The Lost Prince (39 page)

“I intend to pinpoint every living person within fifteen hundred miles of this epicenter,” Allyn said. “Like radar.”

“Uh-huh,” said Theo, pretending to understand.

“Then I will send out a tiny magical current, running it through every person within that radius. No one will be aware of it. It’s like the X-ray at the dentist’s. But in that one brief flash, that current will be rejected by one individual—it will bounce off or go around him—and in that moment, I will have a location to give Malcolm Robbe. I can repeat the spell, targeting that one area to pinpoint him further once Malcolm is in place to intercept him.”

Theo dropped the weights along the edge of the circle with a huge huff. He scratched his head, squeezed his eyelids and said, “But what if he’s outside that radius? What if he moved to California? You’re only going to cover Maine to Florida to the Mississippi.”

The thought hadn’t escaped Allyn. He hoped that since so many of the guardians remained relatively close to the transfer point by which they came to this reality, the boy would also be in the neighborhood, so to speak.

“If I build a bigger henge right on the lay line, I can cover all of North America and halfway down to South America,” Allyn explained.

“Yeah, but what if—”

“Theo!” Allyn cried in frustration. “Stay positive. Hopefully the boy is not in Russia or China.”

Theo continued placing the iron weights where Allyn indicated, muttering, “Like to see Principal Harris let you build a giant henge behind the school.”

Passersby stopped to watch the reverend and his brother-in-law work on the henge. The going story was that he was planning a garden for the spring, and he was setting up the framework now for exercise.

The party rental truck had come by in the nick of time. Allyn instructed them to set up the large white tent used for outdoor events over the henge, concealing the construct from the sidewalk. Normally, the henge remained open to the stars because it was also a calendar and observatory, but what Allyn needed to do would unsettle many church members. It would be impossible to explain.

A livestock truck was the next to pull up. Gabby Martins approached in his usual coveralls, work boots, and CAT cap over his straight greasy gray hair. He had a goat on a rope.

“What’s the goat for?” Theo asked within Gabby’s hearing.

“The petting zoo we’re planning for the kids,” Allyn said in a
keep your mouth
shut tone.

“You sure you want him now, Rev?” asked Gabby. “I can bring him on by tomorrow early. He gonna eat you out of house and home if he come off that rope. Worse than a nuclear-powered lawn mower, goddamned goats.” Gabby realized whom he was talking to and quickly added, “Pardon my French.”

“We’re fine, Gab. He’s an old goat right? Lived a long life—uh, not a danger to kids?”

“Che here’s the Methuselah of goats. Going on fourteen years. Got himself twenty kids, no pun intended.”

“The goat’s name is Che?” Theo said, petting the small animal.

Allyn wished the goat didn’t have a name and felt his resolve waver in the presence of the little animal. He’d spent too many years living as a Christian.

“Name all my livestock after commies,” Gabby said. “Got a cow named Stalin, a pig named Castro, and a rooster named Franklin Roosevelt.”

Allyn waited until Gabby was well on his way back to the proletariat before proceeding. He led the goat into the tent and staked his leash by the altar stone—a discarded granite kitchen counter Theo found at the junk heap.

“Please tell me you ain’t gonna kill that goat,” Theo said, concerned.

“I can’t cast a blessing this wide and this powerful without a lot of blood,” Allyn said solemnly. “It breaks my heart, but better this goat dies than I leave my family to fight in a war I was barely part of thirteen years ago. If I find the boy, I’m free of my responsibilities. More importantly, I am free of my guilt for not joining the others.”

Allyn shut the flap to the tent. He had all the elements necessary for the blessing. Who was he kidding, though? This was no blessing. This was a spell on par with what the wizards did. It irked Allyn that the sphere of wizardry and the sphere of clerics overlapped at their edges. He wanted no brotherhood with those types.

He placed althaea root, angelica root, bloodroot, caraway seeds, and star anise in a steel bowl with a large tumble of alfalfa sprouts and doused various oils over the mixture. He struck a match and set it all to flame. He placed the goat on the altar. It was skittish because of the fire, bleating nervously, and Allyn motioned to Theo to hold the animal. Allyn shaved away a patch of hair at the animal’s neck with a straight razor. Theo’s expression was grim as a hangman.

