Dread Locks (17 page)

How long would it take for Danté’s flesh to turn? Weeks Days? It didn’t matter, because there was no stopping it. I ha turned my best friend to stone.

17

THE FIELD OF DRAGONS

D
anté was as good as dead. I could run as fast and as far as I wanted, but I couldn’t outrun that simple fact. I could hurl myself off the highest cliff to purge myself of the guilt, but I would merely walk away from it uninjured. This act of turning a friend into stone was the final stage of my initiation into Tara’s dark world. I had become a Gorgon, like her sisters and her. Hideous to behold. Ugly in a way beyond words. I understood the myth now. It wasn’t a physical ugliness, but an ugliness of spirit. My spirit bore that same ugliness now.

I ran all the way home, but I had no intention of staying. I would not face my parents, or my ailing brother and sister. I headed straight for my room and began to pack. My gym bag couldn’t carry much, but I realized there was little I needed to take with me. A few changes of clothes. A picture of my family. It’s funny how few “things” really matter, when you think about it.

I had no idea where I would go, but I didn’t care. I was going
away.
That’s all that mattered. I had to get away from this place. Away from people I knew—away from people, period. I could never again be in a place where I would be tempted to remove the shades that shielded my eyes and petrify another human being. Just because I couldn’t resist it when faced with Dante didn’t mean I couldn’t teach myself to be stronger. Given enough time, I could learn to fight that urge, and now I had all the time in the world.

As I zipped my gym bag closed, mentally plotting my path out of town, I heard someone crying. It was a man. I focused my attention on the life energies around me, which I could sense like a scent. It was not within the house, but outside. Out back. I went downstairs and out the back door, to see my father, head in hands, sobbing on a chair beside the pool. Garrett stood next to him, just watching. I had never heard my father cry before—until now I had thought he only had two emotions: frustration and annoyance.

“Dad?” Checking to make sure my sunglasses were firmly in place, I slowly walked over to him. “Dad—what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“It’s not a good day, Parker,” he said through his tears. “It’s not a good day at all.”

Garrett, I noticed, said nothing to comfort him. He just stood there, looking down.

“Things like this shouldn’t happen,” Dad said, doing his best to hold back the flow of tears. “They don’t happen. How could it happen to us?”

“What things?”

But it was like he wasn’t hearing me, he was so lost in his own thoughts. “You spend your life working, providing for your family. You buy a big house; you give them everything they could possibly need. And
this
is what happens.”

He threw a quick, pained glance at Garrett. And this time, when I looked at Garrett, I noticed something I should have noticed right away. Garrett wasn’t moving. He wasn’t shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like he always did. He wasn’t looking at his watch; he was just standing there, staring at Dad. He was paler than ever before. The shade of his pale gray eyes was the exact shade of the color of his skin. I took a few steps closer; I touched his arm, his fingers. They were as cold and rigid as death.

“Garrett, no!”

There’s a vein—you know the one. It runs along your wrist, winding up your arm. Kind of a strange purple-blue line. It’s the one they take blood from at the doctor’s office. I watched as this vein, the last sign of life left to Garrett, slowly began to fade from blue to the same gray that filled the rest of his body. What had begun in him weeks before was almost done. A few more minutes, and he’d be completely turned to stone.

“Now Katrina’s come down with it,” my father said. “Same symptoms.” Then he turned to me. “Looks like we’re going to have statues of all of you around the pool.” He laughed bitterly at the awful thought, then put his head in his hands and cried once more.

Whatever else I had become, I was still human enough to feel my father’s pain. After that, I couldn’t just run away. Escape wouldn’t be that easy for me, because I was still saddled with a conscience. Perhaps Tara had shed her conscience years ago, or maybe she had never had one, but I still did, and I was glad. It was the only thing that kept me human.

As I stood there watching my father mourn for my hardened brother, a sound came hissing over the tops of trees. It was far off, but my hearing was tuned beyond human capabilities. It was the sound of distant, labored grinding. Metal against metal. Gears and pistons painfully pumping in a forgotten, old oil field.

I left the pool, crossed the tennis court, and strode through the grass of our huge yard until I came to the woods that bordered our property. There was no path from here to the oil pumps, but I didn’t need one. Their sound rang in my ears like evil church bells. It was Tara calling to me, I knew. I had the power to resist the call, but I didn’t want to. I had to face her, although I had no idea what would happen when I did. She had destroyed all three of us Baer kids. My brother was stone, my sister would soon follow, and my curse was a fate worse than stone. I was immortal, with a hunger so uncontrollable I would destroy my own friends to satisfy it. I was strong in so many ways now, but that hunger was stronger than me.

I walked miles until I reached the abandoned road that led to the hidden oil field. Five of the six wells bobbed up and down, their rusty gears groaning in complaint. The insect eyes painted on their bulbous heads seemed to follow me as I entered the clearing. The sixth well was unmoving, the creature’s “head” bowed low, as Tara repainted its face. This creature was not an insect anymore, but a dragon: a beast with menacing yellow eyes and razor-sharp fangs.

“Giving your friends a new look?”

She turned to me and smiled that warm, disarming smile that had always left me so defenseless. But I was wise enough now not to lower my defenses at all. I kept my distance and kept my face as cold as stone.

“They’re wrong as insects,” Tara said, putting down her paintbrush and slowly sauntering toward me. “Powerful predators are what they ought to be. Just like us.”

“Just like you,” I corrected.

“Are you still in denial, Parker? Do you still refuse to accept what you are?”

I didn’t answer her.

“I can sense that you’ve turned your first human. Did you enjoy it, Baby Baer? Who was it? I want to know every wonderful detail.”

