Chapter 19 #4
Hours later, when he’d been treated and sent home, Alistair listened to the men who had been on the yacht with him, had watched the videos of his battle with the monster fish.
He remembered to call the hospital and inquire about Chandler, swallowing his annoyance when he learned his head of security was going to be out of action for several days.
The fish had been hauled to the mansion and was currently in a bathtub full of ice.
“Are you going to have it mounted?” one man asked. “It would be a helluva thing to put over the fireplace.”
“But the head is damaged,” another man said.
“Mount it so that side is against the wall.”
“It’s got a big dimple on the other side, like something bit off a chunk.”
Alistair thought about the hatred in the fish’s eyes and couldn’t imagine wanting to see those eyes every time he walked into a room.
“I’m not going to mount it.” He waited until they were all looking at him. “I’m going to have a feast, and you’re all invited. Tomorrow it will be one year since my brother’s disappearance, and we’ll serve that fish as the main course in his honor.”
13
“Forrester.”
“Captain? This is Officer Laci Tower. I work with Captain Russell.”
Charles braced a forearm on his desk. A cop from King’s Hill wouldn’t be calling him unless there was a problem that involved Wyrd. And why wasn’t Grace Russell the person making the call? “What can I do for you, Officer Tower?”
“Captain Russell asked me to inform you that Yaron Kali, Detective Kali’s husband, died yesterday. A massive heart attack. He was in a stolen boat and almost within reach of Wyrd’s shore when he collapsed.”
“He tried to get back to Wyrd on the sly.”
“It looks that way. It was his second attempt since his initial disappearance in the spring.”
Charles rubbed his forehead. Experiencing the uncanny could become an addiction as compelling and dangerous as any other kind—or that brush with the strange could leave a person fearful of leaving their house in case the strange touched them again. “How old was he?”
“Thirty-five if you go by his birth date.”
“How old according to the coroner?”
A hesitation. “Late eighties.”
“You’d like me to find out what bargain Kali made with the Arcana, or what penalties were placed on him if he tried to reach Wyrd again?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll make inquiries and get back to you.”
“Thank you.”
Charles ended the call. He got up, got a glass of water, and informed his team.
“Wyrd?” Ian Kuhn asked.
“Sounds that way,” Charles replied.
“Is one of us going to have to go over there?” Tom Castelletti asked.
Charles shook his head. “I’ll make a phone call.”
An awkward silence.
He returned to his office and placed the call. “Beth? It’s Charles Forrester.”
“Wow, that was fast,” Beth said. “I just saw the e-mail from Colin asking about a summer job in the park.”
“Pardon me?”
“Oh. Ah.”
“It sounds like Colin and I have something to discuss when I get home.”
“Now that I’ve pulled my foot out of my mouth, what can I do for you, Captain?”
“Yaron Kali.”
“I know. I helped arrange for a couple of men from Destiny Bay to return the boat and Kali’s body to the Jackson marina. How is Detective Kali?”
“I’m guessing that, in some ways, she had prepared herself for her husband disappearing again for good.
Him going this way?” Easier in some ways to have a body and a funeral—and closure.
But there was still an unanswered question.
“What bargain did Kali make, or break, with the Arcana that aged a man in his midthirties to his late eighties? That’s what Detective Kali would like to know. ”
He waited. Then Beth said, “I’ll ask and call you back.”
Charles sat back. Cops who dealt with Wyrd tended to burn out—or became too tangled in the uncanny.
He’d dealt with Lucas Frost for years and watched his team change every few years while he’d stayed grounded enough to see some of the truths about the Arcana and still be able to cross the river. Still be able to sleep at night.
Wasn’t that his worry about Colin? That the boy would become entangled and not be satisfied with a world that wasn’t spiced by the strange? Except the world, all the world, was spiced by the strange. So maybe this exposure was better.
Maybe. He’d talk to Lucas Frost before he made a decision. Could he make the decision? The boy was almost seventeen now.
His phone rang, saving him from thinking about that discussion. “Forrester.”
“Captain,” Beth said. “If a person enters Wyrd without going through Destiny Park, the penalties depend on, for want of another description, what kind of disturbance they cause in the Force, if you…”
“I got the reference,” Charles said.
