by Lynn Red
Whatever Graves was doing was making me – and Rex – transform. I hadn’t even noticed, but my hands were turning to claws, and the hair on my arms was getting longer, darker. “What is he doing?” I asked.
“I remember this,” he growled. “He’s trying to make us shift, then he’s going to suck out our power. All at once. Look!”
My sister and her friend were both half-shifted. Dezzy’s light brown fur was covering her face and neck, her ears were growing pointier by the second, and her slack mouth showed off a row of pointy, dagger-like teeth. Mitzi was... well, a Pomeranian. Her puffy ponytail whited out, her eyes were almost the same purple tending to blue as the thing swirling in the air.
“Holy shit,” Rex growled through curling lips and growing teeth.
It only took a second before I saw what got him swearing.
Where once there stood a dashing, if slightly unhinged professor, was now a hulked-out abomination that had aspects of all of us. My tail, my black ringed eyes, Rex’s massive musculature, Dezzy’s fur and patterning and teeth, and... oh God, he had Mitzi’s top-of-the-head puff.
“That’s... not what I was expecting to see,” I said, squelching a laugh. My sharpening senses caught the smell of pine tar, of broken branches and torn up grass.
I shot a short glance over at Atlas, who had somehow knocked the automaton over and was sitting on its chest, playfully slapping at the thing’s face. “Do you think he still likes him?” I asked. Rex flashed a smile and then got very grim again.
A gale blast of cold struck us, radiating out from the center of the area where the twisted Graves shrieked and wailed, still incomprehensible but very obviously wild. “Lilah!” Rex shouted over the piercing, howling wind. “Can you hear me?”
He grabbed my hand even as we were pushed apart by the growing gusts. “That book, do you think that’s what Jenga was talking about? His focus?”
“Must be,” I shouted back, shaking my head and making up my mind at the same time. “I’m going for it. I’m faster than you, and I can latch the hell on to something if things get crazy.”
Rex’s face was lined with worry, but pulled tight with obvious strain. Instead of talking, he just nodded. The moment we split was one of the worst of my life, but I managed, knowing it’d be over soon. We would be together, we could go home.
Home.
There’s a word I hadn’t really even thought about much in a long time. But that’s how he made me feel, like I was home.
“I love you, Rex!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. He looked back, but he was already hunching down, getting ready for a fight. I swallowed hard, and turned to the fluttering, flapping book that hovered about six inches off the ground.
In the next eight, maybe ten seconds, the whole world blew up.
Shards of ice battered my fur covered face as I charged headlong toward the pedestal. Rex was running on his fists, then on bear claws, and when he and the artist formerly known as Langston Graves slammed into each other, the earth shuddered.
Such a release of energy, I felt like I was in the middle of a massive earthquake. Rex threw back his head and roared. Graves swung one of his meaty, deformed arms and caught Rex in the face. Rex twisted underneath another blow and thrust a claw upward, carving a painful gash up from Graves’s bellybutton to his chin.
“Get the book!” I heard as I leapt over the fallen automaton with Atlas sitting on its chest. Jenga was trying to wrestle the little doll out of Atlas’s paw. “Hurry! That book is what we’re after!”
The last thing I saw before I turned was Atlas shove that doll in his mouth, Jenga throw his hands in the air and then start trying to Heimlich his friend. All the while that automaton just sort of wobbled back and forth.
“YOU WILL NOT TAKE ME!” boomed in my ears.
It wasn’t a voice, at least not the kind that came out of a person’s mouth. “YOU CANNOT TAKE ME!”
The words seemed to be coming from inside my own head. “I am Eldred, and your body is MINE!”
Listening to voices in my head was never one of my strong suits. I flipped through the air, scampering up Rex’s back and giving Graves a scratch right across the lips. I dug my claws in his face, and lunged.
This is it. Now or never, Lilah, get the damn book.
My fingers, outstretched, scratched the leather binding, but the book flipped the other direction, almost mockingly. Heat radiated from the ancient looking pages. “YOU WILL NOT!”
