“I’m dreaming,” she whispered in pain, the words echoing. “They tortured me so much I’ve gone unconscious and I’m dreaming.”
NO.
Eva flinched like she’d been struck; the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, off every surface, from every point of darkness, even from the anima itself. Even from inside of her. “Who’s there?!?” she very much didn’t whisper this time.
YOU DO NOT DREAM. YOU WALK IN MY DREAM. YOU ARE VERY CLOSE TO MY REALM, CHILD.
“Child . . . I’m not a child.”
YES, YOU ARE. YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE BORN AGAIN. THE LAKEBORN UNDERSTANDS MORE THAN MOST AND HAS SENT YOU TO ME FOR YOUR ONE CHANCE AT SURVIVAL.
“I’m . . . not right.” Eva almost puked out on the rocks as she stood. “Something’s wrong.”
YOU ARE CORRUPTED.
“Need to . . . get it out, get rid of it.”
YOU CANNOT, YOU CAN ONLY CLAIM IT AND MASTER IT. ONLY THE DIRT KING AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POWERS COULD HOPE TO CLEANSE YOU AND THAT DAY IS FAR AWAY.
Eva groaned as light tried to escape her chest, holding it in with her hands. “I . . . it’s hard to think.”
THE BLOODSEEKER, THE CHARRED FINGER, AND THE BUBBLING UNDERTOW HAVE TAKEN FROM ANOTHER AND GIVEN YOU NOT ONLY HIS POWER, BUT THAT OF HIS WHOLE PEOPLE.
Wait . . . is she saying . . .
Wait . . . how do I know the voice is a she?
THE STRENGTH OF THOUSANDS OF ANIMALS HAS INFECTED YOU DEEPLY. TOO STRONG, TOO MUCH FOR ONE. NEVER MEANT TO BE. AGAINST THE FLOW OF NATURE’S LAWS AS IT IS A CORRUPTION OF YOUR VERY BODY.
“I’m . . . part werewolf?” Eva gasped.
Now that she could focus on it, she knew she was too tall, too heavy, too . . . wrong. All wrong. “What did they do to me?” she cried out. “This can’t . . . how . . .” She screamed as light flashed across her skin, trying to rip her to pieces.
YOU HAVE DREAMT FOR A TIME. EVER CLOSER TO DEATH. IN YOUR WORLD ONLY SCIENCE COULD FAIL YOU. IN MY WORLD THE LIGHT INSIDE OF YOU WOULD SNUFF OUT AND TAKE YOU ALONG WITH IT. AT A BALANCE NOTHING IS POSSIBLE EXCEPT FOR WORDS. BUT BETWEEN THAT BALANCE AND MY WORLD THERE IS A CHANCE AT SURVIVAL.
“Fairy . . . you’re a fairy, like King Henry’s fairy . . .”
YES AND NO, I AM KINDER THAN HE AND MY TOUCH IS FAR SOFTER, BUT I HAVE NOT THE TIME TO EDUCATE YOU. HERE YOU HAVE ALMOST UNLIMITED STRENGTH, NOT THAT PITTANCE OF POWER YOU WIELD IN THE PARASITES’ STOLEN REALM. HERE IN MY DREAMS YOU CAN SAFELY SEPARATE FROM THE LIGHT WITHIN AND CONQUER IT AS THE WARRIOR YOU ARE.
Eva tried to focus. It was so hard. So painful. The light, the prism, the rainbow, call it what you will, it kept trying to break free and take her with it. “The Three Queens gave me Grant Little’s were-anima. I’ve been in a coma. The Lady sent me here to fight the anima . . . because of course crazy ass mancers would choose metaphorical dream battles over something concrete!”
WHEN NEXT IT THRASHES, LET IT FREE. DO NOT RESIST. DRINK DEEPLY OF THE SHADOWS.
In the next minute of pain, Eva swore off children for life. Even if she survived and lived to be as old as the Lady. It hurt. It burned. Her eyes, her soul, the whole false world she stood in. It poured out from her, from her chest, from her throat, from her . . . from every hole it could drain out of.
It pooled together, nothing but rainbow light. Watching it was like being blinded by the sun, when even closing your eyes did you no good. It went too deep, to nerves and connections you didn’t know you had. Your lizard brain couldn’t take it and overloaded, sparkling with wisps that wouldn’t leave your sight.
