Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1)

  I stopped short, my mouth hanging open. First the smiley pancakes and now knowing I was meeting Kannon? Did Mr. Haverty have visions of the future, too?

  The grandfatherly man laughed softly. “Don’t look so surprised. Very few of my patrons are teenagers. It doesn’t take a genius to add two plus two and get four.”

  I relaxed, feeling more than a little silly. Maybe paranoia ran in our family or was contagious, because I was channeling my mother.

  “He is sitting in the corner.” Mr. Haverty pointed to a booth in the back of the square room, away from the rest of the customers.

  “Thanks,” I said and slowly made my way to the far corner of the diner.

  The lighting in the diner was dim, but I had no trouble making out Kannon’s lean form. He kept running his hands through his chestnut hair, causing the curls to loosen and fall in waves to frame his face. A glass of ice water sat in front of him, and three times before I reached the table he picked it up and fished out an ice cube to chew on. Kannon turned when I was still several paces away as if sensing my approach. He smiled and his green eyes seemed to brighten the entire room.

  I slid into the booth across from him.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” I replied, then realized how that sounded. Heat rushed to my cheeks. Who had cheesy lines now? “I mean, I do really want to finish our conversation from the other night. You know when I freaked out and practically threw a chair at you? Which I am sorry for, by the way. It’s just that not a lot of people know about… well, you know. But I shouldn’t have assumed the worst of you. Well, it’s not really you who I thought was playing a joke on me. Jamieson is underhanded and we have this whole rivalry thing.”

  Kannon let me ramble. His smile became more amused the more rope I used to hang myself.

  Thankfully, Mr. Haverty appeared before I could ask Kannon how he felt about Canada or warn him of the dangers of being left-handed, which I was pretty sure he was since he’d started twirling his drink straw through the fingers of his left hand. The diner owner sat a glass of water in front of me and offered us menus.

  “Just holler when you’ve decided what you’d like to eat,” he told us, then moved back towards the counter with surprising speed for a man I estimated to be in his seventies.

  I opened my menu and pretended to study the options while I searched for something halfway intelligent to say. Nothing came to mind. Kannon remained annoyingly quiet.

  “What are you going to get?” I asked to cover the awkward silence.

  “Turkey Reuben,” Kannon said decisively, still not glancing up from his menu.

  “If you already know, why are you reading the menu?” I asked, then cringed. That sounded so accusatory and plain rude.

  Kannon laughed. “Because it’s making you uncomfortable. You are the most high-strung person I have ever met. Relax, Endora. I am not going to hurt you.” Kannon seemed to think about that for minute. “At least not on purpose,” he amended.

  I rubbed my cheek, remembering the painful jolt of electricity. The red mark had long since faded, but I could recall the current running through my body like it had only just happened.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t try and touch you,” Kannon said.

  The innocent promise was a stab of disappointment to my heart. The pang of unease I always experienced in his presence was dwarfed by my mounting attraction to him. Kannon was like a magnet, drawing me in farther the closer I came.

  Instead of responding, I caught Mr. Haverty’s attention and waved him over. Kannon and I ordered our dinners – a turkey Reuben for him and grilled cheese with tomato for me.

  After Mr. Haverty left, the silence returned. Kannon continued to fiddle with his straw, and I busied my hands by tearing my napkin to shreds.

  “So, you were sixteen when it happened?” I said. I never won the silent game as a child.

  Kannon swallowed thickly and turned his head to stare out the window. “Yeah. I was on a family vacation in the Bahamas. We were snorkeling and I wandered away from the group. I dove down to take some pictures of marine plants on the ocean floor. There was a gap between two boulders and I could see something glowing inside. I thought it might be an electric eel or something cool like that. I poked my arm between the rocks to try and take a picture. It got stuck.” Kannon rubbed his left arm and shuddered, reliving the horrifying ordeal. “I started to panic.” The last words were quiet, haunted.

