by Holly Ryan
Where was Paul? I patted down my pockets. And most importantly, where had I put the god bone? The right half of my vision split off a little more, affecting my balance, marking me as easy prey for a god and all his minions.
No. Not prey. I was a monster who would defeat the monster.
And just like that, he appeared in his real form about twenty yards away, a hulking shadowy beast.
I needed the god bone. Step 1. Step 1. Step 1. I blinked down at the note pinned to my duffel bag written in Eddie’s precise hand. Next to Step 1, he’d drawn a picture of my jacket with an arrow toward the inner pocket.
My whole body trembled as I fished it out and held it in my left palm. Focus. Kill Paul, but the god bone faced the wrong direction to do that. The static noise spiked as I flipped it around, urging me to hold it the other way, with the killing end pointed at myself. But not doing that was better, only somewhat, though, because I gripped it in in my non-dominant hand. The right side of me was just about useless.
But Paul didn’t need to know that, now did he?
“Guess what, Paul?” I shouted, while the right side of the world ripped away a little more. “I’m immortal now. Bad news for you, huh?”
He appeared at my side a moment later with a vicious backhand that swept me off my feet. I landed hard on a roaming half skeleton, crushing it to pieces, and then rolled to my feet before a statue could snatch me up and break me in two.
Then I hurled myself toward Paul as fast as I could, seeming to drag the right side of my body along behind me. He blurred toward me at the same time, and we became two freight trains playing the ultimate game of chicken.
But my world ripped a little bit more, shaking up my soul with the force of it, and I stumbled. Paul barreled down on me.
Pain. So much of it I screamed. Tearing. Shredding. Far away, one of the moving statues had my Kevlar vest and was turning it into black ribbons. At least I hoped that was my vest and not actually my torso.
I was losing. Again.
And that could not happen.
I rolled from my facedown position on the ground, the static inside me vibrating the pain along my nerves in slow motion. Glancing down at my body, I found I was mangled but mostly whole, dead but not all dead. Which meant I could still complete Step 1.
Though without the vest, my heart was now exposed to put a weapon through and break apart all of the love that filled it. No. I had too much to live for.
I was not the monster to defeat the monster. Yet. But I could be. I’d been afraid to be like Paul, but I already was like him. After all, I had his power. In his eyes, the Senate was the monster because they’d stolen his power from him. They’d bested him, even though they hadn’t killed him.
I could do both.
Paul was already coming in for another attack, a black blur of savagery and strength.
I forced myself to stand to meet him head-on. “Lovely night for a stroll, isn’t it?”
He stopped suddenly as if I’d produced a wall in front of me, one built with a flashing reminder of his first defeat, the one by the Senate, the one that had caused him to lose his power in the first place, the root of his obsession with those dark words and killing the slayer for his power.
Pain hammered through my head so hard, it blurred my vision. I ignored it. I had to. This was it.
With a roar that drowned out the upsurge in static, I flashed toward him, god bone at the ready.
Step 1: Kill Paul with the god bone.
Focus. Focus.
I took a running leap onto a melting gravestone and jumped high, right at the blurry shape of him. The tip of the god bone speared into where his eye might’ve been if he was made of something other than darkness. He bellowed and flailed, snatching at me with claws to rip me off of him. But the god bone was stuck in deep, and I wasn’t about to let go. I dug it in farther, dragged it down, until finally he whipped me off. Somehow, I landed on my feet, both of them plowing through two crawling skeletons’ rib cages.
I glanced up at Paul, who had fallen. He lay there in his human shape, his striped bowling shoes jutting up from the ground, dirt streaking his name tag on his shirt, and a god bone sticking out of his eye. He was staring at me with an unnerving grin plastered to his face, but he was down. He was dying. He didn’t even try to get up.
So why was he smiling?
A loud plink sounded from the direction of the lake portal, but when I glanced back, I couldn’t see why. Then Paul’s smile faded, his one-eyed stare blanked, and his skin and hair shriveled up until he was another skeletal plaything for the moving statues.
