For a moment they looked at him in a hurt anger that quickly faded as their individuality asserted itself once more. Still, they lingered within a few feet of one another, not wanting to let it go. They stood silent—words seemed to have little point in the wake of this communion. Finally Michael spoke.
“Wow,” he said. “If we could bottle that, we’d be richer than Tessic.”
OKOYA WAS FACING EAST, appearing to stare through a berm that obscured the view. As Dillon approached, Okoya’s stalwart resolve infuriated Dillon, but then anything would infuriate Dillon now.
The alignment between him and the others had filled him with contentment, but had left him with a state of spiritual withdrawal once they had separated. He wanted more, feeling less complete now than before they had touched.
As Dillon approached, Okoya turned to him, looking him up and down. “I see you’ve achieved syntaxis,” he said. “Good for you.” The tone in Okoya’s voice was both congratulatory and disgusted all at once; a sentiment as ambiguous as his gender.
“Syntaxis—is that what you call it?”
Okoya returned his gaze east. “Your alignment with one another will give you the strength you need to defeat the vectors. Without that syntaxis you won’t stand a chance.”
Annoyed by the way Okoya looked off, Dillon moved into his line of vision. “It’s time to bring back Deanna.”
That got Okoya’s attention. He pulled his focus back from the unseen vanishing point, and trained his owlish eyes on Dillon, studying him, not responding.
“We’ve got Tory,” Dillon said. “We’ll soon be on our way to tackling Lourdes. Now’s the time. Open a portal. I’ll go and bring her back.”
“Do you assume that’s a simple matter? Opening a portal?”
“Isn’t it?” Dillon had seen Okoya rend a hole in space before. Twice, Dillon had crossed through himself, into the desolate buffer-zone that existed between the walls of worlds. The first time Deanna had died there. The second time Dillon was too busy trying to defeat Okoya to bring Deanna back. And each time the portal to the Unworld closed, Dillon could feel the infinite distance fall between him and Deanna. Once that doorway was gone, she was further from him than the furthest star in the universe. But having Okoya here, as much as he despised and distrusted the creature, put Deanna within tantalizing reach.
“Not now,” Okoya told him dismissively. “Another time.” He tried to return his gaze to the hidden horizon, but Dillon grabbed him tightly by the shoulders.
“I want a reason!” he demanded.
Okoya shook him off. “Your syntaxis is a beacon for the vectors. They will know Tory has been gathered back.”
“All the more reason to bring back Deanna!”
“All the more reason not to! They know you’re not capable of tearing a hole to the Unworld. If they sense Deanna’s presence here, they will know I’m helping you, and will alter their strategy. Bring back Deanna, and we lose the element of surprise.”
But Dillon knew Okoya well enough to know the deeper reason. “Once she’s back, we have no more need of you. And you’ll have no control over us.”
Okoya regarded him with enough hatred to fill an abyss. It was the same deep hatred Dillon sensed in Okoya back on the diving platform, when Dillon refused to have any part in his plans. Now Dillon wondered if that was the better decision. Tory was right. There was no proof that anything he said was true—and as long as he held the key to Deanna’s prison, he held Dillon hostage as well. He thought back to his incarceration at the Hesperia plant. He would much rather be held captive in his own body than to have his soul shackled by Okoya.
“Do it now!” Dillon demanded.
Okoya smiled. “You ache for her, don’t you? For both her, and Lourdes, but especially for her.”
Dillon didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to—it was obvious. It was the syntaxis—it had made Deanna’s absence unbearable to him. So close to completion, their spirits yearned for the consummation that could only come when they were all together. The craving was overpowering. He felt he would do anything to sate it. Anything.
“You knew this would happen!” Dillon shouted. Okoya must have known the longing would become maddening. Then Dillon realized that this had been Okoya’s strategy all along. The more unbearable it became, the higher Okoya’s ransom could be.
Dillon would not allow it. He would not allow this wretched router of souls to hold them hostage one moment longer. “Open the portal, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands and find a way to make it stick.”
And to Dillon’s surprise, Okoya said, “Very well.”
Okoya sighed, then closed his eyes, concentrating. Dillon felt adrenaline begin to flood his capillaries, turning his fingertips warm.
It began as it always began; a twinkle in the air like an ember, then a sucking of wind, as atmospheres tried futilely to settle the differential. But there was no change in the light, as there always had been before—because this portal was less of a doorway, and more like a peephole. Okoya had opened a hole only four inches wide, and when Dillon peered through it, it was like looking through a telescope.
Even in diminished tunnel vision, the Unworld was there, ever unchanged. He could see the crumbling palace carved into the granite of the mountain many miles away. The place where Deanna lay—the place Dillon was forced to leave her two years ago, alone and unreachable. Until now.
The sight of the mountain through the small hole was enough to cloud Dillon’s judgment. He thrust his hand through the hole, thinking he could just stretch it wide, squeeze himself through. Then it snagged his wrist like a rabbit trap. With a sharp sting he pulled his hand back to reveal that his hand was gone! The portal had sliced shut with the unforgiving finality of a guillotine, taking his hand and three inches of his forearm with it.
