by Vance, Ramy
I thought of my father and how noble he was when he chose death over being consumed by the vampire virus. How he faced the dawn with a smile on his face and how, even though I had turned him hours earlier, he died a human.
That was when I realized I had one more option before me. Blue was going to die, but she didn’t need to go alone. When the dawn came, I could go with her.
The One and Only Chapter Left
Present Day —
I’ve read it in books, seen it in movies, and every time I come across the phrase, “The earth opened up and swallowed [insert character’s name here] whole,” I roll my eyes. To me it’s kind of like reading, “It was a dark and stormy night …”
So when I say that the earth opened up and swallowed us whole, know that I don’t use those words lightly. And if there was any other way to describe it, I would, but hey—some lines are classics for a reason.
The earth opened up, rumbling as if the very fabric of reality had torn open with a ripping clamor that was partly the sound of tearing cloth and partly the sound a thousand bass drums thumping all at once.
It reminded me of a STOMP concert.
The earth continued ripping open until the entire foyer of the hotel was gone. And then it just stopped. There was no warning, no indication that this was going to cease … nothing but the absence of destruction.
Talk about anti-climactic.
Aki appraised the hole. “Interesting. That’s never happened before.”
“What?” I said, gazing over the edge. All I saw was a bottomless void with a few of the flying Others flapping their way up out of it. The other, wing-challenged Others didn’t seem to fare as well and were probably splats Wile E. Coyote style at the bottom of this thing (that is, if there was a bottom).
The tanuki shook his head, the sway of it unhinged in that way only severely drunk people seem to manage. “The hole. Usually the hotel collapses into itself as it leaves one reality and enters another.” He made a sucking noise. “And we’ve never had any guests actually die in the process.”
Not sure what to say back, I turned and saw that the strong and brave Jean had disappeared (sarcasm, moi? Never!), leaving me alone in the room to assess my next move.
Looking up from the giant, gaping hole in the floor, I noticed that there were several mokumokuren all droning about staring at everything. At first I thought they were invisible to everyone but me, like they had been on the airplane and at the izakaya, but when Jean said, “Floating eyeballs … yuck!” I realized that if he could see them, then others could also see them.
And what’s more, what else was now visible?
My worst fear, coupled with heart-wrenching regret for my sleeveless fashion choice, was confirmed when a wendigo shouted, “She has the map to the Museum of Everything. Rip her arm from her body and let it lead us to glory!”
↔
The wendigo hadn’t finished shouting the words when he leapt at me with his claws ready to tear my arm from my body. But before he could get to me Harry stepped in, giving the giant beast a swift roundhouse kick that sent him flying into the hole.
“How rude,” Harry said. “We yetis are oft confused with those wendigos and I don’t like it.”
“Like Canadians being called Americans?” I offered.
“Exactly like that,” he said, lifting his fists up in the manner of a nineteenth-century boxer. “Now if you don’t mind making a run for it, I shall do my best to buy you some time.” He let out a right hook that flattened a gorgon to what remained of the floor.
“Thanks,” I said, and did what any hero would do when facing dozens of powerful adversaries.
I ran.
↔
I wasn’t sure where to go. I was in the middle of an unfamiliar jungle, in a hotel that didn’t exactly have fire exits, being chased by dozens of fanatical Others who wanted to rip my arm off.
Given my options, I figured the jungle was my best bet, but the only way outside that I knew of was through the front door and that was currently blocked.
I also knew that, as strong as Harry was, he’d only be able to keep this up for so long. I couldn’t let him take a beating for me and since these guys wanted my arm and weren’t playing nicely, I was going to have to take it away.
I ran up to the first landing of the stairwell, punching two hobgoblins in my way and climbing onto the bannister’s edge. Lifting up my arm for everyone to see my vacillating tattoo, I screamed, “You want it? Come and get it,” before leaping onto the chandelier hanging above the hole.
I underestimated the distance to the chandelier and nearly missed it, managing to catch a star (quite literally) that hung at the very outer edge. There was a collective gasp as I pulled myself onto one of the arms of the damn thing and hoisted myself up.
All thanks to the McGill Fitness Centre for the sheer power of those guns.
The room was silent, and turning to the mass of Others, I yelled, “Enough! This is crazy. All this for what? Some god that may or may not be down that hole? I know many of you want this,” I said, showing them my arm. The arrow pointed down the hole. “And I know you think salvation is down there. But it’s not. At best, there is nothing down there. At worst, there is a dead god who, if freed, will only enslave us. Is that what you want? Haven’t we evolved beyond the need for a deity to tell us how to act, who to be?”
There was a hush, and for a second I thought that my riveting speech had won the hearts and minds of the Heralds.
All it had really won me was a few seconds of quiet. A skinwalker stood up and said, “Only gods can return our magic.”
“Our immortality,” said another.
“At what cost?” yelled a third, evidently on my side.
“Who cares about the cost? Anything is better than living with the humans.”
“Hey!” I said. “I’m human.”
“A human with the map.”
“A human with the key.”
“A human who’s going to take a swan dive into that hole if you all don’t calm the f—”
“Get her,” screamed a jorogumo just before it shot a line of webbing at me.
