Marko moaned. He continued to rub his head and stare at the ground.
I yanked on her hand. An old lady, one a good three inches shorter than me, shouldn’t be able to hold me by my neck, but I could not dislodge her fingers.
“Let go!” I yanked again. “Marko needs help! He might have a concussion.” She wasn’t gripping me so much as holding my jaw and keeping me from looking away. The chill of her skin was more upsetting than the slight pressure of her palm on my throat.
Mrs. Carmichael didn’t want to hurt me. She wanted me to pay attention.
Slowly, with great deliberation, she turned her face away from the sky. Up close, Mrs. Carmichael looked to be in her early forties, not the seventy-six listed on her chart. But she moved like a seventy-year-old, except for hitting and the holding.
“You are the girl named after a city,” she said.
“I’m Del,” I said. “Let go of my jaw, please, so we can get you and Marko and all the other residents back inside, Mrs. Carmichael.”
For a split second, her eyes did the losing-focus thing again.
Then she blinked and leaned closer. “My sister is about to die.”
She was another of Paradise Homes’ “no living relatives” residents. No sister had been listed on her chart. “Please. You’re going to—”
“Quiet, normal.” Mrs. Carmichael’s grip on my jaw tightened. She might move like a seventy-six-year-old, but she grasped like someone in her prime. “Though you are not as ordinary as most.”
She sniffed my face. “You and most of the other normals in this place have no idea.” She nodded toward the buildings. “Twenty-three centuries my kind,” she nodded toward Building Two, “their kind, too, have been living among you and you have no clue.”
She was answering the what part of my questions. What she was. What Fates were.
She let go. “You’re figuring it out.”
She could be crazy. I could be crazy. But I’d seen Mrs. Karanova in lucid conversations with ghosts. And Mr. Nax wasn’t what he appeared to be.
“Half the security staff and at least one nurse on duty at all times is an enthraller.” She sniffed again.
“What are you talking about?” Was enthralling what Nax did to make himself not be what he was?
Mrs. Carmichael dragged me toward the group of residents standing near the drive entrance. “Listen, child: If your gut tells you one of them,” she nodded toward Building Two again, “is trying to influence you, fight it. Keep your hackles up.” She returned to looking at the sky. “Knowing you’re being enthralled is half the battle.”
Mrs. K had said the same thing.
The wind slapped us with another jolt of ice and bitterness. Mrs. Carmichael cringed.
I had to get her back inside, no matter how weird and terrifying she was. I had to get myself and the six looking at the sky back inside. “Mrs. Carmichael, let’s go in before you freeze to death.”
A laugh as icy and bitter as the storm cracked from her throat. “My name is Julia Meredith Shapiro. I am—was—the future-seer of my Fate triad.” She gave me another sideways glance. “We were thieves. Corporate espionage. We stole from the wrong people, and now my past-seeing husband is dead.” She held up her shaky hand. “This is what happens when we lose triad mates.” She stuffed the hand into her pocket. “My present-seeing sister dies. Her life support is about to fail.”
“I don’t understand.” Thieves? What was Paradise Homes?
Her lip curled. “No, you do not.” Her eyes lost focus again. “I can’t see if you will.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t see anything beyond my sister’s death. There is a fog, as if….” She swallowed as if holding in a gag. “… as if fate has abandoned us.”
“Mrs. Carmichael…”
“I’m about to die, Del Parrish.” She pushed me toward the group.
“Not if we get you—”
“Quiet!” she yelled. “Where is it?” She tapped along her waist and at the pockets of her coat as if she’d forgotten that it wasn’t hers.
She pulled a scarf-wrapped wad out of a hidden pocket. “This.” She held it out. “All of you! How many of you understand what I hold?”
Not one of the group looked at her. They all continued to stare at the sky.
She grabbed my arm again. “We stole this from an arms dealer who had snuck it into the country.” She wiggled the bundle and the scarf fell away. “He had no idea what he held, only that the people he stole it from wanted it back so badly that they would have traded an army’s worth of weapons for it.”
