire, illuminating her face in a ghostly glow.
    His body shook, his heart pounded, and he wanted to cry “no,” but nothing other than a cold gasp could escape the narrowing prison of his throat.
    Her hand inched closer to his face as sparks jumped from her fingers to the tiny hairs on his cheek. Any second now, he feared, they would be locked in that deadly embrace until he robbed her of every ounce of her life, helplessly feeding on her like a parasite until she was nothing more than an empty, smoldering husk.
    He could only watch as her palm moved impossibly close to his face, just centimeters from his forehead.
    A pounding pulsed in his ears, in his head, and in his soul, as the girl’s palm suddenly seemed to shoot forward a surge of arctic energy, sharp as a dagger and straight into his head, freezing him instantly.
    The room around him went instantly black, replaced a half second later with a slow-to-focus image.
    He was standing on a beach, staring at his love. Instantly, a flood of tears surged forth as he whispered, “Oh my God.”
    His hand reached out to touch the memory, but couldn’t. His body was frozen.
    He stared at her. Christ, she is like a painting.
    Emerald eyes, dark auburn hair, lips that curled ever so slightly into a wry smile that was as familiar as it was heart-melting.
    “Hope,” he called out in the duality of now and then.
    She moved closer, whispered in his ear, “Promise, you’ll remember this day always?”
    “Always,” he said as he glanced around, soaking in the image. The setting sun, the cool ocean breeze whipping through her hair. The soft feel of her hands in his. He wanted to die right there in that moment just so he could experience it for an eternity.
    She looked at him with that familiar smile, those eyes that knew him like no other, and spoke again.
    “Don’t say it unless you mean it, John.”
    John!
    The man’s eyes shot open and the bright sun over the horizon blinked away. Heaven was replaced by the darkened reality of the claustrophobic motel room. He stared at Abigail, who stood before him, her hands now dangling at her side. She seemed unharmed by the exchange.
    “Did you see?” she asked, now crying openly.
    “Yes,” John cried too. “Thank you.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 6 — Caleb Baldwin
    7:14 p.m.

    Caleb slipped back in the seat aboard his team’s mobile command unit, a 40-foot vehicle stationed two blocks from the crime scene. His right leg was needles and nerves, his left, the beneficiary of a bouncing pencil.
    He sat stone-faced, staring at the bank of monitors flickering with more than a dozen local and national reporters updating viewers with wafers of information on the murders and the missing child for whom they had no name.
    For all the news coverage, there had been precious little news since that morning. The case was already cold,