Chapter 49 #2
A wonderland vista spread out like a banquet—snow, headlights, taillights, streetlights, golden windows behind which human lives were proceeding at their usual pace.
Even at this hour there was plenty of activity; an ambulance’s mournful cry rose in the middle distance, echoed through concrete canyons.
“Yeah.” Dakshi gazed over the railing, his hair teased by a strong cold breeze which died before it could reach her. “Never gets old.”
Erik drifted closer. “Everyone’s in position.” His shoulders were tense. “See if you can feel anything wrong down there, Liv. Just close your eyes and reach out.”
All you have to do is let it happen, Daniel said in the sparring room. Normally when a man said that Liv wasn’t inclined to go along.
At all.
But Erik was looking at her and he obviously believed she could do this, even if the hideous roaring pressure of so many normal, thinking people lurked just outside a small sphere of peace.
The sound retreated all the way when inside the temple, but out here she could feel it just beyond the fence of Sons, their net keeping her from drowning in an abyss of lives crowded together, a paved warren crammed to the brim.
So Liv closed her eyes and gasped again, because the lights didn’t go away, simply changed color and location. A broad, dense field of stars surrounded her, the bright ones trembling with voiceless cries.
It’s people. Every one of those is a person. Except those, they’re… other things? Maybe?
A swift, painless internal tug, a sensation of dream-falling arrested just before striking the ground, and Liv stiffened.
Erik’s arm was an iron bar around her waist, and they were moving again.
Overlapping rings of force poured through the Sons, and she felt Daniel in the distance like thunder on the plains during a road trip the summer after her senior year in high school, outracing a storm on arrow-straight roads reaching for the horizon.
How did the other lirai stand it? Her inner vision expanded with breathtaking force, sonar rings meeting and melding, dead spots where the Sons fell upon pieces of pulsating, clawed wrongness.
She felt the patches of bloodthirsty corruption, the breath in the Sons’ lungs, foxfire edging their crystalline knives and the broadswords Fathers carried, the Youngers choosing their shots carefully while a cloak of silence ate the bark of bullets.
More than knife, sword, or firearm, warm golden power with rainbow-dappled edges raced through the Sons, multiplying as it leapt from man to man, striking a nest of tentacled horrors in the basement of an apartment building, falling on the backs of lean pale hounds with their rows of sharkteeth dripping rank diseased foam, blaze-blinding the crimson-bunched eyes of scuttling horrors bearing only the vaguest relation to arachnids despite their jointed legs and pinch-waisted thoraxes.
Those eyes popped and oozed under the light’s assault while the things screeched and the Sons fell upon them, wading through thin stinking ichor, cleaning nest after nest.
There’s so many, she thought, and the consciousness of being in different places at once, pulled and pushed in a thousand directions, would have been terrifying if she’d had any way of struggling against it.
It went on and on. Battles fought in corners, in blind trash-choked alleys, under deserted highway bridges, on quiet streets between trim, closed-up homes, on the roofs of apartment buildings.
All that time, not a single mortal gaze was attracted. A knife-cold wind poured through concrete gulches, stinging Liv’s cheeks, and she sagged in Erik’s arms.
She hadn’t even realized he was holding her; the motion was jarring, disrupting her trance. For a moment the giant, pounding-surf roar of the city’s mortal minds poured through her, a butterfly transfixed on a pin.
Liv bent in half, retching. Erik’s hand was flat against her back, warm and sure. The cold vanished, and so did the terrifying sensation of fragmenting, her self splintered into thousands of blinking, breathing, fighting pieces.
“Easy,” Erik said. There was an odd chiming sound, a muffled thumping. “Easy, beautiful. Just breathe.”
The thumping was her pulse, high and wild.
The chiming was metal against something sharp; they were moving again, acceleration pressing against her midsection.
Someone yelled—it was Robert, a short coughing cry she shouldn’t have been able to recognize except she’d been in him a few moments before, a stringed instrument’s long wavering tone passing through an amplifier’s hollow throat.
More sounds—crunching, wet gristle-snapping, liquid spraying. The sense of absolute, sickmaking wrongness crested; the monsters were close.
And it was pretty likely they were pissed, too.
“They’re behind us,” Dakshi snapped. “Call everyone back!”
“She might not be able to.” Robert gasped at the end of the sentence. “But they’re on their way, they’ll feel her distress. Well?”
Yeah, distress isn’t the word for this. Liv struggled to breathe, shuddering. The monsters had found them, and everything in her screamed get out of here, get away, the blind imperative to run denied by heavy arms trapping her.
“They’re closing in,” Erik said. “Move. Move now.”
The world turned over, wind rushing past her ears. Thumping receded, her heart finally deciding to go about its business without alerting her to each squeeze. Liv coughed, her throat scorch-hot as Robert’s, the rest of her aching dully in every fiber.
There you are. A cold lipless voice squirmed under the skin of the world, reaching for the small struggling spark that was her invisible, barely conscious self. Little thief. Did you think to take my Sons from me?
She had wondered how they knew the Mad God’s name. Now Liv Stellack knew it too, and she began to scream like a small animal in an iron trap, bleeding to death while the hunter watched.
And while he stared, he laughed.