Evil shouldn’t be lurking here, in this strange dream world where the long-dead lay in peace.
And…it wasn’t exactly evil that he sensed. It was more a warning against evil, as if the dead in this dank place in the earth had somehow escaped the bounds of their shrouds to sense a growing disturbance in the earth.
As he walked, smelling the earth and mold, the musk of time and bodies long forgotten, he mocked himself. For one thing, he was dreaming, and in dreams, the message might be real but the evil was imaginary. For another, he did not believe that the earth itself could be evil. Evil lived in the heart or the soul. It was made manifest by those who reveled in its cruelty.
But as he walked, he felt the dead, felt their pain, and he imagined that there was a wind here, and that the wind was the whisperings of the dead. He knew that he was once again walking toward the light ahead, that the light was drawing him. When he reached it, he would once again see that strange stone tomb, and the light would surround him. In the maze of tunnels that stretched out in every direction, candles would glow from sconces set in the walls. Legions of the dead rested there.
He knew he would come upon the mysterious woman, and he would try to go closer, closer…and see what lurked beneath the hood, what visage lay hidden there.
Only once had he shared his dream, and seeing the face of another, he had been stunned. The other man had been so real, as if they had both stumbled upon the path like wandering tourists, only to startle one another. He had awakened from the dream that night startled and disturbed.
Tonight he looked down the corridor, but he was alone.
And he was approaching the center.
The wind that was not wind rustled, carrying the voices of the dead. He heard the strange clicking sound as the skeletons began to rebuild themselves.
One, bearing an ancient shield beneath the tattered remnants of his shroud, struggled to rise. The bony face stared at him sightlessly. The brittle finger bones clicked as the corpse attempted to point at him. The skeletal jaw moved, and the wind seemed to form words. Shakespearean words.
“‘Thou shalt beget kings, tho’ be none.’”
So far, he had done no “begetting” of any kind, he thought. He stared at the skeleton, and he did not fear it.
The wind seemed to guide him again, and he moved toward the light. But this time, before he could reach it, the earth beneath him rumbled and rose. He nearly fell. Around him, a shelf in the rock crashed down, corpses shattering to dust. The rumbling was growing worse, and the ground began to undulate wildly…
He awoke, sitting straight up in bed. At his side, his wife, who knew him so well, jerked up, as well. “Lucien?” she said quietly.
“There’s been an earthquake. Somewhere.”
“There are often earthquakes somewhere, my love,” she said, yawning. But then she bolted straight up, as well. “Maggie!…Maggie is out in L.A. visiting Melanie, and they have earthquakes there all the time.”
He turned on the television, clicking the remote until he found one of the 24/7 news networks.
In moments he realized that his dream had been true…
The quake registered 4.0 on the Richter scale. Definitely not the big one, but strong enough to cause some serious scattered damage. Centered south of L.A., it did more damage in the Anaheim area than anywhere else. Certain sections of Los Angeles and Orange counties never even lost power, while some areas would be looking at two to three weeks before all public utilities were restored. Thanks to satellite communication, Melanie was able to draw up that much information on her cell phone immediately, even as she made her way back home.
She was deeply relieved to reach Maggie by phone with equal ease and hear that her friend had taken her car and headed for her apartment to wait for her. Melanie lived in Los Feliz, bordering Hollywood, in an apartment she could reach either from the street or from her small storefront, where she sold high-end pet supplies.
Since she had been through a few minor quakes before, she had decorated accordingly. She didn’t have glass knickknacks on her shelves, nor had she hung many things on the walls, in either her apartment or her shop. When she reached her apartment—where, she had to admit, she’d gotten a bit carried away with an astrological theme—she found that her books were strewn across the floor but she’d suffered no other damage. Maggie wasn’t in the apartment, so Melanie ignored the books for the moment and walked through to the shop.
The lights were on; she hadn’t lost electricity. When she’d first moved to L.A. she’d rued the fact that she didn’t have plate-glass windows looking out on the street; now she was glad. Amazingly, she hadn’t lost a single windowpane. Peering through her chintz curtains, she could see that other buildings around her hadn’t fared so well; many of her neighbors were out sweeping up broken glass.
The corkboard she kept on one wall for posting notices and pictures had fallen, and Maggie was busy collecting the collars and leashes—plain and designer, big and small—that lay scattered around the room.
“Earthquakes!” Maggie said with a shudder.
Melanie grimaced. “At least so far I haven’t heard that any deaths have been reported.”
“So far,” Maggie said quietly.
“Hey, you live with hurricanes. That’s the way it is. There is no actual paradise on earth, you know.”
Maggie set a rhinestone collar on the counter and stared at Melanie. “Okay, so—what happened after you ran out like a crazy woman?”
Melanie righted the bar stool she kept behind the counter and sat down. “I don’t know, exactly,” she admitted.
“The way to tell a story is from the beginning to the end, you know,” Maggie commented dryly.
