“Ugh, dude, seriously. I’d rather have you spit at me than shriek like that. Anyway, I need to get to the top of this cliff without dying, so if you don’t mind…” I made a slight shooing motion with my hand, to indicate that I wanted to move past the squirrel, and to my complete astonishment, it responded by moving out of my way.
Loath to lose my one chance at freedom from shrill noises, I resumed climbing, hoping to put as much distance between me and squirrel-thing as possible.
The three hours that it took me to make it to the top were so blissfully squirrel-demon-free that I’d largely forgotten the creature's existence by the time I launched myself, beached whale style, over the final ledge and lay, gasping and barely able to move through the exhaustion, at the top of the deep slot canyon that I had been trapped in for a week.
“Finally,” said a high-pitched voice behind me. “I’m amazed you survived down there for so long, and I thought you’d never make it to the top climbing so slowly.”
I turned, grunting with the effort of even that simple motion, after what was surely the longest unroped climb of my life, to see who the hell was talking to me.
I shit you not, it was the squirrel. The red-skinned, glowing-eyed, fluffy-tailed rodent-thing that had been tormenting me with its shrieking and random appearances for the past week was moving its mouth and forming words.
“Um… pardon my French, but… what the fuck?”
“That isn’t French, kid.”
“You can talk?”
The squirrel-thing nodded.
“With words?”
Now it glared.
“WITHOUT FUCKING SHRIEKING LIKE A BANSHEE?!”
And yeah, ok, I might have been mad enough that I sat up abruptly and shouted a bit, despite how tired I was.
“Hey! It’s not my fault you couldn’t understand me down there. That’s the damned magic of the canyon. Or anti-magic, I guess. At any rate, I was talking to you just like now, but you could only hear shrieking.”
“What?”
“In this realm there’s a spell in place that lets most folks communicate, assuming they use a verbal language. But no spells work down in that canyon—it’s an anti-magic void.”
“How does that even work? I thought all magic was just dark matter anyway. How can you stop dark matter from working?”
“Beats me, kid. High energy fields, maybe? I dunno. I’m not a physicist or a mage, so… it’s not really my thing.”
“What are you, then?” I asked, before I could consider the fact that it might be rude to ask.
“Just a local,” he replied, sounding a bit shifty.
“Uh huh… demon?” I hazarded.
He tilted his head again, this time locking me with just one glowing eye.
“You gonna run away screaming if I am?”
“Dude,” I said, lying down again and staring at the creepy orange sky, finally able to see a good 180 degrees of it. “You are a talking, red-skinned, glowing-eyed squirrel-thing that almost made me fall off a cliff two hours ago. You really think finding out what you’re called is going to make me run away?”
“Hmm… alright. Yeah. Folks from other realms call us demons sometimes, especially when they find us here. They sure as heck call us nicer things than that when we travel to your realm. Been called an angel more than once, myself.”
I stared down one of his beady, glowing eyes, raising an eyebrow.
“What? You wait. If you saw me in your realm, you’d think I was quite the sight.”
Too tired to argue, and fairly certain that I had no idea what I was talking about anyway, I shrugged.
“So, is this realm hell?” I asked.
Squirrel-thing nodded.
“One of ‘em, yeah.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, not really wanting to get into how many hell realms there might be.
“Azrael.”
That got another raised eyebrow.
“Azrael? Archangel of death, Azrael?”
Azrael shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“You’re a squirrel,” I said.
“Squirrel, angel… same same,” he shrugged.
“Why do you sound like you’re from the south of London?”
“Last time I was in your realm, I spent a fair bit of time there.”
“How do I get back to my realm from here?”
Azrael just stared at me for a moment.
“Same way you came in, Luv.”
“I was dragged in by MOME agents against my will, through… what is it called again? A seam? I think.”
Azrael nodded.
“That’d be it.”
“You’re telling me I can’t leave unless I’m dragged out against my will by MOME agents?!”
“No, no. Nothing like that. But you have to leave by seam. It’s the only way in or out of here.”
“Well, how am I supposed to find it without my magic?” I asked.
“That would be difficult. Shouldn’t matter now, though.”
“What does that mean?” I sat up, no longer interested in the orange sky blotted with purple clouds. “Are you saying I have my magic again?”
I looked at my hands and feet, at the metal shackles that still encircled them.
“I didn’t think breaking the chain would break whatever was keeping me from my magic. Are you telling me I didn’t have to climb that freaking cliff? That I could have just shifted myself up here?!?”
“It wasn’t the manacles that kept you from your magic, Luv. It was the canyon itself.”
“But the MOME agent said—”
“Well, they’re not exactly going to tell you how to escape, now, are they? Mind you, most people never manage to break those chains at all, let alone the manacles. And come to that, I’ve never seen anyone make it out of that canyon before, either.”
I sighed and lay down for a second. I already knew I was too tired to shift myself any distance worth trying, so there was no point in making myself pass out.
“Probably because most people who wind up here grow up with magic,” I mumbled.
