Beyond the Dark Read online

  What can you feel in the dark? How far are you willing to go beyond it?

  Angela Knight does it…in the psychic realm of a woman attuned to the touch of strangers—and the powerful temptations of a seductive and mysterious protector.

  Emma Holly does it…in the fantastic demon world where a powerful queen rules—until she commits the sin of falling in love with the handsome son of her worst enemy.

  Lora Leigh does it…in the domain of a strange Breed, part man, part wolf, on the hunt for the woman he craves—and needs—to fulfill a hunger clawing at him from within.

  Diane Whiteside does it…in an alternate universe of Regency magic where two lovers are threatened by a vicious mage and swept up in a turbulent war off the Cornish cliffs.

  Beyond the Dark

  ANGELA KNIGHT

  EMMA HOLLY

  LORA LEIGH

  DIANE WHITESIDE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2007 by The Berkley Publishing Group

  “Dragon Dance” by Angela Knight copyright © 2007 by Julie Woodcock

  “Caught by the Tides” by Diane Whiteside copyright © 2007 by Diane Whiteside

  “Queen of All She Surveys” by Emma Holly copyright © 2007 by Emma Holly

  “In a Wolf’s Embrace” by Lora Leigh copyright © 2007 by Christina Simmons

  Cover art by Don Sipley

  Cover design by George Long

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY SENSATION is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Knight, Angela.

  Beyond the dark / Angela Knight…[et al.]—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(Berkley Sensation paranormal romance)

  ISBN: 1-101-15793-3

  I. Title.

  PS3611.N557B49 2007

  813’.6—dc22

  2007029889

  CONTENTS

  Dragon Dance

  Angela Knight

  Caught by the Tides

  Diane Whiteside

  Queen of All She Surveys

  Emma Holly

  In a Wolf’s Embrace

  Lora Leigh

  Dragon Dance

  Angela Knight

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sergeant Arial Dean strode toward the command van, the beam of a flashlight bouncing ahead of her, illuminating dead brush and icy ground. For once she was grateful for the heavy weight of the bulletproof vest that provided extra warmth in the December cold. In summer, the vest quickly became a sodden, sweaty mini-sauna, tolerable only because it kept her from taking a round in the chest.

  The white, blocky bulk of the RV loomed before her, emblazoned with the gold and blue James County Sheriff’s Office shield that matched the badge on Arial’s blue-jeaned waist. She hesitated at the narrow door and scanned the surrounding woods. Through the skeletal winter branches, a double-wide mobile home sat gleaming in the moonlight. White icicle lights hung from its eaves, their dim glow illuminating the beer cans lying in the patchy grass.

  The patrol cars that were parked up and down the road weren’t visible from the double-wide. Neither were the SWAT team members who’d surrounded the trailer in their black fatigues, lying belly-down and patient in the frosty leaves, rifles at the ready.

  The sheriff was being extremely low key. Arial approved. The last thing they needed was to spook the asshole in the trailer into doing something stupid. They needed him to start using his pea brain before somebody got killed.

  Like the little girls he’d taken hostage.

  Arial slapped a hand on the RV’s door. It opened with a creak and thump, and she scrambled up the narrow steps, nodding at the uniformed deputy in the driver’s seat.

  Sheriff Bill Davis looked up from his spot behind the bomb squad specialist. Davis was a tall, wiry man with a rawboned face who looked as if he should be riding the range. Like the bomb tech, he wore green fatigues and black combat boots. A green ball cap with an embroidered sheriff’s star rode his thinning red hair. “Glad you’re here, Dean. You gonna get this joker out of his hole for me?”

  “I’m sure going to try, Sheriff.” She made her way down the narrow passage between the RV’s seats. “What have we got?”

  “Tommy Phillips, thirty-five, white male. His wife is Charlotte. They’ve got two kids, Rebecca, who’s three, and Mary, who’s five.” The sheriff pushed his ball cap up and leaned on the back of the bomb tech’s padded seat. “Charlotte called 911 saying her husband was threatening to kill them all. When deputies arrived on the scene, Tommy informed them he was going to fry them and his wife and kids.”

  “Fry?” Arial frowned. “I don’t like his choice of words. Do we know if he’s armed?”

  “No idea. He hasn’t fired on anybody yet. Could be he’s running a bluff…”

  “Or he could have more weapons than Al Qaeda.” And it was best to assume he did. This was the most dangerous kind of hostage incident. Unlike a cornered robber in a bank, a man who took his family hostage had no interest in negotiating with police. His objective was simply to kill his captives and probably himself. His wife and children weren’t really hostages at all, but victims-to-be. “Have we made contact yet?”

  “Nope. I’ve called him repeatedly, but our guys say they don’t hear a phone ringing. Either he’s just not answering—”

  “Or he pulled it out of the wall. We need to get him a throw phone.”

