by Ramy Vance
↔
I WASN’T sure where to go. I was in the middle of an unfamiliar jungle, in a hotel that didn’t exactly have fire exits, being chased by dozens of fanatical Others who wanted to rip my arm off.
Given my options, I figured the jungle was my best bet, but the only way outside that I knew of was through the front door and that was currently blocked.
I also knew that, as strong as Harry was, he’d only be able to keep this up for so long. I couldn’t let him take a beating for me and since these guys wanted my arm and weren’t playing nicely, I was going to have to take it away.
I ran up to the first landing of the stairwell, punching two hobgoblins in my way and climbing onto the bannister’s edge. Lifting up my arm for everyone to see my vacillating tattoo, I screamed, “You want it? Come and get it,” before leaping onto the chandelier hanging above the hole.
I underestimated the distance to the chandelier and nearly missed it, managing to catch a star (quite literally) that hung at the very outer edge. There was a collective gasp as I pulled myself onto one of the arms of the damn thing and hoisted myself up.
All thanks to the McGill Fitness Centre for the sheer power of those guns.
The room was silent, and turning to the mass of Others, I yelled, “Enough! This is crazy. All this for what? Some god that may or may not be down that hole? I know many of you want this,” I said, showing them my arm. The arrow pointed down the hole. “And I know you think salvation is down there. But it’s not. At best, there is nothing down there. At worst, there is a dead god who, if freed, will only enslave us. Is that what you want? Haven’t we evolved beyond the need for a deity to tell us how to act, who to be?”
There was a hush, and for a second I thought that my riveting speech had won the hearts and minds of the Heralds.
All it had really won me was a few seconds of quiet. A skinwalker stood up and said, “Only gods can return our magic.”
“Our immortality,” said another.
“At what cost?” yelled a third, evidently on my side.
“Who cares about the cost? Anything is better than living with the humans.”
“Hey!” I said. “I’m human.”
“A human with the map.”
“A human with the key.”
“A human who’s going to take a swan dive into that hole if you all don’t calm the f—”
“Get her,” screamed a jorogumo just before it shot a line of webbing at me.
The sticky thread wrapped around my wrist. The jorogumo bit it off and started pulling with its four arms. I had to use every ounce of my strength to hold onto the chandelier to stop myself from being pulled off.
I was losing this bizarre tug-of-war when a plate went flying at the jorogumo, hitting it square in its pincer-like nose and causing it to drop it webbing. “Leave the human alone,” Harry said, staring down the creature. But in his distraction a cyclops managed to sneak behind the yeti and hit him over the head with a vase that was older than most mountains. The yeti took the blow with a shake of his head before grabbing the offending cyclops and poking him in the eye.
The one-eyed creature went down with a yelp. But you know what they say: when one cyclops goes down, one tanuki gets up.
OK, no one says that, but after what I saw, they really should start. Aki, seeing his precious vase destroyed, got up, swaying like a drunk on the deck of a boat on troubled waters and yelled, “I said … no … violence!”
Leaping off his own testicles, he spun with such speed and force that his appendage swung like a wrecking ball, knocking down several Others unfortunate enough to be nearby.
Talk about throwing your weight around.
As impressive as Aki was, not everyone’s attention was on him. That became obvious when three banshees started shrieking while they grabbed everything that wasn’t nailed down and started chucking it at me.
“Hey,” I said, “I thought that you guys wanted my map. If I fall in the hole, no one gets it.”
That didn’t seem to stop the banshee who chucked a chair at me. Two hobgoblins leapt on the banshee’s back and that’s when I understood that there seemed to be two opposing camps in the Rip Her Arm Off debate. One group wanted to find the entrance, while the other group wanted to prevent that from happening.
Sadly, both groups felt that killing me was the best the way to achieve their goals.
One of the banshees pulled an ancient tapestry from the wall and used it as a net to grapple one of the hobgoblins and push him down the hole.
