Chapter 2 Know Yourself
Know Yourself
Wally scuttled through the secret back passages of the Below. His nose twitched as he took in the myriad scents of this place. The dry smell of dust. The faint reek of garbage. The acidic burn of urine. Nothing surprising for the places between the walls where those who had little hope lived.
While the Below was thought where the poorest of the poor went, that wasn’t exactly true.
Here in this nowhere place were the most desperate driven.
Often they were mad, out of their mind due to biology or drugs.
They avoided even the amber, dirty light cast by the construction lamps that were strung every dozen feet or so along the passages.
Some of these places were so narrow that even Wally had to turn sideways to slide through.
His belly sometimes caused a little drag and he grunted as he sucked it in and slid painfully along.
“You need to lay off the cheese,” Marban chuckled in his ear.
Wally frowned. The old Swarm Shifter always had the hearing of a bat.
After all, Wally was only wearing a bluetooth earpiece in his right ear.
Marban was on the other end, even though it should have been Rose.
She was the person after all who knew where he was going.
But Marban had insisted on being in charge of this.
“You need to focus on the plan,” Wally muttered. “How far until I shift?”
They had decided that he needed to stay in human form until he was almost at the wall so he could keep in contact with them in case anything went wrong. Unlike Valerius and Caden, he couldn’t psychically connect with anyone in his rat forms.
He could imagine Caden at that moment. The kid would be standing up, rigid, by the couches in the tower, looking intently at Marban and Rose. Valerius would be beside him, rubbing his back and trying to keep him calm. The kid’s concern for him before he left was throat clenching.
“Wally,” Caden’s voice had caught as he had clasped Wally’s shoulders. “You have to be careful, okay? I mean like uber careful. The careful-lest.”
“Kid, I’m not a stranger to danger,” Wally had assured him.
“I know, but… your crime-lord past is… well…” Caden cast around as if for help.
“It’s in the past,” Marban murmured.
“You have no idea what I’ve been up to, Marban!” Wally’s mustache quivered.
“Negotiating plushie prices?” Marban smiled at him in that evilly benevolent way.
“Why you--”
“Wally, ignore him. He’s punching your buttons,” Caden begged.
The kid’s face was full of misery. Wally sighed. “I know I might be a bit rusty, but all I’m doing is watching. Not getting into a knife fight with the Behemoth.”
Caden’s hands tightened on his shoulders almost painfully. “If there’s even a whisper of them seeing you, you run away as fast as your little rat butt can.”
“Something like the Behemoth won’t notice a little rat!” Wally cried. “And think about finding other people involved in the plot. That’s worth a little danger, don’t you think?”
He certainly believed that. Caden’s expression though showed he didn’t agree.
“Promise me, Wally,” Caden insisted. “If you’re seen, you’re getting out of there. No heroics!”
From the strength of that grip on him, Wally was pretty sure Caden wouldn’t let him go until he agreed.
“I promise, kid!” Wally nodded vigorously, but he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth.
He was Caden’s Councillor. More than that, he was the kid’s friend.
He had been Landry’s friend too. He needed to do better by both of them.
Now was potentially his chance. After all, when Caden had heard he had a dark past, the kid could have turned away from him.
But Caden hadn't even asked him about his past. He knew that Caden was interested in his past, but wasn’t going to pry until Wally offered.
But Wally wasn’t ready to discuss things.
He didn’t know if he ever would be. He had closed the door on that life, on that person he had been, and he didn’t want to open it. Not even to glance in.
Slowly, Caden released his hold on Wally’s shoulders. “Okay. All right. I can handle this. Handle risking you in this little bit.”
“I know you want to go down with me all dragony-like but that will just let the Behemoth keep hurting people. Maybe not me or Rose or Tilly, but others,” Wally reminded him. “And you won’t be able to live with that, Caden. I know you.” He had pointed to the center of Caden’s chest. “Am I wrong?”
Caden’s shoulders slumped again and he shook his head. “I just can’t… Wally, I saw her frozen in that wall, turned to stone, and I don’t want that to be you. I don’t want to see that again.”
“Everything will be fine, Caden. The risks are worth it,” Wally reminded him. “I will be uber-careful.”
Caden had nodded, but still just looked more miserable. He clearly had not wanted to lose anyone else. Wally was going to make sure that didn’t happen.
