As the red bike came into view, it passed to the immediate left of a large, rusted-out, double-wide Dumpster. The Thresher’s sword passed straight in front of his quarry’s line of sight and pierced the side of the Dumpster. The sword’s oversized hilt stuck out as a blunt instrument— directly in front of the passing motorcyclist’s face.
The driver of the red machine didn’t have time to realize what was happening until it was too late.
The Thresher watched as his quarry’s head collided violently with the sword’s protruding hilt, the man’s neck wrenching itself sickeningly backward. He fell from the crimson bike with the unmistakable crack of breaking bones, while the bike continued moving out of sight.
In what seemed like only an instant, the Thresher had retrieved his sword from the Dumpster and was on top of the other man, holding his dazed and battered form in a brutal headlock with one arm. His other hand pressed the razor-sharp side edge of the sword against the man’s throat with a tight, back-handed grip. He barely seemed to be exerting himself, with practiced, measured movements that applied only the exact amount of energy and force required, and nothing more.
The man flailed and struggled, but his body was still in shock from the blow, and his coordination faltered.
He spat into the bald man’s face.
There was a buzzing sound and the Thresher turned loose of the headlock, yet the sword held the other man steadily in place.
‘‘One move, and I’ll sever your windpipe,’’ the Thresher said in a calm, gravelly voice that was every bit as frightening as the sword he held with such perfect stillness. The words were marked with a refined British clip.
The hunted man tried to hold his breath as sweat mingled with his own blood, streaming into his eyes and down his face. He felt the edge of the sword prick the skin around his neck, yet he remained as still as he could manage.
The Thresher wiped the spit from his face and fished into one of his pockets, retrieving a tiny phone. He thumbed it open casually. ‘‘Yes?’’ his serious voice intoned.
‘‘Konrad is finished,’’ said the voice on the other end. ‘‘You may proceed.’’
‘‘Parameters?’’ the Thresher asked, even though he knew the answer. This was no client calling to offer a job. This was the call.
The conversation he’d been waiting years for. Quite possibly his entire life for.
‘‘You are hereby endowed with authority and purpose beyond that of any law of man,’’ came the emotionless reply. ‘‘Do not stop until your task is complete.’’
The Thresher hesitated for a faint moment, effortlessly maintaining the sword’s pressure against his quarry’s neck. ‘‘The Secretum is confident? This is the time?’’
‘‘The appointed hour is at hand,’’ was the slightly annoyed reply. ‘‘Your destiny has been written, and so shall it be: the Bringer shall be slain at the hands of the Thresher. Find him, and perform your function.’’
The Thresher snapped the phone shut, sliced his target’s head from his shoulders in a powerful back-handed chop, wiped the blood off onto the headless torso’s shirt, and sheathed the gleaming sword to his side, all in one elegant precise move.
He was gone without another sound.
10
Grant awoke violently, jerking straight up to a sitting position. He was sweating and breathing hard, and every muscle was tensed. It took several quiet minutes before he could remember where he was.
Or who he was.
When he’d finally caught his breath, he frowned; his bed sheet was ripped straight down the middle. He was still clutching the two torn halves in his hands. His leg throbbed, bright sunlight streamed in between the cracks in the blinds, and his thoughts drifted back . . .
Three days had passed since his defeat of the mercenary Konrad. And Julie’s fussing over him had become more and more pronounced each day.
The morning after Collin and Konrad had died in the fire, Grant and Julie visited an emergency room in Garden Grove, on the south side of L.A.—to avoid any potential connection with the arson. It was more than two hours after they entered the hospital before Grant had finally seen a doctor.
The terse woman at the check-in desk was most unhelpful. When she requested his insurance card and carrier, he asked if she could find his records in the computer based on his name. She appeared rather miffed by the request, but she complied. He was unable to muster any surprise when she called him and Julie back to the desk to pronounce that no ‘‘Grant Borrows’’ had ever been a patient at any hospital on record. Her tone of voice made it clear how satisfied she was upon making this conclusion.
