Chapter 6 Yield
Yield
Sascia rolls away on instinct, and the scythe clashes on the street with a screech.
It should break—if it was regular crystal, it would most definitely break—but instead it bounces off unharmed, chipping away a small piece of concrete.
Sascia scrambles to her feet and makes a dash for the mouth of the alley.
Behind her, she hears the swish of the scythe through the air, connecting with her bag.
Holy hell, that was close. She only now remembers the nova-gun in her hand—not much of a clever girl, after all.
She aims the gun over her shoulder, shuts her eyes, and fires.
Her lids blast white from the shot, and a snarl follows a few seconds later.
The creature is still in the middle of the alley, an arm up to protect himself.
The flesh of his wrist sizzles charred and ashen from the power of the nova-light.
Petals rain down from his armor, fluttering to the ground in scorched bits, but otherwise, he is wholly intact.
For a moment, their gazes meet: Sascia’s wide with terror, the creature’s narrowed into threatening slits.
“I tried to tell you in every way I could,” he hisses, lowering his singed hand from his face, “darkness and light can only ever be enemies.”
His arm swings back for another strike of his scythe. Sascia abandons all reason and succumbs to pure animal instinct—she bolts.
Her boots stomp the street, her body bumps against the parked cars and trash cans strewn along 53rd Street.
She looks frantically around the empty neighborhood.
Damn her impeccable research and damn this perfectly secluded fishing spot!
She needs people right now, a hundred people with a hundred nova-guns, but there’s no one and nothing around that could help her.
The boy from the Dark is in pursuit and gaining on her—she catches glimpses of his neon purple Darkprints reflecting on the windows of the cars she sprints past. She fires two more blasts without turning or breaking her run. But his footfalls still follow, still so damned close.
When she rounds the corner, familiar landmarks flash past her: the deli where she sometimes stops for a slice of chocolate cake, the ramp one of her clients locked their bike on, and that—isn’t that frenzy of pixels the Times Square Tower?
She’s just come out to Seventh Avenue, which means Times Square is just a few streets away.
There will be people there, lots of them, and sufficient light to perhaps at least slow the creature down.
Too late, she senses a shift in the air, a whoosh of movement.
She dashes left at the last moment—the scythe grazes her shoulder instead of her head.
Her flesh stings, blood slicking down her arm.
Her lungs are laboring now, her thighs burning, but she bursts into a final gallop, because salvation is right there in front of her.
Times Square is—blessedly, thankfully—a pandemonium.
The famous red steps are full of tourists snapping pictures, with more loitering at the bottom for their turn. People are queuing before food stands, or browsing shop windows, or crowding around street performers. There must be hundreds, if not thousands—
But none of them is really paying her any attention, because this is the living, beating heart of New York and no one bats an eye at a girl running from an elf wielding a crystal scythe. It’s Times Square: the place is a cosplayer mecca!
She needs to figure something out, fast.
A glance back shows her the prince is slowing, forced to zigzag between tourists.
He’s not hurting any of them, has in fact tucked his scythe close to his body so that the sharp curved blade is towering above everyone’s heads.
His eyes are locked on Sascia, shadowing her every turn and shift.
He really wants Sascia dead, her specifically, for some unfathomable reason she does not have the presence of mind to go into right now.
But she can use this. If he isn’t intent on hurting anyone else, maybe that’s how Sascia can stop him.
There’s an NYPD precinct at the other end of the square, with cops always posted around it.
If she evades him long enough to get there, they’ll help.
Her nova-gun barely slowed him, but what about those nova-rifles police carry? Or regular guns with regular bullets?
It’s worth a try. She faces forward again—
And runs straight into a guy in a Mickey Mouse costume. They tumble head over heels, taking down the kids he was getting photographed with in the process. The nova-gun flies out of her hand, disappearing among the feet of the passersby.
“Watch it, lady!” the guy trills.
Parents are dragging their kids away, the Mickey Mouse guy is rolling in his costume, trying to pull himself upright, and Sascia is sprawled in the middle of the street.
The boy from the Dark has stopped a few feet away. People are giving him a wide berth. He looks down at Sascia, slumped on the ground like a limp doll.
“There’s no point in running.” His voice is bone-chilling ice. “Yield.”
Like hell Sascia’s going to yield.
His scythe comes for her—Sascia sends a silent prayer to the Dr. Martens manufacturers and kicks the heel of her boot at its blade.
By whatever miracle, the thick plastic of her sole proves a match for the crystal of the scythe.
The blade jams into the boot and Sascia uses the creature’s momentary confusion to kick his wrist with her other foot.
The scythe dislodges from her sole and flies from his grip.
Sascia twists to her stomach and scrambles over Mickey Mouse guy’s limbs in the direction she saw her nova-gun slide—it’s there, thank god, among the shifting feet of the onlookers gathered around them.
She lunges for it, just as the creature’s hand clamps around her ankle.
Concrete bores into the soft skin of her palms as he drags her toward him and retrieves his scythe in one smooth move.
Sascia clenches her teeth, mind pulsing with adrenaline.
In a burst of energy, she snaps up the nova-gun and flips to her back, facing him.
They come to a stalemate. Him, with the scythe inches from her neck. Her, with the nova-gun aimed square at his face—from this close a distance and set at maximum lumen, she could do some real damage, and it looks like he knows it.
