Thief of Souls (6 page)

But that wasn't why he had to leave.

I won't head west.
He struggled to convince himself.
I refuse to help Dillon Cole.
But there was a gravity pulling on him now. He knew he could resist it, but didn't know if he should.

Thaddy just looked down, his thoughts buried in his cinnamon toast. Winston's mother took a long look at Winston, with a certain wonder in her eyes. He let her have her moment. To be honest, he felt kind of teary-eyed himself.

“I know you'll do great things for this weary world,” she said. “I've got faith in that.”

A few hours later, he kept her faith cloaked around him as he boarded the bus alone toward all points west, and Dillon Cole.

T
HREE HUNDRED MILES AWAY,
the yolks of a dozen eggs oozed through their smashed shells, blending with the milk, Gatorade, and maple syrup that spilled forth from their ruptured containers. Everything in Tory Smythe's arms had fallen to the ground in the wake of her sudden vision, and now the polished white floor of the spotless convenience store was a disaster of running colors and wildly clashing aromas.

Max, Tory's boyfriend, surveyed the mess. “That's not good,” he said lamely. “I told you we should have taken a basket.”

The clerk ran out from behind the counter, his face stricken, as if someone had unexpectedly died in the aisle. “Look at this!” he shrieked. “How could you be so clumsy, you stupid, stupid girl!”

He ran to the back room to get a mop. Tory was pale, unsteady. She gripped the handle of the glass refrigerator case to keep her balance.

“Are you okay?” Max asked.

She was shivering from the cold, although it wasn't cold.

She was recoiling from the touch of their hands, but no one was touching her.

She was screaming, but it wasn't her voice she heard—it was—

“Dillon!”

Her boyfriend eyed her uncomfortably. The clerk returned with the mop, bucket, and about a gallon of Lysol. “Stupid, stupid girl,” he said again, in case Tory hadn't heard him the first time.

Tory grabbed Max's hand, hoping his steady fingers would keep hers from shaking. “Let's go.”

“But . . . the shopping list,” he said. “Your mom can't make breakfast without—”

“Just forget about the damned list!”

Max gasped, and ripped his hand from hers. “Tory!” he said. “What's wrong with you?”

Tory sighed. “I'm sorry,” she told him. She grabbed his hand again, and he reluctantly clasped his fingers around hers.

Behind them the clerk had mopped up much of the mess, yet continued mopping at the same maniacal pace, as if the spill were acid that would eat through the linoleum. Tory knew he would mop and mop until nothing was left to mar the purity of his clean white floor. It reminded Tory of the way she bathed. Compulsively scrubbing to pull away dirt she knew wasn't there, but still felt all around her. These days, her skin was cover-girl smooth, instead of oozing with open, infected sores as it had been a year ago. Now her hair had a fine blonde sheen, instead of being a matted greasy mess. She had been cleansed beyond any shadow of doubt, but sometimes she could still feel the filth, like a ghost, and the only way to get rid of it was to wash and scrub. The way this ridiculous man scrubbed at his clean floor.

Tory couldn't watch, so she left, pulling Max along with her.

The Sunday-morning streets of the neighborhood were full of people walking hand in hand. Children played games, the elderly sat on benches feeding exceptionally healthy pigeons. A Cuban couple smiled at a group of African-American teens on the corner, and they waved back. A Korean man walked a little Anglo girl across the street.

“It's a nice morning,” Max said.

“Yes,” said Tory. “Nice.” The fact was, every morning was “nice” in her neighborhood. The streets were clean, the alleys were free of grunge, and anyone who didn't pick up after their dog was reported by the Neighborhood Watch—which everyone belonged to. The neighborhood was safe, spotless, and uncorrupted. Strange, because this part of town was called “the Miami Miasma” and was the worst neighborhood of the notorious Floridian metropolis.

“What happened back there?” asked Max.

What happened?
thought Tory.
I think I got a wake-up call from an old friend.
But all she said was, “I guess I slipped on the floor wax.”

A policeman strolled past them, grinning. But when he took a look at Tory's feet, his expression changed to one of suspicion.

“Hmpf,” he said, eyeing Tory warily as she passed.

“Maybe you ought to roll down your socks,” whispered Max, “so people won't see how dirty they are.”

