Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (55 page)

I decided I’d go with that idea.

Williams was still watching me.

“I’m good. Thanks.” I groped around for a change of subject. “Want me to carry the rifle?”

I mean, why not? I hadn’t yet seen him use it. He always chose the shotgun.

“Could you hit something with it?”

“Dunno. Put a pinecone on your head and we’ll see.”

He just stared at me.

I sighed. “Yes. I can shoot a rifle.”

He handed me the gun. “Magazine’s full. Don’t shoot anything I don’t tell you to.”

I stood there holding it for a moment, blinking hard. I hadn’t noticed he’d switched his own rifle out for Terry’s M4.

Then I loosened my pack’s left shoulder strap, freed my arm, and slung the rifle over my head. It hung straight down the front of my body, big, mean, and heavy. I tightened the sling up and got my pack sorted out.

Williams looked a bit surprised.

I gave him my best stink-eye, daring him to question my badassery. No reason to tell him I’d never fired an assault rifle until Gwen started letting me play with her collection.

He shrugged. “Aim for the head. Dino skulls aren’t thick.”

“Really?”

“Couple centimeters, tops. They’re birds, not bears.”

“What about the one with the big dome on top of its head?”

His face took on a
why-me?
look. “Other than that one.”

I nodded and looked around at the forest.

Pines were mixed with primitive-looking palmlike trees and things that reminded me of modern hardwoods but were oddly shaped, with weird leaves. The sparse branches and foliage let plenty of light reach the forest floor, which was covered in ferns and mosses with soft, ankle-high stalks. The mixture of light and dark, and various shades of brown and green, might make it difficult to pick out predators.

Then again, we had a wolf. A wolf nose had to be a million times better than people eyes.

We started walking.

Ghosteater floated along in absolute silence. Williams was amazingly quiet for such a large person. I, in contrast, seemed to locate every crunchy twig in the loudest possible way.

My companions didn’t react to my bumbling. Ghosteater just walked steadily along through the trees, turning his head this way and that, moving his mouth slightly as he tasted the air. As for Williams, he mostly looked up.

I could see birds gliding around up there.

Those probably weren’t what he was watching for.

I leaned back against the rock, enjoying the feeling of breathing easily.

There wasn’t as much oxygen in the air as we were used to. Walking any distance had turned out to be hard for all of us. Ghosteater said he’d adapted after a few weeks the last time he was here. Until then, we’d have to take it slowly.

When we stopped, Williams had put up a barrier and concentrated the oxygen inside. I could tell it wasn’t easy. He wasn’t an air-worker, like Andy. Manipulating gasses for anything other than making a barrier would be learned work, for him.

While he concentrated on creating the working, I pressed our bedrolls up against the stone and got some dried meat and fruit out of our packs. We sat down to eat. Ghosteater melted away into the trees.

After about ten minutes, animals began to appear. What I’d thought were birds flying around in the tree tops turned out to be lizards with stiff ribbed wings sticking out from their sides. Some of them were tiny — just a few inches. Others were a foot or two long. The little ones ate insects. The big ones ate the little ones.

They glided down from the tree tops and then worked their way up the trunks. They were well camouflaged. When they froze, they were practically invisible.

Before long, larger creatures showed up — low-slung reptiles with armoring on their backs and a row of thick spines running from neck to tail along each side. The spines sprouting over the shoulders were particularly long and curved, like a bull’s horns. The animals were substantial — twelve or fifteen feet long and thick-bodied — but they had tiny, turtle-shaped heads. The overall effect was strange. I’d never seen anything similar.

“What are they?” I whispered.

“Aetosaurs.”

We watched as they grazed the forest floor, feeding on ferns and moss. They didn’t seem to see us. Maybe Williams’s barrier was hiding us, or maybe they just had bad eyesight.

After a time, another group of reptiles joined the aetosaurs. They weren’t tall — maybe three feet at the back — but their necks were quite long. They could rear up onto their hind legs, grasp a tree with their clawed forefeet, and browse the branches.

The browsers and grazers mixed peacefully.

“None of these are all that big,” I murmured. “Maybe the dragons are small too.”

Williams’s expression said,
Dream on
.

I’d just turned back to watch the animals when Ghosteater burst out of nowhere, seized a young long-neck behind the head, and laid its throat open with a single paw-swipe.

The remaining long-necks went bipedal and ran off, slaloming around the trees. The aetosaurs lumbered away more slowly.

Ghosteater stood over his jerking prey as it bled out. Then he gripped it by the withers and dragged it off into the trees.

“Did you see that?” I said. “He came out of nowhere.”

The big man didn’t answer. He was looking hard at the spot where Ghosteater had popped into view. He looked … alarmed.

“Was he behind a barrier?”

The answer came slowly. “No. I think he came through a strait.”

I peered out into the woods. All I could see was the blood. “There’s a strait there?”

“No.”

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“Wasn’t normal. It felt …”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Two-dimensional. And now it’s gone.”

Straits are like tunnels. How can a tunnel be two-dimensional? And they didn’t disappear. They could be
closed
, but they were still there.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He studied me, eyes narrowed. “You know anything about him? What he can do? What he can’t?”

“No, not really. But I do trust him.”

“Why?”

I shifted, uncomfortable. “I’m not sure why, but he cares about me.”

