by Mel Todd
"Dammit. Okay, I'll get people headed that way." I didn't hear if he said anything else as I hung up on him and grabbed my bag.
"Come on, Carelian. We need to get down there. I have to close those rips." He stood, stretched with a cat's nonchalance, and walked over. I scooped him up and set him in the bag. "You okay, Jo?"
"I'll be fine. Just exhausted. Go." Her eyes locked on mine and she nodded.
I turned and ran. At least this time I was going down the stairs, so I moved faster than I did going up. But the place was a maze and the path to the field seemed purposefully barred. I stood in the main thoroughfare, trying to read how to get there but I didn't see anything that gave me a hint as to which way to go.
"Cori!" The shout made me turn, and I saw Niall sticking his head out of a door. "Down here!"
Relief made my knees go weak as I sprinted towards him. I would never refuse going to the gym again. When I got close enough to speak without yelling, people were still rushing about, though with less stress. "Can we get to the field this way?"
"Yes, follow." He turned and the door almost hit me in the face before I managed to grab it. I went through, then tried to keep up. I failed. His annoyance was clear as he had to wait at each door for me—they were all card key locked.
Bite me. This isn't the life I had in mind.
The stitch in my side had reappeared, with Carelian apparently tripling in weight, before light at the end of a tunnel greeted me. I tried to step up my pace, but we were moving at a steady jog and even imagining blood thirsty monsters behind me didn't get more than a step or two at a greater speed. Sunlight, hot and almost searing after all that time in the tunnels, speared into my eyes and I closed them in reflex, but I kept moving forward to emerge on the playing field. The second I was out from under the weight of earth and metal above me, the presence of the tears were like an ice pick slamming into my mind.
"Ow," I muttered. A quick glance around showed almost no one, so I let Carelian out. He bounded out with way too much energy. "Next time you're walking," I muttered, but I knew he was still too small and too young to take that risk. Out here he should be safe.
"Cori!" Alixant's voice from my left pulled my attention away from the tears hanging what felt like ten feet from the ground.
"Yeah?" I glanced and saw him coming my way, then I turned back to look at the tears in the sky and the man that looked like he was in the middle of them. I figured he was about eighty feet away, but the tears made it hard to just distance as they seemed to change in size and position.
"What's going on?" He demanded and I felt his glare burning into me, but I didn't bother to look at him.
"You see the same thing I do. Is that the guy? The one that did all this?"
"We think so. My mages tell me they can feel the power flowing towards him. Can't you feel it?"
I frowned. None of this made sense. I hadn't played with my abilities enough yet but after he said that, I realized the odd breeze that I had been feeling wasn't a breeze. I should have realized that running through the maze, but I had dismissed it as air conditioning or my rushing. It was magic flowing out of the openings, swirling around, then being pulled back towards the figure, though I could almost sense it swirling around the other mages too. That made me take a few more steps closer and I turned and looked up at the stands. Then it hit me.
"Oh crap."
"What?" He was next to me, so close I could smell his cologne.
"Can you see the magic swirling around people? Since most of them have quit dying"—I paused and shot him a glance—"They have quit dying, right? What she did worked?"
"Yes, they have, and you will explain this later," he growled out but he motioned me to proceed.
"So now the magic is flowing into them, but there is so much it is making them emerge. Expect a wave of things to start hitting." I didn't know how to explain it. It was like I had a weird set of glasses on my face, letting me see the magic like currents of water and some people were pulling it in and starting to glow with magic like a bomb in a video game, close to exploding. Dismissing that, I turned and looked at the man in the center of the rips and went cold, so cold I wanted a coat. I knew it was above ninety out, but my fear was so great I was shivering.
"Cori? What is it?" He must have seen something on my face, because he sounded worried.
"He's about to emerge and there is so much power." I saw the man began to pulse and I just reacted. "CARELIAN! Jo, down!" I put everything into that scream, my eyes locked on the section she was in. There was no way she could have heard me, none. But I saw a figure wearing the colors Jo wore, with a bald head, jerk upwards and then grab others and pull them down.
