Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  I shoved my body backwards in the mud with my feet. Following my retreat, Terian once more bent his knees, sidling forward like a crab. He caught my wrist, staring into my face.

  “Well, let me enlighten you, my dear,” he said. “You are the Bridge. In fact, I can see that it is so, clearly enough in your aleimi. We have been looking for you...the whole seer community has been trying to find you...for more years than you have been alive. I do not know how the Seven managed to locate you first, or to hide you...to keep your sight powers from showing, or your blood hidden from SCARB, but they did do it, somehow.”

  “What are you talking about—”

  “You’re going to kill off all the worms.” Terian smiled at me, but his eyes remained still as glass. His voice grew into a caress. “Every last one, little Allie. You’re going to save us. You’re going to restore your race to its birthright. To its former, unabashed glory...”

  My fingers clenched the mud.

  I was probably dead either way.

  I threw the handful of mud directly at his eyes, scrabbling to get away even as I did it. He lunged after me easily, though, catching my arm.

  “There, there, little girl—”

  “Let me go!” I shouted, hoping someone, anyone might hear. “Seer!” I screamed louder. “Seer! Crazy fucking terrorist seer!”

  Terian dragged me to my feet, his fingers like iron bands.

  His voice remained friendly, bordering on indifferent.

  “It will not help you to pull the authorities into this, Alyson,” he said. “...Not anymore. I would not relish hurting you, like my old friend, Revi’ might, but I will, if I must. The hard part...” He paused. His grin stole wider. “...Well, the hard part for you, of course, is only beginning I’m afraid. But Dehgoies lied. We do not wish you dead. Quite the contrary—”

  “Get your hands off me!”

  “––There is a necessary, ah, assimilation period, of course. It is difficult, I will not lie. But I will do what I can to ease it for you, my sister. Or hasten it, if you prefer.”

  A dark form dropped silently from the trees behind him.

  Terian smiled at me warmly, his voice still collegial.

  “The pain will be entirely worth it, I promise you. It will be brief, you will forget it...and when it is finished, we have such wondrous things to show you, my young friend! I myself regret not a single instant of my time with the Org. Neither did Revi’, whatever he might say now. He once was one of our most ardent—”

  “Help!” I jerked my arms, bucking against him, trying to get away. “Help me, please! I’ll go with you! I’ll go with you! I’ll do whatever you want!”

  Terian whirled around to look behind him...but too late.

  Metal glinted as the shadow swung its arm.

  Then Terian was kneeling on the needle-strewn ground. He clutched his throat, making choking, gurgling sounds.

  He raised the gun, pointing it at the shadow, who knocked it sharply away.

  I only stood there, paralyzed, as the shadow forced Terian to the pine-carpeted ground. It knelt on his chest, holding his forehead with pale fingers. I still stood there, watching, as it cut directly into Terian’s throat with the same, sharp object, sawing through cartilage and flesh above a bucking, writhing body, finishing the job with a methodicalness that bordered on rote. A fountain of blood pulsed up, dark in the moonlight, splattering his hands, face, and chest. Watching it, smelling it, brought bile to my throat in a thick rush.

  I was panting, breathing too much, my back against the tree. It felt like all the blood in my body now sat pooled in my feet.

  When it finished its task, the shadow straightened as if pulled vertical by steel cables.

  “We cannot stay here,” he said.

  I screamed. I must have screamed again, but before I could get too far into it, he threw himself forward in a crouch, clamping a sticky hand roughly over my mouth.

  “Sleep,” he commanded. “Sleep now.”

  The trees, the rain and the dead body disappeared.

  5

  BARRIER

  Time passed. I didn’t know how much.

  For a long time, I wasn’t thinking enough, in straight enough lines, to even care.

  I didn’t question the motion of the car at first.

  It was kind of soothing, even if I struggled finding a comfortable resting place for my arms. A bump in the road brought my eyes abruptly open. Sky through a dirty windshield showed the faint pink and gold of pre-dawn.

