Chapter 18
We walked for a few hours before finding a house in a small town for the night.
Despite my best efforts and sincere intentions to make use of this new boyfriend I had acquired, I passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow, and once more, I slept deeply, not afraid something would come to eat me.
The next day went more or less the same.
We encountered a herd of cows that were roaming the countryside unsupervised.
A little later, sheep. The wildlife seemed blessedly unbothered by the absence of humans.
I wondered, not for the first time, if it was really so bad that most of us were gone.
In the grand scheme of things, I wasn’t sure whether it even mattered all that much.
The monsters we encountered weren’t as frightening as the four-eyed purple one. They looked like big sloths, and since they didn’t appear openly hostile, Vergis just led us around them as they grazed and lazed in the sun.
That afternoon, Vergis stopped suddenly while we were walking past a lake, the water to our right, trees to our left.
“What?” Inkiri’s tone of voice took me from daydreamy to alert within a second.
Vergis’s head moved as he looked from the shore to the tree line. “Something isn’t right.”
“What is it?” I asked.
I could tell Vergis was looking around by the movement of his horns. Behind me, I heard the sound of a blade being slowly pulled from its sheath, and Inkiri pushed me behind him before pulling one of his own swords all the way free.
“I see nothing,” Nokim whispered.
“Oh, but they’re here.” Vergis drew his pistol. “I can feel their magic. Fucking Koa Esher.”
Inkiri and at least one of the others growled. “We won’t let them take you, Vergis,” Inkiri said before he glanced back at me. “Either of you.”
“What would they want with me?” My voice rose along with my panic.
“Conduit, remember?” Vergis said absentmindedly while he was focused on our surroundings. “They might not test you for it. Don’t tell them. Act dumb. Which is to say, be yourself.”
I sighed. “You’re being a jerk now?”
Behind me, Fellisse said something in their language. I didn’t have a chance to ask what was happening. A heartbeat later, it became all too clear.
Ahead on our left side, bagua stepped out of the woods. I wasn’t great at judging distances, but those bagua were maybe five car lengths away, and they were not the bagua I had grown used to.
They all wore white. Off-white, in some cases, just a white sash over what looked like a tan uniform, but white all the same.
Their ibex horns arced back, and their skin was shades of blue and gray, except for one who was celadon.
That one had a particularly mean glint in his eye. He was grinning, showing his teeth.
At a second glance, those bagua definitely were off though.
They were smaller, their skin speckled in some cases, and if I compared them to my guys, they seemed, well, pale was the best word.
Bloodless. Instead of the beautiful ibex horns, their horns were uneven and twisted in a way I recognized as wrong.
Their faces, in a lot of cases, also looked misshapen, eyes too small and too close together, the noses not quite fitting, jaws too big or too small.
Vergis hissed. “Shit.”
The others spoke rapidly in their language. Inkiri turned to me, and the expression on his face was one of distraught pain. He bent toward me. The leader of the white-clad dudes, the celadon one, said something in the other language as well, something directed at our group.
Inkiri ignored it and spoke to me in a hushed whisper. “Rory, my sweet human mate, I love you, no matter what happens here today. Remember it always, Sadir. I loved you. From the moment I saw you.” He kissed me hard and fast and deep.
Vergis turned and looked at me. “Guys, I have a better idea. I’m taking him to pass through the veils. You run and take out as many of them as you can. We’ll meet up at the Stone.”
“What the fuck?!”
I was screaming, my voice like a siren in the relative quiet all around us.
I had no idea what was going on here, but from how the celadon guy was smiling, it wasn’t anything good.
It was the mad kind of smile. The preacher at the commune had smiled that way, and I’d seen what that guy had been willing to do to other people.
I felt all the blood drain from my face.
“That could work,” Lissir said, never taking his eyes off the celadon guy. “Hurry.”
The next few things that happened all sort of blurred together.
Over Vergis’s shoulder, I saw the big celadon dude draw a blade of his own, and the short bagua with the twisted horns pulled small glass jars from their robes.
I saw something wiggle inside, and my unease ramped up by an order of magnitude.
“Go with Vergis.” Inkiri let go of me. “He will keep you safe.” With a quick touch, he teased the straps of my backpack off my shoulders and took it.
