Even as her panicked mind was trying to comprehend that, Sunny checked her wounds. The creature was small , so they were barely more than minor cuts and bruises. She could still bend her arm, so the beak gnawing on her elbow hadn’t cut any tendons, but bone was nonetheless showing.
From the other room, the splashing came again.
It escaped again, she thought, baffled. How is it escap—
The plants .
Suddenly, the answer clicked into focus for her. The way the plants shimmered right before the creature escaped…it was like the Star Trek transporter, beaming someone back to the Enterprise. Maybe it was linked to the octopus things somehow and they called themselves back to avoid danger? Then Sunny remembered the way the apartment seemed to be situated inside Arielle’s apartment, and how the officers had seen through the Aura of Forgettability as if it weren’t there. She knew she was going straight into Dungeons & Dragons territory, now, but fuck it—maybe it wasn’t the plants… Maybe it was the space the plants created . An interdimensional safe haven. A pocket realm .
The splashing in the other room had slowed. Sunny paused to tie a piece of her shirt tightly around the wound in her arm and dosed herself with albuterol and antihistamines before she went in to look.
The baby monster was floating upside down on the surface of the pool, its little black beak gasping. As she watched, even the beak stopped moving, until it was silent but for the drips of the plants and the sound of Sunny’s own breathing.
Then something new occurred to her. As she had been road-hauling Dortez, she had seen tentacles forty feet wide, with enough mass to make Bertha struggle. How could something that big retreat to a place this small? Its hidey-hole would need to be so much bigger, like the size of a pond …
Then it hit her.
Thunderbird Falls. The strange bone-deep chill. The glowing philodendrons. The weird blue tinge to the water… The monster must have grabbed her as it retreated to Thunderbird Falls to escape the shark hooks, then forgot it had taken her with it, letting her swim to the surface as it hunkered somewhere near the bottom.
Sunny left the baby monster in the pool—she figured there was a greater chance Dortez would wade into the tank of Botox that way—gathered up her backpack and the empty canisters and went back outside.
Strangely, the hallway was empty as she stepped from Room 5043, all the cards and flowers removed, the room behind her silent.
A little kid, who had been hunkered behind a trash bin, startled her. “Are you one of Arielle’s friends?” the child whispered, his eyes wide.
Sunny ignored the kid, something in her gut causing her eyes to linger on the missing cards. Had Arielle’s mom opened the door to collect them while Sunny had been inside?
“I hear she’s dead,” the little kid said.
“Bugger off, little kid,” Sunny told the urchin. Children irritated her on principle, probably because of the pregnant-sister fiasco and the fact that, more often than not, when she spent quality time with her sister’s kid, it was like seeing what her children would look like by that fat turd Gary. She was, after all, a clone of her sister. That meant, genetically, those goddamn kids were hers…
Why were those missing flowers bothering her? The mom could’ve simply taken them inside and put them in a vase. She looked closer. What she had first mistaken as water, she realized, was much too dark.
“Do you live nearby?” the kid said. His voice, like the rest of him, was a sweet, innocent singsong. It made Sunny want to punch him.
“Go harass your mother,” Sunny said, putting her fingers to the stains. They came back red. Indeed, now that she was looking, there were red streaks near the walls…
“Is your name Sunny?” the little kid offered.
Sunny jerked to face him.
The little kid smiled. “Thought so. You’ve lost weight from your picture.”
Dortez! her panicked mind screamed, too late.
Then the child’s face seemed to fold back, and his entire body became a writhing mass of tentacles. Sunny, out of Botox, had just enough time to grab the harpoon from her bag before the monster’s forty-foot limbs slammed into her, squishing her to the wall.
“Why can’t I remember you?!” the creature snarled at her, his arms wrapping around her like snakes, squeezing the breath from her. “What magic is this? Do you work with the Shivaan worm? How are you doing it ?!” It started to shake her like a toy soldier. “Answer me! ”
Sunny was just starting to pass out when she saw Khaz come running down the hall, a flashlight upheld in his hand. “Release her!” he shouted. The flashlight flared, and the creature screamed. A moment later, Sunny felt herself slipping along the floor, being pulled …
She was, she realized, getting sucked into the body of a child.
