Chapter 3

Heather burst into the room. "For the last time, Melinda, NO!"

Melinda stomped over the threshold on Heather's heels as her older sister dropped her backpack on the floor near her bed. "Why the hell not, Heather?!" Melinda yelled, her face scrunched up in indignation.

Heather whirled around and plopped herself down on her bed with an exasperated sigh. "I've told you several times already why! It's too risky!"

Melinda shrugged the straps of her backpack from her shoulders and threw it as far as her diminutive frame would allow. It bounced once off the bed and crashed to the floor beyond it. It bumped against a torchiere lamp, making it briefly list to one side before it swayed back upright again.

"Yeah, nice going, runt," Heather muttered, lying back on the bed with her legs still dangling off the side.

"Shut up!" Melinda snapped.

Heather frowned and propped herself up on her elbows behind her. "Huh?"

"How many times do I have to tell you, you bubblehead?! We're not doing that until we can figure out a way to make it safe!"

Heather looked at her sister in confusion for a moment, then rolled her eyes. "I don't mean that."

Some of Melinda's anger faded from her eyes. "You better not be," she said, her voice still sharp. "I've told you a million times that I don't want to get pregnant, so I don't take him inside me. As much as I want to, dammit, I don't."

"All right, I get the picture. Anyway, I'm not worried about that, runt. I'm worried about Mom and Dad."

"They're not even here!"

"But we don't know if they'll decide to return at any time. Not after Dad decided to work from home." Heather frowned. "And you can bet Mom made him decide that!"

Melinda shuddered. The thing she hated the most about the incident with Nyssa was the revelation that her mother had fallen too deeply into the Darkness to be trusted. It was obvious that Penny was influencing her husband David to simply not notice anything that was happening. Now she had managed to persuade him to change his work routine in a major way, even to the point of accepting the expense of a broadband connection, something she had always maintained they simply did not need.

"So, no, Melinda, you can't have your little fuck session with him after the meeting."

Melinda's anger was promptly rekindled. "Fine! If you won't let us have the bedroom, we'll just do it in the living room. Or the basement."

"No way, Melinda!" Heather said, springing to her feet. "I'm not letting you two do it anywhere in this house."

"You're being so totally unfair about this!"

"I'm thinking of your safety, that's all!"

"Jason thinks it's okay, why don't you?"

Heather rolled her eyes again. "Oh come on, runt. You have him so wrapped around your little finger he'd jump out the window if you just bat your eyes at him and whine enough."

Melinda blushed. "I do not!" she screeched.

"It doesn't matter. He's not the one deciding this, I am."

Melinda clenched her hands into fists. "The hell you are!"

"Melinda, I'm warning you, don't defy me on this..."

"Or what?! What are you going to do? Run to Mom? Run to Dad? Face it, we can do anything the hell we want as long as it doesn't involve the Harbingers."

Heather sighed and covered her eyes with her hand. "Melinda..."

"This is not fair, Heather," Melinda whined, her eyes glistening. "Come on, please ... I haven't had sex with him in days..."

Heather snorted. "Big fucking deal. I haven't done it since Nyssa left."

Melinda looked shocked. "What??"

"Yeah, that's right, runt," Heather said, her voice quavering as she folded her arms, trying to look defiant. "Nothing for two weeks. So forgive me if I don't have any sympathy for..."

"And you're going to stop me and Jason just because you're not getting any?!"

"That's not true! That is not the reason I'm doing this!"

Melinda's eyes widened. "Yes it is! Yes it is! You little fink!"

"I said it's not true!"

"Then why are you blushing?!"

Heather opened her mouth and paused a long moment, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Her arms tightened around herself and she took in a deep breath. "I'm ... I'm not..." she said in a weak voice.

"Yes, you are! Come on, fess up, Heather! You're the one that liked to be horizontal all the time with Brad the Wonder Chimp."

"What, you think I'm going to just fall into bed with anyone?" Heather said indignantly, though her voice was rapidly losing its conviction. Her eyes were fixed on Melinda, growing dark and sultry. "I'm not like that, Melinda. I have to have some feelings for someone first."

"And I don't for Jason? Come on, you know ... you..."

Melinda trailed off. Her lips parted slightly.

"What?" Heather asked.

"Stop it!"

"Stop what?"

"You're doing it again. Again!"

Heather tried to open her mouth again to voice a protest, but no words would come to her. She knew she should avert her eyes, but she could not bring herself to do it. Her gaze first fixed on the rise and fall of the swells of Melinda's breasts, then on the curve of her hips.

"What's your excuse now, huh?" Melinda demanded, though some of the edge to her voice was lost as well. "I'm not naked. I'm not even dressed in anything revealing."

