Even as I thought it, I had an instinct about what to do with it. I felt my focus sink into my heart, felt the pulsing life force there and followed it out to my hand, where my fingers wrapped around the stone. I sent waves of life down my arm and through my hand and my fingers, and I felt them flare hot. The stone changed in my hand, warming and shimmering and then going inert. I dropped it, and when it hit the ground, it simply disintegrated.
I had, as far as I could tell, de-magnetized the pull of death energy in it.
Time snapped back into its speeding swirling chaos around me, and I realized that two more bogeys were flanking me and bearing down hard. I still trembled with adrenaline, but was no longer trapped in my own terror. I smiled. Surely he would never guess that I’d figure out how to shut down all his dangerous babies. Now that I knew the secret, I could see the pulsing dark stain deep in the center of each of them.
“Let’s dance,” I whispered to my attackers, and punched hard with each fist in the directions of those stains.
I didn’t have to rip the stones out of their chests, I discovered. I just had to get in close enough contact to push a current of life force into the stones to shut them down, and the bogeys melted or crumbled.
We were holding our own, to my shock. Joe and Cherry and Sara used brute force, swinging large sticks or firing water pistols. The fae battled with their own magic-charged weapons that glowed and sparked when they struck. Tamar and Dionne made strange thrusting gestures at the bogey’s heads, and I saw that they had scraped some kind of sigil into the flesh of their palms that burned the monsters on contact.
But there were still more. I was already panting and slowing, and I guessed the others were as well. I was afraid to even think about what was going on at camp. I wanted a few seconds to breathe, to stop, to sink to my knees and make the world stop spinning around me. I kept fighting, but it was an effort. And the bogeys were happy to come after us one or two at a time, slowly wearing us down.
They seemed to sense when we tired, and that’s when they surged. More appeared out of the darkness where they’d been lying in wait. I was encircled, cut off from my friends. I beat off the limbs that reached for me, shoved and flailed with one arm while my other arm reached for the source stone to shut it down. One of them wrapped its fingers in my hair and pulled my head back so hard it cut off my breath. Another grabbed my fighting arm, twisting it hard. They closed in, pushing me to my knees, something slithering around my throat, teeth sharp on the vulnerable flesh at my waist, something weighing on my feet and calves until I screamed with the crushing force of it.
But the worst was that something was pressing at my skull--not physically, yet the agony was worse than any of the pain my body endured. The thing was trying to invade me, to force me to let it in. My sinuses burned and the bones of my eye sockets throbbed and I struggled to breathe, as though this demonic spirit was water engulfing my head. I jerked in panic but couldn’t get free. Confusion took over, my vision blurring, and I knew I couldn’t hold out. Before long, I would be possessed or dead, and I couldn’t have said which would be worse.
And then the drowning pressure was gone, so abruptly that night air whooshed in to the vacuum and I coughed and choked on my first breath. When I looked up, I saw Vivi. Or to be more precise, I saw something wearing Vivi’s face.
Her fierce grin was a maniac’s as she grabbed one of the bogeys by the throat and lifted it off the ground without the slightest effort. She took one of its legs in her other hand and sank her teeth into its torso, savagely ripping into it until the last of it fell away in thick disintegrating wet ribbons from her hands. Her breath steamed hot in the cool air.
She saw me staring, smiled at the horror that surely showed on my face. “Don’t worry, I’m not to hurt you,” she said in a voice that was alien to my ears.
“What did you do to Vivi?” The words quivered in my mouth.
She--it, him, whatever--tipped her head and looked blank. “She willed it,” said the voice that belonged to the One Who Hungers.
Then she turned and grabbed another bogey and tore it apart as well.
When she’d attacked the one that was trying to force its way into my head, she’d scattered the others clustered around me. I struggled to my feet, my knees buckling as pain shot through my legs, so lightheaded that I lurched forward. Someone caught my flailing arm. It was Cherry, her hair a sweaty mess and her eyes wild. “Can you walk? Come on, we need to move!” She shot the words rapid-fire without waiting for a reply.
