by R. L. King
“Hey!” Jason yelled, and the two crouching figures looked up, startled. “What the hell are you doing to him? He needs a hospital!”
“Hush,” the woman said as if speaking to a young child. “Your friend’ll be fine.”
“Look,” Jason said, exasperated, dropping down next to them. “I’m grateful that you guys saved us from those gangers—I have no idea how you did it, but that’s not important right now. I don’t want to offend you or anything, but—it’s not clean here. You’re gonna kill him trying to help him. I’m just gonna go call an ambulance, and—”
“It’s all right,” the black man said. His voice was soft and gentle, and he didn’t seem at all disturbed by Jason’s agitated tone. “Look.” He lifted the bloody compress.
Jason glanced down, then did a double take and stared. “What the hell…?”
Stone’s side was covered with blood; it had seeped down to stain the top part of his jeans, and a larger stain flowered on the tattered sleeping bag he was lying on. But there was no sign of a wound. His skin was whole, without any scar or mark, or any indication that it had ever been broken. “How did you—?”
The old man shook his head and smiled. “He’s lost a fair bit of blood, and I believe he was already weakened by the spells he cast. He’ll probably be unconscious for a while. But I promise you, he’ll be fine. He’s in no danger.”
“Well, no more than any of the rest of us ever are,” the woman said wryly. She picked up Stone’s overcoat and gently covered him with it. The mage shifted slightly, but didn’t awaken.
“Wait,” Jason said, looking back and forth between Stone and the black man. “You know about—magic?”
“Come on out, Jason,” another voice said. Jason turned to see Verity had poked her head unnoticed through the tent flap. “Let’s go get something to eat and we can talk. It looks like your friend’s gonna be out of it for a while. Good time to catch each other up.”
Jason took a last look at Stone; the mage’s breathing appeared to be regular and he didn’t look in any immediate danger, so he got up and followed Verity out of the tent.
She led him over to one of the campfires, picked up two old, mismatched plates, and ladled something that looked like baked beans from a pot hanging over the fire onto both of them. She handed one to Jason, along with a plastic fork. “Don’t worry,” she said, obviously noticing the look of suspicion and distaste he hadn’t been quick enough to hide. “It’s okay. I’ve been eating their cooking for a while now, and I haven’t been sick yet.”
She took his arm and steered him over to a tree no one was sitting under. “Have a seat. You took a pretty good thump on the head back there. They fixed you up too, but I’m betting you’re still dizzy.”
Jason was indeed still a little dizzy, but he had no idea how much of it was from the hit on the head, and how much was from the shock of all that had happened to him. He sat down next to his sister and took an experimental taste of the beans. For bland, spice-free beans, they weren’t bad. He realized he was hungry—but more hungry for answers than food. “I don’t know where to start,” he said with a sigh. He looked Verity up and down. “So—you’ve been here this whole time?”
“Not here,” she said. “We move around a lot—we have to. You saw the kind of thing they have to deal with. And that’s just the start. Cops, people who just want to hassle them because they think it’s fun—it really sucks.”
Jason leaned back against the tree and rubbed his head. “Oh, God, Verity, I have so many questions. It seems like all I’ve been doing for the last several days is asking questions.”
“We’re safe here,” she told him. “We’re not going anywhere for a while, and it’s way too early to go to bed. Just start somewhere. I don’t know if I can answer ’em all, but I’ll tell you what I can. And I’ll ask you a few, too. Okay?”
Jason nodded wearily. “Okay.” He ate a couple more forkfuls of beans and thought over all the things he wanted to ask. Finally, he looked at her. “You seem—better,” he ventured.
“You mean I don’t seem like I’m crazy anymore?”
“Well—I wouldn’t have said it that way, but—yeah.”
“Lemme get back to that. That part’s a little more complicated. But you’re right—I’m not. At least for now. And hopefully not ever again.”
“Okay, then… Why don’t you start by telling me what happened at New Horizons? Why did you leave? What did you see? Where did you go after you left?”
“Slow down, slow down!” she said, laughing. Then her expression sobered. “I heard a rumor that Charles was dead. Do you know if that’s true?”
Jason nodded, looking down at his plate. “Yeah.” When he glanced up at her, he was surprised to see tears sparkling in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry, V.”
“Yeah…” Roughly she swiped her sleeve across her face. “He was a good guy. He was the only one who even tried to make that hell of a place tolerable for me.”
“V, I—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re sorry you never visited, but you didn’t know how to deal with your batshit-crazy sister. I get it. Why don’t we just forget about that for now, okay? I’m not sure if I’ve forgiven you for it yet, and I might still tell you what I think about it, but—later. Right now we have more important things to deal with.” Her voice sounded bitter, but surprisingly mature.
When had Verity grown up so much?
She was silent for almost a minute, concentrating on eating. Then she looked at Jason. “So—yeah. I woke up one night and thought I heard something, so I went downstairs to check it out. We weren’t supposed to be downstairs after lights-out, so I was afraid I’d get caught, but I had to find out what it was.”
“What did it sound like?”