"I-I know. I'm not ... I'm not interested either."

"Liar."

"Melinda, really, I'm not. I don't know where you're getting this idea. I'm not interested in having sex with you."

Melinda's eyes widened a touch and her cheeks grew faintly pink. The hands that had been curled into fists loosened. "I don't believe you. You've been doing something to me the past week."

Heather took another deep breath, letting it go through her nose. "Just your imagination," she said in a soft voice.

Melinda swallowed. "Y-you're still doing it."

"Then run away," Heather snapped. "If you're so afraid I'm going to make you start licking my pussy or something, then..."

Melinda uttered a strained sigh and collapsed into a nearby chair. She dropped her face into her hands and shivered. "Oh God, Heather..."

"You're horny, aren't you?"

Melinda's cheeks flushed again. "Only because you made me, you b-bubblehead," she said, her voice husky.

"I'm sorry," Heather breathed. "I-I can't help it. I've tried ... I've tried..."

Melinda closed her eyes and shook her head violently before turning away from Heather.

"Please, it's not my fault. It's something left over from..."

"You want to make me into your slave again, don't you?"

Heather looked horrified. "No! No, Melinda, I never wanted to do that!"

Melinda swallowed again. Her pussy grew hot and achy. "I wish I could believe you, Heather."

"Melinda ... we have to do something about this..."

Melinda shook her head again, rust-brown hair flying. She was panting lightly.

"I can't keep going like this. Seeing you all the time and feeling like..."

Melinda shuddered and squirmed in her seat, her panties squishing against her slit. "I can't."

"You want to, Melinda, you can't tell me you don't."

"You made me."

"But ... b-but does it matter? I..."

Melinda's head whipped around. Fury and lust both burned in her eyes. She bolted out of her seat, staggering a bit when her thighs gave her swollen cunt a squeeze that sent another shiver of unwanted pleasure through her. "You're all hot and bothered? That's your problem! You go find someone to fuck. Leave me out of it!"

Before Heather could say another word, Melinda fled.

Heather fell back onto the edge of the bed. Her hands dropped into her lap, her legs spread apart to relieve some of the pressure. She had to resist the urge to touch herself.

She stared at the seat that Melinda had vacated. She wished she did not have to impose this on Melinda. She really wished she could have something -- or someone -- else to distract her.

Heather stood up and headed into the bathroom to make herself presentable for the meeting. In more ways than one.

Richie was inside the house before the bus had barely left the curb, and then on the stairs before the front door had finished swinging closed behind him. He bounded up the stairs two at a time, barely stepped across the threshold to unceremoniously dump his backpack inside, and turned back the way he came only a second after it thumped to the floor.

In less than a minute since he had entered the house, he was already on his way out, stomping down the steps as if emphasizing his desire to remove himself from the place. Richie took the last three steps in a single leap, landing with a heavy thump that made the plastic flowers in a nearby vase rustle, and raced for the door.

"Hey!"

Richie suddenly stopped and whirled around.

Sandra Gardner had emerged from the kitchen, a frown marring an otherwise attractive face under a fall of dirty-blonde hair. Fraying denim cutoffs hugged her hips, a tank top wrapped tightly around the large swells of her breasts, her feet bare. She lifted a can of beer to her lips and tipped it back, taking a long swig before speaking to her son again. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Out. See ya." Richie saluted her and turned towards the door.

"Wait a minute. Did you just get home?"

Richie stomped to a halt again and sighed. "No, I've been hidin' in the basement all day."

"Don't be a fucking wiseass, Richie, I'm not in the mood for it."

"Why? The job workin' ya too hard? That why you're home now?"

"Never mind why I'm home," Sandra snapped. "I told you, my work is none of your fucking business."

Richie said nothing in reply. There was no point. Her mother knew better than to make further pretense anyway. She supposedly worked for a cleaning service. Richie was sure there was more to it than that.

Richie tried not to look at his mother's eyes. That would just make the Dark Aura go away.

He used to think he didn't want to see it around his own mother. Looking intently enough into someone's eyes was a way of negating the perception of the Aura. It made it vanish from the senses for a short time. It was still there, but simply masked from sight for a bit. When he had first started seeing it around his mother, he had wanted nothing more than to stop seeing it.

Now it was the opposite. He wanted to make sure it was there all the time. He didn't want to take the chance that he might think his mother was actually someone worth caring about.

And he knew perfectly well why she was home. It was to prevent the Harbingers from thinking of using that house as a meeting place. It was the only reason that made sense to him. Jason never mentioned it when Richie first told them that his mother's schedule had abruptly changed, but Richie had figured it out for himself.

"Why do you wanna know where I'm going?" Richie demanded.

