Maddy didn’t appear convinced. “Maybe, but Tessic was right about one thing. People like you don’t just get spit out on a regular basis.”
“Tessic.” Dillon gripped the wheel white-knuckle tight. Yes, Tessic had believed in Dillon’s “purpose,” but Dillon had no such faith anymore. All he could feel was a blind drive to do something, but with no clear objective. If anything, he could sense futility and failure, and the laughter of the three faceless divers, reveling in his defeat.
“If I need to do something, wouldn’t it help to know what it was?” All he knew for sure was that his own influence was swelling further beyond his control. “And if it was intentional for me to be this powerful, wouldn’t I be able to control it? You can’t imagine how far my reach goes now. Fifty miles away, there are grains of sand slowly gathering into pebbles, and shattered leaves piecing themselves together again, all because of me. The farther away, the slower the process gets—but I can still feel it happening, maybe a hundred miles away.”
They passed a sign announcing their entrance into Alabama. The road lightened, and took on a rougher texture. Maddy gently touched his arm.
“Forget about what you feel a hundred miles away. Feel the wheel. Feel the road. Focus on finding Winston.”
Her voice was both compelling and comforting enough to ease the maddening static hum in his mind. Find Winston. Finding him wouldn’t be the solution, but it was a positive step toward something. “I wish my mind could be as clear as yours,” he told her.
She smiled. “You forget that you made it that way.”
MADDY KEPT HER HAND on his arm, gently stroking it. Since he had first touched her two nights ago in the derelict diner, she found herself taking every opportunity to touch him again. There were no words to express the way Dillon had changed her. Bitterness had always been the fuel propelling her. Her wounds had become comfortable friends, but Dillon had exposed them for what they were, took her into his arms and excised them. In one intimate moment, her entire past was healed. The clarity he had brought her weeks ago was just a prelude, for far beyond the clarity was a grand sense of connection. She understood what Dillon had meant when he talked about being beyond himself, for now she felt a shadow of his connection to the world around him, and in his moments of self-doubt Maddy took the initiative, moving them toward their goal of finding Winston.
“Nothing’s ever easy for us,” Dillon griped, and chastised himself once more for having a mind that could decipher every pattern and code in the world, but couldn’t remember something simple like Winston’s phone number.
“Now I have to rely on my senses, but I don’t get much of a feeling from Winston, or Lourdes,” Dillon told her, as they passed on a tangent to Birmingham. “There’s too much interference, too much static out there. I mean there are moments that a sense of one of them comes to me, kind of like a scent on the wind, but it passes too quickly for me to get a fix on the direction.”
Maddy felt the car accelerate, and wondered if Dillon even realized that his foot had become heavy. Although Maddy trusted Dillon’s instincts implicitly, she did have her reservations about his choice of destination. Winston’s hometown was an hour south of Birmingham. Dillon figured that if he wasn’t there, his mother and brother would be. Perhaps they might know where he was.
“But, as you’re public enemy number one, that’s the first place they’ll look for you,” Maddy had been quick to remind him even before they left the old diner the day before.
“Maybe not,” Dillon had said. “They’ll think I’m too smart to head there.”
She wondered if his naiveté would save him or destroy him. “The military has no illusions about human intelligence. It thrives on the assumption that the world is full of imbeciles, so everything the military does is filled with redundancies and contingencies. You can bet the entire town where Winston lived is under twenty-hour-hour surveillance by multiple teams, in case one or more screw up.”
“What do you want me to do,” Dillon had answered, his frustration building. “Sit around and wait for something to happen? I might as well be back in my cell at the plant.”
And so, a day and a half later, just around noon, they barreled past Birmingham and into a fresh danger zone.
She reached over and touched his leg. “Slow down,” she said. “We don’t want to be pulled over.”
She left her hand gently on his thigh, feeling that sense of connection again. She had grown used to the sensation of simply being beside him, her cells infused with his aura, neither aging nor decaying. It was a sense of being at the peak of her own existence. But touching him closed a circuit, making her not just a recipient, but a participant.
