Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Yet she’d had no real idea what she was doing. None at all. Zero. She’d just been listening to the voices.

  Because shit like engineering and high-level intellectual stuff and numbers and understanding cutting-edge science, that was way beyond her. She’d dropped out of school, too, just like me. Dropped out because… we really didn’t have an excuse for dropping out. She’d “needed a break.” Mostly we were just tired.

  And here I was, inside the head of a version of myself that had turned that exhaustion into a weapon she allowed the voices in her head to wield.

  “How fucking pathetic were you?” I yelled.

  Alt-me paid no heed. She wasn’t living me the way I was living her. Either that, or she had the willpower to ignore me when I didn’t have the power to ignore her.

  I hadn’t had two decades to learn how to build these bubbles, but that didn’t matter. Stab had hooked me into Alt-me. The ring boosted the signal. How, I couldn’t tell. I picked up nothing from it other than what Stab told me, but whatever it was, however it was built or programmed or designed, the Tsar’s ring added clarity to Stab’s mission.

  They hijacked the moment. The Fates brought the ring for Maria. She’d extended her hand to take it. But it—and I—just got hijacked by Stab.

  My sword was, right now, building an exact replica of the bubble Alt-me built in the future on a different curlicue of space and time.

  “Leif!” I yelled. “Stab is doing this!” Could his suit break the bubble?

  Alt-me hadn’t been standing on this Colorado road. We were somewhere flat and open, with nothing but burned cropland under a bright, summer moon. We didn’t line up in space-time, but we did in the gray. In what Alt-me knew as new-space.

  “What do you want?” Alt-me screamed at the sky. Every nerve churned. Every muscle cinched and spasmed. Our stomach roiled and our head felt as if ants ate at the inside of our skull.

  We buckled forward and heaved onto the dust and dirt.

  Her mind—not my mind, her crazy, swirling, angry mind—echoed the eddies and the whirlwinds inside the gray of new-space. They yanked on her map of reality the same way they yanked on mine, and spun up her feel for the world at velocities that made no sense. They whipped around her mind’s comprehension of where she stood, what direction she moved, how she needed to proceed, but she went nowhere in the real world. She coiled all that weirdness up into its own tornado, and if Alt-me let it go, it would scour the world.

  Make the connection, the distant voice said. The same voice I’d heard when I closed the mini-Incursion. Open the door, Del.

  Let all that energy transfer to another curlicue. Let it move and let it do some good.

  It wouldn’t do good. How could it? I knew exactly what happened when an Incursion opened. Bad things came through.

  “No more opening doors!” I yelled. I’m not crazy. I’m not Alt-me. I won’t open any more doors onto my Earth. I won’t.

  Leif, now suited but not fully zipped up, ran down the bus steps, and immediately stuck his gloved hand into the bubble. It sparked in both the gray and the real. He yanked it back, and shook his shocked arm. “Fight it, Philadelphia! Fight her.” He looked around. “The boss said our version of you was ranting about voices and doors and liars when he found her. She stole the Dragonslayer from us. She sent it away. Then he and the Commander put her down.”

  “I don’t know what the Dragonslayer is!” I yelled.

  The ghost in Addy yanked their shared arm up to her mouth. They watched Leif as if he, not the man controlling Addy’s body, was the ghost.

  Marcus and Harold made almost identical faces.

  Leif stood there all soldier-like and deceptively handsome, doing his best to pretend that he was a good guy when I knew—goddamn it, I knew yet again—that he’d long ago lost the strength to carry the world. He’d had it, once. When he had a family.

  He looked at Addy and his face took on a version of his what the fuck look, but this one held a genuine sense of disbelief, as opposed to the crazy-old-lady look he tossed at Mrs. K.

  He pointed at her but kept his attention on me. “Adrestia.” He nodded toward Marcus. “You will explain why you are traveling with Marcus Drake after we free Del. If you do not, you will not fare well, do you understand, War Baby?”

  Leif did not like—nor did he seem to believe—that Marcus was traveling with the blind woman standing next to the bubble.