Grant paid the bill in cash.
That afternoon, at his sister’s suggestion, they’d both taken up residence in the Wagner Building’s high-rise penthouse. Grant still didn’t feel like it was really his, but as Julie had put it, they simply had nowhere else to go. He tried to convince her to go back home; with Konrad dead, she should be safe. But she would hear none of it, determined as she was to look after him.
He’d spent each night tossing and turning in bed, snatching only brief moments of unconsciousness—all of which were filled with nightmares about burning buildings and bottles filled with fire and watching his own funeral from inside the coffin. He’d woken up screaming several times, and Julie repeatedly burst into the room and rushed to his side.
Prescription bottles rested on his nightstand, waiting. They were terribly inviting.
That night after the hospital visit, he’d had to physically lean on Julie just to make it inside the condominium, but she never complained. Two brand-new sets of stitches were biting into his leg on either side, where the bullet holes had been. The doctor had also treated him for a mild concussion, along with his other scrapes, and given him a prescription for pain—the very bottles that were currently holding his attention.
And as he’d done several times over the last three days, he quietly opened the nearest pill bottle so Julie wouldn’t hear, and ingested more of the contents. He was consuming more than the recommended dosage— Julie had threatened to hide them if he did it again—but he didn’t care.
It was late morning when he emerged from the bedroom to find Julie on the computer in the living room. She didn’t look up from the screen as he crossed the hall to the bathroom.
‘‘Hey, you ever heard of an ‘Inveo Technologies’?’’ she called out.
‘‘Who?’’ he replied, shouting through the closed door.
‘‘Could you come out here, Collin? I think I may be on to something.’’
Grant swung open the bathroom door and crossed the hallway and living room to stand by her side. ‘‘Stop calling me Collin,’’ he grumbled.
‘‘Why do you keep saying that?’’ she demanded. ‘‘You are Collin on the inside, right?’’
‘‘Collin’s dead,’’ he said sourly, but then caught her expression. ‘‘I’m me, yeah. But Collin’s gone. You should know, you went to the funeral.’’
‘‘So what?’’ she finally turned to look at him. ‘‘You’re my brother. I don’t care if you start growing tentacles out of your nose, you’re always going to be ‘Collin’ to me.’’
Grant frowned and turned away. He entered the kitchen and began rooting around in the refrigerator—which, like the apartment, had been fully stocked when they moved in—for something to eat, making quite a racket. Finally he fished out the milk, found a bowl, and poured himself some cereal at the kitchen’s bar. He took a seat on a stool, his back stooped low as he leaned over the bowl to eat.
Julie knew that his bending over had less to do with the food than with what was happening inside his head.
‘‘I’m worried about you.’’
He looked up, spotted her watching him.
‘‘Please stop this,’’ he said, resignedly.
‘‘I can’t help it!’’ she exclaimed, pent-up frustrations erupting. ‘‘You internalize everything, you always have!’’
‘‘How would you kn
ow what I’ve ‘always’ done? Like you were there to see it.’’ He instantly regretted the outburst.
Julie’s lips pressed together. ‘‘Even I can see that everything—all of this insanity that’s happening to you—it’s eating you alive. And it’s eating me alive that it’s eating you alive!’’
Grant grimaced. Women . . .
‘‘I feel . . . trapped!’’ he said. ‘‘Like I’ve been wrapped in unfamiliar skin, and there’s no way to escape it. What am I supposed to do? Go talk to somebody? There aren’t any specialists for this.’’
‘‘You could talk to me.’’
Ah. The real problem.
He stepped out from behind the bar and crossed the room to kneel beside her desk chair. ‘‘You know I’ve never been much of a talker, Julie. And honestly . . . I haven’t even seen you in years—’’
‘‘That was your choice, not mine—’’
‘‘I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to get into how I’m feeling. It’s too much right now, I can’t . . . process . . .’’