Free of it, Eva felt better. Herself. Eva Reti. Shadeshifter. In fact, she felt better than she ever had. She felt . . . one with the shadows. In a few seconds she had her entire fill of scio-anima. She felt heady, drunk, braver than when she’d done a million stupid little things on a dare. She felt like she could climb straight up walls and fall down cliffs unharmed, like she could sit at the bottom of the seafloor uncrushed and grace the dark side of the moon without ever needing to draw a breath.
Only the light was her enemy. Without the light she reigned, invincible.
Only the light was her enemy . . . but the light was in the cavern with her.
The light stood up as a great prismatic wolf. It snarled and snapped at her face. It howled at the full moon. It always returned to thwart her, promised with sacrifice, called by prayers, pulled by more than one gods’ chariot.
YOU MAY ONLY LEAVE WITH IT INSIDE OF YOU, BUT IT MAY LEAVE IF YOU FALL DEAD. FIGHT WELL, JUMPING SHADE!
Eva threw scio-anima all around her, great big spouts of the stuff. In its wake, curtains of pure shadows coalesced. Sciomancy was odd, meant to only work when you had material to work with, but when your material of choice was just absence of light . . . there was a lot to go around. Same with spectromancers . . . the only way they were the same. This made both of those disciplines Intro-Elemental. They could use their own anima inside of their bodies. In a spectromancer’s case: to coat themselves in illusions, to deaden their senses, and to brighten their emotions.
As always, sciomancers were the exact opposite.
Normally they were skills that she wouldn’t have bothered with much.
A waste of anima compared to a nice scio-blade or a shadow to hide behind.
But she had more than enough anima to waste here.
Wherever here was.
Samson and the Lady have some explaining to do about my education. For real! You think you know all the secrets, they tell you about the Divines, they tell you about the Anima Quota, but do they tell you about the talking voices and the cuckoo dreamland? No!
With more than enough anima to spare, pooling thirty minutes of it or more in a few seconds, Eva threw the second pool inward. Her eyes pierced the shadow around her, her ears heard the subatomic clash where Prism Wolf met shadow dream, her nose picked up the smell of water from somewhere nearby. Enhanced senses, but depressed emotions. Her heart stilled itself, her mind focused on her target. All the fear and panic threatening to overtake her faded.
She watched the Prism Wolf with dispassion, watched it snarl, and thrash, and stamp threateningly about without a hint of terror. She watched as her third pool formed and coated her body in shadow, drifting about her like a cloak. She tore a piece of that cloak free with each hand and formed it into scio-blades, the same blades she had tried to beat a way past Isabel with. In the deadened state she couldn’t even feel the fear of that name.
Or the Three Queens.
She felt almost nothing.
More anima, because why not?
She held it, waiting.
Shadows always waited.
The light always came at them.
Prism Wolf snapped a final time before darting forward at her. Where it parted the world there was thunder and crackling lines of faded sunlight. It belonged in this realm less than it belonged in her body. I’m a Were . . . or something close, Eva thought clinically as the light arched in towards her, it will never be the same. I will never be the same.
Teeth made of rainbows sounded like a four-year-old girl’s dream . . . they’re anything but. Pure anima burns . . . thirteen types of anima mixed together . . . dissolves. Eva rolled to the right, perpendicular to the Prism Wolf’s momentum. As she rolled she threw out her hands, scoring long scratches on the beast’s effervescent hide. Thin slashes of black marked it as it howled in pain, but not for long. The anima twisted around in a flash of color, sealing the wounds.
Eva backed away from it and into her shadows.
This was how a sciomancer killed.
Where you couldn’t see her.
The hidden blade.
Did the fairy really just call me Jumping Shade? Sounds like a My Little Pony villain . . . how insulting!
A spare glance down at her scio-blades found them worn down where they had struck the Prism Wolf. I can hurt it, but only if I sacrifice my weapons for each strike. Here she could make more in an instant and did, but if this
was taking place in her dreams . . . I’ve already used ninety minutes of anima, without it I’d be dead.
The Prism Wolf sniffed for her.
You still stink like a human and my nose picked you out, Eva, she heard Isabel say again.
Well . . . shit.
Only unlike that hallway, in the cavern she had room to work with. Move, Eva!
Move she did, from shadow to shadow, spraying more behind her like a squid with ink. Not exactly the metaphor of the year and not exactly the last metaphor I want to make before I die, but we’ll go with it!
Solution: don’t die.
