by Dia Reeves
While Jimi’s golden bees bedeviled the seers, Ophelia pulled a fluffy blanket out of the back of the Rolls and hollered for the other rescuers to get inside. When they did, she climbed onto the car and balanced on the roof while it ran over seers or knocked them aside. Anyone who flew at her dropped heavily from the air, wings sticky and gummed together with bees.
When Ophelia reached Jimi’s chair, she bounded lightly to the top and draped the blanket over his torso. The darkness was instant, as if she’d snuffed a candle. Ophelia swaddled Jimi so thoroughly he had to withdraw his wings so that she didn’t accidentally crush them.
“Jump down to the car,” she said, dangling from the back of the chair. “You can climb in through the moon roof.”
The blanket was so warm. Jimi hadn’t realized how cold he’d become. Cold and tired. He closed his eyes.
“Jimi!”
A new light beamed from the temple, awakening him as Ophelia couldn’t. Such a strong light. Stronger than his own, especially now that it was hidden beneath the blanket.
Whap!
The slap turned Jimi’s head in Ophelia’s direction. He said, the English coming quickly to him, “I could bring you up on charges for that.”
“Good. I’ll see you in court. Back home.”
She tried to drag him forward off the chair, but he resisted her.
“I can’t go back. I ruined too many things. You’re crippled. Dez is dead. Fiamma’s dead. Alexis had a miscarriage and then Giselle had one. All because of me.”
“Yeah, you suck, but Giselle didn’t have a miscarriage. Where do you even get your information? I picked your dad up at the hospital; Giselle had her baby, like, two hours ago.”
“She did?”
“Yes! The sooner I get you home, the sooner I can have some prosthetic wings made. Hill can do it, but his prices are highway robbery. You have to talk him into doing it for cheap.”
“Me?”
“Of course you. What can’t you do?”
Jimi looked out over the mayhem below.
“I was thinking the same thing about you.”
Ophelia pulled him forward, and he hit the Rolls awkwardly, bound as he was in the blanket. As he struggled to right himself, the speaker snatched Jimi backwards off the hood and cried, wings abuzz, “I won’t allow you to be sullied. There’s no time for further purification. The All Seeing comes!”
The speaker wasn’t strong, not anything close to it, but Jimi was so weak now, the tiny arm at his throat shackled him as effectively as a band of steel.
A new light beamed from the temple door as something humungous came forth: an eye.
Like what the blue bird had plucked from the pervert’s face during the rite of summer, but gigantic, with no lid to cover it. The temple made sense now—a building but also a portrait.
The All Seeing’s red iris was clear and bright, the sclera healthy and white. It hovered in the air like an improbable balloon, the long sticky optic nerve serving as a string. The nerve slithered here and there along the ground, curious about the bodies in its path, but the All Seeing remained focused. On Jimi.
Jimi liked attention, but this was on such a galactic scale that he felt smothered.
Instead of fleeing in terror, the seers who hadn’t been killed or injured too badly fell to their knees. Were ignored as the All Seeing floated to Jimi.
“Feed, All Seeing,” said the speaker, fumbling with Jimi’s blanket, “and grace us with your light, your vision. Take him.”
“No!” Ophelia reached past Jimi and into the speaker’s chest. Came away with his soul—a tiny roiling sun—cocked it back like a baseball and hurled it at the All Seeing. Quick as a snake strike, the optic nerve snapped at the light, vacuumed it out of the air.
The All Seeing glowed momentarily, eliciting oohs and aahs from the seers, and when the glow faded, the still kneeling Lillane cried out. A pair of red eyes had filled his sockets. He looked upon the carnage, looked for the first time in his life, and wept.
“That’s not enough!” the speaker said, eyes as mundanely red as everyone else’s. “My light hasn’t been purified or increased. Not like his. He’s what the All Seeing needs.”
But Ophelia was already dragging Jimi to César who pulled him through the Rolls’s moon roof.
When he and Ophelia were inside, the Rolls sped back into the temple and leaped through the pupil, where it shouldn’t have been able to fit, but doors—especially ones leading in and out of Portero—were accommodating like that.
In an instant, the Rolls was in Ophelia’s driveway.