  “Already on it.” The bomb tech glanced up from the remote controls of the squad’s robot and gave her a thin smile. His dark eyes glittered with an adrenalin junkie’s intensity under his cap.

  “I figured you were.” Smiling grimly, Arial leaned over his shoulder to look at the black and white image on his laptop screen. The picture jounced, showing the view from the robot’s camera as the little machine trundled toward the trailer on its caterpillar treads. It gripped a cell phone in one claw.

 
The department had bought the robot with Homeland Security funding a couple of years before to deal with suspicious packages, but it also did double duty in hostage situations. Sometimes subjects even surrendered to it, realizing that where the robot was, there were probably lots of cops with lots of guns.

  Arial had a feeling Phillips wasn’t going to be that accommodating.

  The robot reached the trailer steps and stopped. The tech manipulated the joystick on his laptop to aim the camera at the door, then handed Arial a small microphone.

  Her mouth went dry as she accepted it. She’d been a hostage negotiator for three years, but her first contact with a suspect never failed to tie her stomach in knots. She keyed the mike. “Tommy Phillips?” Her voice sounded steady and cool despite her nerves.

  After a tense pause, the robot’s microphone picked up Phillips’s voice as he yelled through the trailer door. “What the hell do you want? And what the fuck is that thing?”

  “It’s a robot, Tommy. It’s got a cell phone. We just want to talk to you. Nobody’s been hurt, and we want to keep it that way.” She hoped he picked up the subtext: But if you get stupid, we’re going to shoot you full of more holes than a hunk of deli Swiss.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sergeant Arial Dean, Tommy. I’m the department’s senior negotiator.”

  “Uh-huh.” A short, calculating silence followed before Tommy said, “Okay, put the cell in front of the door and have Robbie back the fuck off.”

  Arial nodded at the bomb tech, who busied himself with the robot’s joystick. The view from the camera jostled as the machine crept up the steps and extended its clawed arm, depositing the cell on the small wooden porch. That done, the robot headed back down the stairs and started off through the woods. Its camera was still pointed back at the trailer.

  The door opened a few inches, and a man’s hand appeared to grab the cell. He drew the phone inside, then extended his hand again, fingers spread wide. Arial tensed. “What the hell is he—”

  A bright hot flare shot from the man’s palm. The picture flared into static.

  “Fuck!” yelped the deputy in the RV’s driver’s seat. “He just blew up the robot!”

  As the tech cursed, Arial and the sheriff ran to the front of the RV to stare out the windshield. The robot burned like a torch, sixty thousand dollars in grant money going up in smoke.

  “Oh, hell,” Arial breathed, meeting the sheriff’s wide-eyed stare. “Phillips is a Hyper!”

  “MY team isn’t equipped to deal with a Hyper.” Captain Joe Gaines was a short, broad-shouldered, beefy man who’d commanded the SWAT unit for ten years. He was the kind of coolheaded commander who could be trusted not to overreact in even the worst situation, but he was visibly sweating now. “Especially not one who can do that.” He gestured out the windshield, where a fire department brush truck was spraying the flaming robot with a deluge gun. None of the volunteer firefighters wanted to get out of the truck to attack the blaze with hoses.

  Arial couldn’t blame them. Hypers had first appeared five years before: seemingly ordinary people who abruptly developed abilities straight out of some kind of demented comic book. Flight, fantastic strength, the ability to control weather, telekinesis, other talents even more exotic. Abilities neither physics nor biology could explain. They weren’t mutants, though that had been the initial theory. There was absolutely nothing about them that was genetically abnormal. They weren’t angels or devils or witches, either, though those theories had gained proponents once science failed to offer anything better.

  There was one thing everybody agreed on: Many of them were nuts. This wasn’t the first time unlucky cops had found themselves in a standoff with a Hyper. Confrontations the cops tended to lose, with bloody results.

  Yet somehow Arial was going to have to talk this particular lunatic out of his hole without getting anybody killed. Especially not his family or anybody in a uniform. She felt her palms start sweating at the thought.

  Come on, Dean, she told herself. This is what you’ve dedicated your whole life to: making sure no more innocents end up dead.

  Innocents like Jenny.

  An image popped through Arial’s mind: her best friend’s pale, terrified face, huge blue eyes meeting hers. Jenny’s father, the barrel of his gun shoved against the little girl’s head. His slurred voice screaming threats at the cops.

  The boom of his gun had sounded like the end of the world.

  Arial thrust the memory away. She didn’t have time for that. Not now. Not here.

  Davis pulled off his cap and scratched his balding head. “Where the hell did this guy come from? We’ve never had a Hyper in this county. That’s the kind of thing you get in New York or San Francisco, not James County, South Carolina.”

