Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  So I did as a Fox would — I talked and waited.

  “Well, I’ll be outside,” I said, hands flat on the glass bar counter. “And what happens there is up to you.” I turned. The bladeless hilt of my garnet sword was strapped to my ankle, though I hadn’t been able to use it since fighting Zabor. That didn’t matter. I was aching for this. The fight was cinematic in my head despite the mounting number of holes in my plan.

  But I didn’t get farther than a step before a hand snapped out and wrenched me back by the forearm. It held fast. The stench of burning flesh flooded my already keyed-up senses. His burning flesh.

  And yet he still smiled.

  Only a few people turned — probably the Denizens. The rest went about their eating and drinking. I looked around wildly, and I tried to thrash away, the man’s skin blackening steadily from his fingertips up along his arm.

  “Troublesome mongrel,” he said again in his terribly familiar voice. “I have come to give you a warning, targe stealer. Fox traitor. I have left the garden to bring you good tidings.”

  I watched his arm cook between us. I wanted to throw up. “Urka?”

  “My masters are eager. They tire of our beloved ashes. They wish to make this a world for their own children. They extend gratitude for helping them.”

  I pulled, but the grip was iron. No one was moving to rescue me. I felt myself getting hotter. I knew I could burn him alive if he didn’t let go, but I had to know. “Helping them with what?”

  Urka’s human face shimmered as his clothes caught fire, the synthetics fusing and melting to its skin. “For helping them send their beloved child past the Veil and into your realm. For it could not have happened without you.”

  The black eyes were earnest. I remembered Urka’s stone axe hands, the furnace in its belly. I stopped resisting.

  “The children are coming,” Urka said. “They are coming for you.”

  My chest tightened, and in my moment of terror, the stone perceived its chance. The fire inside me escalated into an inferno, left my skin, and poured out like hot gas. Urka’s gaping yellowed grin peeled away as its very human body stretched, blackened, hardened. Then the grip seized, throwing me backward into the ten-foot-high decorative shelf of alcohol behind me.

  I didn’t have time to stop myself. The Dragon Opal wouldn’t let me. I was a powder keg, and the minute I connected and the glass and liquid rained down, I knew the inferno was no longer just inside me. The restaurant lit up like Hogmanay.

  ~

  It was dark when I got back to my flat. I barely remembered the journey — my brain only flickering on when I shut the door with my body. I jolted like I’d woken from a bad dream, terrified as I looked around. Everything seemed so normal, so safe. What little I’d brought with me from Canada in a small backpack — clothing, books — scattered around the partially furnished flat. Jackets. Shoes. The testament of my solitude. Of a yesterday when things hadn’t gone so completely to shit.

  It definitely didn’t look like the flat of a murderer.

  I lifted my trembling hands, which were black with ash and soot. Had it happened? Had I really burned down Fingal’s Pint with everyone in it? All I remembered was my heart getting too hot to breathe, my skin coming apart in cinders. A yellowed smile. The children are coming for you.

  I crumpled to the ground, breath catching. The stone had saved me — had done its job to protect its precious host. And had made me into the type of monster I had given everything to destroy, to come here to stop.

  Urka. I clenched my fists, remembering the last time I’d seen that wretched thing, down in the Bloodlands. It was the last thing in this world and however many others that had seen my mother, after she’d disappeared. After the man I thought was my father had been punished in the aftermath with his life.

  I suddenly felt utterly spent, like I had no room to feel anything else. I had lost control. I had let it happen. My terror and rage had cost me.

  I had no one to call for advice. No mother or grandmother who could console me, who could teach me, who could help me. I was on my own. I had to be. But I wasn’t truly alone. I touched the stone in my breastbone, ran my fingers over its raw curves. It felt quiet now, only giving off a glowing warmth. It was spent, too. But the whispering, insistent voice it always used, however quiet, floated to the surface.

  The voices of the thousands that had come before me, boring deep into my synapses. I shut my eyes and let them in.

