Blessed (2 page)

Best of all, his probing of the locals had informed him that their modes of transportation had evolved into sleek, metal vehicles that were propelled by mechanics and chemistry rather than the work of animals. The smooth lines and shining surfaces were much more pleasing to the eye.

As he walked through the town, the flashy signs and advertisements that colored nearly every flat surface of the place started to get on his nerves. Wisps of his smoky black energy touched everything that he passed, constantly feeding him information about how the world had changed and how people dressed, spoke, ate and interacted with each other.

A large part of him was extremely disappointed in the decline of barbarism.

It seemed that there were no longer public executions, brawls were highly frowned upon and the annoying sense of loyalty to one’s mate had grown into some kind of natural law that forbade a man from spreading his seed wherever he pleased. It was a wonder that the species had even survived.

A man in a small building with a glass front set his cup down on the table. He probed the primate’s mind for the word and figured out it was a café before willing the paper cup to vanish and materialize just on the other side of the glass. When the glorified monkey reached for it a few seconds later, his brow furrowed and glanced around in search of the missing cup. When he spotted it on the outside of the window sill, he looked around to make sure that nobody else had witnessed his momentary lapse in sanity and went back to reading the magazine in his hand, clearly disgruntled.

A woman on the other side of the road suddenly found herself pushing someone else’s stroller down the sidewalk. Another man suddenly realized that he had worn a dress out to dinner.

The small acts of mischief filled him with immense satisfaction.

When he’d finally had enough fun to satisfy his craving for trouble, he once again let his blood take over and do the walking for him. He quickened his pace and focused his energies on the task at hand.

He found what he was looking for on the outskirts of a city called Indianapolis.  He followed the tug through the front door of a small, unassuming business and found a woman in her late forties sitting in a large, comfortable looking chair reading a book on “finding your inner light”.

He scoffed at the idea of the book, knowing full well that there was no light to be found within him. He’d seen the stuff he was made of first hand and had no doubts about the depth of its darkness.

As the woman closed her book and stood to greet him, her eyes locked onto him and deep wrinkles carved themselves into the corners of her mouth. He took this as a good sign that she really was who he was looking for.

As he slowly released his true self into the room around him, her look went from slight dismay to outright terror.

“W-who are you?” she asked, backing away from him and stepping around to the other side of the chair as if it would offer her some kind of protection.

“It’s not
who
I am that you want to know, is it…” he glanced at the stack of business cards on a small ledge to his right, “Joy? Well that’s ironic.”

He let a tendril weave its way out of his forehead and slowly make its way toward her as he continued. “I’m pretty sure that you want to know
what
I am. Not who. Am I right?”

She backed up even further.

“So you
can
see me! That’s good. I was afraid my instincts had gotten a little rusty over the years.”

The tentacle was now squirming in the air about two feet from her face. Like a predator assessing its prey.

At last, the woman found her tongue and used it, “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.” she stammered. The weak attempt to lie to him fell flat when her eyes betrayed her as they tracked the movements of the dark, smoky serpent weaving back and forth inches from her face.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure you do, Joy. I’m quite positive you know
exactly
what I’m talking about.” He let the tentacle lash out at her with startling speed and smiled triumphantly when she ducked to the floor with a squeal of terror.

“Now that we have that out of the way, I do believe you have something I want.”

As he stepped around the chair to get a good look at her, he found her curled up in a ball trembling on the floor and clicked his tongue. “Tsk, tsk, Joy. You disappoint me.”

“Just take it! Take whatever you want! I won’t call the police!”

“Oh I plan on taking it. There was never any doubt about that, now was there?”

The tendril began to quiver in anticipation as he exercised his will over it. Finally, he relinquished his control and allowed the dark mass to plunge itself into the top of the woman’s head. She gasped and her pupils dilated instantly. He found the conduit that he needed and, with relative ease, tapped into it.

The voices came flooding through immediately, accompanied by the incoherent cries of the woman whose body he was using as a channel to the other side. He silenced her with a simple thought and she stood there with her mouth gaping.

He filtered out the voices from the past that had nothing useful for him and focused on the task at hand. He was looking for a very specific piece of information about a very specific group of people from a very specific time frame. The trick was finding the voice of one of the
very
few people throughout history who had ever known about what he was searching for.

After five minutes of waiting and prodding, he grew impatient. He applied a little more force and the woman began convulsing. Her dilated pupils rolled up into her head and her body temperature shot through the roof.

He knew that she wouldn’t last much longer and the thought of wasting time trying to find another like her further incensed him. He opened the channel wider and took pleasure in the primal scream that tore its way out of her throat as she began to seize. The mental binding that he had clamped on her motor functions snapped as her instinct for survival took over and her body rallied against him.

“Too little too late, Joy.”

Her skin began to crack and she took on the pallid color of a corpse.

He began to worry that he wasn’t going to find what he needed before the woman expired. Then, as the first bits of ash began to appear on the floor, he got the message he had been waiting for.

He reversed the energy of the tentacle, changing it from an antenna to a transmitter, instantly reducing what remained of the woman to ash. No need to leave a slew of corpses in his wake.

