by Scott Duff
I was already swinging at the first when the Night’s magic flared at the bird creature and seared the Loa, closing its connection to the second dimension it lived in and trapping it here. As the dragon bone sliced through the flesh, it sucked the life from the Loa. The second thing careened into the blade’s path, making the Loas’ scream seem incredibly long as it, too, was cut off from its home and the mount was sliced in half. Four pieces of once-human meat thudded sickly to the ground.
The Night sword shifted me right so that the bright green ball of fire would miss me. It was mottled with a black substance that boiled like a skin on its outside. Peter sent it flying at the lizard ten feet away from me and hit the Komodo dragon-looking thing right in the maw as it readied to launch itself at me. The green fire tore through its insides spreading the black oily substance as it went. I’d come back to lizard man in a minute to see if this worked. I moved in on the right since Peter and Kieran had the center run under control.
That path took me straight to Granddaddy. He was using one of the goat things for cover to sneak back behind the line Kieran and Ethan represented. The goat things had protruding red eyes and forward-facing, black, sharp-as-nails horns. The most un-goat-like thing about it was the low hanging jaw with the rows of sharp teeth. It made it look like a barracuda on land.
Granddaddy saw me and started cackling again, reaching out with both hands to grab at me. Night swung forward, menacingly, and he backed off before coming within reach. The goat thing, though, brayed at me, lowered its head, and charged at me. Night swung again at the beast, intent to cleave the horn from its head. Sparks flew when the black blade met with the black horn and bounced off, shocking both the Sword and the Stone as the change in momentum slammed into me and sent me reeling into the wall of the enclosure. The goat-thing spun in a circle in the opposite direction, shaking its head to regain its orientation. My left arm was numb now. I couldn’t feel the Night Sword anymore and I was dizzy. I tried to push up against the wall, keeping my eyes on the goat. My feet didn’t work right and I kept slipping.
Granddaddy helped me out there. He grabbed me by the throat with one hand and held me aloft, my feet dangling off the ground. A man that age shouldn’t be that strong. His eyes glowed with an unnatural yellow. A small rivulet of blood ran down from the hole left by the Crossbow Bolt, congealed… something filled the hole.
“Give up, boy,” he said, his voice a raspy growl. “You can’t win against us. No one can, though many try.” His grin was jaundiced and vile.
The goat trotted up, snorting. St. Croix’s power was pushing on my armor, trying to find a crack to push on and break through. He squeezed harder at my throat but the Stone’s power didn’t fluctuate. I was starting to panic as I felt the flutter of Loa around me on the astral plane building eagerly, hungering. I couldn’t let St. Croix get me. There, over St. Croix’s shoulder, I spotted the Night Sword sticking in the ground. That’s why I couldn’t feel it; I wasn’t holding it anymore. Duh. But I could fix that. I struggled against Granddaddy’s choking hand, kicking at the goat as it got near. I needed the goat to be in exactly the right position if this was going to work. Kicking St. Croix got nowhere. Didn’t even knock the wind out of him. He just cackled harder.
“Give up, boy, you’re just pissin’ me off!” he growled again. I felt the power against my shield double. It still didn’t seem to be near the Stone’s limit.
My left arm changed from numbness to pins and needles. It was now or never.
“Let’s see if this pisses ya off, then,” I said as I stopped struggling against him. Raising my left arm up painfully, I called out, “Night!” The sword tumbled once out of the ground, then flew to me, skewering the goat-thing through its hips as it tumbled through the air. While I watched the Night’s path, my thoughts went to the Crossbow and Quiver at my back. I loaded the Crossbow with the black arrow and moved it to my right hand, barely an inch from St. Croix’s chest. It happened so fast. St. Croix turned his head to see why the goat was screaming. He tensed as he saw the Sword flying through the air, but I fired the Crossbow before Night reached me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to see the Bolt before I fired.
The Bolt pierced him, throwing him back several yards, and freeing me. He thrashed violently on the ground, screaming and throwing energy onto several planes. I quickly decapitated the goat-thing, just to be on the safe side, avoiding the thing’s horns. It’d already “rebirthed” itself once. I didn’t want it happening again.
