Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (21 page)

“I don’t know how else to tell you this,” he said. “But I think it was
your Aunt Meg who made all this happen.” He waved his hand. “All the chaos. The…
ending.”

“What?” she blurted. “How?” She backed away from him, holding the gun
in both her hands; behind him, the black, colorless surf rolled into the night.

“I don’t know how,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “But
please, for the love of God, help me fix it.”

Then he advanced on her and pushed down her arms. She tried to raise
them again but she couldn’t. He cupped her face in his hands. Dizziness swept
through her and she dropped the gun. He held her still and she could feel him
falling right into her, inside her mind. There was nothing but his blue eyes.

Then warmth raced through her, zinging through her bloodstream, and she
began to sweat again. The soles on her sneakers made hissing sounds against the
damp sand. Sparks skittered through her veins and arteries.

Then she shot like a comet into the air, into space, among the stars,
away from the messed-up world. Suspending above the night, she gazed down and
saw Los Angeles in ruins, the way it was, and a huge bloom of red surging
toward the shore.

Toward her beach, just below her house.

And then saw, in that house, two tiny dots of light. She looked at the
dot in the kitchen. It was behind the refrigerator, and as it magnified in her
mind, she saw Anny’s missing house key. She moved on, and found Jordan’s
reading glasses between the couch cushions.

She jerked to consciousness, to find that she was she was sprawled in
the sand. He was on his hands and knees, his face close to hers, and when he
saw that her eyes were opening, he leaned back on his heels with a deep sigh of
relief.

“What did you do to me?” she shouted, trying to get up. But her muscles
were strangely flaccid.

“I think I activated your gift,” he replied. She could hear how freaked
out he was.

“
You think you what
?” She felt in the sand for the gun.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You know what happened.” He just looked at her, and she huffed. “I saw
things. First the world, and the mess.” She thought of the mass headed for the
beach. “Garbage, or something. And lost things.”

She told him about the keys and the glasses. He nodded, looking
thoughtful. Then she saw a faint glow around him.

She said, “Did you make those things glow so I could find them?”

“No. I can use energy, in some ways,” he said. “Like on the dog.”

“And on me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“And you can make people like you.”

“Only when they should,” he replied.

“
I
don’t like you,” she said.

And suddenly she was overcome with weariness. She couldn’t keep her
eyes open. As they drifted shut, she said, “I think you left your wallet in a
building on my street.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said finally, into the muzziness of her sleep.

~

When she woke up just before dawn, she liked him a little more, which
was terrifying, because she didn’t want to like him at all. He had explained that
he’d just found out some unbelievable things—that some kind of
supernatural power ran in his family and apparently in hers, too. All his
people were missing or dead, but some of them had lived in a castle in the
Black Forest. And as soon as he’d gotten inside the castle, he’d turned into
Mr. Electric.

Then they were in the house, and he was helping Jordan pull out the
refrigerator—a useless appliance except for keeping rats out of boxed
food—so Anny could find her house key. Jordan was overjoyed to find his
glasses again. There was no one around to make him new ones.

She put all her own valuables in boxes and Jordan promised to keep an
eye on them. Then, with shaking hands, she packed a suitcase. He was making her
be okay with all this. She could tell. She wanted to make him stop, but she was
doing it.

And then she was saying goodbye.

They got his wallet and then he walked her into an alley where a
vehicle sat beneath a protective covering. He pulled it off, revealing a
beautiful candy-apple red Corvette. She hadn’t ridden in a car in years.
Something loosened in her chest as she slid in on the passenger’s side. The car
smelled of old leather and dust. When they climbed in, he pressed his finger
against the ignition, and the engine purred.

“I couldn’t find the keys,” he said. “Do you see them?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is this some kind of test?”

He shook his head, watching her.

Settling back, she let her lids fall shut. A blur of light passed
through her mind’s eye; then she felt a stab of sorrow, deep and penetrating.
It hurt almost like a physical wound. She opened her eyes and looked at Alex.

“There’s something about the keys that’s sad,” she said.

“The keys are sad?” he repeatedly slowly. As they glided out of the
alley, he knit his brows. “In the sense of…?”

“I don’t know I just felt sadness.” She crossed her arms over her
chest. “Did you put some kind of double whammy on me?”

“I don’t really know what I did to you,” he replied.

~

His jet was bigger than she’d pictured it. It was parked in what had
once been a parking lot for the beach. Fueled up, ready to go. It could cross
the Atlantic nonstop. She sat to his right in the cockpit. He took off his
coat, revealing lots of muscles and a black T-shirt. His right arm was
completely tattooed. Tats on the left went up to his elbow. It didn’t make
sense that a guy who looked like him would have access to a Corvette and a
plane, and that she was flying to Germany with him.

But it didn’t make sense that in eight short years, the world had
fallen completely apart. First everyone talked about fuel reserves and no TV,
no grid, no net, and very few people. It was as if things were melting.
Evaporating. As if the world itself was losing time—or running out of it.

They climbed. She looked down at the coastline. The ocean and sky were
the same color. Skyscrapers had collapsed. Streets were broken up. There were
no birds. Her mother was buried somewhere below her, in a grave not far from
their house because without transportation, they couldn’t get her to a graveyard.

Her throat tightening, she brushed tears from her eyes and focused,
trying to see her mother’s grave in her mind. What she saw was her mother’s
face, deep black, her lips, so brown, pulled back from white teeth in a smile.

