Chapter 13
A Swan Dive over the Edge
When Brady first died, impaled on rebar at the Fischer House party, I was devastated. We didn’t yet know his death was temporary.
When Griffin sailed over the cliff in Clyde on the way to Raven’s Lagoon, I was equal parts terrified and hopeful. At least then I knew there was a chance he’d come back.
When I had to watch while Magnum’s hired guns shot Layla and Hunt, and then pointed a pistol at my head, I was both furious and horrified. What if one of us didn’t come back? What if I didn’t, and that was the last I’d ever see of the people I loved?
When Griffin exploded into charred bits inside Clyde, that especially shook me. The damage to his body was so extensive, the likelihood he’d resurrect was slight despite our history.
Through all that, and through the endless reboots, threats, lies, and deceptions, I’d more or less kept my cool. Sure, I’d puked from the trauma, and I no longer enjoyed pleasant dreams but nightmares I fought to escape.
But now? This time? When Fanny revealed herself to be a literal monster from some … some hell realm, only to eat my sweet, wonderful dog? The only being I loved on this entire fucking planet that wasn’t immortal … ?
I’d been on the edge before. Now, I took a swan dive over that edge and I was in free fall.
Whatever composure I’d still possessed vanished so suddenly I didn’t even note its passing. One moment I was gaping at the nastiest, most hideous cunt I’d ever had the displeasure of seeing, the next I finally snapped.
I lost my motherfucking, ever-loving shit.
My scream morphed from a keen of loss to a violent, assaulting battle cry.
Distantly, I registered my friends at my back, calling to me, both aloud and via our secret bond. I didn’t process a single one of their words. I’d plummeted beyond the reach of measured reason. The entirety of my focus homed in on a single mission: Get Bobo out of the monster as fast as possible.
Fanny’s head was still mostly teeth—so many awful teeth, long like fangs, crowded and overlapping each other.
Like a macabre circlet, her jaws crowned her head, which continued to point upward as she appeared to relish in the meal she’d just consumed.
Her gullet bobbed as if she were swallowing.
With how many teeth she had, I worried she might have them on the inside, too, coating her throat.
But I didn’t notice any movement that indicated chewing.
Her eyes were closed as she seemed to savor her prey, as she trusted that she was the apex predator here, and we were her and Magnum’s playthings, to do with as they pleased, just as they’d always done.
I launched myself at her, tackling her to the ground.
She uttered a surprised gasp, with a whoosh of foul-smelling breath when I landed on top of her—which meant I also landed atop Bobo. But I couldn’t worry about what damage my weight might be causing him.
He was inside a monster. I had more immediate problems than my crushing weight.
From her neck down to her hips, her chest was engorged. Beneath the skin suit she apparently wore, maybe she didn’t have an actual rib cage. Again, like a snake, the outline of Bobo’s body pressed against hers, the ridges and bumps of his form deforming hers.
I straddled her hips, and when she shot her arms forward to restrain me, I gripped them—and realized my error. Bobo gave her a massive potbelly—and was in my way.
She bucked her hips to throw me, and fuck was she strong. She almost managed it, but I held on, snarling as I fought to keep my balance.
Beyond her disgorged torso, I eyed her head. Its teeth gnashed, snapping at the air. She screeched—more foxes being slaughtered.
Without a blade or gun—any handy weapon would do—and unable to damage her chest for Bobo’s sake, my best bet was to break her neck.
I sensed my friends crowding around us by the shadows they cast. I kept my attention on the monster beneath me, on keeping astride it.
Someone delivered a brutal kick to its head. Fanny screeched some more. Then another of my friends joined in, and they kicked her head from both sides. Constant blows rained down. Her cries became a continuous wail pitched to make the ears of mere mortals bleed.
I yanked one of her arms down to the ground and stepped on it, leaning my weight onto it, pinning it in place.
I squatted onto my other leg, gripped her other arm with both hands, and slammed it down against my knee.
The bone snapped as if it were a branch, tearing through her human-looking flesh to poke through in two jagged pieces.
She whined and bucked, arching her laden back upward.
With her pushing her chest upward, the outline of Bobo’s body was prominent.
I clutched the wrist of her broken arm to either side of it and brought it, too, down hard across my knee. The wrist snapped, though no bone poked through this time.
I’d have to try harder with her second arm.
I repeated the process on the other side and did manage to push her bone through her wrist.
The monster squealed and gnashed its teeth in the breaks between the kicks to its head.
Monster-Fanny was still strong, still fighting so that I struggled to stay atop her.
I knelt over her, pressing a knee against the arteries along both of her inner thighs, and did what I never once, in my entire life, so much as imagined myself ever—ever—doing.
I hooked my curled fingers around the fleshy snood that hung loosely around her neck like a scarf … and tugged it down.
It was a little bit like peeling a banana. Enough that I might never eat the fruit again.
I stripped her of her flesh suit down to her hips, revealing more of that slimy, shiny, pasty, gray flesh.
And more Bobo. Bare of her borrowed skin, the outline of my dog pressed against her upper body, clear as if he were simply covered by a blanket.
Seeing him more clearly, trapped inside her, drew another savage cry from me. As if he’d been buried alive, I began digging at the barrier between him and me.
I rended and ripped at the gray flesh—strangely cool to the touch.
The monster’s screams, as disturbing as they were, faded into the background while I zoned onto my singular task.
Save Bobo. Get him out of there.
