by Shane Lee
“What?” Monty was poised on his feet, shaken but ready to run. Not that he would get far. He’d seen how fast she moved. “I don’t know what you—”
“After your land, isn’t he?” She twisted Mullen’s hand, sweeping it broadly across his body with the fingers spread. “All of this! And there’s murderous intent here, too. I feel it. He told you—” She cackled now, tilting Mullen’s head back and wiggling his fingers. “He said he’d kill you and your sister! He means it, child. I can tell you that he means it.”
Monty tried to think, ignoring whatever Nal’Gee was spitting at him. There had to be something else he could do; another way to fight her. He had no backup plan—everything had been so rushed. But he hadn’t had a choice! There was no time.
Nal’Gee’s wild motions stopped suddenly. She stood straight, staring in his eyes. Mullen’s mouth drooped. “Answer me, or I tear out your throat.”
“Yes,” Monty said slowly, glancing at Mullen’s arms where they hung limp. “He wants our farm, and he said that he would kill us to get it.”
“So kill him,” Nal’Gee said.
Mullen’s body was absolutely still except for his mouth. His eyes were unblinking, locked onto Monty’s. There was no wind, so even his robes stood still, like he was a puppet hanging from strings.
“You’re not—this isn’t Mullen,” Monty said, desperately trying to understand Nal’Gee’s intention.
“This isn’t Mullen,” she mocked, crinkling his eyes slightly with the tease, then dropping them back to dead stillness. “This is Mullen. This is his body, which is all that he is. His soul is mine. His body is what brought the harm to you, is it not? So kill him. Won’t you feel better?”
A sudden move from Nal’Gee; she swept the robes away from Mullen’s ankle and pulled out a blade that was strapped to his leg. Monty twitched, and she threw the dagger into the dirt at his feet. The pointed tip stuck into the ground, handle up.
She was still again.
“He brought it to kill you,” Nal’Gee said, voice dripping with mirth. “Are you surprised? You don’t look surprised. He was going to kill you and your sister. You know that.”
But Terra’s not here, he thought, and he thanked the gods and saints for that, then asked them to take her further away. Far away. Across the oceans.
“Pick up the dagger and put it through this bastard’s heart,” Nal’Gee commanded, stepping up close to Monty, within arm’s reach. She slipped Mullen’s hands behind his back and thrust his chest up. “You’ve thought about it, don’t say you haven’t. Kill this man.”
She’s crazy, Monty thought, but he quickly realized that was a dangerous straw to grasp. Nal’Gee was cunning, not insane. She was goading him into murdering Mullen, and there had to be a reason for it.
“You can’t get free of him, can you?” Monty looked the body up and down. Possessed or not, Mullen looked far from death, far from succumbing to the black. He was strong, perhaps stronger than Nal’Gee had suspected. “You’re trapped until he’s dead. And...and you can’t make him kill himself. You would have done it already.”
Nal’Gee didn’t react to Monty’s words. She just looked at him, holding still, and said, “You will never have another chance like this, Monty Bellamy of the Dromm. Take your revenge.”
Monty set his jaw. He stomped on the dagger’s hilt, burying it in the dirt. “I’m not from the Dromm. You are.”
“Most people are not as stupid as you,” Nal’Gee whispered, and she drew Mullen’s hands out from behind him, taking a step back. “I will tell you one thing, Monty Bellamy, and it is that you do not know anything.”
An inane thought crossed his mind—I should have kept the dagger.
Nal’Gee let the arms drop, and Monty watched in horror as the very life was pulled from Mullen’s body.
First was his hair, growing shorter and wispier, shrinking into his skull. His face lost its color, draining like a pierced tin mug, running from impassioned red to icy white, then dark and darker till it was black and shrunken. Mullen’s legs gave out; he crumpled sideways to the ground, his arms flying over his head and landing in the dirt above him. Almost weightless, they made no sound.
It was all over in a few seconds.
