After Darkness Falls: After Darkness Falls Book One Read online

  After Darkness Falls

  (After Darkness Falls #1)

  May Sage

  Cover by Clarissa Yeo of Yocla Designs

  Photography by Lindee Robinson

  Edited by Cara Quinlan

  Proofread by Theresa Schultz

  ISBN: 978-1-912415-86-1

  Contents

  Title Page

  1. Eastbound

  2. The City of Blood

  3. A Hidden World

  4. The Institute

  5. Wings and Smiles

  6. Two Sides

  7. Seven Names

  8. Perspective

  9. A Stranger in the Night

  10. One Step at a Time

  11. Red Doors

  12. Priorities

  13. Oaths

  14. A Little Detour

  15. An Unexpected Bequest

  16. Battle Plan

  17. One Notable Professor

  18. Irritated

  19. Blades and Fangs

  20. Beyond the Veil

  21. Numbers

  22. The Path

  23. Quasi-reasonable

  24. A Bad Idea

  25. An Engrossing Tale

  26. A Portrait

  27. Blood and Cashmere

  28. Alive

  29. A Conversation

  30. Scent

  31. On Night Hill

  32. A Blood Stone

  33. Control

  34. One Course

  35. A Voice in the Darkness

  36. Monsters

  37. Newborn

  38. Pointy Things

  39. Dominion

  40. A New Beginning

  41. Claim

  Untitled

  Untitled

  If you enjoyed After Darkness Falls…

  King of Ruin

  To my brother-in-law, Antoine, and my sister, Eva, who are fighting a battle with the bravery of warriors.

  * * *

  Eastbound

  Just because a piece of advice was given by a serial killer didn’t necessarily mean that it was wrong.

  Chloe’s father used to say, “If your day sucks, concentrate on one thing you can look forward to, and you’ll get through it.” At the time, she hadn’t known that he’d been distracting himself from his dreary routine by imagining what torture he’d administer to the victims he kept locked in the storm cellar, but still. Great advice.

  She put it into practice, trying to forget why she was on a plane for the first time in her life and focusing on new experiences, and the destination. She managed a smile. Seven years ago, she might have even broken into a victory dance. Now, at twenty-five, after working her ass off night and day to pay the bills, a smile was all she had.

  She'd changed. Not all of it was for the worse. Chloe was mature enough to recognize that she'd been self-centered in her teens; otherwise, she would have noted the strange things—the smells, the disappearances, the odd noises that didn't quite sound like they’d come from a TV. But she'd been too busy studying in her room, music blasting in her earphones, to care about what her father was doing.

  Her world imploded in so many ways. With a father arrested, and then convicted as a serial killer, she never had a chance. The colleges that had shown some interest in her were all quick to dispatch rejection letters. None of her personal achievements had mattered in the end. Grades, chess, track, debate clubs—all had been for naught. She was George Miller's daughter, and that was that. The name stuck to her skin like a bad scent.

  Her brother disappeared that same year. She couldn't really blame him. She also would have poofed into thin air, if she'd known how. Instead, Chloe had to grow up fast. She sold the house, sending all the profits to the victims’ families to pay for their funerals and everything else they had to deal with in the aftermath. That hadn’t stopped them from sending insults and threats, but they kept the money, and hopefully it helped. Then, Chloe left Colorado with her beat-up Beetle, her old cat, and a backpack in the trunk. Fast-forward seven years, and she was doing okay.

  But okay had never been her aspiration.

  Chloe soon found out that some people were more understanding than others. While humans—regular humans like her—weren’t entirely welcoming to the daughter of a cannibalistic murderer, sups didn't seem to care.

  Since the Age of Blood, when the supernaturals had announced their existence to the world, they'd mostly kept to themselves, living in gated, tight-knit communities, but occasionally, someone who didn't fit in joined the regular human world. In her travels, Chloe met some shifters, mostly loners. They were a little unsettling at first, but she soon started to seek them out purposely. She preferred their company to the judgmental people who blamed her for someone else's sins. Sups entirely shrugged off her history.

  They all had a horrific story about an uncle, cousin, or sister who'd gone rogue. Among sups, all that mattered was your own actions.

  "One of my brothers went feral. He tried to eat my da'. We hunted him down, though."

  Some people said sups disliked regulars, pushed them away. From Chloe’s experience, they just stayed away from assholes. She had no fur, no claws, no sharp teeth, and they'd been welcoming enough.

  It was no wonder that the first time she’d settled down someplace for an extended period, she'd ended up working in a bar owned by a vampire and frequented by supernatural creatures.

  Chloe was incredibly grateful for the chain of events that had led her to her place of employment. If not for her boss, Charles, she would be dead by now.

  She didn't know why it had taken so long, but someone had finally placed a hit on her, and now thugs were trying to hurt her.