A man in the group gasped and pointed at the sky.
“Give… give that to me…” Marko said. He wobbled to standing, and pointed at the thing in Mrs. Carmichael’s hand.
Mrs. Carmichael gagged again. She gripped my shoulder. “They’re coming.”
“Who?” I looked back at the main entrance. Two guards stood in the doors, both gaping, but neither came out.
“What is this place?” I breathed.
Mrs. Carmichael snorted. “And there it is, the crux of all your questions, Del Parrish.”
“Why is this happening?” Why had I wanted to know in the first place?
“If you’d kept out of everyone’s business,” Mrs. Carmichael said, “you would be inside with the Shifters right now, nice and toasty and out of the way.”
Marko staggered forward. “Del… back away from her…” He fiddled with the strap on his service weapon.
Mrs. Carmichael pushed me toward the group again. “The company who owns Paradise Homes wants this.”
She waved the thing that had been wrapped in the scarf.
Was it metal? It shimmered, even though it appeared so black it sucked in all the light. Yet little rainbows danced along its broken edges.
Whatever it was, it was part of something, and not a whole. “What is it?” I asked.
Mrs. Carmichael rotated it in her hand. “Look again.”
“Del Parrish…” Marko said.
“Be quiet, little man,” Mrs. Carmichael said. “Or I will strip that gun and cave in your skull.”
Marko stood mostly still about halfway between us and the retaining wall. He swayed more than I liked, but he was on his feet and talking.
“Let Marko go back inside,” I said.
Marko shook his head.
Mrs. Carmichael stared at him, but thrust the metal thing at me. “Look at it.”
The piece jutting out looked smooth and touchable, but the edge of the section connected to it looked as if it could cut through anything. “Is it part of a sword?” The smooth part looked like a guard, and the jagged section like part of a blade.
Marko’s eyes and mouth rounded as if I’d just identified the Holy Grail.
Behind me, one of the six screamed.
I turned around. They needed to get back inside before one of them froze to death. “We all need to go back in.” I pointed at the door. “Okay? We can talk about this—”
Mrs. Carmichael gagged hard enough that the sword fragment fell from her hand and bounced toward the center of the circle.
All six of the residents staring at the sky screamed. All of them, in a strangely resonant chorus of wind and shrieks.
Maybe living with the lies of this place would have been better. Maybe not knowing any of the truths of this place would have been safe. “What are you all?” I asked again. Because I was not safe out here, in the wind and under the ominous sky.
Mrs. Carmichael fell against me. “We are Fates, Del Parrish. Some of us see the future.”
“What is Mr. Nax?” Was he what she called a Shifter?
Mrs. Carmichael shook her head. “Not at all what he pretends to be.”
“I know that,” I said. She was going to die out here. “You need help.”
She dropped to her knees. “My sister dies and I see. The world is about to burn.” She tugged on my shoulder and she gasped again. “The world on fire.”
I looked over my shoulder. “
What do you mean the world’s about to burn?” Because a burning world was worse than ghosts. Worse than Nax and his seemingly incongruous size and impressions.
Mrs. Carmichael’s shallow pants hissed as much as the storm. “My sister is dead,” she said.
“Marko!” I yelled. Why didn’t they come out? Why—
A wave hit Paradise Homes. A wave I felt, but had no idea what it could possibly be. It swept over me, and Mrs. Carmichael, and the screaming six standing in the drive. It pushed and I faltered, even if nothing physical touched my body.
Paradise Homes lost power. Every light went out. Every motor ceased. Nothing clicked. Nothing whirred. Even Marko’s flashlight turned off.
I looked toward the road. The streetlights, which should have switched on by now, were off, and the ubiquitous background glow of Aurora and Denver vanished into shadows.
Even though all electrical humming had stopped, a static filled the air.
