Betwixt

by Tara Bray Smith

  Morgan struggled against her shackles, whispering fiercely now. “He’s making a ring. He’s trying to inhabit Neve’s baby. He’s impregnated her. He’ll kill her after he gets what he wants. That’s why you see the fire. You have to stop him —”

  “Shut up,” Bleek hissed, and struck Morgan with the loose end of an iron. She moaned and fell, and K.A. lunged.

  “Moth might have figured this whole thing out had he been an iota brighter.” The cutter brandished the swinging weapon in front of him, and though Moth had been sidling toward him slowly all the while, Bleek spun the metal lasso and plucked him off the wall. In an instant he snapped Moth’s cuff into place and pushed him back again. The changeling tripped and stumbled.

  “But see, this was always the problem with us. He was just too stupid. But Nix …” Bleek paused and looked at Nix squarely. “Go ahead. Give it all you got. Just to let you know: she is going to die eventually, after I’ve gotten what I need from her. That’s what happens to humans. Eventually they die. That’s why we don’t really love them.”

  “Neve!” K.A. yelled helplessly, and tried to pull his hands apart.

  “Pick it up now, Neve. It’s time.”

  It was the girl’s face in response to Bleek’s harangue that finally made up Nix’s mind. Even in her state, she had understood something of what was happening to her, what she had been brought down there for. Her face crumpled and she swayed on her bandy legs. She was about to lose consciousness, he knew. She crumpled to the floor, exposing an already red-ringed wrist, as if accepting her fate. K.A. lurched toward her again.

  Almost tenderly, Bleek lay her wrist in the last cuff and picked up the chain it was attached to, held it and tugged.

  “That’s a good girl. Nice and tight. We’re not going anywhere till this is done.”

  Neve’s light was exploding now in fervent sparkling bursts. Nix didn’t have time to work out the implications of what Morgan had revealed to him, just that Neve had to stay alive no matter what. K.A. was still straining on his knees toward the girl, and Nix felt he had no other choice but to try to save her, even if it meant dying himself. He concentrated on Neve, on her sleepy dark brown eyes, closing now; and on Bleek, focusing every last bit of his energy on making the fire move … moving it to Bleek, who stood now, howling, his head thrown back in ecstasy, his knuckles white upon the chains now wielding the fire —

  “Yes, yes! That’s right. Open it up. Feed it….”

  Then Nix felt it: a current of burning, electric energy moving among them, along the metal chains all five of them were cuffed to, K.A. in the center, his eyes wide. His teeth rattled and his eyeballs felt as if they were about to burst. He smelled burnt hair and struggled to keep his eyes open, on Neve, who was a poisonous shade of white, her eyelids half open, teeth chattering, as the current entered her. She burned and then quelled, burned and quelled, as if fate itself couldn’t decide which way to take her. The rest of them ignited in response. K.A., Morgan, Moth, Bleek — they all wore the ring now. Nix, too? He knew only one thing: they were all going to die. That’s what the light meant. And Nix himself, his own power, had doomed them.

  What had he released?

  “Stop it, Nix!” Moth tried to pull away from the chains. “He’s tricked us — it’s what he wanted! The ring — I didn’t know, Nix…. I didn’t know….”

  “I’ve lost it…. It’s beyond me….” Nix was far away, as if in another room, hearing his own cries.

  “Can’t you …”

  With the last coherent energy he had, Nix lunged at Neve through the violent stream that now linked all of them, through the chains, all of it channeling into her. Bleek stood laughing in the middle of the ring, his hands gripping the metal, unconcerned now with his captives.

  “It’s the ring!” Moth yelled. “He’s inhabiting her! Stop him, Nix. Stop him!”

  Nix’s mind raced. Inhabiting her. Nine months. The exidis had to have an entrance, he realized. A beginning: a time when they were all changed. A moment when they ceased being simply human and became something more. Flesh and blood, electrified by the all-encompassing energy of the universe. Was that his gift, then? Not just to monitor the ring, but to complete it? Scenes from his own life flashed: Bettina’s garden, silver water, a bird flying above. When did he himself go through the change? He remembered Daddy Saint-Michael, a boat, no land around for miles. You are from the void, his grandfather had said. From nothingness.

