The Paladin Prophecy (2 page)

There. Blessings counted. Always works like a charm
, thought Will dryly.

Will had shaken off the morning chill by the end of the second block. Blood pumping, his endorphins perked up his nervous system as the Valley stirred to life around him. He quieted his mind and opened his senses, the way his parents had taught him. Took in the smoky tang of wild sage and the oxygen-rich air of the orchards lining the East End roads, wet and shiny from the rain. A dog barked; a car started. Miles to the west, through the gap in the hills, he glimpsed a cobalt-blue strip of the Pacific catching the first beams of sunrise.

Good to be alive
. He could almost believe it now.

Will cruised toward town, down lanes of rambling ranch houses, grouped closer together as he moved along. After only five months here, he liked Ojai more than anywhere they’d ever lived. The small-town atmosphere and country lifestyle felt comfortable and easy, a refuge from the hassles of big-city life. The town was nestled in a high, lush valley sheltered by coastal mountains, with narrow passes the only way in on either end. The original inhabitants, the Chumash people, had named it Ojai: the Valley of the Moon. After hundreds of years of calling Ojai home, the Chumash had been driven out by “civilization” in less than a decade. Tell the Chumash about “refuge.”

Will knew that his family would move on from this nearly perfect place, too. They always did. As much as he liked the Ojai Valley, he’d learned the hard way not to get attached to places or people—

A black sedan glided across the intersection a block ahead. Tinted glass on the side windows. He couldn’t see the driver.

They’re looking for an address they can’t find
, Will thought. Then he wondered how he knew that.

A faint marimba ring sounded. He slipped the phone from his pocket and saw Dad’s first text of the day: HOW’S YOUR TIME?

Will smiled. Dad with his Caps Lock on again. Will had tried to explain texting etiquette to him about fifty times: “It’s like you’re SHOUTING!”

“But I am shouting,” Dad had said. “I’M WAY OVER HERE!”

Will texted back: how’s the conference? how’s San Fran? He could text while running. He could text while riding down a circular staircase on a unicycle—

Will pulled up short even before he heard the rasp of rubber on wet pavement. A dark mass slid into his peripheral vision.

The black sedan. Shrouded by exhaust, throttle rumbling in idle, dead ahead of him. A late-model four-door, some plain domestic brand he didn’t recognize. Odd: no logos, trim, or identifying marks. Anywhere. A front license plate—generic, not California issue—with a small US flag tucked in one corner. But that was no civil service car pool engine under the hood. It sounded like a hillbilly NASCAR rocket.

He couldn’t see anyone behind the black glass—and remembered: tinting windshields this dark was illegal—but he knew someone inside was looking at him. Will’s focus narrowed, sounds faded. Time stopped.

Then a marimba broke the silence. Another text from Dad: RUN, WILL.

Without looking up, Will slipped his hoodie over his head and waved a faint apology at the windshield. He held up the phone, shaking it slightly as if to say,
My bad. Clueless teenager here
.

Will thumbed on the camera and casually snapped a picture of the back of the sedan. He slipped the phone into his pocket and eased back into his stride.

Make it look like you’re just running, not running away
, Will thought.
And don’t look back
.

He trotted on, listening for the throaty engine. The car tached up and peeled off behind him, turning left and heading away.

Then Will heard someone say, “Fits the description. Possible visual contact.”

Okay, how did
that
voice get in his head? And whose voice was it?

The driver
, came the answer.
He’s talking on a radio. He’s talking about
you.

Will’s heart thumped hard. With his conditioning, he had a resting pulse of fifty-two. It never hit triple digits until he was into his second mile. Right now it was north of a hundred.

First question:
Did Dad just tell me to RUN (from San Francisco?!) because he wants me to stay on pace for my target time, or because somehow he knows that car is bad news—

Then he heard the sedan a block away, stomping through its gearbox, accelerating rapidly. Tires screamed: They were coming back.

Will cut into an unpaved alley. Behind him the sedan burst back onto the street he’d just left. Before the car reached the alley, Will veered right, hopped a fence, and jammed through a backyard littered with the wreckage of Halloween decorations. He vaulted over a chain-link fence into a narrow concrete run along the side of the house—

—and then,
damn
, a vicious blunt head burst out of a dog door to his right; a square snarling muzzle shot after him. He leaped onto the gate at the end of the run and scrambled over, just as the beast hurled its body into the fence, jaws snapping.