The next thing I knew, Vergis was grabbing my hand, hard, and dragging me toward the lake.
Then the air around us was filled with a whirring noise I recognized from when we’d set out: arrows. All of a sudden, this was real. I was in a fight and I didn’t know what it was about, but someone was shooting at me. And at the guys. Everything seemed to slow while my heart sped up.
Over my shoulder, I saw Nokim loose a few arrows of his own, and the four of them formed a half circle around me and Vergis, who was running into the lake with me behind him.
“You’re going to make a wish when I tell you to,” Vergis said, his voice too calm and even. “You’re going to wish for all of Nokim’s arrows to find their mark. When I tell you.”
My feet slapped against the pebbles of the shore, and then they hit the water, the splashes going everywhere. I felt more than saw an arrow whistle past my head.
“W-what?”
“When I tell you.”
Vergis slowed long enough to half turn and fire his pistol a few times. That made my ears ring, and I froze, shocked. I couldn’t count the shots, and it didn’t matter. When he lowered the gun, he grabbed me tight again, dragging me deeper into the water.
The others remained on the shore. I barely saw Inkiri pull a second sword and run toward the white-clad dudes.
He didn’t scream or anything, he just started slicing.
He cut into them in practiced movements with no hesitation at all.
Some fell right away. Some were already on the ground, writhing, staring at the bullet holes or arrows in them.
But still there were more guys in white against just the four standing their ground.
More arrows whistled around us, and my heart was racing. The water was cold, so cold. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want my monsters to die. We’d only just met. I’d only just started to understand how I felt about them. About Inkiri.
“No, wait!” I dug in my heels.
Vergis was way stronger than me, and he jerked me forward. “We have to. They want me, not the others, so move.”
“I’ll stay!”
The water was up to our chests now. Vergis spun. “Wish for Nokim’s arrows to fly true now!”
“No!”
I was not going to just go along with whatever this plan of his was. I was not going to leave people. Cat was gone. So many others were gone. And I was never leaving people behind again. Not when I was already falling for one of them.
Vergis’s hand connected with my cheek in a slap that rattled me. “Those arrows need to hit, or they die. Now, human.”
It was that tone of voice that did it, the finality of it. I didn’t want them to die.
“I wish for all of Nokim’s arrows to fly true,” I said.
The heat came instantly. All of it happened instantly. Where Vergis had a death grip on my hand, I felt something like that pins-and-needle feeling you get when your arm falls asleep, and a luminous brightness wrapped around the both of us.
Then Vergis pulled me along, shouting something I didn’t hear over the ringing in my ears, and all of a sudden, I was underwater.
I clamped my eyes shut when I felt the water against them and thrashed in panic. Either that panic or something else finally, finally detached Vergis’s hand from my own. Just like that, I was free.
I didn’t know where I was, where up was, where air was. I moved my arms and legs in the icy water, my lungs burning with the need to breathe.
It took a few pushes of my arms, but suddenly, I broke the water’s surface, and there was air. Air! I sucked in a lungful, coughed, forgot to tread water, went under again.
The second time, coming up was easier, and while I splashed wildly, I managed to blink my eyes open and take in where I was. There was an unfamiliar wrongness to the place. The shoreline didn’t look right, and the light was too dull and milky. The air felt colder.
“Ink!” I screamed, although I didn’t have enough air to make my voice really carry. Staying above water was a struggle. I was wearing clothes and shoes, and they were dragging me down.
The shore was farther away than it had been before, and it looked different. There was a forest there, but it was a lot denser than what had been there before.
I was freaking out, pretty much, but I needed to get out of the water, that much I knew. There was only so much panic I could allow myself while also swimming. I wasn’t a great swimmer. I had to make it to shore while I still could. I started curling my arms and moving my legs.
The relief that washed over and through me when my feet hit solid ground was unreal. I pushed my heavy body onwards to shore, taking breaths that made my throat feel raw.
My lungs burned too. I looked left and right.
The shore here was sand, dark gray sand.
There had been pebbles before. It all looked different now, and it was cold, so much colder than it had been.
Or maybe that was my waterlogged clothes.
Had to be. The thick clouds in the sky were definitely new though. It looked like there was rain coming.
“Ink! Fellisse?” I stood, battling dizziness. “Lissir?”