Shattered Sky (44 page)

“So you're Tory,” the woman said.

Before Tory could ask how this person came to know her name, the woman raised a rifle. “I hope we can be friends.” Then she fired.

As for Dillon, his experience was different. The initial impact jolted another memory into his mind. A grand piano crashing down through a crystalline roof. It had been annihilated by its own weight when it finally hit the floor, leaving behind splintered wood, with its last atonal gasp. It was a moment from his destructive days almost forgotten, but as the car tumbled to rest, he saw that his life had always been echoes of that moment. Unmanageable, disastrous, absurd.

And he laughed.

Even before he saw Maddy shoot Tory; even before Maddy pulled open the car door, and trained the rifle on Dillon, he laughed—because he knew that he was, once again, that erratic instrument plummeting toward its end.

A
TRUCK RATTLED BY AT DAWN, JARRING
D
REW AWAKE
. H
E
opened his eyes to find the light hitting them triggered an explosion in his head, translating down to his gut. His stomach constricted, forcing him into a dry heave. When the wave of nausea ebbed, he opened his eyes again, forcing himself to bear the migraine pain. He was in the driver's seat of his Durango. For a hazy moment he remembered an accident. Squealing tires. The shrieking of metal on metal. The car wasn't damaged in the least. In fact, it was sparkling new, right down to the new-car smell. There was a pain in his left side, and he looked down to find a serrated blue flag protruding from a small brown bloodstain on his shirt. He tugged it out, grunting at the pain as a large needle slid out from between his ribs. It was the kind of tranquilizer dart they used on animals, and no one had bothered to remove it.

It was dawn. He was alone in the car. Okoya was outside leaning on the bumper. Drew opened the door and stepped out into a muddy field, about thirty feet from a two-lane road. The last thing he remembered for certain was driving that road, but now the car was in the field, which was scarred with deep gouges between himself and the road. Drew felt his stomach begin to contract again but this time he fought the nausea down.

Okoya spared him a quick look, then returned his gaze to the Eastern horizon, where the sun had yet to make an official appearance. “I was wondering when you'd come out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You died, but it didn't take,” Okoya said. “So they tranquilized you.”

“Who?”

“They knocked me out also, so I can't be sure.”

“And the others?”

Okoya pointed. “That way.”

Drew squinted, but saw nothing but the road and fields beyond.

“Don't bother trying to see them, they're too far away for that, and moving quickly. I can barely detect their presence at all.”

“We'll go after them,” Drew said.

Okoya slowly turned, his head rotating with the eerie smoothness of an owl. His eyes were dilated. “
We
won't do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

Okoya advanced a step, and Drew took a step back. Those eyes were more than just dilated, they were piercing and predatory. Drew had seen Okoya take on this countenance before. When he was hungry. Okoya came even closer, and Drew backed up against the car. Drew could see a flash of red deep within Okoya's dark pupils. He wanted to run, but the sedative had turned his legs to rubber.

“Dillon isn't here to protect you,” Okoya said coldly. “And the next time you die, he won't be there to bring you back.” Suddenly Okoya's hand was at Drew's neck, holding him pinned against the car. Paralyzed by fear, Drew couldn't move. “Therefore you will get into your shiny new car, you will drive me to the airport, and then you will drive yourself back to your beautiful home on your beautiful beach.”

“I . . . I can't do that,” Drew said.

“You can and you will.” Okoya tilted his head slightly, studying the apertures of Drew's face, almost as if he zeroed into the pores of his skin. “The consequences of not leaving now, Drew, could be . . . severe.”

Okoya sniffed the air around Drew, as if smelling the scent of Drew's soul on his breath. And then he backed off, his demeanor changing, his hunger reined in. “You've helped them all you can. You can only be a hindrance to them now.” Okoya opened the driver's side door for him. “Go home, Drew. Put your affairs in order.” Then he went around the car, sliding into the passenger side, and waited.

Drew didn't know whether his fear or his anger was more powerful at that moment. He wanted to bail on the entire thing. Leave Okoya and his car, and run. But he didn't. Instead he got in the car, and started it up, riding the rough course back to the road.

