Thief of Souls (15 page)

“I know this is going to sound strange,” Dillon finally said, “but you can't imagine how much I've missed you.”

They didn't answer to that; the feeling was clearly
not
mutual.

“That's all right,” said Dillon. “After what I've put you through, I'm surprised you came looking for me at all.” Then a third guest, who Dillon had not noticed before, stepped forward from the dim shadows of the corner. This wasn't one of the shards. It was a stranger with dark eyes, high cheekbones, and black hair that ran smoothly from his head and down his spine. “Do I know you?”

“You will,” said the dark-eyed stranger.

“Okoya hooked up with us in New Mexico,” said Tory.

He reached out and shook Dillon's hand, keeping those dark eyes locked on his. The stranger's grip was firm, but the
skin supple. Dillon felt the bite of fingernails that were a fraction of an inch too long against the back of his hand. “I've become a big admirer of yours,” said Okoya.

“I have too many of those.” Dillon turned to the Jessups who guarded the door. “I'd like to be left alone with my friends,” Dillon told them, but the couple was reluctant to go.

“Are you sure that's wise?” said Mrs. Jessup.

“We don't know these people,” said her husband.

“They're not respectful of you.”

“They're not in awe of you.”

“What if they mean to hurt you?”

“We could never allow that.”

“Just shut up and go,” Dillon told them.

“We'll be right outside,” Mrs. Jessup said. “If there's anything that you need—anything at all . . .” Then the couple left, swinging the huge wooden doors shut.

“Some group of happy campers you got here,” said Tory.

Dillon chuckled ruefully. “Happy Campers. Yeah, that's exactly what they are.”

“So if everyone's so thrilled to be here,” asked Winston, “where's all that moaning coming from? And don't tell me it's just the wind.”

Dillon thought about how he might answer that question. He could try to explain it in a calm, rational way, and sort of ease them into it . . . but decided it was best to let them see it with their own eyes. Then maybe they'd understand how badly Dillon needed their help.

“I'll take you there,” Dillon said. Winston and Tory didn't seem too keen on the idea, but they went along. Unfortunately Okoya thought this was an open invitation. Dillon had to step into Okoya's path to stop his momentum.

“I'm sorry, but you can't come.”

There was a flash of ice in Okoya's gaze that was quickly replaced by an apologetic smile. “Of course not,” Okoya said. “Actually, I was hoping to explore the castle.”

Dillon nodded, relieved. “If anyone tries to stop you, tell them you have my personal permission.”

“Your name strikes fear into their hearts,” said Okoya with a grin. “I like that about you.”

Dillon laughed, thinking it was a joke. But when he thought about it later, he wasn't so sure.

T
HE
G
OTHIC
S
TUDY WAS A STEP BEYOND NIGHTMARE.
T
HE
dark arches of its vaulted ceiling gave one the uneasy sense of being trapped in the hull of a capsized ship. The walls were lined with aging, dust-coated volumes, and the entire room had become an ad hoc repository of misery: the diseased; the dying; the ones hopelessly broken by life. The floor was filled with almost thirty desperate souls suffering in pain and anguish.

Winston and Tory turned their eyes away, but Dillon did not. He had surrendered his disgust long ago.

“Every day, my ‘Happy Campers' bring me people to fix,” he told them. “There's more and more each day.”

There was a man before them with multiple leg fractures, who appeared to have been hijacked right from the scene of an accident. “I suppose I've made some converts of the local paramedics, and emergency-room doctors. They've started to secretly divert patients my way.”

The wounded man looked up at them in weak terror, not even knowing why he was there.

“There's some people I can help, and others I can't,” Dillon said. “Because there are some things I just can't do . . . . That's why I need you.”

Winston shook his head. “I . . . I can't do things like that—I can't.”

“You can, and you know it,” said Dillon. “I'm sure you helped a lot of people back home.”

“By accident,” snapped Winston. “Never on purpose!”

“Somehow,” said Dillon, “I thought you would have grown wiser. Wisdom does come along with your gift, doesn't it?”

