Earthshaker

Chapter 3

Chapter 3The only thing out of place in Aggie's apartment was the front door. It laid as I'd left it when I'd smashed it in with a barrage of concrete chunks, hanging from the top hinge, the bottom hinge torn out of the splintered frame.

Otherwise, the place was spotless. Everything was exactly where I remembered, undisturbed. Nothing unusual at first glance.

I stalked around the living room, breathing fast, glaring at furniture and knick-knacks. Paused to run my finger over the framed photo on top of the TV, the photo of Aggie and me in Cancun, laughing as we hoisted umbrella drinks the size of fat babies.

Briar eased past me into the kitchen. "No dirty dishes. Everything's put away." I heard him march into the bedroom. "Bed's made. Phone's on the hook."

I gazed at the gold trophy beside the photo atop the TV, a statuette of a winged woman holding up a globe of interlocking rings—symbol of the atom. It was the Emmy award she'd won as weathercaster on the local TV news. Her prized possession.

"No signs of a struggle." Brian was in the living room now. "No signs of a break-in...till you did a number on the door, anyway."

I spun to face him, brandishing the Emmy like a weapon. I hadn't even realized I'd picked it up.

Taking a deep breath, I reined in my anger and lowered the Emmy. "It could've been someone she knew," I said. "Someone who puts everything back where he found it." Turning, I replaced the Emmy trophy on top of the TV set.

"Are you picking up anything?" Briar folded his arms over his chest and looked around. "Anything unusual?"

I swallowed hard and tried to focus. Reached out with my senses, groping for bits of dirt or gravel that could have been tracked in. Particles whose scent I could identify and track like a bloodhound.

After a minute, I shook my head. "I don't know. Nothing yet." I was getting pissed off. The situation was getting to me, distracting me, blunting the edge of my knifepoint intensity.

"What about someone like you?" said Briar. "Someone out of the ordinary? Could they have pulled this off?"

Suddenly, I lashed out at him. "I'm not a suspect, am I? Just because I saw her last?"

Briar snapped right back at me. "Dial it down! I'm asking if anyone who travels in the same circles could've done it."

"Yeah, maybe." I backed off, but it wouldn't take much to make me fly off the handle again. "It's possible."

"Like who?"

"I don't know! She was on TV! Lots of people knew her. All kinds of people." I felt like running out the door. Searching for Aggie my own way. Turning the town upside down and shaking the s**t out of it.

"Okay, try this." Briar picked up the stack of mail that had fallen behind the door. "Tell me about her. Tell me who she is really."

I took a deep breath and fought to steady myself. Getting worked up wasn't my style. I was even pretty cool going up against killers or kingpins—but the personal connection to Aggie was kicking my ass. She was my best friend, for God's sake. Other than Duke, she was the only one who could help me keep it together in spite of my highs and lows. I knew if I lost her, I'd fall apart.

I also knew the crazier I acted, the greater the chance I would lose her. Time to pull it together as if she were right there in the room with me.

"Her real name's Aegle," I said. "She's one of the Hesperides." It was working. I felt myself getting calmer as I spoke. "They're a clan of nymphs who tended famous gardens at the edge of the world."

Briar looked surprised, but only for a moment. "These other nymphs. Any problems there?"

"No idea," I said. "It wasn't something she seemed to want to talk about."

"I'd say that's a 'maybe' then." Briar flipped through the stack of mail in his hand. "What about powers? She have any?"

Other than a beautiful singing voice and vivacious personality? "She can do things with light. Control it. Change it. I don't know what all. She only ever showed me a few tricks."

Briar raised a mail piece close to his hazel eyes and squinted at the label. "Could she use tricks of the light to make herself disappear? Could she be right here in front of us, and we just can't see her?"

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I never saw her do anything like that." Then, I headed into the next room, Aggie's office. It looked as tidy as ever—closed laptop computer on the desk, printer beside it, black mesh-backed office chair. Aggie was a minimalist.

"What's 'Divinities Enterprises?'" Briar said from the living room.

Before I could answer, I drove my toe into something on the floor. I cried out at the instant flash of pain in my foot and hopped back a step.

Briar leaped through the doorway with gun drawn, quick as ever. "What is it?"

I frowned as I stared down at the thing I'd stubbed my toe on. "Not sure." At first glance, it looked like a round gray rock with a hole in the middle. It was about the size of a human head.

"Doorstop?" said Briar.

"I don't think so." I was already getting a funny vibe from the thing before I squatted down and reached out to touch it. Reached out with my fingers and my mind.

The shock I got from it was a hell of a lot stronger than the pain of stubbing my toe. I cried out but didn't pull away.

And I was bombarded. Wave after wave of information cascaded through me, overwhelming me. An avalanche of images and impressions, tumbling and crashing and flowing together. Almost impossible to tell where one left off and the next started.

But I wasn't about to let go. Clenching my teeth, I burrowed into the onslaught, drilling my mind through the pounding surf. Forcing myself to capture and sort the chaos.

