The Lost Prince Read online

  The boy had a price on his head of which he knew nothing about. A distant cousin who was a powerful sorcerer had traversed universes to find him—a prince of a great kingdom—and end him. Colby was collateral damage in that mission. Lord Dorn had taken his heart, literally, and was keeping it hostage in a velvet bag. Colby existed in a sort of static state. He was an undead thing of some kind, unable to experience many basic pleasures all people take for granted. The price of his heart’s return was Daniel.

  The first few days of the transition were the worst. His body voided all its gas and solid waste. He felt oily and smelled awful. But as the days passed, he achieved some sort of equilibrium. Colby could not think of it as an improvement. He did not eat, did not drink—he was inert matter, existing like furniture at room temperature. He worried that the longer he remained in this state, the harder it would be to return him to the living … if Dorn intended to at all. That was the crux of this whole situation. The boy was his. All it would take is one phone call and Dorn’s men would be down in North Carolina ending the whole matter. But Colby didn’t trust Dorn.

  Lord Dorn was an elitist sociopath who used everyone to his own ends. Once someone stopped being useful, he couldn’t care less about them. The most Colby saw getting out of this current situation was the money Dorn promised, and his heart handed back to him in the thumping velvet bag. That was unacceptable. Colby wanted to live again … more than he ever did before.

  “You’re looking better,” Daniel said from under the tree. The kid was a true diplomat. What he really meant to say was: Colby, you don’t smell like a reeking piss-ridden bum anymore. Colby didn’t look too much better. He’d changed into fresh clothes, but his skin was still sallow and the dark circles around his eyes had become permanent fixtures.

  “Thanks, kid. You’re looking better yourself,” Colby said, referring to Daniel’s bruises from his conflicts back in Maryland. “Whatever bug got me before is working its way out. I just needed a shower and a hot meal.”

  “You call what Beverly serves a hot meal? I swear, it tasted like vanilla Pop-Tarts smothered in Ragu.”

  Colby laughed. His sister was a terrible cook. It was probably how his niece stayed so thin when everyone else in this county was packing on pounds.

  “How long are we staying here?” Daniel asked.

  “A while. No one’s going to find you in this bum-fuck trailer park off a sleepy country road. Right now you’re a hot ticket in urban areas. Don’t overestimate your transformation,” he said, pointing to Daniel’s new haircut. “But give it a week or two and there’ll be dozens of new rapes and murders to take up law enforcement’s time. Time’s our friend—the more the cops dig into your family life, the more sympathetic they’ll be.”

  “I’m bored out of my mind. I already filled one sketch pad. I wish I had a book. Is there a library nearby?”

  Colby arched an eyebrow that told Daniel he should know better than to go waltzing into a municipal building with closed circuit security while on the lam.

  “We can ask Luanne,” Daniel suggested hopefully.

  “I don’t think my niece has ever seen the inside of a public library,” Colby said. “It’s not her scene. They’d probably launch a federal investigation to find out why she walked into one.”

  “Jeez, Colby, she’s in high school. There’s not one book in her room. Doesn’t she have English assignments?”

  “Hang tight, kiddo. I’ll see what I can scrounge up. Just draw the pretty pictures for now. Won’t stay this warm for long.”

  “It’s always warm in Central America,” Daniel said.

  That was the kid’s plan. Some Central American country with no extradition and no questions asked. Start life over. It actually wasn’t a bad plan. Colby himself intended to move to Costa Rica or Chile when Lord Dorn first offered him millions to find the kid. Colby was in trouble with the law himself—under indictment for extortion, embezzlement, tax evasion, and a few other charges. It was tough finding credible reasons to keep the kid from taking off. They’d only just met. If the kid had more street smarts than book smarts, he’d be more suspicious of Colby’s altruism.