Monty saw the air shimmer around Mullen’s body, disturbed in the firelight. He slid one foot backward, but knew he had to stay in the circle. Had she been visible like this before, or was it just because she was so powerful now?
She could kill him after all, Monty thought, and then he was wrapped in superheated air and struggling to breathe. It was like a heavy blanket was wrapped around him in an instant, so strong and dense that he couldn’t stay upright. He fell backward to the ground, narrowly missing the thick wooden pole of the torch as his head smacked the dirt.
Nal’Gee was taking him.
He couldn’t move or scream. It felt like there was a huge python wrapped around his body, crushing him into one small piece. But more than that, he felt Nal’Gee inside his head, doing the same thing to his mind. She was wrapping around him, trying to pry her way into his soul through any angle she could find.
It gave him a strange hope. If she was struggling to grasp him, then he was resisting her. No one else had been physically attacked by her specter like this. But he was losing air. He couldn’t breathe.
As soon as he thought that, the pressure on his throat cleared. He sucked in a choking, gasping breath, wiggling his fingers. That, he could do. But the powerful grip around him was too strong to push off. He felt the weight in his mind, like probing, wriggling fingers deep behind his ears. It touched something inside of him, sending a forking lightning bolt of deep-seated pain from his skull down to his ankles, but it wasn’t his body that hurt; it was something else.
She’s touching my soul, he thought, and Nal’Gee’s intentions crystallized within him at that moment. The connection of their essences was violent and painful and unholy and intimate, and Monty read her aspirations like they were written in glowing ink on the backs of his eyelids. She didn’t want to kill him.
Nal’Gee wanted his body forever.
Mullen was too old, and too short. Monty tasted her disdain for the man, and it ran through him like sour cranberries. She didn’t want to spend eternity in his shell.
The golem in the woods was hers, but only if she couldn’t get the power she needed to capture a real, living body. She found that power. Monty saw with some great pain that it had come mostly from Delila. Her resistance to Nal’Gee’s invasion had only given her more to drink. It was with her death that Nal’Gee’s new plan had come to life.
And his family, all of them—they were on her land. The Gartens, too, but Nal’Gee wasn’t interested in them. They weren’t even worth the souls they carried, not to her. This family Bellamy was ripe, and their youngest was young enough to be fooled. To be used. To be lured by a tragedy she was yet to overcome.
It was her way out, and it worked better than she could possibly have hoped.
Anger. Fury. Monty saw red, and the connection with Nal’Gee broke, recoiling like a hissing snake. He bent his arms, trying to grab at the invisible bonds that held him, but there was no purchase.
They were all just food to her. Everyone in the village was a different course, and Monty, well—he was the dessert, in a way. She had eaten all she needed, and now she was ready for a body so she could wield her magic again. Only this time, it wouldn’t be to grow the plants and the flowers. She would strangle the world, one village at a time. After all, they’d done the same to her.
The connection pieced together again, and Monty snapped back flat on the ground, groaning. He couldn’t speak; could just barely breathe. Black crept in around the edges of his vision as Nal’Gee wormed her way into his spirit, her tendrils virile and long.
She could have any other body. There were people younger and stronger. But she wanted this Dromm boy, the one who had dared to live on her land and make money from its yield. The one who had dared to walk through her wood
s and discard their dangers. The one who found her and thought he could stop her.
His mother’s death was a piece of sweet revenge. Taking Monty would be far, far sweeter.
55
Monty was falling into a hole. It was a slow fall, like he was being forced down through the ground by powerful hands, but he couldn’t slow the descent. There was nothing to grab onto. His vision was small circle of light being swallowed up by pure black.
This is where Mullen went, Monty gasped inside his own head as he sank. This is where Mullen went when she took him.
And where does a taken spirit go? Without death, could he be released to the beyond? Or would he stay in this blackness forever?
He breathed from somewhere far away, feeling his chest miles above him. Terra wouldn’t know what happened, would she? She’d see his face and think it was him, and then Nal’Gee would...
