Abandon The Night

Brummell-Marcombe Manor

Wiltshire, England

April 1997

The nape of Quent’s neck prickled and he turned to see his father standing in the doorway, holding a riding crop in his left hand. He slapped it against his trousered thigh, and the sound settled in the room, ominous and full of promise.

“You thought it would be amusing,” Parris Fielding said, stepping over the threshold into Quent’s spacious bedroom.
Slap.
“Trying to show me up.”

Though his palms dampened, Quent remained still. Seventeen years old, he was taller than his father, broader, stronger…but Fielding held the crop.

The backs of his thighs still bore the welts from last time.

Quent knew better than to defend himself from—or even comprehend—whatever sin his father attributed to him today. There was nothing he could say. He curled his fingers into his palms and wondered if it would be this time. If Fielding would finally kill him.

Slap.

He’d come close three years ago. Close enough that Quent had been in the hospital for a week from a “ski accident.”

It had indeed been a ski pole that had inflicted the injuries. But Quent hadn’t been holding it.

Quent’s mother, Starla Tamrit-Brummell Fielding, had deigned to visit once, flying in from Venice where she was filming on location. And then back the same day.

Parris Fielding, however, had been there every day. For hours. Updating the media with bloodshot eyes, reluctantly allowing photo ops of his disheveled self arriving and leaving the hospital. Shielding his face as if to keep the press from seeing his grief and worry.

He’d even, famously, postponed an important Brummell Industries board meeting so that he could remain at his only son’s bedside.

Slap.

Quent lifted his chin, allowing the hatred he felt for the man who’d given him life to show in his eyes. Three more months and he’d be eighteen…and free.

Would he live that long?

Fielding stepped closer and, in spite of himself, Quent’s heart rate picked up.

“Maybe this time I’ll mark up your pretty face,” he said. His eyes danced with dark fury, and Quent saw the dull sheen on his high forehead. Other than that, he looked as if he’d just stepped out of the boardroom—every hair in place, his slacks creased and his shirt tucked in.

No, his father didn’t drink to excess. Didn’t use. His vice was the liberal employment of his hands and fists…and, as his son had grown taller and stronger, he’d supplemented them with riding crops, belts, and ski poles. And, once, a nine iron.

Someday, Quent feared, he’d resort to his hunting rifle. Or the pistol in his office. But then, Fielding’s amusement would be over much too quickly.

Slap.

Fielding strolled casually to the French doors that opened onto a vast balcony, flung wide to the fresh spring breeze. He closed them with a quiet click before turning back to his son. He wasn’t breathing hard, and every hair was still in place. Even in the midst of his most furious of attacks, he remained well pressed and neat.

Slap.

Quent swallowed and thought about running. His muscles bunched beneath his skin, his stomach tightened and began to churn. But in the end, he didn’t. He knew it would only be worse if he did.

And that, as vast as the Brummell-Fielding estate was, there would be no escape from his father.

Not until he was eighteen.

Three more bloody months.

The crop sliced through the air, whipping past his ear and onto Quent’s shoulder. He felt the sting through the T-shirt he wore, and before he could gather a breath, it came again as Fielding pivoted, this time, cutting across his back. And then again. And again.

He staggered, felt the burning in his back, the warm drip of blood. He raised his hand to ward off the next blow. But instead, Quent felt the sting down along his right arm and onto his belly and couldn’t hold back a groan of pain. Fielding’s face was drawn and dark, furious. His eyes, flat and cold and intense.

“Pledging money to
UNICEF
,” he spat.
Whip.
“Half a
million
pounds!”

Half a million pounds from Quent’s own trust fund…twice as much as his father had offered the same charity…and barely a drop in the bucket of the Brummell-Fielding trillions.

Quent swiped a bleeding hand over his face just as the crop slashed his thigh, and then his hip. He twisted and turned, trying to avoid the pummeling that only became worse as Fielding became more incensed.

Sweat and pain blinded him, fear and anger drove him, and he stumbled toward the bag of golf clubs in the corner. Quent knocked into it as he dodged another blow, this time the crop slicing along his left arm. Tumbling against the bag, he collapsed onto the rug in a dull clatter of metal clubs. He rolled away as Fielding came after him, faster and harder, and Quent’s fingers closed around a slender metal handle.

Cool and heavy in his grip.

He tightened his fingers, pulling it out, and tried to drag himself to his feet…but the crop came more quickly, and his father’s biting words, raving about being upstaged, followed.

The club, solid in his hands. Quent knew he could swing out, smash it into the monster who came at him…he could kill him.

He could stop him.

Sixty-three years later

City of Envy

Over the years, there were many times Quent regretted not taking that golf club to his father and putting an end to the fear and torture…but never had he felt the regret as strongly as he did now.

Quentin Brummell Fielding looked down at the object on the table in front of him: a clear crystal, perhaps the size of a large man’s thumb. Its clarity was so pure, the stone was tinged with pristine blue and faint gray…yet when it was held to the light, it allowed the beam to shine through unencumbered, untainted. Faintly ice blue.

Delicate tentacles trailed out from the sides and behind, stylized rays from a sun. Or, in this case, a full moon. Like slender fiber optic threads, the tentacles resembled veins erupting from a heartlike crystal—perhaps a millimeter or two thick where they sprouted from the stone, and becoming as slender as hair or fine thread as they branched out.

“So this is what does it. What gives them immortality?” Quent prodded the crystal with a small pair of forceps. His fingers shook. “
This
is why they destroyed the world.” He looked up at his friend Elliott, who, in a battle for his life, had hacked the crystal from of one of the immortal humans known as the Strangers.