  Something about the Fates made him keenly aware that he was alone in this world, and that awareness wafted off him in gray-world sheets.

  He peered at the bubble as if assessing its structure and size. “Stay back, Emperor!” he yelled. “The bubble is interacting with my wetwear. It’ll interact with the blockers in your blood.” He looked directly at me. “The last thing she needs is to lose her friends,” he said.

  My friends.

  Oh my God, he was right. Alt-me screamed because she craved connection, and those damned voices were connection. Not human connection, but something. How could I be so pathetic? So needy? That’s not me. It’s never been me.

  Pain blossomed through Alt-me’s brain and I screamed. I dropped to my knees on the cold Colorado pavement, under the bright sun, my sword in my hand, and surrounded by people—real and in the gray—who were not my friends.

  How could they be? I wasn’t part of their worlds. I wasn’t Alt-me. I wasn’t a long immortal, as Leif and Nax seemed to be. Maria, though now visible, never talked to me. Only Mrs. K.

  Ismene was just crazy enough to have some sympathy.

  But she was a narcissistic barbarian, so what did that truly, honestly, get me?

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Under that dark, Alt-night sky, out in the open in a field somewhere not-here, an approaching vehicle cast its headlights onto Alt-me.

  I looked up.

  Maria Romanova stood to my side, but she wasn’t attending to me. Why would she? I’m a footnote in all this. I’m a vessel, that’s all. Stab’s the hero here, not me. I’m just the on-switch.

  “Del!” Nax yelled.

  He looked like roadkill. He’d used his abilities before Leif’s blockers had worn off. They calmed the Burner fires roaring through his body, but the embers still smoked and wrenched his body in all sorts of impossible directions. He’d been fighting both the embers and their cages.

  Leif tapped his forearm. His suit powered up and a shimmer danced over its surface. It gleamed in the sunlight as if the fabric was somehow oily and overlaid with swirls and eddies of purples, greens, and oranges.

  Alt-me, in the Alt-night, screamed. Those headlights meant the end of everything she’d tried to build. They meant that she hadn’t worked hard enough, or fast enough. That she hadn’t done her job because she let her exhaustion slow her down and he’d found her.

  The vehicle door slammed.

  Del! the voice yelled. We have to do this now!

  She needed to keep the connection open because…

  Leif stuck his fist into the bubble.

  No! the gray screamed. No no no! I am the fearless and the bold, and you must conjure me into this world…

  The vision vanished. The hijacking stopped.

  I just wanted to walk away. I wanted to run. Why was I seeing these things now?

  “You’re not going to leave me alone until I do what you want, are you?” The voice wouldn’t leave Alt-me alone. Why would it leave me in peace?

  It didn’t answer.

  No one answered. Not Leif, who stared at me as if he was the one looking at a ghost. Not the messengers who’d brought me the Tsar’s ring, Addy and her passenger. Not Marcus and Harold. Not Nax, who looked as if he was about to topple.

  Not Mrs. K, alone in the bus. Not Maria Romanova, the ghost Duchess. Not the other ghost, the man, who I was pretty sure came with our new Fate friends.

  Because like so many other things, I had an inkling of the truth. A sort of understanding about how the past and the present fit together, and how the future m
ight just go, if I was smart.

  Fate things.

  But the one thing I didn’t know was what I was supposed to do. What door was I supposed to hold open? Where were the fearless and the bold for me to conjure? Not that I understood conjuring in either a magical or scientific sense.

  Yet Alt-me had. And somehow, I was supposed to finish the job she started. A job I didn’t want to admit to.

  “I’m being used.” I said those words loudly, and with more confidence in their truth than I should be able to, because of my Fate things.

  Because Stab was connected, as was I, as was the ring, and I had a conduit to more than Alt-me. I had a conduit to the voices.

  Leif looked like he understood better than anyone, except maybe Addy.

  “Who is using you?” Addy asked. No, not Addy. The man she carried.

  “I see you,” I said. “Addy’s ghost. You’re in control.”

  Leif looked between us. “Give me the sword, Del.” He held out his hand.

