Chapter 27 Dreamwalking, Ba-by! I Made That Taffy My Bitch #2
With an internal, guttural roar, I grabbed on to Skullcrusher’s essence like I was in a tug-of-war—ferociously. I made that taffy my bitch.
Then … I heaved.
His essence pitched forward.
I felt more than heard him scream. I heaved and tugged and pulled more and more of his energy into me. All of mine finished returning.
Only then did I realize he was speaking aloud.
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait, wait,” his voice pled, arriving as if from the opposite side of sprawling mountain ranges. “You can’t kill me.”
Like hell I can’t.
“I took some of your power,” he hastened to add.
My eyes remained tightly shut. My mind’s eye was trained on his, on continuing to siphon his essence.
“It’s true,” he insisted in a whine. “You can’t kill me.”
“I … can.” My voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears. It was the same pitch and intonation as always, but it was as if someone far older and far wiser were speaking through me. The lushina within me, perhaps.
“No, no, you can’t,” Magnum said before yelping, then yipping again.
So my claiming his energy hurt him … Good. May it hurt lots more.
“I have enough of your … ow, ow, ow … power that if … you, ow, kill me …” He panted. Starkly gone was the composed archvillain who’d lorded over everyone else. “You won’t be able to resurrect your friends. You’ll die if you … ahhhhhh, ouch, ouch, ouch … if you try.”
He paused just to pant some more. I pulled on that tug-o-war taffy rope with all my might, like I was a beauty queen and my winning grand prize would be global peace and harmony for all.
“You need the power I took from you,” he said. “You need me.”
“I … don’t,” I growled, a bear scaring a rival predator from her den.
Along the taffy thread connecting us, I felt Magnum shudder under my emerging fortitude.
“You do, you do,” he said, unable to hide his desperation.
As deeply linked to him as I was, he couldn’t conceal much.
“Look,” he begged. “Look at what I’m trying … ah, ah, ow … to show … you.”
In my own mindspace, images, cloudy like smoke, crispened in front of the lushina’s light bodies to form scenes—clips from Magnum’s memories.
After Griffin went over the cliff on the way to Raven’s Lagoon, Zoe’s big sister, Hayden Wills, was one of the first responders at the scene.
She was there when they defibrillated Griffin after my crew and I begged them not to give up on him despite the broken neck.
Out of sight, later Hayden stepped out of her skin to reveal herself as a Magnum underneath the cute-girl facade.
Magnum was also Jaggar at the gymnasium, posing as the obedient soldier who offered up defibrillator paddles in anticipation of his murdering us.
At the drag race, when Clyde exploded into a raging fireball with Griffin inside, Magnum was again there, once more in the guise of Hayden Wills.
Save for the first occasion with Brady, since the press covering the “Miracle Kid” incident was what first garnered Magnum’s attention, each time one of us died, Magnum was there. He eventually emerged from a cocoon of someone else.
Linked to his mindspace as I was, I understood that the confident, handsome billionaire was yet another shell. Like matryoshka dolls, the Magnum persona could nestle inside another. But within the Magnum hid a gray, creepy, toothy, alien-looking drash just like those within Fanny and Zoe.
This “special” drash far preferred his human disguise—and hell, who could blame him? So long as he didn’t remove his Magnum skin suit, his body behaved exactly as his human counterpart’s would.
When my crew or I were being revived, before Magnum shed his borrowed skin suit, as our essences returned to our physical vessels, he stole all he could, leaving sufficient to reanimate our bodies.
Relatively, it was a minuscule amount, sure, but souls are meant always to be whole.
Any part of it missing was a significant deficiency.
“You’re the one who conferred immortality on them,” Magnum explained, his voice steady and pedantic.
Distantly, alarm bells clanged. He was no longer suffering.
I tightened my mind’s eye around his essence and gave a violent tug.
He winced and hissed. “Once you … gave them the immor … tality … they didn’t need your pow … er. But only … because you were strong. That augmented the ability … you gave them.”
I pulled as hard as I could. A spurt of his essence flowed
into me.
