Signs of Portents

by Lou Paduano

  Loren turned away from the map. The cot on the right side of the room was unscathed by the destruction Soriya had rained down on the dead man’s possessions. A single book lay tucked neatly next to his pillow. Why it was his chosen reading material over the rest of the books was unknown to the reaching detective, but Loren could not help but feel that if there was any way to find insight from Mentor, it was in the actions of his final hours. He took the book and held it near the dim light of the lamp in the corner of the room. Loren recognized the title immediately from the copy packed away in his apartment. The True History of Portents. Dozens of pages were marked. Notes lined the margins. Loren snapped the book shut, gripping it tightly, and stepped back into the large room. Soriya stood before the Bypass, her head low.

  “We’ll get him for this, Soriya.” He tried to sound confident, knowing that every other time he’s mentioned the fact, someone else has died. No more. He swore the oath in his head. No more. “You know we will.”

  “We can’t stop him now. Kok’-Kol was right about that.”

  There was something else. It was in the way her eyes escaped his stare. He heard it in the words that slipped from her lips like whispers in the dark. Mentor’s broken body lay between them, covered by a thick blanket. He had been her only family for the last eighteen years of her life. He meant more to her than anyone or anything and he was gone. Some part of her was gone as well. Her words were not those of the woman Loren had met four years earlier or even three months ago when he departed the city. They were the words of a fallen soldier, a broken child. And more.

  “What is it, Soriya?” he asked. Time had failed to be on their side the last two days and he refused to let it rush past him again. “What are you not telling me?”

  “He took it, Greg. The stone. Mentor’s stone.” She turned slowly, dried tears on her cheeks. “The killer has a Greystone.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Dawn broke in the city. With it came the masses, pooling out of their homes and their ratty apartments to go about their days. None were aware of the presence of a shadow amid the sunlight that rang in the new day. None knew how close he was to the end of the story he had written so long before, how much blood had been shed to get this far, and how much more would be needed from the city before the end could properly conclude. None understood the importance of the day. They simply existed. For the moment.

  A thin smile cracked through the broken skin that stretched across the shadow’s face. The skin peeled away, falling to the ground in a large clump. He did not care. Caring was for lesser beings, an emotion that tied the city down and anchored it rather than allowing it to rise higher than the rest of the world. It was the vision he held for Portents all those years ago and it was the same he would bring back to them. However, there was the matter of some housecleaning in the meantime. Housecleaning made all the more plausible with the instrument resting in the palm of his hand.

  The Greystone.

  It was the same as it had been all those years ago in the shadow of the flaming hay bales. Small and indistinct, yet raw power permeated through the stone. He felt it, just out of reach. It was just below the surface, waiting to be unlocked. He needed to learn. Time to understand and then time to wield the power.

  He felt it under the shredded skin, stretched along his torso—the moving and shifting of bones. Tissue cracked and bubbled. He felt the broken things inside his tired frame. The old man had played his part, giving up the object he required to complete his task. The price, however, was higher than he was willing to admit. The shadow that was once a man held tight to the wall of the alley, propping his body up to assess the damage. Broken ribs were his first clue as to the damage the stone bearer had inflicted upon him. He felt each punch when he rubbed his cheek and felt the pain of the old man’s kick on his knees.

  The pain would not last. Raising the hand of Martin Decker before him, the fingers shifted from pink to soft white. A glow emanated from the surface and he held it against the first broken rib. The pain was immeasurable. He wanted to cry out, but to announce his presence to the city was not part of the plan. No, the pain would be managed. The pain would be endured. The end was all that mattered. As the white glow burned brighter, it subsided. Under the hand of Decker, the shadow knew what was occurring as it had after his run-in with the wolfen boy. The hand of Decker was not only a proper weapon when used; it also served as a healing balm. All that was required was time.

  Time to heal. Time he needed for the stone.

  As the first bone was repaired, the shadow shifted from the depths of the alley for the city street. Sticking close to the shadows within, hidden from the morning light of day, the shadow watched the city waking up around him. Cars blitzed by him only to be halted by the ever-present red light on the corner. Pedestrians played with tiny toys rather than look at each other. Their world was about to change, although they didn’t know it. They had no sixth sense to warn them of danger, no bad dreams that stirred them awake in the middle of the night. It would be just another day like the last. Only the shadow knew differently.

  Staring past the people that roamed the streets of Portents, he saw it in the distance. His next destination. His final destination. It stood taller than the rest of the buildings surrounding it by close to a hundred feet. It stood at the center of everything in downtown Portents but was largely ignored by its populace, a fixture instead of the crux.

  The black tower.

  It beckoned him, waiting patiently while he knitted his wounds. He held tight to the stone in his grasp, refusing to allow it the opportunity to slip free. Time was all he needed. Then it would come to pass, as he knew it would.

