Sync: Caulborn 1.5 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Sync

  Author’s Note

  Also by Nicholas Olivo

  Sync

  Copyright © 2013 by Nicholas Olivo All rights reserved.

  First Edition: October 2015

  www.nicholasolivo.com

  Editing by: Holloway House Editing and Proofreading

  hollowayhouse.me

  Cover and Formatting by: Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Sync

  As Chroniclers, we are masters of time. We are lords of the past, present, and future. We bow to no nation, no religion, no cause. We keep the timestream safe from those who would change it, and we have the power to literally unmake those who would tamper with it. Except for the old gods. It has always irritated me that we do not have dominion over them. Their very nature makes them immune to our powers. While most of them pine away on Olympus talking about their glory days, that old bastard Janus still jumps through time, doing whatever he wants, changing the future according to his whims, and then we get stuck cleaning up his mess. So when he approached me and offered a deal, I was intrigued. Janus would stop interfering in the past in exchange for us providing a constant amount of focused tachyon onto an infant boy. It seemed the child had been born with an ability similar to Janus’s — to see into both the past and the future, and Janus was concerned that the boy’s mind wouldn’t be able to handle that.

  After some digging, I discovered the child was Janus’s son by a human woman. Through the chronoscopes, I have watched him grow up a dozen different ways. Each time, I’ve had to put him down like a dog. While I honor the bargain I made with his father, I am increasingly certain that no matter what path the half-breed takes, I will ultimately have to see him dead.

  ~ From the journal of the Tempus, high lord of the Chroniclers

  “Let me get this straight,” Megan said as we left the Caulborn offices. “We have a dragon here in Boston, living in human form, and he’s saying that some of his priceless art has gone missing.”

  “Technically,” I replied, “he’s a wyrmling. Cather’s less than two hundred years old, so by dragon standards, he’s practically a teenager.”

  My partner shook her head and smiled. “Just when I think I’ve seen it all in this job, something new pops up. What’s the piece that’s missing?”

  “One of da Vinci’s early sketches of the Vitruvian Man.”

  Megan’s brow furrowed. “Da Vinci? Never heard of him.”

  I laughed, then realized she was completely serious. “Leonardo da Vinci,” I said. “The quintessential renaissance man. Painted the Mona Lisa. Invented the ball bearing and the parachute.” Megan’s blank expression remained fixed. “Come on, Meg, they even named a ninja turtle after him.” There was no laughter in her dazzling ice-blue eyes, only confusion.

  Gunshots erupted around us. Megan rolled her wrists, conjuring 9mm pistols from her pocket dimension. Handy trick, that. She opened her mouth to speak and then froze. Not like she held still, like she literally stopped wholly and completely in place. Her short blonde hair was stopped in mid-swing as her head whipped around; the material in her green blouse halted in mid-ripple as she was bringing up her guns.

  My name is Vincent Corinthos. I’m the son of Janus, the Roman god of Doors and Time. I’m an agent of a paranormal police force known as the Caulborn. But right now, the most important thing about me is that I’m worshipped by a group of psychic fae called Urisk, and their faith grants me a handful of extremely useful psychic abilities. I snapped up a telekinetic shield and scanned the area for the hostiles. Something slammed into me from behind and tackled me to the ground. The sidewalk dug into my cheek.

  “Stay down,” a ragged voice commanded. “Keep behind something. Telekinetic shields won’t stop chronobullets.”

  Chronobullets? Oh shit.

  I rolled out from under my assailant, who grabbed my arm and dragged me down an alley. He was dressed in a ragged black leather jacket, dirty white T-shirt and torn black jeans. A pair of worn Harley Davidson boots completed his hobo-biker ensemble. “Keep moving,” he said as he brushed his wild mane of salt-and-pepper hair from his eyes. “We can outrun them. Don’t bother turning invisible, they’ll be able to see you.”

  “Invisible? I can’t—”

  “No time to talk,” he cut me off as he pulled a gun that looked like a cross between a Star Trek phaser and a pirate’s flintlock from his belt. A chronopistol. Lovely. He fired three shots and then pushed me onward. Anyone struck by a chronobullet would be temporarily frozen in time. There was only one organization in the known universe that used those.

  “You’re a Chronicler, I take it?” Chroniclers, time’s self-appointed guardians, monitored the timestream and ensured no one tampered with history.

  “Duh,” he replied. “Corinthos, you’re a little thick today. Did you get hit on the head when I tackled you?” He pulled me down the alley. I pulled my arm free of his grip.

  “I’m not leaving my partner.”

  “She’ll be fine,” he insisted. “The Entropics aren’t after her. She’s in stasis. She’s perfectly safe. They are after you, Vincent.”

  I let him lead me down the alley. “Entropics? Sounds like a bad ’80s band.”

  The Chronicler barked a short laugh. “If only. They’d be so much easier to get rid of if that were the case.” He stopped at a spot and pulled me close to a brick wall. He glanced at his wristwatch and tapped on its face a few times. As he did, the shadows of two men appeared at the mouth of the alley.