The sticky thread wrapped around my wrist. The jorogumo bit it off and started pulling with its four arms. I had to use every ounce of my strength to hold onto the chandelier to stop myself from being pulled off.
I was losing this bizarre tug-of-war when a plate went flying at the jorogumo, hitting it square in its pincer-like nose and causing it to drop it webbing. “Leave the human alone,” Harry said, staring down the creature. But in his distraction a cyclops managed to sneak behind the yeti and hit him over the head with a vase that was older than most mountains. The yeti took the blow with a shake of his head before grabbing the offending cyclops and poking him in the eye.
The one-eyed creature went down with a yelp. But you know what they say: when one cyclops goes down, one tanuki gets up.
OK, no one says that, but after what I saw, they really should start. Aki, seeing his precious vase destroyed, got up, swaying like a drunk on the deck of a boat on troubled waters and yelled, “I said … no … violence!”
Leaping off his own testicles, he spun with such speed and force that his appendage swung like a wrecking ball, knocking down several Others unfortunate enough to be nearby.
Talk about throwing your weight around.
As impressive as Aki was, not everyone’s attention was on him. That became obvious when three banshees started shrieking while they grabbed everything that wasn’t nailed down and started chucking it at me.
“Hey,” I said, “I thought that you guys wanted my map. If I fall in the hole, no one gets it.”
That didn’t seem to stop the banshee who chucked a chair at me. Two hobgoblins leapt on the banshee’s back and that’s when I understood that there seemed to be two opposing camps in the Rip Her Arm Off debate. One group wanted to find the entrance, while the other group wanted to prevent that from happening.
Sadly, both groups felt th
at killing me was the best the way to achieve their goals.
One of the banshees pulled an ancient tapestry from the wall and used it as a net to grapple one of the hobgoblins and push him down the hole.
“Do you know who gave me that?” Aki screamed with unbridled rage. “Athena. After I presided over her handling of the adoption proceedings of Erichthonius. That tapestry was one of a kind.”
The tanuki twirled around, swinging his testicles like a shot-putter before releasing them in the direction of the banshee. The momentum of the toss sent the tanuki flying over the hole and clearing the twenty-foot chasm effortlessly. Man oh man, I thought. If Thor swung what Aki had instead of a hammer, well, it would have been a totally different movie.
Seeing him fly like that did give me an idea. I hoisted up the webbing that was still attached to my wrist and tied it around one of the branches of the chandelier. Then, loosening the webbing’s grip around my wrist so that I could break free when needed, I ran up a branch away from the front door before leaping off.
Just as I hoped, my own momentum swung me back toward the door. I released the webbing at the last second and managed to swing over the heads of the brawling Others and toward the front door.
I’d like to tell you that being a “cat,” I landed on my feet and tumbled past the fighting Others before running out that door. But the truth was, I landed on a garuda. Her soft, feathered body broke my fall (it was kind of like falling on a goose-feathered duvet) and I shimmied off her body like one trying to get off a half-inflated air mattress and ran outside.
Well, I tried to, but a large hand grabbed me, dragging me back. I turned to see one of the wendigos clawing at me. Wendigos have incredibly large mouths with razor-sharp teeth. All that beast needed to do was bite me at the elbow and he’d have the map.
From the way he pulled me up I realized that was exactly what he intended to do. I knew I had one chance to escape. I needed to time a kick to his groin at just the right moment to—
Before I could impress the world with my Bend it Like Beckham power and accuracy, the tail-end of a telescopic baton whacked the creature across the face, causing him to drop me.
I turned to see Jean reaching out a hand and saying in a terrible Austrian accent, “Come with me if you want to live.”
↔
“Where the f—”
“Language,” Jean interrupted as we ran to the tree line beyond the hotel’s rock garden. “We might be running for our lives, but we’re not running from our manners. And to answer the question you were going to ask … I was doing stuff. And you’re welcome.”
“Welcome?” I said between puffs. “I nearly got killed.”
“Horse shoes and hand grenades,” he said. “And speaking of hand grenades." He pulled out two grenades from his pocket, ripped out the pins with his teeth and dropped them as he ran.
I didn’t look back, doubling my speed to get as far away from the explosive devices as possible. I also counted to three, bracing myself for the loud explosion that usually accompanied bombs.
But there was no boom, just a squeaking sound like air being let out of a balloon. So not a boom grenade. A smoke grenade?
I turned, expecting to see smoke coming out of the incendiary cylinders. Instead I saw nothing but several Others chasing after us. As soon as they got near the grenades, though, they stopped running as they yelped in obvious discomfort.
“Smell grenades,” Jean said, pulling me behind the tree line. “Most Others have a heightened sense of smell, so the boys at the lab cooked those up. I’m told they’re a wicked combination of skunk, rotting eggs and beached whale. I don’t even want to know how you bottle beached whale.”
We pushed on another thirty meters or so before Jean stopped.
“What are you doing?” I said. “They’re right behind us.”
He gave me a sardonic smile before lifting several fallen banana leaves, revealing a hole in the ground. He gestured for me to get in the hole. “Like I said, I was doing stuff.”