Red fur streaked towards me and I grabbed him and fell to the ground, wrapping around him, my back to the man about to emerge at levels I suspected no one had ever witnessed before.
"Everyone, take cover now," Alixant bellowed as he hit the ground next to me. I curled up tighter, then gasped in pain as I felt the rips react to the building power in the man on the field.
Oh, this is so going to suck.
Chapter 42
Gods exists, or at least powerful monsters. Do you really want to use anything associated with them? Turn your back on magic and the corruption it brings. ~ Freedom from Magic
Curled tight, I thought about how bad Jo's emergence had been and wondered if this would kill us all.
And I waited.
And waited.
Had I been wrong? Was he not about to emerge? I thought back to the image of him all but pulsing with power and clenched tighter around Carelian. I hadn't been wrong.
"Cor-" I heard Alixant say, when the bubble of power popped with a sound I sensed but didn’t feel, at least not until the wave of power slammed into me. I felt my clothes ripple around me, and Carelian burrowed deeper into me.
Air, heat, and sound all blasted into me with physical force. Then it vanished as if it had never been there. I listened, scared for a minute. I'd seen what Jo's emergence did. If this one had changed the material of the stadium, we might all be at risk. But after lying there, frozen for an eternal moment, nothing more happened. The stadium didn't creak indicating a compromised structure, and I couldn’t hear screams of terror, just ambient noise that didn't set off alarms. I lifted my head slowly and looked at Carelian. His green eyes met mine and he licked my nose.
~Am fine. Go.~ His voice sounded shaky, but not hurt, so I looked at myself next. This time my dress, my only decent dress, had changed to black leather that clung to what curves I had. I was already starting to bake in the sun. My shoes, previously black flats, were now so heavy I almost couldn't lift my feet. I didn't waste time trying to figure out what they had changed into, I just slipped my feet out and stood, tugging down the dress awkwardly. If I had to guess, my undergarments were now something much less supportive and comfortable.
I saw Alixant standing and gaped at him for a second. His nice suit jacket changed to crepe paper, if I wasn't mistaken, and already started to tear as he moved.
"I hate Transform emergences," he growled out, pulling the jacket away. His shirt looked like it was now silk instead of cotton clinging to his torso in a way I'd seen on romance covers. His slacks had turned to leather and all in all he'd make a good model for anything using sex as a marketing technique
Realizing how bad this could have been, I counted myself lucky. Being naked in front of all these people would have just been the capper on this day.
The intent of magic indeed. This could have been so bad, but it isn't.
I needed to follow that train of thought at some point, research paper maybe, the sentience of magic. The crunch of grass turned into paper caught my attention and I turned and stared at the man walking towards us. Arrogance in every step.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Alixant reaching for his gun then growl as it crumbled in his grip, making the sound of aluminum crackling. He let it go and narrowed his eyes at the mage, who stopped about ten feet from
us and grinned, a wide smile, full of malice.
"Don't bother. There isn't anything you can do to me. I'm the first triple merlin in the world. Did you know if you plan for this, you can combine powers to make yourself shields? The elements combine nicely together. Even if you had a mage here who knew exactly what veins in my skull to rupture, I could kill him before even one of them broke. It helps when you can set your magic to monitor your every cell. Years on that damn fire jump team gave me lots of time to research, to read. That volcano killing those morons answered all my questions about the things hinted to in the books. I am now a god!"
He roared the last part of the monologue and tilted his head back and laughed.
Oh Merlin, we're all going to die. The people he's killed will just be the beginning.
The realization we had failed, and not only had we not stopped the guy, but now he was more powerful than ever, tasted like bitter ash on my tongue. I knew almost nothing. Could I stop him? In theory I should be able to, but with what? I knew how to close rips in the fabric of reality, not much else.
We stood about fifty feet away from Paul who stared at us, a mocking sneer on his face. The three rips hovered above and behind him about thirty feet off the ground.
