by Steve Vera
“Our minds,” Noah said. “The same way that scream sounded human.”
Another flurry of gunfire popped in the distance.
“Gavin, I’m telling you right now, that’s no auditory hallucination. It’s a .45 and a 9 mil, a Glock if I had to put money on it.”
Gavin looked at the others and shrugged out of his camping rack. “We have to know. Tarsy, Noah, with me. Cirena...”
“I’m coming as well,” she said.
“You’re staying with Skip.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Skip said, but Gavin was already leaping into the air, shimmering into spirit halfway across the gap. Tarsidion and Noah jumped after him, disappearing into hazy mirages halfway as well, donning their hoods midflight.
And then it was just him and Cirena.
* * *
The only thought that kept Amanda sane was of Gavin. If they caught up with him, then he could heal her and take this soul withering, incapacitating molten agony away from her. He’d make everything okay. All she had to do was make it to him.
“We have to get to the other side,” Donovan said as the two stood looking at the river. His rasp punctured her haze.
“What’s wrong with this side?” she asked. The mere thought of water on her wounds made her scalp crawl.
“Because of that,” he said and pointed.
Amanda glanced across the river but saw nothing but water, sand and trees. She was in no mood for twenty-questions. “I don’t see anything, Donovan. What am I looking for?”
He grabbed her by the back of the neck, and she squealed, cringing in anticipation of the blow. It didn’t come. Instead he turned her head and pointed across the river. “Look,” he said, shivering her ear with his breath.
She followed his finger, wincing in his grip, and then did see it. A flitter of light on the serpentine branches of a...willow tree.
“Do you see it now?” he asked. She nodded with a small whimper, and he released her.
“You could have just pointed,” she said with a wince, trying to massage some feeling back into her neck. The movement blasted her with pain.
I hate you so much.
“Your feelings toward me are irrelevant. What is relevant is your complete helplessness. From this point on, your actions affect me, and I will not allow reckless stupidity or feeble questions when my wellbeing is at stake. Do I make myself clear? Use. Your senses. Be. Alert. Clear?”
Amanda clawed her hands into her jeans and for just a second her anger was stronger than her pain. “Crystal,” she growled.
Donovan leaned so closely that their mouths were mere inches apart—she could smell his breath, which was becoming familiar to her even if it was strange, like one of those microwavable aromatherapy wraps filled with beads. “Don’t make me say it again.” He lingered there for one more second then yanked himself away and started upriver.
She glared after him, kicked at a rock and then followed. It wasn’t as if she had a choice.
Fifteen minutes later she was composed enough to speak, her anger mollified by the sound of their footsteps in grass and gravel. “How do you propose we get to the other side?” she asked.
“Swim,” he said without turning.
Amanda stopped. “You’re kidding.”
Donovan didn’t even pause, just kept trekking along the river.
“Are you out of your mind?” she asked again, wincing at every step of her jogging to catch back up.
“It’s been argued.”
She blinked, absorbed and stored and kept right after him. “Donovan, those things are in the water. Look at the tracks.”
“They’re nocturnal.”
Amanda let out an exasperated sigh. “Don’t you think there might be other things in there. Plus look how wide it is. I’ll never make it.”
“The river narrows a quarter mile up, well within your capabilities.”
How can he know all this stuff?
She looked out at the river and felt a helpless flutter in her stomach. “What about my back?”
“What about it?”
“If I swim I’ll just tear all my wounds.”
“If it becomes infected again then I will cauterize it again.”
Her stomach lurched as the thought. “Maybe we could build a raft or something.”
“And you know how to build a raft?”
“Well,” she began. “Don’t you?”
“Amanda, I am swimming across. If you wish to stay on this side and build a raft, I’ll let you. I’ll even release you from being my servant.”
He didn’t give her time to respond, just turned and kept walking. Raft-building on alternate worlds had not been taught in the Girl Scouts curriculum.
When they came across the arm of wood and stone stretching into the middle of the river, Amanda stopped. Its design seemed far beyond the intelligence of a beaver, but not quite sophisticated enough to be human. It was eerie just sitting there, alone and forgotten as the river relentlessly pushed around it in a continual splashing.
The base was made of circular white stones cemented with the mortar of dark mud, while the roof was made of overlapping sticks tightly pressed together. A crude form of thatch.
Without warning, Donovan scrambled to the top of the wooden roof like a primate. When he reached the top (which was a good nine feet up) he turned around and looked down at her. He had gorgeous hair, the bastard. It was thick and blond, falling over an oval face with a square jaw that the gods themselves could have worn. His expression, as usual, was hidden by the Ray Bans welded to his face but there was something about him that was too good-looking. Unreal. He offered his hand, and Amanda looked at it as if it were a tarantula.
“I won’t offer it again.”
She rubbed her thumbs against her fingers and shifted from foot to foot. You’ve come this far, Manders. With a purpose that surprised even her, Amanda jumped up and grabbed his hand, which seized hers like a striking cobra. His skin was hot. Their hands clicked together like a seatbelt.
