One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  So as the sun settled over the western edge of the city, the buildings of downtown Los Angeles outlined as if traced in black chalk, Napoleon snuck up the stairs and peeked through a crack in the rooftop door as his grandmother lit incense and candles and rubbed the woman’s forehead with palms and oils.

  It was quiet, and the family was in a semi-circle around the woman, each seemingly in silent prayer, earnestly pleading for intercession as the woman wept in fear. His grandmother was softly singing a song as she stepped across the old, torn tar paper on the roof. The wood-framed pigeon cage was covered on all sides with chicken wire and was resting atop an old table.

  The pigeons trapped within were dumb animals, but evidently not too dumb. It was as if they knew what was coming as his grandmother moved to the cage and opened it. They fluttered and scampered about inside trying to escape his grandmother’s grasp, but eventually one of them was just a step too slow.

  Napoleon watched in horror as his grandmother mercilessly twisted the pigeon’s neck and a sharp cracked snapped through the air. The animal fell limp, and she carried it to her “potions” table, where she cut it with a knife and held the pigeon high so that its blood, thick and syrupy, drained into a small clay bowl.

  Once emptied, the bird was cast aside and she began to mix various herbs, which she ground into the blood before she adding two handfuls of dirt from a bag next to the wooden stool she was seated upon. Before long she had made a paste. She spread it across the woman’s back, which was covered with a large red rash with small areas of puss.

  The whole time Napoleon kept looking back at the dead bird lying on the rooftop, lifeless and limp. It would never fly again, because of two hands that he knew so differently. He wondered how hands that loved so deeply and fully could also kill so easily. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was a question he was going to spend much of his future career trying to answer.

  Napoleon decided the other birds wouldn’t suffer the same fate. They were no more special than the bird that had just died, but that wasn’t the point. They were special in that Napoleon saw what was being done to them and he thought it was wrong. He was sure in his ten-year-old heart that the pigeons that were still alive were his responsibility to save now.

  He snuck back down the stairs and waited until his grandmother escorted the family back out to the street, where they paid her, piled into their Chevy Van and rumbled off.

  He only had a few moments before his grandmother went back into the house and found him missing, so he ran back up the stairs, across the rooftop and to the cage, where a half-dozen set of eyes looked at him eagerly, as if they somehow knew his heart and his intent.

  He cast open the cage door and set them free.

  They scattered like teardrops across the face of the sky and off into the distance, Napoleon watching them with a longing in his heart that he didn’t understand and would never outgrow.

  Then the rooftop door swung open, and he turned to find his grandmother standing there, a look of shock on her face. “Napoleon! What have you done?”

  He looked at his grandmother and couldn’t help himself: he began to cry, less out of fear and more out of that longing that he was feeling in his heart.

  She took small steps towards him, her stern expression morphing to concern. Her heavy frame moved smoothly as she grabbed him by the arms then hugged him gently, the smell of Downy drifting into his nostrils when he pressed his face against her purple dress, his eyes cast down at her worn sandals and dark brown ankles.

  “I didn’t want them to die, Nana,” he said.

  She hushed him and rocked him gently, back and forth, the two of them like swaying statues under the dying light of the day, minutes passing until she finally spoke. “It’s okay, Papi. You’re too young to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What one pigeon can do, baby boy.”

  Napoleon stepped back, angry and confused, the feelings in him emerging and colliding. “But… you killed it!”

  His grandmother nodded and, taking a seat on her stool, held her hands out to him, her eyes wet. “But for a good reason, child.”

  “What? How?” Napoleon cried, refusing to budge, holding his position beyond not only her reach but also her logic.

  She sighed softly, her gray hair fluttering in the wind. With an encouraging smile on her face, she again motioned him towards her. “Ven aqui… Come over here… Let me explain.”

  When he stepped towards her it was with a resignation and a relief, an early lesson in life that you love who you love, even when you don’t understand them, and that there’s a surrender to it that can actually be comforting.