  The silhouette of a saint statue broke my view. It was glued to the dashboard above an old-fashioned FM radio with silver knobs.

  My eyes traveled left, meeting an angular profile framed by black hair matted to a pale neck. Almond-shaped eyes sat above high cheekbones, taking in the road. He had the beginnings of five o’clock shadow. Flecks of a familiar-looking brown stained his shirt, which bulged from a crude, homemade bandage on his shoulder.

  Feeling my stare, he turned. His eyes appeared cold even in the morning sun.

  I tried to raise a hand...

  And the motion of my arm was abruptly stopped.

  I stared down at the handcuffs for a full minute before the reality of them penetrated. It struck me that my wrists were bare apart from the metal rings; the GPS was gone. My eyes traveled lower, completing their tour down to my ankles, which were bound with hard plastic, like those tie-binders they used on reality cop shows. Leaning back, I used my weight to try and budge the only object I thought I had some chance of influencing, namely the plastic armrest.

  When it stayed firmly affixed to the door, I looked up at him again, saw him watching me.

  His eyes shimmered. I translated their expression as disinterested puzzlement.

  He didn’t try to stop me as I continued to test my limits of motion. My whole body hurt; I was bruised, dirty and half-naked under the dog-smelling blanket. My throat hurt, I was so thirsty. My neck had crimped while I slept against the car door. I thought about my mom in a kind of blurred panic. I started to scream, but that got a reaction from him.

  “Be silent!” His words and accent jarred me.

  When I shut up, his eyes lowered, along with his voice.

  “Don’t make me knock you unconscious.” He shifted in his seat, as if uncomfortable, or maybe just hearing his own words. “I would rather not.”

  Hesitating, he glanced at my wrists.

  My eyes started their waterworks thing. I couldn’t help myself. “Please don’t kill me,” I said. “Mom’s not even over dad yet...she’d never be able to handle this. She might really kill herself, I mean it...”

  His gaze drifted out the window. He seemed to sigh.

  “Please! Mister, I...” My cheeks burned before I’d even said it. “I was always supportive of seer’s rights,” I ventured. “I was never one of the ones who—”

  He laughed, startling me into silence.

  Unsure how to go on from that, I was still fumbling with words when he turned, his eyes like two flat stones.

  “I do not wish to kill you,” he said. “I am sorry for your mother. I truly am. There is nothing I can do.”

  I absorbed his words. I felt the blood slide from the veins in my face when it occurred to me that he really wasn’t letting me go. With the GPS gone, even the cops wouldn’t know where I was, but clearly, they’d be looking for me. I glanced out the dusty windows in a kind of desperation, but only saw a semi-truck a few hundred yards ahead.

  When a car began to pass a lane over, I shrieked, banging on the glass.

  He grabbed my arm, forcing me around, so that I faced him. The strength behind his fingers made my muscles lock.

  “No,” he said sternly, as if talking to a dog. “Do not make me put you to sleep.” His eyes flickered between mine. “If you need to hear it again, I will talk. Do you agree?”

  I felt my muscles unclench as a part of me deflated.

  Probably not a good idea to piss off the murdering seer who could read my mind and had me handcu
ffed to his car.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Sure.”

  He released my arm, returning his gaze to the road.

  But he didn’t talk.

  We drove in silence while I massaged my wrist. When I happened to glance up, he was staring at my bare thigh, which had shifted out from under the ugly, gray blanket he must have put over me after he knocked me out.

  Slowly, I retracted my leg, hiding it back under the blanket.

  I’d forgotten all those other stories about seers.

  Frowning, he averted his gaze. “I haven’t seen you in the flesh in a long time.” He gestured vaguely with one hand. “You are...larger.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  “You are safe with me, Alyson.”

  “You say that a lot.” My fingers clutched the chain between the metal bracelets.

  I tried to think if there was any way I could talk him into untying me...then remembered he could read my mind. That pretty much limited my options.

