Shimmer: A Novel (13 page)

Ambrose caught her arms to steady her, then pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay, Thalia. That’s enough—enough for now.”

“Stop him,” she whispered piteously. “Stop him before it’s too late.”

Ambrose held her at arm’s length so she could see the confidence in his face. “We will, Thalia. We will.”

A tremulous flicker of hope returned to her eyes. “Promise?”

“Facimus quem nobis faciendum est,”
he said softly. “We do what we must.” Ambrose sighed.
Much easier said than done.

Chapter 22

Barrett leapt to the side the same moment the tentacle shot toward him with the speed of a hurled javelin, attempting to skewer his midsection. The evasive maneuver cost him his balance, though. He struck the wall as he swung his sword down in a double-handed grip, hoping to sever the eviscerating claw at the end of the lashing tentacle. As if sensing his intentions, the black appendage whipped aside and smashed into the banister supports before rising again. It reared in the air, curled into a reversed S like a snake poised to strike.

He heard a scuffle of feet.

Liana shouted.

Chelsea had slipped free of Liana’s grip and disappeared into what appeared to be a small guest room on the opposite side of the staircase.

Placing emphasis on each word, Barrett whispered fiercely, “Get her out of here.”

“I’m trying,” Liana said defensively. She spared a quick glance at the Outsider before following Chelsea. “Wait!” Liana said as Chelsea shoved past her clutching a brown folding metal chair in both arms. “Chelsea, we need to get you out of here.” Liana caught her arm, but Chelsea shrugged it off.

“Not yet!” Stark terror had transformed into unhealthy rage.

Barrett glared at the young woman. “What do you think you’re doing?”

As Chelsea hoisted the folded chair above her head, Barrett didn’t need latent prescient abilities to know exactly what she had in mind.

“Chelsea,” Barrett said tightly, “that’s a bad idea.” With the mother and brother both dead, Barrett had hoped they’d arrived in time to save the daughter. One survivor out of three victims was not a good day, but no survivors would be a hundred times worse, a complete failure. “A really, really bad idea.”

“I don’t care!” she yelled and flung the chair at the raised tentacle.

In the blink of an eye, the tentacle struck, snatching the chair out of the air, wrapping its hook around the back leg brace. Without hesitation it pulled the chair into the rift, disappearing into the inky darkness with it.

“Satisfied?” Barrett said, angry with her for risking otherworldly retaliation. “Now get out of—!”

Rippling movement skimmed the black surface of the rift—

A crumpled brown metal sphere the size of a basketball erupted from the absolute darkness—

—rushing toward Chelsea’s head.

Barrett
clicked.
That’s how he thought of his sudden transformation into sensory and reflexive overdrive, courtesy of his hyperacuity and hyperaesthesia—as
clicking.
He always operated in a heightened state of awareness and physical response, but in the middle of battle, sometimes as the result of an immediate threat or a blood wound, he would switch into that preternatural high gear. Colors became more vivid, sounds more distinct, odors more pungent, and movement around him seemed to slow down. This time the triggering threat was to an innocent victim.

As the crumpled ball of metal burst from the darkness toward Chelsea’s head, Barrett had insufficient time to complete the one word thought—
decapitation!
—before he sprang away from the wall and swung his sword, striking the sphere and deflecting its trajectory.

The crumpled metal chair blasted through a picture frame with an explosion of wood and glass, lodging in the wall behind it. Few inches to the right and the metal projectile would have smashed Chelsea’s head.

Trembling, she stared at the embedded remains of the chair.

Barrett shouted, “Go!”

As Chelsea nodded mutely, Liana caught her arm again and led her down the stairs.

Then Barrett heard somebody rushing up the stairs.

“What the hell’s going on?”

Grainger,
Barrett thought in frustration.
Just what I need.

Several steps below the second floor, Grainger had already trained his Glock on Barrett. “Drop the…” Sinuous black movement caught his attention. “Holy shit!”

“Nothing holy about it,” Barrett said.

During the brief distraction, the rift had drifted several feet toward him. The tentacle uncurled from within the darkness and the vicious barb weaved a hypnotic pattern in the air.

Grainger’s braced grip swung sideways away from Barrett as he took a bead on the tentacle. Before Barrett could warn him, the police chief fired four quick shots at the Outsider. Two of the four shots hit the bobbing tentacle, the impacts momentarily jarring the appendage—but the slugs ricocheted off its surface without creating any permanent damage.