“I did it,” I said in disbelief. “I did it.”
But I wasn’t done yet. I gripped the sides of my head and willed myself to keep it together for just a little longer. I stumbled toward Paul because I wanted that damn god bone back, and then once I had it, I needed to...ummm. Do other things.
My duffel bag, there by the portal. I cried out as I made my way toward it. Pain in my chest and the smell of blood sharpened my senses enough to clear some of the haze in my head. Motherfucker, I’d stabbed myself with the god bone. It jutted out from my gut. Paul might still defeat me yet. I yanked it out and shoved it into the bottom of my duffel bag. My blood dripped onto the note pinned through the fabric.
Step 2: Kill the maggots with lime juice. Next to that step, Eddie had drawn a picture of the portal with rocks falling on the maggots.
Right. Back through the portal. I picked up the bag and hauled myself through the lake again, once again noting how empty it was. Clouds of dark red billowed out from my various wounds into the water. Just a little farther, and then this would all be done.
Back through the portal again, I found the three sealed, labeled pitchers of lime juice inside the bag. Sloshed it on the maggots below the bridge the best I could. Hoped for the best.
Step 3: Throw down all the corpse flower seeds.
I tore all twenty little packets of seeds open and dumped them over the sides of the bridge.
Step 4: Water the seeds.
I opened the sealed, labeled pitchers of water and splashed the contents down. Nothing happened. I looked at my watch. What the hell? What happened to time? Only nine minutes until my birthday. Nine. There were no steps after step 4. This was it. But I needed my slayer power out before my birthday, or I would lose my mind like Roseff.
As if in agreement, it ripped a little more, and I dropped to my knees with the pain. My head hung over the edge of the bridge in the direct path of falling rocks. Some bashed against it before I had enough sense to drag myself backward. I was losing it, fast, and losing time just as quickly to save myself.
A sob broke through my clenched teeth. I could concentrate on my bites so my vamps would come and help me. Paul was dead. He couldn’t str— He couldn’t walk through them and control them anymore.
The static noise rattled my back teeth together, so I screamed to drown it out. No, if these corpse flowers didn’t grow, I would go to the police station’s basement. I could get there with...with Night’s Fall.
“You will work for me, bird-sword, do you hear me?” I said, already sounding like a crazy person as I fished through my duffel bag. But I’d been talking to inanimate objects for years, so... Yeah, that didn’t make things any better.
Night’s Fall started to glow as soon as I spotted it, and it fit into my hand like I’d been holding it forever. But that wasn’t the only thing glowing. The entire bridge area and even the tunnel beyond shone bright like the sun was beating down. The ground rumbled, and then a thick green stem shot up past me from below along with a terrible whiff of decay.
“Whoo!” I shouted, a mix of disgust and glee. The corpse flowers were growing!
More and more stems burst from below and shot up into the air past the bridge, pulled by the full moon. A shadow fell across the bridge then, and the rocks suddenly stopped falling. I poked my head beyond the ledge and peered up. Enormous purple flowers had bloomed from the stems, a beautifu
l canopy to catch the falling rocks.
The bridge swayed as more stems grew past it, and I raced across before one of them ripped through it.
Leaves uncurled from the stems and pressed themselves against the lake portal. They ignored me, their current need for more water stronger than their need for power.
I glanced at my watch. Six minutes. I had six minutes to get my slayer power out before I completely lost my mind. I couldn’t wait for the corpse flowers to come to me instead of the lake. With Night’s Fall all nice and glowy, it could get me out of here, and fast.
“Take me to the police station,” I said, thrusting Night’s Fall into the air.
A black nothingness swept me up in its grip, not at all like the bright and flowery underground cavern. The sword rushed me through the dark void and then spit me out onto a street. I crumpled to the ground in front of a tan-bricked building spotlighted by the full moon.
