“It stems from your mother,” Dillon said.
And Tessic was transfixed.
“Everything about you—your will to succeed; your faith; your anger. Everything.”
“So Freud would say,” Tessic answered, with less deflective aplomb than he wanted.
Dillon shook his head. “This goes even deeper than that.” He cocked his head, taking in the pace of Tessic’s breath; the set of his jaw; the almost, but not quite, dominant position of his stance. “There was a child before you. Your mother’s child, but not yourfather’s. A child that died in a death camp years before you were born.”
“This you could have learned from many places,” Tessic snapped, but his voice was weak and wavering. He knew Dillon hadn’t learned it; he had divined it. Tessic had always thought he was somehow immune to Dillon’s invasive power. He was now well aware that that had been his own arrogance at work. In the end, he was an open book to Dillon, just like everyone else.
“I believe it was a sister,” Dillon said. “This is the spirit you want to bring back more than any other—this innocent child . . . and yet, the camp where she died is our last destination. You see her as your reward when all others have been revived. No one knows this but you.”
Tessic could barely move or breathe. “Stop,” he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t form the word.
“Shall I go on?” Dillon asked.
Tessic had no idea what Dillon was about to say. Until this moment, he didn’t think there was anything that could make him vulnerable, but now he instinctively knew that the next words out of Dillon’s mouth, whatever they were, would either make him whole or destroy him. He did not know which it would be. Then he realized that it didn’t matter. Either way, Dillon would win. Nothing in Tessic’s own personal arsenal could defend against this weapon Dillon now wielded. Until now Tessic had not truly understood this power of Dillon to affect the world with a whisper. Simple words, nothing more. But from Dillon’s mouth even the simplest of words could be devastating.
“M . . . M . . . Michael and Tory,” he said, stunned to find himself stuttering—something he hadn’t done since the earliest days of his youth.
“Michael and Tory, what?”
Tessic forced volume into his voice. “Michael and Tory may go seek out Lourdes. But I need you and Winston to stay. You two are the ones crucial to this effort.”
There was a hesitation on Dillon’s part. Perhaps the first since he came into the room.
“Please, Dillon. I need you.”
Dillon considered his plea for a moment more, then nodded. “Alright. But I want them to leave immediately.”
Tessic let his shoulders relax. So, it was a negotiation after all. “Yes. Of course—with an escort, a jet—whatever they need.”
“Make those your first calls.” Dillon stood handing Tessic the telephone receiver, then glanced at the pictures on the desk. “Once they’re on their way, Winston and I will be ready to take on that road.”
Dillon left and Tessic collapsed into his chair, forcing a few deep breaths to regain his composure. Perhaps it was worth losing Michael and Tory temporarily in a gambit to bring back Lourdes. He quickly got a paper and began to jot down notes. Their progress would be slower without Michael and Tory, but Michael’s moods and weather patterns were more of a hindrance than a help. And although Tory’s was a medicinal presence, they could do without her; there were medical supplies enough to treat anything the dead brought back with them.
Within five minutes he had retuned his thinking to this new business environment. He was nothing, if not adaptable. And he put out of his mind how, for a moment, Dillon had extracted the fragile core of his existence, and pinched it between his fingers.
* * *
Michael and Tory were more surprised than anyone that Dillon had negotiated their release.
“I could have forced him to let us all go, but I sensed that it would shatter him,” Dillon told them.
“And why is that such a bad thing?” Winston grumbled.
Certainly Dillon had many reasons, not the least of which was admiration, and some level of love for this man who had, in a strange way, become Dillon’s surrogate father. But these weren’t the reasons he gave them. “You don’t want to shatter the richest arms manufacturer in the world,” he told them, and the others were quick to agree— after all, Tessic probably had more fingers on more buttons than all of NATO put together.
Dillon had played the situation, just as they knew he could. He let Tessic believe he had negotiated, but in truth, this was the arrangement Dillon wanted all along. Michael and Tory would be their ambassadors to the Vectors. “Yeah, because we’re expendable,” Michael complained—but they knew why it was best this way. Dillon could not be allowed to face the Vectors until they were at their strongest— because if they defeated him, then all was lost.
Michael and Tory were gone, spirited to Katowice International Airport by helicopter before breakfast was served, bound for Sicily, and the cold embrace of Lourdes Hidalgo, who they all agreed was more than merely AWOL.
If they were shards of the Scorpion Star, then she had become the venom in the tip of its tail.
31. The Dead Sea
Scores of rotting fish washed up against the cliffs of Taormina, Sicily, sending up an uncompromising stench to the Cliffside Greek Theater. It was a constant reminder to Lourdes of her many mistakes and missteps under the tutelage of her three Angels of Death.
The disaster at the Jamaican racetrack had only been the beginning. Following orders from Memo, thinly veiled as suggestions, Lourdes had gripped and controlled one hundred people in Miami, then three hundred further up the Florida coast, marching them this way and that like a cracker box army. There had been no major mishaps. Then when their ship reached Daytona, she had tried to commandeer five hundred—and had succeeded, her skill sharpening with practice, as Memo had said it would. She was able to grip their bodies and their wills, propelling them in an orderly and efficient manner to the beach. But their inertia proved too much for her. The wave of their motion had direction but no destination. They couldn’t stop moving. They drowned.