  He fell into her arms and she scooped him up to cradle him like a baby across her legs. She looked down at his face, her dark brown eyes squinting at him as she spoke. “In this case a tiny pigeon died so that a woman might have faith. It’s sad, I know, especially for the pigeon.”

  He blinked back his tears and looked at her intently, trying to understand.

  She sniffled and continued. “But if it takes one lowly pigeon to make someone believe in a miracle, do you think it matters to God? Listen to me. There is a veil, child, between here and the next world. We must never forget that.”

  “A veil?” Napoleon said, not knowing the word.

  His grandmother chuckled softy. “It’s like a curtain, baby.”

  “Oh.”

  “God is right there, just beyond it, as are all his angels. As for that pigeon? God created it, and he can recreate it a second later, somewhere in Argentina for all we know, or New York, and the pigeon lives on. Who’s to say that’s not so?”

  “Really?”

  “And who’s to say that when that woman’s skin is all healed, because it’s just shingles and it will be healed in time, who’s to say that the ‘miracle’ she thinks saved her life today will not someday give her the hope to believe with right and proper faith? All because of one little pigeon.”

  Napoleon nodded, still not fully understanding but beyond the need to, trusting now, trusting in those soft hands as she ran her fingers through his hair. “I hope the pigeon is in heaven, Nana.”

  In response to this a tear escaped her eye. “Oh, child. You have such a soft heart. I envy you. Please… don’t ever let this world make it hard.”

  Napoleon blinked.

  “Hey, man! Wake up!” Parker yelled, nudging at Napoleon’s shoulder.

  Napoleon shifted in the car seat, groggy, his grandmother’s face still fresh in his eyes as he looked around. “Okay already! I’m awake!” he barked.

  “Man. You were deep down,” Parker said. “I tried twice to snap you out of it. Look at this mess.”

  Napoleon sat up and cleared his throat. Looking out the window, he cursed. “Shit.”

  “Before you ask, we’re on the 46. The main cut across from the 5 to the 101. GPS said it was the quickest way, but I guess that was before this happened.”

  In front of them were four lanes of frozen traffic that couldn’t even be called “bumper-to-bumper” because it wasn’t moving at all.

  “It’s a damned parking lot,” Napoleon said.

  “Yep. Overturned big rig. Took out all four lanes—the two going west and the two going east.”

  “We can’t—”

  “Re-route?” Parker sighed. “Nope. We’re halfway down this road. We can double back to the damned 5 again, take it north to the 152 and cut across through Gilroy, but that puts us above Monterey when we finally get to the coast. By the time we drop back down? I doubt we’d have saved any time.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “No kidding.”

  But Napoleon was also thinking of something else.

  An overturned big rig.

  And the trucker in the John Deere cap back at the rest stop.

  And how there was no such thing as a coincidence.

  When his phone rang, he jumped. “Hello?” he answered.

  It was a woman’s voice. “Det
ective Villa? This is Tamara Fasano.”

  This was all getting better by the minute.

  CHAPTER 28

  What do you say to your first love after nearly twenty years, when they’ve changed and you’ve changed and the parting between you, so long ago, wasn’t a good one? Kyle was beginning to formulate the words when Victoria simply looked away and walked right past him.

  A cascade of emotions ripped through him, one after the other, on a repeating loop: he was stunned, relieved and hurt. Had she really just ignored him? Hadn’t she recognized him? How was that possible? He swore, when she’d looked at him, that he saw a split second of recognition cross her eyes. Was she just stunned? Shy? Unsure of what she’d seen?

  Maybe she was just too full of thoughts about dinner tonight while she’d glanced at the dude sitting by the counter, who she maybe figured looked a little bit like a slightly heavier version of her high school sweetheart before dismissing it as impossible. She lived in lovely Monterey, and for all she knew Kyle still lived in LA or had moved to Alaska by now.

