by C. C. Mahon
I emerged in an ultramodern kitchen, huge just like the rest of the loft, shiny from the floor polished marble to the stainless steel appliances. A muffled sound made me look up.
The kitchen benefited from good height under its ceiling. Metal beams crossed each other thirteen feet above the counters. Hanging from the beams, a strange white cocoon wriggled about. I covered my mouth with my hand to muffle the scream or gag of disgust.
“Nate?” I whispered. “Walter?”
The cocoons were vigorously moving.
I looked around the kitchen, in search of a knife to tackle the cocoon, before remembering that I was holding in my hand a magical sword.
For Pete’s sake! I said to myself. Get it together. What you need is a stepladder!
Something was scraping on the polished marble, just behind me. An ice cold shiver gripped me. I had to turn around. I knew it. Turn around without hesitation. But I couldn’t bring myself to move. “If you make yourself very small,” said a voice in my head, “if you make yourself small and don’t move, and don’t breathe, then maybe…”
“Rebecca,” whispered Callum.
I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and that contact was enough to break my trance. I turned towards him, sweeping the space with my flaming sword.
Nothing.
I raised my head. Callum was above me, hanging by his spider legs from the ceiling beams.
He was completely naked, his back covered in greenish scales that separated at the base of his spine around the beginning of a lizard’s tail. He twisted his neck to look at me with a demented smile that I, unfortunately, knew all too well. His outside monstrosity was new, but his soul had been deformed for a long time.
I backed up. He let himself drop to the ground, turning on his eight legs to face me.
“Rebecca,” he said again, in a slimy voice. “When you ran away a thief, you…disappointed me. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the famous Valkyrie killer in Vegas was actually…you. That’s good. You’ve progressed.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
He smiled wider, standing on his human legs. As he was naked, I saw that his sex was erect. He was playing with me like I was a fly, and it was making him hard.
Sick.
Sadistic.
Rapist, raider, murderer.
The anger began in the bottom of my gut and from the scars on my skin, from my repressed memories and the ones that woke me up at night. It overtook me in a moment. Blood rushed in my ears and turned my vision red. My sword caught fire, and I threw myself at Callum with a cry of rage.
I saw the shock on his face. The surprise. Then the fury What? His prey dared attacked him? The fly was reciprocating? The victim was fighting back?
He let out a roar that made the walls shake. His two front spider legs closed around me. I chopped the left, but the right hit me between the shoulder blades, reopening a not so old wound. The shock threw me to the ground. I rolled and got back on my feet immediately, facing the enemy, weapon in hand.
The end of the leg I had just sliced off was writhing on the floor of the kitchen in a puddle of pale blue liquid. The same liquid was coming out of his stump, splashing the furniture around us to the rhythm of Callum’s tremors. He was boiling with rage, and he produced another deafening roar. I took advantage of it to attack again and shorten the top right legfor symmetry’s sake.
The adrenaline was galloping through my veins like a herd of wild horses. My blood was beating like a drum in my ears. I gladly jumped back into the excitement of the fight, but I wasn’t the one who was nostalgic for the great battles of the past. It was the sword.
But I am you, whispered the sword, and if you want, you can become me. Embrace the power and joy of combat, embrace the justice of the metal, the purity of the blood bravely spilled…
The sword was whispering nonsense to me, and in my fury, I accepted it as truth.
I struck with the speed of lightning, spun like a storm, and spread the pale blue blood of the spider and the still red blood of my enemy’s human body around us.
Callum had to die. Not because he had hurt me, but because he had done it over and over again. With me, with others. With his fists, with his words, his scalpels or his magic. He was an abomination, from his body to his soul. He was violating the oldest laws of all. I had to remove him. I was off to a good start.
In a desperate effort to stop me, Callum grabbed the huge refrigerator and threw it in my direction. I avoided it in a powerful leap. But Callum was already running, knocking over the freezer to block the door and protect his getaway.
I cleared the way with one enraged movement, with a strength that had nothing human about it, and took off after my prey.
35
The trail of blood wasn’t hard to follow. It led to a service elevator, behind the kitchen, the office, and the laundry room. The door closed under my nose and the elevator began to descend.
I let off a few curses and pushed open the door to the fire escape. The stairs were identical to the ones I’d climbed with Lola and the others. On each floor, I found the door to the service elevator. But it was going down without stopping. I hurried up. Letting this monster escape me was out of the question.
A hint of composure came back to me, and I imagined with horror Callum emerging into the street, naked, bleeding red and blue, with his leg stumps, his scales, and his lizard’s tail. I began running even faster. I wished I could fly.
I reached the first floor a fraction of a second before the service elevator. My head was spinning, and my lungs were on fire. But the doors stayed closed, and it kept going down. I continued after it, a taste of blood in my mouth.
The stairs ended three stories down. I pushed open the fire door, just in time to see Callum disappear between two giant crystals. The underground parking lot was full of them. Crystals taller than me, translucent, run through by blue, orange, or purple light. They were coming out of the ground and concrete columns, as if the place was caught in a giant sugar bowl. The crystals were softly glowing in the darkness, and the air was saturated with magic, the smell so strong that it made me nauseous.
