by E. A. Copen
Sheer, irrational terror coursed through me at the sight of Ikelos. I fought the urge to turn the unicorn around and flee to safety, knowing there was nowhere I could go that Ikelos wouldn’t see. I’d been expecting the seven-foot-tall version, not a giant monster. How the hell was I going to kill this thing?
I swallowed my fear and doubt. “Yep. That’s him.”
My murder unicorn snorted a small stream of fire, scorching the candy-colored fog floating around us. “Finally, something worth my time and effort.” He took off at a gallop, leaving me scrambling to hold on.
As we galloped toward the giant monster, I did a little calculating. There wasn’t enough sand for me to make a circle and trap him like I’d planned, so I’d have to improvise. My body was safe if the dream catcher actually worked, but I had to assume that if I died in the dream, my body would follow. Normally, I’d have dismissed that as an urban legend, but considering the circumstances, it was better to be safe than sorry.
“Hey, unicorn. Don’t suppose you can fly?”
“What do I look like? A fuckin’ Pegasus? That guy’s a pussy. I don’t fly. And my name’s not ‘Hey, Unicorn.’ It’s Duke.”
Duke, the foul-mouthed murderous unicorn. Something was seriously wrong with me.
Ikelos withdrew his mouth from one of his victims and tossed the body aside. His head turned, giant black eyes focusing on me. A terrifying screech shook the air and tore boulders from the ground. They rose into the sky, suspended there as if they were in water. One broke free and sailed toward us like a missile.
“Duke, I need to get up to toss some sand in this thing’s eyes!” I shouted as he dodged the first of the boulders. “Get me there, and you can stomp on as many Smurfs as you want!”
“Hell, yeah!” Duke launched us into the air just in time to avoid another boulder and his hooves caught another as it fell, climbing higher. He ran along it and jumped to the next.
More boulders flew at us, slamming into each other and creating booming explosions. Two collided just over my head and sent a shower of pebbles raining down over me. Duke leaped to the next boulder just in time to avoid being hit by the largest chunks. Another flew straight for us, too close to dodge.
“Look out!” I braced to have my head caved in when Duke didn’t change course.
He opened his mouth with an ear-piercing whinny and belched a stream of liquid fire. It struck the rock, melting it to nothing, and we jumped through the wall of heat left behind.
Duke hit the next rock hard. “You’re going to have to jump!”
I winced. Only two more rocks large enough to hold our weight remained in front of us, and we weren’t close enough for me to hit Ikelos. He was too far for me to get to even if I jumped. In reality, at least.
But this was a dream. In dreams, physics didn’t necessarily apply. In a dream, I could fly.
I grabbed my plastic baggie of sand and stood in the saddle, something I’d never be able to do in real life. Duke leaped for the last rock and came down with all the grace one would expect of a unicorn and then sped up. I waited until the last possible second before I launched myself out of the saddle on shaky legs.
For a long moment, everything seemed like it would go exactly as planned. I flew toward Ikelos, arms stretched out in front of me in a Superman pose. Wind whipped by strong enough to rip tears from my eyes.
Then I mistakenly looked down. Far below, the prison complex waited, shrouded in the shadow of the storm raging all around Ikelos. The buildings looked like Legos, the fields like a patchwork quilt. I must’ve been hundreds of feet in the air. I stopped moving toward Ikelos and dropped like an ACME anvil. Air pushed against me, creating enough pressure I found it hard to breathe. The ground loomed closer.
This is it. I’m going to die, crushed like a bug in a dream, all because I trusted a unicorn named Duke. Not how I pictured the end. Not at all.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” said Morningstar.
I fought to lift my head and found him falling with me, one leg crossed over the other. He held a delicate teacup between two fingers and sipped from it as if we weren’t plummeting to our deaths. “What?”
He shrugged. “Ikelos may be a dream-devouring monster, but this is your dream, and you’re the Sandman. You make the rules here. You don’t want to die? Save yourself.”
“Why are you even here? Helping me?”
