Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle, page 12
Dave Montcalm grins as he scoops her younger child up in his large brown hands. He spins on his heel, making Erin shriek with delight as she whirls through the air. Anna slumps against the doorframe. “Thank God you’re here,” she says, equally delighted and relieved.
“Uncle Dave! Uncle Dave!” Tim cries, also pushing past her. “Did you bring us presents?”
Dave kneels down to appease the children, but it’s her eyes he finds above their heads. Fucking crazy night, eh? His deep voice is as clear as a bell in her mind. Hell of a chase you led me on, Annie. You might have saved some of the fun. How d’you like this new trick? One of his dark-brown eyes winks at her.
It’s too much. Dave’s still grinning like he’s discovered the funniest joke in the universe as Anna faints in the hallway.
12. Dave — Sister
Toronto, ON: Tuesday, August 19
“Damn.” Dave leans over the plastic bin to consider the dead skyworm. Crouching on his heels, he reaches out with a tentative hand to touch the dark-purple tentacles that dangle limply from its head. The hole Anna blasted through its face is the diameter of his forearm, the scaled flesh around it charred black. There’s very little left of the creature’s mouth save a few teeth, making it difficult to imagine the original shape or structure. He stares at its empty triple eyes and the pale tentacle severed from its ruined mouth, part of him unwilling to accept its reality. The smell, however, is grounding. “It’s like something out of a movie.”
“Careful.” Beside him, Anna crunches through an apple and tosses the core into a garbage can. Immediately, she pulls a protein bar from her pocket. It’s gone in two bites. Since waking, she’s done nothing but eat and radiate embarrassment for fainting. “They sting.”
“You’re such a mom.” He brushes the nearest tentacle. A crackling jolt, similar to the kind of shock he sometimes receives working on circuit boards, jumps up his arm. Dave hisses and pulls his hand back, shaking his fingers like he would to dispel pins and needles. “Numbing, like you said.”
She tosses the wrapper in the garbage, too. “But you wouldn’t take my word for it.”
“Nope.” He uses his other hand to poke more gingerly at the orange scales. Its head is crested, the veins beneath the platelike structure prominent like those of a leaf. The colour of the scales brightens along its underbelly, narrowing to a whipcord tail with serrated edges. Supple and cool to the touch, the scales make his skin tingle, but the effect isn’t as pronounced as with the tentacles. “You said they can’t be filmed?”
Anna nods.
“Wonder why. It must be some sort of distortion.” Hal would have theories, he thinks out of habit. He touches the scales again to dismiss that thought, biting his lip against the mild jolt. “Makes me think of an electric eel.”
“Show me an electric eel that does that.” Anna gestures to the heap of long serrated metal fragments, beige on one side and dark grey on the other. She picks one up and hands it to Dave. “That’s what’s left of our propane tank. Thank God it was empty. You saw what it did to the SUV.” Between them, they’d managed to change the flat and park it on the street. “And if you think that’s messed up, wait till you see what the big ones did.”
Yeah, you showed me, he thinks, and Anna startles. He smiles, trying not to overwhelm her. In the garage’s dim light, the side of her face is scraped and bruised. He’s always thought of this sister of his heart as striking rather than pretty. Even she jokes that Jason got the looks.
Despite her injuries, however, there’s a purity to Anna this morning that makes his breath catch. She has her mother’s straight inky hair and wide-spaced eyes, combined with her father’s strong jaw. Intelligent and smart-mouthed, she’d scared the hell out of his friends at Waterloo. During the Rune years, his reception team lived in fear of her after a new hire mistakenly assumed Anna had come to make a delivery, not to have lunch with the company’s co-founder and CEO.
He’s often wondered if her temper or her overwhelming sense of justice drive her courage. Probably both. In one of his earliest memories, Anna’s standing over him in the schoolyard, screaming defiance at some bigger kid with blood streaming from his nose. She’d heard the boy, half a metre taller than them both, calling Dave the usual names and sucker punched him square in the face. She’d been suspended for two days, but the boy never bothered Dave again. Neither did any of his friends. Studying Anna’s profile, he has no trouble accepting that she single-handedly fought and killed three monsters.