For the media, it became just one more nasty event in a disintegrating world—and although it would have been analyzed ad infinitum by the public a year ago, there were so many unconscionable events from one day to the next, it was quickly submerged in the collective consciousness. Lourdes thought she would feel worse about it—tormented by the helplessness her victims must have felt, and yet she was amazed at how well she slept that night.
“You’ve grown beyond caring about them,” Memo, the child-demon had told her. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or horrified by her ability to dissociate from a human context. Did it make her a cold-blooded killer, or transcendent?
Still packed with her hedonistic throng, the Blue Horizon had cut a course to Bermuda. There, she had gripped ten times as many—but this time did not leave her impulse open-ended. She clipped it, focusing her attention on the shoreline. Five thousand fell under her control, impelled to the edge of the surf, where they stopped at her command, holding themselves at attention until she released them. Success—and yet in this success there was still no satisfaction.
“Five thousand, or fifty thousand,” the bat-faced woman, Cerilla, had said. “It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anywhere close to what we need.”
“Give her time,” Memo had insisted. But time was running out—yet they wouldn’t tell Lourdes why this needed to be accomplished on a predetermined schedule.
“If you are leading this invasion,” she had asked, “why can’t you decide when it will happen?”
“The water must boil,” Memo told her, “my abuela used to tell me, you can’t put the spaghetti in until the water boils. But if you wait too long, the water boils off.”
When they crossed through the straight of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, that water began to simmer. That’s when she sensed two revivals, fallin
g only a day apart. They were distant—back in America. She could only assume that Dillon had brought back Michael and Tory, as Deanna was unreachable. At both moments, it had evoked in her old feelings of an unbreakable connection between all of them, but those feelings were quickly snuffed by the vacuum in which her spirit now dwelled.
So, the Fantastic Four were together again. Well, good for them. Let them obsess and confer over the fate of the world. She had no interest in being part of that. She knew her three new malefactors must have sensed their revival as well. Perhaps that’s why they continued to be so displeased with her progress.
Then, on December first, with only seven days left until the greatest performance of her life, their pleasure cruise became the Voyage of the Damned.
It was the Captain’s fault. He had chosen to take the ship north of Sicily rather than south, forcing them into an ambush in the Strait of Messina. Perhaps he was in collusion with the ships that attacked them. She could not be sure, and she could not ask him because he had died in the attack, along with most of her guests.
Three warships had attacked the Blue Horizon without warning, under cover of darkness. One torpedo would have done the job, but apparently they weren’t taking any chances. After the third torpedo shredded the hull, Lourdes’s little floating oasis was sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean in less than twelve minutes—not long enough to launch more than a handful of half-empty lifeboats.
But this wasn’t the loss that weighed on her. It was the loss of her brother and sisters. They had not made it through the smoke-filled hallways to the lifeboats before the Blue Horizon coughed up her ghost in a greasy spill of diesel fuel.
She thought she was impervious to that kind of pain, and found her sorrow quickly putrefying into fury, as she foundered in a flooded lifeboat with her three angels, who were content to hurl others off the boat to keep them afloat.
Lourdes could kill the entire population of Italy for what they had done. Every village, every town, every beggar on every lousy cobblestone street. She could kill them all—and made a conceited effort to do so from her lifeboat, sending an angry impulse across the surface of the waters.
This was perhaps her worst mistake of all. It was stupid. Unproductive. Because when the impulse of her anger faded, there was silence in the waters around them. Silence, and bodies. That silence sat in stronger accusation even than her victims in Daytona. She knew what she had done. She had gripped every beating heart within her reach, and shut them all down. Not only were the seamen on the three attacking ships killed by her anger, but the survivors of her own ship were extinguished as well; those in the water, those in the lifeboats. All of them.
Only she and her three “Angels” were immune. Even more, she sensed death in the sea beneath her, running to its very bottom. How far had her impulse gone? Five miles, perhaps, until it fell beneath a lethal threshold? She knew her influence would be felt for many miles beyond that. A sudden spasm in the chest of every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction. For those far enough out of range the spasm would pass. Maybe. She didn’t know her own strength anymore, and until that moment, she had never considered herself a weapon of mass destruction.
Her angels were quick to remind her that the sinking, which they could have turned to her advantage, was only a disaster because of her rash action. She could very easily have commandeered one of the naval vessels and continued their crusade, but now without a living crew to manipulate, they were just as dead in the water as those ships.
They made shore just before dawn. Then Carlos and Cerilla took some rope from the lifeboat, and tied her to a tree. She tried to stop them, but their anger was more powerful than her ability to fight them off.
