by Zile Elliven
As soon as the demon was gone, Marshall could feel the Dreamscape again. He wrapped it around himself and took what was left of his team outside the colony.
Once they materialized outside the walls, Marshall sprawled out on the beach, unable to stand, and reveled in the Source as it poured into him, filling up the empty spaces of his being. Remembering his duty, he lifted his head and locked the castle down so nothing could get in or out. His head flopped down on the sand, and he rolled just enough to look at his teammates.
Jack.
Adelle sat on the ground, cradling in her lap as much of Jack’s enormous body as she could. “He pushed me away before I was tapped out.” She sniffed and brushed a lock of hair away from Jack’s too-still face, the usual warm brown of his skin now chalky and sallow. “I could have given more.”
“How did this happen? He just tapped his generator!”
“Marshall, he tapped his right after I tapped mine. The boost you got at the end was—” Adelle’s voice broke.
“. . . Jack.” Marshall finished for her. He pushed himself to his hands and knees shakily, feeling nothing inside. “But . . . his body is still here,” he heard himself say from far away.
“I can’t feel him.” She hugged Jack’s body to her chest and rocked back and forth.
Marshall crawled to his sister’s side and sat heavily. Numbness raced through his body, threatening to swallow him. Defensively, his mind went into action, trying to stave off the truth. “His body would be gone if he were . . .” He couldn’t say the word dead. Not in relation to Jack.
When a dreamwalker ran out of magic, the body dissolved, becoming nothing more than scattered remnants of the Dreamscape. Had he subconsciously dreamcrafted an image of his friend as they materialized? It was highly unlikely. A crafting of that nature would take more energy than a half-dead Marshall should be able to manage.
His hand kept reaching out and pulling back, reflexively. He wanted to touch his friend to see if he could sense something. Anything. But the idea of touching Jack—a man with more vitality than anyone Marshall had ever met—and feeling nothing, made him want to curl up in a ball and howl.
So he sat there and did nothing. For a while, he and Adelle sat on the rocky shore and looked up at the castle, watching as the nightmares threw themselves against the barrier Marshall had erected. Once Marshall’s magic had replenished itself enough, he held out a hand toward the castle and closed it into a fist, crushing the colony and its monsters. When he opened his hand, he saw the remains of the castle sitting there, like so much sand, and he let it fall on the beach beside him.
Dusting his hands on his pants, he stood up, feeling every single one of his one hundred and thirty-seven years. The void that had swallowed his parents, and most likely Nova, had opened once more to take his best friend—a friend who had been doing his best to keep Marshall from succumbing to despair. Now Marshall found himself teetering on the edge and wondered if it was worth the effort to fight his way free once more.
The sky around them grew dark, and the wind picked up. In the Dreamscape, Marshall’s will was law; if he lost to despair in here the consequences would be deadly. Enough people had died to keep him alive, and he knew in his heart he wasn’t worth it.
“Let me take him,” he said to his sister, bending down. Marshall couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to his friend and he had to make it back to the Real before he was swallowed by grief. At least in the Real he wouldn’t create something horrible when he lost control.
Adelle nodded wearily and uncurled her body to give him access.
When Marshall’s hand touched Jack’s arm, a multicolored spark leapt from him to
his friend. Jack’s body arched off Adelle’s lap, and he began to cough violently.
Marshall tumbled backward and landed on his ass, speechless while Adelle gripped their friend securely, trying to give him support while tremors wracked his body.
“Took you . . . long enough.” His voice was weak, but color began to leach back into his cheeks. Jack looked up at Adelle’s astonished face. “Can’t keep your hands off me, can you?”
Marshall jerked Jack out of Adelle’s lap and into his own, crushing the giant man to his chest. “I thought . . .” His throat closed.
“Yeah, I know what you thought, idiot.” His voice was muffled against Marshall’s shirt. “Next time check before you write me off as dead, okay?”
Adelle began to rain a flurry of slaps on Jack, which Marshall could feel through his friend’s body. “Why. Did. You. Make. Me. Think. You. Were. Dead?!" Each word was punctuated with a smack.
“I was! Well, mostly.” Jack rolled off Marshall as fast as his rebooting body would allow and hid behind him for protection. “Mars, keep her off me, man.”
For once, Marshall ignored the nickname he hated so much. He was too confused to do otherwise. “What the hell did you do? How did you survive?”
“I threw everything I had left into you. Didn’t know if I could do that, but surprise!” Jack grimaced, giving lie to his flippant tone. “I knew you were going to die if I didn’t. And I knew if there was anything of me left once you were done, you’d get me back to my body.”
Marshall buried his face in his hands and wanted to cry in relief, fear, and anger. Instead he laughed—a strangled sound that sounded like a crow hitting a window.
He pulled both of his teammates in for a hug, and they all sat huddled together staring at the aurora that appeared overhead. As blue, amber, and multicolored jets of light danced playfully in the sky, the team quietly adjusted to the near miss they had experienced.
