Shuttered Sky

sure, and she could not ask him because he had died in the attack, along with most of her guests.

Three warships had attacked the Blue Horizon without warning, under cover of darkness. One torpedo would have done the job, but apparently they weren’t taking any chances. After the third torpedo shredded the hull, Lourdes’s little floating oasis was sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean in less than twelve minutes—not long enough to launch more than a handful of half-empty lifeboats.

But this wasn’t the loss that weighed on her. It was the loss of her brother and sisters. They had not made it through the smoke-filled hallways to the lifeboats before the Blue Horizon coughed up her ghost in a greasy spill of diesel fuel.

She thought she was impervious to that kind of pain, and found her sorrow quickly putrefying into fury, as she foundered in a flooded lifeboat with her three angels, who were content to hurl others off the boat to keep them afloat.

Lourdes could kill the entire population of Italy for what they had done. Every village, every town, every beggar on every lousy cobble­stone street. She could kill them all—and made a conceited effort to do so from her lifeboat, sending an angry impulse across the surface of the waters.

This was perhaps her worst mistake of all. It was stupid. Unpro­ductive. Because when the impulse of her anger faded, there was si­lence in the waters around them. Silence, and bodies. That silence sat in stronger accusation even than her victims in Daytona. She knew what she had done. She had gripped every beating heart within her reach, and shut them all down. Not only were the seamen on the three attacking ships killed by her anger, but the survivors of her own ship were extinguished as well; those in the water, those in the lifeboats. All of them.

Only she and her three “Angels” were immune. Even more, she sensed death in the sea beneath her, running to its very bottom. How far had her impulse gone? Five miles, perhaps, until it fell beneath a lethal threshold? She knew her influence would be felt for many miles beyond that. A sudden spasm in the chest of every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction. For those far enough out of range the spasm would pass. Maybe. She didn’t know her own strength any­more, and until that moment, she had never considered herself a weapon of mass destruction.

Her angels were quick to remind her that the sinking, which they could have turned to her advantage, was only a disaster because of her rash action. She could very easily have commandeered one of the naval vessels and continued their crusade, but now without a living crew to manipulate, they were just as dead in the water as those ships.

They made shore just before dawn. Then Carlos and Cerilla took some rope from the lifeboat, and tied her to a tree. She tried to stop them, but their anger was more powerful than her ability to fight them off.

“This,” Carlos told her, “is something you’ve earned,” and then they both beat her with their bare hands, until their fists were as bruised as her face, relieving their anger on her the way she had relieved hers on the world. Lourdes tried to counterattack, by gripping their muscles with her mind, but their immunity to her was complete. Just as they could not devour her, she could not injure them. There was a balance of power, delicate though it may be.

All the while, Memo sat nearby not lifting a finger to stop it. He was the leader of this trio of wolves—one word from him could have ended their beating, but he let it go until his cohorts’ human bodies were exhausted, and their inhuman spirits satisfied.

Memo came to her when the other two left, untying her bonds while whistling a pop tune dredged from his host-body’s memory. Once one hand was free, Lourdes pushed him hard enough to send him flying across the beach on which they were marooned. He stood up looking at her with hurt and surprise.

“You let them torture me, and you expect me to follow your orders?”

He came back to untie her other hand. “Using your power against those warships was a bad thing,” he said, sounding more the child than the demon. “They are angry.”

She had grown used to his manner now, but still it unsettled her the way the personality of the child host- body had merged with the seriousness of the creature who commandeered it. At times almost innocent, and at other times evilly calculating.

But there is no evil, she reminded herself. The angels had taught her that. Was the fisherman evil for catching fish? Was the hunter evil for feeding his family? There is no evil, the angels had told her, only power and weakness. The weak see power used against them as evil.

If I see them as evil does that make me weak?

It was simply easier to ignore the question than to answer it.

“Mama and Abuelo are very angry,” Memo said as he untied her. “But if they hit you enough now, they won’t kill you tomorrow.”

“I thought you didn’t suffer from human emotions,” Lourdes snapped.

“We feel what these bodies feel,” Memo answered. “Me, I find anger the most useful, don’t you?”

Lourdes rubbed her swelling face. She couldn’t find the use in their anger or in her own. It had landed them on this wretched shore.

“Anger must be used, though. Directed,” Memo said.

“And what if I direct it at the three of you?”

Memo stood on his tip-toes looking closely at her swelling face. “More of the same,” he answered, then he kissed a bruise above her eye. “A kiss will make it better, verdad?’

She pushed him away again. “Not that easy.”

“Still, you will do the things we ask of you.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” he said quite simply, “you wish to be with greatness. And we are the only greatness there is.”

She grunted but refused to admit how well he had her pegged. For months she had taken all this world had to offer and found it flavorless. Then to learn that everything the world perceived as divine was merely the work of these predators had crushed her. Crushed her, then freed her. This new, bleak view of creation left her unencumbered by trou­blesome human ethics.

But your brother and sisters are dead, her atrophied conscience whis­pered from its hiding place. They are at the bottom of the Mediterranean because of you.

She would have cried, but refused to let Memo and the other two seraphic ghouls see the depth of her sorrow. These creatures did not care about her sorrow. They simply needed her to accomplish their goal. To know that beings greater than herself needed her was its own reward—and in spite of their constant disapproval, she would serve them, because they were, as Memo had said, the only embodiment of greatness she’d ever know. She longed to be party to the power they would soon unleash. How odd, she thought, to finally find fulfillment in the slavery of “Angels.”

* * *

She set up court in nearby Taormina, in the ruins of the Greek Theater, because it reminded her of those spectacular, but brief, golden days beneath the faux Greco facades of the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. But these ruins were real, from a time before Sicily became a kicking toy for the toe of Italy. It had once been claimed by Greece, and in some fundamental way, Lourdes felt connected to it.

The view from the theater was stunning: snow-capped Mount Etna to the south, and to the east, the tranquil, azure waters of the Medi­terranean—but as they made preparations for the next leg of their journey, it was the north that drew Lourdes’ attention. Something happening to the north.

The other Shards. They were closer. They were . . . doing some­thing. Now they were not just together, but connected in some new way, and the sense of their connection deepened her own sense of isolation. She closed her eyes, hating them for making her feel this way, but longing to know what it was they were doing. She closed her eyes, trying to feel more clearly what they felt. Whatever they were up to it was both wonderful and horrible at the same time.

“Forget them,” Memo said, seeing this new direction of her at­tention. “Come look at the sea. We are not that far from Thira.”

When she looked across the ocean, she imagined she could see the Island of Thira out there, waiting for her arrival, and it chased the irritating sense of the other shards out of her mind.

“There is a scar running through Thira, from the sky to its bowels,” Memo told her with childlike enthusiasm.