Page 52 of Light

Holy. God.

And this time, I mean it literally.

Where the hell else would two children this beautiful, this ethereal, this surreal just suddenly appear from?

My logic hurls the answer into my heart—which then bursts like shrapnel of adrenaline through my body. At once, I’m back on my feet. The next second, my fingertips are light-blaring homing beacons. I angle the beams at my sides, pointing them outward like Wolverine in strike-ready mode with his claws. Another fitting comparison. I step away from Emma, making sure the two cherubs—or whatever the damnation they are—can see that I’ve got ignition and I’m not afraid to use it.

The girls shrink back with matching sets of O-shaped lips and we’ve-seen-a-goblin eyes. And while I hate being that ogre, it’s better than trusting their exterior just to find out they’re actually demons on the interior.

“Hey. Hey. Whoa!”

Emma’s protest coincides with the girls’ frantic retreat, but she’s not fast enough to stop them from scurrying backward. They disappear through the burned-out hole in the elevator’s floor. Okay, not fully vanishing. Their little hands stay visible, their petite fingertips clinging to that angry black lip. But they aren’t screaming, and their huge impish eyes reappear after just a couple of seconds. What the living hell?

“It’s all right!” Emma cries. “We mean you no harm! Reece,” she hisses, “put those damn things away.”

I grunt, enduring her glare as I pull back on my fingers’ intensity. But just by a little. I’m the guy who once believed everything at such face value, I thought a “fun ride” into the Barcelona suburbs was going to land me in a kink club with Angie LaSalle’s throat around my cock. Instead, I wound up on the Consortium’s lab table with a needle jammed down that unfortunate cock. Now that the cock’s back where I want it, I’m not trusting anything about this situation. Not even the two innocent faces that reemerge from the hole and get propped atop their seriously strong hands, sizing up Emma and me with renewed concentration.

“Hi again, beauties.” Emma’s sweet murmur etches a new crack in my heart. The tenderness she’s displaying for these littles, not knowing anything except that they belong on a designer kids-wear ad over Downtown Disney, is moving…mesmerizing. “Come out, come out. I’m not going to let the scary man hurt you, okay?”

Record scratch. So much for “mesmerizing.”

“Scary?” I spit.

“Zeus,” she admonishes. “Isn’t it obvious?” She tilts her head, sending them an engaging smile. Past her upturned lips, she levels, “I’m not sure they know where they are—or if they’ve seen the real world before.”

“What?” I snap. “What do you mean, ‘the real world’? Like they’ve never been—”

The twins turn over my answer before it’s fully formed. Warming to Emma’s soft coaxes, the pair finally steps across the threshold of the elevator into the halogen glare from the first-responder staging area. As soon as the garish beams flow across their faces, they let out taut, tearful screeches and then collapse to their knees, burrowing their heads into their folded arms.

Emma whips up her head, her stunned stare likely a mirror of my own. Clearly that twist wasn’t on her list of expectations. Her distress has me crumpling down to the floor too. I reach out for the girls, though the action is probably too little too late. I hate that they’ve flinched because of me. Fuck. As far as I’ve come as a human being, sometimes I’m still an unthinking moron.

The girls beat a frantic retreat back to their mysterious hole, but instead of dropping back into the opening, they skid to a screeching stop right in front of it. They look down, heads nearly melding into each other like conjoined twins, before emitting more of those otherworldly shrieks.

“Oh, my God,” Emma rasps. “What are they…why are they…”

“It looks like they’re…grieving,” I stammer.

“Or just seriously stressing?” she conjectures. “Wait. Now what? Are they…talking? To each other?”

Her point is validated by rapid-fire sibilance from the girls, carrying the ups and downs of a conversation. But my ears confirm Davidson’s assertion—they’re not communicating in any recognizable language. Being a global playboy in my former life has guaranteed I know a bit of nearly every popular language.

“But who are they talking to?” Emma presses. “Just…each other? Or someone down there?”

“You mean several floors down an elevator shaft?” My snark isn’t intentional, but hanging on to a modicum of logic makes it necessary—which has to be the oxymoron of the year. Am I really standing here with neon-blue fingers, watching a pair of perfect anime characters, worrying about hanging on to my logic?

But in this case, the rationality is justified—perhaps the key to maintaining my sanity. Because if what she’s saying is true and something from down there helped the girls get up here…

But who?

And how?

And why now?

“Well, do you think those two children bore that hole through an elevator car by themselves?”

That astute question from my brilliant wife is only going to be answered in one way.

But as soon as I clear one footstep across the gap into the lift, the twins cut loose once more with their unearthly shrieks.