by Alexia Black
“Hey, time for lunch.”
Aiden didn’t reply.
I lightly poked his shoulder, “Lunch time.”
“Five minutes,” he grumbled, the pen flowing across the paper. Illegible words were strewn across the paper as he chased his muse.
So this was why Travis had asked me to start calling him half an hour early.
I resigned to wait for ten minutes. He obviously wasn’t going to be done in five minutes. It reminded me of the times Sam kept muttering, ‘one more chapter.’
I went back to my previous position with half of my attention on the door and half on him when a movement caught my eye.
What was that?
I squinted at the almost non-existent gap between the door and the floor. Something slithered in. It was like gooey darkness. One second it was the size of a worm the next it had climbed up half the door and was extending its tendrils towards me.
I had no time to think, only react. Reflex kicked in, I pressed the emergency button on my watch. If it had managed to come in, that meant Dave and Trevor, were already taken out.
Damn it.
I whirled back and pushed Aiden’s chair away to the far end of the room.
“What the fuck do you…,” he saw the black tendrils reaching towards us and thankfully shut up. He got up, ready to fight beside me.
Surprise stalled my brain for a second at his action. I shook my head at him and threw a strong barrier charm towards him. Then I threw two more after that for good measure. In one second, Aiden was protected beneath three barriers, one inside the other. But protecting him had left me vulnerable to the monster’s attack.
A tentacle wrapped around my ankle and pulled me back. I twisted around and pulled an enchanted dagger from my boot and slashed at the slimy tendril. The dagger sliced clean through it. Leg freed, I crawled away and took out my other dagger.
The piece that had fallen off, inched towards its main body. The slime absorbed its tentacle back in and it became one big massive gooey miasma again. Just great. I wouldn’t be able to kill it but what I could do was stall it till help arrived.
The slime resumed its attacks. I kept slicing and slicing but it kept reforming. Did this thing have no limit to its power? I could feel the bruises forming where its tentacles had managed to hit me.
“Come inside the dome,” Aiden ordered.
I couldn’t enter an already formed dome. I could make one for myself but analyzing the pace and power with which it attacked, a single barrier wouldn’t even last a few seconds. And without me as the distraction it will definitely turn towards Aiden.
Without looking back, I threw all the charms I had left on Aiden. Ten more barriers formed around him.
“Are you stupid?” he growled, surprised and frustrated.
If it was any other situation, I would have laughed hearing him ask the same thing I did yesterday.
“I am,” I yelled back. “Now shut up and let me do my job.”
I threw my new fire charms at the thing. But, the darkness opened its mouth and swallowed the fire. Not a flicker could be seen outside.
Fantastic. Did it not have any weakness?
When it had slithered in from under the door I had thought a shadow witch was behind this but these were not shadows. Besides, shadow witches couldn’t make them corporeal and this hadn’t been affected by the light from the fire charm at all. What in the fates were these?
The miasma might have easily swallowed the fire but it was definitely growing angry at my antics. Who knew slimes could be sentient too?
In the blink of an eye, it reached towards the ceiling like a tidal wave. I gulped. I could see nothing in front of me, other than the darkness that made up its body. The wave crashed down on me like a tsunami.
Aiden shouted my name as the darkness swallowed me whole.
Chapter 6
Darkness unlike anything I had ever known surrounded me. I floated in the void, my daggers lost to its inky depths. I waved my hands around, encountering nothing.
Something wet and cold touched my stomach. Tendrils raced across my body, encasing me within its slimy skin.
It didn’t tear through my skin but instead it reached and receded against my skin, like it was looking for something.
The tendrils groped my body, holding me stationary as the miasma sniffed every inch of my skin. I wanted to tear my skin away. Rub it raw under steaming water.
I tried to rip it away. The slime covered my hands, engulfing it within its body. The crawling never stopped.
Was it looking for my power? Is that why it had swallowed me? What would happen when it realized I had nothing to offer?
I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, only feel. Losing my senses disoriented me. Hours could have passed or maybe days. I couldn’t track anymore. All I knew was the abyss.
It was easy to give up. Too easy. But I couldn’t. I wanted to live, no matter what.
So, I endured, holding onto the hope that there will be an end to this. That this won’t be forever.
Time passed slowly. I counted seconds in my head to keep myself sane. To focus on anything other than what was around me. I stopped counting after thirty thousand. Time felt endless. Has it been a week already? I wouldn’t know. Was everyone else safe? I hope Selene was able to rescue Aiden. I prayed to the three fates for Dave’s and Trevor’s survival. Slowly, as if disappointed, the miasma slithered away from my body.
A hole opened to my right, barely the size of a coin, light filtered in. The circle kept expanding and soon I saw Aiden’s music room through the tunnel of its body.
I barely had time to turn towards the hole when I was spit out. I landed on the outermost dome that I had cast to protect Aiden, bounced off its surface and fell jaw first on the floor.
Ouch.
“Are you okay?” Aiden asked, palms pressing against the dome.
“I am fine,” I lied. Damn it. It hurt to move my jaw.
