by J. C. Nelson
Four daggers. Two in the sand. One his hand . . . and one in mine.
I flipped it over and drove it down through the heart.
It lurched to the side and lashed a slimy tentacle up at me, wrapping around my wrist. It twisted, revealing a parrot-like beak underneath, with razor edges, and let out a new squeal. Not terror. Rage.
In the blink of an eye it was on me, clicking its jaws as it forced itself toward my throat. I fell backward, blocking its bite with my arm. The beak sank into my arm, sending a river of pain through me.
Before me, Ra-Ame and Brynner faced off.
If before Brynner and Ra-Ame fought like a mongoose and snake, now it was like watching a shadow fight with the light, or bolts of lightning entwined.
Ra-Ame twisted, spun, leaped. And her blades returned to her, dripping with Brynner’s blood from half a dozen slices. Brynner stepped back, red stains spreading through cuts in the trench coat.
When Ra-Ame spoke, her voice rattled like bones in a coffin. “Run away, lesser Carson. You do not know the art of movement.”
“No.” Brynner slipped the tattered trench coat off and tossed it on the ground. “Al-ibna Al-habeeba.” His pronunciation of her name matched hers perfectly.
Amy hissed, “I did not know you spoke that language.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. Dad taught me the secret to killing a Re-Animus.” Brynner shifted from side to side, like a boxer in the ring.
The laugh, if I could call it that, that came from Ra-Ame’s throat would haunt my dreams for years. “I heard. You must not care if you live or die. You do not look like a man who doesn’t care, Death that Follows.”
“You want to know a secret? Dad was wrong. The secret isn’t not caring about yourself.” He danced backward, just out of range, as she flicked her blades out toward him. Brynner shook his head. “The secret is finding what or who you’d die for.” If I’d blinked, I would have missed his movement. Surging forward like a sandstorm, he leaped on her. They bent and turned, twisting, blades flashing in the desert sun. Faster than I could move, faster than I could think.
I’d never seen a man fight that way. Wouldn’t have believed it possible, if it weren’t for my own eyes, for the human body to move with such precision or skill. And the mesmerizing dance of blades nearly cost me my life. Ra-Ame’s heart had lashed out with a tentacle, drawing itself toward my throat.
I forced the dagger between us, letting the heart impale itself.
It squealed again, recoiling, and dropped to the ground.
For one second, Ra-Ame looked away, back to me.
In that instant, Brynner stepped in to her, slamming a blade into her stomach, then tearing it away. As he turned back, he sliced her elbow tendon and the one under her shoulder.
Black smoke gushed like a river from the gash in Ra-Ame’s stomach.
I stomped on the heart and drove my dagger straight through it, pinning it to the sand below, and held it as the heart convulsed, bursting into black flames beneath my foot.
Ra-Ame ignored Brynner, lunging toward me, but he sliced her leg as she passed. She fell, lurching sideways into a rock. Her blind gaze never left me as she flailed her arms, throwing rocks and sand, nearly blinding me. And a stinging bolt of pain in my neck said she’d found her mark. I fell to the side, my hands on my neck, but no blood gushed. No wounds hung open.
She rolled over to hiss at Brynner like a cobra.
The world spun around me as I clasped my neck.
Brynner knelt over her and drove the dagger through her chest with the weight of his body.
Ra-Ame convulsed underneath him, dying a final death. One of her hands lay empty. In the other, she clasped the body of a common brown scorpion.
Too late, I recognized the choking panic in my throat. My breathing turned to whispering gasps, and my limbs convulsed. I fell over, unable to even shut my eyes against the sun, as a wall of darkness exploded from Ra-Ame.
And came down on me.
I never knew death. Only the burning feeling as the blackness worked its way into my eyes and my nose, under my fingernails.
“Grace.” The look of horror on Brynner’s face told me he’d seen what happened.
Held hostage in my own body, I rose. When my lips moved, it was not my voice that spoke. “You have taken something precious from me. And so I take from you. Grace Roberts will never know death. Your spirits will be forever separated. Or you will kill me, and her with me. Can you live like that, Death that Follows?”
Brynner dropped the blades, holding his palms up. “Let her go. Let her go, and you can kill me.”
My lips curled into a smile. “I can do that at will already, Death that Follows. And this body is beautiful, no? Such a shame about the scorpions. But I have learned many secrets. It is so simple to change how these shells behave.” Like a wave of fresh water over me, I shivered, and my lips stopped swelling. My lungs stopped whistling with each breath. “There, it is done. I will never surrender her.”
My body kicked the bag of weapons, spun, and came up holding a pine spear. “Kill me if you can.”
I fought it, pushing against its will, which lay across me like an iron blanket. Brynner dodged my feet and hands, which now moved with deadly precision, wielding a spear so fluidly it made my mind dizzy, if not my body.
Brynner cycled through relics, dodging my thrusts, not moving with the speed and power I knew his toned body held. Because of me. Because he didn’t want to hurt me. And that was the reason Ra-Ame had chosen me in the first place.
