by Gareth Otton
“Fine, we try it your way. Let’s go talk with Ashley and figure this out once and for all.”
Stella sighed in relief and allowed herself to smile at her victory.
“Good,” she said. “You’re making the right—”
She was interrupted when Tad seized her hand before she could lean back and he squeezed it, never breaking eye contact.
“Thank you,” he said with such sincerity that those two simple words made her shiver. “I mean it, Stella. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”
She couldn’t help but be struck with the irony of those words coming from him of all people. He had done more to change her life than anyone else ever had. If she went back in time and explained to the woman she used to be what her life would be like thanks to this man, she knew there was no way she would believe it.
“I… Well…”
She struggled to form a sentence to answer as a lifetime of being walled away from other people left her woefully under prepared for moments like this. Luckily, while he was almost as much a bumbling idiot as her in this area, Tad knew when someone needed rescuing.
“We should go. You may not need the rest, but I need sleep if I’m going to face Ashley Evans in the morning.” He squeezed her hand once more and then let her go, sliding out from under Jen and climbing off the bed. Again Jen’s face scrunched up as she came close to waking, but suddenly there was another shape beside her as Hawk took Tad’s place on the bed, and as soon as Jen’s head rested on the big dog, her face settled again and she drifted back off to sleep.
Once more Stella felt the echoes of Freckles’ loss as she looked at the girl with her dog. However, she didn’t have long to think about it before Tad took her hand again.
“I don’t know where the new safe house is so you’ll have to take us,” he said, and Stella forced herself to grin in response.
“Yeah right. That’s the real reason you made me get this tattoo, you’re just lazy.”
“Caught me,” he agreed, smiling a smile that was no more convincing than hers. However, at least they were trying, and Stella knew it was the only thing they could do if they wanted to get through this.
Thinking of the safe house she had been cooped up in all day, they both vanished. A moment later Growler lifted his big head, sniffed once, and then he too blinked out of existence, following them home.
27
Friday, 30th December 2016
08:31
“Tad, you need to let us do the talking,” Stella warned as they arrived outside the mansion, almost like he was an animal needing to be muzzled. Judging from the looks on Norman and Amelia’s faces, it wasn’t just her that was worried. Even Growler appeared nervous.
He wanted to be offended, but they were right to be worried. The thought of confronting this man who was deliberately holding back knowledge that might impact this war made his blood boil.
For all his insanity, at least Kuruk was trying to fix the world. The Americans were trying to stay relevant on the world stage in a time of change. The Children of ADaM wondered what place normal humans had in a world of superpowers. The eidolon didn’t want to lose the power they had wielded since the fall of the old gods.
While Tad didn’t agree with any of their motivations, at least he understood them. But it felt like Ashley was standing in the way for nothing more than spite and he’d be lying if he said that didn’t make him angry. However, the worried eyes of his companions forced him to swallow those emotions.
Stella was watching him closely, reading his internal struggle, and when he got control of himself, she sighed in relief. She offered a brief smile of support before she nodded to Norman, as if to say they had the wild animal under control.
Tad hated that they were so nervous around him. If Charles was here, he’d be disappointed at Tad’s inability to control himself.
If Charles was here, he’d be telling you to do whatever you can to keep Jen from having to go through what she did last night.
The voice belonged to Tony and came from the depths of Tad’s mind where they were merged. Tad was trying to get into the habit of keeping his ghosts nearby, so he was never caught unaware again. However, with the threat of going against Ashley Evans, Tad wanted the ghosts out of reach. He wasn’t sure if being merged was a barrier to the man’s talents, but hoped it would be enough.
Amelia climbed the wide steps up to the grand entrance and knocked on the door. The wait between that knock and when the door opened felt like hours. The fingers of Tad’s left hand twitched in rhythm with the beating of his heart, the pace constantly increasing as his patience slipped.
When the door opened, it wasn’t Ashley who appeared, but a straight faced man in dark formal wear. His blonde hair was slicked back in a manner similar to Ashley, but this man wasn’t related to Ashley in the slightest.
“Mr Prime Minister, I am sorry to say that Mr Evans cannot meet you in person. He is under the weather and not receiving guests.”
Oh my god, Tony crowed in delight. It’s an actual, real life butler. That’s awesome.
Awesome wasn’t the word Tad would use. Instead, he focused on Ashley Evans trying to dodge him yet again.
“I don’t care how under the weather he is, tell him I’m here—”
The Prime Minister’s words cut off abruptly as they were drowned out by the sound of tearing and twisting metal, shattering glass, and bursting tires. Everyone turned in surprise to see the remains of Ashley’s Maybach, a car that cost about two hundred thousand pounds, finish its final transformation into a ball of scrap metal.
Tad pulled a small magnet, similar to the one he had just tossed at the car, from his pocket. This time, rather than increase the effect of the magnet on the car so much that it changed the shape of the metal it was attached to, he concentrated on the connection between that magnet and the one in his hand. A second later, a tiny silver disk similar to one on the back of a fridge magnet, zipped over to him and slammed into its twin in Tad’s hand.
