Death's Ethereal Enemy

by Ruby Loren

  Predictably, everything changed.

  January found herself in the woods again. It was summer, like it was now. The leaves were green and shiny, forming a canopy that blocked out the arena’s ceiling. January looked around, but couldn’t see or hear anything. Her grip on her sword tightened. No way had Warwick suddenly decided to give her a nice trip to the countryside. Something was going to try to kill her, any second now.

  She held her breath, still looking round.

  And then she heard it.

  The sound of laughter coming through the trees. She turned, as if in a daze, remembering when she’d seen into the other world and met with the girl with the amber eyes. This was surely the same moment!

  She walked through the trees, following in her own footsteps. There it was! The rocks and the thin place. The only thing missing were the people she’d seen.

  But someone had laughed.

  She frowned and focused, realising for the first time that there wasn’t anything there between the rocks. The thin place had gone. She shook herself, trying to remember that this wasn't real, but something else… something made by Warwick.

  She turned around, expecting to see a monster.

  Instead, the girl with amber eyes was there.

  January only saw her image for a fraction of a second. She thought she might have winked, but she couldn’t be sure.

  The next second, all hell broke loose.

  January turned back to where the thin place had been in her memory and discovered it was there again. Only, the scene she could see was different from the one in the forest back home. She looked through the gap at an arena, the carbon copy of the one she was in, except it was devoid of trees… and full of soldiers, lined up in front of a man, who was shouting something from the podium, where Warwick presumably stood in this world.

  The man stopped shouting and made eye contact with her.

  He could definitely see her.

  Time seemed to stand still before January’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and she ran.

  Branches tore at her suit, as she ran through the woods, cursing every twig. What did Warwick think he was doing? She knew full well that the thin place had really been there and - she looked back over her shoulder at the white-uniformed soldiers, who were pouring through like ants - he’d just let some fae army loose in this world! The amber-eyed girl had warned her that it was a dangerous place. She thought she was about to find out why.

  January looked up at Warwick, but he was gone. She felt the impact when he landed in the arena, but she was too busy trying to save her own life to care what was happening behind her. She continued to tear through the undergrowth until it vanished into nothing. A glance behind told her that the soldiers had nearly caught up, and then they were lost to a sudden mist.

  January swore. If this was the kind of game the Old Ones liked to play, she wasn’t going to play along. She reached her magic out and tore the threads, keeping her from changing, out of the suit. The fabric disintegrated. She was a unicorn just in time to jump ahead of the machete, swept down by the forerunning solider. She snorted and gave them a taste of her dust, as she galloped away.

  A second later, she remembered the wall and turned, nearly too late. Her shoulder glanced off the steel-plated concrete, deflecting her, and all of a sudden, she found herself in amongst a group of the soldiers.

  Back in her favourite fighting form, autopilot kicked in and the slaughter began.

  Now the mist was in her favour. She was dark and fast, ploughing her way through a battalion and then back the other way. No one could even touch her.

  After her return to Hailfield, she’d started to look down on her past as a bounty hunter. She’d justified her line of work as a necessity and her enjoyment of it as a reaction to being oppressed.

  Now, caught up in the thrill of the carnage, January accepted that some base part of her nature simply loved a good fight.

  She was turning to make another run when she felt a familiar sense of dread.

  No, not again! she thought, realising that it was yet another thing she’d failed to prepare for.

  Warwick was using the same spell King Bob had done when he’d nearly wiped out the whole shifter pack.

  Only, this time the amber-eyed girl wasn’t here to fold it back on the caster.

  Too late, January sensed what felt like a pulse of pure destruction flood through the arena. It was so terrible, she actually felt the soldiers right in front of her die.

  Then it was her turn.

  She lowered her horn and charged towards the death wave, knowing it might be the last thing she ever did before being turned into dust.

  Then there was light.

  A pure, white light, swept across the arena. January heard the sound of glass shattering and the mist was blown away in a heartbeat. She changed back into human form and spun herself a dress of dark magic with half a thought.

  She was left standing in an empty arena. There was nothing else left behind, apart from the shards of glass from the ruined viewing box.

  “Are you not entertained?” She muttered under her breath.

  “Not especially,” someone answered.

  She turned to see the earth open up and seemingly spit Warwick back out. January was pleased to see he didn’t look nearly as calm and collected as he had when he’d initiated the tests.

  He moved forwards, so that they were only a couple of metres away from each other. “You don’t know what you just did, do you?” It was less of a question, more of a statement.

  January kept her expression blank.

  She was tired of being belittled. “You opened up a thin place and let an army through. Then you tried to disintegrate me. Isn’t that a little much for a ‘test’?” She raised her hands and made air quotes.

  Warwick gave her a final disgusted look, before he wrote a glowing sigil in the air, and flew, back up to his podium and out of sight.

  January shook her head and stalked off in the other direction to find herself some real clothes, only pausing to pick up her abandoned sword and shield. She’d be damned if she didn’t get to keep a souvenir from this ridiculous stunt. It was obvious to her that this had been some twisted way of making her death into entertainment. January frowned, wondering if they’d wanted to see if she really did reanimate.