  Could he still do something? Could he still try to swallow it? Trying to move the fire didn’t work — it had only spread among them. But could he douse the fire? With himself? Nix. From nothingness. Could he do that?

  He stepped through the ring to the other side and smelled burning hair and singed flesh: his own.

  He lurched toward Morgan and Moth first, straining against his bonds and trying, with the force of his body, to dislodge them from their posts, free them from their chains and send them against the wall. He felt them burning under him, felt the melting of their lives into his: Morgan’s memories, Moth’s memories, his own. They were struggling underneath him, but they were still breathing. Was he?

  “Give me your hand, Morgan.”

  Moth must have been unlocking her somehow. Nix heard Moth’s garbled grunting. In his haze he could manage only a whisper:

  “Go. Look for daylight.”

  He felt Bleek’s heat against him, burning stronger now, and with an effort unlike any he’d ever expended, he willed the darkness in him to expand, just for a moment, just enough to protect the others. On the humming edge of reality he saw Moth weave toward K.A., and untie the boy’s wrists.

  “Neve!” Nix croaked. “You have to get her —”

  He moved his head and saw Bleek’s ecstatic, fiery glow. Then K.A., moving toward Neve, reaching for her hand. There was nothing Nix could do now. In trying to save Neve, he had lit the fuse for their collective energy. Nix was close to the edge. Death? Novala? He didn’t know which.

  It was what Bleek had wanted all along. To lure them here, use Nix’s power — mysterious even to himself — then cast him aside. He wouldn’t let him. Wherever he was going he would take Bleek with him. He only hoped the others could find their way out.

  There was only one person who could help them now.

  “Ondine,” Nix whispered. “Cover us, Ondine.”

  It was all he remembered before collapsing.

  CHAPTER 26

  THEY HAD FELT LIKE HUMANS WHEN THEY GRABBED HER, but they were not. She could see that clearly now.

  She had read the letter quickly before taking the drops, holding her breath as she had sat by the lake. Now the words burned in front of her eyes.

  Dearest Ondine, I am your mother.

  One sat in the front of the ambulance, driving. Three were in back with her: one monitoring the IV, another holding a knife pointed at the gurney she was strapped to. Out of the needle in her right arm curved a thin violet plastic tube, tinged with red, from the blood they were filling bag after bag with. The third just sat there and shook his knees, staring at her and laughing. Ondine closed her eyes and tried to remember.

  You’re different. In you runs both the pure cosmic energy of the fay and the blood of a human. You are alone of your kind.

  “How much did he say he needed?” she heard the nervous one ask. And another, an older-sounding one to her right, said, “As much as she’s got.”

  She felt her body losing its strength. She tried to run through the details of what the leg-shaker had looked like when he had spoken to her outside the ambulance, before she had taken the eyedrops: wavy brownish-black graying hair, higher on the top than on the sides. Lean long arms. Red EMT jacket. Brown eyes. But she kept losing hold of the image in favor of what she had seen once he jumped in the ambulance after her, locking her in. Corkscrews of sinuous yellow-green radioactive light twisted near the surface of his sallow skin, turning him — and the rest of them — into not so much humans as skin sacs holding what looked like huge, mu
scular green glowworms. Their teeth were sharp and tiny, as if filed, and though Ondine had shut her eyes after they had first forced her, at knifepoint, to lie down on the gurney and accept the needle, she could smell their rotting flesh. They were going to suck her dry.

  We are coherent structures of electrified plasma. Placeholders, basically. It has to do with the way structures are stacked in other dimensions. We ourselves are tesseracts. When the ring gets formed, “we” slowly disappear, leaving only the human shells behind. That’s the exidis.

  For a long time they had been parked. Now they were driving, and the potholes of whatever street or highway they were on made them jostle and bounce, and she could feel the needle jiggle sickeningly in her arm, and every so often Ondine winced as the jittery leg of the nervous one bumped against her. She willed herself not to respond. She was having a hard enough time maintaining consciousness, with all the blood they were taking, and quickly, too. This was bag number three. Or had she lost count?

