Chapter 28 Eat the World #3
And then I see the key, glinting in the light.
You have the key now, small one, the Fathom said to me in my dream.
Try not to lose it. Suddenly it all fits together in my mind—the key, the spell, the blood, the binding.
The way forward and the way back. I was the last to touch it, so maybe it will still work.
I summon all my strength as Arla tosses the dog aside, and reach out my left hand, using the same power I used to unlock the door in the pub basement, Brennan’s power.
Only this time, I concentrate on drawing the object to me.
At first, it only rattles against the floor, alerting her, but then it zips toward me, zinging into my grasp.
Her head swivels as it happens, too fast for her to understand or stop it.
As I rise up the wall, I see her eyes widen, the whites growing. Her fingers lift to stop me, but she’ll never close the space between us in time, because all I have to do is turn around.
With the key in my left hand, I stab the bit into the open bite wound of my right arm and drag to connect the punctures, blood rushing to the surface.
Then, I swipe my arm across the wall, leaving a wide, wet stripe of red that crosses over line after line of slanting script and complex drawings, blotting out detail after detail, letter after letter.
Incomplete, the spell can’t hold her. Blood I drew myself, my magical blood given, and the binding is undone.
Arla’s face sags against the bones as if it already knows what’s coming.
Beneath our feet, the floor begins to rumble, growing louder and louder with each passing second.
In one fell swoop, the bricks surrounding us crumble away, raining on our heads in a cloud of dust. I stumble over them and crash to the floor in time to see Levi’s last rope give.
He swings, dangling like a cloth doll, but I am already feeling the ability blast through me as I eye the ceiling pipe from which he hangs.
I wrench at it with every ounce of power I have available to me before the Fathom breaks free of her cage.
The water inside surges against the metal even as it grinds apart at the coupling, and in a second, he falls free, coughing and wheezing as I scramble to his side, a spray of water showering over us.
I jerk the chain from his neck and the ropes from his wrists and ankles, and turn to see Arla throw herself across the lid of the well as if she can hold retribution down with her own frail body.
Her eyes meet mine across the room, and suddenly I see the girl in them, small and hurting, used by those whose job it was to protect her.
We both knew the pain of growing up in a world that couldn’t understand or appreciate us, that saw only something to be feared or something to be exploited.
We grabbed at whatever we could to save ourselves.
We did damage in our own desperate attempts to stay safe.
I pushed my power down so others wouldn’t persecute me for it.
She tried to grow hers beyond their reach.
I stretch my hand forward as if I can get to her, pull her to safety, set her free.
But in that same moment, the well beneath her erupts in an explosion of stone and water and fire, a column of energy mutating before our eyes, elements braided together like an umbilical cord.
The room goes deathly black, all light extinguished as if it never existed, as if the world has been raked back into the slumber from which it crawled.
Everything drops away—Levi at my side, the corpses behind me, Arla’s pleading expression, all I’ve held or known or been since that terrible, fiery night so long ago.
I am swallowed now as I was then, lost to the living.
But this death is not soft or peaceful. It’s hard as flint and sharp to the touch.
It gouges into me, pitiless, and I call to those I know and love who share this deathly space—my mother and grandmother, my father, my baby.
I’d think myself lost forever if not for the screams. They reach out to me from some wet, slapping place at the center of it all, where bones are ground to dust and flesh shrivels out of being.
They get louder and louder until I realize they are right before me, until I can practically taste them, until I know them by name. Arla.
Between them, something else sounds against the dark. A steady beating that won’t let go. In a moment, I know it for my own heart pumping, though I’m reluctant to believe it. Even the sound of my breathing as it returns to me feels deceptive, impossible in this void.
The screaming stops and the blackness begins to shrink, to pull itself away from the walls, from clinging to our eyes and lashes, our throats and lips.
The room comes back into focus, the black gathering in starlit swirls over our heads, over the hole where the well used to be, over the ragged form of Arla’s lifeless, shredded body.
It condenses in an opaque cloud at the center of the room and barrels for the hole in the floor, shoving her body down with it, folding her in half as it surges out of view. It streams and streams, a current of night that seems like it might never end, until it finally does.
Levi and I are left breathless, panting, alone. But I feel instinctively that it’s not over.
I get to my feet just as the cracks emerge, radiating out from the well like a deranged star.
Scrambling, I reach for Levi, snatch him up, and pull him away toward the gate and the tunnel.
The floor suddenly shifts inward as we make our escape, everything rolling toward that hole in the ground.
Twig’s and Rock’s bodies slide into it like Arla’s before them.
We stumble but manage to get out before it buckles again.
When I hear the building begin to fall, we are already pounding our way through the darkness toward the light, letting her eat the world as we leave it behind.