by Steve Vera
“Loud and clear.”
“Excellent.” He turned to his brethren. “We ready?”
A chorus of nods.
“All right, then.” Gavin let out a breath and rolled his neck on his shoulders. “Let’s find out where we are.”
The ringing that Skip had become accustomed to at the fringes of his perception here on Theia surged in his ear canal as if he’d gone underwater. All four closed their eyes and when they opened them, it was that scary moment in the movie when the face stares back in the window. Skip jumped. Their eyeballs were wrapped in the spider-light Skip now understood to mean “magic in use.” He should have been used to it by now but it was creepy. It made them look inhuman.
Trance-like, Gavin approached the bonfire and stepped into the flames without so much as breaking his stride. Their eyes flared and upon his entry, the bonfire they’d lined with rocks burst into an inferno with an audible whoosh and Gavin went up like a Roman candle.
Every instinct in Skip’s DNA commanded him to knock his friend over and smother the flames. He suppressed them, of course, trusting they knew what they were doing, but man oh man did Gavin look like a witch being burned at the stake.
As if that wasn’t crazy enough, Gavin levitated into the air, rising slowly from the embers as if he were possessed. Out of his eyes bands of misty amber light seeped out of his sockets and pooled above him like a miniature sun.
Okay.
Noah, Cirena and Tarsidion crisply withdrew their Quaranais.
“Efil,” they chorused, and their blades shot up in the now-familiar ring of metal against scabbard. At full extension, blue vaporous light erupted from each blade, pouring off the silvery metal like fire in a breeze. In the stillness of the trees, the cold, lonely wind emanating from the middle of their swords served as an eerie backdrop to the arcane syllables they spontaneously began to utter from their mouths. There was something both musical and unnerving about their incantations, as if the words themselves were live things, squirming in the air like singed caterpillars. In a quick, ritualistic arc, their blades twirled in a tight circle and plunged into the granite with a crunch of metal on stone. The bonfire shuddered and the flames changed from fire-yellow to Quaranai blue. In seconds the light seeping out of Gavin’s eyes changed to the same, creeping up toward the miniature sun of firelight above him. When the blue reached the yellow there was a pulse and a hiss. The two colors writhed, swirled violently until coalescing into a deep, regal purple.
“Au’tauna valis’te,” Gavin’s voice said not from his mouth, but from the light hovering above him.
Somewhere deep down in Skip’s mind the rational, dispassionate voice of the detective calmly informed him that Gavin had just turned into a talking ball of purple light.
He then watched said purple light brighten a moment—he could almost picture Gavin taking a breath—and then like a shooting star streak away into the night above. From each embedded Quaranai a thin string of silver light trailed behind it, reminding Skip of a never-ending strand of spider silk.
And then Skip was alone with the trees.
* * *
There was no reason for her to have opened her eyes. No sound had been made, the wind had not shifted and it wasn’t from the pain. It was something else. Amanda looked into the darkness and saw lights twinkling in the forest. She sat up, blotting the sleep from her eyes with her fingertips, but before she could focus, the lights flickered away to the corners of her vision. The sparkles were subtle, too soft for her to decipher accurately. At first they seemed reddish, the same as the little moon, but then they looked purple, then green, then silver—she couldn’t be sure. The harder she tried to focus, the more elusive they became, hovering maddeningly at the outskirts of her vision. She craned her neck forward.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Donovan’s voice floated from behind her.
His voice had the effect of a snapping rubber band.
She shook her out her head. “What are they?”
“Whatever they are, they want us to follow them into the forest.” Donovan was lying comfortably on his back, eyes closed, hands behind his head.
“You see them too?”
“Yes, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Why would they want us to follow them?”
“Perhaps they want to make you some tea.”
Amanda gasped. “Was that a joke? My God, I think that was a joke. What’s today’s date? This is going in the journal.”
Donovan didn’t respond.
Her stomach gurgled at her angrily in the silence, demanding sustenance. Imploring for it. She still couldn’t believe he’d eaten right in front of her, hadn’t offered so much as a crumb. Sadist.
She sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, purposefully looking away from the trees while wincing at the stretching of her wounds. The mere thought of dancing lights in a forest that wanted her to follow them was unsettling enough to drive off the considerable sleepiness that clung to her eyes.
This was officially the longest day of her life.
So instead of sleeping, she stared at Donovan on the other side of their campfire and tried to decide whether or not she wanted to kick him in the face or...what? Understand him? Get to know who her emperor was?
Her stomach rumbled again, louder this time. “You could have shared, you know,” she said, unable to help herself. He’d eaten a king-size Baby Ruth bar right in front of her. He could have given her a piece.
“You gave our position away twice,” he answered, which she hadn’t been expecting. “I will not allow your bumbling to jeopardize my wellbeing. Learn or be left.”
Ah, a kick in the face it was.
With a sigh, she settled back gingerly onto her piddly bed of blossom petals and dried grass, trying her best not to think about what might be watching her. Where are you, Gavin? she asked, her voice both small and girl-like, even in her head. Helpless. Please find me, feel me. She could sense something watching from the trees behind her. It was a pressure. A hot wind.
