Council of Peacocks (45 page)

“So close,” Propates said. “For the sake of
our world, please let this work.”

***

When she finished arranging for the removal
of Jared’s body, Garnet came back to her room and stared at the
wall for fifteen minutes. The stink of death was still on her. Her
mind ricocheted: an image of Jared laughing during
Mortal
Kombat
. An image of his body, broken and bent – wide dead eyes
and blood. She let down her hair and was brushing it when Jessica
entered.

“What’s up, Jess?”

“Ugh. You know I hate that name. It’s not
like I call you Gar. Please don’t call me that. It sounds so … I
don’t know what it sounds like, but please don’t call me that.”

“Okay. What’s up, Jessica?”

Jessica did not bother to speak. She stood in
the doorway, hands held behind her back, staring straight forward.
One of the reasons Wisdom employed Garnet as his secretary was the
high level of proficiency she possessed over her empathic powers:
it helped during business negotiations and weeding out disloyal
employees. Images and sensations clicked on in her like a daydream.
In the space of time it would have taken to speak the words ‘I have
a problem,’ she knew all of Jessica’s fear.

“Oh. It’s time.” She put down her hairbrush.
Her stomach was in knots as she studied her face in the mirror.
Suddenly she felt very old. “Don’t worry. I’m serious. Don’t worry
about it. Wisdom is many things – ruthless, emotionally stunted and
extremely impatient – but he’s not stupid. He’s invested a lot in
you, in all of us. He’s not going to throw that all away for
nothing. He wouldn’t take us into something he didn’t think we
could walk out of.”

Jessica narrowed her eyes. “Are you
sure?”

“Absolutely.” Garnet straightened a few
wrinkles in her dark grey pantsuit with strong, crisp movements.
“Go on ahead. I’ll meet you in Wisdom’s office in a few
minutes.”

Garnet kept her composure until Jessica left
the room. Then it slid off her like melting ice. No matter what she
said, she couldn’t honestly say Wisdom had their safety in mind. It
was completely conceivable that he planned to use the Anomalies as
fodder for the Council. Maybe he saw her and the others as a
disposable distraction while he snuck in and did the real damage.
That could have been his plan all along. Only time would tell.

She walked out of her room and headed toward
the elevator, barely looking at the people she passed. All their
petty thoughts irritated her.

***

Garnet was seventeen when she first met
Wisdom. Just a skinny girl in frumpy clothes who was a little too
tall. At fifteen, her telepathy erupted. She heard how others saw
her. They felt sorry for her and called her a loser behind her
back. At first she was angry. Then she decided to do something
about it.

She shed her frumpy clothes for more
flattering ones and took up Aikido to firm up her body. Boys looked
at her differently. She knew when they were thinking about her,
what they were thinking about her. She also learned just the right
way to wink at them. Within a few months she went from frail to
feral. Teenage boys, drunk with their hormones, became her
playthings. At least until Jason Kupnicke.

Jason was a football player, a cliché from a
wealthy family, with a girlfriend named Allison on the cheerleading
squad. Garnet thought he’d be a challenge. In the end, he was all
too easy. She whispered things to him in the library, things he
wanted but could never bring himself to ask Allison to do. Garnet
promised him all that and more.

After one kiss under the bleachers, he
trembled at her touch. Conquest over, she moved on to other things.
Jason did not.

One night Garnet woke up from a dream and
knew that someone was watching her. Jason. She slid out of bed and
went to the bedroom window. There he was, in the shadows by the
backyard shed staring up at her bedroom window. He was imagining
her body naked under his hands. He would do anything to be with
her, whether she wanted it or not.

She backed away from the window, not sure
what to do. She looked at her bookshelf, her eyes landing on
Stephen King’s
Firestarter
. She thought of the father, the
one who could control people’s minds. She wondered if she could do
the same thing. She focused on Jason’s shadow and pushed with her
mind.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then she saw
the flames engulf his hair and clothes. Jason threw himself down
and rolled in the dry grass, trying to smother the fire out. Her
father entered the room to see why she was screaming. Outside, the
fire grew larger and larger, the dry grass devoured by flame until
the whole backyard was a sea of flames. She heard Jason’s last
thought as he died. It was of her.

