by W A Rowland
“Ok. Bast is always ok. She’s strong. Not like Cindy… Bast doesn’t need. Never needs. Always has,” Cindy started to ramble.
“Liam, if her connection is breaking, then she’s reverting. I think you’re seeing parts of Cindy from before and then some,” Lily said.
“Dead! Oh God, everyone’s dead! I… I tried like before, but I couldn’t. Nothing changed. Blood and bodies… and Sarah… we liked Sarah… even when she touched us… always with the touching, oh God.” The girl proceeded to break down into tears and fall over into the fetal position.
“Is everyone else dead? Again?” Liam thought.
“Liam, I don’t know. I’m a bit hesitant to suggest this, but what if you tried doing the same thing to her as you did to Joshua?” Lily said hesitantly.
“That would be great if I flipping knew how I did it.” Liam thought back.
Cindy sobbed softly into the carpet.
“I might be able to help you here. We know that our power can affect another demi’s connection. I wonder if we could try to reinforce Cindy’s connection. I think her core was damaged some-how and her guide was pulled back into the astral plane,” Lily explained.
“How would that even happen?” Liam asked.
“I’m not sure how it could happen. Normally, when a core is destroyed or damaged, the connection dies instantly, the guide is pulled back to the astral plane, and the demi goes insane. No soul to control the body results in purely animalistic actions. Pure instinct. Yet somehow Cindy kept a sliver of her connection it seems,” she finished.
“Well, Bast did say Cindy had an exceptionally strong connection,” Liam added. “What’s the risk?”
“If we affect her connection in the wrong way, it could shatter entirely and she’d lose what little sanity she has left,” Lily said grimly.
“Not a great option then,” Liam mused.
“I don’t see another way to help her. This is kind of unknown territory,” Lily answered.
Liam grimaced and turned to Cindy, who’d quieted and was just staring blankly ahead now.
“Cindy, I might be able to help you, but it would be dangerous. Do you want me to try?” he asked as softly as he could.
She sat unresponsive. Staring blankly. Even her crying and rambling had stopped.
“Lily, did something change?” He asked his guide.
“Her connection is severing. It’s now or never, Liam. She’s dead if you wait regardless,” Lily replied hurriedly.
“Ok, Cindy, I’m sorry if this doesn’t work.” He reached out and placed his hands on her head.
“Ok, Lily, now what?!” he asked frantically.
“I’m pushing some of your soul into hers, be still and maintain contact,” Lily said, and Liam could tell she was concentrating hard on whatever it was she was doing. Then, just like before, Liam felt his consciousness pull from him and he was in a dark room. The walls looked like black marble. The only light was coming from himself and two other figures. One he recognized as Lily, and the other he saw as a little girl. She was banging on the wall, soundlessly screaming to be let out.
She was obviously a much younger Cindy, around six or seven, the same olive skin and dark brown hair, just on a much smaller person.
“I’m guessing we’re inside her head now?” Liam asked, his voice echoing in the space.
“No, I think we’re inside her core,” Lily said, turning a slow circle.
The younger Cindy spun in place and ran towards them.
“Thank God! Liam! I lost my core guide! I don’t know what to do,” the girl said as she slammed into him, wrapping him in a hug around his waist.
“Was not expecting that,” Lily said, lifting an eyebrow.
Liam just shrugged silent and mouthed the word “help?”
“I’m scared! And Reggie’s gone!” Young Cindy cried.
“Who’s Reggie?” Liam asked, deciding to go with the most obvious question.
“My guide, he’s gone and I can’t find him,” Young Cindy said, starting to cry. “It feels like I’ve been alone for days.”
“Ok, Lily, what do we do? You’re the expert here.” Liam looked to Lily.
“Expert may be overstating things a bit,” Lily said. “I was kinda hoping us just being here would fix it.”
“So you can’t help me?” Cindy asked mournfully, the little bit of hope draining from her features.
