Authors: Mark Anthony
Alarm surged in Travis’s chest. “It’s them, isn’t it? The people who are after you.” Jack did not disagree. That was all the confirmation Travis needed. Alarm crested into outright panic.
“Calm yourself, Travis,” Jack warned with a stern look.
“I don’t want to be calm,” he whispered. “Now is definitely not the time for calmness.”
“On the contrary, there is no better time to remain calm than when one is in danger.”
Travis groaned. Jack had to go and say the word, didn’t he?
Danger
.
Jack moved to an old-fashioned typesetter’s desk, opened a drawer, and drew out an object wrapped in black silk. He unfolded the cloth to reveal a slender, murderous stiletto. A bloodred stone glistened in its steel hilt. He handed the knife to Travis.
“Take this, just in case.”
Travis fumbled with the weapon as though he had just been handed a live snake instead. However, a scowl from Jack kept him from dropping the knife. Travis had never owned a weapon of any sort in his life. It felt cool and disturbingly smooth in his hand. He slipped it through his belt. At least that way he wouldn’t have to hold it.
“Just in case what?” he asked in a croak.
Jack ignored the question. “Follow me,” he whispered and moved through the chaotic clutter of the shop.
Travis started to stumble after him, then froze. An electric humming pierced the silence, and a line of brilliant light flared beneath the front door. With menacing slowness, the doorknob turned right, then left, then right again. Travis felt a warmth against his hip and glanced down. The gem embedded in the stiletto’s hilt now shone bright crimson.
“Travis, get over here!”
Jack stood beside an open doorway that led down to the shop’s cellar, but Travis could not move his feet. His eyes locked on the antique shop’s front door. A sharp beam of frosty light shot through the keyhole. The doorknob twisted faster, until it rattled in its socket, then the rattling ceased. A moment later the entire door shook with a
thud
. There was a long pause, followed by a second strike.
“Travis!”
The roar of Jack’s voice shattered his paralysis. Travis lurched toward his friend and bit his tongue as he barked his shin on a cedar trunk. Just as Travis reached Jack, one last blow resounded behind him. Hinges shrieked, old wood exploded in a spray of splinters, and searing light flooded the shop.
Jack pulled Travis through the cellar doorway onto the top step. As one, they turned to shut the door at the head of the staircase. For a fleeting second, through the closing gap, Travis glimpsed a figure silhouetted against the blazing light. The outline of the intruder was tall and slender, and moved toward them with swift, sinister grace. Then the door slammed shut and blocked out the sight. Hands shaking, Jack slid a stout wooden bar across the doorway. Together, the two men half ran, half fell down the staircase into the cellar below. Sheet-draped furniture clustered around them like a spectral chorus, and the cellar air was as cold as a tomb. Above, the first violent blow struck the cellar door. Ethereal light poured through the crack beneath and drifted down the steps like livid mist.
Jack’s thin gray hair flew about his head. “That bar will only hold them for a few moments. You must go, Travis. Quickly.” He hurried to the far wall and opened a small
wooden door. Beyond was a dark passage. “This tunnel leads to the garden shed out back.”
“What about you, Jack?”
A second blow struck the cellar door.
“Don’t argue with me, Travis. There simply isn’t time.”
“But why aren’t you coming?” Every instinct told Travis to flee, to scramble through the tunnel, to run as fast as he could into the late-October night. Yet he couldn’t just leave Jack like this.
“I have my reasons for staying.”
Jack’s voice was flint, his expression steel. Travis had never seen him like this before.
“Then let me help you.”
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Travis.”
Travis shook his spinning head. “I can’t just leave you, Jack!”
At this Jack’s expression softened a fraction. “Don’t be afraid, Travis. I had not planned this, but I see now it is the only way. If I am fortunate, I can give you time to escape. However, you must use it.” A sad light shone in his blue eyes. “You are our hope now.”
He reached out and took Travis’s right hand between his own two and gripped it firmly.
“Forgive me, my friend.”
