Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (2 page)

Sam shrugged. “I didn’t let her. She just ran out here, when she heard you knocking.”

Mara and Ping walked up to stand by Sam next to the front counter.

Diana turned to Hannah. “What’s your name, cutie?”

Hannah giggled. “It’s so silly you don’t know my name, Nana. Just like my dad.” She pointed a finger at Sam.

Diana’s eyes widened. “Somebody please explain to me what is going on. I spent the last three hours dodging mindless rotting people trying to get to my daughter—who lied to me and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night—and now I’m standing in the middle of a disaster area holding a little girl who is calling me Nana.”

Sam reddened and turned to Mara. He held up a hand, inviting her to explain.

“Well, um, Mom, like she said, or rather, sang to you, this is Hannah. And you are Hannah’s, ah, nana.”

Diana slowly turned to Sam. “She’s your … daughter?”

Sam stared up at the ceiling, avoiding his mother’s gaze. He rubbed his face and looked back at her. “We think so,” he said.

“We think so? How is that even possible? She looks like she’s about five years old. Is it normal for boys in your realm to conceive children when they are eight or nine?” Diana asked.

Sam waved a hand. “No, no, you don’t understand—”

“I understand that you should have given me a heads-up before now that not only was I going to have to deal with a son but a granddaughter as well. Are there any more relatives from alternate realities that I should know about?”

“Mom, hold on,” Mara said. “Hannah is not from another realm. She’s from this one.”

“This one? Sam’s only been here for a couple months.”

“She is from the future. She is Sam’s daughter in the future.”

“The future?”

“Right. At some point in the future Sam has a daughter named Hannah.”

Diana walked over to the counter and lifted Hannah onto it, next to where Sam stood. “You’re too heavy to stand around holding.” She smiled at her granddaughter and turned back to Mara. “So, what is she doing here now?”

“We don’t really know,” Mara said.

“Well, how did she get here?”

“Mar-ree sent me,” Hannah said.

“Mar-ree?” Diana raised an eyebrow.

Mara sighed. “That’s what she calls me. Apparently, at some point in the future, I send her back to our time, but that’s all we know.”

Diana turned to Hannah and asked, “Sweetie, why did your aunt Mara send you to visit us?”

“To bring the book and make her shine,” Hannah said. “Can we go to your house and have banana pancakes?”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea. We’ll go in just a minute.” To Mara she said, “Did she have a book with her?”

Mara nodded. “Yes, but the pages are blank.”

“And making you
shine
?”

“That’s a little more complicated to explain. She appears to be a prompter, like her father.” Mara glanced over at Sam, who blushed and looked away. “Except she gives people abilities instead of thoughts. I think she might have saved my life last night.”

Diana took a deep breath and scanned the debris in the front of the store. “So you’re saying you slipped out last night and put yourself in a life-threatening situation and your niece from the future showed up to bail you out.”

“There’s a lot more to it than that. You see, I crossed over to another realm and brought back this guy who was supposed to conduct a ceremony to remove Juaquin Prado’s spirit from the bodies of all the shedding victims, except he tried to put it inside me—”

Diana’s eyes widened. “You crossed over to what?” Mara opened her mouth to explain, but her mother raised a hand. “Don’t answer that. Get your stuff, and let’s go home. You’ll have plenty of time to explain, since you are now grounded until you’re thirty.”

Mara rolled her eyes. “I can’t leave until I clean up and get the windows boarded up. I can’t just abandon the shop like this.”

Ping cut in. “I can call the construction crew who worked on the bakery. They can board up both Mr. Mason’s shop and the bakery. It shouldn’t be too long before Mara can come home.”

Diana looked at Sam. “Take your daughter, and let’s go.” Turning to Mara, she said, “Come home as soon as you’ve gotten the shop secured, and please try not to show up with any more relatives. Mr. Ping, we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We will?” Mara asked.

“For dinner, Thanksgiving dinner,” Diana said. She turned and followed Sam and Hannah to the front door. There she paused and looked back. “Where is Abby? If that was her car they towed away out front, you might want to give her a lift back to Oregon City.” She didn’t wait for a response and left.

