The Lost Prince (8 page)

“What are you making?” he asked.

“Thought I’d whip up something ethnic,” she said. “Baked ziti.”

Colby’s dead stomach almost woke up enough to turn over at the thought of her ziti.

“Kid said he wanted to order some Chinese tonight,” Colby lied. “I’ll pay.”

“We ain’t got Chinese in these parts,” Beverly said. “Does this look like New York to you?”

“You got a barbecue place nearby?”

“Heck yeah. Doug Sauls’.”

“Then he’ll have a pulled pork sandwich.”

“What about you?”

“Not hungry, thanks.”

“Jeez Louise, Colby, you look like death warmed over. You need to eat, hon.”

“You know Bev, it’s bad enough that you don’t realize you need actual pasta and not noodles to make baked ziti, but when you play southern hen with that drawl of yours, it’s hard to believe you grew up with me in Brooklyn of all places.” Colby smiled and walked out the front of the trailer.

“Noodles was all they had left,” she shouted behind him. He could see her giving him the finger in the reflection on the window by the front door. There was still some Brooklyn left in the girl after all.

Luanne was on a beach chair on the front “porch” filing her nails, feet up on a wooden table that used to be a large cable spool. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. If her Daisy Dukes frayed any higher, there’d be no point in her wearing the pants at all—unless it was to warm her abdomen.

Colby looked around the trailer park—he was sure any one of these neighbors would rat him or Daniel out for a buck. He wondered how long it would take for Dorn’s tail to pick up the trail again. The man was a piss-poor spook, but Colby assumed they had magical means to track him, and probably a phone tap on his mobile as well. He didn’t turn on his cell phone in the trailer park. He needed to go back north to Baltimore and find his shadow again, the short stout man in shabby butler’s clothes with the bowler hat that reminded Colby of Jack the Ripper. That’s where he’d put the battery back in the phone and place his call.

“Hey,” Colby said to his niece.

Luanne popped her bubblegum and kept right on filing.

He noticed a tattoo by her ankle that read
Cody & Luanne 4EVAH
on a little banner flying over two red hearts. If she was willing to let an illiterate tattoo artist stick needles into her, what else might she be letting Cody do to her? He wondered if Bev knew—or even cared. Bev was a notorious flirt in her youth as well. Colby realized Luanne’s free spirit might be just the thing to help him out of a jam.

He lifted her feet off the spool and put them down gently. Then he took a seat on it in front of her.

“What are you doing?” she said. “This is
my
house.”

“And a lovely
house
it is, but I have a proposition for you.”

“A what?”

“An offer. Hear me out. Where do you want to be five years from now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Here?”

“Heck no,” she said with a dash of attitude.

Colby was tempted to say,
What, and leave all this behind?
but decided to stay on message.

“What do you make at the Walmart?” he asked. “Hundred a week?”

“About.” Luanne perked up. She figured out that this was about earning some money. Colby had her attention.

“Know that kid I’m with? Daniel?”

“Mama says he’s in some kinda witness protection. I thought the cops put people up in hotels for that.”

“They do, but this is a very special case. Not quite as official, but just as serious. Point is, I’m his protector. But I need to be in two places at the same time. I have to go north and follow up on some elements of the case. He’s okay here; no one’s going to find him. But I can’t take him, and I can’t have him leaving here on his own. He’s antsy, like all boys are.”

It took a moment for Luanne to process what her uncle had said.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“First thing … be nice. Second … don’t let him find out I put you up to making sure he sticks around. He needs to
want
to stay. Third … keep him away from your mom’s cooking. I’ll pay for meals out of my pocket.”

“Well, doesn’t he know he ought to stick around for his own good?” she said. “I mean, if people want to hurt him…”

“It’s complicated.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to do, Uncle Cole.”

Colby pulled out a roll of money—part of the operating budget Dorn had given him. Luanne was fixated on the money. She’d likely never seen so much come out of a man’s pocket before.