“We’re here, give me a minute to think,” Lily responded.
“I don’t know if Cindy has a minute,” Liam pointed out.
“I think this is perceptual time now, not real time. We should have hours of perceived time before her connection finishes breaking,” Lily explained.
“Oh goody, more time mumbo jumbo.” Liam fumed.
“Just shut up and let me think,” Lily said tersely and walked away, her face screwed up in a perplexed scowl.
Liam sat against the wall next to young Cindy for what felt like an hour. During that time, he’d learned that nobody was actually dead that she knew of, but Cindy had been getting glimpses of their probable demise all the way up to her core getting damaged. Apparently core stones bond to random parts of the physical body, and if targeted specifically, can be damaged.
In Cindy’s case, her core was in her left shoulder. Her group had gotten into a firefight with some of Julian’s were-pack and she’d been hit by a lucky shot just over where her core had bonded.
While the round had passed through and she’d healed the wound with a sub-power, her connection to Reggie had quickly started to fray. One of her last sane acts was to teleport back to the bunker. The little part of her physical brain that was still rational figured that if she was going to die, she’d do it at the only place she’d actually called home.
Once she’d arrived there a few hours earlier, she’d lost the connection to her guide and had been stuck inside her own head, watching her body go on autopilot, just waiting for the last of the connection to snap like a suspension bridge holding too much weight.
Just before she’d teleported, she’d seen more wolves arriving at the house Bast, Thea, Michael, and Hansen were holed up in. The rest were in ok shape, but could only hold off the wolves for so long. She’d hoped that Hansen could get enough of a window to open a portal somewhere else, and they could escape through, provided he didn’t take a lucky shot to the head or anything.
The visions she’d gotten before Reggie had disappeared only made her think more and more that something like that had happened, or would happen. Listening to her talk, Liam felt helpless. He couldn’t help Cindy, who was still slowly dying. He couldn’t help Bast, who may very well already be dead. He was just here, sitting uselessly.
Liam had just started musing on how different this version of Cindy was from what he saw in the physical world but it was at this moment that Lily strode over purposefully to the pair and stood in front of them.
“I have a plan,” she declared.
Liam and Cindy waited, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Please continue,” Liam finally said after some awkward moments of silence.
“We’re effectively inside Cindy’s head, right? This is where her connection should be, but it’s a black box. That means that somewhere here is where the connection should be. If we can find that, then maybe we can break through the mental wall, so to speak,” she concluded.
“And then what?” Liam prodded.
“I don’t know beyond that, it’s all guesswork,” Lily said frowning.
“Well, it’s more than we had before, which was nothing,” Liam concluded, then had an idea. “Cindy, when we got here, you were pounding on that wall to our right, why there?” he asked.
“I don’t know; it seemed like a good spot?” Cindy answered.
“I bet that’s where the connection used to be,” Liam said standing up. “Show me where it felt like a good spot.”
Cindy stood up and walked a few feet to the wall and pointed. “There. It feels…comfortable,” she sai
d, seeming uncertain of her words.
“Good enough,” Liam said and walked over to the wall and pressed up against it. On the surface, it looked like every other section of the wall, but when he touched it, he felt a slight thrumming.
“Lily, come feel this,” he said and his diminutive guide came over, taking his spot against the wall.
“Definitely power here, but it’s hard to tell if it’s the tether point or not,” she said skeptically.
Just then, there was a loud groaning noise and the whole room shuddered. What Liam had thought were patterns resembling marble, turned out to be giant cracks and several of them spread.
“I thought you said we had hours of perceptual time?” Liam said, looking at Lily with a stunned look on his face.
“I may have overestimated,” Lily responded, then went back to pressing on the wall.
“God, I hope this doesn’t kill us all,” she said.
“Wait what?!” Liam squeaked as she threw her arms forward into the wall. White energy left her and the wall evaporated, revealing a long silver path.