Every hair on my body stood up.
The six dropped to the ground as one, all as unconscious as Mrs. Carmichael.
The wave passed. The power came back on. Every light surrounding the drive burst on, then dimmed and switched off. The lights inside the doors blasted white out into the cold, then settled down to their normal yellow glare. Car alarms went off. In my pocket, my phone vibrated as if rebooting.
Marko staggered over. “Do you see the shard?” He rubbed his temple. “We need to find it.”
“Mrs. Carmichael!” I shook her shoulders.
“They’re coming,” she muttered.
“Who?” I had been so fixated on the secrets of Paradise Homes that I hadn’t thought that maybe those secrets were secret for a reason.
Mrs. Carmichael pointed at the western horizon just as the first ring appeared in the sky.
Chapter Five
Red blossomed in the sky over the Rocky Mountains. Bright, fire-engine red, not the evening sunset red that had begun to spread along the horizon. Real, rich, too-bright, blood red.
Oh, no, I thought. No plan formed. No call to get the residents back inside. No need to understand.
Just a simple, gut-deep, Oh, no.
We weren’t in the middle of a run-of-the-mill emergency out here on the drive, or dealing with a car accident, or even some crazy evil shooter come to kill everyone.
Because that red in the sky, that wasn’t just me, or Paradise Homes, or Colorado. That wasn’t The United States or North America. That was the world.
Every happy oldster and every cranky one. Every school kid and puppy and kitty and baby elephant. My little brothers. My mom and my stepdad. Everyone.
The red contracted into an arch looming just above the mountains. Yellow filled in under the arch until that color, too, contracted to a vivid, distinct swoop. Then a bright electric-blue arch appeared under the yellow.
A primary rainbow hung over the Earth.
“No, no, no,” I panted. “No.” Those lights, no matter how cheerfully vivid, were not good.
A nurse ran by and down the walk toward Marko. Another ran toward the seven residents lying in the snow and ice.
“Why didn’t you come out when I first called?” I shrieked.
The nurses ignored me. A guard with a phone put his hand on his mouth and paced side-to-side.
The swoops in the sky pulsed and their colors shifted into the secondary tones of orange, green, and purple.
People by the door—other staff, some residents, too—alternated between staring at their phones and panicking.
I looked up at the sky. Death rained down in cartoon colors, and—
A blinding flash of white light flooded the drive. Did something detonate? I cringed and ducked. But no sound or concussive wave followed.
I turned toward the nurse who had run to the residents.
The sword shard—the weird black bit of metal Mrs. Carmichael had dropped—glowed as if blue-hot.
No heat wafted off it, yet something distorted the air above it. The nurse screamed and stumbled backward only to trip over one of the still-unmoving residents.
They were dead. I had no doubt, now. They’d been out too long on the cold, hard ground. Six residents—seven, with the now-still Mrs. Carmichael—had died the moment the thing in the sky appeared. Seven oldsters who, like Mrs. K and Mr. Nax, probably were a lot more than they appeared to be.
The black metal shard spun—yet it did not move. It couldn’t be spinning, or moving in any way, yet it gave off a sense of speed and momentum.
Smaller versions of the candy rainbow colors in the sky burst off its surface in wavering bands pushed by its non-spin.
The nurse screamed again. She ran past me, and snagged the nurse with Marko as she continued toward the building. They ran away, both of them, leaving me and the semi-dazed Marko staring at the glowing magical thing popping off evil rainbows.
I looked at the door just as Mr. Nax pushed his way through and into the cold. “Del Parrish!” he bellowed. “Run!”
Marko blinked as if coming out of a coma. He didn’t run. He pulled out his service weapon.
The distortion bubble around the shard pulsed again, and like the colors in the sky, its rainbows switched to orange, green, and purple.
The entire distortion expanded to a good fifteen feet wide and tall, and almost touched my foot. I yipped and jumped back.
The bubble contracted.
