Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  “Certainly that might be the case, if everyone could do it, or if more than a tiny group of people could do it. But I’m not sure you realize quite the gift that Gwen has given you. She has only demonstrated how to use the power by traveling from place to place, and by the way, to my knowledge, you are the only non-deity who can travel between the realms without using a seam. Something I didn’t realize until you brought me directly to see Siara. I had expected you to take us to the nearest seam, then teleport us to her from there. You—”

  “Albert! Seriously. My brother is tied to a fucking post in the middle of a square, waiting to be blown up, along with an entire city!”

  “My point is, Vic, that if you can jump through points in space, you can do the same with time. It shouldn’t even take much more effort, just some flexibility of mind.”

  “Surely there are a ton of risks inherent to that? Couldn’t I destroy the space-time continuum, or something?”

  “The space-time continuum is, by nature, self regulating. Hence the ‘continuum.’ It is an oft worried about piece of fiction, but in reality there should be no possible way to ruin it. If you change the past, the future automatically alters itself, and if you create a paradox you must inherently ruin that timeline, but it will likely snap to the nearest available alternate timeline, or create a new one.”

  “Ok. THAT. Right there. Sounds terrifying.”

  Albert shrugged.

  “It’s all theoretical, of course, but my point is that while you can likely ruin things for yourself, in your own timeline, I doubt very much that you have the power to destroy the whole universe entirely, even if you destroy the universe in a single timeline.”

  “How does that even make sense? Doesn’t the universe include all available timelines? I—” I stopped talking, shaking my head to force away the cascade of thoughts that wouldn’t let me get to the important part. “Look. I don’t think I can do that. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do in time to save anyone, so can we go with plan B, or whatever? I need to save my brother.”

  PLAN B, IT turned out, was to just go in with guns blazing. Siara sent someone else to appeal to Unterberg for help. Meanwhile, she brought a hundred dragon shifters with her to the street in front of Rhelia’s home which we’d chosen as our base of operations. The hundred she brought with her would go in the first wave, and she’d left instructions for reinforcements to follow behind us should they be needed.