Anna rolls her eyes. “You’re making me blush, Dave.” It’s his turn to be startled. He hadn’t realized he was broadcasting his thoughts. “I had help.” She puts her hand on his shoulder for balance as she stands, keeping her weight off her injured leg.
Without warning, Dave’s suddenly falling against hard concrete, blue energy a haze between him and the police officers crumpling fifty metres away, like paper dolls smashed by a willful child. Something screams above his head and blood thunders in his ears. In the next heartbeat, everything is eerily quiet and he’s kneeling over a woman’s pinched face, her police vest punctured by four purple tendrils the width of his bicep. Sorrow and regret surge in his throat, threatening to drown him.
She’s as loud as Leona, Dave thinks, stepping away to physically withdraw from the tsunami of emotions tumbling through Anna’s mind. Since nearing her house, he’s had remarkably few other mental intrusions, even from her children. Her mesmerizing thoughts, thick as morning fog rolling off the lake, drown out all other noise. They’re less immersive than his aunt’s memories but have the same absorbing pattern of sound, smell, and sensation, particularly when she touches him. Is that because we’re practically family? Or because of xhen?
“Those officers chose to help you, Anna,” he says aloud. “So put that guilt down. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
It’s happening again, Leona whispers in his memory, pushing away the last remnants of Anna’s thoughts about the dead officers. Why else would I let Chun-Mei arrange for the Montcalms to adopt you in Toronto after we lost Rose?
How many times had Dave wrestled with that question as a child? Thousands upon thousands. He’d always known he was adopted: His parents had been open about it from the time he was small. But his uncertainty about where and how he fit in the world lingered, even after he’d started spending time with Leona. Why didn’t you adopt me? he’d wondered. It was the one question he’d never been brave enough to ask.
And while Chun-Mei Lin has been a force in his life for as long as he can remember, he would never have guessed she played a role in his adoption. Dave opens his mouth to tell Anna, and then stops. He doesn’t need telepathy to know his exhausted sister needs the stress of that conversation like a hole in her head. I hardly know the story. I need to talk to Auntie Lee again.
“It’s creepy that you can do that.” Anna scrounges in her pocket for yet another protein bar. “Kalos will have to teach me some tricks so you can’t go rummaging around in my head.”
“Sorry.” Dave stands up and squeezes her shoulder. The monsters dive through the sky of her mind until he lets go, once more pushing her recollections away. Before they came out to the garage, he sat in her living room and heard—and felt and saw—her story twice from start to finish. “It’s new for me, too. Kalos said I’ll get better at controlling it.”
“Where’d you see him?”
“Truck stop outside of Parry Sound.” Dave stretches his stiff back, remembering his jolt of utter disbelief at seeing their teacher materialize out of the trees across from his parking spot. “He didn’t say much. I’d already figured out shit was going down and you were involved. He said you were safe and to take my time driving. I said, ‘Safe from what?’ but he didn’t answer. By the time he left, my back had stopped burning. I found a motel room, slept, and drove the rest of the way this morning.”
“That’s Kalos for you.” Anna shivers and rubs her arms, even though it’s not cold in the garage. “Cryptic as hell.” Her expression darkens. “Have you heard from—”
“Jason?” This time, they both grin.
“Your parlour trick is delightful,” Anna says, the faintest hint of jealousy in her voice.
“Yeah,” Dave agrees, cheered to see her smiling more like the Anna he remembers from their teens. She hasn’t had many reasons to smile lately. I should have come down more often, he thinks. He’d gone to Chun-Mei’s funeral, of course, but the logistics around his workshop had sucked him back to Miinikaa soon after. “We would have gone nuts for this back in the day, huh?” They exchange a deeper smile, though there’s sadness again in hers.
