Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
CLAYTON
Huddled against the wall was a rumpled and tear-stained Tommy. Clayton skidded to a halt, just shy of trampling the boy. “Where’s your sister?”
The boy didn’t answer; instead, he did his best to burrow a hole into Clayton’s side. Clayton held the boy close, patting his back awkwardly for as long as he dared to risk it before pulling away and asking softly, “Where is she, Tommy? Let me help.”
Tommy jabbed a shaky finger behind Clayton and then wiggled and squirmed until he was between Clayton and the wall.
Clayton turned his head in the direction the boy had pointed, but he saw nothing other than a dingy stone wall.
He was about to ask Tommy to clarify, but before he could, he erupted into a sneezing fit.
Bloody underground cave wasn’t fit for anyone to live in. Clayton could barely breathe!
He tried to catch his breath, but his nose was just so blasted itchy. It was so bad that it took him a while to realize that everything around him was getting fuzzy and soft around the edges.
No, wait. That was him. What the actual fuck?
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Mal’s voice came from behind him.
Clayton could barely make him out through bleary eyes and fuzzy edges, but it looked like Mal reached his hands into thin air. His hands vanished, the air rippled around them, then he pulled hard on something invisible.
Only the something seemed to be attached to Clayton’s insides.
All at once, Clayton was big, small, hot, cold, and about a dozen impossible other things.
“Oh my gods, stop!” he managed to gasp. When Mal didn’t stop, Clayton pulled out the worst weapon in his arsenal of threats and added, “Don’t make me touch you. ”
Obsidian eyes narrowed, but otherwise Mal ignored his request. If anything, he pulled harder. Clayton clutched his stomach, certain it was about to decorate the floor with his breakfast—not that it would have made it any more disgusting—when he heard a loud pop.
All the pressure in and around him released, the incessant itchiness abated, and he hit the floor like a sack of wet towels.
Then a small body landed on him.
“Merry!” Tommy’s wobbly voice came from behind him.
The body scrambled off him and shouted, “Tommy, run!”
Clayton looked up in time to see another body land on top of him.
This one was larger and smelled of cinnamon and some other unnamable spice that made his nose itchy again.
He let out a very manly yell when another plopped down right by his face, narrowly missing him.
Then one more landed on his leg for good measure.
“I told you this place was a goldmine, didn’t I?” A greasy, male voice said from on top of him.
“Quiet! I don’t care how many of them there are; we aren’t supposed to be here. Grab one and let’s get out of here before we’re caught.” This came from the bloke using Clayton’s face for leverage as he pushed himself up from the ground.
“How did we even get here?” The final one, another male, came from behind him, where he was crushing Clayton’s foot into jelly.
“It wasn’t my fault. Something grabbed my spell and yanked us here.”
Clayton had the joy of experiencing this conversation through double vision and ringing ears. When the first man landed on him, he’d really rung Clayton’s bell, and the other two joining in had finished the job.
It would be a wonderful time for Mal to step in and do something incredibly scary. He’d made an excellent decision, allowing the man to join him. Or so Clayton thought, until he caught a glimpse of Mal slumped against the opposite wall, eyes glassy and half-closed.
Magic drain.
Shit. Mal would be no help for a while. Whatever creature he was, at least he didn’t have to worry about unmaking himself from overuse of power; only dreamwalkers and nightmares had that problem.
Clayton put Mal in the deal with this problem later queue in his mind.
The crushing weight on his torso abated, followed by, “I got one!” An animal yelp of pain accompanied the first man’s boast. “Grab the other little one. This guy is useless.” Clayton got a kick to his ribs, guessing that he was ‘this guy’.
His vision went hazy at Tommy’s cry of pain. Something deep inside his head throbbed sharply—that same nagging sensation of otherness he’d never fully outgrown—trying to get his attention. But he didn’t have time for it, so he pushed it aside.
Useless? How dare these complete strangers assume Clayton was useless? Just because he was shivering in a ball on the ground and moaning in pain didn’t mean he was useless.
He pushed himself to his knees and grabbed the second man’s leg, stopping him before he could run after Merry. This would be the perfect time for the roof to cave in.
He waited expectantly, but nothing happened. “Oh, come on!”
