Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (29 page)

“I could call Bohannon. Maybe he could get a sample for us,” Ping said.

Sam’s eyes widened when it struck him what they were contemplating. “You’re going to Prado’s realm?”

Mara raised her hands in front of her. “Don’t get excited. It’s only an idea. I haven’t decided on doing anything yet.”

“If we can determine the correct node in the Chronicle, how does Mara use it to cross into that realm?” Ping asked.

“Instead of tapping the node, she grabs it and holds on for dear life,” Sam said.

“What do you mean by that?” Mara said.

“It’s an intense process, hard to describe. But it doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Well, that’s a relief. What can I expect when I get to the other side?”

Sam shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. This is the only realm I have been to, other than my own. My Mara said some of the realms are almost exactly the same with a few differences, but there are some that are totally different. She went to one that was all water and nearly drowned. That really freaked her out, ’cause she had that same water phobia as you.”

Mara reared back in alarm. Ping reached out and patted her forearm. “Prado obviously comes from a realm where they breathe air, or he couldn’t have survived long enough to cause the problems he has.”

“Yeah, but things will be different,” Sam added.

Mara shook her head back and forth. “I don’t know. How do I get back?”

“The Chronicle sort of folds in on itself when you cross over and goes with you. When you are ready to return, activate the Chronicle and grab the node that is floating in front of you. It’ll open up and suck you back into this realm.”

“And your Mara did this?”

“Many times. She went to dozens of realms, looking for people with metaphysical abilities for my mother to take, remember?”

“How could I forget? So that’s it? Grab the right node and go?”

“Pretty much. But, remember, if you run into yourself, don’t let her touch you. You’ll get blown back into this realm, and that does hurt,” he said.

Ping interjected, “Why don’t you head on into the living room so we don’t draw your mother’s attention? Mara and I will be out in a moment.”

As Sam stood up, Mara looked at him. “Don’t say anything to Mom.”

He nodded and walked out.

Ping watched him leave, then turned to Mara. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t there some other way?”

“In order to deal with Prado, we need to understand what is going on, and this seems to be the only way to learn more,” he said. After taking a sip of cold tea and wincing, he added, “Why don’t you take some time and consider it, get used to the notion of doing this. I need to ask Bohannon if he can get a sample of Prado’s remains for us.”

“All right, but, if we do it, we’ll have to do it at the shop or the bakery.”

“Why is that?”

“First, Mom would never allow me to do this, so we can’t do it here. Second, I left the Chronicle at the shop. I took it in hoping you would let me send the dragon back to his realm, but you put the kibosh on that.”

“I didn’t realize you were that intent on it.”

“Well, we have bigger monsters to fry at the moment. Why don’t you get in touch with Bohannon? I’ll meet you at the shop around one o’clock this morning, once I sneak out of the house. Call me if it doesn’t work out.”

As Mara and Ping stood up to go into the living room, a shudder ran through the walls of the house. Glancing up at the ceiling, Mara got the sense that someone was running or jumping upstairs. Sam must be playing around or something. Heavier thumps reverberated, as if something were bounced off a wall, and the loud slamming of a door made her wonder what he was up to. Mild curiosity melted into fear as a scream sliced through the air. The color drained from Mara’s face.

She ran from the kitchen and met Sam at the foot of the stairs. “Where’s Mom?”

“She went up to check on Buddy,” he said.

For a moment that struck Mara as irrational since Buddy stood right there behind Sam in all his translucent green glory.

From upstairs, Diana screamed, “Mara! He’s awake, and he’s out of bed!

She ran up the stairs with Sam right behind her.

As she got to the top of the stairs, she glanced into the open door of her room. It was empty. The bedding had been dragged to the floor and left in a tangled mess, spread from the foot of the bed to the door. The crash of shattering glass drew her to the end of the hall, to the closed door of her mother’s room.

“Mom!” Mara ran to the door and flung it open.

Inside, Diana was wedged into a corner, shrinking into a small space between the side of a dresser and the wall. Lurching toward her with one arm extended was Buddy, or at least his body, gray and rotting with black pus oozing out of the cracks in his skin. He moved haltingly, stiff-legged, propelling himself more by swinging his hips and shoulders than flexing his knees and ankles.
Bruce was right. He really does look like a zombie
.