Monty clawed at the pinprick of the world above him with ethereal hands, reaching up towards surface. There was something to hold onto, something that resisted the forces pushing him down. But it was like getting one hand on top of a ledge while a bear pulled on your leg.
Or grasping a fistful of sticks while someone three times your size yanked you from your mother’s funeral pyre.
It hurt to hang on, hurt him somewhere so deep inside that he didn’t know where it was, but he held on. He wasn’t strong enough to pull himself up, not even a little, but he could resist. He could resist the darkness; the heavy weights on his mind; the incredibly vast, looming consciousness of Nal’Gee, smothering him into nothing. He could breathe for a little while, but for how long?
And what was the point?
It was when that thought crossed his mind that his flimsy grip weakened even more, and he started to slip. The tiny hole above grew smaller; the pressure above him grew stronger.
I’m giving up, he admitted to himself. And it’s letting her take me.
Then he felt a new presence. It was warm, and where it touched him it didn’t bring pain. It soothed him, like slathering the gel of an aloe leaf over a fiery sunburn. He leaned into the feeling, casting himself up toward it, and it granted him strength and brought peace to his flurrying mind. What was it?
Monty tried to call out to it, to ask, but he couldn’t hear anything, not even his own voice. He didn’t know if he was talking. He could see only darkness, but light was filtering in, dissipating the black to a deep, fuzzy gray. Still, he was miles away from the world that he knew.
Monty followed the warmth, ignoring the stinging pain of Nal’Gee’s tendrils slapping back at him, pushing down at his consciousness. His muddled thoughts grew clearer, and he understood that his eyes were closed. He forced them open.
The world was dark and silent. He couldn’t feel the heat from the fire nor the cold of the air, but he could see the few stars in the sky. Nothing reached his ears, not even the crackling of the torch fire or the chirping of nighttime crickets. It was like he was in a glass box.
I didn’t open my eyes at all, he thought. It was Nal’Gee. She’s letting me see through them like windows, and that’s all. I’m not even here.
But her presence in his mind was muted now—still there, still digging into him and trying to suffocate him, yet different from before. And if she had him wholly now, would she still be trying to fight?
He felt a hand on his face, and it was like coming back from the dead. Even just these few dragging, endless moments where he could feel the touch of nothing, not even the air on his skin, made him feel alone and lost in ways he never could have imagined. That soothing warmth hit him hard now, and his cheek went from nothing, to warm, to flushed, and then he could breathe a bigger breath and he pulled it in like it was the last he’d ever take.
A face blocked his vision. No—it filled it.
“Terra.”
Monty couldn’t hear himself say it, but he felt the words rumble his skin, felt his mouth move. He was in control of that, not Nal’Gee. The rest of his body was still pinned, cold winter air brushing against his ankles where his pants had hitched up.
“Mon...”
Terra’s voice, small and distant, brushed at him. He lunged toward it, his body not moving at all.
“...ty! Mon... Monty!”
Two hands on his face now, and Terra was inches from him. He could hear her voice louder, but it was still a whisper, and it looked like she was screaming. Her fingers clutched his head and dug into his cheeks and hair, surely painful, but he didn’t know.
Pain wracked him as Nal’Gee’s essence squeezed its coils, deadly. His eyes fluttered and his jaw tensed, teeth grinding against each other. He was pulled between the craving of the warmth and the sweet, black retreat from the pain.
Terra’s voice was drowned out and overshadowed by Nal’Gee’s screeching consciousness, a banshee storm cloud draped over Monty’s soul.
“Mine you’re mine you’re mine give the body to me it’s mine it’s MINE IT’S MINE”
She cracked his insides like porcelain, running tracks through his brain and trying to break pieces off to swallow. Trying to break big enough pieces so that what was left would be fractured enough to gather up and swallow in one gulp.
Monty felt his soul being pulled apart. It was agony.
But he fought.
Terra’s face was still there; her hands were still on him. He let the pain rip through him as he stretched forward past Nal’Gee’s billowing weight, reaching out to clasp onto something else. It felt like he was jumping high in the air and waiting to fall back down, hand outstretched and grasping.