After the pigeon nightmare, he’d added magnets to a growing collection of items that he kept on him at all times. Seeing the ruin of the expensive car, he was glad he did.
He turned back to find startled faces staring at him. Even the usually unflappable Amelia looked stunned by the sudden destruction. Seeing Stella’s surprise turn to disapproval, Tad spoke up to defend his actions.
“Hey, I’m letting you guys do the talking, so I’m sticking to my end of the deal.”
Despite her obvious frustration, Stella couldn’t help but snort as she tried to hold in a laugh. Amelia looked like she was ready to tear him a new one. She wouldn’t get the chance because suddenly the butler was pulled away from the door and a furious Ashley Evans stalked out.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“Healing you, apparently,” Tad pointed out.
“Do you have any idea how expensive that car was?” Ashely shouted.
“Do you have any idea how little I care?” Tad asked, further enraging the man who took an angry step forward like he wanted to punch Tad before the Prime Minister stepped between them.
“Enough. Ashely, calm down. Tad...” He shook his head like he didn’t know what to say. “Don’t break anything else.”
“So long as I don’t have a reason to, there won’t be a problem,” Tad said, looking at Ashley.
“You are going to pay for that—” he started, but the Prime Minister cut him off.
“Tad’s right. You are looking remarkably well all of a sudden. One might think you were trying to avoid us.”
Ashley pointed at the ruins of his car and shouted, “That thug does something like that and you wonder why I might not want to talk? I’m well within my rights to call the police and tell them to come armed for a dangerous dreamwalker that needs to be taken out.”
“Except that those calls go through the Dream Team, and since this war started, there’s not much of a Dream Team left,” Stella pointed out. �
�If only there had been some way we could have protected them better, maybe secret knowledge shared that would help us become strong enough to keep people from dying.”
Ashley flinched at Stella’s accusation, then sputtered in outrage as he struggled to come up with a response.
“You can’t put that on me. Your inability to protect yourself and complete lack of competence is on—”
The sound of shattering glass cut off the man’s words as suddenly every window frame on the front of the manor house lurched forward, shattering every window and raining glistening shards over the flower beds and driveway.
Tad flipped the magnet in his hand like he was tossing a coin and said to Stella, “This magnet is way more useful than I thought. Focus it on the locks on every window, and it has interesting results. I wonder what else I can do with this thing.” He turned his attention to Ashley and asked, “You want to find out? No. Then maybe you can do me the favour of not insulting people who laid down their lives in service to this country in a war that you seem to be more keen on helping than opposing.” To Norman Tad added, “Aren’t their laws during war times to deal with people who are harming the country like this?”
Norman waved Tad off. He looked a little exasperated, but like a good politician, he worked with what he was given.
“He’s not wrong, Ashley. We are at war, even you can’t deny that any more. If you have information that could help us, you are honour bound to share that knowledge. Doing anything less is making you complicit in the war effort against us. I don’t even need to take legal action against you in that case. I will simply go to Lizzie Bradley and let her share that news with her audience. We’ll let your constituents and the general public figure out what to do with you after that.”
He waved theatrically at the damage done to his house and the wreck of his car.
“I wonder what this place will look like when the people of Britain think you’re working with the people who have slaughtered countless innocents across the country.”
“You can’t threaten me like this,” Ashley proclaimed, trying to sound outraged but instead sounding scared.
“In normal times, you might be right,” Stella pointed out. “But you need to understand where we are coming from. Over the past week we have lost people dear to us, me and Tad have come dangerously close to losing our lives, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming. Normally you could have your secrets and we’d be content to just call you an arsehole and go find answers elsewhere. But right now we don’t have time to play those games, so we resort to desperate measures.”
She pointed at Norman, then at Tad, and then at herself.
“I don’t think you appreciate the combined value of the time of the people in front of you. Like we have made abundantly clear, this is a war and we each have a million and one things that need to be completed. Yet we are all here trying to convince you to do the right thing. That is how important this is.”
“She’s right, Ashley. Enough is enough,” Norman said. “You’ve had your fun and satisfied whatever grudge you have with Tad. It’s time to do your patriotic duty and tell us what we need to know. In case you haven’t realised this yet, we’re losing this war… badly. These attacks keep coming, we keep bleeding, and as yet we’ve been unable to hit back. Our enemy is attacking from the shadows and that leaves us nowhere to strike without becoming like them and focusing our forces on innocent people in their home country. Please, if the information you have will give us even a slight chance, we need to hear it.”
Ashely struggled to answer for a long time, and when he spoke the arrogance was gone from his voice, replaced with desperation.
“You don’t understand what you’re asking... what he is. It’s like unleashing a tiger in your house to get rid of that mouse you just can’t catch. You think it’s solving your problem, but it’s just making it a thousand times worse. There’s never been anyone like him before and you can’t predict what you’d be unleashing on the world.”
