Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (32 page)

Sam snorted and said, “Perfect.”

Mara looked down at the shirt emblazoned with a cartoon boy riding a dragon over the words
How to Train Your Dragon
.

* * *

Mara sat cross-legged at the head of her bed, staring down at the duplicate Chronicle of Creation. She wondered if it was possible for this copy to be used to display the three-dimensional sphere that represented a map of the realms. It seemed odd that it would be as simple as that, even if Ping persisted on saying that the copper medallion had no power, that the ability to see and cross between realms came from a progenitor, not this ornate thingamabob.

She had hoped her mother would be willing to sit down with her and meditate, help Mara focus enough to see if she could actually conjure up the big blue bubble. However, Diana wanted nothing to do with the device, which was not surprising, considering her last interaction with it had led to her body being taken over by her counterpart from another realm. Not only had her mother refused to help with the Chronicle, she had banished Mara and Sam from the living room, after putting Hannah down for the night. Diana then meditated but not over the Chronicle.

A knock came at her bedroom door, and Sam cracked it open enough to speak without shouting through it. “What did you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

“Come on in,” Mara said. “I wanted to talk about this.” She pointed to the Chronicle.

Sam entered the room and said, “Okay, what about it?”

“Originally I assumed Mom would sit with me, while I tried to activate it, just to see if it would work, but she begged off, saying it gave her the heebie-jeebies after all that happened before,” she said. “Anyway it occurred to me that it might be a better idea for you to be here with me while I try. Would you mind?” She pointed to the foot of her queen-size bed on the other side of the Chronicle, inviting him to take a seat.

“Sure, I guess.” He shrugged and took his place across from her. “Why do you need anyone at all? I mean, you’ve activated the Chronicle on your own several times before, right?”

“Yes, but this isn’t the actual Chronicle, and I suppose I thought having someone around for encouragement would increase the likelihood that it would work,” she said.

“Bag the encouragement, sis. I’ll just prompt you to do it, then you’ll see that you have the ability, and we can all get along with our lives. After all, Ping said it’s just a talisman, and the ability to use it comes from you. Why sit around fretting about it, when we can just do it, no fuss, no muss?” Sam said.

Mara shook her head. “No, I hate when you do that. It makes me feel weak and needy.”

“Well, stop being weak and needy, and I’ll stop prompting you.”

Mara gritted her teeth. “Don’t be a jerk.”

Sam held up his hands above his head and said. “Make a bubble, sis, and I’ll stop being a jerk. I promise.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re a little brother, and then there are times like now …” she said.

Ignoring her, he closed his eyes and placed his hands in the
dhyana mudra
, the classic meditation posture, in which his arms rested along his crossed legs and the fingers of his right hand rested atop his left, while the tips of his thumbs touched.

“Nice form. Have you and Mom been practicing behind my back?” she said, taking the position herself.

Sam opened one eye and said, “Are we doing this or what?”

“All right, all right. I’m getting with the program. Give me a minute to get my wits about me.”

They sat in silence for several minutes, while Mara concentrated on not being peeved at her brother. Once her heart rate settled, she tried to envision the translucent blue sphere erupting from the copper medallion. She couldn’t get the picture to come into her mind. She kept recalling the events in Stella Reese’s kitchen earlier that day, the way the sphere looked and acted on that occasion. It was subtly different, the black tear inside the bubble, how Abby walked out of it, the way she seemed to draw energy from the periphery of bubble to display the molten ball of glowing mercury, even how the nodes and lines appeared at the twitch of her wrist. It was all different, like she had more control or practice. Maybe Mara was doing it wrong.

Sam cleared his throat.

Mara narrowly opened one eye to see him staring back at her, exasperated.

“Exactly how long do you guess this will take?” he asked.

“We’ve only been at this for a minute or two.”

He shook his head and glanced over at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s been just shy of twenty minutes since I closed my eyes. I about fell asleep.”

“Really? I guess I got distracted thinking about this afternoon.”

“What happened this afternoon?”

