“I’ve traveled,” Okoya said. “And you’d be wise not to grill someone who comes to you in good faith. It’s the sign of a weak leader.”
The comment stung Dillon far more than he thought it would—and yet there was something refreshing in it: that after the constant acquiescence Of the Happy Campers, here was a personality that actually challenged him. Dillon caught himself grinning, and Okoya returned it. It served to make the others uneasy.
“You still haven’t told us why you’ve dragged us into this nasty game,” Winston asked him. Dillon broke eye contact with Okoya, and turned back to the others.
“It’s got to be more than just trauma care,” said Tory.
“You’re right,” admitted Dillon, “there is more. I called to you . . . I gathered you back together, because it’s the only way to fix what’s gone wrong.”
Winston took a breath for a loud rebuttal, but his brain must have hooked around what Dillon had said. Winston hesitated for a moment, then spoke in a worried whisper.
“What do you mean—‘gone wrong’?”
The other shards had moved closer now, pressing in around the billiard table. Dillon took a deep breath to calm himself.
“Five days ago, I swam the Columbia River,” he told them, “and from the moment I climbed out, I felt a shift in the patterns around me. . . . Patterns of the present . . . and the future. Suddenly I felt everyone and everything begin a long spiral toward a very dark place.”
“You never killed your parasite,” Tory reminded Dillon. “Maybe that’s what you sensed. Maybe that thing has found a way back into this world, and it’s starting to destroy again:” “No,” Dillon said. “No—if it came back, I’d know it. This is something different. Maybe something worse.”
“What could be worse than that?” asked Lourdes.
“All I know,” said Dillon, “is that the first domino is down. Freak events are going to start piling on top of each other, and then one day, people are going to wake up to find that there is no order anymore.”
“The apocalypse is supposed to have four horsemen,” grumbled Winston. “Not five.”
“We’re not ringing it in, Winston,” said Tory. “I think Dillon has a plan to prevent it. Is that what you’re saying, Dillon?”
“I think there’s a chance, if we’re all together.”
“But we’re not all together,” Winston reminded them.
Dillon looked away. He didn’t need to be reminded of how incomplete they were without Deanna—how incomplete he was.
“It’s the best we can do,” he said.
“So, if I’m seeing this right,” said Michael, “you want us all to bust our asses fixing whatever we can, and whoever we can . . . and that way, we might keep things from tanking?”
“Bail out the Titanic!” said Lourdes.
Dillon grinned. “With a big enough bucket.”
Tory came over to him. “You’ve changed, Dillon,” she said.
“I like to think so.” Then he picked up a cue stick, and stroked the cue ball. It struck the other balls, sending the solid colors ricocheting around the table, until they had all found a pocket. The eight ball was the last one to drop.
“Show-off,” mumbled Michael.
Dillon turned to Okoya. If Okoya had an opinion, he wasn’t sharing it. Their exotic guest offered little more than an enigmatic smile. Does he approve, or disapprove? Dillon wondered. And why do I care? That was the question that troubled him more.
***
If the world was winding down, it didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirit over dinner. Michael noted that the mood in the Refectory was more festive than foreboding, and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. A legion of Dillon’s Happy Campers did everything short of sponge-bathing them to make them feel comfortable, and although the attention felt odd at first, Michael found himself becoming accustomed to it remarkably quickly.
They sat together at a table large enough to seat two dozen, and were served a feast fit for kings. Michael had tried to sandwich himself between Dillon and Tory, but somehow Lourdes still managed to squeeze her seat next to his. Michael watched as she ate conspicuously small portions, and loudly denied seconds. It was all for Michael’s sake, of course—to let him know that her obesity, and any hints of gluttony were gone forever. As if her new blossomed beauty could tip the scales, and make him fall madly in love with her—which was about as unlikely as him falling in love with the reanimated Drew.
Michael tried to forget about it and listen to the dinner conversation.
“I hate to admit it,” Winston was saying, “but maybe Dillon’s started something here that should have happened as soon as we converged the first time. I mean, for the last year, all I’ve been doing is ‘dealing’ with things. The tree that uprooted my house, the branches growing through the windows, the neighbors who were afraid to look me in the face; and that’s all I did: deal.”
The door to the kitchen opened, and five dutiful workers brought in the next course, setting it before them on Hearst’s most expensive china.
“After the things we did today,” said Tory, “the things we did together—I can’t go back to living the way I did before. Okoya’s right; our time of hiding is over.”
Michael tried to imagine himself as the world’s Peace Bringer; a great soul sent to calm the skies and raise the spirits of the downtrodden. Certainly he had done some of that back home, but he was only playing, really. He wondered how far his power over the natures could go, if he allowed it. How many minds and emotions could he bring into harmony, if he set himself to the task?
“You know,” said Michael, “I could really get off, spending my life tweaking people into tune.”
“And what about you, Dillon?” said Tory. “I mean, look at all the people who died too young, who could change the world if you brought them back: Martin Luther King, JFK, Princess Di . . . Don’t you ever think about that?”
“Yes,” said Dillon, between bites of his steak. “Remind me to show you my list.”