“We’re not exactly Bonnie and Clyde,” he told her. “You’re not obligated to come with me.”
“Three days ago, I made the choice to give up everything to set you free,” she reminded him. “Do you really think I’d stay with you now just because I felt obligated?”
“Then why are you with me?”
She took her hand away, the question stinging. “Aren’t you the one who told me you knew me? If you can see into my soul, why do you have to ask?”
He turned to look at her, but his gaze wasn’t penetrating as it so often was. Instead it was a gentle caress. For an instant she felt schoolgirl bashful. She was both irritated and appreciative of the feeling. “Shouldn’t you be watching the road?”
He immediately turned his eyes forward, but she knew that his attentions still remained on her.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into an old filling station with pumps decades shy of automation, that still clanged bells as gears spun up the price. That and the attached general store was all that survived of a crumbling hotel which, by the looks of its remains, must have been an old plantation home. Maddy figured they had better get out of there fast, before the building succumbed to Dillon’s presence, and the South rose again.
“I don’t like this place,” Dillon said as they stepped from the car. “I feel . . . unsettled here.”
While Dillon pumped, she went in to pay and pick up sandwiches and drinks. The woman at the register was obviously a fixture of the place. She had pallid, liver-spotted skin that almost camouflaged her against the faded, whitewashed wall behind her.
“Will that be all for ya’?” she drawled.
Maddy’s attention had been snagged by the last newspaper on the counter, and the photo smack in the center. Her own face stared up at her from beneath the headline. Next to her picture was a photo of Bussard.
She snatched up the paper, angling it so the cashier couldn’t see the front page. “This, too.”
Maddy watched the woman’s rheumy eyes, which already seemed far less rheumy than they had only moments ago. Their fog had faded with her liver spots in less time than it took Dillon to fill up. The woman studied the items and the register, giving no indication that she recognized Maddy from the newspaper photo. “Cash or charge?”
Maddy paid in cash, and left with all godspeed. She couldn’t resist taking a closer look at the paper the moment she was out. The military’s official story was that she had murdered Bussard after an affair gone bad. She didn’t know whether she was more infuriated or disgusted. There was, of course, no mention of Dillon at all—which meant that she had gotten it wrong. She was public enemy number one, not Dillon. They could never admit they had Dillon, much less admit his escape, so instead the military spin-doctors had made her the enemy.
Dillon was not at the car. She quickly surveyed the area to find him slipping through a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the dilapidated hotel. Damn! If anything, he was consistent in his distractions, like a hound in search of a lost scent.
She ran to the fence and found that the hole had healed as soon as Dillon passed through, so she climbed it, following a path of flattened weeds until coming into a clearing behind the building. The tall grass behind the condemned hotel was filled with the rotting remnants of wooden lounge chairs surrounding th
e concrete shell of a pool built in a time they truly made them deep. Dry brown leaves clogged the drain.
Dillon was nowhere to be seen. She tried the back porch, and peered in the dark windows. It was as if he had vanished—but there was evidence that he was here, right on the peeling wood of the building. The spots of paint that hadn’t peeled now had a freshly painted look. I can’t put back what’s no longer there, Dillon had told her. Where the paint was gone, it was gone, but the exposed wood looked brand-new, leaving an effect of strangely mottled rejuvenation.
The sound of footsteps on metal made her look up. Above the deep end of the empty pool, there was a high-diving platform. Dillon stood at the edge of the platform, silhouetted against the sun. This was strange, even for him, and she had no idea what business he had in mind. It wasn’t until she moved, and the sun was out of her eyes, that she saw a second figure standing behind him. She raced toward the ladder.
UNSETTLED.
There were so many things out there agitating Dillon, he hadn’t known why this place should stand out. Maybe it was that they were only thirty miles from Winston’s home, and he had absolutely no sense of his presence there. Then he had seen the diving platform through the trees, and it had given him a sudden flashback to the vague visions and dreams that had been plaguing him.
