The Beholder (22 page)

Chapter 39

The following day they buried William McAlester in a brief ceremony. Few words were spoken, because nothing needed to be said. Tyler, Jason, Debbie, Matthew, and a group of black-suited Sighted ones all huddled around the grave, trying to keep warm. The weather was chilly, a cool wind matching the dull, monochrome sky, and only once did the sun manage to break through. The trees rustled in the wind, adding an optimistic glint of green to the day, but the gloom within the souls of the Sighted saw no color but gray.

Tyler looked emaciated, his eyes circled by dark black lines over sunken cheeks. He spoke less now, and his eyes never smiled. He was eaten up with guilt over William, and his heart was heavy with the news that Emily, his best friend, had been killed by Pariah. After the burial Tyler left without telling anyone where he was going or for how long. Debbie fell deep into depression, missing him terribly.

A few days after the funeral, the trio sat in the familiar comfort of Debbie’s living room, talking about the experience.

“You really have no idea what happened before I found you at the office?” Jason asked Matt and Debbie.

“No,” Matt said. “All I remember is entering the chamber and feeling exhausted.”

Debbie sighed. “When I woke up, that guy’s hand was around my neck.” She winced and rubbed at her neck, as if the icy fingers were still there. “Then I saw you, but you looked kind of different from what you normally look like.”

It seemed the missing scenes would remain a mystery to them all. At the sound of the front door latching quietly, all three looked up. They waited in silence, listening to the footsteps draw closer.

“Surprise,” came a familiar voice.

With a squeal, Debbie jumped to her feet and ran to Tyler, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I knew you’d come back,” she said, her cheeks flushed pink. She kissed him lightly, her eyes searching his. “I missed you.”

Tyler gave her a wry smile that deepened her blush. “I couldn’t stand another minute without you,” he admitted.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her longer, and Matt exchanged a laughing glance with Jason. When the kiss finally ended, Debbie stepped away, a dreamy smile on her face. Then her gaze sharpened and she frowned at his neck.

“What’s that?” she asked. “What’s wrong with your neck?” She covered her mouth with one hand while tracing the scar with the other.

Jason hadn’t told the others Tyler’s story, but that was just as well. It was Tyler’s to tell.

Tyler cleared his throat and stood a little taller. “I wanted to show you who I really am,” he said, looking slightly apprehensive. His eyes met Jason’s, and the gray in Tyler’s became wary. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean to say you know about—”

“—the other scars? Yes.”

“Can you tell us now?” Debbie asked, and Tyler forgot all about Jason.

As he told Matt and Debbie in brief about how he had gotten his gift and scars, Jason returned to Debbie’s laptop, scrolling the newspaper articles and thinking hard.

“That’s why you wore a high collar and a cloak all the time!” Debbie exclaimed.

Jason looked up, remembering the end of the story about Tyler. Emily had said the scars had been the price he’d paid to rid himself of all evil. But she had also said Tyler expected that evil to come back someday, that it couldn’t possibly be so simple. She seemed to agree with him, because she said,
“Once I Prophesied that he would, and that may let evil back inside his soul.”

The most horrible thing was that Jason knew what had originally made Tyler such a special person—the killing of Emily’s parents and granddad.

“Tyler, do you remember what made you Sighted?” Jason asked.

“No,” he said, his expression getting somber. “Emily told me I’d remember it, but nothing so far.” Something in Jason’s reaction alerted Tyler. “Wait. Do you know something? Did she tell you anything about it?”

“Nothing special,” Jason lied. “Pretty much the same thing you just said.”

Jason gave him a vague smile, then returned to looking through the pictures. He had almost given up when they appeared: the pictures of the victims in the long ago car crash. He saw Emily’s parents and her grandfather, but Emily was nowhere in sight. Then he began to read the article below the pictures, and his eye was caught by a collection of letters, which he identified as the initials of the Sighted engaged in killing and abducting Jason’s protectors. He took a closer look and started mouthing, “EH, DB twice, SC, CD twice, PvdT, DSC.” And then the last, “EE”.

Jason didn’t have a clue as to who the majority of these people were, but assumed “DB” was Damien Bale, and “CD” belonged to Catherine Delacroix. The other was “EE”—Emily Ethan—the two letters that made Jason’s world crumble. But the number of initials was wrong. According to his calculations, there should have been ten marked people and places. He counted twice, then another time, and came up each time with eleven, not ten.

But that couldn’t be, because N—New York—the last letter of the message, had been the eleventh. Debbie was his eleventh protector, and she’d survived.

Jason googled for more information, and one site in particular attracted his attention. While all the other pictures had shown only one mark at each place, he could see a wall in one picture, and it had been marked twice, the initials EE and AHS glowing close to each other.

Why would Emily have done that?
he thought.
Wouldn’t one mark have been sufficient? And who was AHS?

Something was familiar about the combination, but Jason couldn’t put a finger on it, and the gap in his memory troubled him. He memorized the combinations of initials, then closed the article by pressing the ESC button. How wonderful it would be if he could just press a button and make all the pressure and pain inside of him go away as well. But it refused to let go. Jason pictured Emily again and clenched his fist—the fist he had used to punch Pariah—and a lightning bolt of pain shot through it.

“Ow!” Jason cried, unclenching his hand, but at that moment things got worse. The pain in his knuckles woke a fierce burning in his neck, and he doubled over with a cry.

“What is it, Jason?” Tyler was instantly at his side, a caring hand on his shoulder. Jason looked up and Tyler froze at the sight of his neck. “No way,” he said. “It can’t be. Did you—Goddammit!” Tyler’s look was furious when he met Jason’s eyes. “How could you fall in love with her?”

Jason’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak for a moment. Then he asked, “How did you know?”

