Final Solstice (2 page)
Authors: David Sakmyster
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Paranormal & Urban
Book 1
Chapter 1
At San Diego’s Channel Seven Doppler Weather Center, a small command-room style chamber with no windows to glare off of the sixteen monitors and computer screens, Primetime Weather anchor Mason Grier sat hunched over his chair, staring at a small array of LCD screens, poring over statistics from the twelve-county area, measuring them against chronological graphs from the past forty-eight hours.
Clear weather patterns stretched across the digital maps in all directions, far out into the Pacific even; but then, sudden red concentric circles flared up, localized over the suburb of Sunset Hills, exploding like fire-bursts, then disappearing just as fast.
Mason reversed the time and played the sequence again from several angles on the different screens.
He leaned back, shaking his head. “Impossible.”
The door opened behind him, letting in a shaft of bright afternoon sunlight. His producer, Pamela Brock, stood there beaming. “Mason, time to go. Unless you want to be late for your own award ceremony.” She was fifty-six, and despite two divorces and six kids and fifty extra pounds, still full of frenzied energy. High-strung, her office across the hall was littered with empty cans of Red Bull, which happened to be her nickname among the news team.
“I’ve got a killer intro for you, Mace, got all the press there already. Even imported some special fans of yours.”
“Who?” He had no fans. Mason (“Mace” to his producer, and
only
to her) was a meteorologist, and if you looked up his class description in a role-playing game, his ilk would be described as reclusive, hermetic even. They hid from the limelight, preferring the damp recesses under rocks and in the shadows while people like Emory Jiles the sportscaster and Diana Newman the lead anchor sought all the attention
.
Meteorologists, weathermen like Mason, studied almanacs, pored over statistics and averages, and culled all sorts of data together to attempt the challenging feat of predicting the unpredictable.
At forty-five, Mason was and always had been, a weather fanatic. However, it was a love-hate relationship, spawned in a Petrie dish and fermenting over the years until it outpaced its confines, exhausted its food and went out seeking fresh fodder, thriving off of Mason’s tragedy and taking impersonal glee in shattering his life at every turn.
His first memories were of the tornado in Indiana, the one that tore through half his childhood home—the half with his parents’ bedroom. With a force of such malevolent fury, it scattered their broken bodies across a field nearly a mile away and left young Mason standing on a shattered ledge that used to be a hallway, gaping at the missing half of his room. After a series of foster homes where he slept very little, and never during storms, he worked his way to a scholarship and a free ride at UCLA. For most of those intervening years, nature had left Mason to his own devices. For a time, he had almost dared to feel safe again. Not the safety children feel nestled in their beds knowing their parents are right there across the hall, but a certain similar complacency nonetheless.
Nature had left him alone. Left him to study his enemy, to grow and to learn everything he could about the force that had orphaned him and shaped his life.
Then, just when Mason had come to a comfortable acceptance and the memories had faded, it came again in the guise of a snowstorm that ran his wife, Lauren off the road—and caused a thirty-two car pileup on the Colorado Interstate. Lauren—poor Lauren was left in a wheelchair with a collapsed lung and a shattered hip.
Of course, even that wasn’t the worst part.
The eight-year-old twins were in the car with her. Gabriel escaped unscathed somehow, but had been in such shock he couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened. Shelby, however, had found some part of herself way older than her years, and she had acted. Ventured out into the blustery expanse of white, into the merciless cold. So young, with all that responsibility, she made the noble attempt to get help—and with such repercussions.
Realizing Mom was in serious trouble and her brother wasn’t going to be of any use, seeing a look in his eyes she just couldn’t fathom, Shelby had run from the car into the blinding snowstorm, headlong into and through four-foot drifts; trying to find help. Close to the road, in sight of approaching headlights, she slipped on the ice, fell further down into a ditch and hit her head on a rocky ledge. No one saw her in the blinding snow, not for almost an hour. The snow had even concealed the tracks and obscured the sight of the car on its hood in the ditch.
A month battling pneumonia and finally Shelby came out of it, but the infections and fluid built up in her ear canals had left her permanently deaf.
Mason still remembered the call from the highway department, the madcap race to the hospital, then running between the rooms, having to choose who to see first.
For all those debts and more, Mason Grier had devoted his life to the study of this implacable, unreasonable foe. Finally, he believed that while he could never tame such a force, at the very least he could develop the skills to predict its behavior. Its nuances, its fickle genius, its horrific temper and its subtle wiles.
