The Gatekeeper's Sons Page 33

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Artemis’s Gifts

  Therese closed her eyes against the bright light, and held her breath as the invisible plastic wrapped itself around her. When she opened her eyes, they were standing in the early morning sun in an abandoned alley. The foul smell of urine and rotting food accosted her. She gagged.

  She followed Than, stepping over rubbish and weaving through garbage cans to a dusty window in the back of a metal building. Like Than, she peered inside, but it was difficult to see anything.

  “My sisters must be around here somewhere.” He closed his eyes and appeared to be in deep concentration. Then he opened them and said, “This way.”

  “So you can communicate with your sisters telepathically, like ESP?” Therese asked as she rushed beside him.

  “ESP?”

  “Extrasensory perception.”

  “Telepathy is not an ‘extra’ sense for a god. Just as I hear your prayers directed to me, they can hear mine and I theirs, though the sounds can get distorted.” Then he said, “Turn here.”

  A pack of skinny dogs, crouched around a half-eaten carcass, looked up at them and were about to bark when Than said, “Silence.” The dogs obeyed and went back to what they had been doing.

  Than led Therese around the side of the building from which they could see a road and a jeep approaching. Than flattened against the building, pulling Therese beside him. “They’re meeting us here.”

  “The people in the jeep?”

  “No.”

  Before he said more, Meg and Tizzie appeared before them. They too pressed their backs against the building, out of site of the jeep, which had stopped now. Therese could hear men talking and the jeep doors slamming shut. Then she heard laughter. The laughing stopped at the sound of another vehicle approaching.

  A man Therese could not see spoke in a harsh voice. The only word she recognized was, “McAdams.”

  Meg signaled the others to follow her to the back of the building, back to the heaps of rubbish and garbage cans. The dogs looked up as the group passed by and then the animals returned to their carcass.

  The gods and one human huddled behind the building where Tizzie said, “I’ve found a place in the building where Therese can hide while we use invisibility to get McAdams.”

  Meg snarled, “I can’t believe you brought her, Than. You know Ares is against us. You’ve endangered her life, our mission…”

  “Enough,” Than said. “This is her battle, too. I’ll stay beside her but will help if you need me.”

  Than held tightly to Therese’s hand and the bright light surrounded them. They reappeared behind a metal pallet stacked high with cardboard boxes. Through the boxes, Therese could see three men gathered in the middle of a large room full of machines and assembly lines that at the time were not running. Two of the men were dark-skinned and holding weapons, but the thin, bald, white man trembling before them must be McAdams.

  “May I remind you that you work for me!” McAdams shouted. “We stand to make a lot of money together, and you can’t do it without me. Damn it, you cowards, put away your weapons!”

  “What happened to Grahib?” one of the darker men demanded.

  “McAdams had him killed,” the other said. “He had his own informer killed, too. We can’t trust him.”

  “But I have your money. If you kill me, you won’t get paid,” McAdams said. “Those other men betrayed us. I only kill betrayers. You are good men who have served me well. I can still get you the women I promised, the red-head and her virgin niece. Trust me. Money and women. What could be better?”

  “Security,” one of the men replied.

  Than nodded, and whispered, “I know. We need him alive.”

  The one man said to the other, “Let’s just do it. Do it now!”

  They pointed their weapons at McAdams and pulled their triggers. A loud roar echoed throughout the building as Therese watched in terror. She was shocked to see McAdams standing unharmed, but then Tizzie appeared before him. She spit the bullets into her hand and gave the men an arrogant smile. Blood spilled from her eyes and snakes coiled and hissed in her hair. The two men turned on their heels to hide, one of which came to the very spot where Therese and Than were huddled.

  “Go now,” Than said urgently. “Go back to your room. Concentrate. Now!”

  Therese shut her eyes and focused on her bedroom, but then an image of her grandmother’s green carpeting in her old house in San Antonio entered her mind, and before Therese knew what was happening, she found herself standing in her grandmother’s old living room in San Antonio. Everything smelled new, and the furniture had all been removed.

  “Oh, hello,” a woman’s voice came across the room. “I’m sorry, but the open house ended over an hour ago.”

  “I’m, um, so sorry,” Therese said. “I’ll, um, just show myself out.”

  “Are you okay? Did you come with your parents?”

  “I’m fine. My parents are waiting for me outside.”

  She went through the front door and recognized her grandmother’s old street just visible in the dusk. The woman from her grandmother’s house stepped onto the front porch and watched as Therese hurried down the sidewalk. She walked a little way further and found a cluster of trees, but before she could god-travel, a scrawny old man approached her.

