I feel my tether crawling upward, looking for its own support, much the same way panic is crawling up my spine. “Listen to me, you freak.” Gurgling comes from below us. “My tether has yours.” The fatty layer bucks and folds. “You are to remain motionless until my partner arrives and instructs you to do otherwise.”
His face contorts as he looks down at the opening pore. “We didn’t mean to do what we did. Once we realized your planet’s ecosystem supported advancing life forms, we were going to let you be.”
He swings a little and we center over the black dot below us. “I think the sight of your mech cities dazzled our pilot. I think he thought they were alive and that we’d found the home of legendary creatures.”
“Stop talking. Crazy will not help you in court.” He’s babbling and I don’t want to hear it. The pore looks big enough to let him through. Him, not me. If he drops, if I don’t get away from him, I’ll end up crushed.
“We were an environmental adjustment ship. Our purpose was what you call terraforming. We… malfunctioned when we crashed.” He blinks again, looking directly into my eyes. “We are sorry.”
His other hand swings up into my field of vision. He still has that damned apple. The lush, lovely apple. “Eat.”
“You are under arrest for threatening an—” He takes a bite and sweet, fresh apple juice hits my face.
“Damn it!” I cringe but it’s too late. He yanks me toward him.
His mouth covers mine. I feel his tongue pushing between my lips and the next thing I know, there’s apple in my throat. He’s pushing it in and I can’t gag so my body does the next best thing from its point of view. It swallows.
“We’re sorry it took us this long to develop the necessary tailoring for your species.” He watches the pore widen. “And that so many of your kind Outside died.”
The panic surfaces. I try to vomit out the apple, but it won’t come up.
“The seed will spread to all of you once it learns the small intricacies of the Inside humans. You’ll sleep through it, so don’t worry.”
A yell comes from above. Jensen is okay and looking for me.
The pretty boy glances up at our tethers. “You’re attached. You’ll be safe now.”
I think he’s smiling, but it’s not quite right. His mouth is too wide. “I’ll come back for you. I will find you. Then I’ll wake you up. Don’t worry.”
It was a poison apple.
“You’ll get to leave this place.”
We are lice.
The beautiful boy’s tether releases from his body at the same time he lets go of my waist. He drops, still smiling, and vanishes into the pore. I stare after him, wondering how long the hole will stay open. Wondering if, on the other side, he’ll do the same thing to someone else. If he’ll poison another cop with his crazy rantings.
Jensen resets my tether and hauls me up. I’m already sleepy and my words slur when he holds me to his chest to carry me back to the vehicle. I hope he knows what happened, but I suspect he doesn’t.
And I hope, when my partner sleeps, the pretty boy will come back for him, as well.
~ ~ ~
The seven previous stories inhabited their own, individual worlds. The following two tales occur in the Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon universe; the first, the novella Conpulsio, in its past.
The second, Cinder to Dust, in its present.
During the infamous night Vesuvius destroys Pompeii, two important questions explode in Conpulsio: Who is bound? Who is compelled?
In Cinder to Dust, a mother makes the most agonizing decision of her life…
Conpulsio
1
August 23, 79 AD
The girl didn’t fight.
Ladon held her firm, one hand on her elbow, the other gripping her forehead. He twisted her in the center of her family’s villa, on the exquisite tiles of the open courtyard, under the bright Roman sky. In this place a family such as hers tasted only the best wines and chewed only the best meats. They twirled in rich fabrics and laughed at slaves.
This rich Roman’s paradise. The lands where the Emperor’s favorites thought themselves safe from dragons.
But now, here, the girl’s cheeks trembled, setting her lips fluttering as she tried to gasp one last time. Tried to breathe, her body unwilling and surprised, even though he knew she’d taken this act of retribution as her fate. That she’d offered it up to the gods.
And now the hot noon sun seared the back of Ladon’s neck, crawling like wasps, stinging and biting and screaming that he served justice. Though he felt the looseness of her hands. Saw the blankness of her eyes. He knew now, right now, his actions were correct.