  Colby headed back to their temporary home. Beverly had saved enough to move into a double-wide, which for her and Luanne was definitely a step up, though to hear Luanne tell it, you’d think they were rich or something. Their trailer was on the edge of the lot, with a stretch of grass behind them that ended with trees and the lake. On the other side of them, families of four and five were crammed into single-trailer homes bunched up next to one another like drawers in a mausoleum. It wasn’t Luanne’s fault that she didn’t know any better … the girl had never been to a city bigger than Raleigh, and even that barely met the qualifications of a city. In this trailer park, she was a princess and she had it good.

  From the rear deck, Colby could still see Daniel under the tree. If he hovered or stayed close too often, street smarts or not, Daniel might get suspicious. Right now, the kid thought that staying was his idea. He wished he could chain Daniel down. They were partners on the lam. But Colby needed to leave North Carolina. He had to find the kid’s people without tipping off his current “employer,” and see if they had the same abilities as Dorn. There was no guarantee they were any better than Dorn’s lot, but it was a chance he had to take. The devil he knew was not to be trusted.

  On a bench by the glass sliding doors rested Daniel’s other sketch pad. Colby thumbed through it. He didn’t know a Picasso from a Dalí, but he did know the kid had talent. He sketched everything in the trailer: appliances, table settings, and Colby’s sister in a smock. And then there was Luanne. There were three pictures of his niece in the pad, and they were clearly ones that the boy had worked on the longest. One full-body pose of the girl reclining while watching TV was so detailed as to be almost photographic, the way the television light highlighted the ringlets in her blond hair. Colby could even see the rivets in her Daisy Duke shorts. Careful attention had been given to the lines of her long legs and the way her breasts fell across her chest in the reclined position. Something clicked in Colby’s brain. A pretty girl and a thirteen-year-old boy with a fixation, he thought. Who needs chains?

  He slid open the door and entered by way of the kitchen. It was a relatively large open space with the living room adjoined on the far end in the second trailer. The living room had faux wood–paneled walls, a large beige couch in front of a high-def TV, and a big La-Z-Boy recliner against the far wall by the window. A green shag carpet covered everything except the linoleum on other side of the breakfast counter where the sink, fridge, and stove were. Beverly was getting ready to make supper. She wore a new blue Adidas tracksuit with yellow arm stripes. She’d gained a lot of weight since he last saw her fifteen years earlier, and her hair, which she wore very short, had gone entirely white. Colby paid her two hundred dollars a day to put him and the kid up, and Beverly, who never made more than seventy dollars a day after taxes, got it in her head that it included board. For the kid’s sake, Colby was inclined to offer her another fifty not to cook. The counter had egg noodles, Hunt’s ketchup, garlic powder, Polly-O string cheese, and Kraft shredded Parmesan cheese.

  “What are you making?” he asked.

  “Thought I’d whip up something ethnic,” she said. “Baked ziti.”

  Colby’s dead stomach almost woke up enough to turn over at the thought of her ziti.

  “Kid said he wanted to order some Chinese tonight,” Colby lied. “I’ll pay.”

  “We ain’t got Chinese in these parts,” Beverly said. “Does this look like New York to you?”

  “You got a barbecue place nearby?”

  “Heck yeah. Doug Sauls’.”

  “Then he’ll have a pulled pork sandwich.”

  “What about you?”

  “Not hungry, thanks.”

  “Jeez Louise, Colby, you look like death warmed over. You need to eat, hon.”

  “You know Bev, it’s bad enough that you don’t realize you need
actual pasta and not noodles to make baked ziti, but when you play southern hen with that drawl of yours, it’s hard to believe you grew up with me in Brooklyn of all places.” Colby smiled and walked out the front of the trailer.

  “Noodles was all they had left,” she shouted behind him. He could see her giving him the finger in the reflection on the window by the front door. There was still some Brooklyn left in the girl after all.

  Luanne was on a beach chair on the front “porch” filing her nails, feet up on a wooden table that used to be a large cable spool. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. If her Daisy Dukes frayed any higher, there’d be no point in her wearing the pants at all—unless it was to warm her abdomen.

