Head Over Tentacles

by K. L. Hiers

  What kind of mortal being could fight a god so effortlessly? Was this the weapon the Asra had warned them about?

  Sloane threw out a spell meant to silence all magic in hopes of helping Loch fight back. He gasped when Galgareth’s hand dropped on his shoulder, her divine energy flowing through him to fuel the spell. He closed his eyes, using her power to seal it, and waited anxiously.

  Another wave burst forth from the young man’s chest and struck Loch so hard that his body went tumbling across the street.

  “Loch!” Sloane cried frantically. “I can’t silence him!”

  “It’s not working!” Galgareth shrieked, staring down at her own hands in horror. “Azaethoth, I tried—”

  “Stay away, both of you!” Loch was hit again as soon as he stood up, his feet skidding as he came to a stop several yards away. Black fluid was leaking from his mouth and running down his chin, and he glared furiously at the young man. “Ohhh, you foul little thing. Now I’m really getting annoyed.”

  Sloane couldn’t stand by and watch Loch get hurt. “Protect Jay!” he shouted to Galgareth and took off from behind the car, lunging forward with a shield to block the next attack.

  It was hard trying to aim while looking through the scope of his perception spell, but he put everything he had into his shield as he leaped in front of Loch. “Get away from him!”

  The shield cracked as the young man’s energy struck, but it didn’t break. The shield held.

  Sloane continued to pour his magic into the spell, pressing forward and driving the young man back several paces. He was overjoyed that it seemed to be working, but his hopes sunk as the man slowly lifted his hand.

  The energy was now moving through his fingers, channeled by a twist of his wrist, and the cracks in Sloane’s shield grew. He didn’t know what else to do, grabbing hold of his shield and hurling it at the young man as hard as he could.

  It was raw starlight, powerful and unstable, slamming right into the young man’s head.

  The young man stumbled when it hit him, groaning in pain, and Loch came strutting around Sloane to take the opening for a counterattack. Brilliant light spun from his hands, and it tore at the young man’s body.

  The young man threw his arms up to block the magic, but the intense energy was already eating away at the sleeves of his jacket. The fabric simply peeled away, and his skin was starting to sizzle. There was something on his arms, some sort of symbol, but Sloane was too caught up watching Loch to get a good look.

  He rarely saw Loch use his true power, fully expecting the young man attacking them to surrender at any second. Inside Loch’s mortal frame was an ancient god, and his magic was endless. There was no way that any normal human being could withstand it, not without burning into ash.

  But it didn’t happen. The young man suddenly pushed back against Loch’s energy with a furious scream, the resulting explosion of power violently hitting Sloane and Loch like a tsunami. The street ruptured, asphalt shattering down the block and all the streetlamps popping, raining glass everywhere.

  Sloane landed over by his car, the air knocked from his lungs, and he didn’t see Loch right away. He tried to move and found that he couldn’t, his chest aching as he tried to breathe in. The side of his head was on fire, and something wet was dripping down his neck. “Oh gods…. Loch…? Loch!”

  “Sloane!” Galgareth cried, hurrying over to his side and trying to help him up. “You’re bleeding!”

  “What the hell is he?” Sloane saw that Galgareth looked just as worried as he felt. “Where’s that… little fucking… prick…!”

  “I don’t know,” Galgareth whispered urgently, “but we need to get out of here.”

  “Ugh, wait! I’ve gotta help Loch!” Sloane staggered up on unsteady legs. “Whatever happens, you have to protect Jay! Please!”

  Loch was suddenly there next to him, tentacles and arms wrapped all around him and holding him close. “Sloane, you’re hurt—”

  “Loch! Watch out!” Sloane sensed that shiver again and jerked defensively as he struggled to put together another shield.

  The young man was coming at them again, his ruined jacket discarded as he raised his arms to summon an enormous wave of energy. Sloane could see the symbols on his forearms more clearly now, at least a dozen of them, and they were all small circles with arrows running through them.