"Well, funny thing is, Richie, that I have this job called 'mother.' And it requires I know where the hell you are."

Richie bit back any of the usual responses critical of her capacity in that role. Despite his sharp tongue now, this was actually a far more civil attitude than he had had towards her for some time. But it didn't mean that he was going to be any more direct with her, either.

"I'm gonna go off and join the boy scouts, okay?"

"What, you need a merit badge in smartass or something?" She downed the rest of her beer. "You got one more chance to tell me where you're going or you ain't goin' nowhere, got it?"

Richie fumed, his fingers curling into fists. He would have loved to have told her what she could do with that threat. It was not like she had any real power over him, or so he believed.

"I'm gonna go see some friends, that's all, Mom."

"Yeah? Which friends?"

"What diff does it make, huh?! Shit!"

"Which friends, Richie?"

Richie was not sure how to answer. This was the first time that his mother had bothered to ask. As much as he was at odds with the Harbingers, he didn't want to be the one that brought the Darkness down on them all.

"Just Jason. Mebbe his girlfriend. Dunno about anyone else."

Sandra appeared to pause for a moment. A peculiar look came across her face, as if she were struggling with conflicting thoughts in her head. "Jason, you said?"

Richie paused, feeling a twinge of anxiety. "Um, yeah, Jason. Why?"

Sandra took a half-step to the side, as if having caught herself before stumbling. Richie eyed her and then the empty can. For a moment, Richie thought she was drunk, but she looked too lucid and her speech sounded too clear for that.

In the air surrounding Sandra, the Darkness shuddered.

"What?" Richie said more insistently, his heart pounding. "What about Jason?"

"Nothing!" Sandra cried, exasperated, looking flustered. "Fine. Just ... j-just go. But get your fucking butt back here by sunset."

"But why were you so interested in..."

"Shut up and get out of my face, all right?!" Sandra yelled. She retreated into the kitchen, her Dark Aura roiling and writhing behind her. Richie heard the sound of the empty can being violently tossed into the garbage bin.

Richie frowned and headed out.

"Now, Jason, don't stay out too late," said Audrey Conner as she followed her son from the foot of the stairs to the door.

Jason turned at the door and smiled. "I won't, Mom, I promise. Anything you want me to get you on the way home?"

"No, that's fine, I'm planning a big shopping trip tomorrow. You can come along and help me with that."

"Sure thing, Mom. Anything else?"

Audrey gave her son a faint smile. The auburn-haired woman was still a bit surprised at this turnaround in her son's attitude. Only a few weeks ago he had seemed sullen and withdrawn. And before that, during the summer...

Well, the less she thought about that, the less likely she was to fear her son again.

"No, honey, that's all. Thank you for being thoughtful." She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

Jason smiled again. He was grateful for the show of affection.

He had reason to be. His mother was unaffected by the Darkness thus far, and he kept a close eye on her to make sure she stayed that way. He never saw even a trace of a Dark Aura on her. It was a sort of anchor for him. If he could rely on just one person in his life never falling to the Darkness, it gave him some measure of hope.

But what also motivated him was guilt.

During the incident with the House, Jason had used its power on her mother when she tried to take the internet from him. She didn't understand exactly what he had done to her or how, but it had instilled a fear of him just the same. After nearly losing everything to Nyssa, he realized that he didn't want this situation to continue any longer. But without the power, he could not simply will his mother into normalcy. He had to work at it instead.

"Well, I'll see you later, Mom."

"I'll close the door for you."

Jason headed into the garage and mounted his bike in one smooth motion. He was pedaling fast out onto the driveway barely seconds after the door opened completely.

Jason felt he had good reason to worry about his mother. Where she was innocent of the Darkness, his father was another matter. But it was worse than Richie's mother, or at least he felt this way. Where Sandra was a slave to the Darkness, Henry Conner was willingly working for it.

Jason could tell this from the patterns he saw in the Aura. He alone out of the Harbingers had this ability. He could tell who was a slave, and who was a collaborator. And for the former, he could "hear" the Darkness as it "spoke" to its slave.

He had no idea what his father was doing for the Darkness. He was a neurosurgeon that worked at the downtown hospital, apparently doing some research whose purpose he would not disclose. That was as much as he knew. His father had yet to take an active hand in trying to stop Jason from fighting the Darkness.

Jason pedaled his bike down the street, and it was not long before he was out of sight of his house. He really didn't need his bike for this short trip. But it gave his mother the impression that he was going further afield, so she would not criticize him for getting "too serious" about his girlfriend Melinda.

Jason slowed his pace when he saw the long, black limo parked at the curb just short of the intersection with the avenue that ran by both the Sovert and Gardner households. Here, the car was just out of sight of anyone walking down that avenue unless they turned the corner.

