Renata looked at me, then at Azrael, then at the canyon one more time.
“What makes you think we can even cross it?” she asked. “There is no trail. No suggestion that other humans have been this way.”
I smiled.
“No, but there is a goat trail, just over there.” I nodded in the direction of the faint trace of a path a few meters away. “And we ought to be able to make that work.”
Renata frowned.
“Goats are excellent climbers,” she said.
“So am I,” I replied, just before hopping over the edge to the aforementioned goat trail and offering a hand back up to Azrael.
Azrael looked at Renata, then at me, let out a non-committal caw, and extended their good wing down to where I waited on the rocks below.
Renata looked at me and shrugged before jumping down beside me.
THE NEXT FEW days were difficult. Az’s wing was causing them all kinds of pain as we made our way down the loose, steep choss field that was the canyon wall, and every slip, stumble, and fall seemed to wear heavily on the poor, feathered mess.
Renata seemed as unfazed by our descent into the canyon as she was by everything else in life. She helped with Az sometimes, but mostly she just trailed behind us, silent, weaving in and out of the grey mist that surrounded her constantly.
Alone, crossing this canyon would have been a challenge, but with a giant injured raven in tow, the whole debacle felt like one monumental obstacle after another. And yet… and yet, for the first time in three weeks, I felt like I wasn’t spinning completely out of control. I felt… grounded, solid, real. After weeks of being thrown one new magical conundrum after another, after trying to solve problems I hadn’t even known existed before I was pushed head first into this crazy-assed ocean of magic in the midst of a fucking hurricane… it felt really good to just be in charge of getting three people from one side of a canyon to another.
Like, so good.
Like, even when I was trying to shove a busted raven over a four foot high ledge that was crumbling quickly all around us, or when I was traversing a twenty foot shelf that plummeted into a pool full of scummy water but which would allow me to meet the injured raven in a place that would help them overcome the next bit of cliff face with a much lower chance of dying, or while I was cleaning and cooking trout that Azrael had snatched from the river with their beak in order to feed us all, or building a fire with nothing but two sticks, a large piece of bark, some dry leaves, and a shit-ton of elbow grease, or falling asleep in a heap of raven feathers each night so exhausted that even the scars on my shoulder and face throbbed with it, even then, my days in the canyon seemed a thousand times more manageable than this whole take-down-the-corrupt-magical-government-before-it-takes-everyone-else-down-with-it schtick.
I mean, fuck, why couldn’t more of my problems be solved just by managing to survive in the wilderness? This was what I was good at. This was what I had trained to do since I was a tiny kid. This was where I felt like, not only did I know my ass from a hot rock, but I could defend a doctoral thesis on the ways in which my ass differed from a sun-warmed piece of basalt.
So perhaps it should have been no surprise to anyone that when we finally clawed our broken, tired asses up to the top of the cliff on the far side of the canyon and saw a giant fucking mountain range full of jagged, snow-capped peaks in front of us, I just laughed, turned to help pull Az up over the ledge behind me, and kept on plowing ahead.
IF YOU’RE NOT familiar with traversing mountain ranges, you may not be aware that, unless you’re on a trip with the specific goal of bagging a summit, you don’t generally want to go over any mountain tops. You want to go between and around them as much as possible. Mountains can come in many shapes and sizes, and some of the really old ones can be pretty mellow, but young upstarts like the Rockies, Andes, and Sierras do not fuck around. The mountain range between us and this “Citadel” Renata kept referring to was new to me, but it looked young. Stark, steep, devoid of plant life from about two-thirds of the way up. It was an imposing line of stone sentinels that ran the length of the horizon, and stretched from the ground beneath our feet to the cloud cover that kept its peaks invisible.
In other words, it looked a lot like my old backyard.
Unfortunately, my old backyard regularly kills people. The Rockies aren’t a great place to drag an injured friend around, and the pass we were going to need to clear here in the Realm of the Dead was not nearly as friendly as I would have liked either. The pass would keep us from having to summit any of the nearest peaks, but only by a few hundred meters. We still had quite the climb ahead of us. Unlike the canyon we’d just traversed, the pass at least did us the favor of having a trail winding up it. Sadly, that didn’t help as much as one might hope. We still wound up having to scale a handful of giant boulders that lay across the switchbacks winding up the steep slope. We couldn’t skirt the boulders without risking rolling a few hundred meters down the scree pile that called itself a mountainside here, so up and over we went.
All that scrambling made me extremely grateful that my arms had been healing well; the cuts and bruises that I’d entered the canyon with had stayed clean enough that they’d scabbed over well and could now withstand a bit of exertion. Even still, I had to grit through quite a bit more pain to get myself and Az up over those boulders than I would have liked.
The trail, such as it was, also meant that the aforementioned scree pile wasn’t completely covered in a season’s worth of cracked and shifting snow for every step of the way. Only half of the way. What can I tell you? Trails aren’t always as useful as everyone wants them to be. Sometimes, all they do is tell you that someone else was once stupid enough to make your same mistakes.