  “Brother Wheatson,” one of them called. “It’s time to stop running. There’s nowhere left for you to go.”

  “Pound sand, Abraham,” my companion, Wheatson, replied. To me, he said, “You know what, Corinthos? They think we’re trapped. The alley dead ends.”

  “It sure looks that way,” I said. “Next time, you might want to look into bringing along a getaway vehicle. I’m surprised you guys don’t have garages full of DeLoreans.”

  “Pfff. Stainless steel construction is not good for time travel.”

  “If you say so.” I readied a burst of pyrokinetic flame in my left hand, my switchblade dropping into my right from the hidden sheath up my sleeve.

  Wheatson grabbed my wrist. “No, no, no.” He pointed at the wall. “Twenty-five years ago, there was a door here.”

  The Entropics, whoever they were, began moving down the alley. “Fat lot of good that does us,” I said.

  Wheatson chuckled as he tapped on his watch. There was a chirping sound, followed by a burst of blue light. A shimmering bubble of energy expanded out from Wheatson’s wrist, enveloping us. It lasted only a second and left wavy blue afterimage lines in my eyes. A door stood before us in the wall. We stepped through into a warehouse filled with—

  “Sega Master Systems?” I said.

  “I preferred it over the original NES,” Wheatson replied as he rubbed his hands together. His fingerless leather gloves creaked as he did so. “But no time for that now.” He patted my shoulders and looked me up and down. “L
eather bomber, good, good, jeans, Reebok high-tops, always loved those.” He grabbed my face and looked in my eyes. “Good, good, hair’s still brown, no gray yet,” he said to himself as he moved my head from side to side. He pulled at the collar of my shirt and peeked down. I slapped his hands away and took a step back. “No uniform,” he mumbled.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded as I tucked my switchblade back up my sleeve.

  Wheatson waved his hands in front of him. “No time. We’ve only got a few minutes before they figure out when we went.”

  “So it’s twenty-five years ago?” I asked. “And they’re going to follow us back into the past?”

  Wheatson nodded as if I were declaring that water was wet. “Yes, yes, yes. Now shut up and listen. Time is dying, Corinthos. Dying from both ends.” He held his hands about two feet apart and brought them together. “The past and future as you know them are rapidly vanishing. Vanishing like they never even happened.”

  I thought about Megan. “Would that make people forget about famous people from the past?”

  Wheatson nodded. “Right now, anything older than two hundred years or so might as well not have happened. Things that are older than that might not even exist.”

  My stomach clenched as I thought of Petra. The world knows my girlfriend as one of the cover girls for Victoria’s Secret, but she’s also a living statue sculpted by Pygmalion himself over three thousand years ago. Did she still exist? I hastily pulled out my phone and gawked at its display. “We’re in the middle of the city, how the hell do I not have a signal?”

  “Probably because the cell satellites don’t exist yet.” I glared at him. Wheatson’s expression softened as he put his hand on my arm. “I don’t know if she’s still alive, Vincent. I’m sorry. But we don’t have time for this.”

  I grabbed him by the collar. “Okay, time for some answers. Who the hell are you and how do you know so much about me?” His wild blue eyes regarded me for a moment and then his jaw dropped. He looked at his watch and swore.

  “Twenty-five years from now,” he said as he thrust his watch under my nose. “Will that be the right year?” I looked at the watch. The display was something that rivaled an iPad. I wondered if the Chroniclers got advance shipments of those rumored iWatch things I’d read about. He groaned when I nodded that the date was accurate. “Damn it. There wasn’t enough of the timestream left. I thought I’d get to a point in your life where we knew one another.” He rubbed his face. “All right, here’s the deal. In the future, you and I are well acquainted. That’s not important. What is important is that time is dying and you are the only one who can fix it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked again.

  Wheatson did some math in the air with his index finger. “Carry the one,” he mumbled. “Damn, you can’t do that yet either.” He sighed heavily and scratched at the stubble on his chin.

  “What?”

  He waved his hands and shook his head. “It’s not important. Okay, listen up, Vincent. Have you ever heard of Laplace’s demon?” I shook my head no. “Not surprised. It was a concept developed by a scientist named Pierre-Simon Laplace. The idea was that if you had a super intelligence that could know the exact state of every particle in the universe at a given moment, that intelligence could know everything about both the past and the future. To Laplace, it was just an illustrative concept. Thing is, that demon actually exists. And it’s bored. So it’s literally killing time.”

  “It’s bored so it’s unmaking time?” I repeated stupidly.

  Wheatson nodded vigorously. “Think about it. If you knew everything that was happening, had happened, and would happen, then what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning? The demon’s been bored for centuries, and then it hit upon an idea. See, time itself is governed by a central… clock, for lack of a better word. This one true clock is what maintains the past, present, and future. It creates and governs time as we know it. Now, think about a motor for a minute. As a motor does its job, runs a car, powers a fridge, whatever, it also gives off heat as a byproduct. The true clock gives off entropy as a byproduct. That entropy is what introduces chance and uncertainty into reality.

