by Lou Paduano
Signs of Portents
A Greystone Novel
Lou Paduano
Eleven Ten Publishing
BUFFALO, NEW YORK
Copyright © 2016 by Lou Paduano
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Eleven Ten Publishing
P.O. Box 1914
Buffalo, NY 14226
Publisher's note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
Edited, formatted, and interior design by Kristen Corrects, Inc.
Cover art design by Kit Foster Design
First edition published 2016
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Paduano, Lou
Signs of Portents / Lou Paduano
p. cm.
LCCN: 2016946406
ISBN-13: 978-1-944965-00-6 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-944965-01-3 (eBook)
Other Books by Lou Paduano
The Greystone Saga
Tales from Portents
The Medusa Coin
Pathways in the Dark
A Circle of Shadows (coming September 2018)
Box Sets
The Greystone Saga Volume One
The Greystone Saga Volume Two
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Table of Contents
Prologue One
Prologue Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
About the Author
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Tales from Portents
The Medusa Coin
Pathways in the Dark
Coming September 2018
Prologue One
Eighteen Years Ago
There were freshly fallen leaves under her feet. The chill of autumn had entered the city quickly, giving no time for transition from the beach lovers to the nature lovers. Not that this was unusual by any means. It was the sound of the leaves that seemed uneasy to her ears. They did not crunch heavily or slide out from under her heel with the slickness of a mid-morning rainfall. They broke and cracked under her miniscule weight and the additional mass of the doll she carried by the hair in her left hand.
Blond. That was the color of the doll’s hair she gripped so tightly. She had named her Lady of all names. Not terribly creative, but there was no doubt that it was cute for a four-year-old. The doll had been her companion through many seasons, taking the prerequisite beating that any toddler placed on their possessions. A missing eye, patchwork hair, and three busted seams made the doll unique, special, and no less important in the eyes of the child. The girl and her doll looked at each other, hearing the cracking sound of the leaves, hoping one of them would have the answer. Both, however, were silent.
A strong wind rushed through the air, brisk October weather that paved the way for the snowy November to come. The autumn leaves took to the skies, propelled by the gale, above the young girl. The leaves were dynamic, forming a myriad of colors above her. It made her smile, the colors that surrounded her. It would be a long time before she smiled again.
As the colors continued to brighten before her, as the leaves carried along by the wind swept around her, she realized the bright oranges and nuanced reds were not natural. They were not the autumn leaves that made up piles along the roads to jump in before the city workers could take them away. They did not crunch under her heels with each shift in position. No, these leaves were not meant to see the end of the season. Not meant to be admired for their beauty and color.
These leaves were charred.
The crackling sound overhead emanating from the leaves blowing in the wind was the sound of small flames still burning through each one. Lady was the first to realize this and the girl saw it through the glass eye that hung on to the doll’s sewn face. If horror could have been written on her patchwork face, it would have, but still she smiled at her owner the same as she always had.
Behind her, a van continued to burn. The flames engulfed the tree it was wrapped around on the side of the large curve at the city limits of a place called Portents. The front half of the van was no more than a wall of fire and heavy smoke. The tree had suffered greatly, half of it gone in an instant, a giant matchstick helping spread the destruction.
The young girl stood twenty feet away, unsure of the ordeal, unaware of her role in it. It was the same way the emergency workers that surrounded the scene felt, roping off the area and attempting to clean up the accident as quickly as possible. Fire crews arrived late from the mid-morning traffic but worked quickly to put out the growing flames before they spread to the rest of the park that covered the eastern border of the city. Medics on scene found their role to be minimal, another set of witnesses and nothing more. Their only living patient was the young girl standing in the center of the road with her doll and not a scratch on her.
Attempts had been made to pull her away from the scene. After checking her vitals, everyone had taken a turn, offering quiet words of comfort and a hand to hold. No words were heard. No hands taken. The girl simply stood in place, Lady by her side, the van quietly burning behind her.
Words continued to be spoken between officers and EMTs who then mingled with the Fire and Rescue teams that arrived on the scene once traffic permitted. Most barely noticed the girl among the wreckage.
“She hasn’t said a word. Doesn’t even look at it like it’s there,” one of the EMTs said to his compatriot, a balding man with thin-rimmed glasses.
