Shimmer: A Novel

by Passarella, John

  In utter frustration, the creature swung its wedge-shaped head down toward Barrett, in a blatant attempt to crush him, like an anvil falling from the sky. Barrett leaned forward and thrust his sword under the jaw, through its mouth cavity and into its brain. Almost immediately, and in eerie silence, the dragon barrel-rolled and plummeted out of the sky.

  In the dim light cast by the lava flowing down the cliff face, Liana saw Barrett scrambling to stay on top of the beast. With one hand clutching the hilt of the pinned sword, and the other wrapped around the coil of the creature’s neck, he shifted himself away from its underside.

  The entire descent lasted a scant few seconds, but to Liana’s eyes, time seemed to slow down. They were in a different dimension, so that effect wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. Nevertheless, she imagined her senses were merely heightened by the imminent impact and her dire fear that the creature would accomplish in death what it had failed to do while alive: kill Barrett.

  At the last instant before impact, Barrett flung himself away from the dragon, at an angle perpendicular to its descent. He struck the harsh ground with a painful grunt, and attempted to roll to absorb the shock, only to slam into a wedge of rock with a harsh cry. The winged beast crashed to the ground with a sound like a muffled explosion. It rolled tail over head once, its lifeless neck flopping inelegantly to the side as the bones in its fore- and hind-legs snapped and popped.

  Liana hurried to Barrett’s side.

  He was groaning, on all fours, but still in possession of his sword.

  “Anything broken?” she asked.

  “Bruised beyond recognition,” he said. “But nothing feels broken. Unfortunately…”

  “What?” she asked, concerned.

  “Didn’t stay up there long enough to qualify for frequent flyer miles.”

  She grabbed his free arm and helped him stand.

  Panting, Barrett glanced at the lifeless mound of the dragon. “I feel as bad as that thing looks.”

  “Don’t suppose that was Carnifex?” Liana asked hopefully.

  “Nah,” Barrett said with a smirk. “Hungry minion.”

  Liana peered up at the cliff face and thought she saw more silhouetted shapes flying in lazy circles against the dark sky. “Let’s find a place to rest before another one of those things spots us.”

  She led Barrett to the rock slab behind which she had sought shelter and they sat side by side. After listening to Barrett’s breathing gradually slow to normal, she shook her head and asked, “What’s the point of this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Looking for Carnifex, remember?” he said with a raspy chuckle. “Jeez, I’m the one taking repeated blows to the head.”

  “We haven’t seen Carnifex since we got here.”

  “Maybe not, but I felt his presence when I first arrived.”

  “Long enough to play mind tricks,” Liana said. “But when that failed, he disappeared to let these minions take shots at us.”

  “Your point?”

  “Don’t you get it?” she said. “We’re playing by his rules.”

  Barrett took a deep breath. “Send the minions to soften us up then, when the time is right, he comes in for the kill.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What choice do we have? We’re on his turf. We have to walk through the minefield to find him.”

  “If that’s even possible anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if he’s already crossed to our side?”

  “Wouldn’t you have sensed a rift opening?”

  “I don’t know,” Liana said with a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe, depending on how far away it is. How big it is. How long it lasts.”

  “You can’t locate him magically,” Barrett said. “And, if this direct approach is doomed to failure and he won’t come to us anytime soon, what are our options?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Who knows?” Barrett said, massaging his bruised ribs and wincing in pain. “Maybe I’ve softened up enough to listen to reason.”

  “We should go home.”

  “Just like that? Tails between our legs?”

  “You got it wrong,” she said with a wry grin. “The dragon’s got its tail between its legs, not us.”

  He laughed and winced again. “Ah, wonderful. Hurts when I laugh.”

  “Good thing you have a lousy sense of humor.”

  “Stop it,” he said, chuckling. “You’re killing me.”

  “If not me, there are plenty of minions waiting in line.”

  “Fine,” Barrett said. “You’re not… entirely wrong.”