  “You don’t have to tell me the rest,” I said, reaching for his hand on instinct. The moment before I touched his fingers, I pulled back.

  “Yeah, I guess you know the rest, huh?”

  “Oh, I didn’t drown,” I said quickly, my hand flying to my throat.

  Kannon turned to face me head-on. He arched his eyebrows questioningly. “How did it happen for you?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t remember. I was just a baby. I didn’t even know I’d died at birth until I was eight and kept having nightmares about being strangled,” I admitted.

  Kannon looked confused. “A baby?” he repeated slowly.

  “Umbilical cord wrapped around my neck,” I confirmed.

  “No.” Kannon shook his head. “That’s not right. Minos said you have to be at least sixteen to sign the contract.”

  “Contract?”

  “The Egrgoroi contract,” Kannon replied in a tone that suggested he thought me dense.

  “What are you talking about? Who is Minos? What is an Egrgoroi?” The word sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know what it meant. And I had no clue who or what Minos was.

  “What happened after you died?” Kannon demanded, ignoring my questions. “Where did you go? What did you see?” His voice was low but urgent. The intensity unnerved me.

  “I told you, I don’t remember anything. I didn’t go anywhere or see anything.”

  Kannon’s green eyes weighed me. Then his focus turned inward.

  “What is going on, Kannon? I’m freaking out here. You nearly electrocute me when we meet. You somehow know my name before I tell you. You offer up some explanation about us meeting in your dreams. Then, you somehow know that I died and came back - something even my closest friends don’t know, by the way. And now you want to know what happened in the two minutes I was dead. You obviously know way more about this, so why don’t you tell me what I saw?” I sat back in the booth, short of breath from my rant.

  “Tell me something first,” Kannon said.

  “Fine. What?” I shot back.

  “You have the dreams, right? You do see future events in your dreams?” The way Kannon’s hands gripped the edge of the table told me that a lot hinged on my answer. If the anxious expression he wore was any indication, the space-time continuum might be disrupted if I didn’t say yes.

  “I do,” I admitted. “Nothing serious, though. Mostly it’s stupid stuff, like conversations with my friends and lacrosse plays.” I decided to keep the whole Hermes subject to myself for a little longer.

  Kannon visibly relaxed. “You just turned eighteen. The visions are usually mundane in the beginning. Kind of like test runs to make sure the messages get through.”

  The summer after I turned six, my father went on sabbatical to Ireland and brought Mom and me along for the trip. Dad’s research assistant, Angus, continually referred to his hound as “thick” and complained that his girlfriend was “acting the maggot.” One evening he arrived at our house for dinner soaking wet and told my family that it was “lashing real good” outside and he’d been “sucking diesel” the entire three-block walk. The individual words were all English, but they didn’t form a sentence that I understood. The conversation with Kannon reminded me a lot of that experience.

  Mr. Haverty arrived with our food, startling us both. Maybe the tension surrounding the table was palpable to him too because he didn’t say anything when he set our plates before us. And he left without comment.

  I p
icked up a French fry and nibbled on the end. I had no appetite. Kannon dug into his Reuben without hesitation. Nothing, not even death, could dampen a teenage boy’s hunger.

  “Okay, so you have the dreams. You have the electrical problems. And you have crossed over and been sent back,” Kannon said after he’d wolfed down half of his sandwich. It sounded more like he was talking to himself than me.

  “What do you mean by crossed over and sent back? I died and the doctors revived me,” I said.

  Kannon sighed and set the remaining half of his sandwich on the plate. “You crossed the waters that separate the living from the dead,” he said.

  Again, I thought he was speaking English, but it might as well have been Swahili. I shook my head to indicate I had no clue what he was talking about. The weird turn of the conversation heightened my anxiety, but I found it oddly fascinating as well. I felt like Kannon was about to deliver a lecture on the afterworld.

  “To come back as an Egrgoroi you must have crossed over and stood before the Panel of Three,” Kannon explained. “Only they have the power to judge whether you deserve a second chance.”

