The Gatekeeper's Sons (The Gatekeeper's Trilogy) (34 page)

A pack of skinny dogs
, crouched around a half-eaten carcass, looked up at them and were about to bark when Than said, “Silence.” The dogs obeyed and went back to what they had been doing.

Than led Therese around the side of the building from which they could see a road and a jeep approaching. Than flattened against the building, pulling Therese beside him. “They’re meeting us here.”

“The people in the jeep?”

“No.”

Before he said more, Meg and Tizzie appeared before them. They too pressed their backs against the building, out of site of the jeep, which had stopped now. Therese could hear men talking and the jeep doors slamming shut. Then she heard laughter. The laughing stopped at the sound of another vehicle approaching.

A man Therese could not see spoke in a harsh voice. The only word she recognized was, “McAdams.”

Meg signaled the others to follow her to the back of the building, back to the heaps of rubbish and garbage cans. The dogs looked up as the group passed by and then the animals returned to their carcass.

The gods and one human huddled behind the building where
Tizzie said, “I’ve found a place in the building where Therese can hide while we use invisibility to get McAdams.”

Meg snarled, “I can’t believe you brought her, Than.
You know Ares is against us. You’ve endangered her life, our mission…”

“Enough,” Than said. “This is her battle, too. I’ll stay beside her but will help if you need me.”

Than held tightly to Therese’s hand and the bright light surrounded them. They reappeared behind a metal pallet stacked high with cardboard boxes. Through the boxes, Therese could see three men gathered in the middle of a large room full of machines and assembly lines that at the time were not running. Two of the men were dark-skinned and holding weapons, but the thin, bald, white man trembling before them must be McAdams.

“May I remind you that you work for me!” McAdams shouted. “We stand to make a lot of money together, and you can’t do it without me. Damn it, you cowards, put away your weapons!”

“What happened to Grahib?” one of the darker men demanded.

“McAdams had him killed,” the other said. “He had his own informer killed, too. We can’t trust him.”

“But I have your money. If you kill me, you won’t get paid,” McAdams said. “Those other men betrayed us. I only kill betrayers. You are good men who have served me well. I can still get you the women I promised, the red-head and her virgin niece. Trust me. Money and women. What could be better?”

“Security,” one of the men replied.

Than nodded, and whispered, “I know. We need him alive.”

The one man said to the other, “Let’s just do it. Do it now!”

They pointed their weapons at McAdams and pulled their triggers. A loud roar echoed throughout the building as Therese watched in terror. She was shocked to see McAdams standing unharmed, but then Tizzie appeared before him. She spit the bullets into her hand and gave the men an arrogant smile. Blood spilled from her eyes and snakes coiled and hissed in her hair. The two men turned on their heels to hide, one of which came to the very spot where Therese and Than were huddled.

“Go now,” Than said urgently. “Go back to your room. Concentrate. Now!”

Therese shut her eyes and focused on her bedroom, but then an image of her grandmother’s green carpeting in her old house in San Antonio entered her mind, and before Therese knew what was happening, she found herself standing in her grandmother’s old living room in San Antonio. Everything smelled new, and the furniture had all been removed.

“Oh, hello,” a woman’s voice came across the room. “I’m sorry, but the open house ended over an hour ago.”

“I’m, um, so sorry,” Therese said. “I’ll, um, just show myself out.”

“Are you okay? Did you come with your parents?”

“I’m fine. My parents are waiting for me outside.”

She went through the front door and recognized her grandmother’s old street just visible in the dusk. The woman from her grandmother’s house stepped onto the front porch and watched as Therese hurried down the sidewalk. She walked a little way further and found a
cluster of trees, but before she could god-travel, a scrawny old man approached her.

“Hey, girlie, you got any spare change for a
starvin’ man?”

Therese turned and ran down the darkening street. She wasn’t sure where to turn. Tears welled in her eyes as she rounded a corner and saw a park up ahead which vaguely looked familiar. Two teenagers were snogging on a bench, but Therese crept behind some bushes and deeper into trees where she closed her eyes.

She tried to focus on her bedroom. A strong image of Clifford waiting for her on her bed made it easier this time. She was so afraid and wanted Clifford! She hadn’t been much help on this journey. How stupid she had been to think she could help the Furies! The invisible plastic wrapped itself around her, she held her breath, still focusing on Clifford on her bed, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself standing on her bed looking down at her dog wagging his tail at her.

She
went downstairs and was surprised that Carol and Richard weren’t home yet. Officer Gomez still sat out on the back deck, so she felt fairly safe. After letting the officer know she was home, she put Clifford on a leash and took him outside in the front to do his business. Then she came inside and grabbed a cookie from the countertop, nearly eating it whole.

Therese looked at all the bags and boxes lined up on the floor of her parents’ bedroom and wondered how they would transport them all to Greece. She was too tired to think long on it, though, and before she realized it, she had curled up on her parents’ bed beneath their covers, trying to smell their scents and trying to erase from her mind the scene that had transpired before her in Peshawar. Clifford sat in the corner of the room. He had never been allowed up on her parents’ bed, and even though he probably knew her parents were gone, he couldn’t bring himself to break the rule.

She was nearly asleep when the phone rang. She answered the one on her parents’ bedside table. It was Gina Rizzo. Gina had never called before.

“What’s up, Gina?” Her voice was deep with sleep.

“I just wondered if you heard the news about your friend Vicki.”

Therese sat up. “Uh-uh.”

“Oh. Well her mother committed suicide yesterday. She slit her wrists with a razor blade and bled to death in the master bathroom. Vicki was home when it happened. Isn’t that terrible?”

Gina’s voice sounded more excited than sad, and that eerie excitement drove Therese to anger.