“Do you know who gave me that?” Aki screamed with unbridled rage. “Athena. After I presided over her handling of the adoption proceedings of Erichthonius. That tapestry was one of a kind.”
The tanuki twirled around, swinging his testicles like a shot-putter before releasing them in the direction of the banshee. The momentum of the toss sent the tanuki flying over the hole and clearing the twenty-foot chasm effortlessly. Man oh man, I thought. If Thor swung what Aki had instead of a hammer, well, it would have been a totally different movie.
Seeing him fly like that did give me an idea. I hoisted up the webbing that was still attached to my wrist and tied it around one of the branches of the chandelier. Then, loosening the webbing’s grip around my wrist so that I could break free when needed, I ran up a branch away from the front door before leaping off.
Just as I hoped, my own momentum swung me back toward the door. I released the webbing at the last second and managed to swing over the heads of the brawling Others and toward the front door.
I’d like to tell you that being a “cat,” I landed on my feet and tumbled past the fighting Others before running out that door. But the truth was, I landed on a garuda. Her soft, feathered body broke my fall (it was kind of like falling on a goose-feathered duvet) and I shimmied off her body like one trying to get off a half-inflated air mattress and ran outside.
Well, I tried to, but a large hand grabbed me, dragging me back. I turned to see one of the wendigos clawing at me. Wendigos have incredibly large mouths with razor-sharp teeth. All that beast needed to do was bite me at the elbow and he’d have the map.
From the way he pulled me up I realized that was exactly what he intended to do. I knew I had one chance to escape. I needed to time a kick to his groin at just the right moment to—
Before I could impress the world with my Bend it Like Beckham power and accuracy, the tail-end of a telescopic baton whacked the creature across the face, causing him to drop me.
I turned to see Jean reaching out a hand and saying in a terrible Austrian accent, “Come with me if you want to live.”
↔
“WHERE THE F—”
“Language,” Jean interrupted as we ran to the tree line beyond the hotel’s rock garden. “We might be running for our lives, but we’re not running from our manners. And to answer the question you were going to ask … I was doing stuff. And you’re welcome.”
“Welcome?” I said between puffs. “I nearly got killed.”
“Horse shoes and hand grenades,” he said. “And speaking of hand grenades." He pulled out two grenades from his pocket, ripped out the pins with his teeth and dropped them as he ran.
I didn’t look back, doubling my speed to get as far away from the explosive devices as possible. I also counted to three, bracing myself for the loud explosion that usually accompanied bombs.
But there was no boom, just a squeaking sound like air being let out of a balloon. So not a boom grenade. A smoke grenade?
I turned, expecting to see smoke coming out of the incendiary cylinders. Instead I saw nothing but several Others chasing after us. As soon as they got near the grenades, though, they stopped running as they yelped in obvious discomfort.
“Smell grenades,” Jean said, pulling me behind the tree line. “Most Others have a heightened sense of smell, so the boys at the lab cooked those up. I’m told they’re a wicked combination of skunk, rotting eggs and beached whale. I don’t even want to know how you bottle beached whale.”
We pushed on another thirty meters or so before Jean stopped.
“What are you doing?” I said. “They’re right behind us.”
He gave me a sardonic smile before lifting several fallen banana leaves, revealing a hole in the ground. He gestured for me to get in the hole. “Like I said, I was doing stuff.”
Once inside, he covered us up and lifted a finger to his lips. “Shush.”
We lay in silence in the cramped hole he’d dug, our bodies uncomfortably close to each other as we waited for the Others to run over us. We heard shouting and a few screeches and some yelling that slowly faded away as the Others ran deeper into the forest.
I realized that the smell grenades were designed to do more than just throw them off temporarily—they were to obscure our scent beneath these banana leaves.
When we were sure they’d all gone past, I pushed out of the hole. “You couldn’t have made it bigger?”
