“Yes. He’ll be home soon. And then we’re going to have a big party with balloons.”
“Balloons,” Rosie repeated and confirmed.
Elora hoped to all the gods that she was telling the truth.
CHAPTER 9
Storm had been whizzing along toward his daily lunch briefing with Glen, thinking about how cute Rosie was with Litha’s monks and how much they fussed over her like she was the second coming. Without warning he was stopped dead still. The haze that surrounded him continued to swirl in shades of gray and rose constantly mixing, separating, and reforming like a living abstract of colored smoke. He yelled for Deliverance, but knew the volume of his raised voice had been swallowed by the white noise the currents made. His voice even sounded far away to his own ears.
He told himself not to panic. If there was anything that had been drilled into Black Swan knights since they were little more than babies, it was that panic is never useful. He willed himself to calm and, within seconds, was decided on the only course of action that was both logical and reasonable. That was to do nothing.
If he stayed exactly where he was, Deliverance would come back for him. So he set about trying to stay where he was, but the strength of the current in the pass made it impossible, like standing in ocean water up to your chest. The sand changing form underneath your feet and the motion of the waves would move you around whether you agreed to it or not.
After a while, the exertion from just trying to stay upright was taking its toll on Storm’s muscles. It seemed to him that he’d been at it for hours, struggling to stay where he could be found. He knew his body was succumbing. His mind was trying to organize a Plan B, but he was exhausted.
That’s when he was clipped by a passerby. It wasn’t done with malice. It wasn’t even intentional. Entities who travel the passes don’t expect to encounter a stationary object – like a humanoid at full stop - any more than an autobahn driver expects a single car to be at a standstill in the fast lane.
The impact wasn’t enough to do damage, not even a bruise, but it was enough to cause Storm to take a step to regain his balance so that he didn’t go down. Unfortunately that single, fateful step took him out of the pass and into another dimension. Storm didn’t need a life signature placeholder to keep from having his own life extinguished on contact with a dimension where a counterpart might live. His demon blood negated his susceptibility. He could have a conversation with another version of himself if the opportunity presented. But if he had needed a placeholder, it would have been there for him.
The Storm who was native to that dimension had mistreated a former one night stand outside the men’s room of a club a couple of nights before. She had been so incensed by his humiliating rejection and malicious cruelty that she had taken out a tiny pistol with mother of pearl on the handle and shot him in the face at point blank range. She’d had the presence of mind to take his wallet before she slipped out the alley exit. That was how that dimension’s version of Storm ended up a John Doe in the morgue, with no one who was close enough to him to realize he’d gone missing. Somewhere he had a mother who cared whether he lived or died, but he hadn’t seen her or talked to her in years.
The newly arrived pilgrim, Storm, knew exactly where he was. When he’d been recruited by Sol Nemamiah, the first training facility he landed in was right on the edge of Golden Gate Park. He’d spent time in San Francisco and knew China Town when he saw it. He wasn’t actually in China Town at the moment, but if he crossed the street, he would be.
Storm didn’t know he was in a different dimension, but he knew something had gone wrong and he knew his nerve endings were pricking painfully. He stood in the street for a few minutes grimacing, waiting for the pain to subside, which it did after a few minutes, when his body adjusted to a different vibration. The human in him didn’t appreciate dimension slipping.
When he’d left home it was ten in the morning. The street he was standing on wasn’t completely deserted, but it was clear it was after hours.
He took out his phone and dialed Litha. No service.
Shop fronts were closed. Most eateries were closed. Scanning up and down the block it seemed he had two options. A walk-up donut shop that looked like they could use a mop, or a bar with part of the neon winking on a sign that read, HALCYON. The donut shop had customers, hard as that was to believe, and he didn’t want to wait in line to ask to borrow a phone. So the bar it was. An establishment called Halcyon couldn’t be all bad. Right? And the warmth would feel good. He’d left home in jeans and a black long sleeved tee thinking he was going straight from his kitchen at the vineyard to Glen’s office. The temperature was forty-something where he stood, but with wind chill, it felt colder.
He let the red door swing closed behind him and looked around. It was nothing special, just the kind of place you might go to hide out in the dark and lose yourself in one kind of amber liquid or another. Place had an old Wurlitzer playing mellow, bluesy music. No revving. Just the right mood music for a melancholy drink alone.
Nobody was sitting at the bar, but the guy behind it was just finishing a wipe down. He threw the damp towel over his shoulder as his eyes darted around the room. He was a big fella, about the same size as Storm. Maybe thirty years before he’d had the same flat stomach.
He tracked Storm’s approach, giving him the once over and watching until he reached the bar and stopped.
“Help you?”
“Ah, yeah. My phone’s not getting a signal and I’ve got to make a call. Do you have one I can use?” The bartender studied him for a few beats, then reached into his pocket and withdrew a phone. “Don’t walk off with it.”
Storm nodded, continuing to look the man in the eye so that he’d be reassured he wasn’t making a mistake by giving trust to a stranger. Storm was self-aware enough to know that he was tall and dark with an intense look that could easily be interpreted as menacing. “Very kind of you. I’ll be just at the other end of the bar.”
His hands were itching to dial Litha’s number. He told himself he wasn’t scared, just anxious. He had made a habit of manually dialing every so often instead of relying on speed dial for this very reason – in case he ever needed to call her number from memory. He held his breath when the number rang once, but the little bit of hope didn’t last long. The ring was cut short by an annoying set of discordant electronic tones and a recorded voice saying that was not a working number.
His heart was hammering in his chest, but he tried to tell himself not to jump to conclusions. No sense borrowing trouble. Maybe he’d misdialed. He touched the numbers on the screen again. Slower. Double checking each digit. One ring followed by a recorded voice that was the last thing in the universe he wanted to hear.
He figured he didn’t have to be a genius to come to the conclusion that Deliverance had abandoned him to another gods forsaken dimension. And he was alone. He could hear his heart beating in his ears then realized that was because he’d forgotten to breathe. He looked around and met the curious eyes of the bartender who’d been glancing in his direction now and then.
Storm made his way back to the other end of the bar and handed the phone over. The bartender took it out of his hand and looked Storm over. Again.
“Not good news, huh?”
Storm shook his head and looked around to see if anyone was watching. “I need to ask you something. You’re going to think it’s real strange, but maybe you can think of it as a dare or a practical joke or something like that?”
The bartender put both hands flat on the bar and leaned in looking thoughtful. “Sure. It’s been slow tonight. I could use a good joke.”
Storm took his wallet out of his pocket, pulled out a hundred dollar bill, and put it down on the bar face up. “Does that look like real money or play money to you?”