“You'll find them?” Drew asked as they turned onto the road. “You'll help them do whatever it is they need to do?”

“As my survival depends on it, I assure you, I'll do my best.”

“You'll need cash,” Drew said.

“I can find what I need.”

“What are you, so powerful that you have to make things hard on yourself? Open the glove compartment.”

Okoya pulled open the glove box to a clatter of old cassette tapes.

“Now find the one labeled ‘Eddie Money.' ”

Okoya pulled out the Eddie Money cassette box and opened it to reveal a roll of bills instead of a tape.

“There's more than a thousand dollars there,” Drew told him. “Take it.”

Okoya considered the roll of hundreds, and slipped it into his pocket, saying nothing.

As they got on the Northwest Parkway, heading toward DFW, Drew dared to ask the one question that had been on his mind since he stepped into the car. “Tell me one thing: You had every opportunity to take my soul back there. Why didn't you?”

Okoya chuckled bitterly. “Are you worried I've acquired a human conscience?”

“Have you?”

Okoya's voice grew cold again. “Your friends know the look of me when I'm well fed. They are more likely to trust me if I stay hungry. Otherwise I'd be here talking to your soulless shell.”

He said nothing more. And after Okoya was left at DFW curbside, Drew took the first highway west, flooring his accelerator to 95, openly daring any cop from Texas to California to pull him over. But none did.

D
ILLON'S SENSE OF HEARING
was the first to return. A high-pitched hiss and a deep rumble in his ears resolved into the atonal groan of an engine. He was wrapped in a cocoon. No. Not a cocoon; a shell. It was a sensation familiar and unpleasant. Déjà vu washed through him, leaving him nauseated. He opened his eyes to a narrow swath of vision; a horizontal strip of light, and when he tried to turn his head to see more, he found his head would not move.

He was back in the chair.

After all he had endured, he was seated once again in the infernal device that had held him in check in the Hesperia plant. For a moment he felt he was back in that awful place, but in a moment he realized that this couldn't be the same chair—it was a duplicate—and the slim image before him was not that of his cell. There were several plush leather chairs
in his field of vision. One held Winston, another Tory. No doubt Michael was there as well, somewhere out of his limited range of sight. They were slouched, unconscious, their hands and ankles in shackles—bonds far less elaborate than Dillon's chair, but then the others didn't need the complex restraints that Dillon did. Beyond the chairs were several small oval windows in a curved wall. They were on a plane. A private jet.

Someone moved into his line of vision. A pair of familiar eyes peered in at him, heavy with sympathy, and Dillon looked away, not wanting to meet those eyes.

A
S
M
ADDY CROUCHED, LOOKING
in on Dillon through the faceplate of the restraining chair, she was filled with a strange aggregate of emotions. He was once again helpless, a victim of circumstance, unable to effect his own destiny. But this time she was not his lifeline to the world, she was one of his captors. There was sorrow in this, and yet it was seasoned with a comfortable sense that things were as they needed to be. Things were best this way with her outside of his faceplate, looking in. He would need her now. Need her to explain, need her to calm his angers and fears. Dillon, she had decided, was at his best in chains.

“You're awake,” she said. “Good. We were hoping your tranks would wear off first.”

She got down on her knees to stay in his line of vision, and when he closed his eyes, she took his hand, gently, lovingly massaging his fingers. She could feel him try to pull away, but his wrist was shackled to the chair.

“Listen to me, Dillon,” she said. “This is not what it looks like.”

“No? You've kidnapped us, and locked us up. That's what it looks like. Is there something I'm missing?”

Maddy sighed, still holding his hand. “We had to. You were . . . you were out of control.”

“Out of
whose
control?”

Maddy found herself angry at his bitterness. “Don't throw this back on me. You were the one who left without a word.” He had promised to be back, hadn't he? Instead he left, abandoning both her and Tessic, forcing them to become allies in corralling him again. She looked to Tessic, who stood silently behind Dillon, out of his view. Yes, Dillon had brought this on himself by his own irresponsibility.

