Plane of the Godless

by Peter Hartz

  The doctor watched as the upraised hand of the teenager flashed different colors, almost too fast for him to follow. Each time the light flashed from Daniel’s hand, the doctor’s vision washed out into that color for an instant, returning to normal for only a moment before the next spell hit him. After the fourth spell, he realized that his clothing didn’t fit anymore. He had lost a lot of weight, and felt incredible. He also couldn’t see through his glasses anymore, but he didn’t dare reach up and take them off. Daniel simplified things by doing it for him instead, and he gazed in stunned amazement at the crystal clear world around him. It was real. He almost let go of his pants before he remembered that it was not a good idea, having suddenly lost more than six inches off his waist.

  “Here,” Daniel said quietly. Another spell was cast, and the doctor realized that he didn’t need to hold his pants up anymore. He looked down at his now well-fitting clothing, then back up at the teenager in front of him, his mind stunned, and completely at a loss for words.

  Donald stepped back in shock as he witnessed what Daniel did to the doctor, suddenly weak in the knees and nearly unable to stand up. He was lucky that his brother was there to catch him before he fell. Darius, too, was shocked by the transformation of the older gentleman in front of them. He looked years younger, a lean, handsome man of no more than thirty years of age, and Darius turned to the young man once again.

  “How can you do this?” He spoke in a hushed tone, almost reverent, and Daniel turned to him and smiled.

  “I have the ability, and I have been trained to do this. It is my task in this world to do this. I have to go now. I have to get home.” An impish smile suddenly flashed over his young features. “Hey, if you think all that was neat, watch this!”

  The three adults looked at Daniel in confusion, not understanding at first, but then something happened that drove home that they had been involved in an extraordinary event.

  With a slight ‘WHAP!’ and a mild breeze of displaced air, the teenager that had turned their three lives upside down in such a short amount of time simply disappeared in front of their eyes.

  Chapter 30

  Svetlana hadn’t had any idea where to go when she fled the death and destruction she’d left behind in the horrible building in Georgia. She couldn’t stop and ask questions in her current state. Either she would have to stay in the gargoyle form, which was sure to be a bit… off-putting… to strangers, or change back to her human form, for which she didn’t have any clothing. After avoiding people and populated areas for three days, she’d managed to steal enough things to wear to have at least a semblance of modesty, something she was grateful for after her ordeal. But she was very shy about approaching strangers. She didn’t speak the native language of Georgia at all, and other than her native Ukrainian, she knew only a few words and sentences in Russian. She wasn’t sure what help her native Ukrainian would be, but since she wasn’t sure she would find anyone nearby that could speak it. So she became a homeless stray as she tried to find her way back home.

  She’d eventually met some girls her own age on the streets of Tbilisi, when hunger had finally forced her back to the only city she knew was nearby. They accepted her as another runaway, not knowing anything about her other abilities. She helped them scrounge for food, and they banded together to fend off the boys living on the streets as they tried to survive. Most were barely literate, and had no idea how to get to Ukraine, a place that was a world away from where they were now.

  She didn’t dare go to the authorities, because she had killed those men. She wasn’t sure if, as long as she stayed in human form, they could connect her to the crime. She also didn’t believe that they would take proper care of her, based on the stories the one girl who spoke Ukrainian told about her own experiences with the police.

  Svetlana knew she shouldn’t stay with the girls, but she had no idea on what else to do, or how to get home. She decided to start hanging around the city library, to see if there was a way she could learn what she needed to know. First, though, she was trying to learn Georgian, so she could read the books there without assistance. Her new friends thought she was strange at first for wanting to hang out with books all the time, but gradually they accepted her strange obsession, after she repeatedly told them she just wanted to figure out how to get home in her miniscule Georgian language skills.

  Some of the older girls turned tricks for money, prostituting themselves out for the money needed to buy food. One older girl suggested that Svetlana try it as a way to contribute, but the look Svetlana gave her made her blood run cold, and no one ever brought it up again. She contributed in other ways, though, some of which she was not proud of, but was nowhere near as bad as that other thing. She had killed several men for trying to get her to do that against her will. There was no force on earth, and no argument in any language, that would get her to accept it willingly.

  So, her assistance to the group usually was as a lookout, watching for police as her friends “liberated” things from stores that they desperately needed. She had the pattern down, she thought. But not really, for the situation abruptly changed.

  A huge, burly man in the uniform of the city police force surprised her where she stood on the corner, getting her hands cuffed behind her before she was able to even react. A special sweep had been set up to get the girls off the street and into the welfare system that might give them a chance at a normal life.

  A flash of rage had overtaken her before she realized it, but she stepped on it quickly, squelching the change before it began. Broad daylight was not the best place for her to let that cat out of the bag, and she had gained a lot of control over it, and her anger issues, in the possible five or more weeks since what she was calling the ‘incident’. She decided to play along for now, waiting for her chance to get away. But if the man tried anything at all with her that was like what had already been done to her, she knew wouldn’t hold back. Pigs like that got what they deserved. Besides, the first form she learned to change into wasn’t the only one she knew.

