“Do we have a choice? What good is it to sit around and watch videos of people exploding or turning into some sort of creature? Aren’t we just torturing ourselves, fooling ourselves into thinking that there is anything that we can do about it? It has to play itself out.”
“As we have discussed previously, I don’t think your role in all of this is being a bystander,” Ping said. “And I certainly don’t think you can simply stand by and watch people get hurt if you could do something to stop it.”
“That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it? If I could do something to stop it.” She pointed to the computer screen. “There’s nothing we can do to stop this. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.”
“Mara, as a progenitor, you have the ability to—”
She held up her hand. “Please, let’s not get into my metaphysical obligations to the universe right now.”
Bohannon cleared his throat through the phone’s Speaker. “I appreciate all of that. I’m looking for some advice on how to handle things, especially if we encounter more issues with some of these . . . passengers.”
“How should I know? I’m a seventeen-year-old gadget monkey.”
Ping nodded toward the detective. “Tell him what you would do if you found yourself in an out-of-control situation with one of these people who crossed over.”
Mara shook her head blankly and shrugged.
“Remember Sarah Gamble and her grandson, Jeremy?”
“Oh. Oh, right.” She turned to the phone. “If one of the passengers gets unruly, touch them with some of the DNA of their counterpart, and they’ll get blown back into their own realm. Use something like a toothbrush. Watch out though. It will make a big bang.”
“A toothbrush?” Bohannon said.
“Yeah, and, if someone gets hurt, lay your hands on them and heal them.”
“Come again?” Bohannon said.
“Touch them, and they will be healed—like Denton Proctor did to you down at Pioneer Courthouse Square.”
“I was hoping for something more serious than toothbrushes and miracle cures,” Bohannon said. “If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be involved in any of this either. Unfortunately I don’t have a choice in the matter, and there’s real potential for people to get hurt. So if there’s anything either of you can come up with, I would appreciate a heads-up. It’s not like I can turn to the FBI for advice on this stuff.” He hung up.
Ping turned to Mara. “What was that about healing people?”
“It’s true. The Proctors came over for dinner last night. When Denton heals people, he passes along the ability, or so he says.”
“I don’t think the detective believed you.”
“Sometimes I sound sarcastic when I don’t mean to.”
“Only when you’re speaking.” Ping patted her shoulder.
CHAPTER 32
Ping pushed open the door to the warehouse with a hand, not needing his keys since the doorknob hung loosely in the frame, still damaged from Vanderberg and Galinsky’s break-in the previous week. He walked into the cavernous darkness, followed by Mara and Sam. The smell of burnt polyester and something more organic wafted over them as their few steps echoed off the distant walls. Ping fumbled along the nearby wall for a second and flipped the main light switch, ignited the rows of fluorescents high above.
Oddly, instead of one bright spot highlighting the makeshift classroom in the center of the warehouse floor, now a dark spot hung over its remains surrounded by lights. There stood the toppled metal cabinet and a pile of burnt sticks that once comprised the whiteboard. Large swaths of blackened cement surrounded the former classroom, shadows of the fiery plumes that had whipped across the floor a few days ago.
Mara shook her head, amazed. She had not noticed the burn marks before. Nor the deep gouges scratched into the concrete floor, some several inches deep, exposing rebar. “It looks like a war broke out in here,” she said.
“Wow, look at that!” Sam pointed to the floor some distance away. A distorted, elongated figure of a man was seared into the floor. A blast of char outlined the gray concrete silhouette created by Vanderberg’s body, a human stencil for dragon art.
Ping toed some groves in the floor. “It was quite the conflagration, wasn’t it?” He looked up solemnly. “I appreciate the two of you coming to help clean up.”
Mara walked over to the remains of the whiteboard. “We can drag this stuff out to the Dumpster, but I don’t know what can be done with the burns in the flooring and the walls. I suppose we could get an industrial sander or sandblaster of some sort and take out the burn marks. The gouges will have to be filled or patched somehow.”
“I didn’t realize the extent of the damage to the floors and walls. I’ll have to figure out a way to explain this to some contractors. I was hoping to avoid that,” Ping said.
“I’m sure you will come up with some explanation,” Mara said.
Sam snorted and drummed his fingers on his chest, pointing to the figure of Mickey Mouse in a wizard’s cap, holding a magic wand, emblazoned on his black T-shirt.
Mara eyed him. “What’s your deal, Opie? You trying to say something?”
“Sometimes you guys are dense. What do we need contractors for when we got a Grade-A certified progenitor who can patch this up in a few minutes? You know, do your hocus pocus on it. Metaphysicize the place.” He twirled a finger like a magic wand.
Ping’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t suggesting—”
Mara raised a hand. “Why not? You said I needed to practice to get more comfortable with my abilities. Why have to explain anything to anyone?” She turned to her brother, deepening her voice. “Let’s refrain from hocus pocus references. They are only for the ignorant and the uneducated.”
“Mock me all you want,” Ping said. “I’m trying to give you children a foothold in reality instead of allowing you to be duped into believing superstition and trickery.”
