Drynn

by Steve Vera

  “I am Tarsidion,” the man responded in a disapproving baritone. Though his voice was deep, there was an odd harmonic note to it, as if he were an opera singer.

  “Indeed you are. Skip Walkins, Chief of Police, Rolling Creek, Montana,” Skip said, offering his hand.

  The mocha-skinned leviathan considered it a moment before taking it in his own gargantuan mitt. Normally Skip was the pulper, but in the grip of this monster, he felt like a petunia. He could feel the man’s restrained power trickling through, squeezing a smidge harder than necessary. Which hurt.

  “Last chance,” Noah said.

  “Noted,” Skip responded with a smile.

  She sighed. “Very well. Come with us.” She turned around, as did Tarsidion the puppy eater, and walked toward the escalator, speaking in their mysterious tongue.

  “Sure thing,” Skip said, shaking out his hand.

  Just what did you get yourself into this time, genius? He could hear a roller-coaster cart clicking in his head, climbing higher and higher. Just how high did this thing go before the drop, anyway?

  Chapter Twenty

  “Blackburn party,” Tarsidion rumbled, looking down at the startled hostess.

  She hastily consulted her reservations screen and nodded. “Right this way please,” she said with a nervous smile.

  The restaurant was nice, the sort of place women showcased their latest fashions and men showcased their latest wives. They even had an oyster bar. As they followed their hostess through the busy restaurant, Skip noticed just about every head turn as Tarsidion walked through. The man towered over everything, motorcycle zippers jangling like chains on a saber-toothed tiger. Tarsidion reminded Skip of some ancient god once worshipped by Sumerians or something. He looked like a god.

  Toward the back of the restaurant, in a dim corner, two men and a woman sat around a large circular table, nestled in an alcove. All three had their backs to the wall. Upon seeing them, the taller man stood.

  “Enjoy your lunch,” the hostess said and bolted.

  Without needing to be told, Skip pegged the standing, olive-bronze man to be the leader. There was a quiet gravity that pooled around him as he moved, a steel in his jaw that could not be concealed by his disarming smile or the elegant angles of his good looks.

  “Chief Walkins,” he said politely but with an air of command. His accent was nearly identical to Noah’s. “I’m Gavin Blackburn.”

  Skip didn’t smile but accepted the outstretched hand, noting his last name. He wondered if there was any relation to the Blackburn Massacre back in Montana. The man’s grip was a perfect balance of civility and power, cordial but professional. That was good. Skip liked dealing with professionals.

  “Please, have a seat,” Gavin said, dipping an open hand to the large, circular booth.

  “Why don’t you introduce your friends first.”

  Gavin bowed his head slightly, reminding Skip of a more Eastern culture, and then turned to his right to indicate the other, compact man, who didn’t seem to have any whites in his eyes at all. He watched Skip silently, studying him like a wolf might study a potential meal. “That’s Jack,” Gavin said. “And this,” he said, pointing to a devastatingly beautiful woman to his left, “is Cirena.”

  Though she remained seated, he could tell she was tall. Very tall. Her legs were long enough to cause her knees to push against the bottom of the table. Skip did his best to keep his tongue from lolling out of his mouth. Down, boy. Despite her acute beauty there was something forbidding about her, something hidden behind her dreamy gaze. Long, dark hair fell across half her face and down to her shoulders.

  “Fascinating quintet you make,” Skip said.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Walkins,” Gavin offered again with a smile laced with command. “It seems we have business to discuss.”

  Skip was grateful he wasn’t forced to awkwardly slide into the booth. He’d chance his back to the door right now, thank you very much; the most dangerous people to walk through it today were already seated around this table.

  Skip lowered himself slowly, eliciting an exchange of glances from Gavin and Noah. Gavin raised his eyebrows in question. Noah—almost imperceptibly—shook her head no and then seated herself beside him.

  All right then, Skip noted.

  The venue was perfect.

  The murmur of other conversations and the clinking of glasses would camouflage their conversation quite nicely, while light pop music played through strategically placed speakers.

  “So, Noah tells us that you’re a pain in the ass,” Jack observed conversationally from his left. He had intense, beady eyes that were dug deep in his face, a narrow but solid-looking chin and a nose that was slightly hooked. The five were fanned around him.

  “God-given talent honed to perfection,” Skip replied, meeting the man’s carbon-black eyes without blinking.

  Jack broke into a grin. “I think I like this guy,” he said, hitting Tarsidion’s shoulder with the back of his hand.

  Directly across from Skip, Gavin studied him unapologetically, sizing him up with creamless-coffee eyes.

  Since when had normal become a minority?

  “Look. I’m gonna make this real easy,” Skip opened. “I consider myself an open-minded man. I was a detective for seven years, been in three wars. I’ve seen some pretty sick shit in my life, but nothing, nothing explains what I saw the other night.” The soft luminance of the light fixture suspended overhead created shadows across their expressionless faces. “So allow me to be frank. I suspect all of you know exactly what is going on, and furthermore, I suspect you would like to keep it a secret. That is not an option. The death toll as of this morning is ten. Ten people butchered and devoured.”

  Skip waited. Nada.

