by N. D. Wilson
Young and Old
1970. IDAHO. MIXED WITH LAUGHTER, CHRISTMAS MUSIC echoed up the stairs from the family party below. Rocking in the chair that had been made for moments exactly like this one, Glory was enjoying one of the rare relaxing moments of motherhood. She tossed her white ponytail over her shoulder and rubbed her little Alex’s back, humming along with the music playing from the floor below. She was always humming or singing these days, and had been ever since she’d become a mother. She’d faced down demons in reality’s darkest corners. She’d become a virtual angel of death, a time-walker extraordinaire, wife to a legend just as frightening to villains as she was. But as tough as she was, nothing had prepared her for how undone with love she would be as a mother. She could have spent hours just smelling Alex’s fuzzy little head. The wrinkles in his little fingers melted her.
Alex grunted, kicked his fat footer-pajamaed legs, and burrowed his face into her neck, just like he always had when falling asleep in her arms. Even when Alex had been brand new, she had always ended up with her chin high and his head wedged just beneath her jaw. He seemed far from tiny to her now. He spoke. He walked—careening happily into walls and doors and furniture. He knew what dogs and cats and cows and ducks all said. But the language of the owls truly spoke to him. With big urgent eyes, flushed cheeks, and a perfectly round mouth, Alex had been hooting like a pro for months now. Hooting was his highest compliment, and the surest sign of his affection.
The big house was rarely warm and always noisy, but Glory loved it, not least because there was room for Jude and Millie and their girls to stay whenever they liked. Jude was telling stories down in the living room now, with Sam’s assistance no doubt, and Alex’s two cousins were filling the air with shrieks. They still thought Speck and Cindy were hilarious.
“Down?” Alex mumbled into Glory’s neck.
“No, baby,” Glory said, and she rocked a little harder and hummed a little louder. It was hard being just one year old and going to bed when cousins were still awake downstairs.
“Down?” Alex asked again. He shoved his head further up under Glory’s jaw. She shifted him lower.
“No, baby. It’s sleepy time. Time for dreams.” She rocked and she patted and she bounced as she sang, hoping to feel his body relax and his determination sag.
Suddenly, he did a push-up against her shoulder, levering himself back to look her in the eyes. His cheeks were red and sweaty, and his black hair was overdue for a trim.
“Down,” he informed her.
She shook her head. “What does an owl say?”
“Hoo,” he answered flatly. And then, “Down?” His eyes left hers and searched the room. Wriggling, grunting, preparing to fuss, he tried to escape.
And then Glory saw the sand spilling onto the floor in the corner of the room. In a flash, she leapt to her feet, holding Alex tight. A hooked blade of black glass snapped out of her free hand.
Peter Eagle appeared in the room, sand still trickling from his black sleeves. He wasn’t dressed like a priest. He was still young, the Peter from the youth ranch in Arizona and the island near Seattle. His jet hair was bound back with a red bandana, he had on a black canvas jacket zipped up tight, and he was wearing boots and frayed cowboy jeans. Young enough that the trip had probably been difficult for him. Not yet Father Tiempo. Probably not even eighteen.
“Peter!” Glory bounced Alex up onto her hip, and shook her blade away into a sand pile of her own. “What are you doing here?”
“Hoo! Hoo!” Alex said. “Hoo!”
Glory twisted her son toward her old friend. “Meet my little Alex.”
“Good boy. Always trust owls.” Peter smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “You named him after your brother.”
Glory nodded. “I did. After the brother I loved. Before he became that Dervish woman’s slave. How did you find us? Not that I mind . . .”
“My brother Manuelito helped. He has been dream-walking to watch your son.”
“Really? Why?” Glory asked. “What’s going on? And why did you come so young?”
“There’s not much of me available,” Peter said. “So young me is all you get. And I’m terrified of messing this up worse than it already will be, but I think you need to know. Have you looked at Alex in the future?”
Glory brushed back her hair and turned away from her friend, focusing on her son. Of course she had looked. Wouldn’t every mother? At least every mother who could time walk?