He hissed again, louder this time, more drawn out. “They can’t … do it now. You’re not … whole. You”—hsssssssss—“need me to help you.”
Even latched on to his mindspace as I was, I couldn’t determine the veracity of his claim.
“If you try to bring them back …” he grunted, “it will kill you.”
Perhaps I would die.
I knew one thing for certain: The creepy alien in the smooth-rich-dude skin would never, ever, help me or my family. Not unless it benefited him.
Magnum Chase would want all my abilities: immortality, dreamwalking, telepathy, and preternatural healing. With his own powers alone, he was scary enough.
And megalomaniacs never stopped.
No. There was no room for negotiation, or for error.
I could not allow him to escape.
No matter what it cost me.
Even if it cost me my family.
My crew.
My every-fucking-thing.
If they were in positions to advise me, my friends would tell me to do it. To risk them and myself to rid our world of someone as terrible as him. To spare countless people—with and without supernatural abilities—from his greed.
In a rush, he said, “You need me. You can’t kill me. You’ll die. They’ll die. Most of them are dead already. You can’t bring them … back without me.”
Hold my beer, motherfucker, and watch me.
At the very least I was going to go out giving it absolutely everything I had.
Magnum Chase had to die. It was as simple as that.
He kept talking, but I was no longer listening. He tried to shove more images at me. I deflected them.
I strengthened my bond with the lushina. Within their light bodies, they crystallized into forms resembling humans at the center of their brightly shining auras.
they sang. Their imperative filled every part of my being, driving me with purpose.
Magnum was wriggling and screaming, struggling to free himself. But I wasn’t crushing his skull against mine, as he’d done. I wasn’t grabbing him at all. My hold on his mind allowed me to dominate his body. After all, what is the body but a vessel that carries out the commands of the mind?
He fought me. He even attempted to slip free of his Magnum skin suit, which he hadn’t done since he killed and stole the body of a man in Ridgemore without family or friends to declare him missing.
My grip was a vise he wouldn’t escape.
Magnum didn’t like being a drash. He wanted to be a lushina—but a lushina plus. He wanted the advantages of his kind, those of mine, and any he could steal from other supes.
The man wanted it all and didn’t care whom he hurt to get his way.
He was a true archvillain, Hollywood 101 style.
He screamed, his protest hazy as it reached me. As if it were second nature now, my instincts guided me. I molded his mindspace into believing it wanted to recall his duplicates.
Magnum stopped resisting. This was his idea—so he thought.
One hundred and forty-two copies of him—only those still alive—returned to the one vessel, which absorbed them. Skullcrusher Magnum was the original.
With my mindspace merged with his, my command overriding his own, I held him steady.
With my physical arm, I braced his body around the back and hooked his sweater around his shoulders, baring his torso.
With a magnitude of force far beyond what I knew before, I curled my hand into a fist and drove it against his breastbone.
The skin split down the center as if hit with a mallet.
His breastbone cracked in a long, jagged line, smaller fissures racing toward its edges.
My physical eyes remained closed. Later, I would think it was a little like Neo in The Matrix, when he fought the Smiths and saw the matrix itself.
A little like Neo, but far bloodier—Neo meets John Wick.
My fist was slick with Magnum’s blood. With the drash nestled deep within his Magnum suit, his blood was human scarlet.
He didn’t even gasp his surprise. I released my supporting arm, allowing him to fall back with a heavy smack of his head.
Instantly, I was perched over him, my fist hammering against that breastbone again, shattering it.
I reached around its pieces, behind his ribs, to grip his heart.
It felt human but it wasn’t. It was big enough to require two hands.
I slid my second hand alongside the first, cradling the pulsing, thrumming heart of my enemy in my palms.
I felt it beating.
Beating.
Beating.
I sucked the final threads of his energy into my own mindspace, where the lushina directed the entirety of his essence elsewhere, so that no part of him would taint me.
His mindspace went completely blank.
His heart, however, still beat.
Dadum.
Dadum.
Dadum.
Snapping arteries and vessels, I ripped it free of his chest cavity.
Blood rapidly pooled in my palms, trickled down my arms.
the lushina murmured.
