The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2)

by T. Ellery Hodges

  He reached for the chain. There was no chance Malkier had missed so glaring a detail, but Heyer could take it from sight, try to keep his brother from fixating on it.

  The sound of metal links moving against one another caused Malkier’s face to turn to him in anger.

  “Leave it!”

  Heyer let the chain fall against the stone table, the links shattering into hundreds of brittle metallic shards as they hit the surface.

  “I am sorry,” Heyer said. “I… I only wanted to remove it for you.” Heyer trailed off, but his expression remained one of shared sorrow. Malkier’s abrupt rage quickly burned through its fuel, and his brother retreated back into grief after he realized Heyer’s intentions had been to protect him from a sight they both knew he didn’t want to see.

  When his brother’s gaze left him, Heyer quietly swept some of the shards off the stone, palming them into his jacket pocket. An analysis would give him the specifics, but the steel’s deterioration would give him an idea of how long ago it was that Dams the Gate’s body had returned to the Feroxian plane.

  “You’ve never believed in Karma,” Malkier said.

  Heyer found Malkier’s gaze now lingered at the line on the floor—where the blood had pooled beside the table. “No.” Heyer said. “If I recall, you thought it an overly human sentiment yourself.”

  His brother nodded slowly. “Eyes watching? Tallying our trespasses? Singling us out for…” Malkier paused, grimacing as though the words he’d thought to say had stabbed him, and he could not yet speak through the pain. “The death of one man? Could fate care so much?”

  Heyer approached slowly and gently placed his small, human hand on his brother’s monstrous shoulder. “Sometimes chance is simply cruel. Trust me, you only do yourself harm looking for justice in it.”

  Malkier’s head shook, shivering in a show of his unwillingness to accept coincidence. He needed causality, needed there to be a meaning. “He entered the same gate. He knew…” Malkier said. “And the weapon, it is—”

  “I know,” Heyer whispered.

  A moment passed, and Malkier turned his eyes questioningly to Heyer. “You have spoken to the man responsible?” Malkier asked. “You could not have known to come so quickly if it were otherwise.”

  Heyer nodded, knowing there was no point in denying what his brother had reasoned out.

  “Does he think himself a warrior?” Malkier asked. “Having murdered a child?”

  “Please, Brother, you know he was given no choice. Do not go looking for a villain,” Heyer said. “There is no justice to pursue on Earth. You must look for answers here. We must know how he entered the gate without our knowledge.”

  Malkier grew quiet, seeming to ponder his brother’s words. As time passed in silence, Heyer sat beside him, hoping that his presence might somehow help to dull what pain it could.

  “This man,” Malkier finally said. “Was he named?”

  Heyer drew in a long breath after the question, and made no attempt to hide that he was not sure if it was wise to answer. His brother was not asking that he reveal the man’s birth name, his Earth identity. Malkier sought to know the honorific Dams the Gate had granted Jonathan. The Ferox often gave those they respected in combat a name. Malkier only hoped to learn what Dams the Gate had thought of his opponent before he fell.

  “Brings the Rain,” Heyer said.

  JULY 1990

  FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  CHAPTER ONE

  JULY 1990 | FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  TEARS RAN DOWN the swell under Grant’s eye as he cowered in the shadows. He was still in pajamas, a child, gripping his knees with his arms as he stared down at the floorboards. He shivered, trying to hear if his aunt’s footsteps were coming closer or heading away.

  Just go, he prayed. You’ll just be later if you keep looking. I’m not worth it.

  He had crawled to the center of the space beneath the antique pool table his uncle had left behind. If he stayed precisely where he was, his aunt couldn’t see him unless she went to the trouble of getting down on her hands and knees. He feared the day she bothered, the day when she gave him the ultimatum of coming out on his own or her crawling in and pulling him out.