  “Really? I feel so much better.”

  “Please don’t take offense. You make a good point. Look, I was hoping to catch Carnifex in the act, go toe to toe—or toe to claw—with him and get home in time for supper. But this… this feels weird. Beyond the actual weirdness. It feels staged. Like he knew what our strategy would be and he planned all of this as a stalling tactic.”

  “Or he’s simply using his minions as meat tenderizers.”

  “With the repeated pounding I’m taking, I’m inclined to agree.”

  “So?”

  “I have a question for you,” Barrett said. “Now that you’ve crossed to this dimension, can you come back?”

  For a moment, Liana thought that he had somehow rooted out her thoughts of inadequacy, exposed her intense fear of spending eternity in the hell dimension. Then she understood. “Are you asking if I’ll be able to open a rift to this place?”

  He nodded.

  “Possibly,” she hedged. “Probably. It’s never a sure thing.”

  “Okay, then,” Barrett said. “Let’s say it’s possibly probable. That means we wouldn’t have to pounce on the next rift that he creates to get back here. We can come back on our terms, when we’re ready.”

  “In theory.”

  “That’s progress,” he said. “One small step for humankind. Still, I hate to run back home without destroying the merciless bastard.”

  “It’s possible he’s already crossed to our side,” Liana reminded him. “While we twiddle our thumbs here in the dark.”

  “Twiddling our thumbs? Is that what you call this?”

  “Figuratively speaking, of course,” she said with a grin.

  “Because my thumbs might be the only parts of my body that don’t hurt.”

  “Your efforts were entirely commendable.”

  “But we’re no closer to Carnifex.”

  “Is what I’m saying.”

  “Right.” Barrett sighed. “Let’s go home.”

  “Splendid,” she said. Then, with a sidelong glance, she added softly, “Assuming I remember how.”

  “While you search through your notes,” Barrett said, “I could slice a few dragon steaks.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass on minion meat.”

  “Anything I can do to help your suspect memory?”

  “Shh!”

  “That I can do,” he grumbled.

  Liana stood and thrust her forearms high to cast aside her billowing sleeves in one quick motion. With her hands up, palms facing her, she looked like a freshly scrubbed surgeon about to enter the operating theater. But she stood motionless, examining the graceful golden sigils inscribed in her flesh, looking for a way out. Unlike much of her magic, opening a rift was not a matter of tracing enchanted patterns and uttering spell-commands by rote. To find the way back to their world, she needed to sense the resonance between the two dimensions. A better sorceress could find or create rifts with little effort. Liana’s mother had a real talent for it and she passed on most of that gift to Thalia. Liana’s ability, however, was a distant echo of her mother’s prodigious talent. After Liana had physically crossed into a new dimension, she possessed enough rift magic to find a way home, but it required tremendous concentration and sapped all her psychic energy. Liana’s relative weakness in rift magic had be
en the primary reason that Thalia had taken point on many crossings. And she’d paid a steep price for her younger sister’s shortcomings.

  Liana traced the sigils required for meditative concentration, heightened awareness and visualization, and clairvoyance. The spell was so familiar to her that she could perform it without vocalization. It was a preparatory spell, a kind of gatekeeper between her and unlearned magical abilities. Before attempting new magicks or mastering new spells, she readied herself with this ritual. Of course, this was only the beginning of her process to open a rift between worlds.

  Years ago, Liana had tried to improve her rift magic by studying with Thalia, but Liana quickly discovered that she lacked Thalia’s powers of hyper-visualization. It was as if Thalia possessed another eye, a psychic eye that could bridge dimensions. No matter how much Liana practiced, she could never grow that third eye. Instead, Liana had to attune herself to the cosmic pulse of both dimensions simultaneously—the ebb and flow of life and existence in two worlds—and find the overlap between them, the light in shadow and the reverse, perceiving each world as a layer, and the rift as a gap through which one could navigate those layers. Find that gap and she could visualize the rift, the overlapping tear between the two realties, literally willing it into existence. In effect, she had to manifest a new paranormal sense—“rift vision,” as she thought of it—every time she needed to sense and locate a rift. The effort required was enormous and always wiped her out.