“Okay. The other two men we found had come ashore, blundered around in a static neighborhood, and were found on the main road that runs around the whole outside of the island. Their presence didn’t cause much of a ripple in those neighborhoods, so the penalty for them was five years deducted from their potential number of years to live. ”
“They forfeited five years of their lives for making a foolish decision.”
“Yes. Plus, they’ll probably spend several years in therapy to get past whatever they saw.
Yaron Kali, unfortunately, had a forceful enough personality that his presence, and his wandering from place to place within Wyrd, created disturbances that twitched other people’s lines of fate in those neighborhoods.
Not badly, but enough that the penalty for his blundering around Wyrd was fifteen years.
When he was being escorted to the dock, Lucas set the terms: Kali would forfeit twenty years of his life every time he set foot on Wyrd’s shore.
He didn’t actually set foot on the island, but he was close enough for the penalty to kick in, and it sounds like this was his second time? ”
“Yes. Why didn’t Lucas just ban him?”
“Kali had to make his own decision, make his own choice. Lucas gave him a chance. Banning him would have kept Kali away from Wyrd, but he wouldn’t have chosen to step away and live with his wife and do his work.
He could have spent his life looking for another convergence of the uncanny.
” A hesitation. “Captain, if Colin had gotten on a bus with Yaron Kali, it’s unlikely he would have reached Destiny Park.
You could have lost your son because of a man’s need to see more and more of the uncanny in a way that was breaking his sanity. And he still tried to go back. Twice.”
Charles waited, almost feeling her balancing loyalties.
“Maybe Lucas’s decision to give Yaron a choice wasn’t so much about Yaron’s fate as it was about Detective Kali’s,” Beth added quietly.
“I don’t think I should share that information.”
“No. You shouldn’t.”
“Thank you, Beth.” A pause. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine, Captain. I’m doing just fine. This place…It feels like home.”
Charles ended the call. He would get out for a bit. Take a walk down to the river. And he would think about choices and fate before he called Officer Tower to relay some of the information he’d learned about Yaron Kali.
14
Lucas scanned the area between the food stands and the communication center and rental cabins. He reached for his cell phone to call his security officer when he spotted Beth and Katherine Rose.
“Beth!” he called. “With me.”
Beth hesitated a moment, said something to Katherine Rose, then headed toward him.
“Problem?” he asked.
“What goes around comes around,” she replied.
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. Neither does Katherine Rose. But she’s disturbed by what she saw in the cards today.”
Lucas headed for the dock. “The Ferryman wants to see both of us.”
“Why does he want to see me?”
He had wondered that himself, so he said nothing.
They stood on the dock and watched the ferry’s crew secure the vessel and close up the cabin for the night. The crew nodded to Lucas and Beth in passing.
Were these Arcana anxious to get away from the water—and the Ferryman—for some reason, or had they been told to make themselves scarce while things were said?
The Ferryman stepped onto the dock and looked at the river before he turned and walked toward Lucas. The Sorcerer King’s domain ended at the shore where the Ferryman’s domain began. Meeting at the dock put them on equal footing.
Interesting that the Ferryman wanted equal footing for this meeting, but Lucas thought he understood why when the other Arcana looked at Beth.
“The police boats should keep an eye on the river for a few hours tonight,” the Ferryman said. “Instinct should be enough to bring what is close enough to shore to survive the transformation back to what was, but he might need help getting to shore.”
“Transformation?” Lucas asked.
“A coin for a ride across the river is a simple bargain,” the Ferryman replied. “But it is not a bargain I will allow to be broken.”
“This happened a year ago?”
The Ferryman nodded.
Beth didn’t look at the men. She frowned at the dock. “So there is a…”
“Fish.”
“Fish out there who is about to turn back into a man sometime this evening?”
“Yes.”
“So he might pop up to the surface anywhere in the river and flail around while he tries to remember what to do with his reacquired arms and legs?”
“Yes.”
“This man has been a fish for a year? What would have happened if another fish ate him?”
The Ferryman shrugged. “Meat is meat. As long as the coin that holds the transformation remains in the flesh, what is will remain what is until the payment for breaking the bargain is complete. If the flesh dies before the payment is complete and the coin is removed, what is will still change back to what was.”
Lucas looked at Beth. “You should make the calls to your police contacts to get the patrol boats out as soon as possible.”
“How much time before the transformation?” she asked.
“Soon,” the Ferryman replied.
Beth hurried back up the beach to the communications cabin.