11. Ben
Cress shook me awake in the dead of night. I’d slipped into rest without her, waiting until my eyelids grew too heavy. She explained where she’d been and handed me a tightly knotted bag that smelled of an old-fashioned apothecary.
“Since when were you and the queen bee in cahoots?” I asked groggily once she finished talking.
Turned out, the bag was from an old-fashioned apothecary. Wren had slipped out of the library again without anyone’s permission and left another probably worthless credit card behind to pay for the several bundles of herbs she’d lifted, along with a stockpile of verdant witch potions and tonics.
“Since the audience chamber fight, I think,” she answered. “Well? Will you give it a try?”
Her suggestion was something I’d wanted to do eventually, to get in contact with my Evenstar ancestors and ask for access to my magical inheritance. I got tired of her standing over me and wringing her hands about the reaction she feared I’d have. I dragged her, giggling, overtop me, and we ended up entangled with the covers and each other.
“As long as you’re in this bed with me,” I said, kissing the end of her nose.
She melted into me with a tired sigh. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
I recognized the look she wore and bundled her close until she fell asleep, fully clothed and all. With a dismissive glance at the bag of herbs, I stuffed it under my pillow before pulling away from Cress to untie her shoes and drape the sheets over her properly. Once I turned the bedside lamp off and got comfortable, I closed my eyes and tried not to notice how strongly the herbs smelled.
It was supposed to be a soothing blend, I guess. Lavender and valerian couldn’t completely cover up something foreign and spicy mixed in with them. The scent was supposed to influence my dreams and open my mind to a visit from a deceased family member. My chest ached when I imagined my one memory of Marie Evenstar when I’d met her on Samhain night. My kind, doomed mother.
Cress would’ve liked her. In another life, they’d be close, and Cress and I would’ve chosen to become celestial witches. While she seemed a solid enough librarian witch, I wore the blood affinity I’d been forced to take like an ill-fitting shirt. If it were truly possible to draw forward some of the magic I was supposed to have, well, I’d do it even if it meant I had to accept Wren’s help. I’d drag my aunt Jordan into the mix too for some more solid advice.
Despite me drifting off with my mother on my mind, I slept through what remained of the night without as much as a hint of a supernatural visit. Cress and Wren hid their disappointment quickly over breakfast, stealing glances over at Leona when she took too much of an interest in what we were discussing from her place at the head of the table.
“Today, we continue purging the lesser creatures,” the head librarian announced.
Jonah, the male librarian never too far from her side, remarked, “When presented with the conundrum of one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses, the boss chooses the big one for last.”
Leona frowned over at him. “We will clear the whole library.”
He nodded slowly. “If there’s time.”
I ate the last of my cereal without relish. We were having it dry with sides of protein bars. Mm-mm. The library’s share of the rations didn’t include anything perishable.
My appetite left me swiftly when I was reminded of what was at stake. When Myuna turned her attention on the library, anything we didn’t kill would return to her side. With that in mind, we split into two groups, considering the “lesser” creatures posed less of a threat overall, but there were a lot of them.
Once powered back up from a visit to the powercore, Cress shone like a prism. She was an asset in cutting down unnaturals for the rest of the time we spent in the bowels of the library. Leona pushed us harder and harder still to get our grim task completed. I felt like I barely slept a wink during this time…not the most ideal situation for a potential visit from an ancestor to fish for magic I might be able to combine with my existing affinity, if I was anything like Cress.
I would be the first person to tell you I wasn’t anything like Cress, though. In the evenings, she disappeared with Leona, Wren, and soon Jordan as well to continue practicing what they were starting to call her hybrid magic, testing the bounds of what within her was librarian, or celestial, or both. She returned late each night with an exhausted smile and the occasional superficial burn on her arms or face.
In the meantime, I put off thoughts of reclaiming my family’s celestial magic for a one-sided rivalry with Bianca, who gleefully slayed monsters with the zeal of someone searching out a true challenge.
Eight days later, once all the lesser creatures were killed, we prepared for the kind of epic encounter that had Bianca salivating. We all gathered around a table where Leona had laid out articles and small artifacts depicting artist renditions of a strange aquatic creature. “When I was a young woman, this unnatural animal washed ashore just north of Myrtle Beach. It took out two SPDI combat teams before Cerris City Library was contacted to contain it. We called it the Jellywalker.”