“Like a kid. Screaming.” She took a deep breath and shuddered a little. “When I got there, I noticed the basement door was open—and it’s never open. I heard a voice, and somebody whimpering. So I snuck down there. I have no idea why I was brave enough to do that, but the kid seemed like he was in trouble, or hurt—and I kinda thought of you.”
“Me?”
She nodded. “Yeah. How you always used to protect the little kids in the neighborhood from bullies, remember?”
Jason smiled. That had been a long time ago. “Yeah, I remember.”
“So I opened the door and looked inside—and there was a guy in there standing over a kid. A boy, maybe nine or ten. The kid was scared to death, and the guy—I couldn’t see his face ’cause his back was to me—it was like he was getting off on the kid’s fear.”
Jason’s eyes widened. “You mean he was—?”
Verity shook her head. “He wasn’t molesting the kid, if that’s what you meant. Everybody had their clothes on. But he was definitely getting something from scaring him. And then he reached out and touched his head, and—” She paused, as if gathering her courage to continue speaking. “—and then the kid screamed again, and he—he disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” A cold chill ran down Jason’s back at that. What she’d described sounded exactly like what he’d seen the night Charles died.
“Yeah. I know it sounds hard to believe, but—”
“No. I believe you. Go on.”
She looked surprised by that, but didn’t ask. “So after he did that, I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I was scared to death. And the guy turned around, and his eyes were all freaky, and he came at me. And I—I—just sort of pushed at him. With my mind.” She looked at him again. “This all sounds like I’m back to crazy, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” Jason said. He had to be honest. “What do you mean, you ‘pushed’ at him?”
“I can’t describe it. It was like I punched him with my mind. And then something flew out of him. It looked like some kind of shimmery thing. It flew at me, but I shoved it away, just like I’d done with the man. Then it flew away, and the guy fell over.”
Jason stared hard at Verity, riveted by her words. This wa
s all sounding so familiar—all except the “pushing with her mind” part. He had no idea what she meant by that. “And then you ran away?”
She nodded. “I didn’t even stay to see if the guy was dead or alive. I just ran back upstairs—and straight into Charles. He was in the kitchen. I almost knocked him down, I was going so fast. I thought I was busted for sure, but he saw my face, how scared I was, and asked me what was wrong. I told him I saw something terrible in the basement.”
“Did he go check it out?”
She shook her head. “I think he’d thought there was bad stuff going on at New Horizons for a while. He told me I had to get out, and he’d help me. That’s when I went to call you. But you didn’t answer.”
Jason sighed. If only he hadn’t been out of town for two days—if only he’d been there to take her call—how different the events of the last few days could have been. “I’m sorry about that. I—wasn’t home when you called.”
“Well, it’s good that you weren’t just ignoring me,” she said, this time without bitterness. “I went back to find Charles, and he told me to pack up and get ready to go, fast. He said he had a friend I could stay with. After I got back with my stuff, he sent me down the block to the pay phone, and gave me his friend’s address and cab fare to get there. Told me to lie low, and he’d be in touch.”
“This friend—it was Melody Barnes, right?”
Verity nodded. “Yeah. She’s dead too, isn’t she?”
“Yeah. She and her friend Willow are both dead.”
“So many dead people…” Verity whispered, looking down at her lap. For a long time she didn’t speak. Then, pulling herself together, she continued: “Anyway, Willow and her friend Susanna came to visit Melody. Susanna was homeless. There was something weird about her. We were all just sitting in the living room talking when all of a sudden she looks up like a dog that smelled something. She told us somebody bad was coming, and we all needed to get out.”
“But Melody didn’t want to go,” Jason said. “Right?”
“Yeah. She thought it was all a big joke. Susanna was getting really agitated, and Willow kept trying to get Melody to go. She told her to take me out too. Susanna grabbed my arm and practically dragged me out the back door. Willow told us to go and she’d bring Melody. We never saw them again after that.”
“Do you know who was after you guys?” Jason asked.
“I didn’t at the time—I really had no clue what was going on. Remember, I was still pretty much out of it back then. I know now, though—it was that gang. Dead Men Walking. The one that ambushed you and your friend tonight.”
Jason nodded. “Where did Susanna take you? We talked to Willow at the hospital before she died—she told us to go to this abandoned fruit packing plant in Redwood City. Is that where you were?”
“Yeah. It was a safe place Susanna knew about—she and some of her group were squatting there. We took a bus over as far as we could, then walked the rest of the way. Her group was there, but we didn’t stay very long. She was still freaked out that somebody was after us. The others—they seemed to really listen to what she said, so we all cleared out. That was when we headed down here. We met up with another group, and they were the ones who told us you were looking for me. But by that time I couldn’t contact you, because nobody knew where you were.”
Jason leaned back against the tree, picking at his cold beans and mulling over everything she’d told him. “Okay, so…that explains where you’d been all this time. But it still doesn’t explain why the DMW and God knows who else is after you. Does it have something to do with the guy in the basement? Do you even know who he was?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who he was—but I’m sure that’s what it had to do with.”
