Dark Debt (Chicagoland Vampires 11)

I grabbed Morgan’s arm as my heart began to thud. The air was chilly, but a cold sweat broke out, peppering my skin with clamminess.

“What the hell are—oh, shit, are you okay?”

My throat felt snug as a straw, my head beginning to spin from lack of oxygen.

“Hey, breathe. Breathe, Merit. In, out. In, out.” He mimed the motion, then walked me to the picnic table. “Sit,” he said, but cast a nervous glance around him, waiting to hear humans running through the trees.

But why should they be in a hurry? This was their island. We were the interlopers here, and apparently with no exit.

“This isn’t a big deal,” Morgan said, squeezing my hand. “No need to panic. This is just a minor setback. There’s another way out of here, and we’ll find it.”

I followed his breathing, caught the rhythm of it, forced myself to breathe on counts. In, one, two. Out, one, two. Over and over again, until my heart began to slow its frantic pace.

“You can’t be afraid of the dark, you know. That’s not a thing a vampire can even have.”

He was trying to make me laugh, and I chuckled in spite of myself and my racing heartbeat. “Not afraid. Just—a memory. A bad one.”

“Then you need to replace it with a new one,” Morgan said, looking down, up, around as if he might find a replacement on a nearby shelf.

“Ah,” he said, his gaze on the sky. “Look up.”

“What?”

“Look up,” he said, and tilted my chin upward.

It was as if the moon had exploded and spilled its light across the sky—stars sprinkled the dark canvas like diamonds, the cloudy Milky Way gleaming among them.

I’d seen a similar sight in our few nights in Colorado, when the universe had flung open its arms to us. It was majestic, and it made me feel small in the best possible way.

“There is always light,” Morgan said quietly. “The stars are always shining, even if we can’t see them.”

He was the last person I’d have expected to hear something that philosophical from. And it helped.

A dog barked nearby. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea. Just give me a minute. Keep an eye out.”

I closed my eyes, tried to slow my beating heart, tried to listen to the darkness for an idea, a suggestion, the hint of an escape plan.

My heartbeat thudded in my ears, and I focused past it, strained for sound. It took precious seconds, but I finally heard the soft scampers of animals in the woods, the hoot of an owl, the rhythmic slap of water against the shoreline.

And there, in the back of the sounds, in the darkness, the squeak and groan of metal, just as rhythmic.

I opened my eyes again, stood up, looked in the direction of the sound.

“There,” I said, and as he followed behind, I jogged down the shore until I saw it: a metal dock, about twenty yards away. It floated on booms that squeaked with each soft wave.

Beside it, bobbing lightly in the water, was a boat. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t new, but it was floating. And that was something.

Voices echoed through the darkness behind us, and they were getting louder.

“Dock,” I said, and we took off running. I pushed open the small gate—thankfully unlocked—intended to keep interlopers off the equally small pier, hurried to the boat docked at the end of it.

It was a powerboat, something a family might use for skiing on a day at the lake. A seat for the captain behind a control panel and short windshield, a seat beside for a passenger, a line of cushions across the back. Nothing fancy, but the outboard engine looked serviceable enough.

I hopped down onto plastic carpeting, the boat swaying beneath me. I hadn’t been on a boat in a very long time. Hell of a time for a reunion.

I sat down in the captain’s chair, checked the relatively simple dashboard—ignition, speed, fuel gauge, throttle. The key was in the ignition, and it looked as though the tank was full. There were other bits and pieces of high-tech equipment, which could have been whale-tracking machines for all I knew.