“Now what?” Gwen asked, causing me to almost drop Trev in surprise.
“Damn it, Gwen, you shouldn’t be down here, it can hurt you!”
She shrugged and then glared at me.
“I’m a goddess,” she said, tossing her ridiculous red curls at me.
“This place almost killed you last time,” I said, and something about my tone, or maybe the panic in my eyes, must have gotten her attention because she put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’re almost clear of the dark matter suppressing rocks here, Vic. It takes more than this place to cut me off from my power. It hurts, but it won’t do anything terrible unless I stay here for a while. I assume we’re not planning on staying?” she said, nodding at my two unconscious companions.
But I couldn’t respond. All I could do was stare mutely at her in horror.
“Vic?”
“Past the dark matter suppressing rocks?”
“Yeah, almost, why?”
“Gwen, am I about to explode?”
“What? Why would you explode?”
“Because I was injected with Technetium just before—”
“Vic, darling, you were not injected with Technetium.
“I wasn’t? But I felt the needle—”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because, if you had been injected you’d already be dead by now, along with everyone else in this city. The dark matter suppressers here aren’t effective enough to keep you safe from Technetium, unlike that canyon you keep visiting.”
Oddly, that didn’t make me feel much better because it meant that I had put everyone I loved at risked just by returning to earth. Then I blinked and looked down at Albert’s prone form on the stone floor and realized if I wasn’t going to accidentally kill everyone I needed to refocus on the problem at hand.
“We need to get Albert back to wherever Dryer left his soul,” I said, as if she should just know what that meant.
Gwen looked at Albert and then back at me.
“I don’t think that’s how this works, Vic,” she said, and the gentleness in her voice made my blood run cold in my veins.
“Gwen, you have to do something. We can’t just let him die. Dryer possessed him and then a demon ate her soul and…” my voice trailed off, but Gwen’s eyes just looked sad.
“Fine,” I said, not having patience for whatever she believed was going on here. “Just get the three of us out of this damned dark matter suppressing dungeon and I’ll fix it.”
“Vic, I don’t think—”
“Just GET US OUT OF HERE!”
Gwen didn’t reply, she just grabbed my arm, and Albert’s (I was already holding Trev’s) and shifted us.
~~~
The next moment we were in one of the horribly lit linoleum hallways of upper MOME. They were, as they had been the last few times I’d traversed them, abandoned. I looked at Gwen, and she looked at Albert and then at Trev.
“Want me to take your brother to his dragon mate?” she asked.
I nodded, not sure I could speak without screaming or crying. Trev was still unconscious, but he was breathing normally, and I didn’t think there was much I could do for him aside from getting Gwen take him somewhere else. Rhelia could heal him if he needed it, and would protect him, or ask Gwen to, if necessary.
“Souls don’t just come back to bodies, Vic.”
“What if I take him to Life and—”
“Life can’t fix anything without a soul in residence, and that’s Albert’s only problem right now. Otherwise he’s uninjured.”
She was gone as soon as the words left her mouth, Trev in tow.
I stared at Albert’s inert form for a moment, hoping beyond hope that Gwen was just wrong. That being possessed meant that Albert’s soul was just kicking it nearby somewhere, and would return to him soon. But the seconds ticked by, and his body just got paler and paler and…
Suddenly I was on my knees next to Albert’s body, with my forehead pressed to his.
“How do I fix this, Albert? How do I help you? Where is your soul!?”
Of course he didn’t answer me.
But something did.
A memory. My memory. I closed my eyes, trying to relax and let my brain get the message through. Three versions of me sitting around a room that didn’t exist in anything but my imagination. Or else, didn’t exist outside of my dark matter. Albert wasn’t in his body anymore, but that didn’t mean he was gone completely. He could just be stuck. I had been stuck once.
And before I could consider what a terrible idea this probably was, before I could remind myself that only luck and my connection to Trev had saved me the last time, before my brain could explain that what I was about to do should be impossible anyway, I was holding onto Albert’s shoulders for dear life and reaching into time and space, not following my own dark matter, but reaching for Albert’s instead.
~~~
“How interesting,” said a voice that filled me with an enormous sense of relief. “By all accounts, this should not be possible.”
I looked up into the friendly grey-blue gaze of Albert Bumblebee.
“Yeah, Gwen tried to tell me I couldn’t save you. Still not sure this is going to work,” I replied.
Albert simply stared at me for a moment.
“But your body is dying, so we should probably get a move on,” I added.
“This space is generally devoid of time,” Albert replied, still blinking slowly at my sudden arrival.
The room we were in looked an awful lot like Albert’s office at school, with a few major differences. It had windows that looked out onto a decidedly English-looking countryside, and there were no iguanas draped over the backs of the red velvet wingback chairs here. I kinda missed them. To my amazement, as soon as I longed for the sight of one, a six-foot-long iguana appeared, already draped languidly across the back of a wingback.
Albert blinked at it for a moment, before turning to me again.
I figured it was best if I didn’t ask, so I just replied to Albert’s last statement about time.
