The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [52]
If the average Joe or Judy Human were to possess even a few of these fringe benefits of the gods, things would lead to nothing less than cataclysmic mayhem for the only species to ever walk the earth who could never quite seem to keep their feet on the ground.
There was one thing keeping Bari from her own potential brew of cataclysmic mayhem, from exploiting such powers as Man could...
...and this was her allegiance to her Everborn, upon which these abilities were built. Everything about her was dependent upon a solid guardianship of Andrew, for if any harm should come to him, the price for her would be banishment, banishment from the physical realm altogether, to forever walk the earth while merely viewing the physical realm but hopelessly unable to take part in it. Such is the realm of spirits, but she would not be spirit. She would no longer be a Watchmaid should Andrew die, die for reason.
She would become what came to be called a Magdalene, a term coined by the many Watchmaids who had suffered this fate over the ages and centuries past.
Andrew may not have been aware of Bari’s presence with him at The Crow Job that night, but she had nevertheless been with him, watching him, studying the wife of Maxwell Polito with amusement and intense interest and with increasing approval. She had been waiting for Andrew to make this sort of destined connection with another and it was seeming as if Melony would be the one. Of all women.
But there had been something else present at The Crow Job that night, something lurking about near the dark and deserted alleyway at the nightclub’s rear, something aware of Bari’s presence also, of the presences of all involved.
Something waiting and watching, pinpointing the movements and schemes of the man in shabby grey, savoring the lingering death smell of the black boy it had revived to keep tabs on the shabby grey man when he himself had been an infant; the boy whose second and final death had drawn the being to this alley so many years later.
This something was one of the Magdalene.
And Bari knew what it was waiting for.
14.
Max and Melony
Max had trampled through the front door of his Malibu estate late that Saturday morning, a briefcase in one hand and notebooks and piles of papers in the other. He trotted upstairs, clad in blue jeans and a grey Los Angeles Kings sweatshirt (which was all he cared to wear on his plane trip up) and went directly to his office.
Melony sat at her desk with a cup of coffee. His emergence startled her; she swiveled in her chair to face him as he sped past her to his own desk, dumped his armful of important this-and-thats before an array of keyboarded PC hardware.
“Any calls?” he asked her in a hurry.
“I missed you, too,” came her reply.
“Did Matt McGregor call?”
“How was your trip?”
“Did Matt call? Did anyone call?”
“Phil Hubert of the...” Melony sighed, gazed at her notes. “...the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Susan called from Fairway. Mark Deltmore wants a lunch date, soon, and Ruben Whitfield’s agent called about a booking at the Fall convention. The Cleggs down the street want to know if we can attend their dinner party on the night of the eighth....”
“We don’t have time. Any faxes?”
“They’re on your desk. Oh...Matt sent an acknowledgement that he received your two faxes....”
“Any mail? Packages? E-mail when I was gone?”
“Would you stop?” she said with a calm sort of irritability and she took another sip from her coffee.
Max found his mail, shuffled through an assortment of manila envelopes and subscribed periodicals and junk mail. He turned momentarily to her, absently. “Would I stop what?”
“Interrogating me.”
For Max, the curious disposition of his wife sparked a fleeting display of concern, stifled the next moment by the distracting urgency of a