Then, when the song was over, I applauded, breaking the spell.
Duke turned, and the look on his face said it all. He looked like a kid caught with his hand in a candy jar—surprised, disappointed, and annoyed all at once.
“Hi, Duke.” I waved at the band. “Hi, everybody.”
They all said hi and waved back.
“So sorry for interrupting,” I told them, “but this is pretty important. There’s an emergency.”
The tone of the musicians changed instantly to one of great concern.
“Excuse me, friends.” Duke put his baton on the music stand he’d been using and walked over, taking me aside. “Hello, Gaia.” He lowered his voice. “I guess I can’t trust that Luna after all, can I?”
I kept my voice to a whisper, too. “First of all, great band,” I said. “You’ve still got it, Duke.”
He managed a gracious nod at that. “We call ourselves the Strayhorns. Catchy, isn’t it?”
“Second of all, what are you doing with a band at all?” I asked. “We talked about this. You’re a golem. No comebacks, remember? We have to keep the truth about you a secret.”
“It’s for a benefit concert,” said Duke. “For a very worthy cause.”
I frowned. “What cause is that?”
“We’re raising money for the family of a terminally ill musician,” explained Duke. “He has three children, and the medical bills will leave his wife penniless.”
My annoyance was quickly fading. “Well, good for you.”
“The concert’s in two weeks. I know things have been stressful at the office lately, but I thought, with Luna holding down the fort, I could still get the band ready in time.”
As always, Duke’s heart was in the right place. “I understand, and you’re right,” I told him. “We can have an exception to the no comebacks rule for a worthy cause like this—assuming you don’t bill yourself as the resurrected you-know-who.”
"I wouldn’t dream of it, Earth Angel.” He smiled.
“However,” I said, “I really do need you, Duke. Right now. It’s a five-alarm fire.”
The look on his face turned grim. “No fatalities, I trust?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but our back room is full of ticking time bombs. I need you to help me figure out how to defuse them.”
Duke nodded. “Of course.”
“And did I mention my powers are on the fritz? Only after I helped destroy a fracking site?”
Duke blew his breath out in a long exhalation of resignation. “Say no more.” He turned to the band on the risers and drew his hand across his neck in a throat-cutting gesture. “We’re done for tonight, gang. See you next time.”
20
“We need Veritas.” Duke came up with that idea thirty seconds after I told him about Phaola, Blue Knob, and Prince Gallitzin State Park. “Goddess of truth. I’d bet good money she could get through to them.”
Now do you see why I need Duke on deck at times like this? We were driving back from the Big Band Barn, and he just pulled a plan out of thin air like that. I know he chafes at his life as a golem sometimes, but I swear I’d be lost without him.
“Does she live around here?” I asked. As small as it was, Confluence had become a real nexus of supernatural beings—gods and goddesses especially. It was mostly because they wanted to be close to Mother Earth’s avatar—at least that was Duke’s theory.
“Quite the opposite, I’m afraid,” said Duke. “But silver-tongued devil that I am, I believe I might be able to persuade the good woman to grace us with her presence—in a manner of speaking.”
I flashed him a look from behind the wheel. “Will she or won’t she?” I asked. “Grace us with her presence, that is.”
Duke squirmed in his seat and stared out the side window. “We haven’t always seen eye to eye on things,” he said. “You know how it is. But I do feel strongly that she will come around in support of our very just cause.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “The only way we can help our friends is if we understand what’s been done to them.”
“I can tell you this much,” said Duke. “Dear Veritas will experience my concerns front and center. They will be most prominent in her mind.”
His comments sounded ominous, but I had too much else on my mind and let them pass. “I’m worried, Duke,” I told him as we rolled through the night toward Confluence. “All this craziness all of a sudden. If it’s connected, I hate to think what it might be building up to.”
“Nothing you can’t handle.” Duke reached over and patted my shoulder. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
“Do you think it could be Atlantis again? That he might not have died after all? Or someone from Groundswell, maybe?”
“Too soon to say, Earth Angel.” He patted my shoulder again. “Maybe you’re not their primary target at all.”
He was right; it was possible. Each threat had come when I’d been with somebody else—one person in particular. “You think they’re after Ashanti?”
Duke shrugged. “Maybe they want to finish what they started with her, whatever that is...and whoever they are.”
“I won’t let them,” I said firmly. “Assuming there’s anything I can do about it, with these glitchy powers of mine.”
“How are they right now?” asked Duke. “Are you getting any signal at all?”
Normally, driving down the road at sixty miles an hour, I could still feel the Earth around me—even manipulate pieces of it as I raced past. On a good day, I could grab gravel from the berm and toss it far, firing it like bullets at a bad guy’s car. I’d even been known to trip a tremor en route, setting off a targeted quake in my wake. But with my powers on the blink since the Battle of Shawnee, I wasn’t holding out hope for results like those.
I decided to start small, reaching for a clod of dirt from the side of the road. At first, though, I couldn’t focus in on that level of detail; all I sensed were the vague contours of the landscape, blurred with the speed of my passage.
