If it makessss you feel any better, Living Cat, you are sssstill a child by dragon sssstandardssss.
Then why am I here fighting bad guys instead of playing in someone’s yard?
Rhelia made no reply, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she did.
As I took in the flaming scene before me, I was tempted to try to remove all of the mind control grunts from the equation and just let MOME deal with the fire, but there were too many for me to remove them without getting a bunch of them killed, and MOME seemed to be having zero luck with the fire, despite having all but stopped fighting in order to put it out.
Right then—time to put the boost that getting busy with Az had given me to the test.
THE TANK THAT I’d originally torched had started setting off small explosions that lit up not just the MOME troops that surrounded it, but also the pavement it was on, and… everything it touched.
MOME had basically stopped fighting, though it wasn’t entirely clear if that was in order to try to put out the fire I’d started, or because they only had a handful of people to try to kill left. Renata had removed all of the remaining mind control victims that we had led out, and now I couldn’t see her in the fray. Had she taken Torrence with her? I couldn’t see him at the moment either. Rhelia was certainly here, and a very large target, but no other dragons appeared to be present, and I didn’t even know where Albert had wandered off to.
At any rate, it was handy that they were distracted. But less handy that they were trying to put out the fire by sacrificing mind control grunts carrying spelled blankets.
In fact, that ruined just about everything that was useful about the fire to begin with.
Which is how, seconds after I’d stopped spraying the very fire that had become such a threat, I found myself diving down through the smoke that now clogged the air above MOME’s Phoenix HQ, shrieking, talons extended—because I feel like there’s a certain expectation of fury with wings that needs to be upheld—towards the flaming wreck that had been a tank only a minute ago.
It was more flame than not, and with my quick descent I didn’t have much time to assess where a safe place to grab it might be. Rhelia’s warning about dragons not being immune to dragon flame was still fresh in my mind, but honestly, what choice did I have? MOME had decided to use the people they had unwavering control over to douse the flames, and they seemed to have given them some kind of spelled blankets to do it with, but that didn’t change the fact that the flames were consuming the blankets almost as quickly as they were applied, and then leaping to the folks holding the blankets, with zero fanfare besides the screams of the victims.
So, yeah, I didn’t have time to look around for the best place to put my talons.
There was something that looked like a small hatch open on the side of the vehicle, and while flames consumed every available surface around it, there didn’t seem to be any flames inside of the hatch yet, so I aimed for that spot, hoping to grab the inside edge.
It would have been a different story if I’d had to carry the damned thing anywhere, but as it was, I just latched onto the inside edge of the damned thing and did my best to picture a familiar hellscape where it would fit in nicely.
But nothing happened, and I could feel my scales begin to singe.
I let out a roar of frustration, and then saw the flap of feathered wings at my side.
Azrael? Where the hells did you come from? I asked, with far less irony than I should have.
But Az didn’t say anything before they kissed me. And I had just about a half second to think of how weird it felt because I was still a dragon, so Az was basically just making out with a small portion of my lip, but damned if that didn’t get my dragon blood going, and then bam, I felt the power transfer initiate. Apparently, there were a few perks to having already gotten busy with a succubus. And I didn’t have time to question how any of that worked, because suddenly, still gripping the flaming tank that was now causing the skin beneath my scales to smolder, my power finished the reach I had tried to initiate a moment ago, and then I was in hell.
BOTH LITERALLY AND figuratively, that is. Because of course, with Az’s help, and considering how close we were to the seam that ran near here, I’d pulled myself into that damned canyon of dark matter suppression, complete with orange sky barely visible between towering cliffs, purple sun, and air tinged with sulphur.
Which was actually great, because it seemed to be the only thing that could suppress the dragon fire (and wasn’t that interesting—did dragon fire run on dark matter, then? It must, and that would explain why it was so damned hard to put out, and also why it would eat into dragons as well), but I only had half a second to consider the implications of all of that before my whole world narrowed to one of excruciating pain.
I didn’t think it was the naked red squirrel thing that was sitting on top of my chest causing the agony, but I couldn’t really tell. I’d fallen to my ass as soon as I’d landed in this damned canyon, and I couldn’t see much of what was going on.
I could see that the fire on the tank had been put out, which was great, and I had to assume it meant that no part of my body was currently on fire, but apparently turning human and having human nerve endings to experience the remnants of whatever burning I’d just experienced was the opposite of fun.
And then Azrael started screaming at me.
Maybe they were trying to reassure me. How were you supposed to tell what a red demon squirrel was saying when the translation magic didn’t work and all you heard was the sound of a thousand tortured cats every time they opened their mouth?
All of which ceased to matter for a moment, as I passed out from the pain.
When I came to again, Az was staring into my face, looking concerned. I wondered how long I’d been out, but decided it could’t be more than a minute or two, because everything was exactly as it had been before consciousness escaped me. Also, Az hadn’t abandoned me yet.
“Are we really going to have to climb out of here to get back?” I asked Az.
Who looked at me as if I were a very slow child, for a moment.
I decided to lie down for a bit and let my brain catch up to reality.