  With her arms aglow, she blocked out the fetid smell and distant shrieks of the hell dimension and sought that deeper awareness of her surroundings, the fabric and rhythm of its existence. So deep was her concentration that she was at first unaware of the tremors. She almost imagined that the subtle quaking came from within her mind, a result of her expanding perception. Twice, without conscious awareness, she adjusted her footing to maintain her balance. Far away she could almost hear Barrett speaking, but his voice was an anemic whisper, unable to penetrate the depths of her concentration.

  Her breath caught as she saw it, less than fifteen feet in front of them, a shimmering in the darkness, a rippling of reality that showed the way back home. She locked onto it, pointing as she spoke to Barrett, “There! Time to go!”

  She took a step forward—

  —into thin air.

  Barrett caught her arm.

  They staggered to the right, parallel to the widening crevasse that had not been there a moment ago.

  The light from her forearms sigils winked out, but Liana continued to stare at the rippling rift. Though her light sphere now cast no more than a feeble glow, her adapted eyes never lost sight of the shimmering patch of air.

  The huge slab of rock behind which they had hidden, leaned forward precariously before toppling over with the implacable inertia of an uprooted tree. Sound rushed in to Liana’s ears, almost as if she had forgotten how to hear until that moment. From all around her came the crunching pops, explosions and crashes of rocks and stones breaking, splitting, and falling apart.

  They ran, weaving a path through the random devastation, leaping across the narrowest point of a spreading fault line before it became impassable. Their evasive maneuvers led them farther from the rift. Liana tugged Barrett back on course when she could, but common sense dictated a roundabout path. Their approach became a maddening dance. For every step that brought them closer to the rift, they had to take three in the wrong direction.

  “Someone here must love Greek myths,” Liana shouted.

  “How so?”

  “We’ve gone from Sisyphus,” she said between gasps, “to Tantalus.”

  “Sisyphus was the rolling rock guy, right?”

  She nodded. “Every time he rolled the rock up the hill, it rolled back down again. Futile labor.”

  “Like the tag team minions.”

  Again she nodded, “And now we’re being tantalized with the rift. We can see it, but we can’t touch it. Forever out of reach.”

  “Forever’s a long time.”

  “Right,” Liana said. “We might actually die first.”

  The ground lurched beneath them. Both Walkers fell to their knees a moment before a jagged fissure opened in front of them like a hungry stone maw. Sinkholes formed around them with frightening regularity. Igneous rock crumbled like the thinnest shale. Dust billowed around them. Liana doubled over with coughing spasms. When she finally recovered, she looked up and her heart sank. Where is it?

  Her gaze darted left, right, and back again. Suddenly she sighed with relief. Close call, she thought. Too close. “The rift,” she said, trying to keep panic out of her voice. “We have to hurry before I lose it.”

  Gripping her arm, Barrett led her across the treacherous ground. His reflexes kept them safe longer than Liana would have thought possible. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help but slow him down; it was only a matter of time before one or both of them fell into one of the expanding fissures.

  A false step and her leg slipped through a gap. Barrett braced his legs to support her weight, but the ground upon which he stood was infernally treacherous. With grim inevitability, each square foot became brittle and crumbled beneath him, until, finally, he stood atop a narrow spire of rock.

  Liana dangled from Barrett’s free arm. She cast a frightened look into the cavernous depths and gasped at the ferocity of the churning river of lava. Thick smoke rose around them, burning her eyes and searing her throat. The heat washed over her in pulsing waves, like the hot breath of an insatiable monster.

  “Hold on,” Barrett said. “I’ve got you.”

  “If you need to—if there’s no other way,” Liana said, “If you can save yourself, then let me—”

  “I won’t let go,” Barrett yelled. “Not again.”