“The scar! You told me that during the battle Pariah had lashed her. He didn’t lash you. How could you possibly have a scar in the exact same place? You two must have formed a bond so strong that—” Tyler didn’t finish his sentence. He combed his fingers through his long blond hair, shaking his head. “This is unbelievable.”

Jason frowned, at a loss as to why Tyler was so incensed. “Is it really that important?”

“Don’t you understand what it means?”

Jason didn’t, so he shrugged and waited for Tyler to go on.

“If she’s dead,” Tyler said through gritted teeth, “you are bound to die as well. It’s a chain reaction similar to the one that happened with William and the Legate he was fighting, just a bit slower.”

Jason sighed and dropped his head. So the Beholder was bound to disappear, just like it had said in the Prophecy. Perhaps that was the way it was supposed to be. In the meantime, he had other problems to solve.

“Tyler, I have a question,” he said. “What happened when you got into the room with the shelves and boxes?”

“I noticed that you’d lagged behind in the corridor,” Tyler said, stroking Debbie’s hair, “and Emily seemed to freak out. She said we should go, then she’d return and get you. She was getting really nervous, and when I tried to calm her down, she snapped. When I approached her she shoved one of the boxes into me, and I got sent into a void passage.”

“Void passage?” Debbie asked, looking him straight in the eyes.

“Yes, some things are even invisible for Sighted. The boxes are the most convenient way to travel over long distances,” Tyler muttered. “You can’t see it even in the Sight.”

“Why didn’t we use one when we went from Paris to New York?” Debbie asked.

“She’s too clever. Every move had obviously been calculated in advance. She told me it was unsafe to show you three to a world invisible at the first level.”

“First level?” Debbie’s eyebrows flew up to her hairline. “Gosh, there are levels?”

“Don’t panic, Debbie.” Tyler smiled. “I just want to explain a few things to you.”

She let out a long, slow sigh. “But the more you explain, the less I understand,” she muttered.

Jason understood exactly how she felt, and from the look on his face, he could tell Matt felt the same. Theoretically it was all right, but in practice it wasn’t. Especially for Matt and Debbie.

“I only wanted to say that it takes longer to get to a place when you don’t intend to go there, and she sent me halfway around the world. When I ended up in Siberia, I knew there was something wrong. But for some reason I had no access to the Sight, which is why it took me so long to get back to New York.”

Jason was hesitant about his feeling towards Emily. One moment he had hoped she was just a victim in the story, as most of them were, but at Tyler’s words Jason became more convinced that she’d been one of the masterminds playing a cruel joke on him and the rest.

“Tyler, what is De-Energization?” he asked.

“What? Why?” Tyler’s face showed sincere surprise.

“When I got into the building and was about to fight, I lost all my power and couldn’t enter the Sight.”

Tyler frowned.

“No one seemed to be able to do it, not even Damien. Emily said it was De-Energization.”

“Well,” Tyler said, perplexed. “De-Energization is supposed to be an overall phenomenon. There are times when our ability to enter the Sight disappears—for example, when solar activity is tremendous. When De-Energization happens, Sighted lose their ability to enter the Energy world. But I’ve never heard of selective De-Energization. William and I didn’t have any problems in the Sight as we were flying towards Evelyn & Laurens.”

Jason raised an eyebrow. “Which means someone created it around the building?”

“Can that be possible?” Tyler asked, speaking to himself. “I don’t know. But I can find out.”

Since that incredible night, Jason hadn’t entered the Sight again. There’d been no need, and he didn’t want to. It hurt to think about all those things. They brought back memories of her, feelings he wanted to extinguish.

“Are they going to shut down McAlester’s?” he asked, hoping to divert everyone’s attention away from the Sighted world and its mysteries.

“They don’t know yet,” Matt replied. “They’re looking for a person who can take over. William’s project must continue to exist, for his sake.”

Chapter 40

Jason couldn’t sleep that night. Not because nightmares haunted him, though. He was sure there would be no more nightmares. The awareness of everything that had happened kept him awake, as did the question of what the future held, a topic they’d all tried really hard to avoid in their earlier conversation.

On his way home, Jason bought as many newspapers as he could carry, then piled them on the coffee table in his living room. He made himself a strong cup of coffee with cream and opened a pack of croissants to help make reading more enjoyable.

He didn’t have to look long before he came across a number of interesting facts. Among the heap of papers he found one from three weeks before. Part of him wondered if finding it had been just luck—or if an Energy formula had predetermined that he would find it. That didn’t matter, really. But it was there that he found news of a “short circuit” which had ostensibly caused a small fire on the third floor of the E&L building, though there was no mention of a ruined bathroom or of any damage to the neighboring building.

Had they managed to repair it and hide all traces of the fight?
Jason knew that would have been a piece of cake to the Sighted, but a strange thought pressed in his mind. What if there hadn’t ever been a fight at all?
What if it had all been an illusion set up by Emily or Pariah?
No. It couldn’t all be fake. Emily’s boneless flight through the window was too stunning to be fake.

Jason flipped to fresher issues of the newspapers. The headlines were different, some really far from the truth, some closer to what had happened. One reporter even connected—without proof—the events that had happened in New York that night with the other mysterious killings and disappearances.

Jason laid the papers aside and stretched on the couch. He couldn’t close his eyes, because when he did, he saw her face. And her voice … her voice never abandoned him.

“When we came there I couldn’t control the defensive shield for an instant and saw your Light … I think sometimes you’re a little crazy, and blind—especially for the Beholder. You don’t see me the way I really am … The laws according to which our kind lives differ from the laws of common people.”

Bits of phrases she had said, words which would always be with him.

“… the ends justify the means.”

He wanted to know what “ends” Emily meant, but he guessed he probably never would. Somehow he would have to work past this, and the sooner the better. He had to return to work and find oblivion.