“You know how it works,” Glory said quietly. “Obviously everything can change. And everyone faces hardships, but Alex does well. Really well, even if it’s a little slow coming.” She looked back into Peter’s dark eyes. “Don’t tell Sam, okay? More than anyone, he wants Alex to live in the present.”
“Whatever you saw,” Peter said. His voice was grim. “It has already changed. And it’s still changing. You thought Dervish wouldn’t find you. You thought she wouldn’t care to. But she does. In the new future, your teenage son will be taken by Dervish. He is already moving between times as the Vulture’s heir. He must be hunted down immediately.”
“Hunted?” Glory asked. Instinctively, she pulled her son in tight. “Why hunted?”
“Saved,” Peter said. “If possible. But if saving isn’t possible, he still must be stopped. At any cost.”
“I don’t believe this,” Glory said. “How could we let it happen? Where are we?”
“Gone somewhere,” Peter said. “I didn’t look into that.”
Peter handed her a small rough-edged card. It was blank. “Keep this with you and check it often. If I learn anything more, you’ll find it written on this paper. Dervish seems to be using him purely as a disruption, a cataclysm to break various dams in history of her own choosing. Once that role is complete, I can’t imagine that she’ll let Alex live.”
“Sam!” Glory yelled at the doorway. “Come quickly, please!”
Sam’s voice floated up the stairs in response. “One second!” A moment later she heard Sam’s footsteps on the stairs, and she turned away from Peter, holding her young son tight, with her nose against his neck, inhaling everything about his reality. Above Alex’s dresser, there was a mirror, and Glory caught her own reflection. Her hair had been shot white for years, but her skin was no longer smooth. She had creases around her eyes and smile lines on her cheeks. Her freckles had thickened. But she still felt like the same young runaway who had ended up at the Spaldings’ youth ranch. For her that was a lifetime ago, but for Peter—she glanced back at him—he had probably come to find them directly from the island in the Puget Sound. From Neverland. Was she still there right now? Would Peter go right back and see her on the island, young and happy, but haunted by her victory over the Tzitzimime? Those nightmares still occasionally reached her even after decades.
“Did you come from Neverland?” Glory asked.
Peter shook his head. “Not directly.”
“Are you going back to Neverland?”
“Not directly. But yes. We’re all still in the house. The boys haven’t scattered into their own lives yet. You and Sam still haven’t become more than friends.”
“Are you going to tell me?” Glory asked. “Back then. Will I know?” She looked directly at him. Peter inhaled slowly. “I guess not,” Glory said. “Or I’d have some ghost of a memory of it now, wouldn’t I?”
“I thought this was a better time,” Peter said. “If I told you then, you and Sam might not have married. Or ever had a son.”
Sam’s footsteps rumbled up the stairs and he entered the room smiling.
Glory saw Sam through Peter’s eyes. He was half a foot taller than Peter, with broad sloping shoulders. A few days without shaving revealed scattered white in the scruff on his jaw. His sandy hair was still thick, but it had marched backward from his temples. A large scar marred his right cheek, creating a double smile line on that side.
They had been through almost everything together, Glory thought. On every continent, in every time, and in every kind of
fight. In a way, she had loved him from the first time she met him in Jude’s fiction, but when she had watched him lay his body down for others time and time again—regardless of who they were or where or when they lived—that’s when her love for him had come to define her.
Sam Miracle could be dense and forgetful. That had always been true of him, from their very first moments together. He could lose all perspective in a fight. Time hadn’t changed that. And Glory knew from decades of experience that there could be no better trait in him. Could an unimportant victim hope for anything more profoundly foolish in a hero than a willingness to die for someone who doesn’t matter to the world? A willingness to suffer and bleed for any soul in any time, to hurl himself at any villain. No one knew Sam Miracle’s flaws better than the girl called Glory Hallelujah. Being with him was a lot like being in the harsh unyielding sun. He was made for conflict, after all. A fiery nightmare to nightmares, with the scars to prove it. She hated even the thought of living without his light. And he didn’t have that effect just on her. She saw it on every face of every person who had ever been saved by the boy—and then the man—called Miracle. And she knew how much it embarrassed him.