  Having hidden here many times, he’d discovered that the underside of the table had been neglected the same detailed attention lavished on the exterior. The outside shined with smooth, oiled wood, but beneath, the surfaces were coarse and splintery to the touch. Whoever built the table must have felt there was nothing to be gained spending time on the interior when the exterior was all anyone saw.

  Finally, Grant heard the spring on their back door as it stretched and then pulled the door shut, followed by the clicks of his aunt’s heels receding up the driveway. When her car’s engine started, he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled and shut his eyes, gasping air in hungrily now that she was gone. He began to whimper. When the engine sounded far enough away, he crawled out from under the table and walked to the window to watch her car turn the corner.

  He was on borrowed time now. When she was late for work, it would be his fault. He’d been what slowed her down. She wouldn’t forget—this morning’s terror was only on pause until his aunt came home that evening.

  He stepped away from the window and sat on the couch, staring emptily at his bare feet. He thought over what had led to the swollen spot beneath his eye. He’d forgotten to put his toys away, left them out on the floor of the hallway. She had snapped the heel of her shoe when she’d stepped awkwardly on one of the action figures.

  He’d woken up in pain when his aunt struck him in the cheek with the same toy. It had taken him a while to understand, but she’d been screaming at him. Grant was a selfish and worthless drain, she said—the reason for everything wrong in her life. He was why her husband had left them, why her sister had died in childbirth. She despised him when strangers thought he was her bastard child. His only value was when they knew that he wasn’t hers, when she could brag about her selfless adoption of her sister’s poor orphaned child. His only value was as a symbol of her charity.

  Grant heard the clock ticking then, the only sound in the empty house. Seeing the time, he bit his lip and reached for the television remote, a hopeful smile growing on his face as he flipped stations and finally heard the theme of his favorite cartoon.

  “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” said the television.

  He leaned forward on the couch and watched Prince Adam of Eternia in yet another life-and-death struggle with the evil Skeletor. Grant waited for his favorite part, when all seemed lost and the good guys brought out the real weapon. He was transfixed as Prince Adam reached for the Sword of Power sheathed across his back and raised it into the air.

  Then came the words that flipped the switch: “By the power of Greyskull!”

  Lightning and magic funneled into Adam through the sword, transforming him. His clothing was stripped away to reveal a battle harness and chest plate with its insignia of the red iron cross.

  “I have the power!” He-Man roared.

  The events of the morning were forgotten for a half-hour as cartoon images danced across Grant’s eyes. The story quieted his fears. No one knew who Prince Adam had been destined to become. One day, a wise and mystical being had come along and given him limitless strength, and every powerless moment that had come before was finally given meaning.

  OCTOBER 2005

  NOW

  CHAPTER TWO

  THURSDAY | OCTOBER 6, 2005 | 2:00 AM | SEATTLE

  JONATHAN STOOD IN front of the mirror, gold lines of light radiating out from beneath his skin. He’d been alone in his bedroom when the twitch in his chest told him the enemy had opened the gates. The absence of the searing pain that normally accompanied activation had been enough to make him suspect he was dreaming. The two figures on either side of him in the reflection confirmed it.

  His father’s expression was grim but certain. Opposite him stood the little girl in the pink hoodie. J
onathan didn’t know her name, but most nights, her dead eyes waited for him in the reflection. Whenever he gazed back, all he could feel was the guilt of abandoning her. Most nights, he didn’t meet the child’s eyes, but tried to look at his father’s. Douglas placed a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel the reassuring weight of it—he could only see the gesture in the mirror before his father gave him a nod.

  Jonathan hardened his expression and returned it—the time for standing in front of mirrors was over.

  He didn’t remember gathering his gear, pulling Excali-bar out of its concealment, or starting the engine on his bike. Time played its tricks as it always did in dreams, and soon he was speeding down a street, tracking the enemy with alien instincts. Knowing that he was only off to fight a dream didn’t change anything.

  He was later than he preferred, the gateway having already delivered its passenger. He could feel the Ferox on the move near the east end of the city. A moment later, he was on the outskirts of downtown, amongst the older brick buildings. No longer on the roads, he ran along the city’s roof tops, tracking the signal as it moved between the buildings on the streets below.

