Oathbound

by S W Clarke

  “Philia,” I said, “how slowly does your arrow’s magic wear off?”

  “Gradually,” Philia said. “Sort of like coming down from a high.”

  “Which means his emotions could have been mixed, right? He may still have been partially under the arrow’s effects.”

  Philia nodded. “Right.”

  I stared at the landscape passing by in the afternoon. If Daiski could have escaped, he could just have easily have come for me—for all of us. We were only in the next room over. We would have been unsuspecting. Vulnerable. Surprised. It would have been the easiest thing in the world.

  But perhaps he didn’t want to hurt his “best friend.” Me. And perhaps, too, he didn’t want such an easy victory. And the two warring parts of him had led to this.

  Daiski had chosen to escape through the window.

  “He could still be on the train,” Hercules observed.

  “No,” I said at once. A strange certainty filled me. “He’s not on the train. He doesn’t want it to go down like this.”

  Justin turned to me. “Like what?”

  “Capturing me on the train without any audience. He wants something that will feed the maw.”

  “The maw?” Justin and Hercules said together.

  All four of them were looking at me like I had inhaled too many fumes.

  “His ego,” I said. “Everything he does serves his ego. He wants to impress the World Army.”

  Justin eyed me. “How would you know that?”

  “We talked. A lot. Well, it was mostly him talking.” An odd shame filled me—mostly because of the conflicting feelings I had about Daiski. I should hate him, and it felt like a betrayal to feel any sympathy for him. “He told me how he operates.”

  “He could have lied to you. He probably did.”

  “He probably did about a lot of things,” I agreed. “I can’t know for sure about anything, except … I don’t think he was lying about that.”

  “How?” Justin insisted. “What we do now depends on how sure you are, Isa.”

  Between the wind, my hair flowing into my eyes, and the focus of everyone else on me, I could hardly find the words I needed. “I just know,” I said. “I need you to trust that.”

  To my surprise, Justin was the first to nod. “All right.”

  “You know I trust you, Isa,” Hercules added.

  “You know I do, too,” my Cupid said.

  “And we trust him,” Agape and Philia said of my Cupid.

  “So what’s the plan?” Justin asked.

  I inhaled, pressed my hair behind my ears as I met their eyes. I had a feeling the Cupids weren’t going to like what I was about to say. But GoneGodDamn it, part of being a mature five-hundred-year-old is saying it anyway.

  So I told them.

  Chapter 13

  The Cupids all gawked at me as we stood in the roomette. They didn’t just not like my idea—they detested it.

  “Brilliant,” Hercules said. “It’s been eons since I’ve manned a chariot.”

  “They are not chariots,” the Cupids said indignantly.

  Hercules shrugged. “I imagine it’s a similar ride.”

  Justin clapped his hands together with a certain finality. “Good. Let’s do it.”

  “No way,” my Cupid said, rising into the air in front of him. “It’s forbidden. No one has ever done that.”

  “It’s a little bit life or death here, guys,” Justin said.

  Agape and Philia exchanged glances, both of their gazes drifting to Hercules.

  “Well,” Agape began.

  “You see,” Philia added.

  Hercules eyed them. “You doubt you can carry my bulk.”

  Both Cupids threw their hands up. “Oh no, it’s not that!”

  “It’s exactly that,” my Cupid said. He folded his arms. “Our puffs aren’t just for you to ride around in like taxis, you know.”

  “So I shall ride inside, and you shall hold onto the back,” Hercules said.

  “Like a water skier?” my Cupid said. “No way. Not in my puff.”

  “Puff?” Justin said.

  “Yes, puff!” My Cupid huffed. “That’s the technical name. Yuk it up, human.”

  “I thought you all were here to help me,” I said. “You know, serve my love story and all that.”

  Philia clasped his hands together, his eyes as wide as medallions. “You have to understand that our puffs are designed just for us. They’re our safe spaces.”