  “I wanna know who the hell you people are. I wanna know what the hell was in that grave. I wanna know what tried to shish kebab me in those trees,” Skip counted off his fingers, “but most of all, I want to know how to kill the son of a bitch.”

  John Mayer crooned, breathless, beyond their table.

  “You want many things,” Gavin said.

  “When people’s lives are at stake, you bet your ass I do.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Gavin said.

  Skip closed his eyes. “I’m getting really tired of hearing that.” In fact, he was getting really tired in general. And sore. He slipped his hand into his coat pocket, wrapping around his dwindling supply of get-up-and-move-around facilitators.

  “If you would just hand over that photograph and went on your way, your life expectancy would improve dramatically,” Cirena saw fit to answer.

  “I got a better idea,” Skip said, holding up his finger. He dug into his jacket, pulled out his badge and tossed it in the middle of the table. “Why don’t you just answer my questions before I make all of your lives much less pleasant. All it’ll take is one phone call.” And a shit-heap load of paperwork.

  “Or,” Jack said, “we could just take that picture from you.”

  Skip leaned forward, his adrenaline numbing his pain. “Just try it.”

  “Jack,” Gavin warned.

  “Why we dicking around with this guy, we got—”

  “He was persistent,” Noah interjected.

  “And she didn’t have a choice,” Skip added, holding Jack’s gaze while giving his teeth a suck. “Not unless you want the FBI on your ass.” You wanna make a move here in front of everybody, be my guest, bitch. Stitches or no stitches, I’ll put you down.

&nb
sp; The faintest tremor of a smirk pulled at Jack’s lips. “You got some balls, bro.”

  “Good afternoon, folks,” a slightly too-long-haired server greeted them cheerfully, walking up to the table. Neither Skip nor Jack looked away from the other. “How we doing today?” he asked.

  “Peachy,” Skip answered without looking.

  “Yeah, just ducky,” Jack echoed.

  “That’s good,” the server said, looking between them. “Would you like to start off with a glass of wine or a cocktail while you look at your menus?”

  Silence. Tension. It was as if Skip was staring at marbles.

  “Uh, I could come back,” the server said, angling his body to walk away.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Gavin said. “Jack? You thirsty?”

  Jack’s eyes glinted like a wet knife, and then he shrugged. “Sure. Jack on the rocks.”

  “Still? Mr. Walkins?”

  Skip thought about the pills in his pocket and sighed heavily. “Water.” Tarsidion and Noah followed his lead but Cirena ordered a glass of red Burgundy and Gavin ordered a Laphroaig with two ice cubes. Good taste.

  “So what’s it gonna be, guys?” Skip asked once they were alone again. “You can tell me the truth, get a nice look at this photograph, avoid getting arrested and even enlist the help of a police chief. Or you can take the messy path. Your call.”

  Each of them regarded Skip with detached inscrutability. Gavin said something quietly to his compatriots in their unfamiliar language and they all leaned forward.

  It was a pleasant language; the words flowed into the next, punctuated by the occasional hard C and V. Their conversation went on for about a minute, long enough for their server to return with their drinks. Jack and Cirena seemed to be of one mind while Noah and Tarsidion, much to Skip’s surprise, seemed to hold an opposing view. They won. Jack took it with a shrug, Cirena did not. She glared.

  “Very well, Chief Walkins,” Gavin said. “You’ll get your answers, but we get ours. I want that picture.”

  “And you’ll get it.”

  Gavin nodded. “Understand this. Once you hear these words, you cannot unlearn them. This is where you can either take the red pill or the blue.”

  How ’bout the precious little white ones? “Let’s have it.”

  Gavin gave Noah exchanged a glance.

  “Everett, I need you to trust me,” she said, her fingers cool and light on his forearm. “Make no sudden movements.”

  Uh-oh.

  Without warning, her hand traveled down the embankment of his side and up beneath the cotton of his shirt.

  “Hey, hey, hey, your hands are cold.”

  Cirena leaned back in her seat, arms crossed, staring at Skip as if he’d sprouted eight legs and was skittering across her path.

  No help there.

  Jack smirked.

  Noah’s hands brushed his leather belt. “I need you to relax, please.”

  “What? No kiss?”

  Jack smirked bigger.

  “Very well,” Noah said, and pressed her lips to his.

  He definitely hadn’t expected that. Off guard, Skip nonetheless kissed back. He was a man, after all. Her lips were sweet and soft and delicious and he was only too aware of her fingertips sliding up his shirt. When she removed her face from his and opened her eyes Skip nearly sprung out his seat.

  Pale blue light rippled across Noah’s eyes in bands, shifting and roiling like luminous silk. Her irises were not completely covered; Skip could still make out her gray orbs behind the light, glazed over into the most unsettling cast he’d ever seen on another human being.

  Jack shot out his hand and clamped down his shoulder, sending a bolt of pain through his chest. “Sit easy, lawman.”

  Skip nodded numbly, slack-jawed, but in that moment he had an epiphany. He’d seen this light before, creeping out of the black grave. And out of Mr. Shades—Donovan’s—chest. He cringed backward, squeezing his eyes shut, and waited for…what? Shock? Fire?