No longer a command but confirmation of a task completed.
As if waking from a monthlong slumber, I blinked open my eyes. The afternoon light filtering in through the glass-plated
window wall, largely broken out now, was too bright. The tat-a-tat-tat of nearby gunfire was too loud but rapidly dying down. The earth’s shuddering rumbles were fading.
I blinked some more, and the office came into focus. With all the many Magnums now gone, the office was back to feeling cavernous.
Panic seizing me by the jugular, I searched for those who mattered most. The once luxurious space was more junkyard slaughterhouse than sophisticated office.
A few people were left standing: Orson and Porter, battered as if they’d fought in Armageddon; Armando and Yolanda, looking like they’d also fought a world-ending battle; and only slightly less battered, Sheriff Xander Jones and a scientist, still buttoned into her lab coat, a very blood-spattered white.
And Bobo. He’d reneged on his promise and was favoring the leg he broke when he and I were forced to jump from a runaway Clyde.
Beside Bobo stood a massive wolf, twice the size of my pittie, maybe more. His furry jaw was crimson-tinged, his legs painted with blood.
A few others around our age I didn’t recognize leaned against broken surfaces, exhausted.
Still cupping Magnum’s heart—no longer beating—blood dripped from my elbows and between my fingers. Slowly, I rose on shaky legs.
Once standing, I could better make out who lay on the floor. More bodies sprawled across the debris than remained upright.
My breath left me.
Entangled with Rich Connely’s body and Zoe’s, her alien head exposed—both still as only the dead were—lay Hunt, partially pinned beneath Zoe’s calves, a chair leg jabbed through his gut. His eyes were open but vacant.
I couldn’t breathe.
Brady lay nearby on his stomach. His empty stare pointed over a shoulder on a very broken neck. An arm stretched out to someone but didn’t quite reach her.
Layla.
My friends … my magical friends.
All that truly mattered.
Layla was crumpled in a heap, her legs bent the wrong way at the knees. Her arms pulled the wrong way at both elbows.
Her chest rose and fell with shaky, barely there breaths. It was crushed.
My feet moved all on their own while my stare swept for Griffin. It trawled across bodies in the paramilitary dress of Magnum’s zealous soldiers—and our similarly outfitted parents.
But Griffin—he was nowhere.
I stumbled, almost tripped over an upturned lamp, and when I slid to my knees in front of Layla, whose superior healing wouldn’t be able to work fast enough to repair this level of damage, I caught movement over by the hot tub.
Griffin was dragging himself, trying to get to me.
Seeing only him, I careened forward.
His face was as beautiful as ever. Perfect.
But blood dripped along an eyeball. One side of his skull was smashed in, dented and misshapen.
Blood matted his hair. He’d used all his remaining strength just to reach me.
He collapsed atop shards of glass and someone’s blood—probably a Magnum’s—they’d vanished but their blood hadn’t.
Griffin strained to lift his head and couldn’t. A cheek pressed into piles of glass, he gazed at me, blinking furiously as if he couldn’t focus, couldn’t really see me.
“Dream girl,” he murmured so softly it was already like a precious memory. “Don’t …” His throat bobbed as he struggled to swallow. “Don’t bring us back.” It was a garbled plea. “Live for us.”
He blinked drowsily. His eyes closed to half-mast. “Live for me.”
He must have heard Magnum.
“Fuck that,” I said.
His eyes battled back open. “No. No … don’t.”
They closed again.
For the last time.
A strangled cry escaped my quivering lips.
Something nudged me.
I turned to find Bobo staring at me.
he said into my mind, into my unbearable grief.
He nudged the heart in my hands with his nose.
Vacantly, I extended it toward him and scarcely noticed when he snatched it with his teeth.
Not even wiping the slick blood from my hands before touching Griffin, I ran them over his face, trying to rouse him.
But Griffin, my love … my dream guy … he was gone.
Lowering down to my hands and knees, uncaring that glass sliced my blood-slicked palms, I pressed the tenderest of kisses to his lips, lingered for a few extended moments that had no chance of being enough, and bolted for Layla.