Where was that shard Mrs. Carmichael dropped? Nothing obvious appeared at the bottom of the distortion bubble. If anything, the wiggling bubble surface looked like a heat mirage.
I looked back at the mirage at the bottom of the bubble. It didn’t look like water. Stars swam in there.
It looked like the clear evening sky.
I looked up. A similar mirage danced along the top of the bubble, but in this reflected dead grass, ice… and the shard.
Was the top the bottom, and the bottom, the top? Or was I looking at yet another manifestation of the weird visual manipulations of hellhound- and Nax-glamour alike?
Physics or magic? Was the shard up or down?
Ismene screamed. Mrs. K shrunk down in her chair. Alt-me flickered ever so slightly as if I was looking at her through water, and the resulting refraction angle.
There had to be a way to figure this out before Ismene got to me or I dropped the chunk of shielding on my foot. I didn’t need broken toes.
My toes. I looked up just as I kicked a piece of ice into the distortion.
The ice skidded into the bubble on the straight trajectory kicked ice and rocks always took—catching on every uneven bit of the ground while its mass kept it moving more or less in the direction of the kick.
And it all happened upside down in the bubble.
Except it didn’t. It couldn’t. Because if it did, the hellhounds would be coming out with their talons up and their backs down.
“Del!” Alt-me yelled. “Get it done!”
That shard was the catalyst that opened the distortion. If I dislodged it from the bubble’s membrane, would that be enough to close the distortion?
I juggled the chunk of ballistic shielding. What if I dropped the twenty-five pounds of special material in my hands on top of the shard? Would that be enough of a disruption?
But most importantly, could I toss something that was already making my arms shake the five necessary feet to get it into the center of the bubble?
I shifted its weight. “I hope you don’t end up in Hellhoundville.” Just this once, let the universe smile upon me.
I tossed the shielding.
The membrane of the bubble flexed inward with the chunk. It didn’t pop, or allow the shielding through. It puckered like a sheet of stretchy plastic.
The chunk “landed” on the mirage, floating at the top of the distortion, a good foot short of the shard. A snake-like “tunnel” of pulled distortion membrane flowed from where I tossed in the chunk to… I couldn’t tell. It curved down and up at the same time, and clearly contained the chunk, but its edges shifted around like an Escher optical illusion.
Nothing else happened. The distortion continued to shimmer and throw off power. It still pulsed with velocity, even though nothing obviously moved.
A small hellhound, one about the size of an Australian shepherd, ran out of the distortion. It bounded past me and up to Ismene.
The chunk distorted the distortion, but did nothing to close it. “Shit!” I yelled before I remembered I needed to be quiet.
Ismene pulled up short, the sword held above her head, and her face a mask of shock and awe. “What did you do?” She looked down at the hellhound. “Go on,” she said to it.
It “barked” a rainbow blast at her, then ran toward the trees.
Alt-me vanished, as did Mrs. K. Nax must have moved.
Ismene wasn’t looking at me, except she was looking at me, but offset a little bit. Not a lot, but enough that if she swung her sword, she’d miss.
Nax must be casting an image of me close enough to my actual location that it might—just might—be enough to fool all of her enhanced senses.
Thank you, I thought.
She used the sword to point at the tunnel in the distortion. “That, right there,” she said, “is not supposed to happen.”
“Looks like it did,” I said.
She stared past me at the place Nax must have made her think I stood. “Why are you bothering? It’s going to close on its own.” She tipped her head at the weird angle again. “When the big one does.” She pointed west, into the night sky.
So the blister on the lawn was connected to the blister in the sky. Why wouldn’t it be? “When?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Depends. It made two passes around the world where I come from.”
How much did I want to know about the end of the world? Because that was a weight worse than carrying around the chunk of shielding. And I couldn’t toss the end of the world into a distortion.
If I knew, would I stop fighting?