I landed on my feet and looked up as the book descended. It closed and turned so that I could see the cover. Unreadable letters swirled and twisted, and became a face scowling at me. “You’re too late, stupid child. Idiot, idiot child.” The rage went cold in the voice, which was somehow more terrifying.
“Late for what?” I yelled back. “Rex has him! Late for what?”
Just as I said that, Rex slammed one of his huge claws into Graves’s side, sending the professor to the ground with a hard thud. One of his arms flopped, limply, to the ground beside him.
And then, I left the earth.
Not because I jumped, not because someone picked me up, but because something was dragging me upward. “See, child,” the voice continued in its hypnotic cadence. The world seemed to stop as it caressed me with the sound. “Graves found me. He owned me, that’s the curse of a djinn. But then, I realized that his thirst for power would do something – would give me a gift.”
I shook my head and opened my mouth but no words came.
“Hush, child,” the voice said.
“Hey!” I heard a bellow from somewhere behind me and turned, but I was paralyzed. I wasn’t in control of my own motions, I was just floating like a marble in motor oil. “Leave... my... friend!”
The voice chuckled. “What a simple creature,” it said. “Then again, you’re all simple. You come, you go, you live, and you die. All the while, thinking you’re important somehow, that you’re more than you really are. Ants. Useless, pointless, busying yourselves with your trite waggling.”
“Put... down!”
The voice was familiar, but I was a million miles away. I felt myself slipping. I felt something – someone – invade my mind. “This,” the voice said. “Is what I’ve waited four thousand years to feel. Yes... yes! Arms... legs... a tail!”
As it announced my body parts, they twitched wildly. It was like an infant just learning that she had arms.
My body rotated, and I saw Rex charge for me. I heard laughter come out of my own mouth. Hollow, old and awful. Then heat blasted out of me and launched him backwards. Jenga rushed to his side and fumbled for something in his cargo shorts, then forced Rex to drink from a vial.
It all felt so familiar, but felt so foreign all at once.
“Put... down!” A big, green bear said. He looked stitched together, which was strange, but felt vaguely familiar.
Time slowed. Words turned to mush as they hit my ears.
“You’re mine, child,” the only voice I could hear clearly, said. “All mine.”
Something rough grabbed me. Arms, thickly muscled and covered in fur, dragged me to the ground as the green thing swung a huge arm and snatched... a book? Out of the air? Why was a book in the air?
“I have you! Lilah,” I recognized the voice, sort of. “I’ve got you.”
The bear turned into a man, but all I could do was shake my head.
The other thing, the green bear, he clawed savagely at the book, and suddenly the calm, silken, velveteen voice in my head began to scream.
Awful, piercing, terrible screeches wracked my body. It was like they were coming out of me, ripping my throat raw as I thrashed back and forth. “Lilah,” the man said, calmly, almost sedately. “I have you. It’s okay, come back to me, Lilah, come back.”
I could swear I heard a thickness of tears in his voice.
My consciousness was slipping, the being in my brain being pulled out, like a vacuum was sucking him out of my ear. “No!” I heard myself scream. “STOP HIM!”
&
nbsp; The green bear, who was suddenly a little more familiar, grabbed the book and ripped it right down the middle. “Leave... my friend... al...one!” He growled, and then took a bite of the cover, gulping it down.
My eyes fluttered. The heat left my fingers, and my toes went numb. A man with a jingling beard ran up beside me and put something on my forehead that burned a little, then poured some kind of foul tasting liquid down my throat.
The giant green bear kept eating.
He was smacking his lips. I was screaming. I was thrashing.
“Rex,” I said, finally recognizing the man whose arms I was in. “Oh, Rex. It’s you.”
“Lilah!” he shouted. “I’ve got you. Don’t you leave me again, don’t you dare.”
A tear rolled out of each of his dark, amber eyes and fell onto my cheeks. One of them sizzled, the other did not. “I’ve got you Lilah,” he repeated. He pulled me up and pressed his lips to each of my cheeks, then my lips, then my neck. I tried to kiss him back but I was weak.
So weak.
So, so weak.