Removing the crystal was the only way to kill them.

“Yeah,” said Elliott, who was also known to his friends as Dred. “Once the crystal is introduced surgically, embedded in the soft tissue, it sort of roots itself into the body.”

Quent poked the stone a little more sharply. A tip of one of the tentacles broke off and glinted like a minute shard of glass. If he’d used the golf club that day, sixty-some years ago, his father would be dead. And perhaps the world would still be the same, instead of the overgrown wasteland it had become.

But he had not. Quent had rolled under the bed, clutching the five wood—out of reach of the vicious attack, throbbing, broken, bleeding, half fainting from the pain—and remained innocent of murder yet another day.

And then, thirteen years later, Quent’s father had helped to destroy the world. All for a little crystal that allowed Fielding to live forever.

If Quent had known then what his restraint had cost mankind…

“Are you certain you want to try and read it?” Elliott asked. He’d been a physician, a trauma surgeon, back in Chicago before everything had changed…before Elliott and Quent and three other men had entered a cave in Sedona, Arizona. They’d been on an adventure, using a map that Quent had acquired that supposedly led to a lost Anasazi treasure.

Sedona was a place known for its mystical properties and concentration of energy, but none of them had any idea how mystical and powerful it would turn out to be.

They had emerged fifty years later to find the human race nearly extinct and twenty-first century civilization annihilated. Somehow, they’d resurfaced unaged and unscathed from the destruction that had occurred half a century before. And now, after seven months of trying to find a way to rebuild their lives, the five of them still had no explanation for how or why.

How had they been suspended in time for fifty years?

Why the hell them?

And what the hell was there for them in a world that offered nothing of their previous lives but grief and bad memories?

Quent looked at the crystal, trying to submerge the rise of hatred it invoked. And the deep, nauseating pull in his belly.

This particular stone didn’t belong to his father, but somewhere in this strange new environment that could only be described as post-apocalyptic, Parris Fielding had one of these crystals embedded in his body. It had kept him alive and preserved for the fifty years that had elapsed since the Change.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’ll try.”

Under Elliott’s watchful eye, Quent stripped off the gloves he’d taken to wearing when he was in unknown places. They protected him from the barrage of memories, images, and sights that assaulted him when he touched something unfamiliar. If he wasn’t protected, the psychometric ability to read inanimate objects could paralyze him, sucking him into whatever horrors or violence the item had experienced. Not long ago, Elliott had found Quent collapsed in an alley, barely conscious, lost in a vortex of memories that weren’t even his.

Since then, Quent had become much more careful about what and how he touched things…but with this eerie arachnidlike crystal in front of him, he wasn’t ashamed to admit he was grateful for Elliott’s steadying presence.

Just in case.

He glanced up at Elliott, met his calm blue eyes, and nodded…then looked back down and gently touched the center of the crystal with the pad of his left index finger.

Immediately, he felt a rush of…water. The sensation of being under water, submerged, surrounded by heavy, fluid weight pressing on him…The sea? It rippled and surged against and around him, powerful and relentless, dark and unforgiving. And cold. The crystal had been in the sea.

Quent steadied himself, pulled back from the tug that would pull him into unconsciousness, and focused half his mind on the room around him, the table beneath his other fingers, his friend watching, the chair beneath his arse…and went a little deeper into the crystal’s memories, touching the stone with a second finger.

White light stunned him, shocking and bold, cutting through the dark sea…and then darkness. Pulsing, pumping, throbbing darkness…he shifted in his seat, adjusting his feet on the floor, grounding himself…but opened his mind a bit further, tried to separate the faces that blurred in a whirlwind around him…

And then he felt a strong tug gripping his arm, and the room slammed back into his consciousness. The crystal was gone, his fingers curled empty into the table top, and Elliott leaned over him.

“You all right?”

Quent nodded, vaguely aware that he needed to catch his breath. “I’m all right. Why did you take it away?”

Elliott settled back in his seat, a face that was considered handsome by most, drawn and tight. “You were gone for more than thirty minutes. Your breathing and pulse increased, your color faded. It was time to come back.”

“Thirty minutes?” Quent tried to shake off the wave of unease. Lost for a half hour and it had felt like mere seconds. This fucking ability of his scared the rot out of him sometimes.

Most of the time.

“Was it worth it? Did you get anything important?”

Quent shrugged. “I’m not sure. I saw a lot of faces…some of them seemed bloody familiar—members of the cult, right…but they flew by so quickly. But one thing I’m damned certain of.” He glanced down at the crystal, then back up at Elliott. “It comes from the ocean. Deep in the ocean.”

Just then, a soft knock interrupted them. Elliott rose quickly and went to open the door, exposing three newcomers on the threshold: Wyatt, Theo, and Lou. Beyond them was a spare, windowless room lined with computers, monitors, printers, and an old license plate hanging on the wall.

A coppery-haired woman sat at one of the desks, five monitors arrayed in front of her, fingers typing madly, earbud cords dangling from beneath her hair. He knew from experience that anything short of another apocalypse wouldn’t interrupt Sage from her work.

In fact, if he didn’t know any better, Quent might think he was looking into a control center for
NASA
or even a computer call center…but outside of this hidden subterranean computer lab, working electronics and those who knew how to operate them were nonexistent.

“We didn’t wait,” Elliott said as the newcomers filed in. “Quent’s already done his thing.”

“How’d it go?” asked Wyatt. He was one of the five men who’d been in the Sedona cave with Elliott and Quent. He looked from the crystal to Quent, as if to assess any damage. His rugged face was flat and sober.