  Maybe a biblical lecture, I thought. The term Egrgoroi didn’t sound biblical, though. What did I know? Most of my church-going experience was fictitious.

  “Any of this ring a bell?” Kannon asked in response to my perplexed expression, no doubt. “The Judgment? The ferryman? The beaches of the recently departed?”

  My hand paused with a French fry midway to my mouth. “Ferryman?” I repeated weakly.

  “Yeah, Hermes. He escorts you to the Panel of Three.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The moment Kannon said the Greek god’s name, I flashed to Mrs. Randolf’s class. The image of Hermes with his golden hair and bronze skin was as vivid in my mind now as it had been then. I didn’t know whether to feel relief that more pieces of the puzzle were falling into place or wonder whether both Kannon and I had been drinking the same Kool-Aid.

  “Ah, a budding Greek scholar,” Mr. Haverty exclaimed appearing with a pile of extra napkins and a water pitcher. “Like father, like daughter.”

  My head whipped around so fast pain shot up the right side of my neck and I winced. “Excuse me?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him right.

  A mask of confusion settled into place on Mr. Haverty’s face. “All that research your father is always doing is on Greek mythology. The pages I gave you last week were all about one god or another. I just assumed he was a mythology professor.”

  “History,” I mumbled.

  “Ah, right. He did tell me that.” Mr. Haverty chuckled and tapped the side of his head. “Memory isn’t so sharp at my age.”

  I wish my memory wasn’t so sharp, I thought. That way maybe I could forget the last week. Or the last five years, for that matter.

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” the Moonlight’s owner said before disappearing again.

  I pushed my plate away, rested my elbows on the table, and cradled my forehead in my upturned palms. Nothing made sense. Yet, at the same time everything made sense. When I saw the slide of Hermes, I recognized him instantly. Kannon’s assertion that he was the ferryman matched the explanation I’d pulled from thin air in Mrs. Randolf’s class. Uncomfortably, I realized where I’d actually met the messenger. Not in my dreams as I’d first concluded, but in the two minutes I’d been dead.

  This new bit of knowledge chilled me. Earlier, I’d assumed Hermes visited me in my dreams. Now I knew differently. Kannon’s words were like a key, unlocking a part of my memory that hadn’t been opened since the day it was sealed. As with the dreams, I couldn’t recall the details of my meeting with the messenger, but every fiber of my being felt that we had met eighteen years and ten days before.

  “I remember meeting Hermes,” I told Kannon, lifting my head to meet his eyes.

  “You do?” Hope and relief resounded in those two words.

  “Sort of,” I amended. “In class today, I saw his picture and knew that we’d met. I thought I was crazy at the time. I mean, who really thinks they’ve met a mythological god, right? But I knew I had. I just couldn’t remember where or when. I figured it was in my dreams, like how you said we met in your dreams. But now I’m positive we met the day I was born.”

  Kannon became visibly agitated at the reminder of his premonition about our meeting. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one uncomfortable discussing the aftermath of our respective near-death experiences.

  “What was the dream you had about me?” I asked, suddenly very interested.

  Kannon shook his head, his cheeks colored slightly. “It was stupid,” he murmured.

  “I want to know,” I pressed.

  Kannon sighed. “I dreamt about the party at Elizabeth’s. We were supposed to meet for the first time there.”

  We were supposed to meet for the first time there? I didn’t like the sound of that. It was like we were fated to have that encounter.

  “So you remember Hermes, but not the Panel or the Judgment?” Kannon said after a long pause. He seemed eager to change the subject.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. Maybe I will, though. I just turned eighteen last week, so maybe in time I will remember?” I suggested hopefully. As much as all of this freaked me out, I hated only knowing part of the story. If ― big IF― I had met this Panel and been through a Judgment, I wanted that memory.

  “No.” Kannon shook his chestnut locks definitively. “No one forgets going before the Panel and waiting for the Judgment. Every agonizing detail is burned into my mind. Besides, they want you to remember. That way you won’t violate the contract.”