  “Hey, girlie, you got any spare change for a starvin’ man?”

  Therese turned and ran down the darkening street. She wasn’t sure where to turn. Tears welled in her eyes as she rounded a corner and saw a park up ahead which vaguely looked familiar. Two teenagers were snogging on a bench, but Therese crept behind some bushes and deeper into trees where she closed her eyes.

  She tried to focus on her bedroom. A strong image of Clifford waiting for her on her bed made it easier this time. She was so afraid and wanted Clifford! She hadn’t been much help on this journey. How stupid she had been to think she could help the Furies! The invisible plastic wrapped itself around her, she held her breath, still focusing on Clifford on her bed, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself standing on her bed looking down at her dog wagging his tail at her.

  She went downstairs and was surprised that Carol and Richard weren’t home yet. Officer Gomez still sat out on the back deck, so she felt fairly safe. After letting the officer know she was home, she put Clifford on a leash and took him outside in the front to do his business. Then she came inside and grabbed a cookie from the countertop, nearly eating it whole.

  Therese looked at all the bags and boxes lined up on the floor of her parents’ bedroom and wondered how they would transport them all to Greece. She was too tired to think long on it, though, and before she realized it, she had curled up on her parents’ bed beneath their covers, trying to smell their scents and trying to erase from her mind the scene that had transpired before her in Peshawar. Clifford sat in the corner of the room. He had never been allowed up on her parents’ bed, and even though he probably knew her parents were gone, he couldn’t bring himself to break the rule.

  She was nearly asleep when the phone rang. She answered the one on her parents’ bedside table. It was Gina Rizzo. Gina had never called before.

  “What’s up, Gina?” Her voice was deep with sleep.

  “I just wondered if you heard the news about your friend Vicki.”

  Therese sat up. “Uh-uh.”

  “Oh. Well her mother committed suicide yesterday. She slit her wrists with a razor blade and bled to death in the master bathroom. Vicki was home when it happened. Isn’t that terrible?”

  Gina’s voice sounded more excited than sad, and that eerie excitement drove Therese to anger.

  “I’ve gotta go,” Therese said. She hung up the phone and left her parents’ room and was sick in the kitchen sink.

  Through the window, she caught sight of the diseased elm tree illuminated by the moonlight. Then, in something like a blind rage, she ran down the stairs to the unfinished basement, another project her parents had planned to one
day complete. She went past the washer and dryer and stack of dirty laundry. She grabbed an axe and went through the basement to the garage, which opened to the side of the house. She squeezed by her father’s Chevy truck, pulled out a ladder, and dragged it uphill to the diseased elm tree.

  “What are you doing?” Officer Gomez asked.

  “Fixing that tree!” Then she went back for the axe. She practically dragged it out of the garage door and up the hill.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself. Why don’t you wait until someone can help you?”

  Ignoring the officer, she climbed up the ladder and stretched herself out as tall as she could and hammered the blade of the heavy axe against the dying branch. It barely made a scratch, but she brought that axe up and she struck the branch again, despite the police officer’s protests. She was going to save this dying tree. She was sick of watching the disease slowly suck the life from it, and she was going to put a stop to it once and for all. She struck the branch again and again, nearly toppling over once, till it hurt her arm to keep raising the axe, and then she did it several more times. She broke through the bark, but she could see that she had been right all along. She could not chop down the dying branch. She could not save the tree. She dropped the axe, climbed down from the ladder, collapsed on the dirt, and cried.

  And then it began to rain.

  The officer went to the overhang to get out of the rain and didn’t seem to know what to say.

  Clifford barked at him from the back door. She could see Clifford looking at her through the glass pane. He was probably worried she had lost her mind. He should be, she thought.

  She pulled herself up, leaving the axe to rust in the rain, the ladder to stand like an unfinished promise beside the elm she could not save. She looked over at the other elm a few yards away. Her mother had said that if they did not stop the disease from getting the one tree, it would eventually spread to its twin. It seemed wrong that two such magnificent living structures should be the victims of a life-sucking fungus to be left withering skeletons that would eventually break, crumble, and decompose and then disappear from sight altogether, as though they had never existed.

  “It’s okay, boy!” she hollered to her dog, who had started to whine, but before she left the tree, she caught sight of something shimmering in the adjacent cypress.

  She walked in the rain toward the shimmering tree, blinking her eyes several times and rubbing them. The forest was dark on this side of the house where the moonbeams couldn’t reach. And maybe the rain was blurring her vision. But, no. Even with her eyes rubbed dry, the tree shimmered. Therese backed away now, frightened.

  “Come inside!” Officer Gomez called out.