  Still stunned, Kyle noticed that Sebastian was back on point, spinning off cappuccinos, lattes and caramel macchiatos like a maestro of caffeine. After wiping his face with a napkin, Kyle stood, threw his trash away and made his way outside for some fresh air, which was cool and stung his lungs.

  He watched as Victoria crossed the street, made a left for the boardwalk and was cut off from his line of sight. For a second he thought about going after her, but was then unsure; if she had seen and recognized him, she might notice him following her, which could completely freak her out. So, instead, he turned right and made his way up the hill to a small parking lot, where he made a left into a private alleyway that was littered with cardboard boxes and trash bins.

  Closing his eyes, he lowered his head and was actually about to pray for a better understanding of what to do next when he heard something near him shuffling against the wall. When he opened his eyes, there was a homeless man standing there, dressed in a heavy brown coat and dirty slacks, with pieces of his newspaper bed still stuck to one of his arms.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Kyle said in a startled voice.

  The man said nothing. Instead, approaching Kyle cautiously, his eyes changed from brown to the usual red orbs and he grinned, revealing tiny piranha-like teeth.

  His arms were long… too long for his body… and spread wide, as if they’d once had wings and now didn’t.

  Kyle realized then that he was looking at a fallen angel of some kind, and as his new instincts seemed to be multiplying each passing day, he wasn’t the least bit surprised when something told him to be very, very careful.

  Thought became reality when, in four short strides, Homeless Man covered the distance between the two of them, grabbed Kyle by the shirt and launched him into the air like a rag doll.

  Kyle flew backwards and expected to land on his back, but the ground didn’t reappear when he thought it would. He’d been launched higher and more forcefully than he’d thought, his momentum allowing him to roll over smoothly so he didn’t snap his spine. He was surprised when he sprang to his feet feeling little pain.

  He felt strong. As if the sleep under the pier had not only recharged him but evolved him somehow. Homeless Man cocked his head to one side, his red eyes squinting in surprise, before he crouched down and stuttered forwards.

  Kyle had the strange urge to cry for help, but he knew better. The Gray Man had warned him that he was on his own now.

  Calling on the power within him, Kyle felt it course from his heart up to his eyes and out to his hands. The blue was there, first soft and pale, then dark as the open sea.

  He put his hands together, awed as a blue orb began to form between them, but it was too late. The creature charged him with blinding speed in split-second images, as if it was traveling back and forth between this reality and another. Suddenly it was in his face, each of its spiked hands gripping Kyle’s wrists and pulling them apart.

  “No, poppet. Not today,” it said with grim seriousness and no trace of a smile. Again it picked him up and threw him, bouncing Kyle off the alley wall and into the side of a trash bin.

  This time Kyle was knocked almost senseless. Gasping for air, he looked for an escape, but a black sheet of energy was draped at both ends of the alley, cocooning them in.

  “Let’s see it,” Homeless Man said. “Let’s see the little man run.”

  But as it spoke, a strange war was playing itself out across Homeless Man’s face; it was changing, in pulsating waves, first to an old white woman with wrinkled cheeks and deep green eyes, and then to a Middle Eastern man with short dark hair and a square jaw.

  Standing up slowly, Kyle tried to figure out what to do next. He could still feel the power in him waiting to be called on again, but it was obvious that he couldn’t manifest it quick enough to fight this thing. He was like a young gunslinger, unpracticed and too slow on the draw.

  To buy time, he tried the Lord’s Prayer again. “Our Father…” But this only made things worse.

  The creature simply smiled at him and began to chatter its tiny teeth. “We know that trick, poppet. We used to say it al’a’time.”

  Kyle backed up to the wall opposite the trash bin and eyed the drainage pipe that ran up its length. Maybe he could get up and out of here somehow. But the thought was snuffed out like a flame in the rain when, incredibly, Homeless Man appeared in his peripheral vision crawling up the wall, his long arms having split in two so that he had four, now, to go with his two legs so that he was like a six-legged spider. The comparison was more accurate than Kyle could’ve imagined. Homeless Man suddenly began jumping back and forth, from one side of the alley to the other, in crisscross patterns, spreading a web made of the same dark material that was across both ends of the alley.