Today, for all that, for all his accomplishments, his thirty years of meteorological knowledge and service, he was being honored.
California Weatherman of the Year
. Something about his near-flawless predictive abilities had led him to be nominated, and then to win this thing—a gold-plated statue of a guy looking like Oscar’s bedraggled second cousin holding up a shiny umbrella.
Mason shook his head. Up until last night, he believed he had earned such an award. But after what had happened from seven-thirty-seven to seven-forty-nine last night, he now doubted everything, once again humbled by his nemesis after growing overconfident.
The freak storm had made all the headlines, and it all had to happen right here, practically in his own backyard. And worse—the freak storm that killed Senator Aickerman, burying the man who was a potential shoe-in to be the next president—happened on his watch.
“How can I accept an award after what happened?”
Pamela stepped inside, closed the door. The lines around her dark-circled eyes smoothed. “Come on, this is what, your first miss in over twenty years?”
“But Christ, what a miss! It’s not like I bounced one off the rim and it just rolled out. I threw up an air ball that cracked the back windows.” He turned to the screens. “I can’t understand it. This storm, out of nowhere. No Doppler prediction, no rise in barometric pressure prior to the event, no precipitation indicators …”
“Mace.”
“Not even a goddamned cloud, not even—”
“Mace!”
“Nothing! It’s impossible!” He slammed his fist against the table, knocking over one of the screens. “Shit!”
“Hey, take it easy. Deep breaths. Do I need to get HR in here and recommend you for anger management classes? At this late stage in the game, I’d think it kind of pointless.”
“Sorry. Okay, so, who’s coming to this damn thing?”
“Your wife’s already en route, and before you freak out, I had a medical van sent for her, the hotel is wheelchair friendly and she’ll be fine.”
“She shouldn’t be moved like that.”
“She’ll be fine, Mace, and she wanted to come, practically begged me. And guess what, Shelby’s coming too.”
Mason’s heart leapt. Shelby was nineteen now; she had been in a USC exchange program in London for the past three months, working on a particularly exciting thesis involving early Saxon folklore. Shelby was the one he was most proud of, the one he was closest to, and to have accomplished so much despite her condition.… But his son?
“No word from Gabriel,” Pamela said, as if reading his mind. “Sorry, we tried. I know, deep down you’d like to see him again.”
“You shouldn’t have wasted your breath.” Mason stood up. His head felt like dead weight, so heavy. He looked ruefully at the weather patterns from 7:38 last night, still frozen on the screens, and he shook his head.
“Don’t bother with Gabriel. I’ve gotten used to his absence. It’s refreshing, actually.” He sighed, thinking back again to that accident on the interstate, in the whiteout.
Was that the turning point for the boy?
It seemed that up until that day Gabriel had been a normal kid, interested in the usual assortment of young boy things—baseball, cartoons, comic books, movies with things that exploded. After the accident, however, it was like a dark streak had been run through Gabriel; he became bitter and rueful about some perceived hurt, or as if angry that he had been spared, ignored more like it, by the storm. He withdrew from his family, and within a few years he was holed up in his room with an array of odd books and odder music coming from his headphones at all hours. Up until Berkeley, then it all came gushing out of him, all the hatred and bitterness he had been repressing since the car crash.
“All right,” Mason muttered, “let’s get this farce over with. But I’ve got no speech, and I’m not saying anything except thanks to the Academy and thanks for my wife’s undying support.”
“Yeah,” Pamela said, “all that shit, but if you forget to thank your brilliant and beautiful producer, without whom you’d be nothing more than a hack psychic in circus tent, I’ll slip arsenic in your next cup of coffee.”
Mason let a smile slip, then made an exaggerated bow. “I’ll shower you with praise.”
“That’s the spirit, spoken like a man who knows his place.”
“Really? And where is that?”
“In front of a vastly more successful woman.”
Rolling his eyes, Mason started moving. “Let’s go already, before I change my mind. Or lose my lunch.”