  Perhaps an hour later, Svetlana was seated at the desk of the man that had caught her, as he started typing something on his computer. She was still in her handcuffs, but they were moved to the front so she could sit more comfortably.

  The sergeant had already figured out that the girl in the mismatched, wrong-sized clothing didn’t speak much Georgian. He had asked her several questions outside the car, before he transported her in the back of the car to the police station, along with two of the younger girls. One spoke more Russian and a little Ukrainian, but they were not able to talk about very much. Still, she was able to tell Svetlana not to give her real name, something she was already planning, in case someone would be able to connect her back to the incident at the brothel.

  The killings of the men that ran the brothel had been big news on the streets. A few of the girls she ran with had been unfortunate enough to be brought to Tbilisi that way, and had been lucky to escape to the dubious safety of the streets, where groups of homeless kids preyed on everyone and anyone who could be taken down. The bigger homeless boys raped any girl unlucky enough to be separated from their regular group. Boys found alone and vulnerable were beaten, rarely to death, but the targets were left in a bad way.

  Svetlana herself had been accosted by two boys in an alley sometime after midnight one of the first nights she’d been out on the streets of the city. She’d been forced to make sure they’d been unable to tell anyone about her. The new abilities she’d gained in her escape she kept secret from everyone she could, certain that she would be hunted down and killed if anyone knew. She would take a lot of people with her before she was ended, but certainly she would find herself in the next life if she wasn’t careful.

  The word had gotten out after the bodies of the two older homeless boys had been found: there was a vicious animal of some kind loose in the city. The wilder tales talked about a tiger or lion that had escaped from a nearby zoo, but no one really knew what was happeni
ng. Then word had gotten out about what had been found in the brothel, and speculation turned to the men there as the source of the wild animal. Something they had brought in as a pet, or more likely, to threaten the working girls there, had gotten away from them and killed them all for their troubles.

  Svetlana had smiled inside at that last thought, even as she was repulsed by what she’d done to the men. The memory of that day woke her up frequently in the middle of the night as the horrifying ease at which she had been able to do that haunted her dreams. But they were mostly right: she’d been brought in as a pet, and had escaped their control and destroyed them. She lost no sleep over their deaths. But the act itself had been horrific to relive every night.

  Now she looked up innocently at the police officer, and said nothing as he questioned her, first in Georgian, then Russian, and finally in fluent Ukrainian, which had startled her as she heard her native tongue again for the first time in who knew how long. He’d smiled somewhat, as if he’d won a prize by finding her native language, then the questioning had begun in earnest.

  “What is your name, girl? What is a Ukrainian girl doing so far from home, and living on the streets with the rest of them?”

  Almost against her will, she’d spoke up before she could stop herself, the draw to speak her own language for the first time in weeks so strong inside her.

  “I was…” She stopped before she said too much. But it was an opening the sergeant had been waiting for.

  “I know you are a long way from home. Don’t you want to get back there? Isn’t anyone looking for you? Your mother or father?” The warm, kind words seemed to seep into her, working their way past her walls, and pulled at her where she was hiding inside. She suddenly had the urge to tell him everything, but quickly stepped on that. Everything she knew would get her in deep trouble. They would never return her to her family if they knew what she had done, what she could do. She had been a voracious reader before her kidnapping, and some of the fictional stories she’d found so interesting had been about what happens to those that are different in the extreme. Still, there was something she could tell him.

  “My name is Svetlana Yevtukh. I was kidnapped from the Ukraine over a month ago. I am fifteen years old; I don’t really know what day it is now, so I can’t tell you exactly how long ago it happened. And yes, I do want to go home. But I don’t trust anyone.”

  The calm, quiet answer surprised the sergeant. His past experience with the street kids in his city told him he wouldn’t get anywhere, but he had to try. His own daughter was almost ten years old, and it broke his heart to think about what was happening to these kids he saw every day. He always wished he could help them, but they had to give him something to work with. And this one just did.

  He stared at her in shock for a moment, and then he reached for the phone on his desk. He punched in a few buttons, and spoke rapidly in Georgian to whoever answered the phone on the other end. She caught a few words here and there, including ‘Ukrainian girl’, ‘missing,’ and ‘brothel’. Her fear spiked, and the urge to run, or to do something else ‘more significant’ to protect herself, was almost overpowering. But the knowledge that she could do that something ‘more significant’ helped her stay calm, and wait until the man was off the phone.

  He turned to her and spoke again in Ukrainian. “Your father spent nearly a week looking for you in the city here before he was forced to return to the Ukraine. He left a message for you that he misses you dearly, and hoped that you would be found alive, safe, and unharmed. Which appears to have happened. He left a number to call when you were found. Would you like to call him and tell him you are ok?”