“You said her folks were in there?” the balding man replied, fixing his glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“Looks that way,” said the first man. His voice was low and he turned
away from the young girl. “Pulled two bodies out. They’ll be lucky to pull dental records off of them though.”
“Road isn’t even slick.” Another voice entered the fray, more distant than the others. “How fast were they going to do this?”
“What were they running from?”
The first man’s response caught her ear but she did not turn. “She doesn’t even know yet.”
“Poor girl.”
She heard those words clearly over the sounds of the sirens and the hoses and the chaos of the bend outside the city limits of Portents. They did not matter, however. None of them mattered. She was lost in the glowing air that sung sweetly along the autumn breeze, the leaves dancing before her, swirling in the air with a radiance she would never see again in her lifetime. One caught a second wind and raced back in the direction it came from.
She turned back to the accident for the first time. The van was unrecognizable from the midsection to the front, a charred memory that would never stick. The single leaf fell before her along the street, and her foot stopped its movement when something caught her eye under the singed shell of the van.
Slipping under the caution tape, through the overworked men and women on the scene, the girl moved like a wraith toward the wreck. No one saw her. No one tried to see her. The object was small, curled up tightly near the front wheels of the burning van that looked more like tar along the edge of the road. Something pulled her forward. She had to have the object. In that instant there was nothing else in her universe.
Lady slipped from her grasp in the excitement and found her final resting place among the charred leaves in the road—a third victim of the accident. Another piece of her life slipped away like the rest of her memory.
The young girl did not care. She raced faster toward the vehicle, crouching low beneath the flaming frame of the van. Her small hand grabbed the object and held it up so she could get a better look. It was cold to the touch, even among the flames that had surrounded it. She had never seen it before in her life. It was small and rounded with smooth, unmarked surfaces on all sides. As she turned it over in her hands with wide eyes of wonderment, she thought for a split second that there was something written upon its face. She blinked deeply, passing it off to imagination. She held it before her once more.
A simple stone of grey.
Prologue Two
Four Years Ago
Greg Loren felt every dip and crack in the pavement through the worn-out soles of his Nikes, stepping out of the grocery store at Richmond Knoll. Down the Knoll, he saw the evening traffic coasting off the expressway into the Kings Lane district of the city, home to the second-floor apartment he rented. The names of streets, exits, and businesses flashed on signs, billboards, and taxicabs. The signs were the only way he could survive in the city. Even after living in Portents for the last six years, he still found himself turned around through the maze of downtown.
“It was designed that way,” Beth always said with a smile at seeing his scruffy face round the corner, pouting at running late once again after taking the East End stop of the D line train instead of the East End stop of the A line. The city funneled into downtown like a garden maze, a myriad of dead-end turns and a dozen paths that flowed directly to the shining black tower that stood at the center of the city, never to Loren’s destination of choice.
“Let’s move there then,” Loren said, jokingly. “We’d never get lost.”
Beth never answered his jests. She tucked another set of maps into his bag or a handwritten note in the pack of smokes he swore would be his last.
He reached into the grocery bag when he passed the Kings Lane sign and pulled out the latest of the last packs of cigarettes. It fit nicely with the salad ingredients he stopped for earlier to surprise Beth with a healthy meal. He beat the unopened pack squarely against his palm three times then tore into the wrapper for a post-shift break from reality. It had been another long day at the precinct. The fourth in a row since what was dubbed the “Kindly Killings” struck the city. The case landed square at his feet even though he imagined it had been inserted somewhere completely inappropriate, because after four days of witness testimony and chasing his tail, Loren swore he walked with a waddle.
That was how it went in Portents. Murder and mayhem reigned supreme. Normality was cracking skulls and pounding pavement to find a way to stop it all from spinning completely out of control when everything around you said differently.
Thankfully, he had Beth.
Beth, whose smile rose with the sun and never faded even in the dead of night. This was her city and she saw it in a way he never understood. Hopeful. Proud. Where he saw madness and dreamed of running away, she saw people, places, and history. That was her gift to him. Hope. He had to marry her. There was never any question in his mind. From that first moment she made him smile, wearing a milkshake mustache and a sundress. Even though every instinct told him to escape the city, he stayed for her. Shadows seemed to lighten when she was around and he needed that every night he found himself walking the streets alone, searching for another indescribable beast to throw behind bars. She made it safer just by being with him. That was enough to keep him going.