Now he stood on the end of the platform, the tips of his sneakers an inch over the edge. He could see the old hotel, the gas station, Birmingham in the distance. He grew more unsettled by the moment, but there was nothing here.
He held his hands out to balance himself on the edge, and closed his eyes, trying to recall details from the visions. He heard Maddy climb the ladder, and in a moment could hear her breathing behind him.
“I’ve seen a place like this, in my dreams,” he said, hands still held out, eyes still closed. “There are three people. They’re important. They’re dangerous. I see them standing side by side on the edge and the pool below them is full of flowers. I can almost smell them.”
Then a voice behind him spoke, but it wasn’t Maddy.
“If you intend to dive, I must warn you there’s no lifeguard on duty.”
Dillon knew the voice instantly, and that moment between hearing the voice, and turning to see that face was a moment as awful as it had been waiting for the flood waters of Lake Mead to sweep him under with the soulless four hundred. If there truly was an embodiment of evil in the universe it stood behind him now. He turned to see the leering, sexless face of Okoya, the manipulator of Gods, thief of souls, and would-be destroyer of worlds.
“Hello, Dillon.”
Dillon gaped, paralyzed by fear.
“You’re speechless!” said Okoya. “I knew you would be.”
This was what Dillon had sensed in this place. He wondered how long Okoya had stalked him before getting this close. Dillon mustered his courage as quickly as he could and studied him from across the platform. Okoya was not the sleek, muscular specimen he had been before. His muscles had atrophied, and his rich Native American skin had taken on a muddy, ashen pallor. His long, luxuriant hair with the raven shine, so feminine the way it flowed over his shoulders, was now a straggly snarl. Okoya was a wraith; broken, beaten, but still alive.
“If you’ve come here looking for revenge,” Dillon said, “you’ve made a mistake. I’m much stronger than I was a year ago, when I first defeated you.”
Okoya’s face clenched in a venomous expression of hatred. “Yes. I never got to thank you for that last trick you pulled.”
Dillon recalled that final look of horror and desperation on Okoya’s face, the moment Dillon had unleashed the two beasts on him. The parasite of destruction, and the parasite of fear. “So, did you take care of my pets?” Dillon asked. Those ravenous beasts had leeched onto Okoya, as Dillon knew they would—and Okoya, racked with an urge to destroy, and an insurmountable fear brought on by the parasites, had leaped out of this universe, and back into his own, taking the two beasts with him. It had been the perfect plan. But if it was so perfect, why was Okoya back?
“Your ‘pets,’ ” said Okoya, controlling the rancor in his voice, “lingered within me only until they found better quarry.”
“Better than you?” mocked Dillon.
Okoya didn’t answer; instead he turned to see Maddy as she climbed up to the platform.
“Dillon, what’s going on? Who is this?”
“My old ‘spiritual advisor,’ ” said Dillon. “Back to devour more souls.” He had told her everything about Okoya, and for the first time since he had known her, Maddy was truly terrified. “I thought you said he was dead.”
“I said he was worse than dead.”
Okoya looked Maddy over, sizing her up. “Well, Dillon, I see you’ve found yourself a bitch. Good for you!”
Apparently Maddy’s terror was short lived. She advanced on him.
“Maddy, no!”
She high-kicked Okoya in the chin, and to Dillon’s surprise he went down. In an instant she had her foot wedged tightly against his Adam’s apple, pressing him down against the concrete platform. Okoya made no effort to fight back. Instead he laughed, and rasped with a larynx half closed. “And she’s your personal assassin as well. You really have done well for yourself!”
In response Maddy turned her ankle, closing off more of his wind. “Give me the word, Dillon, and I’ll snap his neck right now.”
“Yes,” Okoya said. “Give the word. And once this body dies, it will free me to inhabit another.” Although he couldn’t move his head, his eyes turned up to Maddy. “In fact, she’d make a tasty host for me.”