Mara closed her eyes and said, “Later. Let’s do this.”

“Maybe it would help if you held the Chronicle in your palm. Isn’t that how you normally use it?” Sam nodded toward the medallion lying on the bed.

Mara opened her eyes. “You know, that’s true. Maybe that’s my problem.” She picked it up and held it in front of her. She slowly closed her eyes and concentrated again.

“Isn’t there something you say before you got it to activate, some kind of incantation or something?”

“Don’t let Ping hear you say that. You know how he gets about all the magic references. But, yes, I used to say something to activate it, but it really wasn’t necessary.”

“Looks like it might be necessary now, ’cause I’m not seeing a blue bubble, sis.”

Her eyes snapped open and said, “Maybe if you would stop haranguing me, I could get it to work.” She looked down at the medallion and said, “Show me creation.”

The Chronicle floated a few inches above her palm and spun, its blue crystals emitting a blue light that smeared into bright circular tracks. Then it flipped vertically while it spun, turning into a blur. A brilliant light radiated from it, and the floating medallion transformed into the familiar roiling ball of shining mercury.

Mara smiled. It was working.

The bubble burst from the molten ball, but as it passed through Sam to fill the room, his body disintegrated into a mass of shiny cubes, pixels that flew in every direction. Before panic could take hold, Mara watched the pixels come back together, reassemble themselves.

But not into the familiar profile of her brother. Sam was gone.

In his place, sitting across from Mara in the center of the transparent blue bubble was another Mara, with a stern expression on her face.

Having forgotten she was sitting at the head of her bed, Mara attempted to jump to her feet and lost her balance, stumbling backward and crashing into the wall above the headboard, setting off several electrical snaps, as her head and arm passed through the edge of the static sphere that filled the room. She gave up trying to reestablish her balance and tumbled to the mattress, landing on her side, splayed across the pillows. Clawing at the bedspread, she pulled herself up into a sitting position and demanded, “What have you done with my brother?”

The other Mara raised a finger and drew a circle in the air, pointed to the bubble around them. “Does anything look different to you?”

“Answer my question,” Mara said. “Where is Sam?”

Her counterpart’s eyes looked upward, as if she were solving a difficult puzzle, and in a mocking tone said, “Let me see. How would Sam explain it to you?” She paused and tapped her cheek with an index finger. After a moment she said, “Ah, pixels. That will work.”

Mara leaned forward, reaching out, and said, “Bring him back now!”

The other Mara dodged her and raised her hands in warning. “Even though I’m not using my own body at the moment, it might be a mistake for you to touch me. I’m not sure if it will set off an explosion or not. Just calm down, and I’ll explain everything. I’m not here to harm you or Sam.”

Mara drew back and fell against the pillows. “What do you mean, you’re not using your own body?”

“I guess you could say that I borrowed Sam’s pixels for a few minutes, so we could talk,” she said. “Don’t worry. He won’t be harmed, and I have no desire to stay here any longer than necessary,” she said.

“You’ve placed your consciousness inside Sam’s body?”

Her counterpart shrugged. “That’s as good an explanation as any. I didn’t want to just show up and have a prompter start telling me what to do.”

“So where is Sam right now?”

“He’s still in here somewhere, but I’m sort of in the driver’s seat for the moment. I was going to park him in another realm somewhere, but, with all the riffraff running around, I wasn’t so sure how safe that would be. Believe me, he’ll be as good as new, when we are done talking.”

“So talk,” Mara said.

Her counterpart waved her finger in a circular motion above their heads again. “Have you noticed anything different recently?”

Mara glanced upward, into the blue haze that surrounded them. Black contrails of fading mist crisscrossed the inside of the bubble, some leading to a particular node, others seemed to fade into nothingness. All of them appeared to be coming from the node directly above Mara’s head, almost as if something sooty had been dragged across the air, polluting and corrupting the clear blue static of the bubble.

She shook her head. “I’ve not seen that before, but it has been a few days since I’ve interacted with the Chronicle. What is it?”

“Remains,” her counterpart said.

