3
Someone—no, two people were sitting at Jack’s table.
Right now they appeared as a pair of lighter splotches against the dark rear wall. He stood inside the door and waited for his eyes to adjust from the late morning sun.
Julio appeared. “They showed up half an hour ago. The guy handed me his pistol. I checked him and he’s not carrying a backup.”
Julio, short and muscular, had let his usual pencil-line mustache expand to a goatee. Jack didn’t think it was inspired by his own beard, but who knew.
“What about the other guy?”
“That’s not a guy. That’s a girl. A kid.”
“And you gave them my table?”
Julio shrugged. “They been here before, meng. You know them.”
As his eyes adjusted, Jack recognized Cal Davis, back to the wall, looking his way. And next to him . . . Diana.
He hadn’t seen these two since January; he hadn’t left Cal and his fellow yeniçeri on the best of terms.
He looked around the sparsely populated bar. No surprise, seeing as it was pre-noon, and only the heartiest digestive tracts dared eat at Julio’s.
“Any noobs?”
Jack went to the window and checked out the street. No sign of any yeniçeri. He stepped back toward Julio.
“They say what they want?”
“What else they gonna want? Talk. You gonna?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You gonna want coffee?”
“Yeah. I think I’m in the mood for a double mocha latte with extra whip cream.”
Julio gave him the finger over his shoulder as he walked away.
Jack approached the table. Davis rose but didn’t extend his hand, so Jack simply nodded. He did however offer his hand to the girl.
“Hello, Diana. This is a surprise.”
Despite the dim lighting, she wore large sunglasses. She’d changed some since Jack had last seen her, losing a bit of her baby fat, maybe a little taller.
She gave his hand a quick, light shake—more of a finger tug. “For me too.”
“How old are you now?”
She lifted her chin. “I just turned fourteen.”
Poor kid. Teen years were hard enough without being a bona fide freak.
He turned to Davis. “I assume this wasn’t your idea.”
He was dressed in a black suit and tie over a white shirt. His black fedora sat on an empty chair.
He glanced at Diana. “I was and still am opposed to coming here.”
“Well then, let’s do what we can to get you back to where you’d rather be and that’s my seat you’re sitting in.”
Davis offered a tight smile as he moved to another. “I know. I was keeping it warm for you.”
Jack took his usual place as Julio arrived with a cup of coffee that appeared to have a small turd floating in it.
“What is that?”
“As close as we get to mocha, meng.” And then he was gone.
Jack spooned out the object: a baby Snickers bar. He ate it, then sipped his coffee.
“So . . . still in Nantucket?”
Davis nodded. “What’s left of us. Just me and Grell and Novak now. Lewis, Cousino, and Geraci lit out after you that night and never came back. Finan and Dunsmore quit a couple of weeks later.”
He knew Davis was talking about his fellow yeniçeri, but Jack had no faces for the names.
“I thought all you yeniçeri dedicated your lives to guarding the Oculus,” he said with a nod toward Diana.
“Some more than others.” He gave Jack a hard stare. “What did you do to those three? They vanished without a trace.”
“The guys in the Hummer? You might want to drag the harbor.”
His eyes widened. “How—?” He shook his head. “Never mind. Diana has something to tell you.”
Jack turned to her. “You’ve had a vision?”
She nodded. “An Alarm, yes. My first.”
Oh, right. Oculi called their visions Alarms.
“Do I want to hear this? I mean, considering what your father’s last Alarm led to.”
Diana paled and Davis’s right hand balled into a fist.
She said, “I’m so sorry about that. I—”
“Not your fault. Not even your father’s fault.” He glanced at Davis. “But I can’t say the same for some of the yeniçeri.”
“We were being used,” Davis said through his teeth. “We were all being used. We’re still being used.”
Jack sighed and leaned back. “Yeah. I suppose we are.”
“And you got your revenge—in spades.”
Jack remembered that time. He’d really lost it.
“Revenge only in one case. The rest was preemptive. You gonna sit there and tell me you blame me, that if positions were reversed you wouldn’t have done the same?”
Davis looked away. “No. Still, a lot of them were friends.”
Jack dropped it. The past was past. No use rehashing it. But he and Gia and Vicky would live the rest of their lives with the fallout from that last Alarm. And Emma . . . Emma wasn’t living at all.
He turned to Diana. Might as well get to it.
“What did the Alarm show?”
As she related her vision Jack realized she was describing the carving and burial of an ancient Opus Omega column.
“You’re nodding,” she said. “You know about this?”
“It’s been going on for thousands of years. Those columns are buried around the globe in a specific pattern.”
Davis frowned. “To what end?”
“When they finish the job, they believe it will give the Otherness the edge to change the world.”