Across the yard, a stiffly walking man who looked a little like a tin soldier but dressed in a suit, untied two very sleepy girls and helped them to the ground. The big green bear finished his dinner and patted his belly and then frowned very unhappily.
All I wanted to do was hold my Rex. The only thing in the world I wanted, I couldn’t do. My arms just didn’t work, my legs wouldn’t respond to my brain.
“Atlas?” the jingly-beard said. As soon as I heard the name, it came back to me. “You... uh, you okay?”
Across the yard a very round-bellied man with no shirt on was looking around very confused, then looked down and hurried to pull his unbuttoned shirt back on.
“Jen...ga,” Atlas said. “Stomach... funny.”
“Uh,” Jenga said. “Here, try this.”
He spooned something from a brown bottle into a tablespoon he pulled out of his colorful shirt, but the bear just took the bottle and drank the whole thing. “Hydrogen peroxide,” Jenga said.
Atlas frowned again, then patted his belly and shook his head. He looked very upset for about a half a second, and then let out a huge, rumbling belch. At the end, a little doll popped out, landed on the ground, and started walking in a circle. The perplexed green giant watched bemusedly, and then picked it up and let it run around in his palm.
Rex clutched me, he hugged me, he kissed me.
“I know you can hear me,” he said. “I love you, Lilah. I love you more than life itself. You don’t have to say a damn thing back, I can see it in your eyes.”
I blinked and said his name again. The world was spinning, then going black.
“Is she okay?” a girl’s voice said. “Sis!”
Rex held me, and everything was okay.
Rex held me, and the world stopped spinning.
-27-
Lilah
“Well ain’t that the damndest thing you ever saw?” Jenga’s rattling, rickety voice and the jingling of his beard trinkets woke me from unconsciousness.
When I opened my eyes, I was still cradled in Rex’s arms, and the sky had opened up some. Storm clouds still dotted the blue expanse, but there was a blue expanse, instead of the slate gray and mottled black of before.
Jenga hovered over me. The smell of acrid rot stung my nose. “What is that?” I asked, wrinkling my face. “That smells awful.”
“Uh-huh,” he grunted, smiling. “You make a poultice that cures someone’s insanity and all they do is say the stuff smells bad.”
I blinked and looked around, trying to get my bearings. “Sorry. Just kinda dazed. Thanks for the goo. Is everything okay?” I asked weakly.
“Mmhmm,” Jenga said. His tongue was sticking out of his lips. “Everything should be fine. You’ll be sore as all hell, but you were trying to tear yourself apart for a minute there. Couple’a days, you’ll be good as new.”
To my amazement, a tiny, puppet-like little doll waddled up to me. Its faceless head leaned toward my direction. “This is how it ends,” it squeaked. “The mighty, ancient Eldred, laid low. Eaten by... by something I can’t quite describe. No tragedy,” the little doll-man shrieked, “no tragedy has ever befallen the world such as this!”
I shook my head and Rex plucked the little figure off the ground. He held it with by his thumb and forefinger. Wiggling, the doll was apparently trying to get free. “Put me down!” it squealed.
“Huh,” Rex said. “This is just about weird as hell. Is he Jenga’s?”
“I am no man’s!” Eldred screamed. His voice sounded like a six-year-old who’d just sucked down three helium balloons. “No man controls my fate!”
Thundering footsteps came up behind me. When I tried to turn my head my neck was just a mess of aches and pain, but I’d know the scent of overly-strong lilac anywhere. I smiled as my nose recognized Atlas.
“Give... friend?” he asked Rex, who handed him the little puppet.
Supremely happy, Atlas trotted off somewhere out of sight, with the angry little mandrake screeching the whole time.
“That’s going to be a hell of a thing to deal with,” Jenga said. He shook his head, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t wait to have that damn djinn-possessed doll screaming around the house all the time. But I’d rather be able to keep my eye on it than worry about it convincing someone who didn’t know any better to make a wish or two and then let him free.”
“Atlas seems like he’s enjoying his new friend,” Rex said. “Maybe it’s not all bad.”
