The Power of Five Oblivion

of pain, harsh light, the smell of antiseptic and the knowledge of plastic tubes, twisting down, carrying fluid into her arm. She was lying on her back, in bed, obviously in a hospital. Once she had seen a woman, dressed in white, leaning over her. A nurse. The woman had said something but the words were far away, indistinct, and anyway, they seemed to be in a foreign language. Sometimes she thought there was a man in the room with her, but whenever she turned to look at him he was no longer there. She knew that she was drifting in and out of sleep and what seemed like a few seconds to her might in fact be an hour. She had never felt more tired. Her arms and legs were completely useless. There was a foul taste in her mouth.
    The pain wouldn’t stop. It was in the side of her head, like a knife pushed in between her eye and ear. The pain was throbbing in time with her heartbeat, so for every pump, pump, pump there was a stab, stab, stab. From time to time she was aware of someone pressing something against her lips, but she couldn’t drink. She wondered if she was going to die.
    And if this was a hospital, where was it and what was going on outside? She heard machine-gun fire, random shots, the occasional crump of a mortar or grenade. Sometimes it was very close and the whole world – the bed, the room, the building – trembled and she smelt dust and felt it sting her eyes. She had to be in some sort of war zone. The explosions were more or less continuous and although she had no real idea when day ended and night began, she was certain they stretched across both.
    She had herself been shot – but not here. That had happened in Hong Kong, in the Tai Shan Temple. She still saw the flash of the gun and felt the shocking impact of the bullet. How long ago had it been? Lying on her back with the pain and the darkness, she tried to piece it all together, as if making sense of the past might somehow explain how she came to be here now.
    The Old Ones had taken over Hong Kong. They controlled the entire city and had lured her in, using her as bait in a trap that had been set for Matt … Matthew Freeman, a boy she had never met, even though the two of them had lived less than a mile apart for much of their lives. There were five of them. Gatekeepers. Matt was their unofficial leader. It was all very complicated and it made her head hurt (as if it wasn’t hurting enough already) just to think of it.
    She focused on the last day. Hong Kong was in the grip of a typhoon that was destroying everything and would have killed them too if she hadn’t held it back. That was her power. She could control the weather … make it rain, make the sun shine. And it was she who had brought them all to the temple, through the eye of the storm. Who else was there? Jamie, of course, the American boy. And Matt.
    But there were also two others … outsiders who had been drawn into the adventure, even though they really had nothing to do with it. The first of these was a journalist from a small, local newspaper in the north of England. Scarlett had barely met him but Matt had told her a bit about him while they were locked up together. His name was Richard Cole and he had become Matt’s closest friend.
    The other man was Lohan, her own protector even if “friend” wasn’t quite the word for him. Dark-eyed, darkly handsome, always in control, Lohan was a member of the White Lotus Society, one of the Chinese Triads dealing in drugs, prostitution and God knows what else. He had never shown very much warmth or affection towards Scarlett and yet he had risked his life for her and would do anything to protect her. He was the man in the room with her, of course. It couldn’t be anyone else.
    They had reached the temple, knowing that there was a door that could take them out of Hong Kong, anywhere they wanted. She had got them there. She had seen the door with its five-pointed star. It had been built specially for the Gatekeepers, to take them across the world in the blink of an eye. Everything was going to be all right. They had won.
    But then, at the last moment, it had all changed. Suddenly the door had opened and Scott and Pedro had appeared. Scott was Jamie’s twin brother. And Pedro … if only he were here now. Matt had also told her how he had met Pedro when the two of them were in Peru. Pedro was a healer. He could touch her with one finger and all the pain would be gone and she would be turning cartwheels out of the room.
    For a few