“Right, so you can take away someone’s power. Is it permanent?”
“That is none of your—”
“Could it be permanent?” I asked. “Could you strip someone of their power forever?”
Hel shrugged.
“All of this?” I gestured around the cavern that surrounded us, my brain putting things together, even in the face of Hel’s reticence. “This was accomplished with the power of others, wasn’t it? That’s what feeds your power, right? Stripping it from everyone else here?”
Hel glared at me, but she didn’t deny it.
“Look,” I said, holding up my bound wrists in the best imitation of a gesture of surrender I could muster. “I don’t care what you do with it, really, as long as it’s possible that you can make it permanent.”
Hel said nothing.
“I believe,” I continued, hoping I was on the right track, “that if you assign me the quest of my choosing, I can bring you a power you might find quite useful.”
Hel raised a single sculpted eyebrow and I decided now was my chance.
“In return for my completing a quest at the end of which I will deliver to you a mage of great power, all I ask is one favor in return. Deal?”
“And what quest would you choose, human?”
“Oh, you know, just overthrowing MOME, taking Rebecca Dryer permanently out of the game, and saving the universe.”
I BLINKED AND rubbed my eyes, sure that I was imagining what I was seeing.
Because what I was seeing looked like every Gwedamned dragon in the dragon realm mustering for battle in the middle of a sun-soaked valley, and that… that didn’t seem like the best idea, considering each and every one of them could be weaponized and used to take out… the world.
“What in the devil is going on here?” asked Azrael from beside me. They seemed relieved to be back in their succubus form, flaring their silver wings in the sunlight atop the pillar of earth on which we now stood, looking out over the dragon meeting grounds. Once Hel had agreed to my terms she’d been almost eager to get me out of her realm. She hadn’t even let me say goodbye to my folks.
“I don’t know, but I think we’d better find out before ‘bad things’ happen.”
“Bad things?” Azrael raised an eyebrow, and I blinked hard as both of their forms tried to take up the same space in my vision. “Worse than the usual?”
“The same as usual,” I replied.
Azrael just smiled and took wing—both of which were healed in their current form—and I was about to issue a complaint about them flying off without me, when I remembered that they weren’t the only ones with wings.
I closed my eyes, calling to mind the feel of wind rushing over my scales, gravity defied by aerodynamics, and the faint trace of fire in my belly. Then I leapt off the ledge, spread my giant scaly wings, and joined Azrael as he spiraled down to the center of the frenetic bustle happening on the ground.
I shifted to my human form the moment we landed, and there was a moment of awkward silence before I was wrapped in more arms than I could easily count.
“Vic!”
“You’re alive!”
“We thought—”
“When Az didn’t come back right away—”
“No one knew—”
“How did you—”
I couldn’t keep track of all the things being said at once, but tears flooded my eyes as I registered the familiar feel of everyone I’d thought I would die saving. Sol, Seamus, Trev, Rhelia… all there, all embracing me.
I’m so sorry, Vic, for everything before, about Rhelia.
I was too overwhelmed to reply, especially because something about Trev reaching out telepathically felt like regaining a limb I thought I’d lost, but all I could do was lean even harder into the group hug. It was probably minutes before any of us let go.
“Oh man,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “I really missed you guys.”
“You missed us?” Sol asked, sounding oddly surprised. When I turned to look at her, probably with confusion displayed in a twist of eyebrows, she smiled and shook her head. “I mean, that’s fine, it’s great that you care enough to miss us in a short period of time, but we were the ones that thought you were dead, Gatita. You knew you weren’t dead. Why would you miss us? You’ve only been gone for a few hours.”
I looked around at all of them, trying to catch the light in their eyes that would tell me Sol was fucking with me. I looked for Azrael to confirm that I wasn’t losing my Gwendamned mind, but they were a few meters away talking intently with one of the dragons.
“Ok, this isn’t funny,” I said, my eyes snapping to Seamus, who I figured was the least likely to keep a joke running if it was clearly making someone uncomfortable, but he just looked at me with his head tilted to one side, as though waiting for an explanation.
“You guys, I was gone for like five days! What are you talking about?”
“Five days?” asked Trevor, looking concerned, but not nearly as incredulous as I would expect if I had seriously been gone for only a few hours here on Earth. “Which realm were you in?”
“Hell,” I said, looking desperately between all the faces of the people I loved most in the world. “Or, well, the Realm of the Dead, not really Hell I guess, and not even really the Realm of the Dead, but that’s what Hel called it, so…”
I trailed off, realizing that I was rambling. Sol looked curious, Seamus concerned, Rhelia looked… her face was oddly blank. Like blank enough that I was suddenly certain that she was hiding something, but before I could ask what that might be, Trev distracted me.
“Did you… meet anyone interesting there?” he asked, and the question snapped my attention back to him. As soon as my eyes met his, I knew. I knew in my bones, and the knowledge made me want to throw up.
“You knew they were there. This whole time. You knew.”
The way Trev blanched, the tightness in his jaw, he looked almost like I’d punched him in the gut, and he didn’t deny it, not even a little bit.
