Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle, page 13
Strange. He returns his attention to Anna. His surprise deepens when he realizes there isn’t a drop of pain or worry leaking from her as she stands with one arm around Malcolm’s waist. What changed? Why?
“I was afraid you were one of the kids,” Anna’s saying.
“They’re playing LEGO.” Malcolm paces over to the creature. “The three things you killed downtown were so big.” He looks at Anna. “You got lucky both nights. You know that, right?”
Tension thrums between them, but Dave catches no corresponding thoughts in their minds. “Don’t touch it,” he cautions as Malcolm drifts a little closer to the corpse. “The scales sting.”
“They stink, too. Let’s box this up before someone realizes where the smell’s coming from.” He fits the lid back in place and glances at Dave. “I saw your dad. He says the federal government’s going to declare a state of emergency.”
Years of being grilled in board meetings keeps Dave’s expression neutral. “It’s a logical step,” he says. “Dad will hate the loss of control, of course.”
“Yeah,” says Malcolm, turning to his wife. “He expects the army will take command of the situation in Toronto soon. You should both talk to Chief Montcalm before they arrive.”
“No,” Anna says. “Not until we understand what’s going on.” She catches Dave’s eyes, and this time he hears her thought, clear as a bell. And don’t you dare agree with him, Dave Montcalm.
“Anna, there are hundreds of people dead,” Malcolm insists. “Officers died, kids died—”
“I saw her,” Anna says shortly. “The dead teen.”
“There were two more,” Malcolm tells her. “Another girl and a boy, all the same age. They went to high school together. And three more kids, all boys, out in the Beaches on Sunday night.”
Dave shivers, sickened, as he locks gazes again with Anna. He doesn’t have to touch her mind to know what she’s thinking. Groups of three. Just like us.
Malcolm’s not finished. “You’re the reason the attack ended. If you understand why these things have come here, if you have a single scrap of useful information about how to protect people, you need to come forward.” His gaze swings to Dave. “Today.”
Dave starts to bristle at the imperative. It’s challenging for people used to giving orders to know when to take them, his leadership coach used to say when he was going through a particularly fractious period with his board of directors. Knowing when to listen and when to stand your ground is what makes a successful CEO.
He takes a deep breath, feeling his way into the other man’s point of view. Malcolm’s like Dad. They’re chain-of-command people. Anna’s inadvertently pushed him out of his comfort zone. Of course he wants to get back in his lane.
Before he can offer any perspective, his sister’s hands curl themselves into fists. And if I’ve got an anti-authoritarian streak, Anna’s is a mile wide. Dave takes a step toward Malcolm, shifting their focus to him. “A lot has changed,” he says. “We don’t fully understand all of it yet.” He looks at Anna for confirmation. She nods. “Back when we were learning, none of this was tangible. Annie couldn’t make leashes. I couldn’t do this.” He holds up his hands, letting the fire arc again. “Or hear thoughts.”
Malcolm does a double take. “You what?”
“Don’t worry, man,” Dave laughs. “You’re, like, the one person I can’t hear.”
Malcolm doesn’t look reassured.
“But we shouldn’t kid ourselves, either. Something big has shifted. The skyworms will be back.” He looks at Anna, who nods, crossing her arms.
“Skyworms,” Malcolm repeats, tasting the word and grimacing.
Dave nods. “The big question in my mind is whether we get Jason here in time.”
“If he agrees to come,” Anna grumbles.
“Hey, let’s assume the positive,” Dave counters. “We’ve got new information.”
“Dave,” Malcolm says, his voice strained. “Would you give us a moment? Please?”
Unease crackles between them, dangerous as a downed power line. They haven’t had any time to talk, Dave realizes. “Sure thing,” he says, squeezing Anna’s shoulder. “Why don’t I check on the kids?” He slips out through the garage door and closes it behind him.
In their backyard, Dave looks down at his hands. Xhen flickers in his mind’s eye, and he lets a thin trickle dance across his knuckles. Here again after all this time, he thinks, humbled and amused. His hospital days after Rune had been rife with navel gazing: about who he’d been, who he should be, and which of his possible new selves would bring the most benefit to his community. Never once had xhen been part of any of his tentative answers.
Smiling, Dave releases the energy. Leona would say Creator sure has a wonderful sense of humour. Let’s hope that will inspire me to motivate a stubborn doctor.
Pulling his phone out, he walks into the house and dials.
13. Jason — Kalos
Vancouver, BC: Tuesday, August 19
Jason’s bare toes grip the diving tower’s pebbled edge. Ten metres down, Anna and Dave bob midair in an empty Olympic-size swimming pool, their arms and legs moving as though they’re treading invisible water.
“Jump!” Anna orders, her voice echoing and thin. “Hurry!”
“There’s no water,” Jason shouts back.
Dave smacks the empty air with his hand, producing a faint splash. “Come on!”
Jump, a voice says in his ear. Jump or they die.