It would be good to see Shelby again, see how much she’d changed in the four months since he’d seen her off to the airport. So much like her mother before the accident. Tall and thin, deep blue eyes brimming with empathy. A smile to warm up any room. He couldn’t keep up with her friends, with her sports: lacrosse, sand volleyball, tennis. But she understood her father’s responsibilities; primarily to care for Lauren. Fortunately, they could afford a live-in nurse, and Lauren wasn’t exactly bedridden; she had good upper body strength and an indomitable sense of optimism, more than countering Mason’s inner grimness, his lingering anger at nature, at the weather and simple fate. All the things beyond his control.
At least at first, but that’s what meteorology was all about—exerting some degree of control over something that was inherently uncontrollable. If you could predict the behavior of a thing, you could have some control over it. You could sidestep its assaults, dodge its moods.
And just perhaps, you could save yourself or someone you cared about.
On the way out the door, Mason stopped and glanced back at the current weather screens showing nothing but clear skies.
Shaking his head, he reached to the hook behind the door to grab his umbrella.
Chapter 2
The taxi pulled up to the Westin Resorts Sacramento hotel and let Mason out. Pamela stayed behind to pay the cab and to meet with the film crew, still unloading their gear from a van. Mason passed a valet dropping off a red convertible Lexus, and then right before the main entrance, he stepped in front of a long, sleek black limo. He paused, feeling a sudden brisk breeze, a wind that chilled through his suit when he looked at the tinted back windows.
He could almost make out a shape inside, hovering ghost-like within: a hint of red hair, eyes that floated, shifting color in the shadowy interior, something hanging from the inside ceiling, vine-like. Frowning, Mason walked around the limo, seeing his own reflection: haggard and stretched, and had the sudden feeling like he was looking into the depths of a fairy-tale onyx mirror, one stumbled upon in the depths of a dark wood.
Who’s not the fairest one of all?
He pulled his eyes away, shaking his head and blinking until a sense of nausea passed.
End of the line,
he thought suddenly for some reason, predicting that this event—claiming this reward, would be it, the seminal event of his life. Nowhere to go from here but down. Retirement and years of sitting on the couch, pushing Lauren around in her chair; spending his free moments staring at the 24-hour weather channel, trying to second-guess his successors. Living just for the accomplishments of his children.
Or at least, the one he still had hopes for, and praying the other didn’t embarrass him further.
Mason fought off the deepening chill that seemed to radiate in waves from the limousine. Forcing heat back into his legs, he turned to climb the stairs and enter the hotel, where the blast of air conditioning felt like a welcoming breath of some fairy goddess.
O O O
Past the lobby, into the conference room, with its sparse population of fellow newscasters, weather-prognosticators, and a smattering of journalists, Mason offered weak smiles and even weaker handshakes as he made his way to the front, to the shining woman in a shinier wheelchair. Tilted at an angle that gave him the impression he was walking down the proverbial aisle, he experienced a momentary flashback to their wedding, only with the roles reversed and she was up there this time, waiting impatiently, fighting the tears of joy at seeing him coming toward her.
He moved even quicker than she did that day, and in moments was at her side, bending down, planting a big kiss across her dry lips. Lauren’s warm hands gripped his head, pinning him close with a mischievous lip-lock. “Way to go, hero,” she said at last. She grinned, then ruffled and smoothed back his thinning grey hair. She had a camera in her lap, and her face was brimming with excitement.
Mason assumed Shelby had something to do with that. He stood up, and she came from the blind spot behind Lauren’s chair, a blur in an almost too snug green dress, and Mason had a flashback to one of her tap-dancing classes when she was only six when she had worn a similar colored dress and bounded into his arms after the performance.
Such innocence, all lost the instant the family car did a three-sixty and tumbled off the road.
“Daddy!” Her speech was still a bit awkward, but every time she said that magical word, it was the most wonderful sound he could imagine; its beauty was expressed by its mere presence instead of what could have been, instead of the silence of its absence.
His fingers and hand motions a blur after years of practice, he signed back to her:
Hon, you didn’t have to come all the way back across the Pond for this! It’s too much
.
“I sure did,” she said, then continued with her fingers moving almost too fast:
especially when your producer’s paying for it. First class
.
Shelby was always one for comfort, for luxury. Such the opposite of her brother. Gabriel would sooner ride with the caged animals in cargo than up with what he would call “white-collar criminals and earth-polluting, resource-raping pigs.”