Retribution held him firm. Obligation lurched through his body like a bolt lighting the inside of his skull. The demand for balance raged and set him into slicing motion. These engagements, these solid weights in his soul, they churned. They wound his muscles and spun in his ears and he had no choice but to set them free here, in this villa.
So Ladon held the girl, this child whose name he did not know and whose death would right the scales tipped by his niece’s murder. One hand gripped her elbow. The other wrapped tight around her forehead as he pulled back her head at the correct angle to expose as much of her neck’s flesh as possible. He performed this movement over the swirling ocean colors of the villa’s tiles, his companion beast Dragon behind him on one side, his tribunus at his other.
The beast pranced under the sun’s glare behind him, his mimicking hide refracting in the brightness of midday. He vanished as he imitated the walls of the villa, then reappeared, rolling and jolting around Ladon’s tribunus, Andreas. The big man stepped into the shadows, his gladius drawn. He’d said nothing, done nothing to stop their descent onto the villa, only followed behind, his face the flat mask of a warrior’s response.
Ladon turned the girl’s body away—an instinctive and adept move of someone whose life brimmed with violence and death and murder—to keep the smear from his skin. But blood coated his armor. Blood muddied his sandals. He gripped the dagger and blood touched his fingers. Death wafted from the girl in waves of metallic stench. Death by blood.
Death he tasted.
But she’d angled herself toward him anyway and the sky-like shade of her eyes flashed vivid as the day. Her hand lifted to his arm in a conscious arc, as if she’d practiced the movement. As if she danced with him, this child who was not quite a woman. This child of a murdering Fate.
The girl was to be one-third of a Fate triad meant to be the Emperor’s own. They were to bring glory to Rome by seeing all there was to see: what-was, what-is, and what-will-be.
Ladon snatched away the promise of her kind and the future of the Empire. It bled out onto the tile mosaic of her father’s country villa at the foot of a smoking mountain. And his actions, the weights in Ladon’s soul, they spun high. They pushed into his veins and out across the energy connecting him to Dragon. Both he and the beast ripped and tore and Rome paid for the crimes of this girl’s father.
On his arm, her fingers let go. First one, then another, then another. Then her palm lifted off his elbow.
He dropped her corpse. Her head hit first, a sharp snap. The rest of her rolled on the grit, scratching out a call to the dead. Ladon stepped back.
Behind him, Dragon danced, a mirage of rage.
The girl’s future-seeing father should have seen this moment in his visions of what-will-be. His triad was the best of their kind.
Yet death lay as a pile of girl at Ladon’s feet. Thirteen years old. Not yet a woman.
Ladon had done what he needed to do—a child for a child. He’d taken the light from this girl to balance the dark hole that had once been Sister’s daughter. His niece.
He served justice. Behind him, Andreas nodded once, sheathing his gladius. He understood. He’d not interfered.
The Fates brought this war. Ladon had done his duty.
Dragon stepped over the dead girl, his talons sinking into the sand un
der the pressure of his forelimbs on the edge of the courtyard’s tile. He swung his big head first left, then right, and a pulse of light burst off his hide. Human, he pushed into Ladon’s mind. We must leave.
Yes, Ladon pushed back. They’d leave. Go west, away from Vesuvius’s flank, now that they’d fulfilled their promise to his sister.
Ladon stared at the dead girl. Her blood formed a crescent on the tile, a shadow that curved toward his feet. Above the rim of the villa, dust rising from Vesuvius’s cone bent in the opposite direction, another shadow mirroring an ended life. They coiled like the gates to Hades, one to its depths, one to its brightness.
If the gate opened for her, or for him, Ladon did not know.
Andreas clasped his shoulder. “Come.”
Ladon nodded, the dagger dropping from his fingers and rattling across the tile. He’d leave it. He had no use for it now.
He glanced one more time at the stillness in the center of the spreading bloodstain, what had been a girl, and stepped away.
She hadn’t fought.
