I am, I’m choosing who I want to be, even while trying to discover why I’m here, why I was given this power.” He turned his palms up and stared at them, as he had so often throughout his life. “Power over life and death.”
“You’ve always been so sure there’s a reason,” she said softly.
“I know there is, Brigit.”
She nodded. “Well, I hate to admit this, bro, but you’re right. There is a reason. And I have recently discovered what it is.”
He stared at his beautiful twin, his opposite in almost every way. And yet they were the only two of their kind. He was certain she was kidding at first, because she had always teased and taunted him about his yearning for meaning, his quest for understanding. His innate sense of goodness and morality. But she didn’t laugh or even smile at him this time. And her face was stone serious.
“You think you know why we were born?”
“Yeah. And it’s not to run along the seashore revivifying dead starfish and tossing them back into the waves like you did when we were kids, or to cure little girls with cancer.” She licked her lips and shot him a quick look. “That’s what you did, just now, isn’t it? Cured her?”
He felt warm all over, and his smile was genuine. “Yeah. She’s gonna be just fine.”
Brigit’s lips curved upward, too, before she bit back the smile and put her trademark stern expression back in place. She was a hard-ass. Or at least she liked people to think she was. They’d played these roles all their lives, and he often wondered why she’d taken to hers as easily as he had taken to his.
His was easy. He was the good twin. The healer. The golden child.
Hers was a harder role to embrace. She was the bad twin. The destroyer, in a manner of speaking. And yet she’d never once complained about the label, even mostly seemed to try to live up to the tag—or rather, live down to it.
“Well?” he asked at length. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I think I have to show you.” She nodded at a magazine that was rolled up and tucked into the cup holder between them.
He sighed, about to argue with her, but when he met her eyes, he found her mind open, as well. Nothing hidden, no barriers, which was a very rare thing for his sister. He narrowed his eyes and felt only sincerity coming from her. No pretense, no hidden motives.
“The end of the world is coming, bro. It’s coming—and we’re the only ones who can prevent it. That’s why we were born. To save our entire race. Read the article while I drive. The page is folded over. I just hope we’re not already too late.”
“Too late?”
“I think it’s going to start tonight,” she told him.
He shook his head, still not following. “You think what’s going to start tonight?”
Brigit licked her scarlet-stained lips and sighed. “Armageddon. At least for our kind, and maybe for theirs, too.”
“We’re one-quarter human, Brigit. Their kind is also our kind.”
“Fuck their kind.” Her eyes flashed.
“Either way,” she went on. This might be it for everyone. Unless we do something about it.” She looked at her watch. “In the next forty-five minutes, as a matter of fact.”
“And where, exactly, is Armageddon going to break out in forty-five minutes?”
“Manhattan,” she said. “At a taping of the Will Waters Show.” She looked his way again and caught him staring at her as if she’d been speaking in tongues. “Will you just read the damned article? And buckle up. We’ve got to move.”
Frowning, he buckled, then opened the copy of J.A.N.E.S. Magazine to an article about a recently translated Sumerian clay tablet, written by someone by the name of Professor Lucy Lanfair. He found himself stuck on the tiny head shot of the professor herself, almost unable to tear his eyes away to read the piece that had his sister so wound up. It seemed as if the professor’s brown eyes were staring straight off the page and directly into his soul.
Brigit pressed harder on the accelerator, and the car’s powerful engine roared like a vampire about to feed.
2
Lester Folsom wasn’t enjoying life anymore, and he was more than ready to leave it behind. But he wasn’t willing to take his secrets to the grave with him. Those secrets were worth money. A fortune. And hell, he’d risked his life often enough while learning them that he figured he’d earned the right to spill his guts and reap the benefits before he checked out for good. So he’d spent the past year doing exactly that.
He was old and tired, and he was damned achy. And it had happened all at once, too. None of this gradual decline one tended to expect from old age. Not with him. One week he was feeling normal, and the next, he noticed that it hurt to lift his arms up over his head. The balls and sockets in his shoulders felt as if they’d run out of lubrication, stiff and tight. And he felt something similar in his knees and wrists and even his ankles now and then. It had happened right about the same time his eyesight had gone to hell. And it had all been downhill from there. His hair had thinned, and what remained had gone silver. His back had grown progressively more stooped, his skin more papery, with every passing year.
The beginning of his end, as nearly as he could pinpoint it, had been fifteen years ago, right after he’d retired from government work. His pension was a good one. But not as good as the advance River House Publishing had given him for his tell-all book. That money had allowed him spend the past twelve months on a private island in the Caribbean, basking and writing. Reliving it all, and yes, occasionally jumping out of his skin at bumps in the night. But they’d all been false alarms.
They wouldn’t be, after tonight. If his former employer didn’t get him, the subjects of his life’s work would. Either way, he was history. And that was fine.
He’d had that year in the tropical sun. Sandy beaches and warm saltwater made bifocals and arthritis a whole lot more bearable. And now the year was over. The book would hit the stands one month from today. He figured he’d be dead shortly thereafter. But he was ready. His affairs were all in order.
“Five minutes, Mr. Folsom,” a woman’s voice said.
He glanced up at the redheaded producer who’d poked her head through the door into the greenroom. It wasn’t green at all. Go figure. “I’ll be ready,” he replied.
And then she opened the door a bit farther and allowed another woman to enter. “You’ll go on right after Mr. Folsom,” the redhead told her.
“Thanks, Kelly.”
Kelly. That was the young redhead’s name. You’d think he could have remembered that from twenty minutes ago, when she’d first introduced herself. Didn’t much matter, he supposed. She was gone now.
The newcomer—he immediately labeled her an introverted intellectual—nodded hello, then looked around the room, just the way he had, taking in the table with its offerings of coffee, tea, cream and sugar, and its spartan selection of fruit and pastries. There
