American Quest (8 page)

With a shaking hand, Gloria withdrew her napkin and gathered her handbag. She couldn’t believe she’d slipped control so badly yet again with this man.

Vance rested back in his chair. “There’s no reason to be upset. Forget I said anything. In the meantime, you can’t possibly leave without trying the restaurant’s hazelnut torte.”

If Vance intended his tone to soothe Gloria’s nerves, he failed. She stood, shaking her head, ashamed at the level to which she’d let this progress. “I’m going to have to leave. If you’ll excuse me . . .”

“No.”

Gloria paused, taken aback, and looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“No. I’ll not excuse you. You aren’t going anywhere, my dear.”

She stared at him. His words were brusque and even rude and Gloria felt her anger rising.

But something else had happened. Vance’s bearing—that intoxicating heat—had somehow blackened. He no longer seemed mysterious. Now he simply seemed dangerous.

Gloria’s blood turned to rust. She knew she had to get out of there. Now. She took sideways steps toward the doorway. In it stood Vance’s driver, who was eyeing her like a toad who’d just spied a mayfly. She paused, and then steeled herself to push past him.

But even as she lifted her chin and strode forward, the room changed. The rosewood boiserie fell away and dissolved into black, and she felt as though the floor had vanished and that she was falling. Her handbag slipped from her fingers. Something caught her at the waist and saved her from spinning away into nothingness.

And then all at once the tilting stopped.

She found herself draped backward, Vance’s arms encircling her. She regained her bearing and tore away from him.

The restaurant no longer existed.

Gloria looked around wildly. They stood in a sweeping penthouse loft with marble floors, gilded objets d’art, and a carved mantle over a burning fireplace.

She felt cold. She turned to Vance, though she was barely capable of moving. His eyes burned with a terrifying intensity, somehow even blacker than before.

“You shall be surrounded by opulence and may have anything you desire. It behooves you to settle in to your new life quickly, my Gloria. Because you must never leave me.”

Vance reached for her hand and took it to his lips. Gloria felt as though all of her actions had become involuntary.

“Never,” he said.

CANDACE AWOKE TO THE SOUND of kitschy music. She rubbed her eyes and blinked. The TV showed a woman demonstrating how to bend copper wire into swirling decorations for a picture frame, and beyond the TV, the afternoon sun cast sharp rays through the blinds to an assortment of unkillable houseplants.

She frowned. How long had she been sleeping?

She’d been so anxious that morning that she decided to take the day off. So worried about Gloria. She wondered how Jamie remained so cool; she was in the exact same situation but somehow didn’t seem scared by it.

Lunch. She and Gloria had casually planned to get a bite together. Probably Gloria had given up and grabbed something with Bruce by now.

A creeping mite of guilt scrabbled up from her stomach. Had some part of her deliberately taken that nap, knowing she might sleep through lunch? She had to make herself leave the apartment these days, and seeing Gloria left her that much more anxious.

She went to the kitchen and poured a can of soup into a pan, then punched Gloria’s number on her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. Candace was about to leave a message, but her mouth was too dry, so she just clicked off and poured herself a glass of water before returning to the living room.

The TV droned. She flipped the channels, sighing, until she came full circle to the same craft show and the swirling copper creations.

She checked the clock. She should have left a message on Gloria’s voice mail.

Candace returned to the kitchen and stirred her soup, thinking about how she and Gloria used to prowl the library together, loading up until they could barely handle the books they checked out. Candace always kept fierce watch over Gloria. She was always leery of anyone who tried to step in too close. Because of this, she had never taken a serious boyfriend—just a casual one from time to time—and never even had other close friends for fear of screwing up her purpose.

Then Bruce came along. At first, Candace was as leery of him as she had been of anyone else who showed real interest in Gloria. But deep inside she knew. This was it. The relationship that defined everything.