On the other hand, the trail also did sweet fuck all to keep us from freezing to death as we fought gale force winds, driving snow, and ice-slicked crenellations on our way to the top of the saddle. As I shoved my hands under my armpits and jumped up and down in place while Renata helped Az over the last crusted rise that should lead to our descent, I reminded myself that this was better than the peaks to either side of us—which definitely would have killed us if we’d tried them—but it wasn’t much better, and I was close to hypothermic by the time I’d dragged my own ass over the top.
Sadly, no matter how much I bitched under my breath, the weather didn’t seem to be interested in our epic human vs. nature narrative thread, and the wind, clouds, and blowing snow kept the view at the top hidden from us. I could smell the ice-tinged air that often accompanied high altitude ascents, but I did not get to enjoy a sweeping view of the land below us, and I would have been pissed about it, but I was too busy trying to stay warm now that we were no longer climbing.
I had to do a lot of skipping to keep my blood pumping, and Az kept stopping to wrap me in their good wing periodically, shoving me up against their warm, feathered, bird body. Then, when we were about halfway through our descent, the view opened up. I might have missed it if Renata hadn’t been there.
As it was, I had my head down and was grumbling, “What the hell is the point of being in a damned book if the clouds don’t clear to let you enjoy an epic view from the summit of a mountain you just dragged a giant busted bird up, anyway? If I have to keep performing rescues that almost get me killed and I have to be rescued half the damned time even though I’ve been granted a bunch of ridiculous magical powers that are straight out of a completely predictable chosen-one narrative, shouldn’t we at least get to enjoy the fucking view? Even the fucking hobbits got to enjoy the view, every now and again.”
And then, suddenly, I ran into Renata, who had stopped dead on the narrow trail in front of me.
“What…” but as I raised my eyes from where the trail met Renata’s mist-covered boots, I saw precisely what had made her stop. The sun, which had been hiding in the clouds for the past few hours of our journey, was now peeking out from behind its grey curtain to entertain us with a glorious orange, red, pink, and purple di
splay splattered across the clouds. And the light show silhouetted the peaks and valleys of an enormous citadel that rested at the foot of the mountains we’d just crossed.
“Well, fuck me.”
Caw.
“It is rather splendid in this light,” Renata admitted.
“THAT’S ONLY A few hours away,” I said.
Renata nodded, or I thought she did. It was difficult to see a motion that subtle through the swirling grey mist that constantly surrounded her.
As we descended the remainder of the mountain in silence, half taken by the glorious sunset glowing ostentatiously behind the city in the distance, half consumed with thoughts of what getting to the citadel meant for each of us, I considered Renata’s figure moving silently before me and wondered if the mist was some kind of magic, and, if so, how she managed to use it. After all, Az and I were unable to access any of our powers.
“It is not magic,” she said, over her shoulder in front of me.
“You can read minds now?” I was starting to wonder how much Renata wasn’t telling us.
“You were going to ask me eventually,” she said, as if that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
“Care to explain how you know that?”
“The mist, how quickly I move, even my strength, all come from one simple thing,” she explained. “I am only half in this realm, and always half in my own realm.”
My brain stuttered.
“How does that work?”
“I am not entirely sure of the science behind it. It is not widely studied, as my kind are incredibly rare, but something about my existence creates a permanent portal between my realm and whichever other realm I choose to travel in. However, time in my realm runs… differently, and… I can move back and forth in other realms’ timelines with some flexibility. Which is why I appear to move faster than should be possible.”
“And your strength?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“The gravity in my realm is considerably higher than in most other realms. Most realms leave me feeling feather light and as strong as a titan.”
Caw.
I jumped forward to keep Azrael from running into me, and started walking again. My feet had apparently been unequal to the task of keeping me moving while my brain processed the information it had just gotten.
“How do you manage to exist in two places at once?” I asked, once my feet had started moving again.
“I am not sure. As I said, it is a little studied phenomenon.”
Something about Renata’s voice made me think she wasn’t quite telling the truth, but maybe it was my imagination.
“It is why MOME was so desperate to capture and study me,” she offered up after a long pause. “It is also why my father was so desperate to keep me near. He was…a peculiar vampire.”
That sounded ominous enough that I was pretty much afraid to ask, but apparently I didn’t need to. While Renata had been almost entirely quiet on our journey up to now—despite my many questions about this supposed “Realm of the Dead” and what it meant that we were here—she was suddenly all too willing to share. The drastic change was welcome, in a way. I knew so little about how this world worked that any new information seemed incredibly valuable to me, although it also made me a bit uncomfortable.
“I believe you are familiar with my father’s obsession with me?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said. “He was very keen to get ahold of you. It was why he kept trying to give us over to MOME. Or at least, he was always asking me where you were whenever he showed up with a bunch of MOME asshats trying to kill us.”
“And you did not simply tell him where I was and leave me to my fate?”