  He leaped, quiet and efficient, from one roof to the next. The Ferox thundered its way forward in search of people to slaughter, unaware that the very life it sought to take was closing in from above. Something was off about this dream though, different, and Jonathan sensed it like a man who was approaching the wrong car in a parking lot. The make, model, and paint job may have all been correct, but he suspected he was approaching a vehicle that he didn’t have the key to.

  Jonathan didn’t recognize this part of the city, wasn’t sure if he’d ever been here. Regardless, the dream carried him forward. He pushed himself to come into striking distance and threw himself from the safety of the roof tops. He began a hard descent toward his enemy’s back. Its skin was blood red, covered in the chaotic web-like exterior of black tar. The Ferox’s biological armor was a warning not to underestimate it. Tonight’s enemy was older, more experienced, more controlled. It would not easily lose its patience, not be as quick to give into instinctual rage like one of the species’ frog-skinned adolescents.

  He tucked his knees toward his chest as he plunged out of the skyline, readying against the coming impact. This maneuver… it seemed as if he’d practiced it tirelessly, to the point of thoughtless execution, but that familiarity was strange. He wasn’t merely starting the fight with a surprise attack, but a devastating combination of strikes. Yet, what followed was a mystery to him the moment it began.

  When they connected, the Ferox’s feet lost contact with the ground, its body slamming into the street as he pressed his knee into its lower back and grabbed hold of its shoulders. He rode the momentum aboard his enemy’s back while its face bore through the asphalt, tearing a gouge into the street beneath them.

  This wasn’t going to stop it—the Ferox could take a lot of damage—but Jonathan knew the bastard was going to feel it. The friction from ripping through the street finally brought them to a stop, but he was two steps into the future before his enemy had a chance to shake its surprise. He realized that he expected the Red to plant a fist into the pavement, that it was beginning to push itself up out of the ground by putting the weight onto its right arm. He knew when the moment was right, and struck with precision into the side of its shoulder blade.

  He understood what he’d done when a wail of agony screamed out beneath him.

  In that brief instant, while the Red’s arm was placed just so, a chink in its armor had presented itself. His fist had targeted it as though he’d exploited the weakness a hundred times before. He’d felt the soft give in the creature’s exterior, thinner skin, when his strike slipped in past its rugged outer armor and hit a leathery patch that covered a joint in the creature’s skeleton.

  Jonathan jumped, back flipping off the Ferox to land on his feet behind it. He’d gotten clear right before the thrashing Ferox turned over and lashed out for him. Experience told him to push the advantage, that he should have kept the Red pinned, should have relentlessly hammered the back of the beast’s skull into the asphalt while it was face down. Even though every neuron in his mind was screaming that this was a mistake, the dream gave no regard, refused to obey his sense of strategy. Unable to seize control of his actions, he could only watch as the Ferox rose back to its full height and set its empty white gaze on him. Yet, the menace that usually stared back at him was conflicted, hiding flinches of pain. The Ferox’s right arm hung limp at its side, and the creature was trying to avoid moving it.

  Jonathan’s eyes grew wide as he realized it was injured. Feroxian bones were strong, near impossible to break, but they were malleable. From the look of the arm, Jonathan was betting that he’d put a bend in its skeleton, right at the joint, which had hindered its movement. He watched the Red slowly come to the same conclusion. Hesitation surfaced on its face and it took a step back instead of forward.

  “It’s called fear,” Jonathan said. “Your entire species is going to feel it.”

  The moment was stolen from him without warning as pain shot down his left side.

  Suddenly, knocked off his feet and spinning in the air, the building on the far side of the street came charging toward him. He was upside down when he hit, nearly punching through the brick and mortar of the building’s exterior. The wall held, though with a man-sized dent left behind, and debris following him as he dropped back onto sidewalk. He reached for Excali-bar on instinct, already in motion, crouched onto his knees and ignored the many reports of pain from his body. He searched the street for what could have hit him, finding where he’d stood a moment earlier.

