Available Darkness Season 2

approaching van, lifted his gun, and took aim. With the man’s full attention on his aim, Abigail delivered a blast of energy at the back of his head, sending him to the ground.
    Larry killed the van lights as he rolled up, jumped out from the driver’s side door, and slipped plastic restraints around the guard’s wrists. The guard moaned as he tried to open his eyes.
    Larry shoved a rag in his mouth, then sprayed his face with something magickal which Larry called moon dust, though it also had another name Abigail didn’t remember. The man looked up at Larry, his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he fell back, passed out. Larry grabbed his cell phone, dropped it in his pocket, then slipped his hands under the man’s armpits, hefted him up, pushed him back into his car and closed the door.
    “OK, you ready?” Larry asked Abigail.
    “Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t.

    **

    Karen McKenna spotted Larry first, his black ski mask pulled tight over his face, as she came from her bathroom holding a glass of wine.
    The glass fell to the floor, and sprayed shards of broken glass across the room as she turned to run toward her bedroom at the end of the hall.
    Abigail, also wearing a mask, was waiting, aiming a pistol at the murderer.
    “Stop!” Abigail shouted. Karen did exactly that, her eyes wide and nervous.
    “W-What do you want?” she asked, falling a step back as she looked back and forth between Larry and Abigail.
    “The truth,” Larry said, closing the distance between himself and the woman, then pressing his barrel of his gun into her temple.
    Karen cried out, “Don’t! Please… I—I don’t know what you want.”
    “He just told you,” Abigail said, her voice muffled, though she imagined Karen must’ve already figured out she was young based on her size alone.
    “Truth about what?” Karen asked, staring at Larry, her whole body trembling.
    Larry answered, “What happened to your son?”
    Something in Karen’s expression changed, fear twisting into something, which for a moment looked like the cousin of defiance. She buried it immediately, but not so fast that Abigail hadn’t noticed.
    Karen started to cry, “Is that what this is about? Why can’t you people leave me alone? Someone killed him. I didn’t do it.”
    “Bullshit,” Larry said. “You have five seconds to start getting honest.”
    “Who are you people?” Karen yelled, looking from Larry to Abigail, then back to Larry.
    Larry smiled, “Inquiring minds that wanna know. Five, four, three …”
    Karen wiped tears from her cheeks. “I’m telling you the truth!”
    “We’ll find out soon enough,” Larry said.
    Karen was facing Larry when Abigail pulled her hands from her pockets and moved in for the kill. Abigail had been worried that she’d have second thoughts about Karen’s guilt, but her hunger consumed her enough to drive rational thought far from her brain. It had been too long since she’d fed. The young, vibrant woman, supple and thrumming with energy, was waiting to be feasted upon — guilty or not.
    Abigail’s hands found Karen’s shoulders, exposed by the gauzy scoop of her low cut dress, and connected.
    Karen fell to the ground with a rattle, shaking as a scream lost its life inside her throat. Abigail closed her eyes, surrendering to the rushing currents of energy coursing from the woman’s body into her own, fleeing as if born to feed her.
    The feeding was bliss …
    … until memories started pouring into Abigail’s mind.
    Having to see, experience, and worst of all, feel, her victims’ memories were always the hardest parts of feeding for Abigail. Because she fed on the worst sorts of people, their memories were usually filled with something Abigail was already too familiar with, abuse — upon victim first, and then from perpetrator later — an endless cycle of misery.
    Karen McKenna’s memories were no different.
    Flooded with horrible recall of her father’s violent verbal abuse, a million images hatched from their shells in the depths of Karen’s earliest memories; the horrible names, telling her she was a worthless accident; that she was a disappointment compared to her brother.
    Jesus. Stop it!
    The flow of memories, once started, could rarely be stopped. While John had said they could be controlled with practice, Abigail had yet to master the flow, and it wasn’t as if John was around to instruct her. Abigail was forced to bear witness to all the misery of Karen’s