Keepers & Killers (The Alchemy Series) (18 page)

"No, but I can find him pretty easily."

"Do it." I anticipated a fight, but he simply nodded and I went back to my chair, not wanting to be that close to him anymore, Cormac following me like some sort of bodyguard I neither needed or wanted.

Cormac stepped up to the table and leaned his hands on the surface. "On to the next problem. Does anyone know what the
senator actually is? He's got human records but we all know how easy it is to build a fake past." His eyes shot to me. "He's anything but human."

"You mean besides that your people made him?" Vitor asked.

"Yes, something helpful would be good. Especially since you seem to like our planet so much, I'm sure you don't want your new home trashed either."

I looked around the room. "How does no one have any idea? Rogo,
your people were working with him. You had the closest contact. You know nothing?"

"He only came around once or twice. Haven
't seen him since and I already asked around. And as Vitor just said, you guys made him and don't know. How the hell should we?"

"See? He does make a pretty good case sometimes, even for being an idiot," Dodd said softly to me.

"Whatever. He's still a dick," I whispered back.

"A dick with really good hearing," Rogo said from across the length of the table.

I didn't apologize. He was a dick. 

Cormac cleared his throat and I swear it was to disguise his own laughter. "We need to take him down."

"What about the hole?" Burrom asked.

"We make sure all portals are shut
down and we hope we don't get anymore."

"Can she fix it?" he asked and pointed to me.

"No, I can't. Not alone, anyway. It isn't a normal wormhole where you can just press it open and once you release the pressure, it closes. This is a tear."

"Another reason that we need to work together to take him down." Cormac stood up again and walked toward Sabrina. "What about the radiation it
's releasing?"

"It
's fine for everyone in this room as long as we don't linger near it too long."

"And what about regular humans?"

"Not so much. You'd have to cordon off a twenty mile area in every direction. Even further, eventually, if it keeps radiating at this rate."

"They
've got NASA all over the place. I'll make some calls to my connections to make sure it happens, if they haven't already figured that out."

We knew the place had been swarmed by government within the first few hours. Unlike the mountain collapse, they didn
't even try to put out a phony press release for this. They pretended it wasn't happening. I didn't blame them. It was hard to talk your way out of a gaping space hole and not have people think the world was ending.

"Rogo, anyone that has ever had any interaction with the
senator - I want sent over here for questioning. Vitor, Burrom, talk to all your elders that are on this side. I need any information they can give us."

The fighting was over as they all realized the dire situation and slowly let out of the room. I think most were feeling as deflated as I was, no closer to a solution than when we started. I leaned back and crossed my ankles on the conference table, not ready to move
, as my brain sought a solution that I knew I didn't have.

Alone in the room with only Cormac now
, while Dodd walked them out with Sabrina, I wanted at least some answers from someone. "Why did you make it look like we were together?"

He looked at me as if I was crazy and smiled. "I didn
't."

"Yes, you did."

"No, I didn't. I think you're reading into things."

"You are really saying you didn
't?" I repeated, starting to feel a bit foolish and a tinge embarrassed. Could I have been letting my own feeling taint the way I saw his actions?

"That
's exactly what I'm saying." He walked over and sat on the table near my ankles. Lifting them up he towed my chair closer to him until he was close enough to lean down over me and put a hand on each chair arm. "Did you want me to stake my claim on you?"

"That isn
't what I said."

"I think it
's what you want though."

"No
, it isn't."

He was still smiling as if he didn
't believe it, but there was something else in his eyes that I found unsettling. "This isn't the time for playing around, Cormac."

"There
's always time to play."

His phone vibrating on the table next to him saved me from making a complete fool of myself as I melted into a puddle
of lust.

"What
's wrong?" I asked, as I saw him read a message.

"I don
't know yet." He dialed in a number and I was a bit surprised when he did so on speaker. "Buzz, what's up?"

"Another one just happened."

"You mean what I think?" Cormac asked, clearly not wanting to put it into words on the phone.

"Yes. And it
's twice the size."

"Where?"

"About seventy miles north east of our location."

"But that would put it…"

"Yes. It's bad…real bad."

"We
're on our way." I looked at his face as he pushed end on his phone.

"Where we going?"

"New York City. Or what's left of it."

Chapter Thirteen

News had spread like crazy within minutes. Twitter and all the social media were alight with the fact that N
ew York City was now completely gone. A private jet flew us to a landing strip in New Jersey, where Buzz and Ben waited for us. It was seven hours later and the small, private airport was somewhere in between a state of great urgency and disorganized mayhem. People of means waited on the tarmac in their private planes, trying to get the hell out of Dodge. According to the ground crew, there wasn't a commercial flight to be had. Their phones were ringing off the hook with people trying to get a charter but there wasn't a plane left. Cormac had the crew lock ours down in a maintenance garage, out of sight, to make sure it would be there when we got back.

We took a yacht from a small seaside town in N
ew Jersey called Middletown. It was even crazier there. People walking quickly down the docks, loading up their belongings onto their boats. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Watching them hurry their children aboard, heading off to anywhere but there, a place so close to what was once New York City.