He gritted his teeth, tasting the faint hint of blood.
Sure, his affliction loved to follow him around all day, every day, spilling paint cans on him, tearing his trousers, giving him concussions, but when he needed it, where was it?
“Not even a single falling brick? How about a rat stampede? Is that really too much to ask for?”
The owner of the leg he was clinging to seemed to think so, or at least that was how Clayton decided to interpret the look of irritated confusion on the man’s face.
Leg Owner pulled back a fist, and pain flared in Clayton’s brain. He hugged the man’s leg, moaning.
“Wait, I haven’t hit you yet,” Leg Owner complained.
Clayton’s mind exploded. The faint throbbing he’d been shoving back all day had become a raging inferno of colors spanning the entire spectrum—some of which he’d never seen before.
Clayton could still feel the world around him, the rock digging into his knees, the squelching in his shoe where it had leaked, and Leg Owner’s leg clutched in his arms, but Clayton’s mind was not in the Real.
This was new. His affliction had never made him hallucinate before.
Clayton got an impression of something vast laced with a hint of fond exasperation, and then he was racing toward a point somewhere in the infinite distance.
A voice. No, not a voice. A sense of familiarity, of homecoming. A song.
Then nothing.
Dark, warm, safe.
This was a good place. Clayton couldn’t remember ever feeling so peaceful and at one with himself.
“He’s not here. Why isn’t he here?!” A feminine voice jarred Clayton’s tranquility.
It was laced with fear, and instinctively, Clayton tried to sit up, searching for the voice’s owner.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have misplaced his body.
He could panic about that, but something about the voice was hauntingly familiar and drew him away from his bodiless quandary.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on where he’d heard it before.
It had a strange accent he wasn’t familiar with.
Come to think of it, it was using a language he wasn’t familiar with, either—there were a lot of long vowels involved and a cadence strangely reminiscent of the odd smell the small army of men who had landed on him moments ago exuded.
Would Clayton be sneezing right now if he had a body?
Fortunately, Clayton had never met a language he didn’t understand. It was his one real talent outside of baking and likely the only reason he’d been accepted into the Guard in the first place.
“How can he not be here? Where else could he have gone?” This voice was masculine and was speaking the strange language as well. It was also painfully familiar.
It’d be nice if Clayton could see. But he supposed that, with having no body, he should be grateful he could hear.
Amusement rippled around him. And it wasn’t his.
:Oh my little traveler, how much fun you are. I would love to keep you, but something tells me you won’t stay.: A voice whispered through him, touching the core of his being and making him shiver.
“Stay? Stay where? Am I in an actual place? Because I thought I was having an episode.” Clayton sometimes thought his entire life was one long, drawn-out psychotic break, but this was taking things to the next level.
Laughter shimmered and winnowed its way through him, swirling his consciousness around like flower petals in a breeze.
Clayton didn’t recommend the sensation.
:Part of you is here… and part of you is there. Vis wouldn’t give you back quite so easily, after all. They and I don’t get along very well, you know.:
Before Clayton had a chance to even begin to unpack that statement, the familiar feminine voice howled in grief, and the sound shook Clayton to his core.
“Beloved…” The masculine voice crooned, “We’ll find him, I promise.”
“Excuse me, Mystery Voice, but should we maybe try to help them?” Clayton wasn’t sure what he could do, being body-free and all, but the couple sounded so sad and so lost that he couldn’t help but want to do something.
“Find them their missing person? I know an excellent tracker. If I can just get my body back, I’m sure she’ll come and help. ”
Once Adelle finished rescuing Fire’s project of the week, rather.
:Oh my dear, sweet traveler… You could help them, but what about your charges? Would you abandon them so quickly?:
Charges? Oh dear sweet Vis, the children. How could Clayton have forgotten?
“I have to go!” Clayton flailed about with his senses, trying to find a way out of all of this nothingness, but he got nowhere fast.
A sigh drifted through Clayton’s consciousness. :I thought so. Before you go, a parting gift.:
The being kissed him, right in the spot where all his headaches were born. Only, instead of a headache, he got a headgasm. It was as though every headache he’d ever had in the history of his life had ganged up and decided to apologize to him all at once.