  For a moment, Liana was confused, but then an image of Gideon’s face came to her, his ravaged face and missing eye. Barrett blamed himself for Gideon’s rift injury. “It’s not the same, Barrett,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said abruptly, flashing a soot-smeared grin. “You’re stuck with me.”

  Grateful for the sentiment, Liana nodded. But she had other problems.

  Her hand was damp with sweat in his grasp. It may have been a trick of her imagination, but she felt her hand slipping through his palm millimeter by millimeter. Soon he would have nothing to grasp. She could almost foresee the long descent, first into darkness and smoke, but then into burning light and devouring magma.

  Her crystal amulet flared again, reminding her not to let her fears overcome her senses. She had to stay rational to survive. Her life was in Barrett’s hand; and his life was dependent upon the narrow spire of rock—

  The first crack sounded like a gunshot beneath her.

  Several more followed in staccato bursts, devastating her sliver of hope.

  She swung wildly beneath Barrett’s straining arm as he fought for balance on his shifting perch.

  Liana glanced down, suspecting the worst.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God, no!”

  Chunks of rock were crumbling away from the spire. Other pieces, under extreme pressure, cracked and popped clear. Agonizing moments passed as the spire wobbled around a brittle, deteriorating axis then, inevitably, the tortured shaft began to lean. To his credit, Barrett scrambled around his narrow pedestal, repositioning himself and Liana to counter the shifting stress points, but it was a lost cause, merely prolonging the inevitable.

  Squeezing her hand so hard her bones ached, he yelled, “Hold on!”

  With one last protesting screech of stone, the dark spire toppled over, carrying Barrett and Liana for one dizzying moment before hurling them toward the raging molten depths of Carnifex’s hell dimension.

  Liana screamed.

  Chapter 45

  “You people are the experts,” Police Chief Grainger said. “Tell me you have a plan to deal with this.”

  “The plan is always the same, Chief Grainger,” Ambrose said from the chair behind hi
s desk. “The plan’s execution, unfortunately, never conforms to a timetable.”

  Ever since Grainger arrived on their doorstep, Ambrose had been trying to pacify the man, to assure him that the Walkers had everything under control. Far from the truth, but Ambrose had learned long ago how to bluff his way through trouble.

  Despite his evident agitation, Hadenford’s chief of police had come to the Walker house alone. If he’d meant to summarily arrest the whole family, he would have brought reinforcements. Logan guessed that because of what the chief had witnessed, he was willing, for the time being, to continue to let them operate freely. His presence at the house was probably to ensure that he remained in the otherworldly information loop.

  No doubt the neighbors would be wondering why the police chief’s cruiser was parked outside the new family’s house. Logan was fairly sure the speculation would be anything but flattering. Not that it would bother Logan. He expected to be living far from Hadenford within the next six months. Change was the constant. Over the years, Logan had learned to keep to himself. They would always be the odd family on whatever block they resided.

  Grainger threw his arms up in the air. “I should have been called about the bus.”

  “I didn’t—”

  Ambrose held up a palm to interrupt Logan’s explanation. “Logan had no way of knowing if the bus, one of the bus stops, or the eventual destination of one of the passengers would be the locus of the incident.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Grainger said unapologetically. “I can’t simply wait around to clean up the aftermath of the next incident.”

  “Let us handle this,” Gideon said.

  “That’s what your brother said,” Grainger countered. “And how did that work out?”

  Grainger hadn’t been inside the house five seconds when he noticed Gideon’s missing eye patch. Skimping on details, Thalia explained that she’d healed the eye. Logan took the opportunity to examine the enchanted artificial eye and was amazed at how lifelike it appeared. Its movement and color matched the natural eye. And the pupil contracted or dilated in response to lighting conditions. No physical reason why anyone would think it was artificial. But Logan saw mistrust in Grainger’s eyes, a refusal to take anything they said at face value. Logan figured suspicion was a big part of the job description for anyone in law enforcement.