“Somebody ate his spinach,” she said, shaking out her hand once topside, trying to ignore the magma in her back.
He walked over the roof like a captain on a ship, unaffected by the pitch of the mud-mortared sticks. He stopped when he reached the end. “We jump from here.”
Though the river was beautiful, there was something subtly menacing about it. It made her think of a Venus Flytrap, like something was lurking just below the surface, waiting for them to dip in. Come on in, the water’s fine.
“You’re nuts if you jump in there,” she said. The very thought of it touching her wounds made her stomach squirm.
“Like I said,” Donovan said, shifting his rifle so that it was tightly strapped against his back. “It’s been argued.” He then pulled out his knife, put the blade between his teeth, adjusted the coil of vine around his shoulder (she had no idea where he’d gotten that) and dove in with hardly a splash.
It was only when he popped up three quarters of the way there did Amanda realize that she’d stopped breathing. If anything happened to him before she got to Gavin...she was dogmeat. River monster food.
Donovan sliced through the water like a barracuda and in under a minute he was on the other side. Just like that. No Venus Flytrap. Just a brisk morning swim on the other side of reality. She watched him uncoil the vine from his shoulder, twirl it and fling it into the river. It splashed down about halfway to where Amanda waited, and floated on top, bobbing in the wavelets. All she had to do was make it to that vine and she was home free. About seventy meters, maybe eighty. Not even one lap in an Olympic pool.
“Jump!” Donovan barked.
She looked one more time into the calm water lapping the never-completed dam and felt a sense of dread at its mundane lifelessness. She glanc
ed at Donovan standing on the other side of the river, waiting with imperious impatience. At least I have my own monster, she thought and then dove in.
For two or three seconds her world was hissing bubbles and screeching agony; she might as well have jumped into a river of liquid hydrogen. When the pain finally subsided from a fourteen to a mere nine on a ten-scale, she broke the surface and instinctively propelled herself with a kick, stretching out her arms to freestyle to shore. Welded flesh ripped.
Maybe it was her screams, maybe the blood, but not six strokes in she heard the unmistakable glug of a very large bubble.
From right behind her.
In that moment, whatever inhibitions her wounds had placed on her body were incinerated. Full speed, no pain, swim for your life. It was probably nothing, but she wasn’t going to hang around and find out. When she dared a glance behind her she saw two fins and a path of bubbles homing in on her like a slow-moving missile.
Liquid terror spurted through her veins. This is not happening.
But it was. She pumped her arms and legs so hard she left a white-froth behind her thick enough to stop a battleship. Ahead of her she saw Donovan with a pistol in one hand, the end of the vine in the other.
He yelled something but it was lost to the water sloshing in her ears. The end of the vine was just three strokes away. Two more. One more. A strange horrible growl reverberated from her left and before she could grab the bobbing end of the rope, a mere arm’s length away, her ankle was snatched by a hand with claws and then she was pulled under.
Why he always seemed to wait until the last possible minute to save her was beyond her. A moment before her lungs burst and her leg was pulled out of its socket there was a zip through the water, followed by a green cloud that puffed around her. The hand released. The instant she was free she launched herself away like a submarine blowing its ballast tanks.
She burst through the water, coughing and sputtering and crying in pain, and tried to kick to shore, only her right calf was a flopping, mangled mess that refused to obey her commands. She switched to backstroke and pumped backward, squirted through the water, crying and blubbering. More trails of bubbles were coming. They were everywhere.
Please, I don’t want to die, not like this, not here...
“Grab the fucking vine!” Donovan yelled.
Wait. Donovan never yelled.
The effect was like a smack across the head. She blinked, reached out and seized the tip of the vine that was floating right in front of her face. The moment her fingers closed around its wet fibers, he was hauling her in, hand over hand, knife in mouth.
Sensing escape, the trail of bubbles stopped and then detonated like a hot-spring geyser, revealing something too horrible to be possible in a spray of falling water.
The creature from last night. But in the day.
“Nocturnal, my ass!” she screamed and kicked as hard as she could with her good foot.
This close to it, every bump and mottled spot on its monstrous, amphibian face jumped out at her, pierced by two feral eyes ravenous with hatred. It snarled, shrieked and bared its teeth while reaching for her floundering leg. It never made it. Just before its clawed hand could encircle her leg, the back of its head blew outward in a spray of bone fragments and gray matter.
The nightmare disappeared back under the wavelets.
Thank you, thank you, thank you...
She grabbed the vine again—she’d released it in her terror—and her journey resumed. All she saw through the blur of water was Donovan, knife in mouth, hauling her in with quick, powerful pulls.
When her back scraped against pebbly dirt she bolted up on her good leg, only to buckle from the pain. The sight of the carnage of her other calf almost made her faint. Donovan dropped the vine, untucked his pistol, fired two quick shots and then was running toward her. Something behind her dropped in a gurgle.