“Cares about you?” He made a dismissive sound. “You can’t be that naive.”

“I’m not being naive. You’ve seen the way he treats me.”

“He thinks you’re a baby. What happens when you grow up and become a rival? Wolves kill their own all the time.”

I stared at him, deeply surprised by his misstep. Then I pounced.

“Ghosteater’s a power. Why would I be his rival? I’m just a Nolander, right?”

Williams looked away.

Fury started building, one fiery brick at a time. I was tired of being in the dark, tired of people not being straight with me, tired of not knowing what I was.

“Sounds like you think I’m a baby power, after all. But if I were, Cordus would’ve told me on day one what I was and how I needed to act and why, right? Anything else would be crazy. But he didn’t. No one’s told me anything. Including you. So I go around acting like a normal person because I think I
am
a normal person, and that’s a reasonable assumption because how many of us turn out to be normal people, and how many of us turn out to be gods in diapers?”

I paused for a breath. Williams opened his mouth.

“I’m not done. So instead of getting information from my own team, I get it from people like Sturluson and Mizzy and Negus. I have to blunder around and piece it together from a million little hints, even though ‘it’ is
what I am
.

“You didn’t have the guts to tell me I’m going to grow up to be one of the baddies. And Cordus … what the hell? Did he think I was going to get a swelled head if I knew what I was? As if! That’s the last thing I want. I want a normal life — some friends, a little happiness. That’s it.”

I pressed my lips together and waited.

If we were in some cheesy movie, he’d nod in grudging respect. Instead, he looked disgusted.

“You want advice? Here’s some: it’s not about what you want.” He leaned toward me. “You’re a weapon that must not be used. So stop looking for friends. Stop trying to help. Stop trying to be happy. That shit doesn’t matter. What matters is not killing millions of people because you put your power in the wrong hands.”

“You can’t be —”

I clamped my mouth shut before saying something stupid.

Millions have died because of one person. I knew that. Human history is full of stories like that. What if I trusted someone and shared my power with them, and they turned out to be the next Hitler or Leopold II or Pol Pot?

Or a terrorist?

I thought about some two-bit water-worker standing in lower Manhattan and drawing on me. Maybe someone who couldn’t pull the water out of a mouse on their own could make a tsunami, if they had me there to help. No, not
help
— it wouldn’t be intentional. But I could be fooled. I’d like to think I was always right about people, but I knew what Gwen would say to that:
Thinking you can’t be fooled is the ultimate foolishness
. I could almost hear her voice.

Graham had fooled me.

Serhan had fooled me. I’d thought he was a pushy kid. It never occurred to me he might be dangerous.

I eyed Williams. There was no mercy there, but at least he wasn’t looking away.

“Okay,” I said. “Point taken. But what you’re worried about isn’t the only risk. I need to stay sane, not get all weird and crazy. If I end up nuts, like Limu, I won’t need someone else to use me. I’ll end up destroying things all on my own. Cutting myself off from everyone, trusting no one — I’ll go mad if I do that. I’m not a loner.”

Williams laughed. “Why do you think Limu lost it? Negus is four times his age, and he’s fine. Because he floats above everything. Nothing touches him. But Limu — all this time, and he’s still trying to connect, trying not to be alone.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Powers are singular. Other. When they fight that, they tear themselves apart.”

“But why —”

“Enough. You wanted the truth. You got it.”

“Did I? You still haven’t said I’m a power — not directly.”

“Because I can’t.”

He lay down and rolled over. The set of his shoulders told me I wouldn’t get another word out of him.

I sat there for a while, mulling over what he’d said.

It made his hostility toward Mizzy seem less bizarre. And his lies … I took
because I can’t
to mean
because Cordus forbade it
. Williams could be pretty dreadful, but he didn’t strike me as a willing liar.

But that would mean he believed what he said about how powers had to conduct themselves — cut off from humanity, friendless and alone.

I thought of Cordus. If he had friends, I sure hadn’t seen them. He had allies and rivals. And servants, most of whom hated him. There was Yellin, who loved him, but I had trouble believing the feeling went both ways. I hadn’t seen Negus treat anyone like a real friend, either. The same went for Bill Gates and Chasca and all the others.

A wave of profound loneliness washed over me. I thought I’d been making new friends back in New York, but maybe I’d been making my last friends.

I lay down in my bedroll, feeling empty.

Some time passed.

A damp muzzle shoved its way through my hair to my neck and snuffled wetly.

“Pup,” Ghosteater said.

He lay down against my back.

I rolled over and cuddled up to him. Fortunately, he didn’t seem too coated in dino gore.

He heaved a sigh and started that slow chops-licking thing dogs do before going to sleep. It was comforting.

Ghosteater is my friend
.

But honestly, I wasn’t sure. He was so different from me.

I woke early right next to something big and warm. For a panicked moment, I thought I’d cuddled up to Williams in my sleep. Then I realized no person could be that furry.

Ghosteater yawned and stretched, pushing me and my bedroll back several inches. Then he sighed and went back to sleep. Despite his bloody kill the night before, he was completely clean. Maybe that’s why he liked the glass fur.

The morning was still and silent. I could hear Williams breathing a few feet away. The sound didn’t have the slow evenness of sleep. Maybe he was keeping watch.