  The end of the story.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The chair creaked under her weight, each noise echoing down the hall. Soriya Greystone sat patiently across from the private viewing room at the morgue. Dawn broke early, dim rays filtering in through the thin slits of windows. Shades covered them as much as possible to keep passersby from seeing what Dr. Hady Ronne referred to as the catch of the day. Soriya was exhausted, stifling a deep yawn under her hand. Daylight was not her time. It was when the city slipped on its mask and pretended to be as normal as possible. It was when the world she knew, the world she protected and fought for, tucked away under a blanket until the safety of the shadows returned. Sleep was not an option, however, not after the previous night. Not after the death of Mentor.

  His body lay in the room across the hall, blocked by thin, crooked blinds. She heard technicians starting their day, sipping on coffee and looking over reports and the man she called family. Her coffee was stone cold in her hands. She passed it from palm to palm to keep her body in motion. To keep her mind occupied.

  The last six hours were difficult to say the least. Growing up, Mentor relayed the importance of the night she was still enduring and the events that had to follow it. Mentor’s death would bring questions. Questions about who he was, where he was found, what he was doing. Too many questions that should never be answered in order to protect the Bypass and their work. She heard the concerns at a young age, never believing the day would arrive. Until it did.

  His wishes were clear. She followed them to the letter, even with Loren’s glares, though he was silent and accepted the situation for what it was. At first, he played the cop. It was a crime scene that needed to be analyzed. The detective in him needed to call it in, needed techs to scrub the scene for prints, leads, anything really. They both knew the outcome of that and the end of all the work Mentor had accomplished over his decades. They knew the killer had no prints, there would be no leads, and from the look in Loren’s eyes, she realized it was easier to fulfill Mentor’s wishes than to press the issue further. There was something else too, ever since the Courtyard and their time with the great raven Kok’-Kol, but she let it lie.

  Mentor wrote down his final wishes in one of the many notepads he kept in the small bedroom. There were directions for where his body should be placed in the all
ey off Sirnow. It was a broken-down area of the city, barred storefronts and little in the way of street lighting. It was a place of endings. Soriya was careful about the placement of his body, the condition of his clothes, and of the alley. It needed to look legitimate to the police, though it would not truly matter. After Loren left to work on catching Mentor’s killer, she created a hovel that would be recognized as his home, a cardboard box leaning against a dumpster behind a condemned restaurant. She tossed his shoes but positioned belongings from his room in the alley to make it genuine. Nothing she could stand to lose, but some books she knew could be replaced and other clothes that would do no good to her in the end. Not much could surround his broken frame. This was a theft turned ugly and could be nothing more. Mentor died a lowly bum.

  The thought seared Soriya deeply but she refused to give in to the grief that permeated her every moment. It stung her eyes but she fought through the tears. It reddened her eyes, it puffed her cheeks, all necessary for the job she had been instructed to accomplish by the only family she knew. As dawn threatened to crack through the dim shadows of night, Soriya called in the death. She was careful to use a pay phone. Her own appearance was already pushing the limits of poverty, dirt, and grime caked on her skin from dried sweat in the race to find her fallen father figure. She curled up in the corner of the alley, keeping Mentor out of her line of sight, and waited until the patrol car arrived. There were always cops that cared, good-hearted souls that fought for every life lost or every victim of every crime as if they all mattered the same. However, there were also cops working for a paycheck and a pension. Cops that saw the world as clearly as it presented itself and no more. The time she called was part of Mentor’s instructions. It shifted as the years passed but he always maintained that the call be made when certain individuals were working.

  The pair that arrived were such individuals, each looking away from the broken body of Mentor as quickly as they could. Mentor was immediately seen as a vagrant, passing in the night from a fight over nothing more than a pair of boots or a golden shoelace for all the officers cared.

  Soriya stayed, giving her statement to the officers under a false name. Another gift of Mentor, fake IDs. Fake histories. Their work was too important to let slip away, even in death. The morning shift also meant that no one would recognize her for who she was, and the work she assisted with as a consultant for Loren. Questions were few but they told the story she was asked to tell. No name was given. She had none to give and they understood. There may have been camaraderie and a sense of belonging with the people on the street but there wasn’t trust. A fight over the alley or shoes or books. It didn’t truly matter. She rambled enough to make it seem like it could be any number of things, but she was not there at the time. It was the only truth she was able to share. She was not there to save her friend. She was too late. The sadness that statement carried sold it to the officers, who were more than happy to sign off on the scene. The ambulance took Mentor’s cool body to the morgue and Soriya followed, sitting uncomfortably next to the black body bag.

