by Lee Dignam
Once inside, Alice headed straight for the bedroom and got changed. Isaac pressed his hand against the fake fireplace, and a moment later it sprang to life, illuminating the room and radiating waves of warmth. Isaac stood in front of it, Silver too, rubbing their outstretched hands together like vagrants around a dumpster fire.
“Any idea where Jim is?” Alice asked as she walked back into the living room.
“Probably still on his way,” Isaac said. He tried his phone. “Damn,” he said, setting his phone on the table again.
“Telepathy,” Alice said.
“We can,” Isaac said, “But you saw what happened to Silver up there.”
“I saw something, but I’m not sure what it was.”
“My spell,” Silver put in, “I cast it, and then while I was transitioning from where I was to where you were, it was like being pulled away by a riptide.”
“It’s the storm,” Isaac said, “It’s interfering with our magic. When you were at the hospital, I tried to find you using Void magic. That was difficult then; things seem to have escalated.”
“No shit,” Silver said.
Alice set the towel down and was about to join the men by the fireplace when someone knocked on the door. Isaac looked at her and made as if to move for the door, but she put her hand up to stop him and approached the door herself. Through the slight gaps in the doorframe and the dark peephole she could see light coming through. She was about to ask who was there when the voice on the other side spoke.
“Isaac? It’s Jim.”
Alice relaxed and hurried up to the door. She opened it, and Jim came in looking like a cat that had been tossed in a washing machine.
“You made it,” Isaac said, approaching.
“Barely. Lights went off while I was driving. The guy in front of me forced me to slam my brakes so hard I almost gave myself whiplash.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s bad. Citywide.”
“Anything on the radio?”
“Static. She could have knocked the power grid out. A couple of precise attacks at the key power points in the city would do it. She wouldn’t even need a great deal of power to pull it off.”
“I didn’t see any explosions,” Silver said.
“What about lightning?” Alice asked.
Silver considered it for a moment, and then nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Yeah, there may have been a spark before the first grid went down.”
“So she has the power to direct the storm to do her bidding,” Isaac said, “Fantastic.”
“We have no idea what the extent of her powers are,” Alice said, “Only that we’re outmatched.”
“I agree,” Jim said, “She’s strong. I don’t know how strong, but the things she’s been doing speak for themselves. Any word from Cam?”
“None,” Isaac said, “We tried to reach him before the blackout but couldn’t. It’ll be impossible now.”
“He’s at the sanctuary, right?” Alice said, “The sanctuary has to have a landline, and those still work in the event of a blackout.”
Isaac nodded, grabbed his phone, and handed it to Silver. “See if you can reach him, will you? The number is in my contacts.”
“Great, relegated to the role of secretary,” Silver said, and he started rifling through Isaac’s phone to find the right number to call.
Isaac, meanwhile, placed his hands on Alice’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. “I need to know what you saw,” he said, “I need to know what made you let go of the tether.”
“I don’t know what I saw anymore,” Alice said.
“What are you talking about?” Jim asked.
“Everything was set,” Isaac said, “I was going to send my magic through Alice and into the Void to try and shut the storm down for good, but I lost the connection. When Alice woke up she said she had seen something in there. Do you remember what you saw when you looked into the Void?”
Alice closed her eyes and tried to summon the image. Darkness, no—nothingness. Darkness, at least, was a known thing; the Void wasn’t. Nothing Alice had ever experienced before, not even her time spent in the Reflection, came close to what she had seen on the other side of that tear in reality. But what had she seen? It was as if her mind didn’t want to revisit that experience. A throbbing pain suddenly struck her right temple and she winced.
“It was…” she started to say, “I can’t remember…”
“Think, Alice,” Jim said, “Just clear your mind and think. We have time.”
Again she tried to conjure the image, the sound, and the general sensation, but attempting to do so was like trying to dig through a brick wall with a wooden spoon. The memory was disjointed and nonsensical, almost like…
“Madness,” she said. “It was cold madness. Insanity. Nothing made sense. My mind told me I was seeing—hearing—things, but I don’t think I was. What I saw on the other side of that tear was the absence of order. It was—”
“Chaos,” Jim said.
Alice looked at him slowly, then nodded. “That’s right. It was chaos.”
“No,” Jim said, pushing his spectacles up against the bridge of his nose. “It was Chaos—with a capital C.”
“My God,” Isaac said, as something seemed to dawn on his dark face. “You’re not suggesting—”
“I am,” Jim said.
“And I’m… lost,” Alice said.
Jim turned to look at her and the light from the fire caught the frame of his glasses, making them shimmer for an instant. “Are you familiar with Greek mythology?”
“A little,” Alice said, “Zeus, Medusa, and Pegasus— that kind of thing?”
“You’re on the right track,” Jim said. “I’ve been doing a little light reading, using the understanding that Nyx as we know her was once a creature of the Void who either created an identity for herself whole cloth, or latched on to an already existing concept and assumed its identity, thus becoming real.”