I took a step back then froze on the threshold of the fire door. Callum was there, somewhere in the middle of this forest of crystals. But the magic saturating the atmosphere made my ears ring, and I couldn’t hear anything else. I tightened my grip on the hilt of my sword and proceeded into the strange basement.
Shooting up from the ground, the crystals had pierced the concrete, had raised it like tree roots on a playground. The crystals themselves came out at more or less pronounced angles. Sometimes they went away from each other, other times they crossed each other like overcrowded teeth. Finding a path in the crystal forest was a challenge in and of itself. Doing it in silence, while looking for Callum, was straight up impossible. From time to time, neighboring crystals exchanged magical currents. Once or twice, the currents hit me as I walked by, pulling gasps of surprise from my throat. I felt like I had wandered into a high voltage transformer.
A louder crackling sounded behind my left shoulder. I ducked behind the nearest crystal before looking towards the origin of the noise.
Callum was standing between two crystalline columns. His spread arms joined the two crystals, and I saw the magic, orange and purple, running through his body. Callum hadn’t seen me: his face was turned towards the ceiling, an expression that looked like ecstasy on his features—hard to tell for sure, because they were less and less human.
Under the flow of magic, the stumps of his spider legs regenerated in front of my eyes. A wave of disgust doubled me over with the force of a punch to the gut. But I didn’t have time to wallow or to be horrified at Callum’s transformation. I leaned on the crystal that was hiding me and felt its magic pulsing under my fingers. Neither sinister, nor benevolent, but hungry for freedom, it threw itself against the walls of the crystals like prison bars.
I threw myself towards Callum without a sound, my sword poin
ted towards his stomach. At the last moment, his eight brand new legs closed around me like the jaws of a bear trap. Their sharp ends dug into my hips, my arms, my shoulders, and on the sides of my skull. The pressure made me see stars, while I swore internally. He had obviously seen me coming. With his beady, faceted eyes, he must have been able to see 360 degrees around him. Impossible to catch him off guard.
That left brute force and face-to-face confrontation.
It was better that way.
Callum’s legs immobilized me, my arms pinned against my sides. Impossible to wield my sword. That left me with my other magical asset.
I called up the image of Mother Dragon in the basement of her building, with her rollers on her head and her flowery bath robe. I placed her to Callum’s left, between two blue crystals, her slippers firmly planted on the concrete floor. I didn’t even have to mumble the incantation, settling for reciting it in my head. Mother Dragon appeared, opened her mouth, and spat a torrent of flames. I let out a cry that, I hoped, would mask the absence of sound from my illusion. Callum jumped and loosened his grip on me. Finally free to move, I chopped two of his legs. His roar revealed his anger more than his pain; it pierced my ear drums, resonating all the way into my rib cage. Around us, the crystals vibrated in unison. I lost my balance. Immediately, Callum was on me. One of his legs pinned my shoulder to the ground. His two stumps were dripping with the pale blue liquid that seemed to be what served them as blood. Callum turned his monstrous face down towards me. The crystals surrounding us were reflected in his endless eyes, like a cloud of multicolored fireflies. But under his eyes, Callum’s cheeks were deformed. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and shook his head. Droplets of spit hit me. Then the corners of his mouth stretched up into a demented smile, wider and wider, until it revealed a pair of hooks, or mandibles, or I don’t know what that might belong in a spider’s mouth but certainly not on a human face. I let out a whine of terror. Screaming would have required opening my mouth, and I wasn’t able to. I barely dared breathe the same air as this monster.
The sword murmured in my ear, a melody without words that called to mind the purity of fire, the strength of light, and the necessity to move my ass as to not end up eaten by the monsters.
I sent a strong kick to Callum’s stomach, that sent the monster flying over my head. The sound of shattered crystals came from behind me; I turned around in time to see the giant spider, on his back in the middle of broken crystals, his legs twitching, arcs of high voltage magic coursing through them.
I thought for a moment that the beast was going to end up barbecued by magic. But it got back on its feet, removed itself from the magical energy arcs, and walked away repugnantly to hide behind other crystals. I followed it, determined to squash it once and for all. It was there, behind that desert rose crystal formation. I stepped on a small crystal and lunged towards the beast. I brought down my sword with all my strength. But the beast had seen me coming, and I only managed to break a purple crystal. An arc of raw magic sprung from the fragments, knocked me over along the way, and disappeared somewhere on the ceiling. The beast let out a roar of pain as another arc of raw magic came down from the ceiling and fractured an orange crystal.
Around us, the crackling was getting stronger and stronger, like an army of angry wasps. The crystals also shone brighter, in faster and faster waves. I thought I saw Callum’s grotesque silhouette between two giant columns. Then a magical arc suddenly linked the tips of two crystals separated by several yards, filling the air with its multicolor crackling, raising the hair on my head. More importantly, the arc was blocking my view and my path. Crossing it would have been like walking through lightning.