“What’s that?” Azrael hopped over so he was looking me in the eyes again, even though I was lying down.
“I grew up thinking I was a normal human. I’ve only had magic for a few days, or only known I’ve had it that long. It amounts to the same thing, anyway. Taking my magic away doesn’t leave me as paralyzed as it might someone else. I’m used to having to make do with whatever my body is capable of.”
“Whatchoo doin’?” asked Azrael, as my eyes started to close.
“Taking a nap,” I mumbled. “Can’t do shit if I pass out the first time I pull on my magic.”
OF COURSE AZRAEL waited until I’d just drifted off into a peaceful sleep before pouncing on my chest and batting my face with his tail repeatedly.
“Azrael. What the fuck?” I asked groggily, pawing his tail away from my face.
“There’s a storm coming, and believe me when I tell you that you do NOT want to be out here when it hits.”
I thought of all the flash floods in the bottom of the canyon, and also the sounds of large animals stampeding a few hours before each flood…
“Ok. I will take your word for that. So… where can I go? Is there high ground around here somewhere?”
Azrael shook his head.
“During a storm, the safest place in the realm is the bottom of that canyon.”
“Fuck that. I am never going back down there. How do they expect any prisoners to survive down there? I mean, I assume they don’t particularly care if I survive, but if you’ve seen other people stowed here…”
“They expect you to get washed down the canyon, I think. That’s what happens to most of ‘em, anyway. I think they have a collection unit at the bottom. Likely keeps most of them alive. I did try to tell you that on the first night.”
That whole thought process, especially the bits in which I was supposed to have let myself get washed down the canyon, with my arms and l
egs shackled, no less, instead of resolutely climbing to high ground during each flood and eventually finding a way to break my manacles… it kind of made my blood boil.
I took a deep breath, deciding to let that go for now. I also ignored the idea that Azrael had been trying to impart useful information on the first night that he’d flown at me out of the darkness and started shrieking like a dying cat.
“So, what am I supposed to do, then? I don’t have the energy to shift myself back to Earth from here. I’m exhausted.”
“Luv, you could be as rested as the Queen on her birthday and you’d never be able to shift yourself to Earth from here. You’ll have to find a seam. And you’d best get on with it, 'cause the storm will be here soon.”
It did occur to me, briefly, to wonder what in the nine hells Azrael was getting out of this whole save-the-human-you’d-never-met-before-finding-her-randomly-at-the-bottom-of-a-canyon thing, but since it seemed likely that whatever nastiness these storms caused was just as likely to kill a squirrel-sized demon as a 150lb human, I decided it didn’t really require that much assessment. He was probably just trying to save his own ass.
“So, how do I find a seam?” I asked, eyeing the angrier-looking purple clouds above us, which were beginning to blot out the orange sky.
“How does a dragon not know how to find a seam?”
Azrael’s voice was so incredulous that I actually turned to look at him. His face showed as much indignance as I thought was possible from a squirrel, demon or not.
“I don’t know what I look like to you, buddy, but I’m not a dragon.”
I could feel my eyebrows reaching for my hairline, but Azrael skittered back from me and started gesturing wildly to the ground behind me.
“Have you never seen your Shadow?” he asked.
“Umm… I have, on more than one occasion, looked at the silhouette of my body cast by the sun. I have a feeling that’s not what you’re talking about, though.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Luv, but on this planet the sun doesn’t just shine a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum through the atmosphere, and the creatures here are built to actually see things properly. Look.”
He gestured emphatically at the ground behind me.
I turned to look, but only saw an even darkness spread on the ground.
“Shit,” Azrael mumbled. “The cloud cover is too dark, and you’d probably have to call on your snow leopard to see it anyway, but believe you me, your Shadow tells the whole story.”
I found it both suspicious and creepy that Azrael knew I had a snow leopard form, and it irked me that there was something different about the shadows here that I wasn’t catching. I tried looking at the ground behind Azrael, but I only saw the general darkness cast by the clouds in the sky.
“Never mind,” he muttered. “No point now. And you already said you were raised without magic, so I don’t know why I’m surprised. Look, just close your eyes and feel around for a break in the ether.”
That was a sentence that would have made less than zero sense to me even a week ago, but, weirdly enough, thanks to the crazy turn my life had taken lately, I actually had some sense of what he was talking about.
I closed my eyes, centered my breathing the way I did at the beginning of a training session, and tried to sense any gaps in the energy that surrounded me.
I felt for a rift in the darkness, seeking for the seam. Just as I found an edge between the energy that suffused the world and the nothing between it, I felt something warm and slick stick to my leg. Without waiting to find out what the hell it was, and hoping desperately I would still have a leg on the other side, I pulled.
I WAS BLINDED by a white light and felt the sweep of large wings as I fell backwards against cold, hard rock. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dim glow of the light around me, whatever had blinded me was long gone. The only thing left was…
“Seamus?”
“Vic?!? Is that really you? They tried to tell me you were dead.”
“What? Who tried to—Gwendamn it!”