“Okay? We’ve talked about this,” Alice said. “Isaac told me the whole Lich story and explained how he may have been the first mage to ever discover and use the Void. When the Void killed him, the piece he had summoned returned to its realm with a part of his soul and became sentient.”
“We can agree on that. We have also, until now, been under the assumption that Nyx became sentient by way of a similar process. I think we’re wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“When asked, most people will tell you that Zeus was the highest of Greek Gods—the big dog. But that’s simply not true. Zeus wasn’t even close to being the big dog. There were way bigger dogs than him. Older dogs, with sharper teeth and more cunning. Zeus was son to Cronus and Rhea, who were children of Gaia, who was sister to—”
“Nyx,” Isaac added.
“So she assumed the identity of a Greek Goddess. Is that what we’re wrong about?”
“Nyx had a father,” Jim said, “And his name was Chaos—he was the all father, the one from which each of the other Greek Gods were birthed. Chaos was frequently referred to as a dark and gloomy place, a shapeless, unformed mass, and also personified as someone who could bear children. Chaos, according to the Greeks, was the first thing that ever was, and from him came darkness, daylight—and night.”
Alice took a moment to process all of this, swapping between staring at Jim and at Isaac. Silver, who hadn’t been able to get through to Cameron on the phone, was listening in too, though he was doing so quietly.
“So, you think what I saw up there in the Void—you think that was Chaos?”
Jim and Isaac nodded in synchronicity.
“And Nyx—Night—is Chaos’… daughter?” Alice asked.
“I think so,” Jim said.
“But then, everything the Greeks said was real, right?”
“Not necessarily. We don’t know when the first of these creatures entered the world. If it came in during the height of the Greek period, and if Lich existed anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean area, Chaos will ha
ve formed itself using pieces of that time.”
“Does this information help us in any way?”
“Probably not, but maybe…”
CHAPTER 21
Practical Knowledge
Alice emerged from the bedroom with her backpack swung over her shoulder, Trapper hanging from her neck, and her leather jacket zipped up. Isaac, Jim, and Silver looked at her from across the room, their faces lit up by the warm glow of the fake fireplace. Outside, the wind howled and whipped at the trees and the street lights, causing them to wobble and sway. Sirens blared off somewhere in the night; the sound they made was cut into shreds by the thrashing wind.
“Going somewhere?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah,” Alice said, “I’m going to find Cora.”
“It’s dangerous out there, and we have a plan.”
“We don’t have a plan, Isaac—we have a bunch of disjointed ideas. But we also know what Nyx’s endgame is, and I don’t know about you, but I think she’s close to finishing whatever it is she needs to finish.”
“She’s right,” Jim said, “Think about what’s happening in the city right now and what’s been taking place over the last couple of days. A cop shoots a boy, a protest turns into a riot, followed by a city-wide blackout. You heard the sirens. That’s probably a combination of cops trying to stop looters, fire trucks trying to reach the trapped, and ambulances trying to reach the injured or dead. The city is in chaos right now.”
“And we’re not going to fix any of this by sitting on our hands,” Alice said.
“We’re hardly sitting on our hands,” Isaac said, folding his arms in front of his chest. “We’re figuring out our next move in a logical way. Going out there is dangerous, and not just because of Nyx. If there are more of those shadow creatures out there, the ones we saw pushing the protest into a full blown riot, we won’t even be able to see them in the dark, let alone deal with them. We have to stick together, but we won’t be sitting around and doing nothing.”
“Cameron’s out there somewhere, Isaac,” Alice said, “Cut off from the rest of us and driving in the dark. We don’t have the time to figure out a plan. We need to act. I need to find Cora because, out of all of us, she’s the only one with a shot of tracking Nyx down.”
“What do you mean?” Isaac asked.
“She was there that night at the hospital because she had tracked the surgeon down. She didn’t know what the surgeon was, but she had felt it, and had thought it dangerous enough to decide to go after it. The last time we spoke, she said she was going to get to work on trying to track it down again.”
“So you’re saying she has an ability we don’t?” Jim asked.
“I have abilities you don’t have, and she has abilities I don’t have,” Alice said, “Abilities I want to learn. With the phones being down I don’t know if I’ll have an easy time getting to her, but I’m going to try. Meanwhile, you guys should try to find Cameron and figure out a way to stop Chaos.”
“We’ll try the phones, then we’ll try with magic,” Jim said, “Maybe we’ll be able to get a bead on Cameron, especially if he wants to be found.”
Alice nodded. “Now that’s a plan,” she said. “You guys can find Cameron while I go to find Cora.”
By the hard lines appearing on Isaac’s face, Alice could tell he didn’t like the idea of splitting up. He didn’t like it one bit.
“I’m going to help Jim,” Isaac said. “Silver, you should go with Alice. We need to check on the magistrate, too, and make sure the safe zones haven’t been compromised. If we’re going to split up, it’ll be best to have a Void Weaver in each group.”
Silver nodded and stepped up next to Alice. “Sounds to me like I got the fun job,” he said to her.
