Chapter Seven

Darkness Is Only The Absence Of Light

"Devon!" Michael seized my shoulder as I cradled Carolyn's limp body in my arms. "Come on! Get up!" His grip tightened urgently. "Or it'll be too late!"

I ignored his commands. I tried to shrug him off. I wasn't about to get up or give up. Not yet…

I stared down at my love, willing her to live. For me… for us. I watched for the faint signs that she was still alive. I saw the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest.

I had been breathing for her. My lips pressed to hers time and again, but she was fading away from me. I could feel her life seeping slowly away.

My tuxedo jacket now covered her injuries as I tried to keep her warm. The wound in Carolyn's left shoulder was the worst. It had taken her high but had missed her heart. A small mercy. The bullet she'd taken in her side had gone clean through. Shock and blood loss were my main enemies now.

"Don't you go anywhere without me…" I whispered against her hair.

The husband of one of the guests – thankfully, a doctor - had worked swiftly to apply pressure to the wounds and staunched the flow of blood with the white material that had once been Stevie's veil. Then he'd bound everything together tightly with the wedding ribbons from the decorations. He kept a vigil at my side, checking and rechecking Carolyn's vital signs. The expression on his face told its own story, but he didn't comment.

Carolyn's face was now deathly pale. Looking down, all I could see was virgin white and blood red. I don't think I had ever felt any more helpless or more consumed with such black rage.

I'd heard her scream at her attacker to distract him. She'd deliberately put herself in harm's way and not given Durant enough time to aim and make his bullets count.

Reginald and Michael had chased after the bastard, but he'd gotten away in a van that had been waiting for him beyond the gardens. They'd crashed through the metal gate at one of the back entrances at high speed, barely missing the guards who had tried to stop them.

"Devon!" Michael commanded again, gaining my unwilling attention by shaking me. "The helicopter's all set! Come on! Get up, man! There's no time! They've got to go if they're gonna try and save her!"

His hard grip on my shoulder didn't lessen. The pain of it shot through my body. Hands came beneath my arms and hauled me to my feet by force. Carolyn was taken from me against my shouted protests, but no one paid me any attention. A stretcher had been fetched and four men, including the doctor, hurried Carolyn on it toward the FLAG helicopter that had been fired up on the lawn beside the house.

I would have followed but Michael's strong hands on my arms forcibly held me back. "No, Devon," he said. "She'll get the best of care in FLAG's private hospital. There'll be no awkward questions we can't answer. But you're not in any state to follow. Not yet. Not like this. You'll only get in the way."

"Get out of my way!" I hissed through clenched teeth as I tried to shake off his grip, but I was already too late. The helicopter lifted off and flew away, clattering out across the landscape.

"Blast you!" I snarled, finally managing to get away from him.

"Blast me all you want," he replied in a hard tone. "But we both know that Durant won't give up now that he's made his move. He can't afford to look weak, or he's done for. We've seen his face and knew his real name. From now on he'll be doubly dangerous. He has to try and finish this, and I'll be right there to stop him. You have my word on that."

He flicked a hand at my bloodied clothes. "Right now, you need to go inside and get cleaned up. And I want to know how he got in here in the first place. This place was supposed to be more secure than Fort Knox."

"Please listen to him, Devon," Stevie urged, taking my arm and shaking it. "You must. You need to focus. You can't help Carolyn right now. She'll be in surgery for hours."

She glanced around at the crowd of guests watching us. "I'll take care of everything here. We all have something we can do for Carolyn. She was very brave. She must love you a great deal." She kissed my bloodied cheek before she walked away, calling for the wedding attendants to help her with her new arrangements. I shook my head at her calmness.

"We'll take your car and go straight to the hospital," Bonnie told me. "RC and I will keep watch over Carolyn for you. No one will get past us."

"Yeah, Boss," Reginald added grimly. "Nobody's gonna mess with your lady again. Not on our watch. I'll kill them first."

He hugged me fiercely, followed by Bonnie's quick embrace and a kiss on my bloodied cheek. They hurried away together toward the house. I watched them go. They were right, of course.