Like every other front door in Podunk City, the police station’s stood wide open. Beyond it and to the left sat a brunette female officer. It was a public building. I could walk right in, but after that? I didn’t have Detective Appelt’s black skull key to get me to the basement.
The static noise fried my ears with a burst of volume. I crushed my hands to my head, my brain shredding itself until it felt like I had just a single piece of me left.
A loud plink, like an exact echo of the one I’d heard when Paul died, sounded through my pain. No time for noises, either real or imaginary.
I focused on my vamps’ bites, summoning them to me, as well as my need for my dad and his black skull key.
Gah!
Something slammed into my back hard enough for me to eat asphalt. Something sharp. Something speared dangerously near my heart. And I was 66 percent sure I hadn’t done it myself.
Footsteps behind me.
I didn’t know what this was, but I didn’t have time. I turned my head, took entirely too long to focus, and then wished I hadn’t.
A woman with long black hair stepped toward me from the other side of the street. Her skeletal frame was slicked with water and her dingy dress clung to every part of her, as if she’d just stepped out of a lake. A lake/portal to be exact. She pointed a crossbow right at me.
Then it hit me. Not another stake from the crossbow, but something much, much worse. I was a vampire, hunted by a very dead slayer. Behind her, more and more plinked into existence from inside every open doorway on the street, all with that same sound, all of them wet, all of them armed. They jerked and spasmed unnaturally as they strode nearer, and watching them hunt me welled a scream at the back of my throat.
Stop. Don’t come here. I flashed the thought to my vamps, then hauled myself to my feet, stumbled, stumbled again toward the open front door of the police station.
Another stake hit the back of my shoulder, but I kept going.
Just before I reached the front door, a drop of water fell from the top of the doorframe. It plinked to the ground, and out of it sprang another slayer. This one male and armed. Blocking my way.
But not for long. I ran him through with Night’s Fall, then mowed him down on my way inside.
This was Paul’s punishment for killing him. Apparently, he hadn’t underestimated me, and he’d planned for this. He’d stored drops of lake water containing his power—what was left of his literal power in these dead slayers—inside the open doors in the city like so many spies, watching to see if I won the final battle. Such a spite-filled little bitch Paul was.
The officer behind her reception desk screamed when she saw me try to rip through the heavy door that led deeper into the station. It wouldn’t budge, not even with my extra strength. Piece of shit doors really would be the end of me.
I risked a glance behind me out the front door to the street. The slayers were coming, hundreds of them.
“Open the door!” I shouted to the screaming officer, then smashed my fist through the bullet-proof glass separating her from me.
Her face bubbled and warped when I reached for her neck, and time seemed to slow like a clock with a dying battery. Like a clock... Like a watch...
Focus. Time was running out.
I blinked hard at my watch, willing my mashed potato brain back together again. Two minutes.
Slayers were crushing their way through the open front door of the police station. I shoved the officer away, spotted a black button next to her keyboard, and slammed my palm on it.
The door clicked open, and I slid through with slayers hot on my heels. I threw myself to the left, the overhead lights swirling like disco balls across the graveyard-shift officers’ faces. They were melting, too, but cowering back and screaming instead of trying to kill me like the first time I’d been here.
Paul was dead. That fact put an extra bit of feeling back into the numb half of my body, put an extra burst of speed into my legs, even though my brain was telling them to buckle, to give up, let the madness win.
But I wouldn’t.
I dragged myself toward the elevator. Past the bulletin board with Paul’s picture pinned to it. And found my answer for my lack of a black skull key in another face.
The officer who’d drugged me before taking me downstairs to the cell. The one whose head I’d smashed into the bars and then stole his uniform. He stepped out of the elevator, his melting eyes widening at the scene in front of him.
Behind me, slayers swarmed the police station, jerking and spasming their dead bodies closer. Stakes flew through the air toward me, some of them hitting but not sticking. Yet.