“That’s been my experience with my personal dimensional pocket too, but you came here without your body as an anchor this time, so I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I mean, you were a lifeless corpse when I left you. Luckily, you’ve been that way for less than two minutes, but we are starting to push the boundaries of ‘how long a body can survive while technically dead,’ and I really don’t want to get back from here and find out we’re too late.”
Albert smiled.
“But, my dear girl, you’ve brought the tether with you already. I can feel that I’m once more connected to myself.”
“Seriously? It was that easy?” I looked around bewildered.
“I would not call it easy,” Albert said, arching a white eyebrow in my direction. “I’ve never heard of anyone accomplishing such a task before. Besides, we’ve yet to make it out of here. I can feel that the tether to my body is restored, but I’ve no idea what to do with it. I’m not supposed to be in this place.”
“So you’ve never been here before?” I asked.
“No. I’ve placed other things here, but I cannot venture here myself without becoming trapped. I rather thought this was simply what death was. Rebecca pushed me out of my body rather forcefully, when I wasn’t expecting it. I was certain this was to be my afterlife.”
“Ok. Weird. If our afterlife is getting trapped in our own pocket dimension, I really don’t want to die.”
Albert shrugged.
“There were plenty of good books,” he said.
I looked around at his shelves and considered it.
“Only ones you’d read before, though, right?”
Albert looked at his shelves for a moment.
“Fair point. Let’s get out of here, shall we?”
I nodded, reaching out a hand to Albert. If he didn’t know how to get out of here, I was probably going to have to help. I suppose it made sense, as Alber
t didn’t have any experience shifting into animal form by reaching for a body that was familiar to him.
Reminding myself that I had gotten stuck before because I’d been in a dimensional pocket with all of my own forms, I figured the easiest way out of here was probably going to be shifting to one of those. I closed my eyes, even though that was arguably unnecessary, and thought of being coated in thick fur, having a hefty tail to check my balance, and padding along on four padded feet that could run over snow and rocks.
I returned to the awful fluorescence that was the MOME hallway I’d just left, and blinked.
Then I jumped back and hissed when I was confronted with a six-foot-long iguana.
And no Albert.
“Umm…” I had apparently shifted back to human for the sole purpose of speaking. Because, holy shit, what had I done?
The iguana looked at me and blinked a few times, seemingly undisturbed and unsurprised by my presence, both as cat and human.
“Albert?” I asked, wondering if I was hallucinating, or somehow still stuck in a pocket dimension. Or maybe just a very odd hell realm.
The iguana opened its mouth, as though to speak, but it merely wheezed and hissed a bit before snapping its mouth shut again.
A moment later, Albert stood before me where the iguana had been.
“Well, that was educational,” he said, before his legs gave out and he slid to the floor.
~~~
“Albert!” I shouted racing to his side. “Are you ok?”
Albert blinked a few more times, his gaze distant and unfocused, and his tongue darted out for a moment before sliding back into his mouth.
“I am alive, and I am not permanently an iguana,” he answered.
“True statements,” I replied, waiting for actual confirmation that he was ok.
“I believe that means I am ok. However, when this day is over, I have…a few questions for you, Vic. Everything that has happened in the past few minutes should not be possible.”
“Ha! Welcome to my life,” I said, giving Albert a hug, which he dazedly returned before getting back to his feet with a little help from my shoulders.
“Indeed,” he said. “Let’s go finish this, shall we?”
AS SOON AS Albert was steady on his feet I shifted to dragon form, clutched Albert in one set of talons, and then shifted my dragon ass out to the front of the building, because running through those damned fluorescent hallways again could fucking die in a fire.
If I ever got ahold of the jackass who was supposed to be in charge of this story, I was going to slap them. Honestly, if I were a person reading my life right now, I would be losing my shit. How many times can one person run out the same set of doors into mortal peril, only to have to go right back to the same fucking hell dimension to avoid destroying the world, in one day? It was too much.
And whoever was writing this damned story must have thought so too, because when I broke through the doors this time, no one was trying to tear the universe into tiny pieces with an ill-advised magical bomb.
Nope.
They were just trying to kill all of my friends and family with regular old gunfire and spell-slinging.
It looked like things hadn’t gone all that well after I’d left with Dryer/Albert and Trevor. MOME was still clearly trying to kill everybody I cared about, just not with any world-ending weapons. I took a moment to wonder who was leading this whole thing, with Dryer deposed, but I honestly wasn’t sure that it mattered. In all likelihood, she had more than one lackey, or even a few other MOME higher-ups, who were probably all too happy to see all non-magical humans subjugated, magical entities becoming top dogs, and MOME themselves running the whole thing. Honestly, based on what I’d heard Albert and Sol say about the biases of the magic-wielding world in general, it probably hadn’t even been that hard for Dryer to get people to see her “side” of things. In fact, now I was wondering if she’d actually faced more than token opposition.
So it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to find that the asshats I’d left behind when I’d tackled their leader into another dimension were still hard at it, trying to kill the rest of us. After all, a bunch of us had shown up to make it clear that we weren’t in favor of the whole “subjugate all humans” piece. And, now, with all of the reinforcements that the Unterberg delegation seemed to have brought along, we had almost half as many fighters as MOME did, even without our suspiciously absent dragon reinforcements.