But instead of sharpening her awareness, instead of kicking her into a higher gear, Gloria’s romance with Bruce spiked her anxieties. Candace just wanted to hunker down, and she wanted Gloria to hunker down with her. She wished she could just
tell
Gloria why, but she wasn’t allowed to do that. Not that Gloria would have believed her, anyway. Gloria would have thought she’d gone nuts. Of course, considering the way Candace was acting lately, Gloria probably thought she was nuts, anyway.

The soup began to bubble, lumpy browns and oranges with pale chunks of something that might be a pastalike substance or perhaps had once been barley. Candace gave it a couple more stirs and then emptied it into a bowl. She grabbed some smiling fish crackers and wondered at the notion behind biting the smiles off their little cracker heads. Even that managed to give her a chill.

She headed back to the living room, bowl in hand and cell phone tucked under her arm. The soup and crackers went down, more texture than any flavor beyond salt. When she finished her lunch—pizza near Gloria’s office would have been so much better—she tried Gloria’s number again. Again it went straight to voice mail. This time she left a message.

It was strange that Gloria’s cell went straight to voice mail. It should have rung a few times first, even if she were on the phone with someone
else. Dead battery? Possible, but unlikely. Gloria kept a charger at her desk.

Her intuition buzzing, Candace tried Gloria’s office phone at Woven Hillside. After a few rings, the line reverted to the receptionist, who informed Candace that Gloria was out. The receptionist, of course, had no idea when Gloria would be back.

Candace pressed her finger over the End Call button. Something was not right. Candace knew she had a tendency to be paranoid—who wouldn’t in her situation?—but she was utterly convinced that this was
not
paranoia.

She grabbed her bag and headed out the door, moving for the subway. She went all the way to Gloria’s offices at Woven Hillside, hoping beyond hope that Gloria would be back at her desk. No such luck. The receptionist knew nothing more than she did before and Candace spoke to another colleague who didn’t even realize Gloria was out.

Candace trudged out to the sidewalk in a daze. She looked left and then right, and suddenly the city seemed terribly vast.

It had happened.

Somehow, right under her nose, it had happened.

It wasn’t exactly under her nose, though, was it? Candace had turned her nose away. She had cowered when Gloria needed her the most.

She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. She’d find Gloria. She knew her better than anyone did—even Bruce. She’d use what she knew to find Gloria, and she’d try to get her back herself. And if she couldn’t, she’d call Jamie. She couldn’t face her just yet, though. God, what would Jamie say when she found out?

Candace kept her eyes squeezed shut. She was good at this. She’d always been a Finder, something Jamie never mastered. She let the image of Gloria focus in her mind, let that essence settle over her. Slowly, there came a tingling along her left side.

Fine. She turned to her left, half-opening her eyes, and took two steps in that direction. Yes. The sensation continued. She strode all the way to the corner and paused again, looking deep inside. She felt certain that she was on the right track. But it was like trying to read extremely fine print with a microscope, where the dime-sized lens only revealed half a phrase at a time.

She crossed the street. After another pause, she felt the distinct compulsion to follow in the same direction. She continued in that vein, agonizingly stilted though it was, until she had traveled north for nearly twenty blocks. Finally, though her senses told her to continue north, she also felt the inclination to move slightly east as well. She crossed the street in an easterly direction and continued down that block.

She came upon a neighborhood park. Here, the atmosphere shifted. People were milling about and two in particular seemed strange. A pair of obese and red-haired men who looked like brothers. They were looking back at her, which caused Candace to turn away.

Off in the distance, a single cloud, a green cloud that looked no more than the size of a nickel, danced along the blue skies. It seemed to be approaching.

Candace closed her eyes, pulse quickening, and tried to resume her internal search for Gloria. But the strange atmospheric shift seemed to clutter her sensitivities. When she opened her eyes again, she looked toward the two fat men and found them still staring at her.

She turned north again and strode the full length of the park before she felt a shadow fall across her. She tilted her head back. That tiny cloud had drawn near enough to block the sun and rested directly overhead, though now that it was closer, it seemed bigger.