“Relax,” Alice said, “We’re going to find Cora and see if she’s been able to track down the surgeon, any of the Pain Children, or better yet Nyx herself. If she has managed to find Nyx, we aren’t about to charge in without backup.”
“Whatever. Hanging out with you will probably be more fun anyway.”
Alice grabbed her phone, tried Cora’s number, and heard the same message they had all heard a number of times tonight; the phones were down.
“Nothing?” Isaac asked.
“No,” Alice said. “But we should get moving anyway. We’ll try and reach her on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“To my office. If there’s looting going on, I want to make sure no one’s trashing my place of business.”
“I highly doubt anyone’s going to be breaking into your office.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right, but I’ll feel better checking.”
“How will you be getting there?” Jim asked.
“You drove here, right?” Alice asked, “How were the roads?”
“Bad, at least they were when the power first went out. It’ll be dark, but at least the storm will be keeping most people indoors. There will be some people on the streets, though, and they’ll be hard to see. But that’s what high beams are for.”
“For the record, I don’t like the idea of splitting up,” Isaac said. “I think it’s dangerous, and I think we could be heading into trouble, but I’ll agree that there are a couple of things that need to be done tonight, and we’ll get them done more quickly if we’re split up.”
Alice approached him and rested a hand on his cheek. “I know you’re nervous about this. I am too. But you asked me to trust you earlier; now I’m asking you to trust me. This is the best way forward. We aren’t going to finish this by playing safe.”
Isaac nodded. “I trust you.”
“Good,” she said, and she flicked her head around to look at Silver. “You ready to go?”
Silver nodded and started heading toward the door. Alice gave Isaac a peck on the lips. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, and she followed Silver, who opened the door and began to step through, but Isaac stopped both of them.
“Wait,” he said.
Alice looked over at him. “What?” she asked.
“I’m going to keep track of you both at all times, but the interference from the Void storm will make things difficult. What happens if I lose track of you?”
“Don’t lose track.”
Jim looked at Isaac and shrugged. Isaac nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.
Alice stepped through the door and shut it. The hall was as dark as pitch, but she could hear the sounds of life behind the other doors in the corridor. Children were scared of the blackout, teenagers were complaining about the lack of Wi-Fi, and parents were trying to get through to relatives on the other side of town. How long would this blackout last? What exactly had Nyx done, and could it be reversed?
These thoughts occupied the relative silence in which Alice and Silver walked down the stairs to the ground floor, then through reception, and out onto the blustering city streets. They ran across the parking garage toward Alice’s Mustang waited, shielding their eyes from the rain and the wind with their hands as they went. But the wind tried to do more than attack their eyes—it wanted to topple them over, and it had enough force to do just that had Alice not kept her head down and her center of gravity low.
She pulled her keys out of the back pocket of her black jeans and pressed the button on the small remote. The Mustang blinked, the doors unlocked, and a moment later Alice and Silver were inside panting, but out of the wind and rain. A thousand tiny hands drummed on the car from all sides, but the sound died out when the Mustang growled to life.
“This is a sweet car,” Silver said.
“Thanks, she’s my baby.”
“Try the radio?”
Alice flicked it on. A couple of stations were still transmitting—those running on backup generators. Mainly there were news stations, talk stations trying to capitalize on the lack of competition on the air, as well as a single music station. Alice tuned in to the news, keeping an ear out for reports on what was going on around Ashwood. Jim had been right; the looting had already started, e
mergency services were backed up, phone lines were clogged, and the weather warning had been pushed up to ‘get the hell indoors’—though neighboring cities and towns weren’t feeling more than a light drizzle.
This gave Alice hope that Cameron was okay. The sanctuary was a good drive away from downtown Ashwood, and if the storm was centered above the city, then it probably hadn’t been hit as hard. When she was done with the news she switched to the only rock music station still broadcasting and let the sound fill the car while she peeled out of the parking space and onto the dark road. Driving using only high beams in the middle of a dark city was unnerving and put Alice’s senses on high alert, but the streets were mostly empty and she knew her way to the office by heart.
“When you looked at it,” Silver said, “What did it feel like?”
“It?” Alice asked. She knew what Silver was talking about but needed a moment to try and put the sensation into words.
“Chaos,” Silver said, “What was that like?”
“It was… cold… like I had been hit in the face with an ax made of ice. I went numb. I couldn’t think or act. It didn’t feel evil… but it felt intelligent, and cold, and that’s worse.”
“I want to see it.”
“Why would you want to see it?”
“Because I want to know what it feels like. Practical knowledge is better than second hand knowledge, and knowledge is power.”
“I didn’t feel powerful.”
“That’s because you weren’t expecting to be hit with something like that. But now that I know what to expect, I can protect myself against it, and stare into the face of the Void. I want it to know it has no power over me.”
“I don’t know if it’s that simple. What I saw wasn’t meant to be seen by human eyes. If that thing gets down here, we’re all screwed.”
“Nyx won’t win. There are too many of us, and we’re on to her. Once we find her, we’ll get rid of her, and the storm will leave on its own. Without her, Chaos can’t come through the eye of the storm.”