  The families of her father’s victims weren't satisfied with her apologies, her money, or the fact that George was on death row, waiting for his comeuppance. They wanted her life as payment for the ones George had taken from them.

  Chloe didn't know who had raised the bounty; any of the dozens of people her father had wronged could have been responsible. Charles was still looking into it. But she'd been attacked seven times in the last month.

  After the first incident, Charles put a close protection officer on duty around her at all times—that meant hiring three guards who could take turns. He couldn't keep those resources focused on one waitress forever.

  She'd expected him to fire her, or just tell her to sort out her mess herself. Instead, the vampire who ruled over the supernatural factions of NOLA waved his fairy godmother’s wand and made her wildest dreams come true. All right, not literally—although Chloe would have been surprised if Charles didn't own a wand, or a fairy costume. The man loved his masquerades.

  Even in her youth, as sure as she'd been of her own intellect, her GPA, her list of extracurricular activities, there was one college she never would have applied to, knowing she had zero chance of being accepted.

  The Institute of Supernatural Studies.

  She didn't even qualify, because any submission needed to be sponsored by two supernaturals, and she’d known none in her teens.

  The Institute was one of only a handful of colleges run by sups, and its alumni ruled the world. Not many regulars were accepted, but those who graduated with one of the Institute’s degrees became presidents, Fortune 500 owners, foreign diplomats. Even the occasional king.

  Chloe never truly gave up on her aspirations; it wasn’t in her nature. She’d always wanted to be successful, driven by a need to prove herself, so she signed up for online undergrad studies after her father's arrest. She had a hard time paying for the tuition and studying while working full time to support herself, but she finally got her BA last year.


  She'd toyed with the idea of starting a post-grad course. It wouldn't hurt. If she had an MBA, maybe someday Charles would promote her within his small empire. Never in a thousand years would she have thought that she'd get to work on her degree at the Institute.

  “It's a fortress,” Charles had told her. “No human can reach you there. I made a few phone calls. Chelle likes you; she said she'd vouch for you too.”

  To the rest of the world, Chelle was Michelle White, the queen of the witch covens of Louisiana and a frequent customer at Sucker Punch, the bar where Chloe worked.

  Chloe liked Chelle, if only because the woman was kind, tipped well, and never acted superior, but they didn’t know each other well. The one true interaction between them had been over a year ago, when Miss Prissy Paws, Chloe’s seventeen-year-old cat, had been ill. Chloe took her to the vet, and the scans revealed a footlong list of issues associated with her eyes. They said the kind thing would have been to put her down.

  Chloe couldn’t even recall a time when she hadn’t had Priss. She didn’t even think. The pet carrier against her chest, she walked right out of the vet and into Michelle White’s distinguished home.

  She’d left without her cat. Because the moment Priss had come to, after the healing, she’d jumped on Chelle’s lap and claimed a new owner.

  Animals took to witches, sometimes. Chelle apologized profusely, but Chloe had just been glad Priss was healthy and happy.

  Still. That the queen would go through the trouble of writing her a recommendation blew her mind.

  Chloe had refused to let herself believe that her luck could finally have turned, that she could really have a future—a good one that didn't involve her killing her back, legs, and wrists while sleazy assholes called her names and touched her ass. She didn't have a thing against waitresses—they were practically saints for putting up with the amount of crap customers dished out at them—but God, she really, really didn't want to do it until retirement.

  Telling herself that she might get into the Institute, and then having to face disappointment when the refusal came, was not something she wanted to go through again.

  But the letter that had arrived from England had started with "Congratulations."

  If someone had told her seven years ago that she’d be admitted to the Institute someday, she would have snorted and recommended that they lay off dodgy mushrooms.

  There were a lot of things she wouldn’t have foreseen back then.

  Now she was heading to another country, where the name George Miller meant nothing, and Chloe Miller, even less.

  This was a chance, a new beginning, and she wasn't messing it up. Even if it killed her.

  Chloe grinned as the customs employee stamped the very first inked logo onto her brand-new passport.

  "Welcome to London, miss."

  He smiled pleasantly as he handed the documents back to her.

  "Thank you. Glad to be here. Anything I shouldn't miss while I'm in the city?"

  It occurred to her then that the tall, handsome man with sun-kissed skin, Indian features, and a delightful British accent was part of the border force, not a tourist guide, but, as always, her tongue had worked faster than her brain.

  The man leaned forward, lowering his voice to a whisper.

  "You want to take a hop-on hop-off tour; it'll stop at every landmark so you can get off and visit. And if you're into that sort of thing," he added with a wink, "there's also ghost tours."

  She beamed, glad she’d asked. Ghost tours.

  "Thank you, Henry," she said, glancing at his name tag. "You have a good day."

  “Same to you, miss.”

  He tilted his hat and rearranged his features into a severe expression before calling the next traveler forward.

