The goal was to write a paranormal romance in 3,000 words. Tricky. One day, it will be a novel. Until then, it’s this:

Fear of Darkness

by me, Christine Danse :)=

I.

California, 1894

I crouch on a building where land meets sea, looking down at the ships in harbor. A fog has rolled in from the bay, making them appear ghostly. Their sails are all furled for the night. Only the pennants on their top masts are free to fly and snap in the chill wind. They put me in mind of Alena’s hair when it flies from its ties. The flags are just like her: a free spirit. 

I dream of making love to her in velvet darkness, where she would know only the sound of my low voice and the whisper of my caress—and not the grotesque visage behind them. I would show her that not all the monsters that haunt the shadows are bad.

A pity she loathes the dark.

My Gentleman Shadow smoothed a lock of hair behind my ear. The pads of his fingers were rough, but the touch was tender. His mouth brushed close to my ear as he whispered, “I want to make love to you with the lights on.”

I shuddered and reached my hand for the lamp switch—

And was woken by a frantic rapping at the door.

I jolted upright in bed. The glow of the gaslamp at my bedside told me that it was still dark out, for it was set to switch off come dawn. I glanced at the clock. It read one.

Blinking and rankled, I got the door. Detective Gurney’s wife stood wide-eyed on my stoop. The Detective consulted me frequently for my expertise in the occult. I had met his wife twice for dinner, though she had never called on me like this before. “Madam Swift! Come quickly, please!” 

“Wait one moment,” I said, and rushed back to my room. I eschewed my usual skirt and corset for a more practical pair of breeches and a shirt, bound my hair tightly in a bun, and nabbed my pistol from under the sleep-dimpled pillow. Outside, a sleek black electric carriage was waiting for us, its side emblazoned with the police insignia.  The interior was pitch dark. I paused to crank my dynamo lamp and shine its light inside. Satisfied that it was empty, I climbed onto one of the stiff leather seats. I held the lamp so it shone at the ceiling and cast the interior of the carriage in dim, even light. Mrs. Gurney stared at me.

“Is your husband well?” I asked. “Did he call for me?”

She shook her head, and my skin went cold. “No. But he lives.”

Little more was said as we sped over the steep streets of San Francisco. We stopped at the towering doors of the Ada Institute. I felt tension in the air, thick like the fog that curled at our ankles when we stepped out. Tension, and something else. A charge—almost electric—that raised the hairs on my arms. It was an unmistakable feeling: Magic was afoot.

The charge increased as we walked through the doors, passed deserted marble rooms, and descended a set of spiraling stairs. Down here, the air nearly snapped with it. 

A clot of policemen stood muttering at the base of the stairs. They watched me sullenly as we passed them to the door. I deigned to ignore them. I knew they did not speak kindly of me behind my back—because of my unconventional field of investigation, and because I was a woman who carried a gun.

A giant chalk pentagram had been inscribed on the stone floor of this basement engine room. A ring of cloaked men lay crumpled like rag dolls around it. I saw no blood, but knew they were dead.

I noted the shattered window at the opposite end of the room, close to the ceiling and perhaps just at ground level. Tables had been pressed to the side of the room, butting against the analytical engines that lined the walls, most likely to make room for the ritual. A silver chalice, athame, and other occult tools lay on one of the tables. Someone had obviously placed them there—one of the police, perhaps. No Bell Detective would have dared molest a crime scene. 

In fact, the only Bell Detective in San Francisco, Detective Gurney, lay on his back at the side of the room with his head propped on a cushion. A physician knelt at his side, one hand pressed to the pulse on the detective’s wrist while the other held a pocket watch. The doctor looked at me wearily. “He is alive, but unconscious,” he told me, when I asked.

“And the rest of these men?”

“Dead. From no identifiable cause. It appears that their hearts simply stopped beating. No poison, no toxins. Nothing.”

I knelt at one dead man’s side and regarded the rictus of terror on his face. Something shiny on the ground at his side made me pause. I touched my fingers to it and curled my lip distastefully. It was saliva, viscous and spindly when I stretched it between my fingers. My eyes focused past it to a sequence of sigils inside the pentagram. I recognized one for “demon.”

A young policeman hovered nearby with one eye on me. Grimly, I faced him. “I would suggest getting everyone off the streets, including your men.” I walked off before he could respond, leaving him gaping at my back.

II.

A crackle in the air draws me from my reverie and away from the waterfront. I sprint across rooftops and at first cannot find the source of the energy that ripples over my skin. But then the screaming begins. The night is filled with the wails of people waking from nightmares. Lights blaze on behind windows. Babies cry. There is little rhyme or reason: First one street is affected, then another. The pattern snakes, until I realize I am following a trail. Something powerful is running purposelessly through the city.