Dillon almost involuntarily found his foot swinging at full force, connecting with Okoya’s ribs. Okoya groaned, and Maddy turned to Dillon, surprised by his uncharacteristic brutality. But a creature as vile as this one didn’t deserve the smallest measure of sympathy or dignity.
“I’m not your enemy!” Okoya gasped. “I thought you would have realized that by now!”
Dillon regarded him there on the ground. Okoya seemed so weak now. But that didn’t mean anything. He was a master of deception.
“Let him up,” Dillon told Maddy, then watched with caution as Okoya slowly rolled over, pushed himself up on all fours, and labored to his feet.
“I came here to make a deal with you.”
“Not a chance.”
“Then you’ll never know the things I can tell you,” Okoya said. “And that tragic end to this world you keep prophesying will come to pass just as you expected, and you’ll have no idea how to stop it.”
Dillon hesitated. Okoya was a liar through and through, serving no one’s needs but his own. Dillon had to be careful.
“What kind of deal?”
Okoya took a step closer. “I can tell you what’s coming, and what you need to know to stop it. I can even tell you where to find Winston. You won’t find him without me—you’re not even in the right time zone!”
“In return for what?”
Okoya smiled. “Your blessing,” he said. “Permission to live freely in this world under your protection.”
Dillon began to fume, thinking back to the hundreds of souls Okoya had consumed, leaving behind walking, breathing bodies of flesh with nothing living inside. Death that mimicked life—the very negation of life itself. How could he even think of making such a deal with this thing?
“How many souls have you gorged on since you’ve been back?”
“My doings here are insignificant!” he shouted. “Whether it’s one, or a hundred, it means nothing.”
Wrong answer. It meant quite a lot to Dillon. He lunged forward and grabbed Okoya by the shirt with both fists. “If you stay here among humans, I swear I will chain you up in a place where no one will ever find you, and you’ll never be free to walk the Earth.”
“I was told that once before. But mountains crumble, and shackles break.”
Dillon gripped him tighter. “Not the shackles I’ll give you.”
MADDY WATCHED, KNOWING BETTER than to get
caught in the battle zone between them, wishing she could help Dillon, but knowing she could not. Incapacitating Okoya was one thing, but truly battling him? From what Dillon had told her of Okoya, only another Star Shard could help Dillon now, and that was something she could never be.
A siren drew nearer and Maddy turned to see a police cruiser pulling up by the gas pumps where the cashier pointed the officer right toward them, as they stood there in clear view on the high platform. The woman had recognized Maddy after all.
“Dillon, they’ve found us.”
Okoya took that as a cue, and suddenly burst free from Dillon, took two bounds to the end of the platform, and launched himself off in a clumsy gainer to the distant scream of the cashier.
A sickening thud, and they looked over the edge. Okoya lay flat on his back on the concrete pool bottom, skull crushed, blood running down toward the drain now clogged with bright green leaves.
Maddy grabbed Dillon, pulling him toward the ladder, leaping the last few feet to a patio where the cracks had healed, crushing out the weeds growing between them. But these weren’t the only things that had repaired themselves in the short time Dillon was there. Something was moving in the shallow end of the pool. It was Okoya, who ran to the shallow end, and climbed out.
Dillon almost bolted after him, but Maddy stopped him. “No. There’ll be another time.” Together they raced off into the woods before the police got there, and just kept on running.
DILLON KNEW OKOYA HAD used him again. When he had dived off that platform, he had known that Dillon’s own healing power would mend his broken body in seconds, before they could climb to the bottom of the ladder. He had used Dillon’s restorative powers to escape, and it was one more weight on Dillon’s head. Maddy said there would be another time, but there was no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, Okoya would be out there, feeding. Yet he had said he wasn’t the enemy. How could that be true?
A half mile away, they came upon a dirt road and a small house in the woods. Now that the authorities knew their whereabouts, federal agents would be called in—it was only a matter of time until the entire area was secured. They had to get out now.