Chapter 4

Deland, Massachusetts

June 9, 2003

Peter

I’ve been dead for too long, Peter thought as he watched Ben making goofy faces in the bathroom mirror while he willed his hair to change color over and over. Red, green, purple, black, pink and on he we went while trying not to laugh too loudly.

Peter felt a momentary pang of jealousy at the boy’s carefree explorations of his new power. It had not been like that for him in the beginning. Even after all these years and the death of his own body, he still felt a swell of hatred for the legate who had forced him to abandon his first life.

Adhemar, the pompous cunt, had declared him a charlatan when he could not produce the spear he had pulled from the pit. Peter had tried reasoning with him. Saying the spear was not meant for mortal men, and as such Saint Andrew had descended to claim it. The legate was a shrewd man, drunk on the power his papal authority afforded him, and so he sought to punish Peter for his false tale and presumably for keeping the spear to himself. Adhemar had noticed his renewed health and was partially correct in assuming the spear was responsible.

In those days following the failed destruction of the spear, Peter remembered how he and his brothers had begun to discover the abilities they now possessed. In the dead of night they would test their new strength, lifting boulders alone which would have taken three normal men to lift. The ability to shift their physical appearance with a mere thought. It had taken Stephan, the crudest of his brothers, four days before he thought to enlarge his genitals to equine proportions Peter remembered with mirth.

Yes, he thought, people were different then. Simpler for certain, but also capable of more barbaric behavior than he had seen in this new world.

While he and his brothers tested their limits, their army was starving around them. As a last act of defiance, the city’s former occupiers had sullied their food stores and poisoned most of the wells within the walls when defeat had become imminent. Matters worsened when another Muslim army arrived, laying siege to the beleaguered crusaders. Peter had heard of soldiers banding together to hunt pagans within the walls, roasting and consuming their flesh to slake their terrible hunger.

The army fought off the Muslim besiegers with the ferocity of starving feral dogs, just managing to break the siege before they crumbled from the effort. Many died, Peter remembered, if not in battle then from starvation or disease. A few resorted to consuming the multitudes of rats within the city which had been feasting on the sullied food still stored beneath Antioch. Theirs was a lingering death, a plague which spread throughout the soldiers, further decimating their ranks.

Seeing the suffering around them, Peter and his brothers knew their good health would not go unnoticed for long and had decided to forsake their vows and flee the city. That was when Adhemar, just beginning to show signs of the illness that would shortly claim his life, ordered Peter’s arrest on the charge of charlatanry.

It wasn’t until many years and miles later that he had wondered if one of his brothers had let slip to the legate that he was planning on leaving in the night. Their previous principles had already begun to warp under the shard’s influence and at times Peter didn’t recognize the men he had once called his brother’s. He was no different of course, having readily agreed to abandon his oath to god. An oath which he had always upheld with great pride.

None of this had occurred to him yet as Peter sat in his cell, mulling over his options for getting out of this mess. There was really only a single option which Adhemar couldn’t use against him and that was a trial by fire.

From their nightly experimentation, Peter knew he could survive the walk through the flames but the experience would be excruciating. He and his brothers had found that they were resistant to physical damage from fire, as a result of almost instantaneous healing, but had not yet discovered how to turn off their pain receptors. When the commander of the army visited him in his cell to ask how he would plead, Peter had said a silent prayer for strength and declared his wish for a trial by fire.

His mind still recoiled at the memory of that day. The smell of the wood smoke mixed with the dank odor of the soiled rags they had made him wear being burned from his body as he walked through the flames. And the pain. My God, the pain. He had never before or since experienced anything close to the agony he felt in those 60 seconds. But he had survived, exiting the fiery pit to face his commander and the sickly Adhemar, nude but unhurt and thus declaring his innocence in the eyes of God.

Likely at Adhemar’s insistence, the commander had Peter under close watch following his trial. This complicated he and his brother’s planned desertion and forced them to outsmart the ailing legate.

Peter had pretended to take ill with the sickness which had already claimed so many of his compatriots, willing his body to turn the sickly shade of yellow which was the hallmark of the disease. After a weeks time, his brothers who had pretended to care for him had declared his death to the commander, smuggling his still living body out of the city on one of the many carts hauling the dead to be burnt beyond the walls. From there, he and seven of his brothers had disappeared into the night, the others having already decided to walk their own path.

Lost in memories of the many years that followed, Peter remembered the gradual parting of his remaining brothers as they each sought their own seats of power. Their abilities had developed over time and they eventually learned to influence the minds of others which inevitably fostered a worry that they would try to control each other. They had parted ways amicably before any disagreement could lead to a test of mental wills. Peter thought this the best outcome under the circumstances, though he still longed for the close companionship of equals he had enjoyed for that brief time.

While Ben dried himself after his shower, Peter idly wondered if any of his brothers still lived. He knew it was quite possible. He himself had not physically aged in the nearly 500 years he had borne the shard. The range of his abilities had also grown at a steady pace for those five centuries, leading Peter to speculate on just how powerful they could be after nearly a millennium. Unable to know for sure, he turned his focus to what he could see and hear through Ben’s senses.

He was quite impressed with the boy. Intelligent beyond most of the scholars he had known in his lifetime and possessing a sense of curiosity Peter believed would serve him well in the development of his abilities. Ben was younger than he had been when he first received the gift of the shard and Peter was determined to guide him so that he might avoid some of the mistakes which had ultimately been his own downfall.

As Ben passed through what he had thought of as his living room, Peter caught sight of the television through Ben’s eyes and mentally stuttered as he tried to understand what he was seeing. The shower and electric lights had been a mild curiosity, but they were nowhere near the level of magic of this living painting. There were people moving through a totally different room and speaking to each other within the frame. More unseen people could be heard laughing for some reason as well.

In his time, Peter thought, Ben’s whole family would have been burned as witches for possessing such an item. Looking into the boy’s memories, he discovered these things were commonplace in society and used primarily for entertainment.

Peter decided it might be prudent to dive further into Ben’s memories so that he might become more familiar with the modern world.

Yes, he thought excitedly, the world has certainly changed.

Ben

He couldn’t wait to get back to the privacy of his bedroom to continue experimenting with his new ability to change his body. Ben had found the color changing hair trick to be immensely entertaining. I’ll never have to worry about gray hairs at least, he had thought, thinking about his father’s prematurely graying hair. Not yet realizing that the shard had essentially made him immortally seventeen.