Available Darkness Season 2

you need me?” Mr. Dark rasped from the driver’s side, beneath a billowing umbrella of whirling shadows.
    “No,” Jacob said, opening the door and setting his heel on the concrete. “That won’t be necessary. Wait here. I’ll be finished shortly.”
    Jacob closed the car door, stepped out from the billowing shroud and into the night. He crossed the sweeping lawn that circled the perimeter of Cooper Arms, the opulent apartment building where Koenig made his home. The doorman nodded at Jacob, looking slightly baffled but mostly dazed. Jacob nodded as he walked past him.
    Inside, a man wearing a well-fitted, hunter-green blazer with thin, gold stripes circling the cuff, nervously fondled the knot on his tie, swallowing as Jacob approached him. “May I help you?” he asked.
    Within a heartbeat, Jacob was inches away, leaning over the counter and into the man’s face as he swallowed again, then again, looking as if his throat had a golf ball riding the geyser from a broken faucet.
    “Yes,” Jacob said. “I’ll be going up to the seventh floor to see Mr. Koenig. “Would you be so kind as to make me a key?”
    The man stared at Jacob without any idea that his next few seconds determined the rest of his life. If he was only a stupid animal, like most humans and exactly as Jacob expected, he would make the keycard for Jacob. By the time the elevator dinged and Jacob stepped inside, the man would be well on his way to forgetting what had happened and what he’d done, just as the doorman outside had already forgotten Jacob.
    If the man was the rare fighter with courage, he would sense the danger and make it his death. A fight with Jacob would last only a second, and the aftermath would see Jacob that much stronger as he rode to the seventh floor and met Koenig.
    “Of course,” the man said like an automaton, averting Jacob’s eyes. He went to a drawer, pulled it open, grabbed a blank card, slipped it into the machine’s mouth, then tucked it into a keycard-sized envelope and handed it across the counter to Jacob.
    Jacob smiled as he took the card from the man. “Thank you, Mr. Wyatt,” he said, glancing at the man’s nameplate, finding his eyes despite Wyatt’s resistance, then holding them to stir confusion enough to know all memory would surely be lost.
    “Of course, sir,” Mr. Wyatt said, his voice emotionless.
    Jacob turned from the counter, crossed the lobby, pushed a button and waited 30 seconds, then stepped into the elevator. Jacob held Mr. Wyatt’s thoughts until the elevator doors shut and then he felt them fray to nothing. As Jacob’s elevator ascended he could feel Mr. Wyatt swatting at the surface for truth, but by the time the doors opened to the seventh floor, Mr. Wyatt had already drowned beneath it.
    Jacob stepped out from the elevator, walked to the end of the hallway, and slipped the keycard inside the door.
    Because it was late, Jacob expected to find Koenig sleeping in a back bedroom, but he wasn’t. He was making filthy love to his woman instead. Their bloated bodies were naked, pressed into one another and turning the sofa into a sticky mess. Koenig’s eyes widened in horror as he turned in mid-thrust to see Jacob racing toward them.
    Koenig screamed — even louder than his woman — as Jacob picked him up by the throat, dug his fingers deep into his flesh for a second, then lifted him high and threw him across the living room.
    Koenig landed with a loud snap across the room as his back spattered against a thick square column at the apartment’s center. He smacked into the sharp corner, then fell to the hardwood floor gasping for air in a fetal ball.
    The filthy woman tried to run. Jacob left Koenig gasping as if he were a wad of trash to be tossed later, then raised his hand and hurled a blast of energy at her feet knocking her to the ground. She fell, face first into the coffee table, blood gushing from her mouth as she reached up to feel for broken teeth. He looked down, and yelled, “Do you want to live?”
    “Y … yyy … yyyessss,” the woman whimpered through a mouth of blood.
    “Then have a seat on the couch,” Jacob hissed. “Otherwise you die while he watches.”
    The woman climbed up to the couch, crying as Jacob turned toward Koenig and approached the column.
    He looked down at Koenig with utter curiosity, wondering if such a simple ugly man could possibly know anything about the power inside him. Was he even aware he wasn’t human? No, it did not seem