Strangled cries ebb and flow around them. The crowd is backing up, no longer entertained by their fight. Nothing stands between the Darkcreature and Sascia now. Death is only inches away, at the tip of a scythe made of the blackest onyx.
She should pull the trigger; guns are fast, unavoidable. There’s a good chance the blast will hit him before he has the sense to push his blade into Sascia’s skin.
Yet she hesitates.
Her mind reels like the gyrating lights of a police car.
Red for fear and panic and self-preservation.
Blue for awe and wonder and beauty—here is a person she pulled out of the Dark, an elf from a fantasy film, a nymph out of a heartland forest. How can Sascia hurt him?
She who has loved the Dark all her life—how can she be the one to harm it?
Her index finger lifts from the trigger. Her arm goes slack; the nova-gun drops. In her periphery, she can see the crowd’s reaction, hear their cries of panic—but she only has eyes for the prince.
The lines on his brow unravel, loathing giving way to confusion. A muscle flexes at his jaw, disfigured by a long scar that starts at his ear and disappears into his collar.
A hissed question tears out of him. “Why won’t you strike?”
The column of the scythe trembles. He steps forward. His blade hovers over her skin, the promise of blood thick in the air. Shrieks erupt around them—Sascia’s screwed.
For the sake of wonder and beauty, she is absolutely screwed.
Then someone yells, “Freeze!”
Someone yells, “Drop your weapon!”
Cops break through the crowd, handguns and semiautomatic nova-rifles all aimed at the creature. They form a wall, closing in on him, and within moments, Sascia is behind it, sheltered, safe. Someone hauls her up by the armpits. She flips her hood over her head, trying to disappear into herself.
“Part!” the creature demands of the crowd. “I have no quarrel with you.”
The cops bark frantic orders in reply.
Sascia senses what’s going to happen. The crowd withdraws in dread, Sascia strung like a puppet among them, and the cop on the farthest left shouts a command, spit spraying from his mouth. He shoots first. The other officers follow. Gunshots split the air.
The creature straightens his back and flexes his fingers.
All around him, the shadows between the paved stones, the black around the giant screens, the darkness beneath every car and taxi, every foot and stroller, down every alley and side street—in the space between seconds, it all streams toward him, pooling around his feet, rising in front of his body.
He has called forth the Dark, as though it is his to command, his to wield. It coalesces before him, shadow shifting into solid black, a thick, shiny wall of it—the bullets ring against it and are instantly swallowed into its depths.
The creature steps through the wall of black, shadows clinging to him like a pet cloud.
Moths flitter around his face. His chin is tucked into his chest, his eyes dangerous slits beneath his brow.
He’s beautiful, Sascia finds herself thinking.
Skin hard and smooth as porcelain, hair like streaming onyx, face sculpted in the image of an ancient god. He is power and danger and magic.
Hurried movements and sharp orders draw Sascia’s attention. A young cop at the very back is hunched over a casket, assembling a weapon. Long snout, wide barrel, 500,000-lumen strong. A Dark-killer, military grade.
“Shield your eyes!” the young cop warns the crowd.
Stop, Sascia thinks. You’ll kill him.
The machine gun shoots a missile of nova-light at the creature’s chest. The stream of white is nearly a foot wide—nothing made of Dark can survive this kind of blast.
But the creature acts fast. He wraps the Dark like a cocoon around him. When the blast hits it, there’s a deafening crack that makes Sascia’s ears pop.
Every jumbotron, streetlight, and car headlight in the square dies instantly, as though the collision of the blast against the prince’s cocoon was an electromagnetic pulse. The square descends into darkness, broken only by the flaming red of the grills in the hotdog stands.
Sascia looks around frantically. There is nothing where the Darkcreature’s charred corpse should be, nor anywhere else on the square. Against her instincts, against all reason, Sascia hopes—that he’s alive. That he escaped.
The crowd gawks, equally perplexed, but Sascia has regained some of her senses.
She is the girl who pulled a humanoid monster out of the Dark, then was chased through Times Square by him.
This could go sideways for her very, very fast. Life might have just proven she’s not as clever as she thinks, but at least she’s still quick.
She slips through the crowd before the cops even think to turn their attention to her. She tugs her hood lower over her face and hurries down Seventh Avenue while sirens blare past her.
She takes the long way home.
Sascia locks the door of her bedroom and slides to the floor. For a few moments, she closes her eyes and breathes, counting her inhales and exhales.
Then, out of nowhere, something buzzes in her ear.
A panicked cry leaps out of her. Her hand shoots to the folds of her hood. Velvet wings meet her fingertips; cupping the thing in her palm, she raises it to eye level.
It’s a moth, bigger than the ones she’s been studying in her garden. Its forewings shimmer with a white Darkprint. A fringe of hair curves over its eyes and its antennae are long, oval, and feathered, their tiny touch tickling the soft pad of Sascia’s palm. Where the hell did it come from?
Sascia’s pocket vibrates—startled, the moth shoots toward a patch of shadow beneath her desk and disappears back into the Dark.
It’s a text from Danny: Where are you?
Then: There’s some insane news all over the internet.
Then: Tell me that’s not you, along with a link to a video of a guy holding a Mickey Mouse head under his arm, describing the anonymous person who collided with him while being chased by a scythe-wielding humanoid monster that could control the Dark.
Sascia doesn’t text back.
It’s me seems too irreverent an answer.