  At her touch, rivulets of blissful warmth spread through his body. He felt, rather than saw, the stitches in his chest writhing like worms put to a lighter.

  He yanked his shirt up and tore at the gauze over his stitches to see the angry tissue lightening, the stitches wriggling out of his skin until they dropped soundlessly into his lap, and with them…the pain.

  There’s no pain!

  Noah shuddered once and collapsed on the table as if she’d just sprinted—not flown—from Montana. The vaporous light leaking from her eyes was gone. Her hand rested limply on his upper thigh.

  Skip looked around, dumbfounded, but the din of the restaurant continued unabated and none of the others seemed concerned by this collapse.

  “Give her a moment,” Gavin said.

  Skip had nothing original to say, so he settled for a good ole fashioned, “Holy shit,” while probing his former wound with his index finger.

  “How?” Skip asked, somehow crystallizing the entire experience into one syllable.

  Cirena leaned across the table and whispered. “Magic.”

  A starburst of goose bumps erupted across his brain. He recoiled. “You mean, abracadabra-pull-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat magic?”

  “Something a bit more…complex,” Noah muttered from her slouched place beside him.

  “Not magicians, then?” Assimilate, assimilate.

  “Not magicians, Chief Walkins. Magi.” Gavin this time. “We are a race of people who no longer exist here.”

  “I see,” Skip said. His mouth was dry and it wasn’t from lack of water. “Now, when you say here, do you mean, like, West Hartford? The Northern Hemisphere?”

  “I mean this world,” Gavin said.

  “Naturally.” He licked his lips, wishing for a Scotch now. “And out of idle curiosity, which world did you say you were from again?”

  “We will not be mocked,” Tarsidion said, slamming his palm on the table. That one drew a little attention.

  “Easy, killer. I’m just trying to wrap my little Earthling brain around this.” Oh yes, the Skipster was back.

  “Mr. Walkins,” Gavin began.

  “That’s Chief Walkins.”

  Gavin just looked at him. “You have the unique privilege of finding yourself in a war that has crossed two worlds.”

  Skip settled (easily!) back in his chair. “Go on.”

  “Where we come from, Earth is a myth. Just the name of some minor, forgotten mythological god I know of only because I was forced to study as an Apprentice. The fact that Earth could actually exist as a place, as a world is…inconceivable.” Gavin leaned forward, a glint in his calm eyes. “You,” he said, pointing directly at Skip, “are to us what Atlantis is to you.” He waited for the impact of his words to fully register. “A place like Shangri-la or the Bermuda Triangle. And yet here we sit, on Earth.” Gavin framed the word “Earth” in quotation marks with his fingers. “A world so utterly alien and strange, so…”

  “Fucked up,” Jack chimed in.

  “Different,” Gavin corrected, flashing Jack a look. “A place were magic doesn’t even exist, or what little does is not worth mentioning.” The disapproval in his voice was unmistakable. “A world where mankind alone is dominant, where science and technology rule in the stead of magic.”

  Guess that explained Ahanatou’s theory.

  “Did you know that Earth once had a twin, Mr. Walkins?”

  “Can we just go with Skip? And I can’t say that I do.”

  “It’s true, ‘Skip.’ According to scientists here, roughly four point five billion years ago, Earth once shared the same orbit with another planet. Unfortunately for that smaller twin, when
they did collide—”

  “Poof,” Jack interrupted, mimicking an explosion with his hands.

  “Yes, poof. The resulting collision was cataclysmic. Whatever had begun to form on Earth prior to that point was eradicated. Whatever wasn’t consumed outright by the planet’s core was catapulted into space, forming a disc around Earth, much like Saturn’s rings. Only, these rings were on fire. Eventually that ring coalesced into what you see in the sky every night. Your moon.”

  Skip scratched his head. “What has this got to—”

  “Just listen.” Noah impatiently slapped at his side.

  “Scientists named this former protoplanet ‘Theia.’ The name ‘Theia’ is also the name of our world.”

  “Your world’s name is Theia?” It rolled off the tongue. His inner poet approved.

  “Yes, though just as you would not answer ‘Earth,’ if I asked you where you were from, so we would not answer ‘Theia’ to yours. Our homeland is an island nation just a few miles off the mainland, known as Valis.”

  Skip sucked an ice cube into his mouth and dug into his Eagles Jacket. Painlessly. Mwa-ha-ha-ha. Bypassing the magic white pills, he pulled out his trusty, battered Five Star notepad with his Papermate Breeze Gel pen shoved through the spiral rings, licked his thumb, flipped open the pad, clicked the top of the pen and wrote with a shrug, “Theia.”

  “You were a soldier, yes?” Gavin asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Have you ever actually seen battle?”

  Their eyes met. “A time or two.”

  “Then you may actually understand what I’m about to tell you.”

  Their server returned.

  Reality as Skip understood was redefined over Scotch and lobster risotto.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Amanda couldn’t decide whether or not she wanted to choke-lock somebody or swan dive off the nearest skyscraper. What the hell were the chances of falling in love with someone in the Witness Protection Program, anyway? One in a million? Ten million? Where was that jackpot when she played Powerball?