Black Knight

by Christopher Pike

  Except jump. Even spinning out of control, I’m still able to bend my knees and flex the muscles in my legs enough to send me soaring upward. A fraction of a second slower and I would have been cut in two. I feel the breeze of his slashing machete on the bottoms of my feet as I rise.

  The jump works, it extends my life—an extra two seconds. From ten feet above the ground, I look down in search of a miracle, only to find Nordra directly below me.

  Yet he’s made a second error. In his lust to separate my head from my torso, he swung too hard, putting every last fiber of his being into his blow. As a result it’s his turn to be caught spinning out of control due to excess momentum caused by a bad miss.

  The fact that I have just cut into his left knee also helps. His healing ability isn’t truly instantaneous—it’s just awfully fast. His injured knee is still a problem, it’s still healing. I know because he staggers as he spins.

  This is one of those rare instants where his size and strength are a disadvantage. I’m only half his size. He may be fast but he’s not nimble. Bottom line—he can’t duplicate the height of my leap into the air.

  I don’t strike at his head. It’s the obvious move and even in the midst of his wild gyration he still possesses enough smarts to raise his machete to block such a blow. Instead, as I descend, I place the tip of my machete on the top of his massive skull. I’m not trying to draw blood—I’m trying to line up my fall.

  I drop directly onto his shoulders, my legs gripping his neck. I don’t know who’s more shocked—him or me—that my crazy move has worked. I’m sure he’s never had to “play horsey” with an opponent before.

  I grab his head. I have it in my hands, I’m ready to snap his neck. He’s completely vulnerable and there’s no reason for me to hesitate. He’s a murderer. His latest victims lie strewn in pieces all over the meadow and I’m sure they’re only a fraction of the people he’s killed in his life. He deserves to die.

  Yet I do hesitate. Throwing spears at his creeping minions, pinning them to trees, even letting them die slow, painful deaths, that didn’t bother me as much as it does to hold Nordra’s head—his life—in my hands. It makes no sense.

  Yet it does make sense, unfortunately. Soldiers often talk about how in battle they can shoot and kill the enemy at a distance. But to come right up to them, to stab them with a bayonet, or worse, a knife, to hear and feel the blade go in another person’s body, it can overwhelm even battle-tested marines.

  Yet I don’t have the luxury of being overwhelmed.

  Logic intercedes.

  If I don’t kill him, he’s going to kill me.

  Slipping my right palm beneath his chin, I grip a handful of hair at the base of his skull and viciously rotate his head farther than it has any right to go. I hear a bone crack and am only a millisecond from snapping every vertebrae in his neck . . .

  When his machete swings up and strikes my left wrist.

  The sharp end hits my green bracelet. Had it struck anywhere else, it would have taken off my hand. Still, the blow is painful and I hear a loud pop. Pain rockets up my arm. I figure it’s my own bone breaking and fear I’ve waited too long. With his free hand Nordra reaches up and grabs me by my shirt and tosses me over his head as if I were as light as a pillow. I know what awaits me when I strike the ground.

  Death. He will decapitate me when I land.

  Yet something miraculous happens. I take forever to hit the ground. Well, maybe not forever but a long time. I wonder if it’s because I’m about to die. If my brain can’t cope with the grim reality and has overloaded and shorted out and caused the last second of my existence to last and last.

  If I’m objective, though, I’d have to say time is suddenly moving at quarter speed. I take four seconds to hit the ground, and in those seconds, Nordra scarcely moves at all. I don’t know why, I’m dumbfounded. When I do strike the ground, I hear the stone inside my bracelet click against itself and realize that Nordra must have broken it with his machete.

  But I pay it little heed because when I land time returns to normal. For me, not for Nordra. He’s still acting like a figure that’s been caught on film and replayed in slow motion. He sees me, that’s clear. His eyes swell with rage and the veins in his neck pop. I know I broke one of his cervical vertebrae but I don’t know which one. Obviously I didn’t get the top joint, which would have killed or paralyzed him. The bastard’s still moving, still preparing to cut off my head.

