Signs of Portents

by Lou Paduano

  The world went from chaos to order in her mind at last. Each symbol sparked on the pillar was from a different crime scene. Four signs, symbols of dead languages, one for each of the pillars guarding the great, glowing orb hidden in the center of the city. Loren believed they were a message, but for so long Soriya saw nothing to indicate what that message could have been. Each letter, from Gothic to Vincan, stood alone. None strung to the next to form a linear thought. Because there was no linear thought behind them—only the endgame.

  It was right before her eyes the entire time. The Vincan sign under Vlad. The Cyrillic symbol on the wall at Urg’s apartment. Their deaths were selected for multiple reasons. The trophies to carry out the other murders were the first step. The locations were the second, though why they were selected still escaped the young woman’s fast-moving thoughts. Neither one mattered compared to the third reason. The reason behind the signs. The reason behind the deaths that had plagued the city and haunted Soriya’s fading life. Each death, each sign unlocked the pillars containing the energy of the Bypass. For over one hundred years, the orb was contained and hidden but in a single week the door had been opened and the waves of glowing, green light filtered through the fissures in the ceiling, escaping into the city streets above. Four deaths for four pillars. The fifth in the alley had been used as a cover, a distraction, to retrieve the trophy lost at the fourth scene. She knew that now as clearly as she knew everything else around her.

  Including the death of Mentor.

  His death was the final key. Where the four columns safeguarded the floating orb, containing it within the confines of the chamber, there was another piece needed to temper the energy locked in the Bypass. A Greystone. The fifth sign, the one marking the front of her stone in order with the rest, was the final key to unlock the chamber. It was a code hidden within the chamber, a passkey unknown to her and possibly even Mentor to free the Bypass from its sanctuary.

  The Bypass rose, tendrils of energy flickering and fading through the cracking ceiling. The light faded from the chamber around Soriya. Everything was fading, out into the darkness of the city of Portents. The old soul’s plan came together before her eyes, the energy of the Bypass the last step toward his return. She gripped the stone tighter in her grasp. She begged for it to stop, pleading with the stone’s power to force the symbols to fade back into nothing, to return everything to the way it was only days earlier.

  No answer came. No answer was expected. The stone would not be her saving grace. There was no reset button, no timeout to call, through the mysterious forces behind the Greystone. There was only her. Soriya Greystone. There was a time that name meant more to her than life itself. There was a time that responsibility meant more as well. It was her job. It was her lot in life no matter the pain, no matter the loss, no matter the sacrifice required.

  It was time to remember that.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The Night of the Lights.

  That was how it was to be remembered. Some had their own ideas of the name, to be sure. There was the Night the Lights Filled the Sky, but most thought it wasn’t punchy enough. The Portents Chronicle actually held tight to that one for a week before realizing it was the underdog in the naming war between every major news outlet in the city. Some were more dramatic about the night in question, believing it to be more of a sign of the end times than anything else. They were not far off the mark in that regard but no one wanted to see that lining the television screen or in black, bold letters on every newsstand in the county. When it came down to it, the consensus held that it was The Night of the Lights in Portents.

  It was the night things changed.

  In the first minutes, most believed it to be an elaborate display—fireworks and sparklers dazzling the skyline for an unscheduled celebration. Smiles lined the faces of pedestrians. They infected the shop owners closing up for the night and the lovers hailing a cab to head home from a romantic meal downtown. Green streams carried their joyous wonder up into the sky, their gaze enthralled by the magic that surrounded them. Parents called children from their beds to look out windows, while others tucked deeper into the shadows, afraid to face the rising lights.

  Those moments of wonder did not last. The lights, starting slow and sparse, became brighter and denser. They were no longer small streams against the black sky but waves of glowing green swirling up from the ground through the city streets. Delight turned to worry to outright concern as the waves grew wider and brighter. They swam the breadth of eight city blocks of business and residential neighborhoods in the center of downtown Portents. The lights raced along corridors and wind tunnels, faster and faster through the streets. Parents pulled their children away, lovers returned to their restaurants, and shop owners to their shops.

  The speed of the spinning lights brought with it the wail of the wind. So fierce it shattered the glass that ran along the front of homes and businesses. Concern became terror, as the citizens witnessing the moment where the lights took back their city understood the wailing that filled the streets was not the wind at all.

  They were screams.

  For every person it was different. Some heard screams of joy whirling around them, though joy was the last emotion to enter their own hearts. The people of Portents felt nothing but fear over the shrill laughter that cut through the glowing green wave that stretched over downtown. It rose higher and higher with each pass, becoming louder and louder. From the warehouse district to the docks, it could be heard. The laughter. The joy. But most of all, the screams.

  When the visions began was when the death toll started to climb. Flickers of emerald left the wave, falling back to the street while the main fleet of lights continued their ascent into the black sky. The glowing embers of the wave that fell passed through homes and people like wraiths. Elderly saw their lost children, taken unjustly before them. Widows saw husbands and wives return, judging the decisions that followed their demise.