  The symbols were glowing with a hint of blue, something familiar that Sloane couldn’t immediately place. He didn’t have time to identify them or give any thought as to their purpose, groaning in pain as Loch laid him in Galgareth’s arms.

  “Take care of him,” Loch commanded. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Loch, no….” Sloane groaned, gasping and wincing in pain. He watched helplessly as Loch started back to the street to fight.

  “Enough of this!” Loch’s eyes turned black and flooded with stars. Sloane could see the godly dragon inside of him struggling to escape as Loch charged head-on at the young man.

  They clashed, and the collision was deafening, a flash of light blinding them all with the powerful aftershocks shaking the car next to them. Sloane and Galgareth clung to each other for dear life, and then Sloane heard a name:

  Alexander!

  It wasn’t Loch or the young man who had spoken, and the voice sounded strangely far away, even though Sloane had been able to understand it clearly. He looked all around, trying to identify the source, but he couldn’t see anything. As the intense light faded away, only Loch remained.

  The young man was gone.

  “What… what happened?” Sloane called out weakly, his heart up in his throat hugging his tonsils. “Loch? Hey! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Loch returned to Sloane and embraced him. He kissed him, deep and passionate, murmuring, “I’m fine, Sloane. I’m here. I’m yours.”

  “What happened?” Sloane demanded, clinging to his lover and patting him all over to make sure he was really unharmed. “Where did he go? And what was that voice?”

  “I have no idea.” Loch rested his hand on Sloane’s chest. “And I don’t care right now. You’re hurt, my love. I need to heal you.”

  “We should really go.” Galgareth jerked her head to the car.

  People from the office building were peeking out from the doorway, and traffic had completely stopped at the corner from the destruction of the road.

  “Shit,” Sloane mumbled.

  “The police will certainly have been notified after that spectacle,” Galgareth said more urgently. “We need to be anywhere else but here.”

  “Home. Let’s go home.”

  Against his better judgment, Sloane let Galgareth drive. She insisted she had experience, and Sloane didn’t want to argue. Someone who appeared so young behind the wheel was a risk, but it was a better option than letting Loch, who had only ever driven in Mario Kart, do it.

  Galgareth swung around in the street to retrieve Sloane’s car door, reattaching it with a snap of her fingers. It was a little crooked, but it would hold for now and hopefully not draw any more unwanted attention.

  Sloane sat in the back seat with Jay, who was still blissfully asleep, while Loch’s tentacles reached back from the front seat to tend to his wounds. He closed his eyes, letting Loch’s divine touch ease the burn of what was probably several broken ribs and a deep cut on the side of his head. The pain faded, leaving only the uneasy twist of his stomach to deal with.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Sloane said quietly, voicing his troubled thoughts. “He was Silenced. Totally Silenced… but he was using, well, he was using something against us!”

  “It couldn’t have been magic,” Galgareth chimed in. “Our silencing spells would have stopped it!” She frowned, her borrowed fingers fidgeting against the steering wheel. “Unless….”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless he wasn’t using mortal magic,” Loch supplied, one of his tentacles taking Sloane’s hand and giving it a squeeze.

  “Like an
Asra?” Sloane glanced between the two gods in the front seat. “Is that what you mean?”

  “No,” Galgareth said with a quick shake of her head. “It’s definitely godly. He must have a totem or some other kind of artifact imbued with a god’s essence or something blessed by one of us. It’s the only explanation.”

  “Because even those who are Silenced can still use magical objects,” Sloane said thoughtfully. “So, find the object, destroy it, take out his power?”

  “In theory.”

  “What happened back there?” Sloane tugged at Loch’s tentacle. “Did he really just disappear?”

  “I don’t know,” Loch replied, his brow furrowing with an unusual amount of unease. “One moment I had him in my grasp, and then the next… he was gone. Like passing through a portal.”

  “So? What if he did?”

  “Any form of teleportation requires extremely powerful magic,” Galgareth said forlornly. “It’s very difficult for those not born with it to learn, and I don’t know of any magical object that can give that much power to a mortal, much less a Silenced one.”

