Dillon had played the situation, just as they knew he could. He let Tessic believe he had negotiated, but in truth, this was the arrangement Dillon wanted all along. Michael and Tory would be their ambassadors to the vectors. “Yeah, because we’re expendable,” Michael complained—but they knew why it was best this way. Dillon could not be allowed to face the vectors until they were at their strongest—because if they defeated him, then all was lost.
Michael and Tory were gone, spirited to Katowice International Airport by helicopter before breakfast was served, bound for Sicily, and the cold embrace of Lourdes Hidalgo, who they all agreed was more than merely AWOL.
If they were shards of the Scorpion Star, then she had become the venom in the tip of its tail.
31. SEA OF DEATH
* * *
SCORES OF ROTTING FISH WASHED UP AGAINST THE CLIFFS OF Taormina, Sicily, sending up an uncompromising stench to the Cliffside Greek Theater. It was a constant reminder to Lourdes of her many mistakes and missteps under the tutelage of her three Angels of Death.
The disaster at the Jamaican racetrack had only been the beginning. Following orders from Memo, thinly veiled as suggestions, Lourdes had gripped and controlled one hundred people in Miami, then three hundred farther up the Florida coast, marching them this way and that like a cracker box army. There had been no major mishaps. Then when their ship reached Daytona, she had tried to commandeer five hundred—and had succeeded, her skill sharpening with practice, as Memo had said it would. She was able to grip their bodies and their wills, propelling them in an orderly and efficient manner to the beach. But their inertia proved too much for her. The wave of their motion had direction but no destination. They couldn’t stop moving. They drowned.
For the media, it became just one more nasty event in a disintegrating world—and although it would have been analyzed ad infintum by the public a year ago, there were so many unconscionable events from one day to the next, it was quickly submerged in the collective consciousness. Lourdes thought she would feel worse about it—tormented by the helplessness her victims must have felt, and yet she was amazed at how well she slept that night.
“You’ve grown beyond caring about them,” Memo, the child-demon, had told her. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or horrified by her ability to dissociate from a human context. Did it make her a cold-blooded killer, or transcendent?
Still packed with her hedonistic throng, the Blue Horizon had cut a course to Bermuda. There, she had gripped ten times as many—but this time did not leave her impulse open-ended. She clipped it, focusing her attention on the shoreline. Five thousand fell under her control, impelled to the edge of the surf, where they stopped at her command, holding themselves at attention until she released them. Success—and yet in this success there was still no satisfaction.
“Five thousand, or fifty thousand,” the bat-faced woman, Cerilla, had said. “It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anywhere close to what we need.”
“Give her time,” Memo had insisted. But time was running out—yet they wouldn’t tell Lourdes why this needed to be accomplished on a predetermined schedule.
“If you are leading this invasion,” she had asked, “why can’t you decide when it will happen?”
“The water must boil,” Memo told her. “My abuela used to tell me, you can’t put the spaghetti in until the water boils. But if you wait too long, the water boils off.”
When they crossed through the strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, that water began to simmer. That’s when she sensed two revivals, falling only a day apart. They were distant—back in America. She could only assume that Dillon had brought back Michael and Tory, as Deanna was unreachable. At both moments, it had evoked in her old feelings of an unbreakable connection between all of them, but those feelings were quickly snuffed by the vacuum in which her spirit now dwelled.
So, the Fantastic Four were together again. Well, good for them. Let them obsess and confer over the fate of the world. She had no interest in being part of that. She knew her three new malefactors must have sensed their revival as well. Perhaps that’s why they continued to be so displeased with her progress.
Then, on December first, with only seven days left until the greatest performance of her life, their pleasure cruise became the Voyage of the Damned.
It was the Captain’s fault. He had chosen to take the ship north of Sicily rather than south, forcing them into an ambush in the Strait of Messina. Perhaps he was in collusion with the ships that attacked them. She could not be sure, and she could not ask him because he had died in the attack, along with most of her guests.
Three warships had attacked the Blue Horizon without warning, under cover of darkness. One torpedo would have done the job, but apparently they weren’t taking any chances. After the third torpedo shredded the hull, Lourdes’s little floating oasis was sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean in less than twelve minutes—not long enough to launch more than a handful of half-empty lifeboats.
But this wasn’t the loss that weighed on her. It was the loss of her brother and sisters. They had not made it through the smoke-filled hallways to the lifeboats before the Blue Horizon coughed up her ghost in a greasy spill of diesel fuel.
She thought she was impervious to that kind of pain, and found her sorrow quickly putrefying into fury, as she foundered in a flooded lifeboat with her three angels, who were content to hurl others off the boat to keep themselves afloat.
Lourdes could kill the entire population of Italy for what they had done. Every village, every town, every beggar on every lousy cobblestone street. She could kill them all—and made a concerted effort to do so from her lifeboat, sending an angry impulse across the surface of the waters.