Had we come through a seam? I had shifted us here, this time, but used the seam as a guide, because it made the whole thing more energy efficient. What about the last time? The last time I’d used the seam in the dungeon from MOME. Which, Sol had reminded me a few days ago, didn’t require any special powers to do. Nons (muggles, normal humans, whatever you wanted to call them) occasionally stumbled through seams, right? So… that meant that I should be able to go back through the seam here. The first time I was brought here, I was dropped off by MOME, tied up, and had no idea how seams worked, so it hadn’t occurred to me I could get back from here, besides, I would have just wound up back in the dungeon, so that wouldn’t have helped me. But this time, I had no real reason to care about going through the MOME dungeon. Sure, it might slow me down, but not nearly as much as climbing the cliff would.
Part of me wanted to climb up just to check on Siara, but for one thing, I was still largely a ball of agony. For another thing, I still had a battle to fight, and even though it was tempting—so Gwendamned tempting—to just lie down here and take a break for a minute because damned if I wasn’t covered in burns, and just generally beat to shit, and felt like I deserved a break after saving everyone’s asses from dragon fire…
Of course, I’d been the one to set the damned fire to begin with, and there were still people I loved back on Earth, possibly fighting MOME, and possibly in mortal danger, and if anything happened to one of them because I wasn’t there to help, I—
I was suddenly on my feet, Az perched on my shoulder, doing their best not to gouge me with their little sharp-assed squirrel claws—which I sadly was in too much damned pain elsewhere to even feel, but bless their little squirrel heart for trying—and feeling around in the air for the edge to the seam.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, hoping
that this seam really did lead back to the MOME HQ in Phoenix and not to some other dimension where some other freaking monster was going to swallow me whole before I could even get my bearings.
DID I SERIOUSLY jinx myself? I wondered, blankly, as I reached the front door of the MOME compound, only to grind to a halt in horror, my arms and ribs aching with the burns they’d received earlier. Had I actually come through the door to another dimension? I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but it was something out of a nightmare inspired by Cthulhu and an oyster having terrible messy sex and then producing… whatever this was.
“What the ever-loving hells is that?!” I asked Az, who was now standing beside me in their winged human form.
“Hmmm?”
Az sounded distracted.
“Az, what is that?” I repeated.
“That, Luv, is someone you would do best to avoid if you’re able.” Their voice was calm, but they were twitching in a way that was anything but. I couldn’t say I blamed them.
I’d basically sprinted here after pushing through the seam in the dungeon, burns or no burns—and thanks to Az kissing me rather thoroughly, as soon as we’d made it out of the dark suppressing stone of the dungeons, the burns were barely noticeable anymore. I’d shifted to snow leopard form right after that, in order to move faster through MOME’s sterile, fluorescent-lit interior design nightmare, and then I’d shifted to human as we’d reached the heavy glass doors, apparently for the sole purpose of interrogating Az about the hellscape that lay before us. Technically I supposed it was just the one hell-creature, and not a whole hellscape, but… clam shell, tentacles, giant fanged maw, lots of writhing, and dripping… it painted quite the scene.
And whatever it was, it was using suckered, dripping tentacles to grab… everything around it. As I watched in a sort of fascinated horror, it shoved everything into its maw, from people, to gear, to the one remaining tank. It was even grabbing up pieces of flaming pavement and choking them down.
And…
“Oh…” I muttered.
Az turned their silver gaze in my direction.
“What?”
“I still don’t know what it is— your explanation was no help at all, BTW—but I think I know why it’s here,” I said, watching as the thing grabbed an AR-15 out of the hands of a human and swallowed it whole, followed immediately by another chunk of flaming concrete that some of the MOME mages had launched in the creature’s general direction after managing to sever and lift it using some form of telekinesis.
“I think someone brought it in to do cleanup,” I clarified.
I winced as it grabbed one of the mages that had been manipulating the section of flaming concrete, swallowing him down too.
Az stared at the thing again, and shuddered.
“I’m not sure that’s an improvement on the fire, really,” they said. “Thanatos does ingest dark matter in any form, but he’s… not the most agreeable demon on most days, and… he rather despises being summoned against his will.”
And yeah, I could kinda see that. The thing was eating things and people as indiscriminately as the dragon fire. But then something caught my eye that made me realize that whoever had brought it here had probably intended to kill two birds with one stone. My spine straightened in terror, though, as I realized that they were likely to kill a whole lot more than two birds.
“Shit, Az, we have to stop them,” I said, pushing the doors open and deciding that I was going to have to brave the monster, no matter how pants-shittingly scary it was.
Az started to object, but then they must have seen what I did, and they were sprinting alongside me.
Someone was trying to sneak up on the creature with a syringe—filled with something that looked an awful lot like Technetium.
UGH. THAT THING, Cthulhu-Oyster hybrid, whatever the fuck—Thanatos, I guess Az had said—was huge. And the closer I got to it (shooting past Az on my much larger wings), the larger it seemed. Not just from the perspective change, but like it had actually grown since I’d started watching it. Maybe it had? After all, if what Az said was true, the damned thing consumed dark matter, and maybe that was the kind of thing that made a creature gain mass quickly? I mean, why the fuck not? Everything else about it was horrifying, so why not add getting visibly larger every time it ate to the list?
