“Stupid boy,” Cavus said in a confused voice. “Why would you say that? You don’t have fangs and claws. You’ve never had fangs and claws. You just have a piece of a very old knife and a little light that will slowly kill you.”
What’s his problem? Teeth growled. Did he forget that time when I bit half of his face off? Because that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that fades away with enough group therapy and positive thinking.
I think he’s like Stell right now, I said, using my only point of reference for multi-bodied people. I don’t think this part of him knows that we killed another part of him.
“My comment stands,” I replied, seizing control back from Teeth and acting like his words were my idea all along. “I’m not letting you near Stell. Not any part of her.”
My eyes kept roaming for the source of the voice, but, like Merada, I couldn’t find him.
“But that doesn’t make sense, stupid boy,” Cavus insisted, in a sinister voice that somehow still sounded like he was trying to be patient and reasonable. “You can’t stop me. You can’t kill me with that little light of yours, ugly, stupid boy. It will only hurt me until I run away again. You’ll embarrass me, stupid boy, but the light takes more from you than it will from me. You’ll burn yourself out with it. Just like the old ones of your race did. Just like the other, older boy that looks like you did.”
Dad.
This was the second time Cavus mentioned fighting, and killing, a man that was probably the Challenger before me.
My father.
“You said you killed him,” I growled. “You said you killed my Dad.”
Wait, what? FNG asked.
Our father! I snapped. Our real father! Pay attention!
Geez, calm down, the dragon part of me replied.
But Breena stiffened behind me.
“John,” she whispered softly. “He killed John.”
“I didn’t!” Cavus protested suddenly. “He killed himself! And then the others on your world killed him on Earth before he could come back! I wasn’t even trying to kill him!”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, still baring all of the sharp objects in my mouth. “You mean the whole thing was some kind of tragic misunderstanding? Some kind of traffic accident gone wrong? Did you both fucking change lanes without using your turn signals?”
Language, Teeth cautioned.
Not now!
“He went after me!” Cavus hissed harshly, and all of the shadows around me suddenly danced. “I had never seen him before! I had never even fought his kind in the last war! But he went after me with his little light, until he burned himself out!” The Umbra’s voice grew angrier. “He cost me time! So! Much! Time!”
Another angry hiss swept through the shadow-trees.
“He set everything back! Getting my new worlds! Finding my little Stell! And it was none of his business! He shouldn’t have even known about me! But he chased me and burned me until he died for good! And you’ll do the same, stupid boy! You can only make me waste time!”
The hissing voice stopped, as if it was taking a breath.
“So I want to make a deal with you, ugly boy. I want to save all of our time.”
My head was spinning from all of this news about my dad. Too much for me to tell Cavus to fuck off like I wanted to.
Breena, I sent, trying to focus.
Yes, Wes? She asked, sounding just as dazed as I was. She had known my dad, too. And that was a subject I desperately wanted more time to talk about with her.
How is Merada? I asked, trying to figure out if we were even stalling this thing.
Cavus began speaking again before she could answer.
“Just hear me out,” the invisible Umbra pleaded, sounding a tad more coherent than before. “Let’s do this. You want the ones who really killed the other boy, right? The ones who killed him for good?”
“Father,” I spat, giving information against my better judgement. “The man you’re pretending you didn’t help to kill was my father.”
“And you want most the ones who really killed him, do you not?” Cavus hissed without missing a beat. “The ones who betrayed him? Who spat on his corpse as it cooled? Who made him look small, and weak, and wrong, to all who knew his name? Who mock him, even now? I can give you all of them. I can help make them pay.”
“Don’t need your help,” I growled. But the hissing voice only chuckled.
