And Then There Were Dragons

by Alcy Leyva

  For my first pair ever, the boots actually felt better than the sneakers. They also made me feel taller. Not as tall as Cain, all six feet of her, but I had to admit it wasn’t a bad view from the extra inches.

  “I didn’t mean to force you into this.”

  “Oh, please,” Cain snickered, sliding into a brown leather jacket. “I was only giving shit to his high-and-mightiness because Palls deserves it. Truthfully, I want to help. For you or your sister? Anything, Grey. Not to mention I’ve put off heading down for long enough.”

  “What do you have to do in the Fourth Circle, anyway?”

  Cain stopped short. She spun around and touched her palm to one of my cheeks. “Can’t sat it’s as honorable as going to save my sister. No need to worry about it. You can count on me. I’ll get you there in one piece.” Pausing to correct herself, she added, “On second thought, let’s just drop the ‘one piece’ part. I’ll get you there. Let’s not make promises we can’t keep.”

  She tapped me on the shoulder and laughed as she exited the apartment.

  Stunned for a few moments, I chased after her yelling, “No, let’s. Let’s make promises, Cain. I’m down for amending our friendship to include any and all promises of non-dismemberment.”

  ****

  Palls made sure to keep us off the main streets. Warden or not, he was definitely not interested in letting anyone know I was human. Taking this as sound advice, I kept my mouth shut and walked close, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. As a unit, we weaved in and out of the city without too many bulging eyes (and twisting pincers and glancing suckers) on us for too long. This sometimes meant we had to veer into dark alleyways to avoid the city lights, which also meant walking past the shadiest of creatures lurking about. In one small parking lot, a fat spider draped in a fur jacket dropped from a streetlight and tried to scalp me tickets to a public beheading.

  “C’mon, honey. Heard the poor louse on the chopping block is a hydra so it should take about four or five hours to void him out him completely. Seats aren’t bullshit, neither. Good view. Best arterial spray for the price.”

  I declined, as politely as possible.

  Thankfully, most of the intense looks during our journey were directed at Palls. A few demons seemed to recognize him and welcomed him the way you would a cop on a beat—a few with silent nods and others by backing up against the walls to escape his path. From time to time, Palls would tip his hat as he walked by as a sign he was just making his way through. Nothing to see here.

  “So far, so good,” Cain whispered.

  Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

  A large thud behind us signaled the landing of a Screech. Its black flesh glistening in the city lights, it opened its beak and began to speak.

  “JUST FOUND OUT THERE’S A HUMAN WOMAN IN THE CITY. SAD! PEOPLE SAY SHE’S GOING TO DESTROY THE ECONOMY AND I AGREE. FIND THIS LOWLIFE AND TEAR HER THROAT OUT. HASHTAG HUMAN-FLESH-TASTES-LIKE-APPLESAUCE. HASHTAG PAINT-THE-TOWN-RED-WITH-HER-ORGANS.”

  And then, just like the one before, the Screech keeled over and died right where it stood. A few howls went up in the city as every citizen of New Necro received the same message.

  “We need to run,” Palls said, dashing out in front before the mob could get moving. “The way down to the Second Circle is right back here.”

  We ran around a brown-brick building I thought housed a yoga class but was really currently facilitating a corpse-packing seminar instead. When we arrived at our destination, I was too busy running for my life to pay attention to something as trivial as my footing. Luckily, Cain grabbed me and pulled me back in time. “Might want to watch your step there, gorgeous.”

  She was more than right. I had almost tumbled down into the black, endless nothing of the Maw.

  A blast of heat shot up from the chasm like an eternal belch and Palls held his hat in place until it died down.

  “All right, Cain. You’re up.”

  “Looks like we’ll need to improvise this next part.” Spreading her black wings, the angel flew out to the center of the Maw and hovered. “I can’t exactly carry both of you for too long, but as long as you don’t struggle, we can make it. I’ll float us down to a back exit of the Second Circle. Cross will sense us as soon as we step foot in the hotel, but going this route, he won’t be able to do anything about it. We can take the next elevator on that floor down to Circle Four.”

