Council of Peacocks (17 page)

“Don’t you dare say another word, Amy!”
Jessica whirled to face Amy so quickly David thought she was going
to hit the other girl.

“Jessica, he’s right,” Todd said. “We should
tell him what little we know.”

The four of them looked at each other for
some time. Their eyes darted to each other, holding a silent vote.
When the tension reached a point where David felt it painful to
breathe, Jessica lowered her head and said: “Whatever. Tell
him.”

Amy put a comforting hand on Jessica’s
shoulder. The other girl pushed it away.

“I’ll tell you a little story,” Bethany said.
“I’ll start with how Wisdom found me. I was living in England –
Liverpool, actually. Life was brilliant. Then, I made the
dim-witted blunder of going with my friend Tanya to this psychic
fair.

“Any who, I got this reading from this
funny-looking woman all dressed in black. Her hair was all
wild-like. She looked like a bad actress trying to pretend she was
a psychic. There was even a crystal ball standing on the middle of
the table.

“So I sat down in this metal chair, ungodly
uncomfortable. She told me her name – can’t remember it now for the
life of me – and pulled out a deck of tarot cards. She told me to
shuffle them while focusing on a question. So I did. I felt this
strange sort of buzzing in my head like I was getting a headache.
My body went numb and my head started to sway. The woman reached
over and took hold of my hands. ‘That’s good enough,’ she says.
Turns out I’d been shuffling them for a couple of minutes.

“She laid out the cards and said “I see a
tall, dark man in your future’. I burst out laughing. I mean, it
was such a campy thing to say. Like something out of an old Roger
Corman movie or something. The psychic lady – I think her name was
Sue or Mary-Sue, something like that – she just smiled like she was
used to that sort of reaction. Then, quick as I can snap, she
wasn’t smiling anymore. Her head flew back and I could feel this
wind. It blew back her hair but didn’t touch the cards at all.
Other people felt it, though. I could tell because all around me
the noise just dropped off. It was actually quiet, except for the
beating of my heart in my head and the words of Suzette. That was
her name. Suzette.

“‘The Dark Man will lead you into a battle
against powerful demons,’ she said. ‘Many people will die. You may
be one of them.’ So by this point I’m kind of getting freaked out.
I’m not sure I want to stay and hear the rest of it. But I can’t
seem to move my muscles to get up. The wind grew stronger and so
did the buzzing in my head but I could still hear her perfectly.
‘But you are not like other people,’ she says. ‘You have more in
common with the demons.’

“Then the crystal ball shattered. Well, as
soon as she stopped screaming, she pushed the money back in my hand
and told me to get out. A few days later I got a letter from
Wisdom.

“You see, Wisdom can sense things. Amy was
right. We don’t know everything. One thing we don’t know is exactly
what he is. I mean, it is possible he’s just somebody like us,
someone who has EFHBs. But sometimes I feel he is something else. I
can’t put my finger on it but I don’t think he’s really human.”

“He’s partly human,” Amy said. “But he’s
partly something else, too.”

David whistled. “Do you think he’s related to
those winged things?”

Bethany bit her fingernails for a moment then
shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. I can still remember how
those things felt in my head, kind of wet and slippery, like snakes
in black water. Wisdom is something else. There is something very
hard and very fiery about him. What I do know is what we’ve been
taught in class.

“Ms. Ryerson taught us that humans aren’t the
only people on earth. Now I am not talking about UFOs or people
from Mars. There are civilizations on Earth that have been here for
thousands of years that do their best to keep away from mankind.
They’ve gotten very good at it over the years. Partly they hide out
of fear. There are not as many of them as there are of us. The
bigger the world gets, the harder it is for them to hide in one
sense, but in another it gets a lot easier. They can’t hide out in
the woods and country graveyards anymore, so instead they hide in
high-rises and sewer systems.”

“What are you talking about?” David asked.
“Vampires?”

Jessica scoffed. “Newbie.”