I couldn’t help a poorly muffled snort.
She shot me an unimpressed look. “Laugh if you like, but I watched it tear apart two senior librarians and maim a third in the time it took to cast a stasis spell. Myuna would salivate to have it under her control, and it is the one with the lowest power level of the eleven greater creatures that remain in the library. Best case scenario…it is already dead within the dry containment room we stuffed it in.
“In the much more likely case that it is awake and biding its time like the good little ambush predator it is, you have to be aware of what it can do and how it moves.” She picked up a wooden carving. “It is mostly legs. Eight feet of looming legs studded with jellyfish stingers that shred skin. It moves in quick bursts to overwhelm its prey, and its sting causes paralysis.”
The carving was passed around so we all could get a good look at how bizarre the Jellywalker was. Its head was helmeted like a jellyfish, with solid plates that might resemble rocks if it buried itself in sand or dirt. Under the rim of its cranium, it had dozens of eyes for full sight in every direction. It supported itself on five tentacle legs and had a hidden tooth-filled seam of a mouth on the underside of its head.
“Imagine the ocean having more of these things,” I said.
Willow glanced around before saying in her wisp of a voice, “The merfolk hunt unnatural creatures in the water like some of us do on land.”
“So there are more.” A few of my friends paled at my suggestion.
“Ben,” Cress warned.
I cocked my usual half smile her way. “Just confirming for my nightmares, thanks.”
“Anyway,” Leona said pointedly. “We are running out of time. Myuna’s new creatures howl outside our walls every night.”
I wasn’t the only one shuffling in discomfort. By some unspoken agreement, none of us had acknowledged that it seemed like unnaturals were calling to each other every night above our heads. Their trills and screeches were muffled by several layers of dirt and metal, but they were still present. It was easier to pretend the sounds were from the monsters still trapped in the library…but there were only eleven of those left, and they were all below us.
Geo had taken to standing guard over us at night, posting up in gargoyle form in the shadows of the library’s ground floor. He’d have told me if he killed any monsters…I think.
“The Jellywalker and the rest of our targets are unlikely to be as cowed by Cress’s sunshine as the lesser creatures we’ve faced. So, not everyone at this table will be fighting the Jellywalker. Sorry, kids, but Mad Ash would have my head if you got seriously hurt,” Leona said.
She more specifically had Willow, áine, and Wren agreeing in various states of reluctance to sit this fight out. áine would be helping the twitchy verdant witch nurse care for any wounds, while Willow was still too unpredictable in her magic and Wren was out of magic, in need of time and rituals to store new spells.
Cress squeezed my hand under the table, beaming. “She wants me to fight,” she murmured under the planning going back and forth between Leona, Jordan, Geo, and one of the older Crystal fae that’d been assigned to the library.
I smiled back, not having the heart to tell her that she was probably coming as a spotlight to blind the demented jellyfish. She needed to work on her channeling, because most days, she used up her storage of magic just by managing her over-bright Lux spell.
If only I could share my channeling ability with her. Our mothers had had the same general problem—Eris Darkmore was all power, and Marie Evenstar had channeling for days but little oomph to back it up. Because they were of the same affinity, they could share power. All the more reason I hoped to see my father’s spirit every night as my nostrils were tickled by the packet of herbs still under my pillow. My mother’s ghost had given me a spark of her channeling as a gift and promised to wake Liam Evenstar in the next life so he would visit too.
So, where was he when we desperately needed him to visit me?
It took a little over an hour to devise our full strategy for the Jellywalker. Geo would be the only one to engage it at first. Its expected tactic of jumping out of a corner of the ceiling to wrap all five legs around its victim would be ineffective with all those stingers scraping solid obsidian. After that, we’d whittle it down while keeping a safe distance.
A small smile lifted Geo’s face, a subtle sign of how pleased he was to protect us from this danger. “Let’s go,” he rumbled.
We headed down to floor negative ten for the fight. I was in the second group down and took the short ride as an opportunity to apply my blood runes. I pricked the pad of my index finger with a blade and traced the familiar shapes in my own blood up my arm. Strength, speed, agility, stamina.