He yelped in pain, staring at the raw, pulsing stump in disbelief—but the wound closed in an instant, scar tissue bubbling forth, pinching the veins and arteries, closing in the raw flesh, until it looked like he had lost his hand years ago.
“Pity,” Okoya said, relishing his own indifference. “That was a nice watch, too.”
“Y-Y-You son of a bitch!”
Okoya stood from his fence post and approached Dillon, only so he could push him back like a schoolyard bully. “Do you think tearing a hole in your universe is an easy thing to do? It takes more energy than I can dredge forth from the pathetic greens and animal flesh you’ve forced me to eat.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think you know.”
As much as he wanted to deny it, Dillon did know. It had to do with an appetite. An old, ineffable appetite. So this was the wage for partnering with Okoya—this was the ransom: Deanna, in return for more souls to devour.
“I’ve let myself grow weak,” Okoya said, becoming more coy, more feminine. “In order to gain enough strength to punch a hole large enough, and hold it long enough for you to retrieve Deanna’s corpse, I’ll need a nice healthy feeding. A hundred souls, at least.”
“No. No, I won’t let you!”
“You’re a stupid child.”
Dillon gripped his wrist, feeling his whole being thrown out of balance by the absence of his hand. He tried to grab a fencepost, but found there was nothing to grip with, and he stumbled. Okoya advanced on him again. “Compromise is the great constant—in your universe as well as mine. Deanna is worth a million common human souls. You’re getting the better part of the deal; all I’m asking for is a few thousand.”
“You said a hundred.”
“I’m entitled to a profit margin, am I not? After all I’ve done for you? And then there’s fair restitution for the trouble you’ve caused me.”
“I’ll kill you before I let you take a single soul.”
“Then everyone will be devoured, and you’ll die along with the rest of your kind.”
“You’ll die with us!”
“Perhaps not. After you’re dead and the infection takes root, the vectors can aff
ord to take pity on me, and allow me some sort of existence.”
Dillon looked away. Above everything, Okoya was a master of manipulating his options.
“The choice is yours,” Okoya said. “Souls in exchange for salvation . . . or the spirit-death of humanity.”
Although the pain in Dillon’s arm was little more than a memory echoing through his nervous system, the pain of this choice lingered. It had been one thing to flood Black Canyon, and kill the soulless shells of the four hundred Okoya had already devoured—but to give this dangerous demon his blessing to devour more innocents? He couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Okoya reveled in Dillon’s anguish. “Decisions, decisions. Your moral integrity, or the survival of your species.”
Dillon could only stand there, impotent within his own power.
Okoya sauntered away, as always without any hint of conscience. “Better have Winston see to your hand. I suspect you’ll be wanting it back.”
Dillon strode back toward the hotel room, wondering which would be worse, telling the others, or bearing the burden himself.
Winston’s sphere of influence was now such that the strip of motel rooms was already being forced off its foundation by undergrowth. Dillon didn’t even have to look down to know that his hand had fully regenerated even before he reached the room. He simply used it to open the door.
As he joined the others again in a tightly bound syntaxis, he silently wished for some godsend—a monkey-wrench that could plummet from the heavens into Okoya’s plans—for that could be the only way they could scrape back some self-determination within the events unfolding around them. He now knew they were no match for Okoya—either joined, or separate—they had never been. Dillon could see the pattern of their future now. If they did the job Okoya set before them, and defeated the coming “infection,” then Okoya would be the last of his kind. He would then find a way to dominate the shards, rising to power over them. In the end he would seize control of this world.
If, as Winston was fond of saying, everything was just a reflection of the larger whole, then Dillon had to concede that scripture could wind up being an accurate mirror; for Okoya was most certainly a Prince of Darkness, and, if he had his way, would be the star of Armageddon.
AS WITH SO MANY things in the shards’ lives, the monkey-wrench Dillon asked for fell heavy and hard. It happened as they left the motel, and pulled onto the deserted highway late that night.
Tory was the first to see it.
Dozing in back seat, peering out of the window, she thought she saw a ghost of a car veering over the double yellow line just ahead of them. She hesitated a moment, and never had the chance to warn the others.
The car sideswiped them hard, threw their back end into a fishtail, and then the Durango flipped. The earth and sky revolved around one another for a long graceful moment, and then the world exploded.
Drew and Winston, who were in the front seats, were killed once, then again, and again with each flip of the car, but thanks to Dillon’s presence behind them, death never lasted long enough to be anything more than flickers in their persistence of vision.
Tory felt herself an observer, out of body, watching the car flip away from her, over and over again, tumbling through the field, sending glass and gears and hubcaps spinning free. Then she realized she was an observer, lying in the mud, thrown from the car. The pain only now registered in her body—but it faded almost as quickly as it had come. The Durango came to rest upright, wheels deep in the gouged mud of the field, a mangled ruin—but when she cleared her eyes and looked again, the damage didn’t seem quite as bad. Still lying in the mud, she forced her head around to see that the car that had struck them had never left the road. Several of its passengers were now running out into the field, no doubt to assess the damage, and help them. A woman approached her, and stopped a few feet away.
