Hard Mettle

by John Hook

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Well, if you do get turned into a proto, at least do it when we’re around so we can point and laugh and say we told you so.”

  Anika smacked Izzy on the back of the head playfully.

  I didn’t feel much need for glamour food, so after a bit more catching up back and forth, we pulled ourselves up and prepared for heading to the Mountain.

  “What if the sword is ready?” Izzy asked.

  “It’s not. If it were, they wouldn’t need to keep bothering with Guido.”

  “And it’s not like we have another plan.”

  “There is that.”

  “I think that’s usually our standard justification for trying your plans.”

  “It’s better than ‘because I said so.’”

  We emerged from the jazz club and started walking across the square. My attention was immediately pulled by orange glows in windows and doorways. Out of all the doors and windows of buildings surrounding us, fire monkey demons jumped down and poured into the square, surrounding us. There was more hooting and flipping and then they stood still and grew very quiet, seeming to stare at us. I couldn’t get a sense of an alpha leader so I just addressed all of them.

  “What do you want? We’re trying to free Guido. Let us pass.”

  The monkey demons continued to just stare at us, not moving even if we pulled closer to them.

  “Are they trying to stop us?” Kyo asked.

  “Maybe they are just curious about us,” Izzy suggested.

  “Maybe they are delaying us,” I added.

  “Give the man a prize.” The voice was from above us. A female voice.

  Zara floated down, her fiery carpet disappearing as she got close to the ground and she landed among the monkeys. She walked forward towards us, tousling the flames on the heads of the monkey demons she passed as if they were hair. As with our previous encounter, you could only see her eyes.

  “Do you like these new friends I have? We seem to have an affinity in fire. That, and I have promised them that those responsible for the genetic experiments that created them would be punished.”

  “Saripha, this is the new Shade in our region, Zara.”

  Saripha was standing back, observing. Zara didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her.

  “So the fire demon monkeys serve you now.”

  “They are actually called the Yarwalli and I consider them allies. They chose to work with me. It would be better if you and I joined forces.”

  I looked into her eyes, since that was all I could see. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what. They didn’t look like real eyes.

  “Kyo!” Saripha spoke softly but there was a commanding tone to it that was unmistakable. “Grab Quentin.”

  I was confused, but saw Kyo launch herself at me. That was the last thing I saw as a spiral of flames went up around me, spinning. The world was a blur. Kyo was an out-of-focus dark blob getting larger and larger. And then she was gone. The others were gone.

  I was gone.

  10.

  I found myself tumbling through a dark tunnel. It wasn’t a cave in a classic sense. There were no rock formations and the walls of the tunnel were smooth. It didn’t seem natural. It reminded me of when Saripha had first guided me out of my body and I had been grabbed and separated by Janovic. The difference was, I wasn’t gliding smoothly but was tumbling awkwardly and something seemed to prevent me from reorienting. Come to think of it, seeing a whirlwind of fire envelop me reminded me of when Janovic had made a grab for Saripha. Guido had been around then to thwart it, although at the time I didn’t trust Guido any more than Janovic.

  Finally, I landed hard against what felt like a cement floor. Before I could get my bearings or take in my surroundings, I was set upon by a crowd of Yarwalli—fire monkey demons—hooting and chattering and grabbing me. Whatever their bodies generated, it wasn’t fire. It didn’t burn flesh, but it did sting intensely. I tried growing larger to see if that would give me some advantage, but the pain prevented me from concentrating enough. I felt myself being pulled and suddenly my back hit an irregular but curved surface. I flailed and lashed out but when I dislodged one Yarwalli, more took its place. They finally managed to pin my arms. They stretched them up over my head and I felt something being wrapped around my wrists. I realized at the same time that my legs were being similarly secured. My feet were no longer touching the ground. Uneven metal pressed at my spine, creating terrible discomfort. A strip of sticky substance was slapped over my mouth. It felt like duct tape. Or at least it felt as I imagined duct tape would feel, as I hadn’t actually ever had my mouth duct taped.

  The Yarwalli, having done their job, leapt away from me in all directions, chattering noisily, and disappeared out an entranceway and into the hot darkness. The room was unlit and I couldn’t make out anything. Tara entered the room. She must have been still dressed in black with her veils, as all I saw were her eyes and the illumination around them.

  I tried to speak, but it was unintelligible.

  “Maybe I should just leave you hanging there so you can understand what it’s like.” She remained quiet again. I realized I had no idea what I was dealing with here. “But I won’t,” she finally said.

  She stepped away from the door.

  “Watch your eyes. I’m going to give us some light.”

  I heard the sound of a switch and light flickered from overhead fluorescent lights, creating a strobe effect in the room. In those flashes I caught momentary shapes and realized even with that little information that I knew this place. Of course, there are no fluorescent lights in Hell, nor electricity, for that matter. That didn’t matter. As the lights all came on, illuminating everything, my first impressions were confirmed. We were in Janovic’s crucible, his faithful recreation of the basement of an apartment building in the 600 block of East 14th street in New York City.