She wasn’t sure how long the fight lasted.
For hours maybe. It felt like it. Strike after strike from the shadows into retreat into the Prism Wolf healing itself. She got more desperate, tried more and more stabs per attack, enough for the Prism Wolf to hit back. Where it bit her arm, there were only holes. Not wounds, but holes of nothingness. Shadow dissolved by the light.
Where the Prism Wolf tracked her down, where it crossed her shadows, they disappeared. She made more shadows. She made more scio-blades. She kept moving.
YOU MUSTN’T! the whole of the dream screamed.
That’s when Eva’s shadows began to move, all towards the center of the cavern. The eldest and the newest, even the just created, they all moved towards the center of the cavern. Eva felt naked without them, the Prism Wolf gleaming from across the way. It saw her and snarled.
YOU WILL FALL!
“Only because you’re cheating!” Eva yelled. “You said you wanted to help and now you’re betraying me! I should have known better than to trust a fairy!”
YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG, CHILD. WHAT IS DONE IS DONE FOR YOUR AID AND IT IS NOT BY MY WILL.
. . . it . . . is . . . my . . . duty . . . not . . . hers . . . a second voice whispered.
The shadows, even pieces of the darkness, slid onward, coalesced, gathered in an implosion of absence. Not shadow, not darkness, scio-anima so folded, so lost, so lonely that it was from a piece of existence devoid of even matter. All of it formed into a single knife. A knife so dark only a sciomancer could see it, a knife so dark that even the Prism Wolf couldn’t dissolve it.
. . . take . . . up . . . my . . . mantle . . . and . . . live . . . would . . . that . . . we . . . had . . . more . . . time . . .
Eva thanked the Mancy that she didn’t feel in that moment, that she could barely think, that she was in her own scio-anima created depression, else it would have overwhelmed her. Else . . . she might have thought on that voice and not taken the aid it offered her.
The Prism Wolf howled and charged.
It was faster than she was.
It passed the dividing line of the cavern before Eva could reach the knife. She had only one choice, so she took it.
She jumped.
A single hand slammed downward on the Prism Wolf’s back, between its shoulder blades. The skin on that hand dissolved. It bled shadow as she vaulted over the Prism Wolf, stumbling, rolling to her feet. She slid the rest of the way thanks to momentum alone, carried far enough to grasp her good hand around the mysterious knife’s pommel.
Eva turned.
The Prism Wolf jumped at her.
She struck true, between a rib, right into its metaphorical heart, the place where all thirteen anima types met. Where the anima of the original thirteen wolfs sacrificed to the Wolf Nation Totem resided.
The Prism Wolf died above her, howling in pain. It dripped down on her, coating her from her face down her chest. It seeped into her. It became one with her, mastered by her anima, controlled by her anima. Not the relationship between two souls that made a man a Were, but something else. Something new . . . or something very old.
Eva Reti knew in that moment she would never become a wolf, but she also knew she was even less human than she had been before. She also knew . . . that something horrible had just happened.
But she wasn’t sure what.
Around her even the shadows of the dream faded. The voice serenaded her, both ecstatic and mournful.
ARISE, LIGHTEATER!
ARISE, MY QUEEN OF DARKNESS!
ARISE, MY NEWLY TEMPERED DARKWATCHER!
ARISE, CHOSEN OF AQAMADELLAT!
ARISE AND LIVE!
THE AWAKENING DRAWS EVER CLOSER!
THE PRISONS CANNOT HOLD!
WE WILL SPEAK AGAIN!
*
Eva’s eyes opened to nothing but light.
Across from her, the Lady sat naked, covered in stale Slush, but smiling nonetheless. “Someone had an adventure, didn’t she?” the old woman joked.
Eva laughed, realizing she too was covered in Slush.
And naked.
She felt tired and weak, but . . . she also felt in control. Around her she picked out shadows . . . which made no sense in that light. She squinted, feeling her own anima aura. It felt darker than before, as dark as that knife she had used, and at the center was a small bundle of prism light, tucked away to never see the day again.
“How—”
“Two weeks,” a tight voice said off in a corner.
Eva turned enough to see Evelyn Strange, the doctor of the Asylum Infirmary. She was holding what looked like a miniature star. She was also naked. “Do you two always take your clothes off while around other women?” Eva asked.
Strange barked a laugh. “Not since college.”