This was perhaps her worst mistake of all. It was stupid. Unproductive. Because when the impulse of her anger faded, there was silence in the waters around them. Silence, and bodies. That silence sat in stronger accusation even than her victims in Daytona. She knew what she had done. She had gripped every beating heart within her reach, and shut them all down. Not only were the seamen on the three attacking ships killed by her anger, but the survivors of her own ship were extinguished as well; those in the water, those in the lifeboats. All of them.
Only she and her three “Angels” were immune. Even more, she sensed death in the sea beneath her, running to its very bottom. How far had the impulse gone? Five miles, perhaps, until it fell beneath a lethal threshold? She knew her influence would be felt for many miles beyond that. A sudden spasm in the chest of every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction. For those far enough out of range the spasm would pass. Maybe. She didn’t know her own strength anymore, and until that moment, she had never considered herself a weapon of mass destruction.
Her angels were quick to remind her that the sinking, which they could have turned to her advantage, was only a disaster because of her rash action. She could very easily have commandeered one of the naval vessels and continued their crusade, but now without a living crew to manipulate, they were just as dead in the water as those ships.
They made shore just before dawn. Then Carlos and Cerilla took some rope from the lifeboat, and tied her to a tree. She tried to stop them, but their anger was more powerful than her ability to fight them off.
“This,” Carlos told her, “is something you’ve earned,” and then they both beat her with their bare hands, until their fists were as bruised as her face, relieving their anger on her the way she had relieved hers on the world. Lourdes tried to counterattack, by gripping their muscles with her mind, but their immunity to her was complete. Just as they could not devour her, she could not injure them. There was a balance of power, delicate though it may be.
All the while, Memo sat nearby, not lifting a finger to stop it. He was the leader of this trio of wolves—one word from him could have ended their beating, but he let it go until his cohorts’ human bodies were exhausted, and their inhuman spirits satisfied.
Memo came to her when th
e other two left, untying her bonds while whistling a pop tune dredged from his host body’s memory. Once one hand was free, Lourdes pushed him hard enough to send him flying across the beach on which they were marooned. He stood up, looking at her with hurt and surprise.
“You let them torture me, and you expect me to follow your orders?”
He came back to untie her other hand. “Using your power against those warships was a bad thing,” he said, sounding more the child than the demon. “They are angry.”
She had grown used to his manner now, but still it unsettled her the way the personality of the child host-body had merged with the seriousness of the creature who commandeered it. At times almost innocent, and at other times evilly calculating.
But there is no evil, she reminded herself. The angels had taught her that. Was the fisherman evil for catching fish? Was the hunter evil for feeding his family? There is no evil, the angels told her, only power and weakness. The weak see power used against them as evil.
If I see them as evil does that make me weak?
It was simply easier to ignore the question than to answer it.
“Mama and Abuelo are very angry,” Memo said as he untied her. “But if they hit you enough now, they won’t kill you tomorrow.”
“I thought you didn’t suffer from human emotions,” Lourdes snapped.
“We feel what these bodies feel,” Memo answered. “Me, I find anger the most useful, don’t you?”
Lourdes rubbed her swelling face. She couldn’t find the use in their anger or in her own. It had landed them on this wretched shore.
“Anger must be used, though. Directed,” Memo said.
“And what if I direct it at the three of you?”
Memo stood on his tiptoes looking closely at her swelling face. “More of the same,” he answered, then kissed a bruise above her eye. “A kiss will make it better, verdad?”
She pushed him away again. “Not that easy.”
“Still, you will do the things we ask of you.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because,” he said quite simply, “you wish to be with greatness. And we are the only greatness there is.”
She grunted but refused to admit how well he had her pegged. For months she had taken all this world had to offer and found it flavorless. Then to learn that everything the world perceived as divine was merely the work of these predators had crushed her. Crushed her, then freed her. This new, bleak view of creation left her unencumbered by troublesome human ethics.
But your brother and sisters are dead, her atrophied conscience whispered from its hiding place. They are at the bottom of the Mediterranean because of you.
She would have cried, but refused to let Memo and the other two seraphic ghouls see the depth of her sorrow. These creatures did not care about her sorrow. They simply needed her to accomplish their goal. To know that beings greater than herself needed her was its own reward—and in spite of their constant disapproval, she would serve them, because they were, as Memo had said, the only embodiment of greatness she’d ever know. She longed to be party to the power they would soon unleash. How odd, she thought, to finally find fulfillment in the slavery of “Angels.”
SHE SET UP COURT in nearby Taormina, in the ruins of the Greek Theater, because it reminded her of those spectacular, but brief, golden days beneath the faux Greco facades of the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. But these ruins were real, from a time before Sicily became a kicking toy for the toe of Italy. It had once been claimed by Greece, and in some fundamental way, Lourdes felt connected to it.
The view from the theater was stunning: snow-capped Mount Etna to the south, and to the east, the tranquil, azure waters of the Mediterranean—but as they made preparations for the next leg of their journey, it was the north that drew Lourdes’s attention. Something happening to the north.