She stood right in front of me now, and I refused to back away. She reached out and touched my long, twisting locks, but I reached up, grabbed her firmly by the wrist, and moved her hand away.

She looked at me, perhaps trying to read something behind my dark lenses. “Still mad at me, Parker? Still angry that I chose you for my most wonderful gift?”

“It’s not a gift; it’s a curse. It’s horrible. You’re horrible.”

She tugged her wrist out of my hand. “Then so is every human being. You breed and murder animals to serve on your tables. You lure fish, then tear them out of the water and let them suffocate. You shoot birds and beasts for sport, and half the time you don’t even eat them.”

“That’s different!”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t kill our own kind!”

“And neither do we! You and I are not human anymore, Parker. We’re something more. Something greater. Human beings are predators, plain and simple. And eventually every predator becomes prey.”

There was truth to her argument. Brutal, maybe, but it was truth nonetheless. Humans were the most successful predators on earth. Not sharks, or tigers, but us puny, civilized humans. Her hand was in my hair again. This time I closed my eyes, enjoying the feeling.

“We are a new link in the food chain,” she told me gently. “You mustn’t feel guilty about that....”

“But my family ... my friends.”

“Mourn for them,” Tara said. “Mourn for your old life, but don’t let it stop you from accepting your new one.” Then she leaned forward and whispered, “I’m your only friend, Parker.”

“I hate you,” I whispered back.

“That will change,” she said. “I want to give you something. One more gift.” Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a hunting knife, shiny and deadly sharp. I backed away.

“I’ve never done this for anyone before ... but I’m doing it for you.” Then she reached up, grabbed two of her shiniest curls, and with a grimace, she tore the knife through them.

I don’t think I can describe the scream of pain that came out of her then. Not in the deepest torture chamber has such a scream ever been heard. It could have made stone shiver.

Tara fell to her knees, and the two locks wafted to the ground. They squirmed for a moment, then were still. As the hair died, it turned from gold to ashen gray.

“There,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I’ve released your brother and sister.”

I was speechless. My brother and sister were free? I reached to my own curls, thinking about Danté.

“Don’t try it on yourself,” she warned. “The pain would destroy you.” She picked herself up, still weak from the experience. “But I was willing to experience that much pain for you.”

She came over to me, already recovering from her pain.

“We will be wonderful together,” she said. “We can go anywhere, do anything. We will be companions, Parker. Eternal companions.”

I was repelled, yet drawn to the idea at the same time. Both feelings were so powerful, I felt I’d be torn apart.

“I know what you’re feeling,” Tara said. “Love and hate, terror and peace. To feel both extremes at once—that’s our nature, Parker. All your life you’ve lived a lukewarm existence: never too warm, never too cold. That’s not living. Now you will learn to live the extremes and embrace them.” And she hugged me as she said it. It felt horribly wrong. It felt totally right. I now lived at the extremes.

“We are two of a kind,” Tara said. “The only two.”

Something about that didn’t ring true. It took a moment until I realized why. “We’re not the only two. What about your sisters?”

She took a step away. “My sisters are in a gallery at the Louvre,” she said, with malice in her voice.

“What are you talking about?”

“They fought a thousand years ago and caught each other’s gaze. They turned each other to stone. Now they’re just two statues in a museum.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “But ... but I thought Gorgons were immortal.”

To which she answered, “They are.”

I didn’t have time to think about what that might mean for her solidified sisters, because a sudden engine roared up behind me.

“Parker! Step away!” a male voice said, but before I could move, an angry gray slice of steel passed before my vision. It was a blade. A chain-saw blade. It came down inches away from me—but I quickly realized it wasn’t meant for me—it was meant for Tara. She backed away in a flash, just missing the buzzing blade.

I turned to see Mike Fisher, the sculptor, wielding his chain saw like a broadsword.

“Sculptures with fingerprints? Reports of kids turning to stone? At first I thought there had to be another explanation, but no matter where I looked, it all kept coming back to you.”

He swung the blade again but missed, because he wasn’t looking at her. He couldn’t risk that she’d take off her glasses and use her lethal gaze on him. “If I had any doubts, they’re gone after what I just heard.” He pulled the blade back for the next swing, and it came dangerously close to me.

“Move away, Parker,” he said. “We both know what she is. We both know she has to be destroyed.”

“You’re crazy! She can’t be killed!”

“There’s one way to kill a Gorgon,” he said. “If the myths are right, the only way to kill a Gorgon is to cut off its head.”

Yes! He was right! The myths said that Perseus had done it—although now I knew that Perseus had never gotten his sword near her neck.

Tara seethed in this standoff against the artist. Her anger flared in her curling tendrils of hair, which now squirmed in fury.

“How could something as vile as you exist?” Mike said. “How many people have you destroyed? For how many years?”

“More than I can count for longer than I can remember,” she said, and I knew it was not just a boast, it was true. The statuary of museums and palaces around the world must have been filled with her victims—not carved by the hands of men, but hardened by the eyes of a Gorgon. “You will be just one among thousands,” she told the artist. “You’ll die like Perseus, and I will spit on your cold stone face.” She tore off her sunglasses and hurled them to the ground, but Mike turned his gaze downward, toward her feet, refusing to meet her gaze.

“Take off your glasses, Parker,” she demanded. “He’s got to look at one of us sooner or later.”

I just shook my head.

“I said, ‘Take off your glasses.’ ”

Mike seemed confused for a moment, until he took a good look at me. “She’s made you like her! She’s turned you into one, too!”

“Take off your glasses now.” The command was almost impossible to resist—still, I fought the urge to obey and kept the glasses on.