Dark Time: Mortal Path Read Online Free

she knew, was Patty’s. Easing the door open, she slipped inside.
    The curtains were open and a square of moonlight fell on the bed. A young girl was there, blanket thrown off on a sticky summer night, her nightgown twisted around her legs. Patty had turned fourteen a month ago. The faint odor of nail polish hung in the room. The top of her dresser was crowded with hairbrushes, bottles of cream, makeup, and a jewelry box a much younger girl would have, the kind with the dancing ballerina. Next to the jewelry box, in a prominent position, was a framed photo of the family, mother and father beaming as their daughter blew out the candles on her birthday cake. Susannah peered at the photo and counted the candles. Fourteen, plus one for good luck.
    Susannah had never had a birthday cake.
    Emily’s room was on the left side of the hall, the moon-dark side. Susannah let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness, and then stood just inside the room. The sleeping girl wore pajamas covered with sheep.
    Emily was seven, and the owner of seven times seven dolls. They were all over the room, propped on a dresser, piled on a chair, mounded at the foot of her bed. Sharing the dresser with half a dozen dolls was a photo of Emily with her father, dressed for Halloween as matching clowns, clowns with laughing eyes.
    The picture had a frame made of Popsicle sticks, glued on neatly except for one that sagged on the bottom. Susannah put her face up close to the framed picture, looking at the latticework of sticks. A few still had traces of orange on them, her favorite as well as the child’s.
    11 z 138
    2009-08-25 02:50

    Emily stirred in her bed, and Susannah backed out into the hall.
    Mary’s room was next on the left, closest to the master bedroom that was across the hall. The room was dark, like Emily’s, and the door was pulled mostly closed. Susannah put her hand on the door, but was suddenly reluctant to open it and enter. Instead she peeked in to see the dark-haired girl baby sleeping peacefully in the crib.
    As Constanta should have been.
    She pulled her hand away.
    A smell drifted from the room. Mary needed a diaper change and might wake soon, crying because of that or hunger or the pure cussedness of being eight months old.
    In the master bedroom, Katherine DiNina wore a delicate nightgown that the moonlight turned the color of old blood. She had a few extra pounds on her, no doubt a result of cooking to please a family, and a sweet face that wasn’t quite beautiful. Black hair spread over the pillow. Pictures of her family crowded the top of her dresser, but the side of the bed where her husband slept was empty. Her arm rested across the space where he should be. Susannah’s gaze fastened on a Moonbeam alarm clock on a stand next to the bed. The lighted clock face said 2:45. Susannah had a clock exactly like it. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh scents of soap and shampoo. This woman went to bed clean, ready to embrace her husband.
    Thoughts tickled the back of Susannah’s brain. From the infant girl to the mother’s black hair, this family could have been hers and Nathan’s, in a different time. The pain of remembrance coursed through her in a way that it hadn’t in centuries.
    My job is to destroy this family, so like mine could have been. These people are like piers of a bridge. Yank one out and the bridge is unstable. That’s what I’ve been doing since I became Ageless, I just never thought of it that way. One strike, one kill—but a cascade of ruined lives.
    It was time to leave.
    As Susannah retraced her path, she understood why the man of the house, Lorenzo “Ledger”
    DiNina, had made a deal with the Feds to turn on Adamo Tenaglia, a ruthless crime boss. He did it for the four dark-haired females in this house, who meant more to Ledger than his life did.

    A week later, she ran on a dusty road, breathing evenly, enjoying the feelings of her muscles moving and blood pumping.
    It was half an hour past