Agony raced up Travis’s arm. For a fractured moment it felt as if his entire body was on fire. White-hot radiance washed over him, pierced flesh, blood, and bone—streamed through the very substance of his body as if he were as transparent and brittle as glass. Travis tried to scream, but his voice was lost in the roar of the wildfire that engulfed him. In another heartbeat it would burn him into nothing.
The moment shattered. Travis reeled away from his friend. The blazing fire had vanished, and now chill sweat trickled down his sides. Although he dreaded what he would see—crisped flesh and blackened bones—he looked down at his throbbing hand. The skin was smooth and undamaged. However, all that was left of the hair on the backs of his knuckles was a fine gray ash.
He looked up at Jack with a mixture of fear and wonder.
“Go, my friend,” Jack said. “May the gods walk with you.”
Travis shook his head in dull incomprehension. Another
impact shook the cellar door. The thick wooden bar cracked with a sound like breaking bones.
“Go, Travis!” Gone now was the kind and slightly absent-minded old man Travis had known for seven years. In his place was an imposing stranger: face sharp, voice commanding, eyes vivid as lightning.
This time Travis did as he was told.
He dived into the cramped tunnel. Cobwebs clung to his hands and face. With a cry he tore them to shreds. From behind came a crash as the cellar door shattered. A high-pitched sound crackled on the air, like dry ice on metal. Travis ran hunched through the tunnel, propelled by terror. Seconds later the passage dead-ended. For a panicked moment he thought he was trapped, then his groping fingers found the wooden rungs in the blackness. He clambered up the ladder, threw open a trapdoor, and found himself in the cluttered garden shed. He stumbled out the shed’s door and into the frigid night.
The antique shop loomed thirty feet away. Light—hot and brilliant as a burning strip of magnesium—flickered behind the windows. Travis took a staggering step toward the antique shop. At that moment every one of the shop’s windows exploded outward in a spray of glittering glass. The shock wave struck Travis like a clap of thunder, threw him to the ground, and knocked the breath from his lungs in a grunt of pain.
He gritted his teeth and struggled to his feet. Now the flames that poured out of the antique shop’s windows were red and orange. Fire, real fire. The place was going to burn.
Travis whispered a single word. “Jack.…”
Then he turned and ran into the night.
Just north of town, the billboard faced blindly into the moonlight.
The highway was empty, a silent river of blacktop cutting across the high-country plain. The night was still. Stars glittered in the purple-black sky, and added their glow to that of
the crescent moon. Somewhere a coyote warbled a mournful sōng that would have spoken of cold rushing water, of old splintered bones, of lonely mountains stretching to the end of the world, had anyone been there to listen to it.
The moon brushed the sharp horizon. That was when it began. Like a drop of water on a hot iron skillet, a spark of blue light skittered across the face of the old billboard. The spark burned itself into a cinder of darkness and was gone. Another pinprick danced across the billboard. Before this one dimmed another spark joined it, and another, and another. In moments the entire face of the billboard sparkled with blue incandescence.
A faint hum buzzed on the air. As the sound grew louder, a strip of the faded cigarette advertisement peeled itself off the surface of the billboard and fell to the ground. Sparks clustered like blue fireflies around the edges of the hole left by the chunk of old paper. Bathed in their sapphire glow, a patch of the picture beneath showed through—a jewellike fragment of a wild landscape.
Winking like tiny eyes, the sparks spread outward. More strips of paper curled themselves into tight coils and dropped to the ground, then still more, to reveal the long-hidden image beneath.
People in the Emergency Department always told Grace Beckett she had a good grip on reality.
If they meant she could pull hot chunks of car shrapnel from the chest of a screaming motorcyclist without blinking … if they meant she could perform a caesarean on a seventeen-year-old mother killed in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting and somehow still smile at the perfect smallness of a premature baby’s toes … if they meant she could get called away from the other residents in the TV lounge to resuscitate the elderly victim of a hit-and-run and still make it back before the commercial was over … if that’s what people meant, then Grace supposed they were right. She was good, she knew she was, and she knew it without any sense
of hauteur or self-importance. It was simply a fact. Everyone had a talent, a gift—something they did better the first time they tried than most people could do after years of practice—and this was hers. Grace could put broken people back together.