  “I…” I lifted my arm and my shoulder responded by swinging Stab in a figure eight. I wiggled my fingers and my wrist responded by rolling my super-sharp sword in a fucking ninja-move circle.

  “Whoa!” Leif stepped back. “When did you learn to do that?”

  “I never learned any sword moves.” Thrust, I thought.

  My body responded with a perfect thrust and twist move for avoiding a counter-attack.

  Leif and Nax looked at each other, then at me. Both men stared at me as if I’d turned into a green, raging monster.

  Philadelphia!

  I froze. “The voice is back.” Not back. It had never left. The bubble popped but the voice echoed through my gray-space-infested head. Hold the connection, Del.

  “Voice?” Leif asked.

  I couldn’t shut down that system. I couldn’t unplug that phone or turn off that radio or put down my sword.

  My fingers would not release the sword I gripped.

  Hold the connection.

  The connection was holding me.

  I bent over, gripped my knees, and closed my eyes. Stab’s hilt dug into the fleshy part of my lower thigh, her blade aimed outward toward the trees, but I knew all her pushes and pulls in that place she forced me to feel.

  Stab throbbed. Pressure pushed against my chest, then receded, then pushed again in a rhythm faster and discordant with my heartbeat. The accident over the little hill yanked on my extra sensing of Nax and Leif. And Leif’s glass-like, magnetic strength calmed the whirlwinds around us.

  “Stop,” I breathed. “Please, Stab, just stop.” I didn’t want this job. Not now. I had no idea what I was doing.

  Why did I have to conjure the Dragonslayer?

  The trees moved.

  “Hound!” Addy yelled.

  Something big rammed the back of the bus. Something massive and mostly invisible.

  A huge front limb appeared—just the limb and the plate-sized, taloned, bear-like paw—and swiped toward Nax and the men.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The paw sparked and glowed as if the hound’s mimicking skin wasn’t working correctly, and what had to be blood coated its talons. Only the paw was fully visible. The rest of the hound almost-vanished into the sun’s glare.

  It hissed and swiped again, the way a cat swipes at a threat more to show its claws than to actually fight. If this hound had wanted to—or could—do immediate damage, it would have already.

  A piercing, sharp howl reverberated between the trees and the bus, and the hound scooted backward like a terrified dog.

  “It’s injured,” Addy said. “It must be the one we hit.”

  And I… I couldn’t set down the ring, or Stab. One fist was curled around a piece of ruby-encrusted gold, and the other around the hilt of a sword. I couldn’t even maneuver the ring enough to put it on my finger.

  Alt-me’s world flickered into my vision again.

  I backed toward the wrecked SUV. “I’m being hacked,” I said. Alt-me was hacking me as if I was the one with the wetwear, not Leif. Me, the most “normal” of all the people here.

  I might be normal, but Alt-me wasn’t.

  “Who, Del? Who is hacking you?” Leif asked.

  “I don’t know.” Alt-me didn’t seem to have any more of a clue as to what was happening than I did. She swirled Stab in a future no one wanted, and did what the voices told her to do.

  Nax backed Harold and Marcus against the side of the bus. Addy moved next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “That hound belongs to one of the mean species,” Addy said.

  “Mean ones?” I held out Stab so I could look at the hound through her lensing. I couldn’t put her down, but I wasn’t going to melt into a screaming puddle of panic. “They’re all mean.” And this one was frightened, injured, and in pain.

  Addy stared at the sunlight shimmering along the monster’s back as a line of mirage-like distortion. The line ran at about the same level as the midline of the bus’s windows, and meant that this hound had to be close to my height at the shoulder. Another distortion outlined the hound’s injured leg.

  The hound was bulkier than the horse-like ones we’d seen at Paradise Homes. This one had a more rhino-like body, but with the same bear-like limbs as the other large hounds.

  “I think its leg is broken,” I said.

  “I doubt that will slow it down,” Addy said.

  The hound was close enough that with one leap it could rip apart Nax or Harold and Marcus, who leaned against the bus. Marcus looked like he was about to throw up. Nax stepped in front of them, even though he, too, looked like he was about to puke.