Once inside, he covered us up and lifted a finger to his lips. “Shush.”
We lay in silence in the cramped hole he’d dug, our bodies uncomfortably close to each other as we waited for the Others to run over us. We heard shouting and a few screeches and some yelling that slowly faded away as the Others ran deeper into the forest.
I realized that the smell grenades were designed to do more than just throw them off temporarily—they were to obscure our scent beneath these banana leaves.
When we were sure they’d all gone past, I pushed out of the hole. “You couldn’t have made it bigger?”
“And what would have been the fun in that?” he said, pulling what looked like a cellphone from the 1980s out of his backpack. “Besides, don’t flatter yourself. If I had spent more time making this hole any bigger, you’d be minus an arm right now.” Jean tilted his head, considering this. “Which, if you think about it, would mean we’d manage with a smaller hole.”
“Hilarious.”
“Like I said, I’m funny in Paradise Lot.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said, turning away from him and assessing my next move. The hotel was locked away, filled with brawling Others, some of whom wanted access to the museum, others who wanted to stop that from happening.
Unless Aki and Harry turned out to be ninja, samurai or super-soldiers, it was unlikely we could return there and gain access to it that way. Even if we did, I didn’t think we could find a safe way down that hole. As far as I could tell, the hole was so deep that the Others who’d fallen in were probably still falling.
I looked at my map, but it wasn’t of any more help; the arrow still pointed at the hole.
“Neato,” Jean said, grabbing my wrist with a bit too much familiarity for my liking. If he knew that he’d crossed a line, he made no indication of it as he stared intently at my arm.
Then he took his pinky finger and traced a blue line that seemed to run under the main map area where the red arrow pointed.
I pulled my arm away. “Hey—my body, my choice, perv.”
“Oh get over yourself.” He held out his hand, asking for my arm back. “Come on,” he said, jerking his ring finger in with a “come hither” swagger.
I groaned and extended my arm out. Jean leaned in closer to examine the map and again he traced the blue line.
“Will you stop that?” I said.
He scratched his head, ignoring me. “What do you think this line is?”
Staring down at my arm, I followed the blue line as he traced it again. It zig-zagged, each zig or zag uneven in length, but all going in the same general direction as the red arrow. It reminded me of a complex weave where each layer was its own design and only when overlaying the individually crafted layers did you get the desired, intricate design.
The way it seemed to lay under the main map made me think that it was just decoration. After all, this was mystical in nature and it wasn’t beyond the gods or Others or whatever celestial force had created this map to add a little decorative flair.
But as Jean continued tracing the line, I began to see a pattern to the blue lines. They weren’t decoration like I had previously assumed. They were—
“Holy guacamole,” I muttered, “this map is in 3D.”
Jean snapped his finger before shaking his head. “That’s exactly what I think,” he said. “And what’s more ...” He reached for his backpack and pulled out something that reminded me of a Star Trek tricorder (from the original series). Flipping it open, he showed me a green radar screen with three blips on it—two right next to each other, the third some distance away.
As the radar’s arm passed around, it showed two lines that zig-zagged in an eerily similar pattern to the blue line on my arm.
“Here’s the hotel, and these two blips are us. These lines are us running out of the hotel. As you can see, we ran pretty much in a straight line out of there.” He traced the two green streaks that started at the hotel and ended at the blips—us
. “And this third dot is Keiko. Here’s her leaving the hotel, where she stops somewhere for …”—he tapped the screen and some numbers appeared over the lines—“about twelve minutes. Then she descended into what I can only assume is a hole, before following a path that is almost identical to the blue line on your arm-map thingy.”
I stared at the blips. There was no doubt that the blue lines followed the same pattern as Keiko’s path. The other thing that was blatantly evident was that this asshole was stalking us. Without warning, I punched Jean square in the nose. Hard.
He went down, grabbing the bridge of his nose as two spurts of blood came out. “Ow,” he cried. “What was that for?” But before I could answer, he raised a hand. “Never mind. I know what that was for … and you’re not wrong for punching me. But you’re not right, either. If I hadn’t tracked you, I would have never known where Keiko went and, well …”—he pointed at his tricorder screen again—“and that she’s stuck there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she hasn’t moved in over an hour,” he said, pointing at her dot with a blood-covered fingertip. “I doubt she’s taking a nap.”
I looked at the little number that hovered over Keiko’s dot. Seventy-three minutes. Seventy-three minutes was a long time to be in one place, especially given that about forty minutes ago the world had rumbled as a new plane of existence competed for space in this one.
Keiko had gone off on her own, looking for … what? An entrance to the museum without us? A way to get to the prize first? I doubted that. From everything I knew about noro and everything I had seen in Keiko, she most likely wanted to stop Jean and his human military cohort from finding the entrance. And she didn’t trust me enough to let me in on her plan.
Whatever her motives, they didn’t matter. What mattered to me now was that Blue’s granddaughter was in trouble.
“Let’s go,” I said, marching in the direction on his screen where Keiko had stopped to descend into the hole. The map was in 3D and it used different colors to represent depth. The deeper it went, the darker the colors.