I left the tent and went back to join the others. Everyone tried to be nonchalant and not look at me. Well, except for Tamar and Cherry, who were unaware of me as they wrapped towels around a very soggy and forlorn-looking Vivi. I’d seen her expression on the faces of cats who’d been bathed.
Then I noticed that she was sitting on the ground outside the circle. “What happened? Vivi, are you okay?” I hurried over and dropped to one knee near her.
“She can’t cross the circle,” Tamar said. “When we found her, she was...not in charge. We had to drag her over to the showers and hold her under to give her a chance to take the wheel again.”
“He wanted to fight them.” Vivi’s voice was rough and reedy like she had laryngitis. “To eat them. I thought if I gave in just a little, I thought it’d be okay. That I could help, and maybe if he got full he’d stop making me eat, and I thought I’d still know what was going on, you know, so I could stop him when I wanted to. But he just flattened me. All of a sudden I was drenched in cold water and I felt like I was waking up.” She was shaking with chill and Cherry rubbed her arms and shoulders through the towels. “And now he’s mad.”
I could tell by Tamar’s face that Vivi was getting worse. That this was bad. If she couldn’t cross a salt circle, it would be harder to protect her. And if the thing inside her had gotten any stronger by consuming the bogeys, would it be easier for him to take her over again?
Dionne touched my arm and motioned me away. I followed her to the little camp table, where she had a notebook open to a page with scribbled notes and symbols. “I got an idea,” she said. “I think we could use what you did back in the woods to cut down most of them, maybe even all. But we can’t burn out people to do it--it’s too much to take. We gotta have a place where there’s powerful living energy we could pull from. Extra strong. If what you did was a static shock, we gotta get them bogeys to hold a live wire and then plug it in to a socket.”
I wracked my brain. “Trees? Fire?”
“Not enough.”
“The fairy circle?”
“Strong enough, but too chaotic. Fae shit is unpredictable. It could do nothing or it could kill us all.”
I started to say that I had no idea what would work, and then I thought of something. “The marriage of heaven and earth,” I mused. “Order and ecstasy at the same time.”
She raised her eyebrows. “If you got something like that, then yeah, it just might work.”
We agreed that none of us would go out alone, and that none of us would leave Vivi unattended. Joe passed out refilled water pistols to all of us. He and Sara and Cherry went out to scout camp again, and along the way see if they could beg or borrow any of those ridiculously over-sized water guns. I never thought I’d see the day when a green and purple plastic pump-action toy would be the most responsible thing I could be carrying, but what the hell. The world made a lot less sense to me right now than it had a few days ago.
I sat on the other side of the salt line from Vivi and took a deep breath. “Okay, Vivi, you want to turn this tide for us?”
She huddled in her towel. “Anything.”
“Great. I need you to figure out how to get us the use of the yurt at Science Faction--without any of them getting in the way.”
“Why?”
I looked over my shoulder at Tamar and Dionne. “Ritual space?”
Tamar had Dionne’s notebook. She nodded as she read it. “Yup. Yup. We’ll need to--oh, yeah, you got that covered.” She looked up at me. “Sorry?--Yeah. You think the yurt’s gonna have the juice we need?”
“Will miniature galaxies, music of the spheres, and songs of the trees do it for you?”
Her eyes widened. “Fuck yeah it will.” She gave the notebook back to Dionne. “I got a couple ideas if you want to hear them, but this is so solid.”
Dionne took the notebook and turned its pages. After a moment she nodded. “Yeah. I do want to hear them. It’ll be stronger with both of us on it.”
“Chris’s big light show? Mari, no way he lets us take that over. He’s been planning that for weeks. We can’t shut him out of it,” Vivi said.
“No, of course not. But after that? Could you get us in so we could just use the equipment?” I had no idea how to make that happen, but Vivi was way more charming than me.
“What do you think? He’s never going to agree to that. His precious stuff? He thinks you guys are crazy.”
“Thanks to you,” muttered Dionne. Vivi flinched.
“I didn’t say we should ask him.” Gods, I felt like a shit just saying it.
Vivi opened her mouth but only a tiny “ah” came out. She licked her lips. “I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Thought you wanted to help,” said Tamar.
“Don’t.” I shook my head. “Forget it, Vivi. I don’t want to put even more on you. We’ll find something else.”
“Like what?” said Dionne. I ignored her.
Vivi looked at her lap. “No. Tamar’s right. I do. I just--okay. I’ll figure something out. But, it’s going to be a couple hours, okay? The show’s going to happen soon, I think, I don’t know what time it is. People are going to hang out for a bit after. What if I go back there now and find out what the plan is for after the show?”
“Do that,” said Tamar. “I’ll follow you, just to make sure nothing jumps you.” And, I suspected, to make sure Vivi followed through.
“Come with me,” said Dionne. “I gotta find more ashes. There’s gotta be cold fire pits somewhere in camp.”
“What’s going to happen in the ritual?” I tucked my water pistol into my waistband as I followed her out into the night.
“You ever seen one of them movies where an EMP shuts down a city’s electric grid?”