  For the third time that night, the urge to demand he speak American English seized me. All this talk of panels and judges, and now contracts, could have been taking place at the dinner table with my mother. Yet, somehow I doubted Mom would have thrown in words like “ferryman” and “beaches of the recently departed.”

  I took a deep breath to calm my racing thoughts. “Maybe you could start at the beginning. I have no idea what the Panel is or what kind of Judgment you are talking about. And I definitely don’t know what an Egrgoroi is.”

  Kannon eyed me suspiciously while taking a large bite of his Reuben. He chewed thoughtfully for longer than necessary, mulling over how to phrase his next words. After he’d finally swallowed the masticated turkey and coleslaw, he downed half the contents of his water glass. Definitely stalling for time, I thought.

  “When you die, the ferryman, Hermes, takes you before a panel of three judges, Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus. They are known as the Panel of Three. They weigh the positive contributions in your life against the negative ones and pass judgment accordingly. If the good outweighs the bad, you are sent to Elysian Fields. If the scales tip the other way, they sentence you to Tartarus. I hear that place is worse than any pit of hell the special effects crews in Hollywood can create.”

  “Sounds like heaven and hell,” I said. Inasmuch as I’d given any thought to an afterlife, I sort of assumed mine would be spent in one of those two places. The places Kannon had mentioned rang a bell, but that was likely from my mythology reading for Mrs. Randolf. Until lately, I’d been doing the homework every night.

  “Sort of. The underworld is more complicated than that,” Kannon told me. “Heaven and hell are just simplified versions used in modern-day religion. Elysian Fields is sort of like heaven and Tartarus is sort of like hell, except there are many different levels of each. Only the worst of the worst are condemned to spending eternity in the lowest circle of Tartarus. And only people like Mother Teresa end up drinking ambrosia with the gods in Elysian.”

  The way Kannon spoke with so much authority left little doubt that he believed his words were true. I, on the other hand, was a skeptic. I liked the idea of life after death and could not deny that his explanation for my electrical problems and visions made a lot of sense, although the rational side I’d inherited from Mom said that this was all a load of crap.

  Kannon
’s story was a good one, but a story nonetheless, I lectured myself. He was offering me justification for every abnormality in my life. I desperately wanted to believe his words. But wanting something to be true does not make it so. And after being raised by a woman who didn’t buy anything science wasn’t selling, I remained unconvinced.

  “I took one breath in this world. That hardly counts as a positive or negative contribution,” I pointed out. “How could anyone judge me as being good or evil?”

  “First of all, it’s not as simple as good or evil. I told you, there are varying degrees of bad and good,” Kannon said. “Second of all, the whole newborn thing is what I’m having trouble with.”

  Oh, that was all? None of the rest of this bothered him?

  “I distinctly remember the Panel telling me how lucky I was to have turned sixteen a couple of days before it happened. They told me that at sixteen I was old enough to decide whether I wanted to return to earth as an Egrgoroi. The contract stated that my service wouldn’t begin until I was eighteen, though. And that is consistent with what others have told me.”

  What others had told him? So, I wasn’t the first person he’d met like him?

  “There are others like us? I mean, like you at least?” I asked, realizing that if there was any truth to what he was saying there had to be. There were probably quite a few people like us, or him rather, out there.

  “I’ve met a few,” Kannon said evasively.

  “Did you electrocute them, too?” I asked, in what I hoped was a playful voice. The conversation was too serious. I needed some levity before my brain exploded from the influx of improbable information.

  The tension lining Kannon’s forehead eased, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards in a slight smile. “No. I didn’t touch any of them.”

  “How did you know then?” I asked in a small voice.

  “Egrgoroi give off a higher electrical charge than normal humans and are more sensitive to electrical impulses. We can feel each other. I can feel the charge you give off right now. At the lake I just didn’t realize it soon enough. The water must have dulled the sensation and I didn’t register the charge until, well, until I touched you.”