“How about it? Should I give it a go?” she asked.
Ping waved his arm to the open, scarred space and bowed slightly.
Mara stared out over the blackened floor and slowly focused on it. After a few seconds she closed her eyes, still seeing the image in her mind’s eye. She tried to imagine the floor unmarked, but she couldn’t get the image to change. Eventually it simply faded away, and she had trouble picturing it at all.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” Sam said. “Clean ’er up.”
Ping shushed him and walked up to Mara, taking her elbow. “It might help if you used a talisman, to get started. What do you think?”
Mara opened her eyes. “It might help me to concentrate a little better. Do you still have the bytownite crystal here—the yellow one that I practiced with before?”
Ping pointed at the toppled metal cabinet and said to Sam, “Can you look in the cabinet? I think I left it there.”
Sam jogged over, lifted one of the cabinet doors as if it were a coffin and lowered his upper torso inside. He lifted out a shelf and threw it on the floor, then reached in once again. After throwing a few items out of his way, causing a loud series of clatters inside the cabinet, he straightened and held up a softball-size crystal.
“This it?” he said, jogging over without waiting for an answer.
“Yeah, that’s it.” Mara took it and sat down lotus-style on the cold concrete floor. “You guys go hang out over there for a minute.” She nodded back toward the cabinet. “And be quiet.”
Sam rolled his eyes and walked away with Ping.
Turning the crystal in her hands, Mara stared deeply at it, consciously allowing the refracted light to shine into her eyes. Soon her entire field of vision filled with golden light, and she felt a sense of control flow over her. She could move the light with a thought—make it lighter, brighter and more amber. A childhood memory of staring into the sun came to her, a time when she had squinted into the light to bend it and shape it. But now it didn’t feel like a fantasy—she could move the light, bend it to her will.
She pe
ered through the light and gazed at the warehouse floor. She willed the amber rays to scour away the blackness. She visualized the slate floor rippling like the surface of a pond, tiny waves slowly diminishing until it was smooth as glass. Something glinted in her mind’s eye.
From somewhere she heard a tiny voice say, “Whoa, cover your eyes!”
Sam held out his hands, trying to create a makeshift screen to eclipse the bright light streaming from the crystal in Mara’s hands. It wasn’t enough, and he closed his eyes, though he sensed the brightness through his eyelids. He even felt the light on his skin, like the noonday sun but without the heat. Soon he sensed the light had diminished and took a cautiously peek.
Sharply defined rays of golden light retracted into the crystal, and the dull institutional light from above shone down on them.
“Look,” Sam said, pointing to the floor. “The burn marks are gone.”
“So are the gouges. And our little classroom is back,” Ping said.
The cabinet stood unmarked next to the pristine whiteboard. Three mats sat on the floor in front of it.
* * *
After cutting off all the lights in the warehouse, except those over the makeshift classroom, Ping returned to his mat and sat down. “You even repaired the back door. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Do you think it’s a problem that I needed a talisman to do this? I mean, I’ve done a lot more elaborate things without one before,” Mara asked.
“Your instincts were probably correct when you said you needed to use the crystal to help you concentrate. Those more elaborate things you did while under duress. That has a way of focusing the mind.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.”
Ping leaned forward and pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it.
“What's that?” Sam asked.
“It’s the list of passengers from Flight 559 that we had started to review before your mother got into trouble a few weeks ago. We never got back to it, and I was thinking that we might want to consider it.”
“What exactly do you want us to consider?” Mara asked.
“Let’s get to that in a second. I’ve marked off all the ones who are accounted for—those who have ‘disappeared’ back to their realms, the ones who’ve come to untimely ends, a few that Detective Bohannon has told me about and the ones we have met who seem to be adjusting to life here. There were 121 people on board the flight, and I have accounted for 23, including us.”
“Me too?” Sam said.
“I didn’t count you since you didn’t have a counterpart on the flight when it left in this realm,” Ping said.
“Okay, what’s your point?” Mara asked.
“Before things got out of control, we had started to go down the passenger list to see if there was any way to avert problems with them. Remember?” Ping said.
“We used the list to narrow down the options when we were looking for Missy Harrington, after she had swiped the Chronicle from us. I don’t recall wanting to go looking for problems.”
“Well, given the circumstances with the bank robbery, don’t you think it would be prudent to check up on some of the other passengers? It might prevent unnecessary harm or even bloodshed.”
Mara emitted a long-drawn-out groan of frustration.
“I can’t believe you would simply stand by and watch people get hurt,” he said.
“I understand that, on some twisted metaphysical level, I am responsible somehow for bringing all this about. But don’t you think this stuff is going to sort itself out eventually?”
“Probably, existence has a way of doing that. But how many innocent people are you comfortable with losing in the process? Five, ten, one hundred?”
“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?” she asked.
“Based on what we saw on that video today, I’m not so sure.”
“Is that the one with the man turning into a big bug?” Sam asked.