“And what would have been the fun in that?” he said, pulling what looked like a cellphone from the 1980s out of his backpack. “Besides, don’t flatter yourself. If I had spent more time making this hole any bigger, you’d be minus an arm right now.” Jean tilted his head, considering this. “Which, if you think about it, would mean we’d manage with a smaller hole.”
“Hilarious.”
“Like I said, I’m funny in Paradise Lot.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said, turning away from him and assessing my next move. The hotel was locked away, filled with brawling Others, some of whom wanted access to the museum, others who wanted to stop that from happening.
Unless Aki and Harry turned out to be ninja, samurai or super-soldiers, it was unlikely we could return there and gain access to it that way. Even if we did, I didn’t think we could find a safe way down that hole. As far as I could tell, the hole was so deep that the Others who’d fallen in were probably still falling.
I looked at my map, but it wasn’t of any more help; the arrow still pointed at the hole.
“Neato,” Jean said, grabbing my wrist with a bit too much familiarity for my liking. If he knew that he’d crossed a line, he made no indication of it as he stared intently at my arm.
Then he took his pinky finger and traced a blue line that seemed to run under the main map area where the red arrow pointed.
I pulled my arm away. “Hey—my body, my choice, perv.”
“Oh get over yourself.” He held out his hand, asking for my arm back. “Come on,” he said, jerking his ring finger in with a “come hither” swagger.
I groaned and extended my arm out. Jean leaned in closer to examine the map and again he traced the blue line.
“Will you stop that?” I said.
He scratched his head, ignoring me. “What do you think this line is?”
Staring down at my arm, I followed the blue line as he traced it again. It zig-zagged, each zig or zag uneven in length, but all going in the same general direction as the red arrow. It reminded me of a complex weave where each layer was its own design and only when overlaying the individually crafted layers did you get the desired, intricate design.
The way it seemed to lay under the main map made me think that it was just decoration. After all, this was mystical in nature and it wasn’t beyond the gods or Others or whatever celestial force had created this map to add a little decorative flair.
But as Jean continued tracing the line, I began to see a pattern to the blue lines. They weren’t decoration like I had previously assumed. They were—
“Holy guacamole,” I muttered, “this map is in 3D.”
Jean snapped his finger before shaking his head. “That’s exactly what I think,” he said. “And what’s more ...” He reached for his backpack and pulled out something that reminded me of a Star Trek tricorder (from the original series). Flipping it open, he showed me a green radar screen with three blips on it—two right next to each other, the third some distance away.
As the radar’s arm passed around, it showed two lines that zig-zagged in an eerily similar pattern to the blue line on my arm.
“Here’s the hotel, and these two blips are us. These lines are us running out of the hotel. As you can see, we ran pretty much in a straight line out of there.” He traced the two green streaks that started at the hotel and ended at the blips—us. “And this third dot is Keiko. Here’s her leaving the hotel, where she stops somewhere for …”—he tapped the screen and some numbers appeared over the lines—“about twelve minutes. Then she descended into what I can only assume is a hole, before following a path that is almost identical to the blue line on your arm-map thingy.”
I stared at the blips. There was no doubt that the blue lines followed the same pattern as Keiko’s path. The other thing that was blatantly evident was that this asshole was stalking us. Without warning, I punched Jean square in the nose. Hard.
He went down, grabbing the bridge of his nose as two spurts of blood came out. “Ow,” he cried. “What was that for?” But before I could answer, he raised a hand. “Never mind. I know what that was for … and you’re not wrong for punching me. But you’re not right, either. If I hadn’t tracked you, I would have never known where Keiko went and, well …”—he pointed at his tricorder screen again—“and that she’s stuck there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she hasn’t moved in over an hour,” he said, pointing at her dot with a blood-covered fingertip. “I doubt she’s taking a nap.”
I looked at the little number that hovered over Keiko’s dot. Seventy-three minutes. Seventy-three minutes was a long time to be in one place, especially given that about forty minutes ago the world had rumbled as a new plane of existence competed for space in this one.