  The key is in your blood. Take the eyedrops and fight.

  But she hadn’t been able to fight, at least not yet. The creatures had gotten to her too quickly, and they were strong. She strained at the tethers on her ankles and wrists. She wondered if she’d even moved.

  Think of a fish, as one of the humans’ theoretical physicists has put it. You’d be dimly aware of a world “out there,” but have no way to access it, no way even to think about it. Unless you were pulled from your medium, which of course is possible. But then you’d die. But you still wouldn’t understand.

  Ondine was trying to maintain hold but her mind kept skating out to the gray edges of consciousness, to the letter she had read too quickly, to her mother and father, to Viv and Nix, Morgan, Moth, Neve, K.A.

  And Bleek, she remembered feverishly, who wanted to kill her.

  Blood, she reminded herself. The key is in my blood. It was reddish violet, different from that of the creatures around her. When she had looked down at her skin, even after taking the eyedrops, her body had been different, too. Not glowing, more solid.

  You’re special. I got you early enough.

  It had something to do with her blood, then. Was her power released when her blood was? But why did Bleek want it?

  A butterfly flaps its wings…. Connected … Everything is connected.

  She was … a changeling? The thought made her want to pass out, which she was close to doing. But here, now, in the back of a careening ambulance — how fast were they going? — Ondine did not want to lose consciousness. She could not take one more bag. She did not want to die.

  She heard a voice. Dark, muffled, but present. In her bed, under the twisting green leaves of the Rousseau jungle so many weeks ago, she and a boy had become one. Fused. Now he was speaking to her, asking her for help.

  Cover us, Ondine.

  Cover us? Like in a game?

  He carries a bit of Novala with him — everyone in his line does. He’s there right now. Between the worlds. Can you meet him there? He can help you. It’s called the breach, Ondine. Very few ringers survive the breach….

  “She’s almost gone,” the older one said. He tugged at the needle in her arm. “Should I disconnect her?”

  “How many you got?”

  “Three.”

  “Get one more. He said he wanted at least four.”

  What I’ve done is forbidden. They would eliminate both of us if they knew.

  Ondine cracked an eye. Just a sliver — not enough for them to see the white. The older one, the gray-haired one, was extracting the needle from her forearm.

  A butterfly flaps its wings.

  She made a fist and squeezed.

  “I can’t get it out.”

  A hand on her jaw knocked at her chin.

  “Let it go, little girl.”

  Ondine squeezed harder. She felt the cold terrible point of metal at her throat and in her arm and the stink of cutter breath on her face. She let her features sink into a stony stillness but kept her fists tight.

  “I said let it go.”

  “I think she’s going into shock.” It was the brown-haired one, she deduced, who was leaning over her now, talking. Someone else must have held the knife. “I can’t get the needle out with her fists like that.”

  “Take the straps off and jiggle it. She’s not coming back.”

  “Aw, fuck. My coffee. You think the asshole could drive?”

  For a moment the knife moved away from her neck while her captors rearranged themselves, starting to unbuckle the straps on her wrists. Ondine waited until she felt the last peg give on the left strap. She saw the brown-haired one bending over her. The other with the knife was dealing with his coffee. Number three stood turned away by the IV.

  She moved her left hand to her other arm, extracted the needle, and aimed for the brown-haired one’s eye. Yellow fluid burst from the bulb, and just as he screamed, the other looked up from his spilled coffee and Ondine sat up, reached over herself with her left arm, and went again for the face. She missed his eye, but the hand holding the knife fumbled it and before the standing one had moved the IV aside and bent over the gurney to pin her down, Ondine had twisted out of the way and with her one free arm felt along the coffee-stained floor. She looped her fingers around the knife’s handle, and just as the men pulled her back, she thrust it into a flaccid thigh. One screamed. The van lurched and screeched to a stop.

  “What’s going on back there?”

  “I’ll kill you,” she breathed through tight lips, and dug the knife in a little more. “I’ll sentence you to everlasting pain.

  “Hold hands,” she said. They hesitated. She pulled the knife out and lunged at the older one’s shoulder, and he bent down in wincing pain.