  The morgue was Soriya’s main concern, though she did her best to pass off her nervous energy as grief. Not a stretch for her, but the concern remained strong in her thoughts as Hady Ronne stepped into the hallway to greet the new arrival. She hadn’t slept in what looked like weeks, her eyes deep caverns of darkness. Soriya’s gaze fell, following the body. It had only been a day since Hady last saw her and Mentor with Loren as they looked over the remains of Vlad and the first two victims. If she recognized them, the questions would return and so would the officers, making Mentor’s final wishes that much more difficult to fulfill. Twice, the stumpy woman glared at the body and the young woman accompanying him. Twice, her mouth pursed to form a thought but fell silent. She signed off on the transfer and shooed the EMTs away from her so she could do what she labeled as “actual work.” Soriya was offered a cup of coffee and a small plastic chair outside the viewing room while they set to work.

  Hady’s work was quick and efficient. It raised questions about Mentor’s death that would be investigated by the Central Precinct, questions about the wounds that led to his death as well as the time of death not quite lining up with Soriya’s story. She knew their cover would not be 100% but it didn’t need to be, not when she could simply slip back into the night and lose herself to the shadows. She needed him at peace. That was all. Or so she thought. Questions were one thing but what Soriya Greystone did not expect was Hady to learn something she had never known.

  Mentor’s name. His real name.

  The tech that ran the prints and made the discovery was excited and exuberant about it, which confused the young woman holding tight to her cold cup of coffee. Christopher Eckhart. She heard it repeatedly in passing. Mentor’s name was Christopher Eckhart. She never knew. She never thought about it. His role was his name, his job was the only title he carried with her and she accepted that as easily as her own name being that of the role she played in their work. She was Soriya Greystone, though she understood that until the age of four she held another name that she no longer remembered. She thought Mentor was the same as her. Lost in memory, finding a new purpose and a new role. She thought he was simply Mentor and nothing more.

  Christopher Eckhart was much more, however. Whispers traveled the halls of the morgue in the early hours of the day. Eckhart was the longest open missing person’s case in the city. Twenty-five years missing from public life. He was an author, some said. A teacher. Soriya tried to let it wash over her; she tried to let it pass through her so she could accept the information as it was delivered. To say it was a blow to her perception of their relationship was an understatement. To call it a secret was not enough; it was too small a word to encompass the truth. It was not, however, the final secret he carried she soon found out.

  As the morning hours waned and mid-day reached the city of Portents, Soriya found her eyes had slipped closed for a few moments. In her dreams, she saw Mentor begging her to be saved, pleading with her to not be too late. When her eyes snapped open, she jumped in her seat, causing the small cup of coffee to fly from her grasp to the tiles below. She cursed, rubbing her eyes deeply. A young man in a white lab coat bent beside her to assist and the two shared a small smile, though he was quick to depart from the shabbily dressed and foul-smelling vagrant she played that morning. The dream left her more exhausted than ever, Mentor’s words echoing in her every thought. Everything faded, though, when they walked into the hall.

  Two women. One was in her fifties, small and resigned. The other, closer to thirty, had thinning brown hair done quickly in a ponytail. From the way they carried themselves Soriya immediately saw the family resemblance. Mother and daughter. As they neared, however, she saw something else in the daughter. It was in the thin gray of her iris and the light brown of her hair. It was in her walk, leaning more on her right side with each step and how she ran her thumb along the tips of her fingers. They were small things she saw in someone else. Mentor. Christopher Eckhart. Whoever the man was behind the thin blinds of the viewing room.

  He had a family. A life. Secrets he had kept even at the beginning.

  Soriya sat in the little garden enclosed between the rectory and the church. Behind her, the orphanage towered over her small body, wrapped tightly in a coat and wool hat. Winter was fading from memory but it was still bitter when the wind was caught in the small tunnel the garden provided. She waited patiently, her hand buried in her pocket, wrapped tight around the stone she found under the burning van.

  Two voices approached. The ones she had been waiting for in the quiet twilight hours of the day. One of them she recognized immediately as Father Tomlin, the priest that gave services for the church and for the girls of the orphanage. The other was new, but she had been told of his arrival. He was interested in taking her home, a nun told her, to which she replied she had no home. She had no home and no name to be called. The nuns whispered about her, whispered about the wreck of the van and the flames that
surrounded her. They spoke of her time at the orphanage and the strange sights that followed her through their halls. They spoke to each other but rarely to her. She preferred it that way.

  Father Tomlin spoke in low whispers, the same way the nuns did though the young girl of four easily heard every word being said. The man he walked with made no effort to conceal his words, speaking normally. As they entered the small garden, she saw him for the first time. Tall and thin, a brown beard tight against his face, though she could see the first gray hairs creeping into the mix. His eyes were light gray like the winter clouds that rolled over the orphanage. They were calm and a thin smile crept along his face when he saw her. The aging priest held the man back for a moment, his words continuing to be low. His gaze kept away from the young girl when he spoke, as if by not seeing her there was little chance of her hearing him.

  “I have to warn you. There have been incidents,” Father Tomlin said. “Nothing violent, of course. Just a strangeness that I felt should be mentioned.”

  “I will take that into account,” the man replied. He looked curiously over the priest and then back to the young girl he had traveled to see. “Has she mentioned these to you? Said anything about them?”