Never in her whole life had she seen a human being move so fast. One second he was ten feet away from her, the next she was being slung like a sack of rice onto his shoulder.
Pain.
Draped over his back she saw more bubble-trails, six of them, seven. They were coming from everywhere. It was all she could do to not empty her bladder on Donovan but even in her pain-induced terror she knew better.
“Here,” Donovan said, handing her last night’s gun after flopping her on the sand.
Sucking air, Amanda nonetheless took it in a fumble and aimed toward the water in time to see the creatures rising from the surface like zombies from the grave. Water poured off their bodies in streaming rivulets.
“Aim for their eyes, heads or throats. Do not waste my ammunition. Keep your composure.”
She looked at him, heart slamming, wide-eyed, but his calmness was infective. In fact, that faint smile she’d seen earlier was twisting the left side of his mouth. Its inappropriateness punched through her fear and pain like brass knuckles. He wasn’t afraid. He was looking forward to this.
“Phase two of today’s education, Amanda.” He brought up his right hand to his face, took off his shades and handed them to her. The rims of his irises were smoky crimson, the middle still blue. His lips twisted higher. “How to kill.”
* * *
Their bodies streaked through the trees so fast that they left blue echoes of themselves behind. It was risky to blur in a forest, reckless even, but after seventeen years of estrangement on a world without magic they flew through the trees like the wind.
Forty feet out from the ledge they slowed to a mere sprint and stopped in unison at the edge of a cliff overlooking the river.
For a moment, none of them spoke.
“It makes a sort of sense,” Noah finally said reasonably. “If he opened the tomb, why not the Black Veil too?”
There was a wall between what his eyes saw and what his mind processed. Amanda. His love. The woman he had wanted to marry. Somehow, against the forces of logic, magic and physics, she was right there by the river, surrounded by river trolls. Gavin didn’t even try to make sense of it.
“I’m coming, baby,” he said and stepped off the cliff.
* * *
No matter what they did, how they lunged, screamed, swiped or bit, Donovan was already gone. And he made them pay for trying. Their bodies were slashed to ribbons, their bright green blood spattered across the rocky bank like a cafeteria food fight.
In the time it took the average person to throw a left hook, Donovan batted his attacker’s arm away, buried his knife under its pit, ripped out the blade and retracted to his former position. A stream of green blood spurted out across the gravel.
He resembled nothing human. Two red orbs glowed like bright embers in a breeze in the whites of his eyes.
All he needed was a black robe and a scythe.
There were only three left. All the others were dead or dying. Donovan’s latest victim was down to a knee, clutching its side, gurgling frothy bubbles. Not that Donovan needed her help, but Amanda covered him, her barrel lined up on the leader as it tried to stalk around Donovan.
Its attempt failed because suddenly it was the one being attacked, scrambling backward to evade his whirling blade. It failed that too.
Maybe it was luck, or because she’d been hanging around with Donovan so long, but she sensed the lunge of the allegedly wounded arm-pitted monster and just barely avoided being filleted by three-inch claws. She fired twice, first grazing its shoulder and then hitting its jaw, taking a good portion of the bottom of its face. But even so, the creature’s forward momentum drove it toward her, raking at her face with its talons. She just barely managed to scramble out of reach before her next shot punched a hole through its throat. Its head snapped back, it clutched its neck, glared balefully at her while struggling to breathe, and then was hurled eight feet back by a wall of blue fire and lighting. For several s
econds it writhed like a half-crushed beetle, electric fire clinging to its skin, eating its body away like acid. In seconds, all that remained was charred bones. A concussion of thunder followed, pounding at her eardrums.
Even Donovan looked up, his eyes shifting from lava to mercury. Assailed by this new threat, the last three creatures fled, running for the river.
Mouth dry, Amanda whipped her head to the source of flames and saw three spirits flying toward her.
* * *
“So, is it just the gun, or do you not like me on general principle?” Skip asked. Cirena stood apart from him, facing the trees, back straight, forearms grasped in front of her. Her cloak moved on its own as if she were standing next to a vent pouring a faint current.
“General principle,” she responded without turning.
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know your type.”
“Now I’m a type.”
Cirena lifted her gaze from the forest and placed it on Skip. “Yes.”
“So what’s my type, Cirena?”
He noticed a lone birch standing among a copse of pine, its papery bark peeling back like a sunburn.
“You are divorced, yes?” she asked, her eyes like a snowdrift on the other side of a curtained window.
Skip sucked his teeth. “Yeah.”
“How many times?”
“Just one.”
“Do you have any children?”
You’re pushing it, Cirena. “I have a son.”
“You don’t see him very much do you?” she said.
“Kinda hard, being on the other side of the universe and all.”
“Don’t be coy. Before this.” She’d turned her body and was now completely facing him.
“Court order. I blew my life savings trying to get custody of my son.”
“Your ex-wife must hate you very much.”
“I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore.”
“Let me guess. The job came first. And...” She held up her finger and tilted her head as if receiving divine revelation. “You cheated on her, didn’t you?”