Colby began pulling out hundred dollar bills and laying them on Luanne’s thigh, starting at the frayed ends of her shorts and stopping at her knee. When one leg was covered with fifteen bills, Luanne scooped the money before a gust of wind stole it. He handed her another fifteen bills. She made a neat stack of the bills, folded it, and stuffed it into her ample bosom.

“That should get you to California or wherever you want to be five years from now that’s
not here
. Keep him in this trailer park by any means necessary short of hog-tying,” Colby said. “And if nothing else works, then hog-tie him.”

“But what if—”

“He’s thirteen,” Colby cut in. “A pretty sixteen-year-old says ‘boo’ to him, he’ll follow her like a puppy trailing snacks until he grew some sense. If Daniel’s still here when I get back, there’ll be another forty of these bills for you.”

Luanne was trying to calculate how much that would be. Colby waited for the ding in her head when she finished. Her face beamed.

“If he’s gone, however,” Colby continued, “I’m taking back what’s in your bra. Do you get me?”

Colby could almost hear the whirring and clicking in her young mind. The tumblers of a plan were falling into place. When she smiled, he knew that she had gotten it.

CHAPTER 5

CHILD OF A LESSER GOD

1

The reverend had spent the wee hours of the morning restless, staring into the space above his bed, reflecting upon the multitude of revelations that accompanied the return of his memories. His origins in Aandor, his temple—how would he coalesce the two belief systems, their cosmology that had dominated the two halves of his life? Would it even be possible to incorporate the past with the present? His two lives were diametrically opposed to one another, and he had never abandoned his first one willingly.

Wizards … there are sorcerers on this world now. This world!
In Aandor, the Wizards’ Council maintained order among the overly ambitious—education was available and threats were neutralized, but this world? It was defenseless and ill prepared against amoral power brokers with the ability to pervert nature at their whim—like the spell that had robbed Allyn of thirteen years of his true identity.

Quietly, Allyn left his bed before sunup, still unsure whether these new revelations were in truth a well-disguised bane. The truth in this case, contrary to setting him free, had burdened him with doubt and confusion. As so not to disturb Michelle, he dressed downstairs, pattered into the garage to get his wheelbarrow and a flashlight, and went into the woods behind his home. Each time the wheelbarrow was full, he deposited its contents behind the church, which was next door to his house. As the sun rose, he surveyed the patch of grass that had hosted many church barbecues and baptism celebrations now littered with the pickings of his treasure hunt. His next actions would be considered sacrilegious by most of his congregation. It could not be helped. He took solace in that his motivations were entirely Christian.

At about 8:00
A.M.
, the drapes of his kitchen window across the driveway rustled. He held his breath, hoping that Michelle or Rosemarie would not come out and ask him what he was building. His luck seemed to hold, and he continued to work until eight thirty, when Michelle’s brother pulled into the driveway in his black GMC Terrain. When Theo stepped out of the SUV, the vehicle jumped up six inches. He’d been a defensive linesman for Alabama’s Crimson Tide—a sweet-natured kid with massive shoulders and arms. Allyn chuckled, suddenly comprehending Theo’s college nickname—“The Mountain That Rides.” It supposedly came from a popular novel.

Despite the cool air, Allyn’s undershirt was moist. It stuck to his skin—a clammy adhesion made tolerable by the honest labor that produced it. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief to keep the sweat from his eyes, and resumed working as Michelle, Theo, and Rosemarie approached.

“Allyn, should you be exerting yourself so soon after your … episode?” Michelle asked.

“Episode” was what the girls decided to call the event from the previous night, since neither could agree on what it actually was. Michelle thought it was a stroke. Rosemarie insisted it was an epileptic seizure, because they had just studied how to identify one in her health studies class and it matched the symptoms she had looked up on WebMD. The janitor insisted it was bad pork. None of them would ever guess the right of it—not in a million years.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” asked Allyn’s daughter.

