“I can’t save all of you,” Renata said, her voice sounding pained. “There isn’t enough time.”
And she was right. Unless she had a few more tricks that I hadn’t seen yet, there was no way she could move fast enough to move us all out of the way of these bullets. And the people behind me, the brainwashed innocents who were still compelled by the command I’d given them to follow me, were still coming out the heavy glass doors, and would keep coming until I gave them a contradicting order that they could all hear. Which was never going to work with all the gunfire and shouting going on. Gunfire that had already torn a hole in my sleeve and the skin of my arm, as I tried to dodge a hail of tiny obstacles that were coming at me in the fastest game of dodgeball I’d ever played in my life. Renata was busy dodging as well. She hadn’t let go of my hand yet, but I could already tell this was never going to work—we were going to have to dodge in different directions soon. She couldn’t even save me. Not to mention Torrence and Rhelia, or all the nameless folks we’d just pulled from MOME’s dungeons. Not without getting herself killed. She needed more time.
And then I remembered that we were free of the damned dark matter suppressing powers of MOME’s dungeons, and I didn’t have to try to solve this one with nothing but a stolen uniform, my winning smile, and the apparently unsuppressable powers of a dhampir.
I also didn’t have time to plan anything, so I did the first thing that came to mind. I held tight to Renata’s hand, and reached through time and space.
AND WE DIDN’T go anywhere. Not really. Because I hadn’t reached through space all that much. Just a few feet to the side of where we’d been. Mostly I had reached through time. Not far, only thirty seconds into the past or so. Just long enough to turn and watch myself, Renata, and Rhelia come plowing towards the doors that would lead them out into the open, only they were plowing in a strange slow-mo, while Renata and I seemed to be the only ones moving at full speed. I guessed this was what she’d meant when she’d once told me that time in her dimension moved differently than it did in others. Our hands were still linked, and Renata immediately began pulling me towards our earlier selves, but I resisted.
“Wait,” I whispered.
Thankfully we were still in her liminal space, and I didn’t think anyone could see us. Certainly, when I glanced over my shoulder, the short bald guy who’d fired a spell right at my chest wasn’t doing anything but watching the door with the kind of manic anticipation generally reserved for toddlers and serial killers.
“We have to warn ourselves,” Renata hissed.
“No, we can’t warn ourselves, or we wouldn’t be here. We have to stop the folks who never made it out the door, and send them somewhere else.”
I might have only been doing the time travel thing for less than a week, but I was already pretty clear on the fact that you couldn’t really change the past, you could just nudge the future a little bit. Because when I finally had talked to Rhelia about it, it had been clear that at no point had she experienced a reality in which we hadn’t been working together to save Trev. She had never died, no matter how much it had looked like it, felt like it, to me the first time I’d seen it. But if I hadn’t gone back in time, we never would have had the plan to begin with. You couldn’t change the past, but if you didn’t time travel the past would have turned out differently. So, I already knew that we weren’t here to warn past me, or past Renata, or even past Rhelia and Torrence, because damn it, they’d made it out the door, and we couldn’t change who left the building before the shooting started, even if we tried.
I hadn’t noticed who had made it out besides the four of us, honestly, so as soon as the doors opened, and past me came storming out in slow motion, I pulled Renata along, and the two of us slid past Renata from 30 seconds ago, past Rhelia, who Renata seemed to make a concerted effort to bump into, and past Torrence. Then we plowed into the hallway, where most of the horde of mind control victims were making their way towards the doors at a slow but determined plod.
A few of them had moved more quickly, and were already blasting out the doors, even as we reached the main group. There was nothing I could do about them now. If they were outside, they were beyond my sphere of influence. I had to help the folks standing in front of us, before it was too late to save them. Then we would go back and save Rhelia and the others. We had to. There was no way that Trev was going to forgive me for getting his girlfriend killed for real. He’d barely forgiven me for when it hadn’t actually happened.
But first Renata whipped out the whistle, which I belatedly realized she must have stolen off of Rhelia as we walked past her, and she let go of my hand, so that she could blow the thing where everyone could hear it.
The hundred-ish group of magical beings, which I now noticed covered every being, including trolls, pixies, elves, human mages, human weres, and an assortment of other folks I had no name for, came to an abrupt halt.
“I need everyone to hold hands,” I said, nodding my appreciation to Renata. I had kind of assumed that I could just give new orders to the mind controlees, but that probably wasn’t how this worked. “Hug if you have to, but I need everyone connected right away.”
I shuddered, as I heard the army behind us open fire. It wouldn’t be long before bullets and spells started making their way through the heavy glass doors into MOME. I had to hope they’d been magically reinforced, or something, because otherwise we weren’t even going to have time to get us out of here without casualties.
Luckily, the folks who’d had their minds altered still seemed inclined to listen to whistle-given commands, and within a few heartbeats of asking, we had a group of a hundred or more people of every variety, including all the folks who still had unconscious MOME guards draped over their shoulders, all holding onto one another. It could have been a Coke commercial—f we hadn’t all been about to die in a haze of bullets and spells, that is.
