Council of Peacocks (43 page)

David blanched. “Jesus, Jessica. Can’t you
give us a few minutes?”

“No, I can’t. We’ve already wasted enough
time, thanks to Jared.”

“What the hell did you do to him, Jessica?
How is that even possible?”

Jessica punched David in the arm. “Here we go
again. Just deal. He’s dead. Get over it.”

David swung his hand toward Jessica,
obviously trying to smack the back of her head. Jessica saw the
movement and ducked out of the way.

“You know child abuse is against the law.”
Jessica put her hands on her hips. She could not have looked more
like a child if she'd been trying.

“Not in this country. Now be civil.”

Jessica cocked her head to one side. “You’re
lying. Child abuse is, like, illegal everywhere. Isn’t it? He is
lying, right, Todd?”

Todd exchanged a look with Josh that nearly
sent him laughing out loud. He covered his mouth with his right
hand, realizing any sign of amusement on his face would just send
Jessica over the edge.

“Let’s not find out.” Todd said tactfully,
stepping between the two of them. “Jessica does have a point,
though. We did come here to tell you something, Josh. And I’m sure
this thing with Jared just made everything that much worse. Wisdom
is on the verge of a meltdown.”

“I told you he thought Wisdom was crazy.”
Jessica stuck her tongue out at David.

“I did not say Wisdom was crazy. He’s just
not overly sane right now. He plans on attacking the Council of
Peacocks and he’s going to use us as weapons.”

Josh put a hand on the dresser drawer for
support and took a deep breath. “I was afraid of that.”

For a moment, no one said anything. Jessica
glared at him while David and Todd exchanged a long silent
look.

Finally, Jessica spoke. “What do you mean,
you were afraid of that? You
knew
this was going to happen?
How could you?”

Josh rubbed his hands over his face. He
looked over at his bed and realized he had been very right about
this day. He should have stayed under the covers. “Have a seat and
I’ll tell you. Wisdom came to me last night. Well, he came to my
dream. Anyway, this is what happened.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

By the time Josh finished telling the story
of what had happened last night, everyone in the room was wide-eyed
and speechless. David chewed on his nails, slowly shaking his head,
while Todd just stared off into a corner. Jessica did her best to
pretend his story didn’t faze her. She nodded and rested the index
and middle fingers of her right hand on her chin in a fairly good
imitation of Katie Couric interviewing a celebrity. However, she
cleared her throat far too often and kept tapping her left foot on
the carpeted floor. She was nervous. Josh did not have to be
psychic to see that.

“I had no idea Wisdom could do something like
that.” Todd rubbed his palms against his pants, his eyes still
focused off in the distance.

“Let’s be honest, Todd,” Jessica said,
clearing her throat again. “We don’t really know what Wisdom is
capable of. We’ve never known, not really.”

“True. I mean, I knew he was powerful but to
enter someone else’s dream like that, make Josh see the things he
saw?”

“It’s like he’s Freddy Krueger or something.
Spooky.” David spoke through his fingers, not bothering to take a
break from his nail biting. “Here we are, all signed up to do
whatever he wants us to, and we know nothing about him.”

“Speak for yourself.” Jessica flung her hand
away from her chin, a smug expression forming over her face. She
turned away from Josh and focused on David, the act setting her
ponytail flopping behind her head. “We know lots about Wisdom.”

“Like what?” David started pacing now, still
chewing away. “He’s a man with lots of secrets and a whole bunch of
money and some sort of mysterious power that lets him do things no
one should be able to do? Hell, that describes Donald Trump. What I
mean is we don’t know what he is. He could be the devil himself for
all we know. Who’s to say we’re not on the wrong side? Maybe the
Council of Peacocks are the good guys in this.”

Josh leaned back on the bed and cupped his
hands behind his head. “Don’t think so. There is the whole making
deals with bloodsucking reptilians and pussing demons. Not to
mention how they keep trying to kill us.”

“Maybe they should!” David let his hands drop
away from his mouth and stood there, stiff, each breath he took
heavy and pointed.