Glory knew where Sam and his heroic scaled hands appeared in ancient hieroglyphs. In illuminated manuscripts. She knew where to find his mythical form in medieval stained-glass windows, painted on cave walls in Utah and Slovenia. She knew where Sam’s shape was crouching as a protective gargoyle on three different cathedrals. Strangest of all, she knew where to find the massive Incan idol of the boy-god with serpent arms who had saved thousands from slaughter, because that idol was at the bottom of a lake right where Sam had dropped it, tied to the priests who had attempted to sacrifice 144 children to him in bloody gratitude.
“Peter!” Sam said. “Wow.” His scarred face lit up.
Glory bit her lip and stepped toward her husband, eyes instantly hot with new fear.
Sam’s expression faded immediately.
Glory leaned against Sam with Alex between them and her forehead against his shoulder.
“What?” Sam asked. “What is it?” His scaled arms slid around his wife and his son and the long rattles on his shoulders twitched slightly.
We’ve been through everything, Glory thought. But never this.
“Tell him, Peter,” Glory said. “I can’t.”
DOWNSTAIRS, GLORY HAD TROUBLE LETTING LITTLE ALEX go. He was thrilled to be left, bouncing in his Aunt Millie’s arms, pointing and laughing at the girls on the floor. Glory kept needing one more touch, one more kiss, one more long smell against his neck.
“It will be fine,” Jude said. “He’ll be fine.”
Sam nodded. Glory sniffed. She hoped so. Jude and Millie had no idea Peter had even been in the house.
“Take as long as you need,” Millie said. “We love our Alex, don’t we, girls?” The girls jumped up and down and whooped. “Do you need food to go? I could wrap some pie.”
Finally, when the front door was closed behind them and Sam and Glory stood in front of the tall house lined with fat-bulbed Christmas lights, Glory took her husband’s hand—palm to palm, her fingertips barely reaching his scales.
Their breath clouds were lit orange and red and green by the blinking lights behind them.
“I don’t think I can fight our son,” Glory said, and she leaned her head against Sam’s upper arm. “I feel sick.”
Sam nodded, checking the gold watch with the broken chain that he had clipped to his belt. “And I feel old. Now let’s go save Alex and end that woman. Where are we going?”
“France,” Glory said. “1914.”
“Oh, gosh.”
“Yeah.” She pulled the small rough-edged card out of her jacket and turned it over in her fingers. It was still completely blank. She sighed.
Inside, Alex grabbed his auntie’s face with two fat hands. Millie smiled at him with wide happy eyes.
“Hoo,” he said. And then. “Down?”
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever my buddy wants.”
ALEX WAS LYING ON A STONE TABLE. HE WAS SHIRTLESS AND shoeless and his arms were motionless at his sides. Seven chains—six with watches—twisted in a slow column above him, rotating in his chest.
He didn’t remember opening his eyes. He didn’t remember his eyes having been closed.
But he remembered the owls. Especially the big one with the red feathers in his wings. It had been looking for him in his dreams. Looking right at him, but somehow unable to see.
“Hoo,” he said. “But owls don’t have red feathers.” Alex’s voice was a croak. His throat felt like antique sandpaper.
Rhonda slid into view on his right. Her hat and puffy coat were gone and her hair was longer. She looked very . . . different. Taller. Bigger. Prettier. “You’re awake,” she said. “How are you feeling? Are you okay?”
Alex tried to lift his head. And failed. “What is happening?” he asked. “Where are we?”
Rhonda leaned in way over him, close enough for her hair to swing down against his bare shoulder. Close enough for a whisper.
“Another time garden,” Rhonda whispered. “She said it was the oldest one. The first one. But I think we’re buried beneath it. In a tomb or pyramid or something. This entire place is sandstone. No windows. There are hallways all over, but I haven’t found a single exit. Pretty sure we’re underground. You’ve been out for days. Ever since she beat you up in France. And she did some seriously freaky things to you. She called it sculpture. Try not to be startled.”
“Water,” Alex said. “Please.”