2
Four days prior, on the open piazza tiled with scenes of a sea god’s anger, Mira of the Jani Prime, a Fate bound to the fabric of Rome, clenched her hands and stared at the wisps rising above Vesuvius. At that moment, in the now of what-is, her present-seeing ability swirled inside her head, screaming Run! Go! Though her mind yelled Get as far away from the mountain as possible, even if you must crawl.
Even if you must scrape your skin raw or take another of your brother’s punches. Mira would have danced her fingers over the deepening purple-green of her tender cheekbone, but her hands held tightly to each other. They would not cooperate.
Yet wincing filtered her every motion. The flinches jiggling her vision and the bites that laid blood on her tongue. The smoke rising from the mountain made it worse.
The sky behind the cinder cone was a deceptively brilliant blue, a color, for Mira, carried the buoyancy of her niece’s happiness. Minerva’s eyes had lit up the evening before, when Mira spread the new silk over the girl’s shoulder. She’d grinned, holding in her bubbly laughter, but Mira knew the soft drape and the vivid green-of-the-leaf had brought joy to the heart of a young woman who, most days—most weeks and years—knew very little happiness.
Her father, Mira’s brother, was not a man who issued caring.
Faustus had left the day before, gone east toward the mountain to attend to their father. Minerva’s grandfather. The man from whom all Fates descended, even if most would rather slice their own wrists and bleed their blood onto the pebbles and moss than live life by their fate.
Mira and her sister Ismene were to follow their brother today, to complete their triad. A future-seer such as Faustus lost value when separated from his triad’s present- and past-seers. What-will-be only became clear when its foundations were laid bare.
Yet her seer screamed again: Take the children! Run to Rome!
But she knew: Beware the dragons. Beware the war your father started.
The beasts did not venture away from the city other than to lead their legion north, into barbarian territory, which was why her brother had brought the children here, against the sea. For safety.
How Minerva and her two nephews—Ismene’s boys Junonius, and Jupiter—were safe here under Vesuvius, she did not see.
“The mountain will blow in five days,” her brother had warned. “And the gods of the underworld will bury these seaside villas in dust and ash.”
She’d asked questions: “Why do you not send the children home now? My seer thrashes and I know they must leave. They must go, brother. And we should not venture to the mountain. Why must we go? Father does not need us. We should run before Mons Vesuvius kills us all.”
Faustus punched. Mira stopped asking.
On the other side of the villa, by the stables, a horse whinnied. Mira’s seer told her what-is: Ismene finished their travel preparations. What-was smoothed her riding clothes and admonished a slave for not bringing what-is to her with greater speed.
Mira of the Jani Prime triad, the most powerful seer of the present in all the Empire other than her father, slid her foot on the smooth stones of the piazza. If she left now, ducked into the side hallway, the slave would not find her. She’d have time to tell the children to escape.
Once she and Ismene left, the children needed to saddle their own horses and ride northwest, along the coast. They’d be safe there, when the mountain exploded.
The air they’d breathe would not carry the weight of a mountain. They’d be able to sit by the sea, perhaps on a boulder, and watch gulls fish. These three children, one almost a woman and two almost men, would live in a present where they’d be, for a moment, free.
But from the inside, Mira’s seer hit at her bruised cheek. She wasn’t the only Fate in the villa who’d stopped asking questions. Last night, after Mira draped the silk over Minerva’s shoulder, after her smiles faded, the girl wrapped the fabric around her hand and arm. And around her neck.
Her beautiful sky-blue eyes had clouded, her face flat. Then she muttered sounds about her father’s orders. About doing her duty. Because she was a Fate, and fate bound her more than it did any other.
Mira had pulled her close, holding her to her breast for as long as she would have, if the child had been her own. No tears flowed. No scent of fear rose from the girl. Only her shallow breaths moved across Mira’s skin.
Minerva’s seer, though promising, was not yet active and writhing like a temple whore inside her head, as Mira’s did now. Yet as Fates, they were all bound by their fate—a future Mira’s brother, the child’s father, would not let them escape.