I don’t know how he moved so fast. I’d seen him step out, but not run the last twenty feet down the walk to where I stood in the drive.
No, Nax was not a small, frail man.
A huge hand cupped my shoulder and an equally huge bicep curled me toward a broad chest. Nax turned me away from the distortion bubble just as another blinding flash filled the circle.
The power flickered once again, and every car alarm near the building went off. All phones died. And Nax stood between me and an impossible blast.
He groaned. We stumbled. I looked around his large bicep.
“Marko!” I yelled, and pointed at the entrance.
Our guard lowered his weapon and ran for the doors.
The distortion bubble had collapsed down to about an eight-foot diameter, and a watery-looking energy membrane wavered and floated over a… hole. A three-dimensional hole in reality. A gaping, shapeless-though-contained lack-of-reality.
Mrs. Carmichael’s weird sword shard had ripped open a portal.
“What the hell?” How was such a thing possible? But then I remembered the huge man standing between me and the hole in reality had, only moments before, appeared old and frail.
An animal burst through the membrane. A beast about the size of a lion leaped out of the distortion and landed directly parallel to where I stood next to Nax. But it wasn’t a lion. It was some kind of shimmering, glowing monster.
Nax positioned himself between me and the bubble before pushing me forward. “Go!”
He was hiding me from the monster. I knew he was hiding me, as if I could smell his glamour in the air. I couldn’t see why, or from what, but he hid me inside the same glamour he used to hide himself.
Another monster as huge as the first vaulted out of the bubble at high speed.
Another creature darted by. And another.
Patterns moved across their hides like the shimmers and colors that formed on a hunting cuttlefish’s skin—wave after wave after wave of blues, oranges, purples, and yellows flowed in fast, hypnotic pulses. But these animals weren’t invertebrates. They stood on all fours like leopards and wolves, though they were clearly neither.
One had raised ridges along its neck and back. Another had a smooth, long neck and an iguana-like head. Yet another looked like a naked, shimmering bear.
Marko almost made the doors. Almost. One of the monsters leaped.
He shot the beast and the pop of his gun echoed off the buildings.
The monster flopped onto its side, its hide screaming in blinding flashes of every color, and skidded across the concrete toward the door.
“Jump!” Nax yelled.
I vaulted the monster’s corpse and directly into Marko’s arms. In one fluid movement, he twisted me behind him and raised his weapon again.
The door triggered, and the glass slid open. I ran in, followed by Nax and Marko, who jumped up and slapped the lock button on the side of the door’s sensor mechanism.
One of the monsters headbutted the door. It stepped back, shook its head, and rammed the door again.
Reds and blues cascaded from the point of impact on its skull, over its wolf-like head, and down its back. The colors pulsed twice to yellow-orange, then back to red and blue.
It rammed the door again.
Nax pushed me toward the inner doors. Marko jumped up and locked those, too.
The wide, open, check-in desk window was to our direct left. In front of us, the lounge that took up a good part of the concourse between the buildings. Around the check-in desk, the end of the concourse led into Building Two. To our right, the constricted part that led to the dining hall and ultimately to Building One.
Someone had closed the main doors into Building Two and the smaller door between the lounge and the part of the concourse leading to the dining hall.
The main doors were bigger and heavier than any other in either building. They also lacked windows.
I’d never before seen them closed. I’d always thought they’d look like the chain doors at malls. They were hidden inside the walls, covered a full fifteen-foot width of the main hallway, and were made of a thick, sturdy material.
The monsters would have a difficult time getting through. We weren’t going to get through, that was for sure.
To the right and beyond the dining hall, an identical set of doors probably blocked off access to Building One. I couldn’t see, because the regular doors dividing the lobby from the rest of the concourse had closed. They weren’t heavy doors like the ones into Building Two, but normal swinging doors like the ones between units in hospitals. They locked, but I doubted they’d stand against headbutting monsters.
Witch of the Midnight Blade Page 3