  Cain threw out her arms by way of invitation.

  “Yeah, no,” Palls shouted. “I’ll take the stairs.”

  “No stairs, big guy.” Cain opened her arms again, this time with a taunting smile.

  Grumbling, Palls held onto his hat, set his feet, and jumped into the waiting arms of the ex-angel. She struggled with him for a few seconds, and I thought there was a chance of them crashing and burning. But, showing some of her superhuman strength, Cain steadied herself and held out her other arm for me.

  Taking one look into the Maw, I called to her. “I’m pretty sure I should’ve gone first.”

  “I’ll catch you, Grey. Just hop over.”

  “Sure. Hop.” Bracing myself, I ran a few steps and jumped—right at the exact same moment a black cloud of Screeches flew up from the Maw. Falling short, Cain caught hold of me with one hand, but the violent winds of a hundreds Screech wings flung us into a midair tumble. It felt like we were in the eye of a wild shrieking hurricane.

  Somewhere in that chaos, something grabbed my foot.

  Grasping my ankle was a pale blue man, naked and blathering. I had absolutely no idea where he’d come from. The only thing I could guess was the bastard had leapt off of one of the Screeches on the way up.

  “If we keep going like this, we’ll both fall, you idiot,” the man clinging onto me had the (blue) balls to shout.

  “Good point,” I replied and swung my free heel right into the side of his head, caving his skull in as easily as if I had kicked a wet paper bag. He kept clawing at me, mushed head and all. Eventually, he bound himself around my other leg and, holding onto the entire lower half of my body, the weight was too much to bear. I screamed as I slipped from the angel’s grip, plummeting like a stone into the Maw surrounded in nothing but black. Black. Black.

  All I could do was stare up as the city lights became smaller and smaller.

  Now the size of my hand.

  Now just a pinprick.

  Now gone.

  CHAPTER 11

  It’s hard to tell how long I was falling. With no light, no sound, and no sense of direction, it almost felt like I was weightless and free. Yes, freedom. Even though I was plunging into a never-ending abyss, there was an odd joy to the way my arms and legs swept against the air—the way I twisted this way and that, leaving everything to gravity.

  Falling without purpose or direction reminded me a lot of what it felt like to carry anxiety around all the time. It usually felt like some invisible, impossible beast was chasing me. Other times, it felt like I was plummeting towards my doom, weightless, and waiting to crash.

  The other thing about being surrounded by pure darkness: you can’t tell if your eyes are closed or not. You kind of just stumble about, half drunk, half dreaming.

  And the worst wakeup call you can receive from this existential stupor is standing up and stubbing your toe on the edge of a piece of furniture. It’s the kind of thing where your mouth is filled up with hexes for every salesman, every Ikea, every motherfucker who had ever called themself a carpenter for building whatever the hell you hurt yourself on.

  That’s what happened to me. I don’t remember hitting the ground, just kind of “waking up” from landing. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hands, even when I felt my finger touch my nose. So when I say I got up and instantly toppled over a hard something-or-other that then proceeded to tumble down with me, it truly wasn’t my fault. Feeling it with my hands (and face) told me the culprit was a
wooden chair. Not my lamest enemy.

  The sound of my voice sounded muffled in this dark space. I couldn’t tell if it was my throat or my ears not working properly. In my mind, if I had actually survived the massive fall into the Maw, it meant I had landed somewhere in the hotel and that Mason had already captured me. As I searched around in the darkness for an exit, I envisioned him ordering his patrons to sharpen their knives for another bloody meal. I felt like, sooner or later, the shadows were going to claim me every bit as much as my anxiety had always wanted to.

  And I was not fucking going to let that happen.

  A blur of light spawned in the air in front of me. It was an image of two girls sitting at a table—one older, one younger—both writing in their notebooks. Flat and partly translucent, the image was familiar and yet so fleeting. As if it was projected into the air itself, the light slipped quietly between the spaces in my fingers.