  “Hey!” again from the front, and the slamming of a door.

  “I said hold hands. Don’t fucking let go.” And they did. “Now, you,” Ondine said, wagging the knife recklessly at the third one, who had manned the IV. “Take the straps off.” First the feet, then her right hand. Ondine was free.

  She heard the driver knock along the side of the ambulance. For a moment everyone was silent, Ondine looking from face to face, the knife still held in front of her. In the split second their idiot attention skittered to the sound of the driver fumbling at the back door, Ondine was at the small window that separated front from back. She was the only one small enough to shimmy through, which she did with the wriggling speed of that little fish she’d seen in the park. But it was dead and she was …

  Quickly she ducked into the front cab, locked the front doors, and put the car into drive, engaging the emergency brake. She was alive. Alive. Never before had she been so thankful she was petite. They were scrambling toward her. She could hear it. She scanned the dashboard and found what she was looking for. Just as a red-jacketed arm plunged through the small portal that separated front from back, the back door light illuminated and she stepped on the gas, hard, releasing the brake. The car bucked and lurched. She heard the gurney skid, something heavy fall, cries from behind.

  She sliced her captor between his thickly webbed fingers straight to the bone and finally he let go.

  Up a curb, she veered hard, right and left, till she heard the crunch of body against steel, and muffled cries.

  Horns sounded. She tried to right herself, narrowly missing a car. She heard a last thud. The blood that still trickled from where she’d stabbed him had appeared fluorescent; now it was slowly darkening. Her vision was returning. The first wobbly sign she saw read LAKE FOREST, and she pulled off there, thinking the “lake” in the name sounded promising. She’d drive from there to Evanston, wherever that was.

  The frothy tops of oaks and maples threw green lace reflections along the ambulance’s windshield. She was weak, and getting dizzier by the minute. A vast shining openness greeted her and she took a right, hoping that this was the direction Evanston lay in. Her head was pounding and she was vaguely aware that she was weaving along the road as village after village coast
ed by. Highland Park, Glencoe, Kenilworth. Cover us, Ondine. She was surprised she’d been able to concentrate, with all the voices and sounds that were crowding her head: Morgan’s raspy, insistent breathing. K.A.’s lumbering trudge. Running. Something else, a kind of high frequency hum. And under them all Nix, calling her. Ondine, he was saying over and over. Cover me.

  “I’m here,” she heard herself say aloud. She slowed the ambulance, transfixed by a bend in the boughs of a tree trailing the lake. A truck passed. Evanston Dodge, a nameplate read. What would they think, her parents? I thought maybe I should finally give blood. She rolled down the window. A light wind blew. But no one has your blood, Ondine. She sat still and looked at the breaking waves and the clear water and concentrated as hard as her spent body would allow.

  I’m here.

  She saw the lake as if from above: a giant hole in the earth puddled in glacial blue. It rocked, undulated, throwing up patterns as regular as a stone thrown in a pond. Then she saw all of them: caves, caverns, the holes in trees in the earth, graves, and closets, and trapdoors. Pockets and windows and all the places in the visible world that opened up, bordered the invisible one. The one she now knew she was a part of. Like latticework, ever-shifting, ever-moving, ever-opening. What was visible was just one thin sheet, pocked with holes, promising a gate, a thruway. Viv had told her she had the power to fold the worlds. But how? Could she tunnel through them, as Raphael had so long ago suggested? Could she meet Nix there, between the layers?

  She shook one out and started folding.

  “Nix,” Ondine whispered, “show me what to do.”

  In her mind she flew to him. Over plains and mountains and patchworks of crops. Over the Rockies, violent in their strength, their sudden, jagged height. The vale of Eastern Oregon, its wheat-colored bulk, then green and blue, ringed in cones of fire. Explosive St. Helens, Hood, Rainier, Shasta, Denali, Cotopaxi, Popocatepetl, Kilauea, Fuji. Names that flooded back to her now, here, in the flattest landscape imaginable. All around the Pacific. Had she actually learned about them? In geography class? Or did she just know them, only now speaking them, like an incantation?