She didn’t sleep for days.

A rumor went around school: Jason had set
himself on fire in her backyard because he did not want to live
without her. It became accepted reality. Teenagers kill themselves
every day.

She did not go to the funeral.

People whispered behind her back. Pockets of
girls in the hallway talked about her between classes, wondering
what was so special about her that had turned Jason crazy. She
tried to tune out their thoughts, but that was something she only
learned to do under the tutelage of Ms. Ryerson. Wave after wave of
judgmental anger and jealousy struck her daily, mingled with an
almost-incoherent flow of teenage sexual hunger.

Eventually she struck out again.

Despite the Aikido, she did not have the
type of physique to pound someone’s head in. What she did have was
the ability to see into their deepest, darkest secret. So, when
Allison McGraw called her a tramp in gym class, Garnet asked her
why she lay in bed listening to her parents having sex and
masturbated with the image of her father on top of her. Allison was
so shocked she screamed and ran out of the gym. Hitting someone
with something that personal, that secret, did not allow time for a
rebuttal.

Allison never recovered. Garnet felt a
shimmer of guilt when she saw the tired look in her eyes. But only
a shimmer.

By the time she was seventeen, she was bored
and alone. She quickly discovered that boys were better lovers in
their imagination than they were in reality. Even the fear and
jealousy directed at her became tedious. So many people had exactly
the same thoughts, it felt like facing a collective of petty,
insignificant insects.

Then she began using her power outside of
school. That’s what drew Wisdom to her.

Unlike Jason, she didn’t come from a wealthy
family. Everything she wanted was so expensive. She started with
extortion: next-door neighbors and people she stumbled upon at the
mall. When you can read minds, it’s child’s play to blackmail
people, easy to know which ones have the money to keep their
secrets hidden. It was also easy to break into their houses when
you knew their security codes, where they kept the spare keys, and
when they would be away from home. It was so simple she called
these break-ins ‘shopping.’

During one of those little shopping sprees,
she stumbled upon a ten-page report that changed the way she looked
at the world. The house belonged to a member of Candleworks who
broke protocol and brought home sensitive documents. The report
covered a murder that Candleworks attributed to a crazed Sasquatch.
If not for the full-colored pictures accompanying the report – the
creature’s corpse on an autopsy table and mangled human bodies –
she would have laughed the whole thing off as fiction.

The photos forced her to see the truth. Some
people would have run. Instead, it left her wanting to know more.
Maybe she wasn’t the only impossible thing in the world. If Big
Foot existed, maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe there were others like
her.

She staked the house for several days
before. When the agent was home, she read his thoughts from a car
across the street. She discovered Candlework’s Vancouver location.
On a Friday night, she told her parents she was going to the movies
with friends and drove to a twenty-four-story building at 1169
Alexander. Outside, a sign proclaimed the company was Fault-Aid:
Seismic Hazard Mitigation Experts. She parked across the street
with a cup coffee while she scanned the building for random
thoughts.

Then there was knock on the window.

She yelped, spilling coffee down her front.
She felt like a mouse caught sneaking out of its home, too startled
to even think of running. She looked at the man who knocked and
realized something even as his smile filled her eyes. She had not
heard him coming. She should have been able to hear his thoughts
long before he'd approached the car. Wisdom’s mind was closed to
her.

***

She felt the tension long before she reached
Wisdom’s office. It was a workday, not long past noon, but the
reception area and the outer offices were deserted. Wisdom had sent
everyone home early.

Wisdom leaned against the window, looking
like something from a fashion magazine in his expensive red suit
framed by the backdrop of Hong Kong. All the wounds from his fight
with his father were healed. Jessica sat in a chair against the
wall to Garnet’s left. She held a ceramic mug filled with
still-steaming coffee and stared into the liquid. Garnet flinched,
instinctively thinking Jessica was too young to be drinking coffee.
Jessica looked over and stuck her tongue out at Garnet. Obviously,
she’d heard the thought.