I advanced on St. Croix and examined the writhing old man carefully. The black Bolt was still searing his power, blocking him from shifting into the other dimension and eating away at his strength.
“You’ve killed for the last time, St. Croix. For all that you’ve done to my world, to my family, you need to die,” I said, calmly. I raised the Night sword and shoved it straight down into his heart. Yellow energy screamed out of him, out of every pore in his body. The scream reverberated through the astral plane and into the Loa’s. They all sat up and took notice of St. Croix’s violent passing. They panicked and swarmed for an exit.
I pulled the Night sword out of the now crisp and burnt shell that was St. Croix, smoldering in the grass. I’d just rationalized killing a man and now I was going looking for more. How messed up is that?
Okay. I’d gotten six myself. Peter got at least one, probably two. Ethan and Kieran’s pyres were still hot enough to melt just about anything, but I couldn’t count anything that may have been inside at the time. There was nothing on this side of the fires so I took the far side. Scorched and scored grass with occasional, not easily recognizable body parts littered that side. It was eerily quiet, even with the fires.
“Seth! Where are you?” I heard Kieran call out. Ethan echoed the yell farther over.
“Here!” I yelled, stepping past the fires. “Where’s Peter?” I hadn’t heard from him yet and I was getting anxious.
“He’s hurt,” Kieran said. It was a bone chilling to hear those two words. It was worse when my senses cleared the fire and I could see Kieran kneeling over Peter, adjusting his body. His pelvic bone was crushed and his left side was almost pulp. Thankfully, he wasn’t conscious, but he was barely alive.
“No!” I yelled as I ran to them. This was my fault. Guilt and grief flooded me as I watched Kieran flood Peter with a fine line of blue healing energy that diffused throughout his body. I made myself look at the damage in Peter’s body as Kieran worked. It was worse than with Kieran. Something had crushed his left side and ruptured organs along with bone. He must have had a shield up but gotten caught between a rock and a hard place. Peter wasn’t going to make it. Kieran couldn’t move fast enough.
“Seth, Kieran, you might want to hear this,” said Ethan, walking up to us from the far side of the fires. He was holding the goat-thing’s head, the one that I’d decapitated, by its horns. Its eyes glowed once again but nowhere near as strongly as before. “Say it again,” Ethan said to the head, shaking it violently.
“We will heal the boy if you allow us to go home,” the goat-thing said. It was amazingly articulate with razor sharp teeth and no throat.
“And you’ll never come back to my world again?” I asked.
“No,” it agreed.
“Can we get them home?” I asked Ethan. He nodded. “Do it, then,” I said, “But if you are deceiving me, I will come after you. All of you, you understand me?” The goat stared at me with pure hatred for an instant before the fire in its eyes died out completely. The Loa swarm above us dove at Peter, all of them. I raised the Night sword nervously but held it in check. Kieran pulled away as one Loa from the swarm reached out and touched Peter’s abdomen. The change was instantaneous, unlike the change it made to the human forms to the twisted animal forms earlier. His body was re-formed, just like Ethan did with his, solid and just like it was before he stepped onto the field. The swarm pulled away and I felt Ethan begin to push on the block he’d created.
“Wait,” Kieran said to Ethan.
“You said you would heal him. You’re not done.”
That made me look again. Kieran was right—Peter still had holes in his aura, in his soul. Big, jagged holes that looked like bite marks. The blood drained out of my head when I realized this. I felt it leaving, like it was puddling in my feet. This was what my grandfather was trying to do to me.