“Gatita, what—”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t decide if it was worse that my parents had left without telling me where they were going, but had for some reason told Trev, or that Trev hadn’t told me after he found out. It was hard to weigh betrayals that way.
I couldn’t look Trev in the eyes, and I couldn’t cope with feeling like I’d just gotten Trev back and then lost him again a few heartbeats later.
I wasn’t really thinking of a destination when I reached through space and time, but I just didn’t want to be here anymore, and I really hoped Azrael had been paying attention enough to fill everyone in on the pertinent details, because all I wanted to do was disappear.
Turns out that’s a not a good mindset to have when one is reaching through spacetime.
When I opened my eyes, I was no longer surrounded by my friends, or hundreds of dragons preparing for battle.
I was no longer surrounded by anything at all.
Oops, I thought, as darkness enveloped me.
VICTORIA MARMOT
and the
ROAD TO HELL
Virginia McClain
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Natasha Snow
Copyright © 2019 Virginia McClain
All rights reserved.
To Dad, for always having a sense of humor.
THE NOTHINGNESS WAS absolutely terrifying.
I would probably have shit my pants, except I didn’t appear to have any pants, let alone an intestinal tract with which to shit them. In fact, even the sensation of terror felt slightly off, because I had no heart to race, no pulse to quicken, no breath to catch.
An instant ago, I had been surrounded by friends in a world I recognized. Then Trev had admitted he’d known about Mom and Dad being alive, I’d freaked out, re
ached through time and space while only wanting to disappear, and now…
I had nothing.
I could see nothing. No light, no shadow, no hint of shapes in darkness, just… nothing.
Even that would have been manageable, I think, if I could have felt anything. Anything at all. But for a moment, for as long as it took me to register that I didn’t seem to have a body, or anything at all to contain me—whatever qualified as “me” in that instant—I was nothing.
Nothing but thoughts.
And then, as suddenly as the thought occurred to me—in the instant in which my mind wanted my body to be there—it was. I still couldn’t see it, or anything else, but I could feel my hands, feet, heart beating, lungs breathing, all the little twitches and ticks that make up a body.
And the moment that I longed to see that body, if only to confirm that I wasn’t somehow hallucinating it, I could.
There was light, though it was the strangest light I’d ever experienced, since it seemed to have no origin, and lit nothing but my body. There was no source, and my body cast no shadows. The light wasn’t coming from within me, but a glow surrounded me like a tightly wrapped blanket.
It was just enough to confirm that I had eyes to see and a body to feel. A naked one, for a heartbeat anyway, until I thought that I’d rather not be, and was suddenly covered in some galaxy leggings and a soft t-shirt with “i2 (keep it real)” emblazoned on the chest.
“Better than what my Gwen powers keep choosing,” I said, into the nothing. Because even though I now had a clothed body that I could feel, there was still nothing around me. So much so, that I wondered how I was speaking aloud. I supposed there must be oxygen, since I was still alive and didn’t even feel out of breath, but there was certainly no motion of air around me, or even a sense of what was up or down. I felt as though I were floating in space, only without all the freezing to death, having all your blood vessels burst, and asphyxiation.
Then I wondered if the reason that I wasn’t dying was simply because I was already dead.
What else would cause me to be suspended in nothing, as a string of thoughts that seemed to be able to will myself into being?
Beginning to panic, and now with a body that latched fully onto the sensation of a tightening chest and more rapid breathing, I closed my eyes and tried to shift back to the dragon realm. I reached for it with every fiber of my being. Stretched desperately for that field in the sunlight, where I’d just reappeared in front of all of my friends after my crazy trip through hell.
And got nothing but the mother of all headaches in return.
That did not help the rising panic situation.
I tried to take some deep, calming breaths and focus on lowering my heart rate.
To my amazement, it worked.
Although I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. If I’d just managed to think galaxy leggings into existence, why not calm my breathing with a thought too? Which sort of just reinforced the idea that none of this was real. Which brought me back to being convinced that I was dead. And…cue chest tightening.
“Damn it! Calm the fuck down, Vic.”
And ok, apparently yelling at myself worked too. As soon as I said the words, my heart rate returned to normal again.
I closed my eyes again, and tried reaching for every location I could think of: the glade of Life, Sol’s cabin in the Andes, the ruins of my old house in Arizona, the ruins of my older home in Colorado, Uncle Algy’s place, Flagstaff High School—nothing worked. I remained surrounded by nothing.
“This is getting kinda old,” I informed the nothing.
“I would really prefer it if I had someone to talk to,” I added, hopefully.
Since I’d been half expecting to conjure another person out of thin air, I should not have nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a soft thump to my right. I did anyway.
But when I turned to inspect the blackness there, I didn’t see anything.
“I would love to be able to see the someone I can talk to,” I clarified, and immediately gasped, finding myself confronted with a very large, very toothy snow leopard.
“PLEASE DON’T EAT me.”