“There’s not a mouse in this house,” the Prime Minister argued. “It’s an army of rats who will eat our food, destroy the furniture, and are carrying disease. They’re going to kill us anyway, and if it takes a tiger to get rid of them, then that’s the risk we have to take.”
Seeing that Ashley was still on the fence, he added, “This will be on me, not you. I am as much as forcing you to tell me against your will. You can tell people I blackmailed you, threatened you, whatever it takes to help you sleep at night. I am not giving you an option other than to tell us what we need to know, so the weight of what happens will no longer be on your shoulders. You might have the knowledge to bring the tiger here, but I’m the one who opened his cage and set him free.”
Ashely looked from the Prime Minister, to Amelia, to Stella, and finally to Tad as though looking for support from at least one of them. Then he slumped in defeat and let out a dejected sigh.
“It’s about balance,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
“Balance?” Stella asked.
“Yes, balance. The universe needs balance in everything. When it gives power with one hand, it creates something that balances that power with the other. Take your people as an example. The Eidolon have incredible power, but it is balanced by the need for people to believe in that power for it to work. Enough disbelief and they lose their abilities.
“Animancers like myself can draw power from ghosts and interact with spirits. Given enough ghosts, we can achieve incredible things, but that is always offset by those ghosts possessing only a finite amount of power for us to draw from. If we use up our resources, we lose all of our power.
“Dreamwalkers,” he said, glancing hatefully at Tad. “Have more power than most, thanks to him. But even then it’s still balanced because they can’t stray too far from nature and the amount of power they can pull from Dream is limited.”
He took a deep breath as he prepared to cross the line he had been hiding behind for so long. He pointed at Tad and said, “But he’s different. He’s both dreamwalker and animancer, with the strengths of both that let him bypass the weaknesses of dreamwalkers and animancers.
“He can call on the power of ghosts to augment his dreamwalking abilities, getting around the limitation of Dreamwalking. But because he is a dreamwalker, his connection to those ghosts fuels the ghosts back up, getting around the limitations of animancy. Given enough ghosts, he could power himself up indefinitely and the possibilities of what he could do are limitless.”
Tad frowned, understanding what Ashley said but unable to reach the same extreme conclusion.
“Your logic is faulty. I would need to merge with all of those ghosts to get their power, and I couldn’t do that. You don’t understand the cost for a dreamwalker to merge with a ghost. It’s so intensive that with that many I would lose myself and go insane.”
“But that’s just it,” Ashley disagreed. “You don’t need to merge with them. You are an animancer, which means you can draw strength from ghosts without needing to merge with them. And...” He hesitated again, taking one last look at the people around him before saying, “I suspect you can share your energy with them as well. If you practice animancy, you can get the benefits of merging with a ghost without needing to merge with them. You can draw the strength from the ghosts around you, and you can replenish them with your connection to Dream, all without the cost of merging.”
He let out an explosive sigh and staggered back like saying those words had been physically taxing. Meanwhile, the rest of them struggled to absorb the information he just shared.
“You see now why I didn’t want to share this. Tad might indeed get the power to stop any war he wanted to. He could be almost godlike with enough ghosts on his side. But as the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We would unleash something so much worse than—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Stella spat, angrier than Tad had ever heard. “You don’t know what you’r
e talking about and if you even think about comparing Tad to those murderous bastards who are killing innocents across the country, then you won’t have to worry about anything so mild as having your car broken or replacing a few windows. Tad is not the monster you make him out to be. He doesn’t even let himself use the power he already has to hurt people if he can help it. He could have killed every man Kuruk brought with him yesterday, but he couldn’t do it, because he’s a good man. So don’t you go treating him like he’s some kind of monster when all he has ever done is try to protect people.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he would be worse than Kuruk and his men morally, just that he has the potential for worse. There is truth in the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good and evil is in the eye of the beholder, and when you have unlimited power in your hands, it is easy to impose your version of good on other people against their will.”
Turning to Norman, he shot the man one last imploring look and said, “The tiger analogy only goes so far. A better analogy might be nuclear weapons. Creating a new atom bomb might stop this war, but you have to think about what comes next.”
“None of this matters,” Tad said, having remained silent until now so that he could think this through. “After all this time, Ashely, if you had just told me this from the beginning then we wouldn’t even be here right now. If all it will do is help me become strong enough to kill even more people, then it’s as good as useless. Even if I had access to a nuclear missile, I don’t have it in me to ever launch one, no matter what might come my way. I don’t want that sort of power, and definitely not the responsibility that comes with it.”
“Which is why you should have it,” Norman pressed. “Who else could be trusted with it.”
“You’re not listening, Norman,” Tad argued. “I wouldn’t be able to use it even if I had it—”
“Not to kill, no. But what about to protect. If a hundred of Kuruk’s people show up at a location that’s fortified by dreamcatchers, how long do you think those dreamcatchers would last? It’s only a matter of time before that happens. Until now, these incidents have been kept small because the Americans are still trying to deny what I shared on Lizzie’s show and pass this war off as terrorist attacks unrelated to them. But when that fails, they’re going to double down and what we’ve seen so far will be nothing in comparison.”