One eel-like creature swam out of the swarm down to Peter, sniffing at his prone body. It spent a few seconds on the bite marks then looked up at the swarm. Whatever it communicated I didn’t catch, but it roiled like an angry snake pit until three of the Loa were forced to the outside. Something invisible seized their heads and dragged them down, the rest of their bodies snapping wildly trying to get free. As they neared Peter, their inarticulate bodies went rigid and they were twisted from head to tail. The essence of Peter’s soul dripped out of their thinning bodies and down onto Peter. It filled the holes thinly, but not completely. The three Loa were tossed into the fires, their bodies spent and lifeless. The Loa began to swim through space back to the swarm as the goat-thing’s head still in Ethan’s hand said, with difficulty, “Best… we… can… do…”
Damn it, they’d already lied to me once. I jumped up and grabbed the retreating Loa by the tail and jerked it back down. It snapped around, trying to bite me, but found only shield, and the Stone wrapped its own power around the eel and trapped it like a fly in amber. I had its measure now and the Stone knew how to hold it. I looked down the thing’s throat and saw more of Peter than any of the other three held combined, and don’t cha’ know that just pissed me off?
It didn’t get a chance to scream as I ripped its jaws apart and kept ripping until I got the piece of Peter’s soul. I lifted it out as gently as I could. It felt like I was holding his heart in my hand instead of a gentle energy matrix. I choked at the thought and had trouble seeing suddenly. Everything was very blurry. Kieran came up and took the bit of Peter’s soul out of my hands. That’s when the sob wracked through me and I realized why I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t do this right now. This was my fault and Peter needed me. He needed me to be all I could be. I wiped my eyes and tried to seal my emotions away. Looking at Peter intently, I tried to judge how much was still missing. There were still two pretty big holes but his body was breathing on its own again. I hoped that was a good sign. Autonomous brain functions were kicking back in. What were the holes going to affect?
Oh, damn. I saw it now. I looked at the goat head and said, “You make me come up there and I’m killing all of you.” I meant it, too. Peter was going to be a vegetable. He’d live. Sorta. They lost and they were trying for revenge. And they’d almost gotten away with it. As it stood, Peter had no higher brain functions and no access to his magic. On the surface, everything looked right. I owed Kieran big for not being as obtuse as I was. I repeated the words to myself that Kieran taught me in the garage several days ago as I stared deeply into Peter. See in truth was their meaning, but I needed more than truth now. I needed to differentiate fine energy, but from a distance. And Ethan had taught me magic that worked on a cellular level. A soul wasn’t cellular.
I sighed as I started to rise into the sky, lifted up by the Stone. Ethan jumped up beside me. I welcomed his presence. We were maybe four feet off the ground before two dead Loa were lying at our feet, split open from head to tail. Well, their heads were actually missing. Ethan picked up Peter’s essence out of one eel and I picked up the other one while the Stone lowered us. Kieran took the soul bits and placed them delicately into the holes. He breathed lightly onto them and the bits lit up in sympathy with the rest of his soul. We plugged the holes, but there was nothing written in the stars that said it would cohere and work together. This wasn’t clay.
“Do they have anything else we can use to help him?” I asked Kieran, as I knelt down beside Peter.
“I can’t sense anything of enough significance,” Kieran said, looking worried. “And I think I’ve done all I can, at this point. He’ll either heal or he won’t.”
Looking up at the nervous swarm, I said, “Pass the word to all your kind, if I see the slightest waver of you, I will track you down and kill you. Now get the hell out of my sight.”
Ethan pulled his plug on the hole and the swarm flooded out of our universe, leaving the stink of hatred and fear as their trail. I called it a plug. It was more like he confused its ability to exist here. I watched him do it and basically, it looked like he moved out of their way, like he moved the “in-between” that he lived in from in front of the portal. It was a weird sensation.
I took Peter’s right hand as I sat down on the grass, cross-legged. He was still holding onto my battery. I smiled as I pushed energy into him, cool blue for healing and a warm rosy caring and concern. Kieran pulled back, sighing in relief. He’d been at this a while now. A huge expenditure of energy, to be sure. He had to be exhausted.
“Thank you, Kieran,” I said, earnestly. “For everything, really, thank you.”
“S’what family’s for, Seth,” he replied. “Walls are coming down.”
The roar of the crowd hit when the walls were about three-quarters high and it was deafening. There was no conversation between us until the walls were finally down completely and the referees closed in on us. They carried a magic bubble of silence with them, or something. Two came up with a stretcher and slowly lifted Peter up while I continued to coax the rips and tears in his soul to mend. That’s all I could do, coax through bleary eyes.
