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Dreadhorse Chapter 26
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Loran’s left hand trembled as he pressed his back against the chill of the trailer’s thin paneling, chest heaving in the dark. Outside was only the midnight emptiness of the gravel lot, punctuated by the distant, unworried purr of motorcycles from the road. He’d unplugged every device—phone, laptop, even the digital clock—and drawn the curtains tight. He was alone. He hadn’t seen his children or wife in three days, ever since the shards first started hissing and jittering across his vision, threads of color running between his fingers when emotion spiked.
He’d kept a list on a creased notecard taped to the wall: STAY CALM. DON’T TOUCH THEM. THINK OF FAMILY.
He was a man of privilege, everyone said. From the rooftop office, Loran once thought little of the workers who passed like ants below, their sullen faces always a reminder that some people just weren’t meant to lead. “People need order,” his father used to say at the club, his voice blurred by expensive whiskey. “It’s nature’s way.” At school, Loran had repeated the stories: their kind built the city, discovered the formula for control, deserved the safety that came from tradition.
But in the static evenings of his self-imposed exile, the gamble of each day became more literal. Although he hadn’t stepped inside a casino in months, his hands still shook for the feel of dice and the heat of risk, the same desperate hunger that now tingled in his skin with every supernatural flicker. The idea that he was chosen, special, had always filled him with a quiet thrill. Now, isolation gnawed at that certainty, every memory of luck from his gambling days replaced by the crawling terror that none of this was destiny at all.
On his tiny TV, state historians discussed the “caretaker class,” those laborers and technical experts whose ancestors once ruled vast tracts of land. Loran watched more to busy his mind than for knowledge, but one evening, as his latest episode of spectral colors danced behind his eyelids, a guest scholar said something that snagged in his thoughts: “Over centuries, their comfort transformed into weakness. They relied on stewards—cooks, drivers, fixers. Soon, the skills that made them powerful faded, and bitterness festered as others took their place.”
At first, Loran scoffed. But as the powers in his own body grew, alarmingly volatile and unnerving, he saw the parallel. Wasn’t he as helpless as they’d been—cut off from the sources of control, from usefulness? The way the media described the bitter, “destined-to-serve,” he’d always parroted, sounded suspiciously close to the tales told of those who’d fallen before him. Had his culture’s confidence been built on the same brittle myth as theirs?
He thought of the mechanic, old Jess, who’d fixed his bike every spring and never met his gaze. Of the grumbling riders at the diner, whose faces changed but whose laughter grew more forced each year.
As twilight pooled outside and another spike of power left the curtains smoldering, Loran understood: The world around him was shifting. The growing resentment humming beneath the city wasn’t, as his father said, “the static of the masses.” It was thunder. And he—alone, gifted, but now as vulnerable as those he’d pitied—felt the first, icy certainty that his world was fraying.
He rose, heart pounding, as a cold knock shuddered through the trailer door.