  “Do not be afraid,” the tree said. “I am Artemis, goddess of the wood, and I will not harm you.”

  Therese held very still, not sure if she should speak. She swallowed hard and waited.

  “I am pleased with your stewardship of the forest and the animals that abound in it. You have won my heart.”

  Therese couldn’t make out an image of the goddess, just the shimmering tree. “Thank you. I’m grateful.”

  “Like Aphrodite and Athena, I have gifts for you, but mine are far better than theirs. Aphrodite may have saved your dog from death, but I have given him immortality.”

  Therese sucked in air. Did she just say that her best friend Clifford would never die? “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” She glanced at Clifford still looking at her through the back door. His tongue hung happily from his mouth as the stubby tail wagged back and forth. He seemed to understand what had happened to him. He would be able to go with her now and live in the Underworld! “I don’t know what to say.” Tears pricked her eyes.

  “Therese!” Officer Gomez called again. “What are you doing out there? Come inside!”

  “Wait,” Artemis commanded. “There’s another. Whereas Aphrodite gave you a traveling robe, I now give to you a beautiful crown. It is made of the finest pearls and diamonds, and when placed upon your head, will make you invisible to mortal eyes. It is waiting for you on your bedroom bureau.”

  Therese put her hands to her cheeks. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Don’t forget your promise to me, Therese. The wildlife preserve. I am counting on your offering.”

  “Yes, m’am. I’m pleased to give it.”

  “Is there anything else you would ask of me?”

  “No, m’am it’s just…” Therese faltered.

  “What is it?”

  “My friend Vicki. She’s all I can think about right now. Her mother committed suicide yesterday. If I can ask something of you, I ask you to please watch over her and help her, if you would.”

  Before Therese had finished her sentence, the cypress no longer shimmered and the rain no longer fell, and Therese had the feeling the goddess was no longer there.

  The crunching sound of gravel made her aware of Carol and Richard pulling up the drive in Carol’s little red Toyota Corolla. Carol waved to her before driving into the garage beside Therese’s father’s pickup. Therese wondered whether it was her request of the goddess or the appearance of her aunt and uncle that had made her disappear.

  A few minutes later, Carol and Richard came through the back door, Clifford scrambling out ahead of them to growl at Officer Gomez, standing beneath the overhang of the house. Carol and Richard looked across the deck to where Therese stood beside the elm, the axe, and the ladder, still flabbergasted by Artemis’s visit and the news of her gifts.

  “What have you been doing?” Richard asked.

  “Um, I was trying to save this tree from the Dutch elm disease. Mom and Dad were going to chop off that dying branch and treat the roots, but…well, I couldn’t do it.”

  “You should have told me,” Richard said. “I’ll take care of that for you.”

  “Sweetheart, you’re soaked and your backside is covered in mud. And you could have hurt yourself.”

  They went inside, including Officer Gomez, who moved to the screened front porch to avoid the rain, which had started falling again. After a shower and change of clothes, Therese came back down to hear about her aunt’s day while Carol made spaghetti and Richard sat on the sofa with the news turned down low. Therese showed Carol the bags and boxes she had lined up in her parents’ room, and Carol was amazed by all she and Than had accomplished. Therese told her about taking the things to charities tomorrow—though she failed to mention they were located in Greece.

  Therese also mustered up the strength to tell Carol about Gina’s phone call and the terrible thing that had happened to Vicki. Tears streamed from Therese’s eyes when she admitted to her aunt that she had been blowing Vicki off, especially the night they were supposed to go to the movies.

  “I should call her, shouldn’t I?” Therese asked. “I should invite her to come over sometime soon, don’t you think?”

  Carol put an arm around Therese, while she stirred the pasta boiling in the pot.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Things haven’t been perfect around here, either.” Then she added, “But maybe it would be nice to invite her to do something.”

  Therese nodded. “Maybe I’ll go give her a call.”

  Upstairs in her room, before she made the call, Therese noticed the crown inconspicuously tucked on a blue silk scarf on one end of her dresser behind her CD player. She hadn’t noticed it before when she had come up to shower and change, and with the arrival of her aunt and the appearances she had at first tried to keep up, she had forgotten the goddess’s gift. Now she took the crown in her hands and studied it.

  A gold base with embedded diamonds was topped by a scalloped band of gold studded with smaller diamonds. Between the scallops hung teardrop pearls from a third, thinner golden band shaped in five large scallops along the front of the crown, and at the crest of each scallop was a single large diamond. The largest of them was set in the top center scallop. Therese had never seen anything like this jeweled crown in all her life.