“Electro-magnetic pulse? Yeah, I’ve seen that on TV or whatever.”
“Kind of like that.”
I lost the thread as we plunged into camp and saw the people around us. It was no longer the calm before the storm. People were everywhere. Their eyes were wilder, their movements more erratic, their paces quicker, their voices louder. It seemed like nearly everyone was in motion. The ones clustered around fire pits or huddled in camps got up and scattered, flies stirred by an unseen hand. I knew Dionne and I couldn’t split up, but I was anxious about spending time filling her bucket with ashes instead of being out there trying to keep everything under control.
A figure zigged through the loose clumps of people and passed us, but circled back. It was Boden. He was battered, weary, but defiant. A few more of his fae darted out of the way of people and came up to his sides. He grabbed my arm. “The barrier fell?”
I nodded. “They’re inside. Your people--?”
“Some losses,” he said. “We knew there would be. But we broke them. We took some prisoners. Some ran. I have hunters out after them. The humans?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” said Dionne. “So you know, the bogeys have physical form, sorta.”
People were starting to bump into us like they weren’t paying attention to what was in their way. I shouldered someone off of me. “What about the circle?”
He stared hard at me. “It would be in our best interests to retreat and close it soon. Our threat is past.”
“Not while the hungry grass is still out there,” I reminded him, and then I knew. “You want to make a deal in exchange for your help.”
“You are right about the grass,” he said. “But I must make a choice. I could pull back all but my hunters and do nothing but guard the circle until they return. I would lose fewer that way. Or I could keep a small guard there and lead the rest out to fight alongside you. It would likely spare more of your humans from danger, but at a cost to us. Is it not then fair to ask something in return?”
The back of my neck prickled. “What do you want?”
“Only a token,” he s
aid. “There is a small item here that one of my scouts spotted, a piece of your world, that is insignificant to you but would be of great use to us.”
Dionne and I exchanged glances and I saw her eyebrow twitch. “That’s it?” Her voice dripped disbelief. “You can’t just take it?”
He lifted a shoulder. It looked remarkably human. “It would require one of you to volunteer to carry it across for us before the circle closes. We cannot take it with us while preserving its form. But that is all. A simple delivery, and a guarantee of safe passage there and back for the one who carries it.”
I thought about the infinitesimal peek I’d taken through the fronds of white heather. My heart lurched with longing. I couldn’t volunteer anyone but myself, and why not? I had no place to go after this, no home, no plans. If it was as simple as he said, I could step across and see the overwhelming beauty I had barely glimpsed, and then be returned here before the circle closed--nothing to it. If it wasn’t that simple, though, who was there to miss me? And I’d have purchased the aid of a small army to get through this night with no or few humans seriously harmed.
Dionne pinched the skin over my tricep, hard. I yelped and jerked away from her, but it forced me to meet her eyes. “Oh, no you don’t.”
I pulled in a breath to yell at her, and that’s what made me catch myself. I remembered what Joe had said, little though it was. I felt the small weight of the key against my breastbone and reminded myself that I was still learning the consequences of accepting one deal that I didn’t entirely understand.
“I can’t offer that,” I said. “And I can’t make that deal for anyone else. I don’t speak for them.”
Boden sighed and pressed his lips together. “Then all we can promise right now is that we will not close the circle. The offer remains, for the moment.” He gestured to the other fae and they vanished among the crowd.
Dionne and I hurried through camp, clearing out any empty, cold fire pit we could find, which wasn’t many. There was a charge in the air now, an intense feeling like winds whipping up before a rainstorm, a churning energy that both came from the people around us and affected them. We almost lost each other several times, forced to dodge and sidestep around Morphers who moved like they didn’t even see us. I looked at their faces, their eyes. I expected to see vacant stares or the strange malevolence of something not-human, but they were staring into the middle distance like they were distracted or lost in memories. Someone bumped right into me and I grabbed his arms and shook him a little as I turned him. He didn’t even notice.
We crossed from opposite sides of the dirt road, clasping hands as we met. “Are they all possessed?” I took a step behind her, still clinging to her hand.
“No. Don’t know what this is, but not that. Maybe some kind of deep trance, but I don’t know what’s causing it.”
I tried to look around as we wove through the milling crowd. I’d thought their motion was random, aimless, just people getting up and drifting around and staring into space. But it wasn’t.
I tugged at her arm. “They’re going somewhere. Look. They’re all headed toward the center of camp.”
“Shit.”
“I know.”
We were salmon against the human current, getting into the farther reaches of camp where it was darker and there were formless crowds of tents huddled across the fields. All around us, shapes emerged from the night, around us, in our path, and each one that I couldn’t make out forced a fresh jolt of adrenaline into my veins as I struggled to tell whether it was human.
“Let’s go back,” said Dionne. “I can make do with what we got in the bucket.”
And then we saw one of them. The creatures.
Ahead of us, a row of tents crowded against a wide tangled patch of wild grass about as high as my chest. I could just barely make them out. People were crawling out of the tents, tousled from sleep or in some state of undress, wandering back and forth until something oriented them and they moved, jerky, in the same direction as the others. One person carried a lantern that gave off a feeble glow. I saw the tall grasses shake, caught a glimpse of something behind the fronds.
