Available Darkness Season 1

comparison. To think that he would never lay eyes on another allutroch or gnebblewok only pushed him closer to the brink of despair.
    He stared down again at the pavement 50 stories below.
    Given his weakened state, he wondered if the fall would finally do it. His foot inched forward, hovering in the air with a mind of its own. He laughed at the thought that his body was willing to do what his mind had not found the strength to carry out.
    Perhaps, I should listen to my body.
    His right foot was floating in midair, 50 stories above probable death, when a vibration from his pocket suddenly buzzed above the wind’s cry.
    He laughed again.
    Cell phones, always interrupting me from important tasks!
    He looked at the screen. It was Davis, a man he had not heard from in more than a year. Davis was a descendant of one of The Pioneers and wouldn’t be calling Jacob to exchange pleasantries.
    No, this was important.
    Jacob turned, leaped from the ledge down to the rooftop, then sat down.
    “Yes?” Jacob answered the phone.
    “It’s Davis,” the man on the other line said. He sounded excited. “I found him!”
    Jacob said nothing. The words had paralyzed him with something he had never felt before—hope.
    Davis continued, “I found John.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Hope

    Morning
    October 2, 1999
    St. Augustine, Florida

    Hope lay in bed, mentally tracing her fingers over John’s angular jaw, across his chin, and then over his soft lips as his breath rose, fell, and whispered between them.
    The soft light of the morning sun creeping across the bed made her feel ridiculous for her mini-breakdown hours earlier.
    The painting, which she’d started without any thoughts of what it was or where it would eventually go, had taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It was a non-commissioned piece and not something she planned to show at her friend Sergei’s gallery. She initially thought the new direction was some unrealized artistic desire bubbling up and pushing her to explore beyond her boundaries.
    As the painting progressed, however, she started to sense another power at work. Night after night, she was continuously pulled from her sleep, unable to rest until she returned to the canvas, adding bits and pieces of images, compelled to lay them across the canvas as though she were obsessively divining the will of the gods.
    She’d never felt so out of control and without direction, save for the first painting she’d ever professionally shown, Dusk Wanderlust . The one which drew John into Sergei’s art gallery when it first opened in the historic district of St. Augustine nearly two years earlier. Just as that painting seemed to draw her and John together as one, this painting seemed more ominous. She wasn’t sure why, but Hope felt it somehow threatening to shred them back to two.
    The angel didn’t originally start out looking like John. He first appeared on the canvas as a rather generic, golden-haired heavenly being. Before that morning, there was also another person in the painting—the broken body of a red haired woman, her body draped in black. A dark tattoo of a shooting star stained the pale flesh along the nape of her neck.
    Hope wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was positive the angel had just killed the woman.
    Then, last night, she was roused from her sleep with a sudden, burning desire to return to the canvas and scrub it with changes. Without realizing where her mind was moving her hands, she’d endowed the angel with her lover’s face.
    Two hours later, sweat matting the hair on her forehead, she dropped her brush and succumbed to the first of her tears. Shaking, she knelt down and picked the brush back up, then quickly began to paint over the dead woman’s body in violent strokes of indigo and violet.
    Something wretched was bubbling to the surface of their lives. Hope could feel it burning beneath her skin and in every cell of her body. Well, at least, in the inky shadows of the night.
    In the light of morning, under the down covers of a warm, soft bed, that fear seemed as out of place as a grandfather clock in the corner of a nightclub. John had talked her down from the ledge last night, helping her examine why she was so upset. She didn’t tell him about the woman in the painting because some part of her felt it had something to do with infidelity and she didn’t want to appear insecure. If there was one thing Hope knew about John without any doubt whatsoever—it was that he was a faithful