Ismene pinched the bridge of her nose. “We had a good run, you know? You and I. We were besties. But then you started with dumb stuff like…” she waved the sword at the tunnel again. “… like this. So I ate you.”
Nausea burst in my gut the way the damned distortion was supposed to have burst because of the shielding. All her threats. All her screaming. Every bit of her disgusting, weaponized stench. And her officially saying that she ate the Alt-me she knew was enough to make me throw up.
Or maybe it was the final straw. But I would not puke in front of a monster.
“We will never be besties,” I said, and I was pretty sure she really was about to eat me.
Nax might be offsetting me in her perception, but that wouldn’t last long. I’d dodge one, maybe two swipes with that sword before she figured out where to actually swing. She was about to slice and dice me for easier consumption.
Maybe I could attach my corpse to her and make her flop back to where she came from.
Had I given up? Did Ismene win? I tried to close the portal and stop the hellhounds. Nax and Mrs. K tried. But when the world ends, it takes most of its people with it, me included.
“Do your best to keep everyone here safe,” I said, hoping Nax would hear me.
I glanced at the distortion one last time. My head rotated, and my eyes refocused. I thought nothing of it—no one thinks about the body movements it takes to re-center one’s attention—until my refocusing felt… different.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what changed—or if anything had changed. But in the process of rotating my head, I picked up the distortion’s sense of velocity.
Not movement per se, not exactly speed, either, just that part of the universe was rushing on by no matter how we all stood still.
Ismene raised her midnight sword to strike me down.
Something—someone—grabbed my arm.
Chapter Twelve
Nax was there. Huge Nax with his bear-like beard and his massive shoulders. But Nax didn’t have me. Nax grabbed Ismene’s sword wrist.
Someone else gripped my arm.
A regal woman in Nineteenth Century clothes peered at my face from no more than a foot away. Dainty lace poked out from under the collar of her military-style jacket, and around the jacket’s cuffs. She wore her long, thick brown hair in a braid on the back of her head. Her blue eyes gleamed so brightly they shimmered as much as the terror beasts outside.
Yet she wasn’t standing next to me. No one stood next to me. No one touched me.
I was looking at a ghost.
“Mrs. K!” I screamed. I saw her ghost. I saw the long-dead Russian Grand Duchess, Maria Romanova.
Why would seeing a ghost I already knew about make me upset? It made no sense.
Except that it did. The ghost felt like the distortion. The same unmoving whipping. The same sense of velocity without all the sensations that came with it. The same irrationality to its reality.
Nax yanked Ismene’s arm down and to the back at an angle that should have dislocated her shoulder. But Ismene rotated with his pull, and slapped the palm of her free hand against his chest.
She burned through his shirt. A puff of yellowish, acidic smoke burst off his chest. He howled and flung his body away from her, but somehow kept hold of her wrist.
The ghost of Maria Romanova imitated the flex of Ismene’s sword arm, then pointed at her own mimic of Ismene’s sword-holding hand.
Then she pointed at me.
“You want me to take her sword?” I asked.
The ghost nodded, then waved her hand between the sword and me.
I was to take a magically-sharp sword away from a demon-goddess who’d just fried Nax, the Emperor of Glamours.
Nax punched Ismene straight in the nose. Her head whipped backward so fast that her neck should have snapped.
It didn’t. She stumbled and her entire body heated.
Nax howled again and let go of her wrist. He vanished.
“How am I supposed to get the sword from that?” I asked, but the ghost had also vanished.
I looked around. Had she been as much of a mirage as the upended poles on the distortion?
Where was Mrs. K? Nax was still hiding her, but I knew the location of her chair in relation to where I stood. Maybe the ghost gave her more info—
A dragon appeared opposite Ismene’s sword arm, but not a flashing, hellhound-like dragon. This dragon gleamed with green and gold scales. Huge, piercing horns grew from its forehead. Its long, thick tail ended with mace-like spikes.
It breathed fire directly into Ismene’s face.