  But I have time to escape, four times more time than I should have. Not being the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth—or question all the weird shit that keeps happening in my life—I jump up and race to the edge of the meadow, grab my spears, boots, and socks, and run into the trees. I keep the machete. Whatever’s happened to Nordra, or me, I figure I’ll be seeing him again soon.

  Twenty minutes later, I find Marc and Ora in the worst way possible—by following Shira’s screams. Whatever happened to time in the meadow has stopped here in the forest. And it’s clear I’m not the only one who ran into a witch.

  Shira lies writhing on the ground with Marc desperately trying to put out her burning shirt by smothering the flames with his own shirt. Only the fire won’t die and Marc is getting his own hands burned.

  Meanwhile, Ora stands pinned to a tree by a spear that has pierced far inside his left shoulder. It sickens me to see my own dirty trick used against my own people. Ora isn’t bleeding heavily but is clearly in pain, although he hides it well. Yet it’s obvious his inability to help Shira is causing him more grief than his wound.

  “Stand aside!” I snap at Marc as I push him out of the way and reach for the water bottles in my pack. The reason Shira’s shirt keeps burning is because it’s been sprayed with molten lava. I don’t think Marc knows that.

  “Get out your water!” I order Marc as I pour my own supply over the flames. The instant the liquid hits the lava a jet of steam strikes us in the face and Shira’s shrieks echo through the forest. I keep pouring, though, going through a dozen pint-size bottles before the flames are finally out and the lava loses its ghastly red glow.

  Yet a mass of bloody flesh has taken its place. The left half of Shira’s chest and a large portion of her left side, down to her waist, is severely burned. I want to try to heal her—I have the gene for healing. Unfortunately, I’ve used the power only sparingly: to cure Lara’s colic and Jimmy when he had a bad flu. I doubt I can summon enough juice to cure Shira.

  The lava intimidates me the most. In large swabs it’s literally fused with burnt skin and I can hardly tell the black flesh from the black rock.

  Shira’s cries begin to die down. It’s a mixed blessing. I want her to black out and escape her agony but fear she’ll go into shock. Marc shares my concern.

  “We can’t let her lose consciousness,” he warns. “We have to keep her awake.”

  “Who’d want to live through this?” I mumble, the adrenaline-fueled rush I had felt after escaping Nordra being replaced by a feeling of despair. It was childish but I’d actually felt excited running back to my partners. I felt pumped up—ready to share what I’d learned and help plan how we’d strike back. Clearly the intoxication of escaping death had gone to my head. Now I wished I had never left my friends alone.

  I don’t even know what happened to them—who attacked them, and if the person is still in the area—and I’m surprised to discover I’m in no hurry to know. It won’t change a thing, I try to tell myself. But the truth is far more disturbing.

  I’m a pitiful leader.

  I must have closed my eyes without realizing. Marc shakes me and I reopen them. “Do something!” he shouts.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You told Ora this afternoon you can heal. Heal her!”

  I glance behind where Ora stands pinned. “But Ora . . . We have to get him free.” I start to stand. “We have to pull out the spear.”


  Marc yanks me down. “Pull out that spear and he’ll bleed like a stuck pig. We have to be prepared when we take it out. But right now you have to save Shira.”

  “Shira,” I whisper. I realize then I’ll never be a doctor. I can hardly bear to look at her wounds. The lava has burned through to her rib cage. I see charred bones poking through black crusty skin. The stumps of veins that have been cauterized by heat. Open veins that bleed freely; the sticky blood trickling over her scorched belly and soaking the top of her pants. A wave of nausea sweeps over me and I fear I’ll vomit.

  “I can’t,” I moan.

  Marc takes my hands in his. “Look at me, Jessie.”

  I do as he says and suddenly I realize how grateful I am that he’s not hurt. That’s something, I tell myself. Yet the thought also fills me with shame.