  More and more the lights took form, some unrecognizable in the darkness of the city. Three women strode the downtown strip of restaurants and bars, on the hunt for men willing to shower them with gifts and what they perceived to be a form of love. Little did they know, the gifts were just the appetizer to murder once the men had satisfied their desires. Sirens, they had been called, once upon a time in distant lands. A myth long forgotten, now present among the living in Portents.

  Other people saw strange things as well in the light that poured over them. Chariots raced through the streets. The cheers of battle rang out as they raced. The firing of muskets and cannons. The world was lost in time, the city washed over in the light of the Bypass. More light rose and with it more form, more beings finding their place in the present. Not all were concrete, some as ghostly as phantasms, slowly pulled back into the light as quickly as they fell. Some refused the gift completely, knowing their time had passed while others welcomed it. Like the Sirens of old, they saw their return as a second chance but unlike the three women strutting the streets, they waited patiently, slipping into the shadows for another day.

  If another day came.

  Outside the eight-block radius of the lights, the rest of the city felt the change. From the docks of the west to the warehouses and rail yards of the east, all of Portents looked to the skies watching the green glow rise higher and higher. Although there were no visitations, no visions, no wailing and no death outside the epicenter of the strangeness, there were four points within the city that glowed with the same intensity as the rising tide above the city. Four points of light emanated from four signs, smeared in blood. From the Town Hall Pub to Evans Apartments, all four crime scenes dropped their mysterious pretense at the same moment the lights cracked through the streets for the skies above. Through warehouse and ranch home, the light that started with the symbol scrawled along walls and upon floors beamed up in a straight line for the heavens. Four points marking the borders of the city.

  The lights washed over the city for what felt like ages but passe
d in a matter of minutes. Each witness heard and felt something so unique it would never truly be forgotten. Those who watched, even through the shattering of glass and the screams that cried out of the glowing wave, saw the light pass over the skyline in a great circle. Higher and higher, over building and skyscrapers it climbed. Eight city blocks it encompassed but as it reached the cloudless sky, it contracted and thickened. It spun faster and faster until it surrounded only a single structure.

  All eyes—from the lovers to the shop owners to the parents—turned toward the center of the city, each wondering if the end had come at last. All eyes, including the brown orbs of Soriya Greystone looked up from the city streets at the giant wheel of light floating above them. To everyone else, it was every emotion locked in one from wonder to terror. To Soriya, it was nothing more than a giant billboard begging her to follow. The lights rose and rose until only a single structure lay within its wake, turning all eyes to the single tower of black in the center of the city.

  Evans Tower.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Hopeless. That is what they call the situation you’re in.”

  Loren and Ruiz stood silent, listening to the gravel behind each word spat by Nathaniel Evans. Leather shoes tapped lightly against the tile as the refurbished man, in the skin of his descendant, walked farther into the room. The towel in his hands wiped them clean of the last flakes of blood caught under the well-manicured fingernails. He dropped it to his side, his head turning to survey the entirety of his company. Naeger was closest, near the wall of photos depicting two centuries of the Evans line. Jankowitz was on the far side of the room near the bar. Her terror was palpable, with eyes flitting toward the elevator and the two men stationed there.

  “Can’t you feel it?” Evans asked. The skin molded to his body remained fixed but a wide grin stretched behind it. In the stillness of the evening, the darkness that surrounded the black tower with tinted windows on all sides, Loren saw lights. Dim at first, spinning along his periphery while maintaining a cool look at the man before him, Loren watched the green glow rising to greet them. Stillness shattered with glass, the lights spinning faster and faster below them. The earth around them quaked but no one budged, though Jankowitz and Naeger were ready to call it a day, sweat beading along their brows. Loren did not know what was happening. He did not know that the city was caught in the grip of Evans’ smile. All he knew was that it had to end.

  “The futility of it all.”

  Evans’ hands rose slowly, his palms free of any instruments. He was the definition of calm and collected. There was no worry in his eyes, his new eyes taken from the corpse behind Loren. There was nothing but a confidence that shook Loren to the core. It gave him pause, made him question everything he had seen and learned over the course of the last few days. Questions that had no bearing any longer, not with the murderer he had sought now in front of him. He did not want to hear another word. He did not want to see another grin. Ruiz told the same story, his hand inching toward his sidearm. Still, they waited, wondering what was behind the musings of the killer before them.

  “Humanity’s inability to extend itself past its own basic instincts. I achieved where mankind simply took those achievements and abused them. I created a paradise for you and you let it rot around you like a disease.” Spit flew through his gritted teeth. “This place was pure. I made it pure. And the fools I was surrounded by, your ancestors, murdered me for it. I was trying to save them! From freaks and terrors that none of them knew of, that none had the capacity to understand! Sacrifices were required, to be sure. Not the least of which was my own. Did they care? No! They beat me and burned me as easily as the witches of old. Like the freaks I protected them from all that time. I created a paradise that none deserved.”

  He believed it. It was in the fury of his words. In the anger on his lips. In the burning of his eyes staring through Loren. He believed every word, every moment, every bit of his wretched life and turned it to the role of savior. Loren knew the account in the book he left with Pratchett in the lobby. When so-called freaks and monsters were not an option, women and children were the sacrifices of choice. Sacrifices for good harvests. Sacrifices for mild winters. Sacrifices for anything and everything that gave Nathaniel Evans the feeling of power over his city. Portents was a plaything to him, not a paradise. He was a tin god ruling over no one but his own ego, though his view may have written a different tale.