  “Now, here’s the thing. Physicists have long known that in the past, there’s been a lower amount of entropy in the universe than there is in the present, but they’ve never been able to figure out why. It’s because the demon’s been reaching through time and siphoning off the entropy, and he’s using it to power a new central clock, one I call the Entropic Glass. This Entropic Glass will make time out of entropy itself.”

  “And that’s bad why?” He cuffed me. I cuffed him back. “Look, pal, I don’t have a degree in temporal physics or whatever the hell it is you’re talking about. Put it in terms I can understand.”

  Wheatson ran his hands through his wild hair. “Okay, okay, okay.” He held up a finger. There was a thick band of dirt under the nail that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. “Think about it like this. Time moves at a fixed speed. One second per second. And, for the most part, time moves in a straight line. Those two things are constant. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Boston or in Berlin, on Earth or the realm of the fae, those things are consistent. Cool so far?” I nodded. “Good. Now imagine that time moves faster in Boston than it does in Berlin. Maybe an hour passes here, but three hours pass there. Hell, maybe a week passes there. What happens?”

  I took a moment to process that, to imagine the freakout that would cause. People would age at different rates and panic. Economies would collapse as world markets fell out of sync with one another. “Chaos,” I said.

  Wheatson nodded gravely. “Once the Entropic Glass is fully functional, there will be no knowing what will happen.”

  “And that’s exactly what the demon wants,” I said.

  Wheatson nodded again. “Right now, the central clock is still running, but the demon has connected the Entropic Glass to the timestream. It’s gradually erasing time as we know it, and it won’t be long before reality itself is reset.”

  “Got it. So why do you need me? Isn’t this sort of thing exactly what the Chroniclers are made for?”

  He ran a dirty hand over his face. “Normally, yes, normally,” he said quickly. “But this isn’t normal. When all that entropy was injected into the timestream, there was a backlash. All the Chroniclers but me were instantly remade. To them, this,” he waved his hand all around us, “is normal. Time dying from both sides. To them, this is how the world’s supposed to be. They see Laplace’s demon as a benefactor. They want to make it happy.”

  “And you weren’t affected?”

  He shook his head. “No. Was in between times when the backlash hit. Must’ve protected me.”

  “So again, why do you need me?”

  He grabbed me by the front of my jacket. The leather creaked in his grip. “Because you’re a deity, Corinthos!” he said in exasperation. “A deity with ties to time. There are only a handful of beings, dragons and gods mostly, that wouldn’t be affected by time’s erasure. I couldn’t find your father, but I could find you. So here we are.”

  Well that explained why Cather would remember da Vinci but Megan didn’t. “Couldn’t you—”

  He slapped me on the back of the head. “No more questions! We literally don’t have time for this. Once the timestream as we know it is gone, there’s no getting it back. I need you to open a portal to the Chroniclers’ Citadel. Then we can try to undo the damage. Come on, get to it.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.

  “You want me to do what?”

  Wheatson’s face fell. “Oh damn, I came back that far?” he said to himself. He looked me straight in the eyes, and I saw the fight go out of him. He slumped down to the floor. “We’re screwed.”

  “Now just a minute—” I was cut off as two men materialized in th
e room in a burst of blue light.

  “You know, Wheatson,” the one Wheatson had called Abraham said as he brushed imaginary dust from his shoulders, “that was a pretty good trick. We almost couldn’t find you, but then I remembered that your little pal here was glowing with a hundred times the normal amount of tachyon radiation. Once we picked up on that, you were easy to track.” The men were dressed in identical black jumpsuits emblazoned with a scarlet hourglass on the right breast. The room’s fluorescent lights shimmered faintly across the surface of their suits. No, that wasn’t light; the suits were rippling, as if they were made of some dark ichor. Tendrils of black spiraled up the men’s necks from their collars and disappeared into their hairlines. Okay, this was just creepy.

  Abraham crooked a finger toward Wheatson. “Time to come back to the Citadel. You’re sick. The Tempus will fix you up, and then everything will be fine.” His wolfish smile did not touch his dark eyes. His partner stepped up behind him, looming large, partially blocking out the light from the overheads. To say this guy was ugly was an understatement. He looked like his face had been beaten with a baseball bat and then dunked in a deep fryer. I shuddered involuntarily as he sized me up with a stare that could’ve frozen magma on a hot July day.

  Wheatson slowly got to his feet. I’d like to say that there was a fierce defiance in his eyes, that he was about to bring to bear all the fury that someone who could control time and space held, to go down in a blaze of glory. Instead, he didn’t even meet Abraham’s eyes. Shoulders slouched, he simply nodded once.

  “As for you,” Abraham nodded to me, “you’ve been a problem for the Tempus for far too long. I think he’ll give me a medal for this.” Wheatson suddenly stabbed his index finger into his watch. There was a blast of blue light, and a great wind tore past me. I shrieked. It was like I’d been standing in a comfortably warm room and then suddenly tossed out into a freezing gale-force wind. The cold was so intense, it felt like I should’ve been covered in frost.