The heart of a Carson. I had it. And she had me.
He threw a cross, and a vial of holy water, and a sprig of pot, but I’d never been a Rastafarian. And that was the other reason she chose me. I never believed in anything, so there were no marks upon my psyche, no weapons that could drive her out.
Her spear flashed overextending, and he caught her-me, pulling me to him. “Fight her. Fight her off.”
And I did, pounding on the mental wall while I watched my own body relax against him. My lips opened. “It’s working.” What? “The orthodox cross. My parents took me . . .” My mouth lied to him instead of screaming a warning.
He reached for the chain around his neck, fumbling with the armor that kept it in place.
For one moment, his eyes left me.
In that second, my hand slipped downward. And drove the spruce shaft into him, right at the shoulder joint where we both knew he was vulnerable.
“Fool.” My body kicked him over, while he clutched at his arm, trying to quell the bleeding. “Now you will be the first new sacrifice.”
Brynner rolled onto his back, his eyes staring up at me in shock. In acceptance. He mouthed the words I’d always wanted to hear. Never from him, I told myself. Or only from him. “I love you.”
My body froze, like a battering ram of ice had just clubbed Ra-ame. I surged against her, feeling for the first time her pressure lift. How had he done it?
Not he.
We.
Because while I didn’t pray to the cross, or kneel at a stone, or avoid bacon, there was one thing I did believe in. Love. “Again.” My lips moved of my own accord, then my jaw bit down, filling my mouth with blood as I warred with the pharaoh’s daughter.
He rose to one knee. “I love you, Grace.”
And he did. I knew it the way I knew the sun rose in the East. I believed in it the way I believe in gravity and taxes. He had to. No other power could change a disaster like Brynner Carson into a man I—I loved. It had come upon me unawares, in disguise, but in plain sight. Like Ra-Ame herself.
The knowledge, the sheer elation poured through me, making me tingle from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. I was loved. Completely. Totally.
Black smoke poured from my mouth, tasting like I’d eaten roadkill for breakfast. With a final wail, Ra-Ame poured out of me into the light, scalded from within by the love that coursed from my heart, and burnt to ashes by the merciless sun.
/> Long after the last of the smoke left, I lay drained in the sand. Brynner’s face, a pale gray, drove me to rise and drag myself to my purse.
One emergency call. A helicopter flight. Two units of blood and three dozen stitches later, the doctors came to me and said I wouldn’t live the rest of my life alone. And I waited by his bedside, for him to wake.
Forty-One
BRYNNER
I woke to find Grace asleep by my hospital bed, and enough tubes and wires run in to me to make Dale envious. I wanted to wake her, but each time I looked at her, the words died in my throat. I couldn’t ever tell Grace how close I came to dying. How I heard my father calling me, welcoming me to the halls of the dead.
But I couldn’t go. Not alone. Not without Grace. She’d never believe me if I told her. I loved her anyway. When I brushed the hair out of her eyes, they flickered open, and Grace threw herself onto me, doing her best to bust my stitches.
It was completely worth it. If I’d known that’s how she would greet me, I would have gotten stabbed by an insane monster sooner.
We left the hospital together and hopped a plane to Portland as soon as the doctors let me. And for weeks, I didn’t answer the phone, or the door. I testified by phone during Director Bismuth’s court martial trial, then called Dale to let him know I really was quitting the BSI.
It wasn’t that the dead didn’t still need killing.
It was that I’d had enough death to make me appreciate life and the woman I wanted to live it with.
The morning Grace made me breakfast, I knew something was up. I never did work up the courage to tell her that she’d mistakenly used salt instead of sugar in the French toast, or that the crunch bits in the omelet were eggshells, not bacon bits.
She led me to the spare bedroom, her warm hands over my eyes, her body pressed against my back. “Look.”
On the spare bed, my armor and equipment lay, polished, repaired, replaced. I turned to her, wrapping one arm under hers and running my hand down her cheek. “I don’t understand. I quit.”
“In Chicago, there are reports of a co-org terrorizing one office tower in particular. No others. And only at night. The field team there is stumped.” Grace kissed me. “How about being a freelance contractor for the BSI?”
Grace knew me, knew that while I loved curling up with her at the lake, I craved the hunt, the rescue. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Don’t’ be silly.” Grace pushed away from me and opened the closet door. There, a second suit of armor. Lightweight, thin, built for speed and agility. “I’m going with you. You might need rescuing.”
So we packed up our weapons and headed up to catch a charter flight to Chicago. The weapons manifest had six new types of ammo Grace had created in her workshop, a sonic gun we thought might tear the armor off a Re-Animus, and an antidepressant formula that put a smile on a stone statue.
What it didn’t list was the love I honed every day with Grace, and every night when she lay in my arms. With the blades on my hips and Grace at my side, the dead didn’t stand a chance.
J. C. Nelson is a software developer and ex-beekeeper residing in the Pacific Northwest with family and a few chickens. Visit the author online at authorjcnelson.com.
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