:Now off you go, little traveler.:
There was a push, and the nothingness surrounding Clayton began to fade. He began to have the faint sensation of rocks digging into his knees.
He had knees again!
“Wait, Mystery Voice! What about the sad people? Will you help them?”
:They will keep until you return.:
And then Clayton was back in his body, kneeling on the dirty floor, clinging to some guy’s leg, and enduring the rather pungent odors of Boston Below.
Mal was still slumped against the wall, dead to the world. Merry was now struggling against Guy Number Three, and Tommy had his teeth locked on Guy Number One’s wrist.
And Clayton was still useless.
Except…
That spot in his mind. The one where all the throbbing migraines (and where he had begun to suspect his affliction came from) was altered somehow. It was as though a switch had been flipped. A very big, very important one he’d never known about until now.
What if…
Clayton flung out a hand in a punch. He’d been taught how to punch—of course he had.
He was a member of the Guard after all. All members of the Guard had to undergo self-defense training.
But only Clayton had ever been excused halfway through the course for his own safety.
Any time Clayton had ever tried to attack anyone, somehow Clayton was always the one who got defeated instead.
Sometimes his hand shattered on impact, or the rug under him slipped and caused his feet to take off in opposite directions.
On several notable occasions, he even managed to punch himself in the face.
Whatever the case may be, Clayton had never successfully managed to attack anyone other than himself.
The situation in the bar with his human chair had been an unprecedented moment of awesomeness, which Clayton in no way attributed to his own expertise.
But now something was different. As his hand struck out, it formed a fist and nailed Leg Owner right in the gut.
To Clayton’s astonishment, not only did he not feel the crippling sensation of bones splintering in his hand, but Leg Owner made a horrible croaking sound and doubled over, then slipped on a loose bit of rock and crashed to the ground.
The man’s head made the bowel-loosening sound of a rotten melon hitting a brick wall as it impacted the stone floor.
Leg Owner didn’t stir.
Guy Number Three cursed, dropped Merry, and threw an angry-looking spell at Clayton, who, in turn, kicked a piece of debris up from the floor—a bit of broken mirror—which collided with the spell and sent it right back at Guy Number Three.
“Yes! I just did that!” Clayton pumped a fist in the air, looking around to see if anyone saw him. Must have been a silver-backed mirror. Sometimes they could reflect certain kinds of magic.
Merry raced forward, kicked the man holding Tommy, grabbed her brother’s hand, and started dragging him toward the main tunnel.
Guy Number Three shouted, “Don’t let them go, idiot!
” But instead of doing anything about it himself, he was busy being incredibly pissed that half his magic shield had been torn away by his own spell.
The man holding Tommy—Clayton decided to dub him Jerkface because, well, just because, okay?—straightened and faced Clayton. “You’re one of those? Maybe you are worth taking after all.” Jerkface sneered, spat on the ground, and reached into his coat, pulling out one hell of a fuck-off gun.
Only it wasn’t a real gun; it was some monstrosity made of twisting wood and glimmering crystal that made Clayton realize he would have been better off if it had been a norm gun.
Clayton had a split-second to react, which was more than enough time to realize that Mal would be a great asset right about now.
Without thinking, he whipped out his crystal box and flung it at Mal, hoping against hope that the man could drain it of magic like he did with the spell patch earlier.
He winced when the box exploded on contact as its contents realized all of their potential at once.
Oops.
For a moment, Clayton thought he’d just murdered his only backup and was about to get vaporized by a magic gun, but then he saw a bit of his crystal box sticking out of the side of the massive fuck-off gun. Its main crystal was shattered, now useless and dark.
A completely unmutilated and definitely not dead Mal growled and shot to his feet, eyes clear and full of murder. Clayton nearly twirled in joy, until he realized he didn’t know who the murder glare was for. Then Mal stormed toward Jerkface, shot out a hand, grabbed the man by the face, and pulled.
Black veins crawled across the kidnapper’s face and spread down his neck.
Electricity sparked and hissed as Mal drew something out of the man.
Lightning arced and leapt for Guy Number Three, who hadn't succeeded at getting his shield back up.
Both men gave a strangled keening noise before collapsing to the ground as lifeless husks.
Electricity crackled in Mal’s coal-black eyes.
“That’s one way to do it,” Clayton managed.