Half a block away, he heard the twin-hemi yowl as the car raced to the next corner. Will paused at the edge of the yard behind a towering hedge and gulped in air. He peeked around the hedge—all clear—then sprinted across the street, over a lawn, and past another house. A wooden fence bounded the rear yard, six feet high. He altered his steps to time his jump, grabbed the top, and leaped over, landing lightly in another alley—three feet from a weary young woman juggling a briefcase, a coffee flask, and her keys near a Volvo. She jolted as if she’d just been Tasered. Her flask hit the ground and rolled, leaking latte.

“Sorry,” said Will.

He crossed the alley and raced through two more yards, the sedan rumbling somewhere nearby all the while. He stopped at the next side street and leaned back against a garage. As his adrenaline powered down, he felt faintly ridiculous. Thoughts and instincts argued in his head, tumbling like sneakers in an empty dryer:

You’re perfectly safe
. NO, YOU’RE IN DANGER.
It’s just a random car
. YOU HEARD WHAT THEY SAID. PAY ATTENTION, FOOL!

Another text from Dad hit the screen: DON’T STOP, WILL.

Will motored down open streets through the outskirts of the business district. The team should be waiting at the diner by now. He’d duck inside and call Dad so he could hear his voice. But he realized he could hear it RIGHT NOW. Reminding him of a rule that Dad repeated like a fire drill:

#23: WHEN THERE’S TROUBLE, THINK FAST AND ACT DECISIVELY.

Will pulled up behind a church and peeked around. Two blocks away he saw the team, six guys in sweats outside the diner, RANGERS stitched across their backs. They were gathered around something at the curb he couldn’t see.

He checked the time, and his jaw dropped. No way that could be right: He’d just covered the 1.4 miles from home, steeplechasing through backyards and fences … 
in five minutes?

Behind him, the snarling engine roared to life. He turned and saw the black car charging straight at him down the alley. Will broke for the diner. The sedan cornered hard behind him, swung around, and skidded to a halt.

Will was already two blocks away. He flipped up his hood, stuck his hands in his sweatshirt, and casually jogged up to the team.

“Whaddup,” he mumbled, trying to keep panic out of his voice.

The team mostly ignored him, as usual. He blended in, keeping his back to the street. They parted enough for him to see what they were looking at.

“Check it out, dude,” said Rick Schaeffer.

A badass tricked-out hot rod sat at the curb. It was like nothing Will had ever seen before, a matte black Prowler slung long and low on a custom chassis, with a slanted front grille and wheels gleaming with chrome. Bumpers jammed out in front like Popeye’s forearms. The manifolds of a monster V-8 burst out of the hood, oozing latent power. Baroque, steam-punk lines, crafted with sharp, finely etched venting, lined the body. The car looked both vintage and pristine, weirdly ageless, as if there were countless miles on this clean machine. A stranger’s ride for sure: No local could have kept these hellacious wheels under wraps. It might have come from anywhere. It might have come from the nineteenth century by way of the future.

Will felt eyes find him from behind the diner window. They landed hard, like somebody poking him in the chest with two stiff fingers. He looked up but couldn’t see inside; the sun had just crested the hills behind him, glaring off the glass.

“Don’t touch my ride.”

Will heard the voice in his head and knew it came from whoever was watching. Low, gravelly, spiked with a sharp accent, bristling with menace.

“Don’t touch it!” snapped Will.

Startled, Schaeffer jerked his hand away.

The bald man driving the sedan didn’t see the Prowler until the kids shifted away. He thought he might be hallucinating. He clicked the necro-wave filter onto the lens of their onboard scanner. The pictures of the family on-screen—father, mother, teenage boy—shrank to thumbnails. He focused on the hot rod until it filled the screen, pulsating with blinding white light.

No doubt about it: This was a Wayfarer’s “flier.” The first field sighting in decades.