  Colby looked around the trailer park—he was sure any one of these neighbors would rat him or Daniel out for a buck. He wondered how long it would take for Dorn’s tail to pick up the trail again. The man was a piss-poor spook, but Colby assumed they had magical means to track him, and probably a phone tap on his mobile as well. He didn’t turn on his cell phone in the trailer park. He needed to go back north to Baltimore and find his shadow again, the short stout man in shabby butler’s clothes with the bowler hat that reminded Colby of Jack the Ripper. That’s where he’d put the battery back in the phone and place his call.

  “Hey,” Colby said to his niece.

  Luanne popped her bubblegum and kept right on filing.

  He noticed a tattoo by her ankle that read Cody & Luanne 4EVAH on a little banner flying over two red hearts. If she was willing to let an illiterate tattoo artist stick needles into her, what else might she be letting Cody do to her? He wondered if Bev knew—or even cared. Bev was a notorious flirt in her youth as well. Colby realized Luanne’s free spirit might be just the thing to help him out of a jam.

  He lifted her feet off the spool and put them down gently. Then he took a seat on it in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “This is my house.”

  “And a lovely house it is, but I have a proposition for you.”

  “A what?”

  “An offer. Hear me out. Where do you want to be five years from now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Here?”

  “Heck no,” she said with a dash of attitude.

  Colby was tempted to say, What, and leave all this behind? but decided to stay on message.

  “What do you make at the Walmart?” he asked. “Hundred a week?”

  “About.” Luanne perked up. She figured out that this was about earning some money. Colby had her attention.

  “Know that kid I’m with? Daniel?”

  “Mama says he’s in some kinda witness protection. I thought the cops put people up in hotels for that.”

  “They do, but this is a very special case. Not quite as official, but just as serious. Point is, I’m his protector. But I need to be in two places at the same time. I have to go north and follow up on some elements of the case. He’s okay here; no one’s going to find him. But I can’t take him, and I can’t have him leaving here on his own. He’s antsy, like all boys are.”

  It took a moment for Luanne to process what her uncle had said.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “First thing … be nice. Second … don’t let him find out I put you up to making sure he sticks around. He needs to want to stay. Third … keep him away from your mom’s cooking. I’ll pay for meals out of my pocket.”

  “Well, doesn’t he know he ought to stick around for his own good?” she said. “I mean, if people want to hurt him…”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do, Uncle Cole.”

  Colby pulled out a roll of money—part of the operating budget Dorn had given him. Luanne was fixated on the money. She’d likely never seen so much come out of a man’s pocket before.

  Colby began pulling out hundred dollar bills and laying them on Luanne’s thigh, starting at the frayed ends of her shorts and stopping at her knee. When one leg was covered with fifteen bills, Luanne scooped the money before a gust of wind stole it. He handed her another fifteen bills. She made a neat stack of the bills, folded it, and stuffed it into her ample bosom.

  “That should get you to California or wherever you want to be five years from now that’s not here. Keep him in this trailer park by any means necessary short of hog-tying,” Colby said. “And if nothing else works, then hog-tie him.”

  “But what if—”

  “He’s thirteen,” Colby cut in. “A pretty sixteen-year-old says ‘boo’ to him, he’ll follow her like a puppy trailing snacks until he grew some sense. If Daniel’s still here when I get back, there’ll be another forty of these bills for you.”

  Luanne was trying to calculate how much that would be. Colby waited for the ding in her head when she finished. Her face beamed.

  “If he’s gone, however,” Colby continued, “I’m taking back what’s in your bra. Do you get me?”

