Ghostlands by Marc Scott Zicree

Author:Marc Scott Zicree [Zicree, Marc Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epic, Fantasy, General, Magic, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061050701
Publisher: Eos
Published: 2004-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Virtually the first thing Cal Griffin asked Agent Larry Shango and Mama Diamond when he got them alone was, “Whing lattes and espressos at a table decoupaged with images torn from a Time-Life history of the twentieth century—Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph McCarthy and Mahatma Gandhi. These heroes and villains of the century past, gone, all gone, and their world gone with them….

“Lord, son,” said Mama Diamond, surveying Cal’s ashen face. “You look like someone just walked on your grave.”

“Not on mine,” Cal murmured, as the past unfurled like a banner bolted onto the present, shifting fiendishly in its weight and measurements.

He had thought Ely Stern most likely dead and long rotting on a Manhattan pavement, his lungs and hopefully his sadistic heart, too, skewered by the same sword that rested now against Cal’s thigh.

If anyone had deserved to die, it was certainly Stern, who had left desolation and murder in his wake; who had attempted to spirit away Tina before the Source had at long last succeeded; who had done his level best to kill Colleen and Doc and Goldie—and Cal himself, into the bargain—before he had finally been sent spiraling down into the darkness between the spires of New York.

Yet why had Stern stolen Tina in the first place? Cal had long wondered about that. True, he had clearly thought she was transforming into the only other one of his kind, but that wasn’t sufficient explanation.

From what Cal had learned since, it seemed obvious that whatever lived at the Source hungered for the flares’ unearthly power, and so had gathered them in Its net.

But as for Stern, the reason seemed more personal….

Upon Cal’s saving her and on the journey southward to Boone’s Gap, Tina had chosen to speak little of it. So Cal could only speculate from what he’d briefly overheard Stern saying to her on that distant rooftop.

There had been a tone in his voice Cal had never heard before, in all his years working for this pitiless man, before Stern’s dragon self had erupted outward and revealed him for what he truly was.

His words to Tina had held tenderness…and longing…and loneliness.

Previously at the office, whenever Stern had spoken in passing of women, it had always been with derision and rage. But here was a new thing, something Cal had only had moments to wonder at before Stern had turned his killing gaze upon him, and Cal had been forced to save himself and destroy Stern.

Or at least, so he thought.

Another passing player in Cal’s life, another purveyor of scars, physical and mental, safely relegated to the past, gone but most assuredly not forgotten.

But Cal knew now that Stern was alive, not a hideous ghost of memory but an active presence just out of sight, no longer in Manhattan but on the move, a restless wandering spirit like themselves….

But no, Cal corrected, not like themselves, nothing like themselves. He had stolen Mama Diamond’s gems, had brought them here, much the same way—Shango now informed him—that the scientists at the Source Project had coveted and accumulated such stones….

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