Mira would try. She’d be stern with the children. Tell them that as the Prime present-seer of their family, they had no recourse. They must listen.
Then she’d ride for the mountain.
***
Four days later, after she’d told the children to go, she knew they hadn’t listened. “You tell us to run, yet you go to the mountain? We are Fates, aunt. We follow the threads woven for us.”
She wanted to scream. To turn back and make them go, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. So she rode on, following Ismene up the side of Vesuvius to join their brother.
The heavy air weighed on their seers as much as their noses and throats. They all exhaled, the harshness of the mountain’s heat crushing. They performed their duty to their father.
Now Mira shuffled through the grit coating the crags of Vesuvius’s cone, following her brother down the mountain face and back toward their horses. Time to return home. Time to run from the gods of fire. Her triad walked in shadow; the mountain blanketed each step with gloom and vapors rising from pits. No sun reached this deep inside the mountain’s fractures.
In a shadow, five paces in front of Mira, Faustus stopped pushing forward, stopped moving completely. Stopped and inhaled and would not look at his sisters.
Fear lurched upward into Mira’s chest and constricted around her heart—a wave from her brother’s future-seer hammered through her skull. She could not see what he foresaw, but she felt the coming violence. The cone, perhaps, was about to explode. They, perhaps, were not to escape the mountain.
But the lurching in her chest moved farther up, into her throat. No, what came was not the land under their feet. Mira recognized the truth in Faustus’s posture: He looked down at his sandals for the briefest moment, his hand clutching a nub of Vesuvius’s rock face. Then he sighed, a long push of his breath, as if he’d realized the true meaning of what he’d unleashed in their home. At their villa.
When the what-will-be her brother saw moved into what-is, Mira felt the actions within the courtyard, down the mountain, near the coast. She felt the slice to her niece’s neck. Felt the sting radiating from skin to muscle to emptying veins.
Mira stumbled backward into her sister. Her blond hair mingled with Ismene’s black, her pale skin contrasted with her sister’s deep glow. Ismene’s gaze locked onto their brother and the sho
ulders he refused to slump, and his hand on the boulder towering over them all.
“By all the gods,” Ismene whispered, as what-is passed into what-was, and her ability saw the truth. She pressed against Mira’s back as unmoving as the pumice and rock surrounding them.
Ismene’s son’s triad was now broken. In her family’s villa, down the mountain and toward the coast, the man and the beast—the Dracos—had taken not only a life, but the destiny of two boys.
Burning radiated off Ismene as it did off the stone and the dust and the coming ash. Heat flashed off her, rising from her core to her neck and cheeks, mirroring the path Mira’s fear had lurched across moments before.
Right now, Mira knew the unmoving Ismene erupted inside herself. She agitated her own guts and the roiling snapped the high cymbals of her past-seer into a deafening rattle inside Mira’s head. Mira felt fractures. She tasted metal on her tongue. Saw flashes of nothing in her eyes.
A hole opened across her triad’s interwoven abilities. A cavernous, gaping crevasse that cracked Mira’s soul with the same power and violence as the mountain’s coming vomiting. The same shuddering in her core, the same pulsing constriction in her throat. It all erupted inside her body.
The present rattled inside her skull once more: The whirlwind of the man and the beast spun down. Pushed forward these past days by both the gale force hatred of his sister and his own grief, the man had found clarity in the death dripping from his beast’s talons. But now his task was done.
Mira felt his fracture as well—his own niece’s murder gouged across his world and left him on a cliff’s edge. He raged along the precipice, a sword in each hand and a dragon at his back, making sure every last villain went over with him.
Down into the ash-choked inkiness. Down inside a blistering hole.
A new moment of what-is danced into her mind’s eye: Junonius and Jupiter finding their cousin. One boy hiccupping. The reek of blood and the bitter stench of shit. Tears streaking cheeks and the backs of hands. The other boy curling into a ball on the sand and rocking back and forth, back and forth.
Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds Page 12