Eventually Marshall stirred. “Okay, here’s the plan. We are going to stay here until every one of us is completely tanked up. Once we are back in our bodies, we are going to wallow in that palatial lounge of Clayton’s, and have all Jack’s favorite foods delivered to us, which we will then proceed to eat in front of him while he watches. Because, I swear to the gods, Jack, if you ever do something like that again, I’ll fade you myself! Copy?” His voice shook with emotion.
Adelle nodded soberly in agreement. “Copy.”
“Copy,” Jack said, though his mulish expression told Marshall the gravity of the situation was lost on him.
“And after that, we are going to show the Blaikes exactly how we feel about witches who consort with demons.”
Chapter Thirteen
Fourteen
The moment the compulsion had faded, he skidded to a halt. His heart was racing as though he had run, rather than ridden his bike halfway through the city. Sharp spikes of anger kept flooding through him, desperately burning away at the conditioning that riddled his mind. Pure emotion continued to sweep through him, only to be stopped cold by the nothingness that pervaded. It kept coming, swamping him in waves. Cold, then fire. Nothingness, then pure, unadulterated rage.
He turned the bike around.
When he found her, he was going to . . . what? What did he want to do? The obvious choice was to save her, though it was becoming clear to him she was going to fight him every step of the way. Once he had her back, he was going to take her somewhere safe. He had a safehouse in Montreal with a modified basement that might hold her for a time. If he wore earplugs, maybe she couldn’t order him into releasing her.
His bike darted into the morning traffic, and he ignored the indignant honking of the delivery truck he missed by an inch.
It would have been a challenge, but he could have gotten her away from her aunt. He could have gotten them both out if she had just fucking trusted him. Having a self-sacrificing handler was not something he had been programmed to deal with. Having a sexy, barely legal, self-sacrificing handler was going to get him killed.
Aeyli had turned him upside down and inside out mere hours after meeting her. He had gone from being a compliant drone to a man who had something to fight for. He thought of the dream they shared, and the cold slipped to the edges of his consciousness. If he had a choice in the matter, he never would have
woken up. That would have been a damned shame.
His lips curled in a half smile as he remembered the sensation of waking up with her in his arms. Now that her effect on him had lessened, touching her skin was less of an intense therapy session and more of a religious experience. The feeling of her small body nestled against his was something he knew he could spend a lifetime studying and the idea that he could be free enough to do so was exhilarating.
Granted, having her as his handler wasn’t ideal. Her reaction when he’d admitted he had to let her do whatever she wanted was confusing, but he was willing to work with it. After so many years of having handlers use him like a toy robot, or worse, Aeyli was better than anything he could have hoped for. She treated him like a person, not a thing, and if Fourteen wasn't mistaken, she cared for him. If he could just get her to trust him . . .
He realized he was growling and stopped. He didn’t have the luxury of getting himself all worked up—he needed to be able to deal with whatever he found at the warehouse. He tried to focus on driving. It almost worked.
He made it back to the warehouse twenty minutes after he’d left, since he’d shaken off Aeyli’s order quicker than he could have hoped. It could have been much worse; he could have come to his senses in Canada—or never.
Aside from the still-smoking hole on one side of the building, Fourteen could find no evidence of the fight. The mercenaries he’d dispatched on his way out had been removed without a trace—there was no blood, not even a scuffmark to show where he’d grappled with his pursuers.
Frustration mounted as he tore the place apart, looking for any sign of Aeyli’s family, any clue that could lead him to where they were keeping her. After combing the ground floor without success, he looked at the wreckage leading up to his apartment and sighed, irritated by the idea of taking even more time to scale the wall to look for clues.
A quick search of his SUV turned up rope and a grappling hook. He managed to anchor it on the twisted remains of the railing next to the door of the apartment, but the action of throwing the hook caused him to discover a metal screw lodged in the meat of his shoulder. It must have happened when the stairs fell on him earlier. Absently, he plucked the screw out and flicked it onto the floor, barely noticing the ping as it landed.
It was a sign of how agitated he was by the whole situation that basic self-maintenance had been forgotten. The first thing he should have done when he came back to himself was a quick self-diagnostic. It figured that when he needed it most, his conditioning would falter. He couldn’t let that happen now. Later, when he had her back, it could go straight to hell for all he cared.
So he did what the waves of panic were screaming at him not to do: he stopped and centered himself. He took stock of his body, slowly and meticulously, refusing to leave anything out.
Fortunately, other than a random assortment of abrasions and a perforated shoulder, he was fine. Then he checked his weapons with painstaking care, reloading his SIG and his AK-47. Once he had finished, he sat quietly, free of all thoughts, allowing the insanity of the past several days to fall away.
It was fortunate he had done so. If he had been upstairs digging through the wreckage of his apartment, he would have missed the sound of a truck pulling in to his parking lot.
“It doesn’t look like much. Are you sure this is the place?” A rich baritone voice drifted through the hole in the wall.
Fourteen was on his feet, SIG in hand. Without a making a sound, he crept toward the hole, his back tight against the wall.
“Samantha said her spell pinged this area as a hotspot less than thirty minutes ago.” The second person was a woman with a husky alto voice.
“Look back here, this area is as whitewashed as Stella was.” The third voice, also male but deeper than the first, was only meters away from Fourteen.