Racing towards it, even shifted to my dragon form, made my stomach feel like a solid cold lump of terror. I hoped that, as a dragon, I was too big for the creepy thing to swallow, but I was not particularly reassured. At any rate, I wasn’t aiming for the damned creature. I was aiming for the idiot with the Technetium.
Because injecting Technetium into something that was basically a dark matter repository seemed like a terrible idea. Or just a really good way to kill everyone and everything in this whole city… and possibly the entire universe, as previously discussed.
And damn it, I knew that had been Dryer’s master plan, but I didn’t think the rest of her minions were so stuck on it that they would still be working towards it even after her death. I mean come on, who is that committed to taking out the whole universe? I mean, I’d even flambéed the short asshat who had seemed to be in charge of this whole regiment, so who was going around ordering people to blow up the world now?
But all of that would have to get filed under “shit to worry about when you’re not about to die,” because right here and now I had to worry about preventing the end of the world. Again.
And dude with the syringe knew how to hustle. He wasn’t wearing any of the useless radiation gear that might slow him down and—
Shit.
I wound up slamming into both him and the clam-Cthulhu love-child demon, because fuck if he didn’t reach the tentacled menace before I did. And not one of the damned tentacles even tried to grab him. Which could not be said for me. I was half-wrapped in one, even as I reached forward with my scaled snout—ignoring all the pain radiating out from my sides and forelegs, where I’d been burned—and tried to nudge the syringe-carrying fool out of the way. But the dude was moving with the kind of determination reserved for sprinters and zealots, and I could do little more than nudge him to the side, as the tentacle of the monster clam tried to pull me into its maw. So I slapped the monster clam with my tail, reaching my neck forward again to crash into the Technetium wielder, but I was too late. I watched in horrified silence as the syringe plunged into a waving tentacle.
I didn’t even think, I just shifted with every Gwendamned thing I had.
And I caught just the briefest glimpse of an orange sky with purple sun, before blackness took it all away.
I BLINKED MYSELF awake to a purple sun in the orange sky, almost exactly where it had been the last time I was here.
“Gwendamn, I really need to get some tests done,” I muttered, to no one. Or maybe to the small, electric blue rabbit that was sitting on my chest. It, unlike Az in squirrel form, had plenty of fur. It looked downy soft, was almost small enough to fit in my palm, and had eyes the size of nickels. It was practically an anime character.
“Hello there,” I said. Since, you know, this was a hell realm, and the shrieking squirrel that I knew as Azrael was also a talking angel back on earth, so, this guy could be anyone. There was no reason to be rude.
“Hello, human/dragon female,” the bunny replied, blinking mildly.
I tried to sit up, without really thinking about it, because, even after everything I’d been through, a talking blue bunny was a bit startling. Only I couldn’t, because the damned thing felt like it weighed at least a hundred pounds.
“Oh, pardon me,” the bunny said, hopping down beside me and causing a tremor in the earth. “Still digesting,” it added, as though that explained why it weighed about a hundred times what it should have.
“Do, uh… do you know how long I was unconscious just now?” I asked, wondering if it would be rude to ask the bunny how the hell it spoke English aloud, when translation magic didn’t work down here.
“From the moment we a
rrived here, until just now? Only handful of minutes, by your reckoning,” the bunny said.
“Spent time in England?” I asked, wondering why all the demons I was meeting sounded like they’d spent time in the UK.
“Yes! Devonshire. One of my favorite haunts when I’ve been visiting your world. Although there are many other places I’ve enjoyed. Earth is a lovely world all around, but Devonshire was where I learned to speak English. I’ve always loved the accent, though of course I try not to emulate it—very difficult for some folks to understand.”
Sure. Why not? And then my brain let go of the fact that the bunny had a British accent, and was producing spoken English from vocal chords that shouldn’t have been able to manage those sounds, and focused on the fact that it had said “from the moment we arrived.” We arrived. We. I was pretty sure that I had only been touching one thing when I’d shifted us here. I swallowed, but tried not to let my newfound fear of the tiny blue bunny show on my face.
“Did, uh… did anyone else show up with us?” I asked, blinking and trying to look around.
“The unpleasant fellow who stabbed me with a syringe arrived here with us, but he took off running immediately after we landed. Thank you for shifting us here, by the way. I don’t think I would have been able to reach the seam before the Technetium took effect, and I rather prefer not becoming disassociated atoms.”
I swallowed again, but this time the emotion I was trying to contain wasn’t fear exactly, it was the overwhelming sense that the universe was just going to keep fucking with me until I died.
“Do I even want to know how you know about that?”
The small bunny twitched its nose as though it might be offended, so I tried to look apologetic.
“I mean, I know shit about shit when it comes to the magical world, and I really don’t know who you are, so forgive me if this is something you’re a well-known expert on, but I was under the impression that it wasn’t widespread knowledge that Technetium reacted poorly with dark matter, and that MOME was weaponizing it.”
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 60