“So you’re Tory,” the woman said.
Before Tory could ask how this person came to know her name, the woman raised a rifle. “I hope we can be friends.” Then she fired.
As for Dillon, his experience was different. The initial impact jolted another memory into his mind. A grand piano crashing down through a crystalline roof. It had been annihilated by its own weight when it finally hit the floor, leaving behind splintered wood, with its last atonal gasp. It was a moment from his destructive days almost forgotten, but as the car tumbled to rest, he saw that his life had always been echoes of that moment. Unmanageable, disastrous, absurd.
And he laughed.
Even before he saw Maddy shoot Tory; even before Maddy pulled open the car door, and trained the rifle on Dillon, he laughed—because he knew that he was, once again, that erratic instrument plummeting toward its end.
29. GABRIEL’S TRUMPET
* * *
A TRUCK RATTLED BY AT DAWN, JARRING DREW AWAKE. HE opened his eyes to find the light hitting them triggered an explosion in his head, translating down to his gut. His stomach constricted, forcing him into a dry heave. When the wave of nausea ebbed, he opened his eyes again, forcing himself to bear the migraine pain. He was in the driver’s seat of his Durango. For a hazy moment he remembered an accident. Squealing tires. The shrieking of metal on metal. The car wasn’t damaged in the least. In fact, it was sparkling new, right down to the new-car smell. There was a pain in his left side, and he looked down to find a serrated blue flag protruding from a small brown bloodstain on his shirt. He tugged it out, grunting at the pain as a large needle slid out from between his ribs. It was the kind of tranquilizer dart they used on animals, and no one had bothered to remove it.
It was dawn. He was alone in the car. Okoya was outside leaning on the bumper. Drew opened the door and stepped out into a muddy field, about thirty feet from a two-lane road. The last thing he remembered for certain was driving that road, but now the car was in the field, which was scarred with deep gouges between himself and the road. Drew felt his stomach begin to contract again but this time he fought the nausea down.
Okoya spared him a quick look, then returned his gaze to the Eastern horizon, where the sun had yet to make an official appearance. “I was wondering when you’d come out of it.”
“What happened?”
“You died, but it didn’t take,” Okoya said. “So they tranquilized you.”
“Who?”
“They knocked me out also, so I can’t be sure.”
“And the others?”
Okoya pointed. “That way.”
Drew squinted, but saw nothing but the road and fields beyond.
“Don’t bother trying to see them, they’re too far away for that, and moving quickly. I can barely detect their presence at all.”
“We’ll go after them,” Drew said.
Okoya slowly turned, his head rotating with the eerie smoothness of an owl. His eyes were dilated. “We won’t do anything.”
“What do you mean?”
Okoya advanced a step, and Drew took a step back. Those eyes were more than just dilated, they were piercing and predatory. Drew had seen Okoya take on this countenance before. When he was hungry. Okoya came even closer, and Drew backed up against the car. Drew could see a flash of red deep within Okoya’s dark pupils. He wanted to run, but the sedative had turned his legs to rubber.
“Dillon isn’t here to protect you,” Okoya said coldly. “And the next time you die, he won’t be there to bring you back.” Suddenly Okoya’s hand was at Drew’s neck, holding him pinned against the car. Paralyzed by fear, Drew couldn’t move. “Therefore you will get into your shiny new car, you will drive me to the airport, and then you will drive yourself back to your beautiful home on your beautiful beach.”
“I . . . I can’t do that,” Drew said.
“You can and you will.” Okoya tilted his head slightly, studying the apertures of Drew’s face, almost as if he zeroed into the pores of his skin. “The consequences of not leaving now, Drew, could be . . . severe.”
Okoya sniffed the air around Drew, as if smelling
the scent of Drew’s soul on his breath. And then he backed off, his demeanor changing, his hunger reined in. “You’ve helped them all you can. You can only be a hindrance to them now.” Okoya opened the driver’s side door for him. “Go home, Drew. Put your affairs in order.” Then he went around the car, sliding into the passenger side, and waited.
Drew didn’t know whether his fear or his anger was more powerful at that moment. He wanted to bail on the entire thing. Leave Okoya and his car, and run. But he didn’t. Instead he got in the car, and started it up, riding the rough course back to the road.
“You’ll find them?” Drew asked as they turned onto the road. “You’ll help them do whatever it is they need to do?”
“As my survival depends on it, I assure you, I’ll do my best.”
“You’ll need cash,” Drew said.
“I can find what I need.”
“What are you, so powerful that you have to make things hard on yourself? Open the glove compartment.”
Okoya pulled open the glove box to a clatter of old cassette tapes.
“Now find the one labeled ‘Eddie Money.’ ”
Okoya pulled out the Eddie Money cassette box and opened it to reveal a roll of bills instead of a tape.
“There’s more than a thousand dollars there,” Drew told him. “Take it.”
Okoya considered the roll of hundreds, and slipped it into his pocket, saying nothing.
As they got on the Northwest Parkway, heading toward DFW, Drew dared to ask the one question that had been on his mind since he stepped into the car. “Tell me one thing: You had every opportunity to take my soul back there. Why didn’t you?”