Rubbing out the butt of his cigarette with his shoe, Loren felt a change in the air. As he bent down to lift the butt from the ground to toss it in the nearest corner receptacle, he had no doubt something had changed. Traffic had stalled down his street. Not a “Breaking News Update” by any means, but the fact that some had been vacated of passengers struck Loren as bizarre. Pedestrians had slowed to a crawl in their travels down Brockton Avenue, their eyes looking toward a four-story brick apartment building sandwiched between a deli and a Laundromat.
Loren’s apartment building.
He rushed over to the mounting crowd of people as fast as his feet would carry him. Each footfall felt like a hundred yards. Each second that passed felt like an hour. Something had happened. Not to anyone else in the building. He knew, no matter how light the shadows had become since meeting her, he knew that something had happened to Beth.
“Excuse me,” Loren said, shuffling through the crowd. He clutched firmly to the two bags of groceries to keep them from getting lost in the melee. He needed them to make dinner for Beth. He held onto that thought tighter than his grip on the thin plastic of the bags. “Please let me through. Police officer.”
No one questioned this fact. They simply took a step to the right or left of him, their eyes never leaving the center of the crowd. Murmurs made their way through, whispers and rumors that Loren was afraid to hear.
“She just…she just fell,” one woman said, pointing up toward the roof of the building.
Loren noticed the window to their apartment leading to the living room was open. Beth loved having it open to cool off the place and to hear the sounds of the city in the evening. Portents never comes to life before sunset, she’d say.
“Ambulance is on the way,” a man said from Loren’s right. Loren looked to the young boy beside him, holding him close. “I heard someone call but—”
“Not going to matter, I think,” an older gentleman said, finishing his sentence.
Loren continued past him, his eyes catching the man’s before slipping into the center of the crowd. After everything was said and done, when the crowd had dispersed and the day had ended, Loren saw those eyes in his sleep. Those sad eyes that had seen more than any man should in his lifetime. They were eyes that would never leave Loren.
A lone woman lay upon the sidewalk in the open circle, surrounded by onlookers. She stared up into the growing darkness of the Portents sky. Blood curled by her thin, pink lips and ran down to meet her blond hair that spread wide against the pavement. She wore an apron over what Loren knew to be a red sundress with rose print trim.
“Beth.” The name escaped his lips. His groceries slipped from his hands. A romantic salad dinner that never had a chance to be made.
Loren fell to his knees beside her. He tried to lift her head, to h
old her close, but felt nothing solid to grab onto under her stained blond hair. He could feel the tears stinging his cheeks, sirens blaring in the distance.
Too far away.
Too far gone.
Her hand grazed his cheek, pulling him back to her. Her dark blue eyes were oceans of calm staring up at him. She smiled through the blood. Her chest heaved under collapsed bones. Too shallow. Too slow.
He needed to know. His mouth opened once, then twice, all to ask the dozen questions that he would bring to the table at any other crime scene he investigated—but nothing came out. There were no words. Only tears.
His hand rested softly on her cheek. Her lips moved to speak and he bent closer. Beth continued to smile, her words lost behind the noise of the approaching sirens and the murmurs of the crowd. Lost behind the beating of his own heart in his ears.
All that remained was her smile when Beth’s eyes closed for the last time.
Shadows darkened in the city of Portents as her smile carried her away from Detective Greg Loren forever.
Chapter One
Rain poured against the city of Portents, threatening to wash it clean. It beat against the tallest skyscrapers and the smallest row of houses along the East Side. It pitter-pattered on awnings and sewer grates alike, all of it flowing down and settling in a series of large puddles throughout the city. The warehouse district of the city felt it most, the band of clouds hanging around for hours after sunset. Where bright lights from the nearby club scene stemmed the tide against the torrent of raindrops, in the warehouse district of Portents where darkness was constant, rain meant clouds, which equaled more shadows.
Vladimir Luchik hated the rain. It was the way it chilled his bones, the way it slammed the top of his head like a jackhammer, and the way it never, ever could miss the opportunity to knock him further down when he could not possibly need the help. He could feel it in his sneakers. He could feel it soaked along his ripped jeans. He always hated the rain.