Jimi sat in the back between César and Alexis with Rishi and Sugar Lynn facing each other in the jump seats. Everyone winced as light flooded the car, but not because of Jimi, not with the blanket still binding him.
Just another beautiful, sunny day back home.
Beautiful, except for the wave of horror spreading through the car.
Carmin and Lecy, up front with Ophelia, stared back at him, at the window behind him. Everyone stared.
Framed in the rearview window was the All Seeing.
It had made a certain sense back with the seers who had been obsessed with eyes, but here in the real world, the Eye was a quivering eldritch abomination, as out of place as a maggot on a birthday cake.
The optic nerve whipped forward and struck the rear window, which spider-webbed. The broken lines weren’t confined to the glass, but crackled along the doors, the floor, and the roof. Even their seats. Everyone was screaming, so Jimi knew he should be upset, but he couldn’t quite manage it.
César yelled, “Drive to Nightshade. Quick!”
Ophelia reversed beneath the Eye and shot backward into the street, but before she could drive away, the Eye hit the car again, and the Rolls shattered. Not into pieces of car, but puddles of light, of soul. The car’s passengers were strewn along El Pasillo like storm debris.
The Eye drifted over the road toward the puddles, leading with its hyperactive optic nerve, intending to vacuum Ophelia’s soul as it had the speaker’s.
Ophelia took off.
Not to her home, since it wasn’t there anymore—other than two upstairs windows, like empty eyes—but to her lawn. The puddles followed her, shooting stars chasing a comet, orbiting her when she stopped, forming a dome of light. A bubble. She was safe at least.
Everyone else was slower to get up, hurt and disoriented from the destruction of the Rolls. Jimi, still wrapped tight—why had she wrapped him so tightly?—curled on his side, watching as the Eye floated past his friends and family, waiting patiently as it drifted closer. Jimi had thought his strange detachment would ease away from the volcano, but it had gotten worse.
When the Eye was close enough to cast an ocular shadow over Jimi, Rishi ran forward and karate chopped into the white sclera, only to become stuck, then airborne after the optic nerve whacked him. Rishi landed hard on Ophelia’s lawn, rolling to a stop so close to her bubble that she reached out and pulled him inside. “Guys! Come on!”
While Rishi had been futilely battling the Eye, Jimi’s parents had come up behind it and snatched Jimi from the street. Ran with him, with everyone, to Ophelia’s shelter. The Eye sped over as well, but while the humans passed easily through the barrier, the Eye bounced off with a wet smack.
The Eye struck the bubble with its nerve, and the ear-splitting crack startled everyone except Ophelia, who instead doubled over in pain. The more the transparent bubble was hit, the more livid it appeared and harder to see through, as though they’d sheltered inside a gigantic bruise.
Ophelia’s bruise.
While everyone else stood at the ready, guarding the perimeter of their fragile bivouac, Ophelia crouched over Jimi. Protectively. He knew she would have preferred to hide behind him, but he didn’t have an army of bees to fly to his aid anymore.
“What do we do?” Sugar Lynn said, gripping her cane like a baseball bat. The Eye had stopped hitting the bubble and was instead scanning the surface, the optic nerve sq
ueakily probing for weaknesses.
“I’m on it.” Carmin was texting furiously. “We just have to sit tight until the cavalry arrives.”
Rishi poked the bubble and said, “Will this thing hold out?”
“It’s my soul,” Ophelia snapped. “Not a thing.” She focused inward, fists balled on her knees. “It’s less vulnerable in this form but…”
In rebuttal, the Eye’s optic nerve penetrated the bubble and shot toward Jimi, the nerve as prehensile as an elephant’s clammy trunk, the mouth/nose orifice worrying at Jimi’s blanket trying to pull it free, to get at the treat it was hiding.
Now he understood why Ophelia had wrapped him like a burrito.
Lecy stabbed it with one of her poisoned hair pins, and the nerve quickly retreated, bunched itself into a wounded knot. Jimi waited to see if the Eye would collapse or weaken, but if Lecy’s poison had an effect other than pain, Jimi couldn’t see it.