The Lady made no comment on the question, only taking the time to reach out and touch Eva’s face. “Two weeks. We know about the Three Queens. We did not catch them or Isabel, Conan Sapa is dead, King Henry is fine. King Henry is actually visiting the school today . . . which has had security in a tizzy.”
“Can I . . . can I see him?” Eva asked. “Clothed preferably . . . both of us.”
“I’m sure Evelyn has twenty tests to conduct on you, but I don’t see why not,” the Lady decided after a while, before cautioning, “If that’s what you want.”
“Yes, I do.”
I think he’s the only one who will understand.
I hope he understands.
Someone needs to understand.
Because I sure don’t.
Strange didn’t even bother to get clothed before pulling out a clipboard. “Wants to see King Henry Price,” the doctor mumbled as she wrote. “First signs of brain damage?”
Home is Where the Crazy Is
Most people got over their firsts by the time they’re a teenager, college at the very last. Other than the baby thing, and King Henry Price wasn’t ever expecting to experience that first . . . he was rather praying against it.
But other firsts . . .
That was his life as of late.
Twenty-three and stacking them one on top of the other.
Firsts normal people, non One-in-a-Million people, don’t have to worry about. First time meeting a dragon. Checkmark. First time leaving the Earth. Checkmark. First time watching a blood god die. Checkmark. First time destroying a ‘zombie’ army. Checkmark. Add in killing a man—check, check, check—and his life was all sorts of interesting.
Another first was waiting ahead for him.
Waiting ahead on a winding road.
Choosing to go to the Asylum on his own, driving himself, and not getting stabbed with the Giant Fucking Needle.
“There’s the pearly fucking gates, Mini,” he told his passenger.
His passenger was a cube of steel.
It did not speak as such, though it did form an exclamation point on its top surface to indicate its excitement.
Talking to myself . . . not a first. Not even close.
The gates weren’t pearly, nothing about the Asylum was pearly . . . well, maybe the Cafeteria food. What day is it? Wonder what they’re serving? If he knew the day then he’d know what they were serving. Had that menu down to memory after seven years of it. He just wasn’t sure on the day . . . being he’d spent so much time in his hobbit hole lately trying to build himself an arsenal worthy of taking on Obadiah Paine
.
Wait . . . is it . . . it can’t be . . . is it Friday? T-Bone said something about the weekend, didn’t he? Wait . . . fish tacos? There are fish tacos in the Cafeteria right now?
His whole itinerary had just changed on a whim. One: get through gates without being stabbed by Giant Fucking Needle. Two: park car. Three: fish tacos. Four: more fish tacos. Five: maybe see about talking to Plutarch . . . probably take some extra fish tacos with you just in case.
Pearly fucking gates. Weren’t that, no they weren’t. Had a whole lot in common with a park tollbooth, just up in the mountains and instead of a park got themselves a school full of half-crazy kids. More half-crazy than the usual teenager even. Anima and hormones, everyone run for the hills. Shit, we’re already above the hills? Lock yourself inside then, don’t forget the peanut butter.
Tollbooth had itself a pair of guys pretending to be park rangers even; made King Henry wonder if maybe he took the wrong road. Sure as fuck hope not, was a long enough fucking drive as it was. Though given the speed at which he drove and the lead quality of his foot, he got there pretty damn quick for crossing half of California. Shit, I just put Ceinwyn’s lap record to shame, yes I did. Sure, there was that section where he almost caused a pileup with that chicken truck, but it hit the fucking water barrels, didn’t it?
No harm, no fowl.
Puns, bitches, I got ‘em.
Ranger Smith popped a window open to stare down at King Henry. His buddy, Rescue Ranger, was busy scratching his balls and reading a magazine. Very serious business scratching your balls and reading a magazine, you accidentally scratch the paper and turn your balls and it can ruin your day.
“Nice car,” Ranger Smith greeted King Henry.
King Henry glanced around him at the red convertible. What? It makes Prince Henry feel all fluffy. “Rental, usually got a bike, but I couldn’t kidnap any kids without having a trunk, ya know?”
Ranger Smith glared down at him, just like every other security guard King Henry had ever bullshitted. Don’t matter if they’re working for mancers or the Vamps or the Weres, they’re all the same middle-of-the-road moron who’s power tripping on their single bit of authority. “If your ID doesn’t check out then I’ll be detaining you and handing you over to the authorities for your little joke.”
King Henry and the Three Little Trips (The King Henry Tapes) Page 13