She dragged me after her as she bolted, and I stumbled along trying to keep pace. The others also fled, vanishing into the darkness of the path. I put all my focus into following Cherry and sucking in big burning lungfuls of air. My pulse thundered in my ears, and my breath and steps fell into a pattern with it. Inhale, pound pound pound pound, exhale, pound pound pound pound.
When we broke free of the path into camp, I wanted to collapse right there on the ground. My muscles were on fire and I was gasping more with each stride. But everyone else kept going, and Cherry’s hand was clamped onto my wrist, and so I loped along and felt the passing air chilling the sweat on my face.
I couldn’t even make out what was going on around us. The lights and colors smeared into blurs against the night and the noise was a babel colliding with the echo of breath and pulse in my ears. I felt like I had entered some hellish afterlife where I was doomed to run and run forever.
A jerk on my wrist made me swing around, my arm set free as I crumpled and skidded into a pile of aching meat. The grass was cool and damp under my skin. I strained to pull air into my constricted windpipe, and the effort made me cough. I trembled and left my face pressed to the ground because it was too hard to lift it.
“Mari!” I forced my eyes open and looked up at Dionne. Her strong, callused hands pushed my hair out of my face, her touch grounding and comforting. “Girl, you still with us?”
I nodded, wheezing too hard to form words. She helped me sit up and kept an arm around my shoulders, letting me lean on her. I registered that we were back in Free Radicals. Cherry crouched nearby and held out a hand in my direction, fingers opening and closing with impatience. “Your pistol!”
I fumbled for it and Dionne took it from me and passed it over to Cherry. Then she tipped my chin back and examined my face. “Do not tell me you’re that bad out of shape from a little run. What did you do back there?”
“Need to do more cardio,” I slurred, missing “wise ass” on the target and hitting “pathetic”. I tried to explain to her what I’d discovered about the bogeys’ forms and how I’d dispelled them.
“Shit.” It was equally full of rebuke and respect. “Number one, you cannot go around using your own life energy as a weapon, because you do not have unlimited ammo. So cut that shit out. But number two, you may have just saved the night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The situation, as I pieced it together, was that we’d pushed the bogeys back just enough to buy ourselves time to run for camp. It was a calculated risk. By running, we invited them to pursue us and swell the numbers of them stalking the undefended people in camp. But enough of them had been left behind at the wards to keep us busy until we’d used ourselves up. If we wanted to do anything more than chop off hydra heads until we collapsed, we needed to get into camp again.
Tamar put down a salt circle around Free Radicals’ social area as we rested, and it gave us a small piece of safe ground where we could regroup and plan. Joe and Sara went out to do a quick bit of recon while she did. A few minutes later, they returned. Sara shook her head. “They’re not attacking. Not that we can see.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. “They could’ve hurt so many people by now.”
“He’s waiting on something.” Tamar dropped to the grass beside me. “Best guess, not enough wide-open heads yet.”
“Why wouldn’t they just fight people li
ke they were fighting us?” said Cherry. “Why do they even need to possess people?”
Dionne pulled a bandanna out of her pocket and wiped her face. “Them stones ain’t gonna feed them forever. They get into bodies, they stick around longer and do a lot more hurting.”
“And that’s what he wants now, right?” Sara opened a bottle of water, swigged it, and passed it around. “We spoiled his alliance, so now he just wants to punish us?”
“Punish me, for sure.” My stomach lurched as I pictured possessed people murdering each other all over camp for no other reason but to show me what Murmur was willing to do to anyone who defied him. I remembered my revelation. “No. Wait. He wants Vivi. I mean the Hungry Man. He told me he’d leave us be if I handed Vivi over to him. Wait--where’s Vivi?”
Everyone stared at me. “Didn’t you hand her over to the wild fae?” said Cherry.