“No? Weak as you are, compared to them? You think the ones you want the most are only as strong as the ones who failed to kill you? They grow stronger by the day, as you do. They gain new powers and crowns, as you do. And they are many, as you are not. Their minds are whole, as yours is not. And they march forward in my favor, as you do not,” the Umbra ended as a growl. “But I can withdraw my favor from them, stupid boy. Make them fight on their own, as you do. Give them a chance to fail, as you have. It will not save you, because I will still come for these worlds and take your false crown, and you cannot beat me. But you will gain time, broken boy. I’ll even let you spend more time with the rest of my little Stell…”
My vision reddened. Teeth and I almost nuked the entire goddamn forest before Breena got to us.
Merada’s coming, she sent to me. She’s coming toward us. We’ll fight him together.
“Yes,” Cavus continued. “You heard me right. I’ll leave alone the one you’re with right now, until I’m ready for her. I’ll just go catch the other parts of her instead. It won’t matter in the end. She’s teased other boys in the past. She can’t help it. But it’s never stopped her from being my little Stell…”
Vision went red again. All the teeth in my skull started itching. Merada’s voice checked my rage at the last second.
“Alright, now someone tell me what the bloody hell is goin’ on over here,” Merada grumbled. “Yon Challenger is grindin’ his teeth so loudly I can’t hear what any of ye are talkin’ about.”
“Just leave her with me, ugly boy,” Cavus hissed quietly, and the look on Merada’s face told me she couldn’t hear him at all, somehow. “Just for five minutes. I’ll let you have years with the other parts of her, but this one is special. This one is new. This one is young. I won’t let you drive me away from her. Even if you burn yourself out completely like the other stupid boy did.”
My next expletive came out in a guttural roar.
“Lost hells!” Merada snapped as she leaped away from me. She still can’t hear him, the tiny, sane portion of my brain noted.
But the rest of me was too busy trying to shift into Teeth’s dragon form, and it was only half-working. Part of me was still digesting something from the wyvern I had slain earlier, which meant this situation was Teeth’s fault.
I’m trying to fix it! The Freaking New Guy snarled. Got it!
Body enhancements for dragon form successfully adapted, my mindscreen chirped. Senses improved.
Three new pieces of information became immediately apparent. The first was that the light coming from Breena and my sword didn’t seem nearly as intense anymore. My eyes adapted to it easily. The second was that the darkness beyond my light became less opaque.
The final thing I realized was that some kind of massive black limb was swinging directly toward me.
“Breena, move!” I shouted, desperately trying to dodge the incoming blow. Fortunately, the little fairy was a much smaller, more nimble target than I was. She darted out of the way in a trail of pink light.
I got about half my body clear before the pole-like appendage knocked me off my feet. I rolled into a tree-like shadow that painfully arrested my fall, then crumbled apart when my sword’s light washed over it.
It hurt like hell, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Cavus had knocked me farther than that on our first meeting. The next moment, I was back on my feet and charging back toward my best friend’s personal nightmare.
Cavus was no longer a tottering humanoid abomination or an unbalanced spider-ant. His current form, by far the largest, was a giant, snake-like cr
eature just as pitch-black as his previous forms. Its massive black coils were between me, Breena, and Merada. Breena was currently in her smallest form, diving easily around the coils trying to encircle her as she tried to find a way through the loop which was tightly walling off Merada. I was bounding off crumbling trees, so I had a higher vantage point and could see Merada directly.
The Umbras’ new head was a flat, pumpkin-like thing on top of his snake body. It would have been human, except that the number of features kept changing. The top part of the head kept creating small openings for eye sockets, where little multi-colored lights tried to escape, only to be yanked back at the last minute by something else inside the Umbra’s body. Beneath the vanishing and reappearing openings was a large, empty mouth that yawned impossibly wide Hanging off of the chin of that mouth, however, was another one, just as large, yawning just as wide, with another mouth hanging off of the second one, and I could see multiple subsequent mouths extending below his oily chin. At times, the mouths would collapse into each other and vanish, and alternately, they would double in number, but there were never fewer than three sets of jaws on Cavus’ new head.