Tory glanced down to see a few stray spots of egg yolk splattered on her socks and Nikes. Normal people, she knew, wouldn't care about how clean her socks were, but the people who now resided within her extended aura were not exactly normal. They were . . . clean.

“I don't care if people see,” she muttered.

Max bristled. “Whatever.”

They turned down an alley that had once been full of fetid cardboard and rags—a place where the destitute took shelter. But there were no homeless here anymore. No one was exactly sure what happened to them, and apparently no one in the neighborhood cared.

Tory stopped walking, overcome by a wave of cold nausea that dragged her back to her vision of Dillon. She leaned against
the brick of the alley, and Max looked at her with concern, trying to make sense of her odd behavior. He gently touched the smooth skin of her face “You're cold,” he remarked. “Tory, are you sure you're okay?”

Tory closed her eyes and thought back to the day she arrived here, in November—almost a year ago—in search of her mother, who had vanished from her life years before. Back then, this part of town had been the armpit of civilization, aspiring to even less attractive regions of the anatomy. There was no discrimination in the Miami Miasma. The dregs from all nationalities were drawn here equally.

She had found her mother in a welfare hotel, destitute and wheezing with bronchitis. Tory had nursed her back to health remarkably quickly. And, amazingly, the woman began to find in herself the qualities of a good mother. Before long, Tory noticed other things changing around her as well. Actions and attitudes of the neighbors began to slowly shift. The evidence of it surrounded her even now as she walked with Max. A group of small children ran through the street picking up litter as if it was the best game to play. From across the street came the caustic hiss of a shop owner sand-blasting decades of soot from his building. Strolling all around them were sparkling-clean men and women oozing an almost Victorian refinement. The whole neighborhood had become a strange mix of accidental
übermenschen
—an anomalous set of people suddenly rising above the random violence and lewd behavior that had once been a part of their lives, repulsed and mortified by the sights and smells of urban decay. Turns out, the Miami Miasma cleaned up real good; now, not even the garbage smelled.

It was still hard for Tory to understand and accept that she was the cause of all this. Not by anything she did, but by her mere presence. It was an aura that penetrated the streets
around her like radiation, cleansing it, body and soul.

Of course, just a few blocks away, the wretchedness still lived on in the places where her light did not reach.

“Tory, are you sick? Do you have a fever or something?” asked Max. “Maybe you're getting the flu.” It obviously hadn't occurred to him that no one in this part of Miami had come down with the flu this year.

“Max,” Tory dared to ask, “do you remember what you were like before?”

Max blinked at her in total innocence. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when I first met you?”

Max's shoulders twisted in a shiver. “I was awful. Let's not talk about it.”

The fact was, he had been worse than awful. He was a gangbanger with neither conscience nor remorse for any of the brutal things he did. He bragged about his gun, and longed for the day it would take a life. Tory had despised him. The way he and his cohorts would hang out on the corner, shouting rude, lusty comments at her as she passed had made Tory hate leaving the small apartment she and her mother shared. She had feared that one day the verbal assaults might turn physical when those thugs were too drunk or aroused to care.

But then Max began to change. The gun went away first. Then his attitude. He became caring, and good, without even noticing the change in himself. His gang slowly turned as innocuous as a team of eagle scouts, and their street-corner greetings became a caress rather than an assault.

There was a time several months ago, when Max's hair was still long, and his spirit still untamed, that Tory loved him deeply. That's when the newfound goodness of his heart was tempered by mischievous unpredictability.

But the changes continued. He cut his hair short and neat.
His fun-loving grin became the blank smile of total innocence. And every single word he thought to utter was pure and wholesome. Tory had sanitized him.

Tory realized she was crying. She wondered if Dillon, wherever he was, could feel her cry, the way she had felt him scream. She thought of the other shards, who were suddenly at the forefront of her mind, and for the first time in many months, began to feel herself being pulled toward them, as she had been pulled that first time, when the light of the supernova had filled the night sky, filling them all with the overwhelming need to find each other. But this time it was Dillon's call beckoning her to come west.

Max regarded her tears with deep concern. He was so clean it made her feel dirty. It made her feel like slipping into a scalding bath.

