by Steve Vera
“You have no right. I’m not going to ask again. Give me my fu—”
“All right,” Gavin snapped. Studiously ignoring Cirena, Gavin shifted, reached beneath his cloak—
“Don’t you dare,” Cirena warned.
—and pulled out Skip’s nickel-plated, six-inch barreled Colt Python .357 Combat Magnum. He looked good with it too; it went with his outfit.
“Gimme,” Skip said.
“Stavengre, don’t,” Cirena said in a voice close to a plea.
“What’s the big deal, Cirena? I’ll keep it safe.”
There was something alluring (in a scary kind of way) about the way her jaw unhinged. Her straight, even teeth peeked from behind her lips. “That you should even have to ask such a question,” she said in a voice hardly more than a whisper. “Imagine the calamity such a weapon could wreak on this world should it fall into enemy hands.” Her eyes narrowed and her jaw clamped. “It must be destroyed.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not happening. How ’bout I just unload it? That way, if anybody somehow miraculously got their hands on it, they wouldn’t have a clue as to what it could do because it would be empty.”
“That’s not good enough,” Cirena said.
“It’s gonna have to be,” Skip said. “Cause it’s mine and you can’t have it.”
“There is another way,” Tarsidion interjected, his deep smooth bass like salve on a burn.
All heads turned his way.
“What’s that?” Skip asked.
“We could rune it.”
“Come again?” Skip asked. “Did you just say ‘ruin’ it?”
“No,” Tarsidion said, reaching for the revolver. Gavin still held it and resisted a moment before releasing it with a shrug. Even in Tarsidion’s monstrous mitt, the Python looked like a cannon. Man, Skip loved that gun.
“I said rune it, which means enchanting it with runes in a way that allows only your hand to touch it, or ours, to wield it. Any other who might seize it...” his eyes darkened, “...would remember the moment for the rest of their days.”
The song of a tree lark warbled through the air. Perhaps the one who’d been at Jack’s funeral. Skip thought about it a second and shrugged. “Fine by me—sort of a smart-gun fingerprint recognition self-destruct enchantment. I got no problem with that.”
All eyes switched to Cirena.
“For the enemy to even be exposed to such a thing could alter warfare here forever.”
“As I recall, Azmo-face has already been exposed to it.”
Cirena hit him with another couple of purple torpedoes. “There are other evils in this world, Everett, that have not.”
“If they see it in action, it’ll be the last thing they ever see. I never miss.” He turned to Gavin. “I think...runing it, or whatever, will do just fine. All those opposed say ‘nay.’” Skip looked around, as did the others.
“Nay!” Cirena said, glaring at her brethren. “Nay!” she repeated, this time in a yell.
“Excellent. Four to one, and while we’re at it...where’s the .50?”
Tarsidion’s face crinkled in alarm. If Cirena had been upset before, she looked outright homicidal now.
“What .50?” she asked in a voice so low it could have come from the bottom of the ocean. Her normally heavy-lidded eyes were practically popping out of her face, but this time, her wrath was directed at Tarsidion. “You let him bring that abomination?”
“At the time I was carrying both you and Jack and three rucksacks strapped across my back in the middle of a deluge. I didn’t see the need to argue. I forgot about it.”
“Forgot about it? You never forget anything.” Sure was a good thing Tarsidion was seven feet tall because Cirena was about to go nuclear.
“Well now,” Skip said, detaching himself from the quartet, “I don’t see it here, which means...” He walked over to the riverbank and kicked off his shoes.
“What are doing?” Noah asked.
Skip answered by shedding his jeans and yelling over his shoulder: “Be right back.” They scrambled to stop him but by that time, he was already in.
The water was scrotum-shriveling cold but also very clear, and in moments he found what he was looking for: The army green, triangular Drag Bag. Like a treasure awaiting discovery it rested on the bottom of the river, a crescent of sand spread across the upper tip.
He grabbed it with both hands—it was a heavy bastard—and hauled it up by its canvas strap. A small school of silver-blue fish investigated his face before zipping away as one, offended by the flurry of bubbles spewing out of his mouth.
When he popped back out of the water, each of the four Shardyn shared the identical expression of a parent coming home to an unsanctioned teenage party while holding a failing report card. Gavin was the one who spoke.
“Let this be your first lesson on Theia, Skip,” he began in a very quiet voice. “Never, ever, ever enter the waters of an unfamiliar river. You have no idea what might be beneath the surface.”
Skip stared at the quartet, dripping a puddle into the gravelly sand by the bank, holding a .50 sniper system.
“Are you going to try and tell me that’s an heirloom too?” Cirena asked.
“I got eight shots left,” Skip said, splashing toward them on the bank. “Once I’m out, turn it into scrap metal for all I care, but do you really want to waste eight tungsten carbide armor-piercing incendiary rounds at the threshold of this war everybody’s been dreading like the damn bubonic plague?”
“Yes,” Cirena answered immediately. “Wholeheartedly.” She turned to the others.
“Nobody’s gonna know what it is, right?” Skip asked. “Just call it a...magical staff of thunder or something. I could hit a pineapple at over seven hundred yards.”