  Tribunal by Air

  Eli was not a nervous person. Even before the Moonstone, he was fairly self-assured. He stepped into things because he sought them out, and if they didn’t go as he planned, then he’d try again from another angle. A survivalist’s approach.

  But even now, on a private plane headed towards a Grand Council that would weigh in on his actions in Winnipeg the past season, his heart and mind were in turmoil. He had gone against the stone’s influence in the end, and yet it had had such a hold on him for so long, it had resulted in the deaths of innocent Mundanes and Denizens alike. A year ago he would have been immune to this excruciating brand of soul-searching. The ego alone from his own tremendous power would have prevented it, and he wouldn’t dare be dwelling on his best-forgotten origins with a mad mother or the bitterness of a father he barely knew only claiming him after she’d died. Empathy, however late coming, was already tedious.

  It was a lot to bear at once, yet despite it all, he had some modicum of peace, one thing he’d managed to win back for himself: he could finally push the voices away. He could try to rebuild himself separate from the Moonstone.

  Eli glanced about the plane, carrying at least a dozen aides and Owls in addition to Eli and Solomon. Satisfied no one was watching, he pushed his sleeve up, bringing his arm into the light shining through the porthole window. The scar was white now, coiled around his flesh with the indentation of the thin gold chain that had bit into it months ago, down deep in that strange underworld. He’d looked at it often, wondering if it would fade away entirely or if he’d have it for life.

  And he wondered if hers looked the same. If she looked down at it, too. Roan Harken.

  He pulled his sleeve back down with a huff of frustration, fighting to refasten the cuff buttons. Any clarity of mind he had now, he owed to her. Pigheaded, ridiculous, amateur Roan Harken, who had stumbled blindly into a power greater than anything her dim-witted existence, up till now, could have ever quantified. And yet . . . With her stupidity came a clear conscience. Something Eli couldn’t say he’d ever had, even before his own Calamity Stone. But he despised that she was out there playing the hero. Last year, throughout the ordeal of Zabor, she never once suggested that it was something she had to do on her own. Yet no one had heard much from her, much to his chagrin, since she climbed into a plane not unlike this one and shut everyone out. Including him.

  Eli grimaced out the window, bright sun cascading over the tops of the clouds the plane skated over. Roan. The colour of ashy dust on a horse’s coat. Usually an animal too strong for its own good, gentle but easily led, headstrong and terrible when it got out of control.

  Roan.

  The next Paramount of the Foxes . . . the thought was a bitter, laughable one. Her? Already she had no idea what she’d gotten into, taking that stone. Accepting it. What it had already cost her, and what it would, very soon, if the Conclave of Fire had anything to say about it . . .

  Eli felt the plane jutter slightly. He tensed, meeting Solomon’s eyes in the seat facing him.

  “Just turbulence,” Solomon said in the soft reassuring voice of a mentor, and Eli slammed the door shut on his mind. With newfound clarity came carelessness, and his father was nearly as perceptive as he. It didn’t help that Owls’ power allowed them to send tendrils of thought into weaker minds, and lately Eli would let those thoughts in without thinking.

  But closing off meant that the only way to ascertain someone’s f
eelings was to talk. Tedious.

  “Are you all right?” Solomon asked. He had the decency to look unconcerned, even in his stiff posture, his body not yet accustomed to the new artificial leg from the knee down. He hadn’t fared well in the battle against Zabor, and yet he’d done all he could. Eli wasn’t shocked that he’d survived but that he’d been injured at all, knowing his power. Once, it crossed his mind that Solomon taking himself out of the deciding moment of the fight had been intentional, perhaps — a visceral changing of the guard to make way for the son he trusted would show up despite his shame.

  Eli glanced back out the window. “I’m uneasy.”

  “About the tribunal?” Solomon looked surprised.

  Much had changed but not Eli’s ego. “Tch. I called the thing. And if I know anything it’s this Family. They haven’t had qualms about my actions for years as long as it protected their interests and the Narrative’s. No. Something else.” He looked his father in the eye. “You feel it, too.”

