Chapter 27 Dreamwalking, Ba-by! I Made That Taffy My Bitch
Dreamwalking, Ba-by!;
I Made That Taffy My Bitch
My awareness divided. I remained only vaguely aware of my surroundings, as if they were the dreamspace instead of whatever bizarre shit was happening within my mind.
The multitude of Magnums faded until I was cognizant only of two: the one who gripped my arms so unyieldingly that my shoulders were easing from their joints, and the one clasping my head with crushing force.
His fingers squeezed my skull so brutally that I briefly considered it might be my end.
With my skull shattered, bone splintering into my brain, and my crew already incapacitated, there’d be no one left to revive any of us—assuming that Magnum was lying and we actually could still return from the dead.
The pain—so acute, so devastatingly unbearable—nearly yanked me from the Sky People clamoring for my attention. But with my eyes squeezed shut, they were all I saw. I fought the agonizing touch of the two Magnums.
“Give it to me,” Skullcrusher snarled, his breath hot and revolting near my mouth. “Give me your power. All of it. All you have left.”
A sensation as of warm taffy stretching from my mind’s eye and into Skullcrusher’s was nauseating.
I might not understand precisely who or what the Sky People were, or what all Magnum and his alien-looking bitches were, but I knew down to my bones that I shouldn’t be surrendering a single iota of my lushe, as he called it.
It was my essence, my light, my life force, I suspected, perhaps even my actual soul. My lushe was whatever made me who and how I was. It was that part of me that marked me as a lushina—a Sky People.
Regardless of what it might cost me or my crew, I couldn’t allow him to take any more than he already had.
I resisted. I willed myself to hold on to my lushe. The light bodies of the Sky People behind my eyelids shifted from the tall, thin outlines that suggested humanoid physiques to a smattering of light and color, blending together.
Pursing my lips, I battled to keep what belonged to me.
Not to him.
To me.
To fucking me.
First, I envisioned tugging my energy back into myself, and when that didn’t work, severing the flow of it entirely.
But dammit, it turned out that wishing and willing weren’t enough. Not even close.
More of my lushe snaked from me to this hideous creature sheathed inside a man.
The more I resisted, and the more it did no fucking good, the more I panicked. The more I nearly succumbed to the pain begging me to do something to protect my body from harm.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s it!” Skullcrusher said on a delighted, airy laugh. “Let it flow. Don’t hold back. Empty yourself.”
Like hell I would.
Though it seemed insurmountable, I pushed away my pain. I didn’t exactly succeed in not feeling it, but it did dull just a little. And that just a little turned out to be enough to once again hear the Sky People. Their light bodies again took more precise form.
They were fighting as hard as I was to stop the violation that was underway. The soothing, beautiful melody I heard from them the night before was replaced by jagged screeches. Calls to action, I realized—alarm too.
So then what Magnum was doing must be even worse than I guessed, with far-reaching implications beyond me as an individual.
My lushe was a flowing river. Its current was picking up speed, draining me all the faster.
At some point, despite the danger to my body, I couldn’t help but sag into Shoulderwrencher’s grip.
It loosened. Eventually, I discovered myself on my knees, with Skullcrusher kneeling across from me, murmuring skin-crawling encouragements while softening his crushing hold on my head, just slightly—maybe to keep me from passing out.
“That’s it. Just like that, yes, yes. Keep going.” His voice was already gloating and celebratory.
My head lolled, held up only by Skullcrusher’s forehead against mine. When had he removed his hands from my skull?
Vaguely, as if from whole oceans away, I heard screams, breaking glass, smashing furniture, and gunfire, pained cries, and those pops that had delivered our enemy right into our midst.
For many years I’d worked to learn how to defend myself and those I loved—with my body, with skills and weapons of this world. How was I to protect us from powers beyond this world?
My entire body went limp for long enough to startle me, to tug me fully back into it.
If I didn’t do something now—like right the hell now—there would be no second chances for me—or for Griff, Lay, Hunt, or Brade. Everyone I loved would vanish from this world—Bobo, too, probably.
My breaths were coming in ragged wheezes I experienced only abstractly. Skullcrusher kept up his victorious commentary, but I barely heard it.
The Sky People’s cries, however, grew louder.
