I hesitated before I stepped off the final step. A childish sense of superstitious dread made me put my foot onto one of the rocks instead of into the mist. I walked like that, weaving back and forth as I picked my way across on the rocks and went into the trees.
Up close, they weren’t actually trees. They seemed organic, bone or connective tissue, and as I passed close to them I saw that they were beginning to decay. A little shock ran through my belly. This silent, dead realm was going to rot away. I wondered how long it would last after the attack. I wondered what would happen to anything that was trapped in it when it finally crumbled. I wondered if it would completely cease to exist, or if--like matter--its remains would be transformed instead of destroyed. I wasn’t curious enough to want to be around to find out. I pressed on, rock to rock.
Hooded figures moved silent among the tree-things, heads bowed, perhaps a dozen that I could see. I touched my third eye, fed energy to the sigil. None of the figures seemed to take notice of me so far. Were they demons, simply waiting? Were they some other kind of spirit? One of them passed close to me and I froze, clinging to my camouflage. It kept moving. I thought I heard it whispering.
I walked a long way. Would I be able to find my way back? Would I find another way out? I spread a hand over my navel and comforted myself with the silken brush of the fine silver cord that floated there.
Just when I began to think I was going to be lost in this forest of entropy forever, I saw a doorway. The grayness simply parted and widened in a spot, connected to nothing. It was darker in there, but as I got close I saw a faint glow beyond the entrance.
I stepped through and found myself in a short passageway. It was ridged and slightly pulsing. I had to crouch to avoid touching the walls. I emerged into a room much like one I had passed through on my last journey, its walls lined with cells or chambers. Only this one was not abandoned to the dead; here, there were signs of movement. Some of the cells were open and in some of them, things stirred in the shadows. Others had been sealed, and in those I saw silhouettes--shapes floating suspended in fluid, things curled and pulsing, things pushing against the seals, stretching and warping them. There were scratching and shushing sounds, pitched too low to make out, none of them remotely human or animal.
There were so many. I pressed on. I needed to learn more.
I moved through more, smaller, rooms and passages that seemed empty. Some of them looked out over Morph. Unlike before, there was a sense of presence around me, even though I couldn’t see anyone or anything there. I’d have preferred the feeling of a barren wasteland.
It was getting harder to keep up my camouflage. The longer I was here, the deeper into the realm I went, the more effort it took to stay conscious of my sigil. It felt like holding my breath underwater. I couldn’t keep it up much longer. If I didn’t see a way out, I’d just have to worry about getting to a good location and counting on Tamar to be able to yank me out by my cord.
A long passage ended in a vast room. It was like a cave with huge stalactites and stalagmites meeting to form thick pillars, but there was a feeling here of decay, of putrefaction, that assaulted my spiritual senses as vilely as a putrid smell. And the walls were moving.
No, that was wrong. The walls, the pillars, were still. But things were attached to them, growing on them, extruding from them. My energy grasped at my sigil as my mind rebelled against what I saw.
This room was crawling with monsters incubating, malicious spirits taking on some kind of substance. There were smooth but uneven white faces taking form in the walls, with empty eyes and rows of jagged teeth. Lumpy, knobby forms like wet papier mache struggled to emerge, unblinking eyes wide and haunted. Indistinct shapes hung fastened to the walls like cocoons or maybe maggots, shifting and wriggling. Yes, like maggots, all of them, feasting on the carrion of this realm as they took on form. More than I could count.
In the center of the room was a pit. I didn’t want to look in it, but I forced myself to do it.
I wished I hadn’t.
The pit was a mouth.
It was lined with fine curved barbs, endless rows of them. My eyes traced the glistening gray-pink flesh around it, how it spread and elongated into thick ropy protrusions splayed up along the walls, oozing something viscous that was hungrily lapped up by the demon-maggots. Or grew into shorter slug-like tubes that squeezed out cloudy jelly spheres one at a time. It was Mother.
I forced myself to look closer at the mouth. The opening narrowed but went on. And it was full of people.
Not people--spirit forms of people. Souls.
One of them was Charlie.
Murmur’s stolen souls of the dead. I remembered Dionne saying that there were a lot of things a demon could do with them. These, he had fed to the pit. I felt sick.
I saw the barbs tear into their spirit forms. I saw wetness ooze up and melt them wherever it touched. They were being digested. They couldn’t even cry out. Their faces stretched up, they reached and grasped at nothing, their eyes rolled and gaped, their mouths stretched in silent agony.
And they couldn’t die. They would simply suffer until they were dissolved entirely and ceased to exist.
I stared at the ground beneath my feet and realized I was standing on the mother’s flesh.
And then I realized that the monsters were looking at me.
My camouflage was gone. I had let the sigil go without realizing it when I looked into the pit.
The living floor shifted and I took a stumbling step or two back, terrified of being pitched forward into the pit. A sound started, low and then rising into a horrible, rasping, whining shriek that went on and on, getting louder, vicious and angry and primitive. It came from the ground. The creatures picked it up and added to it, a war cry chorus that pressed so hard against me that I clamped my hands to my head to keep my mind from shattering. The faces in the wall yawned their toothy mouths and echoed the screams. The ones working their way out of the walls reached toward me, straining to get free. They were crawling, creeping, slithering, stumbling toward me.