“Buddy! Leave her alone!” Mara yelled. “You need to go back to bed.”

He continued as Diana pressed against the wall, tried to make herself smaller, while he swiped at the air inches from her face with dry, shriveled fingers.

Diana gritted her teeth and made a low growling sound of frustration as she dodged by turning her face away. “Stop trying to reason with him and do something,” she said.

“Don’t let him touch you, Mom!” Sam yelled from the hall.

Diana rolled her eyes and slid down the wall, sitting on the carpet with her head pressed against the dresser. There was nowhere else to go.

“You too, Mara. You can’t touch him,” Sam added.

Dragging a limp foot forward and planting it stiffly, Buddy closed the space between him and Diana. He leaned forward and grabbed a handful of her hair. With a sudden jerk of the arm, he yanked her out of the little cubbyhole and flung her across the room. Airborne for several seconds, Diana landed half on and half off the queen-size bed in the middle of the room. Momentum carried her over the edge on the far side, and she rolled to the floor.

Mara lifted her hands before her. Bolts of lightning arced from them, striking Buddy in the chest, sending a shudder through his frame. A smile crossed his face, and his blackened eyes shone more brightly, as if it tickled. He lurched forward, almost staggered, as if he were just learning to walk, toward the bed, toward Diana.

“Buddy, don’t,” Mara said in a low voice. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He stopped. His head snapped toward her; his empty eyes drilled into her. In the shiver-inducing baritone, he spoke, “I am taking this one. You cannot stop me,” with a light lisp on the word
stop
. He smoothly tilted his head toward the far side of the bed, an oddly coordinated and confident motion compared to how he walked.
He’s still learning to control these bodies
.

“That is not going to happen. You are going to go back to bed and keep your hands to yourself until I figure out how to help you. Don’t make me hurt you.”

Buddy laughed. A haughty belly laugh. “Hurt me? You? You’re a child.”

“Buddy—”

“I am not your buddy, little girl.” His eyes narrowed, his head tilted sideways and upward, and he inhaled deeply.

From behind her, Sam extended his arm over her shoulder, shoving his phone in front of her face. Whispering, he said, “The mist. It’s heading across the room toward Mom. I don’t think it’s got to her yet.”

Mara pushed away his arm and stared ahead. “Prado. You’re Juaquin Prado.”

“I was once.”

“And now? Who are you now?”

“I am many people. I will be many more.” He turned to look over the bed again toward where Diana lay. “I will be your mother soon.”

“Shut up.” Mara raised her hands.

“I am becoming many things, all things. I am Nemesis. I am Blight. His head lolled slightly, dreamily, and his black eyes looked around blindly as he spoke, as if he could not focus or was distracted by something on an unseen horizon.

“I thought you were Legion and before that you were Juaquin Prado,” Mara said.

“Yes, I am them as well.”

“Sounds like you are having some kind of personality crisis to me.”

“I am still becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

Incongruously he shrugged. “We will see. Perhaps one day I will become you.” He paused for a beat and added, “Mara.”

Sam pushed her from behind. “The mist, Mara, the mist. It’s almost across the room.”

Mara narrowed her eyes at Prado, freezing Time, leaving him motionless and silent. Over her shoulder, she asked Sam, “Is it still moving toward Mom?”

“No, it’s hovering there over the bed.” He squeezed between Mara and the door frame, and moved toward the bed, pointed his phone’s camera lens over the bed. On the screen, an elongated wispy cloud hung in the air, beginning to descend toward the floor where Diana lay.

“Stop looking at your phone and help Mom,” Mara said.

In the hall, Ping walked up behind her, and Mara stepped into the room to allow him to see what was happening. She paced around Buddy’s unmoving body a couple feet in front of the dresser and noticed he was standing barefoot in a mound of broken blue glass—a vase that had been shattered before Mara had responded to the screams.

“What can he possibly hope to accomplish by infecting all these people? Clearly their bodies cannot sustain him. He’s killing them. Won’t he eventually die when they do? Won’t he run out of people to infect or possess or whatever this is?” Mara asked.