A promising (and expensive) education pissed away, as far as Mason was concerned. Two semesters at Berkeley, and all Mason got for his return was a freethinking son who hated everything and everyone, his father included, for their purported crimes against nature. They hadn’t spoken since Gabriel’s junior year, after the call from the police that Mason had been dreading: Gabe had been arrested in a logging district in Washington State, along with fifteen of his classmates. After the police had to cut him loose from the trunk of a redwood, he then attacked the officers with those same chains.
Another twenty thousand in legal fees, just to get his ungrateful son off with no jail time, and the first week out Gabriel pulls an even bigger stunt: firebombing a Hummer dealership in Beverly Hills.
No avoiding jail time there.
Except, somehow he did. Bailed out by one of his acquaintances and fellow like-thinkers. Someone with deep pockets.
Mason hugged Shelby tighter than he had planned. He had mourned enough over his son; their disassociation haunted him as intensely as the tragedies that had taken the lives of his parents and injured his wife; Gabriel’s loss (for how else could he see it?) had opened up his ribcage, creating a void, a wounded chasm just as deep.
He couldn’t dwell on that now. He had one child that loved him, one that respected him and was grateful to be alive. That, in itself, was a miracle. He took his wife’s hand as he continued smiling at Shelby.
“I want to hear all about your British wanderings, about Spam and Stonehenge and all that, but I just need to do this little speech thing first.”
She nodded, then signed:
Blow ’em away, daddy
.
“Bloody right,” said Lauren.
Mason smiled. “Bloody right.”
O O O
A half hour later, after the uncomfortable acceptance of Pamela’s introduction, and after some initial stumbling, Mason made good on his promise to keep it short, and to thank those who needed thanking, especially his brilliant producer. The Oscars ceremony this definitely wasn’t, with only a few camera flashes going off, a few journalists, and one video camera with a feed that might find its way to the archives of the Meteorology Society. But it was just right as far as Mason was concerned. His favorite two people in the world were here, smiling in the front row.
He had the award in his hand, and raised it up one more time after his speech, to mild applause, and he posed for a quick picture. The flashbulb still searing his vision, he caught sight of someone in the back, someone standing up quickly before the others.
Mason squinted.
Something about that figure
. The man was young, all in black, with a starched fancy black suit. Clearly out of place among these journalists. Head bald, or shaved. His face however, was too unclear in the after-spots of the flashbulb.
Blinking rapidly, Mason leaned forward. The oddest thing about that man … he seemed to be holding a cane, or a stick of some kind. Mason took a moment until the spots cleared and the cheers subsided, and then sought out the man again.
Above the waving hands and the friends and coworkers coming to congratulate him, their eyes made contact. Eyes that were a fierce blue, almost like cobalt or quartz mined from the California hills. Deep and reflective of the profound depths from which they had arisen. So blue …
Just like his mother’s.
Mason couldn’t breathe, and it took several attempts to expel air from his constricted lungs, but he managed to push out one word.
“Gabriel.”
O O O
The next ten minutes were some of the longest of Mason’s life. Shaking hands, sharing trivial stories and memories of his career: his start in Seattle and cutting his teeth on the complex weather patterns in the upper northwest, the blizzard of ’99, the floods and mudslides of ’05. Through it all he kept stealing glimpses to Lauren and Shelby, where they were perched off to the side of the stage, signing to each other and smiling, laughing like two chatty high school girls after class.
Finally, in a short break he got Lauren’s attention and made the sign for “Gabriel,” and motioned to the back.
Lauren smiled, nodded, and then Mason understood. They had known all along. She signed back:
he called last week and asked if he could come. Go. Talk to him, it’s important.
Wondering what else his wife had been keeping from him, Mason excused himself from the current crowd of journalists, and from Pamela, who snatched up his award at the last moment.
“Let me see that. Nice. Not as nice as mine for Producer of the Year, but it’s okay … for you.” She gave him a lopsided grin and a pat on the back, then noticed his eyes, and followed them to the back of the room. “Who’s that? Paparazzi?”
Mason eased past her. “Worse.”
He made his way down the aisle, walking with legs that felt heavier with ever step, acutely aware of the lighting in here, the sounds at his back diminishing to mute whispers, the bulbs flickering, the air cooling. Gabriel had been leaning against the wall. He pushed off now, using the cane, a lacquered cherry wood stick with a golden tip, and took three quick, energized and certainly not feeble, steps to meet his father.
“Who are you,” Mason asked, trying to set the mood, “and what have you done with my son?”
