Some time later she felt him get out of bed, and heard him dress. She watched him move in the shadows and the strobing flashes of lightning as he opened the closet door, pulling out the designer overcoat Tessic had given him for their trip to the cold northern reaches of Poland.
“Going out?” she asked.
“Something I need to do. I won’t be long.”
He opened the door to their suite, letting in the hallway light. He lingered there for a moment before he left, silhouetted against the door frame, looking toward her.
“I love you, Maddy,” he said.
“I know you do,” she answered. But it was only a shard of what she needed to hear.
27. THE DYING VOID
* * *
THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS METERED OUT THE TIME IN DILLON’S taxi like a metronome.
“I hate storms like this,” the cabby said. “They make me nervous.”
Dillon had taken the stairs down sixty-seven flights rather than alerting Tessic by using an elevator. As soon as he had descended away from the penthouse, a sudden sense of the outside world hit him. Dread and paranoia, a panicked call to action, with no hint of what action to take. Do something, his spirit cried. Do anything. He immediately realized that his time convalescing under Tessic’s protection had changed nothing. He was no more equipped to face things now than he had been when he first arrived. If anything, the sense of panic had intensified.
Already drenched by the downpour, he had called a taxi from an all-night coffee shop three blocks away.
“Got caught in a flash flood once,” the cabby said as they drove to the address scrawled on the slip of paper. “Sumbitch washed my car away. Lotta power in them there things.”
The taxi was brand-new. Dillon was certain it hadn’t started that way. He wondered how long it would take for the cabby to notice the change. Hopefully not until after Dillon left the cab.
Halfway there, the rain turned to sleet, pummeling the roof in a metallic clatter. “Yeah, this is a weird one,” the cabby went on. “Pattern of a hurricane, but it ain’t got no eye. Stretches all the way to San Antonio.”
That was almost two hundred miles. A year ago the radius of Michael’s influence was only ten, maybe twenty miles at its peak. This knowledge only added to Dillon’s sense of foreboding.
“I don’t like it,” said the cabby. “Don’t like it at all.”
The address was a warehouse in a deserted industrial district. “Sure this is where you want to be?” the cabby asked, obviously nervous, yet not knowing why.
Dillon double-checked the address. It was right, and he could feel Winston and Michael close by. Having no money to speak of, Dillon told the cabby to wait, knowing he would not. Michael’s icy sphere of emotional influence would repel anyone from its epicenter—and sure enough, as soon as Dillon stepped out into the sleet-filled street, the cabby spun off, his back end fish-tailing until it found traction.
Dillon took in his surroundings. The place would have been dismal even in bright summer sunshine. Up ahead, a red Durango straddled the curb, as out of place in this bleak circumstance as he. The headlights of the Durango flashed on and off, and as Dillon approached, the driver’s-side window rolled down. Drew sat behind the wheel of the otherwise empty car.
“They’re inside,” Drew told him, pointing to the warehouse entrance.
“How come you’re out here?”
Drew hesitated before responding. “Hey, ignorance is bliss, right? Some things I don’t want to know. Some company I’d rather not keep. Go on, they’re waiting for you.”
The window closed before Dillon could question him any further. Dillon went to the door of the warehouse, and pushed it open.
Inside, the warehouse had been plunged into a deep freeze. Ice coated the walls; it hung in massive icicles from the high ceiling, like stalactites. The few lights that worked flickered in and out, casting the ice cavern in shifting shadows. Dillon lost his footing on the slick floor, and fell to one knee.
“He’s here,” he heard Winston say.
Carefully rising to his feet, Dillon followed the direction of the voice to a far corner, where several chairs sat. Three were occupied, one awaited his arrival.
Three? Was Lourdes there, too? Was that Winston’s secret?
But as Dillon approached, hopefulness gave way to apprehension, and then to despair. Even before he saw the mystery guest, he knew who it was.
“The prodigal son returns,” Okoya said. “So happy you could grace us with your presence.”
Dillon felt his feet threaten to slide out from under him again so he stood still, holding his distance. The sense of betrayal was more overwhelming than the cold.
“It’s not what you think,” Winston said.
“I’m not sure what I think.”
“Winston says we have to listen to him,” Michael said. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”
Every human instinct told Dillon to turn and run . . . but, like Michael’s ice storm, Dillon knew it was a reaction of fear. He would let Okoya have his say. And when he was done, Dillon would leave. Alone, if he had to.
He took his place with Michael and Winston on either side, across from Okoya—who looked less emaciated than when Dillon had last seen him, but just as depraved. Speckles of frost dotted his long dark hair, and he wore heavy layers of old clothes like a vagrant, but the clothes were quickly renewing, their colors brightening, their tattered threads redarning.
“I want to talk to you about destruction,” Okoya told Dillon. “It’s important that you understand the level of devastation you’ve caused.”
“I already do understand.”
“No,” Okoya said. “It goes beyond anything you’ve witnessed—anything you’ve imagined. But within that destruction lies your salvation.”