We’d clearly thrown a wrench in whatever attack plan MOME had for today. An invasion of some kind, if Rebecca Dryer’s raving ghost was to be believed. So, yeah, they were probably more than a little pissed off at us.
And that was fine, really. I mean, what the hell? This was something we were all more or less equipped for, unlike ripping holes in the universe. I put Albert on the ground. He nodded and ran off to do whatever badass mages do in a fight, and I launched myself skyward. As I rose into the cerulean Phoenix sky, I took stock of the battle below.
The reinforcements from Unterberg were spread out, not far from where they’d been when I’d grabbed Trev and Albert/Dryer from certain doom, and many of them were flinging spells at MOME’s leather-clad mages. They were doing a fair bit of damage, though their own shields were also taking plenty of hits. In addition, the Unterbergers seemed to have a number of shifters, ogres, trolls, and other large hand-to-hand combatants, whose forms and names I was unfamiliar with, and they were giving the MOME mages one hell of a time, as they did their best to defend against a magical barrage at the same time as a physical one. Seemed like MOME hadn’t brought as many shifters to this battle, and they’d lost the advantage as a consequence.
As I rose higher, I caught sight of a huddle in my peripheral vision that included Seamus’ Moms and my parents, along with a recently arrived Albert, all of whom seemed to be involved in a hurried discussion. I had to assume that it was a strategy meeting, but soon I lost sight of them in the fray and decided that I was needed elsewhere, anyway.
Rhelia, in her glorious dragon form, was tearing into a troop of mages with her talons and teeth, looking as furious as I’d ever seen her. And, as I dove down to join the fray, I saw Sol streak past in her panther form, knocking the guns from the hands of the few remaining mind control victims who were still running on instructions to kill us, deftly dodging bullets as she went. Rhelia must have spread the word about not killing the front line grunts.
Seamus, much to my surprise, was tearing around in wolf form, dragging something long and wet from his mouth and sneaking up behind troops to hit them with it. I had no idea what that was about, and I didn’t have time to figure it out before I reached the fight and started tearing into a line of mages at Rhelia’s side.
I gave Rhelia plenty of space, assuming that her attack radius would need to include her tail, and trying to account for how much larger she was than me. Of course, I hadn’t really accounted for how she would react to me coming back without Trev. Thankfully, she didn’t actually tear into me, the way her shrieking dive in my direction made me fear. Instead, she stopped short and turned on the mages to my side.
Where issss he? He issss not ressssponding to my call.
I batted a few MOME mages aside with my tail as I replied, He’s safe, but I can’t get ahold of him either.
To be honest, I hadn’t even thought of communicating with him mentally until Rhelia had started diving at me, and it had occurred to me that she might want an answer about where Trev was. But he hadn’t replied to my very urgent suggestions that now would be a great time to wake up, you know, before his girlfriend/soulmate/partner eviscerated me. So, I wasn’t lying when I told Rhelia that he wasn’t replying to me either.
Rhelia turned aside briefly to literally bite a MOME mage in half, and I was grateful that I was in my dragon form, because dragon-me wasn’t nearly as squeamish as human-me, and I was pretty sure human-me would have tossed her cookies at that.
Wassss he harmed? Her mental voice was surprisingly calm now, d
espite how anxious she’d seemed just a moment ago.
Not after we got to hell, I replied, casually swatting a few more MOME mages away with my foreleg before they could launch their spells at me. Damn, it was handy to be able to see magic. It was even more handy to know that the majority of it was just going to bounce off of my scales. I have no idea what Dryer did to him before I grabbed him, though. I didn’t get there until just before she tried to inject him.
I thought sssshe had merely put a ssssleep sssspell on him, but that sssshould have worn off with her demisssse.
She turned and roared in the faces of a group of about six mages who were trying to sneak up on her, and I swear more than half of them soiled themselves as they retreated. I tried not to take too many deep breaths, as I didn’t really want to confirm that one.
Where is he? Rhelia asked again, after the mages had retreated.
I gave him to Gwen. I didn’t know what else to do with him. I couldn’t leave him unconscious and alone in the hell realms, I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
It hadn’t really occurred to me to leave him behind. I didn’t consider Thanatos, who could apparently eat people’s souls even in his blue bunny form, to be a safe person to leave my unconscious twin with, and there hadn’t been time to do anything else.
My thoughts must have leaked to Rhelia anyway.
I am sure Gwen will keep him safe.
I couldn’t help but notice that Rhelia’s accent was slipping again, and I wondered if it slipped when she was annoyed, or just when shit got serious enough that she didn’t want to waste time on the extra sibilance.
We were both momentarily distracted by a barrage of spells that included a few of the nastier, dragon-scale-breaching variety, so we dodged in silence for a moment, before resuming our own attacks and our conversation.
A small part of me just wanted to end all of this nonsense with dragon fire, then bring Thanatos in to do the cleanup and call it good, but something told me that if it were as easy as I thought it was, someone else already would have suggested it.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 62