  She threw her marshmallow shield back up when she walked back into the locker-room. Just because she was out of the arena, she couldn’t assume that she was safe.

  Emerson’s presence in the room told her she’d been right.

  She threw the shield at his face.

  It went straight through and smashed into a row of wooden lockers, shattering at least four of them.

  “Did you really think I’d be able to come down for a pep talk in person after that display?” he said, incredulous. “You need to get out of here right now. When he's angry, Warwick does things he sometimes regrets later. Although, in your case… he probably won’t regret it.” Emerson shrugged.

  “Why is he angry? He’s the one who opened up a thin place and let an army through, before obliterating everything with that spell.” She shook her head. She still wasn’t sure how she’d survived that, or what the white light had been, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

  “You think he was the one who opened a gateway between the overlapping worlds?” Emerson opened his mouth to say more, but shut it again. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to discuss this at great length, later. Right now, you need to leave, and I know the way out.”

  He threw her clothes at her, and she hastily put them on. Her hand automatically went to pick up her sword again, but Emerson made a derisive sound.

  “They’ll hardly let you on a plane with that.”

  She reluctantly dropped the sword and followed ethereal Emerson from the room.

  “So, none of that was supposed to happen,” she clarified, jogging along corridors behind Emerson, wondering if this was all leading to another trap. Was he lying, and t
he tests weren’t finished after all?

  “The beast, the metal, the really deep hole, and the dragon, all of that is standard stuff. The rest of it… not so much.”

  She hurried to keep up. Her senses told her they were going even deeper below the earth. Was this really a way out, or was she walking into yet another trap?

  “But how…”

  “There’s no time. You’ll only get bits and pieces if we talk now, and it’s slowing us down. You need to get out from beyond Warwick’s immediate grasp. He’ll calm down, and it will be fine… probably,” he added and then tilted his head. “I’m not saying he won’t have questions, though, so you’d better come up with some good answers!”

  “What? I don’t even know what happened!” January protested.

  “See? You do need to work on your answers.”

  January ground to a halt. “Gregory! We’ve left Gregory behind. What if Warwick gets rid of him to teach me a lesson?”

  She thought Emerson might have rolled his eyes, but he had his back turned to her. “That wouldn’t be of any benefit to us, other than the slight benefit that comes from keeping the crop young. That’s why you did your job, by the way. The older the vampire, the more likely they are to get big ideas about superiority and do something crazy, like try to take over the world.” He waved his hands in the air, dramatically.

  January was about to inform him of the irony of that when they reached a small, steel-reinforced door. Emerson pointed to the deadbolt and January slid it back.

  “There we go. Your ticket out of here.” He pointed to the left. “Keep walking that way until you see the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Is that a joke?” January asked, but Emerson shook his head.

  “This is the only way out. You must have seen the compound.” He mimed flailing around and then exploding.

  “Fine,” January said, already knowing this was going to be awful. Bring back the schmoozing and fancy dresses, all is forgiven! She silently thought.

  Emerson was smiling at her.

  “I should go,” she said, still unsure whether to trust him, even an inch. She knew full well that he would have a motive behind his actions. Not knowing what it was meant that she was completely at his mercy.

  Emerson kept smiling. “You should go, but tell me one thing… Does it really smell as bad as I’ve heard?” he asked, gesturing to the sewer the door opened onto.

  January glared at him and his grin grew wider.

  “I’ve always wondered, and now I know.”

  January was glad when he disappeared into his fragments of light, and she was left alone with the dreadful smell and the prospect of squelching through miles of goodness knows what - and for what reason? She still wasn’t sure what had angered Warwick. All she’d done was defend herself against the things he’d made happen. The only thing she couldn’t explain was the white light, which had shattered the window and apparently forced Warwick beneath the ground.

  “What did he expect me to do when he did that spell… die?” She muttered, before starting the long walk to freedom.

  12

  January slept for a day when she got back to her house on the edge of the woods. She had so many questions going round her head and so many worries. Where was Gregory? Was someone coming for her? And most importantly… what had happened in the arena? But worries and questions hadn’t been enough to stop her from drifting out of consciousness the moment her head had hit the pillow. Whatever she’d done in the arena had taken it out of her. She’d felt like an empty battery that only sleep could recharge.

  When she opened her eyes in the evening and found that she was still alive and alone in her house, she breathed a sigh of relief. Emerson had been right. Warwick must have decided not to have her wiped off the map for whatever she was supposed to have done. Not yet, anyway. She reflected that Emerson had also warned her there would be questions, and that she’d better have come up with some good answers for them.

  January threw on some clothes and a pair of trainers. A walk in the woods was exactly what she needed to think about answers. There was somewhere she needed to visit, too…

  She was still thinking about that when she opened the front door and was hit in the face with an axe.

  January just had time to think ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’ before she died.