Jenga smiled warmly and patted my bear – yeah, I thought it and it didn’t feel weird at all – on the shoulder. “That he is. If he’s happy, I’m happy.”
“Where’s Graves?” I asked and looked around. “And my sister? And Mitzi?”
“That is a hell of a thing, too,” Rex said. “Jenga did something to that robot, and—”
“Automaton!” Professor Duggan shouted, running up to the three of us. One of his shirt buttons was undone, but he had managed to get himself mostly back together. “It’s an eighteenth century automaton. I’ve only seen ones in shape that good on Antiques Roadshow. Let me tell you. One time, I went all the way to Raleigh for a taping of it, and that wise-acre jackass host made fun of my – very nice, mind you – Thomas Kinkade original, saying it wasn’t actually an original, and—”
“Duggan?” Jenga asked. “What... are you talking about?”
The hedgehog professor puffed out his cheeks and the end of his nose got a bit red. When the witch doctor put his hand on the panicking professor’s shoulder, it seemed to calm him down some. “Sorry,” Duggan said. “I was just remembering a trauma. Anyway, that was an automaton which had apparently been renovated by the vanished, and completely fake, Langston Graves.”
“He vanished?” I asked, crinkling my forehead. “How?”
Duggan shrugged. “Weren’t you in my Greek History class four years ago? I’d remember that hair anywhere. You got a ‘C’ if I recall, because you never came to class, but you always did well on the exams. You even missed drop day and made up some wild excuse.”
I blushed furiously, but not because of his comically accurate recollection of my academic prowess. Trying to turn the subject back to the actual subject, I asked about Graves again.
“Oh, I have no idea. Jenga did something to that automaton, and when we started looking around, Graves was just gone. As it turns out, every single thing about him was faked. Degrees, work history, everything.”
“Figures,” Rex said with a grunt. “Nothing good about that shit heel. But still, to just vanish?”
Rex, Duggan and Jenga all turned their heads toward the sky, as though they expected to see him flying past. Atlas prodded his little friend in the head, and drooled on him. Eldred screeched in protest.
But Graves? Just... gone. Where I remembered him thrashing around there was a rumpled suit, all torn to shreds. It was like his transformation was a distant nightmare, even though it had only been an
hour? Maybe two?
“How long was I out?” I asked.
Before anyone could reply, an excited yelp came from my left.
“Sis!” I heard Dezzy scream before I heard her feet crunching across the leaves. “What happened?”
I reached for my sister, shaking my head. She paused, and then a half second later, wrapped her arms around my neck. The feeling was starting to come back into my fingertips. I wiggled them in her purple and blue striped hair as the little ring on her nose pressed into the side of my face. “Are you okay?” I finally asked, when she pulled away sniffling.
The next few minutes were a wild collection of hugs and kisses and hand holding and more than a little crying from everyone around. Jenga smiled a lot, replying to questions that weren’t exactly what anyone asked, Professor Duggan did a lot of weird deep breathing exercises, and Rex waited very patiently for my sister to have her fill of me before he came back to my side.
By then my hands were working pretty well, my eyes could focus. But the thing I noticed most? I smelled Rex when he cradled me again in his arms. Before those prickly whiskers brushed my cheek, before he was able to lull me into peaceful comfort with those amber eyes, that familiar, sensual, calming scent crept through my nostrils and tickled my tongue.
“I would fall apart without you,” I admitted with surprising candor for me.
“No you wouldn’t, you’re stronger than you think. Stronger than you like to admit,” Rex said softly.
“You saved me,” I was starting to tear up again. Sniffles and thickness marked my attempts to talk. “You kept me alive, and... and now I think you’re going to keep my heart from breaking, aren’t you? You are somehow just that perfect, aren’t you?”
“Perfect?” he laughed. “I’m about as far from perfect as anyone can get. But you make me feel about one step closer to it.”
I blushed, deeply. Rex curled his fingertips patiently against the skin on my back. That’s the first time I realized my clothes were all torn and messy. I reached up to try and adjust my bandana, but found only hair. My white curl fell down in front of my face, defiantly reminding me that it still existed.