Alliance

  To Will West, it seems a lifetime ago that he fled his home. Pursued by mysterious men, Will escaped to the Center, an exclusive prep school. There, he and his new roommates exposed a sinister underground society of students known as the Knights of Charlemagne. In their pursuit of the truth, Will and his new friends discovered they had uncanny abilities. …

  Now, Will and his roommates test their emerging mental and physical powers while investigating the secrets behind them. As they delve deeper into their backgrounds, they uncover disturbing details about the Center’s past and its ongoing connection to a centuries-spanning conflict, one so vast that it may predate human history. Will’s alliance will have to distinguish friend from foe as they prepare for a battle that reaches not only beyond the school but beyond the boundaries of this world.

  In the second book of the Paladin Prophecy series, Mark Frost delivers another heart-pounding adventure with his trademark combination of mystery and the supernatural.

  The Paladin Prophecy

  The Paladin Prophecy

  Alliance

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Mark Frost

  Jacket art copyright © 2014 by Hilts

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

  Printed in the United States of America

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  First Edition

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  Contents

  Cover

  eBook Information

  About This Book

  The Paladin Prophecy

  Title page

  Copyright page

  No one can do it for you …

  Epigraph

  MARCH

  JUNE

  WILL AND ELISE

  AND BROOKE

  THE ALLIANCE REBORN

  THE TRAIL

  THE BARBER SHOP

  THE ISLAND

  MR. ELLIOT

  TWO IF BY SEA

  TEOTWAWKI

  PALADINS

  CAHOKIA

  THE HOSPITAL

  HOBBES

  NEPSTED

  THE MANDALA

  THE CAVES

  BETRAYAL

  FAMILY BUSINESS

  Dad’s List of Rules to Live By

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  No one can do it for you …

  I live my life in growing circles

  Which move out over the things of the world.

  Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

  But that will be my attempt.

  I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

  And I have been circling for a thousand years,

  And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

  Or a great song.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  MARCH

  Lyle Ogilvy had trouble staying dead.

  During the past seven months, the medical staff had given up on him half a dozen times, only to realize that he was a case for which they could find no precedent in the history of medicine.

  They finally had to admit that the question Is he dead or alive? had them baffled.

  The answer was even harder to come by for anyone outside Lyle’s inner circle, as his family and the school had agreed to and honored an ironclad confidentiality agreement about his condition. The mysterious truth was that, since the “unfortunate incident” last fall, Lyle had fallen into a bottomless coma and his vital signs remained a whisper. Six times they’d taken him off life support, but each time they’d hooked him back in because, while nothing they tried would revive him, Lyle’s EEGs continued to demonstrate robust brain activity.

  The only clue for the rest of the school that the controversial Ogilvy might still be on campus was the frequent, furtive presence of Lyle’s parents. They had accepted the trauma team’s recommendation that trying to move their son from his secure intensive care suite at the school’s medical center could prove fatal. Because Lyle wasn’t only a patient; he was also a prisoner, and if he ever did regain consciousness, he faced a long list of serious criminal charges.

  So Lyle lay bedridden, as still as a marble replica throughout the winter months and into the spring. His eyes opened periodically, in no discernible pattern, and his pupils responded to light, one of the few encouraging signs the staff could point to.

  As expected, with a feeding tube providing his only nourishment, Lyle’s bulky overweight frame had melted like wax, apparently wasting away, but closer examination would have revealed that his muscles were growing leaner and more defined. Although the nurses turned him four times a day, because his customized bed was so oversized and they never saw him upright, none of them seemed to notice that the six-foot-two Lyle had grown three inches taller.

  Persistent vegetative state, a phrase often used by the doctors when discussing Lyle, didn’t come close to describing what was really going on inside him. Lyle’s mind had not regained the use of words, but had he been able he might have said that lately he’d grown steadily more aware of his circumstances. He was even dimly able to “see” people coming and going from his room, whether his eyes were open or not.

  And as the last of the late-season snows fell and the ice on Lake Waukoma retreated from its shores, something unusual stirred inside Lyle Ogilvy. If he could’ve settled on just one word to describe what he was going through, it would have been Change.

  Spring was the growing season, and new life was stirring inside him, assimilating the old Lyle into something far more compelling and powerful. Another perception had recently begun to take shape in his cobwebbed consciousness as well. A rising sensation more felt than known, but Lyle felt it in every cell of his body.

  Hunger.

  “How do you feel?” asked the coach.

  Numb. That’s how Will felt at the moment. And not just from the bitter cold. It exactly describes how I’ve felt for the last five months.

  “Do you think I can do it?” asked Will.