  But then a force took over. As if latching onto my outstretched hand, I found myself being sucked into the image itself. The next thing I knew, I was standing right in the middle of the small living room space with the two girls.

  I recognized the room. This was my parent’s apartment. This was where I grew up. Remembering it had been destroyed, I realized this was not an alternate dimension or a trick of the mind. More importantly, I realized who these girls were—and had no idea how I’d missed it before.

  The smaller of the two was Petty. There was my little sister, maybe at age four or five, strutting around the house in pigtails and the jean jumper Mom loved to throw on her when she was insistent about getting dirty. Petty was the epitome of a town boy and never met a houseplant or crayon she didn’t want to decorate the apartment with.

  Whatever this memory was, younger Petty couldn’t see or sense me. It was almost as if I were walking inside a playback I had been edited into. I was a ghost in my own memory.

  The girl in the side seat was, of course, me. Observing how I was slumped over a book with my hair forming an iron wall around my face, it didn’t take me long to remember this moment. It was not a good one.

  In the memory playback, Petty tapped my shoulder. “Come play,” she pleaded.

  “Not yet,” younger me replied stiffly, lifting one hand to my temple. I remember not wanting to move my head too much.

  Petty let out a long wail and my mother ducked out of the kitchen. “Mandy, go play with your sister.”

  I was stunned to see my mom. In truth, it hurt—even it was just an image of her. Part of it was because it been so long since I’d seen her, but it was also that she looked so young. She wore jeans (when did she ever wear jeans?), a fitted blouse, and her hair was blonde with only the earliest traces of grey peeking out around her forehead. I don’t remember my mom ever being so young.

  “Doing homework,” younger me replied curtly.

  “You’ve been on that all afternoon.” Mom walked toward the table. Watching myself, I never realized how uncomfortable I came across. I thought I’d played it so cool, but how could she not know something was wrong? But she did. She reached out and pulled away the hair that was blocking the hideous swell over my right eye.

  She sat in the chair beside me. “Another fight?”

  I shook my head, but that only revealed the black and blue swelling over my left eye.

  Mom reached out, pushed aside the book, and clasped both of my hands in hers. “Tell me the truth, Mandy. Were you fighting again?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a fight, per shhhhay,” I answered, now unable to hide my missing tooth.

  Naturally, Mom freaked, but not in the way I’d thought she would. Not even twenty-four hours later I had found myself sitting across from my principal. I didn’t say a word. My mom and dad said it all. That marked the last day of school I ever attended.

  From that day on, I was homeschooled.

  ****

  The image vanished and I found myself spit back into the darkness like a big fat loogie. I may have not had a heartbeat built into this faux body of mine, but I laid there feeling as if the edges of my existence were throbbing in the darkness. Every inch of me hurt and radiated with pure pain.

  Over the course of what must have been hours, this cycle repeated over and over again. A long time would pass in the darkness, then a hazy fog would show me an awful memory, I would get sucked into it, only for it to spit me back out after it was done and leave me alone again.

  I lost count around the seventeenth trip down Mutilated Memory Lane. Soon I found myself talking to myself—to no one. These memories featured all of the Amanda Grey hits: grade school screw-ups, playground fights, that one time Pretty forced me to double date with her and I ended up setting the guy on fire.

  This last is in no way sexual, by the way. The schmuck got too close and I chucked a dinner candle at him, end of story. Sure, I didn’t know his dense cologne—an aroma which smelled a lot like steroid-induced testosterone and non-consent—mixed with his billowing and exquisitely groomed chest hair would make him go up like a douchebag-o-lantern.

  Still, watching “Grey: This is the Crappy Existence You Called Your Life” segments was exhausting.