  “And quite delicate,” Agape added, his eyes darting to Hercules again. “If they sense we’re taking advantage of them, they won’t always come as cumulus. Sometimes they come as stratus.”

  “Or even cirrus!” Philia said with a shudder.

  “Not cirrus,” my Cupid groaned.

  “It sounds like you’re saying these clouds are sentient,” Justin said.

  “Oh, they very much are,” Agape said. “Kind of like canines.”

  “Dogs?” I said. “So they have the mental capacity of toddlers?”

  Justin snorted. “Fitting.”

  My Cupid pointed a finger at him. “What did you say?”

  We were digressing. And right now, we needed to be doing the opposite. “We just need them to whisk us to safety.” My fingers flitted through the air. “At the speed your puffs can travel, it’ll take … what? A minute?”

  Agape sighed. “This is true, Isabella. But the puffs cannot carry us and you at once. If we summon them, then you will have to ride in them alone.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Can’t you just fly after us?”

  My Cupid spun around to show me his wings. “Do you see the ratio of wing to body here? We’re designed for short, quick spurts.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you decline, then we’ll need to get off at the next stop. Daiski and the rest of the World Army may very well be waiting for us, so we’ll need to be prepared for a fight.”

  All three Cupids gawked at me again.

  “We have an option?” Agape asked.

  “Of course you do.”

  Philia flew forward, clasped his chubby arms around my neck and commenced crying again.

  “All through history, we’ve always had to do what the gods commanded,” Agape said with tears in his eyes. “It’s only now, in this GoneGod World, that we’ve begun to exert our free will.”

  “And you respect that!” Philia cried.

  “Of course I do,” I said. One of my hands went up to awkwardly pat Philia on the back. “You can always say no.”

  My Cupid folded his arms. “Empty Hell, Isabella.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “No mortal has ridden on our puffs since the dawn of time. But you’re about to change that. And you even gave these two the option to say no. You’re not really good at forcing an issue, are you?”

  Hercules leaned toward Justin, their shoulders touching. I heard him whisper something, and Justin gazed at me with appreciation.

  Heat crept up my neck. “So that’s a yes?”

  Philia swept back, appraising Hercules. “We’ll need all three puffs at once for the son of Zeus.”

  “It’s a yes,” my Cupid said. “But we’ll need some way of getting out of the train while it’s in motion. Herc won’t fit through that window.”

  I pointed at Hercules. “But he can pry open doors.”

  “I don’t know about …” Justin began.

  Hercules lifted his free hand, folded the fingers into a fist so that his enormous knuckles popped white under the skin. Then he drove that fist straight into the wall. The metal wall.

  When he pulled it back, the wall bore a fist-sized—well, Hercules-fist-sized, which was about as big around as a cantaloupe—hole in its center.

  All of us stared at the hole.

  “OK,” Justin said. “He can open doors.”

  A sudden thought popped into my head. The antidote. My magic. Dihydrogen monoxide.

  “You guys get ready to leave,” I said. “I have to do somet
hing before we go.”

  “Right,” Justin said, pulling open the door. “I’m going to get our things together. Cupids, you too.”

  “We don’t have anything to get together,” Agape said.

  “We’re minimalists,” Philia explained. He pointed to his bow and arrows. “Just the weapons and what we’ve got tucked under the loincloth.”

  “I don’t even want to know what you’ve got tucked into your loincloths,” Justin said before he disappeared into the hallway.

  I approached the container of distilled water, still sitting by my tiny lab. “So the only missing ingredient is water,” I said over my shoulder.

  Agape came up behind me. “Yes.”

  “But I have water in it.”

  “Not enough of it,” Agape said. “You need four ounces more.”

  This is ridiculous. I didn’t want to believe it, that I’d tried twenty-five times only to be missing four ounces of water. But I added that amount of distilled water and mixed it all together.

  With a deep breath, I upturned the beaker and finished it all in one gulp. Meanwhile, the two voices in my head sparred.

