Shuttered Sky

turn.

The “angels” did nothing; only smoldered deep within the bodies of their hosts. Now with the upper hand, Lourdes wielded her disdain from the bottom of her belly. “You pretend to be divine, you talk of salvation, but you’ve forgotten one thing: I’ve pretended to be divine as well—made a lot of people believe it, but it didn’t bring me any closer to being a god. I have no patience for your pretensions.”

She stood from the table, looking each of them in the eye, daring them to lash out at her, but they didn’t. Either they can’t, or they truly do need me for something, she thought. Either way, it was a victory for her. Oddly, the boy’s face began to go red, and his lip to quiver. She saw tears in his eyes; his host body reacting to the stimulus of being scolded. But in the man and woman, she saw bitter anger.

“Dinner is over,” she said. “I want you off my ship.” Then she stormed to her cabin and waited to see what their next step would be. Either they would leave and cease to be her concern, or they would make some move. Either an attack, or reconciliation. She waited, keeping her own anger simmering in case she needed to call on it to help battle theirs.

* * *

The boy came to her cabin at ten in the evening, alone.

“Why are you still here,” Lourdes scoffed. “Isn’t it past your bed time?”

“My name is Guillermo,” said the boy. “But people call me Memo. It is the name attached to this host body. You may call me that. The others are Cerilla and Carlos.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“Please, sit down.”

Lourdes reluctantly crossed to her most comfortable chair, and took a seat. If there was anger, sorrow, or any other emotion in this creature before her, Lourdes could not sense it. There was a complete lack of passion to him—a direct, businesslike tone to his voice. Perhaps, thought Lourdes, the tango has ended.

“I’m listening,” she said.

“We are not what we claim to be,” Memo began, “and at the same time, we are what we claim to be.”

“You’ve come to me with riddles?”

The boy ignored her and continued. “You would call our realm heaven, but it is a place humans will never see. We don’t come here often, because human beings have never been important to us. We appear in a caul of light, becoming the one thing your spirit most desires. Some have seen us as angels, some see us as loved ones. Some see us as God. We shine with glory, turning your hope to our advan­tage. We lure you close with promises of heaven and love. Close enough, so that we may devour your souls, and leave your shells to walk the earth.”

She felt the hair on her neck rise, the skin on her arms and legs tightening into gooseflesh. His candor was almost as disturbing as his revelation. “Then you are like Okoya,” she said, surprised to find her voice quivering. She tried to summon her anger and bitterness to use as a shield, but could not find it. She was suddenly bereft of anger, and instead found fear in its place.

“Okoya is the least of us,” he said. “A criminal spirit, weak, worth­less and unimportant.”

Lourdes wanted to push herself away, but the chair sat in a corner. She wanted to expel this boy-thing from her suite, but sending it away now would be a show of weakness.

“Do you want me to go on?” he asked.

Every ounce of her soul said no. “Yes,” she told him, and he continued in the same easy, forthright tone.

“Humanity,” he said, “has always struggled to learn its purpose. We know the answer, and always have. Your purpose is to feed our appetites. You are food of the Gods. You’ve never been anything more. And never will be.”

His dispassion made it sound like a simple fact of life, as if the ramifications were insignificant. As if humanity was insignificant. She wanted to deny his claims—she was always so skilled at strategic denial, but somehow this boy had sliced through her defenses. That was, after all, his skill. But instead of showing her spirit the thing it most desired, it showed her instead the thing she most feared, capturing her just as effectively. She felt her soul bare and open to this child-faced predator. This was the vulnerability she had sensed within herself; these creatures knew ways of shoving a hook deep within one’s soul.

“You can see why it would have been much easier if you had simply accepted us as angels when we arrived,” he said. “We didn’t want our meeting to have to come to this.”

“Stop . . .” her voice now came as a faint whisper. “Please, for the love of God, stop.”

“God?” said Memo with the sweetest of voices. “Everything your world has ever seen as divine has been our hand at work. We are pretenders, you could say, showing the world a false light, so that we can feed.”

Lies lies lies everything it says is a lie. But that voice in her was fading, what little faith she had was extinguished beneath the boy’s thumb.

“More of us are coming,” he said. “We need you to help us pre­pare.”

Lourdes was crying now, bawling uncontrollably. Could all this be true? Could the universe be such a hostile, loveless place that this vile blasphemy could be true? In spite of herself she found herself infected by him, accepting every word he said, like it was gospel.

“Do you believe me?”

But why did he have to ask? He knew she did. He had snared her, and she longed for him to devour her soul. She longed now for the death of her consciousness, so she did not have to live with the knowl­edge he had forced down her gullet.

But it didn’t devour her, instead it took a step closer. Then, the boy suddenly seemed no more than a little child again, frightened and lonely. She didn’t understand the change in him, only that it served to shift her even further off balance.

“Abrazame,” Memo pleaded. “Hold me. My mother—she never does. It is her ruined face—she feels she is unworthy to hold me. But you can, Lourdes. Hold me. Hold me now.”

Her arms swung open. He stepped forward, her arms swung closed, enveloping him, and in that embrace, her last failing ember of faith was snuffed into darkness. With nothing left to cling to, she held him tightly, and cried, rocking him back and forth. Let my life end. Let the world end. Let every last human vanish from existence, for what does it matter now. What does it matter now?

* * *

By midnight, the Blue Horizon had moved through the Gatun Locks, and was sailing into the flat blackness of the open sea.

21. Sanctuary

Dillon awoke on a lounge chair in paradise. His eyes focused, revealing a flagstone patio within a colorful flower garden, surrounded by a grove of wild-limbed, white-barked trees. A large, free-standing umbrella shielded him from the sun.

Although his mind still struggled to fit together his memories he was fairly certain that none of them would logically lead him here. He remembered driving along the Texas highway, and then came the flash of sudden awareness of an unearthly arrival so disturbing it sent him flying off the road. He recalled his unintended stunt in the graveyard. And Tessic. Tessic was there. Why was Tessic there?

As he lay on the lounge, he could still feel the threat of the strange trinity that had infected the world, but it felt distant now. Whoever they were, whatever they were, their arrival had changed something in him, amping up his power to a new extreme.

Dillon heard footsteps, and turned to see that Elon Tessic ap­proached through the knotty olive trees that only stood a few feet taller than he.

“Good to see you awake,” Tessic said, and sat in a chair beside him. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d come out of it today at all.”

“Where am I?” Dillon asked. “Where’s Maddy?”