  As she only had a backpack, she headed right out of the terminal and took the train from Heathrow to Paddington, in great spirits and ready to immerse herself in the unfamiliar city.

  Chloe had slept most of the six-hour flight, which had left at seven in the evening and arrived at seven the next morning. What a headache. It was now one in the morning back in Louisiana, and if she hadn't crashed, the jet lag would have been a thousand times worse.

  She felt a wave of gratitude toward the stranger who’d written the highly detailed correspondence to her. Along with her acceptance letter, the Institute had added a thick envelope with the most useful welcome pack she’d ever seen. Bubbliness oozed from each of the three pages of longhand advice written on thick, grained paper by someone named Blair Lawson, who perfumed her letters and sealed them with wax and a bit of lavender.

  Blair was Chloe's mentor. On the first line of her long message, she informed Chloe that this was her second time mentoring, and that the subject of her first mentee should never, ever be mentioned. And then, she merrily launched into what she called the "Survival Manual 101."

  Bullet point seventeen said, "Travel: crash on your way to Europe. As a general rule, I find that if I'm going to the right side of the globe, I need to sleep and bring on the coffee."

  Chloe hadn't been sure she'd be able to sleep in the plane, but the comfortable business-class seats were better than her bed back home.

  She owed that, and so much more, to her boss. She never would have been able to pay for the cross-Atlantic travel on such short notice, on top of all her expenses. The school was funded by its alumni and didn't accept tuition fees from students, but still, the dorms and meal plans hadn't been cheap. Charles had made it a non-issue on the very day she received her acceptance letter.

  "Chelle and I are your sponsors. You need something, you let us know. I'll book your tickets to London. From there, one of Chelle's contacts will pick you up and take you to the Institute."

  "Will I have time to see the city?"

  Chloe had felt pretty selfish the moment the words had crossed her mouth. She owed Charles and Chelle enough, and this wasn't a vacation—she was being hidden because her family's mess had blown up in her face.

  Charles had just shrugged. "For a couple of days, sure. Wear a hat, no pictures on social media, and you're good. I don't think whoever's looking for you will think to check another country quite yet. Chelle will give you an address. When you're ready, head there."

  So now, she had two days to enjoy London.

  The City of Blood

  Chloe didn't think that two months in the city would have been enough. She loved standing in the middle of the bridges, fresh air on her skin, watching the River Thames.

  She visited Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London, and wished she also had time for Hampton Court, Windsor, and Kensington. She watched three plays, two ballet performances, and a pantomime—seeing one of those was enough to realize that she didn't need to watch any more. She might have loved it at six years old, though. Chloe ate at an Indian restaurant—the best kind of British food, according to everyone she talked to at the Bayswatter hostel where she crashed at night—and had Sunday lunch at a pub, as well as a fish and chips in the street.

  Her first weekend abroad would have been perfect, if January wasn’t so very cold. Thirty-two to forty degrees—or, in Europe, zero to four degrees. She was great with numbers, but getting used to thinking in pounds, grams, and Celsius would take a while.

  The two days practically flew by, and then she had to return to reality—a reality where she was knocking on a witch coven's door to find someone who'd take her to a college mostly accepting supernatural creatures. It was time to head to the Institute.

  Chloe should have been afraid, like any normal person. But if she searched her feelings, she only found anticipation.

  As she neared the address Charles had given her, she grew more surprised, and slightly concerned that she might have wandered into the wrong area. The neighborhood definitely didn't look like her idea of a witch's coven.

  In New Orleans, the witches didn’t even attempt to blend in. Their houses were painted red or black or purple, and mysterious signs hung on their doo
rs. But the quiet residential street off Regent's Park Road in Primrose Hill could hardly have been more inconspicuous, with rows of identical handsome white houses with tiny enclosed gardens at the front barely wider than the sidewalk.

  Something felt wrong.

  At Number 87, her destination, Chloe found the little gate of the half-meter-tall black fence around the miniscule lawn open. She looked up toward the house. A couple of steps led to a dark green front door that was also ajar.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with leaving your door open, per se. Chloe had been guilty of that plenty of times back in her small town. But one wouldn’t expect that type of behavior in a city. Besides, a bad feeling had been making her stomach churn since the moment she’d turned onto the residential street.

  After a moment of hesitation, Chloe pulled her phone from her pocket, finger hovering over Charles's number. Not that he could do anything from all the way back in the States, but if anything happened to her, at least he'd know.

  Chloe felt her heart beating in her ears as she crossed the paved path. At the door, she gasped.

  There was a body. A person, definitely dead, judging by the amount of blood coagulating on the carpeted floor. Then, her eyes traveled further into the house to see that the body wasn’t alone. There were two others just in the hallway: a man pinned to the wall by a long knife, and a woman on her back. Chloe couldn’t see any wounds from where she stood, but the absolute stillness was telling.