Maggie took a deep breath. “Okay. We were out for the evening when the earthquake hit. I went outside to—”
“You’re already neglecting something,” Maggie pointed out.
“What?”
“You suddenly becoming Rembrandt.”
Melanie shook her head and waved a hand in the air, dismissing her artwork. “I heard someone screaming from Mr. Delancy’s jewelry shop, and there were six guys there attacking Mr. D and Viv Larson, the salesgirl, and then…” She paused and shook her head, as if trying to make sense of everything that had happened. “Then this guy showed up, and he…well, he must have had some kind of martial-arts training or something, because I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. Anyway, he went after the guys beating up Mr. D, and I chased the guy who took Viv. I followed them to the cemetery farther down Santa Monica, and when I got there, the guy showed up again. I mean, it was weird. He was tall enough, and well built, but I have no idea how he took on all six of those creeps.”
“You know what they say. Disaster brings out the best and worst in people.”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?”
“He survived. And I still don’t know what he was doing there,” Melanie said.
Maggie picked up a broom and started sweeping. “Melanie, don’t you think he was pretty surprised to see you there, as well? I mean, how many women who look like you turn out to be good in a fight?”
“Lots,” Melanie said with a laugh. “This is Hollywood, remember?”
Maggie didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. She just stopped sweeping and stared at Melanie. “Well, was he…?”
“Like me?” Melanie asked softly.
“Yes,” Maggie said flatly.
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I know he wasn’t.”
“You’re certain?”
“I think so.”
“‘I’m certain’ and ‘I think so’ are not the same thing,” Maggie said. “It’s very strange,” she continued gravely.
“Maybe he just studied kung fu or something. It’s not so strange—maybe.”
Maggie stopped sweeping to wave a hand in the air. “I don’t mean just your stranger helping out. I mean the whole evening.”
“Honestly, an earthquake in California isn’t strange,
” Melanie said.
Maggie let out a sigh of exasperation. “Not the earthquake. The drawings.”
“They were doodles,” Melanie said uneasily.
“Museum-quality doodles.”
“Well, they’re gone now,” Melanie said.
Maggie placed a hand on her hip. “No, they’re not. I took them with me. And I’m going to show them to Lucien. If anyone can figure out what’s going on with you, it will be Lucien.”
“Lucien is in New Orleans,” Melanie pointed out.
“No, Lucien is on his way here. I just talked to him.”
“Is he—flying in?” Melanie asked.
“Of course he’s flying in.”
“But the airport—”
“Suffered no major damage. Limited flights will begin arriving tomorrow around noon.”
“You’re kidding. After all this?” Melanie asked.
Maggie nodded. “As you said, an earthquake in California is nothing out of the ordinary. Your TV is working just fine, and a few local stations never even went off the air. Of course, one of them has been airing some kind of psychic who claims that this was just a warning. That the real quake is coming and it will be Armageddon.” Maggie rolled her eyes, then managed a smile at last. “The end of the world as we know it. He says this was a prelude to the cataclysm of 2012, as foretold by the Mayans.”
“What?”
“Are you telling me you’ve never heard of the Mayan prophecy?” Maggie asked.
Melanie felt edgy and impatient, but mostly because Maggie seemed to be taking everything so seriously. “Sure, I’ve heard of it. For some reason they decided the world will end in 2012.”
“It’s not that simple. They based their calculations on a bunch of factors—the ancient Mayans were brilliant astronomers and mathematicians. They said we’re going through a cycle, a twenty-six thousand year evolution, and that culminates on the winter solstice, December twenty-first, 2012. It wasn’t just the Mayans who thought so, either. Other societies had similar prophecies, including the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Navajo and the Apache—and if you look at them closely, you can see hints of the same thing in Druid, ancient Semitic, Celtic, Norse, Greek and Roman beliefs.”
“The Egyptians worshipped cats, you know,” Melanie reminded her.
“You know, lots of people think cats rule,” Maggie said lightly. “But getting back to my point, the Hindus also speak of the stages of life, and the end of one of the stages coincides almost exactly with the Mayan beliefs.”
“I would think, when you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of years, someone might have mis-counted somewhere along the line,” Melanie said, her tone dry. “Seriously, Maggie, do you actually believe all this?”
Maggie shook her head. “I was speaking with Jade—she called me before I had a chance to get hold of anyone, including Sean, back home. Lucien dreamed there was a quake right as it happened. He and Sean are going to fly out here, and Jade’s already working the Internet for everything it’s worth. But I didn’t get all my information from her. I’ve read a lot about this over the years. I find it fascinating. I was reading an article on the different roads men take to arrive at the same place. In every religion there’s a supreme deity, though often there are other gods and magical, even divine, beings. In Christianity you have angels, including one very bad angel—the devil, who has his own demons to control—and other beliefs have demonic beings, too.”
Melanie stared at her blankly.