If Okoya had bitterness and vengeful intents, they were no longer evident. In fact, Dillon sensed a hopefulness in the dark creature. And so he forced himself to suspend judgment, listening to everything Okoya had to say. He began by talking about home.
“As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the place I come from has a different reality from this universe, with its own natural laws,” Okoya said. “There is no physicality; all is spirit and energy. And in our dimension, my kind is supreme.” Dillon shifted, irritated by Okoya’s species’s arrogance. “The best way I can describe our existence to you is that of a single pod of interconnected spirit-beings—about three hundred thousand in all. We exist on a grid of three dimensions, moving in unison along simultaneous vectors of depth, width, and time, but these three vectors, like everything else in my universe, are alive. They are three powerful entities—the greatest of our kind. The vectors determine the course and momentum of the pod, as our species impels through the universe.”
Michael laughed nervously. “Great. Extra-dimensional off-roading. Why do we have to know this? Will we be tested on it?”
Dillon considered what Okoya had said. “I think I know why. These three ‘vectors’—are they the spirits we’ve been sensing?”
Okoya nodded. “They are.”
Dillon felt his own vector of fury building within him, and it took all his control not to launch himself at Okoya. “Why did you bring the leaders of your soul-sucking species here?” Dillon hissed.
Okoya met his scorching gaze with ice enough to douse the flame. “It was your actions that brought them here, not mine.”
Dillon turned his gaze to Winston, who only looked away.
“This world of yours,” Okoya said. “This entire universe has always been insignificant to us, but we do occasionally make ourselves known, angling for sport or amusement. In our natural form, we are, to human eyes, whatever those eyes wish to see. Glory and wonder; lost loves; sacred memories. Wherever your emptiness—wherever your need—that is how we appear. Call it the natural lure of a species of hunters. The problem is that humans are too weak to resist the lure, and so there’s no challenge to the hunt. Fortunately for you, the effort it takes to b
reak through to your universe is rarely worth the reward.”
“Then why did you come?” Dillon asked.
“The lure of power can be irresistible as well,” Okoya admitted. “But trying to elevate myself in this world earned me immediate condemnation by my own kind. I was therefore a pariah from the moment I first arrived here.”
“And the three vectors, as you call them—are they lured by power as well?”
“They came here out of necessity.” Okoya tossed his long hair which had become caked with white rime, and the flakes fell from him like dandruff. He turned to Michael. “I wish you’d warm up to me, Michael; this frosty welcome gets tedious.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “Maybe I should broil you instead.” But the temperature retained its deep freeze.
“You still haven’t explained why the vectors are here,” Dillon said.
Okoya turned back to Dillon, pointing an accusing finger. “It all comes back to what you did last year. Your cunning ploy to get rid of me.”
“It couldn’t have been too cunning if Okoya came back,” Michael said. “So what did you do, Dillon?”
“I . . . infested him,” Dillon explained. “Okoya had confronted me, and offered me a bargain. He offered me the chance to reclaim and revive Deanna . . . in return for my servitude. Then he punched a hole to the place where we left Deanna’s body.”
“The Unworld?” Michael said. “Okoya can get to the Unworld?”
Dillon nodded. “I agreed to his terms, but when I crossed into the Unworld, I never went after Deanna. Instead I went looking for our parasites—the two that were still left alive, but trapped in the Unworld.”
Dillon had tried to put it out of his mind, but now brought the vile memory back. He explained to Michael how, in order to defeat Okoya, Dillon was forced to invite those two unclean spirits into his soul. His own parasite had evolved into a winged gargoyle that still hungered for destruction, and Deanna’s was a vermiform serpent that thrived on fear. They were as complementary and codependent as he and Deanna had been—and far too powerful, for they had been nurtured well. While the other shards had faced and killed their parasites, these two had survived, trapped in that place between worlds, waiting for a soul to crawl into. A soul that could take them out.
“I stood on the sands of the Unworld until they came,” Dillon said. “Then I took them into myself, letting them leech onto my soul. And I brought them back into this world.”
“I was not expecting it,” Okoya said. “The moment Dillon came through, the creatures leapt from him, and burrowed deep into me. I could not free myself from them, and in a panic, I punched a hole into my own universe. I withdrew back to my own world, taking the two parasites with me. And in so doing, infested my entire universe.”
“They were only two parasites,” Michael said. “That’s not exactly an infestation.”
“You saw the damage they did when they were here,” Winston reminded him.
“They infested us,” Michael said, “not our universe.”
“Such limited thinking.” Okoya turned to Dillon. “When I escaped, you caught a glimpse of the place I came from. What do you remember of it?”
Dillon closed his eyes, trying to find a way to put it into words. It wasn’t so much what he saw, it was more a feeling spilling through the breach. “Like you said, there was nothing solid; everything was light and shadows. It seemed to me that the light was somehow alive . . . and not just the light. The darkness was alive as well.”
“The living void,” Okoya said. “Sentient darkness. It fills our universe like water fills an ocean. It’s what my kind thrives on. We move through the living void, consuming the darkness.”