“Are you going to tell us why you left?” she asked. “What could you possibly have been thinking, going out there alone?”

“I wasn't alone. And if I left, then I had reason to.”

“You have no idea how dangerous it is for you out there, do you? You have no idea how many people want to use you—the way Bussard did.”

“Don't pretend I'm here for my own protection.”

Maddy wanted to argue with him—to tell him that, yes, he was here because he was incapable of taking care of himself—incapable of giving direction and purpose to his own powers.

“I'll talk with him now,” Tessic said, making his presence behind him known.

Before leaving them, Maddy asked if there was anything she could do for him. To which Dillon answered, “You could scratch my nose.”

And so she did.

T
HE COCKPIT WAS THE
only place she could go to get away from Dillon, and as much as she wanted to be with him, she wanted to be miles away. It was the strange nature of Dillon's charm that it repelled almost as much as it attracted. Or maybe it was that she had no way to deflect his anger. Let Tessic talk him down and enlighten him as to why they were halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. It was, after all, his inspiration, not hers.

She closed the door, and although it shut out their voices, it didn't close out the strength of the field that surrounded each of the shards. She was used to it by now—eventually she could tune it out like the background drone of the jet engine, but never, never when Dillon was close enough to touch.

“Come sit,” the pilot offered in an Israeli accent even stronger than his cologne. His name was Ari, and he had also piloted the helicopter that spirited her and Dillon from the graveyard a few weeks ago. From what Maddy knew, he was once the most decorated pilot in the Israeli air force. Now he served as Tessic's own private aerial chauffeur. Only the best for Tessic.

“Come, the co-pilot takes a crap. Sit down, I teach you to fly.”

Maddy ignored the invitation. She looked through the windshield to see darkness. Flying east, the sun had plunged behind them quickly. Now there was nothing before them but night. “How much longer?”

“Four more hours.” He looked her over. “Teach you to fly some other time then? Just two of us? This I will enjoy.”

Maddy wasn't sure if he was serious, or whether flirting was his only lexicon for communicating with American women. “Do you have any idea what's going on here?” she asked.

Ari shrugged. “The big man says ask no questions, I ask no questions, and I sleep at night. The ones who do ask—they don't sleep so well.”

Maddy had to laugh. Ignorance was indeed bliss where Dillon was concerned. Still, she caught Ari pondering the hairs on his arm; the way they had grown denser since picking up their new passengers. Dillon's effects might have been more pervasive, but they were subtler among the living; the straightening of teeth, and a sort of cellular detox—but you couldn't miss what Winston did to those who hung around him too long. Ari caught her watching him. He brushed his hand across his
arm. “I make a hairy man today,” he said, confident in his misspoken English. “Like a wolfwere. You like wolfwere men? Hair give you something to grab onto. This you will enjoy.”

Maddy laughed, and he laughed as well, feigning that he was only joking. “Do me a favor,” she told Ari. “Ask me no questions, and I won't throw you the hell out of the plane.” To think only a few weeks ago, Maddy might actually have entertained such a panting proposition. Dillon had undone in her that need. But he hadn't truly undone it, had he? He had merely redirected her wandering desires, focusing them all toward him. There was the cruelty in the kindness. But better not to consider that; momentous things were happening here. If she kept that at the center of her focus, perhaps she could find a bliss that was somewhat closer to ignorance.

“Y
OU'RE HERE BECAUSE YOU
fell victim to your own folly,” Tessic told Dillon, back in the cabin of the plush jet. “Consider this an intervention.”

Dillon found Tessic uncomfortably close to his face mask. “Not exactly a divine intervention, is it?” Dillon said.

“No—that would be presumptuous. But time will tell.”

Dillon strained against the titanium exoskeleton, knowing it would not give. “You told me I could come and go as I pleased—that I was not a prisoner.”

Tessic leaned away and sighed. “You and I were not meant to travel the easy path,” he said. “God has a vision for you, Dillon. You must come to accept this. If it takes me locking you down long enough for you to come to your senses, then that is what I must do.”