  This had better work, Isa. You’re out of time.

  Agape knows what he’s talking about.

  Why didn’t you figure this out sooner? Why didn’t you fix it?

  And it occurred to me, as the concoction burned like acid down my throat, that I hadn’t really been aware of that potent, cruel voice inside my head until Daiski and I had talked about it.

  I mean, I knew it was there. But it was like a chronic pain, pushed out of the foreground of my thoughts. Now that he’d reminded me of it, I felt like two Isabella’s warred inside me.

  The Isa of Fear, and the Isa of Hope.

  All of which was compounded by my nature as an encantado. We were the best actresses in the natural world—better than actresses, because we could very nearly become the person we pretended to be. In appearance, in spoken and unspoken language. In attitude.

  And right now I was wearing Hinata’s face. Hinata had always brought me optimism, hope. It was Hinata’s voice I was hearing. Hinata was the Isa of Hope.

  I started coughing, and then I didn’t stop.

  “I think it’s working,” Agape observed.

  Justin emerged from the room with our backpacks ready. He dropped them when he saw me keeled over.

  Soon, I felt hands of various sizes helping me stand upright. And all the while, the antidote poured through me as though it was filling a vessel. Or, more accurately, burning El Lobizon’s poison out of me. I groaned, clutching my arms crossbody.

  The Cupids flitted nervously, wrenching their hands together.

  My first thought was: Isa, you did it again. You screwed it up.

  No, the other voice returned. You did it right. Just trust.

  Part of me wished I could push those voices into the background again. Another part of me was grateful to be aware of them. If I was aware of them, I could focus on one. The Isa of Hope.

  “Is it working, Isa?” Justin asked. I could hear his voice right next to me, but I was drawn fully inside myself by the processes occurring in me. In this moment, I was fully biological: a beating heart, a wrenching gut, a throbbing head.

  Justin stepped in front of me, both hands on my cheeks. Normally they felt warm to me, but now they felt cold. My entire body had flushed with heat. “Isa, tell me what’s happening.”

  I met his eyes, and I was reminded of when this had all started. Back in New York City, when I had been hit with a dart and Justin had used a pocket knife to dig the implanted tracer out of my shoulder.

  “It’s strong in me,” I breathed. By which I meant, El Lobizon’s poison had been in me for days. The infection was worse, harder to cure. “I’m OK. It just needs to do its thing.”

  I slid down the wall as it worked its way through my body. The train rumbled under me, and all I wanted was to leap up and tell them that we could go—we needed to go, to get off this train—but I couldn’t.

  Not until I could stand again.

  As minutes passed, the burning subsided. It was pressed out by a growing feeling of well-being, and then euphoria.

  My magic was returning. It was coming back to me.

  ↔

  “It’s back,” I said when I could finally speak. “I’m an encantado again.”

  And just because I could, I closed my eyes, and within seconds I had shifted to one of the other twelve thousand faces I had worn in my lifetime: a blonde beauty with blue eyes.

  “Holy—” Agape began.

  “—Hera,” my Cupid finished.

  “I’ve told you never to speak her name,” Hercules growled.

  “Sorry,” my Cupid said. “But you have to admit, that was pretty cool.”

  “Did you burn time to do that?” Agape asked.

  “A few minutes.” Even my voice sounded different. Higher-pitched, breathier. I extended my hand, and Justin helped me to stand. “I have been twelve thousand women, and I can be any of them at any time. It’s only becoming someone I haven’t been before that forces me to burn a lot of time.”

  My Cupid whistled. “Baller.”

  “Let’s go.” I grabbed my backpack off the floor and pulled the straps over my shoulders. “Cupids, call the puffs.”

  My Cupid rolled his eyes. “We have to be outside to summon them.” Part of me regretted that I had gotten the sassy Cupid as my sidekick. Another part of me felt glad; sometimes he was the only one who called out nonsense.