As if my thinking of them woke them up, the rips rippled. Where they had looked like tears in fabric, gaping a little where our reality was pealed back and revealing another existence, they now looked like mouths that were gaping open, ready to spill things out. If they hadn't already.
Indira had told me not to look into them, that you could get enraptured by what you couldn't quite see but I stared. I didn't see how you couldn't. Colors I didn't have names for, colors I shouldn't be able to see sparkled on the other side. Things moved in there - creatures that were dark, wondrous, immense, ethereal, and yet they were all of these, some of these, and none of these at the same time. I felt my grasp on reality start to slip when pain blossomed from my thigh. It hurt bad enough I looked down to see what had stabbed me.
Carelian stared up at me, his claws in the exposed skin of my thigh. ~Dangerous, seductive, not for you.~
Blinking, I snapped out my hand at Alixant who stared entranced at the rips. I hit him hard in the arm, the silk shirt absorbing none of the sting.
He turned his head slowly at first then moving faster once his gaze left the rips. "What the hell, Munroe?" He demanded, rubbing at his arm.
"You were getting entranced," I said, my voice bleak. "We need to snap the others out of it."
~Me!~ Carelian’s voice had way too much delight to it as he scampered behind people, needle sharp claws swiping at calves, and in at least one case, a rear end. Muted exclamations of pain, then sharp indrawn breaths followed his path of bloodletting.
I turned back to look at the man, Paul, laughing and staring at one of the rips.
"Maybe we can grab him now? You think he's entranced?" Alixant muttered starting to move forward, head tilted down slightly.
"I can hear you. No. I am no longer subject to the weakness of mortal minds." He waved his hand behind him and Alixant few back toward the benches lining the field. He hit with a crash that made me wince. A sound emanated from the rips and I found I couldn't look away, but I wasn't entranced, this time I couldn't look away from sheer fear. Things were stepping out of their own realities into ours.
Niall had somehow ended up next me. His clothes had come out better than Alixant, a cotton jersey and denim, and I could see Siab making her way towards us, though I had no idea what they thought we could do. Maybe they had a sniper somewhere that could kill him, or another archmage or merlin that could explode his brain.
Paul turned his eyes on me, and I realized he was crazy. Not just wired crazy, but the snap and kill everyone type of crazy.
"No, silly woman. There is no one that can stop me. Reading all your thoughts is laughably easy but killing you would ruin all my fun. I want you to see what you couldn't stop." A sound of grass, or what had been grass, crunching as one of the beings stepped onto the ground grabbed my attention. A smile spread across Paul's face as he turned away. "And look, my familiars are coming to me. With them I'll have everything I ever wanted."
I heard his rambling but at this point I was trying to watch three things at once. A hoof, silver and delicate stepped out of the plane that felt like Order to me. A long, snakey tail had slithered out of the opening to Spirit. Then something, something black, oily, and writhing, oozed out of the portal to Chaos, and it was attached to something larger on the other side.
Fur brushed by my naked legs and I bent down to pick up Carelian, not glancing away as a unicorn stepped out of the Order rip. It gleamed silvery white, its horn at least three feet long and a pearly silver that hurt to look at. I wanted to go pet it and that scared me even more. I'd never been into horses, I'd always liked cats, but horses never called to me and I wanted to go pet this one? It nickered, a long musical sound, and revealed a mouth full of fangs.
Paul twisted to face the unicorn. I looked at his back and for a moment I wished I had the ability or knowledge to kill him, but before it could complete into a real thought, much less an action, I snared on the creature coming out of Spirit. A long snakelike body that coiled and twisted, in hues of green and blue that seemed restful. I let my eyes wander up the perfect torso, muscular and tanned to breasts that even air brushed models never had. Her face was classic, clear beauty, with not a flaw or wrinkle on it, full lips, high cheekbones, and the snakes that formed her hair seemed to match perfectly.
But for all that, I was sure people were supposed to turn into stone if she looked at us. No one did as her gaze ran over all of us, though I couldn't turn to see anything else. Siab had made it next to me. She stood on one side while Niall stood on her far side. I didn't know if Alixant had managed to get back up or if Paul had killed him. We had to do something, and I had no idea what we could even begin to do.