Of them all, Anna struggled the longest to adapt to life after Kalos. They’d known next to nothing about him, only that the village where he’d been born no longer existed in modern-day Turkey. His existence seemed entirely focused on teaching them to use xhen. When pressed, he’d refused to explain anything more.
The mystery had haunted Anna. Once, over beers at the Madison Pub, she’d told Dave that she’d chosen classical studies to increase her ability to hunt for answers. At one point, she’d considered graduate work overseas to expand her search. Then she’d met Malcolm and her focus had irrevocably shifted.
Dave nudges her side. “Do you remember all the silly shit we tried to make Kalos come back?”
“And Jay was so furious when none of it worked,” Anna says, hanging on to her smile despite her twisting lips.
Dave nods. There’d been nights when the twins fought so bitterly over what had happened to them that Dave feared they’d never speak again. Weeks passed when they hadn’t, leaving him caught between his two best friends, unable to choose a side. To Dave, the question was moot. All that mattered was that their training was over and it was time to move on.
“Yeah. Jay’s a stubborn dude. I texted him this morning,” Dave says. “Nothing yet. I’ll call him from Mum and Dad’s and get him on a plane the second Pearson Airport reopens.” He flashes a wicked grin at her. “So long as Kalos doesn’t get to him first.”
Anna frowns. “Or the skyworms show up in Vancouver.”
“Shit, I didn’t think of that.” He exhales noisily, annoyed to have missed the kind of strategic risk he used to pride himself on anticipating. “How likely do you think that is? Hard to play backup across four provinces.”
They contemplate the skyworm’s corpse for another long minute. Anna’s wrapped in bone-deep sorrow, familiar as his old hoodie. At the centre of its crushing force are Jason and her mother. Dave slips his arm around her shoulder, acutely aware of the vast distance between them and the third corner of their triangle. He pulls Anna and her layers of pain to his side, accepting the deluge of emotion. You know, Annie, I’m really fucking glad you didn’t die last night.
“Me, too.” Skyworms loom in her mind, their three-eyed heads seething with menace alongside a teenage girl’s frozen face. She presses her eyes into his shoulder, not bothering to put words to her feelings. They stand that way together in silent communion. Then she sniffs the red cotton of his sweatshirt. “You smell like cigarettes.” She glares. “I thought you quit, Dave.”
“Had one in the car.” He scrubs a hand through his hair. Halina had introduced him to smokes as a serious pursuit. Back in the day, when it had been just them working all hours in a computer lab or a coffee shop, they’d gotten in the habit of taking smoke breaks. As Rune expanded, Halina quit smoking. Dave had doubled down. Now, he can’t think about cigarettes without thinking of the knot in his chest that had never loosened once he’d met Charles Larkin, which makes him think of the heart attack, which makes him think of lying in his hospital bed suffering through nicotine withdrawal.
What would Hal think of xhen? he wonders, and pushes thoughts of his co-founder and Rune away. “I haven’t lit up in three years. Spare me the sermon.”
Anna’s eyebrows narrow. “If you get back on that train, I’ll sic both Dr. Lins on you.”
“Your dad’s scarier.” He stretches again, taking a step away. “So. Skyworms are that big, huh?”
A line furrows her brow. “Don’t change the subject.”
It needs changing. But now that the moment’s arrived, he feels a different kind of sickness. What if I can’t summon xhen?
“You will,” Anna says, exuding confidence. She’d been the same the weekend she’d driven to Waterloo for a visit, and he’d asked her if he and Halina should incorporate Rune. In the garage, he quivers with anticipation as she limps across the room and closes her eyes.
A familiar burning prickle washes over Dave’s forehead from the bridge of his nose to his hairline, lighting his kidneys up in an echo of the soft blue light that seeps from his sister’s skin. Dave gapes as Anna’s eyes open, every hair on his body standing at attention. Wow. He can’t do anything but stare, feeling the last of his disbelief spiral away as her xhen coalesces into a long slim line. She deftly throws the pulsing cord at him, like a hunter angling for a slippery fish. It coils around his arm. Her grin widens.