With more determination than I’d ever had to employ, I homed in on their voices.
They were indiscernible squeaks, like a bunch of excitable chickadees.
My head rolled backward, only an inch before Skullcrusher clamped down on it with his bruising hold.
My energy whooshed into him with renewed vigor.
The Sky People’s voices faded.
No.
No!
My eyes shutting out what was directly in front of me, I pursued the Sky People, chasing them farther inside myself.
Their birdlike squeaks became louder.
And then … oh fuck … oh fuck, yes … then they coalesced into familiar vowels and consonants, if drawn out slowly, spoken at a tenth of average speed.
As if they’d studied humanity from afar, learning all languages and accents at once, they communicated to me in an English that was part, well, everything.
In a hodgepodge of cultures and inflections, they spoke in a single voice.
Despite its garbled slow distortion, its tone managed to be both urgent and commanding while also somehow compassionate and encouraging—a peppy cheerleader with a whip in hand, its end capped in feathers instead of flaying barbs, though a whip nonetheless.
Their voice was at once ethereal and homogenous, diverse yet unified. It pronounced drash to rhyme with “trash”—I approved—their own name for Magnum’s kind, apparently.
pronounced loo-sheh.
Surely some prime details were being lost in translation. Like, how—precisely—did one go about taking lushe and ending a drash?
Even if the lushina were able to eventually give me more instruction, I didn’t have time to wait for it. More connected to the lushina than my own body right then, I could still sense that my physical form was moments away from a point of no return.
Immortality or not, whether or not that power remained to me and my crew, I doubted there’d be any coming back once my essence—that which made me a lushina—was gone. After that I’d become merely human.
And humans weren’t exactly known to resurrect.
A terrible choice was foisted upon me: wait for further details in that long-drawn-out voice and risk my end and, consequently, that of my friends, or fight now with all I had.
When Skullcrusher’s giddy, triumphant giggles reached me, garbled as if from beneath water, my decision was made for me.
If he believed he’d already won, that I was at the very end, then there was no more time to wait. Not even a second to spare.
It seemed I was truly a lushina in human form, and as such, some part of me, somewhere, must know how to combat this terrible enemy. Beyond my rational mind and its reign of logic, I clutched my intuition …
Instead of resisting the final tugs of my lushe as it traveled into him, I dove after it.
My knees remained planted on the floor of Magnum’s fancy office but I felt worlds away as I projected my consciousness into his.
Just as far away, I heard the lushina’s encouraging cheers. I was on the right track. I leaned harder into my instincts.
Inside Skullcrusher’s mindspace, it was dark and cold, both all-encompassing, as if the light never shone there and never would. I could see nothing through the proverbial eyes of my awareness. I could, however, sense plenty.
The one Magnum’s mindspace contained all the others.
There were a total of one hundred forty-three Magnums still alive in the office.
Within them lay the seeds for an infinite amount of our enemy.
This drash could reproduce without ceasing.
So long as one lived, he could multiply into two more, and then each of those into two more, and onward.
It was the quality that made Magnum special among the drash.
Skullcrusher began struggling—all in the mindspace or also in the physical, I couldn’t determine. My own body felt beyond my reach.
He resisted my control. I fought back.
He hardened his will against me. I hardened mine more.
He attempted to pull free, to disrupt the flow of lushe that linked us. I didn’t allow it. I reinforced the connection … and reversed the flow of energy.
This time, it worked.
Now his essence was streaming into me, mine that he stole returning with it.
When his fear first burgeoned, I believed it was mine. But before long I realized the terror I was experiencing was his.
He understood what I was only just beginning to sense: This, this that I was doing, it was dreamwalking.
There was no requirement for sleep or dreaming. I was traveling among his thoughts, his mind. Worse still for him, I suspected I could actually overpower them.
I could force my will upon his.
Abruptly, I discovered Skullcrusher’s hands gone from my head. My skull pulsed, but only in recovery from his assault. Shoulderwrencher, too, had released me.
My thighs quivered as I struggled to keep myself upright. My shoulders tingled as if swarmed by fire ants.
It was a smart move on Magnum’s part. My physical body was signaling, and loudly, that it required immediate attention.
I had to refuse it.