Frustrated, I clenched my teeth and concentrated harder, straining to blow away the fog that was blocking me. If anything, the scenery got blurrier. I started to panic that my link to the world had been severed completely and for good.
Then, I felt Duke’s hand squeeze my shoulder. “Relax, Earth Angel,” he said. “Let it come to you.”
“But it’s gone. I’m cut off from the world.”
“That’s impossible, don’t you see?” Duke chuckled. “You are the world.”
I did what he said, trying to relax instead of fighting to make contact. At first, my perceptions were unchanged.
Then, unexpectedly, the landscape around us burst to life in high relief before my mind’s eye. Gasping with surprise and joy, I peered into the manifold layers of the glorious world around us, feeling planet Earth in all its complexity.
“You got there, didn’t you?” Again, Duke chuckled. “Good for you.”
“The signal is strong,” I told him, and then I reached for a clod of dirt. Instead, a blanket of the stuff peeled up from the ground and soared out in front of us, rippling in midair like a flying carpet.
“Well done, Earth Angel.” Duke patted my shoulder once more before letting go. “The power loss must have been temporary.”
“Thank God,” I said, grinning at the magic carpet of dirt flowing ahead of us. But even as I said it, I couldn’t help wondering.
What if I lost it again at the worst possible moment?
21
“You were right to bring me in,” said Duke as he stared down at the three bodies on the floor of the back room. “This is indeed a most inauspicious situation.”
“You’re not angry, then?” Luna, who was standing in the doorway to the office area, looked worried. “It’s okay that I told them where you were?”
“Under other circumstances, I would be most perturbed.” Duke smiled and winked at her. “But in the case at hand, you clearly did the right thing, my dear.”
All of us were in the back room at that point, standing around Phaola and the others. I, for one, felt a little better than before—headache gone, powers restored, coffee onboard, Duke at my side. Maybe we were even on the verge of getting answers to some of our questions.
“So how do we contact Veritas?” I asked. “And how do we get her here if she’s located far away?”
“The answer to your first question is rather mundane, I’m afraid.” With a flourish, Duke pulled a cell phone out of his pants pocket. “A little modern-day magic ought to do the trick.” Clearing his throat, he thumbed through his contacts, then selected an entry and opened a text window for it. “This is where all that ivory-tinkling finally pays off,” he said, rapidly thumb-typing a message onto the screen.
As the rest of us watched, Duke finished his message and hit the send button. A reply came a moment later, leading him to rattle off a reply of his own.
It went like this, back and forth, for several minutes. Some of the replies made Duke chuckle; some made him scowl. One made him shake his head, and another made him curse under his breath.
Then, finally, he looked up at the rest of us arranged around him and nodded. “We’re all set.”
“Set for what?” I asked. “How’s this going to work?”
“Will she just—zap herself here?” asked Ashanti.
“Not quite.” Duke took off his sweater and unbuttoned his shirt. “It’s rather more—involved—than that.” He pulled off the shirt, revealing a ribbed white scoop-necked t-shirt underneath. “It’s more of a person to person kind of thing, really.”
Duke reached into his pants pockets and fished around for a moment, then pulled out a gold amulet that fit snugly in the palm of his hand. The amulet was round and embossed with an image of a pair of wings.
Duke chanted and passed his hand over them, and the wings started to glow. The glow grew brighter and brighter, pulsing like the beat of a heart.
Then, Duke himself started to glow. A soft light suffused his brown skin, pulsing in time with the brighter light of the amulet. Still, he remained focused on the object in his hand and continued to chant in a language I couldn’t remember ever hearing before.
The chanting got louder and faster, and he clamped his eyes shut. The aura around him rippled, and it almost looked to me like his skin was rippling, too.
Because it was. As Ashanti, Luna, and I watched, Duke’s own physical body began to change. The flesh of his arms and chest and shoulders crawled, as if something were squirming beneath it. That flesh turned pliant and took on a rubbery consistency, then altered again, looking more and more like clay.
The very clay I’d used to mold him in the first place, years ago.
Ashanti choked and turned away, but I couldn’t blame her. I could see how it might be hard to watch the golem revert to his base ingredients—especially when his face began to melt.
Duke’s features ran like those of a waxwork dummy in a fire. Still, he kept chanting, even as he became increasingly unrecognizable to us.
Then, the process paused—and moved in reverse. The molten flesh flowed back into human features and parts, rippling into the shape of a person again.
But the person wasn’t Duke.
It wasn’t even a man. The body took on a distinctly feminine form, complete with a narrower torso, flared hips, and bulging bustline. The skin changed color from chestnut brown to pale pink, and the hair swelled into ample curls and converted from jet black to glossy red.
As for the face, it became more oval, with bright green eyes instead of brown. The broad nose narrowed, the lips became more full, the age lines and eye bags smoothed. The cheeks hollowed, and the cheekbones became more prominent. The chin rose and tightened, the neck narrowed, the Adam’s apple disappeared.
Soon, we were face-to-face with a beautiful, red-haired woman where Duke had once stood. Duke had reshaped his own malleable body to allow her to recreate herself far from home.
Even the voice belonged to her, higher-pitched and feminine as she continued the chant.
