When Father Michel Emeric and Dr. Ray Benson warn young widow, Kate Jacobs, of occult danger stalking her, she dismisses them as deranged fanatics. The eerie disappearance of her four-year-old daughter, Sara, changes her mind. Ray and Father Mike rescue Kate’s child, but the fight has only begun. Dark powers from beyond our world want to destroy Kate and Sara and prevent the birth of a future child foretold to have extraordinary psychic powers and a destiny as a great warrior against evil. Kate must develop her latent wild talents and allow Sara to do the same, in a universe weirder–and more dangerous–than she’s ever imagined. Genre: Urban Fantasy/Paranormal     Word Count: 105, 532 (ebooks are available from all sites, and print is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and some from Angus and Robertson) [wp_social_ninja id=”217140″ platform=”reviews”] Chapter 1 “The dark! It’s watching me–make it go away!” Wrenched out of sleep, Kate sat up in bed. From across the hall, Sara screamed again. “Mommy! Make it go away!” Throwing the covers back, Kate glimpsed the glowing numerals on the alarm clock–one thirty-five in the morning. Nightgown tangled around her hips, she dashed into Sara’s room and snapped on the light. Her daughter sat up in bed, rigid, her eyes wide, shrieking, “The dark! The dark!” Blinking in the sudden glare, Kate sat on the edge of the bed and put her arms around Sara. The child’s slender body felt as stiff as a mannequin. Stroking her hair, Kate found it damp, plastered to her scalp with sweat. Sara gave no sign of seeing, hearing, or feeling anything. She screamed over and over, emitting a siren wail like nothing Kate had ever heard. Shaking, she murmured Sara’s name and massaged the tight knots of her shoulders under the Winnie-the-Pooh nightshirt. Night terrors. Now, with her panic fading, Kate remembered reading about this phenomenon, a nightmare-like seizure so extreme nothing could break its grip until it ran its course. She’d never expected to see it in Sara, though. She set her teeth, her own pulse pounding in her head, and waited for the attack to end. After several minutes, Sara abruptly fell silent and slumped back, eyes shut. Kate eased her onto the pillow, tucking sheet and quilt up to her neck. She looked sound asleep. Kate watched for ten minutes before she could force herself, still trembling, to stumble back to her own bed. She lay awake for over an hour, straining her ears for any sound from the other room. Sara had never before expressed any kind of irrational fear, certainly not of the dark. Was she sick? She didn’t have a fever. Was the stress of having no father and a working mother taking its psychological toll? I can’t believe that, not when she’s always handled it so well. And if I did believe it, what could I do about it? A succession of worries chased each other around Kate’s skull like hamsters on a wheel until exhaustion stilled them. The next morning, she considered asking for the day off from work. To her surprise, though, Sara didn’t mention her panic attack. She dressed herself and ate her whole-wheat raisin toast as calmly as ever. When Mrs. Pacheco, the widowed grandmother who lived upstairs, arrived to baby-sit as usual, Sara welcomed her with no apparent reluctance. Rather than upset Sara all over again, Kate left at her normal time. When she came home that afternoon, though, Mrs. Pacheco greeted her with the whispered remark, “I don’t understand what’s gotten into Sara this afternoon. About an hour ago, she started acting, well, nervous.” “Nervous?” Kate kept her voice low, glancing from the foyer into the living room, where Sara sat on the rug in front of the TV, watching Sesame Street. “It’s not like her, Mrs. Jacobs, that’s why it worried me,” said Mrs. Pacheco. “She said something about a dream she had last night.” “A nightmare. She’s never had one before that I know of.” So she hasn’t forgotten it, after all. Kate gnawed on her lower lip as she shrugged out of her jacket and hung it in the entryway closet. Mrs. Pacheco whispered, “She said she didn’t want you to leave tonight.” “But how could she possibly know–” Kate herself hadn’t known until half an hour before quitting time that her boss had an assignment for her this evening. She stifled a twinge of guilt about having to go out. In this day and age, mothers are allowed to have careers. As if I had a choice, anyway! Recalling last night’s hysterical outburst gave her an almost physical chill. It contrasted so sharply with Sara’s normal behavior. No mother could ask for a more self-possessed, composed four-year-old. The child probably got her competent manner from associating so much with adults. Now Kate didn’t know how to cope with this sudden change. Could it come from the strain of acting older than her age? Did Sara think she had to act grown up because of her mother’s job? Cut out the amateur psychology, Kate told herself. One nightmare does not mean a breakdown. At that moment Oscar the Grouch finished his trash song, and Sara leaped up to run into the foyer. “Mommy, you’re home!” she cried in a surprised tone as atypical as the fears. She flung her arms around Kate’s waist. “Of course, just like this time every day.” Kate let Sara clasp her hand and tug her to the couch. Barefoot, dressed in lime green shorts and T-shirt, Sara perched cross-legged on the couch, with her elbows resting on her knees and chin supported by her fists. “Please don’t go out tonight. It’s real important.” Now she wasn’t screaming or crying, just making a statement she obviously saw as plain fact. “I have to. I promised.” Sara usually understood about promises. Kate stroked her daughter’s honey-colored, shoulder-length hair. “I’ve worked late plenty of times, and you didn’t mind.” She glanced up at Mrs. Pacheco, waiting in the entry hall. “I’m