“Maybe they should kill us?” Todd turned away
from the corner. Josh could not read the expression on Todd’s face.
There were bags under the heavy-set man’s eyes Josh had not noticed
before. Todd’s eyes moved rapidly in the sockets, as if trying to
take in every part of David all at once. “You think because we’re
part demon, maybe we deserve to be, what, exterminated? Like vermin
or something? Is that what you’re saying, David? Christ!”

“Why don’t you just go back to your room?”
Jessica said. “For that matter, why don’t you just go back
home?”

David made a sound that was part laugh, part
cry. “That’s just it. I can’t go home. Wisdom knows that. See, I’m
sort of wanted on murder charges. Kind of takes away some of my
options. I’ve spent that last couple of days – hell, the last
couple of months – trying to convince myself that I wasn’t some
sort of monster. Thing is, I really
am
a monster. Maybe it
is because I have this demon blood inside me, or maybe it’s just
because I was born wrong somehow. I’ve done bad things. Hurt
people.”

“And your answer to guilt is a death-wish?”
Todd’s lips raised in a sneer. “Bathroom’s over there. Take one of
the mirror shards to your wrist and get happy. Suicide is stupid.
Period. Way I see it, maybe I am quote-unquote evil. Maybe I am
damned to hell just because of how I was born. But I think the way
you live says a lot more about you than the way you were born. So
you’re wanted on murder charges and you feel guilty about it.
Boo-hoo. Turn yourself in if you feel so bad about it. Do your time
in jail, pay your debt to society and all that cliché crap. Killing
yourself or letting someone else kill you is not going to bring
anybody back to life, and it certainly won’t make you feel any less
guilty. You want to be a martyr, go ahead. Be my guest. But I don’t
think you can be a demon and a martyr at the same time.”

Jessica cut in. “I think what he’s trying to
say is quit your whining, you big baby, and focus on the trouble
you’re in now.”

“Actually,” Todd’s face went lax, “that’s not
quite what I was aiming for.”

“Whatever. I’m starting to think that being
an adult just means you use more words than you need and pretend
you’re thinking something other than what you are. We all know he’s
wussing out. What he really needs is a slap across his self-pitying
face, not a tough-love pep talk. Let’s forget he’s here, okay? Let
him sit in the corner and get all weepy-faced about how he’s a bad
man and all. We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“About what?” Josh sat up again and let his
hands fall to his side.

“Hello?” Jessica slapped the bed with both
hands. “You were listening, weren’t you? Wisdom is going to take us
into a battle with the Council. Does any of this ring a bell?”

Josh smiled. “Gee, Jessica. You sure are cute
when you’re not, you know, killing things.”

Jessica bit her lip. Blood raced to her face.
She looked like Elmer Fudd in a
Bugs Bunny
cartoon about to
blow his top.

“Look, you guys do what you want. I have to
go with Wisdom.”

Todd lowered his head as if the weight of
Josh’s words had pushed down on him. “Say what? You’re going with
Wisdom into Hell. Josh, of any of us here, with the obvious
exception of Mr. David gloomy-pants, you’re the least capable of
surviving something like this. You have no idea what your EFHBs
are, let alone how to use them. The Council has Edimmu, not to
mention enough mojo power to make Wisdom think twice about taking
them on. And so what? You think
‘Oh I know karate so I can take
on this secret society’?
’”

Josh chuckled, a genuine smile on his face.
“I don’t know karate. I know how to take care of myself, that’s
all. And I did use my whatever-you-call-it to throw Jared across
the room. I think I’m getting a handle on the power, but that is
beside the point. This is about family, Todd. My father. He’s mixed
up in something – got me mixed up in something – and I need to know
what it is. No matter what anyone says, whatever the circumstances
of how I was conceived, my father is not a demon. My father works
for a branch of the CSIS, but it also looks like he works for the
Council of Peacocks. My real father is very human – a human mixed
up in some very weird stuff, to be sure – and I need to find out
what he is keeping secret from me. And just so we’re clear here, I
may not be able to read minds or levitate books but I can take out
a couple of guys with guns before they fire a shot. And let’s not
forget that I’m the only one here who has killed an Edimmu before.
Until a few minutes ago, I thought I was the only one capable of
killing a human being.”

Josh stopped.