“This,” Carlos told her, “is something you’ve earned,” and then they both beat her with their bare hands, until their fists were as bruised as her face, relieving their anger on her the way she had relieved hers on the world. Lourdes tried to counterattack, by gripping their muscles with her mind, but their immunity to her was complete. Just as they could not devour her, she could not injure them. There was a balance of power, delicate though it may be.
All the while, Memo sat nearby not lifting a finger to stop it. He was the leader of this trio of wolves—one word from him could have ended their beating, but he let it go until his cohorts’ human bodies were exhausted, and their inhuman spirits satisfied.
Memo came to her when the other two left, untying her bonds while whistling a pop tune dredged from his host-body’s memory. Once one hand was free, Lourdes pushed him hard enough to send him flying across the beach on which they were marooned. He stood up looking at her with hurt and surprise.
“You let them torture me, and you expect me to follow your orders?”
He came back to untie her other hand. “Using your power against those warships was a bad thing,” he said, sounding more the child than the demon. “They are angry.”
She had grown used to his manner now, but still it unsettled her the way the personality of the child host-body had merged with the seriousness of the creature who commandeered it. At times almost innocent, and at other times evilly calculating.
But there is no evil, she reminded herself. The angels had taught her that. Was the fisherman evil for catching fish? Was the hunter evil for feeding his family? There is no evil, the angels had told her, only power and weakness. The weak see power used against them as evil.
If I see them as evil does that make me weak?
It was simply easier to ignore the question than to answer it.
“Mama and Abuelo are very angry,” Memo said as he untied her. “But if they hit you enough now, they won’t kill you tomorrow.”
“I thought you didn’t suffer from human emotions,” Lourdes snapped.
“We feel what these bodies feel,” Memo answered. “Me, I find anger the most useful, don’t you?”
Lourdes rubbed her swelling face. She couldn’t find the use in their anger or in her own. It had landed them on this wretched shore.
“Anger must be used, though. Directed,” Memo said.
“And what if I direct it at the three of you?”
Memo stood on his tip-toes looking closely at her swelling face. “More of the same,” he answered, then he kissed a bruise above her eye. “A kiss will make it better, verdad?’
She pushed him away again. “Not that easy.”
“Still, you will do the things we ask of you.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because,” he said quite simply, “you wish to be with greatness. And we are the only greatness there is.”
She grunted but refused to admit how well he had her pegged. For months she had taken all this world had to offer and found it flavorless. Then to learn that everything the world perceived as divine was merely the work of these predators had crushed her. Crushed her, then freed her. This new, bleak view of creation left her unencumbered by troublesome human ethics.
But your brother and sisters are dead, her atrophied conscience whispered from its hiding place. They are at the bottom of the Mediterranean because of you.
She would have cried, but refused to let Memo and the other two seraphic ghouls see the depth of her sorrow. These creatures did not care about her sorrow. They simply needed her to accomplish their goal. To know that beings greater than herself needed her was its own reward—and in spite of their constant disapproval, she would serve them, because they were, as Memo had said, the only embodiment of greatness she’d ever know. She longed to be party to the power they would soon unleash. How odd, she thought, to finally find fulfillment in the slavery of “Angels.”
* * *
She set up court in nearby Taormina, in the ruins of the Greek Theater, because it reminded her of those spectacular, but brief, golden days beneath the faux Greco facades of the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. But these ruins were real, from a time before Sicily became a kicking toy for the toe of Italy. It had once been claimed by Greece,
and in some fundamental way, Lourdes felt connected to it.
The view from the theater was stunning: snow-capped Mount Etna to the south, and to the east, the tranquil, azure waters of the Mediterranean—but as they made preparations for the next leg of their journey, it was the north that drew Lourdes’ attention. Something happening to the north.
The other Shards. They were closer. They were . . . doing something. Now they were not just together, but connected in some new way, and the sense of their connection deepened her own sense of isolation. She closed her eyes, hating them for making her feel this way, but longing to know what it was they were doing. She closed her eyes, trying to feel more clearly what they felt. Whatever they were up to it was both wonderful and horrible at the same time.
“Forget them,” Memo said, seeing this new direction of her attention. “Come look at the sea. We are not that far from Thira.”
When she looked across the ocean, she imagined she could see the Island of Thira out there, waiting for her arrival, and it chased the irritating sense of the other shards out of her mind.
“There is a scar running through Thira, from the sky to its bowels,” Memo told her with childlike enthusiasm. “We get to tear it open again.”
Lourdes knew if they succeeded, it would mean a slow and painful end to the human condition, as if afflicted by some terminal disease.
A disease, thought Lourdes, is that what these creatures are? She couldn’t shake the thought, and yet when she dug down to mine her feelings about it, she found she did not care. To her, the human race was already dead. In that, perhaps she was not all that different from these creatures of darkness posing as light—for if she was a luminous spirit, why did she feel so black at her core?
Up above a reconnaissance plane flew past, toward the three dead warships that had run aground ten miles up the coast.
“Tearing open the sky . . . " Lourdes said. “I can’t wait.” Then she effortlessly gripped the hands of the pilot in the low-flying plane, forcing them forward, and she and Memo watched as the plane plunged into the sea.
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