Jack also knew that every insertion of one of those columns into the ground was a knife in the back of the Lady with the dog, and left a scar. Was that the purpose—hurt her? Was she some sort of barrier between the Otherness and Earth, and if they weakened her enough the Otherness could make the leap?
He wished he knew. So many things he wished he knew.
“Are they crazy?” Davis said. “Don’t they know what that will mean? Hell on Earth.”
“Not for them. They believe participants in the Opus Omega will be given special treatment and privileges in the new world order.”
Davis snorted and shook his head. “Privileges or not, they’ll still be in hell. Ignorant dumbasses.” He turned to the girl. “Sorry, Diana.”
She didn’t seem to have heard, or care if she had. She sat twisting her fingers together.
“But in the vision they sealed me in the column—alive—and then buried it.”
“Apparently it’s not enough simply to stick a body in the column. Someone has to die inside it.”
“It was horrible. But then the strangest thing happened. A glowing egg appeared and hatched something . . . something I couldn’t see . . . a dark shape that seemed to suck in the light around it.”
Jack tried to grasp that and failed. Could that be the goal of Opus Omega—create a cosmic egg with some sort of black hole within? He turned to Davis.
“You must have heard about a lot of these Alarms over the years.”
He nodded and glanced at the girl. “From Diana’s father, yes.”
“Did they tend to be pretty much true to life, or more metaphorical?”
“From what he told me, true to life. The Alarms showed either what would happen if we didn’t interfere, or what we should make happen. It wasn’t always clear which. They could be ambiguous at times, but definitely true to life.”
True to life . . . a big egg hatching something. Sheesh.
“But that’s not the strangest part,” Diana said. “The thing that came out of the column . . . it might have been human, but I don’t think so. If it was human, it wasn’t a normal human.”
More vagueness. Couldn’t anything be clear-cut?
“So you didn’t get a good look at it.”
She shook her head. “It was blurred, almost flickering, as if it was flashing in and out of existence. And then a word sounded in my head: Fhinntmanchca.”
“Say what?”
“Fhinntmanchca. Don’t ask me what it means. I have no idea.”
Davis said, “Don’t look at me. I’ve never in my life heard the word, or anything even close to it.”
“I think it refers to whatever came out of the egg.”
That seemed a reasonable assumption.
“Did the egg crack open?”
Another shake of her head. “No, this just sort of emerged from it. One second it wasn’t there, and then the next it was moving toward me.” She looked at Jack. “Fhinntmanchca . . . you’ve never heard of it?”
“No.” He didn’t even know if the word applied to the egg or the thing that hatched from it. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know. The Alarm . . . at the end it was clear that I had to tell someone who could do something about it.”
“And you chose me?”
“Well, the Sentinel would have been best, but no one knows where he is, do they?”
The Sentinel . . . that was what these folks called the point man in the war against the Otherness. Others called him the Defender. They ascribed all sorts of power to him, but he was just a man now, an old one. Jack knew his real name, but the old guy preferred to go by the name Veilleur.
“So, since I couldn’t tell him,” Diana was saying, “it seemed pretty clear I should tell his Heir. And that’s you.”
Yeah, he thought. Me. Lucky, lucky me.
What was he going to “do” about something he’d never heard of?
He’d have to wait until he could ask Veilleur about it, but he seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth the past couple of months. Maybe the Compendium had heard of this finnymacaca or whatever it was. But even if it was in there, could he find it? Worth a try.
“Got an idea,” he said. He rose and retrieved a pen and a napkin from the bar. “Okay. What’s this thing called again?”
Diana repeated the name and Jack spelled it phonetically: fint-MAHNCH-ka. One weird word. Didn’t seem to fit any language he’d ever heard.
Suddenly Diana shot from her seat.
“He’s here!”
Jack saw Davis instinctively reach for his empty shoulder holster. They both looked around, wondering what she meant.
“I feel him!” she cried.
The whole place was staring at her now. Someone at the bar said, “Hey, you can feel me too! Anytime you want.”
Jack shot a look toward the bar, searching for the comedian. Couldn’t tell so he turned toward the front window and saw Veilleur’s face peering in. An instant later he was gone.
“He’s outside!”
She rushed toward the front door. Davis tried to grab her arm but missed, so he rose and followed on her heels. Jack held back. He wanted to see Veilleur too, but had to let him go.
Diana stepped outside and peered up and down the street. Finally she gave up and came back in.
“I know it was him,” she said with a despondent look as she dropped into her chair.
Jack knew the answer but felt obliged to ask. “Who?”
“The Sentinel. He was right outside. I felt him.”
“Are you sure?” Davis said.
“Of course I’m sure,” she snapped. “Sometimes you just know things, and I know he was out there.” She looked at Jack. “Why didn’t he come in? If I can sense him, I’m sure he can sense me. Why would he avoid me when I could tell him about the Alarm?”