When he found the grip, he knew instantly that it was Terra, that his soul was reaching out to hers and she was anchoring him to herself. If he was pulled away, then she would be pulled too, and Nal’Gee would eat them both.
“Don’t,” he said, and Terra blinked, not knowing what he meant. Whatever she was doing, it was on a level beyond recognition, beyond decision—it was instinct; it was love. She couldn’t stop it if she wanted to, and she didn’t.
Monty waited for the scale to tip to Nal’Gee.
Waited.
And for the first time since falling to the ground, he felt whole. Balanced. He was being pulled on and clawed at, but he was...secure.
It’s not me, Monty thought, looking at Terra in wonder as his younger sister held his face and called out his name, telling him to come back. It’s her.
Terra was strong. More than that—Terra was steel. Monty held onto her and he felt all the unwavering power of her conviction and belief. Her assuredness that they would triumph over Nal’Gee; that good would beat evil. Her fear, yes, of losing her brother, but also the incredible lengths she would go through to stop that from happening. The potential there, and all that she could accomplish.
It was beautiful.
Panic pulsed from Nal’Gee now, a narrow wave that tickled prickly fingers through Monty’s head and left him shivering. The spirit’s desperation was showing itself, peeking through the torrent of latching arms she shoved at Monty. Each time she bounced off or lost a hold, that desperation grew. He could feel everything she felt, but that connection was slipping away, too.
Nal’Gee flew away from Monty and leapt for Terra.
56
All at once, Monty was free. He sat up immediately, gasping for air.
Terra, meanwhile, had fallen back, sitting in the dirt. Her arms jutted out behind her, palms flat on the ground. Her head was tucked into her chest and her hair was wild, twisted over her face. She sat almost perfectly still, but clearly strained against the onslaught, her legs trembling and her hair shifting as her head twitched.
Monty reached forward and put a hand on her knee. He got something, but he wasn’t able to feel Terra the way he had when she was reaching out for him. What he did feel was enough for him to know that the battle he had fought with Nal’Gee was nothing like the one happening inside of Terra. There was no pain there, no frantic struggle.
Nal’Gee could not hold on.
“She’s panicked.” Monty spoke his thoughts aloud, surprised to feel an awed grin coming across his face. “She knows. You know, Nal’Gee! You know you’ve lost!”
Invisible teeth snapped at Monty’s fingertips, forcing him to withdraw them from Terra’s leg. His sister curled in tighter on herself, drawing her legs up to her forehead. Monty’s grin disappeared.
“Get her away, Terra,” he said, not sure if she could hear him. “You’re stronger than she is. Nal’Gee knows it, and she’s scared.”
He unconsciously snapped his fingers where they hung by the dirt. “Make sure it’s the last thing she ever feels.”
In that moment, if he could have grabbed Nal’Gee with both hands and torn her in half, he would have done it. It was infuriating, knowing that she was trying to steal his sister’s life away in front of his eyes and he could do little more than watch.
The tightness in Terra’s shoulders and legs started to relax, her feet sliding along the dirt, her fingers straightening and pulling out of the ground where they had curled in.
It happened slowly, then all at once. Terra fell backward, lying flat on the ground. In the intermittent light of the flickering torch, Monty saw sweat soaking her forehead. Stray hairs stuck to her skin.
“Terra! Hey.” Monty knelt over her, grabbing her hand in his. Her eyes were closed, but he could see that they were moving. “Hey! Are you okay? Is she—”
Terra’s eyes shot open, looking directly into the night sky. Monty followed them as she clutched his hand, and there he saw it. They were witnessing Nal’Gee’s rejection; her spirit and essence being cast away from Terra.
She was massive. Vast. It was like a storm cloud had come down from the skies to drop upon them, except it was rising upward. She faded in and out of existence, slipping between the planes of life as she drifted, a swirling black cloud that grew gradually grayer and smaller.