Beneath that head dangled a series of hooked appendages, as if Cavus had originally wanted to be some giant type of shrimp before changing his mind. The segmented legs twitched toward Merada, and they were large enough that I could see more mouths at the ends of each of them—toothy, drooling things, with tongues that lashed drunkenly out of the openings.
Now that the monster was closer, my dragon-enhanced senses could make out that the leg-mouths were constantly talking.
“Gimme Stell,” they whispered in a hissing voice, over and over. “Gimme Stell, gimme Stell, gimme Stell..”
I tried to tune them out, but they formed a maddening backdrop against the sane parts of my mind. The monster’s head was hovering over Merada, leering at her with its horrifyingly kaleidoscopic features.
“Hello, my little Stell,” the Umbra said over the ‘gimme Stell’ chant of its leg-mouths. “Uncle Cavus finally got to see you. The rest of you didn’t want you to find out about me. But you can remember me now, right?”
The number of eyes watching Merada increased, making contact with her own brown pupils. She had been gripping her spear tightly, but after a moment’s pause,her entire body suddenly slackened.
“Ate them,” she said in the most timid voice I had ever heard her use. The spear slipped out of her numb hands, and her knees sagged. “I had a family. And ye ate them all…”
A hungry chuckle escaped the lowest mouth on Cavus’ face.
“She remembers,” the Umbra rasped. “My little Stell remembers her Uncle Cavus after all. They were delicious, little Stell. Did you know that?”
“They’re gone,” Merada said numbly, as if she couldn’t even hear Cavus. “And I left them… I left them all behind,” she sank to the ground, staring at her hands as if they had betrayed her. “Why did I leave them behind? I never run,” she insisted, as if she was arguing with herself. “Right? I never run…”
“How would you know, little Stell?” Cavus asked, leaning downward with his massive head. “You’re so young… so very young,” he moaned, and the leg-mouths all moaned with him, before he finally mastered himself. “Maybe this part of you never had a reason to run. But that’s okay now, little Stell. You can feel like running, if you want to, right now.” Thick black coils surrounded her completely on all sides, stacking on top of each other as if they were preparing to completely encase her from view. “You can try to run right now, and it will still be okay. Because there is nowhere for you to go anymore.”
Breena and I blasted him at the same time.
A roar tore its way out of my widening jaw as my battleform activated immediately, sending the magic of my six Ideals into overdrive. Lately, my dragon form seemed to be activating more gradually, increasing my size and muscle mass bit by bit. An iridescent lightning bolt blasted its way out of my forearm, flanked by tiny balls of fire, ice, earth, and blood. The blast tore through the pitch-black coils closest to Merada, shredding them and flinging wet, black lumps through the air. At the same time, Breena suddenly increased her size to her Dawn Fairy form and blasted a bright pillar of light at another patch of coils, making them crumble apart. Our two attacks were close together, so it created an opening wide enough for Merada to escape out of.
But the huntress didn’t move. She just sat there on her knees, clutching her head.
“Why did I run?” she asked herself. “I loved them. Why did I run? Why did I run?”
The Umbra had begun to scream in pain from our combined attack, but when he heard Merada, two of his mouths stopped screaming long enough to chuckle.
“Little Stell, do you not know yourself? You’ve been running from me all your life. You left your entire family behind. You left your world behind. And when I finally found you again, after all these ages, you left the ugly stupid boy behind, even though you like to tease him so much.”
“Tease him,” Merada repeated, and guilt suddenly flashed across her face. “I do tease him… and I did leave him… why didn’t I know?” she shook her head slightly. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
Cavus chuckled again, even as he slapped coils at me to keep me from coming close. But Breena was finally able to shrink down and dart through the opening to reach the side of her fellow Satellite.
“We didn’t want you to have to deal with him, Merada!” the little fairy insisted, as she tried to pull the larger woman out of the opening. “Stell didn’t want you to get any of those horrible memories! She thought you could be safe from all of that, and we didn’t think Cavus would ever be able to find us. When he finally did, it was too late to help you understand just what he really was!”