If we didn't manage to eliminate the man we now knew as Kurt Rolands, then his shadow would forever hang over us all. He would not give up until he was caught and punished for his numerous crimes.

My shoulders sagged as I remembered the words I'd written to Carolyn in my note. I had been trying to recapture the past by looking to the future. I had surrendered to that most tenuous of things. Hope...

I whispered the words I'd written now as I followed Michael toward the house. "Wait for me… Please don't leave me here, alone in the dark…"

※※※※※

I was floating… That was the only word that made any sense out of the jumbled contents of my tortured mind. I drifted and glided inside my head, moving endlessly through a menacing white fog that kept trying to swallow me whole.

Where I was and why things were being done to me, seemed an irrelevant question. But if I concentrated hard enough, I knew I must be in a hospital by the whiteness all around me and the firmness of the mattress beneath my back. There was an almost aggressive smell of cleanliness. I could barely remember the clattering helicopter that brought me to this place, wherever it was.

Behind my closed eyelids, I kept seeing the grimly set face of the gunman and the weapon in his hand. His snarl of pure hatred as I foiled his plans. Again, and again the bullets slammed into me, and I was falling once more, back into that formless white fog.

Whenever I managed to float up again to a barely semi-consciousness state, I was forced to lay as still as possible. I'd found that if I tried to move so much as a single eyelash there was pain. Intense and agonising pain. The massive rock someone had placed on my chest had not eased its downward pressure. Breathing was a constant agony and I'd quickly decided it was almost not an option.

But something was breathing for me, rhythmically forcing air into my pain-filled lungs. My dry mouth was clogged with thick tubing and tasted of plastic. The machine hissed like an angry snake next to my bed as it inhaled and then exhaled. I wanted to curse it and spit the thing out, but it wasn't possible. To move was to die all over again. So, I lay as if I was already dead.

"It's the morphine…" someone said. "She's already on the maximum dosage. We can't give her any more for now. Her body wouldn't cope. Unless…"

"There's no more to be done. The rest is up to her. We can only watch and wait…" another voice commented.

There was a long silence before a low, grim voice said, "Then we will wait."

There was such menace in that tone, an implied threat of violence. It snagged my wandering attention. I waited, wanting to hear more. I knew they were still there. I could hear movement.

"You need to get some sleep. You can't go on pushing yourself like this, man…" a different voice said. "Or you'll end up in that bed right next to her. Do you want that?"

I listened and tried to make sense of it all. But skeins of tangled cobwebs muddled my thinking. I couldn't remember when those words had been spoken. I could not recall anyone coming or going in my dreams. They were all as ethereal as smoke. I drifted away between heartbeats, back into my all-consuming fog where the gunman waited once more.

I was totally unaware of the passage of time. Hours, days or weeks could have passed, and I didn't care. I floated and tried not to move, praying for the pain to end. To be allowed to slip away into the blessed relief of final oblivion.

But something kept me tethered tenuously to life, however fragile. Words I barely remembered kept repeating themselves over and over inside my mind. It was a mantra I clung to like a tiny life raft tossed on a stormy ocean. I used them to push back the fog, the darkness and the gunman's threat.

Someone visited me often. They would hold my hand and press their lips against my temple. They whispered those same words in my ear, "Wait for me… Please don't leave me here, alone in the dark…"

I drifted deeper and deeper into the welcome shelter of unconsciousness with those words as my one true comfort. Somehow, I knew I was no longer alone in the dark…

※※※※※

"It's the morphine…" The nurse shook her head at me. "She's already on the maximum dosage. We can't give her any more for now. Her body wouldn't cope. Unless…?" She raised her eyebrows at me.

I ignored her deliberate hanging question. I ignored her.

"There's no more anyone can do now. The rest is up to her. We can only watch and wait…" Carolyn's specialist trauma surgeon commented, watching me with deep sympathy in his dark eyes.

FLAG paid handsomely for the very best and the most discreet. The surgeon had certainly earned his salary. He'd spent hours and days working on Carolyn, keeping her alive to the best of his considerable abilities.