  “Maybe it was just an illusion?” Sloane suggested. “Maybe he cloaked himself with invisibility or something?”

  “Maybe.” She looked back to the road. She didn’t sound very certain.

  “What about the Faedra?” Sloane sat up straight in his seat. “They’re everlasting creatures who can manipulate time and space, right? Could this guy be one of them? Maybe an Asra? They can teleport. I mean, he didn’t have the pointy teeth, but there’s a chance, right?”

  Galgareth glanced sideways at Loch, asking him bluntly, “He doesn’t know?”

  Loch sank down in his seat. “It hadn’t exactly come up.”

  “What?” Sloane pressed. “What hadn’t come up?”

  “The other beings,” Loch said with a sad sigh. “The Faedra, the Asra, the Vulgora… the many things that end in ‘a’ that are everlasting. They once all walked the earth as we did, worshipped us like humans… but then the dreaming came, and not all of them followed us to Zebulon.”

  Sloane didn’t like where this was going. “What happened to them?”

  “They died,” Loch said flatly, his tentacles slowly drawing back, as he was clearly uncomfortable with this conversation. “Those that stayed here, anyway. They were hunted down by humans, either slain for their precious parts like the Eldress for their horns or the Vulgora for their scales, or they were murdered outright for being abominations in the eyes of the Lucian god.”

  “That’s horrible!” Sloane’s heart wrenched at the thought. It was a bit awkward mourning creatures he didn’t know fully existed until today, but he felt sick all the same.

  “Our greatest failure as gods,” Loch said with a bitter sigh, “was not being able to save them.”

  “But they’re not all gone, right?” Sloane offered a hopeful smile, and he reached over to squeeze Loch’s shoulder. “The Asra we met today, what about him?”

  “He comes from Xenon,” Galgareth explained, pulling into the apartment parking lot. “The Asra who rebelled against us founded a new world there, a little kingdom of their own. If any of the other everlasting peoples live? That’s where they would be.”

  “Maybe someone there knows about this Silenced problem?” Sloane frowned down at Jay. “The Asra is the one who warned us about it. Someone there has to know something more about what is going on.”

  “We can’t.” Galgareth frowned. “Gods are forbidden from entering Xenon because of the peace treaty the Asra made with Great Azaethoth. Trying to go could start a war.”

  “Besides,” Loch said grumpily, “their kind shouldn’t be trusted. They would have never risked leaving unless they had something to gain from it. That little fiend is not telling us all that he knows.”

  “He’s also still not back yet,” Sloane mumbled, unbuckling his seat belt and sighing wearily. “Guess it’s time for another fun round of carrying the unconscious man around in broad daylight?”

  “Oh, I can’t wait,” Loch drawled miserably.

  They worked quickly to get Jay inside without anyone seeing, Loch depositing him on Sloane’s couch with a huff. He looked to Galgareth, asking, “Can you try to wake him up? I’m getting tired of dragging him around.”

  “You’re a god with limitless strength and stamina,” Sloane chided.

  “It’s beneath me.”

  “I’ll try, but I don’t think I’ll have any luck.” Galgareth kneeled beside the bed. “An Asra’s word is as good as a curse.”

  Sloane wandered into the kitchen as he tried to get a handle on the last few hours. His body was still tingly from the rush of adrenaline and fear that had squeezed his heart so terribly.

  Loch followed him, his arms curling around Sloane’s waist and holding him against his chest. “Oh, my sweet Starkiller. I was so worried.”

  “Me too,” Sloane confessed, wrapping his arms around Loch’s neck and kissing him firmly. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “He wasn’t that powerful,” Loch protested. “If I had shed my mortal body, I would have simply eaten him and it would have been over with.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Loch was offended, pouting. “Very certain, thank you. Hmmph. You doubt me?”

  “He almost broke my shield.” Sloane kissed Loch’s cheek to soothe his wounded pride. “I’ve never felt power like that before… except….” His skin shivered again. “Except when I held the sword made of starlight from Great Azaethoth and killed Tollmathan.”