“There are a great number of organisms in the world that are deadly to the hosts they feed off of. This may be a completely natural life cycle for Prado.”

“Only if part of that cycle includes delusions of grandeur. I mean, the guy sounds psychotic with all that talk about being a nemesis and a blight. He clearly sees himself as some demonic force bent on causing pain and destruction.”

“We can only attempt to guess at what his motivations are. All this could simply be instinct, or perhaps he has suffered some kind of mental breakdown as a result of crossing over to this realm.”

“You sound like you are making excuses for him.”

“Only pointing out how little we really know.”

Across the room, Sam helped his mother stand up and held her arm as they walked toward the door. As they approached, Diana looked up at her daughter, and her eyes widened. “Mara, what’s wrong with you?”

Mara looked back blankly and then glanced down at herself. She flickered for several seconds, then solidified.

“She flickers like that when she uses her abilities too much,” Sam said.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry. It has happened before. Ping, can you help Mom downstairs while we figure out what to do with Buddy or Prado or whoever this is?”

“Absolutely,” Ping said, moving in to let Diana put an arm across his shoulder. They slowly navigated around Buddy and left the room.

Mara examined Buddy and considered what to do. After a few moments, she turned to her brother. “It seems like whenever I mess with the element of Time, I start to fade and flicker, so I can’t hold him like this much longer. If I release him from this Time lock, do you think you could prompt him to sleep? Will that work?”

“I don’t know. I’ve not ever prompted a dead guy possessing a bunch of people before,” Sam said, shrugging. “We don’t have much choice but to try. You look like you are about to disappear.” He nodded at Mara’s flickering arm, which was slowly becoming more transparent.

“Hold on,” she said, walking over to the end of the bed, pointing above it. “Is the mist up here?”

Sam held up his phone and eyed it. “Most of it is to the left side near where Mom fell over to the floor.”

Mara stared into the air and imagined a black mist billowing before her. In her mind’s eye, she imagined it slowly appearing before her. A hazy smear wavered and flickered above the bed. Darkening to a smudge, it coalesced into a cloud. Narrowing her eyes, she concentrated, and it exploded into a spray of tiny translucent pixels that showered over the bed and slowly disappeared.

“That pixelizing thing you do is so strange,” Sam said.

“Yeah, yeah. Get ready to prompt Buddy the zombie,” Mara said, nodding in his direction.

Buddy staggered slightly as if being released from the grip of something, and Sam leaned forward to catch his attention, grimacing at the wet tar-colored eyes in which he stared. “Hey, Prado. Go to sleep.”

Buddy’s body fell to the ground in a heap.

Calling from downstairs, Diana said, “Kids! You better get down here. You need to see this.”

As Mara and Sam descended the stairs, they could see Ping and Diana standing in front of the television, staring down at it. Entering the room, Mara noted that Buddy’s apparition remained seated on the couch, apparently entranced by the screen as well. Sam tapped his mother’s and Ping’s shoulders, and they parted, standing back to reveal the news report in front of them. A reporter was doing a voice-over of a large hospital ward comprised of rows of beds with shedding victims standing next to them in their hospital gowns. A Breaking News label flashed at the bottom of the screen and below that scrolled:
Just one minute ago at Northwest Memorial Hospital, “shedding” victims awaken from their comas to speak.
More than twenty patients stood stiffly and stared blankly at the television camera with their wet black eyes.

“Hold on,” said the off-camera reporter. “My producer says we will have that video unstuck in a second. On a side note, a hospital spokesman says they have no comment on what is occurring with the patients and refuse to conjecture as to the meaning of what they are saying or why they are saying it. Here’s that footage.”

The screen flickered for a second, and the video resumed. Rows of patients looked through the camera and laughed a haughty belly laugh, and, perfectly synchronized, said, “Hurt me? You? You’re a child.” All twenty voices were the same, a deep baritone chorus of Juaquin Prado.

Mara’s blood ran cold. It was the conversation she had just had with him, coming out of the mouths of all the victims. Because her contribution was missing, it sounded nonsensical, like overhearing half a phone conversation.