Cirena turned her head very slowly, like the turret of an Abrams tank targeting his face. Man, she was mad.
“A magical staff of thunder...how funny,” Noah mused.
Cirena stepped closer, but Gavin interjected.
“Are you really as good as you say you are?” he asked.
“I am,” Skip said without hesitation. “I started off as a sniper. It just didn’t suit me so I went for the PJs instead. Some people are born to paint or run or do flips. Me?” He let his sentence hang in the air. “I just see it. Three points.”
Standing there in front of four otherworldly warriors on another world, Skip somehow managed to feel a sense of déjà vu. Something inside him was waking up.
“All right then,” Gavin said. “Tarsidion, you enchant the Barrett, Noah you have the Py—”
The change in Gavin’s face was not the most frightening thing about that moment; it was that his expression was shared by all of them. Even angry Cirena. An image of a Wooly Mammoth frozen solid for a couple ten thousand years with grass still in his mouth flashed in Skip’s head.
“Please tell me there isn’t a monster behind me,” Skip said, doing his best to not move his lips.
“Skip,” Gavin said in a low breath. “Very slowly, exit the water.”
A swarm of sweat droplets beaded Skip’s forehead. “Okay. No problemo. It’s not Asmodeous, is it?” Skip whispered while slogging as quietly as he could, willing whatever was behind him to scurry off.
“No,” Noah answered in the subdued, cautious voice a person might use next to a hydrogen bomb that had just begun counting down. “Just keep walking, don’t run.”
Skip closed his eyes, grit his teeth and slowly turned around. He couldn’t not look.
And there, yet again, the boundaries of his perception of reality bulged.
Descending from the sky was a formation of pure white clouds, illuminated as if they were filled with silver lightning. They streaked down from the heavens, wisps and vaporous threads that began to coalesce into the
unmistakable silhouette of a woman—an ethereal angel without wings. She hovered over the wavelets of the river.
“Time to depart,” Gavin said, donning the deep hood of his sapphire cloak. The moment he did he disappeared, morphing into a hazy mirage, like heat coming off a summer highway. Skip’s jaw would have dropped if it hadn’t already been open.
Tarsidion, Noah and Cirena followed suit and in a second, Skip stood alone, surrounded by four shimmering ghosts.
“What is it?” Skip whispered, unable to look away.
“Shut up and take my hand,” came a low, Cirena-ish growl from the human-shaped blot of roiling air standing beside him. Skip obeyed immediately. It was like grabbing the grip of a power sander; his whole body erupted into vibrations pulsing static shocks into his eyes but when he looked down at his feet, all he saw was interrupted air.
I keep thinking I’ve seen it all...
Clad in a filmy, pearlescent gown, the translucent cloud woman skimmed the river like a silent flying saucer. She was more eerie than frightening, an ethereal daydream come to life, though it looked as if she were coming right at them...
Do not move. He couldn’t tell if Cirena’s voice was inside or outside his head but either way, it was sound counsel. Within moments the cloud woman arrived, coasting to a hover in front of Jack’s tree, which still simmered in pale fire. It was only then that Skip got a good look into the holes that served as her eyes. It was like staring into the eyes of a thunderstorm. The hairs on his arms jumped up. For just a bare moment it seemed as if she saw him, as if there were a small glint of lightning inside the miniature cyclone twisting slowly in her eye sockets, and then he was being pulled away.
Chapter 6
Amanda shivered. After the sun had gone down the world had plunged into a darkness that was more than the mere absence of the sun; the night here was an entity that throbbed and swirled. Unfamiliar and sinister sounds emanated from the trees behind her and once again a Rho-beet! Rho-beet! Gurkle, gurkle sounded from behind her, keeping her huddled on the flat stone under the branch of a tree next to the water.
So far, all the rustling and movement she’d heard in the trees had sounded small. Her body was stiff and the gashes in her back seemed as if they’d been dipped in battery acid.
On one hand she didn’t believe Donovan would actually just leave her, she couldn’t believe that, but marooned on her little island it was easy for her to imagine she was the last human being alive. He’d been gone a long time. After he’d completed his weapons check, Donovan had strapped up, looked around and walked right into the trees as if he’d been going on a little hike.
Ten hours ago, according to her watch that still somehow worked.
The only thing she had going for her was the sky. As an astronomy major at Trinity, Amanda was thoroughly fascinated by anything remotely celestial and now, hunkered down on her rock, she looked up and drank in the sky’s alien magnificence. It stole her breath. Way far away, like sailboats on a horizon, she could see distant clouds of greenish-blue gases colliding with ribbons of magentas birthing a fiery turquoise. For all the terror that the night held here, there seemed to be an obverse beauty.
There was something else, though, something that completely hypnotized her.
The shattered moon.
It rose from the northeast, magnificent and eerie, like a pale archipelago in a vast sea of stars. Easily twice the size of Earth’s, it sat in the sky like a broken skull. Thousands of fragments hung suspended in quasi animation between eastern and western halves.