“Don’t have any,” Rhonda said. “And if I did, I’d probably drink it myself. I’m that thirsty and I’m that selfish. Do you want me to get the witch lady?” she asked. “She left me with a bell to ring when you woke.”
“She have water?” Alex asked.
Rhonda nodded. “I’ll ring her. Hold on.”
He didn’t hear the bell, but he heard Mrs. Dervish’s voice clearly enough. It rippled through his bones and left them feeling like liquid.
You should have had more fun when you had the chance. Sit up.
“I can’t,” Alex said aloud.
You can now. Sit up and look in the mirror. Tell me what you see.
Alex rose to his elbows on the stone slab and looked around. The low walls were made of enormous stones fitted together without mortar, and every surface was covered with strange carvings. Cows eating cows. Wolves nursing children while crocodiles devoured them. Kings seated on thrones made of humans, in palaces made of humans. Armies of monsters—lions with wings and bearded human heads, winged bulls with human heads, giants and locusts and dragons and three-headed goats. Wizards fighting with staffs while kings and queens watched. And at the top of every wall, a wheel of fire, lined with eyes. At the bottom of every wall, a brass bowl holding lazy slow-moving fire.
Alex sat all the way up. Rhonda stood beside the only doorway, a tunnel, narrow and low. Beside her, a mirror was leaning against the wall, spotty with age.
Alex stared at himself. He had a pointed beard. And thick, black hair that almost reached his shoulders. His shoulders . . .
Swinging his legs over the side of the slab, Alex stood. The watches clinked against the ceiling above him. He was inches taller than he had been, more than half a foot. And broader. With muscles.
“She aged you more than me,” Rhonda said. “I’m like, eighteen. She said you would be twenty, but you look more like thirty to me. Or forty.”
“I don’t want to be forty,” Alex said.
“And I don’t want to be locked in a weird crypt by a witch,” Rhonda said. “But here we are.”
Alex turned in a circle. “How long have we been in here?”
“Honestly, it only felt like a couple of days,” Rhonda said. “But I was asleep for a while.”
“Days?” Alex tugged at his beard. “How?”
“Quite simple.” Mrs. Dervish emerged from the tunnel behind Rhonda, carrying a cup of water. She handed i
t to Alex and then brushed and straightened her skirt, primly interlacing her fingers when she had finished. Alex poured the greasy fluid down his parched throat—nasty, sour water, but he didn’t care. Leaving an inch of liquid in the bottom, he handed the cup to Rhonda and focused on Mrs. Dervish. She looked exactly the same, not one minute older, and she cleared her throat and spoke like a schoolteacher. “This is a time tomb. One of the first ever made—by men questing for everlasting life, as they always seem to be—and it is in the greatest tower the worlds have ever seen. An obelisk that ruled the first era at man’s beginning, but its builders were thrown down and forgotten and the tower was buried in a cataclysm. Only the tip remained above ground, but even the tip was hundreds of feet high. Sumerians used it in the second era, long-lived Ethiopians in the third. Faint imitations were attempted in Egypt—those little pyramids perched on top of the sand—in Persia, and even Central and South America, but none of those structures ever approached the might of this tower. It remained unused in the fourth era and was known only by my own ancestors in the fifth. In the sixth era, it shall once again rule. In these chambers, men and women opened themselves up to the stars. In these chambers, time does not rule, it serves the mistress of the garden. Climb four thousand and forty stairs, and you will find the garden. I am its mistress. From this place I have created and ruled many. The Vulture. And now El Terremoto.” She smiled at Alex. “Collecting you at thirteen was the simplest approach. But I do not need an adolescent general. I need a man. So I sealed this tomb and granted you both ten years in what, to me, was a single night.”
“Okay,” Rhonda said. “Great. I guess I just age better. That clears everything right up.”
“But why me?” Alex asked. “I’m not your general. And I never will be.”
Of course not. Mrs. Dervish laughed. Does pawn suit you better? Or puppet? And I think it would be obvious to you why Alexander Miracle would be my natural choice.
Alex said nothing.
Well, that’s sorted, then, Mrs. Dervish said. Come to the top. It’s time we lightened the mood. I won’t even make you take the stairs. But you can if you like.