Shattered Sky (49 page)

She had grown used to his manner now, but still it unsettled her the way the personality of the child host-body had merged with the seriousness of the creature who commandeered it. At times almost innocent, and at other times evilly calculating.

But there is no evil,
she reminded herself. The angels had taught her that. Was the fisherman evil for catching fish? Was the hunter evil for feeding his family? There is no evil, the angels told her, only power and weakness. The weak see power used against them as evil.

If I see them as evil does that make me weak?

It was simply easier to ignore the question than to answer it.

“Mama and Abuelo are very angry,” Memo said as he untied her. “But if they hit you enough now, they won't kill you tomorrow.”

“I thought you didn't suffer from human emotions,” Lourdes snapped.

“We feel what these bodies feel,” Memo answered. “Me, I find anger the most useful, don't you?”

Lourdes rubbed her swelling face. She couldn't find the use in their anger or in her own. It had landed them on this wretched shore.

“Anger must be used, though. Directed,” Memo said.

“And what if I direct it at the three of you?”

Memo stood on his tiptoes looking closely at her swelling face. “More of the same,” he answered, then kissed a bruise above her eye. “A kiss will make it better,
verdad
?”

She pushed him away again. “Not that easy.”

“Still, you will do the things we ask of you.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” he said quite simply, “you wish to be with greatness. And we are the only greatness there is.”

She grunted but refused to admit how well he had her pegged. For months she had taken all this world had to offer and found it flavorless. Then to learn that everything the world perceived as divine was merely the work of these predators had crushed her. Crushed her, then freed her. This new, bleak view of creation left her unencumbered by troublesome human ethics.

But your brother and sisters are dead
, her atrophied conscience whispered from its hiding place.
They are at the bottom of the Mediterranean because of you.

She would have cried, but refused to let Memo and the other two seraphic ghouls see the depth of her sorrow. These creatures did not care about her sorrow. They simply needed her to accomplish their goal. To know that beings greater than herself needed her was its own reward—and in spite of their constant disapproval, she would serve them, because they were, as Memo had said, the only embodiment of greatness she'd ever know. She longed to be party to the power they would soon unleash. How odd, she thought, to finally find fulfillment in the slavery of “Angels.”

S
HE SET UP COURT
in nearby Taormina, in the ruins of the Greek Theater, because it reminded her of those spectacular, but brief, golden days beneath the faux Greco facades of the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. But
these
ruins were real, from a time before Sicily became a kicking toy for the toe of Italy. It had once been claimed by Greece, and in some fundamental way, Lourdes felt connected to it.

The view from the theater was stunning: snow-capped Mount Etna to the south, and to the east, the tranquil, azure waters of the Mediterranean—but as they made preparations for the next leg of their journey, it was the north that drew Lourdes's attention. Something happening to the north.

The other shards. They were closer. They were . . .
doing
something. Now they were not just together, but connected in some new way, and the sense of their connection deepened her own sense of isolation. She closed her eyes, hating them for making her feel this way, but longing to know what it was they were doing. She closed her eyes, trying to feel more clearly what they felt. Whatever they were up to it was both wonderful and horrible at the same time.

“Forget them,” Memo said, seeing this new direction of
her attention. “Come look at the sea. We are not that far from Thira.”

When she looked across the ocean, she imagined she could see the island out there, waiting for her arrival, and it chased the irritating sense of the other shards out of her mind.

“There is a scar running through Thira, from the sky to its bowels,” Memo told her with childlike enthusiasm. “We get to tear it open again.”

Lourdes knew if they succeeded, it would mean a slow and painful end to the human condition, as if afflicted by some terminal disease.

A disease
, thought Lourdes,
is that what these creatures are?
She couldn't shake the thought, and yet when she dug down to mine her feelings about it, she found she did not care. To her, the human race was already dead. In that, perhaps she was not all that different from these creatures of darkness posing as light—for if she was a luminous spirit, why did she feel so black at her core?

