Grant couldn’t hold back the tears now. This was beyond anything he could’ve expected . . .
‘‘But why me?’’ Grant shouted.
‘‘I fashioned you to be the Bringer. And you must play your role, and face what is to come. There is no one else who can.’’
‘‘And if I don’t want to?’’ Grant asked, even though he didn’t want to know the answer.
‘‘I’ve already proven that I will go to any lengths to ensure that you’re ready for what’s coming. But the time for talk is over. Your destiny has come, and it’s waiting for you. And I will do whatever it takes to ensure that you seize it.’’
‘‘You’re insane . . .’’ Grant sobbed. ‘‘You can’t do this . . .’’
‘‘I can do anything, or haven’t you learned that by now?’’ the Keeper replied malevolently.
‘‘How could anyone be this—’’
‘‘Spare me the pontificating. Your mother served her purpose, and when the time came, she had the good grace to let go. Now it’s your girlfriend’s turn to do the same.’’
Time ran like molasses. Grant’s face contorted in horror as the phone fell from his hands. Hannah turned to him, worried, from where she stood in front of the large picture window. He heard the shot ring out from far away.
And instinctually, he panicked.
A silver platter resting on a nearby shelf launched itself spinning into the air, passing between Hannah and the window . . .
But it was too late by a fraction of a second . . . The window shattered, and she fell.
‘‘NOOO!!!’’ Grant screamed, running for her.
With Alex’s help, he dragged her from the view of the window and whoever was out there shooting. Her eyes were closed . . .
No! No! No! No! No!
‘‘Hannah!’’ he cried, brushing her hair back. ‘‘Wake up! Stay with me!’’
Alex was contorted with shock and sorrow as she gazed back and forth between Grant and Hannah.
Hannah stirred as Grant cradled her in his arms, inspecting the wound. The bullet had struck her shoulder, but it looked like a clean hole, it wasn’t that bad . . .
She’s going to make it, she’s okay . . .
He was looking into her eyes, smiling in relief when he realized she wasn’t taking her eyes off of him.
And blood was everywhere, all over him, on Alex, the carpet . . .
Words she’d spoken once flashed through his mind.
‘‘I have to be on a line-of-sight with whoever I’m doing it to for it to work . . . and I can only do it to one person at a time.’’
Grant looked at Alex. Her features were stricken.
Grief-stricken.
But still Grant saw only the flesh wound on Hannah’s shoulder, as she gazed on him without blinking.
‘‘It’s all right, big boy, I’m going to be fine . . .’’ she whispered.
Pain swelled within him but he choked back the tears until he felt like his throat might explode.
But he held her tighter, rocking her slowly. Only his whimpers could be heard.
Hannah’s pulse faded as Grant kissed her forehead, pushing her hair out of her face . . .
She fought to keep her eyes open, her voice fading. ‘‘Don’t . . .’’ she said groggily. ‘‘Don’t let them take . . . your soul . . .’’ she said, struggling to speak.
‘‘Hannah—!’’
She stopped breathing.
Her eyes fell closed.
And then Grant was finally able to see the truth. The wound wasn’t in her shoulder.
It had torn open her neck.
She had bled to death in his arms in a matter of seconds.
Grant stopped breathing, too.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t blink, no words would come. Inside him, her light dimmed, dimmed, and then, with a sigh, vanished.
Grant pulled her tight with his eyes closed and rocked her back and forth, holding nothing back in his grief.
‘‘Grant,’’ Alex said quietly.
He didn’t hear her, he only continued rocking and crying.
‘‘Grant, she’s gone.’’
She’s really gone, he thought.
No!
I never got to tell her . . .
He let go of Hannah and looked up at Alex, his heart flattened in despair. Still he said nothing as he cried, his soul dark and empty without her.
Alex watched as Grant turned loose of Hannah’s lifeless body. But he was no longer rocking back and forth. He was trembling. And as he did, a deep, powerful rumble shook the building to its foundations.
Perfect time for an earthquake, she thought at first. Typical L.A.
At least it felt like an earthquake.
But then she saw Grant’s face. His skin had turned red, his eyes were open, looking all around through a haze of water, his cheeks were soaked, and veins appeared on his forehead as he trembled harder and harder in a blinding fury.
Grief and rage burned in his eyes. The building was shaking violently now, and Alex found that she couldn’t get up off the ground, even as she watched Grant rise to his feet.
Everything in the apartment rattled as the tremors grew worse.
Small objects took on a life of their own and flung themselves across the room. Furniture and appliances uprooted themselves, falling over.
Dishes and picture frames whizzed by in all directions and shattered against the walls.
Alex put her arms up to protect herself from flying papers, books, plates, picture frames, and other objects swirling about the room in a wild hurricane of power.
She could barely see Grant anymore as he walked unharmed through the heart of the storm toward the apartment door.
The door threw itself open, crashing into the wall beside it, and Grant stalked onward.