“It’s fascinating, really,” Maggie told her. “You, of all people, should see that.”
Melanie flushed. “There’s good and evil in life, we all know that. There’s a spark, or a soul, in all people, and some of those people are good and some are evil, and it doesn’t matter if they come from the U.S., Canada, Europe or Timbuktu, any more than it matters if they’re male or female, black, white, yellow, red or polka-dotted. I know there are things in this world that can’t be explained, but…”
Maggie smiled slowly as Melanie’s voice trailed off. She said firmly, “You drew the four elements.”
“And you called Lucien, and told him that he had to come here because of something I drew on a napkin?”
“I told you—Lucien knew the minute the quake occurred.” She turned away, suddenly sweeping with new industry.
The way Maggie was behaving was scary, Melanie thought. Like Lucien, it seemed that Maggie simply knew things.
“Maggie?” Melanie asked. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. She stopped sweeping and stared at Melanie again. “Okay, I’m concerned. Jade said that Lucien hadn’t been sleeping well.”
“He never sleeps well,” Maggie said. “I…we never sleep deeply.”
Maggie shook her head. “He’s been having dreams.”
“About what?”
“He hasn’t really told her. But she thinks he’s worried. It’s just…Lucien having nightmares, you drawing weird things on cocktail napkins. And then a quake,” Maggie said.
“I think that Lucien is…informing some of our other friends before he comes,” Maggie said. “I think something…big might be afoot.”
Melanie knew that Maggie wasn’t referring to just any friends. She meant that Melanie had somehow started something that would require the presence of many members of their loosely knit group.
The group they called the Alliance.
“It’s important that we find out if this does all mean something, don’t you think?” Maggie asked.
“I was just sketching,” Melanie said. But her protest sounded weak even to her own ears, and she felt an odd mix of both anticipation and dread.
“Tonight, that man you saw? He wasn’t one of the Alliance?”
“Definitely not. I would know.”
“Then for all we know, he’s part of what’s going on. It will be good to have Lucien and Sean here.”
“Sure. It will be great to see them, no matter what,” Melanie agreed, then picked up a bag of dog food and put it back on a shelf, trying to behave normally.
Just what the hell was going on?
And who the hell was the tall dark stranger who had come to the rescue, just like a modern-day knight in denim armor?
Whoever he was, he was not like her, but there was…something about him.
It had seemed easy enough to Scott when he had been chasing the lowlifes who had decided to use the earthquake as an excuse for robbery, and attempted rape and murder.
But after the burst of energy he’d expended disappearing as the cops closed in on the mausoleum, the walk home seemed to be a long one. It was bizarre the way one block showed so much damage, while the next appeared almost as if nothing had happened at all. But ever since he’d made L.A. his home, he’d become well acquainted with earthquakes and their aftereffects.
As he made his way down Santa Monica, he stopped occasionally to help people. He managed to help a guy lift the end of his Mini Cooper off his front porch, and he moved a broken gargoyle that had landed on a woman’s steps, imprisoning her in her house. People were still out on the streets, but as he walked along, it seemed that they were already coping better with the crisis. Lights from streets with power cast a pale glow over streets that had none, neighbors were out helping one another, but mainly people were just standing around talking, trading information from cell phones with Internet capacity and calls to friends in other neighborhoods as to what had happened in the rest of the city.
As he turned toward his own neighborhood off Sunset, a woman came running toward him. “Sir, do you have a phone?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Do you have service?”
“I do,” he told her. She was in her forties, and attractive, but her features were filled with pain and fear—some of it that her request might be rejected.
“If I could—I can pay you.”
“Please,” he said, and handed her the phone. She glanced at him gratefully and then began to punch in a number with shak
ing fingers.
“Tommy?” she said. He heard the male voice on the other end. Tommy had apparently answered. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, and as he listened to her side of the conversation, he realized that she had reached her son, who was attending a local college. He moved a few steps away and let her talk as long as she wanted.
It wasn’t as if there was anyone waiting for him at home.
She finished her call and handed the phone back to him, tear tracks still wet on her face but a smile on her lips. “Bless you,” she told him. “Thank you. Thank you so much!”
“Not a problem,” he said, smiling as he took his phone back. “I’m glad to hear that Tommy is okay. There hasn’t been a single fatality reported.”
She nodded. He could tell that she wanted to care about the rest of the world, but she was just too relieved that her son was alive and well to think about anything else.
“Only child?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad he’s fine,” Scott said again, then offered a casual wave as he started walking again.
Strength wasn’t everything, he thought, as he kept heading toward home. It never had been. An oldie went through his head. Dionne Warwick, he was pretty sure: What the world needs now is love, sweet love.
It was corny, but it was still true, and never more so than tonight.
There were undoubtedly more bad guys out—a natural disaster like this one was sure to bring them out of the woodwork. But on his way home, he was encouraged to see that the best of mankind seemed to be on show.
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