I took a deep drink of the tide, let it swirl into my head and fill it up like seawater in a jug. Spun it like blood in a centrifuge, separating the component parts, isolating them. Shooting them through the filters of my mind, extracting nuggets like glittering gold dust from a prospector's sluice.

The bombardment became a shower of telltale sensations: the taste of ashes and mud in my mouth, bitter and thick; the touch of fur, silken and staticky; the sound of purring become the final sigh of death; bones at the heart of it all, smooth and hard and opalescent. Suddenly, I realized what it was I was reading. Not a doorstop, not a rock after all.

A cat. Curled up in a ball and dead inside a shell of hardened ash and mud. The neighbor's cat. In my worry and hurry, I'd forgotten Aggie was catsitting.

But there was more beyond that. Lingering heat, wisping from pores in the dried ash and mud. The memory of heat intense enough to flash-bake a stony shell around a living thing...yet controlled enough not to leave a speck of charred carpet or the smell of singed fur.

Reaching deeper, I found disruptions at the molecular level, a crazy-quilt of shattered bonds. Like someone had dragged a rake through the lattice-work chemical structure, leaving a jumbled field of uprooted and disconnected debris.

And still there was more. Overshadowing all of it, looming like storm clouds above the destruction, a feeling. A force. A presence. Swelling and seething and aware. Darkness, unfolding and ripening.

Looking back at me. Reaching for me.

I pushed away, and it followed. Calling for me. Sending impressions of the unspeakable things it would do when it caught me.

Gathering all my strength, I focused on breaking the link. Just before I cut all the way through the cord, the dark presence made contact—tapped me on the shoulder as I faded from its sphere of influence.

Something rushed into me then and exploded like a bomb. I felt a surge of heat and light, drowning out everything else—then a burst of input so concentrated and powerful it hurt. A stream of thought and sensation so intense, it made the earlier bombardment seem like a shower of rose petals.

It was too much for me, and I fell. Let go of the flash-baked cat and collapsed on the floor in a seizure.

I heard Briar calling my name, but I couldn't answer. My mind was on fire, my body thrashing out of control. I felt myself biting down on my tongue, tasted blood in my mouth, but I couldn't unclench my jaws.

Then, suddenly, the seizure stopped. Everything went limp, and I slumped on the carpet.

"Gaia!" Briar was shouting at me. "I'm getting an ambulance!"

"Noooo." My voice was slurred. I felt like I was only halfway there, only part of the way back in the real world. The rest of me...

...was elsewhere. When I opened my eyes, I didn't see Briar or the ceiling of Aggie's office. I saw bright turquoise sky, adrift with tufts of cottony cloud. Sitting up, I saw gleaming spires of silver and gold and bronze, climbing from a glittering city sprawled over a vast coastal plain.

"Where am I?" My voice was still slurred. My heart was hammering, but I felt like I was moving through quicksand.

"You made the right choice," said someone else, someone new. His voice was deep and warm, full of tenderness.

And...familiar. Somehow familiar.

I thought if I could see his face, I might recognize him, but that didn't help. When I turned and saw him sitting beside me with his fair features and loving smile, I was left with the same feeling of knowing but not knowing him.

"Who are you?" I said.

"How does it feel to make a fresh start after all this time?" It was like he hadn't heard my question. "How does it feel to know our secrets?"

My head throbbed. Nothing was making sense. I knew him, but I didn't...and not just him. Everything about that moment was familiar.

We were sitting on the grass on top of a hill overlooking a city I'd never seen before...but somehow I recognized it. I heard birdsong and smelled flowers I'd never heard or smelled before...but somehow, I knew them.

And the words he said. I knew them too. I didn't, but I did. "Our biggest secret of all, I must teach you." He never said that. This never happened. "It's called love."

So real. Everything so sharp and strong and perfect. Like a memory.

Like a memory.

He reached for me then and kissed me under the golden eye of the sun. I felt a shock pour through me, shaking me to the marrow of my bones...and then another explosion. And it was over.

All of it went away in an instant. I blinked, and everything was gone. I was back on the floor of Aggie's office with Briar staring down at me, pushing the hair out of my eyes.

"Ambulance is on the way," he said. "How are you feeling?"

"Like...road kill." I tried to get up but couldn't. Too dizzy, with a migraine to boot. Everywhere I looked, I saw that yellow haze I get when a migraine's at its worst.

"What the hell happened?" said Briar. "What is that thing, anyway?" He nodded in the direction of the stone-encased cat.

"Dolly," I said. "Neighbor's cat."

"That's a cat?"

"Aggie was cat-sitting." I reached up and rubbed my head, wincing at the pain. "She's in trouble."

"Aggie?"

As I remembered the malevolent presence, my headache got worse. "Oh, God, Dale." Tears trickled down my cheeks as I thought of my best friend. "I've got a terrible feeling about this."