For all Jack knew, Veilleur could have been stopping by to see him after all this time. He certainly understood why he wouldn’t want an Oculus and a yeniçeri to see him in his present condition.
“Maybe he already knows,” Jack said, realizing it sounded lame.
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. It feels like everything is slipping away. The Adversary seems to be getting the upper hand, and the Sentinel does nothing.”
Because he can’t, Jack thought. Because he’s not the Sentinel anymore. There is no Sentinel. Just an old man and his supposed Heir.
But he couldn’t say that. No one could know, or even suspect—especially the Adversary . . . the One . . . Rasalom.
“I’m sure he has a plan.”
“Well, if he does, he’d better act soon, because there’s not much time.”
She pulled off her glasses and he had a glimpse of her startling, all-black eyes before she covered them with her hands and sobbed.
Jack wanted to reach over and hug her against his side and tell her it was going to be all right. But she knew too much to believe that anyone could promise that. And how convincing could he be when he didn’t believe it himself?
He saw Davis’s stricken look and knew he felt the same way.
“Did you see anything else?”
“No,” she said without looking up. “But I had a dream after the Alarm, and it was what I didn’t see then that scares me.”
Jack knew immediately what she was talking about.
“You mean the future?”
She nodded. “I saw the Nantucket house in the summer as it is now. And then in autumn with the leaves falling. Then covered with snow. Then the trees budding. Then . . .” She lowered her hands and leveled her black gaze at him. “Then nothing . . . nothing but blackness.”
Jack held her gaze. “I know.”
“You know? How?”
“You’re not the first to see that. Over the past year I’ve heard exactly the same thing from a couple of other sources.”
The late Charlie Kenton for one. And during her coma, Gia had experienced something similar to Diana’s dream.
“Then that means the Adversary is going to win,” Diana said. “And if that’s true, then all this is for nothing.”
“Not necessarily.”
She squeezed her eyes shut as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I’m never going to be fifteen.”
Jack grabbed her hand. “I have it on good authority that what you’re seeing is how it will be if we do nothing. But we aren’t going to do nothing. We’re going to stop him and the Otherness.”
He didn’t know why, but he needed to give her hope.
“How?”
“The Sentinel—once he’s alerted to the danger, he’ll act. He’ll come charging in and make the Adversary wish he’d never been born. He’s kicked Otherness butt before and he’ll do it again. That’s why the Adversary is being so sneaky. He knows if the Sentinel gets wind of his schemes, he’s cooked.”
Jack marveled at how easily he mixed lies and truth. And Diana seemed to be buying it.
“But why doesn’t he do something now? I have an awful feeling about this Fhinntmanchca, whatever it is.”
“I’ll look into it,” Jack said.
If he couldn’t find it in the Compendium, maybe Veilleur would know—if Jack could find him. Damn, he wished he knew where he lived.
The three of them lapsed into silence and Jack glanced at the PBR clock over the bar. Noon was approaching.
Diana took a slow, shuddering breath and pointed to the black orbs of her eyes. “I don’t want this.”
“Diana,” Davis said softly. “You were born to it.”
“Then I wish my parents had never met. I don’t want to know what’s coming. I don’t want to look like this. And I don’t want another Alarm.”
Jack had witnessed her father in the throes of one and it hadn’t looked pleasant.
“Painful?”
“You wouldn’t believe.” She replaced her sunglasses. Her voice edged toward another sob. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“That makes two of us.”
She leaned toward Jack. “You’re the Heir. You’re supposed to be itching to take on the Adversary.”
Jack held back a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I’ve met him, and believe me, that’s the last thing I want to do.”
“But you’re supposed to be noble, a hero.”
Teenagers . . .
“I don’t know who’s doing all this supposing, but it doesn’t change who I am. I’m just a guy from Jersey who’s learned a few tricks. This is the only way I know how to be.”
“But how . . . how will you defend us if your heart’s not in it?”
“Defend you?” Jack looked at her, then Davis, then back to her. “I don’t know you well enough to put my life on the line for either of you.”
“She was talking about the rest of humanity,” Davis said.
“Hey, I know the rest of humanity even less. But I do know a couple of people in this town I will die for if I have to. So if you wind up benefiting from my defense of them, then lucky you. But you won’t have to thank me, because I’ll have done it for them.”
Diana shook her head. “I don’t believe you. You’re better than that. You’re the Heir.” She said the last word as if repeating it would somehow morph him into her preconceived image.
“So I’m told. Be nice if someone had checked with me first.”
“If you’re the backup,” Davis said with a sour expression, “then let’s wish the current Sentinel continued long life and good health.”
Jack raised his coffee cup. “I’ll drink to that.”