And that was when I realized I was right back in the same fucking dungeon I’d started out in before they’d shipped me off to solitary. I tried to pull on my snow leopard form, my Gwen-given powers, anything. Nothing worked. I was right back where I’d started.
F. M. L.
~~~
The next day, after a long night of banging my head against the wall, cursing myself, Azrael, and MOME, Seamus and I were both dragged out of our cell and through multiple rock corridors, finally reaching a bland, drywall-covered maze that led us from one shitty, neon hellhole to the next, until we emerged into a grand marble foyer opening onto a set of large, arched wooden doors.
Beyond the wooden doors lay a round room encircled by high benches laden with people in robes. Great. I felt like I’d walked into the Wizengamot or some shit. If I saw Dolores Umbridge holding a gavel, I was going to lose my shit.
“You ever been to this kind of thing before?” I whispered to Seamus, who had his hands tied behind his back, just like I did, and who was being manhandled through the room right behind me.
“Nope. Wolf justice… looks different,” he whispered back.
“Silence!” That was a voice from somewhere in the darkness that surrounded the circle we’d finally stopped in.
The center of the circle was brightly lit, while the benches surrounding it were dark, leaving us blind to everything but the otherwise empty space we inhabited.
“Lovely set up you have here. I was really digging the antique bleachers. Shame we can’t see them anymore.”
Apparently, I fought my spiraling fear of death or incarceration with sass.
“I said, silence!”
“Yeah. I heard you the first time. Did no one else mention that I’m terrible with following orders? I’m surprised it didn’t come up. The lawyer I talked to found it fairly irksome, and the medics drugged me to stop me from talking. Oh, and you guys threw me into a hell dimension just to keep me out of your hair for a while, so—”
“Siopí!” shouted the voice in the darkness. I felt a slight buzz pass over my skin, and wondered if that meant someone had just cast a spell.
“Is that Greek? Cool! I didn’t know that Arizona had much of a Greek population.”
Much muttering and gasping followed that exclamation.
“Are you all Greek? Did I just offend you all? I can’t see shit past this circle of light, you know, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve missed some visual cues.”
Seamus snickered behind me.
“What?” I asked.
“I think that was supposed to be a spell to make you shut up.”
“And it didn’t work?” I asked.
He chuckled again.
“Well, I can still hear you. I’m guessing they can too.”
I turned back to the darkness around us, in the general direction of the voice that had uttered the spell.
“I told you, I really don’t take orders well. I thought I was supposed to testify, though. I can’t do that if I’ve been silenced.” Not that I actually expected to be allowed to testify—I fully expected them to conveniently “forget” about that part—but if they were going to pretend this was a trial, then I was going to keep reminding them of it. Not for the first time, I wished that lawyer had left behind a book on mage law or something.
“You will be quiet, or you will be removed from this court.”
“Now that seems counterintuitive. I’m here so that you can ask me questions. Kicking me out for talking would just be silly. That would be hard to explain to your dissenters, wouldn’t it? Are there any reporters here?”
That caused another stir, and sure enough, no one repeated the threat. I supposed I’d guessed right about the reporters and the dissenters. I guess they had to at least make it look like a fair trial.
“So, now that you’ve dragged us all the way up here, what did you want to know?” I wasn’t feeling at all cooper
ative, but I at least wanted to get this farce over with. I knew that silence wouldn’t help me, but giving the mages time to compose themselves didn’t help me either.
“How long have you been working with the Openers?” The question came from a different voice than the one that had been telling me to shut up in Greek.
“That doesn’t sound like a formal inquiry, that sounds more like an interrogation. Is this an interrogation? Weird.”
“Answer the question!”
“Sure, but hey, is this being recorded? I want a record of this whole trial. Do you mages have anything close enough to due process to grant that, or are you just going to report whatever you like when this is all over?”
“The trial is being recorded. Now answer the question.”
“But who has access to the recording? And can it be altered? Honestly, I would feel more comfortable if someone I knew were here, or at least privy to the recordings.”
“You are allowed to request a witness,” said a third voice.
“Great. How about Albert Bumblebee?”
I had been thinking about it since my first talk with Rebecca Dryer. Of course, I’d been a bit distracted since then, but as soon as I found myself trapped here again last night, I’d decided that the best person to ask for was my high school principal. Naturally, I would rather have requested my brother, or Sol, or anyone else I actually knew well, but all the people I was closest to were wanted by MOME, and none of them could show up on my behalf without getting locked up themselves. To my knowledge, Albert Bumblebee was free and clear with this court, and also a mage. He seemed to like me, and had tried to help me a couple of times already.
“What is your association with Grand Master Bumblebee?”
“Grand Master?” That was news to me. “Albert’s my homie,” I said, delighting in the consternation that seemed to be coming from the bleachers. “He’s also my school principal.”
“You will address Grand Master Bumblebee with the appropriate respect!” demanded a furious voice on the other side of the darkness.
“She is addressing me just as I requested she address me, Master Elfthwin,” came a familiar voice from behind me.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 28