Oh Jesus no, she thought, just as she disappeared inside the child’s skin and there came the sound of thunder and the world flashed black.
Chapter 12: Another Dunking
Sunny found herself floundering in the waterfall again, but was quicker to right herself this time. After a brief tumble in the icy water—during which something huge and meaty brushed her body several times—she spotted light and started swimming for it desperately.
This time, when Sunny broke the surface, she quickly scrabbled as far away from the pool as she could get, putting a hundred feet between herself and the water before she slowed down. Then, at this new vantage point, she turned to look.
Sure enough, under the surface, she saw the long, eel-like arms squirming slowly under the water. Above them, ringing the rock walls of the pool, were the glowing philodendrons, leaking their luminescent purple dew into the water below. The area was colder than it should have been, even with the misty breeze off the waterfall.
Sunny watched the twenty-foot arms taking up the bottom of the pool retreat, leaving a gravel bed once more. She narrowed her eyes.
So it hops bodies, she thought. Uses us like a hermit crab uses shells.
She’d been looking at it all wrong, she realized. She shouldn’t be thinking like she was fighting an octopus—she should be thinking like she was fighting a hermit crab .
And how did someone kill a hermit crab?
Pry it out of its shell.
Sunny looked up at the philodendrons carefully planted in the cracks and crevices around the pool. It would take effort to get to them all, but if she could pry them loose, maybe she could cut off its retreat for the next time.
Sunny, who had already been dosed with enough antihistamines to treat an elephant, nonetheless had to find a way to staunch the blood flowing from her wounds before she could pull off a feat of acrobatics. She cut up the rest of her shirt—the way it had been shredded, she wasn’t using it again anyway—and bandaged the wounds she could reach. Then, steeling herself, she went rock climbing.
It was cold, wet, and harrowing, but over the next six hours, Sunny managed to pry, shove, or dig each of the ethereal philodendrons away from the rocks around the falls. It was already nighttime before she set the last one atop the pyre she’d built and, with her sparker and some birch bark, lit it all on fire. It was hard to make them catch, but with enough dry spruce limbs, the plants made a strange glowing reddish smoke that Sunny decided was best not to inhale, so she retreated a few hundred feet to watch from afar.
When the plants had burned to ashes, Sunny returned to the pool at Thunderbird. Despite the fact it was almost midnight, the pool felt warmer, the hues more orange and red, less blue. Feeling that, she was relatively certain that whatever nexus the plants had created in Thunderbird Falls had been dispersed.
Then, because she was too exhausted—and hungry—to walk back to the Domes without sleep, Sunny threw some more wood onto her fire and hunkered down beside it for the night. She knew bugs were going to bite her, but she fell asleep before she could care.
#
“I apologize—my peers have been watching me, so tonight was the first time I was able to come. I had to wait until
they were distracted by something that’s happening in the city.”
Sunny was in the back of an ambulance, trying to resuscitate a little girl with over fifty bullet wounds. The girl was watching her with dead, accusing eyes. They had dried out and now looked like fuzzy glass.
Harris put an old, wrinkled hand on her arm. “The girl is dead. Reliving the memory won’t change that.”
“I’m not trying to bring her back,” Sunny snapped. “I’m trying to figure out what the hell she did to me.” She checked the girl’s IVs. Up ahead, the driver was shouting to Sgt. Gilles about an SUV and Uzis.
Harris cocked his head at her, then looked down at the little girl. Sunny’s hands were covered in blood to the elbows. She wasn’t wearing gloves. Crap. She should be wearing gloves.
“What do you mean, what she did to you?” Harris said.