  “Yes,” he agreed neutrally.

  I turned at this, biting my lip.

  “So what are you?” I said. “A terrorist? One of those ‘unaffiliateds’ who want a seer nation? What?”

  He made that soft clicking noise with his tongue. I watched him do it, fascinated in spite of myself. I remembered reading somewhere about seer language, how they used sign language in addition to verbal and telepathy.

  “Alyson,” he said. “Killing him bought us time only. I’d prefer not to waste it while you assume my agenda is that of fictitious seers portrayed on your human news.” He glanced at my face. “I was sent to bring you back to our world. That is all. I would only kill you...”

  Letting out a shriek, I slammed my shoulder against the door and window.

  The man grabbed my forearm, roughly. Once more, I found myself staring up at his face.

  “...I would only kill both of us if my attempt failed. If I failed, Allie. Understand?”

  I found myself staring back and forth between those clear, glass-like eyes. As I did, my shoulders relaxed involuntarily.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “But you believe I will not hurt you.” I heard relief in his voice. “Good. That is good.” He released my arm, putting both hands back on the steering wheel. “We can talk now.”

  But he didn’t talk.

  I watched in disbelief as he sank deeper into the cloth driver’s seat, wincing from the gun wound in his shoulder.

  “So you’re from another world,” I prompted, when he didn’t look over. “I remember reading some conspiracy theory about that actually...that you’re really aliens who seeded us from another galaxy.” I leaned against the car door, trying to find a comfortable place for my arms. I couldn’t. “I also heard one where you were all victims of some disease...or an asteroid that hit the earth back in the early years of human evolution.”

  His eyes flickered to mine, puzzled once more.

  “Seriously,” I said. “If this isn’t about the terrorist thing, what do you want? Money? I don’t have any. Sex? There are easier ways, man. You’re not a bad-looking guy. One of my friends thought you were hot. I don’t know how she feels about seers, but knowing Cass, she’d try anything once.”

  He frowned slightly, his eyes flickering back in my direction.

  “Did someone hire you?” I said. “Do I have a rich crazy stalker this time?”

  “You are the Bridge,” he said. “The Harbinger.”

  “Great,” I said. “That’s what the other guy said.”

  The man’s mouth firmed to a line. I got the sense my words irritated him, though.

  “Terian likes his little games,” was all he said.

  I waited, wondering if he would say more, but he didn’t.

  Biting back impatience, I shook my head, as if to clear it. “So what kind of accent is that? German? I didn’t think any seers lived in Europe anymore. I thought you were all in Asia, with the exception of a few who worked directly for—”

  “You are not human, Alyson.”

  When he didn’t say anything else, I broke into a shaky laugh.

  “Okay. So you want to play that game again? Well, I’ve been tested, like, hundreds of times, man, so pardon me if I think you’re full of shit. Whatever you’re trying to do, framing me as some kind of über-seer, Syrimne-wannabe, I don’t appreciate being the fall guy for whatever takeover trip you’ve got planned...”

  He reached out without a word and laid a hand on my leg.

  It wasn’t a sexual thing that time, but I sucked in a breath anyway, feeling him all around me, invisible hands shoving at me, pushing me out of my body until...

  ...I feel myself leaving.

  I can’t stop it.

  The car disappears like a shadow in brilliant light along with slices of road visible through a mud-spotted windshield, the plastic saint statue glued to the dashboard, the handcuffs, my bruised legs, his shirt collar with the dried blood...

  I pass through what feels like a stretched membrane...

  ...and find myself once again in that endless black and violet sky.

  The colors shock me back into remembrance.

  It is a place without walls, with only dimension and light.

  Here, though, with only him and away from San Francisco, the dreamlike place seems more real somehow, less abstract even than the world in the car with the ocean sliding by behind his long body and dark hair.

  We are alone, surrounded only by distant stars and lumbering clouds.

