Available Darkness Season 1

and it made her giggle.
    “You two have to make up,” Abigail said. “I know what Larry did was messed up, and you’ve got every right to be mad about your brother and Hope. But you can’t beat yourselves up for what happened to me. If you hadn’t come along, I’d still be locked up in that monster’s closet. If Larry had let you die, then you’d never have come along and saved my life.”
    “I didn’t save your life,” John said, “I made it worse. You are cursed, infected with something which will never allow you to grow up, or live a normal life, something which is going to require you to kill others. Do you really think that’s an improvement over the life you had?”
    Abigail stared at John, “You know what I went through. I’d rather die a million times than live another day in that closet.”
    After a long silence, and since John had brought up the subject, Abigail finally asked what was on her mind, “How often am I going to have to kill? What happens if I don’t?”
    John glared at Larry and then looked at Abigail, “I need to feed once a week, but I’m not sure if that’s the same for humans, or for kids.”
    Abigail stared at her shoes, then asked, “What happens if I don’t feed?”
    “Again, I’m not sure with people, but with my kind, the parasite acts against us, draining our life, until we either age aggressively or die.”
    Abigail asked, “You said you went years without feeding, right? You were able to live a normal life.”
    “Humans are different, though, I think,” Larry answered instead of John. “While magick works to keep The Darkness at bay in John’s kind, infected humans are already dead. The parasite is the only thing keeping you ‘alive.’ On the plus side, you can ‘live’ thousands of years.”
    “Wait? You mean I’m already dead?” Abigail said, her voice betraying her attempts not to sound terrified.
    “For a lack of a better word, yes,” Larry said, his voice calming. “In effect, the parasite is keeping you alive, allowing your body to function normally, even better than normal, actually. If we try to kill the parasite or use a spell to cure you, the parasite would probably kill you instantly.”
    Abigail stared at her shoes again, trying to sort the mixed blessing of her new life. On the one hand, she was all powerful, nobody would ever mess with her again, and she might live for a long time. On the other, she wasn’t really herself — there was something else inside her, something alien, which she could sense just under the surface. She felt almost as if she were being constantly spied on by something she could not interact with, and to whom she was a slave.
    Then, of course, there was the fact that she would have to kill to survive.
    Part of her wanted to cry, to mourn the life she would never have. But she’d come to grips long ago that her life wasn’t normal and never would be.
    “Can we kill only bad guys?” Abigail asked Larry. “Like we talked about?”
    “There should be no shortage of bad guys to feed on,” Larry said with a smile. “Sure.”
    “I need a hug,” Abigail said, looking at John.
    He stood up and she embraced him, then buried her face in his chest and turned to Larry, “You too, Larry. Group hug.”
    Larry shrugged, and joined their embrace. Abigail looked up to see John’s eyes meeting Larry’s, cold at first, then warming up.
    “Don’t use this as a chance to cop a feel on my sweet ass,” Larry said to John.
    Abigail giggled, which shook a laugh from a reluctant John.
    They would be okay, Abigail decided.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 5 — John

    John, Larry, and Abigail sat around a table in the “war room,” one of the darkened offices upstairs as Larry scribbled on paper, detailing his plan.
    They would call one of Larry’s contacts to put it in the wind that John and Abigail were at the warehouse hiding out and that they’d be leaving tomorrow night, knowing the flow of information would lead to Jacob in little time. From there, they expected whatever remained of Jacob’s agents to strike during the day. From the memories John had absorbed of the soldiers, he figured there were 10 more at Jacob’s immediate disposal.
    “Then, they meet our army,” Larry said, nodding at Tiny who was leaning against the wall while 40 of his men were preparing for battle downstairs. “And we smoke their asses.”
    “Hell yeah,” Tiny said with a huge smile.
    “At the same time,” Larry continued, “once they