Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) (22 page)

“Okay, so you have the dreams. You
have the electrical problems. And you have crossed over and been
sent back,” Kannon said after he’d wolfed down half of his
sandwich. It sounded more like he was talking to himself than
me.

“What do you mean by crossed over and
sent back? I died and the doctors revived me,” I said.

Kannon sighed and set the remaining
half of his sandwich on the plate. “You crossed the waters that
separate the living from the dead,” he said.

Again, I thought he was speaking
English, but it might as well have been Swahili. I shook my head to
indicate I had no clue what he was talking about. The weird turn of
the conversation heightened my anxiety, but I found it oddly
fascinating as well. I felt like Kannon was about to deliver a
lecture on the afterworld.

“To come back as an
Egrgoroi you must have crossed over and
stood before
the Panel of Three,”
Kannon explained. “Only they have the power to judge whether you
deserve a second chance.”

Maybe a biblical lecture
, I thought.
The term Egrgoroi didn’t sound biblical, though. What did I know?
Most of my church-going experience was fictitious.

“Any of this ring a bell?” Kannon
asked in response to my perplexed expression, no doubt. “The
Judgment? The ferryman? The beaches of the recently
departed?”

My hand paused with a French fry
midway to my mouth. “Ferryman?” I repeated weakly.

“Yeah, Hermes.
He escorts you to the Panel of Three.”

Chapter
Thirteen

The moment Kannon said the Greek god’s
name, I flashed to Mrs. Randolf’s class. The image of Hermes with
his golden hair and bronze skin was as vivid in my mind now as it
had been then. I didn’t know whether to feel relief that more
pieces of the puzzle were falling into place or wonder whether both
Kannon and I had been drinking the same Kool-Aid.

“Ah, a budding Greek scholar,” Mr.
Haverty exclaimed appearing with a pile of extra napkins and a
water pitcher. “Like father, like daughter.”

My head whipped around so fast pain
shot up the right side of my neck and I winced. “Excuse me?” I
asked, not sure I’d heard him right.

A mask of confusion settled into place
on Mr. Haverty’s face. “All that research your father is always
doing is on Greek mythology. The pages I gave you last week were
all about one god or another. I just assumed he was a mythology
professor.”

“History,” I mumbled.

“Ah, right. He did tell me that.” Mr.
Haverty chuckled and tapped the side of his head. “Memory isn’t so
sharp at my age.”

I wish my memory wasn’t so
sharp
, I thought. That way maybe I could
forget the last week. Or the last five years, for that
matter.

“Let me know if you need anything
else,” the Moonlight’s owner said before disappearing
again.

I pushed my plate away,
rested my elbows on the table, and cradled my forehead in my
upturned palms. Nothing made sense. Yet, at the same time
everything made sense. When I
saw the
slide of Hermes, I recognized him instantly
. Kannon’s assertion that he was the ferryman matched the
explanation I’d pulled from thin air in Mrs. Randolf’s class.
Uncomfortably, I realized where I’d actually met the messenger. Not
in my dreams as I’d first concluded, but in the two minutes I’d
been dead.

This new bit of knowledge chilled me.
Earlier, I’d assumed Hermes visited me in my dreams. Now I knew
differently. Kannon’s words were like a key, unlocking a part of my
memory that hadn’t been opened since the day it was sealed. As with
the dreams, I couldn’t recall the details of my meeting with the
messenger, but every fiber of my being felt that we had met
eighteen years and ten days before.

“I remember meeting Hermes,” I told
Kannon, lifting my head to meet his eyes.

“You do?” Hope and relief resounded in
those two words.

“Sort of,” I amended. “In class today,
I saw his picture and knew that we’d met. I thought I was crazy at
the time. I mean, who really thinks they’ve met a mythological god,
right? But I knew I had. I just couldn’t remember where or when. I
figured it was in my dreams, like how you said we met in your
dreams. But now I’m positive we met the day I was born.”

Kannon became visibly agitated at the
reminder of his premonition about our meeting. Apparently, I wasn’t
the only one uncomfortable discussing the aftermath of our
respective near-death experiences.

“What was the dream you had about me?”
I asked, suddenly very interested.

Kannon shook his head, his cheeks
colored slightly. “It was stupid,” he murmured.

“I want to know,” I
pressed.

Kannon sighed. “I dreamt about the
party at Elizabeth’s. We were supposed to meet for the first time
there.”

We were supposed to meet
for the first time there?
I didn’t like
the sound of that. It was like we were fated to have that
encounter.

“So you remember Hermes, but not the
Panel or the Judgment?” Kannon said after a long pause. He seemed
eager to change the subject.

“I’m sorry, I don’t. Maybe
I will, though. I just turned eighteen last week, so maybe in time
I will remember?” I suggested hopefully. As much as all of this
freaked me out, I hated only knowing part of the story. If ―
big
IF― I had met
this
Panel and been through a Judgment, I
wanted that memory.

“No.” Kannon shook his
chestnut locks definitively. “No one forgets going before the Panel
and waiting for the Judgment. Every agonizing detail is burned into
my mind. Besides, they want you to remember. That way you won’t
violate the contract.”

For the third time that night, the
urge to demand he speak American English seized me. All this talk
of panels and judges, and now contracts, could have been taking
place at the dinner table with my mother. Yet, somehow I doubted
Mom would have thrown in words like “ferryman” and “beaches of the
recently departed.”

I took a deep breath to calm my racing
thoughts. “Maybe you could start at the beginning. I have no idea
what the Panel is or what kind of Judgment you are talking about.
And I definitely don’t know what an Egrgoroi is.”