During my inspection of my gear, I flicked out the hidden vial of blood secreted within the ring I was wearing. It was a weird shade of purple…a gift from Phaeron, who’d taught me a couple new symbols where it’d be appropriate to use dimensional blood. I could use it to give myself shadow talons or paint a third eye on myself to see through unnatural magic. I was saving it for a dire emergency.
As we faced the Jellywalker’s door together, waiting for Leona to unseal it, I swallowed my nerves. The fights were only going to get more difficult from here. We were lucky to be healthy and whole and have the advantage over this creature’s natural weapons in the form of Geo. Even the five Crystal fae, with their armor of rock and mineral and natural geode-like growths, would be assets. Roe stood with them, her silver flail at the ready and the magical armor flowing from her necklace to encase her in a suit of polished orange crystal with reinforced fists.
Bianca and I stood to one side, prepared to shoot and stab the creature from afar. The librarian witches were another cluster, swords and books at the ready. Cress’s handbook fluttered in graceful loops over her head, chattering away about the best places to get sushi that it’d recorded in Cerris City ten years ago with its last owner. She was blushing faintly, caught asking a rhetorical question that it made literal.
“Hush,” Leona said sternly.
“Hushing!” It dropped its voice to a whisper and flapped closer to Cress’s ear. “As I was saying, there’s a place on Fourteenth Street that’s to die for…”
Sighing through her nose, Leona went ahead and unsealed the door, opening it for Geo to step through. He lifted his shield high and rushed inside.
There was a screech of something scraping unfeeling stone. The fae and Roe pushed into the room next, with the rest of us following suit. I was so grateful I’d seen the Jellywalker in theory first, as it helped me make sense of the hissing, pungent creature that was unwrapping its limbs from Geo and scuttling backward.
The monster’s five legs were fully flexible, currently bowed to drop its helmeted head several feet. Its many orange eyes darted in separate directions all at once, taking in the crowd invading its containment area. We were in an extra-large room, a twenty-foot box with a ten-foot ceiling and a dirt floor it’d been burrowed in for who knows how long.
Dust flecked off its moist skin as it used those flexible limbs to start climbing the wall.
“Heads up!” one of the fae shouted.
Its undulating body made it a difficult target to hit. A silver-tipped bolt flew, and one of its eyes exploding with a splash of blue blood. I threw a few daggers while it reeled from the injury, getting them stuck in its helmet and a second eye.
One of the librarians hit it with a stasis spell in that moment, but the creature shrugged it off and scuttled further up the wall, clinging to the ceiling with its many stingers sticking it in place. It inspected us from above for a more ideal target, and that’s when Cress hit it with the concentrated light of her Lux spell. The Jellywalker screeched again in distress, its limbs retreating under its head that it suctioned to the ceiling to seal out the blast of illumination.
Leona unleashed a level-four spell, something I’d never seen Cress do. Living shadows curled into a ball shape at her side before answering to her will and the point of her sword tip. The ball became a giant hand, which attempted to pry the Jellywalker off its perch. In the meantime, a bolt cracked one of its protective plates, and I narrowed in on the weak spot, aiming to let fly a dagger to impale it in the brain and end this conflict.
White light suddenly flared from a new source…all of the monster’s intact eyes. They turned white and refocused in one direction, the person closest to the door. It unstuck from the ceiling and lunged at Aurora.
She screamed as its many stingers wrapped around her body. “Help!” she cried, her hand dropping her sword and freezing half extended toward us. The Jellywalker bundled her up in two tentacles before it scuttled out of the containment room on a desperate burst of speed.
“Fuck!” I exclaimed.
Bianca and I ran after it the quickest with our speed runes. It seemed to glance around with intelligence before sprinting straight for the stairwell and heading upward with impossible speed by skipping the stairs and using its three undulating legs to climb straight up the walls.
Bianca flashed a grin. “Race you,” she said to me.
She refreshed her speed and agility runes before charging up the stairs after it with superhuman speed. I, of course, did the exact same thing, only ducking from a warning shout from Geo. He half flew up the stairwell, landing and pushing off the handrails since his stone body was too cumbersome to maneuver back and forth for a seamless flight. The metal buckled under his weight, but he outpaced Bianca and me this way.
