Chapter Eleven Taranis #3
The pain comes again, this time for my legs and ass, which clenches up like I’m trying to keep in a tremendous shit.
I should stop talking now, but I don’t. I’m so determined to lob the head off the beast that I fail to realize the only beast I’m fighting here is me.
“Because she’s the most talented woman I’ve ever met.
” The words are out before I can stop them.
They are the strangest words I’ve ever said.
My head. It must be whatever’s happening to my head.
The pain is . . . sensational. Damn near resplendent.
I need this irritating woman to get the fuck away from me before I promise to meet her at her hotel later and instead make a deal with Bia and the Meinad to let them have their way with her in the hotel’s back alley. That is, if I survive this.
I stagger back, clutching my head between my hands while the woman on the floor says, “You’re an asshole.
” These are the words I expect to hear from humans.
How dare you talk to me like this? Who do you think you are?
Drivel drivel drivel. But instead of punctuating her asinine statement with any of those pitiful follow-ups, she screams. Literally screams. And damn, would she make a fantastic final girl in a horror flick.
“What?” I snarl, but I feel something happening. I feel terrible. My head. My fucking headache . . .
“Your head!” she shrieks again.
“Taranis?”
A soft voice startles me. I look to the right. Monika stands there, and my whole focus is attuned to the stricken look on her face as she lifts her phone. “Let me call—”
“Don’t fucking . . .” Call anyone, is what I would have said—I don’t need her reporting me to the COE for electrocuting her fake friend. Only, I start to wonder if that’s what she was talking about when my vision starts to go dark and my body collapses.
I hit the hard tile on one knee, my headache fucking splintering.
It feels like I’m being stabbed repeatedly by the Meinad in the skull over and over.
I close my eyes as my hands fall out to the sides to steady myself.
The tile in this hallway beneath the light of so many lanterns is ice cold.
I try to use it to ground me, to remember how to breathe, but strangely all I can smell is Monika’s deep spiced-and-smoky-honey-scented perfume, and all I can hear is her voice in my head saying, Please.
Then several images slap me in quick succession.
The first, a glimpse of a small monster with hideous, scarred skin, bright-white eyes, and horns spiraling up over his head, ending in points that are deadly sharp.
The second, a blazing flash of light.
The third, the feeling of my entire body being thrown back and forth, sending pangs of agony shooting through all my limbs, making me feel like I’m being torn apart.
And the last, a dark, demonic voice whispering terrible things in a language I’ve never heard spoken before but somehow understand: Kill them all. Every last human.
I’m blitzed by rolling pictures, too many to track, that form a patchwork quilt in my skull, a maze that I follow and follow down, down, descending into the final ring of hell before I’m able to cross the divide and fight my way to freedom.
When reality resettles around me, I’m shocked to find myself in the exact same position I’d been in. I’d have expected to be lying flat out on my back, drooling like an idiot. Instead, I’m still kneeling there, listening to the voice of an actual idiot shrieking at me in her annoying falsetto.
“Oh my God, it happened! Oh my God, did it . . . Was it because of me?” Bright laughter tingles through my pain, pulling me fully back into the present.
I lift my head, surprised that I can at all with how heavy it feels.
It’s like my skull was crushed between anvils or like I got sat on by a whale.
I roll my shoulders back and blink my eyes open, though I can’t see shit.
Everything’s blurry, but I rise to stand anyway.
A dizzy spell causes me to reach out with both hands.
One of them lands on a skinny little arm.
The other lands on a shoulder that’s softer than the silk she wears. I turn toward the latter.
“Easy,” the voice says to me. It’s deep for a woman’s, and grounding. I find it soothing, and despite the tremors still rolling through my body in waves that recede like the tide, I’m able to exhale almost all my panic. Even some of the pain, too, subsides.
“Monika?” I say, blinking at her fuzzy outline.
“Yes.”
My grip tightens on her shoulder.
“Are you Taranis?” a higher female voice says.
“Of course he’s Taranis,” Monika answers in the same breath that I growl, “Of course I’m Taranis.”
“I think we should get you to the COE.”
“No way! We have to show eomma. Taranis and I need our picture taken together!” The higher voice giggles—giggles. Didn’t I just torture the woman a few minutes ago?
I snarl and take another step toward Monika’s blurry outline, away from the annoying voice, but I stagger.