  There was nothing, only a sudden, disturbing silence.

  It was as though a Ferox had walked up behind him and backhanded him across the street. Yet, that was impossible. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the beast, hadn’t felt any movement within his mind. He fought down a sudden surge of adrenaline as he realized he no longer felt his enemy at all. The asphalt still lay torn apart in the street like a trail of destruction pointing to where the injured Red should still be standing, but it had vanished.

  The sound of breaking glass and bending metal drew his attention. Turning toward the noise, he saw an overturned pickup truck barreling down on him. With no time, his reflexes thrust him forward, sending him rolling into the street and barely getting clear before the vehicle finished punching a hole through the wall.

  Coming out of the roll onto his knees, Jonathan felt the rumbling thud of a massive body hitting the street behind him. A shadow crawled over him, the night seeming to grow darker as he knelt in the street with his back exposed. He spun, coming to his feet and fully committing as he swung Excali-bar at his attacker.

  There was a thunderous clap as the demolition bar connected.

  Jonathan’s body jerked to a painful and unexpected halt after having struck an unmovable object. A massive black fist had closed around the end of his weapon. His gaze followed up its arm—charcoal, rhino-like, Feroxian skin covered with the crisscrossing black tar. When his eyes reached its face, where its empty white slits stared down at him, he saw it was waiting for his attention. The Ferox studied him with an almost human calmness he’d never seen in the species. Its stillness quickly began to drill holes in his mental armor.

  “They will not follow you,” the Black Ferox said. “You have no hope to offer them.”

  Its words did not translate in his mind. They came to him in English, though disturbed by the guttural tone of Feroxian vocal cords.

  The words were followed by a short-lived quiet inside of him. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he saw fractures forming across a brick wall, black smoke seeping through the cracks. He swallowed the urge to run, choked it down into a void within him. He could hear it, a pressure building, shaking the city around him, the asphalt breaking beneath his feet as his dream began to crumble.

  When he spoke, his words betrayed a raw hatred for this monster who dared to spe
ak his fears. “No, I can’t give them hope,” Jonathan said, then his voice dropped to a whisper, “but I can give them anger.”

  The Ferox studied him, pondering the reaction, its eyes taking in the shaking landscape of the dream with a demeaning curiosity. When Jonathan’s stare failed to waiver, the beast spoke one last time. “Your anger,” it said, “will never be enough.”

  With impossible speed and strength, the beast kicked into his chest. The grip Jonathan had on Excali-bar, the footing he had on the ground, and the air he had in his lungs was all lost in an instant. The pull of gravity seemed to shift violently, and he was airborne, watching the face of the monster and the crumbling streets rapidly shrinking below him. Yet he didn’t feel as though he were shooting through the air, rather, as though he were falling.

  He fought to breathe, though his lungs insisted that they had forgotten how. He finally gasped—air came in and his heart began to slow. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, sitting up to place his feet on the cool floorboards. His room was dark, but the moonlight from his bedroom window let him see the outline of his reflection in the mirror. Only Jonathan looked back at him. In time, the illusions of the nightmare resolved themselves with reality.

  His dreams had always been relentless, but for weeks now, they had ended on the same theme. He felt he’d already gotten the message his subconscious seemed so adamant that he acknowledge. His self-doubt didn’t seem to want to take any chance he might forget it.

  The muffled sounds of the television downstairs told him he wasn’t the only person up, and he knew it was Hayden again. There was no point mentioning that he had noticed his roommate’s insomnia—Jonathan would have been the pot calling the kettle black. In truth, he had been grateful of the development. He didn’t wish for his friend to have any issues sleeping, of course, but since Jonathan had last spoken to Heyer, he’d had more trouble sleeping through the night. His roommate being in the same boat gave him someone else to talk to.