  “I can’t,” I repeat.

  Marc squeezes my hands. “I know what’s been driving me crazy since I met you. You have magic. Even before you told us you were a witch, I knew you were special, maybe even more special than you realize. You can heal her, Jessie, I know you can. So does Ora. After that bitch attacked us, and Shira was crying and I was freaking out and Ora was stuck to the tree, Ora told us it would be all right. He said, ‘Jessie will come back. Jessie will save us.’” Marc pauses. “You can do it.”

  “Was it Viper?” I ask as if the name has meaning to me, and it does in some primal way. It’s as if I’ve been dreaming about her along with Marc, only when it came to Viper they were nightmares that I blocked out and forgot about. Until now.

  “That’s what she called herself,” Marc says. “She could have killed all of us but she didn’t. She said she wanted to wait until you were here so you could watch us die.”

  “She’s evil,” Ora says solemnly. “But you’re a good person, a great person. What Marc says is true—I have faith in you, we all do. Help Shira. If you can’t save her, at least stop her pain. Don’t worry about me. I can wait.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I say, turning back to Shira, instinctively placing a hand on her forehead and another on the center of her chest. Closing my eyes, I feel as if the moon suddenly swells in size and brilliance before I realize I’m seeing it all inside—some kind of mysterious light. It’s not hot or cold but it moves and is alive and I sense it carries life within it. In the midst of my despair my intuition is finally able to speak clearly. The light has come to us because I’ve dropped my badass attitude, because I’ve been humbled, and most of all because I only care about helping Shira.

  Beneath my hands I feel her body relax and know her pain is receding. I open my eyes the same instant she does. Looking up at me, her face calm, she smiles. She has a nice smile.

  “Thank you,” she whispers.

  I lean over and speak in her ear. “In another world I’ll find you. I’ll call and introduce myself. You won’t know me at first but I’ll know you, and maybe we’ll have a chance to be friends.”

  Her eyes fall shut. “Be sure to call, Jessie.”

  I kiss her cheek and feel unshed tears burn my eyes.

  “I promise, Shira,” I say.

  She dies. She dies to the real world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN I WAKE UP IT'S noon, in witch world, and the house is empty. That’s okay, I’m back home, the nightmare’s over. I can’t believe how much relief I feel! It’s like I want to run around the house and scream how great it is to be alive!

  A pity I’ll be back in the Field come tomorrow.

  There’s a note from Jimmy. He’s taken Lara and my mother to Griffith Park Observatory.

  I use the bathroom, shower, don’t bother with makeup. A lot fewer people use makeup in witch world than in the real world, I don’t know why. For breakfast I have scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, and thank God it’s not fish. I drink three cups of strong coffee with plenty of sugar but only a pinch of milk. Finally, with hot food in my belly and caffeine fortifying my blood, I feel ready to tackle the day.

  It’s unusual for Jimmy to leave without saying good-bye. I must have been sleeping deeply. I never stay in bed until noon. Then again, in the real world, in the Field, I didn’t get to lie down until near dawn. I barely made it back to the cave to make what I like to call the “soul switch.” It’s during the two and a half minutes when the sun is rising that a witch’s mind moves from one dimension to the other. If you’re not in bed asleep during that narrow span of time, you black out where you’re standing.

  I call Cleo after I finish my breakfast. I’ve had her private number since Las Vegas but have never called before. I sit on the living room couch with a pad and pen nearby in case I need to take notes. The woman doesn’t waste words, I remind myself.

  My heart pounds as I dial the number. Cleo answers after one ring and cuts straight to the chase. “Jessica. I’ve been waiting for your call. I’ve heard you’re in the Field.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Your competition’s been calling their contacts and asking about you. Specifically, they want to know how many genes you have and what powers you’ve developed.”

  “Nordra and Viper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “If there is anyone else, they’re being discreet.” Cleo pauses. “How’s it going?”

  “I lost one of my team. Shira Attali from Tel Aviv.”

