“I don’t think you understand.”
“Yes, I do.” Then she undressed herself, and undressed him. He was glad it was dark, so she couldn’t see the humiliation in his face at his own flaccidness.
“I told you,” he said. “DOA.”
“And I told you, I don’t want it anyway.”
She moved her hand up his thigh, and although it brushed past his groin, it continued past, never her destination. She ran her hands across his chest, his neck and shoulders. She sifted her fingers through his dark hair, and in a moment his hands were on her as well. Like her, he found his hands had no destination; the path itself was the pleasure. It was as if she were teaching him how to touch a woman all over again—and he who had seduced more girls than he could count from the earliest days of his volcanic pubescence. Those were days of a dark fire—when he was enslaved by his own parasite beast, feeding on a lust that consumed him, drove him. His whole being had wired itself to feed that lust, and everything he did and thought was filtered through the beast’s glowing turquoise eyes. When he had finally killed it, it exacted a heavy price. It stole from him not only his lust, but his passion, leaving him as asexual as a eunuch. Seventeen, and never to be a whole man.
But here he was, naked in Tory’s arms, and somehow she had found a way to turn his impotence into a virtue. Love without lust. She made his jaded spirit feel clean and pure.
She kept running her hands over him until there was not a spot on his body left untouched. Her touch coated him now like a second skin, and although he could still feel the looming threat of Lourdes and the vectors, for this brief moment, they felt muted and distant.
“I love you,” he told her. He could not remember ever telling anyone that.
She kissed him and rested her head on his chest. “Hold me,” she whispered. “Hold me like you did when we died.”
He did, and this time he was determined not to let go.
THE FIRST INDICATION THAT something was amiss was the state of traffic. The main Sicilian highway that led east toward Taormina was flooded with traffic heading west. It seemed to Tory that she and Michael were the only ones going against the trend. Their driver stopped to ask what the trouble was, but everyone had a different story. Some said a battleship had run aground and was leaking radiation. Funny, because battleships were not nuclear powered. Another spoke of disease—smallpox, Ebola, and even a new invention; il Morte Aspettare—the standing death—something downright medieval for this new dark age. Yet another spoke of poisoned earth. She’s become poison. Isn’t that what Winston had said? Tory thought. Apparently the driver, who was on Tessic’s payroll, was not paid enough for this. He abandoned the car and thumbed his way in the other direction, leaving Michael to take the wheel. The weather stayed clear, but the winds blew chilly.
“I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’m scared,” Tory said. Which was probably not what Michael wanted to hear. After all that had happened between the two of them, she knew he considered her the brave one.
“Come on,” said Michael. “It’ll just be like any other family reunion. Blood; violence; medical triage.”
“So what do we do when we find her?”
“We’re in Sicily,” Michael said, and put on his best Vito Corleone. “I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.” Tory laughed in spite of herself.
By the time they could see Taormina in the distance, both sides of the road were deserted. Then once they wound their way up to the cliffside town, the situation became far clearer than they wanted it to, for while homes and businesses on the outskirts were deserted, there was a point closer to the town’s main gate where the population remained, but they weren’t talking much.
Michael slowed the car for a man crossing the street, only to find the man stuck in mid-stride, not moving, like a toy whose batteries had died halfway across the street. On the cobblestone street, people were frozen in place.
“Lourdes . . .” said Tory. This time Michael had no quick retort. Lourdes had seized control of these people—but there had apparently been an event horizon. Those who had seen the immobile victims from just outside that horizon could not have understood what they were witnessing. Some would have crossed over and been caught themselves, like insects on flypaper, until enough had gotten the general idea, and would run, beginning that panicked exodus. The road narrowed into a pedestrian-only street, so they left the car and continued on foot. They strode around static figures until reaching a very literal tourist trap; a spot in the road clogged with frozen pedestrians. Although they were not subject to Lourdes’s field as these people were, they could still feel it, making it a chore to move their own muscles as if the air were thick and gelatinous.