Breath.
She screwed her eyes shut to block out her imagination but when she did, all she saw was Asmodeous’s face looming in front of her, red lightning flashing behind his grotesque head, his monstrous, sharp teeth bared, mouth open, eyes blazing like infernos. She’d seen what had happened to Jack. What had almost happened to her. If it hadn’t been for Donovan she would have been eaten alive, would have felt those teeth sinking into the flesh of her cheeks and jaw...
A tremor rolled through her body so violently that the gashes around her shoulders seared to life.
Please, God, let Gavin find me...
Chapter 9
Being a former sociopath had its advantages. First, the list of things that mattered was relatively short—things were either for Donovan or against him. And would be treated as such. As for the “former” part, he had yet to decide on how he felt about the onslaught of emotions bounding, skulking and flying across his formerly gray mindscape.
He looked over the flickering flames of the campfire he’d built and regarded his new servant. It had been a long time since he’d spent so much time with a single person—years. Noteworthy was the lack of his desire to be immediately free of her presence.
He rather enjoyed being an emperor. Her emperor.
Yes, she was a liability and untrained and full of misguided passion, but there was something, dare he say, refreshing about the truth of her character. The ability to read people’s souls had long ago inoculated him from the fables of honor and truth in human beings.
The race of human beings were little more than walking packs of lies.
His servant however, was different. Her soul possessed a bright unflickering nucleus of rich, vivid gold. Donovan could count on one hand how many people he’d known who’d possessed such colors. One of which still haunted him.
She learned faster than most and her ability to withstand pain was remarkable, even by his standards. The lacerations in her back would have reduced most men to whimpers, yet she sucked it up. Kept moving.
“Donovan, are you asleep?”
And clearly she had guts.
“I know you’re awake, Donovan. You’re always awake.”
He didn’t so much turn his head as shift his attention. “What do you want?”
He already knew of course. He could see it in her colors—a constant throb of dark red and sodium orange swirling through her outer bands. Pain and fear. And she was hungry.
“I keep thinking something’s going to jump out of the trees and grab me,” she said in a whisper thick with emotion. “How do you make it so you’re not afraid?”
Donovan studied her from across the dwindling flames. Her face was a mess, black left eye, starfish-shaped bruise across her right cheek and her lips were double-split. His work. “Dismiss it. If it doesn’t serve you, discard it.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is.”
“For you, maybe.”
“For everybody. It’s just a matter of deciding. All human beings are master of their thoughts. Now shut up and go to sleep. We’re going to move hard tomorrow and I will leave you behind without compunction if you can’t keep up.” There was a bit of dried grass stuck in her hair.
“Don’t you ever get tired of being a dick?”
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, any soul stupid enough to insult Donovan directly suffered. Tonight, he let it go. “I’m not a dick.”
Twin expressions of shock and incredulity wrestled across her face. Incredulity won. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Donovan, but you are such a dick.”
“Explain.”
She pshhed, which annoyed him. “How about the fact that you kicked the shit out of me in my own apartment? In my own room. That was a pretty dickish thing to do.”
“You had a choice. You chose to defy me. Cause and effect. If I hadn’t offered you a choice, which I had no obligation to do, and just beat you for efficiency’s sake, then your argument would be more credible.”
“Are we really having this conversation? Look at my face.”
“Note that you still utilize the complete array of your bodily functions. If I was a dick, you would have fewer teeth. Your kneecaps would be broken.”
“You could have just told me you were there to help.”
Donovan rolled his head in her direction. He was feeling uncharacteristically chatty. “But then I would have been lying.”
He rather enjoyed the expression that crinkled her face.
“What is it you want, Donovan? What’s your deal?”
“You’ll see,” he whispered.
A flicker of churlish yellow rippled through her outer bands—the equivalent of a spiritual eye-roll. The urge to backhand her flashed through him like a concussion grenade.
“Donovan,” she said. There was the appropriate amount of nervousness in her voice. “Your eyes just changed color.”
“What? Explain immediately.” A storm of yellow-green solar flares thrashed through her outer bands—disbelief and fear.
“What do you mean, ‘explain’? Your eyes just went fucking red for a second, and now they’re blue. Back at my apartment they had no color. They looked more like...bullet holes, and now they just changed to gold.” Her hand was by her mouth. “What are you, Donovan?”
The silence that followed her words hung heavily in the confines of their make-shift cave. What the hell was she talking about? His irises had no color except for the blacks of his pupils—it was the whole reason he wore sunglasses. He was conspicuous enough.
“If you’re lying to me,” he started in a flat voice. He took out his tactical mirror from his right thigh pocket, pulled out the retractable end, swiveled the base toward his face and looked into it without his sunglasses.
He stared a long time into that four-inch disc of reflection, watched his eyes oscillate from gold to yellow flecked with chips of garnet to green and then to red. Like a rumble of thunder rolling along the currents of his mind, body and soul a purpose so massive and vivid crashed across his thoughts and stormed into his desires that in an instant...a life question was answered.
He knew exactly what he wanted. I’ve come home, he thought.