  “A pity. Are you all right?”

  “Physically I’m fine, but I’ve had a few close calls. Nordra and Viper are not nice people.”

  “Tell me,” Cleo says.

  I relate everything that’s happened since I woke up in the transport cell with my gang. As usual Cleo listens without interrupting. I try to give as much detail as possible, but toward the end I feel I’ve talked too long and rush through my battle with Nordra and Shira’s death.

  When I finish Cleo asks, “Why didn’t you call yesterday when you were first taken?”

  “I didn’t feel I had enough to report,” I say.

  “Nordra and Viper contacted their people right away. They were better prepared than you.” Cleo pauses. “Still, you have done well so far.”

  “All I’ve done is stay alive.”

  “That’s the main point of the exercise.”

  “Looks to me like it’s the only point.” When Cleo doesn’t respond, I ask, “What can you tell me about Nordra and Viper?”

  “They have at least six witch genes each. To be taken to the Field you must have at least that number. As to their strengths, you have already met Nordra. You know he’s fast and strong and heals quickly. To kill him you’ll have to strike a single fatal blow.”

  “Have you scanned his DNA?” I ask. My own DNA has been scanned but I’ve never been “formally” told by the Council which witch genes I possess, although I’m aware of five of them.

  I have healing—which can involve the healing of others or myself; intuition—which can manifest as insight, intelligence, or wisdom; speed/strength; cloaking—which means I can assume the appearance of other people; and the time gene—which I only heard about from Cleo the other night.

  The other two are a mystery to me, and my lack of knowledge of them frustrates the hell out of me, particularly at a time like this when I need every edge I can get.

  Unfortunately, the Tar’s Council usually withholds the details of a witch’s genetic makeup because they have a strict rule that a witch should develop his abilities naturally, over time. They feel that if a person knows he has a latent ability, there’s a good chance he’ll focus on developing it prematurely. In other words, the Council feels even good witches can be seduced by the desire for more power.

  Yet my father gave me plenty of hints about my abilities in Las Vegas, and Cleo did tell me about my ability to alter time when I saw her in San Francisco. Given the fact that I’m fighting for my life in the Field, I’m hoping that
Cleo will ignore their protocol altogether and tell me everything she knows about me, along with any secret information she might have on Nordra and Viper.

  “The Council has not had a chance to scan Nordra’s DNA,” Cleo replies. “But we know he has heightened hearing and vision—far beyond what most witches possess. He also has the intuitive gene, which in him manifests as cleverness. He came right at you when you fought but watch out for his tricks. He can be clever.”

  “Why is his self-healing ability so phenomenal?”

  “It runs in his family. Long ago I fought an ancestor of his. She’d recover from the most severe wound in a matter of seconds.”

  “Where did you fight her?”

  Cleo hesitates. “In the Field.”

  “So you—”

  “Focus on the task at hand,” Cleo interrupts.

  I feel a flash of annoyance, which I often do around Cleo. I love the woman, and my respect for her is immense, but I dislike having to answer to her. I’ve never made a choice to be beholden to the Council, but my father has told me that as a good witch—one who’s not a Lapra—I’m automatically Tar and required to obey the Council. And since Cleo leads the Council, she’s technically my boss.

  “What about Viper?” I ask. “Like I said, I didn’t meet her face-to-face but Marc and Ora—two of my people—told me her gang struck with spears while Viper sprayed Shira with molten lava without warning. Marc says she just waved her hand and the lava flew through the air.”

  Cleo speaks seriously. “Viper’s a psychopath. She enjoys inflicting pain and she has the tools to do so. The depth of her cruelty’s impossible to overexaggerate. We think it’s a result of being connected at the age of six. No other witch in our history has ever been awakened so young. She grew up wild on the streets of Tokyo, closely connected to Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. She’s strong and fast and heals quickly. Her telekinesis is extremely potent. There’s any number of ways she could have used it to burn Shira with the lava.”