“Hold on tight,” I said, grabbing the arm of the nearest person, an orangish-toned elf, slightly taller than Nethia, but similar enough in appearance that I assumed he was from the same realm. His eyes were as blank as any of the others, so I didn’t bother engaging him in conversation. Even asking someone’s name when they were in this state felt like a violation. They couldn’t resist any question I asked them, so I didn’t want to ask them anything. I was going to stick to saving their lives if I could, and if they felt like telling me about themselves once they were better, that was their business.
As soon as I gripped the orange elf’s arm, Renata slipped the whistle back into her pocket and grabbed onto my other hand.
“Here goes nothing,” I said.
And pulled over a hundred people through time and space.
AND SUDDENLY, I felt so drained that if I hadn’t been holding onto two other people, I would have collapsed to the… cactus and yucca strewn ground? That wasn’t right.
“The fuck?” I asked groggily, blinking at the high desert sun shining through a cerulean sky, baking away at the pink-tinged ground as though it were mid-July instead of early September. Because the desert didn’t really give a fuck about things like seasons. Or at least, not a piddly season like fall. It gave a little bit of a damn about winter, at this elevation, but September was just an excuse to have pretty sunsets, as far as the desert was concerned. That was fine. I got that. High deserts made sense to me in their own way. What I didn’t get was why we were in the rocky scrubland that smelled faintly of mesquite and juniper, when I’d been aiming for a certain grove of pine trees surrounding a singular oak tree just outside of Flagstaff.
“You did it,” Renata said, holding me up while looking at me quizzically. “You got them out.”
I blinked some more, and saw that she was mostly right. I seemed to have brought us all away from MOME.
But I should have been able to shift us all back to the grove. It wasn’t that far away, and this was a lot of people, sure, but I had moved way more people than this back in Bolivia. Of course, that had almost killed me, b
ut this group was like a tenth the size. I should have been able to make it all the way there, and I shouldn’t feel so damned drained.
“I was trying to take us to the Tree of Life,” I said, absently, as I took stock of where we were. I had also been trying to take us five minutes into the past, to make sure that we would have enough time to get back to the fight as soon as the shooting started. Maybe that was what had drained me so quickly. It was a problem I was beginning to ignore, as I started to wonder what the fuck these folks were going to do out here in the middle of the desert without any mode of transportation.
Renata shrugged.
“They are clear of the hail of bullets that MOME wished them to die in, so I think we can call this a success.”
“But they can’t stay here. The desert is no joke. September may as well be the middle of summer here, and they don’t have supplies. Even if they did have supplies, they can’t—”
“They will be fine,” Renata said. “At least until we can make it back to them.”
“You don’t understand how quickly dehydration and sunstroke can take out the unprepared.”
Renata shrugged.
“They are much better off than they were. You took them from certain death to a plausibly distant one that we have a decent chance of rescuing them from, after we have rescued the others.”
I sighed. She had a point. And I didn’t have the energy to argue. In fact, I didn’t have the energy to do much of anything.
I put out my hand, and was glad that Renata placed the whistle in it without even a question between us. I blew the pattern that I’d heard Rhelia and Renata use, then cleared my throat.
“Seek shelter from the sun, try to find water if you can. Don’t drink anything stagnant, only the moving stuff. Take care of yourselves and each other. If you can use your magic at all, do it. We’ll be back to find you as soon as we can.”
Then I turned and grabbed Renata’s hand, and once more reached through time and space.
AND PROMPTLY FELL right on my ass. Thankfully, I missed the two specimens of yucca and prickly pear that were hanging out nearby. Not so the tiny barrel cactus that was now mostly embedded in my right thigh, nor the pointy rock that had stabbed me in the left butt cheek.
“Ow,” I said, mainly to vent my frustration. It didn’t hurt that badly. If anything, it was a bit of a distraction from the still-throbbing bullet wounds in my shoulder and upper arm. As I stood up, both the barrel cactus and the rock released me. Barrel cacti were relatively friendly, as far as cacti went—the thorns were robust enough to hurt, but they mostly stayed in the cactus when I pulled away and stood up. It was a fact I was grateful for at that moment, since I really didn’t have time to pull a bunch of cactus spines out of my ass.
“I can’t shift,” I said to Renata, who was looking at me as though I were an untrained dog whose behavior she couldn’t begin to predict.
“Can you reach your magic at all, or did shifting so many people full of dark matter suppressant drain you entirely?” she asked, looking nonplussed. I wondered if she was calculating how long it would take her to run us back to Phoenix in the liminal space she occupied.
I started to reach for my snow leopard form, but then thought better of it. I didn’t know how much energy I had, and couldn’t be sure I’d have enough to shift again, but if we needed to get from here to Phoenix in a hurry, without me shifting us through space and time, there was really only one useful thing I could do.
Renata smiled, from far below me, as I spread my wings and lowered my neck enough for her to hop aboard. I didn’t know exactly how long it would take to fly from here to Phoenix, but it couldn’t be more than a few minutes, could it? It would have to be enough. I refused to think that we couldn’t make it back in time to save Rhelia and the others.
There had to be some advantages to being a dragon, damn it.