Barrett twisted his head and shoulders and felt the passage of one deflected bullet a split-second before it plowed a furrow into the wall beside him.

The tentacle rammed forward, smashing through two banister uprights on its way to impaling the Hadenford chief of police—at least it tried to impale him. Grainger dropped in a flash, collapsing across the incline of stairs. The obstruction of the banister had given him enough time to avoid a potentially fatal injury. Even so, Barrett had to admire the man’s solely human reflexes.

From his prone position, Grainger yelled, “What the
hell
is that thing?”

“You’re in the right precinct”

The tentacle withdrew and traced a new, irritated pattern in the air. The bullets hadn’t injured the Outsider but they had provoked it, like smacking a beehive with a flyswatter. Agitated, the tentacle was looking for something to strike.

Mindful of the gore soaking into the hallway carpeting, Barrett stepped in front of it, placing himself between the Outsider and the ordinary human. The tentacle was quick to take the bait. It darted forward in a series of quick attacks, the lethal claw whistling through the air like a scythe. Barrett dodged, side-stepped and ducked as necessary to avoid the fierce onslaught, caught in an intricate and deadly dance too quick for normal human eyes to track.

Each time the tentacle withdrew for another attack, Barrett countered with a deft but quick swipe of his sword, taking care not to leave himself unprotected. Twice the claw clanged off the flat of the blade. Then he followed a parry with a sudden thrust, nicking the surface of the tentacle. Black fluid, maybe blood, sprayed across the hall carrying a foul stench. The tentacle’s attacks became fevered—and careless. Barrett blocked a high attack, spun his sword around in a half-loop and severed the tentacle inches behind the hooked barb, which dropped to the damp carpet with a heavy thud.

The barb thrashed on the floor, taking several quick hops toward him before fading from existence. From inside the rift came the sound of something shrieking.

Black-blood-spurting from its severed end, the tentacle withdrew into the darkness. A moment later the rift peeled away from the wall and flipped from vertical orientation to horizontal. It appeared as a long thin line before him, as high as his throat—

Barrett launched into a back flip, over the banister
railing, knowing that a rough landing was the least of his problems. Heels over head, he twisted his neck and caught a glimpse of the rift streaking toward him, crossing the row of banister supports with the sound of an industrial-strength wood chipper.

As expected, Barrett landed hard, but he caught the heel of Grainger’s black leather shoe and clamped down hard, tugging the chief of police down the steps with him.

The rift skimmed down the carpeted stairs, creating a series of explosions as it destroyed one step after another.

The two men tumbled down the staircase, moments ahead of the Outsider’s fury. Something soft and wet broke their fall—Chelsea’s dead brother. Barrett climbed to his feet, caught Grainger’s upper arm and hoisted him up before shoving him aside. Barrett’s overdrive—the preternatural adrenaline rush—had the side benefit of giving him a significant though equally temporary boost in strength. Afterward, his muscles often ached for days.

With Grainger out of harm’s way, Barrett stood his ground at the base of the stairs, staring down the approaching rift and wondering if this was his moment, his chance to prove he was worthy of the Walker name… to prove he wasn’t a coward.

He remembered as if were yesterday the day Gideon disappeared into the San Diego warehouse rift. Pinned beneath a pile of collapsed lumber, Barrett had been helpless to aid Gideon in that critical moment of crossing, not knowing if he would ever see his brother again. Though Gideon had returned from that crossing, those lost moments had been costly. Something had died within Gideon. Soon afterward he’d abandoned the Walkers and their way of life. Barrett blamed himself for that. He should have crossed with Gideon, stood at his side in the darkness.
We walk in shadows, damn it,
he thought angrily.
And I failed him.

This time was different.

He was ready.

No excuses.

Shards and slivers of wood from the exploding stairs pelted his face. He winced but stood firm. “C’mon!” he shouted.

“Barrett, no!” Liana called. “It’s too small! Logan!”

“Stay back!”

They didn’t listen.

Out of the corner of his eye, Barrett saw Logan rushing toward him but wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted at the critical moment. “No!”

The kid was smart enough to know he lacked the upper body strength to shove Barrett out of the way. Instead he drove his shoulder into the back of Barrett’s knees, buckling them.

His defensive stance compromised, Barrett abandoned his plans for a solitary showdown with the rift. He grabbed Logan around the chest and hurled both of them clear of the path of destruction. He flung Logan aside and jumped to his feet, tracking the rift as it collided with the dining room table and seemed to chew up and spit out one of the legs. The back of a mahogany chair ruptured and then the darkness was gone.