“Maybe I'm wise enough to know not to screw with things I don't understand.”

Tory's eyes drifted to a man across the room whose hacking, liquid cough spoke of tuberculosis.

Like Winston, she had never actively sought to cure the ills of the world around her—as if she had no right to willfully use her power. But faced with the misery before her, it seemed selfish and cruel to stand there and do nothing. And maybe it would make her feel better about herself. Cleaner.

She made her way across the room to the coughing man, and began gently massaging his fiery throat and inflamed chest. “Am I doing this right?” she called back to Dillon, but Dillon had no answer, because he had no idea. In less than a minute, however, the man was breathing easier, as the disease drained from his lungs.

Dillon led the reluctant Winston across the room. “They keep bringing me people with lost limbs . . . but I have to send them away,” Dillon told him. “I can fix broken bones, but I can't fix something that's not even there.”

They stopped before a man with bandages on his knees, and nothing but air where the rest of his legs should have been. His dressings had already been removed.

“A human being is not a tree!” Winston shouted. “You don't just regenerate a new limb out of thin air. It's against the laws of nature.”

Dillon took a step closer. “So break the law.”

Winston shuddered out a sickening breath, then knelt down to the legless man, realizing, as Tory had, that his own conscience left him no choice. “Dillon, have I ever told you how much I hate you?”

Dillon nodded. “Maybe we can fix that, too.”

“Please,” begged the man. “Please take me back to the hospital.”

Winston looked at the raw stumps, where swollen flesh was pulled tight by heavy sutures. “What happened to you?”

The man grimaced. “I need morphine!”

“Was it an accident?”

“You kids are crazy! What are you doing here? What are you doing?! I need my medication!”

“Shh.” Winston bit back his own revulsion, and pressed his hands forward. He had seen his share of charismatic evangelists lay hands on the infirmed, pronouncing them healed to the cheers of a wide-eyed flock. But this—this would be something very different. Because not even the most brazen of faith healers claimed the ability to put back that which the good Lord had taken away.

Winston focused his attention on the man's left stump, where his fingertips gently touched it. It took about a minute to see the flesh begin to swell—the stump to elongate almost imperceptibly. The skin gathered by the sutures began to stretch as new growth pushed on them from the inside. The sutures burst, but rather than spilling forth gore, new folds of flesh unfolded from within the wound, slowly inflating with bone and muscle. And Winston suddenly found himself smiling, no longer repulsed, but rather thrilled with himself and this ability he had never dared to tap; consumed by the magnitude of his own power.

T
EN MILES AWAY, CROWDS
of angry tourists packed around the ticket booth at the Hearst Castle Visitors Center, when a weather system bore down on them from the north. In moments, the sky turned gray, and the wind blew bone-cold.

Three teenagers drove up in a stolen car. The two in the front seemed anxious. The one in the back was dead.

“The castle's closed for repairs,” the parking attendant said. “You can take the garden tour, but you can't get inside the castle.”

Lourdes looked out of her window to the long lines by the ticket booth. Hours' worth of lines.

“We have to get inside!” Michael blurted out. “He's in there!”

The parking attendant looked at him curiously. “Who's in there?”

Lourdes watched as Michael stammered helplessly. Her beloved Michael never had a head for strategy in tight situations. He either stormed too hard, bringing about disaster, or blew an ineffectual wind in the midst of panic.
That's why he needs me—to get him through the hardest times,
thought Lourdes.
He needs me for that and much, much more. He must realize that by now.
She threw a glance to the backseat, and pulled the blanket over an exposed edge of Drew's body. She didn't know what had set off Michael's lethal tantrum, and although Drew's death was a bitter pill for them to swallow, Lourdes resolved not to dwell on it right now. They couldn't abandon his body, nor could they bring him home. That meant they would have to bury him themselves—a grim prospect Lourdes was not ready to consider.

“Is there a problem here?” the attendant asked, beginning to notice Drew's lack of animation.