Oh, right. “No, of course not. I took the wild fae to get ambushed by the land fae. I just wanted to get Vivi away from him, away from the fighting. She and I ran. She helped me. I told her to hide along the path so the wild fae that stayed behind wouldn’t be suspicious. But she jumped in and fought with us there at the end.”
“She what?” said Joe. “I didn’t even see her.”
Had I imagined it? If so, then what had happened to the bogey that was attacking me? “She wasn’t herself. When she started fighting I mean. She was different. She was beating them.”
“Oh god,” said Cherry. “Is she still out there? We need to go get her!”
“I’m going.” I tried to figure out how to get up off the ground.
“Sit your ass down.” Dionne’s hand clamped on my shoulder.
I tried to argue, but Tamar interrupted. “Cherry, let’s go.”
“Okay,” said Dionne. “He said he wants the Hungry Dude inside her?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t spell it out. But he said if I put her outside the wards, he’d stop. That he wouldn’t kill her. Why? Why else would he want her so bad, I mean except for being a petty bitch? That’s the one thing she has that he could want. He doesn’t have to kill her for that. He just has to wait for her to die.”
“Is that why he was so mad about the egregore?” said Sara.
“Maybe,” said Joe. “Maybe the Hungry Man’s soul is attached to hers. Maybe he can only control the Hungry Man if he has her soul.”
“But then--isn’t it already too late for that?” I scrubbed my face. Gods, I was exhausted.
“Maybe he’s trying to force his way back into her now.” Sara shuddered.
“First things first.” Dionne rummaged around in a store of snacks. She handed me a bottle of sports drink and half a bag of jerky nuggets. “You look like shit and you’re worthless to the cause like this. We gotta get something grounding in you. Protein, salt, fluid.” She watched as I guzzled half the bottle and scarfed down one piece of jerky after another. It was teriyaki and it tasted fantastic. She nodded. “Finish that up, then we’re gonna have to get your mojo back up since you were a dumbass and used up too much. Just a band-aid, but it’ll get you through the night.”
My stomach fluttered with sudden fear. “When you said I didn’t have unlimited ammo, does that mean that I, like, used up a year of my life or something?”
She sat down opposite me and regarded me with serious eyes. “I don’t think it works like that, but I don’t got any way to know for sure. Probably more like burning fuel. You only got so much in the fire at one time, right? You push it too hard, you end up with nothing but a big scorch mark. You stop soon enough, you can replenish it in a few days, just like you can heal from most things. But right now, we gotta find you some kindling.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do I do?”
“Tap into a bigger source. There’s a few ways to do that. The fastest and best one is, ah...” Her voice trailed off and she looked away and cleared her throat.
“Oh,” I said, and made sure I didn’t look at Sara or Joe, who busied themselves with anything else.
“There’s breathwork,” Dionne went on in a hurry. “You might be able to connect with a tree to help draw some up from the earth. There are some martial arts exercises--”
“I’ll do it.” I felt myself blushing. I sensed Rosa’s presence, nudging me. “The first thing I mean. I just--have to find someplace to go that’s safe.”
“Sure,” she said. “What you just gotta remember is not to--release it.”
“Sure,” I said. We were all quiet for a moment.
“You can use my tent.” Joe couldn’t look at me. “So you don’t have to leave the salt circle.”
“Thanks.” I couldn’t look at him either. I glanced at Dionne, my face flaming. “It’s just the fastest way, right?”
She scrubbed fingers through her short hair and rolled her eyes. “Ugh, just stop being weird, all y’all. Go, get it done. I got work to start on here.”
Joe’s tent was at the edge of the salt circle, far enough from the others to be discreet. I dragged myself in and zipped it up, navigating discarded t-shirts and half-filled grocery bags to find his bed. Dammit, he had an air mattress and a big fuzzy blanket in there. If I had time for a nap, I’d be sleeping in the lap of luxury.
