Chapter Nineteen #2
The stance—like something from a Renaissance painting about the mythical monstrous defender of some embattled people. Legs astride half the road, his weapon held aloft, hair now almost a pelt, flowing back in the breeze. It was impossible, magical. She could have stared in awe all day.
But she wasn’t permitted to.
Because while she was still busy gazing in wonder, and he was trying to roll his shoulder back to where it was supposed to be, something just darted out from nowhere. Or rather—it seemed to dart out from nowhere.
Really, she thought it came out of a kind of split in the fabric of reality.
And it looked as mad as that suggested. Like a dog, in some cursory sort of way.
But with limbs and eyes and bones in all the wrong places.
It seemed as if it had a hand emerging from the place its head was meant to be.
Its head didn’t seem to be a head at all.
All she could make out was five eyes, all in a row, as if a spider had melted into part of its face.
It was horrifying.
And it was running right at Jack.
So she couldn’t possibly give herself time to think.
She wrote the word wall on the air, as fast as she could, and the second it was done she just flung it.
She pushed it at him with her mind and her hands and the pen, and for the second time no game show noise came.
Instead, she actually saw a thing made of bricks and cement swirl between Jack and the creature, so close to being in time that she could hardly watch.
Her heart was in her throat.
She tried to breathe and found she couldn’t.
I’m too late , she thought, about a split second before the thing smacked right into a wall that hadn’t been there an instant ago.
And she just couldn’t help it when it did.
She punched the air. She let out a little yelp of delight.
“Yessss,” she somehow gasped. As if this were a ball game, and she’d just made the shot that clinched the title.
Ridiculous, she knew, even as she did it.
But even more so when the thing started to get up.
And it was not happy about what she’d just done.
It bared teeth at her. Then bared a second and third and fourth row of them, just beyond the first. It was like looking into a tunnel of razor blades—and the moment she thought that, she remembered the story in the Gazette .
The cows with chunks out of them. These things aren’t just a risk to me, or her, or Jack , she thought.
Every time he slips up, or pushes too hard against this pact, they are there, waiting.
She couldn’t linger on that idea too long, however.
The thing had just broken into a run.
“Oh fuck ,” she gasped, and scrambled to write something else. She had to scramble to do it, because Jack wasn’t going to be of any help. Somehow, when she’d made the wall, she’d boxed him in. She could hear him yelling from the other side in that despairing, fuming way of his.
If you don’t die I’m going to kill you , she thought she heard, just as she scribbled more walls on the air.
And she couldn’t blame him for being that mad.
Because somehow the spell didn’t work this time.
It honked, and now the thing was no more than ten feet from her.
Ten feet , she thought, and closing fast .
She stumbled back to give herself time to write more.
But somehow the next words— move me —honked even louder than the last.
Like panic was making it come out wrong. She wasn’t focused, she wasn’t calm. She was falling over her own feet, while something Sigourney Weaver had once fought got to five feet, then four, then three, then god, oh god, it reached out one spindly, gristly hand-claw to grab her.
She saw it and scrambled back so fast she almost fell.
For a second she flailed, one arm pinwheeling, no part of her able to write a goddamn thing.
She had no idea how she even managed to hold on to the pen, truth be told.
But she did, she did, she hung on to it, and even as she closed her eyes and looked away from her own impending doom, she tried with it.
She scratched out something in a clumsy slashing motion.
A word she barely registered, just scythed through the air.
Not enough, she was sure, she was sure, she was sure.
But then she heard the sound. A kind of ghastly ripping, so grisly and gross she half knew what had happened. Even though her eyes were still tightly closed, she guessed, and tried to dodge what she grasped was coming. She went to step back, or to the side—but oh god, she knew she wasn’t in time.
And sure enough, she got a slap of something cold, and wet, all along her side.
As if she’d been hit by an enormous custard pie, hurled by a clown.
Only of course when she looked, it wasn’t cream and crust.
It was red, and sticky, and thick, and it was all over her, it was everywhere. It dripped off the tips of her fingers and the ends of her hair. Her blouse was ruined, her skirt was worse; she had to take off her glasses to get a good look at what she’d done to cause this. And then, there it was:
That hellhound split clean down the middle.
One half still kind of standing. The other collapsed in a heap of gore.
And after that it all went, and she could see beyond it.
She could make out Jack as he finished bursting through the wall she’d made.
All covered in brick dust and flecks of mortar, as if the whole thing had been as real as anything on any building in town.
She wondered if it would stay now, invisible to most but there for anything supernatural to see.
A monument to her clumsy witchy abilities.
Or, at least, that was how it seemed to her. Until she saw his face.
He didn’t even seem to register the mess she’d made of herself.
He just stared, awestruck, at the wonder she had become.