Logan approached from the other side of the room, rubbing a sore elbow, which he’d probably dinged when Barrett tossed him across the room. A wide-eyed Fallon—when had she joined the chaos?—walked over to Logan as if grateful for a friendly face.

Barrett looked angrily from Logan to Liana. “Why did you stop me?”

Liana clung to a trembling, sobbing Chelsea and stared back at Barrett defiantly. “That rift was too damn small to cross and you know it.”

“I could have made it!”

“Like hell!”

“It was my choice to make!”

“We work as a team. If you have a death wish, kindly leave us out of it.”

“You need me here,” Barrett said stubbornly. “This family needs me.”

“We need fighters,” Liana said, her tone more reasonable, “not martyrs.”

“That’s not—! I’m not…” Barrett sighed, feeling the familiar wave of depression and exhaustion that inevitably followed overdrive. “Oh, hell.” He walked toward the front door.

“Just a minute,” the chief of police called. He’d been following their argument with interest, but with each exchange the confusion on his face had grown.

Barrett wasn’t in the mood for answering a bunch of questions. “I just saved your ass, chief,” he said to Grainger. “How about cutting me some slack?”

“Look, buddy,” Grainger said. “I don’t care about your family squabbles.” He nodded toward Chelsea. “This girl’s mother and brother were killed and I need answers now.”

“You think we’re responsible for that?”

“You charged in here with a sword for Christ’s sake, and this one”—he pointed to Liana—“tried to run me down. Either you were accessories to this… butchery or you knew it was about to happen. Either way, you don’t get a free pass.”

“Fine. You want answers, join the family debrief,” Barrett said as he turned back to the door. “Or shoot me in the back. At this point, I don’t really care.”

Chapter 23

As the Hadenford chief of police, Travis Grainger was accustomed to being in control of situations. When others panicked, his was the cool head navigating through the crisis. People counted on him and he had no problem bearing that responsibility. He had a practical approach to life and his career. Took things one day at a time. Handled problems as they arose. Not to say he didn’t plan for contingencies. Far from it. Part of his job was to plan for every imaginable emergency. And that was the problem, because nothing in his police training or in his regular departmental strategy sessions could have prepared him for what he’d witnessed this evening.

He hated to admit it, even to himself, but what he’d experienced less than two hour ago had rattled him to the core, spreading condemnation-class fissures in the foundation of his rational worldview. Nothing
rational
could explain the things he’d seen. His first instinct was to reject what he’d witnessed, to disbelieve his own senses. His gut told him to throw the whole damn Walker family into a holding cell and lose the paperwork. But that was fear talking. Fear of the unknown. Ultimately, that was what he had rejected. A quiet, contemplative corner of his consciousness had overruled the irrational fear and the churning nausea in his stomach. Locking the Walkers in a forgotten cell would not make the madness go away. On the contrary, their absence might give whatever… thing had come out of that darkness free reign over Hadenford. Deep down he didn’t believe they had abetted it, assisted it in any way. They’d been there to stop it, to protect the Conrad family. Barrett Walker had, with great disregard for his own safety, placed himself between Grainger and the thing that had tried to kill him. But what was it? And how did the Walkers know it would be there? Nagging questions.

Compounding Grainger’s fear of this particular unknown was the uncomfortable knowledge that his bullets—a policeman’s weapons of last resort—had done little more than irritate the thing the Walkers referred to as the Outsider. But the Outsider didn’t have the monopoly on strangeness this evening. Even before he’d glimpsed the creature—and that’s how he thought of it—Grainger had witnessed the strange abilities of the Walkers themselves. Discounting the spectacle of a man wielding a sword on a suburban street in the early part of the twenty-first century, Grainger had seen the woman, Liana, cast some sort of spell on him, using golden glowing tattoos on her arms and a language he’d never heard before. Then Barrett Walker had become a blur of motion. Grainger’s fellow officers would think he was crazy if he told them he saw the man dodge a bullet… but that was the impression he had of the incident outside the Conrad home. And inside the house, again with the sword, Barrett had become a blur of motion, engaged in a lightning-fast duel with a creature out of a fever dream. Grainger had been unable to focus on Barrett’s movements, almost as if intermittent stroboscopic flashes revealed him in a series of disconnected images.