‘‘But,’’ she protested, ‘‘you have to get past all of this bitterness and anger and frustration.’’
‘‘No, I don’t,’’ he said plainly.
Julie nearly fell out of her chair.
He pressed the issue. ‘‘The pain and the hostility are all that’s keeping me going. This drive to find answers is the only reason I have for getting out of bed in the morning.’’
‘‘No, Collin—’’ she shook her head vehemently—‘‘You can’t give in to that.’’
‘‘Why not?’’ he stood, frustrated.
‘‘Because I don’t want you to be a person who hates!’’ she howled. Tears began to stream down her cheeks. She crumpled further into her chair. ‘‘And neither would Mom and Dad. I want you to be the good man I know you are.’’
‘‘But I’m not a good man!’’ he exploded at last, his face the color of blood.
She wouldn’t face him and he looked away angrily, at a loss for words.
Finally he spoke in a small voice. ‘‘I killed him. Konrad. I think I really did it.’’
Julie stood and lifted his head with one hand. ‘‘He was trying to kill you.’’
Grant shook his head, inconsolable.
‘‘When you realized that I was in danger,’’ she said slowly, ‘‘what was your first instinct? What did you immediately do?’’ When he refused to answer, she said, ‘‘Think about that the next time you decide you’re not a good person.’’
She left him standing there to retrieve something from her desk.
When she returned, Grant saw that it was the brass bracelet that Collin had placed inside his jacket before he died. ‘‘You are who you decide to be,’’ she said, placing the bracelet on his wrist. ‘‘And I have decided that you’re a kind, good-hearted man who takes after his father.’’
Grant embraced her, and she hugged him back. When they let go, she could see on his face that he remained unconvinced, uncertain. But there was hope in his eyes for the first time. That was something.
‘‘You never answered my question, by the way,’’ she re-seated herself at the computer. ‘‘Who do you know at Inveo Technologies?’’
His face was awash in confusion. ‘‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’’
Julie fingered a small business card from the desktop and handed it to him. ‘‘I found this in your jacket. With the bracelet.’’
What?
He’d checked all of his pockets after his first conversation with that weird barefoot girl, and hadn’t noticed any business cards anywhere. His jacket had been empty, at least until Collin had put the—
‘‘It was in the same pocket as Granddad’s bracelet?’’
Julie nodded.
A clue! At last.
Collin had given him more than he thought. He looked again at the card. It read ‘‘Carl MacDugall, CEO, Inveo Technologies.’’
‘‘Looks like some kind of tech company. They’ve got a big plant here in California, though it’s a ways off, northeast of San Bernardino. Near Apple Valley, I think . . .’’ Julie was saying. She had pulled up Inveo’s website and was clicking rapidly through the pages.
Grant began to pace.
‘‘That man—we’ll call him Collin for lack of a real name—he meant for me to find this. This company . . . they’re involved, they have to be. It’s some kind of conspiracy or something. Maybe they’ve even got the—I don’t know, the technology or whatever that did this to me.’’
Julie watched him from a sideways view but said nothing. He couldn’t tell whether she was incredulous at his suggestion that technology was responsible for his brand new life, or if she just didn’t like where this line of reasoning was headed.
‘‘Maybe I’m supposed to talk to this Carl MacDugall.’’
‘‘You really think he’d give you an audience?’’ Julie asked, dubious. ‘‘Honey, from the looks of this office complex of his, the man could buy Bill Gates if he wanted to. What could possibly make him want to talk to you?’’
‘‘He is involved,’’ Grant protested. ‘‘Or Collin wouldn’t have given me that card.’’
‘‘But what good does it do you?’’ Julie said, examining the card she held between two fingers. ‘‘What did he expect you to do, march into this guy’s office and demand answers?’’
Grant’s eyebrows popped up.
‘‘Don’t even think about it,’’ Julie warned, and then turned back to her computer monitor. ‘‘The front entrance has three guards, so the rest of the place must be major league.’’