Tory stopped to examine one woman. Although she wore a hat, her arms and shoulders were exposed by a strapless dress. Most of the exposed flesh was red and peeling with a sunburn that went down to second degree. Tory took off her own sweater and covered the woman’s shoulders.
“Lourdes must have grabbed them in the middle of the day yesterday,” she said, “and just kept them here.” For what purpose? Tory wondered. She was holding them in abeyance, in a sort of psychic stasis, but for what?
Then the woman suddenly started moving, and Tory yelped and jumped back, stumbling on the uneven street. This woman wasn’t the only one moving, the others on the street were as well. They came out of shops and galleries, villas and flats, adding to the numbers on the street. Although their footfalls fell at different paces, they seemed to be of one mind when it came to their direction—downhill, toward the sea.
“Looks like we’re just in time for the brunch of the living dead,” Michael said. But these people weren’t exactly zombies. The marching throng had more grace than Tory and Michael expected.
“Shall we join the party?” asked Michael. And so they did, for today, in the town of Taormina, all roads led to Lourdes.
At the bottom of the winding street was a marina, quaint, but sizable. People made their way down the docks and boarded boats. Some were just passengers, others seemed to own the boats and have keys. Other keys were pulled through the smashed ruins of the marina office. This made it clear that Lourdes’s power had gained a new sophistication; she wasn’t merely controlling their bodies, but she had commandeered their wills like a persuasive post-hypnotic suggestion. In every way, these people now belonged to her.
“Those people who got away weren’t all that wrong,” Tory said. “I can feel her hatred like radiation.”
Tory saw her first. She was at the entrance to a small gazebo, in a park overlooking the marina. She stood there watching her private civilian navy take shape, but Tory knew she was also watching them.
“Remember,” Michael reminded, “we’re just as strong as she is.”
“Except that she has the vectors on her side.”
“They’re like Okoya,” Michael said. “They can manipulate, but they have no direct power over us, except the power we give them.”
But it did nothing to ease Tory’s sense of dread, as they approached Lourdes.
LOURDES LEANED ON THE railing of the gazebo, her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on them as they came across the park toward her. The latticework of the gazebo cast weblike shadows across the floor. She stepped back into the gazebo, letting the web of shadows fall across her clothes and her face. They would have to enter into this open-air lair. They would not want to get that close, but she would make them.
“Hello, Lourdes,” Michael said, stopping just a few feet short of the gazebo. Tory stepped forward first. Coward, thought Lourdes. He’s a coward. What did I ever see in him? She remained toward the back of the structure, making no move toward them. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. “What a surprise,” she said, making it clear she was not surprised at all.
And then her eyes shot down to Tory’s hand. It had clasped Michael’s. Even in their apprehension, their hands came together with such casual ease, she knew there was something more between them now than there had been befor
e. As they stepped into the gazebo, Lourdes found her jealousy, which had seasoned so many of her days, was now bitter arsenic in the back of her throat.
“Where’s loverboy?” she asked Michael, with such enmity in her voice, she barely recognized it as her own.
“Excuse me?” said Michael.
“Drew,” she said. “Your lover.”
Tory turned to Michael more curious than shocked.
“You’re mistaken, Lourdes,” Michael told her. “Drew and I were never lovers.” And then he added, “Any more than you and I were lovers.”
She felt the barb twist in her gut. “I know what I know,” she said. In fact she knew nothing—only suspected, but she was loath to admit it.
“Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Tory asked.
All right, she thought. They were no more interested in small talk than she. “My vacation came to an unexpected end. I’m here making myself some new friends.” She gestured toward the marina, where tourists as well as locals flooded the docks, squeezing themselves onto whatever boats still had room. Lourdes noticed their progress had slowed since her attention had shifted to Tory and Michael. This gathering required focus, and she resented that her focus had been pulled. She had thought she was supposed to be stronger in the presence of other shards, but their fields were working against her own, hopelessly out of sync.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she said to Tory. “The stench from the beach has been unbearable in this heat. But the second you got here, the smell went away. Now the whole place is minty fresh.”