&
nbsp; She watched herself in the mirror above her dresser as she placed the crown on her head. She gasped when her reflection disappeared. Frightened, she instantly removed the crown and sighed with relief when she could once again see herself gazing back from the glass.

  With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, she returned the crown to her head and watched her reflection vanish. She decided to test to see if she really were invisible to mortal eyes, so she went downstairs to the kitchen and waited to see if she would be noticed.

  The pasta had been drained and three plates of spaghetti sat cooling at the granite bar, but Carol and Richard sat together at the sofa speaking in muted tones. Therese crossed the kitchen so she could hear what they were saying.

  “So are you going to tell her tonight then?” Richard asked.

  “I think so. Do you think she’s ready?”

  “You know her better than I do. It’s your call.”

  “I might know her, but I have no idea what’s good for her. I wish I were better prepared. What a responsibility. And you’re still sure it’s the right thing to do?”

  “Positive. It would be best for all of us,” Richard said.

  Therese couldn’t figure out what they meant, but a part of her worried they were talking about Carol giving her up. She had suspected becoming Therese’s guardian would be too hard for her aunt, leaving her life in Texas, her independence. Maybe they planned to give Therese to an orphanage, or foster care, or a halfway house for abandoned youth. She knew she was being ridiculous, but, what if? Her heart sped up as she waited to learn more details, but they stopped talking to listen to the news, and then Carol got up to pour glasses of iced tea. It wouldn’t matter for long, anyway, she told herself. Therese intended to become a god. Carol wouldn’t need to worry anymore.

  Therese backed up to the stairwell, and as she tiptoed away, she heard Carol say, “I’ll wait and tell her tomorrow. She’s worried about her friend tonight.”

  That’s right. Vicki. Therese went upstairs and took off the crown and called Vicki, reminding herself that there were others besides herself to think of. She sat on her bed next to Clifford and took up her phone.

  A man with a tired sounding voice answered. “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Vicki please?”

  “Sure.”

  Vicki’s voice sounded tired, too. “Hello?”

  Tears came to Therese’s eyes as she told her how sorry she was to hear about her mom. “I know what it’s like to lose a parent,” she muttered. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “We should go somewhere and do something and get our minds off…things.”

  “We have a lot of family in town for the funeral and everything. Maybe next week.”

  Therese wondered if she would still be human then. “Okay, but let’s not wait too long.”

  As Therese hung up the phone, Carol called for her to come eat, so she went downstairs unable to stop herself from worrying about Vicki and how tired she and her father had sounded. She also wondered anxiously about what it could be that Carol and Richard had wanted to tell her.

  After supper, Therese scuttled off to her room where Clifford was waiting for her. She still couldn’t believe he was immortal. She hugged him and told him they would be together forever—if the Furies and Than could help her successfully catch McAdams. If only there had been a way to make her parents immortal, too. They could all be together—one big happy family.

  Therese lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. She was anxious for Than to return. “Than,” she whispered. “Than, come over.”

  When he didn’t appear, she grabbed her laptop from her desk, sat back on the bed, and turned the computer on. She googled wildlife preserves in Colorado, found the Perins Peak State Wildlife Area west of Durango, located the website, and made an electronic contribution using her debit card in the amount she earned this summer. She would deposit the cash to make up the difference in her account later.

  “Are you coming, Than?” she whispered again.

  The phone rang, so she picked it up to find Jen on the other line.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” Jen said. “I was rude.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. I was being selfish.”

  Jen’s voice had the same tired sound Vicki’s had had earlier. “Did you hear about Vicki?”

  “Yeah. I talked to her earlier.”

  Then, out of the blue it seemed, Jen said, “My dad came home today.”

  Therese sat there on her bed in shock.

  “You still there?”

  “I’m here. Oh my gosh. Is everything okay I mean, are you glad?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh no. Do you want to come over?”

  “Can’t tonight. Unless I run away. If I run away, can I hide out in your basement for a while?”

  “Jen, I’m coming over there.”

  “Don’t. Just wait. I’ll call again later, or tomorrow.” Jen hung up before Therese could say anything more.

  Therese hung up the phone and flapped her hands like she’d just washed them and there were no paper towels. “Oh my God.” Then, in her mind, she screamed for Than.

  His sudden appearance startled her. She leaned back in the bed with her hand on her mouth.

  “I can’t stay,” he said, panting in his white trousers and open white shirt. “We’re on a chase. The men from Peshawar. Can you hold on another hour or so?”

  She saw the frantic look in his eyes and nodded. He vanished.

  After saying goodnight to Carol and Richard, Therese went to her dresser and put on the crown, witnessing her own image disappear from the mirror. Then she slipped down the stairs and out the back door to Jen’s.