“I want to know,” Sunny said, yanking sterile blue latex over her bloody hands, making them appear brown underneath, “what the little shit did to me.” She bent down and pried at a bullet wound, looking inside.
Harris seemed perplexed. “You dream this same dream every night.”
“Yeah,” Sunny said, closing the wound and moving on to one in the back of the little girl’s head. “Because I haven’t figured it out yet. Now please get out of my way, Harris.”
Harris didn’t get out of the way. He just squinted at her, looking baffled. “Half the time I talk to you in the dreamscape, I can’t tell if you’re awake or asleep.”
“Just get back to work, Harris,” Sunny said, rolling her eyes.
Harris walked around the gurney. “No. This is important. It’s almost like you’re being suppressed…” He frowned and reached out towards her forehead.
Sunny ignored him and kept working. The girl was developing a tension pneumothorax and was having trouble breathing. She needed to drain the fluid before the pressure made her lungs unable to expand…
As soon as Harris tried to dab the sweat from her forehead with his old, gnarled hand—Sunny thought that was only something that they did to doctors in surgery, but whatever—he recoiled. Blackness spun outward, coiling around her like an octopus.
…octopus … Sunny paused in treating the girl, trying to remember why that was triggering a memory for her.
Harris, for his part, was backing away from her, the blackness curling around his hand, melting it. He looked more perplexed than worried. He shook it off, and the blackness slapped against the walls of the ambulance, melting them. Outside, Sunny could see the two black SUVs hurtling alongside the ambulance on the wet, rainy road. A masked man inside had a submachine gun, and was aiming it at Sunny’s back. He pulled the trigger.
Harris held up a hand and a blue-white barrier appeared between her and Uzi-man. He was walking around her like she was a curious item on display, not helping her save the child. He watched as Sunny tried to get oxygen in the girl’s lungs. When Sunny started chest compressions, however, he said, “Stop.”
Everything in the ambulance came to a sudden halt except Sunny.
“Go back.”
The scene rewound except for Sunny and Harris, who stayed in place as everything moved around them. It stopped on the girl reaching out to Sunny.
Sunny fought an overwhelming wave of dread. “I don’t want to see this part,” she babbled. Harris frowned at her, then at the child.
Closer , the child said.
Sunny moved closer.
Lean down.
Sunny started to lean. Harris grabbed her and yanked her away, his ancient face lined with worry. “That’s a compulsion. How could this child…” He cocked his head at Sunny. Odd, how Sunny had never noticed Harris’s wrinkled Athabaskan face or near-white hair.
“What did that girl compel you to do?” Harris asked.
Sunny shook her head, her heart hammering a staccato in her chest. “I want to wake up now.”
Harris ignored her and returned his attention to the gurney. The scene started playing again.
Touch my forehead.
Sunny touched the child’s bullet-ridden forehead.
A hot, overpowering wave of energy rammed up her arm like she’d grabbed an electric line. Sunny felt her fingers spasm and slip into the girl’s brain , but she couldn’t force her body to pull them out.
All around her, slime green energy roiled in geometric shapes and patterns that made Harris gasp.
“I know what this is…” Harris whispered, watching the lines form an intricate cage around them.
Sunny felt her body convulsing, her mind floating free.
Release, the voice came again. It wasn’t the girl’s voice anymore. It was something deeper, scarier, a thousand times louder. Let go. The compulsion to do as she was told was so strong that Sunny started to comply, allowing it to shove her aside, making way for something else …
Harris wrenched her out of the ambulance and threw her into a creek. The sun was hot when she emerged, gasping, blinking water out of her eyes.
Harris’s dark native face was uncharacteristically pale. “Did you let him in?”
Sunny swam to the bank, choking.
Before she could climb out of the water, Harris ducked and grabbed her by the chin, wrenching her face towards him. “Did. You. Let. Him. In? ”
“No !” Sunny shouted, yanking her chin away. “Back off, old man.”
He released her and slumped backwards, looking shell-shocked. “Holy crap.” The way he was looking at her, she might as well have been a tentacle monster that ate little kids.