Hands shaking, the bald man lifted his wrist mic and tabbed in. He tried to contain his excitement as he described what they’d found. Contact immediately approved a revised action.

No one had ever tagged a Wayfarer. It was a historic opportunity. The boy could wait.

The bald man ejected a black carbon-fiber canister the size of a large thermos from the nitrogen chamber. His partner picked it up and eased his window down. He raised the canister, chambered the Ride Along into the tracker bug’s payload slot, then broke the vacuum seal. The open window helped dissipate the sulfurous smell as he prepared to fire, but it couldn’t eliminate it.

Nothing could.

Will watched the black sedan ease forward, drawing even with them. He chanced a sidelong glance as it slid past. He saw a man holding a black canister up to the passenger window. Something skipped out of the canister, bounced onto the pavement, and came to rest. A wad of gum?

Will waited until the sedan moved out of sight. He reached for his phone, ready to fire off an urgent text to Dad. Then the coffee shop door swung open. A massive pair of buckled, battered black military boots etched with faded licks of flame stepped into view below the door.

That settles that. I don’t want any part of
this guy,
either
. Will took off toward school in an all-out breakaway. Barking about his head start, the rest of the team scrambled after him as Will turned the corner.

Behind them, the “wad of gum” in the street flipped over and sprouted twelve spidery legs supporting a needle-shaped head and liver-colored trunk. It skittered to the curb, sprang into the air, and attached to the Prowler’s left rear fender with an elastic
thwap
, just as the engine rumbled to life.

As the hot rod drove off, the tracker bug crawled up and around the fender, then snickered forward along the Prowler’s side, heading toward the driver. Before he reached the corner, the driver extended his left arm to signal a turn. The bug sprouted an inch-long spike from its snout and launched into the air toward the back of the driver’s neck, ready to deliver its invisible payload.

The driver swung the Prowler around in a controlled skid, and what looked like a small derringer appeared in his left hand. He tracked the airborne bug into his sights and pulled the trigger, and a silent beam of white light pulsed from the barrel. The tracker bug—and the invisible Ride Along it carried—puckered, fried, and dropped to the ground, a burnt black cinder on the road.

The derringer disappeared back up the driver’s sleeve as he completed his turn—a full, smooth 360-degree spin—and kept going.

DR. ROBBINS

Anxiety gnawed at Will like termites as he ran. He never let up, glancing over his shoulder only once. No black car, no Prowler, no more texts from Dad. And no other runners: Will arrived at school alone. He hit his stopwatch and was shocked to see that he’d covered the 1.2 miles from the diner to school in 3:47.

His best times shattered, twice, in less than an hour, and he’d hardly broken a sweat. He’d always known he was fast. He’d found out he could run like a deer at ten, when a dog chased him and he discovered he had another gear. But when he told his parents about it, they’d been dead-set against letting anyone see him run. They wouldn’t even let him try out for cross-country until this year, and only after he promised to hold back in practice and meets. Will still didn’t know how fast he really was, but based on this morning, he could have crushed every record in sight.

Will was already halfway dressed for class when the Rangers staggered into the locker room almost two minutes later. Gasping, a few threw strange looks his way.

“What the hell, West,” whispered Schaeffer.

“Sorry,” mumbled Will. “Don’t know what got into me.”

Will hurried out before anyone could ask more questions. If nobody else on the team had kept time, maybe by this afternoon they’d forget how fast he’d run. He would hang back in practice, in line with his mediocre standards, and they wouldn’t give the torching he’d just laid down another thought.

But he still couldn’t explain it to himself.

Will hustled through the halls and slipped into his seat a minute before the start of history class. He checked his messages one last time. Nothing. Dad had either gone into a breakfast meeting or headed out for his morning run.

Will switched the ringer to vibrate as the bell sounded. Classmates trudged in looking cranky and sleep deprived, fumbling with their phones as they digitally wrangled their frantic social lives. No one paid any attention to him. They never did. Will made sure of that. The perpetual “new kid,” Will had long ago learned how to cork his emotions deep inside, showing nothing but a bland mask to his peers.

#46: IF STRANGERS KNOW WHAT YOU’RE FEELING, YOU GIVE THEM THE ADVANTAGE.