She took a step toward Tory. “ ‘The Goddess of Purity,’ isn’t that what Okoya had called you? Is that why you like her, Michael? Because her crap doesn’t smell? I’ll bet she doesn’t even have morning breath, does she?”
“You’re one sick bitch,” said Michael.
Lourdes laughed, and the laugh was echoed back a hundredfold by the mob in the marina, sounding like the cackling of geese.
“Did it feel good to kill all those people in Florida?” Michael went on. “Is it a thrill to pull planes out of the sky?”
She thought to tell them that Florida was an accident—and that she had to pull reconnaissance planes from the sky to keep them from finding out what happened to the three warships. But telling them this would serve no one. Their disgust, on the other hand, was something she could relish.
“We know about the vectors,” Tory said. “We know what they plan to do.”
“Vectors? Is that what you call them?”
“Why are you helping them?” Tory grabbed her, and for a moment she felt that long-lost connection between them.
Lourdes pushed her away, not wanting to feel it. “Because there’s nothing and no one in this world worth saving.”
“So you’d rather fill it with demons?”
“They’re not demons!” She turned away. “They’re not angels either. But they’re the closest thing there is. If I have to choose sides, I choose them.”
Michael looked at her, not with disgust, or horror, but with pity. It was a look Lourdes could not abide. “What have they been telling you?” he asked.
“Only the truth,” she said. “That there is no God—there are no miracles—there is no meaning to anything we do; that the universe isn’t just indifferent, it’s hostile, trying its damnedest to get rid of us.”
Again that look of pity from Michael. “And you believe this?”
Lourdes felt her hands close into fists, and she knew if she wasn’t careful, she’d send another lethal pulse of anger out through the crowd she had gathered.
Just then, the three “vectors,” as Tory had curiously called them, stepped out from their hiding places; behind a tree, behind a shed, behind a truck. They converged on the gazebo at a steady but unhurried pace.
“They’re going to kill you,” Lourdes told Michael and Tory. “You must have known that when you came here.”
And indeed Michael and Tory did know. They knew these creatures were formidable enemies. They knew they would most likely have their own brief candles snuffed once more—perhaps this time for good, but they also knew they had to come.
If we die together again, thought Michael, then it will be okay.
But Tory, on the other hand, was not thinking about dying. She was running through her mind every possible way they might live.
She and Michael said nothing, only took in the faces of the three approaching creatures. A child, an old man, a cleft-lipped woman with witch-long hair. Tory could laugh at the hosts they had chosen to inhabit.
temporal
lateral
leading
The identities of the vectors were projected into her mind. Not so much names, as assignments. Each one was an axis of dimension. The child—he was the leading vector, and most powerful. The old man was temporal, the woman lateral. Then as they approached, they changed. They drew out from their hosts their true being, letting the false light flow around their bodies.
Tory almost fell to her knees with a very personal revelation of glory. “What do you see?” Michael asked. Tory couldn’t answer, the image was so vivid. It was a young girl with flaxen hair running through a cotton field. The girl kicked up wisps of cotton that drifted high into the air, as if pulled toward the sun. “I see myself as a child,” she said. She saw the same image in all three of the vectors. It surrounded her no matter where she looked.
Michael, on the other hand, saw his mother, who had walked out of his life when he was ten. The woman Michael saw now, however, was not as he remembered her, but as he wished he remembered her. Not the cold, bitter woman she was, but a woman with such inner warmth it could fill any needy child. This was a fun-house mirror distortion that took the ugliness of his memory and bent it into something so desirable, he could barely resist. It was something he didn’t realize he needed until now.
“They’ll make it easy for you,” Lourdes told them. “They will make you feel fulfilled. Complete. It will be the most wonderful moment of your life.”