“I bet it has something to do with Theia,” Amanda whispered.
Donovan methodically collapsed his tactical mirror, inserted it back into his thigh pocket, moved his hand to his right breast pocket, unsealed the Velcro patch, took out his Ray-Bans, slid them onto his face and laid back onto his hands. He wasn’t feeling chatty anymore. His past reached out like fingers from a grave but he crushed them back into their places. For the first time since his murder, in the still of the night on another world, Donovan allowed himself to be human, felt a visceral surge in his spirit, as if something inside him had just been turned on.
He would have his answers.
“Do you truly want to know who I am?” he asked her in a voice that barely escaped his throat.
“Yes,” she said immediately.
He licked his lips and tasted their dry salt. “I’m the monster.”
He didn’t say it to scare her, he said it because it was the truth. There was no undoing the things he’d done.
She was quiet for a long time. It was just the sound of her breathing and the soft whisper of the fire. “I don’t buy that,” she finally said. Before he could tell if she was lying or not, he turned off his Othersight. He might kill her if she was lying. “I’ve seen what a monster looks like, Donovan. You may be a lot of things—self-serving, ruthless, mean, an asshole—but you’re not a monster. I’m not sure what you are, but I know that.”
You know nothing.
Without waiting for an answer, she settled back onto her little pallet and curled up to sleep. Her stomach rumbled. Four minutes and thirty-nine seconds later she re-entered a shallow realm of sleep. He watched her chest rise and fall, annoyed by how it soothed him, and fought off glimpses of his past, of the things he could remember.
Of whom she reminded him of. The only person he’d ever loved.
Who’d ever loved him.
“Yes, I am,” he whispered to the night. From the corner of his vision the will-o’-the-wisps winked and danced from within the trees but came no closer.
They knew it too.
Chapter 10
“I hope you’re happy, numbnuts,” Skip muttered to himself, staring in silent wonder at the army of ghostly trees surrounding them. Every time a breeze came up off the river a cascade of petals would blow across the campsite and change the world to perfumed snow.
This was where fairytales came from.
Well, everything except for Gavin’s rotisserie body twisting slowly three feet in the air vertically behind him.
At first he’d studied the four of them in detail, taking advantage of the luxury of not having to look away—the strong jaw of Cirena’s chin, the warm lines that radiated from the outer corners of Noah’s eyes like the sun’s rays, the exquisite craftsmanship of their armor, the details of their belts, which sheathed the sleeping forms of their Quaranais, the way their cloaks moved as if they were half alive. He marveled at the way the blue flames of the bonfire licked the bottom of Gavin’s boots to no effect.
But as usual, after ten minutes Skip got antsy. He stood and looked around, wondering for the three hundredth time just what the hell he’d gotten himself into. The one thing the silence afforded him was the opportunity for his mind to prowl roads he wasn’t prepared to traverse.
Tarsy would have told me if this were a one-way ticket, right?
And what if it was? Could he live with no Earth? No Dunkin’ Donuts dark roas
t with Baileys French Vanilla? No Sunday nights in his easy-chair with his laptop flipped open, tuned in to his fantasy football lineup while the Eagles massacred the Giants on his sixty-inch HD? How about just good old-fashioned regular electricity? Did they even have that here? And dammit, he’d just bought that truck. What the hell had he been thinking?
He found himself staring at the mist creeping between the trees, splashed with bone and blood from the moons above. Just another day at the office, Skippy-boy. You got this.
He heard a rustle. With a snap of his head he homed in on it, targeted it with his eyes and ears. It didn’t sound too big, maybe a raccoon or its equivalent here. A muskrat with a unicorn horn or something.
Nevertheless, he draped his fingers over the heel of his revolver and rested his palm on his chest. We are at DEFCON 3, Gentleman.
The next rustle came much closer and from a different direction. His fingers went from drape to encircle. Nobody in here but us chickens. He tapped the trigger-guard of his .357. The next rustle he heard was deeper in the trees and this time...he saw lights. They were so faint that at first he figured them to be those sparkles he saw at the corner of his vision after getting up too quickly, but the longer he stared, searching for the rustles, the more tangible they became—a pale glitter twinkling within the trees. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, squinting to get a better look, but every time he got close, the lights would dance away, infuriatingly to the edges of his vision.
He took a step forward, eyebrows drawn. Was he really seeing this? Theia’s version of St. Elmo’s Fire or something? Dangerous? He scrolled through his mental Rolodex of Greek Mythology and King Arthurian lore but came up empty. Only one way to find out. He rubbed his chin, glanced back at the four—they were fine—and took another step. I’ll just go up to the trees.
After about five steps he realized, just barely, that he was about to enter the trees.
Uh, Skipster, what are you doing? He really had no answer, other than abandoning his post to chase after the pretty lights. He scrubbed at his eyes and shook his head; his brain felt as if it were wrapped in gauze. When he looked back he was sure they’d be gone, some sort of optical illusion brought on by an exhausted brain saturated with too much magic, but nope...there they were. Dancing at the corners of his vision. There was something deliberate about them, something...strategic.