Kannon eyed me suspiciously
while taking a large bite of his Reuben. He chewed thoughtfully for
longer than necessary, mulling over how to phrase his next words.
After he’d finally swallowed the masticated turkey and coleslaw, he
downed
half the contents of his water
glass.
Definitely stalling for
time
, I thought.

“When you die, the ferryman, Hermes,
takes you before a panel of three judges, Rhadamanthus, Minos, and
Aeacus. They are known as the Panel of Three. They weigh the
positive contributions in your life against the negative ones and
pass judgment accordingly. If the good outweighs the bad, you are
sent to Elysian Fields. If the scales tip the other way, they
sentence you to Tartarus. I hear that place is worse than any pit
of hell the special effects crews in Hollywood can
create.”

“Sounds like heaven and hell,” I said.
Inasmuch as I’d given any thought to an afterlife, I sort of
assumed mine would be spent in one of those two places. The places
Kannon had mentioned rang a bell, but that was likely from my
mythology reading for Mrs. Randolf. Until lately, I’d been doing
the homework every night.

“Sort of. The underworld is more
complicated than that,” Kannon told me. “Heaven and hell are just
simplified versions used in modern-day religion. Elysian Fields is
sort of like heaven and Tartarus is sort of like hell, except there
are many different levels of each. Only the worst of the worst are
condemned to spending eternity in the lowest circle of Tartarus.
And only people like Mother Teresa end up drinking ambrosia with
the gods in Elysian.”

The way Kannon spoke with so much
authority left little doubt that he believed his words were true.
I, on the other hand, was a skeptic. I liked the idea of life after
death and could not deny that his explanation for my electrical
problems and visions made a lot of sense, although the rational
side I’d inherited from Mom said that this was all a load of
crap.

Kannon’s story was a good one, but a
story nonetheless, I lectured myself. He was offering me
justification for every abnormality in my life. I desperately
wanted to believe his words. But wanting something to be true does
not make it so. And after being raised by a woman who didn’t buy
anything science wasn’t selling, I remained unconvinced.

“I took one breath in this world. That
hardly counts as a positive or negative contribution,” I pointed
out. “How could anyone judge me as being good or evil?”

“First of all, it’s not as simple as
good or evil. I told you, there are varying degrees of bad and
good,” Kannon said. “Second of all, the whole newborn thing is what
I’m having trouble with.”

Oh, that was all? None of the rest of
this bothered him?

“I distinctly remember the Panel
telling me how lucky I was to have turned sixteen a couple of days
before it happened. They told me that at sixteen I was old enough
to decide whether I wanted to return to earth as an Egrgoroi. The
contract stated that my service wouldn’t begin until I was
eighteen, though. And that is consistent with what others have told
me.”

What others had told him? So, I wasn’t
the first person he’d met like him?

“There are others like us?
I mean, like you at least?” I asked, realizing that if there was
any truth to what he was saying there had
to be.
There were
probably quite a few people like us, or him
rather, out there
.

“I’ve met a few,” Kannon said
evasively.

“Did you electrocute them,
too?” I asked, in what I hoped was a playful voice. The
conversation was too serious. I needed some levity before my brain
exploded from the influx of
improbable
information.

The tension lining Kannon’s forehead
eased, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards in a slight smile.
“No. I didn’t touch any of them.”

“How did you know then?” I asked in a
small voice.

“Egrgoroi give off a higher electrical
charge than normal humans and are more sensitive to electrical
impulses. We can feel each other. I can feel the charge you give
off right now. At the lake I just didn’t realize it soon enough.
The water must have dulled the sensation and I didn’t register the
charge until, well, until I touched you.”

“I feel it too,” I told him quietly.
The energy radiating from Kannon was what stopped me every time I
considered touching him. It was an invisible barrier that
surrounded his person like an electric fence, complete with a high
voltage warning sign.

Kannon sighed, and his
expression turned pensive. “If you don’t remember making the
agreement to become an Egrgoroi, then I don’t get how you can be
one. You don’t even know what you’re supposed to do. But you have
all the signs and you
did
die.” He seemed to be vocalizing his stream of
consciousness rather than actually speaking to me.

“What agreement did I not make?” I
asked. “What exactly is an Egrgoroi?”

“Egrgoroi is Greek for ‘watcher.’ It’s
our job to ensure that events on earth unfold the way the gods want
them to. We agree to receive messages and carry out the acts the
way the visions show us in exchange for a second chance at life on
earth.” Kannon hesitated; maybe he’d said too much.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know too
much more. What he was describing sounded a lot like destiny. A
presence of destiny and fate, and whatever else you wanted to call
it, meant an absence of free will. It meant that some supposedly
superior beings were calling all the shots, using us lowly mortals
like chess pawns.

“Endora?” Kannon whispered my name
like a question. “Are you okay? Believe me I know this is a lot.
When I woke up in the hospital, I thought it was all a bad dream. I
prayed it wasn’t real. Part of me kept that hope alive until I
turned eighteen and the visions and visits began. At first they
were stupid things, like you were saying. Within a couple of weeks
they turned a little more serious.”

I needed to start
collecting a dollar for every time someone asked
me if I was okay.
I
could pay for college by the time this nonsense was sorted
out.

No, I wasn’t okay. In ten
days, the sun my world revolved around had gone from lacrosse
practice and studying for AP exams to setting up trysts at
a biker hangout to discuss
the cosmic issue of destiny and whether or not I would play a
role in ensuring
that mankind fulfilled
theirs.

“Can we talk about something else?” I
asked. “I know this is why we met and all, but I…I,” I stuttered,
not sure how to finish the statement.

In addition to my appetite, my sense
of reality, right and wrong, good and evil, were gone. The fact
that there may be people, these watchers, these Egrgoroi,
influencing the outcome of a given situation did not sit well with
me.