“So it wasn’t that Delaney guy?”
“Dr. Delancie?” She looked surprised. “No, it wasn’t him. He was full of himself and could be a real asshole sometimes, but I don’t think he was part of this.” Taking a deep breath, she continued, “Okay, now you know where I was. But I guess you need to know what’s going on here. Why I’m hanging out with these people.”
“I was wondering about that,” Jason said, nodding. “It sounds like they kinda took you in and took care of you—that’s a good thing. But—why homeless people? Al—my friend in the tent there, Alastair Stone—and I are getting more and more convinced that there’s more to them than meets the eye. That’s true, isn’t it?”
Verity looked off into the camp, watching the various residents moving around. “Yeah,” she said. “Your friend’s a mage, isn’t he?”
“You know about mages?” Jason was surprised. For a bunch who were supposed to be as secretive as Stone had implied they were, a lot of people seemed to know about them.
“Only since recently,” she said. “A lot of the Forgotten know about them.”
“Forgotten?”
She nodded. “That’s what they call themselves. The—special ones.”
“The ones with powers, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
Jason leaned forward, searching her face. “What’s with the powers?” he asked. “We’ve seen some of them in action, but I don’t really get it. Do they all have them? Where did they come from? Are they mages? Al says they’re not as far as he can tell, but it sure seems like magic to me.”
Verity spread her hands in a how should I know? gesture. “I don’t really know anything about mages except that they exist. But—a lot of the Forgotten have powers. They don’t have a lot of control over them—they just kind of happen, you know? When they need them to, I mean.”
Jason thought of the way one of the library group had concealed them from the fake cop. “You mean like hiding people.”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s one of them. That one’s fairly common—most groups have somebody who can do that.”
“So what would other ones be?”
“Lots of things,” she said, shrugging. “Lamar can heal—you saw that with your friend. That’s pretty rare. We’re lucky to have him. Some are like detectors—they can tell when something dangerous is around, or getting closer. Some of them can influence animals—you know, calming down mean dogs and that kind of thing. One lady—I think you met her, she’s one of the group who told us they’d seen you—has a shopping cart with all these bags, and she always seems to be able to dig around and pull out whatever she needs at the time.”
Jason remembered the old lady with all the tote bags at the library. “Yeah…I think I do know her.”
“Another one some of them have—I thought this was kind of cool to find out—You know how you can drive by a building a bunch of times and never really see it?”
“Yeah.” He knew exactly what she meant. Every town had them: those nondescript, faceless buildings, usually government offices or businesses that didn’t cater to the public, that everybody missed unless they had some reason to be there. He called them “invisible buildings.”
“Some of the Forgotten can do that—make a building hard to find like that. It’s not like you can’t find it, but if you’re not sure where you’re trying to go, or you’re not looking for it specifically, you tend to just go right past it without seeing it.”
Jason thought about how they’d passed the fruit-packing plant the first time, and had to turn around and do another pass before they found it. “Where—do these powers come from? Does anyone know? Have they always had them?”
“They haven’t told me everything, so I’m not sure about that part. But from what little I’ve been able to put together, I think the powers started showing up right around the time things started going bad around the country.”
Jason stared at her. His mind was spinning again, trying hard to put things together. “Wait a minute. Hasn’t anybody thought this whole thing is too big a coincidence to be a coincidence?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re telling me the bu—er, the Forgotten—started to get these powers around the same t
ime stuff started going to hell. Which is about the same time you started having your—episodes. You don’t think this stuff is all connected?” He remembered what Charles had said. “And—Charles was telling me this—around that same time is when he said people around here started to get meaner. It might have happened around Ventura too, but maybe not as bad, since there are fewer people down there.”
Verity looked contemplative. “Are you saying that—something happened back then to cause all of this? That’s crazy, Jason! What could it have been? And how could it have happened without anybody knowing about it?”
“I dunno. I think I need to talk to Al about this when he’s awake. It doesn’t make any sense, but I can’t shake the idea that there’s something more to all this.” He looked at her again. “Putting that aside for now, though—I got more questions. I don’t think I’m gonna run out any time soon. So—what is it about these symbols I see all over the place? Is that a Forgotten thing, too?”
Verity nodded. “They told me about that. They use them to communicate with other groups. It’s dangerous to let the groups get too big—people squabble and it makes us more vulnerable to attacks. You have to remember, even though they have these weird powers, most of these people have some kind of mental stuff going on. They don’t always play well together. But they use the symbols to let each other know things—what places are safe, what places are dangerous, where the Evil is—”
“The Evil?” Jason leaned forward, stiffening. “What’s the Evil?”
“Oh, right. I didn’t tell you about that. That’s what they call it. Kind of a dumb name, I know, but—”
“What is it?”
“They don’t know, exactly. It’s the shimmery thing I saw coming out of that guy in the basement. It’s some kind of—spirit, or being, or something—and it possesses people. Some of the Forgotten can see it in people—see when they’re possessed. That’s one of the reasons they stick together—it’s trying to kill them, because they’re the only ones who can, or almost the only ones. Nobody knows why.”