***
Dillon left before dessert, and Michael used Dillon’s exit as a chance to escape the table as well. He took a plate of food with him.
Drew wasn’t in the Celestial Suite, and while the helpful hordes around Michael leapt at the opportunity to be of assistance, none of them knew where to find him.
Michael found Drew sitting on a stone bench in the basement, in a sort of self-imposed exile. It was a mournful place of unrestored artifacts—wounded statues, torn tapestries—and Michael wondered if Dillon’s presence in the halls up above would, in time, mend these forlorn relics the way his aura restored most everything else. Still, no amount of restoration would stop the basement from resembling a dungeon.
When Drew saw Michael, he quickly stood up and made himself look busy, studying the objects around him.
“Hearst must have been a maniac,” Drew said casually. “Half the art in the world is in this place.”
Michael reached the bottom of the steps, and handed Drew the plate of food.
“It’s cold,” Drew deadpanned, but Michael sensed his gratitude nonetheless. The food’s aroma chased away the mossy stench of the basement walls, and added the slightest degree of comfort to the situation. Still Michael kept a few feet of distance between them, lodging his hands firmly in his pockets, while Drew sat down to eat.
“So,” said Michael, “how’s life?”
Drew ate hungrily. “Better than death.”
Michael ventured a step closer. “What was it like?” asked Michael. “Being dead, I mean.”
“There was a lot of tofu and new-age music.”
Michael grinned. “You must have gone to Hell.”
Drew pondered his plate for a moment. “Actually, I don’t remember anything at all. It’s as if my mind went through an air lock between here and there. You know what they say: ‘You can’t take it with you.’ I suppose you can’t bring it back, either.”
Michael
finally sat beside Drew on the steps, which was about as awkward as anything Michael had ever done. He kept trying to kill the silence with some meaningful words, something truthful that didn’t sound trite, but all that came out were false starts.
“You must hate me in a major way,” Drew finally said.
Michael tried to run a little mental subroutine to see if he could find hatred in there. But that was a feeling as absent as love.
“No,” Michael told him, “I just feel . . . tricked.”
“Yeah. I’m good at that,” said Drew. “I even trick myself sometimes.” Drew took a few moments to compose his thoughts, and became uncharacteristically serious.
“I never meant the mind-screw.” Drew said. “And if it means anything—I really am your friend. The other feeling . . . well, it slipped in when I wasn’t looking.”
“Yeah—well, as long as it doesn’t slip in while I’m not looking.”
Drew grimaced and chalked his finger in the air. “Point for you. I walked into that one with both feet, didn’t I?”
Drew picked through the remnants of his meal, then put the plate down. Even the gentle clatter of the plate on the bench echoed hollowly off the stone walls. Michael found himself filled with questions that he didn’t want answered, so he just sat there, looking down at the dusty floor.
“Hell, everyone’s got some glitch, right?” Drew said with a smile. “So I figure this is mine.”
“And I always thought you were glitchless.”
Drew chuckled. “Perfection on three legs, right? Big man on campus. The track coach would have a cow if he knew. Shit, he’d have a whole herd!”
“Your parents know?”
“For about a year.”
“Is it bad?”
Drew shrugged. “They kind of treat me like I’m the murderer of their future grandchildren, but most of the time it’s okay . . .” Drew looked up, turning his eyes to a faded tapestry, rather than looking at Michael. “Last week was bad, though,” he said. “My father, who never usually talks about it, starts telling me about some guy he found who could ‘straighten me out.’ You know— like all I need is a good chiropractor. Anyway, I went ballistic, he retaliated, and that’s how I ended up at your house that night.”
Michael swallowed hard, remembering the troubled man who had come to visit him that same day: The man asking Michael to change his son’s nature. The man who must have been Drew’s father.
Drew shook his head as he thought about it, and laughed. “Now my parents probably think that I ran off to join the queer circus.”
“Maybe you should go home.”
“No,” said Drew quickly. “How could I leave after seeing what you are—what your friends are? How could I ever go back?”
Michael shuddered to think of Drew as one of the Happy Campers.
“What if I kept a journal for you?” suggested Drew. “A record of all the things that happen from here on in. Anything . . . so I can be a part of this.”
Michael forced himself to look in Drew’s eyes. It wasn’t Drew’s usual coolness there—instead there was a whole squadron of emotions, and his feelings for Michael were still a potent part of the mix.
I can live with this, Michael told himself. If I can part the skies, I can deal with Drew being in love with me, can’t I?
Still Michael felt anxious to get away. He collected Drew’s plate and turned to go—but before he did, he had to ask Drew the question. The one question he wanted to ask from the moment Dillon had brought him hack.
“Drew . . . if you had the choice—would you want to be straight?”
Drew threw Michael an icy look, as if trying to read where the question was coming from. “Yeah, and if I had the choice I’d piss Pepsi, too, but that’s not gonna happen, is it?” Drew held his annoyed gaze a moment more, then just let it go. “Some things you don’t get to choose.” And that was all Drew said about it.
