Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(17)

He even remembered to pack two forks, which she discovered at the bottom of one bag. She inspected the Tupperware containers and found homemade potato salad, a garden salad and sliced ham—real sliced ham, not packaged and processed meat. The garden salad had fresh spinach, leafy romaine lettuce, radishes, carrots and green onions and was tossed with a creamy Italian dressing.

The sights and smells slammed into her. The food was wholesome, and her whole body wanted it. She wolfed down potato salad and bites of ham, chewing while she popped open one of the chilled cans of Coke. While she ate, she watched Michael.

She started on the garden salad as he emptied out the backseat of the Ford. The long, black weapons bag went into the rear seat of the Jeep. When he had shifted everything to his satisfaction, he opened up the toolbox, pulled out a license plate and a wrench, and he changed the license plate on the Jeep. Fascinated, she tried to see what else was in the toolbox. All she could see from where she was sitting were more license plates.

“How many license plates do you have?” she asked, her mouth full.

“I like to keep a dozen or so on hand.” He tossed the wrench into the box, closed it and tucked the Jeep’s legitimate license plate under the camping gear. “They provide more options.”

Questions crowded her mind. Where had he gotten them? How many were stolen? All of them? He slammed the Jeep’s rear door. Then the questions flew out of her head as he joined her. She noticed how pronounced his limp had become. She handed him containers of food and a fork. Then she opened a Coke for him while he bent his head and ate with quick economy.

She gave him the drink, opened a container of yogurt and passed it to him when he was ready. She told him, “I packed the less perishable food into one bag to take with us.”

“Good,” he grunted.

He made an amazing amount of food disappear. At that moment he could have been any tired, hardworking man after a long day. Then he paused to strip off his flannel shirt in the heat of the early evening. She saw the bandages and bruises on his wide, taut torso, and the illusion vaporized.

She finished most of her own yogurt before she became too full to eat anymore. Taking a deep, replete breath, she sipped at her Coke as she looked around the scene.

The dense gathering of trees and underbrush shimmered with the Van Gogh effect that had started yesterday. She frowned. When had she last noticed it? She couldn’t remember. She had become too depleted to notice, and then she became preoccupied with other things.

“Michael,” she said. He looked up from finishing the ham. “Ever since I—what did you call it—ripped through the veil in the Grotto, something funny has happened to my eyesight. Everything has this transparent shimmer around the edges. Or it has whenever I’ve had the time to notice. I’ve been calling it the Van Gogh effect.”

“The Van Gogh effect.” He slanted an eyebrow at her.

“You know, because everything has rippling, wavy edges. It reminds me of his paintings. Do you know what it is?”

He studied the surrounding scene, then gave her a quizzical glance. “You’ve been coping with everything so well, I forget how new your memories are and how much you’ve yet to recover. What you’re seeing is energy.”

“Energy,” she repeated. She cocked her head and squinted doubtfully at a tree.

“Everything has energy and movement,” he replied. “Everything has a vibration, even things that most people think of as being stationary and immobile. Take a rock.” He bent and picked up a piece of gravel. “Even this has vibration and movement. Think of the basic elements contained in an atom.”

She squinted at him. “Do you mean electrons, neutrons, protons and a nucleus?”

“Yes. Do you know how the electrons and the protons rotate around the nucleus?”

“Sure.”

He pressed the piece of gravel into her hand. “Movement is present in everything in the universe. It’s our human senses that tell us that the rock is inert and stationary. The reality is quite different. The rock is in motion, just as the entire universe is in motion. The vibration of the rock’s energy is simply at a much slower frequency than other things.”

“Vibration,” she echoed. She hefted the rock in her hand as she thought back to the moment when the Deceiver had taken Michael. She looked up at him. “Back at the cabin, when the Deceiver had you pinned to the ground, he made some kind of humming noise. It was a horrible sound. I wanted to stab things in my ears to keep from hearing it, but it wasn’t actually a physical noise, was it? It was psychic, right?”

The angle of his mouth turned grim. “It was both psychic and physical. He was using vibration as a weapon. A vibration at a certain pitch and frequency can destroy us if it comes from both the physical and psychic realms at once, and if it is strong enough. Buddhist monks make use of physical vibration in their chants. Legend has it that with the right frequency they can cause a mountain to avalanche. When I’m fighting creatures in the psychic realm, I use the vibration of my energy to shape a weapon. A physical sword is useless in that kind of fight. It passes right through them.”

She thought back to the tall, blazing figure that she had seen with her mind’s eye. He had wielded what had looked like a spear of white light. “So you really were fighting psychically the same time that you were fighting physically?”