The other shards. They were closer. They were . . . doing something. Now they were not just together, but connected in some new way, and the sense of their connection deepened her own sense of isolation. She closed her eyes, hating them for making her feel this way, but longing to know what it was they were doing. She closed her eyes, trying to feel more clearly what they felt. Whatever they were up to it was both wonderful and horrible at the same time.
“Forget them,” Memo said, seeing this new direction of her attention. “Come look at the sea. We are not that far from Thira.”
When she looked across the ocean, she imagined she could see the island out there, waiting for her arrival, and it chased the irritating sense of the other shards out of her mind.
“There is a scar running through Thira, from the sky to its bowels,” Memo told her with childlike enthusiasm. “We get to tear it open again.”
Lourdes knew if they succeeded, it would mean a slow and painful end to the human condition, as if afflicted by some terminal disease.
A disease, thought Lourdes, is that what these creatures are? She couldn’t shake the thought, and yet when she dug down to mine her feelings about it, she found she did not care. To her, the human race was already dead. In that, perhaps she was not all that different from these creatures of darkness posing as light—for if she was a luminous spirit, why did she feel so black at her core?
Up above a reconnaissance plane flew past, toward the three dead warships that had run aground ten miles up the coast.
“Tearing open the sky . . .” Lourdes said. “I can’t wait.” Then she effortlessly gripped the hands of the pilot in the low-flying plane, forcing them forward, and she and Memo watched as the plane plunged into the sea.
32. WEB OF SHADOWS
* * *
MICHAEL AND TORY’S FLIGHT TO SICILY WAS A LESSON IN European geography. What Michael expected to be a brutally long flight aboard Tessic’s jet was a mere puddle jump. Two hours from Warsaw to Palermo and by late afternoon they were received at Tessic’s villa on the north shore of Sicily.
“Is there a place where this guy doesn’t have a villa?” Michael had asked as the housekeeper walked him and Tory through, pointing out the many amenities. There was no fog here—and although a chill filled the air when they had arrived, it had become a sullen breeze. Now that the weather was permitting, the glass wall of the living room was slid open, leaving a vast Mediterranean view as their fourth wall.
Michael and Tory sat out on the verandah, taking a late lunch, feeling guilty about it—but not too guilty. This was, after all, the first real reprieve they had—not just since being revived, but since the nightmare at Hoover Dam, and the heady hell of being addicted to their own power. “Who says we have to find Lourdes,” Michael said, devouring some delicious Sicilian dish he could not name. “Let’s just stay here, sponging off of Tessic, and watch the world end from our balcony.” He was only half kidding.
“Won’t work,” Tory told him. “World’s ending to the east; the balcony faces north.” Tory wasn’t eating. Instead she was still examining the silverware, too embarrassed to complain to the help about the spots, but too obsessive to use them. Well, thought Michael, our experiences left us all with some quirks.
“Lourdes is on the island, east of here,” Tory told him. “Not all that far.”
Michael did not want to be reminded.
“She’s up to something horrible,” Tory went on. “I can feel her like a short circuit.”
Michael had to admit her presence did feel different. One of them, and yet not. Winston had warned them about her—that she was not the girl they remembered—that she had let herself become evil. Michael thought to when he had first met Lourdes. She had been a bitter outcast, so frighteningly obese, she inspired fear rather than sympathy. Hatred and anger were not new emotions to her—she had hated with a riveting, heart-stopping intensity even back then. She could have killed any number of classmates and teachers with the intensity of her hatred. But then, for a time, anger gave way to self-indulgence, as it had for all of them. What then of Lourdes’s self-indulgence? Had that matured into something wo
rse? Had it fused with her anger into something even more lethal than the gluttonous parasite that had once enslaved her?
“They say she kills people,” said Tory. “Hundreds at a time. For pleasure.” She shivered at the thought. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Keep talking and you’ll ruin this wonderful warming trend.” And indeed, Michael could feel the temperature dropping. It wasn’t just the presence of Lourdes that bothered him—it was the vectors. Everything inside him was screaming panic—but he was strong enough now to box those emotions. And so, when sunset came, he streaked the sky with wispy cirrus—a trick he had perfected back at San Simeon for his adoring throng a week—no—a year before. The swatches of clouds soaked in the colors of sunset, painting the whole sky in vivid oranges and blues, resolving to violet. When the spectacle was done, Tory led him to the bedroom for a syntaxis of two.
“We’ll set out to find her in the morning,” Tory said. “But we owe ourselves this one night.”
They lay down on the bed, fully clothed at first. Michael had hoped that the right set of circumstances would ignite his scarred libido, but it wasn’t happening, and as she pressed against him, slipping her hand into his shirt to feel his heartbeat against her palm, he grew uneasy.
“I want to be with you,” she whispered to him, and although he felt his heart pouring out, the passion moved no lower.
“I can’t,” he told her, taking her hand from the lip of his jeans. “I used up all my lust a long time ago. Didn’t save anything for a rainy day . . . or a starry night.”
She giggled, as if she were drunk. Is she drunk on me? he thought.
“I still want to be with you,” she said.
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