Mara blanched.

Ping noticed and asked, “That’s a good question. Where is Abby? I don’t remember anything after Prado’s spirit—that black vapor—invaded her body. How did you defeat it?”

“I didn’t.” Mara’s eyes welled up, and she looked downward. “He took her.”

Ping wrapped an arm over Mara’s shoulder. “What do you mean,
he took her
?”

“Prado, the darkling wraith or whatever you want to call it, took Abby, all of her. I think he took her entire consciousness from every realm and
merged
with her somehow.”

“That’s impossible. How could that be?”

“After he possessed Abby’s body, she attacked you. She was literally cooking you on the spot, and she made me open the Chronicle. When she entered the bubble, I saw all the different versions of Abby fly from the nodes and meld with her. All of what she is or could be, that thing took. I think she and Prado are—”

“You think they are what?”

“I think they are one and the same now. Suter called it the Aphotis.”

“I remember asking him about that word. It has some disturbing connotations. Something that is aphotic can live only in darkness. I do not like the sound of that.”

“In Suter’s realm, there is a belief that, at some point, a person’s soul would go viral and become what they called the darkling wraith, possessing many people’s bodies. That’s what happened with Juaquin Prado. They even described the flowing dark vapor we saw on the videos. Eventually this wraith would gather to one person, consuming their soul and becoming one with it.” Mara’s voice cracked. “I think that’s what happened to Abby.”

“But why Abby? Why didn’t it take you, when you were possessed by it?”

“He needed
all
of me, and that was out of reach. He seemed confused by that, like he didn’t realize we all exist in multiple realities and how he only had access to this one realm. Prado needed to merge or consume the entire consciousness of a soul, all its permutations in existence. That was only attainable by using the Chronicle to reach out to every realm, which he was not aware of when he first possessed me.”

“But somehow he was able to attain that knowledge?”

“I think from me, when we were joined. But he figured it out too late. By then I started to shine, as Hannah calls it, and drove him out.”

“That’s when he entered Abby.”

Mara nodded. “And demanded that I open the Chronicle. I practically served Abby’s soul to him on a platter.”

“You could not have known,” Ping said.

“Prado took that knowledge from me and used it against me. He even mocked me with it, talking about how I had so much knowledge and so little understanding. I helped him turn Abby into a monster.” Mara wiped her eyes, preempting tears before they ran down her cheeks. “Remember when we talked about good versus evil?”

“You mean, constructive versus destructive forces,” Ping corrected.

“I mean a metaphysical devil.”

“There is no such thing, simply opposing forces competing to define the nature of existence in differing ways.”

“You mean, the battle for existence,” she said.

“Yes, in a manner of speaking.”

“Well, I think it’s on.”

Ping stared at her for a few seconds and then wiped beads from his brow, despite the cold air wafting in from the shattered window. “Surely you’re not taking that literally, are you?”

Mara pointed to the ceiling. “What happened up on the roof wasn’t a metaphor. That thing took my friend. It took the Chronicle, and, if what I suspect is true, it took enough of me to pose a significant threat to us all.”

Ping went pale. “What do you mean,
it took enough of you
?”

“For a few minutes, it
was
me. Before it left, it shared my knowledge, awareness and beliefs, so—”

“So, if that’s true, it may have your abilities to shape reality, the abilities of a progenitor.” Ping’s eye twitched and then his cheek. He walked around the counter, sat on the high stool behind it and leaned forward. He placed his elbows on its surface and cradled his head in his hands. Without looking up, he said, “I always assumed that the battle of existence referred to something that would be played out over time, an accumulation of constructive and destructive events that would shape the nature of reality. It never occurred to me that it might be an actual altercation between those forces, an actual battle. Perhaps the coming of this Aphotis is why the dragon has been so restless. This intuition, this sonar it sends out, is definitely setting off some kind of alarm in the creature.”

“Considering what happened on the roof when I was possessed, when I lashed out at the dragon, it’s logical that it would be fearful,” Mara said. “You said it could sense danger, even before it arrives.”

