Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) Read Online Free PDF

air. The smell of a thunder storm. Then the blue light coalescing around her father, his horn shimmering in its cast until it became so bright she couldn’t see him inside of it anymore. After that, the light turned into a blue mist that left nothing of her father’s body behind.
    Gone.
    Like that.
    Elka watched it all from the small cubby behind the mirror, which wasn’t really a mirror at all, but a magical glamour that only a unicorn could see or pass through. Old magic, passed down from thousands of generations of her proud people.
    When Elka awoke from the dream, she could still smell the electric ozone left behind by the girl’s power—whatever kind of wicked power it was. Just for a second. Then it was gone. She was back in her apartment bedroom, with walls so close she sometimes felt like she was back in that cubby, helpless to watch her father’s murder and the defiling of his body.
    She did not wake with a start or a gasp. She had the dream enough times in the last three years that it no longer scared her. But her cheeks grew warm and she clutched at her sheets with white-knuckled fists, the urge to strangle the life out of someone strong in her blood.
    In the moment, any victim would have sufficed. But it was her, the girl with the black hair and the haunted eyes, whose neck Elka really wanted to feel in her grip.
    She didn’t have time for revenge fantasies, though. The beeping alarm clock started up only a minute after she woke up. She didn’t really need the alarm. She always woke up a few minutes before it went off. But she couldn’t afford to be late for work, either. Kenny liked to fire his girls almost as much as he liked to fondle them.
    Out of bed, into the shower, quick smoke before brushing her teeth while she examined her human face in the mirror, checking for any flaws she might want to work on. She had a few acne scars left over from her teen years, but she kept those to keep from looking too perfect. It wasn’t in a unicorn’s nature to accept flaws in any of their features. Elka didn’t have that luxury anymore. She needed to fit in far more than to look beautiful.
    Still, she wasn’t going to let herself completely fall apart. She smoothed out a few lines around her eyes that a girl in her early twenties shouldn’t have anyway. Stress had a way of aging even a unicorn. Her hairline looked a little uneven. She let several long, red strands grow to match the length of the rest of her hair, filling things out nicely.
    Then she examined her freckles. Several times she thought about getting rid of them. When she was a kid, the boys would make fun of her, call her freckle face as if it were the most ingenious and original insult ever imagined. She would run home crying and beg her father to let her get rid of them, but he insisted she couldn’t. Not without drawing suspicion. Freckles simply didn’t disappear overnight. Besides, he had said, he loved her freckles, loved her just the way she was.
    Since then, she kept them no matter how many times she resolved to finally wipe them out. Not only because someone might notice, but because of her father. If he watched her from the Bright Beyond, he would surely weep to see his little girl get rid of one of his favorite features of her human form.
    Elka took a deep hit from her cigarette and blew smoke at her reflection.
    She dressed in her uniform—the tight little shorts and the scrap of fabric that qualified as a tank top. She brushed her red hair straight while it was still wet, otherwise it would curl into wild ringlets at the ends that looked unkempt rather than pretty. She used to use a curling iron, but had no patience or time for that these days.
    As always, Elka arrived at work ten minutes early. She parked around the back of the building. When she cut the engine, the car did its routine sputter and shimmy, the tremors rattling right up through the steering wheel. One of these days, that would be the Pontiac’s last sound before