He grinned. “I’m not. I’m just a hallucination, remember?”
The Devil winked out of existence as if he’d never been there.
Save myself. But how? I must’ve read a hundred articles on lucid dreaming. In theory, I knew how, but I’d never successfully managed it. Then again, I’d never been the Sandman before either. Dreams were my domain now. There, I was God.
I closed my eyes tight as the ground loomed ever closer and held onto the first thing that came to mind. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than smashing face-first into the dirt. Come on, I urged, slipping a little magic into the thought.
An eagle’s call sliced through the air. I slammed into something hard enough it knocked the wind out of me, but I didn’t die. When I cracked my eyes open, I found myself clutching the neck feathers of a giant golden eagle, surging back into the sky. Flanked by two more eagles, we flew back toward Ikelos. The Titan swatted at the eagles but missed by mere inches when they tilted their wings.
“Get me to his eyes!” I shouted.
My eagle screeched and beat its wings, surging higher. The other two broke off in opposite directions, forcing the Titan to take them on one at a time. He reached for the one on the right as it dove toward his eye and caught it by the neck. My eagle dove, screaming.
I fumbled with the bag, pulling it open and grabbing a handful of sand. Ikelos saw us coming and reached for us with another hand. With a shout, I flung the sand at his big, black eyes. “Nighty-night, asshole!”
The sand hit him in the face, drawing a furious roar. He dropped everything to paw at his eyes in an attempt to clean out the sand. Ikelos blinked, snarled, and spat, but he didn’t go down. My handful of sand wasn’t enough. I’d have to hit him with a lot more, maybe the whole bag. Fat chance of that. I hadn’t even gotten the whole handful in his eyes over the first pass. Most of it hit outside his eyes.
What if I had a bigger target? This was my dream. Just how much could I change and get away with? Ikelos didn’t seem to have one true form, instead, appearing big, small, however. Besides, the giant monster looming in my dream wasn’t really him but an avatar. Avatars in my dream had to conform to my rules. Rules I could reshape to my will, now that I was the Sandman.
I extended a hand toward Ikelos as my eagle narrowly avoided another swipe. We were just at the edge of his reach. “Take me back in.”
As I uttered the command, I conjured a new face for Ikelos in my mind’s eye. I stripped away the straw mouth, the glistening black skin, and the bone underneath until there was nothing left. His two black eyes, I merged into one giant red eye hovering above a towering body made of black stone.
Slowly, Ikelos’ avatar changed, transforming him into the image I’d created. He let out a scream and reached all six hands toward me as they slowly turned to stone. When his mouth disappeared, the scream faded to a muffled rumble. We flew safely between the six outstretched arms and straight up to the unblinking red eye. I urged the eagle to pause as the eye focused on me.
“How’s it feel?” I asked the Titan. “Able to see and feel, knowing that I’m about to kick your ass, but totally helpless to stop me? How many people did you force this on while you fed on them and killed them? Innocent people?”
He couldn’t respond, but the one giant eye widened in response.
I opened my bag of magic sand, leaned over, and dumped the whole thing on Ikelos’ eye. Unable to blink, the eye quivered in response. The earth rumbled and a seismic wave blasted out from the base of the tower I’d built him into, pushing back the fog and revealing black ground underneath. Ikelos crumbled, his giant red
eye tumbling to the side. I watched from above as he crashed to the ground and broke into a thousand impotent pieces. The eye flickered once, then shrank to a single thin line before going out like a television screen turned off.
Chapter Thirty-One
My eagle gracefully touched down a good distance from where Ikelos fell and bowed to let me climb off. Duke stood to one side, chewing on a patch of dead, bloodstained grass. I didn’t want to know what had made all the bloodstains on his hooves.
I slid off the eagle just as his two fellows came to join him. I’d thought the one was done for, but it looked like he’d recovered, even if he had lost a few of his neck feathers. The eagle fluffed up as it regarded me.
“Thanks for the assist,” I said with a slight bow. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
The eagle gestured for me to continue with a wing.