"See what comes to serve me?" He laughed with his arms spread wide. I didn't. Neither the gorgon nor the unicorn looked remotely servile. Without really wanting to, I turned my attention to Chaos and the thing oozing out of it. It formed on the field, the earth cracking under it and I couldn't see it. I mean I saw it, but it shifted and twisted and wasn't there even while it was there. I could comprehend a mass of writhing shapes with an oily feeling that made no sense.
With a sense of desperation, I ripped my eyes away to focus on the unicorn, wondered if unicorns ate meat, and then looked at the gorgon. Turning to stone might have been the easy way out, but while she looked around with an aura of supreme disinterest, nothing turned to stone.
"What do we do?" whispered Siab.
I gave her an incredulous look. I had no idea, then I realized she was asking Niall. The flush of stupidity didn't have a chance to last long.
Paul walked up to the three tears, staring at the creatures in front of them and crossed his arms. I could still see power leaking out of his body. Even though I couldn't see his face, I knew he was smiling a smile that made me want to smack it off his face. His words confirmed it.
"See? I get three monsters to serve me. I will have every person on Earth kneeling before me. Everything I have ever wanted will be mine."
~Me? Serve you?~ The gorgon looked at him and laughed. ~Did you hear that, Salistra? The mortal thinks we would serve it.~
Her words rang in my mind and ears, though what my ears heard was a string of syllables that meant nothing while my mind filled with her words.
The unicorn shook its head, and matching laughter filled my mind. ~As if. I think I shall pass. I prefer mine more innocent, if not an actual virgin. He is already so corrupt that what little he has left to fall would be of no interest to me.~ This time I heard nothing, but the words in my mind sounded like crystal bells and I shuddered with revulsion as the sexual overtone of corruption seeped into my mind.
~You and your virgins. Just because they've never had sex doesn't mean they are innocent. There have been a few that even turned my stomach.~
Somehow I knew it was the gorgon talking and my eyes kept drifting back to her. She was fascinating and less scary than the overly perfect unicorn with lavender eyes and teeth made to rend and tear. I had zero doubt she was just as deadly.
"Excuse me?" Paul Goins sounded surprised and insulted. "I'm the most powerful mage Earth has ever seen. You will serve me." The black ooze from Chaos had reached his leg and started climbing up around it. His leg jerked as if stung. "Get off. You are mine to command, do you understand?"
~We know you are the most powerful mortal in centuries. Why do you think we are here? We wanted a new toy.~ The gorgon’s voice held contemptuous amusement as she slithered around him, circling him as if he was her prey.
~Virginity just ensures there is something for me to model to my desires. I prefer those I can twist and bend. He is already too tarnished to enjoy. After all, look at what he was willing to do just for more power. So simplistic, so wasteful.~ The musical horsey sound of the unicorn filled my head and I didn't know if I wanted to cry or scream at the sound.
~Mineeee,~ a voice, dark, oily, twisted, hissed through my mind and I moaned a bit in pain. Niall screamed.
A dark tentacle, except it changed width and length and twisted as it moved, slithered forward and started to glide around Paul Goins.
A sound that I couldn't hear in my mind assaulted my ears. It was followed by the gorgon’s voice midway through a sentence, making me think that horrible sound was the Chaos thing’s name. ~You never did have any patience. Why are you claiming this one? You took one last century. We should get him. What if I want him?~ Affront and amusement coated the voice, but no true anger. It worried me how I could tell the feelings of these creatures.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Siab with both hands over her ears, tears running down her face.
~Still jealous, Tirsane? Lovecraft did so enjoy my company. I broke him too soon. I need another to tell stories of me. Merlins tell the best stories.~
The voice drew blood from my mind, and I screamed, hitting my knees, tears streaking down my face as I fought to deal with the pain. Siab lay next to me on the ground, her hands over her ears, sobbing.