“And then they’ll kill us,” said Tory, unable to reconcile the thought with the visions of happiness the vectors put into her head.
“You’re shards,” Lourdes said, “so they can’t devour you like they devour others. Your souls will go . . . wherever the souls of shards go. Where you went before, the first time you died.”
But they had no memory of where that might have been.
The vectors came closer. They were at the entrance to the gazebo now.
“Come,” Michael heard them say deep within his mind in that gentle voice of his fantasy mother. “Come and I’ll rock you to sleep. Come, and I’ll make you believe once and forever that I loved you.”
“Come,” they said to Tory. “Come play in the field the way you used to. This is your heaven.” So innocent and so compelling were the images they put forth, that the blade they each held in their sweet little hands hardly seemed to matter at all. “Just let me bring this across your neck and you can stay here forever.”
Both Tory and Michael wanted to, so overwhelming was the lure—but a lure was all it was. Tantalizing, enticing—irresistible. But a lie.
“Hold on to me, Michael,” Tory said. In an instant she felt Michael’s hand around her, linking her to him. Then Tory reached out toward Lourdes.
“You should feel this,” Tory said, “before we die.” Then she grabbed Lourdes by the shoulder.
Syntaxis was sudden and powerful. At last their mismatched fields fell into place. This was a new variation for Michael and Tory—a different harmonic from syntaxis with Winston and Dillon, but every bit as satisfying.
For Lourdes, who had not experienced this before, she found her mind had no way to interpret the feeling. Time seemed to cease as all the darkness within her nurtured by the vectors soaked in this new light. She could feel her own field multiplied by theirs. She could feel at once the beating of every heart within her sphere of influence. Not just in Taormina, but miles beyond, to the country
side; to the north shore; across the Island of Sicily. Finally when she could stand no more, she broke free and saw Cerilla taking Tory into her arms, then turning her around, bringing a knife to Tory’s neck.
“Wait!” Lourdes shouted.
The woman looked at her as if she might turn her blade on Lourdes instead.
“These two can help us!”
“They’d much rather die,” said Carlos. “And we’d much rather kill them.”
“Kill them and you’ll never gather enough hosts,” Lourdes told them. That stopped them and got them to listen.
“When I connect with them I can seize the wills and bodies of a thousand times what I can do on my own.” Then Lourdes smiled. “Take them with us, and we can use them to gather the three hundred thousand you need.”
The pity Michael had shown before transformed into disbelief and horror. Good, thought Lourdes. That was an expression she could live with.
Free of the vectors’ spell, Tory and Michael tried to run, but Lourdes turned a dozen people in the marina against them. They were tackled and tied with such unceremonious ease, she almost wished the vectors had killed them. At least in that, there would have been some dignity.
THE FLEET OF NINETY-THREE boats—everything from sailboats to speedboats, fishing boats to yachts—set out from Taormina. After more than a year of unbridled luxury, Lourdes took a curious liking to a well-seasoned fishing boat. The fact that it was named La Fuerza del Destino, after the Verdi opera, clinched it for her. She wasn’t much for opera, but how could she not sail on The Force of Destiny?
With more than eight hundred bodies and souls trained into her gravity, they sailed east from Sicily to the southern shore of Italy, the sole of Italy’s boot. As the fleet grazed the shoreline, Lourdes let her influence drag along the fishing communities they passed like a rake pulling up leaves. In each town a dozen new boats were added to their number as their owners were impelled to join them. However, as they set off across the Gulf of Taranto, trouble set in—not with the power of Lourdes’s control, but with the boats themselves. The Gulf of Toronto was ninety miles wide and many of the boats simply didn’t have enough fuel to cross it. Engines stopped; dozens were set hopelessly adrift in the water—and the fact that Michael kept the winds raging against them didn’t help. By the time Lourdes reached the far side of the gulf, all but the largest boats were running on fumes, and they had lost more than half their numbers.