Read Out of the Dark for Free Online

keep the shadows from taking him.
    Above him, the hissing got louder. It burned his eardrums, poking like pins inside his head. Like voices, but none that he could decipher. Had he been clocked on the head harder than he’d thought? But no, a quick shine of his light up to the roof again showed him the same things. They didn’t recoil from the light this time.
    They focused on it.
    And then they came down.
    All of them at once, burying him in a pile of reeking, leathery flesh and claws that tore at him. Teeth that fought to find his flesh. He hit one of them with the heavy flashlight, breaking the bulb but sending the creature screaming into the dark. Another. Then another. Rocks fit into his fists, became weapons. He kicked and punched. He found his voice when one of them sunk its teeth into the tender webbing between his thumb and forefinger, when the flesh tore, when the thing tore away a chunk of him.
    Again and again he fought as the hissing whispers got louder, searing his eardrums. The stink rose, too, until he choked with it. Writhing, Luke hit out again and again. Screams of pain and fury rose around him, not echoing in the cavern but inside his skull. Bones crunched. Blood coated him.
    He fought.
    He killed.
    Later, much later, Luke would eventually give in and agree with the version of the story that said the cave simply collapsed beneath his feet a few feet from the exit. He would stop insisting that something had punched through the cave floor and pierced his ankle with thick talons, the same kind that carved up his back and chest. He would accept the explanation of a blow to the head, coupled with a cave-in, for his injuries. Later he’d smile and nod at whatever the doctors said so he could just get the hell out of the hospital. He’d convince them he believed their “truth.”
    But all of that was a lie.
    Something had taken him into the dark and tried to hurt him, and he’d hurt back.
    And something was still out there.
    Â 
    A knock at her door in the middle of the night should’ve surprised her, but some part of Celia had been waiting for the past six months to find Luke on her doorstep. She couldn’t have said why. Wishful thinking? Maybe the dreams she’d had about him in all his naked glory, so vivid she’d woken with his flavor still in her mouth and her skin tingling from his touch. Or maybe it was just some inexplicable sense of inevitability that had been with her since the morning after the night they’d spent together, a hovering sense of…not urgency, but something the opposite of that.
    Of waiting.
    Still, she was cautious when she cracked open the door to peek out. She was expecting to see a grinning Luke, maybe with something silly like flowers or a stuffed toy he’d picked up from the gas station. That, she realized at once, was really wishful thinking. If it had been that man on the front porch, she might easily have teased him with a pout and a shake of her finger scolding him for showing up unannounced. The smile died on her lips when she saw who really stood there waiting for her to open the door, which she did immediately and all the way.
    The Luke she’d met at Frog’s Hollow had been loose-limbed and funny, with a lightness about him that had been incredibly appealing. The man standing on her front porch was anything but light. He wore worn jeans, battered and scuffed boots, a dark T-shirt beneath a plaid shirt of black and gray. His brown leather jacket was a total cliché, roughed up and scratched like he’d worn it in a tumble off a motorcycle going eighty around Deadman’s Curve. And, she saw as she looked past him to the snowy yard, there was the motorcycle.
    â€œLuke?” First, a question. Then an invitation. “Luke.”
    He came through the door with a hesitating, one-two step, pushing past her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He didn’t look at her, not straight on, and this disturbed