  We had to hope that MOME didn’t know that I could shift that many of us from one realm to the next without going through a seam first. Honestly, we had to hope for a lot of things. If this went wrong, we were about to get a whole lot of people killed, ourselves included.

  ~~~

  In order to maximize our element of surprise, we decided I would shift us all into a spot in mid-air and everyone would shift into dragon form upon arrival. The main reason for the plan was that my brain couldn’t handle the idea of shifting a hundred dragons through time and space as easily as it could fathom shifting a hundred people. Apparently, everyone from the dragon realm who had signed up for this mission had no qualms with being dropped into the air a few hundred feet above La Plaza Murillo.

  The sky was a cerulean blue and there was not a cloud in it. The air was crisp and fresh, despite being in the middle of a city of half a million people. I barely had time to notice any of that, though, or even take note of where Trev was, before I was free-falling through the sky and trying to call on my dragon form.

  Thankfully, it responded quickly to my call and then I enjoyed a crash course in flying. I snapped my wings out, and they caught the wind with a deafening crack that shot me upwards at a terrifying speed. Panicking, I tried to drop my wings, but found them buffeting in and out awkwardly as I tried to lower them slowly, so I snapped them shut instead. Of course, that caused me to plummet towards the ground again. Terrified of hitting the ground, I spread my wings wide again, and this time, apparently clear of whatever updraft had grabbed me before, I began to glide in a gentle arc towards the ground instead. By the time I circled back around to where everyone else was, I was rather enamored of flying and vowed to practice it more often, assuming I survived everything that was about to happen.

  Or… everything that was already happening, I corrected, as I looked at the scene unfolding in front of me.

  The dragons were mowing into the MOME forces that lined the plaza, and the only thing that seemed to keep them in check was the fact that there appeared to be some non-magical people wandering nearby, as if they’d been curious to see what all the fuss was about. As a result, the dragons were mostly using teeth and claws to destroy the MOME agents that surrounded the plaza, the majority of spells flung their way simply ricocheting off of them, and the attacks of the few shifters present hardly grazing their hides.

  It was easy to see why MOME had considered the dragons a big enough threat to try to eradicate them, even though the mere thought of doing so was completely despicable. One had to appreciate just how much damage the dragons could do when provoked. Of course, one also had to take into account just how far one had to go in order to provoke the dragons to begin with. They had spent centuries in peace with everyone else in the known realms. It had taken the abduction of two of their own and threat to the entire world, before they’d been willing to bring this down on MOME.

  I looked around to see if I could spot Sol in the fray. She had come in on the back of one of the weredragons who was better at flying than I was (which is to say, ANY of the other weredragons), since I hadn’t been confident that I wouldn’t send us both crashing to our deaths. I barely caught a glimpse of a tiny (relatively speaking) black figure darting in and out of the mass of dragons and mages clashing on the ground before I refocused on my primary objective.

  In the quick plan that we had hashed out before embarking on this whole endeavor, I had been given a very clear assignment: do whatever I could to free Trev before Rebecca Dryer, or whoever else she’d put in charge of the task (of course whoever applied the syringe would likely be killed in the blast unless they were able to make an incredibly fast escape, so there was little to no chance that it would be Rebecca), could inject Trev with liquid Technetium. Or, barring that, kill whoever was going to inject him.

  He was exactly where he’d been in the photo sent by Sol’s abuelita, tied to a somewhat phallic statue in the middle of a small, nicely landscaped circle in the middle of the plaza. He’d clearly been tied there in order to draw the maximum amount of attention from the camera crews that now crowded around that center circle. Indeed, we’d realized during our planning that the only reason Rebecca hadn’t set Trev off immediately, before we’d even known what they were planning to do, is that she intended to gain maximum visibility before doing so. After all, her threat would be that much more effective if she had the eyes of all the world leadership on her for her demonstration. And only a live feed would work, because any and all equipment close enough to get footage would be entirely destroyed by the blast. If she wanted any long-lasting record of the event, she would need to have coverage from afar. I wondered if she had cameras placed miles and miles from here, to try to capture a video of the explosion from a distance.

  Of course, even if she did, they wouldn’t be all that helpful if she managed to take out the entire earth with her. She had grossly underestimated the effectiveness of her own weapon, or was willfully ignorant of the additional risks—either way, she had to be stopped, regardless of the cost.