“Holy crap what?” Sunny crawled up onto the bank, dripping sheets of water into the grass. She glanced around, finding the land features completely foreign to her. “And where the hell are we?”
Still appearing shaken, the old native man gave her a long look. “That definitely explains some things.”
Sunny peered up at him, one of her boots half off. “Like what?”
“Like why your mental stance got so bitter lately,” he said.
Sunny squinted, getting the distinct feeling that he was in a position to know. “Who are you, again?”
He waved that off. “Look, you’re running out of time. They’re gonna figure out I’m talking to you and cut us off. They want you to die when you fight the Náakw tomorrow. They say the gift is wasted on white people, and they should all be destroyed before the apocalypse, but I don’t agree.”
“The…apocalypse?”
“I’ll tell you later.” The old man seemed out of breath and his image was flickering. “This Náakw isn’t something that can only be killed in the physical. It must be killed in the astral at the same time, and there are only a few weapons with the power to do that. The Council probably could, but it won’t try…” He winced like he was in pain.
“How do I find a weapon like that?” Sunny insisted.
“They are very rare, very powerful,” he groaned. “Takes…something special…to make…”
“Are you okay?” Sunny asked, noticing that he was sweating.
“They figured out what I did to reach you and they’re undoing it now,” he panted. “I only have a couple minutes. I don’t have all the time I wanted to talk you through this, but the gist is this: There’s something called a devaputra that’s been following you that can help you kill Dortez. I’ve smelled it several times—it’s going to be attracted to your energy. If you see him, he’s going to appear…strange…”
Vaguely, Sunny remembered Obi-wan. “How strange?”
“Terrifying,” the old man said, gasping. “People have…heart attacks…when they see them.”
Definitely not the skinny Indian guy, then. He was just annoying. “So if I get a chance to talk to this thing, what do I say?”
“The devaputra can’t do much in this realm without a master,” the old man said. “Too much power…unhindered.” He was sweating so much that his face was literally melting away. “There are rules.”
Sensing her time with the old man was growing short, Sunny said, “T
ell me what I need to do.”
“It’s a long shot…” the old man panted, “…but find the devaputra. Tell him you want his service. He’ll understand.”
“You don’t look so good,” Sunny said, backing away uncomfortably.
“They’re not happy,” the old man managed, curling in on himself. “Find the devaputra.” He kept curling, folding inward like a piece of paper. The last thing she heard from him was a moan before he vanished.
A moment later, there was a snarl, and the world around Sunny started to rumble and shake. Wake! something angry roared.
#
Sunny sat up, covered in sweat and gasping.
It was early morning, with soft sunlight filtering through the trees overhead, dappling the creek leading to the waterfall.
“Devaputra,” Sunny muttered, grabbing her head. After finding herself at the entrance to a secret tunnel under the Dome following one such dream, she had to take this one a bit more seriously than she normally would have. So there was a critter out there that could help her. A special kind of shaman?
Tell him you want his service. He’ll understand.
Sunny groaned and got to her feet. She might have slept all night, but somewhere between the cold, the hard ground, the bugs, and some old men screwing with her dreams, she hadn’t gotten much rest.
She dusted herself off and headed back to the road. It was another three hours of walking before she found herself at her last campsite, and it was midday before she had narrowed down her approximate location from what she could remember of that sleepwalking dream. She couldn’t, however, figure out which alder thicket she’d been led into.
Sunny had been wandering for another two hours, thrashing the bushes looking for the opening back to the Domes, when a girl’s voice said, “The tunnel’s over there.” Sunny turned to see the native girl with the shotgun. The girl gestured at a thicket Sunny had already explored.
“Who are you?” Sunny asked.
“I could ask the same of you,” the girl said. “But I’ll forget as soon as you wander off, won’t I?” There was a bitter twist to her lips. “Or I could just shoot you. Did I miss the first time?”
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 22