As soon as Jason came alongside the limo, he hit the brake and skidded to a halt just as the window in the rear seat slid down.

"Anything?" Jason called out.

Cassie's face appeared at the window. "Jason, he stayed after with Miss Davis today," she said in a distressed voice. Behind her, a lanky girl in the shadows waved.

Jason nodded to her. "Hey, Diane. Cassie, did Richie do anything else with her?"

"It was hard to tell. I only listened from the hall. I didn't want to take the chance on being seen."

"Did you get a look at Miss Davis?"

"Briefly. I tried to go and talk to her after Richie was gone, but she shooed me out of the room. She was trying to hide it, but she was upset."

Jason sighed. "Damn him," he muttered.

"Jason, I don't know if Richie actually did anything to her. I mean, he had two weeks to try anything. Why only now?"

"Yeah, but I put you on watching him only in the last week or so."

"Maybe it was perfectly innocent."

Cassie hated the idea that Richie was backsliding. While she was not as enamored of him as she once was, she didn't want to be unkind towards him.

And the truth was, Jason did this at Melinda's insistence. Linda Davis was her favorite teacher, and she grew increasingly paranoid that Richie was going to take advantage of any lingering influence. Cassie had agreed to do it largely because the class she had at the same time put her just across the hall from Richie's anyway.

"Yeah, I wish I could believe that," Jason said. He was still angry over the way Richie had dismissed their attempts to stand up to the Darkness when he had intercepted his friend on the way to Linda's house to complete her enslavement. He wanted to believe that Richie was trying to do better, but Melinda was still so vociferous in her hatred of him, and he held Melinda's opinions in high regard lately.

"So we keep an eye on him still?" Cassie asked in a tired voice.

"Not much else we can do. All right, we have to get this meeting started. I'll just meet you over there."

Jason was pedaling away even as he uttered the final sentence.

"All right ... well ... the first thing is, though most of you already know this by now, is that it's definitely Melissa Hendell."

Even though she had been expecting it, Diane met Jason's words with a terrible sense of disappointment. She flopped back against her seat on the sofa, wrapping her arms around herself. She seemed to draw herself in, as if trying not to touch either the hand rest on one side or Heather on the other. She couldn't even bring herself to look at Heather. She averted her gaze to the other side of the room, where Richie sat alone in a chair borrowed from the dining room.

"So someone saw her black shit?" Richie called out.

"Oh yeah," Ned said, nodding his head. He squatted on the floor next to the chair in which Cassie sat. "More black than the inside of a bowling ball warehouse at night in the middle of a power outage."

Cassie's lips curled into a tiny smile and she had to resist the impulse to giggle. "It's pretty bad, yes," she commented.

"God, who hasn't seen it?" Melinda piped, leaning against Jason and shivering.

"I haven't," Diane said glumly.

Heather turned her head and looked at her friend with concern. Diane's eyes flicked to her and then darted away. "You mean you haven't run into her yet?" Heather asked hopefully.

Diane sighed, feeling her cheeks flush. She hated being put on the spot like this. "I mean, I can't."

"You still can't?" Melinda asked, surprised. "Why not?"

"Melinda, shut up," Heather snapped.

"Don't tell me to shut up! You're not the boss here, Jason is!"

"Look, everyone just stop, okay?" Diane called out in desperation. Her eyes shimmered as she looked at the others. She sighed and stood up. "I'll just leave. I'm sorry."

"Diane, no. Wait, Diane!" Heather bolted out of her seat and stepped in front of her friend. "Please, I..."

"Heather, I was looking right at her!" Diane cried. "She was right in front of me! I could almost reach out and touch her, I was so close. I saw nothing."

"Diane, that's dangerous. You know ... you know what she might ... I mean, what she can do..."

Diane shook her head. "No, forget it. I can't stay here when I'm totally useless."

"Diane, wait, " Heather grabbed Diane's arm when the lanky girl started to edge around her.

"Come on, Diane, ya don't hafta leave," Ned said. "So ya can't see the spooky black stuff. It's overrated, anyway."

"Diane, you helped me free one of the others from Nyssa!" Cassie called out. "That wasn't useless!"

Melinda's eyes just flicked between the two older girls. She had never been a big fan of Diane. Most of the time Heather was tying up the phone line, it was Diane with whom she was conversing. Also, if Melinda were unfortunate enough to be in the same room with both of them, their teasing was so merciless it sometimes drove her to tears.

That was before the House happened, but it was a recent enough memory that it still hurt. She bit her lip, unsure of what to say or do.

"But I can't see the Darkness," Diane said, her voice quavering. "All of you can. I'm just going to wind up getting someone in trouble for having to go save me or something like that."