  “I’m not the one who needs to answer that,” said Ira Jericho, arms folded, standing back from the edge.

  “I know. But your opinion would be useful in helping me form mine.”

  “Cop-out. Concentrate.”

  Numb. Overwhelmed. Stuck trying to process and sort through more emotional trauma in one month than he’d been through in his lifetime.

  Will and Coach Jericho stood on the eastern bank of Lake Waukoma, halfway through their daily training session, looking out at the water. Most of it was still covered by its winter sheet of ice, with sections of it breaking apart into a checkerboard pattern of isolated floes.

  The weak sun drifted low in the west, touching the tree line now. Temperature in the low forties and dropping.

  All winter, Will had spent two hours of every afternoon training with Coach Jericho. Like most kids his age, he c
raved routine and regularity, something that, because of his parents keeping them constantly on the move, had in his life forever been in short supply. After Christmas Will had thrown himself into his first full class load at the Center, the most daunting intellectual gauntlet he’d ever run. When his academic day ended, his training sessions with Jericho presented even tougher physical challenges.

  Will had gone dead inside since the scandalous public “deaths” of his parents, and he knew exactly why. It was an involuntary way of protecting himself, maybe even a healthy one, from all the darkness surrounding his early life. So he understood the reasons but hardly felt motivated to change it, particularly during the therapy sessions he’d been required to undergo with Dr. Robbins, the school’s psychologist.

  Every session with Robbins felt like walking through a minefield, giving her just enough details to suggest he was making progress without divulging any of the secrets he needed to keep to himself. The whole experience left him hardly capable of feeling anything, which made the truth he was hiding easier to bear. He had learned to welcome the physical agony of his training with Jericho as the only sensations he could even experience. At least they let him know his body was still alive.

  Will knelt down, stuck a hand in the water, and shivered. “It’s about one degree above freezing,” he said.

  “Fall in, you’d die of hypothermia in less than five minutes,” said Jericho. “That is, a normal kid would.”

  “Would you?”

  “I’m not stupid enough to try,” said the coach.

  It’d been forty-two degrees when they left the field house at 3:20. It was overcast and damp, leaving the path through the woods muddy and cold as they jogged down to the lake. An altogether lousy April afternoon.

  “But I am?” asked Will, sticking his semifrozen hand under his other arm to warm it back up.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Jericho. “I just said you weren’t normal. Can you do it?”

  Coach had asked him that question, about so many different puzzling assignments, at least five hundred times during the past few months. The cross-country season was long over, and with most of the team booted out of school because of their involvement with the Knights of Charlemagne, Will had Jericho all to himself. He quickly realized that their daily sessions had been designed to do a whole lot more than teach him better technique on the track.

  Each assignment Jericho presented to Will posed an unstated question: Are you strong enough? Are you tough enough? Are you committed enough to (fill in the blank)? Will pushed himself to always answer yes, but Jericho seemed maddeningly indifferent to his efforts, to the point where Will had decided the man was either insane or impossible to please, which only made him try harder. He didn’t know what kind of heat he’d get if he said no; he hadn’t summoned up the courage to ever do it.

  “Yes,” said Will. “Yes, I can do it.”

  Jericho didn’t react. He never seemed to react to anything. He just took in whatever Will said and rolled it around in his head, only responding when he had something to say. Most days he seldom said a word, but on occasion, without warning, Coach launched into long rambles outlining his unique philosophy, a mind-bending mash-up of New Age metaphysics and ancient mythology, filtered through the lens of Jericho’s Native American lore and legends. The conventional back-and-forth rhythms of social interaction—the polite verbal lubrication that made people feel better about themselves and each other—meant nothing to him.

  But what really drives me bat-crap crazy about this guy is that he never answers any of my questions, particularly the ones I most desperately want to know, like: Why are we doing this stuff? What are you trying to teach me?

  Whatever their purpose, Jericho’s tasks grew more difficult as they worked through the winter. They were often purely, brutally physical—run from here to there, climb up this hill, jump down from that ledge. Sometimes they involved endurance—balance on this rock on one leg with your eyes closed and listen to the wind, or hold this excruciating posture for an hour until your muscles fail. Other times his “exercises” seemed to have no purpose whatsoever: Sit absolutely still, hold this stone falcon in your hand, clear your mind, and picture an earthen well. Now slowly lower a bucket into it, bring it back up and drink deeply.

  Whatever their purpose, Will grew steadily stronger. Increasingly confident of his unfolding abilities—the uncanny speed and stamina he’d discovered and the startling ways in which he could affect the world and those around him with just his mind.

  So what is it going to be this time?