She always knew when a rush was coming.
Of course, there were all the usual signs even a first-year intern knew—a full moon, a rising barometer, a hot Friday night in June. But even when there were no signs, when the city drowsed, and there hadn’t been anything more serious than a sprained thumb all day, somehow she could feel it about to happen, like a prickling on her skin. Even as the others played broom hockey in a slick-tiled hallway—a game they resorted to in those rare ebbs—Grace would slip on a pair of latex gloves and stand, expectant, before the automatic doors.
With a hiss the doors slid open. Then they were there, streaming into the Emergency Department of Denver Memorial Hospital, pulled from an overturned bus, or a burning hotel, or a twenty-car freeway pileup. While the others scrambled to grab gowns and stethoscopes, Grace already weaved her way among the wounded, the frightened, the dead, soothing hurts and fears with precise hands. Some in the ED mistook this cool and focused efficiency for aloofness, but Grace never bothered to correct them. She had not come to this place to make friends.
Yet, sometimes, in the quiet hour that always came at four in the morning, when everything in the world seemed to sleep and the Emergency Department grew still and tomblike, Grace would sit in a vacant wheelchair, holding a foam cup of dull beige coffee drizzled from a dull beige vending machine, and she would think that people were wrong—awfully, utterly, hilariously wrong—and that it was really just the opposite. Grace didn’t have a good grip on reality.
Reality had a good grip on her.
Bullet wounds, mangled bodies, burnt children … despite her effort to keep each instance distinct and sharp and tragic, all inevitably blurred into one endless tapestry of suffering. For every hole she patched, for every shattered limb she straightened, for every heart she shocked and battered
and cajoled into beating again, there would be another to take its place.
Still, in all her wheelchair reveries, there was no prescience that could have warned Grace of, or even hinted at, the queer happenings that would weave themselves around her on that purple autumn night. Not that it mattered. For in the end, whether she gripped it, or whether it gripped her, the result would have been exactly the same.
Grace Beckett’s reality was about to unravel.
Grace watched as two interns pushed the gurney down the institutional green hallway. One of the thing’s wheels was askew and rattled like an old grocery cart as it hurtled along. Neither of the fresh-faced young men seemed to notice. Elevator doors lurched open, and a moment later interns, gurney, and patient—victim of an apartment building fire—were gone. Grace leaned against the wall and pressed her cheek to the cool tiles. The doors of Trauma One flapped behind her like the palsied wings of an old bird. She let her eyes droop shut for a delicious moment, then forced them open again. She shucked off her papery sterile gown, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into a receptacle where it could await the cleansing fire of the incinerator. With a deep breath she started toward Admitting to get her next injury. The day wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
She navigated her way through an antiseptic labyrinth of corridors, past color-coded examination rooms and dim alcoves where emergency medical equipment lurked like alien creatures, waiting to suck vital fluids from human bodies held in their metallic grips. Spare wheelchairs and gurneys littered the hallways, along with a haphazard collection of patients. Most were bored refugees from the recuperative wards—those able to walk, hobble, or wheel their way out of their rooms, exploring in curiosity, maybe looking for a place to smoke a cigarette in secret, oxygen tanks and clattering IV stands dragged in tow.
Grace detoured for a moment and pushed through the door
of the ladies’ rest room. She bent over the chipped sink, splashed water on her face and neck in an attempt to wash away weariness and the smell of blood, then used damp fingers to comb short, ash-blond hair. With a snap she straightened the white coat she wore over a blouse and chinos, then surveyed her appearance in the mirror—not to see if she looked attractive, but rather to determine if she looked capable, professional. Beauty was no concern of Grace’s, though in fact she was beautiful. She was a tall woman of thirty, lean and angular, almost stiff in bearing, yet possessed of a subtle elegance. Had her voice had substance, it might have been smoke, or butterscotch, or fine cognac. She never wore cosmetics, and although she thought her features sharp, others described them as
chiseled
or even
regal
. She had absolutely no idea that her green-gold eyes had the power to mesmerize.
“It’ll work,” she murmured to the reflection.