  “He may have picked Hyperism up somewhere else,” Arial told him. “There’s a theory that it’s communicable.”

  Gaines stared at her. “So his wife and kids could catch it? My guys could catch it?”

  She shrugged. “It’s possible, but they don’t think it spreads that easily. Otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot more Hyper humans than there are.”

  “Let’s hope so. The one we’ve got now is more than enough.” Davis glowered furiously, gnawing on his lower lip a moment. Finally he said, “I’m calling the Feds in on this. They’ve got agents on standby for shit like this. And we’re going to need some means of containing this jackass once we take him down.”

  “It’s going to take time for anybody like that to get here,” Gaines pointed out. “The closest guy they’ve got is Tracker, and he’s a couple hours away.”

  “I’ll see if I can get Phillips on the phone,” Arial told them. “Maybe I can keep him from killing anybody until Tracker can drive in from Charlotte.”

  THE barbell was loaded with eight hundred pounds as Josiah Ridge pumped out another set of repetitions. It was cold as a bitch in the basement, and steam rose from his bare shoulders, tempting him to turn on the heat in the barren cement-block room. He didn’t. Being cold was the whole idea of this little exercise in masochism. He was trying to discourage the aching hard-on in his sweats. The damn thing looked like a baseball bat.

  Celibacy sucked.

  Christ, sometimes he’d kill just to sit in a coffee shop and look into a woman’s eyes. Listen to her talk about her day, her newest pair of pumps, anything. Unfortunately, he doubted he had the self-control to restrict himself to conversation. And he just couldn’t take the chance.

  Not with his Beast clawing for control.

  To distract himself from his burning biceps and hungry dick, Josiah listened to the police scanner crackling on the weight bench behind him. If he got really lucky, the cops would need Tracker. A good fight would burn off a lot of frustration.

  As if on cue, a series of high-pitched beeps sounded.

  “Thank you, Jesus.” Somehow he managed to resist the urge to drop the barbell and lunge for his beeper. Last time he’d done that, he’d cracked the concrete floor. Instead he forced himself to gently lower the weights to the ground before plucking the beeper off the bench.

  His brows flew upward when he saw the number on the tiny screen. It was John Myers, his FBI contact.

  This promised to be a hell of a lot more interesting than the convenience store robbery he’d expected. If John was calling, it meant there was Hyper trouble.

  Which meant he was either going to get the fight he was spoiling for…

  Or he was going to end up dead.

  “SHE thinks she can leave me,” Phillips snarled. In the background, a dog yapped furiously. The microphone planted in the throw phone picked up the sound clearly, just as it carried the sound of muffled sobbing. “Well, hell with that. I’m gonna fry the bitch. Her and her brats.”

  Arial’s palm felt slick around the phone. Her sweat-damp T-shirt felt glued to her back under her Kevlar vest. Her throat was hoarse from trying to talk sense into him over the past two hours.

  Groping for inspiration, she
glanced down at the file that had been compiled by another negotiator, who’d been calling Phillips’s friends and relatives. “Tommy, we’ve talked to your mother. She said this isn’t like you—you love Charlotte, Rebecca, and Mary. They’re great kids, beautiful kids. Charlotte’s a good mother. If you do this, you’re going to regret it the rest of your life. And think about the rest of your folks, your brothers, their kids. They’ll never get over it.” Arial certainly never had.

  “This ain’t my fucking fault!” Phillips yelled over the dog’s high-pitched barks. “I didn’t ask for this—becoming a Hyper. I was normal! Just fueling my rig in a truck stop in Mobile when this bitch came up and blasted me. For no reason!”

  Arial frowned. “A woman attacked you? And that’s how you became a Hyper?”

  “Oh, yeah. I came to lyin’ beside my truck, and the bitch was gone. The next day, fire starts shooting from my hands. I caught my own fucking rig on fire. Company canned me! It was an accident, but the bastards fired me anyway. Fuckers.”

  She winced. Lost job, wife walking out—it was the classic nightmare recipe guaranteed to push a control-freak male into killing somebody. “There’s no doubt you got a raw deal, Tommy. But what you’re doing now—”

  “Now this bitch says she’s gonna walk on me. Says I’m dangerous!” He lifted his voice and yelled at the animal, “Dammit, Pugly, shut the fuck up!”

  “Don’t kill him, Daddy!” one of the little girls screamed.

  Arial tensed. If he went off on the dog, it could trigger him into attacking the rest of his family. She had to get him calmed down before the situation spiraled into murder. “Becoming a Hyper isn’t your fault.” But taking your family hostage is, you selfish shit. “But it’s not your wife’s either, or those pretty little kids’. Turn ’em loose, Tommy.”

  “Yeah, right. I do that, and you cops’ll kill me.”