  She was still lying outside her front door on the gravel drive where she’d fallen when she woke up. Just like the last time, her eyes felt gummy and her vision was fuzzy - as if she’d woken up from a deep sleep. Instead, she’d come back from the dead.

  Mercifully, the axe was no longer embedded in her face, but that didn’t stop it from hurting when her skin knitted back together. She was reminded of a time when Gregory had nearly lost the top half of his head and had asked her to make sure it was set in the right place, before his natural healing had kicked in. She hoped that the same thing was happening to her and prayed her nose was still in the right place.

  She blinked a couple of times and thought she was probably ready to stand up and find out who’d swung the axe. Then she was going to make them very sorry for doing it.

  Whoever it was, hadn’t gone far. She could hear voices behind her in the house and when she turned her head, she could see the lights were on.

  January pushed herself onto her hands and knees and then got upright. Her body was yelling at her to change, so that the pain would be less - as she’d done after she’d died the first time - but she needed to stay in this form. She was going to give her killers the surprise of their lives.

  Especially now she had a shrewd idea of exactly who they were.

  January walked back into her house, still covered in her own blood.

  “That’s not a nice way to say hello to your sister.”

  Jo Chevalier spun round and dropped the jar of coffee she’d just taken out of the cupboard.

  “You were dead,” her tall, dark, and deceitful sister hissed.

  “Did you let Morgan do the checking? You’ve probably noticed he’s not very good at the hands-on stuff,” she said, nodding in the direction of the were-tiger sat on her sofa, who was now several shades paler than usual.

  Jo made a sound of disgust. “I checked. I swung the axe, too. In Paris, everyone goes on about how you’re this legendary bounty hunter, who’s oh so scary. But I knew you wouldn’t expect something that basic. You’ve got an ego, and people with egos get sloppy.”

  January thought that was very rich coming from her sister. “That’s good to know. I’ll bear it in mind for the future,” she said, sarcastically.

  Her sister frowned, as it probably dawned on her that January’s being alive made what she'd just said irrelevant. “You aren’t dead,” she stated. “I know you were dead,” she repeated.

  January grinned, knowing just how horrible it probably looked with her gore-streaked face. “A lot has changed since you’ve been gone.”

  “Clearly! You had our parents killed,” Jo said, folding her arms.

  January turned her head in time to see Morgan attempting to sneak out the door behind her. She encased him in one of her trademark marshmallow shields and glued him to the wall.

  “I did not have them killed,” she said, baffled by the way Jo was trying to turn this around on her, after murdering her own sister.

  Jo made a sound of disbelief. “You sent them to Paris, where all your friends are, and then they die - apparently from a lack of oxygen, but there’s no explanation as to how.”

  January bit her lip. She’d known all of that, but hadn’t yet had time to look into it. Things were kind of boiling over right now. Solving her parents’ murder was one too many pots to keep on the stove. “It was nothing to do with me. You were the one in Paris at the time of their death. I bet you haven’t been keeping nice company, either.” January looked pointedly over her shoulder at Morgan, who was fighting his own private battle with the invisible giant marshmallow he was encased in.

  “Forgive me for never being ‘The Chos
en One’,” Jo said - quite nonsensically in January’s opinion. Her sister had always been the favourite child.

  “Look, I didn’t kill our parents. I was pleased when they told me they were leaving Hailfield and going to Paris. I was less pleased when they let slip you were there, too, but I wiped it from my mind. As long as you all stayed away, things would be fine. Or so I thought.” January said.

  “That’s a nice story,” Jo said, already back to raiding the cupboards of the sister she’d just murdered.

  January felt her temper snap. After her time in the arena, she hadn’t had much of a long fuse to start with, and to add insult to injury, she had just been killed.

  January lashed out with her magic and only just restrained herself from disassembling her sister, in the nick of time. The moment she’d sent out the thought - and regretted it - she’d tried to divert it, but unfortunately…

  “My hair! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY HAIR?” Her sister screamed.

  Jo’s hair was gone.

  January tried to keep a straight face, but failed. Knowing Jo, winding up bald was probably a fate worse than death.

  “You deserve it after killing me… and trying to kill me the last time, too,” January added. It was hardly sisterly behaviour.

  Jo had gone white with rage. “Put. It. Back.”

  January shrugged and went to sit down on the sofa. “I can’t. I pulled the atoms apart.” She didn’t let on that it had nearly been Jo who’d been disintegrated - not just her hair. Then she’d be just as bad as her sister. “You can get a wig. They have really good ones these days.”

  “It’s going to take ages to grow back. You have no idea,” Jo hissed.

  January managed to keep a straight face this time around. Jo didn’t know it yet, but her hair wouldn’t be growing back. Every single trace of hair had gone from her head. January just hoped Jo wouldn’t spread the story too far, or she’d be inundated with people asking for magical hair removal. Come to think of it… why hadn’t she tried that on herself yet?

  “Why did you kill me?” January wanted to get the conversation back to the important matter of her own death.