‘‘Grant!’’ Alex shouted above the din.
He spun around in a violent blaze, and the apartment seemed to turn with him. ‘‘He killed her!’’ he roared, his voice booming like a clap of thunder.
Alex saw madness in him, and she realized in horror that she was looking into the face of a stranger . . .
What was that?
Something in his eyes . . . .
No, now there was nothing.
‘‘He is not going to get away with it!’’
‘‘Grant, no!’’ she screamed, grappling for words and trying not to hug the carpet as the terror around them built to an impossible crescendo. They held each other’s gaze, but she couldn’t mask her terror at what she was witnessing.
What would Julie say to him right now?
‘‘Grant, if you do this . . .’’ she shouted, finding her voice, ‘‘you will lose everything in you that’s good! ’’
His face was hard as granite as his next words came out through clenched teeth.
‘‘I wasn’t made to be good.’’
He turned and walked out, leaving her to stare in stunned silence at the spot where he’d been.
The door slammed itself shut behind him.
The deadbolt and chain locked themselves.
62
Los Angeles quaked.
Rippling waves shuddered the city to its core, and the upheaval grew ever worse. Bricks fell free from buildings, awnings crashed to sidewalks, ceilings caved in, and light posts and power lines were uprooted.
Electricity went out and night engulfed the city for miles.
Cars screeched and crashed into one another. Fire hydrants were shaken loose and overturned, water gushing high into the air. Pedestrians spilled out of businesses, residences, and other buildings in droves. Mothers and fathers picked up their children and tried to get as far away from the stampedes of the rioting city as possible. But they didn’t know where to run.
And then everything changed.
It began with a single scream.
Then another. Others followed, lifting their gazes to the night sky, and the panicked cries spread like an outward-growing ripple in a pond. One afte
r another after another joined in the chorus as all eyes turned upward.
The moon and stars were gone.
Fierce, pitch-black clouds billowed and churned uncontrollably through the sky as if a thousand volcanoes were erupting.
Bright orange hues danced behind the clouds and around their edges. The heavens themselves were sparking into a scorching holocaust of heat and flame behind the swelling storm.
All light was gone, darkness swallowing the city whole, broken only by hair-trigger flashes of angry orange light from above.
Terror struck every heart, and everyone inexplicably knew that something—something that would change the world forever—was coming.
It was coming now.
On the bottom floor of the Wagner Building, the elevator doors ripped apart and Grant emerged, trembling and cloaked in malice. His cyclone of rage surrounded him, whipping up dirt and dust and anything else in its path, and stretching wide enough to blow out the windows on the ground floor.
Outside, the world had gone mad.
But Grant had no interest in what was outside the building.
Hannah’s blood still dripped from his clothes, the coppery smell flooding his nostrils and fueling his turmoil.
His thoughts returned again and again to the words of the Keeper . . .
After I have explained, you will come down to meet me . . .
He knew what it meant.
The Keeper was very near, and had been all along.
Grant turned before reaching the front door and entered the emergency stairwell. He descended to the basement, retracing his steps from the day he was first Shifted to the small mechanical room where he’d hid from Konrad.
The spartan room was exactly as he remembered it: musty, dim, and filled only with a pulsing hum, as if you could hear the building’s heartbeat. The narrow, emergency ‘‘fire escape’’ door that led to the subway was to his right in the back.
But the furnace was symmetrical in design, and a similar space was open amid the pipes on the left side of the room. But there was no door there.
At the room’s threshold, Grant’s eyes went dark as they settled on the furnace.
The massive heating device ripped itself free from its moorings and exploded out into the hall. Grant himself was unscathed and unmoved.
The subway door gave way from the blast, and a hole appeared in the opposite wall.
The hole was roughly the size of a man, and Grant went through, stalking down the dark corridor beyond.
Sweat poured off of him, his breathing fast and hard. He came upon a small set of double doors that slid apart as he approached. A stark, stainless steel elevator car waited on the other side.
He entered.
Grant never bothered with the buttons on the panel. He merely thought down.
And down he went.
Like a falling bomb.
Waiting to explode on impact.
Alex made it to her feet as the miniature storm in Grant’s apartment subsided.
Hannah’s broken body held her attention, outstretched as she was on the floor. The girl was already pale, the blood having drained from her neck wound. Alex blinked back the tears and tried to think straight, tried to decide what she should do next.
Morgan. I should find Morgan.
A light from the broken picture window flashed in the corner of her eye.
Another tremor unbalanced her stance, but this one felt different.
It wasn’t localized around the building—she could see the entire city shaking outside, high-rises swaying back and forth ever-so-slightly.
Peering down at the streets far below, she gasped at the massive swell of the crowd. Every person in the entire city seemed to be fleeing in all directions, running for their lives.
She looked up.
It was a sight no human had ever before laid eyes on. The sky roiled and crashed like waves at sea in a turbulent storm. Clouds darker than any black she had ever seen collided, swirled, stirred, sparked, and detonated.