She coughed and staggered, then laughed. “Too chicken-shit to make a real dragon, huh, Lesser Emperor? Even at the end of the world, you’re still too scared of the Dracae to mimic one of them, aren’t you?” She laughed again.
The dragon vanished.
Ismene placed the sword on the scabbard. “Beware the dragons!” she yelled. She pointed at me. “Looks like the Lesser Emperor abandoned you.” She cracked her neck. “Couldn’t take the heat.” And snickered at her little joke.
He had to be nearby. Would he help? She’d burned his chest and hand pretty bad. But if Nax couldn’t stop Ismene, how was I supposed to? How was I supposed to get the sword?
Mrs. K touched my hand.
She and her chair were right next to me. Right there, right off my elbow. “The scabbard clasp,” she said.
The strap holding the scabbard onto Ismene’s back wrapped over her sword shoulder, between her breasts, and fanned out into three thinner straps across her opposite hip. The clasp sat above her hipbone, between the single over-the-shoulder portion and the three-strap web.
The clasp itself appeared to be mechanical like the array of articulated, almost insect-like legs that gripped the sword. The blade lay flat against the scabbard, and the legs curled around it. Nothing touched the actual edges, only the flat side of the sword.
The buckle looked similar, except the “legs” interlocked.
Ismene had done a specific pull when she lifted the sword off her back—up, out, then up again. The buckle probably needed a similar set of movements in order to unlock.
“I can’t get it off her unless I know the combination,” I said to no one in particular, hoping that either Mrs. K or her ghost would hear.
No one answered.
I was on my own. “Ismene!” I yelled. What was I doing? I had no clue how to get the sword, much less the scabbard. Would she set me on fire if I touched her? Would she take a bite out of my shoulder?
She scowled, but didn’t step closer.
“Who did you steal that sword from? Who did you kill? Was it me?” I was grasping at straws, but was pretty sure no emperor laid it upon her shoulder and sent her out as his Bitey Knight at the End of the World.
The heat and light flared off her teeth.
Did she steal it from her version of me? “Give me the sword.” I might as well channel some of Nax’s swagger. I wiggled my fingers. “If it’s mine, then you need to give it to me so we can get on with whatever it is that you plan on doing.”
Her brows crinkled. Her frown deepened. “We aren’t friends.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course we aren’t friends! Would you be my friend if I showed up and threatened you?”
She pouted. I’d managed to confuse the demon-goddess.
“Give me the—”
A wolf-sized hellhound burst through the distortion, no more than three feet from me.
I froze. My body wouldn’t move. Ismene scared me half to death but she also made me mad enough that the clarity of indignation overrode my body’s need to curl up into a little screaming ball on the icy ground.
A hellhound was a completely different type of terror.
It wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t a bear—God knew it wasn’t anything from the reality I lived. But it had wolf teeth and four fast legs and the damned thing flashed and dazzled. The deepest parts of my brain knew that if I ran, it would chase. And chasing meant I’d be dead within seconds.
The hound wagged its enormous head, sniffed at me, and huffed.
“Sit!” Ismene yelled.
The hound huffed again. A line of red appeared around its nostrils and quickly pulsed down its neck to its belly, where it divided into three new rings, one of which continued to its tail, one reversed back to its snout, and the third stayed pulsingly, glaringly stationary.
“You think so, you stupid beast?” Ismene yelled. “Don’t you dare—”
It leaped right by me and directly at Ismene.
“I will cut you!” Ismene screeched.
The hound ignored me, yet it knew where I was. “Nax?” I called. All the hounds had ignored me. I’d assumed it was because Nax was glamouring in a way that made them not see or smell me. But now I wondered.
Nax didn’t answer.
Ismene descended on the hound. She wrapped one arm around its great head and sank her teeth into its neck. Hound flesh sizzled. The beast wiggled but Ismene knew where to bite.
She ripped off a hunk of its flesh. The wound did not bleed, as if her teeth had somehow cauterized it. Cooked meat and acid stench rolled from them both.