  The lights, once dim and low on the periphery, now surrounded them on all sides. Through the wailing winds that spun faster and faster outside the glass prison in which they were enclosed, screams were heard. Screams of the victims of Evans’ dreams. Screams of the innocents left in his wake. Loren heard Urg, Vlad, Mentor, and the others. He heard them crying for him to act, now, before it was too late. But what could he do? What could a simple man with a pistol do against someone who could raise the light of the Bypass above the city? More important to Loren at the moment was the final player in their drama, missing from the scene: Soriya Greystone. He needed her more than ever.

  “Now,” the man in the suit continued, “with the energy I wield I will raze this city to the ground and all within it. I will burn it back to its purest form and start anew in the flesh of my descendant. I will be a hero, the lone survivor of a great tragedy. You deserve this end. And I am more than happy to bring it to you.”

  All of them saw it coming. They saw it in the pure look of pleasure that refused to wane across his stolen face. They saw it in the slow drop of Evans’ hands and the glint in his eyes. Loren wanted to yell but found no voice.

  “Keep your hands in the air,” Ruiz demanded.

  “You hesitate. Captain, is it? Unsure how to stop me. Unsure if you can stop me. You can’t.”

  Ruiz stepped forward, his weapon raised. They all saw it but none of them could do anything about it. Naeger was too close. He was simply too close.

  “Let me make the decision for you then, Captain.” Evans’ left arm shot out like a bullet and snagged the unsuspecting arm of Officer Naeger. The surprised officer was jerked forward in front of Evans. The others were unable to get a shot off. Evans’ cold eyes stayed on Ruiz the entire time, the killer’s hands catching the falling officer’s head before snapping it to the side.

  Naeger’s body collapsed to the floor, still twitching but dead all the same.

  There was nothing left in Ruiz. No doubts. No fears. Just anger.

  “Put him down. Now.”

  Shots rang out, mixed with screams from Ruiz and Jankowitz. They unloaded their clips in an instant. None hit their target, who raced down the wall of photos, allowing the Evans line to take each bullet in stride. The shots marked the second mistake on their part, the first lying dead before them in the crumpled heap of what was once Officer Thomas Naeger.

  The shots were nothing but a call for Merrill and Daniels, both of whom ran into the room, service weapons drawn. Daniels was faster on his feet but slower to act. He barely made it three steps into the room before he saw the approaching Nathaniel Evans.

  The man in the suit threw an uppercut that caught Daniels square in the chin. It drove him off his feet, his body suspending in midair for a moment before crashing down. When he fell, his weapon let loose three rounds in rapid fire. His aim was wide due to his arms flailing to right his falling body. All three connected, but not with their intended target. Merrill went down hard. The first bullet shattered his knee. Each bullet impacted higher and higher until the third met his left temple.

  “No,” Daniels muttered before the breath left him on impact with the tile floor. Merrill wasn’t moving. Daniels couldn’t look away, wouldn’t, even as Evans slipped behind him. He held tight to the sides of Daniels’ head. A slight snap was the last thing heard before Daniels fell lifeless next to his partner.

  More shots broke the discord of the room. Ruiz and Jankowitz had reloaded in the few seconds it took Evans to dispatch their two colleagues. Two more deaths to add to the toll of the last week. Th
eir shots met Daniels’ chest, a lifeless shield for the grinning murderer. Gradually he moved closer toward Ruiz and Loren. Jankowitz shifted for a better angle but Evans kept their dead friend between them.

  “No putting me down, Captain,” Evans laughed, the sound of his leather shoes on the tile floor becoming louder, each one bringing him closer and closer to Ruiz. “Nothing will stop me. Nothing will stop this. I survived Hell’s eternal flame. I stripped the flesh from my bones and transcended to this place. For this task.”

  Loren watched everything unfold. Just watched. From the death of Naeger to the fall of Daniels and Merrill. He never fired a shot. He simply observed the craven beast before them take three lives in the matter of a minute. With his hands. Yet not the same as before. No one else noticed. No one else saw it. Evans had eviscerated Vladimir Luchik with the hand of Martin Decker. A hand that could be turned into a deadly weapon. However, he had not used any such talents on the men lying on the floor of the penthouse office. Evans used no gifts or trophies taken from his previous victims.

  Loren peered to the broken corpse of Gabriel Evans. He saw the missing eyes and the vacant hands. The skin of his descendant had not been enough for Evans. He needed the other pieces, forsaking the previous trophies. Why? Soriya would know right off. There was something about it, something that had changed the game Evans was playing.

  It no longer mattered. Evans lifted Daniels’ lifeless frame and tossed it aside. The body flew through the air, connecting squarely with Jankowitz. The force of the impact, the sudden connection of 200 pounds against her 130 was enough to send her crashing across the room. The force of the throw smacked her side and her body twisted enough to slam face first against the tinted glass windows of the office. Her body slid down the glass, settling against the floor.