Allyn surveyed his work, a group of stones about two feet high, standing on end, arranged in concentric circles with an outer diameter of about fifteen feet. Outside the circle was a dirt bank with a concentric outer trough next to it. A heel stone stood at the end of a makeshift avenue that bridged the trough and bank a few feet away from the circle facing east. At the east edge of the trough and bank on the avenue was a slaughter stone. On the north and south ends of the dirt circle were barrows with station stones within. Within the ring he had constructed a circle of blue stone and within that a small U-shaped group of sandstone trilithons surrounding three sides of the center. At the exact center was an altar stone of high iron content, slightly bigger by comparison to the rest of the setup. Allyn didn’t know how to begin to explain it to his family.

Theo offered an opinion. “It looks like that place in England,” he said. “Stonehedge.”

“Henge,” said Allyn, grasping upon the observation. He would never question the value of an athletic scholarship again. “Yes, very good. It is a miniature henge,” Allyn confirmed.

“Like in
Spinal Tap,
” Theo added.

“Why are you building a henge?” asked Rosemarie.

“To draw energy from a nearby lay line,” Allyn said matter-of-factly. “It’s the pattern of the stones and their elemental content, you see. The henge will draw the flow.”

“The flow of what?” asked Michelle. An edge had inserted itself to her speech ever since the previous night, not just because of his episode, but because of the things he had said about gods and other universes. Allyn had explained it with the same conviction he preached the Bible on Sundays.

“This energy I’m drawing, it is the gods’—it is God’s life energy circulating through creation,” Allyn responded. “The power of my blessings comes from this.”

Michelle’s severe look warned Allyn he could not put off a long and complicated explanation for much longer. Michelle normally bore the aspect of a schoolmarm—she had good posture; her speech came near formal, but often contained a kind word or vital information; her skirts always fell below her knees, her blouse always buttoned to its apex; and though she was by no means a large woman, she was thick in that healthy way that promoted a good image for young women.

Nevertheless, Allyn returned to his work. He placed tea light candles on each stone of the sacred circle surrounding the center and a votive candle on the altar stone and lit them. On the diminutive altar sat their wooden salad bowl filled with distilled water and next to that their stainless-steel mixing bowl. In the water floated a long piece of quartz tied to a birch twig by a vine. Using a hunting knife, Allyn chipped pieces of roots, seeds, and plants into the metal bowl.

“What are those?” asked Rosemarie.

“Althaea root, angelica root, bloodroot, caraway seeds, and star anise. Remember that herb garden I tried to start a few years back? In frustration, I discarded what was left of it in the woods behind the house, and some of them took root. The star anise is from our cupboard.”

Allyn used the bottom end of a steel ladle as a makeshift pestle and ground the pieces up in the bowl. He emptied a bottle of lavender oil into the bowl.

“Is that my lavender oil?” Michelle asked. “Lord, Allyn, what are you doing?”

He cut his palm with a knife and let the blood drip into the bowl. His family cringed and cried out in unison.

“Everyone, please stand back outside the trench,” he asked. Using a candle, he lit the inside of the steel bowl full of roots, blood, and oil.

“Oh Jesus, Allyn!” his wife cried out. “You’ve lost your mind? Theo, do something.”

Theo hesitated at first. When he decided to act, Allyn motioned before him, a single wave as though wiping a windshield. Theo remained outside the circle.

“Theo, do something!” Michelle repeated.

“I can’t,” Theo said. “Feel like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and I can’t take the next step.”

Allyn pulled out a child’s drawing from his coat pocket—a crayon depiction of Jesus creating bread for the five thousand. It had been one of many on the display in the church’s vestibule. He read the line scrawled under the picture:
When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up? Twelve, they replied.
The children loved that story. They always loved the magic in the Bible. The bottom of the drawing was signed
Zach Taylor, age 6
. He threw the drawing into the bowl and watched it burn.

Allyn raised his arms over the flame and the water bowl.
“By the powers of Moon, Sun, Earth, Air, Fire, and Sea what has been lost, be known to me,”
he chanted. He repeated the line—drawing the power into himself—thinking of Zach, imagining the boy’s face, the sound of his voice, his laugh, and then he switched the chant to his religious order’s sacred language, summoning an elaborate cadre of elemental forces. The trees bristled loudly, whooshing as the wind whipped through them. His family huddled together, anchored by Theo, as the wind whipped all around them.