Jessica and Todd stared at each other, their
faces overly relaxed as if their muscles were dead. Jessica's eyes
twitched ever so slightly as if she was actually trying to see
through Todd’s eyes into his brain. Todd’s eyes glistened as if
they were covered in a layer of tears.

“What?” Josh went stiff. “What aren’t you
telling me?”

Jessica nodded and looked at the ground.

Todd took a breath and let it out slowly
between pursed lips. He licked his lips before starting to speak.
“That wasn’t the first time Jessica killed someone, Josh. It’s part
of the training we get from Ms. Ryerson.”

“She trains you to kill people?”

David stopped pacing.

Jessica nodded.

Todd went back to looking off into a
corner.

“Great. The fun just keeps on coming.” Josh
covered his mouth with his right hand and leaned forward,
thinking.

For several minutes the only sound in the
room was that of people breathing. Finally, Jessica cleared her
throat and spoke. “Maybe we shouldn’t have said anything about it.
It’s … well, I can’t say it’s not a big deal, because that’s kind
of….”

“Monstrous?” David started chewing on his
fingernails again. “Is that the word you were looking for?”

Jessica shrugged. Then she shook her head. “I
don’t know. It was necessary, at least the way I see it. If we
don’t know how to kill with our powers we wouldn’t really know how
not
to kill. It makes sense if you think about it. It’s
like, well, the only way you can really know how strong you are is
to push yourself to your limits. It was hard for me.” The way
Jessica hung her head made it obvious she disliked saying anything
was hard for her. “But I got through it. Which is more than I can
say for Jared.”

Josh shivered. “Didn’t look to me like he had
a hard time with the idea of killing.”

“Really?” Jessica said. “Well, maybe you’re
not looking at it the right way. He could have snapped your spinal
column when you were in the shower or caused a brain hemorrhage.
Instead, he had to call someone else to do the dirty work. It’s
true what I said. I never really liked him. I think it was those
beady black eyes of his. He looked like a seagull with sandy-brown
hair. Anyway, he had a few tests and he just wasn’t able to go
through with it. He left them wounded, but he could never finish
them off. He wanted so bad to get to the next level in class, to
catch up with Amy and me, but Ms. Ryerson told him he would have to
keep taking that test and pass it before he could go on.”

Josh fixated on the image of Jared sneaking
into the bathroom while he showered and snapping his neck using the
power of his mind. He shivered again.

“Count me in as extremely grateful he wasn’t
as good a student as you.”

Jessica smiled with pride, and Josh felt even
colder than before. He went to the closet, took out a sweater and
hoped that would help.

“Okay, you guys do what you want,” he said.
“I’m off to see Wisdom.”

“What?” Todd raced over and grabbed him by
the shoulders. “Stop and think, man. He wants to send us off into
some sort of war and here you are skipping off to the head of the
line?”

“I think I answered that already. There’s no
sense hiding from what you can’t escape.” Josh walked toward the
door, stopped and turned back to face them. “David, why don’t you
come with me?”

“Huh?” David went slightly pale, which made
his freckles all the more apparent. “Why me?”

“Because you need it most of all.”

“Need what?”

“To confront the beast inside.”

***

“Maybe it won’t be enough.”

When he first travelled back through time, a
calm sort of arrogance filled him. He knew what was going to
happen, so he knew how to prevent it. He knew when the Edimmu would
attack Toronto, knew they would slaughter or kidnap most of the
Anomalies; but all of that was unimportant. All that mattered was
keeping Echo alive. That and making sure Propates did not get to
remake the world in his image. So Wisdom found Josh: a new Anomaly
who could perhaps lead to a different string of events.

Unfortunately, not all of the new string was
to his liking. Jared’s betrayal had caught him completely off
guard. Maybe it was pride that had blinded him to that threat the
first time or maybe, just maybe....

“The threat wasn’t there the first time.”

Perhaps he had not given enough thought to
just how much influence this visitor from another world was having
on the course of events. Ever since he felt the surge of power
preceding Jared’s death, Wisdom had been filled with a subtle and
recurring emotion. Fear. If Wisdom wasn’t the only one traveling
through time, maybe all of his carefully calculated plans were
worthless.