“You.” I marched toward the officer as he stumbled backward into the already closing elevator doors and grabbed him around the neck. “Take me downstairs now.”
He jerked his dissolving face away toward the rush of dead slayers and flying stakes behind me. He jumped when his eyes locked on mine again, having already forgotten about me as soon as he looked away.
“Please don’t kill me,” he begged.
The plea in his voice snapped some clarity into me, because killing him was the very last thing I wanted to do.
“Detective Appelt sent me.” I ducked at an onslaught of stakes rocketing through the air and hauled the officer into a crouch behind a desk to my right. “My dad.”
Stakes clattered around us without sound since I couldn’t hear well, but I could see well enough to know that the slayers were only feet away.
“Oh.” He nodded, making the skin on his cheeks slide down faster, and handed me his keys. “Take them.”
“I need you to come with me.” Still tucked in a crouch, I dragged him behind me. I would have to mow some dead slayers down to get us inside the elevator. “Get to the elevator and hold the door until I join you. Go now.”
He went then.
And so did I, swinging Night’s Fall through the air and decorating the walls with dead slayers. The sickening splats of their wet body parts turned my stomach. This did not make me proud.
I cleared the way enough to hurdle myself into the open elevator while the static drilled out from inside my skull.
“Ack!” the man screamed, having already forgotten about me again, and folded himself into the corner.
“Where’s your key?” I jabbed the close door button.
“Who are you?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Detective Appelt’s daughter! Where’s your key?” When he didn’t move, I arced Night’s Fall through the air until its edge flirted with the skin on his neck. “The key.”
With his whole body shaking and dripping flesh, he fumbled for the key and then plugged it into the wall panel. When he turned back to me, he screamed in shock yet again, and I screamed right along with him at the pain splitting apart my head. I sagged into the opposite corner, my arms flailing at my sides as if I’d already lost control of them. I was losing this battle with my brain as it tried to sever its hold to sanity, just like Roseff’s had.
But I couldn’t lose. I wouldn’t. Three beautiful faces floated up like lost helium b
alloons, plus a fourth much furrier one, all a reminder of why—why I had to keep going, why I had to push through the pain cracking open my skull so insanity wouldn’t pluck out my brain and dropkick it.
The elevator doors opened with a ding, and curling my fingers around the back of the officer’s collar, I hauled us both out into the long hallway. My vision dipped and rolled, rippling the tiled floor in crushing waves. I dug Night’s Fall’s tip into the ground with each step, fighting for balance, and moved as fast as I could, a crawl even at human speed, down the hallway.
Behind us, the elevator doors shut, and then it rumbled back up. We would likely have dead slayer company real soon.
“What time is it? Including seconds,” I hissed between the officer’s screams. He must’ve looked at me again.
“El-eleven fifty-eight and forty-seven seconds.”
Thirteen seconds until 11:59. My birthday.
All of the cells down here were full of swimming dark shadows and angry voices, but the barred door on the last, my original, cell stood open. Only ten thousand yards to go.
“Look at me,” I told the officer.
He swiveled his melting head around as I dragged him along, and screamed.
Humans. Oh my god. “As soon as I get in that cell, you queue up the corpse flowers, got it?”
He nodded hard, sloughing off skin all over my arm that held him by his collar. It wasn’t real though. It was just my head playing tricks. The only thing that was real was the necessity to get me inside that cell. I couldn’t lose track of that or time. Focus.
Finally, I stumbled into the cell and crumpled to the stone floor. Huge splotches of color went missing from my vision, completely sucked into the black hole of my mind. Somewhere very far away, the elevator doors dinged. Then the static grew to impossible, a deafening rattle like bones in a jar.
“The...” I pointed up. Up towards...what?
The world blanked into nothingness.
Chapter Nine
I couldn’t see anything. Then I realized I had my eyes closed.
It was quiet inside my head, clear and serene and pain-free, but on the outside, chaos was throwing a scream-fueled party. My least favorite kind.