The floor pitched and rolled. One of the fleshy limbs detached from the walls, flinging off the nursing bogeys with their dripping mouths, and reached toward me.
I ran.
One of the dead pillars had been mostly abandoned. I threw myself toward it in a leap that was far longer than anything I could have managed in my physical body, and as I smacked into it, I dug my fingers into the putrefying mass, jamming my toes in and climbing as fast as I could. It was hideous to the touch. Everything in me recoiled from it. The fleshy beast flailed its limbs, trying to knock me loose, and I could barely evade it.
Other things were flooding into the room. The silent hooded figures and the horrors from the cells and things that shambled and things that flew and things that should not be.
Kicking away bogeys that crawled up after me, I ducked from flying things that swooped at me. I saw Murmur enter the room. He was not wearing a face. I looked into the void there and saw the full measure of his rage. It made me dizzy and sick; I almost lost my grip.
I forced myself to look away and into the pit. The agonized faces were all staring up at me, reaching toward me. I looked at Charlie. For a moment I saw him know who I was.
I might die here, I thought. I met Charlie’s eyes. I couldn’t fail him again.
So be it.
Dodging assaults on every side, slipping and struggling to hold on to the pillar, I shouted the words of the incantation that Dionne had given me, praying I got every syllable right. As I spoke it, the pattern of sigils all over my body began to glow. I felt the pinpricks open, my own blood running in slender threads that outlined and powered the sigils. I felt my palms and soles and the top of my head open and a force rushed into me that I could barely contain. I was luminous. I was radiant like the detonation of a bomb, beautiful and devastating. The energy that poured out from the sigils
was painful and brilliant and it burned everything it touched.
Monsters screamed in fury and pain. The mother’s flesh steamed where the sigils scorched it, and it heaved and roiled, its burning limbs thundering against the walls as they crumbled. I saw Murmur, a blur of movement evading the divine fire, heading toward me, perhaps not caring any more whether or not I was off-limits.
I couldn’t keep channeling all this energy. It was ecstatic and powerful and if I kept it up, I would explode from the force of it. It was agonizing and blissful and I couldn’t think and I felt a strange sort of peace, a sweet desire to surrender to this annihilation.
I pushed off from the pillar. Chunks of dead place broke loose and rained down, crushing the scorched forms of the burned bogeys.
I fell through the air, face down, looking into the pit and into the faces of the souls that I hoped would somehow be given some release from their suffering. The light from my body glowed on their faces.
I closed my eyes and grabbed onto the silver cord at my navel and tugged.
The roar was deafening. And then there was silence.
I lay in blackness for--a moment? An hour? I didn’t know. Just floated in unthinking quiet and dark.
And then I opened my eyes and sat up.
I didn’t recognize my surroundings. But I recognized Rosa Vermelha.
And she was pissed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Don’t you ever do something like that again without consulting me first,” raged Rosa Vermelha, slamming around a kitchen and furiously stirring something in a tin mug.
I blinked, feeling off-kilter and slow. Pulling my mind together felt like collecting a huge armload of rubber balls that slipped and bounced and rolled away. I looked around. I was in some kind of very small house, clean but plain, in a room with a kitchen along one wall, a formica-topped table with vinyl chairs, and a narrow hard couch on which I lay. There were windows wide open and a wooden door to the outside that was propped open while a second, sagging screen door sifted bugs from fresh air. The sun was bright outside the screens, a late-day slanting sun that didn’t fill the room. Everything around me looked out of date, from the unfashionable wallpaper rising up from the paneled lower walls, to the worn linoleum squares, to the rounded and chrome-trimmed shapes of the small refrigerator and narrow stove.
“That’s right.” She threw a glare in my direction as she worked. “I know you’re awake. I know you hear me, girl.”
Panic sharpened my focus and flooded me with energy. “What time is it? How long have I been out?” Oh, god. What if I’d been asleep for a day, two days, even just the night?
“Not long enough.” She picked up the tin mug and shoved it at me. “Drink.”
I obeyed. It tasted like alcohol and medicine, strong and crude, like moonshine. I thought I tasted hints of honey and licorice. Was I in my physical body again? I didn’t think so.
Rosa Vermelha stood over me, hands balled on the curves of her hips, exquisite face full of thunderclouds, watching to see that I drained every drop. She wore a long cotton house dress, her hair bound up with a scarf, and still looked majestic.
And frightening. I lowered my eyes as I finished drinking and handed the cup back. “Where am I? What happened?”
“I took you on a little detour.” Her voice was still angry but it had simmered down from boiling fury. “And you damn lucky I did. Ain’t none of them strong enough to pull your ass out of that without putting some big hurt on you. I brought you here to fix you up a little so you won’t be totally useless to me.”
Images flashed through my mind of all the horrid things I’d seen in the dead realm. “That place--what happened to it?”