Then she stopped chanting and waving her hand over the winged amulet. The aura around her flickered and faded, and the flow of the amulet died out, too.
Duke was gone. In his place stood the goddess of truth, transmitted as if by magic through the ley lines of the Earth.
“Hello, everyone.” She smiled at each of us in turn, then lowered her gaze to the bodies on the floor. “And these must be the subjects I’ve been brought here to examine.”
“They are,” I told her. “We’re not sure what’s been done to them, but they’re definitely not themselves anymore. They tried to kill us when we went to rescue them.”
“Do you know who did this to them?” asked Veritas.
“Not really,” I said. “We found them at a fracking site operated by EarthSave Unlimited, and they attacked us. That pretty much covers everything we know.”
“Your honesty is clear to me.” Veritas nodded and rubbed her hands together. “It could be any number of things, then. I’ll have to interrogate one of them to get at the truth.”
“So we’ll have to wake one of them up,” I said.
“That’s usually the first step in questioning, yes.” Veritas smirked, but it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. I liked her automatically, in fact, though she was very all-business and not so much focused on the feels. I was glad about that, since likeability wasn’t always a trait of your average god or goddess on the street.
“Can you do it?” I turned to Luna. “Can you wake up Phaola?” Of the three of them, I wanted to talk to Phaola most; I trusted her and her eye for detail more than anyone in the room.
Luna looked worried. “Are you sure that’s what you want me to do? If I wake her in her current condition, she’s likely to pick up where she left off and lash out with her powers against us.”
“Wake her up just a little, then,” said Veritas. “Just enough to answer questions. Keep her in a twilight state the whole time.”
Luna frowned, tapping her upper lip with her forefinger. “I haven’t tried that before, keeping someone half-awake and half-asleep at the same time.”
I held out a fist and smiled. “I have faith in you. I know you can do it.”
She stared at my fist for a moment, then bumped it with one of her own. “All right, I’ll try.”
“Good,” I said. “And Ashanti and I will be on alert if she comes to all the way.” I looked at Ashanti, and she nodded, her face and posture free of doubt.
I, on the other hand, was full of doubt. If Phaola regained full consciousness and control of her powers in her hostile state, she could devastate the offices and everyone in them in short order.
Luna knelt beside Phaola and carefully placed the fingers of one hand on her forehead. She closed her eyes, then, and her own head lowered.
The rest of us stood and watched for long moments without a sign. Only when Luna finally looked up and nodded did I realize I’d been holding my breath the whole time.
Veritas knelt on the opposite side of Phaola from Luna and leaned in close. “Hello, Phaola,” she said softly. “Can you hear me?”
Slowly, Phaola’s eyes slid open, but she only stared at the ceiling, not the women on either side of her. “No.” Her voice was a whisper, just loud enough for Ashanti and I to hear. “I am not Phaola.”
Strangely, her lips kept moving after that, but no audible sound came out. The movements could have represented words, I thought, or just involuntary twitches of her mouth.
Veritas frowned and leaned closer. As she did, Phaola’s lips stopped moving.
“But I am told this body is Phaola’s,” said Veritas. “You cannot deny this is true.”
“The body is no longer hers,” said the voice that was coming from Phaola. “Her self has been removed and replaced with mine.”
“And who are you?”
Phaola shook her head. “You won’t get that information out of me.”
“At least tell me how she w
as removed and replaced,” said Veritas.
“First, The Hollowing,” said Phaola. “Then, The Filling.”
“And how exactly are those things done?”
“The magic of the land,” said Phaola, “and the science of man, united. Ultimate power wielded by those who would serve the greater good.”
“Who are they?” asked Veritas. “Who wields the power?”
“That information is on a need-to-know basis.” Phaola’s sneer was cruel, not at all like her. “And you do not need to know...yet.”
Veritas looked frustrated...until Phaola’s lips again moved silently, as before. The goddess of truth in the body of Duke watched them carefully, reading what they were saying. I tried to do the same, but lip-reading is something I’ve never been good at.
“I see,” Veritas said after a moment. “So that’s who’s controlling all this.”
Phaola’s brow knitted with annoyance. “What are you talking about? I said nothing about those in control.”
“Shhh,” said Veritas. “I’m talking to Phaola, not you.”
Phaola’s voice rose to an angry shout. “I told you, Phaola’s gone! It’s just me in here now!”
“That’s a lie,” said Veritas. “The Hollowing was imperfect. Phaola’s self is as present as yours within that form. I know because she told me so.”
My heart beat faster at the hope that my friend was still alive in that body, that perhaps we could somehow yet save her.
Or, maybe, she could still find a way to save herself.
“Tell me more, Phaola.” Veritas was still intently focused on my friend inside that body. “Tell me why. Why are they doing this?”
“No!” shouted the dominant voice I now knew was not truly Phaola’s. “You get nothing! Nothing until it’s too late!”
Seconds later, Phaola’s lips again moved silently. Veritas stayed close and tracked every word they uttered, watching every syllable they shaped. With every fiber of my being, I wanted to know what those syllables were.
“Tell me more,” said Veritas. “Tell me what they’re planning. What’s happening next?”
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