Fire was devouring the night sky, and it was spreading . . .
Spreading downward.
It was here.
But Grant had gone mad.
And Hannah was dead.
A wild notion rushed through her thoughts, from out of nowhere.
She decided it was the best idea she’d ever had.
Payton needed to see it for himself.
Using the stairs, which buckled wildly beneath him, he made a treacherous journey to the bottom floor of the Wagner Building where, like many of the other Loci, he had taken up residence in the last few days.
He met Morgan halfway down, flanked by Fletcher. Daniel and Lisa were already in the lobby on the ground floor when the three of them staggered out of the stairwell. Not escaping their notice was the door that led to the stairs, which had been ripped off of its hinges, but they had no time to consider it.
Payton coolly met the eyes of the others—all of which were filled with fear—and then gazed again through the empty window frames.
No words were exchanged.
As a group, they filed through the front door and took in the full scope of the event before them.
They’d no sooner regrouped outside than a monstrous tendril of flame leaped out of the sky and bored into the earth. All five of them were knocked off their feet as an office complex two blocks down was hit by the massive fire bomb; glass, steel, and everything within the building sparked to flame as if it had been superheated in a single moment.
They rose to their feet again and watched an enormous plume of smoke rise from where the office building had stood. They doubted anyone had been inside at this hour of the night, but it was still a fearsome sight.
Payton’s hand was instinctively on his sword. ‘‘We must do something before this gets worse,’’ he cried urgently.
Morgan turned to him, resigned. ‘‘What would you suggest?’’
Payton had no answer.
Lisa’s face was more stricken and terrified than Daniel had ever seen it. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she side-stepped into his grasp, until his entire arm was holding her.
‘‘What is it?’’ Lisa whispered.
‘‘Something bigger than anything that has ever been,’’ Daniel replied quietly, repeating words he had once spoken to Grant.
‘‘Alex was right,’’ Morgan spoke up.
They all turned to her.
‘‘It’s the end of everything,’’ she said.
Grant’s fists were clenched tight as the elevator door slid open after a long ride to the bottom.
‘‘Mr. Borrows. Right on time,’’ a voice to his right said. It sounded busy, occupied, impatient.
Grant stepped out and found a short, balding man holding a clipboard and watching him through round, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a scientist’s white lab coat and a detached expression.
‘‘If you’ll just come with me, he’s eager to get underway . . .’’ the little man said, turning to walk away.
Grant barely gave the man a fleeting glance.
Instead, his eyes swiveled all about, taking in the sight before him, just as the bald man was suddenly jerked away to the side, crashing into a distant wall.
Grant was inside an immense hollow that looked as if the dirt and rock underground had been scooped away. It was like being within an enormous crater that was upside down. The vast, circular space was over half a mile in diameter.
Directly in its center stood a gleaming silver cube of solid steel, offset by metal girders thatched across its surface. It rose over ten stories above him, not quite touching the top of the hollow. A set of double doors lay straight ahead. The whole area smelled unnaturally clean, like a hospital.
A contingent of guards in black jumpsuits guarded the entrance. They already had weapons trained on him as he approached. But Grant was moving unstoppably forward, a force of nature. The guards were knocked hard to the ground on either side, as if the Red Sea had parted before him.
/> The double doors before him were labeled in big letters:
SUBSTATION LAMBDA-ALPHA
The doors never opened.
Grant glanced at them, and both doors exploded outward in a tremendous blast. He deflected them with an instinctive thought, and the two doors parted, falling to either side of him.
All the while, he never stopped moving forward.
He never slowed down.
Alex ran out into the ground floor lobby, scanning everything for Grant’s trail.
She caught sight of the stairwell door lying broken on the ground. She looked inside and pieced it together.
He hadn’t gone out into the city.
He’d gone under it.
She raced down to the destroyed mechanical room, surveying the damage, grim evidence of Grant’s outrage. A thin path led through the devastation, across the floor to the far wall.
Which meant there was no time to waste. Into the opening in the wall and to the waiting stainless steel elevator she ran . . .
Inside the tall underground structure, black-clad militia men advanced on Grant in droves as he continued his slow, steady progress through the building. Unarmed scientists in lab coats ran screaming from his presence.
Everyone who came within sight of him was lifted up off their feet and blown aside.
Walls, doors, windows, lights, even the floor tiles were all caught in the hurricane of Grant’s approach, and he showed no signs of tiring.
Blood in his eyes and death in his heart, he moved steadily toward the heart of the building through a tall, wide main corridor made from the same pristine steel as the outside.
But he was oblivious to it all, the image of Hannah’s bloodstained body consuming his vision.
He was equally oblivious to the shimmering glow coming from the ring on his finger. Brighter and brighter it glimmered, its radiance outshining the building’s own lighting.
Still he continued on, destroying, uprooting, tearing apart.
Searching.
Where.
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