  We all followed Hercules toward the front of the car, where he descended the stairs to the door. He pressed his shoulder up against it, testing its resistance before he looked back at me. “Are you prepared?”

  I nodded. “You only need to open it enough to—”

  But my voice was lost beneath the sound of Hercules stepping back and, with a snarl, punching the door right off its hinges. At this speed, the thing flew straight out into the scrubby landscape and clanged out of sight.

  “Well,” Justin said, “now we really can’t stay on the train.”

  Philia clapped his hands. “Oh, I have missed Hercules’s feats of strength!”

  Hercules leaned forward, his lush brown locks whipping around his head as he peered out. When he turned back, he waved me forward. “We have several miles of plains. Come, Isa.”

  Justin and I met eyes, and he gripped my hand and pulled me toward him. He and I leaned into the hard kiss that followed, as if we had both had the same thought in the same moment.

  He smirked as we parted. “Well, now I know what it’s like to kiss a buxom blonde.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s like a different flavor of the same brand of gum.”

  I stepped away. “Did you just compare me to chewing gum?”

  “Yep.” He waved me toward Hercules. “Go on.”

  I turned toward the open door, and in the next moment all my hair was gone. New muscles slowly filled out my clothes. When I turned my now-green eyes on the Cupids, all their mouths had fallen open.

  “What?” I said. “Who wants long hair when it’s windy?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the sound of your bones cracking when you do that,” my Cupid said. “Come on, your puff awaits.”

  “One second.” I reached down and slipped El Lobizon’s claw out of my boot. I pulled off my backpack, set it down before me and unzipped it. “Just in case anything happens,” I murmured as I set the claw into the bag and closed it back up. I threw the straps over my shoulders and rose.

  Hercules steadied me as I approached the hole in the train. Out there, the almost-desert went on and on, small rocks leading to big rocks and a forest that seemed endless. We must have been moving at least sixty or seventy miles per hour.

  No puff awaited. “Where is it?” I said.

  My Cupid set two fingers in his mouth and whistled. He pointed out and up, and we watched a tiny fragment of cloud detach itself from the cumulus above us and co
me dashing down toward the train. Cumulus, I thought with gratitude.

  Another thought: at some point I was going to have to ask the Cupids how they got around on a clear blue day. What was the radius from which the clouds would come? Hundreds of miles? Thousands?

  The puff hovered just outside the door frame at the same level as my feet, wavering back and forth. At times, I could see right through it to the rushing ground below.

  “Are you sure it’ll hold me?” I asked.

  My Cupid floated up behind me. “Absolutely positively not.”

  I spun on him. “What?”

  “I’m jonesing you.” He waved a hand. “Just go.”

  “How do I steer it?”

  The door to the car opened, and a woman’s voice yelled, “Stop—all of you. Step away from the door.”

  “Time to fly,” Justin said, leaning around the corner. “It’s the conductor.”

  Well, I’d have to figure steering out as I went. With a yell, I did what might have been the stupidest thing I’d done in my long life. And I’d done a lot of stupid things.

  I threw myself out of a moving train and into the open desert.

  Chapter 14

  As I fell out of the train, I remembered something. Something important.

  The reason I thought of the Cupids’ clouds—or puffs, as it were—was because of a recurring dream. In it, I fell from the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, miles and miles toward the ground. Below, the world spread with impossible beauty, clouds swirled like whirlpools. Continents etched the edges of oceans more enormous than I’d ever imagined from the forests of Brazil.

  A terrifying beauty, because I was falling toward it.

  I passed through the high up stratus, and then the cirrus, and finally the cumulus swept up toward me like a blanket, and I closed my eyes and held my breath. Every time I felt that mortal fear.

  And every time, the cumulus caught me. I fell into it like a feather duvet, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the moon above. My anxieties melted into a tremendous gratitude. I was alive, and the world wasn’t terrifyingly beautiful—just beautiful. And I had been granted the great fortune to live in it for half a millennia.