I shook my head at his unspoken question. I knew he was trying to say I shouldn't hold onto hope. He wanted to let me down gently, giving me time to assimilate the inevitable. Carolyn was dying and there was nothing more we could do about that. We should just allow her to slip away peacefully. Increasing the dosage of morphine would ease her passing.

"Then we will wait." I glared at the man, making him throw up both hands as he backed away from my implied threat of violence.

The decision wasn't mine to make. That was for Carolyn's next of kin to decide when we finally found them. But I would kill anyone who tried to end it for her. Only Carolyn could decide if she could stay or go.

I turned from him, not willing to accept his professional verdict either. They did not know Carolyn as I had known her.

She'd said to me, 'If you never opened the box, then you couldn't know if the cat inside was alive or dead. You could live with the not knowing and cling to the only thing you have left. Hope…'

Hope… I clung to that single simple word like it was a tiny life raft tossed on a stormy ocean. Where there was the tiniest spark of life, there was hope. It was all I had. I would not give up on her. I couldn't. She would never have given up on me if she hadn't been convinced of my demise thirty-five years ago.

"You need to get some sleep. You can't go on pushing yourself like this, man…" Michael stared at me. "Or you'll end up in that bed right next to her. Do you want that?"

"I'll sleep when I'm dead," I muttered, turning from his brusque concern as well.

Of course, I knew Michael always had my back. He'd been as good as his word.

He's taken Kitt and tracked down Kurt Rolands. The criminal mastermind had worked his way into FLAG HQ by murdering one of the senior catering staff and assuming the man's identity. The two men had looked enough alike for him to slide past our security checks undetected.

Now Rolands and all his followers were locked up in supermax prison awaiting trial. If found guilty of their crimes, they would be sentenced to death or life without parole. At least, there was no blood on Michael's hands. Kitt had stopped him just in time from killing Rolands. A task I would have gladly performed if I'd found him first.

For the past two weeks, I had haunted this starkly white hospital room day and night. I no longer knew nor cared what was happening at FLAG HQ. The last thirty years of my life melted away like snow in the sunshine.

I'd taken the lease on an apartment close to the hospital, but I was barely ever there. I would shower and change my clothes - eat enough to keep me alive - and return to her bedside. I slept fitfully in the chair next to her.

As expected, the Foundation's board had moved quickly to install a temporary chairman to make the appointment permanent if I finally declined to return. Angus Jones was a man without any family ties and very little humour. He was as efficient and thorough as a fast-acting deadly poison. The board liked him, and he enjoyed schmoozing them with his cold fisheyes and lean smile. They loved his attention to the tiniest detail.

He'd been after my position for the last ten years and his endless patience had finally been rewarded. Budgets I had made were being closely scrutinised and each line was challenged. Every FLAG employee still loyal to me was walking on eggshells and wondering if they would still be employed come Christmas.

I could do nothing to help them except listen. Bonnie and RC visited as often as they could and kept me informed about the changes and ongoing cutbacks. Michael had given me Kitt's commlink watch. No one from the Foundation had asked for it back and I didn't offer it up because they didn't know the car was still around.

Bonnie had cleverly disabled his GPS, making him invisible to any unwanted snooping. Michael informed the Foundation that the car had been completely destroyed by Rolands' henchmen in a final firefight and there wasn't enough of it left to make a half-decent ashtray.

He'd enjoyed that encounter, telling my grim-faced replacement there had been a fatal weakness in the car's basic design and they'd better rethink any plans to construct more Knight Industries Two Thousands. They would need to start again from scratch.

Jones had paled at the enormous expense already incurred, but he didn't know enough about the top-secret project to ask any awkward questions. Kitt had always been Wilton's dream and his legacy. But the huge losses were one more black mark against my name with the board.

Therefore, the most expensive vehicle in the world was now just another one of the many parked downstairs in the hospital carpark. Kitt kept vigil with me, a comforting and impartial voice during the long hours of waiting and watching.

I looked back at Michael now. I was well aware his choice to leave FLAG had been a wise one. Get out while you still can and don't look back. Take Stevie and walk away. Make a new life.