She yanked out a chair and sat down, facing me. “I told you this was bad news, didn’t I? I told you so. And there you go anyway, like an idiot. And you drag me into this fight, too.” She blew out an angry breath through her nose. “You banged things up pretty bad. Didn’t wipe the whole place out, but you caused a lot of damage.”
I leaned back against the thin pillow and sighed in relief. “Good.”
“I don’t mean just to that place.” She folded her arms on the table and cocked an eyebrow at me. “It’s gonna take a while for you to be fixed. You gonna have to do some work to get the pieces back.”
“What pieces?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. She jerked her chin toward my body.
I hesitated before I looked down at myself and pulled away the thin quilt that covered me. I was definitely still in my spirit body. I knew because there were holes in it. Literal holes, like I could see the fabric of the couch through them.
Rosa’s voice gentled, sad and weary. “Girl, what were you thinking? You got a lot of gifts, a lot of strength. That’s the only thing held you together in there. Someone else, they gonna got ripped to shreds doing that. But you don’t know what you’re doing yet. You want to play in that league, you got a lot to learn.”
I threw the blanket back over myself. It was freaking me out to look at myself with holes where parts of me should be. “I had to do it.” I was trying not to lose my shit. “We’re trying to protect people tonight. We needed to know more.”
She studied me. “You could’ve gotten your own ass out of that camp. Let it be someone else’s problem.”
“No. I can’t just turn my back.”
She rested her mouth on her hand and I thought she might be hiding a little smile. “Yeah, you’re my girl, all right. But you listen, you are mine. You made the deal. You took my help. Now you don’t get to break that deal by destroying yourself, you got it? I got work for you to do in this life.”
Tears rose up, threatening to choke me. “How?” I said. “Why bother with me? You said yourself I don’t know what I’m doing. I can barely keep myself alive most of the time. I don’t know how I’m going to manage anything. How am I going to be of use to you when I’m just surviving, and not even well?”
“Shh. Don’t you worry about all that right now. You gonna learn a lot. And like I said, you got a lot of strength. You just gotta learn how to use it.”
A thought hit me and I sat up again. “Charlie and the others. In the pit. What hap--are they--did they--”
“It ain’t pretty,” she said. Very quiet. “But they’re not his anymore. He gave ‘em up when he tossed them in there. That was supposed to be the end of them.”
“But it’s not, now?”
She shook her head, the corner of her mouth quirked in a bittersweet smile. “No.”
I put my face in my hands and cried.
She sat beside me and put her arms around me and cradled me against her shoulder, humming and rocking me like a child. I wept and wept, great heaving sobs. I purged the relief, the fear, the tension, the horror, the pain, the rage of these few days and many past. Rosa’s touch was pure comfort, a feeling of protection and love that drew out the poison.
“Sorry I pulled you into this mess.” I let out a shuddery deep breath. “I didn’t know how else to keep him away from Vivi.”
“Yeah, well. Him and me already got beef over you. What’s one more fight, right?”
“Thank you for helping her.”
“Yeah. Guess I’m in it now.”
Something in her voice made me look up at her. Was she--afraid?
“What do we do now?” I sniffled. “How do we win this?”
I could tell she was struggling. It was a long time before she answered. “You can maybe end what he’s after this weekend, but that ain’t gonna stop him. It’s just making him mad.”
“But I’m supposed to stop him.” I remembered my visions. “How do I do that?”
“You can’t.”
I pulled away from her. “I can’t, or you don’t want me to?”
She leveled her gaze at me. “Both. But you can’t because you don’t got his true name.”
“But
--it’s Mu--I mean we know who he is, don’t we?”
“Oh, my girl. No. You got a word that people call him by. A true name, he’s got it guarded. Or hid. Can’t be too far from him but you gotta find it and then figure out how to get it. How about first you worry about making it through this weekend alive, all right?”
“I guess.” It made me so tired to think about it.
“Close your eyes.” She stroked my hair. “Rest a few minutes more while I take you back.”
I settled back against the pillow and she drew up the quilt and tucked me in, smoothing my brow as I closed my eyes and tried to hang onto this moment of safety and comfort.
I drifted in a sleepy darkness again, a dreamlike state without any dreams. And then it felt like falling asleep at the wrong time, like I was plunging. My whole body jerked and woke me up.
It was hotter than I remembered, and I couldn’t make anything out at first. I rolled my head from side to side, groggy and achy, as I heard my name.
“Mari? Mari!” It was Tamar, her eyes sharp with worry, bending over me. “Are you here? Can you hear me?”
“I’m...yes,” I muttered, pushing myself up to my elbows with an effort.
“Holy shit,” said Cherry. Joe dropped down beside me and pulled me against him in a crushing hug. I smiled against his shoulder and brought weary arms up around him. I smelled Sara’s sandalwood oil as she wrapped her arms around both of us. One by one, everyone else joined in until I was smothered in tight, sweaty hugs. I drank it in.
“Guys?” I said after a long moment, muffled. “Guys, I can’t breathe.”
The knot dissolved as everyone fell back. Joe still held my hand. Sara sat behind me so I could lean back against her. Dionne looked me over and checked my pulse. “You okay? We thought--it seemed like we lost you for a minute there. We were all scared shitless.”
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 30