“Why do you always do that?” Liam yelled as the room shook.
“Because it always freaks you out,” Lily shouted back over the rumbling of the room, before grabbing Liam’s hand and pulling with a surprising amount of force, throwing him through the hole and into the path.
As soon as Liam’s feet touched the silver ground, he felt his “body” dissolve and he was transported through the astral connection. He popped out of a portal into Joshua’s cabin, the old man standing next to a giant of a man. The two both wore shocked expressions.
“What the hell are you doing here?!” Joshua blurted.
“Trying to help Cindy, we got her connection open again, but we don’t know how to fix it. Help would be good about now,” Liam explained quickly.
Joshua looked dumbfounded, but the big man spoke up. “Cindy’s still alive?!” he said, his voice filled with relief and fear.
“You must be Reggie and yeah, but not for long. It was crumbling away when Lily tossed me into the connection,” Liam said. “I thought she’d be here too though.”
“She probably stayed behind hoping to use your own connection as a lifeline for Cindy. She was always a smart one, but this is bizarre,” Joshua said walking over to look at the glowing silver portal, and doing his blank-eyed reading bit again.
“Yup, she’s pushing bits of your energy through Cindy’s connection, but that would mean… were you two in Cindy’s core?” Joshua asked, looking wide-eyed at Liam.
“Yeah, how else would I be here? I didn’t have an invitation obviously,” Liam said snarkily.
“Do you even know how dangerous this is?! If Cindy’s core had broken with you in it, it would have chained back to your own core and broken it as well! Poof! Gone!” Joshua said snapping his fingers.
Liam suddenly felt ill. He hadn’t thought it through, but it made perfect sense. Like jumpstarting a car battery and mixing up the cables. Feedback loop breaks both batteries.
“However stupid it was, it worked, and we have a chance to save my Cindy, so are you gonna help us or not, old man?” Reggie asked. It felt odd having someone on Liam’s for a change. He wasn’t really sure how he felt about that.
“Nothing needs to get fixed, the channel is open again and pulling energy. It should already be fixing the damaged parts of the core, and with the amount of energy Lily seems to be feeding into it, there’s no risk of it closing off again unless someone does something stupid,” he finished, looking at Liam with a pointed expression.
Reggie, the giant of a man, laughed and scooped up Liam in a giant bear hug, lifting him off the ground and spinning. When he finally set Liam down, he could see tears in the big man’s eyes.
“Thank you, Liam, Cindy, and I won’t soon forget this,” he said and clapped Liam on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger the smaller man.
“Save the favors for a minute. It looks like Cindy and Lily are coming through,” Joshua said, stepping away from the portal.
A moment later, Lily and Young Cindy stepped out of the glowing channel hand in hand. Once her feet hit the ground, Young Cindy squealed and ran to Reggie, jumping into the big man’s arms. Reggie, for his part, scooped her up and spun her in a similar fashion to what he’d done to Liam a minute earlier, except Cindy was laughing with joy during it.
They eventually stopped and Reggie put the girl down on the floor then knelt. “Thought I’d lost you squirt,” he said, cupping her face in a giant hand.
“Almost did,” she replied, then looked over to Lily and Liam, who had assumed a place off to the side where they were bantering about her never telling him the plan before doing something stupid. They stopped when they realized they were being watched. “So are we good now?” Liam asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden.
“Aside from being stupid and having a death wish, yeah, I think you are,” Joshua said, smiling widely at them, a look that Liam had never pictured on the old man’s face.
Joshua, remembering himself, coughed then knocked his staff against the floor and shouted, “Alright now, everyone’s alive and whole, so it’s time y’all get outta my house!” he said and started shooing them back towards the portal.
The four entered it and once again found themselves back on the physical plane, wary of what surprises were in store for them next.
AN UNUSUAL ARRANGEMENT
Liam and Cindy spent the night inside the bunker resting. Liam had initially wanted to rush out and help Bast and her group immediately, but Cindy couldn’t recall where they’d been exactly and he’d eventually been convinced that resting and searching the next day would be the best option.