“I’ve gotta go,” Therese said. She hung up the phone and left her parents’ room and was sick in the kitchen sink.

Through the window, she caught sight of the diseased elm tree illuminated by the moonlight. Then, in something like a blind rage, she ran down the stairs to the unfinished basement, another project her parents had planned to one day complete. She went past the washer and dryer and stack of dirty laundry. She grabbed an axe and went through the basement to the garage, which opened to the side of the house. She squeezed by her father’s Chevy truck, pulled out a ladder, and dragged it uphill to the diseased elm tree.

“What are you doing?” Officer Gomez asked.

“Fixing that tree!” Then she went back for the axe. She practically dragged it out of the garage door and up the hill.

“You’re going to hurt yourself. Why don’t you wait until someone can help you?”

Ignoring the officer, she climbed up the ladder and stretched herself out as tall as she could and hammered the blade of the heavy axe against the dying branch. It barely made a scratch, but she brought that axe up and she struck the branch again, despite the police officer’s
protests. She was going to save this dying tree. She was sick of watching the disease slowly suck the life from it, and she was going to put a stop to it once and for all. She struck the branch again and again, nearly toppling over once, till it hurt her arm to keep raising the axe, and then she did it several more times. She broke through the bark, but she could see that she had been right all along. She could not chop down the dying branch. She could not save the tree. She dropped the axe, climbed down from the ladder, collapsed on the dirt, and cried.

And then it began to rain.

The officer went to the overhang to get out of the rain and didn’t seem to know what to say.

Clifford barked at him from the back door. She could see Clifford looking at her through the glass pane. He was probably worried she had lost her mind. He should be, she thought.

She pulled herself up, leaving the axe to rust in the rain, the ladder to stand like an unfinished promise beside the elm she could not save. She looked over at the other elm a few yards away. Her mother had said that if they did not stop the disease from getting the one tree, it would eventually spread to its twin. It seemed wrong that two such magnificent living structures should be the victims of a life-sucking fungus to be left withering skeletons that would eventually break, crumble, and decompose and then disappear from sight altogether, as though they had never existed.

“It’s okay, boy!” she hollered to her dog, who had started to whine, but before she left the tree, she caught sight of something shimmering in the adjacent cypress.

She walked in the rain toward the shimmering tree, blinking her eyes several times and rubbing them. The forest was dark on this side of the house where the moonbeams couldn’t reach. And maybe the rain was blurring her vision. But, no. Even with her eyes rubbed dry, the tree shimmered. Therese backed away now, frightened.

“Come inside!” Officer Gomez called out.

“Do not be afraid,” the tree said. “I am Artemis, goddess of the wood, and I will not harm you.”

Therese held very still, not sure if she should speak. She swallowed hard and waited.

“I am pleased with your stewardship of the forest and the animals that abound in it. You have won my heart.”

Therese couldn’t make out an image of the goddess, just the shimmering tree. “Thank you. I’m grateful.”

“Like Aphrodite and Athena, I have gifts for you, but mine are far better than theirs. Aphrodite may have saved your dog from death, but I have given him immortality.”

Therese sucked in air. Did she just say that her best friend Clifford would never die? “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” She glanced at Clifford still looking at her through the back door. His tongue hung happily from his mouth as the stubby tail wagged back and forth. He seemed to understand what had happened to him. He would be able to go with her now and live in the
Underworld! “I don’t know what to say.” Tears pricked her eyes.

“Therese!” Officer Gomez called again. “What are you doing out there? Come inside!”

“Wait,” Artemis commanded. “There’s another. Whereas Aphrodite gave you a traveling robe, I now give to you a beautiful crown. It is made of the finest pearls and diamonds, and when placed upon your head, will make you invisible to mortal eyes. It is waiting for you on your bedroom bureau.”

Therese put her hands to her cheeks. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Don’t forget your promise to me, Therese. The wildlife preserve. I am counting on your offering.”

“Yes,
m’am. I’m pleased to give it.”

“Is there anything else you would ask of me?”

“No, m’am it’s just…” Therese faltered.

“What is it?”

“My friend Vicki. She’s all I can think about right now. Her mother committed suicide yesterday. If I can ask something of you, I ask you to please watch over her and help her, if you would.”

Before Therese had finished her sentence, the cypress no longer shimmered and the rain no longer fell, and Therese had the feeling the goddess was no longer there.

The crunching sound of gravel made her aware of Carol and Richard pulling up the drive in Carol’s little red Toyota Corolla. Carol waved to her before driving into the garage beside Therese’s father’s pickup. Therese wondered whether it was her request of the goddess or the appearance of her aunt and uncle that had made her disappear.

A few minutes later, Carol and Richard came through the back door, Clifford scrambling out ahead of them to grow
l at Officer Gomez, standing beneath the overhang of the house. Carol and Richard looked across the deck to where Therese stood beside the elm, the axe, and the ladder, still flabbergasted by Artemis’s visit and the news of her gifts.

“What have you been doing?” Richard asked.

“Um, I was trying to save this tree from the Dutch elm disease. Mom and Dad were going to chop off that dying branch and treat the roots, but…well, I couldn’t do it.”

“You should have told me,” Richard said. “I’ll take care of that for you.”

“Sweetheart, you’re soaked and your backside is covered in mud. And you could have hurt yourself.”

They went inside, including Officer Gomez, who moved to the screened front porch to avoid the rain
, which had started falling again. After a shower and change of clothes, Therese came back down to hear about her aunt’s day while Carol made spaghetti and Richard sat on the sofa with the news turned down low. Therese showed Carol the bags and boxes she had lined up in her parents’ room, and Carol was amazed by all she and Than had accomplished. Therese told her about taking the things to charities tomorrow—though she failed to mention they were located in Greece.