Нил Шустерман: Thief Of Souls

He reached his mind out, but found no large sea creatures he could inhabit, and he knew he would die in this awful, awful world.

It was the fault of The Twelve. It was their fault and the fault of every human infesting this place. His sole consolation was that the twelve star-shards—the only ones ever born to the undeserving human race—had been squelched. And soon, he imagined, this entire race would no doubt destroy itself with its petty and selfish ways.

If it was in his power, he would do the job for them. He would draw out the soul from each human that ever lived, and cast their weak bodies to the red sands of the Unworld. He would blot out this world from crea­tion, just to make sure no star-shards were ever born to humanity again.

He held on to his anger and his hatred of human kind as his life slipped away. As he died, his spirit dissolved into the ocean depths, and his thoughts were carried by the currents to the far corners of the Earth. Lost in the waters of death . . . for three thousand years.

Dillon’s arms had grown strong from his labors.

At first, his back and shoulders had filled with a fiery soreness that grew worse each day as he worked. His biceps would tighten into twisted, gnarled knots—but in time his body had grown accustomed to the work. So had his mind.

He dug the spade in the soft dirt, and flung it easily over his shoulder.

The chill wind of a late-September night filtered through the nearby forest, filling the midnight air with the rich scent of pine. He shivered. With knuckles stiff from gripping the shovel, he struggled to zip his jacket to the very top. Then he resumed digging, planting the spade again and hurling the dirt, beginning to catch the rhythm of it, giving in to the monotony of spade and earth. He made sure not to get any dirt on the blanket he had brought with him.

He realized he should have worn heavy workboots for the job, but his sneakers, though caked with mud, never seemed to wear out. None of his clothes ever wore out. He had just torn his jeans hopping over the wrought-iron fence, but he knew they would be fine. Even now, the shredded threads around the tear were weaving together.

The fact was, Dillon Cole couldn’t have a pair of faded, worn-out jeans if he wanted to. He called it “a fringeless fringe benefit.” A peculiar side-effect of his unique blessing.

The shovel dug down. Dirt flew out.

“I got a scratch.”

The small boy’s voice made Dillon flinch, interrupt­ing the rhythm of his digging.

“Carter,” warned Dillon, “I told you to stay with that family until I got back.”

“But the scratch hurts.”

Dillon sighed, put the shovel down and brushed a lock of his thick red hair out of his eyes. “All right, let me see your hand.”

Carter stretched out his arm to show a scratch across the back of his hand. It wasn’t a bad scratch, just enough to draw the tiniest bit of blood, which glistened in the moonlight.

“How’d you do this?” Dillon asked.

Carter just shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Dillon took a long look at the boy. He couldn’t see the boy’s eyes clearly in the moonlight, but he could tell Carter was lying. I won’t challenge him just yet, Dillon thought. Instead he brought his index finger across Carter’s hand, concentrating his thoughts on the scratch.

The boy breathed wondrously as he watched the tiny wound pull itself closed far more easily than the zipper on Dillon’s jacket. “Oh!”

Dillon let the boy’s hand go. “You made that scratch yourself, didn’t you? You did it on purpose.”

Carter didn’t deny it. “I love to watch you heal.”

“I don’t ‘heal’, " reminded Dillon. “I fix things that are broken.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Carter, who had heard it all be­fore. “Reversing Enter-P.”

“Entropy,” Dillon corrected. “Reversing entropy,” and he began to marvel at how something so strange had become so familiar to him.

“Go back to those people,” Dillon scolded Carter gently. He returned to digging. “You’re too young to be here.”

“So are you.”

Dillon smiled. He had to admit that Carter was right. Sixteen was woefully young to be doing what he was doing. But he had to do it anyway. He reasoned that it was his penance; the wage of his sins until every last bit of what he had destroyed was fixed.

The blade of Dillon’s shovel came down hard, with a healthy bang.

Carter jumped. “What was that?”

Dillon shot him a warning glance. “Go back to the house.”

“That woman won’t stop praying,” Carter com­plained, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and back again. “It makes me nervous.”

“You go back there and tell them I’ll be back in an hour. And then you sit down and pray with them.”

“But—"

“Trust me, Carter. You don’t want to see this. Go!”

Carter kicked sullenly at the dirt, then turned to leave. Dillon watched him weave between the polished gravestones and slip through the wrought-iron fence.

When Dillon was sure Carter was gone, he took a long moment to prepare his mind for the task of fixing. Then he brushed away the dirt, and reached for the lip of the coffin.

Little Kelly Jessup, wrapped in a blanket, clung to Dillon Cole, shivering. Dillon braced himself as he car­ried her through the door of the Jessup home. Mrs. Jessup stood in the hallway, not quite ready to believe what her eyes told her, until the little girl looked up and said, “Mommy?”

The woman’s scream could have woken the dead, if the job had not already been done.

Dillon’s dreams that night were interrupted, as they always were, by the green flash of the supernova—a memory that had seared its way deep into his uncon­scious. It was the first flash of vision that there were five others like him out there . . . and the first inkling of what they truly were; the most powerful and lumi­nous souls on earth. Shards of the fractured soul of the scorpion star, incarnated in human flesh.

From there his dream took a turn into nightmare, and he knew where he would find himself next. The throne room of a crumbling palace, on a ruined mountain, within the red sands of what he could only call “the Unworld.” That non-place that existed between the walls of worlds.

And before him stood the parasitic beast that had leeched onto his soul for so many years, its gray mus­cles rippling, its veiny wings batting the air, and its face an evil distortion of his own. It was a creature that would never have grown so powerful, had Dillon’s own soul not been so bright.

I will be fed! it told him. You will destroy for me. I will feed on the destruction you bring.

In the dream, Dillon saw himself raising the gun to shoot it, knowing what was about to happen, unable to stop it. He pulled the trigger, the beast stepped aside . . . and there was Deanna.

The bullet struck the chest of the girl Dillon himself would die for.

He ran to her, took her in his arms, while his beast flexed its muscles, absorbing this act of destruction, feeding on Deanna’s dying breaths.

“I’m not afraid,” coughed Deanna; “I’m not afraid”— for after she had purged the parasite of fear from her own soul, terror had no hold on her.

Suffer the weight, Dillon, the creature said, as Deanna died in his arms. Suffer the weight of destruc­tion . . . and every moment you suffer is a moment I grow strong . . .

Dillon was shaken awake by small hands on his shoulders. He opened his eyes to see Carter standing above him. By now this had become a regular routine.