“No problem at all,” said Lourdes. “Pleasant dreams”—and the guard collapsed to the ground with a thud and the skitter of loose gravel.

Lourdes then turned toward the crowds, concentrated, and pushed forth an airborne nerve impulse. It struck all the tourists
in the lot, and they fell to the ground like a collection of rag dolls in Hawaiian shirts.

Michael turned to her, flabbergasted. It was the first time he had seen how her powers had grown. Clearly he was impressed. “Lourdes, what did you do?”

“I put them all to sleep.”

“For how long?”

Lourdes shrugged. “It depends on how tired they were.”

They locked the gate behind them to deter new tourists, then drove up the winding road to the castle.

F
ROM THE COASTLINE
, H
EARST
C
ASTLE
appeared small and insignificant, but the closer one got, the more its audacious majesty came into focus. It had the semblance of a great Spanish cathedral—a four-story Castile, between two bell towers shimmering with blue-and-gold tile.

Tourists flocked the palatial grounds around the castle and guest houses, chattering to one another, and taking snapshots, but the doors to every entrance of La Casa Grande—the great castle itself—were closed to visitors.

A pair of guards were posted on either side of the wrought-iron gates. One of them shifted position, just enough to display the weapon holstered on his waist.

“I'm sorry,” he said, eyeing Michael and Lourdes as they approached. “The castle is closed until further notice.”

“We're here to see Dillon Cole,” said Michael.

“He's expecting us,” Lourdes added. “Or at least he should be.”

The guards reacted instantly, looking to one another, not sure what to do.

“Are you one of us?”

“No,” said Winston. “We're one of
him
.”

The guards considered the prospect fearfully. “Yes,” they said, swinging the gates open to admit them. “He has been expecting you.”

The interior of the castle was spectacularly overdone, from the Louis XIV armoires, to the Ming dynasty vases. The entire castle mocked itself at every turn with self-conscious opulence. Men and women stood at every threshold, like an unofficial security gauntlet, and Lourdes had the distinct feeling they were passing through layer after layer of protection that surrounded Dillon and his inner sanctum. Until finally, a door opened before them, and they stepped from paradise . . . into Hell.

Michael had hoped to see no more carnage today, but here before his eyes was a room full of people who weren't much better off than Drew. Michael had to cover his ears from the awful sounds of anguish around him.

“Madre de Dios!” gasped Lourdes. “What happened here?” Then Michael caught sight of Dillon tending to a woman whose many wounds had left her a bloody mess. Winston and Tory were there, too—both of them as focused as surgeons, as they moved around the room.

Dillon caught sight of them, but didn't bother to greet them. “Good. You're here!” he said, as someone closed the door behind them, pushing them off the threshold and into the room.

“Michael!” shouted Dillon. “These people here are way too stressed, and it's getting in the way. Can you do something about it?”

But Michael could only stand there with his jaw dropped; his own sense of panic infusing the patients like a lightning storm, adding to the chaos.

“I
said
, can you do something about it?!”

Suddenly, Michael realized he had been here before. It was the “emergency-room dream.” Michael would walk through a door, and find himself a surgeon, in the midst of mortal chaos, with absolutely no medical knowledge. His anxiety continued to skyrocket.

With nothing but dead air from Michael, Dillon turned his attention to Lourdes. “Lourdes, could you do something about their pain?”

“Wh-what should I do?”

Across the room, Winston left one patient, and moved on to another. “C'mon, Lourdes,” Winston said. “If we can do this, so can you!”

The panic in the room continued to build as the patients continued to resonate Michael's emotional distress. Around him, people began to squirm and scramble to their feet, trying to flee.

“Michael, stop it!” shouted Tory. “You're only making it worse!” Michael could feel his own state of terror stab into the hearts of those assembled, creating greater and greater panic. Lately, making bad situations worse had become a specialty of Michael's. He wasn't about to let his own shortcomings ruin the efforts of the others, so he spun on his heels, and pushed his way out of the room, slamming the doors closed behind him.