Ping nodded and turned back to Mara. “Take those events and multiply them by a factor of a hundred. That’s how many people from other realms are running around out there. Now is it melodramatic to think someone is going to get hurt if we don’t act?”
“Okay, okay. I guess it won’t hurt to check up on the ones who live around here, but let’s keep it low-key. I’d prefer not to get into any metaphysical brawls if it can be helped.”
Ping smiled, folded up the list and slid it back into his pocket. “Excellent. I bet Detective Bohannon would be glad to give us some assistance in return for ours.”
“Speaking of brawls, there’s something else we need to get squared away,” she said.
“What would that be?” Ping asked.
“The dragon.”
“What about the dragon?”
“I’m thinking that we should try to send him on his way—you know, back to his own realm.”
Ping tensed and straightened. “I’m not sure if that’s even possible. We essentially share the same body. How do you propose to accomplish this?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I was able to pull Diana, Sam’s version of Mom, out of my mother’s body using a crystal to separate their consciousnesses. Why couldn’t I do the same with you and the dragon?”
“My situation is a little different. The dragon isn’t simply an outside entity that invaded my body, as was the case with your mother. Our bodies, the dragon’s and mine, were basically blown to bits during the battle with you on Main Street in Oregon City.”
“I recall,” Mara said.
“When our remains reassembled we became fully integrated. The dragon isn’t simply a squatter inside my body.” Ping pointed to his own chest. “This body is as much his as mine.”
“There’s got to be a way to separate you.”
“Even if there were a way to do it, I don’t think he would allow it. He doesn’t just defend himself with brute force. He has the ability in intuit danger in a way that I have never experienced before. I’m only now beginning to get a sense of it.”
“Intuit? What do you mean, intuit?”
Ping paused and looked upward, thinking. “The closest thing I can think of would be sonar. It’s like the dragon sends out these waves, not sound waves, but something I can only describe as thought waves. Eventually they bounce back, and the dragon can interpret them even before the danger is imminent.” He shrugged and added, “I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s the best way I have of describing it.”
Sam leaned forward and said, “That is so cool. Is that why he was so restless before Galinsky and Vanderberg showed up?”
Ping nodded. “I believe so.”
“All the more reason why we should be trying to figure out how to get that thing out of you. How can you sit there calmly lecturing me about some guy turning into a bug at the bank while you are harboring a monster of mythic proportions inside you? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you don’t want to be separated from this thing.”
“There may be some truth in that,” Ping said. “There is a certain allure to the power and majesty of this creature that is a part of me.”
They sat in strained silence for what seemed a long time.
“Well, that sucks,” she said.
CHAPTER 33
The following day when Mara parked along the curb on Woodstock Boulevard in front of the Mason Fix-It Shop, she eyed a large man in a trench coat facing away from her, hunched against the cold and drizzle, standing in front of the shop’s display window, alternately stomping his feet as if trying to ward off a chill. She and Sam got out of the Subaru, and he gave her a questioning look. She shook her head and said, “It’s only a customer waiting for me to open up. You can head over to the bakery.”
Sam slammed the passenger door and jogged over to Ping’s brightly lit storefront. As Mara approached the shop’s front door, the man turned to face her with an expression so grave that, for a second, she didn’t recognize him. It was Detective Bohannon.
She raised the hand hold
ing the keys she was about to use to unlock the shop and said, “Detective, I don’t really have time to talk. I’ve got to open the shop and get to work.”
“I didn’t come to talk. I need you to come with me,” he said.
“I really need to get to work.” She inserted the key into the door.
Bohannon placed a hand on her arm and said, “People are dying. I need you to come with me and take a look at this. You don’t need to do anything. Let me know what you think, and then I’ll bring you back.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the hospital over up on Gleason in the northeast sector. I’ll have you back here in an hour. Hour and a half, tops,” he said.
“Let me go get Ping. I would really feel more comfortable if he were with me.”
“He’s on his way. I stopped in and talked to him a few minutes ago. He was waiting for your brother to come in to keep an eye on the bakery while we go.”
Just then Ping stepped out of the front of the bakery, pulling on an overcoat. He still wore his white chef’s smock. He approached them, and Bohannon pointed toward his blue Ford F-150 parked across the street.
* * *
They drove in silence to the hospital. For some reason Bohannon didn’t want to elaborate about who or what they were going to see, and Mara had decided that not asking a lot of questions might be the best strategy for not getting any more deeply involved than she absolutely had to. It was one thing to agree to look into what some of the passengers from the flight might be up to, but it was another to out-and-out go seeking trouble. And taking an impromptu trip to the hospital with the grim-faced detective felt like trouble.
They parked in a small parking lot tucked between two wings of the hospital that didn’t appear to be used by the general public. A quarter of the spaces were occupied by utility vehicles, vans, trucks and one ambulance. The rest struck Mara as employees’ personal vehicles. When she stepped out of the truck, she noticed a loading dock nestled in the portion of the building that connected the two wings. Bohannon pointed in that direction and to the left, to a door with a uniformed police officer standing guard.
Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) Page 18