He did send a text to the number Steven had given him, warning his friend that the were-pack was hunting demis. Cindy said that Bast had noticed cars following them about 15 minutes after they’d left the bunker, and they had been attacked not long after.
Early the next morning, Liam turned on the TV in the common room to the 6am news in hopes that there would be some kind of report of a crash or a firefight from the night before, but nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Just various stories about politics, natural disasters in Asia, and a cooking segment on omelets that made him hungry once it came on.
While he was in the kitchen, trying to follow the vague instructions of the TV chef on how much parsley to put on his breakfast, Cindy teleported into the common room just on the other side of the kitchen bar, startling him, and making him put, what he was certain was too much parsley on his breakfast.
“Can you warn me before you do that?!” he said tensely, his heart racing.
“Sorry, I don’t really think about it sometimes,” Cindy said sheepishly, looking down as her eyes started to water.
“Liam! You apologize right now!” Lily yelled at him in his head making him wince.
“I’m sorry, Cindy. You just startled me is all,” he apologized, then looked down at the parsley covered omelet and held it out to Cindy like a palm branch. “Hungry?” he asked.
Cindy gathered herself up a little bit, her eyes drying up as she looked at the plate being offered to her.
“That’s a lot of parsley,” she commented.
“I suppose it is,” Liam said, laughing, and pulled the plate back and scraped most of the parsley off into the skillet. He’d be making another omelet anyway.
“Better?” he asked, offering the dish again.
She didn’t respond; she just took the plate and sat down, digging into the yellow dish with a will.
“Wow, you really were hungry?” Liam commented, to which Cindy paused with a mouthful of eggs, ham, and cheese and said, “Someone threw out my dinner last night.” Then gave him the evil eye as she started in again.
This Cindy was definitely getting closer to her normal self; maybe she’d just been hungry? Or dying? Liam was going with dying.
“I swear Liam if you don’t start being nice to Cindy, I’m really going to make you have an a
neurism,” Lily said angrily.
“Sorry. I’m just having a hard time figuring out how to talk to her. The Cindy I talked to last night was much easier to communicate with,” he thought back.
“That was her soul you were talking to. This Cindy has to express things through her physical brain. The imbalances that cause her phobia make it hard for her to express herself. She knows what she wants to say, but her physical mind can’t figure out how to say it. And you yelling at the poor girl doesn’t help with calming those down!” Lily said tersely.
“How do you even know all of that?” Liam asked.
“I got to chat with her yesterday for a few minutes when you went through the channel. She’s actually really sweet when you get to know her,” she explained. “Now pay attention, she’s trying to get your attention, dummy,” Lily said.
Liam brought his attention back around to see Cindy looking at him shyly, “Thank you for the breakfast, it was very nice of you,” she said quietly.
“It’s nothing,” Liam said dumbly, not knowing what else to say for a moment. “How are you feeling?”
Cindy looked down and away, not saying anything for the moment.
“Sorry, did I say something wrong?” Liam asked.
“No… I just don’t know what that answer is,” Cindy replied.
“It’s ok. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine,” Liam said, trying to backpedal away from what he assumed was a touchy subject. He’d only really met this girl last night after all. They were practically strangers, other than when he’d first arrived and she’d been yelling about everyone blowing up.
“I can’t see them…” she suddenly burst out, pulling Liam back into the moment. “I haven’t had any more visions, and I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what to do! And I don’t know how to help! The only thing I see anymore is a dark hall and something horrible chasing me. It’s like a reoccurring nightmare, but it’s in my head every five minutes. Over and over and over…”
She went on for several minutes like this, talking as fast as she could, her features flashing between panic and frustration. Liam wasn’t even sure if she’d taken a breath, and when she started hyperventilating, he wasn’t sure what to do.