  Solomon exhaled through his nose. Eli had spent enough time with the man to concede a resemblance between them, but the line was thin. He’d always felt that he took after his mother, though his memories of her were like sharp splinters. And Eli still resented Solomon too much to probe. Eli was just another ritually conceived Denizen, born to a woman who had known the location of the hidden Moonstone. Yet when she refused to claim it for the Family, the Stone itself destroyed her mind. Eli wouldn’t soon forget that Solomon only became interested in him when, after being granted his mother’s fatal legacy of the Tradewind Moonstone’s location, Eli had next been chosen by it.

  “Things have changed because of that Fox,” Solomon admitted, drawing Eli back from the edge of old furies. “Zabor may be gone, but I fear she won’t be gone for long. She went almost too gently into her good night.”

  Considering that a good part of Winnipeg’s downtown core had been decimated in the wake of Zabor’s rising and that many Mundanes and Denizens had been killed . . . Eli didn’t really consider that “gently.” And the psychological cleanup the Owls had to perform on Winnipeg’s Mundane population had been taxing, to say the least.

  But he wasn’t an idiot. “So you think it was planned? That she wanted to return to the Bloodlands?” Not a day went by when Eli didn’t think of that place — the ruin and the utter void of it. The horrors that dug their roots deep there. The place had nearly claimed him and Roan, too, for their efforts in retrieving the targe that would put Zabor back in that miserable hellscape. It hadn’t been an easy feat, but it was something countless generations before him had shied from attempting. Maybe there had been a reason.

  Now Solomon looked out into the wide sky. Creatures of air that they were, the vault gave Owls some peace. “I think there’s more yet to come. More that we don’t know.” Solomon sucked on his teeth, grip tightening on the gold-topped cherry wood cane he relied on. “The passing of the Dragon Opal isn’t a good sign, either.”

  Eli’s heart squeezed. Yes, there would be an outcry from the Fox Family soon if there hadn’t been already. Because without fanfare, ritual, or blessing, Roan had been given a greater burden than the one she’d originally been cursed with by Death herself. Perhaps this was the Moth Queen’s true intention, after all: that an uninitiated girl, who had had no concept of Ancient and its universal machinations, would be given one of the most powerful artefacts of their world . . . Eli rubbed his chest. He knew that following her like a watchful dog wouldn’t have helped, that spitting warnings and oaths and trying to show her how to control a Calamity Stone would have been rejected. But he could have offered her more. Could have at least extended himself to her as a . . .

  Instead he let her leave alone. Allowed her to be isolated in a strange country, with nothing and no one to guide her. Because that had done him good, hadn’t it?

  The plane lurched again — this time, the wing took a noticeable dip as though it was banking. It righted itself even more suddenly, yet the air and sky outside did not change.

  Eli could feel it in the wind. “That’s not turbulence.”

  Suddenly, an announcement from the cockpit came through. “Whatever this is, it’s not showing whatsoever on our radar. We’ve lost connection with air traffic control. We’re flying dead, sir. GPS is still connected. We’ve just passed the Bering Sea . . . I’m going to have to divert towards Magadan airport. It’s the closest, sir.”

  “Russia?” Eli quipped, but the plane took another dive, and Solomon signalled for his aide.

  “Tell the pilot to take us wherever he thinks is wise. We need to get out of the air.” When the aide scurried off, he looked hard at Eli. “And away from the water.”

  Eli nodded tightly. He undid his seat belt and went up to the cockpit. “I have to see it for myself,” was all Eli said to Solomon’s unspoken concern, as he crossed the aisle with a meaningful glance to his father. After everything, he hadn’t forgotten waking on his return from the Bloodlands and seeing the look on Solomon’s face. He’d given Eli the same look just now. Bald fear and regret.

  The pilot and co-pilot acknowledged Eli as he dismissed the aide. “I swear, sir, this is the first time we’ve seen that since we left Montreal.”

  That was a swirling column of black punching through the golden cloud and rosy clear sky only a few miles ahead. It was sending massive tendrils towards the plane, rocking it whenever one made contact, then vanishing in a black flash.