  Numbly, not expecting anything like this to happen, she nodded, then held up her hands with the cuffs on them.

  He smiled. “You’re not going to run away from me, are you? I guess we can take these off you.”

  With that done, he pulled the phone over to her, and dialed a number written on a note from his desk drawer. Then he handed it to her. She put it to her ear, and heard it ring, her heart beginning to pound. Was this really happening? Then her father answered, and she knew it really was.

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy?” It came out in a strained whisper, but he heard it anyways.

  “SVETA? Oh my lord, my little Sveta! I have missed you! Where are you? I will fly there today. Are you ok?” It was strange to hear her father trying to talk through his tears as he openly wept over the phone.

  “Daddy, I’m ok. I got out of that place. I’m ok!” Now she was crying, tears coursing down her face. The sergeant didn’t say a word, but pushed a box of facial tissues across the desk to her, and she smiled at him gratefully as she wiped at her eyes and face. “I don’t know where I am. Talk to the policeman.” She handed the phone back to the man, then pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked back and forth, trying to get control of her emotions.

  The police officer spoke to her father for a while, discussing where they were, and how they would keep her safe until he could get there to pick her up. He handed the phone back to her, and she talked with her father some more. She asked if her mother and brother were there to talk to, but he said he was at work. But he was leaving as soon as he had arranged to fly to Tbilisi to get her. He told her that she would be safe with the police officers, and they would keep her in the station with them until he could get there. It was still mid-morning, so he expected to be able to get into Georgia that same day, and would be united with her by evening. Happy that she could suddenly see the end to the long nightmare her life had become, she was suddenly optimistic that things would be better soon.

  They ended the call, and she smiled at the police officer, suddenly happy that he had caught her earlier that morning. He was caught off guard as the young girl bounced out of her chair and wrapped her arms around him in a big hug as she giggled.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Svetlana was bored out of her mind. She’d been staying in the station, with a nice police woman bringing her food and drinks to sustain her, surprised at how much the young girl was eating.

  Officer Oksana Tsverdievna had been surprised when the girl was found. Everyone assumed that she had died on the streets somewhere, if she hadn’t been killed outright by whatever had torn up the brothel and carried off elsewhere to be eaten, but her body had never been found. As time went on, no one expected her to turn up.

  Now she sat and talked to the girl, trying to find out what had happened in the basement of that building she had been taken to, but Svetlana was, unsurprisingly, very tight-lipped about what she had gone through. Oksana assumed that it was because she had either not seen anything at all, or had seen too much, and didn’t want to recall the painful memories. For that matter, everything about that experience had to have been painful. Being yanked away from your parents and brother and then driven for four days through three countries had to be traumatic.

  Now she frowned as a police lieutenant stepped into the room and motioned her out for a moment.

  He closed the door behind her, and spoke up. “You are needed down at the evidence locker.” She frowned, unwilling to leave the girl alone, especially with the more senior police officer. Something about him had always left her feeling a little like she needed a shower, but there had never been anything specific for her to put her finger on. Since there was nothing specific that raised a flag to her, she nodded once. “I will be back in a moment. Don’t let anyone in or out of this room, by order of the commissioner. Her father is a high-ranking member of the Ukrainian government, and is on his way here. His plane will land in less than thirty minutes, and expects to see her here.”

  After sufficient reassurances that the girl would be safe with him, she ducked her head into the room to explain that she was being called away, and would be back soon, before hurrying away to get the task completed as soon as possible.

  Once she was around the corner, the police lieutenant nodded to himself once, and opened the door.

 
The girl was cute, that was sure. He sat down across from the table she sat at, picking at the remains of her food.

  “Svetlana, isn’t it? Can you tell me what happened at the brothel when you were brought there?”

  “No.” The one word response surprised him, and made him a little angry.

  “You have to tell me what happened. Several men were killed there, dying painful deaths that shouldn’t happen to anyone.” He pressed slightly, leaning forward a bit to emphasize his position and trying to mentally dominate the young girl and force her to answer his questions.

  “No, I don’t. And I won’t.” The words came out calmly, as if spoken by someone talking about the weather.

  “No you won’t what?” More forcefully. He didn’t understand why the girl in front of him wasn’t being cowed into answering his questions. It was almost like she didn’t care about him.

  The truth was that Svetlana was on guard the moment she saw him. His attitude reminded her strongly of the first man she’d killed; that same sense of entitlement that didn’t care about anyone that got in their way. She was not about to tell anyone what had happened, least of all anyone like that man. But she reached deep inside herself and touched that current of energy again, readying herself in case her special abilities were needed.

  “I won’t talk to you about it. Do you understand what I am saying? Stop talking to me. I have no intention of talking to anyone about that, least of all you.” The tone of voice was more emotional now, but of the wrong kind of emotion, as far as the lieutenant was concerned. She was dismissing him, something he found intolerable. It was almost like she was treating him like something she’d scraped off her shoe.