Keiko had gone off on her own, looking for … what? An entrance to the museum without us? A way to get to the prize first? I doubted that. From everything I knew about noro and everything I had seen in Keiko, she most likely wanted to stop Jean and his human military cohort from finding the entrance. And she didn’t trust me enough to let me in on her plan.
Whatever her motives, they didn’t matter. What mattered to me now was that Blue’s granddaughter was in trouble.
“Let’s go,” I said, marching in the direction on his screen where Keiko had stopped to descend into the hole. The map was in 3D and it used different colors to represent depth. The deeper it went, the darker the colors.
“You’re welcome,” he called after me.
I turned. “No, you don’t get to play the ‘ends justify the means’ card with me. Just because stalking us paid dividends doesn’t make it right.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But I’m surprised you’re surprised. I mean, did you really think we’d offer you safe passage here without surveillance? We’re military, ma’am. We’re not really the trusting type.”
“I know,” I said. “And neither am I.”
I tapped the screen two more times, revealing a fourth blip. I had noticed that he’d put the tracker on me back on the boat, just before the meres attack. When I went into the bowels of the boat and saw his pack, I’d paused for a second to take one of his unused trackers. When the hole opened up I’d thrown it in, figuring it would help us find a way down.
I showed him my planted blip.
He looked at it and then up at me in surprise before a comprehending smile dawned on his face. “Clever girl,” he said with a chuckle. “Very clever indeed.” And he bowed in my direction.
↔
WE MADE our way to the spot where Keiko had clearly stopped for several minutes before she’d descended. But from where we stood there was no path down. As best as I could tell, we were standing in the heart of a tropical forest that was very much sans a hole.
And I would know: I was an expert tracker, having spent three hundred years honing my skills by tracking my human prey. If Keiko had been there, she’d left no indication of it.
There was simply no way for her to have been in that spot without crushing some brush, breaking
some branches, leaving behind some sign of her—or human—presence.
To cover her tracks so thoroughly, she’d have to have burned time. And not just a little bit of it … lots of it.
Jean was thinking the same thing, because he was looking at his Mickey Mouse watch. He nodded before showing me the clock face. The second hand was spinning round manically, completing a full minute’s rotation in less than a few seconds.
I scanned the trees, the ground, our surroundings, looking for the source of magic. Whatever burned time had hid itself as well, sacrificing time for … for what?
The answer was obvious. For Keiko. She was a noro and just as she had summoned the makara—Meres Griffin (hey, I had to hand it to Jean, the name was catchy)—she had summoned something else to hide her tracks.
Something like—
I leapt to my right, throwing my body against the tree that stood not three feet away from me. Because I was looking around in a confused manner, I was able to hide that I had caught the glimmer of a kappa sitting so perfectly still in the shadows of the jungle that I might have mistaken the gray, turtle-like creature for a rock.
I grabbed the kappa and growled, “Stop it. Now!” as I applied pressure to the creature’s neck, forcing it against the tree.
The kappa gulped but held fast. “Ahh,” I heard Jean mutter from behind me, “He’s not stopping anything. If anything, Mickey’s working overtime now.”
“Release your magic, foul beast,” I snarled, “lest I show you the final meaning of mortality.”
The creature’s eyes did not waver and I could see that my threats weren’t going to dissuade it from protecting Keiko. He was willing to sacrifice time for the noro. Lots of it.
But the mere fact that he wasn’t attacking us also indicated that Keiko had instructed the kappa not to harm us. So whatever her plan was when she went off on her own, killing us wasn’t part of it.
I felt Jean’s hand on my shoulder. “Um, Kat … I don’t know when we went full Game of Thrones, and as much as I love watching you play bad cop, you mind giving me a shot?”
I let the kappa go and watched as Jean walked over to the creature and put a hand on its shoulder. I couldn’t hear what Jean said, but I knew he was showing the creature his tricorder device. Jean talked and at one point the kappa even laughed.