Like getting to light up the asshat who had given the order to fire on a bunch of unarmed brainwashing victims.
~~~
Fun fact: apparently, if you are a dragon with a dhampir on your back, you can fucking fly in liminal space, and thus turn what should have been a ten minute flight into a thirty second one. Honestly, with a trip that short, it was almost as fast as using Gwen powers.
And it was WAY more satisfying to dive at the head of MOME’s forces from a few thousand feet and release a spray of molten fire right in the bald fucker’s face.
Go ahead, ask me how I know.
And look, I am not a fan of killing. It made me physically ill to shoot that one MOME jerk, and it had even made me feel awful to incinerate Edik’s diamond cranium, honestly. But all evidence suggested that dragon-me was way less worried about violence in defense of one’s friends, and bald-manic-mage-dude had just unleashed a haze of bullets on me, my new dhampir friend, the tauren I was coming to think of as a battle buddy, at the very least, and my dragon sister-in-law, not to mention the hundred brainwashed MOME victims who he didn’t know I’d been able to remove from the line of fire.
So, yeah, I wasn’t feeling too guilty about roasting the dicktart.
He deserved it, and dragon-me let out a roar of vindictive rage and triumph when his body was immolated in dragon fire.
Unfortunately, having their leader incinerated didn’t miraculously get the rest of the troops to immediately cease hostilities. It did, however, serve as enough of a distraction to get Renata on the ground without getting her riddled with bullets. She proceeded to weave through our reality and her own, picking up the dozen or so hapless mind control victims who had managed to follow us out of the door the first time, and had since been standing awkwardly in a hail of bullets. As far as I could tell, Renata and I had arrived almost immediately after we’d left, mainly judging by how few bullet holes were riddling the brainwashing victims we’d had to leave behind. Sadly, it was a number greater than zero, but not by much. Most of them were still on their feet. And now they were getting sucked out of my field of vision, one at a time, faster than I could keep up with.
I didn’t see Rhelia anywhere, but I didn’t actually search for very long, because I was no longer in Renata’s liminal space, and therefore suddenly presented a very large stationary target. I was alerted to this fact by the hail of bullets that abruptly began raining down on me.
I needed to focus on saving my own ass for a minute.
~~~
Damn, I was learning a lot in this battle. For example, did you know that dragon hide is basically bulletproof? True story. The slugs raining down around me in the bright September sun simply bounced off, falling harmlessly to the ground. The few that bounced back towards the troops who had fired them at me seemed to ping against the shields that the mages had set up. Shields that my dragon eyes saw as a light glow encircling certain troops. Certain troops. But not all of them. And my dragon brain, for all that it was excited to wale on some enemies, was also a bit faster than my human brain, I guess, because it came to the conclusion that those unprotected folks were very likely to be even more of our brainwashed MOME victims. Perhaps dragon me could actually smell that dark matter suppressing water in them, or perhaps part of me simply realized that the only folks not likely to have shields would be the folks who MOME thought were expendable. So I pulled up before I could accidentally torch any of the folks who were shieldless.
Then I learned that dragon hides are bulletproof, but they aren’t completely spellproof. Many of the spells that the mages hiding behind shields slung at me bounced off as harmlessly as the bullets did. Many, but not all. Someone threw another one of those creepy-ass acid clouds outward and I barely dodged it (dragon memory in action is awesome, and it warned me that the acid cloud wouldn’t just bounce away), but I was too focused on dodging the acid cloud to successfully dodge the barrage of spells that followed in its wake, and one of those spells was nasty, and stung like a cat on fire. I didn’t even get a chance to see what spell it was, but luckily whatever it was had only grazed my tail, and while the pain was sharp,
it didn’t seem to be slowing me down. I roared off the pain and focused on a bit of retaliation.
Which led straight to the next fun fact of the day, namely that while many mage shields protect against bullets, you know what they don’t protect against? DRAGON FIRE. Seems like nothing is dragon fire proof, at least insofar as my recent experiments had shown. Which probably explained why, after charring one tank full of vampires and mages, and a few of the mages hiding behind the front line of AR-15 wielding, shieldless mindcontrol victims, Rhelia swooped in to nudge me away from the enemy.
I was pissy about it at first. Dragon-me still wasn’t done wreaking havoc on MOME’s troops, but Rhelia pushed and pushed with her iridescent ebon muzzle, and once I backed up far enough it was clear what the problem was. The dragon fire I’d unleashed on the tank was… well, it was spreading, quickly. And nothing the mages and vampires were doing seemed to be able to stop it.
Well, shit.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, decimating MOME’s ranks with dragon fire seemed like a fine idea. Right up until I remembered that those same mages, vamps, and probably weres, were highly unlikely to do anything to stop the fire from consuming the same mind control victims that I’d been trying to spare in the first place.
At least the conflagration that had once been a tank—and damn, I hadn’t thought metal could burn like that, dragon fire was some seriously badass shit—was keeping most of MOME’s frontline forces busy for the moment. But that wasn’t going to stop the fire from taking out the mind controlled grunts, nor was it going to stop it from taking out most of Pheonix, if given enough time.
Ugh…I hate being an adult sometimes.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 59