Gabriel shifted the cane to his left hand and reached out to shake his father’s hand, pumping it vigorously. Mason stared at their connected hands. It was the first time they’d touched in over three years.
“Congratulations, Dad.”
Mason pulled his hand away and tilted his head, eying Gabriel quietly. Neither spoke for a long time. Finally, Mason said, “Glad you lost the beard. The last I saw you, your hair was down around the middle of your back. Next, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a job at a bank?”
Gabriel chuckled. “Please, we don’t want to go there.”
By “there,” Mason knew he meant the whole evil of the federal government and the ownership of the world’s sparse resources by the fiends in the international banking community. Or some other such nonsense. Mason couldn’t resist, however. And he needed to see who this young man standing before him was now, needed to learn if anything had changed. Surprisingly, he found himself actually nearing the brink, daring to hope.
“And you Dad, lost a bit more up top, and the grey’s taking over. I figured rather than go quietly, I’d just shave mine all off. Much less maintenance.”
Mason nodded. “My genetic gift to you.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Could be worse, and considering what else you’ve given me, a fair trade.”
“What’s the ‘else’ you’re referring to?” He wasn’t following.
A smile broadened on Gabriel’s face. “Come, let’s walk out in the lobby, get some fresh air. We need to talk.”
Mason stood motionless. “Talk?”
“Yes, you know. You and me. Talking, moving our lips. Hearing. Responding.”
“Sarcasm I get. What I don’t understand is why. Why now? Last time we ‘talked,’ I heard the words ‘Dad’ and ‘Fuck Off’ as they led you away in handcuffs.”
“I was a different person back then, but if you want apologies and groveling, if you want me to act out the Prodigal Son, you’ll have to wait. I’m here for a more important reason.”
“Good,” Mason said acidly, “then get to the point.”
“Outside?”
“No, here. I don’t want to lose sight of your mother. Or your sister.”
Gabriel cocked his head. “Still blaming yourself?”
Mason’s eyes hardened. “For what?”
Gabriel’s eyes stayed on his, unblinking.
He knew what his son was thinking:
for not being there, not being the one to drive; or for telling Lauren, who always hated driving in snow, that the weather report looked just perfect, not a chance of even one snowflake, much less anything like that merciless blizzard heading her way
.
“Nothing, Dad. Look, what if I told you I could give you a chance to do something truly important with the rest of your life? Something in your field, something … light years beyond all this?” He waved the cane’s tip half-heartedly at the remnants of the ceremony. “This nickel-and-dime, dog and pony show. Weather forecasting? Come on, here in southern California anyone with half a brain or access to a window could do your job. No offense.”
“So which one do I have?”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t give you a window.” Gabriel’s smile softened. “Look, what if you could have the chance to achieve what you’ve always wanted?”
“And what would that be?”
Gabriel smiled. “Call it what you like. Redemption. Understanding. Control.”
“Control?”
“How about sweet old fashioned revenge?”
Blinking, Mason stepped back. “Gabriel, please stop talking in circles. Why are you here? What do you want?”
His son reached into his suit coat and retrieved what looked like a black playing card. He flipped it over with a snap like a stage magician and handed it to Mason.
A business card. Plastic, laminated.
SOLSTICE SYNERGISTIC, INC.
Environmental Research
Seattle, Washington, 45050
555-643-3333
“Environmental research?” Mason gave his son a skeptical look. “This is what you’re doing now?”
“You’re surprised?”
“By the very fact you have what sounds like a real job, yes. So what do you do there?”
“A little of this and that. I’ve been moving up in the ranks. Working on environmental law, currently.”
Mason made a face. “Is that just a fancy name for chaining yourself to more trees?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I told him you’d be unreasonable.”
“Who?”
Gabriel motioned to the card. “Call the number on there, anytime. We’d like you to come in, tour the facility, see what we do.”
“For what purpose?”
“That should be obvious.”
“Pander to an old man. State the obvious.”
“We want you to come and work for us.”
O O O
“So, what was that all about?” Lauren asked him when he returned, a few minutes later. Mason hesitated. Shelby was watching him intensely, staring at her father’s lips, ready with baited breath to read the next words from his mouth.
Mason glanced at both of them. He was still holding the business card, shifting it between his fingers as if practicing a failed magic trick, trying to figure out what might have gone wrong. “He didn’t tell you?”