  Colby could almost hear the whirring and clicking in her young mind. The tumblers of a plan were falling into place. When she smiled, he knew that she had gotten it.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHILD OF A LESSER GOD

  1

  The reverend had spent the wee hours of the morning restless, staring into the space above his bed, reflecting upon the multitude of revelations that accompanied the return of his memories. His origins in Aandor, his temple—how would he coalesce the two belief systems, their cosmology that had dominated the two halves of his life? Would it even be possible to incorporate the past with the present? His two lives were diametrically opposed to one another, and he had never abandoned his first one willingly.

  Wizards … there are sorcerers on this world now. This world! In Aandor, the Wizards’ Council maintained order among the overly ambitious—education was available and threats were neutralized, but this world? It was defenseless and ill prepared against amoral power brokers with the ability to pervert nature at their whim—like the spell that had robbed Allyn of thirteen years of his true identity.

  Quietly, Allyn left his bed before sunup, still unsure whether these new revelations were in truth a well-disguised bane. The truth in this case, contrary to setting him free, had burdened him with doubt and confusion. As so not to disturb Michelle, he dressed downstairs, pattered into the garage to get his wheelbarrow and a flashlight, and went into the woods behind his home. Each time the wheelbarrow was full, he deposited its contents behind the church, which was next door to his house. As the sun rose, he surveyed the patch of grass that had hosted many church barbecues and baptism celebrations now littered with the pickings of his treasure hunt. His next actions would be considered sacrilegious by most of his congregation. It could not be helped. He took solace in that his motivations were entirely Christian.

  At about 8:00 A.M., the drapes of his kitchen window across the driveway rustled. He held his breath, hoping that Michelle or Rosemarie would not come out and ask him what he was building. His luck seemed to hold, and he continued to work until eight thirty, when Michelle’s brother pulled into the driveway in his black GMC Terrain. When Theo stepped out of the SUV, the vehicle jumped up six inches. He’d been a defensive linesman for Alabama’s Crimson Tide—a sweet-natured kid with massive shoulders and arms. Allyn chuckled, suddenly comprehending Theo’s college nickname—“The Mountain That Rides.” It supposedly came from a popular novel.

  Despite the cool air, Allyn’s undershirt was moist. It stuck to his skin—a clammy adhesion made tolerable by the honest labor that produced it. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief to keep the sweat from his eyes, and resumed working as Michelle, Theo, and Rosemarie approached.

  “Allyn, should you be exerting yourself so soon after your … episode?” Michelle asked.

  “Episode” was what the girls decided to call the event from the previous night, since neither could agree on what it actually was. Michelle thought it was a stroke. Rosemarie insisted it was an epileptic s
eizure, because they had just studied how to identify one in her health studies class and it matched the symptoms she had looked up on WebMD. The janitor insisted it was bad pork. None of them would ever guess the right of it—not in a million years.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” asked Allyn’s daughter.

  Allyn surveyed his work, a group of stones about two feet high, standing on end, arranged in concentric circles with an outer diameter of about fifteen feet. Outside the circle was a dirt bank with a concentric outer trough next to it. A heel stone stood at the end of a makeshift avenue that bridged the trough and bank a few feet away from the circle facing east. At the east edge of the trough and bank on the avenue was a slaughter stone. On the north and south ends of the dirt circle were barrows with station stones within. Within the ring he had constructed a circle of blue stone and within that a small U-shaped group of sandstone trilithons surrounding three sides of the center. At the exact center was an altar stone of high iron content, slightly bigger by comparison to the rest of the setup. Allyn didn’t know how to begin to explain it to his family.

  Theo offered an opinion. “It looks like that place in England,” he said. “Stonehedge.”

  “Henge,” said Allyn, grasping upon the observation. He would never question the value of an athletic scholarship again. “Yes, very good. It is a miniature henge,” Allyn confirmed.

  “Like in Spinal Tap,” Theo added.

  “Why are you building a henge?” asked Rosemarie.

  “To draw energy from a nearby lay line,” Allyn said matter-of-factly. “It’s the pattern of the stones and their elemental content, you see. The henge will draw the flow.”