Gregoire had just made it to the edge of a lawn when the lights went out. Whatever it was, it had been amazingly beautiful. Wispy beams of colored light had been waving against the sky like sea grass, swaying in the breeze. Scores of beams had been gleaming, and then they had vanished, replaced by the light from the moon. Everything about this island was wrong, and Gregoire had hoped for some insight at the source of the light show. Instead, he stood in a tree line bordering a well-manicured grass lawn, a ruined structure on the far side of the grass, a pair of people just close enough to be recognizable as a man and a woman. The man was holding a sword, which Gregoire took to be both odd and evidence of potential danger, so he adjusted his weapon and made his way quietly along the edge of the jungle, keeping himself from being silhouetted and exposed.
“Stay right where you are and make no sudden movements,” Gregoire said from the shadows, the weapon raised to his shoulders, sighted center mass on the duo.
“Greg?”
“Dave?”
Gregoire flipped the rifle’s rail flashlight on and swept it over the pair, astounded to see Arris and a young black girl standing before him. Gregoire lowered the weapon and stepped to Arris, giving him a bear hug. Arris returned it less enthusiastically, slightly embarrassed by his friend’s display of affection. They separated and regarded each other for a moment.
“How did you get here?” Arris asked.
“In a boat, of course,” Gregoire said, looking around the expanse of lawn for some explanation for what had happened before he had arrived. “Where are the agents?”
Arris shook his head. “They didn’t make it.”
Gregoire nodded toward the collapsed, smoldering structure on the side of the low mountain on the opposite side of the lawn. “What the hell happened here?”
Arris shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well, I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me,” Arris said, hooking a thumb at Nereika. “Maybe she could explain it to you better.”
Gregoire turned to the girl. “She’s hurt!”
He bent down on one knee near the girl and lowered his weapon to the ground, pulling a small medical kit from a cargo pouch on his combat harness. He moved the girl’s hands from her stomach and looked up at her.
“Come, lay down, and let me take a look at your wound.”
Nereika looked to Arris for guidance, and he nodded to her that everything was okay. Gregoire pulled a small flashlight out of another pouch and handed it to Arris.
“Shine this here for me,” he said, tearing a large opening in Nereika’s robe, exposing the gunshot. The hole was barely oozing blood, the opposite of what should be happening. Indeed, she should not have been able to be standing with the ease she had been, now that Gregoire could see the extent of the damage. Not to mention the excruciating pain she should be feeling.
He tore open a QuickClot packet and pressed the dressing to the wound, although he wasn’t sure the girl needed the clotting-agent-impregnated bandage. “Who shot you?”
“He did,” she said, staring over at Arris.
“That’s true,” Arris said. “I’ll tell you when we get back home; I’m going to need a couple of drinks to process this -“ he looked around “- episode. It’s been a strange couple of days.”
Arris turned and began walking across the lawn toward the ruins of the mansion, playing the flashlight beam off the divots in the grass. Truly spectacular, whatever it had been that caused this damage, Arris thought. Beams of light. He turned half-way through the lawn and retrieved the black sword from the ground, pulling it up and examining the small gem the pommel. It was dark. He tapped it with the butt of the flashlight and nothing happened. He shrugged.
He slipped the sword under his belt and climbed up the rubble where the main entrance to the building had been and shined the flashlight beam down into the hole where the foyer had been. There was a perfectly carved semi-sphere in the ground, partly filled with remnants of the mansion. He played the beam through it until it refracted in the bottom, the crystal Onorien had used giving off as scattering of colors and glinting wildly. Arris stepped down to the bottom of the hole and picked up the crystal and then glanced at the gem in the handle of the sword. Nothing.
Arris held the crystal up before him at arm’s length and said, “Abracadabra.”
Nothing. Arris smiled at himself. Faith? He had none, especially not in his ability to make the crystal come to life as Onorien had. He slipped the crystal into his pocket and walked out of the hole back toward Gregoire and Nereika.
Gregoire hooked a thumb at the smoldering structure on the side of the mountain. “What was that?”
“A mansion,” Arris said, “a very large, very weird mansion. We’re going to need to get her to a hospital, and I’d like to get the hell off this island. Where’s your boat?”