awfully sorry about the late notice, but could you possibly watch her this evening? Starting about six-thirty?” “Of course, Mrs. Jacobs, no problem,” said the older woman, though her worried frown didn’t relax. “It will be all right. I won’t stay out any longer than I have to.” Kate knew how lucky she was to have someone like Mrs. Pacheco living in the apartment right above hers. Comparable personal attention at a day care center would have gutted her budget. Sara didn’t speak again until the babysitter had left. “Who did you promise? Mr. Boyle?” She nodded. Sara knew and liked Ned Boyle, not only Kate’s employer but a long-time close friend of her deceased parents. “He’s a nice man,” Sara persisted. “He’ll let you stay home. Tell him it’s important.” “Why, munchkin? What makes this time different?” Kate stepped across the room to turn down the sound on Sesame Street. Sara’s lips quivered. “The dark. I don’t want the dark to get you.” “But you know the dark isn’t an animal or a person. It can’t ‘get’ anybody.” The faded couch sagged in the familiar spot as Kate sat down again. “You’ve never been afraid of the nighttime before. It’s just like in Goodnight Moon, remember?” “Not that kind of dark.” Sara’s voice held the long-suffering patience with which she often explained things to her lovable but rather dim parent–or so it sounded to Kate. “This is a special kind. I saw it last night.” Fear welled up in her blue eyes. Worried that the child might talk herself into another panic, Kate stood up and said more firmly, “I wish I didn’t have to go, too, but this time I don’t have a choice. You like Mrs. Pacheco, and you know I’ll come home as quick as I can. Don’t you?” Sara gave a tentative nod. “You have to be brave, munchkin.” She ruffled the girl’s mop of hair. “All for one–” “And one for all!” Sara managed a smile. Kate turned up the TV and headed for her bedroom, her eyes stinging. No four-year-old should be required to “be brave”. At moments like this, she felt an irrational anger at Johnny for abandoning the two of them. Yeah, right, as if he planned the whole thing. She plucked hairpins from her chignon and collected them in her palm as she walked. She’d have to hustle to make it to the Mark Hopkins by seven. What a day for Ned Boyle to ask her to represent him at a book signing! But he wouldn’t have done it on the spur of the moment without good reason. He’d been scheduled to attend the affair himself, until his wife had gone into the hospital with pneumonia barely an hour ago. The other three staff members had previous commitments; only Kate remained available. She couldn’t say no to the man whom she owed so much. His small publishing firm, Golden Apple Press, had hired her straight out of college, with no qualifications beyond a B.A. in English from Berkeley and a year on the campus newspaper. Not only that, she owed him double for hiring her back after Sara’s birth, when she’d desperately needed an income. But tonight of all nights! And for Arthur Sandoval, of all people! She zipped through her shower, consoling herself that she could escape after a brief show of support. Ned believed Sandoval’s latest treatise on occult and supernatural occurrences in modern California could be a breakout book for both author and publisher. The public’s fascination with weird phenomena might give this release a wider appeal than Golden Apple’s usual line, poetry and regional-emphasis material such as guidebooks. Kate kept her opinion to herself. She’d had to copyedit Sandoval’s book as part of her job; otherwise, she wouldn’t have touched the thing. After Sara’s birth and Johnny’s death, her indifference to the occult had changed to outright revulsion. And she didn’t care for Sandoval himself, either. He wore a black goatee that looked doubly affected with his thinning hair and middle-aged pot-belly. Apparently, he was hoping to make himself resemble the head of that “Church of Satan” downtown. Bundling on a robe over fresh underwear, Kate dashed from the bathroom to her bedroom. As she started working on her makeup at the scarred early-American dresser, she heard Sara switch off Mr. Rogers and patter down the hall. “Mommy, may I come in and watch you?” She seldom forgot to use “may” instead of “can” when appropriate. “Sure. What do you want for supper?” “Hot dogs?” Kate sighed and blotted her lipstick. “Okay. Not the healthiest thing in the house, but it’s quick.” Sara knelt on the end of the bed, behind her mother. “You really gots to go?” “I really gots to go.” Watching Sara in the mirror, Kate compared the child’s reflection with the picture of Johnny on the dresser. The familiar resemblance struck her afresh. Sometimes she fancied that Johnny had produced Sara by a sort of male parthenogenesis, with Kate only an incubator. Father and daughter had the same thick, dark-honey hair, the same deep blue eye color that faded after infancy in most people, the same elfin features. Kate’s own face was broad rather than delicate, though her height enabled her to eat what she liked without expanding from solidity to plumpness. She began to French-braid her auburn hair. To her relief, Sara seemed to give up trying to make her stay home. Instead, Sara asked, apropos of nothing, “What’s inn trow pee?” She pronounced the three syllables so distinctly that Kate had to mouth them to herself a few times to come up with the word “entropy”. Good grief, what did I do to deserve a precocious genius? “Chaos, I guess. Disintegration. Everything winding down like a worn-out clock.” As if that will make any sense to her. “Where on earth did you hear that word?” Kate figured Sara must have accidentally viewed part of a science program on public TV. The concept couldn’t have popped up in conversation with Mrs. Pacheco, who, for all … Continue reading From the Dark Places by Margaret L. Carter