I thought about that for a minute. It would have been easier to tell Edik where we’d left Renata and let them have their own showdown, but…
“All I knew about you was that you had been rescued with the rest of the ‘child’ captives held with MOME and that you clearly hadn’t tried to get in touch with your dad after getting free. I knew we’d left instructions with the folks caring for all the children to put them in touch with their families if they wanted them. I figured if you hadn’t tracked down Edik yet, there was a reason. And, after my own experiences with him, I wasn’t keen to force him on anyone else.”
“Most people on Earth would have insisted that a child should be reunited with their parents,” Renata commented, seemingly without ire.
“Well, I’m not most people. There are good reasons for kids not to want to be with their parents. If you’d been younger, I might have arranged a meeting or something. I think that’s what they did for all the youngest kids we busted out of MOME, but older ones…”
Renata laughed, a dry sound, at least in this realm.
“I am certainly older. I am likely twice your age, at least in your world. However, in my world… I do not seem to age in my world. And as I spend more than half my time here… I do not seem to age very quickly at all. I believe that is why my father wished to find me. He was rather… obsessed with his own mortality.”
“Uh… wasn’t he a vampire?”
“Indeed. He was. But did you know that vampires aren’t truly immortal?”
That had me stopped in the trail long enough for Az to smack into my back.
Caw.
“They aren’t?” I asked.
Renata laughed again.
“Oh, they are so close as for it to make no difference to most of them. With food in abundance, they will live for thousands of years. No one is entirely sure quite how long. But eventually, their bodies can no longer support the constant energy transfer, so they age and die, just like anyone else.”
“So… you’re telling me Edik was afraid of dying?”
“Indeed. So much so, that he was willing to spend as much time as possible in my realm with me. He was convinced it would stop his aging.”
“Woah, so he was going to what, move in with you?”
“In a sense…. I do not think that would have worked, for many reasons. But he was determined to try. I could never be near him but he would find a way to latch on to me and make me take him into my own realm.”
We were all silent for a long time, as we resumed our slow plod down the steep hillside.
“I do not enjoy having other people in my realm. It… feels wrong.”
And sure, I could see that. I mean, I didn’t have my own pocket realm that I could visit at will, but… I didn’t even like having most people hang out in my room for too long. If I had a whole realm that was unique to me, and I was forced to share it against my will?
I shuddered.
I decided not to ask too many follow-up questions on that one, though. Honestly, I was amazed with how much information Renata had just volunteered. No one else in the magical community had been this forthcoming with me. Then again, maybe this was just the first chance I’d had to spend time talking to someone about how any of this stuff worked. It seemed like ever since that first night that Edik had attacked me, the night when Seamus had explained a bit about being a werewolf and I’d first learned that magic was more than something to read about in books, I’d been constantly on the run, trying to preserve my life and the lives of everyone I cared about. It had all been running, evading capture, dodging death, helping people, getting rescued, almost dying…. None of which left time for lectures about how magic worked, what everything was called, or who got which powers, and why.
Which reminded me…
“Hey, Az, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you have different preferred pronouns for your different forms?
Caw caw.
On our first night camping in the canyon, we’d decided two caws would be no. One would be yes. Charades was even harder for Az in crow form than it had been as a squirrel demon.
“So, if I use they/them for all of your forms, that’s ok with you?”
Caw.
“Is there any time you’d like me to use different pronouns?”
Caw caw.
“Cool. Sorry I didn’t ask earlier. Everyone just keeps trying to kill us and then I forget.”
Caw.
Az’s beak lowered to my shoulder and they nipped very gently at my earlobe in what I took to be an affectionate motion. It still hurt. I tried to be surreptitious about rubbing it after they let go, though.
I looked out at the citadel in the distance again, and the excitement I’d felt at first seeing it—knowing the end of our journey was in sight, that I’d soon have my powers restored and be able to get back to fighting MOME and stopping Rebecca Dryer from blowing up the world—faded, as I realized that as soon as we reached that citadel, we’d be out of the wilderness and I would be back to feeling like I’d stumbled into the chat room for a MMORPG as a level one character, while the only other people logged in were level 70 and all in a different guild than me.
“Do not worry, Victoria,” Renata said, ignoring the hundred times that I’d asked her to call me Vic. “You will not feel like a fish out of water forever. Soon you will hit your stride.”
I laughed awkwardly, deciding that even if what Renata could do wasn’t mind reading, it was close enough to make me uncomfortable.
This time when the citadel caught my eye, I began wondering how different things would be there compared to all of the other magical places I’d been so far. It looked… like the silhouette of a life-sized Duplo construction—as though a mountain-sized toddler had spent hours perfecting their sprawling structure, half blocky towers, half single-story sprawls, none of it particularly artfully put together, though still striking when haloed by the setting sun from a great distance.
“It does not improve upon closer inspection,” said Renata, putting the final nail in the coffin of “I’m not mind reading.”
“But I am not,” she said. “It is only that once I have responded to something you were going to say in a moment, you will not say it anyway, and so you believe you only thought it.”
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 49