I stop at a roof’s edge to pull in a long draught of air, but my nose is clogged with the stink of ozone. Alena will be out to hunt soon, if she is not on the case already. I cannot smell her cedarwood and muscle balm on the air, but then, the energy is too thick for me to smell anything at all. 

I turn toward the trail and follow it again. If she is out here, she will find whatever this is. I will come across it, or her, or both.

The city was awake and screaming. I raced up and down the streets as if through a nightmare, skin and hair prickling. I dodged the carcass of a horse in the street. The skin of its head had been slicked clean off, leaving dark red muscle and a staring white globe, but it was otherwise intact. Its flesh shone with saliva. Two blocks away, a beggar in rags lay on the ground. I would have missed him if not for the constellation of spilled coins glinting on the ground at his side. No blood, but dead. 

When newly invoked, demons had no appetite for flesh. Instead, they were ravenous for vices or base emotions. I wondered what this one preferred. Lust? Gluttony? Grief? No. With a cringe, I remembered the expression of terror on the dead cultist’s face. Fear. 

I had only fought a demon once before, but I remembered what Less had told of them: that, like spirits, they came from an ephemeral realm without physical form. I wonder what sort of wretched creature the cultists had forced this demon into. A dog? A man? An automaton? The thing was running blindly through the streets and kicking up a psychic dust cloud that was waking up every man, woman, and child in the city. It left little real destruction in its path. Most likely, it had not yet discovered that it could tear aside doors to reach the sweet feast inside. The trick was to slay it before it did.

I was alert to the shadows. Every dark form or small movement could be the demon, or fae, or my Gentleman Shadow—the only shadow I ever looked forward to seeing. He had been hunting with me for nearly a year, yet I had never seen more of him than a silhouette. 

I dreamed of him sometimes, my Shadow—wondering how he looked, if his face matched the low timbre of his voice. If he loved as skillfully as he fought. I doubted he was human. He moved too swiftly over rooftops and was far too nimble for that. Perhaps fae-touched like my mentor and old lover, Less—someone stolen by the fair folk and warped by their magic into something no longer wholly mortal.

I wondered where he was tonight. This city was as much his as it was mine; little went on that he did not know about. Could he feel the charge of magic in the air? Had he sought out the demon, like me, but been stripped by the thing? The thought of him lying like the horse on the paving stones made me cold.

The forested rise of Hill Park loomed before me, a black silhouette that swallowed much of the horizon. Shuttered carts lined the sidewalk that skirted the park’s base, home of puppet shows and refreshment stands during the day. Several of them lay in fresh splinters on the ground. 

A man’s scream—loud and near—rose suddenly from the depths of the park and was cut off sharply. I stopped short and stared into the blackness. The city had never deigned to light the park with lamps, so at night it remained a dangerous wilderness of beggars and shadows—and now, demons. I cursed under my breath.

A cold sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. I stood at the foot of the path that led up into the park, fidgeting to fit my lamp to its dock on the pistol. 

There came a crash, and the trees nearby swayed. I nearly leaped from my skin, but forced my hands steady. My lamp illuminated a dusky patch of foliage. Nothing was there.

“Going into the dark all alone?” rumbled a familiar voice from close behind me. The velvety words were both a shock and a relief. I whirled again, but my light illuminated nothing but the empty, misty street.

“Must you startle me always?” I demanded, voice loud and flat in the tense quiet of the night. “I’ve a loaded gun.”

His voice came from my left. “Perhaps I mean to startle that fear of darkness out of you.”

I turned. “I am not afraid of the dark.” But my voice was strained as I spoke the words. I scanned my surroundings with narrowed eyes, trying to calm my pounding heart. “Why do you always go about skulking in shadows, anyway?”

“To avoid that gun of yours.” He chuckled, voice now to my right. Farther away, in a voice almost too low to be heard, he added, “Perhaps to prove to you that not all things hidden in the dark are bad.”

His soft words hung between us on the fog. My heart leaped—this time, not from fear. A memory from my dream came to me: His black silhouette crouched close to me in bed, almost straddling me as he brushed my temple with his fingers. Yes, perhaps he could prove to me that something good could come from the dark. But still I frowned and snorted wryly, loudly for him to hear. “A fool’s errand.”

I feared that I had perhaps offended him, because he did not reply. At last, he said, “We will have to confront the creature in the park, else we chase it through the streets for the remainder of the night.”

I nodded, dread creeping up my limbs and back like a cold, winding vine. Swallowing my pride, I asked, “Cover my back?”

“But of course.”

My lamp lit a narrow path before me as I walked up the trail and into the park. The cold air seemed even chiller in the blackness under the trees. Somewhere nearby, my Gentleman Shadow tailed me. If he made a noise, it was drowned out by the tramping of my own feet. I felt conspicuously loud. 