And then it broke.

The sudden shower came gently, surprising the passersby with its light, almost refreshing sprinkle at first. Candace didn’t even bother to duck for cover. She turned and looked over her shoulder at the fat men. They hadn’t pursued her, but their eyes tracked her.

A moment later, she lost focus on the men because the rain began to burn.

Candace backed toward the nearest building and flattened herself against its facade. The drizzle that earlier kissed her skin now inflamed it, seared it. Fat red welts mushroomed along her exposed flesh. A woman across the way began to scream. A newspaper, though wet, ignited along the edges with flames.

Candace suddenly felt cold and terrified. Across the street, a subway stairwell led to the underground. She looked back at the two men who now watched her intently and seemed impervious to the scorching drizzle. A wadded tissue hissed with fire near her feet and she sidestepped
it with a cry. Her forearms and hands began to tremble. The shallow awning of the building mostly protected her, but errant droplets found their way to her skin.

She looked again toward the subway stairs. She couldn’t imagine exposing herself to that burning again, even if only for the length of time it would take to run across the street to those stairs. But how else was she going to escape this acid torrent? Someone else was screaming now, a man, and she saw him writhing on the ground in the park, unable to muster enough sense to duck for cover.

“Get out of the park!” she screamed at him. “You have to find shelter!”

He staggered to his feet, arms flailing, feet heavy. The wind changed and blew the drizzle directly into Candace’s face. She screamed, instantly blinded despite her glasses. She used the underside of her shirt to dab at her skin. She was sure her bra was showing as she wiped her face but she didn’t care. The burning liquid striped her flesh, tightening, and she felt boils bubbling up around the frames that protected her eyes.

She shook her head, blinking and squinting as best she could, and made a dash for the subway.

The rain sliced at her flesh and sizzled in her scalp. She cried out, wracked with agony and panic, running and then sliding down the stairs, tearing open her knee and the palms of her hands.

And then at once she was safe.

She whimpered, hugging herself. She fanned a shaky hand to sluice the moisture from her arms as the last residual liquid ate into her flesh.

A train was coming, and she limped toward the end of the platform. She didn’t care where the thing was going. Others crushed in behind her. Most seemed to have no notion of the atmospheric phenomenon that was occurring just beyond the ground surface.

She closed her eyes, weeping, and groped inside her heart once more for Gloria. The reality of what just happened left her feeling more ashamed. It was an incontrovertible reminder of the tremendous power and evil behind what they faced. To think she’d literally fallen asleep on her watch and allowed her friend to be taken without the slightest resistance.

She could no longer sense the location of her best friend. One
sensation did filter through, though. Something angry, searching. Something evil. It came from just behind her. She opened her eyes but didn’t dare look over her shoulder. She concentrated on that feeling and knew, like watching a rattlesnake whose black eyes fixed upon a field mouse, when it would strike.

She looked to her left and saw the train approaching, its Cyclops eye emerging from around the bend, and she felt that snake behind her.

She jerked to her left just as hands pushed forward at her back.

She felt the awkward motion as they lurched harmlessly past her, glancing off her spine and into the crush of people. If she had stayed still, those hands would have forced her off the platform and down in front of the train. Someone gasped, Candace heard a scream, and she watched in horror as another woman teetered at the edge of the platform. But someone yanked the woman’s arm and pulled her back to safety.

Candace scanned the faces, looking for the fat, red-haired men she’d seen in the park above. She saw people in business suits, people with children, and a wide-eyed lady with a hairy mole on her cheek dressed in full Arabic headscarves that covered her mouth. She saw no one she recognized and could not tell who’d tried to push her.

She stepped onto the train along with the throng, moved down the car and, just as the doors were about to close, stepped off again. She ran down the platform without looking back. Another train loomed, screeching to a halt, and she hopped onto it. No one else boarded along with her.