  Even though the pain kept swelling up, over and over, I shouted into the darkness, “Hey, Cross. Are you doing requests? It’s just this is supposed to be Hell, the Hell, and I was kind of expecting … I don’t know, something better? Now, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but if this is how you torture folks down here—with a glorified slideshow presentation of a person’s fuck-ups—then I don’t think you’ve done your homework. Screwing up is kinda my thing. Superman flies. Batman punches people. Amanda Grey burns down half the East Coast casually refilling an ice tray.”

  Still nothing.

  Another memory came, this time of my thirteenth birthday when I threw up all over my mom’s homemade cake.

  “Good talk,” I mumbled to the darkness.

  The memories steadily climbed up my timeline until they finally reached something that was disturbingly recent and fresh: the night I met Gaffrey Palls. By then, I must have seen more than a hundred of my memories, and yet this one felt more raw than any of them.

  I saw myself staring into a mirror trying to practice smiling.

  Then I heard the three knocks that would change my life forever.

  I saw myself walking to the door, opening it, and letting Palls into my small apartment. Letting him into my life. I watched the fight that had happened next. The broken wrist, the shattered glass. Somehow, watching it from the outside made me even more uncomfortable. Palls beat me within an inch of my life and yet out of pure dumb luck, I had somehow survived. I should have died that night.

  Everything played out the way I remembered. Palls falling to the ground holding his throat. Me crawling to the side with my own breathing problems.

  And then there were crows. Five (and then six, of course).

  Barnem brandishing a bat.

  The money.

  The decision that would change—and ultimately end—my life.

  This memory marked the darkest part of my life, namely, the last. I don’t want to say watching these were anywhere near torture, but they were definitely unpleasant. Every time Barnem showed up, I wanted to spit at him. Every time I saw my parents, a lump grew in my throat thinking about my dad dying.

  And there were the other folks who played a role in my life, making brief appearances over what would end up being the last few days of my life. My Super, Lou. Burley’s. For some reason, Burley’s was a weird thing to remember because I never really got to know Pops and his wife, Lady, just their tasty BYO-ingredient burgers.

  Finally, Donaldson. Seeing him again was tough, especially considering the last time I saw him, he had been smashed into a wall. He was always so nice to me, and generally for no reason. It drove me freaking crazy. In my experience, people weren’t just nice for no reason—but
Donaldson had been.

  “You were a good guy,” I said to his face as the Amanda in the memory tossed him a specially made burger. I closed this sentiment with, “You big doofus” because it still felt like the right thing to say.

  The fall of each Shade.

  Petty dying and then undying.

  D’s transformations.

  Each memory played out in the same horrible fashion.

  Everything led to the standoff in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The warrior angels. Barnem cutting off my arm. Bill and Ada, the freakish looking angels that turned out to be the new owners of Heaven (whatever the hell that means, no pun intended). I had only managed to beat Barnem by sneaking those demons inside of me, a little trick D had helped me pull just before we got there. I mean, I had died so I’m not one hundred percent sure I could call that a victory. But I also knew Barnem had lost, and in the end that was all that had mattered.

  As the image of D holding my lifeless body faded away and I was vomited back out into the darkness, I felt the silence of the world crawl back around me. I laid my head down, thinking it was better to sleep than to continue staring at nothing. But sometime later something else appeared.

  Something I didn’t recognize at all.

  As I was pulled into this memory, I looked around, confused by my surroundings. I was standing amidst rows of newborn babies resting in a hospital nursery. Some were fussing, others dozing.

  I shouted to no one, “Hey, whoever’s handling the projector up there, you botched this one. This isn’t one of my memories.”

  The lights weren’t completely off in the nursery, and the few that were on cut shadows across the room. For some reason, my vision lingered on one specific corner, gravitating to an empty space where the edge of a table met the wall.

  What was there? I stepped closer to get a better look.

  As I did, the lights snapped on and a nurse appeared. The sudden sight of her scared the crap out of me and I cleared my throat as if trying to save face, though I was technically a ghost in this memory. She didn’t notice me, and I hissed at her to move because she was blocking my view.