Ismene spit out the hellhound flesh. “They taste like cold water octopus and rabbit stew.”
Gross, I thought. I never thought I’d feel sorry for a hellhound. They weren’t particularly smart, and she’d killed it out of vanity.
Ismene pointed at the sky. “Do you understand the power you can have? The world burns and here you are, a witch unwilling to learn.”
Couldn’t stop the end of the world, but I could stop Ismene and the killing and the distortion puking out evil puppies.
So I did the craziest thing I could think of—I charged Ismene and slapped her across the face. I must have surprised her, because touching her didn’t boil off the skin of my palm.
I dropped my hand to the scabbard clasp.
If the sword was mine, if I was the one who was supposed to be wearing the scabbard, then maybe, just maybe, Alt-me set the combination sequence that would open the clasp. And maybe, just maybe, she and I were more alike than I wanted to admit.
Because I didn’t want to be Ismene’s bestie. I didn’t want to be some type of witch wielding a black-as-midnight sword and housebreaking hellhounds. I also didn’t want the world to end.
I slapped the clasp, then squeezed it top and bottom as if it was a regular slide-in clasp, like every other one on every other bag I’d ever carried. I figured that I wouldn’t set it up to do anything weird, because I’d always forget.
The clasp released, and the scabbard slid off Ismene’s back.
“You little—” She whipped around suddenly as if hearing someone approaching that I did not.
Nax carried a log on his shoulder, one about the diameter of my head, and a good three feet long. He swung it like a bat.
Ismene flew to the side. I dove for the sword.
And everything I knew about the world changed.
Chapter Thirteen
My hand swept downward. My finger slid between two of the crisscrossing arms holding the sword.
I touched the midnight blade.
Cold bit into my fingertips, and a colder world into my mind.
I wasn’t in my space. I wasn’t in my head, though I was in my head. Alt-memories wrapped themselves around my consciousness like a brand-new version of an old sweater I’d had for ages—the arm
s and neck fit, and the waist draped correctly, but the entire thing scratched.
They called the blister in the sky The Incursion. It had opened over the world the same way it had over my world—red, blue, and yellow, and raining death down onto every city below. The invaders started over Japan. They moved west. The world became a burned-out husk of soot and death.
And I remembered.
Fires burned over the horizon and filled the sky with smoke. The evening sunset blazed the same red, blue, and yellow as The Incursion and the world smelled of the unwashed, electrified acid of Burners. Hellhounds ran the now-empty streets of Aurora.
In the alt-version of reality, no mini-Incursion had opened onto Paradise Homes. Burners had snacked their way through the staff and Ismene had set off enough oxygen tanks to take down both buildings.
Ismene crouched on the smoking, crackling rubble. She crouched and cackled and her eyes burned. Behind her, dragons broke the world.
And the midnight-colored blade, the gladius in her hand, was a talisman of power, an object of great manufactured magic made by the mages at Praesagio Industries, and a thing that might save everyone.
They did not understand how. Nor did I. But that sword knew it belonged with me.
The Ismene on the rubble knew. She was a Fate, a powerful one, and she knew. So she trained Alt-me.
Trained me to fight. Trained me to survive.
We were to build our own empire among the craters and the ruins. We were to lead humans and hellhounds. We were the true queens of all the versions of time and space.
I couldn’t remember how Alt-me died. Did Ismene eat me, as she suggested? Or had I been shot, like she’d screamed at Nax? Did a hellhound get me?
I didn’t think so. Something—someone—else took me down. And Ismene came looking for a replacement.
I yanked my fingers off the blade.
Somewhere, right now, The Incursion hung over my world. That evil blister in the sky would cause the end of my life. Everyone’s lives. The entire planet.
I couldn’t be the bitter, broken Del Parrish I’d felt when I touched the blade. I couldn’t be tempted to destroy just to cement my place as a sword-wielding wasteland warlord.
Witch of the Midnight Blade Page 8