“After I bleed the goat, take it to that corner. There’s a first-aid kit. Wash its wound, and bandage it. Give it some orange juice and spinach.”

“You ain’t killing it?”

“I need more than a pint of blood, Theo. The goat may die, but I don’t need for it to die for the spell to work. Back in Aandor, we’d simply cut the animal’s throat and then we’d roast the flesh for dinner. But I’m only going to make a small incision in its neck.”

Allyn had not realized how much the boy’s faith in him had wavered until he saw Theo tear up and smile a wide row of teeth. Through his smile, Theo’s faith in one of his personal heroes was affirmed. How such a mountain of a man who delivered brutal punishment on the gridiron could have so tender a heart was a mystery.

“I am a minister, you know,” he said to Theo, defensively. “Do unto others and all that.”

Allyn punctured the goat’s artery with a long surgical needle. The goat bleated in distress, but remained in place under Theo’s massive arms. Allyn placed a funnel with a rubber tube running under it by the hole and placed the tube end over the bowl. A stream of blood gushed into the flame. Allyn instructed Theo to take the goat away when he had what he needed. He closed his eyes and began to chant, pushing out his will and drawing in the energy of the circle, letting the current of power hasten from a lazy river into a roaring rapid. It filled reservoirs within him that had been empty for the better part of a decade. He spread the energy out through his consciousness, like a tablecloth whipped out and billowing over a large dinner party. He let the energy fall on the land and saw the light of millions in all directions from his epicenter. He saw the glow that represented Theo in the tent, the lights of his wife and daughter in the house, the cluster of intense lights in the cities as people massed together in concrete domiciles—living souls in an unbroken web of magical connection. Once he’d reached the limit of his range, he put his hands up, palms out and pushed out a second wave of energy to piggyback the first one, meant to penetrate these beings with streams of magic less than a molecule thick. He pushed it out in a flash and felt the current connect with millions of beings—except for …
two?

Two beings rejected the stream, forcing it around them.
But that was not possible,
thought Allyn.
Danel should be the only one with resistance.
And stranger yet, the two entities were both in the south … one near the Virginia border … and the other, only a few miles north of his present location.

“Only a few miles north?” Allyn mumbled to himself.

“Did it work?” Theo asked.

“No. I don’t think so,” Allyn said, defeated. “I must have missed something—forgotten an ingredient.” And yet, everything seemed to have worked exactly as he expected.

Rosemarie’s shout came moments before she ran into the tent excited and out of breath. She was holding the cordless phone up at him as she tried to catch her breath. The goat in the corner surprised her. She gave her dad a quizzical expression. He pointed to the phone and mouthed
Who?

“Malcolm Robbe is on the phone from New York,” Rosemarie said. “That MacDonnell guy believes the prince is in North Carolina. And he’s in a lot of danger!”

“Lord have mercy,” Allyn whispered.

CHAPTER 28

PINKIE SWEAR

1

Daniel returned from the store to find the house dark and quiet as a crypt. A note from Bev on the counter said she was doing another double shift at the bar. She left a twenty-dollar bill clipped to the note for food.

Daniel could see why Luanne turned out skinny and wild with so little parental guidance and little to eat. He wasn’t one to talk since his own alcoholic stepfather was barely in his life except to beat on him, but at least his mother had been home and tried to keep food on the table between dosing up on tranquilizers. Maybe Rita felt she owed her first husband, John Hauer, that much.

The cold weather was settling in, as was dusk, and opportunities to sketch outside would diminish. He decided to do one last sketch—the waning sun would make for great shadows in the forest—a great setting for werewolf stories. Walking into Luanne’s bedroom, Daniel froze when he saw his sketch pad on the bed open to the nude he’d done the previous night. This was the pad he hid so that Cody wouldn’t find out what was really going on in Luanne’s house. He smelled the remnants of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume.

A wave of dread shot through him.
She wouldn’t,
he thought.
Luanne can’t be that dumb.

Daniel thought long and hard about what to do next. He appreciated Bev and needed Colby’s advice, but staying put in that trailer even for one more day might be the most dangerous thing he’d ever done.