Her throat tightened. She gripped the armrest so hard the beds of her
fingernails stung.

“Why did I come with you?” she asked him through tears.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why did I come get you?”

~

Hours later, they began their descent through a sky the color of old
copper. The sun was beginning to set. Snow was falling onto skeletons of trees
and vast deadfalls. Anticipation skittered through her as his castle came into
view. It sat on a hill, as he had said. Half of it had been destroyed; the
other half rose into the aged, metallic sky.

They landed and rolled to a stop. Alex had explained that he’d been
adopted by a wealthy couple named Aaron and Maria Cohen. His parents had been
on a trip to Greece when the Collapse had occurred. That was what he called it.
Explosions, earthquakes, riots. Eight years of looking for them. Finally he’d
found a key, and then a bank safe deposit box. There were his adoption papers,
saying that he had been born in town called Ritterburg, in the heart of the
Black Forest. He’d lived in the castle for three months before he’d come to get
her.

“Here we are,” he said, sounding nervous.

Alex had brought a little foldable ladder. She didn’t really need it.
As she climbed down, he retrieved her suitcase and his black duffel. A gritty
brown wind brushed over her. Strips of faded blue cloth dangled from flagpoles
at the top of the castle, and somewhere a hinge squeaked back and forth in the
bitter wind.

Neither one of them spoke as he led the way to the castle. With his
long coat and boots, he looked like Neo from
The Matrix
. There were
patches of snow on the ground. They were gray and they kind of smelled, but
they were the first snow she had ever seen.

Alex put his hand on the small wooden door, cut into the larger, older
door, to push it open. The rectangle of wood hung in the air for a second, then
disintegrated, falling to the snow in a heap of fine ash. He pulled back his
hand and stared at the space where the door had been.

“Shit,” he said in English. “Things are getting worse.”

“No kidding,” she murmured.

 
He crossed the threshold
and she reluctantly—so very reluctantly—followed him in. There
wasn’t much left. No roof, piles of stone and rubble, blackened walls
stretching up hundreds of feet.

“I’ve got all the stuff in my room,” he said.

Her cheeks warmed. “Do I have a room?”

“
Ja
.” He smiled stretched into a grin. “Just across the hall
from mine.”

“You were pretty sure of yourself when you came to find me,” she
muttered, crossing her arms over her chest. She didn’t like this place. Things
were tapping for her attention just beneath her consciousness. Whispering just
a little too softly for her to hear.

He looked over at her. “I cast a lot of magics to find you, Dana. I
didn’ t know if you would come, but I wanted to make sure you would feel
welcome.”

“You could just work a spell on me,” she said. “The way you did back in
LA.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I wasn’t proud of it.”

His manga-man black coat billowed around his legs as he crossed the
marble floor. Most of the black and white squares had been smashed. He led her
down a narrow passage bordered on either side by piles of wood and stone. There
was more roof there, blocking out the light. Flicking on a flashlight, he led
the way. It was icy, and she wrapped one hand around the other. She became
aware that a low-level sadness, no, it was despair tinged with anger,
crept up the backs of
her legs like a needy, starving dog. Freaked out, she glanced over her
shoulder, seeing nothing.

“Something’s here,” she announced. “I feel it.”

“What? What do you feel?” he asked, sounding excited. He painted the
walls with the beam from his flashlight.

She told him.

“Maybe it’s a ghost?” he said.

“
Maybe
?” she echoed, alarmed. “Damn it, Alex.”

He opened a door, pulling back his hand quickly as if he expected it to
fall apart the way the front door had. His flashlight passed over a stone
floor, swept clean. He moved to table and lit a trio of candles, except that
she didn’t see a lighter or a match.

He handed a candle to her. In the soft glow, she saw him open his palm,
and a small ball of light appeared.

“I’m not clear what your ‘gift’ is,” she said.

“One of them is light,” he replied. “At least, I think it is. I’m on my
own figuring all this out.”

They moved toward a bed dressed in a thick, furry coverlet and topped
with a stack of pillows. Unhappiness rose around her like a mist.

“This place is bad,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Bad,” he said. “How—”

She pushed past him, not willing to stay inside. He joined her in the
hall.

“Better?” he asked.

“Not really.” She looked left and right. “What happened here?”

“Like I said at the beach. They were attacked, as far as I can tell.”
He made a face. “There are a lot of bones. And cages.” He pointed to an open
door. “That’s my room.”

“
Bones
? I think we should leave,” she said. “We’ll get the stuff
you need from here and go somewhere else.”

“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.

There was a sleeping bag on the floor of his room, and a heavy wooden
table. Stacks and stacks of leather-bound books balanced on a heavy wooden
table and several open boxes. Candles, crystals, and herbs were spilling out of
them.

“Oh, my God,” she said. It would take them days to cart all of it out
of the castle.

 
“
Ja
, you see,” he
replied.

Then he walked to the table and placed his palm on a black book with
scrolled gold writing that she couldn’t read.

“I don’t know what it says, either,” he told her as he flipped it open.
There was a loose photograph of a woman with red hair, red eyebrows, and big
blue eyes. She was wearing a cat suit and body armor strapped over that. She
had a black helmet on her hip with ZECHERLE in white. He tapped his finger on
the lettering. “That’s her last name. Maybe it’s your father’s, too.”

Delaney Zecherle. Her mom’s last name was Martin. Her mom’s name had
been Tenaya.

He turned the page, edged a small photograph from the crease with his
thumbnail, and handed it to her.