“I think we have a name for this place,” Winston said. “We call it hell.”
Okoya turned to Winston, considering his little insight. “Very well,” said Okoya. “Then consider yourselves warned that the gates of hell are about to open.”
Dillon’s body gave in to the cold, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. “And why would the gates open?”
“The moment I returned with the parasites, they left me, and inhabited the living void. Their host became the void itself, and it became rancid. The void was alive now with destruction and fear, feeding on itself, consuming itself until our universe could no longer hold, and began to collapse. As great as we are, my kind cannot survive the death of our universe.” Okoya kept his eyes fixed on Dillon. “And so they’ve chosen to come here.”
Dillon pulled his overcoat tighter, and clenched his teeth to stop the shivering. A malevolent species facing its own extinction. Dillon wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“The arrival of the vectors is a prelude to a mass migration,” Okoya said, “for where the vectors go, my species will follow. It is a physical law of my universe.”
“We could coexist,” Dillon suggested. “We could offer them—”
“You can offer them nothing!” Okoya stood, and paced the frozen corner, his voice growing angrier. “They have neither compassion nor patience for humanity. You are vermin to them—less than vermin—and nothing will change that. Rest assured they will come; they will steal almost three hundred thousand of your bodies to use as hosts. Then they will enslave you, then they will devour every soul on earth, and when they are done they will burn your bodies, keeping only enough of humanity alive to breed a new generation of souls. This is the fate of your precious world.”
Dillon shut his eyes, wishing he could erase what he had heard. This was the face of his dread, and it was hideous. “No,” he said, “you’ve lied to us before. I won’t believe this.”
“Disbelieving it won’t change the truth.”
An icicle the size of a human leg plunged from the ceiling in the center of the warehouse. It shattered, radiating a vibration that shook sheets of ice from the walls, like the calving of a glacier. When the room fell silent again, the silence remained for a good long time before anyone spoke.
“Why,” mumbled Michael, “couldn’t I just be left at the bottom of Lake Arrowhead?”
And although no one expected an answer, Okoya said, “Winston knows why.”
Dillon and Michael turned to Winston, who had said very little during Okoya’s revelation. “What else is there, Winston?” Dillon asked. “What other secrets have you been keeping?”
Winston couldn’t look up at them. He kept his eyes lowered to the ground. “It’s no secret. It’s something Drew and I came to understand.”
“Enlighten us, O wise one,” said Michael.
Winston took his time before he spoke. Finally he said, “For years we’ve wanted to know the reason behind our lives. Why did the Scorpion Star explode? Why did we inherit its fractured soul? Why have our powers been growing? What are we?” Winston looked to Dillon, then to Michael, then back to Dillon again. “How ready are you for the answer?”
Suddenly Dillon found himself no longer wanting to know.
“Okoya talks about his universe being a living thing,” said Winston, “but what if ours is alive as well? Not a living void, but a lifeform of matter and energy stretching across space—a single organism, thirty billion light-years wide?”
Michael threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, gee, that’s just wonderful. So what does that make us? Universal sperm?”
Winston ignored him. “If we see the universe as a complex organism, how do you think it might protect itself from invasion—from infection?”
Dillon fought his own resistance, and let the idea begin to sink in. When he finally spoke, he found his own voice cold and hollow. “You’re saying we’re some sort of defense? A kind of metaphysical immune system?”
“Dillon gets a gold star,” Okoya said.
Dillon considered it. The idea was too large to grasp, and yet simple at the same time. He found himself looking at his hands—which he had always seen as an interface for his powers. Healing hands; hands held up to hold back a flood, or to release one. Instruments of creation and
destruction. If Winston’s conjecture was true, it would reify what was always just a vague sense of purpose. It would explain why the shards were so attuned to one another, and to rifts in the “skin” of space. All the questions he posed now had obvious answers when factored through this new equation.
“If this is all true, then why would you help us?” Dillon asked Okoya. “What could you possibly have to gain?”
“My kind views me as a hated fugitive,” he answered, far too casually for Dillon’s comfort. “If their plan succeeds, what do you think will happen to me?”
“You would sacrifice your entire species for your own survival?”
The question gave Okoya pause. His demeanor clouded, bitter and resentful, as if the question were an insult. “Loyalty is as foreign a concept to us as compassion.”
Dillon held his astringent gaze, more comfortable with Okoya’s hostility then with his congeniality.
Winston leaned closer to Dillon. “Okoya agreed to give up his appetites, in return for a kind of political asylum.”
Michael let loose a cackling laugh. “Asylum?” he said. “I agree. Let’s all find an asylum. We can tell people how we’re actually T-cells in disguise, and they can tell us how they’re really Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Frigging Great.”
Dillon thought to say something to shut him up, but noticed that the frost around Michael’s chair had melted. In spite of Michael’s derision, the truth was setting him free. Dillon turned his attention back to Okoya.
“So if we face this ‘infection’ the moment it happens . . . you think we’ll be able to stop it?”