‘‘I can do this. Don’t ask me how, I just know I can. This MacDugall guy and I have got to have a conversation.’’
Julie’s ears were burning red, but Grant ignored her. It felt good to be in forward motion again.
‘‘Are you seriously telling me,’’ Julie remarked slowly, ‘‘that you’re going to try to get an appointment to talk to this person?’’
‘‘It’d never work,’’ he concluded after some thought, shaking his head. ‘‘It would look too suspicious, and besides, I’d have to make something up—some fake story about why I want to see him—and let’s face it, I’m a terrible liar.’’
A hint of a smile played at her lips, accompanying memories of awkward attempts he’d made as a toddler to explain how he’d made a terrible mess or ‘‘accidentally’’ let the dog out of the back yard.
‘‘Then where does that leave us?’’ she asked.
‘‘Only one option I can think of,’’ he said. ‘‘But you’re really not going to like it.’’
11
‘‘So that morning, four days ago, did you see anything . . . out of the ordinary?’’ Daniel asked.
The young man on the other side of the counter had been listening to him very intently, but now he rolled his eyes straight up, vacantly, in what Daniel could only assume was some form of concentration.
‘‘It was the morning of that terrible rainstorm . . .’’ Daniel prodded.
‘‘Oh right,’’ The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘‘This one dude came in with, like, the most criminal toupee ever,’’ he said, laughing. Daniel didn’t respond, so he went on. ‘‘I kid you not, it was like moss on top of his head, man.’’
Daniel merely stared at him, eyebrows up.
‘‘Does that help?’’ the boy asked blankly.
Daniel turned and walked out of the coffee shop into the concrete canyons.
Do I attract the crazy people? Am I putting something out there that draws them to me?
Dry wind whipping around him, he scratched his head of short-cropped hair while surveying the street from side to side. Were there any other stores on this side of the road he hadn’t tried yet? He glanced once again down at the bus stop, a few blocks away. It began there, he thought. The further he got away from the shimmers’ points of origin, the less likely he was to find out where they were coming from. Or rather, who they were coming from, as he suspected.
Why can’t I find you, whoever you are?
How did you do it, when so many others have failed?
His cell phone vibrated. He flipped it open as he continued walking down the street.
‘‘What have you got?’’ He knew it was Lisa. No one else ever called him. He’d sent her to check some of the businesses in the upper floors of the larger buildings while he stuck to the storefront shops on ground level.
‘‘One juicy possibility, though it’s sort of a dead issue. So to speak.’’
‘‘What is it?’’
‘‘This snotty secretary at a consulting firm said one of their IT guys was killed a few days ago.’’
Daniel stopped walking.
‘‘Killed how?’’ he asked.
‘‘She wouldn’t say. Not sure if she just didn’t know or if she was holding out on me. But she did mention that the guy lived in Glendale, at the site of that towering inferno from a few days ago. So naturally, I’m wondering if he died in the fire.’’
He was walking again. ‘‘Yeah, yeah. I remember that on the news. Did she give you a name?’’
‘‘She didn’t want to, but I decided to make myself her new best friend until she felt like opening up.’’
Daniel found himself sympathizing with the woman at the consulting firm. ‘‘What’s the name?’’
‘‘Collin Boyd,’’ she replied.
‘‘Collin Boyd,’’ he repeated thoughtfully.
‘‘You think he’s our shimmer guy?’’ she asked.
‘‘If he is, then the best lead I’ve ever had just went up in smoke,’’ he replied.
‘‘Let me see what I can find out about the fire and I’ll get back to you,’’ Lisa said. She was always up for a challenge.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened to the Wagner Building’s spacious parking deck, which extended four floors below the building. Grant exited, purpose in his stride for the first time in days, and was met by a sea of Mercedes, Cadillacs, Ferraris, and Hummers.
A key chain from a kitchen drawer in his apartment looked an awful lot like car keys. Did the apartment come complete with wheels of some sort? If so, it would be here. He pressed the button on the chain.
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