“Why didn’t you just take the One Ring to Mordor yourselves?”
The eagle blinked and tilted his head. “Beats me. I didn’t write those books.” He and his friends took off into the sky. With a loud call, they bid me goodbye and flew off over the horizon.
Duke huffed out a nose of smoke. “Suppose you’ll be wanting to go back now?”
I looked out over the crumbled bits of black rock with a frown. “Is he really dead?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Duke trotted over to where I stood and regarded the rubble with a disapproving snort. “You broke his hold in this realm. He has no power. No magic. Without magic, a magical creature dies. It isn’t hard to figure out. You must be a dumbass.”
I sighed and grabbed the saddle to pull myself. “It just seems to me that all these all-powerful gods shouldn’t have had so much trouble taking out the Titans. If this dumbass could do it, they sure as hell could.”
Duke turned and picked his way down from the hill we stood on. A vast, foggy valley stretched out before us, huge hills on either side. A rainbow stretched from behind one hill to the other. “You overestimate their ability to work together and be creative.”
That much was true. My job would’ve been a lot easier if they’d stop trying to kill each other and get along. Soon enough, I’d have to do something about that. There were other Titans loose on the world that the rest of the Horsemen and I would have to track down. Plus, they’d have to pull their heads out of their collective asses and work together if they wanted to have a chance at taking down Loki and his army. It was high time for a sit down between gods and arranging that would fall to me. No one else would do it. Sometimes, being the responsible adult sucked.
Duke clip-clopped down into the quiet valley and stopped when the fog was thigh-high on me. “This is where you get off, bitch.”
I looked around the valley before sliding off the saddle, taking my empty sandbag with me. I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. “Hey, Duke, what do I do now?”
He rolled his eyes. “You wake up. Duh.”
“Um, how do I do that?”
He looked behind him, drawing his lips back to grin. “I can help with that.” Duke picked up his hind legs and lashed out.
The last thing I saw was a bloodstained hoof closing in on my face.
I sat up in the morgue with a gasp and a sharp pain in my head. Grammy stood next to me, the baton in her hand now instead of the gun. Thank God for small miracles, because she swung it at my head and shrieked, “The power of Grammy compels you! Get outta my future grandson-in-law!”
“Ow! Hey, stop hitting me!” I flailed and managed to grab the baton and pull it away. “What the hell, Grammy?”
“You weren’t yourself,” she explained. “Layin’ there, spouting something about murder and unicorns. I thought that thing had you.”
I rubbed my aching head and looked around. The floor was littered with bodies. I hoped most of them were still alive. Moses was moving from person to person, securing them with plastic zip ties he must’ve found in one of the drawers. The warden sat on the floor in front of my slab, his little bottle of pepper spray held out in front of him, fingers shaking. Emma stood next to the door, her back pressed against the wall, the gun pointed at the floor. Four officers lay at her feet, tied up and groaning. The door was off its hinges and flat on the floor in the hallway. Several confused looking correctional officers shuffled around, rubbing their heads and blinking.
“Is it over?” I asked.
Emma released her hold on the gun. “I think so. They’ve stopped trying to tear into the room, at least. For a minute there, I thought I was in an episode of The Walking Dead. Did you get it?”
I slid down off the slab, looking around at the slew of groaning officers as they woke up from their awful dream. For a minute, I wondered if any of them had talking murder unicorns hidden somewhere in their psyche. I’d miss Duke, even though he’d kicked me in the face. Oddly, the dream world was a nice place. Beautiful. Besides, who wouldn’t want to live somewhere where you could bend reality to your will? With this mantle, I was practically God in my sleep.
Then again, I missed pulling souls out of smart-mouthed gods who thought they were better than me. No one but me could make them work together. Deep down, I was meant to be the Pale Horseman, even if the occasional break was kinda nice.