The last part was true, I reflected to myself, as I snarled and slashed apart more coils in my way. I had tried to describe Cavus to Merada, and the brave, carefree woman had scoffed at his appearance, saying he couldn’t possibly be that hideous, and that even if he was, she wouldn’t let something like that affect her. I probably would have felt the same, if I had heard Cavus described before seeing him in person.
“But it’s all true, my little Stell,” the monster retorted in a thick, wet voice. The leg-mouths below continued to moan their horrible chant. “Uncle Cavus ate all of my little Stell’s friends and family, just so that he could have the rest of her when he finally caught her. And now Uncle Cavus is here, and he brought some of his Little Stell’s old lights, just so that we could all be together.” More eye sockets opened up on the pumpkin-shaped forehead, and the little lights inside buzzed around even more furiously. “Can’t you tell they miss you, little Stell? I kept them all with me, especially your sisters and friends and mother. I brought some of them here, so that they could see you, my young little Stell. See you become first,” the monster finished with a drool.
Breena whirled on him.
“That’s enough out of you,” she said firmly, and power began to crackle along her wings. “And you’re too late to torment me here. Because this part of me isn’t afraid of you anymore. Begone.”
Cavus drew back from her.
“I see,” the Umbra hissed, and the leg-mouths took on an angry tune to their chant. “No matter. As long as Uncle Cavus gets a piece of his little Stell, he can work his way back into the rest. But you can’t stop me here, no matter how free you feel, Little Stell. Because I built this place just for you.”
I hated the bastard’s constant monologuing. But at least it made it easier for me to fling my fireball into his face.
The multi-elemental detonation knocked the Umbra’s head back as I came charging through the hole in his coils. Breena and I turned our attention back to Merada, but the Woad Princess was still on her knees, staring blankly ahead and shaking her head mournfully.
“Why?” she asked. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“On your feet, Merada,” I said as I pulled on her arm. Breena turned to send one of her sharp wing blas
ts into a nearby pack of coils that lashed our way. “We can handle this fight. We’ve beaten him before.”
“How?” she asked numbly, not rising to her feet, no matter how hard I pulled on her arm. “He’s eaten far stronger beings than ye… I never knew…” her voice became smaller. “I thought I was strong.”
Crown her, the familiar voice said in my mind. I rage.
The armband around my bicep began to burn.
Another piece of the monster whipped toward us. I ducked and made sure it missed Merada, but when I looked up, the coils were tightening around us again.
“Useless, useless!” Cavus hissed as he moved his head farther away, letting his coils protect it. “I can just grow everything back! Did you think I wouldn’t be ready? I came here for the freshest part of my little Stell! I won’t let you take her from me! Do you hear me,” he finished in a roar from at least three mouths, “Do you hear me, ugly, stupid boy?”
Eat him, Teeth growled in my mind. I need you to let us eat him. So he can shut the hell up.
“We need to get clear of all of this, or we’re finished,” I said, hurling a spinning blast of air to vertically bisect another mass of coils. And, true to the Umbra’s words, I noticed tiny grey hands crawl out of the pitch-black wound to begin pulling more flesh out of it, as if they had been hiding spare parts inside the Umbra himself. Meanwhile, the remaining coils tightened all around us and began piling on top of each other to form a giant wall.
“We need to get away from him,” I said as I picked Merada up in a fireman’s carry and began to run for the weakest section of the snake wall, Breena trailing behind me.
I rage, the voice repeated. Crown her, and write fearless love on her arms.
I raised Claimh Solais and swung the bright blade about in a circular slash. A thick ring of light blasted out from my weapon, shredding more of Cavus’ giant coils. Breena raised her new wand to fire at the closest remaining patch, making an opening wide enough for us to dart through.
Lighting Distant Shores (Challenger's Call Book 4) Page 8