I yanked and tugged and shredded flesh until I hit the black of Bobo’s fur, wet and slimy, slick instead of fluffy and soft like it usually was. At some point, other hands joined mine in excavating as I continued to unearth my sweet boy.
Until all of him was exposed, curled into a tight ball within a large, gaping body cavity. Indeed, the monster had no ribs, and there was nothing to indicate whether Fanny, in her true form, was actually a female or male.
Finally, I rose from where I’d knelt my weight onto the monster’s legs, keeping the beast immobilized while I dug Bobo out.
With the kind of care I’d taken with him when he was just a tiny puppy, entirely vulnerable and dependent on me to meet his every need, I slid my arms under his body.
I couldn’t fully ignore the squelching that accompanied the action, or the way I was reaching into a body, dammit.
Slowly, the reality of what I’d done, what I was still doing, began returning. Sounds, which had been muted and dull, started sharpening. My pulse, a constant whooshing that had acted as a buffer between me and my surroundings, began to slow, to hush.
Bobo slid from inside the monster with a pop like a calf bursting free of its mother’s womb.
His weight flung against me, knocking me onto my ass. I fell awkwardly, half seated, half sprawled across the monster’s legs, the bunched-up human suit, which felt, incongruously, just like flesh, even though it had pulled off like a costume.
Bobo’s weight was heavy across my lap, pressed to my chest.
“Is he alive?”
The question floated toward me as if from a great distance. But it arrived now. It touched me.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, sounding foreign to my own ears.
“Fanny’s dead,” another of my friends told me, though my senses were still emerging from the haze, not yet capable of identifying which of my friends had spoken.
I bent over Bobo. His chest was unmoving. His eyes were closed. His body entirely limp when I moved him.
Someone’s arms tugged me and my precious cargo back off the monster’s body. Ah, not someone. Griffin. I always did recognize his touch before anyone else’s …
His legs slid around mine, bracketing me. His arms rested gently on my thighs beneath Bobo. His head rested softly on my shoulder in silent support.
“Is he breathing?”
This time I looked up and was met with Hunt’s stare. The dark chocolate of his eyes was bright amid the blood and gore that had splattered his face.
For the first time, I noticed that I was covered in it. I’d be getting it on Griffin. My fingers and arms were coated in gore.
I bent my head over Bobo’s, examining his nose, his mouth, then his chest. No movement whatsoever.
I shook my head. Hunt’s eyes darkened.
My sweet, sweet boy. All Bobo had ever done was be a good dog. All he was to blame for was loving me, loving my friends too. His goodness was met with evil, with a terrible darkness. With greed and a power-hungry need for more, more, and ever more.
It took me several moments to realize I’d begun speaking.
“No. No. No,” spilled from me, over and over.
“Joss. Baby,” Griffin whispered soothingly at my ear.
“No!” I only said it louder. I only meant it more.
“Everyone, get away from me. Don’t touch me.”
I didn’t bother couching my request in politeness.
Griffin, being the awesome bestie-boyfriend that he was, slid back and away from me without comment or question.
Around a monster’s body and the blood and gore of its insides—gray like the rest of it—my friends knelt and crouched on the ground. They circled Bobo and me but didn’t touch us.
“What are you gonna do?” Brady asked, his words sad as a dejected trombone.
Bobo might have been my dog in name, but he was all of ours. We all loved him.
And we’d already lost enough.
I closed my eyes and cradled Bobo’s heavy, limp body. I ignored the goop that coated him and felt beyond it to what was only him.
My pittie. My baby boy.
And then I recalled that, somehow, in some inexplicable way, I contained power beyond this world’s understanding.
I had, apparently, gifted my friends with immortality.
I’d presumably taken lightning or something from one of the institute’s students.
According to Hunt’s father, I even walked his dreams. I could speak telepathically to my friends.
And I could love them and Bobo so freaking much that it practically felt like a superpower.
I had no knowledge of the extent of my abilities. I had even less of a comprehension of where exactly they came from, or why they were mine before anyone else’s.
But, however it had happened … whyever it had … magic had found me. Whether it was from this world or another entirely, it was, I allowed myself to believe, mine.
And so was Bobo.
In a ferocious pulse, I released into Bobo’s body my will, my determination that, despite all appearances, he shall live.
I heard crisp crackling but didn’t see it.
I smelled the electricity, mingling with the scent of blood and remains.
I pulsed and pulsed and pulsed what was feeling more and more like my magic with every passing breath.
I pressed and pushed my magic into Bobo.
Until I felt him move his legs.
The motion was subtle, hardly there, but my eyes flung open.
The pale blue of lightning arced across his body, jumping from mine to his and back again, so that he practically glowed.
I stared at him—willing, willing, willing him to be alive, not to have imagined his weak movement—until his eyes fluttered open.
I exhaled a disbelieving laugh, a sound incongruous in our surroundings.
Beyond the bright light that still encompassed his body and mine, I glanced up.
My friends’ expressions were all varied in their details, but uniformly awed.
I laughed again, and finally smiles dared to inch across their stunned faces, all splattered and smeared with dull gray blood.
“He’s alive,” I breathed, nearly afraid I was imagining this result as much as my magic.
Bobo blinked rapidly as if to dispel the gunk that covered his eyelids.
When his tongue emerged and started to lick his face clean, he grimaced with a spread of jowls, pulling his head back into his neck until his skin wrinkled and he gagged.
Then he stuck out his tongue and gacked, his eyes going wide.
I laughed again, as did my friends.
a voice with a lisp, sweet and innocent like a child’s, said into my mind.
It took me an entire minute to process that it came from my dog.