Up above a reconnaissance plane flew past, toward the three dead warships that had run aground ten miles up the coast.

“Tearing open the sky . . .” Lourdes said. “I can't wait.” Then she effortlessly gripped the hands of the pilot in the low-flying plane, forcing them forward, and she and Memo watched as the plane plunged into the sea.

M
ICHAEL AND
T
ORY'S FLIGHT TO
S
ICILY WAS A LESSON IN
European geography. What Michael expected to be a brutally long flight aboard Tessic's jet was a mere puddle jump. Two hours from Warsaw to Palermo and by late afternoon they were received at Tessic's villa on the north shore of Sicily.

“Is there a place where this guy doesn't have a villa?” Michael had asked as the housekeeper walked him and Tory through, pointing out the many amenities. There was no fog here—and although a chill filled the air when they had arrived, it had become a sullen breeze. Now that the weather was permitting, the glass wall of the living room was slid open, leaving a vast Mediterranean view as their fourth wall.

Michael and Tory sat out on the verandah, taking a late lunch, feeling guilty about it—but not too guilty. This was, after all, the first real reprieve they had—not just since being revived, but since the nightmare at Hoover Dam, and the heady hell of being addicted to their own power. “Who says we have to find Lourdes,” Michael said, devouring some delicious Sicilian dish he could not name. “Let's just stay here, sponging off of Tessic, and watch the world end from our balcony.” He was only half kidding.

“Won't work,” Tory told him. “World's ending to the east; the balcony faces north.” Tory wasn't eating. Instead she was still examining the silverware, too embarrassed to complain to the help about the spots, but too obsessive to use them.
Well
, thought Michael,
our experiences left us all with some quirks.

“Lourdes is on the island, east of here,” Tory told him. “Not all that far.”

Michael did not want to be reminded.

“She's up to something horrible,” Tory went on. “I can feel her like a short circuit.”

Michael had to admit her presence did feel different. One of them, and yet not. Winston had warned them about her—that she was not the girl they remembered—that she had let herself become evil. Michael thought to when he had first met Lourdes. She had been a bitter outcast, so frighteningly obese, she inspired fear rather than sympathy. Hatred and anger were not new emotions to her—she had hated with a riveting, heart-stopping intensity even back then. She could have killed any number of classmates and teachers with the intensity of her hatred. But then, for a time, anger gave way to self-indulgence, as it had for all of them. What then of Lourdes's self-indulgence? Had that matured into something worse? Had it fused with her anger into something even more lethal than the gluttonous parasite that had once enslaved her?

“They say she kills people,” said Tory. “Hundreds at a time. For pleasure.” She shivered at the thought. “I can't imagine it.”

“Keep talking and you'll ruin this wonderful warming trend.” And indeed, Michael could feel the temperature dropping. It wasn't just the presence of Lourdes that bothered him—it was the vectors. Everything inside him was screaming panic—but he was strong enough now to box those emotions. And so, when sunset came, he streaked the sky with wispy cirrus—a trick he had perfected back at San Simeon for his adoring throng a week—no—a
year
before. The swatches of clouds soaked in the colors of sunset, painting the whole sky in vivid oranges and blues, resolving to violet. When the
spectacle was done, Tory led him to the bedroom for a syntaxis of two.

“We'll set out to find her in the morning,” Tory said. “But we owe ourselves this one night.”

They lay down on the bed, fully clothed at first. Michael had hoped that the right set of circumstances would ignite his scarred libido, but it wasn't happening, and as she pressed against him, slipping her hand into his shirt to feel his heartbeat against her palm, he grew uneasy.

“I want to be with you,” she whispered to him, and although he felt his heart pouring out, the passion moved no lower.

“I can't,” he told her, taking her hand from the lip of his jeans. “I used up all my lust a long time ago. Didn't save anything for a rainy day . . . or a starry night.”

She giggled, as if she were drunk.
Is she drunk on me?
he thought.

“I still want to be with you,” she said.

“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.

T
HE 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.