“As best I can determine, that is true.”

“And this started up a few days ago, before Prado and the shedding, and me coming back with Suter. As all of that happened, what you felt, did it get worse over time?”

“I would say so.”

“And now? How do you feel? How does
it
feel?”

“Barely contained. As long as the threat exists, I may have trouble controlling it.”

“Then we have to deal with the threat.”

“Mara, I cannot ask you to put yourself in danger for me.”

Mara shook her head. “I would do it for you, but it isn’t just that. I’ve got to get Abby back, if that’s possible, and I’ve got to stop her from whatever it is that she—or this thing she has become—hopes to accomplish.”

“How could you ever find her? If she has the Chronicle of Creation and your abilities to wield it, she could be anywhere.”

“I’m not sure, but, if it’s true that I sent Hannah back from the future with that book, the Chronicle of Continuity, they might hold the keys to what’s going on. Don’t you think?”

“That would seem logical.”

“Why do you think I would entitle the book the Chronicle of Continuity? Does that have any significance? Why appropriate that name,
the Chronicle
, when it already refers to a different object, a copper medallion?”

“Maybe you didn’t appropriate the name.”

“What do you mean?”

“The title of the book is in your handwriting, so it’s obvious that you named it. What if you also named the Chronicle of Creation? The use of the term
chronicle
might be some kind of marker, an indicator to draw your attention. For all we know, you might not only be the author of this book but the creator of the Chronicle of Creation as well.”

“I never saw it before the flight to San Francisco. How is that possible?”

Ping shrugged. “Maybe you created it in the future, or the past, or in another realm. Who knows?” He perked up a bit, as something occurred to him. “There’s a Chronicle of Creation associated with the element of Consciousness. And the Chronicle of Continuity, clearly associated with the element of Time.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, what can you infer and extrapolate from that information?”

“All I can extrapolate at the moment is you are obviously exhausted and talking gibberish,” Mara said.

“You are half correct. I am exhausted, but I think I’m onto something here. What if there’s a Chronicle associated with each element of reality—Consciousness, Time, Space and Consequence?”

Mara rolled her eyes. “You are making my head hurt. Can’t we just call your contractors and get the windows boarded up? I need to go home, get some sleep, wake up and have Thanksgiving dinner, and then I’ve got to fight a battle for existence against my best friend from high school.”

Crunching across the gravel parking lot of Mount Blossoms Nursery, Liz Murray wondered what had gotten her boss all aflutter, not that it was rare for Reuben Stills to get into a tizzy over the most mundane problems. However, it was Thanksgiving morning, and Liz had expected to have the day off. Instead Reuben had summoned her to the small wooded lot south of Portland, home to the office trailer and the sizeable greenhouse that loomed behind it.

Rueben rushed up to her, breathless. “Elizabeth, thank you for coming! You are not going to believe what has happened in the greenhouse!”

Liz rolled her eyes. “Rube, I thought we agreed that I would focus on my responsibilities in the office, so, unless you have an emergency invoice that needs to go out, I’m going to return to fixing my turkey dinner. I have a houseful of relatives coming over in a few hours.” She stood half turned toward her car.

“I know. I promised I wouldn’t ask for your help in the greenhouse, but we’ve had a disaster, and I didn’t know where else to turn.” Rueben held his hands together prayerfully, almost bowing in front of her. “You are not going to believe what happened. All the poinsettias are dying! On Thanksgiving! Do you know what that will do to my business? We may both be out of a job.”

Liz sighed and waved a hand toward the gravel path that led around the trailer to the greenhouse. “I thought you said it wasn’t necessary to keep the poinsettias in the greenhouse, that they could be warehoused for a day or two until we got them to the retailers.”

“That was the original plan, but, with all the craziness going on with the shedding outbreak, I thought it would be less trouble just to put them here, instead of driving into town and getting caught in the mayhem. Besides, the greenhouse was empty, and I thought an extra day or two in a controlled environment would make them look particularly radiant.”

“And you could charge more of a premium for the shops that placed late orders.”