Michael understood Drew’s answer, but he doubted Drew understood why Michael had asked. So Michael didn’t push it. Instead he left Drew alone, with a single thought to consider.
“Actually,” said Michael, “Dillon could make you piss Pepsi.”
***
Dillon had thought the arrival of the others would give him some peace of mind—he had hoped that somehow the suffocating sense of doom would disappear—but the pall had not lifted, and now Dillon wondered if his fixing frenzy was just an exercise in futility.
If Deanna were here, she’d know what to do, and have the strength to do it. If Deanna were here, we might not even be in this mess.
He left dinner early, unable to bear her conspicuous absence. Then he wandered the castle, trying to map it out in his mind, so he wouldn’t feel so consumed by its vastness.
Deanna was lost in a place like this.
And that single thought made it impossible for him to explore, for now he could hear her voice in the eerie echos of La Casa Grande. He could hear her screaming, as she had screamed in the days when her spirit of fear suffocated her. Then he would hear the gentleness of her patient, fearless voice, the way she had been at the end.
As he climbed the stairs toward the kingly suite they had claimed for him, the followers he passed lowered their eyes and stepped aside, as if unworthy of being in his company. At the entrance to his suite, sat an armed guard, who proudly protected Dillon’s door, and beside him sat Carol Jessup. She must have taken the role of his personal maidservant. They launched to their feet the moment they saw him, offering him the most courteous of greetings.
Am I doing any of this right, Deanna? he asked in his thoughts, as if she were somehow with him, instead of a whole universe away. Am I anywhere close to getting things under control?
The answer came in the form of two dozen cardboard boxes, piled everywhere as he entered his room.
“We weren’t sure of your size,” Carol apologized, “or the style you wanted . . .”
Dillon need only glimpse the face of a single colorful box to know what was inside every one of them.
Rollerblades.
Pair after pair of Rollerblades.
“You did ask for them, didn’t you?”
Dillon was suddenly glad he hadn’t eaten much, because he could feel dinner on its way back up.
12. The Tools Of A Thief
The Bringer could not raise the dead. Nor could he banish disease, numb pain, or whip winds into weapons of destruction. But he was a formidable spirit with a crushing power of will. The skills he did not possess would be his to wield soon enough, though—and the thought of it brought an irrepressible grin to his face as he moved through the towering halls of the castle.
Those he passed smiled a return greeting, obviously assuming that his was the joyous grin of surrender—the same surrender that painted all of their faces, now that they were in service to the Shards.
Okoya strolled at a calm, deliberate pace through the lavish corridors, running his hands across the tapestries and sculptures—noting the eons of art and civilization born during his three-thousand-year hiatus. But his thoughts were on weightier subjects.
Five Shards!
And each one greater than the Olympian king who had ordered him chained to the mountain! A quintet of diamonds too bright to behold . . .
. . . And too powerful to devour.
These were souls too large to feast upon—and although his hunger was great, he hid it from the five. These were spirits to master and control—not spirits to dine on. These Shards could be useful tools for the harvesting of a world . . .
But as with any tool, there were dangers. Spirits of such power needed to be broken and harnessed like horses before the chariot—and if a horse could not be broken, it had to be destroyed, lest it turn on its master.
But so far, things were going exceptionally well. The Bringer had already begun to watch and listen—seeking out weaknesses into which he could insert his will, like a hand into a puppet. Deep enough so that he could either play them or crush the
m—whichever ultimately suited his needs.
The Bringer stepped out into a calm night, and there, on the steps of the castle’s front gate, sat a man in the uniform of law enforcement. His head was cupped in his hands like a small child. Curious, the Bringer sat beside him.
“My name is Okoya,” said the Bringer. “Spiritual advisor to the stars.”
The man looked straight ahead at the fountain, and poke as if carrying on a conversation with himself. “What am I supposed to tell them? How can I tell them anything?”
“Tell who?”
“I’m with the county sheriff,” he said. “They got word of something suspicious at the castle, so they sent me here to check it out. Then, when I got here, they brought me to that redheaded kid.”
“And he ‘fixed’ something?”
“He just said something,” the deputy told Okoya. “I don’t even remember what he said, but suddenly . . . suddenly . . .”
“Suddenly all that was wrong with your life fell into place.”
The deputy finally looked at Okoya. “Yes! Yes, that’s right!” Tears welled up in his eyes. “How can I turn him in?”
“You won’t,” the Bringer instructed. “You’ll return to your office, report that nothing is wrong, then you’ll quietly collect your family and join us.”
When it was put to him so plainly, like a clear-cut set of orders, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.
“Yes, that is what I’ll do,” he said—as if he had any choice in the matter. The fact was, from the moment Dillon received him, the pattern of this man’s destiny was set. It was a pattern even the Bringer could read.
The officer stood to return to his squad car, but Okoya grabbed him by the arm.
“Just one more thing.”
The man turned his eyes to Okoya, and Okoya silently, secretly, lashed out. Fine tendrils of pink light shot from Okoya’s eyes, dancing across the officer’s face, penetrating the pores of his skin. The tendrils reached way down, and drained out the very thing that made the man human:
His consciousness.
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