I walked for some time, deeper and deeper, until I could turn in a full circle without seeing a hint of a street light. Dizziness washed over me. I leaned against a tree and cranked the lamp so that the beam shone brighter, but its light showed me nothing but tangles of branches and leaves. My lungs squeezed and I felt suddenly as if I was breathing through a straw. Be calm, I told myself, exhaling slowly. “Shadow?” I asked. My voice was small.

He spoke no reply. “Shadow?” I risked asking again, but still heard nothing. I was alone in the dark. 

My informal partner and I had bantered in the past—had even shared dark humor—but never had he played such an utterly cruel joke on me. I could only hope that it was a joke, and that he hadn’t— No. I had not heard noises of a struggle, so how could the demon have taken him?

I tried to cock my gun, but my muscles failed me. I could not move—only stood immobile where I steadied myself against the tree, ears straining.

Branches cracked. “Shadow?” I croaked.

A low, unearthly growl ground my nerves. I whirled and swung the beam of the lamp upward. It flashed against a large form arcing through the air toward me—two massive spread arms, washed-out orange fur, a yawning toothy maw.

“Alena!” cried Shadow, and a large, dark form dropped onto it from above. Two bodies merged into a pile on the ground—snarling, screaming, hissing. Nerveless and near-blind, I stared at the colorless forms that writhed in the dim light.

“Shoot!” yelled Shadow, voice surfacing from the fray.

I seized up. Shoot where? There was nowhere to shoot without hitting him.

“For God’s sake! Shoot! Shoot now!”

A godawful snarl startled me into action. My arms jerked into a shooting position and my fingers spasmed against the trigger. 

The night suddenly fell still. There was only the ringing in my ears after the report of the gun and the gentle drift of leaves to the ground. 

I ran to the bodies and dropped to my knees beside them, cursing as I pushed aside the ragged, furred form of a monstrous animal. Its arm fell away from its head, revealing a twisted face that had once belonged to a tiger. The demonic possession had warped it almost beyond recognition—maw too long and toothy, eyes livid even in death, claws too long to belong to any true cat. And underneath…

A crash of alarm in my gut. I looked down upon a grey face, a ridged nose, two delicate protruding canines, and a pair of horns that may have belonged to a devil.

“Gargoyle,” I hissed. My Gentleman Shadow, my hunting partner, was a creature of the night.

And he was beautiful. The heavy curve of his brow, his strong jaw and high cheekbones, the graceful point of his ears. No less human than Less—no less a man.

“Is that why you hid from me?” I asked aloud, alarmed tears welling in my eyes. He was still—very still. I pawed at his bare chest, searching for the movement of breath, but found nothing. I cursed him soundly. “You heartless monster, you hid from me, only to leave me once I discover your face? No. Things don’t work that way. I will breathe life into you if I have to.”

I lowered my lips to his and gathered my breath to fill his lungs.

III.

For a moment I am stunned. When I come to, Alena is kneeling over me, so close that I dare not breathe. The dynamo lamp shines on my face. Her hair brushes my cheek, and I smell her woody scent of cedar and muscle rub mixed with the sweat of her fear. I nearly groan aloud with my guilt at that—abandoning her in the dark as bait for the demon. But now it lies dead at my side and Alena is here, looking down upon me and not screaming. She presses her mouth to mine and I part my lips, my body flushing with a rush of warmth.

I squealed and recoiled at a gentle, cool exhalation against my mouth.

The gargoyle’s eyes opened and he stared lazily up at me. “Why did you move?” he murmured. It was my Shadow’s voice that rumbled under me.

I snatched my hands back as if his skin was a scalding boiler. “You tricked me!” 

“Oh no, no trick,” he said, wincing. “I was well and truly pinned by the thing.” His eyebrows furrowed. “Forgive me.”

“For what? Allowing an innocent woman to kiss you?”

“Innocent?” he grinned, and I nearly punched him. “No. I meant…for using you.”

“What?” I asked, carefully.

“As bait. Did you hear how the city screamed? This demon fed on fear, and in the dark…”

“I am terrified,” I finished for him. Numbly, I stared at him. I thought that maybe I should be angry, but suddenly I was too tired for any emotion. 

He frowned. “Forgive me,” he said again, and before I could reply, he pulled me close to him. My blood thrilled in my veins as he closed his mouth around mine, and this time I marveled at how soft his lips were, how velvety smooth his skin was under my hands. His mouth claimed mine—deeply but tenderly—as if he would suck away my fear and breathe strength back into me.

I gasped as he gently released me. “For that, never.”

With a look of dismay, he began to push me away, but I cradled his face and dipped my mouth to his. I smiled and added, “For that, you need no forgiveness.”