Available Darkness Season 2

daylight wasn’t too difficult. While their house was large enough — three bedrooms, one for each of them plus space for his office — living with a perpetual preteen girl, and the frequent moodiness that came with it, made his alone time all the more precious.
    He grabbed an ice-cold Mountain Dew from the fridge and sat in the middle of his three monitors, scrolling through his many alerts to see if anything worthwhile had surfaced while he’d slept.
    Abigail was good for at least two weeks, without feeding, but Larry liked to search ahead of time for someone who met their criteria so they had enough time for all the requisite research, thereby ensuring they had someone truly deserving of death. He’d blown it last night with Karen McKenna, and Abigail gave him the silent treatment the entire trip home, then added to the onslaught even once they were back. She went to bed without saying a word, which meant she’d probably be extra annoying today.
    Seeing nobody even close to local that they should or could go after, Larry started sifting through his email looking for word from John.
    Nothing.
    It had been a few months since he’d last heard from his old friend, and more than a year since he’d seen him.
    Their communication was limited to the rare email from one of John’s many aliases. The e-mails were always the same — photos with encrypted data buried inside. John’s last message was asking Larry if he had found Hope yet.
    “No, nothing yet,” Larry sent back in the form of an encrypted message.
    As far as anyone in Larry’s network could confirm, Hope was a ghost. He had considered hiring a Tracker to find her, but John insisted that he involve only the most trusted people he knew. There were scant few people Larry or John fully trusted, particularly since John was working on behalf of the Guardians and Omega, kidnapping or killing, depending which rumors you believed, a steady stream of Otherworlders. It would have been one thing if they’d only been rounding up Harbinger, the group which had been helping Jacob. But now innocents were being targeted — Otherworlders, hybrids and humans alike, none of whom had taken a side in the war.
    Larry still had friends in the community of aliens along with those humans, like himself, who’d come to learn from the aliens, but there was nobody he trusted who was also able to track Hope. Adam would have been able to help, but Larry burned that bridge when he killed him.
    When it came to people they saw on a daily basis, Larry and Abigail had only one another.
    Larry didn’t mind so much — he’d always been a loner. But he could tell the loneliness was heavily weighing on Abigail. She didn’t have John, the man who turned her and thus forged her soul’s deepest bond, but she also had no friends or family, things most girls her age desperately needed. She and Larry got along reasonably well, but Larry felt that Abigail needed someone either closer in age, or with less twig and berries between their legs to rain a more positive, as well as a decidedly more female, influence onto her life.
    Larry turned his attention to the usual stream of news feeds and saw a mention of Karen McKenna’s disappearance right at the top. Her bodyguard was facing all sorts of questions, and “experts” were already wondering if Ms. McKenna had fled the country.
    Yeah, keep thinking that.
    A minute later, Larry was checking for updates on the newly opened portal. Of course, there was no real news. Nor was anyone calling it a portal, since few knew what they were looking at, and those who did weren’t saying shit. Larry had known what he was looking at the second he saw the footage on a video leak website.
    The portal was exactly like the one Jacob forced his brothers to help him open the year before.
    Hearing nothing from John made Larry nervous. Surely he would be working on this case — unless he had somehow gone over. Larry certainly hoped he hadn’t, though it was impossible for him to be sure. While he’d once been able to connect with John telepathically, their connection hadn’t been the same since John insisted on getting wiped and buried. There was a time he would have felt John nearby. Now, proximity meant nothing. John could be near, far or possibly dead, though Larry believed he would’ve sensed something if his best friend had died.
    He wondered if Abigail had sensed anything. If so, she hadn’t said so. Then again, her psychic link to John had been