  It was all just as he had left it. The workbenches, the clutter, the Mason jars of rusty hardware and parts. The air was hot and seemingly devoid of much good oxygen. There were acrid, metallic smells that seemed to inflame my nostrils. I glanced to either side, though I hadn’t really needed to. I was strapped to the boiler. I tried growing bigger again, but my bindings somehow prevented it because they would not expand. I looked across the room and saw the hook Janovic had planted me on. Was that my blood still on it or was it just rust?

  I was getting a very uneasy feeling in my gut.

  Zara walked over to a worktable. She opened a Mason jar of rusty bolts and tossed them out into the table, making a loud, brief clatter. Then she grabbed a bottle of vodka, hidden in among the containers and rags, and poured some in the jar. She walked around to me, grabbed the tape from across my mouth and yanked it hard.

  “Janovic’s crucible, perfectly preserved.” She nodded behind her as if she needed to indicate what she was talking about. “Would you like a drink?”

  “That’s okay. I’m fine. That bottle has probably been here since Janovic offered me some on my last visit.”

  “Suit yourself.” Zara turned and walked away to the worktable. She loosened and removed her veil, but she had her back to me so I could only see that she had bright, flowing red hair. She took a hard swallow from the Mason jar and slammed it down.

  “What do you want?”

  Zara turned and shook her head. Her hair unfurled in the air and settled back around her shoulders. Her eyes blazed. She was beautiful in a similar, exotic way that Rox had been when I met her. I felt a disquieting mixture of arousal and distrust. The latter was raised in part by the seeming connection to Janovic that I hadn’t quite figured out.

  “I want to know why you won’t help me.”

  “We have a bit of a philosophical difference and I think I may be reevaluating my assessment that you aren’t psychotic like the other Shades.”

  “Why you never helped me, even when I was like you are now?” The word “never” was said in such bitter emphasis that it seemed to re
verberate against the walls.

  At first I couldn’t make sense of her statement. Then I looked at her again. I don’t know how I even knew. I had only seen her in dim light, hanging from the boiler, duct tape over her mouth. I had averted my eyes, afraid to look closer. I hadn’t even noticed that her hair was red. But now the fleeting glimpse I had that I had buried deep in my unconscious was all I needed to see who she was.

  “You were the woman Janovic was torturing when I…”

  “You didn’t try to help me!”

  “If I recall, I was a little preoccupied at the time with getting shocked from a car battery and getting stabbed a gazillion times. Oh, and that’s right, I died.”

  She slapped me hard enough to drive my face into the boiler. It would probably leave a bruise on my face, although the glamour would heal it quickly. Then, she grabbed my face in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth, her tongue entering between my lips. My mind and body were in a tug-of-war. I thought she was crazy—possibly with good reason—and I didn’t want her doing this. My body obviously disagreed. There was a taste of spices on her lips and I felt excitement well up.

  She shoved me hard back against the boiler.

  “You could have done something. Do you know how long I hung there before I died and then I ended up with Janovic and later a bloody ugly Manitor? You could have come back. You could have found me.”

  My head was swimming. Conflicting emotions were roiling and if there was some way that my powers could get me out of this, I couldn’t tell. A passionate kiss, then an angry outburst and then she seemed to implode inside herself again. She placed her hand on my groin. There was an involuntary stiffening. She looked up with as seductive a smile as I had ever seen.

  “You know Janovic,” she whispered as if sharing a great secret. “He was never sexual with me. He liked pain for its own sake. But you!” She looked at my tented pants and smiled wider. She slipped her slender fingers to my waist, releasing my belt and pulling open my pants. “You want to fuck me.”

  “You romantic, you.” I rolled my eyes, but she was right. I don’t know if it was her, my confusion, how long since I had been sexually active or whether some of Saripha’s aphrodisiac was still in my system, but as much as there didn’t seem to be much good about this situation, I really had this overwhelming desire to ravish her. What she did next didn’t help. She released something at the back of her neck and the black outfit she wore dropped away, revealing a truly stunning body, pinkish skin with licks of golden flame caressing her. The next thing I knew my hands and feet were released and I dropped towards the floor. I would have hit the floor, but she caught me. She shoved me back against a stanchion of steel pipes and I grabbed her and pulled her against me.

  The rest was like a drug-induced blur of pain and pleasure. I think we managed to knock over most of the worktables by the time we were done. I had cuts, bruises and bites over most of my body. She actually had much fewer on hers. She had no bites.

  We sat spent, leaning up against the boiler. We didn’t say anything at first. It wasn’t an awkward silence, nor was it a silence of regret. I didn’t know what all that was, but I didn’t regret a moment of it. It was fun, risky and high adrenaline. I wasn’t in love; it was more like an afternoon at a really scary amusement park and the rush was incredible. As crazy as it was, I think I needed that kind of release with everything else that had been going on. What I was less sure of was what she had gotten out of it.

  “So, what was the point of that?”

  She pulled herself up. She had already redressed her glamour without the scarf. Her red hair was luminous and looked like she had just spent hours brushing it.

  “I didn’t know fun had to have a point.”

  “Knock it off. Everything you do has a purpose.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes looked haunted. It was unnerving how much sliding between emotions she did.

