Chapter 26 A Damnable Frenzy of Magnums, and a Fading Pulse, a Weakening Heartbeat #2
she said, softer still. Then, more terrifying still,
Brady said. But panic rode his words.
Only pops and guttural grunts and the tat-a-tat-tat of nearing gunfire.
Brady yelled.
He waited. With my heart in my throat, I waited too.
Nothing.
Brady asked.
Hunt said right away, the one word heavy before he yelped and groaned.
With my mouth open to ask, he said,
He didn’t sound okay, though.
“You’ve made your decision, then,” the Magnum holding me said. “It’s a bad one. You won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you.”
The circle of them was so tight around me I could make out the nose hairs of the Magnum directly in front of me. His eyes glittered with avarice, like he believed he was about to get to claim his prize.
Me.
“No!” I said. “No, no. Just gimme a sec to think it over.”
“You don’t have seconds. Your friends are already dying.”
My heart thudded through its next beat.
Fuck, were they?
I called out.
I waited only a second before calling for him again.
His voice was thready.
I yelled.
The Magnum was shouting in my face to be heard above the din. I no longer cared what he said. I listened only for Griffin.
It was Hunt.
He audibly groaned, something he’d be trying to prevent us from hearing.
I ordered.
He sighed into our bond. he mumbled, like he was fading.
Brady shouted.
I shouted, my eyes smarting.
Hunt said.
He cut off abruptly.
“She refuses to submit,” the Magnum facing me announced to the room.
Cutting through the cacophony, his pronouncement echoed as every other Magnum took a turn repeating the condemnation.
She refuses to submit.
She refuses to submit.
She refuses to submit.
“She’ll never submit,” Hunt cried above the momentary lull in the fighting. “To you or to anyone. Don’t ever do it, Joss. No matter what. Never do it.”
That sounded so … final.
Like Hunt thought he wouldn’t make it.
“Kill him first,” the same Magnum said, the others joining him, the death sentence ringing out all too clearly.
“Nonononono,” I pled. “What do you want from me? What is it?”
The Magnum across from me smiled. This time, it was him alone.
“Nothing we need any of the others for.” His smile turned pensive. “You won’t be able to resurrect them this time, you know. Not anymore.”
Could it be true? My heart, seized by fear for my crew, shrieked that this might be one of the few truths the man had ever told me.
“Please,” I said, uncaring that the word tasted foul in my mouth. For my crew, whatever was necessary.
“Don’t hurt them. I’ll do whatever you want. Anyth …” But I trailed off.
Now I was lying.
I’d do just about anything to save those I loved more than I loved myself.
But I wouldn’t do absolutely anything.
They wouldn’t want me to either.
“It’s moving to see you so concerned for them,” the Magnum said. “Really, it is. I value loyalty greatly in my own people.” He chortled. “Well, I use the term loosely, of course.”
“What are you?” I asked.
This Magnum wasn’t vibrating, though it wasn’t that great of a relief when the gigantic office was already crammed with identical copies of the man. There were hundreds of him.
This one brushed plaster and glass shards off the shoulders of his sweater, a pointless exercise when the sweater was torn in several places; a single, bloodless bullet hole gaped from its front.
Magnum looked at me, really studied me. “The Aquoians call us …” His upper lip rolled with distaste. “ … skinsnatchers.
“Such a crude term for our kind when we’re capable of such great feats. We don’t snatch. We transform. We’re like stars, brilliant and astounding, like nothing else in the cosmos. But stars start out as dust.”
“You’re implying that humans are dust?” I said blandly, while silently calling out.
A soft moan, I couldn’t tell whose.
Nothing at all.
“Dust we make infinitely more impressive. More powerful. Mighty.”
A general murmur swept through the Magnums. When the self-proclaimed orator turned toward the entrance, so did I.
Rich Connely, his grade-A prick of a nephew, waltzed in, along with Zoe Wills, Hunt’s obligatory girlfriend.
The Magnums didn’t exactly make way for them, but they didn’t interfere as the two ambled through the maze of bodies.
When Rich and Zoe drew close enough that he didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard, the orator cast a glare at our ninja instructors, before pointing at Homer.
“That one betrayed me.”
Rich and Zoe exhibited no reaction beyond veering Homer’s way. Their faces were calm and relaxed, as if they were just joshing around at Ridgemore High during recess. They drew to either side of our nimble and muscled instructor.
Homer punched Rich square in the nose, hard enough to crunch bone and cartilage, then spun a kick toward the smaller Zoe.
Our classmate with the pleasant face and demeanor, soft, brown curls, and a baby growing in her uterus, didn’t so much as flinch. She struck Homer’s leg so ferociously that his momentum jerked to a halt in midarc, jarring his hip out of socket. Then, she twisted the leg.