  Eli let the Moonstone in completely, let its influence permeate his flesh and his mind. Then he opened his mind into the void they were heading to.

  A faceless face. Burning. A terrible sound and smell — familiar, something he remembered from . . .

  “Urka,” Eli muttered, recognizing the fume for what it was. His mind was haunted with the screams of trees.

  “We need to descend now,” Eli commanded. “If you come up against any more rough air, I’ll help level you out.” A warning light and a sharp buzzer came on suddenly.

  “Shit,” the pilot said, then, “Brace yourself!”

  The next blast of air smashed into the plane and sent a violent tremor through every soul aboard. For a moment, they were dead in the air, then Eli felt his stomach drop.

  They only free-fell for seconds, but it felt like a prelude to a blackout. He felt his molecules reshaping, flesh flexing, as he focused the power of the stone in his breastbone, felt his mind grasping the air currents outside of the plane, and he released his own terrible torrent back towards whatever was attacking them.

  Such a retaliation took a lot out of him. Eli came back to himself seconds later, jolting at the touch of a calm hand. It was the aide. “Sir?” she asked shakily. “Do you need help?”

  He batted her hand and good intentions away, staggering to his feet. “What’s happened?”

  The aide led him back to his father. “We’ve levelled out. We’re descending. But there’s a com coming through. It’s from Soon Yin.”

  Solomon was bent over an iPad, but the picture and sound coming through were breaking up. “Park, I’m sorry, I can’t —”

  “—urn around!” This time the voice was clear. “You must go back! Do not come here. They’re . . . they’re all —”

  The sound did not cut out; in fact, it was clearer, because they could hear heavy breathing. Park Soon Yin, the Owl magistrate for Korea, was calling them from his cellphone, from somewhere dark, somewhere hidden. He was so far away, he could not telepath the warning, but verbalizing it could soon cost him.

  Eli reached over his father’s shoulder. “Park, where are you? What’s happened?”

  The shadowed, haunted face of the magistrate swung into view. The picture was clear enough now to see the moisture on his face. Sweat or tears, Eli couldn’t tell.

  “It was children. It was all children. They had the Serenity Emerald. The Rabbits —”

  The signal cut out then, and t
he plane banked.

  Eli staggered backward into the seat across the aisle. The iPad clattered, and the aides and other Owls they were travelling with let out a collective cry.

  “We need to change the flight plan,” Eli grunted. Against the pull of the sudden gravitational change, he yanked himself towards a window, which was pointed up. He looked over the wing, saw that it was coated with black muck. And the sludge seemed to be crawling, expanding. Hunting.

  Eli felt the change of the Therion, even before he registered allowing it. Fight and flight. The bones in his back flexed and separated, making room. His focus sharpened. Everything seemed to become tighter.

  “No,” he heard Solomon say, as Eli clenched his taloned fist and found purchase in the aisle with the heavy black claws of his feet. “You can’t —”

  “It’s no longer a matter of that,” Eli said. He sent a warning into the minds of everyone on board to hold on, for their fear had opened them to reception. Once he felt they were all buckled down, Eli wrenched the emergency hatch open, slid out, and slammed it shut again.

  They were breaking through the cloud cover now, but the shock of being 20,000 feet in the air was enough to send Eli reeling, even in his elevated state of power. He had flown high in the years of testing himself, but never this high.

  The cold was a lance. The rush of the wind was a thousand razors. But this was the power from which he’d come, and when he braced, feeling feathers penetrate his flesh and protect him from his mother element, he relaxed into the current and let go of the plane.

  The wind filled his wings and he banked and tumbled underneath the jet, pulling away quickly from its turbulence. When he came up and righted over it, he saw that the column of black they’d observed from above the cloud line was coming back towards them, shooting barbs of the same sludge that spread over the right wing.

  The column was gaining, but in the meantime Eli sent a frost-sharp torrent at the black matter on the plane. That shattered it, seeming to stop it from advancing and growing, and the plane was able to pull up and back into a controlled descent.