He put a hand on my shoulder. "Stevie's gone through the contents of Carolyn's handbag and made some phone calls. She's finally tracked down an address for her daughter. Seems Lucy's been living and working in Paris for the summer. She's contacted her brothers, and all three of them will be flying into LA as soon as they can book their flights. They should all be here by the morning."

"I'm glad…" I sighed, frowning at the bed. "I hope they'll be in time."

"So do we all…" Michael raised his shoulders. "With them here, maybe then you'll be able to get some sleep."

"I'm not tired," I managed the lie with a straight face.

"Suit yourself. But killing yourself will not save her. It's in God's hands now." Michael shook his head as he turned and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

"Then God had better be listening…" I muttered as I approached Carolyn's bed.

I stood looking down at her pale slenderness lying beneath the crisp white bedcovers. She lay still, barely seeming to breathe. The machine was doing that task for her.

I had developed the habit of sitting in the chair beside her bed and holding her hand. I spent hours reading her favourite poetry and some of her novels aloud until my voice wore out. Sometimes at night, Kitt would take over while I slept.

I tried everything and anything to bring Carolyn back to me. To make her hear me and to know she was not alone. Even if it was only to say goodbye.

"No…" I pushed the betraying thought forcibly from my mind. I picked up her hand and held it between my own as I bent forward to kiss her temple.

I sighed as I whispered in her ear once more as I'd done for hours uncounted, "Wait for me… Please don't leave me here, alone in the dark…"

※※※※※

I was dragged slowly from the mire of the abyss I had fallen into by the sound of familiar voices talking quietly in the room. I wanted to open my eyes to look but I was too afraid of renewed incapacitation if I moved.

But I felt different somehow. Slowly, I inhaled a single cautious breath and waited for the inevitable pain to bite into my cringing flesh like a rabid dog. To my surprise, the agony was still there but it was no longer as crippling. The weight of the stone weighing down my chest had lightened. I tried a second, slightly deeper breath and felt my ribcage expand and contract as I breathed out again.

The quiet voices were still conversing. I could hear decisions being made for me, without my input. I resented that. I could detect at least three people in my room, maybe more. Not one of them had noticed me or my tiny signs of consciousness. I gathered my courage with both hands. I decided I would try to open my eyes just a little. Just enough to see who was talking.

Their voices pulled at me, drawing me closer and closer to the surface. I strained to listen. Suddenly I knew them. Of course, I knew them. I'd given birth to every one of them. Tears gathered in my eyes as I struggled to communicate.

'Edward…' I tried to whisper around the tube blocking my throat.

But I couldn't speak. I concentrated on one hand, lifting it and flopping it back onto the bedcovers. I tried again and managed a soft gurgle.

"Mum?" My first-born child was beside me in an instant. He leaned down to look at me. "Hi, there, sleepyhead. You gonna lie around in bed all day?"

It was an old joke between us from when he was a little boy. He loved to sleep, and I always had trouble waking him up on a school day. My tears spilt over and ran down my cheeks.

"We've all been so worried about you." Edward smoothed the palm of one hand over my forehead gently, pushing back my damp bangs. He leaned in to kiss my cheek. "Danny and Lucy are here with me. You gave us quite a scare, you know. Devon said—"

'Devon…' I tried to speak again.

It was no use. I was forced to settle for widening my eyes questioningly as I stared up into my son's handsome face with his mop of blond curls and deep blue eyes.

"Yes, Devon. He's here with us…" He nodded, turning to look at someone behind him, motioning at him to come forward.

Then there were two sets of blue eyes looking down at me with deep concern mixed with cautious relief. One pair was younger and the other older. I stared up at both of them and my heart missed a beat. They were silently asking questions I couldn't answer then.

My son and Devon looked so alike now they were standing side by side I knew there could be no hiding the unvarnished truth. My most closely guarded secret had finally caught up with me and I had no clue what I was going to say or how I would explain everything. But I did have very valid reasons for not telling Devon he had a grown-up son when I first found out about his very dangerous world.

'Now, what could I say?' I closed my eyes in despair. For once, I was grateful for the intubation tube that was blocking my ability to speak. But I knew the time for confession would soon come when I was stronger and could finally tell my side of our tangled story.

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