It emerged. Shorter than the grass, it seemed to be wrapped in rags or maybe drab long feathers. Black eye holes peered from a rounded head and then the wide red mouth opened in two directions like the blooming of a horrible flower, and it was a moment before I realized that there was sound coming from that throat, too high and thin to be heard so much as perceived. Two more rustled out of the grass on either side of that one, several feet away, their red orchid mouths also widening and--
“Run,” snapped Dionne, backing into me and turning and pushing me hard. “Run!”
My overtaxed legs burned as I obeyed, skipping around tent cables and weaving among the tents, not stopping until she did, back on the main road not far from Free Radicals.
“What?” It was all the question I could scrape together as my body trembled with effort and my lungs pumped like a bellows.
She was also sucking in breath, hands clamped on her waist as she walked hunched over. “They’re causing the trance. Sirins. Singing people into trance but you don’t hear them coming.”
“Sirens?” I said, confused. “Like the Odyssey?”
She shook her head. “Like that, sorta. More like bad spirits.”
“Mur--he called backup.”
“Maybe. Maybe part of the plan all along.”
“Can we do anything about them?”
“Probably all over camp by now. Look how many people they got to already. We got no time. We gotta get that yurt.”
My stomach lurched. “How long before you can have everything ready there?”
“Need some time. Focus. An hour, maybe? We ain’t getting a second chance, so I gotta be able to do this right.”
We were coming up on Free Radicals. Tamar paced inside the salt circle, while Vivi slouched in a chair just outside it, looking wasted and weary. Her eyes were tortured.
“This is bad.” Tamar swept her arm toward all the entranced people ambling down the road. “What the hell’s going on out there? Where’s Cherry and them?”
A thought occurred to me and I turned to Dionne. “What about the people we drew on? Are they safe?”
She shook her head. “Dunno. But even if nothing can get into them--”
“Anyone who’s possessed could still hurt them,” I finished for her. “And let me guess, if they are all tranced out like this, they won’t fight back or get out of the way.”
“I gotta get to the yurt,” she said, and looked at Tamar. “I need you there with me. We gotta get this done as fast as we can.”
“I fixed it.” It cost Vivi an effort just to speak. “I asked a favor. Merry Pranksters. I know someone there. Asked her if they could do an after party for Chris’s show so I could plan a surprise at Science Faction. So we told Dove to get Chris and everyone there after. Said it was a surprise party.”
“They ought to be starting the show now-ish,” said Tamar. “Means we probably got another hour before we could get in.”
“Not great, but we still got shit to gather and details to figure out.” Dionne was already digging through a bag by her tent. She glanced at Tamar. “You good to help me with that?”
Tamar started to nod, and then looked at me. “What about the stones?”
“Shit. Yeah.” Dionne straightened up. “Mari, you gotta get us some of them stones from inside the bogeys. At least five. Nine is better. Don’t dust them, though, just pull them out and keep them as is.”
We all looked at Vivi. We’d said no one goes out alone, but... “Vivi has to stay here,” I said. “She’ll be better off if she can rest and you two can keep an eye on her. I’ll find one of the others to stick with me.”
“Don’t try to be a hero,” warned Tamar. “Get a buddy. Get some stones. Help folks if you can, but no dumb risks
. It’s a lot more important that we pull off this ritual than hurt ourselves sticking band-aids on this mess.”
“I’ll be careful.” I wasn’t sure I could keep that promise, but one thing at a time. “Those things--the sirins--what can I do to protect myself?”
“Run,” said Dionne. “Get away. They’re always in clusters. You won’t be able to hurt them quick enough for them not to get you. You feel like you’re spacing out, make a bunch of noise to ground yourself, but still--just run.”
I’d expected Vivi to protest, but she wasn’t saying a word. She’d closed her eyes and her breathing was strained, each exhale a soft moan. A tear slid into the hollow under her cheekbone.
I took off as fast as I could bear to move, heading toward the burning heart of Morph. All around me, people moved dreamlike at the summons of some signal I didn’t want to encounter. Those of us who remained--me, Dionne, Tamar, maybe all seven of us--were vulnerable to its source. And now that we’d disrupted the original plan, we had no way to know what Murmur would do instead.
All I felt certain of is that it was going to be much, much worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Countless moving bodies formed a stormy black ocean against a smoky orange haze. The fire still burned, much lower now but persisting, and the entranced people hovered around it like moths. There were so many. They were coming from the lower half of the camp as well. The sirins must have circled the camp like sheepdogs, driving the population toward this spot.
And the bogeys waited for them.
Lurking in shadows, creeping forth out of the woods, they stared hungrily at the entranced. There was still music coming from the theme camps with DJs, the distorted percussion of dubstep clashing against the racing pulse of electronica. Blinking lights and el-wire threw colored glows across faraway gazes and horrible maws alike. So many people were still in party clothes and costumes.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 38