Breath slow and shallow, he waited. If he could, he would wait until they were grouped together so he could take them out quickly. His gut told him these three were more dangerous than the witches he’d faced earlier. It was hard to tell if they were part of Aeyli’s family or not, but it was safe to assume from their words they were part of the Other. In his mind, any community that condoned what had been done to Aeyli was on his shit list.
“This place has definitely seen action, Adelle, look at this.” The man with the deep voice was close enough that Fourteen was about to lose the element of surprise.
Two out of three would have to do. He trusted his speed to get him to the other male if he tried to run. If he could take him alive, he could interrogate him. Cold satisfaction spread through him at the thought.
“Jack, you stay out here and cover us while we look around inside the—” Gunfire cut him off as Fourteen emptied his SIG into the man’s face.
Rather than wasting time reloading, he stowed it, pulled out his AK, and fired at the woman as well. Like his earlier battle with Stella and Sterling, spheres sprang into being around his targets, one orange and one blue, but rather than making loud noises of protest, the shields around them shimmered and made pinpoints of light where his bullets struck. The pinpoints of light pulsed and faded as they were absorbed by the shields.
Before he had a chance to see if his attack was making any difference to their defenses, the man and woman retreated out of his line of sight, forcing Fourteen to clamber over the rubble after them.
“Holy Vis, Marshall, shut him off!”
“Gee thanks, I never thought of that, Jack. Maybe you should teach a class on stating the obvious!”
Fourteen managed to put a few more rounds into the blue shield before its owner escaped around the corner. He jogged to the edge of the building and listened.
The man named Jack grunted. “Huh, it’s like he’s not even there. I can’t find a single trace of him.” Rather than sounding upset, he sounded curious.
“What’s a norm doing with shielding like that?” The woman also sounded more curious than alarmed, as if taking half a dozen bullets at point-blank range was as normal as going to the bank.
Fourteen pulled out his phone and opened the app controlling his security cameras. He was in luck. Out of the entire system of eighteen cameras, only four had been damaged in the attack earlier. Pulling up the live feed from the front of the warehouse, he could see three areas of distortion, grouped ten meters from where he was standing, right in front of the loading door.
He headed back into the warehouse via the hole and got into his heavily modified SUV. Nearly a small tank, it had a quiet engine, but he chose not to rely on the witches not being able to hear it. The second the engine turned over, he had it in gear, put the pedal to the floor, and aimed straight for the loading door. The SUV punched through the door like it was made of wet paper. He had a brief impression of a blue flash when the whole vehicle bounced off something and spun across the parking lot.
The hood had popped open in the crash, and the airbags were inflated, making it impossible to see. His injured shoulder protested loudly as he reached behind him and pulled out his spare AK-47, trying not to get it tangled up in the airbag as he exited the vehicle.
As low to the ground as he could get, he crept to the edge of the car to survey the scene. A quick glance told him very little. All he could see were three glowing shields, one orange, one blue, and one that reminded him of the night sky in Norway. They were completely opaque, obscuring the witches inside. Another look told him they were moving straight at him.
If he’d been able to take out Stella and Sterling’s shields, he could defeat these as well. Going back into the SUV, he dug under his seat for some extra magazines. He set himself up next to the hood and braced for what was to come.
The ebb and flow of emotions had now reached a crescendo in his mind. Maim, rend, and destroy was foremost in his mind, but on the edges of the maelstrom, his conditioning said Watch and wait. Right action will come. As he put round after round into the approaching spheres, the bloodlust eclipsed the calm. All he wanted now was for someone to pay for what ha
d happened to Aeyli.
The spheres were almost on top of him and showed no signs of faltering under his attack. They nearly had him surrounded, and he tried to retreat. He couldn’t save Aeyli if he were deactivated.
Killed, not deactivated.
His mind was a tangle of confusion as unfamiliar emotions and long-time conditioning collided and fought for supremacy.
The orange shield darted forward impossibly fast and cut off his escape. He pulled out a knife and slashed, but the knife sank into the sphere and was held fast. Under his disbelieving gaze, the blade began to dissolve, so he released it. Behind him the other two spheres closed in and began to morph, each one creating a solid-looking wall penning him in. The orange one followed suit and joined with the other two, trapping Fourteen in a colorful triangular prison. He still had several weapons tucked in various places on his body, but with the exception of the grenades, which he knew were a bad idea, he had a feeling his armory would all be absorbed if he tried to use them.
“So, first I just want to say that you are absolutely terrifying. If we weren’t who we are, I’d need new pants right now.” Jack’s voice came from the shimmering, multicolored sphere.
“There’s a time and a place, Jack.” The unnamed man’s voice came from the blue sphere. “Let’s just give him a minute to calm down, okay?”
Fourteen’s heartbeat was so rapid it was hard for him to breathe. Calming down sounded like a good idea, but he couldn’t figure out how to accomplish it.
For lack of a better thing to do, he crouched down on the ground, a position that allowed him to rest and prepare to wreak maximum damage on all sides. He needed to get a handle on his body. If he could calm it down, he could regain control.