If only I had a camera, she thought. The slither of feelings churning inside her stomach were part terror, part exhilaration and part wistfulness, though she couldn’t understand why. At the age of twenty-two, Amanda had just accomplished the dream of every budding astronomer, professor or kid, for that matter. She was on another planet, gazing at the constellations of an alien sky. And she couldn’t prove it.
The river slurped. Amanda’s head snapped in its direction, eyes pinned wide.
That sounded bigger than a fish, she thought. That sounded like a sasquatch. Slowly, she crept backward off her stone away from the lone tree toward the woods and fought the impulse to run screaming.
“Be very still,” floated a raspy whisper from behind her. The relief that gushed through her was strong enough to drown the panic thrumming through her blood like a shot of Bourbon.
“I knew you’d come back.”
“Shut up. You’re a liability.”
Her mouth was dry—with terror and regular old thirst.
“Your blood has attracted attention,” Donovan continued.
“Of what?”
Silence.
Amanda slowly rotated her neck backward and up so she could look at him. The first thing she saw was the barrel of his rifle, capped with some sort of silencer, or a suppressor as her uncle would have chided her, protruding from the trees behind her. His emotionless, predatory face bore down over it, scanning the river like a sniper. Energy crackled out of his pores. Thank God, thank God, thank God...
“I don’t know what they are,” he finally answered. The tip of an icicle of fear pressed into the nape of her neck and cut off her prayers.
“They?”
He looked down at her from over the rifle. “The time has come to define the parameters of our relationship, Amanda Kasey.”
There was something in the way he regarded her that threw her heart into overdrive. “You really think this is the right time to do this?”
“I do.”
She glanced back at the river and swallowed. “Fine. However you want to define it, let’s just get out of here.”
“If you want my protection, because you most certainly will die tonight without it, then you must swear allegiance to me. I will know if you are lying.”
Amanda shook her head out as if her ears were clogged with water. “What?”
“Swear your allegiance to me and I will save your life.” As if to punctuate his words the river slurped again, but this time she caught a glimpse of something green and brackish beneath the soft glimmers of moonlight.
“For how long?” she asked in disbelief.
“Until I release you or you pay your debt.”
“Debt?”
“I will have saved your life. Twice. Save mine and you will be unbound.”
And if you die? she thought.
He put his face into hers. “Trust me, Amanda Kasey, you’ll die long before I do.”
Her insides squirmed. For the first time in her life she was the dumb blonde she hated so much in the movies, frozen by indecision. There had to be another way; she couldn’t just forsake her freedom to anybody, especially him.
“Very well,” he whispered and disappeared into the darkness.
Her defiance lasted a nanosecond. “Okay, wait, okay!” she whispered, her resolve crumbling.
“Okay, what?” he asked, re-appearing.
Amanda sighed heavily before answering, grinding her teeth. “Okay, I swear allegiance to you. Whatever that means.”
“It means I own your ass. You do as I say, it’s that simple.”
“Anything you say?” she asked.
“Think of me as your emperor.”
She would have laughed had he not been dead serious. “Is that all?”
“That’s all. Do you accept?”
Either be enslaved to a sociopath or torn to pieces and devoured by river monsters.
“Don’t make me ask you again, Amanda.”
“I won’t hurt somebody simply because you tell me to, Donovan.”
“Then goodbye.” He started to fade again.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious.” His whisper was like sandpaper to her nerves.
The river
splashed again and this time...she saw eyes. And a fin. Her heart catapulted into her throat.
“Fine, I swear allegiance to you,” she said in a panic. “I fucking swear allegiance to you. Just get us out of here.”
He lowered himself, hovering scant inches from her face. “And Amanda—” He grabbed her by the back of her hair with iron fingers and forced her to look into his face. She gasped. What she saw had to be a trick of the light—a glint of red behind his sunglasses. He leaned closer, his breath hot and smelling like wild herbs and licorice. His mouth was utterly perfect. “You belong to me now. I am unconcerned about your precious Gavin. If you lie to me, even once—” his hand tightened around her hair, “—you’ll avoid mirrors for the rest of your life. Are we clear?”
He forced her head to look back out toward the river and as he did the river parted, the dim glint of shattered moonlight breaking against a flash of scales. And eyes.
“Crystal,” she whispered. “Crystal, crystal, crystal.”
There was something sinister in the way his lips twisted up, revealing the points of his teeth. “Good. Now get inside the trees.” A foul stench came from the river, heavy with brine, and washed over her nostrils. “Ease inside, no sudden movements.”
She obeyed, crab-walking as quietly as she could into the darker shadows of the white barked trees. Young grass and the remnants of last year’s leaves stuck to her sweaty palms. Once in, she balled her hands into fists and tried not to cry, huddling in shame by Donovan’s leg.
For several long minutes there was nothing, only the eerie sounds of the night around them, and then...another ripple in the water. Donovan held his hand up, eyes fastened to the scope.
Like out of a nightmare the head of something inhuman and grotesque split the surface of the glimmering river soundlessly. The gasp that escaped through her lips was far louder then she intended. With all her might she wished she could take it back, saw the muscles at the hinges of Donovan’s jaw bunch, but no such luck. The emerging creature’s head was turned at an angle, cocked like a lizard reading the air.