Bethany shook her head. “Not vampires. I
don’t think those are real. But then again, maybe that is something
else that’s being hidden from us until we’re ready. We were never
told their names, only that they had an ancient civilization that
thrived all over the planet 1200 years ago until their culture
destroyed itself in an idea-war. Truth is, if Echo was telling the
truth about how old these caves are, they were probably the ones
that built them.”

“What does that have to do with Wisdom?”

Bethany looked into David’s eyes. “Ms.
Ryerson said these people are getting tired of hiding in the
shadows. They are making deals with a group of humans, some sort of
cult that’s doing experiments on humans. They are planning a war.
We’re being trained to stop them.”

David put his hands on his head, scratching
idly. “So is that what we are? The result of some cult doing
experiments on humans?”

Bethany looked over to Jessica.

“Don’t look at me,” the little girl said.
“You started it. You might as well finish it.”

Bethany bit her fingernails again, speaking
through her fingers. “No, we’re not that. We’re something else.
Something evil.”

David lowered his head. “Evil? As in not the
good guys?”

She nodded. “As in pretty far from the good
guys. I don’t know anything more specific. Wisdom always said he
would tell us before the big day, before the battles began. Seems
he was a little late there.”

David jumped off the sofa. “I’m not a
monster!” He walked in the direction of the living quarters. “No
matter what you say, I’m not evil!”

When he left the room, Jessica crossed her
legs and smiled.

“I told you he wasn’t ready for it. Newbies
never are.”

Todd got up from the coffee table. “Jessica,
I’m not sure I’m ready for the truth. Even after everything we’ve
seen and done in the classes, it’s never easy to learn you have a
little demon inside you.”

Chapter Twelve

David brushed past a group of teenage girls.
He was barely aware of the tears streaming down his face. Teeth
clenched and red-faced, he headed down a hallway lined with living
quarters and looked for his room. While the mottled walls were
unevenly carved out of stone, the doors and frames were constructed
of polished wood. Many of the doors were open to luxurious
apartments. Thick slate-grey carpet covered the dirt floor.
Electric sconces shaped like nymphs supported the illusion that
they were in a hotel rather than an old cave dwelling. Anomalies,
young and old, gathered in small groups along the hallway. It
seemed no one wanted to be alone.

He found his assigned room halfway down the
hall. He stepped inside, quickly closing the door behind him. He
leaned his forehead against the cool wood until the pounding in his
head stopped. Then he turned around and looked for a place to
collapse.

His quarters were luxurious. There were two
dark green couches in the front room. Deep umber and rust-colored
pillows were thrown in a carefully constructed chaos on the
furniture. Pillows filled the corners as well. Past that was a
round room with a bed twice the size of a normal king-sized
mattress.

“I’m not a monster.” The words fell out of
his lips before he realized he was still thinking about that.
“Bethany has to be wrong. It’s probably just genetic mutation or
something.” The only problem was the evidence piling up around him.
He wasn’t the only one who had hurt people. Todd had killed two
people because he could not control what he was. Did that make him
a monster?

‘No,’ he thought. ‘But I can’t pretend I’m
like Todd. He killed by accident. I went out of my way to kill.
Maybe not the first time, but I knew what I was doing the last two
times.’

He shook his head. That was not quite right.
The second time he killed someone he didn’t really know what he was
doing.

‘But I hoped.’ He lay down on the bed and
closed his eyes.

***

The second time he killed with his power was
not long after the prom. People were still reeling from the strange
explosion that had killed Ramona and Paedrag. At first, the police
suspected a car bomb. They questioned David and a few others
several times but soon admitted they couldn’t find any evidence of
foul play.

Many people came to him in the weeks after,
offering condolences. He nodded, even cried a few occasionally.
Most of the time, the tears were even real. Most of the time.

Then he started to play with the buzzing in
his head. He knew it was somehow connected to the explosion. He
realized he had to control it or someone else was going to get
hurt.

That next someone was Dunstan Joyce.

It was lunchtime.

David sat with a few friends playing cards.
He heard laughter and raised voices. The whole cafeteria turned to
look over at Dunstan. He stood on top of a lunch table while two
Goths in black makeup with purple hair shouted at him. Dunstan and
his friends were laughing.