Ophelia’s face was tense as the opening sealed, and then agonized as the Eye lashed out. It couldn’t breach the bubble this time, but the bruising intensified and the world beyond became increasingly purple.
“We can’t stay here,” said Lecy.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Carmin. “Help’s on the way.”
“What help?”
“Us!”
Carmin stared at the Penetraliad, as confused as everyone else. “I didn’t send for you.”
“We know,” said the Penetraliad. “Ophelia did.”
The shock Jimi felt was mild, but real.
“We like games.”
“All sorts of games.”
“Which one are you playing?”
They’d cupped their tiny hands against the bubble to peer inside, and it reminded Jimi of kids with their noses pressed to the shop window of Ducane’s to better see the toy display at Christmas time.
“This isn’t a game,” Ophelia crawled toward them, rested her head briefly against the bubble to catch her breath. “I need you to listen.”
They waited, attentively.
“Remember when we met the first time and I was scared because I couldn’t understand why you’d left eternity?”
“Yes.”
She looked back at Jimi, and he couldn’t believe what she was allowing him to see in her face, not even trying to hide it. “I get it now.”
The Penetraliad tumbled and twirled. “Isn’t he great?”
“Yes, he is, but he’s in danger.”
A fierce smack sent Ophelia toppling backward into Jimi, helpless to break her fall.
The Eye was circling again shark-like.
Ophelia righted herself and went back to the Penetraliad. “See? That Eye wants to get in here and eat Jimi’s soul.”
“So give it one of yours. You’ve got loads.”
“I tried that. It only wants Jimi’s.”
“We know!” All four of them snapped their fingers. “Let it have Jimi’s soul, and you give Jimi one of yours.”
“Yeah. Sharing is caring.”
Ophelia gasped as the Eye found a different spot to probe. “Without his own soul, Jimi won’t be Jimi.”
The Penetraliad conversed among themselves. “Ophelia’s right. I like regular Jimi. Not zombie Jimi.”
“Zombies are scary.”
They zoomed toward the Eye. “You can’t turn our friend into a zombie!”
“Wait!” Alexis shouted. “Don’t go near it.”
“Don’t worry about the Penetraliad,” said Ophelia, rising to her feet. “There’s more to them than you can see.”
As she stood, the bubble strengthened, but she looked worse than ever, worse even than when her wings had been ripped away. Sick with shock, but determined to stay upright. How could he have thought such a girl would roll over and die from being wingless? Ophelia was stronger than Jimi would ever be.
Jimi smiled for the first time in ages.
The Penetraliad meanwhile, zigged and zagged about the Eye, whorled and whirled, like a swarm of flies harassing a lion.
“You better give us a good reason not to be mad at you.”
The Eye’s sclera, formerly white, now bulged with capillaries. The optic nerve serpentined with deadly patience, tracking their flight pattern.
“Jimi doesn’t owe you anything,” the Penetraliad said. “Even if he does, he doesn’t have to pay up if he doesn’t want to, Cyclops.”
The capillaries burst, and blood fell upon the white grass like angry tears. The Eye bullwhipped the Penetraliad out of the air, faster than Jimi could follow, and left them broken upon the lawn.
Alexis cried out.
Then, like a film rewinding, the sequence played in reverse. When the “film” stopped, the Penetraliad no longer faced the Eye. Not the Penetraliad as Jimi knew them. A mouth had taken their place. Huge and red-lipped. The Eye rolled wildly, panicked, dwarfed. Backed away. The mouth snapped forward and swallowed it anyway, slurped up the optic nerve like a strand of spaghetti.
Jimi thought of the opening sequence of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the disembodied mouth singing for no reason. This was like that, but the only music was rubbery chewing.
The lips pursed and blew a bubble. White and impossibly big. A red iris appeared in the whiteness, hysterical gaze falling on Jimi. Then a pop, as loud as the cosmos. Two pops because Ophelia’s bubble burst at the same time as the Eye.
She fainted face-down onto the white lawn, radiant soul circling her like a moat, a last line of defense.
“Oops.” The Penetraliad hovered over her, no sign of the inexplicable mouth or the Eye it had eaten. “We didn’t mean to blow her up.”