Slightly disappointed that he had gotten only part of the information he needed, he took out his frustration on the absurd book that Joy had been reading when he walked through the door, reducing  it to ash as well before returning the monster to its cage.

His next stop was Kirtland, Ohio. The next piece of the puzzle was housed there in a big white building with green doors. Some people called it a temple. Those people called themselves “Latter Day Saints”.

“This should be interesting.”

The twenty first of December marked the passing of yet another year for Ardra Cooper. She had always loved her birthday. It was the one day that it really
was
all about her. The other three hundred and sixty four days of the year, she actually had to work at convincing people that the universe revolved around her.

Looking back on the twentieth year of her life, she was able to quickly label it as a good year. She had made loads of new friends, excelled in all of her classes at the University of Utah, become a Sunday school teacher for her church, and volunteered countless hours at the Bishop’s Warehouse, where the church distributed food to families in need. In her eyes, she had not only bettered her own life considerably, but she had also bettered the lives of those around her.

Yet she still had a nagging voice in the back of her head saying that she was meant for bigger and better things. It was constantly telling her that what she was doing with her life was a waste of time.  Over the summer, this bitter little voice had cast a shadow over the path that she had carefully and painstakingly plotted for herself. It had been easy to hide it from the rest of the world, even her best friend, Piper, as she had an inborn confidence that had always allowed her to hold her head up high and appear to be one hundred percent convinced that what she was doing was right.

It was much harder to hide it from herself.

As she lay in bed that cold December morning, she wrestled privately with the ugly little beast that had made its home inside of her. She went through the reasons why the last year of her life hadn’t been a waste over and over again in her head, telling herself that, while she may be meant for bigger and better, there’s no reason that bigger and better needed to happen right then.

She was young, smart, strong and truly cared more for the people around her than she did for herself. She seemed to be incapable of passing someone asking for money without offering to run to her car and see what change she could find. She had stopped carrying cash because the panhandlers were costing her about a hundred dollars a week. Try as she might, she could not afford that on a college student’s allowance.

Granted, her parents were pretty well off so her allowance was a hefty sum, but school was expensive and gas prices were out of control. Not to mention her shopping addiction.  It was her favorite way to unwind and she always donated her old clothes when her closet door started to protest. Luckily, her parents lived close to the University and let her stay home while she was in school, saving her the hassle of rent and utilities.

She finally shoved all the doubt back in its little box and climbed out of bed with a yawn and a stretch. She grabbed her sweat pants off the back of her desk chair and pulled them on before pulling her ponytail out and tossing the elastic on her dresser. She grabbed her bathrobe off the back of her door and headed for the shower.

After towel drying her hair and wrapping it up on top of her head, she left the bathroom door open and went back to her room to pick out a birthday outfit. She decided on a pair of jeans and a baby pink Hollister t-shirt for her day wear and a black v-neck to change into for her party that night.

After blow drying and straightened her hair, she went down to join her parents in the kitchen for breakfast. It was a ritual that had been in place for as long as she could remember. Her mom never missed her birthday breakfast. She’d wake up hours before dawn to start cooking and this year was no exception. The smell of bacon, sausage, blueberry muffins and Belgian waffles filled the house as proof.

Her parents were sitting in the breakfast nook, each of them reading a section of the Deseret News with cups of orange juice in front of them. When they heard her come down the stairs, they both looked up from their papers and beamed smiles at her that made her heart soar. The sun rising over the snow covered Rockies outside the floor-to-ceiling bay windows behind them made her wish that she had a camera to capture the perfect little moment in time.

“Morning mom!” she chimed as she leaned down to kiss the woman’s cheek before sitting next to her father.

“Happy Birthday sweetheart.” her father greeted her as she sat down. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, another ritual that had survived her childhood and teenage years.

“I just can’t believe you’re already twenty one!” her mother bemoaned, tearing up like she had every other year since her first birthday. “It seems like just yesterday that we were bringing you home from the hospital!”

Ardra poured herself a glass of orange juice from the carafe in the middle of the table as her mom went on about how fast she had grown up. “I just wish that I could rewind the clock and do it all over again.” was her closing statement before her father managed to divert the conversation from the past to the present.

“Have you decided where you want to go shopping for your birthday yet, Ardra?”

 “Probably just down to the Gateway.” Ardra shrugged, “They have all the stores I like, so we can go wander the mall and get it all done in one outing.”

This sent her mother off on a new tangent, “You know, Ardra, they just put in an Urban Outfitters there! They have a lot of cute clothes that are exactly your style! I’ve been simply
dying
to go in there and look around, but I figured it would be more fun if we went together! I must admit I cheated a little and looked at their online catalogue. I may even get myself some clothes while we’re there! I could use a little more spunk in my wardrobe. Times are changing so fast and I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t paid much attention!”

Ardra couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother that the store had been there since the summer and that she already owned several shirts from there. Instead, she plastered a smile to her face and played into the conversation, “Really? What kind of clothes do they have? It’s been so long since I’ve gone shopping that I’m not even sure I know what fashions are in this winter!”

Her father knew better and sent her a wink and went along with it, “Anne, I’m sure you two can find the time to bore me to death with your fashion gossip while we’re shopping. How about we have breakfast for now and leave all of this girl talk for the mall?”