  Leif waved his arms. “Hey, big boy!” He held out his hands. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” He finished zipping his suit. He held up his hands as if approaching an angry bull.

  Addy’s entire body stiffened. She touched the smaller of her two necklaces, the one that looked like the emblem Erik gave Mrs. K. “What is your name?” she asked Leif.

  He ignored her.

  A sputtering seer popped out of Marcus, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “He’s Seraphim,” he spat out.

  Harold’s hand dipped under his jacket.

  Leif pointed at Harold while still watching the hound. “I can and will disarm you if necessary,” he said. He returned his hand to his bull-taming ways. “Aim at the center of the hound’s chest, or between its eyes.”

  “Who else came through with the Seraphim?” Addy asked in a way that made me think she knew already and that she was having a difficult time believing her own seers.

  She’d obviously had experience with this world’s version of Vivicus. Everyone here had experience with him, except Leif and me. And everyone but Leif and I reacted with a hint of terror. Huge, glamouring Nax did. Mrs. K knew the stories and seemed unwilling to accept a “good” version of the man. And now I had two Fates and a guy who I suspected was a hell of a lot more than he appeared to be, tensing as if Vivicus was some sort of unkillable movie serial killer who was never, ever going away.

  Stab didn’t seem to have an opinion, but my gut said yes, Vivicus was the crazy dude in the hockey mask with the machete, no matter how nice he was in a devastated future.

  “Seven of us came through,” Leif said in a sweet, soothing tone as he inched toward the hound. “Three of us went with a Guard Fate who met us at the ground Incursion at Paradise Homes. Ismene killed Kai.”

  Addy’s agitation increased. “Ismene, too?” she breathed.

  “That leaves me, Penny, and the boss,” Leif said.

  The hound sidestepped. A low growl came from under the shimmering line of distortion marking its back.

  Alt-me’s world flickered into my perception again. The dark returned, and the headlights. Someone yelled “Fan out!” Alt-me mumbled words I didn’t understand.

  A small bubble like the big one I’d just escaped formed around her hand holding Stab. It expanded out to about an eight-inch sphere, then collapsed onto her skin and Stab’s hi
lt like shrink wrap on a toy.

  I smacked my back and shoulder against the wreck and the real world reasserted itself. Alt-me worked a fucking spell and bonded the sword to her hand. She did some sort of techno-magic and made me unable to let go of Stab, or the ring.

  Because she was about to be attacked. Because she hadn’t finished what the gray wanted her to do. She hadn’t saved everyone.

  Addy stared at my hand and both of her seers fanned out around us, with the radar-like one sweeping. But her other, future-oriented seer seemed to catch not on Leif, but the hellhound. “We need to leave, Del Parrish,” Addy said. “We need to leave immediately.”

  My gut said to put Stab back on my scabbard and run for the bus. My soul said to grab Leif as I ran by.

  Because that same teeny weeny little poke in my gut that said to run also said that this running might well be Leif’s last chance. That the long immortal man between us and the injured hellhound wanted an opportunity to get back his strength. Not the “following the boss’s orders” strength he had in spades, but his own strength. His own will to figure out what needed doing and to do it correctly.

  He wanted to be fearless. Bold. Things a hero should be. Things that Leif was, right now, as he edged toward a wounded hellhound that probably could kill him, even with his nifty super-suit.

  Things I wanted to believe I was.

  And now I had a double-Fate I didn’t know—a Fate who had literally waltzed into my bizarre life only moments ago—telling me that we needed to leave immediately.

  The bonding to Stab that was happening because of the open connection to Alt-me terrified me. I didn’t like how fractured it all was, and how it didn’t help me understand what was happening around me. It didn’t help me connect, either.

  I wasn’t part of Leif’s world. I wasn’t part of the reflection of his world here in my own. I was an outsider, so why the hell did my gut tell me to extend my hand and offer a Seraphim a chance?

  That chance wasn’t mine for the offering.

  It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

  I was here for one reason, and one reason only—to use my connection through the curlicues and do the bidding of the voices.