  I still wasn’t caught up on all the physics behind how it worked, but essentially the introduction of unstable Technetium into blood that contained large amounts of dark matter could easily cause a wave of dark energy strong enough to destabilize any nearby seams, thus potentially sucking our realm into another realm, and possibly destroying both of those realms in the process. And that was on top of my brother and half a million innocent civilians being killed. Not to mention all the dragons that I’d just shifted in here to help kick
MOME’s ass.

  So, when I saw a person in a white hazmat suit approach my brother, with one arm outstretched, I didn’t hesitate. I dove as fast as the wind would allow me, wings tucked tight to my sides and nothing between me and my target but thin air. I really hoped that I wouldn’t take Trev out in my attack, but he would be dead either way, if I didn’t get to this asshat before he got to Trev, so it was a risk I would just have to take.

  I crashed into the earth hard, even though I flared my wings a bit just at the last second, and plowed through the grass and stone of the circle surrounding the statue that Trev was tied to. Before I let myself even register the pain of the stone impacting my scales, or the features of the person underneath the hazmat suit, I shoved my head forward, pushing past the line of stone that had finally stopped my slide forward, and snapped my jaws around the person whose arm was still outstretched to Trev.

  “NOOOOOO!” Trev screamed, his face contorting with more pain than I’d ever seen on a human face. “RHELIA!!!”

  For a moment I thought he’d somehow mistaken me for Rhelia, even though our dragon forms looked nothing alike. Even though there was no way my brother would ever have made that mistake.

  And then my brain caught up with the truth, and I opened my jaws to allow the person in the hazmat suit to fall to the ground. The small window in the face of the suit showed an unmistakable visage. Ebon skin, ebon hair, and yellow, unblinking eyes.

  “NO,” I WHISPERED, amazed to find myself in human form again, my arms wrapped around Rhelia’s waist, though I couldn’t remember moving. “No! NO! It can’t be her! Why is it her? WHY? She would never have agreed to inject you. She wouldn’t! It can’t be her. It can’t be—”

  Rhelia, why? A whisper in the distance.

  I looked down and saw the syringe on the ground, which she’d most assuredly been about to inject into Trevor, but it still didn’t make any kind of sense. Why would she have volunteered? Why would they have let her? She would just have died with Trevor, while causing an even larger catastrophe. Did she not know that? Had they told her something else? Did she think that her dragon's scales would save her from the explosion? Or did she just want to die with her mate?

  My brain couldn’t land on any explanation that made sense, and I couldn’t fathom how a single bite from my dragon’s teeth had been enough to end her. That didn’t make sense. Rhelia was invincible. She was death on wings. She couldn’t be killed, least of all by me. She could kill me a thousand times before I would ever get close to her, I was sure of it.

  “Trev? What happened? Why is it her?”

  But Trev was sobbing uncontrollably, and wouldn’t answer. I was sure it was that he wouldn’t, and not that he couldn’t, because he could have spoken to me through our twin bond, but all I felt through that bond was despair. The worst kind of pain that a human could experience, as though I’d torn a part of his soul away from him.

  “What do I do, Trev? What do I do? How do I make this right?” Tears were streaming down my face and my voice was barely audible around the grief that choked me, but I didn’t know what to do. My brother was going to die because of a thing I had done, and I didn’t know how to make it right.

  Could you?

  Could I what?

  Could you break Trevor free yesterday?

  The memory surfaced like a bubble in a pond, clear, and shiny and destroyed with the mere swipe of a hand… but it was there. And before I could think of anything else, before I could say anything, before I could even take another breath, I was reaching through time and space, but in this case, mostly through time.

  I HAD MOVED entirely on instinct, or what I thought was instinct, using some tiny backwater of my brain that understood better than I did what was going on. Or maybe it was just that the thing I wished to see most in the world right then was a living, breathing Rhelia. One who hadn’t just had the life crushed out of her by my dragon jaws. One who wouldn’t stare blankly at me as I screamed her name over and over again.

  “Rhelia!” I gasped, mostly in surprise, as I found myself staring into her eyes once more. Her living, seeing eyes.

  Before she could even acknowledge my presence, I threw my arms around her and held tight, hoping desperately that she wouldn’t find the personal contact an invasion of her space.

  “Living Cat, are you well?” she whispered, returning the embrace, much to my surprise and relief. “You sssseem disssstressssed.”

  Yeah. You could say that. Or well, someone could. I couldn’t, because I was too busy sobbing into Rhelia’s hair.

  When I could finally breathe clearly again, I said, “‘Well’ is not the word that I would choose to describe myself at the moment, TBH.”

  “TBH?” she asked.

  “Oh, come on. I know you spend as much time on the computer as Trev does, you must know that acronym.”

  She laughed, then.