That was about as much desire as I felt at that moment. I still ached and every movement was heavy with weariness. I was dirty and sweat had dried all over my body. And I couldn’t even think about Joe right then because knowing that he knew why I was in his tent was embarrassing as hell. It was bad enough that his pillow smelled like him. Still, I needed to be recharged and fast, and I felt certain it was what Rosa Vermelha wanted from me. I stretched out on my back, letting the pleasure of that little luxury wash through me and help me get closer to the right state of mind. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes.
My mind’s eye filled with the memory of my first sight of Rosa Vermelha, languid on her chaise in front of me, teasing me about my towel and toying with the hem of her cropped shirt. I surged with longing as my body responded to the image. I pictured her arching her back, her tongue touching the corner of her ruby mouth. Other images crowded in--Sara dancing, her bare waist undulating, the burning way she smiled at me. Joe naked in the pond. The feel of Sara’s body pressed back against mine as we drifted off to sleep. I thought of people dancing, sweating, embracing, of the electric moment right before a first kiss, of the way that Joe’s hand touching mine sent live wire voltage through me. I thought of my Beloved, of the ocean smell in the waves of his hair, of lips that burned my skin so sweetly, of tasting myself in his kiss.
My hands moved along my body, eliciting shivers, following the paths of my memories. Lovers. Kisses. Illicit fantasies. My breath quickened. My nerve endings hummed in my skin like the strum of a Spanish guitar. My weariness and aches melted around the edges.
I drifted, my consciousness going in and out of focus. My thoughts veered off on their own side path. Naked bodies splashing in water, laughter and sweat, tan lines and jiggles; and I responded with incredible yearning to the sheer life in it. My skin remembered not just the caresses of lovers, but the safe arms of friends, the cool prickle of grass, the heat of firelight. Voluptuous, sensual memories--honey licked from a fingertip, the perfume and juice of a peach fresh picked, a blanket cocoon in winter, the sequined velvet of city lights seen from an airplane window, haunting music, intriguing accents. I felt a desire so deep and hungry that my entire body was a sex organ, ripe and exposed, craving union beyond what seemed possible, my five senses not enough to embrace the world.
That was the moment that she was there, filling my mind and soul with her image--Rosa. She smiled down at me, all the sensory wisdom of the world contained in the terrain of her body, all movement and light and color within her. She covered me and bent down over me and put her lips to mine, and I shook, helpless with need. A thick hot fire, like magma, rose up from my root as though my life force s
ought to kiss her through my lips. When that flow reached my heart, she placed her hand between my breasts and whispered against my mouth, “Keep it here. Control it.”
Control was the last thing I wanted to think about, and yet some little responsibility monkey part of my brain struggled to assert itself, reminding me that I was here to do a job, not just get off and take a nap. Under her hand, that inner fire burned stronger in my heart. It was almost unbearable, feeling as though I were perched at the top of the first hill of a roller coaster and desperate to plunge. I whimpered.
“Not down and out.” Her voice was whiskey and smoke, her eyes intent on mine. “In and up. Now.”
As if her command were a magic word--maybe it was--I felt the intensity of a release. But I thought about pulling it inward and upward, containing it, and the waves of energy rolled between my groin and my heart, back and forth, not letting up, sending ripples throughout my body.
In that moment, I understood annihilation, and how it could be sweet.
The universe bloomed in my marrow and my being was stardust scattered throughout existence. Holding that orgasm within myself, forcing myself to endure that ecstatic intensity as it rolled back and forth within me, I couldn’t discern a single feeling any longer nor tell where my own edges were. And then, like a film of a bomb played in reverse, I snapped back and coalesced around the singing pulsing core of energy running between those two points in my body. Sweat dampened my face, my breathing ragged, my senses on overdrive.
Rosa was gone. I was alone, there in the dark.
My exhaustion vanished. I lay there for a moment until my nerve endings quieted down a bit and the world didn’t seem quite as painfully vivid, but the temptation to sleep was gone. I sat up, and aside from a little lightheadedness, I felt better than I had all day. I stretched, because my muscles craved it, and found that my aches had faded too. The tent felt small and confining and I wanted to be out in the world, in the clear cool night under the stars.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 37