Homer cried out.
She’d dislocated his hip.
When she released him, he stumbled backward on his other leg and crumbled to the floor with another cry.
Apprehension was thick in my throat. Homer was a large, strong man. Zoe was petite. How much strength had it required for her to overpower him like that?
I’d only just begun to wonder if there might be more to her when she yanked down her face—her fucking face, yo—much like Fanny had done.
Her fingers clawed at the stripping flesh, digging under it, and yanked the rest of her skin down off her head. It came off clean, including her hair, as if her human skin wasn’t all that different from a high-end costume mask. She left it pooling around her neck like a snood.
But I wasn’t really looking at her neck.
I was staring at that now familiar shiny, glistening, gray flesh.
And the row upon row of vicious, predatory teeth that would be right at home in any good alien flick.
Homer’s intelligent eyes goggled as he scooted back away from her—it, whatever the alien was—only to bump into a Magnum. Four others inched closer, cutting off any route of escape.
Monster-Zoe gnashed her teeth with an insectoid-like clicking. She stalked toward Homer.
His left leg dead weight, hanging loose from the dislodged joint, he scooted back onto a Magnum’s loafer.
Zoe crouched down, scooped up Homer like he was a plaything that weighed a fraction of his densely muscled body, aligned his head with her mouth—and all those incredibly disturbing teeth. Her maw unhinged as it stretched wide enough to accommodate his bulk … and then she began chomping.
Crunch, crunch. Chomp, chomp.
Gore and blood, bone and spit flew.
She fed his body into her mouth with the ease—and grinding—of a pencil driving into a sharpener.
Crunch, monch, monch, chomch.
By the time his shoulders vanished into her throat—into a space physics suggested he wouldn’t fit—his body had ceased its struggles.
I didn’t even have a gulp in me. I gawked, an unsettling tremor starting in my extremities. I might never eat again.
I asked my crew weakly.
If they responded, I didn’t make it out above Monster-Zoe’s chewing. She was like a giant panda chomping down loudly on some bamboo—just as content but with absolutely none of the lovable cuteness.
When Monster-Fanny had swallowed Bobo, she hadn’t chewed.
I didn’t think Homer was coming back out of her in any recognizable form.
A sob, abruptly silenced, sounded over Zoe’s chewing.
Yolanda, perhaps. Or maybe Armando. The sight was enough to bring anyone with a reasonable sense of right and wrong to their knees.
I tried again.
No answer.
I studied the chatty Magnum. Tested the hold on my arms. Still tight as a steel band, staying me in place, at his—their—mercy.
Griffin’s voice was softer than a faint breeze, too weak even to complete his sentiment.
Like a fading pulse. A weakening heartbeat.
The Magnum across from me smiled fondly at the sight of Zoe eating a grown man. A man I’d very much liked and admired, a wonderful specimen of human.
Now gone.
And for what?
“We are drashneemooshta,” Magnum said fondly. “The pinnacle of creation.”
He dragged his admiration from the meal still in progress over to me. The cacophony of ongoing struggles lessened.
“I am a special kind of drashneemooshta. Just as you are a special kind of lushina. The time has arrived for you to give me the rest of your power. I’ve been patient enough. I won’t wait any longer.”
The rest? That implied he had some of my power …
“You refuse to submit by choice, even to save your lushina friends. Then you will submit by force. The games are over.”
He brought both hands to my shoulders.
I thrashed and flailed and slammed my forehead into his nose. It spurted blood, a bright crimson as if he were actually as human as he appeared.
He tsked while I slammed my head back into the face of the one holding me.
He yelped, growled fiercely, and gripped me so hard that both my shoulders eased from their joints.
A single millimeter more and both shoulders would be fully dislocated.
I’d be at their complete mercy, even more than I was now.
I stilled completely.
With blood trailing from both nostrils down his lips, the Magnum in front of me gingerly patted his nose. He scowled angrily at me—like, how dare I?
He boxed my ears with a smack so intense it left my ears ringing, and he aggressively pushed his forehead against mine.
“I will take your lushe, lushina,” he snarled.
An energy of some sort, which I’d never before known existed within me, stretched toward him through the point of contact. Like taffy being pulled, he sucked it from me.
I didn’t even know how to resist this … this otherworldly shit.
No, I screamed inside.
And suddenly, they were there.
The Sky People. The lushina.
In my mind’s eye, in a waking dream, whatever it actually was, light forms that vaguely resembled bodies filled my vision.
Their energy was manic, loud, and most importantly, motherfucking powerful.