Jason blinks. The pool is full of liquid, but it’s red, not blue. Anna’s glaring up at him, her face stained crimson. And there are things circling beneath her and Dave in the bloody pool—impossibly massive things with crested heads—and as he leans forward to look, vertigo seizes him, and he’s falling and . . .
. . . Margo’s shaking him awake. “Jason. Jason, wake up. You’re dreaming.” She leans over him, one hand lightly shaking his chest. Her brown eyes are wide with concern. “Are you all right?”
He tilts his head on the pillow to look up at her, frowning.
She shrugs slightly, as though embarrassed for him. “You were screaming.”
“I was?” His throat’s dry. Jason reaches for the glass of water he always keeps on his nightstand. The clear plastic cup is red, and he recalls Anna’s crimson face. He spoke to me in the garage. I heard his voice. Jason freezes, his fingers halting in midair.
Margo takes the cup and waits until he’s sitting up to pass it to him. “Yeah,” she says. “‘Stop touching my head! Stop touching my head!’ You shouted that over and over.” She grins like she does when someone’s made an awkward joke at a dinner party, inviting him to shape the gaffe into something amusing. But his stomach’s a block of ice, and the glass feels like a stone.
Kalos.
Years ago, there had been a period of perhaps six months when Jason would have given his right arm to hear that distinctive non-voice whisper in his thoughts. Anna probably still would. But that time is long gone.
“You’re so pale,” Margo tells him, touching a hand to his cheek. “Are you sick?”
“Maybe.” His aching head feels muffled, like it does when he’s coming down with a sinus cold. Maybe I’m going crazy.
“Poor doctor,” Margo chides, sliding her hand down his stubbled cheek until she’s cupping his chin. “I’ll take my chances.” Smiling, she lifts his mouth into her orbit. Her lips taste of coffee and sugar, as they always do in the morning, but he can’t kiss her back.
Anna. Dave. They swim through his thoughts, stirring alarm. Stop it, he tells himself. It was just a dream.
Margo draws back as though aware he’s not fully in the moment, but her expression is playful. Normally, she’s keyed up and tense in the run-up to previews for a show. Last night’s dress rehearsal must have been spectacular. “You really aren’t well,” she observes with concern.
“I’m fine.”
“Liar. You’re all sweaty. You should go back to sleep.” Margo points toward the clock. “You’ve barely had three hours. And I have my cast meeting at eleven. Take advantage of the quiet.”
“Too late.” He swings his legs over the side of the bed, massaging his forehead. The pressure sends needlelike arcs of pain across his temples. Something attacked me in the garage. He drinks water, aware he’ll get a migraine if he doesn’t heed Margo’s advice. But if he sleeps, he might dream again. “I’m up.”
“Mmm. So I see.” Margo slides her hands over him, putting truth to her observation, and then she’s climbing into his lap and kissing him again. “You’ve got another shift tomorrow,” she says in a teasing voice, her teeth gently nipping at his ear lobe. “You need to be on your game.”
Jason pulls her close. She’s reassuringly solid against his bare arms and chest. As he holds her, he feels the strain inside him ease. This is real. She’s wearing one of his white dress shirts knotted over a black tank top and skirt. He kisses Margo’s neck and the hollow of her ear as he slides a hand up her leg. “I’m always on my game.”
“Not on three hours!” She laughs. “Let’s get you sleepy.”
Jason smiles into her neck, turned on despite his poor sleep. “You’re going to be late.”
“Director’s prerogative,” she murmurs around his tongue.
Desire jolts through him. Her hands rake his hair; his unbutton her shirt. In the space of a heartbeat, they’re naked beneath the sheet and Margo commands his attention. In her arms, everything else falls away.
She comes. Jason’s orgasm hovers teasingly close before the image of the pool and the creatures surfaces again. I heard his voice. His erection collapses. They persist for a few more minutes before agreeing to let the moment go. Margo grants him a last spectacular kiss and then climbs out of bed.
When she’s dressed, she bends to pick up her purse, catching his eye as she smiles. I’m the luckiest man in the world. Jason smiles back at her, tempted to pull her back into bed and kiss her again. “Have a good cast meeting.”
“Oh, I will,” she says. “Everyone was so jealous of my flowers yesterday. And you gave me the most fantastic brainwave.”
Folding his arms behind his head on the pillow, Jason gestures for her to continue.
“Ivy and I are going to send a basket of chocolates, flowers, and four tickets to every sorority on UBC’s campus. It’s a play for and about women. If they like it, we’ll have word of mouth jumpstarted like that.” She snaps her fingers, the picture of confidence.
Jason grins at her, enraptured.
“You better be here with more inspiration when I get home. Rested!” Blowing a kiss, she turns to leave in a swirl of her orchid perfume. But at the bedroom door, she pauses to look back. “Oh, your sister texted me. Twice. And your friend. Dave? You should call them.”
Alarm fires through every synapse in Jason’s head, banishing his good mood in an instant. Great, he thinks as Margo’s heels click to the front door. A glance at his phone confirms his unease as he flicks on the device’s sound: seventeen texts and two missed calls from Dave, a missed call from his father, and one text from Anna:
Call me today.