  Jericho reached into the pocket of his rain gear, pulled out a shiny silver dollar, held it up for Will to see, and then hurled it as far as he could out into the lake. It landed and stuck into a large floating patch of ice nearly a hundred yards offshore.

  “Don’t think about it,” said Jericho. “Go get it.”

  Will turned and ran away from the lake for twenty strides, turned back, and accelerated straight toward the shore, nearing top speed with astonishing quickness. As he reached the shoreline—thinking don’t think about it—he left his feet and soared toward the first patch of ice ten feet out, felt his cleats crunch down into the crusty ice, sensed instantly it would collapse if he gave it his full weight, pushed off, and leaped out to the next patch eight feet to the left.

  Another unstable wobble underfoot, but without losing momentum he leaped onto the next patch, and then the next, skipping across the water like a stone. Within seconds he skidded to a halt on the large central span of ice where Jericho’s dollar had landed. The floe rocked and swayed as his weight settled.

  Will bent down to pick up the coin but the ice floe broke apart under his weight, with the coin on a section that was too small to support him now floating quickly away.

  You’ve worked on this. Don’t panic. You know what to do.

  Will focused his look on the silver dollar and held out his hand. He instantly felt a firm connection shoot through the air between himself and the coin.

  Just do it quickly.

  Will threw all his mental weight at the coin, felt its shape ease into his grasp, then tugged it back toward him. The coin rocked and swayed, then pulled loose from the ice and flew hard and fast toward him, hitting his hand with a loud smack. Will closed his hand around it, then held it up for Jericho to see and laughed, amazed at what he’d just done.

  Then he heard a deep muted twang echo underfoot, like a string breaking on a huge off-key guitar. He immediately felt a fracture form in what was left of the ice beneath his feet and saw a fault line open at the water behind him, running rapidly in his direction.

  “Oh crap.”

  He looked back at the way he’d come, all his frozen stepping stones still rocking in the water, drifting farther apart. With no time or space for a full run-up on the return trip, he took two steps and launched off the edge of the floe just as it split in half beneath his feet.

  Landing on the nearest fragment, Will rocked and swayed like a novice surfer, only staying upright because his cleats nailed him to the ice. His calculations told him the next chunk was too far away so—again, without thinking—his mind reached down into the frigid water and pulled that ice block toward him within reach. He leaped onto it and continued that way, vaulting from block to block, using his momentum to urge each floating step toward the next, as water washed over his shoes, freezing his feet up to the ankles.

  Twenty yards from shore, the last stepping-stone ahead of him, barely a yard across, crumbled apart. In desperation, Will looked at Jericho, immobile on the shore, his whole posture a shrug. Will felt the block beneath him begin to implode, and his mind reached down to plumb and scan the desolate bed of the lake floor below, at least fifteen feet down and quickly running deeper: rocks, dead weeds, sluggish fish.

  With the same fierce concentration, Will looked up and a pathway appeared to him, leading toward shore straight
across the water. In desperation he flailed out along it, furiously churning his legs, creating so much surface tension that he felt it, just barely, support his weight.

  His mind and his muscles sustained the effort to within a few feet of land before he finally plunged down into the water up to his knees and the shocking cold shot through his whole body. He was on the rocky beach a few staggering steps later; then he ran toward Jericho.

  His coach had a fire going on the sandbar beyond the rocks. A full, roaring campfire with kindling and split logs. Shivering, Will yanked off his shoes and track pants, sat on a flat rock, and held his frozen feet up near the flames, grateful for the warmth.

  How? How did he start a fire like this that quickly?

  Coach Jericho never questioned him directly about his powers, how they worked or where they came from. Will wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway; he honestly didn’t know. Jericho simply accepted what his eyes told him, that Will could do these astonishing things. As they’d worked to develop them, Will came to believe he could trust Jericho to keep his secrets. Coach didn’t seem to have a hidden agenda, and Will never worried about him reporting back to anyone about what they were up to.

  And as the months passed, in fleeting glimpses that never seemed quite accidental—like the fire that simply appeared on the lakeshore that dreary April morning—Will began to realize that Jericho could do some pretty astonishing things himself.

  He always moved silently. Sometimes he seemed to change locations without moving at all. Once he’d shown up at the top of a waterfall about two seconds after Will had seen him at the bottom. And another time, although it came at the end of a grueling session that had Will nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion, he swore he saw Jericho standing in two places at once.

  Jericho also insisted that Will always carry in his pocket the small stone figurine of a falcon Coach had given him as a gift. And every once in a while Jericho would order Will to stand still, then pull a handful of feathered sticks out of his pocket and—never explaining why—wave them around Will’s head a few times, touching him on the head, neck, or shoulders.