A hand latched onto my leg and squeezed. I looked down into the bloodshot eyes of one of the correctional officers, his face twisted in a mad sneer. He jerked my foot from under me, dragging me to the floor. My head bounced off the cement floor, and I blinked away stars while the officer’s hands closed around my neck.
“How does it feel?” he hissed out, his voice raspy. His hands tightened, cutting off the air completely. “Seeing and feeling the life slip away and being totally helpless to stop it?”
Ikelos, I realized as black threatened the edge of my vision. Apparently, he was only mostly dead. I tried to pry his hands free from my neck, but he was too strong.
Grammy let out a battle cry and smacked him so hard with the nightstick the sound echoed. She kept right on beating him over the head too, even after he let me go, stopping only when his body jerked uncontrollably. Moses had fired his taser into the officer’s ass. For good measure, the warden got him with pepper spray when he hit the floor and the poor guy screamed, covering his eyes.
“How?” shouted the Titan, whose face was swollen and red. Tears dripped down the side of his face, and his nose blew a snot bubble. “The gods couldn’t defeat me, and you’re just a human! A stupid, puny human!”
I pushed myself to my feet, rubbing my sore neck. “Dumb luck, mostly. You picked the wrong Horseman to mess with. You thought I couldn’t handle chaos? I thrive in chaos.”
He let out a desperate scream and lunged blindly at me.
I unleashed a blast of kinetic energy in his direction. It hit the officer, knocking him back to the floor. His head slumped to the side.
Moses rushed over, yanked out the prongs for the taser, and checked him for a pulse. “He’s alive.”
“Step back.” I closed on the down officer, a spell ready in my hand just in case he tried to attack again. He didn’t move.
The only way to be sure I’d gotten the thing would be to verify there was no magical energy present. Titans fed on magic, which meant I should’ve been able to feel it if the thing was lurking nearby. I extended my senses toward the unconscious officer and came up empty.
“He’s clean,” I said with a relieved sigh. “We finally got him.” I grabbed Emma by the waist as she came closer and tipped her back dramatically.
Her eyes went wide. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Hail to the king, baby,” I said and kissed her deeply.
We told everyone it was a training exercise gone wrong. Warden Kane helped us explain it to the affected officers while I checked each of them out. The accidental discharge of a smoke bomb interacted with swamp gas present in the morgue thanks to a faulty drainage valve, creating a temporary shared hallucination and loss of consciousness. The officers were all confused, but no one had any s
erious injuries. No one complained, especially when Warden Kane offered them an extra three days of paid leave each.
Once I was sure all the officers were free of any residual magic, I walked the prison grounds with the warden limping along beside me and made sure every trace of magic was gone. My flashlight moved over the dark public spaces of the prison along with my will, searching for anything out of place. I felt nothing. I’d done it. I had killed a Titan.
“So,” said the warden with a grunt as he climbed back into the golf cart, “you decide what to do with your old man?”
I sank into the seat next to him. Despite the bright lights lining the compound, I spied the first tinges of red in the eastern sky. Dawn was almost upon us, which meant I’d soon lose my hold on the Sandman mantle and become the Pale Horseman once more. “I’ve made arrangements with a local funeral home in New Orleans to retrieve his remains.”
“That’s surprising. I got the feeling you didn’t want anything to do with him.” He eased his foot onto the pedal and the golf cart jolted forward, headed back for the administration office where I’d left the others.
I watched the buildings crawl by. “He wasn’t a good person, my father. I can’t forgive or condone what he did to anyone, and I know he died exactly where he belonged. But if I hold onto the hate and anger I have for him, I’m no better. I don’t have to forgive or forget to treat him like a human being.”
Kane nodded with a grunt. “That’s the one thing people get wrong about running prisons. Some of the men here, they did monstrous things. They deserve to be locked up, every one of ’em. But they’re not animals. They’re still men, and every human, good or bad, ought to be shown some level of decency. If he ain’t, he forgets his humanity. You don’t come back from that. Doesn’t help many, but if it helps even one of them in some small way turn his life around, even a life behind bars, then it’s worth it.”