God, she never gives up. It’s the aspect of Anna’s personality that he finds most infuriating.
As unease balloons inside him, Jason leaves the bedroom with his phone in hand. In the living room, the TV is off. Margo rarely uses the flat screen for anything but Netflix. She hates social media. The news is so depressing! she’s always saying to their friends. They want you to be afraid of everything. Why make space for that negativity in your life?
I bet she hasn’t heard about Toronto, Jason thinks as he picks up the remote. He jumps to CBC and half listens to the commentators gamely trying to parse the same pixelated images he saw the previous night. Then one says, “We’re going to footage captured from security cameras at the base of the CN Tower. Police are looking for this woman—”
Jason doesn’t hear a word after that because it’s his sister on the screen, pulsing with light. Anna, what have you done? She’s hooded, but Jason would know her anywhere. The bottom of his stomach drops out of his body as he watches his twin charge across a field of grass, shining with what can only be xhen, toward two strange, pixelated blurs. Was she telling the truth?
Jason.
Refusing to look, Jason walks into the kitchen and pours a cup of coffee from the half-empty Bodum sitting on the counter. But when he turns to the refrigerator for cream, his eyes see empty air, but his mind sees Kalos beside the stainless-steel appliance. His old teacher’s serene expression is the same, his symmetrical face framed by a neat salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. Perhaps two inches shorter than Jason, Kalos’s dark eyes hold the same cool distance he remembers in a face Margo would describe as dignified rather than handsome.
Jason sets down his mug, hatred leaping in his chest. “No,” he says. “No. You’re not real.”
Kalos inclines his head. Child.
“You left us!” Jason shouts, partly shocked by his fury. “I have a life now! Whatever you’ve come back for, whatever you want, the answer is no. I want no part of you.”
Kalos’s expression doesn’t flicker. As a teacher, he was stingy with praise and insistent on perfection in their endless drills. Jason had once believed Kalos was human, yet he seemed so deeply attuned to xhen that he’d theorized their teacher had forgotten informal human gestures like smiles. There was the ritual of instruction between them, and little else. And yet, Jason had once loved him more than anyone.
Your training was complete.
“You told us to go back to our lives.” The bitterness is as fresh as the night Kalos vanished in the glow of an alley streetlight, never to return. He remembers how furious he’d been to hear those words. How deeply they’d cut after everything he’d endured under Kalos’s guidance. He can’t count the nights that he, Anna, and Dave went out, separately or together, to get so stoned they couldn’t stand. It had been like they were making up for lost time. It was then that his doubts about what exactly had happened to them crept in.
And you did. But the world has need of you, Jason. You and your triad.
“That mess in Toronto has nothing to do with us.” In the corner of his eye, his sister sprints across the living room TV, her every step unraveling his words.
It was the site of their first attack. Anna killed four skyworms there. Yet the veil between worlds is thinning. They will come again.
“That’s a lie.”
I do not lie, Xenthian.
“Xenthian?”
For the first time, something soft relaxes the stern lines of Kalos’s face. So you are, xhen-wielder. As was I, once.
Memories come back in a hot rush: that night behind the Montcalm house with Dave, the way an opening in the fabric of the world seemed just beyond his reach, the crushing pressure as he tried to grasp that edge and push and push and push—and then nothing but dust beneath his bare knees and the stale taste of sweat on his lips. “I haven’t touched xhen in years.”
Yet it touches you. And skyworms have come to harvest our xhen, as they have come before. Two thousand years ago, they attacked this world. Xenthians rallied to resist in the Levant, across North Africa, in Southern Asia, and across Southern China. A shadow passes over his face. That war claimed many brave souls.
Jason grips the counter as he hears himself laugh as though from a great distance. “Are you going to tell me that’s when you fought them? Do you expect me to believe in all your children’s stories again?”
Not then. Skyworms have attacked us twice. My sisters and I allied with the Mesopotamians to fight. We fell within sight of Babylon’s walls.
Cold shivers through Jason’s body. If that’s true, Kalos is at least 3,000 years old. Shaking his head, he begins to pace. “No,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense. You would have told us years ago.” He turns to sneer. “You would have said anything to make us trust you.”
Xenthians are always trained in case the skyworms return. But you do not shoulder pointless worry for a war that may never come. That burden is mine.
The sneer dies on Jason’s lips. Before he can check his curiosity, a question rushes out. “How many times have you trained people like us?”
Child, says Kalos, and his infinite gentleness draws Jason’s gaze to his calm face. More times than there are hairs on your head. Go to your family. Your triad must be whole before the skyworms return.
And then Kalos is gone.
Jason stares into his cooling coffee. This is how people break. Believing self-serving nonsense tangled in half-truths.
His phone rings. Jason automatically picks it up, hoping it’s Margo calling to say her cast meeting is canceled. Margo’s my family. But she would text, not call, and the lock screen shows a photo of Jason drinking beer with Dave in his parents’ backyard. Jason clicks the TV off and answers on the third ring. Here it comes. “Hey, Dave.”
