I was trying to get into the Cop headspace now. Like my other aspects, he’d been shoved to the back by the Darkness, so much so that he seemed to stop being anything but a memory. Now I really needed him. Desperately. To solve this, to make sense of this crazy hunt I was on, to pick up the pieces of my fragmented memory and puzzle them into some shape that had order and purpose. As random and obscure as the Darkness was, there was a method in there. A plan. And I was sure that at the end of the chain of logic—no, I won’t call it dark logic because that sounds too much like I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons with myself.

Only this logic was skewed, slanted. It was like trying to understand a word puzzle in a different language. It had a different kind of emotional logic from the one I understood. I was fighting for understanding and fighting for control, and it was anyone’s guess as to whether I was gaining ground or being fed crumbs by this new, dangerous, warped, and ugly aspect of myself.

Funny, but when I was first aware of it, I’d told Rudy, and he was the one who gave it the name. He called it the darkness, but for him, it was lowercase, not a proper noun. I knew differently. It was every bit as real a person within me as the Modern Man, the Cop, and the Killer. It wanted to live, just as they did. It wanted control because, just like the others, it had work to do. Unlike them, it did not want to share its secrets, its methods, or its toys.

Earlier this year, after I got out of the hospital, I’d speculated about what a person does when they turn out all the lights. At first, I’d relied on the old military answer to that: you learn to use the darkness. But that was wrong. It was too commonplace an answer for a person as damaged as me. It wasn’t that I learned to use the darkness imposed on me during that act of transgressive horror.

No.

In that moment, I became the Darkness, only I didn’t know it yet. I think by accepting that it was a real thing, I gave it license and access, neither of which I seemed able to take back. I didn’t delude myself into thinking I was clearheaded now, because I’d won any heroic internal struggle.

“Head in the fucking game,” I told myself, and I realized I was so jangled I’d nearly said it too loudly. Even Ghost gave me a sharp, questioning look. “Sorry,” I told him, pitching my voice much lower.

Ghost gave an eloquent grunt of reproof.