But just because the pad was out and opened to a naked drawing of Luanne doesn’t mean anything, he rationalized. As these thoughts crisscrossed his brain, he realized he’d subconsciously been collecting his items from around the house and packing them in his bag. While his conscious mind had been rationalizing about staying there, his subconscious clearly knew what he had to do.

The thought of heading out into the cold night, in the middle of nowhere, was none too appealing. Raleigh was nearby, several miles away, but there were no taxis or buses. The front door slammed.

He peeked out of the bedroom to see Luanne, alone, with several shopping bags. She was decked out in brand-new formfitting clothes, with open-toed leather pumps that showed off manicured toenails, and a new hairstyle. Gone was the wild bramble of wavy blond hair—she’d straightened and combed it and cut it down to just below shoulder length. Her fingernails were long and manicured as well, a bright lacquered red with tiny black Asian characters along the edge. She looked beautiful. From the window, he spied Eljay driving off in a VW Beetle with several store bags in her backseat.

“Danny!” Luanne shouted excitedly. “Come see what I bought!”

Luanne placed the bags on the living room couch. They were from fine stores—Nordstrom, Macy’s, and the like. There had to be hundreds of dollars worth of swag here. No way that this was Cody’s doing; that cracker was about to have a serious cash flow problem due to an aggressive competitor. And Luanne was broke. So was Eljay for that matter.

“Where’d you get all this?” he asked her.

“The names is right on the bag. Can’t you read?”

“How can you afford this?”

“Oooh—look at this sweater!” she said, extracting something pink and as fuzzy as a cat extricated from a clothes dryer.

She was elusive about the source of her newfound wealth. It was her business after all. He didn’t know why he was so mad at her for buying all that stuff—Daniel was just a guest and could push only so hard. Something about the shopping spree bugged him though. Luanne had only one asset, her looks, and his suspicions led him down a dark path of the only way he believed she could earn this much money in so short a time span. The thought disgusted him and made him angry as well. He didn’t know why he was angry … she didn’t belong to him.

“Hey, uh … I noticed that my drawing pad was on your bed,” he said, changing the subject of one source of aggravation to another.

She continued pulling out new clothes and folding them in a pile on the couch arm.

“Yeah. I wanted to show Eljay,” she said a little too bubbly. “That neked picture is the best one. Why’d you hide the pad under my bed?”

It was as though someone poured liquid nitrogen into the base of Daniel’s brain and down his spine. Was he frozen with fear or anger? Both emotions fought for dominance right now.

“Weren’t you right there when your boyfriend threatened to kill me because I drew you with clothes
on
?” The stress on the word “on” was to indicate how much more Cody would want to kill him when he found a picture with her clothes “off.” It did not have the desired effect on Luanne—educating her to a serious breach of trust and common sense of … well, biblical proportions.

“Don’t fret,” she said, swatting her hand down like giving a slap on the wrist. “I made her pinkie swear first that she’d keep it secret.”

“Oh! You pinkie swore. Well there you have it. I was worried for nothing.”

At moments, Luanne dropped her guard and revealed she was not as clueless as most people thought. Yes, she was capable of bad judgment and reckless behavior, but there were times he recognized in her the con of fostering a ditzy persona for the intentional sake of having others underestimate her. Luanne did not make love the way Daniel imagined stupid people would engage in sex. Not that he’d had a lot of experience, but he’d seen his share of dirty movies, and there was just something about her that didn’t add up.

Their intimacy let him see through her spell. This was one of those moments where he picked up a degree of complexity coming from her that belied the obvious—her eyes conveyed a full recognition of his sarcasm, a detailed understanding about his concern, even the seriousness of Cody discovering their affair, capped by a body language that said she did not care to worry about it.

“I didn’t tell her nothin’ else, Danny,” Luanne said in a
you think I’m stupid?
tone of voice.

“Cody
already
suspects something, Luanne. Now there’s a picture showing you were sitting naked five feet in front of me for, like, half an hour…” He broke off and brushed back his absent hair. Daniel usually forgot he had cut it all off to avoid recognition. He no longer looked or felt like himself anymore. He’d become someone else.