  “Ssssomeone hassss been ssssnooping while I’ve been locked away,” she responded, then stepped back a bit and took a good look at me. “Why are you here? You cannot hope to resssscue me from thissss placsssse, ssssurely?”

  I took a deep breath, noticed said breath was full of dank, moldy smell, and finally took a look around.

  “What, does every MOME headquarters have its own dungeon?”

  “Mosssst of them were built long enough ago that they do, but in thissss casssse, we are in what wassss left of the Bolivian HQ. Ssssomething about not wanting to rissssk anymore officessss, in casssse our friendssss wanted to come get ussss? The guardssss were a bit all over the placsssse with their thoughtssss. They sssseemed nervoussss.”

  Indeed, we were standing in the middle of a dank stone cell, surrounded by solid rock walls and thick metal bars. At least they’d left enough light in here for Rhelia to see by. It was a nicer accommodation than my last MOME visit. I reached out to touch one of the metal bars and instantly recoiled. It burned the way that the netting surrounding Trevor had.

  “Technetium,” I muttered, as I checked my hand for damage. “I’m amazed I was able to shift myself here.”

  Rhelia nodded.

  “Indeed, I did not exsssspect to ssssee you. Where did you come from?”

  Ah yes, that was a legitimate question, but how to answer it? And what good would that answer do? Could I shift Rhelia and myself out of here? And even if I could, would that save Trev? What would happen in the future if someone else were holding the needle? Would I kill them in time? Would they inject Trev sooner? How could I be sure I wasn’t going to make this whole thing worse? There was no way to predict what would happen if I changed things, unless…

  “Unlessss what, Living Cat?” Rhelia asked.

  I ignored the reminder that my thoughts tended to be an open book for Rhelia and the other dragons, focusing on the thought that had just tickled the back of my mind.

  “Unless the person holding the syringe in the future knows exactly what’s supposed to happen and plays along,” I said, realization dawning on me. “Albert was right, time does fix itself.”

  Rhelia gave me the kind of smile that would have terrified me if I’d thought I were her prey. Luckily, we both had bigger game in mind.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE Rhelia and me very long to come up with a plan, especially after I asked her a few pointed questions about how they were being held. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were each being used as collateral against the other. If one attempted escape, the other would be killed, and vice versa. It wasn’t particularly creative, but it was effective. Of course, once I informed Rhelia of MOME’s true intentions (which, thankfully, she had suspected already—thus cutting my explanation time in half), she was more than willing to take the necessary risks. I just hoped I was right about how this was all supposed to play out.

  The reason I was able to shift in and out of Rhelia’s cell, it turned out, was that the cell was not lined completely with Technetium, so I was able to shift through the rock bed instead of the areas where the bars covered things. Meanwhile, for Rhelia and Tre
vor, who were unable to shift through time and space as I was, the prison was quite effective. They didn’t have time to dig through the rock bed before a guard would come running, and the Technetium kept them from even touching their bars, let alone somehow manipulating them out of the way.

  I probably could have shifted Rhelia out of there with me, but I discovered not long after I settled into her cell that I was truly exhausted from everything I’d already done that day. Not only had I shifted myself to the past, and straight to Rhelia’s prison, I had also shifted an army of a hundred weredragons straight from the dragon realm into the human realm, then changed into a dragon, taught myself to fly right quick, and attacked and killed one of my new friends. It had been a rough day, by any stretch of the imagination.

  So, I wasn’t going to shift Rhelia anywhere before I got some rest. Instead, Rhelia and I talked for a long time, switching to our mental-only channel for all of the important bits. To an outside observer, it probably looked like two really tired people just staring at the walls and each other for a long time. Then it probably looked like I fell asleep for a few hours.

  Probably because I did.

  I woke to a quick slap across my face.

  “You musssst go. They are coming.”

  I nodded and, without another word, I shifted, hoping against hope that the next time I saw Rhelia she would be alive and well, not a blank-eyed rag doll hanging limply in my arms.

  ~~~

  When I arrived in front of Siara, she damned near dropped the ceramic bowl she’d been drinking soup from.

  “I do not appreciate being surprised, youngling,” she said.

  I smiled, though I doubt the gesture reached my eyes.

  “Then you’re not going to like anything I have to say.”

  I looked around the room we were in, a modern kitchen by all appearances, complete with tile backsplash and a fancy kitchen island with a butcher block counter, and I wondered if she had brought all of this back from an Ikea in the human realm and installed it herself, or if she had somehow transported a fully finished home from the human realm to here, or somehow managed to get human contractors to come work on the place in the dragon realm. The last seemed particularly unlikely.