Wait, why was I back here? I was pretty sure it has at least been a week since I was taken.
“How long was I inside that thing?”
Aiden’s eyebrow rose, confused at my question, “It spit you out immediately.”
What. The. Hell.
The door burst open and Selene ran in. Enchanted chains wrapped around her fist. She used weapons? The eerie blue glow of the chain lit up the room. Outside the door, Trevor and Dave lay unconscious.
I propped myself against the wall nursing my bruised jaw. I had heard rumors about the weapon that could nullify even a Fae’s power, but never seen it in action, much less expected Selene to own it. The thick chains hummed with magic, so much magic even someone like me, half disoriented from time-loss, could sense it. The metal had an almost otherworldly sheen to it. The ultimate weapon of defense.
Selene darted from side to side, ensnaring the being with the chains. Considering its body resembled a blob, she wasn’t very successful in tying it down but the chains kept on wrapping around the being, never ending, like a magician’s handkerchief.
The blue glow dimmed on touching the creature’s skin. That was weird I thought, artifacts grew brighter upon nullifying magic, like my enchanted dagger did. The monster was starting look stronger instead.
Oh no, was it…
“It’s eating up the magic,” I yelled.
The miasma absorbed in the thick chains like a hungry animal till no part that had been wrapped around it could be seen outside.
The darkness had devoured the magic.
A tentacle formed out of its body. It yanked the chain forward and Selene with it and then threw her back. She thudded against the wall and fell rolling down into a crouch, the chains still held tight around her palm.
The force with which she had thudded against the wall dislodged the guitars. They fell in a resounding cacophony that had Aiden wincing.
The monster’s body rippled, like it was shuddering.
Interesting.
I took the guitar that had fallen near me. The monster and Selene were en
gaged in a tug of war. She had half transformed, claws ripped out of her shoe. She was at a disadvantage in an enclosed space like this. So, she pulled the monster out of the room, inch by inch.
“Let me out of this. I can fight. Take off this damn bubble.” Aiden paused, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to play music, what else?” Without getting up from my position, I started to play as horrendously as I could. Considering that I didn’t know how to play a guitar, it wasn’t that hard. I could hear a stream of curses behind me. Aiden had his ears shut and eyes screwed tight. Otherwise, his face showed no reaction to the beautiful melody I was playing. But I didn’t care, because it turned out my intuition was correct.
Not even monsters could handle bad music.
Tiny waves rippled across the monster’s body, like it was having goose bumps. If it could cringe, it would have. The tentacle retreated back into its body. The blob started getting smaller, like it was hunching and shutting its ears away from the sound. But, if I was right, then every part of it was just one big sensory organ, so it couldn’t hide away from the sounds.
I dragged another guitar towards me with my feet, kept both on the ground side by side and started playing simultaneously. At this point, even tough as stone, Selene was grimacing. But, she didn’t ask me to stop. The monster was slowly regurgitating her chains back out.
“Hating bad music is a universal thing it seems,” I said. Selene lips curved up. She took out a small bottle of water from inside her jacket and coaxed the water to float out the bottle with a wave of her hand, “Continue playing.”
I continued strumming nonsense. Aiden’s face was blank; he longer had his eyes shut. If I squint really hard, like super-duper hard, maybe I could even see a glimmer of admiration in there.
Selene flicked her wrist. The water hovered in the air, forming a circle one second and in the next, it spread out like a thick web, near invisible to the eyes and trapped the slime inside it. One more flick of her wrist and the water hardened into ice. The miasma was frozen inside.
Selene kicked the ice sculpture, shattering it into pieces. Each broken piece held a part of the darkness within it. I stopped strumming. The ice, much like me, didn’t have any magic of its own. There was nothing to absorb, nothing to sustain its cravings.
I leaned back against the wall, panting. The adrenaline rush died down, and all I was left with was my bruised body and a feeling that no matter how many times I bathed I wouldn’t be able to get that slimy feeling off my skin.
“We will need to call in the druids and barricade the perimeter. The threat is bigger than we had initially analyzed,” I heard Selene’s calm voice speaking to the phone. She was outside the room, overseeing the transporting of the demon.
Ignoring the urge to cradle my jaw, the pain a constant thrum beneath my skin, I turned to face Aiden fully. My hip twanged from all the twisting and turning I had done inside the abyss.
Some of the outermost domes had burst already. The creature must have been relentless in its attack during the single second I was trapped inside it. Every fiber of my being rebelled against that thought, I knew in my bones that it was at least a week but I sighed and thought, nothing made sense anymore.
“You okay?” I asked. He nodded.
“You don’t look so good,” he said. It was hard to judge whether he was trying to insult me or ask me out of concern from his expression. Had he taken a vow to go through life hiding all his emotions or something?
I chuckled, then immediately regretted it. Maybe, I should take a page out of his book and stop moving my face till my jaw healed.
“I am fine. Who did you piss off though? You have gotten yourself a pretty powerful enemy.”
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t believe him. But, I should stop questioning him. I was just here to protect him and play bad music once in a while.