Jimi petted the tiny foot of the one closest to him, but they all smiled.
Sugar Lynn rushed forward and turned Ophelia over, made Rishi kneel so Ophelia’s legs could rest on his back. She patted Ophelia’s cheek. “She’s unconscious.” Sugar Lynn checked her heart. “We need a hospital. I bet one of the neighbors would drive us.”
“She’s obviously not human,” the Mayor said. “A hospital wouldn’t know what to do.”
In the shocked silence, César removed his be-bop hat in deference and then looked askance at Carmin. They all did.
“You texted the Mayor?” said Lecy.
“Of course he did.” The Mayor stepped onto the lawn and joined the huddle. “Why wouldn’t he? A ‘huge ass eye that wants to eat everyone’ sounds pretty serious.”
“Not everyone.” The Penetraliad floated closer, curious. “It just wanted Jimi. Until we fixed it.”
It was now the Mayor’s turn to be shocked. She looked around, as if for help, but there was none.
“Don’t be nervous,” the Penetraliad said. “We like gods.”
“Mmm. Especially the cherry-flavored ones.”
“Why are you here?” the Mayor demanded. “In my town?”
“Jimi said we could visit anytime.”
“Jimi isn’t the Mayor!” She whirled on Jimi. “Send these creatures back where they belong.”
“Did she taste good?”
Jimi’s question distracted her from the Penetraliad. “Pardon me?”
“Ophelia’s wings. Did you enjoy them?”
The Mayor zeroed in on Ophelia. “Immensely.”
“Jimi,” Alexis said. She tolerated his fresh mouth at home, but she hadn’t raised him to talk back to his elders.
This wasn’t back talk. It was real talk.
“It wouldn’t have mattered what she’d said that day; you just wanted your snack. Even now with her unconscious, I see the way you’re looking at her. The same way as in the ice cave—like she’s food.”
“She is.” The Mayor was unapologetic. “You all are, really.” She stared at each of them in turn, and then back to Jimi. “You of all people should understand that.”
Thought she could throw his slight detour into cannibalism in his face, huh?
Jimi turned to the Penetraliad. “She stole Ophelia’s wings. Get them back for me.”
“Okay!
”
They flitted forward and reached four arms elbows-deep into the Mayor’s stomach.
She shoved them away, but they wheeled backward clutching a pair of snowy wings so large and heavy the Penetraliad buckled under the weight.
Jimi’s rescue squad gathered close between him and their enraged Mayor. A half-hearted attempt at chivalry that had to feel unnatural, even criminal. The Mayor cared for them, protected them, knew what was best for them, and Porterenes obeyed her without question.
But Jimi was unnatural—and in a questioning mood.
“Even if Ophelia is your food, you didn’t earn those.”
The Mayor snatched the wings back, squeezing them to her chest. “I did! She broke her word.”
“It’s not your place to make her promise not to take someone to eternity. You have no authority there. You’re not the Mayor of the universe.” Jimi turned to the Penetraliad. “Is she?”
“No!” They blew raspberries in the Mayor’s direction.
“I have authority over you,” she reminded him, shifting the wings to one side, a long finger aimed at his face. “I won’t be spoken to this way. You are banished!”
In the long anxious silence that followed, Jimi tried to remember what he’d done with the black teardrops Ophelia had given him. Had he lost the bottle in the long fall down the volcano? Not that he felt like crying, but it had been an amazing gift.
“Leave!” the Mayor ordered.
Jimi could see past the bluster and the mirror eyes that so artfully revealed nothing of herself. He saw her, his Mayor. How she was making it up as she went along. Like everyone else.
“You have authority over me,” Jimi told her, “if I say you do.”
The silence now was not of anxiety but awe.
“The strangest thing about my eyes isn’t the color. It’s the ability to see possibilities. All of them. A Portero without a Mayor, for instance. What would that look like?”
“We know!” The Penetraliad’s hands shot up like eager schoolchildren.
The Mayor stopped pointing at Jimi. Took the smallest step away from him, moved the wings in front like a shield. “There’s no need to sit around wondering about foolishness.” No fear or hesitation when she spoke, though. Jimi admired that.