  “So,” Loch mused, “the source of the boy’s power is godly without a doubt.”

  “Yeah, I think so. And the name—did you hear the name?”

  “What name?”

  “Alexander. Right when you two smashed into each other, I heard a voice calling out.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.” Loch frowned, turning to ask his sister, “Gal? Did you hear anything when I bravely defeated our adversary? A name, perhaps?”

  “No.” Galgareth left Jay’s side, walking over to join them in the kitchen. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Weird.” Sloane scratched his neck. Maybe he had been hearing things. “I guess Jay is still out?”

  “I can’t wake him up without the Asra who put him to sleep,” Galgareth said. “The spell won’t let him die of starvation or dehydration at least, but he could stay like this forever.”

  “Great!” Sloane groaned. “My client is under a sleeping curse. That’s wonderful.”

  “Is he really still a client?” Loch wondered out loud. “I already solved his case.”

  “Wait! You?”

  “The Asra did it. Case closed.”

  Sloane let Loch have his moment, reaching for a magnetic notepad that hung on the fridge. He grabbed a pen and drew a rough sketch of the symbol he’d seen on the young man’s arms.

  “What are you doing?” Loch poked Sloane in the side with a tentacle.

  “This is what I saw on that guy’s arms,” Sloane said, adding the last arrow. “It’s Sagittarian, I think. See, we have a new case now.”

  “We do?”

  “All the Silenced people who are missing plus figuring out who is after Jay and why,” Sloane replied patiently. “The Asra probably isn’t telling us everything, but that guy coming after us is proof that something hinky is going on.”

  “And the doodle?”

  “I just told you. It’s what I saw on the guy’s arm. He had a bunch of them. I could see some sort of blue stuff….” He paused, looking at Loch’s hands. “You said you grabbed him, right?”

  “Yes?” Loch held out his hands expectantly. “I had a hold of him, and then he vanished away.”

  Sloane held his fingers out for a perception spell, and he gasped when he saw the glimmering blue residue on Loch’s hands. “Loch, it’s the goo! The blue godly goo!”

  “Huh, look at that,” Loch said, cocking his head and wiggling his fingers. “Perhaps my mysterious breth
ren helped place those odd symbols on him.”

  “Oh! I know what that is!” Galgareth said excitedly, tracing the shape on the paper. “It’s a binding symbol! For binding spirits in necromancy.”

  “Like with ghouls?” Sloane asked. “Where a person’s soul gets bound to the ghoul body?”

  “Indeed. A ghoul body is no different than any other inanimate object you’d bind a spirit to. But you say you saw this on the young man?”

  “Yes,” Sloane confirmed. “They were all over his arms, but I saw his aura. He’s not a ghoul.”

  “That is troubling,” Galgareth murmured. “The boy is very much alive, and this means that something’s been bound to him.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible,” Sloane scoffed. All magic dealing with soul binding and ghouls was highly illegal, and he admittedly didn’t know much other than the basics. “You can’t bind two living souls together… right?”

  “It shouldn’t be possible, no. Oh, how I wish Babbeth was awake,” Galgareth fussed.

  “God of Death and Lost Children?”

  “Yes, he’d know what this all means.” She pulled absently on one of her lip rings. “Souls are his expertise, obviously, and he could tell us what’s bound to that boy and how to break it. What we really need is a necromancer! Ulgh, but I haven’t seen one in centuries.”

  “Really?” Sloane glanced at Loch, and he grinned. “Centuries, huh?”

  “What?” Galgareth glanced between them quizzically. “Do you know a necromancer?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  Chapter 4.

  “HER NAME is Lynnette Fields,” Sloane explained as he got behind the wheel of his car. He went to shut the door, and he frowned as it promptly fell off again. He silently prayed that it wouldn’t rain any time soon. “She’s Lochlain’s sister.”

  “Lochlain?” Galgareth asked from the back, getting settled with Jay’s sleeping body next to her. “And he’s the one whose body Azaethoth has?”