  “I was angry that you were ignoring me and weren’t willing to work with me, but then it kind of turned into something else.”

  “I noticed. And I told you, our approaches are different.”

  “The rest of it came out of two impulses. One was to find out if I could absorb your blue power.”

  “I could have told you that. You can absorb it from the talismans, but not when the power has been merged with your glamour biology, as with both of us.”

  She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure. And that was more fun than asking you.” She winked at me.

  “You said two impulses.”

  “I wanted to form a bond with you so you would let me travel with your group.”

  I had gotten to my feet, but when she said that I started laughing.

  “You think that’s funny?” Her eyes flared.

  “Zara, you grabbed me and trapped me in Janovic’s crucible, for Pete’s sake. It was a great ride but even you must see how unpredictable and psychotic you are.”

  “You’d be psychotic too if you had been through what I’ve been through.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not going to feel guilty about that.”

  “Saripha might help me.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe, but right now Saripha has too much on her plate.”

  “Look, you need all the help you can get. I’ll let you be leader, but I can help. I want to get the Angels.”

  “None of us is the leader. We can’t have an unpredictable and unreliable teammate. We tried that and it came out very badly. Now how do I get out of here?”

  “Either way, I will follow you. I’ll be much more unpredictable if you and your friends aren’t keeping an eye on me.”

  My head was reeling again. I had a Shade first having rough sex with me and then wanting to join our team.

  I sat down, closed my eyes and turned inward, paying attention to my breath. As the strange situation I found myself in when I first got here had flipped a switch causing confusion, I managed to finally flip another switch, bringing peace. I could hear Zara asking me what I was doing, but then it faded far into the background as if I were in a bubble. I reached out with my blue energy. I found the energy of the crucible, which was dark and heavy, and I illuminated it. Wrapped around it, I found coils of energy like a snake. I found the head of the snake and closed blue rings around its throat until they cut through, severing its head. The dark energy seemed to uncoil and fall. Above was flooded by blue. It was the sky and I was standing in a field.

  Janovic’s basement was gone.

  So was Zara.

  I realized I was in the field just outside Ohnipoor, and it didn’t take me long to find Saripha and the others who had remained in the city unsure where I had gone. Saripha looked relieved. I gave her a hug.

  “Miss me?”

  “I’m just tired of losing people at the last minute.”

  “You knew what it was?” I remembered her calling out to Kyo.

  “Not at first. But when I saw her eyes, I knew it was the Shade, just as that purple tornado that tried to grab me was Janovic. It felt like the same thing, so I figured she was making a grab.”

  “So what happened?” Izzy asked.

  “I got to know our Shade a little better.”

  “Where did she take you?”

  “Janovic’s crucible.”

  Blaise look puzzled.

  “Janovic was the first Shade I encountered. He was also my landlord and the one who killed me.”

  “See what I mean. Things never dull with you.”

  “Yeah, well, one of his tricks was to create a small world where his power was concentrated. It was a recreation of the basement of our apartment building where he spent most of his time.”

  “He’s gone now?”

  “I hope so.”

  Izzy interrupted. “So what do you think of the new Shade after having spent some quality time with her?”

  Anika pulled open the collar of my shirt, looking a little amused as she looked at the welts that still hadn’t healed.

  “I’m guessing from the positioni
ng of your—ah—injuries, that this wasn’t entirely torture.”

  Izzy rolled his eyes. “Aside from whatever else you were doing, what is your impression?”

  “She’s crazier than I thought, maybe psychotic, just not all the time. She was Janovic’s last victim before I killed him. She died and ended up with him again. She’s been through a lot.”

  “I’m asking…” Izzy let his eyes drift up. “…because she seems to be watching us.”

  We all turned and looked. She was hovering in the air some distance from us. She was no longer using the veil so we could see her face and red hair. Saripha came up beside me.

  “What does she want?”

  “She told me she wanted to join us.”

  “You said no?”

  “Of course I said no. While it’s understandable why, she’s a nut job. I think we’ve got enough of unpredictable and unreliable with Lazitar.”

  “Nut job is really not a useful description,”“ Saripha said patiently.

  “She’s a little obsessed with me because I didn’t come rescue her because Janovic was stabbing me.”

  “Inconvenient, perhaps, but understandable from her perspective.”

  “Look, she’s probably smart and probably powerful, but she sees things very differently than we do.”

  “No doubt. But we have a Shade willing to work with us and I suspect we need all the allies we can get.”

  I looked at the others. They just looked bemused at my discomfort. Actually Anika changed into her male form and both she and Izzy winked. I got the point.

  “When you first showed up, Quentin, we didn’t know if we could trust you. We took a chance. Every new person who joins us, we take that chance. Sometimes we’re wrong, but most of the time we do pretty well. Even Rox started out as our enemy.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. And now I’m the one resisting change.”

  “Yes, Paul,” Izzy teased.

  I looked up at Zara.

  “Come on down here and join us. It’s easier to talk than shouting up at you.”

  Zara landed in front of Saripha. The two studied each other. Saripha was the first to speak.