I wanted to stop them and tell them everything would be okay.

I couldn't. It might not be.

It didn
't take very long to sail close enough to see that New York City was truly gone. Gone. Just gone.

From what Buzz had said, it had happened in a matter of seconds. He
'd been close enough at the time to see it. It was there, and then it wasn't. Millions of people were just gone. Skyscrapers disappeared into nowhere. The entire city, and parts of the New Jersey coastline, across the river, were now torn from our universe, leaving a gaping hole where stars from another place and time hung. It looked too beautiful for something that was so deadly.

We bobbed in the ocean for a while, the four of us just staring. I don
't know why exactly we couldn't stop looking but we stayed there and stared for a while before we could speak. Shock, disbelief, grief, and maybe most of all…dread of what was to come; all those things ran through my brain. 

"What does this one feel like to you?" Cormac finally broke the silence to ask.

"I don't know," I replied and wiped away a tear that had finally managed to escape. I'd thought I'd done away with those completely. I guess if it was bad enough, there were still more to be had. "How does it feel to you?"

"Your senses are much better than mine when it comes to wormholes
, but to me it feels ragged and irregular, more so than the last one."

I reached out my senses to it
, like someone would take a deep breath trying to catch a scent on the air. "Yes. Ragged edges. Even stronger radiation."

"Do you think you could close it?"

I shook my head, annoyed he'd even asked. I hadn't been able to close the one in Nevada. Didn't he think I would have done, if I could? There wouldn't have been a discussion about when or how. I would've just done it. When I felt this one and applied any sort of pressure, it didn't budge.

"What about if we had
more Keepers trying at once?" he suggested.

"I have no idea." I closed my eyes, not wanting to look anymore. "I
'm sorry, I just have no idea."

"Trust me, I get it."

"The edges feel torn, not distorted. If we try to force it closed, I'm not sure what will happen. I couldn't do it by myself, anyway. I'd need help. We'd have to force it closed and the way it feels, I just don't know if it's going to be possible. We'd be stretching the very matter of our universe."

"This is worse than the last. If we don
't close it, I'm not sure what will happen." His words didn't give details but his tone spelled it out clearly.

"You mean…like everything?"

"We gotta try," Buzz said, as if he had just woken up.

Ben was still transfixed. There was no judgment
from me. This was my second space hole and I didn't think I'd be any less stunned or horrified if it had been my hundredth.

"How many Keepers are there?" I
'd only met fifteen, but I didn't know how many there were at the other locations.

"Not every Keeper c
an work a wormhole. There are forty-seven, excluding you and I, that can do it with varying degrees of strength and ability. There are about twenty-four more that can't but have other skills."

"I don
't think it's going to be enough. We need more. What about the people you lost to Tracker and Hammond?"

He didn
't answer.

"Cormac?"

"Twenty-two."

"We need them. It
's no worse than working with Rogo."

"Yes, it is. Rogo was never with me."

"If we can get them, we've got to use them."

"Fine, but keep them away from me." He turned as he said, "We
've got to get going. I'm afraid that if we don't get back soon, there won't be a plane to get back to." Cormac walked back and started up the boat engine.

I sat and watched the spot where NYC used to be fade into the distance as everyone fell silent again. It broke my heart. Watching a civilization falling apart will do that to you.

It was a good thing the airport wasn't far from the dock because the traffic had reached a notch below gridlock. The radio had nothing but people screaming the sky was falling. Even satellite radio had interrupted service to talk about the catastrophe. Some said it was aliens, some said it was the government, or the Chinese government, or Russians. The list went on and on trying to find a logical place to lay blame.

The president came on and told everyone to remain calm. That they were getting the situation under control. It was laughable. How did you get missing parts of your universe under control? Once we got close enough to the airport, we abandoned the car and walked the rest of the way. I was relieved to not
have to listen to the radio anymore.

It took six hours to get back from NJ in the small private jet. The first couple of hours I
'd been despondent. By hour three, the ugly reality of what was happening to our world clung to me like the death stench of the black plague finding its latest victim. By time we landed, I was beyond all reason. I was pure fury.

When
the door of the penthouse clicked shut behind Buzz, it was just Cormac and I left in the room. I'd found my bulls eye. If he hadn't been running portals, none of this would've happened. I'd be in med school, blissfully ignorant, and millions of people would still be alive. Earth wouldn't be on the verge of destruction.

I started pacing as he flipped through paperwork on the table. Even that bugged me. Who gave a shit about paperwork
? My world is about to fall apart and he's flipping through papers? "You know this is your fault? You and your goddamn wormholes. You had no right to bring aliens here. The senator wouldn't even have existed if it weren't for your people."

He dropped the papers onto the table and went still. "And you have no blame here?"

"I didn't start this! I don't run this."

"I took over from my ancestors…as did you."

"Don't compare us."

"Can
't I? What have you been doing for the last several weeks? If you found it so appalling, why did you join us?"