“Not far now,” Marban answered, drawing Wally out of his thoughts. The pause before he’d answered was, undoubtedly, him checking with Rose.
“You could just give Rose the phone and eliminate the middleman, Marban,” Wally reminded him, not for the first time.
“You and I are used to working together. I thought it would be good to do so again,” Marban said.
On the one hand, Wally thought it was foolish for them to be speaking.
Shouldn’t he be silent and ghost-like--or rat-like--as the case may be.
But on the other hand, he was sure that the people down here knew he was here.
So maybe being silent would mark him out even more.
Yet he didn’t hear anyone. But these beings were used to being whisper-quiet. Still he was unnerved.
But speaking to Marban was not his idea of a good time ever. It was like someone was knocking on that door of his past and that knocking grew louder and louder the longer that Marban spoke.
“Are we going to go through this now?” Wally asked abruptly.
Marban pretended not to know what he meant. “I don’t understand what you--”
“C’mon, Marban!” Wally huffed. “You must want to talk about the old days, because the new days are strangely similar.”
“Both of us Councillors for two of the most powerful beings on Earth? Well, we wanted to be those beings before,” Marban chuckled.
His voice was cast low. Wally wondered if Valerius and Caden were listening.
Probably not. They were likely speaking quietly to one another.
But Rose was there. Rose should understand Marban’s depths, too.
She thought she knew them, but she only had seen Marban as her “Grandfather” and a crime boss that had to be obeyed.
Wally had known more of Marban as they had been equals.
So it was worth having this conversation.
“We could never have been so powerful as we are now on our own,” Wally pointed out.
There was a quiet moment. “No, I suppose not.”
It was almost laughable now to think of their seething empire of worms as anything compared to these beings that flew through the sky and could turn a world to ash.
When Caden had become the ninth Dragon Shifter, Wally felt like he had lifted his head to the skies after looking down at the dirt for so long.
He’d agreed to be Caden’s Councillor even though he feared being close to power again.
If he slipped off course once more, would Caden notice?
Would Caden stop him? He wanted to think “yes.” He wanted to think that life and circumstance had caused him to dig into his darker nature where there wasn’t that need now.
“We wanted to be out from under before, Marban. We wanted to be safe,” Wally said.
“Safe?” Marban snorted. “Neither of us was safe. The higher we rose, the less safe we became.”
“That was the irony of it all,” Wally said and grimaced as he continued to worm his way through these passages.
“We didn’t want to be victims anymore. Our lives were not our own before we joined with our Spirits.
Then we both became Shifters that people looked down upon.
So we were still under the heel of someone. So we did something about it.”
“Yes, those who stood before us, fell. They underestimated us. They disrespected us. They thought they knew us, but they did not,” Marban agreed. “We got our revenge.”
“Until we became the very thing we were working against,” Wally said and grimaced at the bitter taste of the words on his tongue. He was just halfway through this bottleneck. It would have been so easy to get through here as a rat! “Power corrupts.”
“Is that why you gave everything up, Wally?” Marban said silkily. “Trading in the power of life and death for the existence of a shopkeeper?”
“Hey, I love that shop! That shop is the best thing I’ve ever created! Don’t knock it until you try it!” Wally snapped.
“I know. I worked a day with you,” Marban sounded almost sad. “You were clearly happy.”
“You enjoyed it too. I know you did, Marban,” Wally reminded him.
He and Marban had bickered like the old married couple they’d practically been long ago.
But this time instead of who should live or die, whose life should rise to the heavens or be destroyed with a few whispered words, it was what color plushie should be where and what merch needed better product placement.
Marban had chatted up customers, increasing the size of their purchases.
Oh, you like werewolves? Have you seen our hoodies?
What about the snow globe with the werewolf under a moon?
And did you know that we have werewolf pens?
Let Rose ring that up for you. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed your day at the Emporium.
“It was a pleasant reprieve,” Marban admitted.
It had been pleasant. Wally had enjoyed Marban’s wit as he always did when it wasn’t cruel and acerbic.
“Can you imagine if we had built a store together instead of what we did?” Wally asked as he dusted off the stone that clung to his shirt now that he’d squeezed out of the end of the bottleneck.