“The barriers will burst in a while. Stay put till then.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me, “Do I have an option?”
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. Usually I was the epitome of polite to customers but something about him made me want to snarl back, “Unless you manage to break it with your fists, nope. You can stay inside your bubble. Would you like to hear some music during your stay inside? I have been told that I am a great guitar player.”
A ghost of a smile curved his lips. It disappeared as fast as it had appeared. It seems everything about Aiden was like that, so fleeting that, if you blink you would go your entire life thinking he was made of stone.
“No, thank you,” he said. ”I would rather be murdered by that thing.”
I pointed at the notebook and pen lying beside him. It had fallen along with him when I pushed him away. “At least you won’t be bored”
“Getting attacked definitely makes for a great muse.”
“Damn right, you are.”
I turned away from him, keeping guard in case something else came to attack him, but mostly because I was too exhausted to move.
This supernatural was nothing like I had seen or heard before. What was it? My limbs shook in exhaustion. If I wasn’t so empty of magic, I had a feeling I wouldn’t have gotten out of it alive. For once, my lack of magic had been a blessing.
Outside the room, Dave and Trevor were being loaded into a stretcher while Emilia looked relieved. I sighed in happiness. They must be alive then.
Selene stood stock still as the medics took them away. Her fists clenched tight, relief and anger warring on her face. Emilia stood beside her, one hand wrapped around Selene’s waist.
Whoever his enemy was, they had the power to unleash something that had knocked out even Selene’s team. For the first time in my life, I was sure I was way over my head with this one. I felt like a child battling against gladiators. Failure seemed inevitable.
I shook my head. No, I had survived this long against all odds. I can’t give up now, especially not because of a gooey monster.
Selene came towards me, a healer in tow, question in her eyes.
“What did it feel like when it had swallowed you?”
I let the healer pour his magic through my body as I wondered how to answer her question.
“Like gravity didn’t exist inside it. It was like this pitch black void. And I was just floating there. It felt much bigger than it looked from outside. Much, much bigger, like an abyss.”
Selene nodded. Eyes clouded with unhappiness.
“Then they tried to suck the magic out of me but you know…” I shrugged. I didn’t have any magic to offer. I was a dud.
“It spit me out in a second, according to Aiden. But, to be honest with you, I felt like I had been fighting against it for days. I had counted to more than thirty thousand before I stopped. My sense of time got completely whacked inside.” It had been really disorienting to know it was only a second.
“Maybe, you were stuck inside for days,” she said.
“Huh?” I said eloquently. That didn’t make any sense.
“The energy signature was different and the magic was off the charts. That thing doesn’t belong to our world.”
“Then where is it from?”
“The Demon realm.”
Selene clasped her hands behind her back and looked at where the ice covered slime was being transported by the druids in special containers.
Demons didn’t exist. They couldn’t. It was just a myth created to scare children away from strangers. Was she saying another realm other than ours exists? More importantly, if what she was saying was true, how were we going to deal with it if the rest of the demons also came to attack Aiden?
What in the three fates had I gotten myself into?
Chapter 7
“Thanks,” I waved at Bart as he drove away. I had gotten off shift as soon as it had gotten over. Bart had dropped me a mile off from my apartment, at my request, so I could walk the rest of the way.
Thoughts crowded my head. Dark. Violent. Ominous. I needed time to just proces
s everything that had happened today.
The streets were busy with people hurrying home after work or on their way to a club. I liked walking on busy streets, wondering who these people were, what their lives were. But, not today.
“Hold my hand tight Mia, or a demon might snatch you off.” The girl gripped her mother’s hand tight, looking around to see whether a demon was hiding somewhere to take her away. Did the mother know how close to the truth she was? That soon, demons might walk freely upon these streets, preying on all of us. Even the Fae might not be stronger than demons. Today’s victory was fluke, one we won’t be able to repeat.
One part of me had accepted that demons were real but the other was still skeptical. If mom was here, she would have said anything was possible, after all she believed even in the three fates. Imagining the existence of three deities who could control all of our fates, who could make the impossible possible was even harder for me; although that hadn’t stopped me from trying to believe in them. Maybe in some stupid way, I wanted to believe what she believed. Every time, I called on the three fates, I could hear mom in my head, saying the same. It was like she was right beside me.
I sighed. I had thought walking would clear my head but it was bringing up feelings I had kept suppressed for so long. I pinched the bridge of my nose and picked up the pace. I could feel a headache brewing.
I rubbed my palms together and blew air between them. I always ran hot but today I could feel the chill under my skin. Was I coming down with something?
I trudged myself through the empty corridor towards my apartment. My thoughts were starting to spiral again. Everything I forbid myself from ever thinking was dancing on the forefront of my mind. I pushed them down hard and locked it within the deep recesses of my mind. Taking in a deep breath, I slowly counted down from thirty. I had to report to work tomorrow. I couldn’t let my fear take over now. That was a surefire way to get kicked out of the team or worse, killed off during the next standoff. I hadn’t survived all those years, crushed under grandma’s heels to give up now. I had fought to survive and survive I will.