“
Must be going into all that gay stuff
again,” David’s friend Mark said.

David rolled his eyes. Dunstan was always
going around telling anyone who would stop long enough to hear that
homosexuals were going to burn in hell.

“
God,” David said. “I just wish he would
shut up. Or die or something.”

Then the laughter stopped. It was replaced
by a scream. Dunstan clawed at his own throat, as if trying to
scratch out whatever was in there preventing him from breathing. A
flurry of people rushed to him but nothing worked. The thing was,
David felt a part of his mind drift across the room, tightening
around Dunstan’s throat. He couldn’t draw that part of him back.
And the scary part was he didn’t really want to.

***

He slept through the night and woke the next
morning with a headache. He opened his eyes and shut them quickly.
Even the dim, recessed lighting around the room was too much. He
rolled onto his side as the nausea took hold.

‘Damn migraine.’ Slowly he threw off the
covers and sat up. ‘No wonder, really. After all that crap
yesterday, I guess my mind is going through a required meltdown.’
Keeping his eyes closed to fight dizziness, he reached out for
something to steady himself. His fingers touched stone and a jolt
of electricity shot up his arm. He screamed and opened his
eyes.

He was no longer in the bedroom. Instead, he
was on a rooftop looking down on a city. It wasn’t a city he
recognized. Figures moved below him in a rush. Unfamiliar scents
streamed around him: spiced meats and flowers, perfumes and sweat.
He looked above and saw nothing but darkness and dry earth.

‘I’m still underground,’ he thought. ‘An
underground city.’

He looked back at the people milling about
the streets below and realized they were not really people at all.
Tall and slender, their faces and bared arms were covered with
sleek, moist scales. He’d never actually seen one before, but he
knew these things, these winged beings, were Edimmu. They were far
different than the savages who attacked the building in
Toronto.

These Edimmu were as civilized and refined as
any city dweller of the modern age. Women carried babies in their
arms. Children played in front of stores where merchants bartered
in a sibilant chatter, a series of clicks and growls that was at
once magical and threatening. Something flew above his head. He
looked up and saw a trio of bare-chested Edimmu playing a game
consisting of throwing a gold discus while flying backwards. They
flew over the city, dodging taller buildings.

Another Edimmu wearing a plain, white tunic
flew from house to house with a large cloth sack draped over his
back. It appeared he was the equivalent of a paperboy or mailman.
He dropped parcels off at each stop. That implied that the Edimmu
were not only civilized, but literate as well. Closer to him, he
saw an open window leading to an apartment. He blinked slowly as
his eyes fell upon two Edimmu in the middle of lovemaking. The slow
kisses and gentle thrusting motions made him blush.

Then he heard something. He realized it was
the first sound he’d heard in awhile. It started as a soft ‘ting,’
like a small bell being rung or the chinking of crystals. Then, not
only could he hear the sound, he could see it. He saw it ripple
throughout the city. Translucent rings of light and shadow touched
every subterranean corner. He looked back to the open window and
the couple making love. Suddenly, he was gone from the rooftop. Now
he was inside their apartment. He watched as they stopped what they
were doing. They cocked their heads to the side, trying to find the
source of the sound. The male Edimmu stood, wrapped a blanket
around his waist and went to the window. His female partner said
something to him, an incomprehensible series of clicks and hisses.
The male shook his head and then turned sharply toward David and
started moving. For a moment, David thought he was discovered. Then
the male rushed past him, heading to a smaller room off the
bedroom.

‘A bathroom,’ he whispered. It looked
distressingly similar to bathrooms of the modern world, complete
with shower, sink and toilet. All three devices were running now.
Water flowed from everywhere. Hot water caused the air to mist and
steamed over the wall-length mirrors that lined one of the walls.
The male yelled now as he struggled to turn off the taps. The
ringing sound grew louder. It filled David with a tingling
sensation that started at the base of his spine and spread
throughout his body.