“Tory, I'm worried about you,” he said.

Tory looked deep into the eyes of this handsome, wholesome boy. There was no question he was better off than before—after all, it was far worse to be unconscionably bad, than to be pathetically good. Still it saddened her.

Tory leaned toward him, wanting to kiss him, but he leaned away, shocked and embarrassed.

“Tory, no! We're in public!”

“Please,” begged Tory. “Just this once.”

“Oh, all right.” Max leaned forward and endured the public kiss. There was tenderness in the kiss, but nothing more. No passion or urgency. No hint of mystery. No spice of unknown intentions. His thoughts were as pure as the smell of his breath and taste of his kiss—flavorless as distilled water.

“Good-bye, Max,” she said sadly, then strode away from him without looking back, heading west toward Dillon Cole, and to escape the effects of her own scouring presence.

T
HAT SAME MORNING, TOWARD THE EASTERN END OF
L
ONG
Island, Lourdes Hidalgo concentrated on the five girls around her as the volleyball arced over the net toward them. None of these girls were on the volleyball team, and yet, over the past month, they had become a curiosity in their phys-ed class, and had gained the attention of the volleyball coach—enough of his attention that he helped schedule today's challenge match against the
real
volleyball team of Hampton Bays High. No spectators were officially invited, but word of mouth had brought at least two dozen.

The ball cleared the net, and Andrea, the girl to Lourdes's right got under it, passed it to Lourdes, who was the setter of their unofficial team. Lourdes passed it to Patrice in the front row, who spiked it to win yet another point. Cheers from the sidelines. The coach shook his head. “Incredible!”

Meanwhile the real volleyball team scowled in disbelief. “Who are you rooting for anyway?” shouted the team's Amazonian captain.

Coach Kline scowled right back at her. “If you're a team, then play like one.”

Lourdes smiled. Now she and her friends controlled the court like a team that had trained together for years. They functioned with the precision of a Swiss watch, as if they were all being controlled by a single will.

The truth is, they were.

As setter, Lourdes was the leader of the squad, but rather
than merely positioning the ball for the net players to spike, Lourdes set the players themselves. She gripped each of them with her will, subtly pulling their strings and manipulating the movements of their bodies. She could adjust their metabolisms in microseconds, causing adrenaline to flow, and muscles to contract faster, with added energy, as if they were all part of a single being, with Lourdes at the center. It was a gift Lourdes was learning to brandish well.

She forced them to work as a perfect team, and as volleyball was ninety percent teamwork, no one could beat Lourdes's machine.

Her team served, and the real volleyball players fought valiantly, returning the ball over the net in a powerful spike—but Lourdes was ready. She raised Patrice's hands to save the ball, then got under it herself for the second tap. Next, she willed Andrea into position to slice it over for the final point. It couldn't have been easier if all twelve hands, and all twelve feet, were Lourdes's.

The ball was still in the air when Lourdes got the mind-blast from Dillon Cole. Her head swam, her vision faded, as if she had stood up too quickly. He was calling for her—for all of them. He was being smothered by a crowd . . . . She felt faint, but only for a moment. When her vision cleared, the team on the other side of the net was suffering the agony of their humiliating defeat.

“That's match,” said Coach Kline.

As the players cleared the court on both sides, the coach pulled Lourdes aside. She reigned in her frazzled thoughts and emotions, refusing to be befuddled in this moment of victory.

“I have to admit, Lourdes,” he said, with deep admiration, “you've really come into your own this year. You've come a long, long way.”

Lourdes had heard that a lot, but she never tired of being reminded. She had gone from being a 350-pound outcast, to one of the most admired girls in school, at half the weight. True, her figure wasn't exactly that of a model—the large bones of her frame wouldn't allow for that—but she was as slim as she needed to be. She felt comfortable in her clothes; her many chins had melted away; and when she looked in the mirror, she liked what she saw, from the front, and from the side. Ralphy Sherman told people that she had undergone a high-risk experimental liposuction technique at a Swedish clinic—and since no other explanation surfaced, people actually believed him. In any case, “fat” was not the word that came to people's minds when they saw Lourdes Hidalgo, these days. “Impressive,” maybe even “powerful,” but not “fat.”