  Subtleties of light pull my attention from all sides. It is more than I can take in...the stars, the strange, river-like currents I can feel, flowing above and below where we stand, filled with flecks of different colored lights that dart and glint just past my awareness. A kind of prismatic wind ripples the light veins in my limbs, penetrating my light-filled skin.

  Above us both, clouds so vast and mountainous trek inexorably by, moving so silently that to watch them float strains my mind.

  I could spend hours looking only at him.

  He stands beside me in this dark, star-filled space, carved in detailed gold and white and deep red lights. Bones, muscles, teeth, veins, irises, hair and skin are replicated in a million subtle shades and hues, all moving so fast the colors appear almost to be stable, even though waves flicker through the whole, changing them and him subtly and silently.

  The space directly over his head fascinates me the most. There rotate complex geometries, like living math equations, perhaps thoughts rendered into multi-dimensional shapes. They look more complicated than that, though. I sense something else, too...presence maybe, but also a feeling of, I don’t know...function. As if those things I’m seeing have a use, as if they embody a direct functionality of some kind. Whatever they are, I definitely don’t get the impression they are just a bunch of pretty lights. I assume it must be some element of seer biology, or maybe something more subtle than that, more difficult to translate into words.

  One thing is for sure: he is nothing like the man in the park.

  He shines with a clear glow that is vastly different than Terian...and yet, he is not soft here, either. His eyes are diamond white, carrying a faint edge.

  I am still staring at him when he points.

  Some part of me follows.

  I see nothing at first. Nothing but clouds and stars, endless skyscapes made of shifting dark, woven through with subtle frequencies of presence and light.

  Light remains even in the darkest segments of that night, I realize, arrayed in more colors than those for which my mind has names.

  Beings dart from and into those massive thunderheads.

  They remind me of old woodcuts of tentacled leviathans surrounded by underwater forests. Some are singing. Watching them, I know I should be more afraid.

  The man with me watches me, too.

  I feel his attention on me as I flinch, reacting to a giant beast with whipping tail and claws that wings over our heads, screaming without sound. />
  It will not hurt you, he reassures me. You are not of its kind.

  Where are we? I wonder.

  Instead of answering, he points down.

  Two long, twisting trails of light, one white and gold, the other a different shade of gold and white, loop languidly from our feet. I follow the course of those lights and find I can see any distance along their length.

  At the bottom is a circle of blue daylight.

  There, a black-haired man drives a car, blood staining the collar of his shirt. His hands grip a leather-wrapped steering wheel as he leans back in his seat, and next to him, a girl with matted blond hair with dark roots leans against the car door, her wrists handcuffed to the armrest and a big bruise on her arm, probably from when I got thrown against that tree in the park.

  I look dirty to myself, exhausted, bruised. I have a bruise on my face and dried blood at my hairline. My eyes are closed. Slumped against the door, my body bounces lightly from the car’s motion.

  Landscape flows by as he steers us to a frontage road. His eyes appear to shine white; I do not know how they would look to others, or even to me, down in that car.

  To humans, I look normal. To seers, too, down there. After a pause, he adds, You are unique in that regard, Alyson...although it is rumored that Syrimne shared this trait with you. Humans and seers can see it in the physical world when you operate your light at certain frequencies. It is possibly something I can train you to control...

  As he speaks, I watch his reconstructed veins pulse and plume more light.

  There are several...oddities...in your make up, he tells me next. Your blood is undetectable as Sark...Sarhacienne, that is...seer. It is an extremely rare condition. Only one in several hundred thousand seers have this. I have it, too. It is why they made me an infiltrator.

  I am back to staring at myself inside that car, trying to convince myself that the rest of this isn’t real, that the sleeping girl is the only part of me that matters.

  He reaches out, catching hold of my light arm.

  This is the Barrier, Esteemed Bridge. Do you recognize it?

  I am forced to nod, which isn’t a nod of course, but a silent conveyance that feels like one.