Todd, eyes red and face smudged with wet
streaks, sat in one of the chairs next to Wisdom’s desk. He kept
shaking his head: small measured movements. He was cleaning
invisible dirt from beneath his fingernails, his eyes refusing to
focus on anyone else in the room. Elaine stood beside another of
the chairs, her body stiff and distant. She was decked out in a
black pantsuit that showed a surprising level of class. Garnet was
used to seeing Wisdom’s hired gun in leather trench coats and
mud-soaked dark clothing. David sat in a third chair. Although
sitting was not quite the right word for what he was doing. It
seemed like his body had been bent in half. His head was in his
hands, which in turn were almost lying on his knees. His body
jerked in sharp spasms like a fish in lightning-soaked water.

Josh sat on the edge of Wisdom’s desk, his
body relaxed and, somehow, extremely present. Garnet gasped. ‘I
can’t read his mind, either!’ She looked at him, seeing nothing but
his body. ‘How?’

Keeping her eyes on him, Garnet walked into
the room and closed the door behind her. Josh pushed himself off
the desk and took a few steps toward her.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I’m ready when
you are.”

“Oh, Jesus. We’re dead.” David stood up and
paced in short quick strides.

“Sit down, David.” From the tone in Wisdom’s
voice, it was not the first time he’d said those words today. David
sat down heavily.

Echo yawned and ran her fingers through her
hair. “Seriously, Wisdom, do we have to bring the child? We could
bring Ms. Ryerson instead. David can barely stand right now, let
alone fight a horde of Edimmu.”

“Thanks for making it easier, Echo.” Wisdom
walked away from the window and sat in his throne-like leather
chair. “Current theatrics aside, I know what kind of strength lies
in David. And to answer your implied question, Ms. Ryerson has her
own assignment, one just as important as our own. We’ll likely hear
from her tomorrow.”

“What’s our plan?” Garnet walked further into
the room and took her position at Wisdom’s side. Each step added
more pressure to her, as if she was diving deeper and deeper into
an ocean. Fears and doubts swam by like fish. “How are we going to
fight them?”

“How else?” David said. His voice was
piercing. “Invasion. Brilliant plan, really. Wisdom is going to pop
us over to Greece and we’re going to invade their headquarters like
we’re some sort of Navy Seal ninjas.”

“The Navy Seals don’t have ninjas, David.”
Elaine shifted her weight. “And please lower your voice.”

“Oh, you’re afraid someone is going to hear
about this insanity?”

“Not really, no. You’re just really annoying
me.”

“Too bad, so sad for you. Did you want to go
and shoot my mother, too?”

“Enough!” Wisdom snapped his fingers and
bright light flashed through the room. Garnet screamed and covered
her eyes. The room fell silent and she opened her eyes, her face
flush red with embarrassment. Whatever Wisdom had done, it appeared
to work. Now there was only one thought, one feeling in all their
minds.

Whatever lay ahead, they were all much more
afraid of Wisdom than fighting.

“Better.” Wisdom straightened his tie and
leaned forward on his desk. “I know you’re all afraid. It’s a
natural reaction. Now get over it. Quickly. And David, if I hear
one more whine, one more pretense of weakness, I will pull your
brain out through your nose. We both know what you’re capable of.
I’m not sure if this little performance is for your benefit or
mine, but it’s extremely tiring. I know you haven’t been trained,
but I also know something else. No matter how hard you try to deny
it, you like killing. You committed each murder not out of
necessity or desperation, but out of desire. You wanted to see them
dead. So stop your whining and deal. Feel guilty tomorrow after the
Council’s destroyed.”

Everyone turned to watch David’s reactions.
It did not take long for Wisdom’s words to have their intended
impact.

David sighed, dejectedly, and hung his head.
“When are we going?”

“Now.”

Wisdom walked around the table to stand
beside Echo. She reached over and grasped his hand. Wisdom placed
his other hand against her cheek. A moment later, he flicked his
wrist and a 6-foot wide oval of bright light appeared. Elaine
stepped through the portal first.