  “Jesus…” Kyle whispered.

  The creature shrieked with joy, this time with the face and voice of the old lady. “He ain’t here to help you now, child. He’s too busy trying to save the rest of the world.” And the woman cackled, her eyes wide with madness.

  Fear began to bloom in Kyle. He was in over his head this time, for real. Why in heaven was he being asked to fight a demon this strong, one that emanated evil so much that it actually caused waves of nausea in him? This thing made the boy on the bike or the woman on the bus seem like first graders in a barroom brawl.

  Think. Just think.

  Homeless Man finished its web and then dropped straight towards the ground, stopping and hovering six inches above the pavement.

  “It’s what I was promised, if I’d only give up my wings,” said the face of the old Arab man. “It’s much easier than flying, you know.” But then his face contorted in pain and he screamed. “No. No, you can’t hurt him! I won’t let you.”

  Homeless Man’s faces began to spin like images in a slot machine, blurring together as the many selves of the creature warred with each other.

  Its host, Kyle thought. The Arab man was an angel once, and the others… he let them in somehow. But now he’s trying to stop them. Why?

  Homeless Man was back. “Because he’s weak, that’s why. Weak! Oh, you and your kind, you and your silly love of the angels!” It giggled, making a mocking face. “So strong, your little guardians. Yet your own rotten little book tells you that they are beloooooow you, human. So if you are so weak… what makes you think they can help you?”

  The faces spun again until the old man resurfaced, his face teaming in desperation as he looked at Kyle intently. “Be ready, child.”

  Dumbfounded, it took Kyle a few seconds to realize that the old man was actually trying to help him. He stepped from the wall and called the blue to his hands again.

  The old man was impeding the creature somehow, internally. It moved forwards, but in a herky-jerky motion, running and stopping, shuffling, then running again, at moments streaking towards Kyle and at others barely lumbering his way.

  Looking into the creature’s burni
ng red eyes, Kyle felt himself going numb as some sort of paralysis overcame him.

  The face of the old woman came cackling back. “You’re gonna die now, sonny.” But by appearing she had broken the numbness in Kyle, and this forced her to incur the wrath of Homeless Man, who came back with glistening teeth. Momentarily, two separate heads were visible, each on an elongated neck. The Homeless Man screamed at the old woman in a foreign language of some kind. Her face warped into desperate terror before their heads coalesced again. Homeless Man looked victorious as he once again fixed his attention on Kyle, but it was short-lived as the old man’s face appeared again. “Now,” he screamed to Kyle. “Now!”

  Kyle launched the blue out of his fingers and it formed a solid, perfect orb between his hands. In awe, he wondered what to do with it now. Something told him to hold the orb in front of his chest and to launch it by pulling his left hand on one side of it while pushing with his right hand on the other.

  With incredible velocity the orb spun true to target, striking the creature in the stomach, the spinning faces releasing a chorus of guttural screams. The shockwave nearly knocked Kyle off his feet. His right foot gave way and he almost fell on his face, but instead he used the wall to right himself.

  Then, to Kyle’s amazement, the creature grew, muscles bulging as it snarled at Kyle and clawed at its stomach before resuming its march towards him.

  Calling again on the blue, Kyle was dismayed when all it did was light up in his hands and then sputter out. He’d used too much of it and it hadn’t had time to recharge. No. That was wrong. He hadn’t had time to recharge. Weariness was overtaking him again.

  He looked up to see the creature glaring at him with a hatred that spanned centuries and countless lives before him. Then, with reckless abandon, it pitched forwards at him, lowering its head and shoulder.

  “No!” Kyle screamed.

  The creature caught him square in the chest. Kyle partially deflected the blow, but it was like getting hit by a car. He skittered backwards along the wall, skin peeling off his arm when he swung it out for balance, the momentum spinning him around until he slammed hard against the brick.