“Whoa there, big guy. Whoa! Hey, I can’t take your weight.”
“I’m not that heavy,” I grumble, trying to find my footing. I feel like I’m moving through a swamp.
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” the other woman squeals behind me.
“Cynthia, please! Shut the fuck up!” Monika shouts in the meanest tone I’ve heard her use to date. “Get the fuck out of here. And don’t tell anyone about this.”
“About what?” I groan.
“I think we should head to the bathrooms. I think you need to see . . . umph,” she grunts, trying to support me as we make our way forward, but struggling.
The annoying girl squeals, “Okay, I’ll go get help!”
“No! Don’t go get anyone! Fuck . . . we need to get out of here quick,” Monika says to me in a lower tone. I’m aware of a door being opened and bright lights washing over us. “Here. Can you see?”
I nod, and it’s true. My vision has started to clear.
But there’s something touching the top of my head that’s annoying me, and for some reason—maybe because we’re clearly in a bathroom—the feeling of needing to shit has come back tenfold.
Actually, it’s a pressure higher up my spine than that.
Like a knot sits at the base of my tailbone.
“There’s something on my ass,” I grumble, voice deeper and stranger than before.
Monika doesn’t hesitate, the warrior in her moving with efficiency and not a hint of sexuality as she reaches for my belt and undoes it.
She shoves the ass of my pants down, boxers, too, while I grab hold of the edges of a sink made out of black stone.
Only, as I look down, my head thunks against something and my hands look .
. . weird. My vision has cleared for the most part, so why is it then that my hands look so strange?
Whatever bathroom lighting there is in here must be off, because my hands look blue and fucking huge. “Monika, what the fuck is . . .”
“Ssi-bal,” she squeals, followed by, “mein Gott” and “holy shit,” all uttered in perfectly native accents.
“That’s so fucking hot,” I whisper to her, voice sounding like I swallowed gravel and chased it with a bottle of scotch.
At the same time, she shouts, “Taranis, you have a tail!”
“A what?” I glance over my shoulder. Why is my tuxedo all ripped up? Frayed stitching sprays into my peripheral vision like the plumage of a peacock.
I expect to see Monika’s face. She’s a tall woman—tallish—and even though I’m six one, I strangely can’t see the top of her head. She must be bent way over. I start to turn, but she’s pulling on something on my ass and it feels fucking strange.
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” I zap her, only . . . the strangest fucking thing happens. Well, among the strangest. This is turning out to be a generally strange fucking evening.
She staggers back, clutching her chest. She hits the bathroom-stall door, which is closed, so she thankfully doesn’t fall through it as she rights herself and blinks her eyes open at me. “I . . . You . . . you electrocuted me,” she accuses, only she doesn’t sound pissed; she sounds more intrigued.
“I didn’t see anything.” I frown. There were no sparks, no small flares of light to show where I’d struck her skin. I’d meant to strike her gently.
“I felt it . . . here.” She points to her chest and swallows hard. “I didn’t think I’d have to ask you this, but please don’t kill me on accident. I’d prefer to know it was coming.”
I frown harder, and suddenly something behind me lashes out angrily into the space between us. She jumps. I jump. “What the fuck?”
She points. “Taranis, I told you! You have a tail. Look in the fucking mirror!”
I turn and open my eyes. With my vision clear now, there should be no confusion as to what I’m looking at. Who I’m seeing. But I am wholly and completely fucking confused. “I . . . don’t . . . understand,” I say, sounding just as idiotic as the idiot I left out in the Tunnel of Lights.
“Taranis, you reverted,” she says to me. There’s a sudden banging on the bathroom door. “And unless you want to have to explain this to the ambassador of South Korea and every other person at this party, I suggest we get out of here before Cynthia tells too many people . . . Whoa!”
Monika starts to fall back as the bathroom door behind her swings inward, revealing the elderly, pleasant-faced Korean woman who’d walked by Cynthia and me moments before in the Tunnel of Lights.
She stands in the bathroom stall now, aghast, before her shock morphs into a fear so crisp I can feel it like a breeze.
I know what she’s gonna do a moment before she does it—and so does Monika, who holds up both hands and says something to the woman in Korean.
Doesn’t fucking matter. The woman still belts out a scream that surprises me and sends a zip of lightning shooting down my spine.