Mara frowned. “Remains of what?”

“Remains of people dragged from your realm and left in the void, where they have dissolved into oblivion. It’s a senseless slaughter, and you must do something to stop it, before it is too late,” her counterpart said.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“There’s a creature from your realm, who looks like my friend Abby. She is the one who is doing this. It looks like she’s using these people as a conduit or guide of some kind into their realms, but she’s not simply hitching a ride with them. She’s abandoning them out here before she enters their realms, leaving them behind like discarded bread crumbs. What I don’t understand is why and how all these people from different realms ended up in your realm in the first place.”

“In an incident a couple months ago, more than a hundred people from various realms crossed over,” Mara said.

“So you had an accident with this Chronicle of yours and let a few dozen people from other realms into yours? Then you had the big battle with a version of Mom with snake tattoos on the Oregon City Bridge …”

“Snake Mom’s Mara is the one who caused the big mess with people crossing over from other realms, not me. And how do you know about the thing on the bridge?”

“I was one of the Maras you summoned to pull Snake Mom from your mom’s body, remember?” She dismissed the subject with a wave of her hand. “Anyway you need to get a grip on your psycho friend Abby. Apart from being a metaphysical serial killer, she’s clearly not going into these realms on vacation. Something bigger is going on.”

“What do you mean,
something bigger
?”

“What happened to Abby? In my realm she doesn’t have any metaphysical abilities at all, and, while she can be a little obnoxious occasionally, she certainly hasn’t shown any propensity or desire to kill people.”

Mara locked eyes with her counterpart. “How long has it been since you talked to your Abby?”

“It’s probably been a couple weeks. Why?”

“The creature you think looks like Abby isn’t just a version of her from my realm. Her consciousness from every realm was captured and melded into an entity called the Aphotis. I’m sure when you go back to where you came from, your Abby will be missing. Anyway she thinks she’s in some kind of cosmic battle with me for the fate of existence. I’m not sure what all this other stuff has to do with it.” Mara waved at the black trails of mist.

“How did this happen? Abby’s not a progenitor. How can she move from realm to realm?”

“At one point, before this entity captured Abby, it possessed me. Somehow it picked up on my abilities by tapping into my knowledge, awareness and beliefs. It then stole the Chronicle and disappeared.”

“This Chronicle, what is it?” the other Mara asked.

“It’s a jeweled copper medallion I used to access this,” Mara said, pointing to the bubble around them.

“So, it’s a talisman, a charm of sorts.”

“That’s what Ping keeps telling me. You don’t use one?”

She shook her head. “I can project my consciousness at will into any place, person or object.”

“Interesting. Mom has friends who believe they can do something called astral projection, but this looks a little more … I don’t know how to describe it. And when you do this, you rearrange their appearance to match your own?”

“Not always. This time I wanted you to know it was me and not Sam talking. It’s important that you understand how grave the situation is. This Aphotis thing of yours is wreaking havoc in the realms that she is visiting. She’s not just killing a few people unfortunate enough to have ended up in your realm.”

“How do you know this?”

“Like I said, I can project, even into other realms when necessary.”

Mara slumped forward and put her head into her hands. “How can all this be going on, but I’m not getting a hint of what to do?
Ignore the dragon
. Nothing about Hannah. No help for Abby. It absolutely makes no sense.”

“I’m sorry. You are talking gibberish. Can you pull yourself together and say something coherent?”

Mara looked up and said, “How can I be sending messages to myself from the future and not even drop a single clue about all the stuff that is happening now? Not a word about Abby killing people or invading other realms. How can that be?”

Her counterpart’s eyes widened. “Did you say you are getting messages from the future? From
you
in the future?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That’s not good. That’s bad.”

“That’s redundant—and not very helpful, by the way.” Mara said.

Her counterpart pointed at her chest and asked, “Have you ever manipulated the element of Time before?”

“Yeah, I’ve frozen Time in a limited area a few times, and once I actually rolled it back a few hours. That was after the brouhaha at the bridge.”