Available Darkness Season 2

a solitary candle sitting in the center of a table in the eye of the room. Several folding chairs surrounded the table as if it were a regular meeting place of some sort. At the table sat a short, blonde-haired woman with medium length hair who looked to be in her mid-30s. She wore thin, round, red-framed glasses. “This is Judith,” Talani said. “She saved me.”
    “Hi,” Abigail said, standing at a distance and waving.
    “Sit,” Judith said in a friendly voice, waving her hand at the other chairs at the table.
    Abigail sat across from Judith. Talani took a seat to Abigail’s immediate right. Abigail looked around, “What is this place?”
    “A special sort of meeting place,” Judith said. “Talani tells me you’re one of us? A vampire?”
    “Yes,” Abigail said.
    “And so young,” Judith responded with a sigh. “Who turned you?”
    Abigail felt protective, and didn’t want to give John’s name. “A man who saved me after I was shot,” Abigail said.
    “And where is he now? Why is he not taking care of you?”
    “He was, but he has a busy job,” Abigail said. “He has to travel a lot.”
    “Yes,” Judith said. Abigail thought she might have heard the slightest hiss behind it. “I heard he works for our enemy.”
    Abigail wondered how she knew that. Abigail hadn’t told Talani. The girl must’ve been poking around in her head and found out about John. Abigail felt a chill run down her spine, afraid she’d made a bad mistake meeting Talani.
    “He’s not a bad man,” Abigail said, shifting nervously in her seat.
    “It’s OK,” Judith smiled. “I’m not interested in persecuting your friend. We all make our choices, and who is anyone to judge another’s decisions until they’ve walked in their proverbial shoes?”
    “Good,” Abigail said, fidgeting, uncertain what she should say and feeling like she might have offended the woman, though she had no plans to apologize.
    “It’s OK,” Judith said. “You’re among friends now. We run a meeting for our kind here twice a week at 8 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays.”
    “What kind of meeting?” Abigail asked.
    “Support, Abigail. We offer a place for outcasts to come and feel accepted. It’s sort of like church, but without a false God to pray to.”
    “Oh,” Abigail said, not sure what else to say. She was feeling uncomfortable and wished she had called Larry rather than following Talani’s call.
    “Show her the place,” Talani said.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Judith said.
    Abigail wondered what place Talani was talking about.
    “You have to!” Talani pleaded, for the first time sounding like a teenager instead of the authoritative voice Abigail had somehow grown almost used to hearing in her head.
    Judith met Abigail’s eyes, “Would you like to see something only five others on Earth have ever seen?”
    “OK,” Abigail said, shifting in her seat, uncomfortable behind the thick curtain of uncertainty.
    Judith held her hands out in front of her, cupping them as she muttered and whispered into her palms. Abigail could barely hear the words, and what she could hear made no sense. It was a language, that much she knew, but nothing she’d ever heard — and yet it seemed vaguely familiar.
    A dim light was born in Judith’s palms, then began to glow brighter as an image hovered above them. The image jumped and flickered, like video looking for reception, until it cleared enough for Abigail to see the rich, green mountains, a waterfall larger and bluer than any she’d ever seen in pictures, and something flying high in the richly purpled sky. As the image closed in on the something in the sky, Abigail saw that it wasn’t a bird, but rather the impossibility of a Pegasus instead.
    “Whoa!” Abigail breathed, lost inside the beauty of a winged horse, so rich with details it couldn’t be fake.
    Judith closed her hands around the image, and Abigail watched as it faded into ashen wisps of nothing.
    “What was that? ” she asked, mesmerized.
    “That is the world I’m from,” Judith said. “Home to our kind, the Valkoer.”
    Valkoer? That’s what we’re called?
    “It’s so beautiful,” Abigail whispered, wondering if that was where John was from, too. And the world his brother, Caleb, had gone off to. It had to be. John and Larry didn’t speak much of the world in front of her, or Caleb. She’d only picked up on bits and pieces. But they had never described it so beautifully, or mentioned something so mythic as