The crystals were now emitting blinding waves of light at the speed of a strobe light. I could no longer see Callum. The air saturated by magic was barely breathable. I had to get out of there before everything exploded. The ground was vibrating under my feet as I searched for the fire door through which I had come in. The energy currents jumped from one crystal to another, striking me along the way, occasionally blinding me. I recognized a column leaning like the Tower of Pisa. The door was just behind it.
I went back up the stairs as quickly as my exhausted body would allow. On the first floor, out of breath, I frantically pushed the service elevator button, found refuge in the metal box, and pushed the very last button. I had to warn the others.
The machine had seemed fast when it was carrying Callum and terribly slow now that it was my turn.
I rushed out of the service elevator like a bat out of hell and ran towards the center of the loft.
“It’s gonna explode!” I shouted. “It’s gonna…”
I slipped on the glass stairs and fell into the old library like a fury. Lola greeted me gun in hand.
“What’s gonna blow?” she asked dryly.
Behind her, Britannicus and Lizzie seemed to be in full trance. Kneeling here and there in the room, they moved their hands as if to manipulate invisible objects, mumbling incantations. The air between them was luminous, a mix of blue, orange, and purple that I immediately recognized.
“The ley lines,” I said, pointing to the light. “I don’t know what Callum built in the basement, but it’s about to explode.”
Lola turned towards the two wizards. “Brit? Lizzie?”
“I know,” said Britannicus without looking at us.
His face was scrunched up in concentration.
“Gather the others,” said Lizzie. “Everyone in the middle of the room, fast.”
Still trapped in their circles, Callum’s two accomplices seemed half scared to death. Julie, who was standing back, hurried to her sister’s side. Patricia was still unconscious.
“Matteo,” breathed Lola.
She took off like a shot.
I went down to the kitchen to get Nate and Walter. And where was Barbie?
“Barb!” I called out. “Barbie!”
Turning down a hallway, I ran into a grizzly running at full speed. The impact propelled me several feet back on the thick carpet.
Nate looked like a Halloween decoration, covered in spider webs. The puma in the same state must have been Walter. The other felines, probably his “guys,” had arrived like the cavalry, well after the fight. The metamorphs shook their heads, as if some sound was irritating them. I heard it too, the vibration of magic. The whole building was now vibrating. The air began to dance under my nose.
“Up there,” I said. “Quick.”
The metamorphs took off. I got back on my feet and followed them towards the stairs. Completely focused on reaching the stairs, I pushed on my legs like they were pistons, using my arms to propel myself. I felt Nate by my side; the grizzly was waiting for me.
I left the confined space of the hallway and exited into the main room of the loft, with its twenty-foot-high ceilings. The stairs were in front of me. The building was vibrating under my feet. I flexed my back muscles…
I flew off with a powerful beating of wings. Under my feet, the pumas were ascending the stairs in great bounds. Nate was skidding on the unpolished glass. I dove towards the grizzly, caught a handful of his fur, and pulled to help him back on his feet.
Brit and Lizzie were motioning for us to join the others, huddled in the center of the room. Nate landed between Lola, who was holding Matteo in her arms, and the group of pumas. I positioned myself on the edge of the group, facing the stairs and the rest of the loft. Where was Barbie?
Lizzie and Brit surrounded us with one gesture. The circle of light closed a fraction of a second after the detonation. The sound of the explosion rose from the depths of the building, then the two wizards’ protection turned it off, like muting a television.
I thought of Barbie, then the world exploded.
36
BARBIE FOUND US in the rubble. She shook my shoulder gently. I opened my eyes to discover my favorite harpy leaning over me, her face disfigured by anguish. Her red wings kept me from seeing further. I had other things
to worry about anyway. I was pinned against Nate, my nose in his fur, with two or three pumas laying on top of me. The metamorphs had lost consciousness—like the rest of us—but hadn’t regained their human appearances. Each puma must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. I freed myself as much as I could, praying they didn’t wake up with a start and exposed claws.
I stood up, looked around me. My mind didn’t manage to connect the dots right away, and I remained speechless.
We were in the middle of a field of ruins. Pieces of broken concrete stuck out here and there from a mixture of anonymous debris. The whole thing was pulsating with blue, orange, and purple light that I had seen before…
The memories came back to me like a slap in the face. Callum. His transformations. The ritual. The ley lines. The crystals in the basement of the building…
“Everything exploded,” I said.
“Yes,” said Barbie.
I remembered how much the harpy’s absence had worried me, a few seconds before the explosion, and caught her by the shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She nodded her head slowly, speechless, her eyes fixed just behind me. I turned around, half convinced that Callum was going to appear from the rubble. But other than a pile of bikers in fur, I didn’t see anything in particular.
“What?” I asked the harpy.
“Boss…since when do you have wings?”
Reflexively, I put my hand on my right shoulder. My fingers met feathers, under which I felt the hard presence of bone. I grabbed the whole of it and was surprised to feel the sensation in my hand but also in my wing. My. Wing.