Against his skin, Anna’s xhen feels cold and . . . fuzzy. Dave twists to try and break her leash. She holds him fast. “Damn, Annie. I mean, I was ready but not at all ready, you know?”
He starts to laugh when she releases him, the same way he used to when they smoked weed in her parents’ garage during the terrible spring and summer after Kalos vanished. He’d let himself mourn what they’d lost, taking long walks with Jason at night or playing video games in his basement with Anna. When he’d moved to Waterloo that fall, he had put xhen away with the rest of his childhood.
“I feel it,” he manages, hearing the thickness in his throat as he holds a hand to his navel. “It’s right here, ready to break me open, too.”
“Well, come on, Dave,” Anna says, and he doesn’t know if it’s her memory or his, but they’re eleven or twelve, working up the nerve to jump off the ten-metre diving tower at the Summerville pool out in the Beaches. “Do it.”
Dave closes his eyes. At first, he does nothing but breathe, waiting for his pulse to slow. When he can’t bear the nervous waves washing against the inside of his stomach for a second longer, he lets his mind’s eye seek the center buried in his solar plexus, which is also a doorway to the universe. A burning sensation prickles up his back, chased by a delight so raw that the center of his bottom lip cracks beneath the force of his grin. Flickering light dances across his eyelids, bright as the last rays of sunset. When Dave opens his eyes, his body is bathed in deep crimson xhen. It flickers in the dimness, forming a living flame that wreathes his body as it undulates. He raises one hand, admiring the way the energy flows across and between his fingers without burning.
On the other side of the garage, Anna laughs. Her eyes dance in the dark, reflecting his fire.
It’s so crazy wonderful. A tear slides down his cheek. He wipes it away, half expecting it to sizzle. Shit, Annie. I forgot it was like this. He meets her shining gaze, his chest heavy and light all at once. I never let myself believe that xhen would come back.
“You and me both,” she says as the giddy truth beneath her words washes over him. He knows then, that for all her outward nostalgia and reluctance, she had also believed xhen was gone forever. Anna smiles, her grief momentarily forgotten, as energy pulses between them in a shared, joyous current. “Jason has to come home. Will you help me convince him?”
Dave nods. I drove over four hundred kilometres to be here, Annie. I’m all in.
Behind them, the garage’s side door opens. Dave spins to block the entrant’s view of the skyworm’s corpse. Anna turns, too. But the person entering isn’t one of her kids or the nosy neighbour she mentioned, but Malcolm, wearing khakis and a wrinkled golf shirt, carrying a metric ton of worry in the set of his shoulders.
“Goddamn,” he says, wide eyes leaping from Anna to Dave and back. He chuckles, the sound echoing the awkwardness of his posture. Something flashes over his face, but the emotion is gone before Dave can parse it. He’s always found Anna’s self-contained husband difficult to read. “Should have guessed you were part of this, Dave,” Malcolm says. He looks at his wife. “Jason, too?”
“Not yet,” Anna says, releasing xhen to embrace Malcolm. “I’m glad you’re back.” But the stiffness doesn’t leave his stance as he takes in the xhen flames still dancing up and down Dave’s arms. Faced with such naked curiosity, Dave can’t help himself. He holds his palms up, letting xhen arc between them like he’s a street busker. Malcolm smiles, finally relaxing, and Dave releases the energy. For a fleeting moment, they’re three old friends standing in a garage.
“Good to see you, man,” Dave says before the atmosphere gets too weird. He likes Malcolm, always has, but they’re friendly, not close. He concentrates as they shake hands, curious if Malcolm’s thoughts are different from Anna’s or Leona’s. To his surprise, the police officer’s mind is completely closed to him. As they shake hands, Dave gets nothing beyond the briefest flash of crowds, tents, rubble, and people in yellow hazmat suits.