Of course, right after I said it, the giant snow leopard’s jaw snapped shut in the final throes of what, now, was clearly a yawn, but that didn’t make my ass unclench, or keep my stomach from feeling like it was doing somersaults for a while. Instead, it blew a huff of air out of its nose and twitched its expansive whiskers, before stepping past me and into… a room that hadn’t existed a second ago.
Dark hardwood flooring stretched beneath a throw rug, low coffee table, and some plush leather couches. There was also a fireplace, complete with a crackling fire and the smell of cedar smoke. Given that the place looked and smelled like a cozy combination of my parents’ Colorado living room and Sol’s Andean cabin, someone was trying to make me feel better.
Belatedly, it occurred to me that someone was probably me.
The excessively large snow leopard waltzed past me, past the coffee table, and onto the dark leather sofa. There, she twitched her large, fluffy tail a few times before pressing her furry head into the sofa cushion and blinking sleepily at me.
It was then, gazing into eyes that weren’t the dazzling grey exhibited by most snow leopards, but instead ringed in a bright green like my own, that I realized exactly who I was staring at.
“You’re me, aren’t you?” I asked, unsure if that was the right way to phrase it. “Or, me when I’m a snow leopard, anyway.”
Feline me merely blinked at me again, then shut her eyes and began purring softly.
“Well, fuck. I was kinda hoping for someone to talk to, you know. Not just someone to talk at.”
Snow leopard me said nothing, but the large oak door to the room, which hadn’t been there a moment ago, suddenly reverberated with a deep and echoing thump.
“Well, that’s not terrifying,” I said, reluctantly turning away from snow leopard me and heading towards the newly existent door.
IF STARING DOWN snow leopard me had been disconcerting, staring into the plate-sized eyes of a dragon was as terrifying as the nothingness of death.
“You can turn off the ‘make the human shit her pants glamour’ any time now,” I said, by way of introduction.
“I am not using my glamour, Vic. It’s just that dragons are terrifying up close. Even when they’re you.”
That voice wasn’t mine. Or, at least, it didn’t come from my human mouth. What qualified as “mine” in this place was getting stupidly more complicated by the second.
“I suppose we’re all here?” asked the dragon, poking her head, which was about five times the size of the average horse head, into the room. “Hey, Kit!” she exclaimed, addressing the still sleeping feline, whose tail flicked in a semi-conscious gesture of welcome.
“Mind making the room bigger, Vic?”
The dragon turned her giant head in my direction again, and I realized she was talking to me. I had been too stunned by her overall appearance to really listen to her. Unlike my snow leopard form, which I had at least seen in the mirror once, I’d never gotten to look at any part of my dragon form for more than a few fleeting seconds while I was inhabiting its skin. Or its scales, I suppose I should say.
“Room, be bigger,” I said, not sure how to make things adjust intentionally without voicing my requests, and finding myself too distracted by dragon-me’s beauty to even notice how much larger the room and door got. Instead, I stood mesmerized, as dragon-me pushed her enormous, scaled body into a room that was now large enough to encompass her in all of her sunset-colored glory. I’d forgotten just how stunning those scales were. Perhaps not surprising, considering I’d never gotten more than a peripheral glimpse of them. Seeing them full-on, and from the perspective of a human, was completely entrancing. Almost hypnotic.
“I know, we’re lovely, aren’t we?”
I blinked, distantly noticing that the voice wasn’t mine.
“Why have I never noticed
that I can speak aloud in dragon form?” I asked, suddenly embarrassed.
“Yes, well, you’re rather new to the whole being a dragon thing, aren’t you? And I… well, I don’t exactly have more experience—I haven’t existed any longer than you have, since we’re the same person really, but without human thoughts to distract me it all just sort of… works. You’ll need practice, of course, but dragon vocal chords are incredibly versatile. There’s little we can’t do with them. Anyway, I didn’t mean to show off, but since you were already speaking aloud with Kit, I thought it was only polite to do the same.”
I took a deep breath and decided to focus on the last thing dragon-me had just said.
“You heard me speaking to her?”
“More or less. I was you while you were speaking to her, so I heard everything.”
“And you’re not me now?” I asked, starting to wish I were sitting down. As soon as the thought formed, I was sitting on a large, dark leather sofa perpendicular to the one where feline-me slept.
“Ok, this place is freaking me out,” I admitted.
“Yes, I’d noticed. I suppose that’s understandable. You’re never conscious when you’re here, after all. None of us are, usually.”
“Where, exactly, is here?” I asked, trying not to wince.
“Well, that’s complicated, but the short answer is… the extradimensional pocket where you keep all your dark matter.”
“Isn’t my dark matter inside me, spread throughout my blood?”
“Yep.”
“So, I’m inside myself?”
“Sort of.”
“That doesn’t seem like a place I ought to be able to go,” I said, feeling my mind trying to bend around to understand dragon-me’s explanation.
“It does seem implausible,” she agreed. “But here we are.”
“How could I possibly have gotten here?”
“I’m guessing it had something to do with your Gwen-given abilities, but I’m not entirely sure, to be honest.”
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 51