I worried the creature was somehow scouting for Myuna when it burst onto the first floor and paused, taking in a panoramic view of the library with a sibilant hiss. It resumed its flight upon spotting Geo cocking his arm back, preparing to skewer it with one of his signature quartz spikes.
Heedless of anything, the Jellywalker scuttled straight for a glass wall helmet-first and smashed its way through it into the streets. Bianca was starting to sing-song “Fuck fuck fuuuuuck fuck” since it was pretty clear the monster was racing for the audience chamber and the soul-eating goddess awaiting its arrival with one of our librarian friends in tow. She shot a silver-tipped bolt at its retreating back.
Geo circled higher to drop on it from above, but he wasn’t the humanoid form that landed on its helmeted head first. It was a block away and starting to truly outpace us when this new person grabbed the ridge over its eyes and dropped their weight toward the ground, unsettling its balance. Silver flashed, and one of its scuttling limbs came free in a gush of blue liquid, flopping like a boneless eel.
The Jellywalker squealed and shook the person free. As we gained on the monster and took aim at its back, our new ally landed on her feet and spared us a fleeting glance before sweeping her sword at the leg it tried to ensnare her with. It wrapped the limb around the edges of the weapon instead, and the woman released the handle, dodging being ensnared by the loops of its leg with impressive agility.
Bianca shot it through an already wounded eye, and the creature collapsed with one last hiss of air, deflating sideways to resemble a jellyfish in death. Geo landed on its head shortly afterward, further destroying the corpse.
“The fuck was that thing?” the woman asked in a voice like a roughened purr. She eyed the Jellywalker with disgust as she pulled her sword from its limp leg and went over to sever the two limbs still encircling Aurora.
“Identify yourself,” Geo rumbled. He bent to help disentangle Aurora at the same time she did.
She was murmuring, “Monster slain and a civilian saved. You got the footage, T?” Upon seeing his stone hands, she released the back of one of the legs and let him carefully peel it from Aurora’s shredded clothing and skin.
It took me longer than a blink to realize she had a small microphone taped to her ear and was angling a body camera toward the scene and Geo. “I know. I wasn’t expecting survivors either,” she said to the person on the other end of that mic.
Bianca got impatient and pointed her crossbow at the woman. “The gargoyle said to identify yourself, bitch,” she said.
Smirking, the other woman stood and said, “I just saved your friend, and this is how you treat me?”
“You could be an unnatural in disguise,” Bianca replied.
“By that logic, you could as well.”
I inspected the newcomer’s aura, seeing nothing unusual in the moving waves of power around her. She had subtle signs of a big cat shifter with her beast close to the surface. The fingernails she pretended to inspect were lengthened to claws through small slits in her gloves, and her naturally up-tilted eyes were slitted and amber. Fur seemed to pattern the back of her neck under the messy fall of a platinum blonde ponytail.
“Ladies, please. Let’s get Aurora back to our healers and put the claws away,” I said, stepping between them. Bianca immediately pointed her weapon toward the ground.
Geo lifted Aurora in his arms and turned to me. “Handle this,” he ordered. He fanned out his stone wings and flew toward the hospital, leaving me to deal with the two women, who eyed each other carefully.
“You must be an unnatural hunter, then,” Bianca said.
The cat part of the other woman was fading. She had a feral kind of grin that still lent a feline edge to her face along with her pointed nose and strong chin. Her blue eyes lidded at a lazy-seeming angle, and she had the kind of tanned skin that suggested she often worked out in the sun.
She touched a pin high on the leather armor she wore, close to the body cam. It resembled a hissing Medusa head, with several of its hair snakes baring their fangs. “Damn straight. Soon to be a part of the highest-ranked team in Chaos Inc. The name’s Grace. You’re survivors, huh?”
Bianca and I exchanged a glance and introduced ourselves. “You won’t be ranked anything if we don’t figure out a way to leave this pocket dimension,” I commented.
“Ah, well, do I have good news for you! I just got here with my teammate. Do you have a safe place for us to join you?” she asked.
“You tell us how you ‘just got here,’” I said with air quotes, “and we’ll take you there.”
I ignored Bianca’s hiss of warning. We needed all the help we could get to kill the last ten unnaturals waiting in their containment rooms, and this woman was a specialist in doing just that, with a teammate hiding somewhere.
“Lead the way, then,” the shifter purred.