We’d won the battle, but the cost was still too high.
Chapter 21
Peter’s body was intact and working normally. His aura fluctuated around the tears, not wanting to accept the patching or the glue the Loa supplied. The pathways between his mind and his soul had been ripped away and I didn’t know how to repair that. Grief hit me hard as I looked down at him and I squeezed his hand harder in mine. The battery bit into my hand sharply. My mind flew down into it and I saw an echo of Peter pulling from it to form a deadly spell with his mind: a caustic liquid suspended in ethereal gel that would eat away at anything biological.
Suddenly I realized I was in Peter’s mind. It was an odd feeling, because I was also perfectly aware of myself, outside of Peter walking slowly beside the stretcher. I watched as Peter cast the spell directly at me, confident that I would duck just in time so that it would hit the lizard coming up on my right. And I did. Then I moved further right and kept going, out of sight. Two fiery figures burst past the fires and around Kieran. Peter did a terrific job of destroying one with another caustic orb of green fire and sent the second careening into Ethan’s fire. It was truly magnificent timing. I felt his decision to get more active in the battle. I felt like pulling out and kicking his butt around the stadium a few times. Instead, I followed the decision up into his emotional center.
I hadn’t felt that anything I’d done was particularly courageous. I was behind a nigh impervious shield with seriously powerful weapons at my disposal. What Peter did here was courageous. He advanced between the fires. He was in the ready stance, walking slowly and watching. He had two spells ready and waiting, a push spell and the caustic gel spell he’d used twice now. He had gotten maybe four steps forward when the second goat-thing trotted through the gap in the fires, its stringy hair smoking lightly from the heat. The Loa trapped within the fires were roiling at the edges, keeping Ethan and Kieran occupied containing them.
The goat charged him hard. Peter slipped into a defensive push, trying to leverage the goat past him on the left. The same as Kieran had done. He used the push spell he had ready to add to it. The goat just shoved its horns through the magic and broke it apart. It just wasn’t enough. Peter did everything right. His maneuver was correct in form, but it wasn’t strong enough. The goat-things were deceptively strong and those horns were resistant to magic. At the last second, he loosed the caustic gel in an arc to come at the goat on the side. It didn’t have enough time to avoid that and the spell crashed into its backside and started eating a
way at it. Score another one for Peter. But its inertia still slammed it into him, crushing into his left side.
A small group of Loa leapt free of the goat as its head erupted in green fire. They swarmed at Peter, jumping and biting into him like eels on his chest and head before fleeing skyward. I guess that was about the time I killed the St. Croix Loa.
And it was all because of me. He had to protect my backside. He didn’t want me to be alone. He screamed my name when that thing hit him. The loss was overwhelming. I had to move; I was having a hard enough time keeping my emotions capped but adding Peter’s on top of that was breaking me.
I stepped back into his intellect and considered what to do. It was the echo that had pulled me in. There had to be a clue in that somewhere, something that would help. He hadn’t really lost anything. His memory was intact; his brain functions were working. What he’d lost was control of them, his sense of self along with it. It wasn’t a medical problem at this point—it was more psychological and probably spiritual. I was going to need his help to rebuild this. How was I going to do that?
Standing there for three heartbeats—I could feel Peter’s after all—I heard a soft crying. That was… curious. Searching through the whole of his aura and his body, I couldn’t find anyone or anything to account for the sound. It was definitely there, though, in the present. I pushed down into the battery again and followed the echo of Peter’s pull on the power, followed it to a dead-end. This had to be one of the places the Loa bit away. A benefit to the bifurcation popped into my mind: I could see where I was, where I wanted to be, and what lay in between the two. I could make a path without worrying about destroying anything. Still, I trod as lightly as I could.
I stepped out into empty space. Another odd sensation, but the crying was clearer now. I just couldn’t see where it was coming from. There wasn’t an up and down here, no left or right that I could sense, no evident boundaries. I let myself drift for a moment, listening. When I heard the crying again, I willed myself in that direction and stopped when I couldn’t hear it anymore. It took me five tries at this before I found him, huddling in the dark, arms around his knees, hiding his face. Crying.