by Jen Ponce
Of course, I had no idea how long I’d been here, either. There wasn’t a sun to rise or set and there weren’t any clocks.
How long had some of these people been in Ravana’s clutches?
I didn’t know. I decided I didn’t want to know.
We’d emptied nearly eight floors before I called for a break. Eight floors equaled eight hundred souls freed. Eight hundred freed and only two thousand, two-hundred more to go. Gaius Regulus would be staying put as far as I was concerned. Perhaps he was a super nice guy, but I couldn’t imagine anyone willing to work with Ravana as nice.
Jack stayed with me as we worked and there was something about him that soothed those we released. I didn’t know what it was; he wasn’t exactly a handsome guy and he didn’t look harmless, but he won people over, no matter what they were.
“There’s an entire floor of chythraul,” Kali said when she found us. “Shall I kill them all?”
“No,” I said, drawing out the word. I hated the idea of slaughtering them, but I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get them out without a fight. I doubted even Jack’s powers of soothing could lull an assassin spider into complacency. Maybe if they knew they would be going back to the swamps where they lived … “We’ll leave them locked up until we can figure out a safe way to let them go.”
She snorted and disappeared, clearly not on board with that idea.
“I’m going to go back to Ty’s for a bit. Maybe see if he has some food. You want to come, Jack?”
“Out?”
“Yeah. With me.”
He ducked his head and contemplated his fingers, wiggling them and touching each with the index finger of his other hand. Finally, he said, “Okay. Will it hurt?”
“No. It’s easy. And I’m guessing since you were born here in the Slip, it won’t affect you the way it affects others who visit. You’ll stay with me and I’ll keep you safe.” I crossed my fingers behind my back when I said that. People had a way of getting hurt when they were around me. I hoped things would go well and no disasters would crash into my path while he was with me. “You’ll just need to hold my hand.”
He wrapped his webbed fingers around mine and I hooked us to Ty’s before Jack had a chance to freak out. He stood panting in the main room, his big eyes even wider as he took in his surroundings. After a moment, he said, “Oh.”
“Not too bad, huh? Hey, you want to meet a good friend of mine?”
“Friend?”
I called for Nex and he bobbed into the room, stopping when he saw Jack. They studied each other and then Nex turned to me. “Where did you find him?”
“Ravana’s Reach. She made him.”
Understanding dawned on his face. “Ah. He is an interesting mix.” To Jack, he said, “Do you eat the flesh of the living?”
‘Nice, Nex. Ask the grossest thing and freak him out.’
Jack made a swimming motion with his hand. “I eat fish?”
“Have you had your first blood?”
My new companion tipped his head.
“May I see your teeth?”
Jack glanced at me as if asking for permission, or perhaps to see if I thought Nex was crossing a line. I shrugged and Jack pulled his lips away from his teeth.
Nex turned to me. “He is an unblooded fleshcrawler. Sort of.”
Hearing, “sort of” from Nex tickled my funny bone. Obviously, I was tired. Giggling, I covered my mouth and turned away from them both. I heard Nex explain I was strange but good and it only made me laugh harder.
That was how Ty found us.
“I see you survived the tentacles.” He sounded annoyed.
I nodded, taking a few deep breaths to clear away the laughter. “Yes,” I said finally. “Turns out Ravana’s Reach is sentient.”
“It talked to you?”
“She, and yes.”
His eyes moved to Jack and then he raised his eyebrows.
“That’s Jack. He’s …” I bit down on the words, suddenly worried I would hurt his feelings or something. “Our brother. Sort of.” The words made my lips twitch, but I managed not to giggle again.
“We’re not siblings.” He moved closer to me, looking decidedly un-brother-like.
“No,” I said, drawing out the word. “But Ravana screwed with us both. And she screwed with Jack, too. So that makes us family.”
“Family.”
“Right.”
I realized Jack and Nex were no longer speaking. Jack’s eyes were wide as he stared at Tytan. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
A muscle jumped in Ty’s jaw. He didn’t answer Jack or look his way again. “Why is he here?”
I looked between them both, but no answers were forthcoming. “He’s been helping me release Ravana’s prisoners.”
“Tell me you didn’t let Gaius go.”
“God, no.”
He sagged in relief. Tytan. It made me glad I’d gone with my gut instincts that Gaius was bad news.
“That bad?”
“He’s quite civilized.”
When he didn’t say more, I reached over and squeezed his forearm. “I’m sorry too.” After a moment, I clapped my hands together. “So. Don’t suppose you have any food?”
“Magic, Devany. You can use magic.”
“I always forget. Not like I grew up using it, you know. And besides, I’m not sure how. Things don’t just come from nothing, right? Am I stealing food from random people? Do parts of cows go missing?” I gasped. “Is that what really happens to the cows people find with parts missing? Not aliens, just hungry Skriven?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’ll make something.”
“For all of us. Well, the four of us, at least. Maybe Kali too. I’ll ask her.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“Because I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go to the Reach, knowing … well, knowing Ravana. Seeing …” I swallowed. “I changed it all. It doesn’t look anything like it did.”
“Thank you.”
I mocked hitting him in the arm. “You betcha.” Awkward. That was me. Luckily, he didn’t make a big deal out of it, instead heading off to make the food. I wanted to watch, though, so I followed him into a modern-looking kitchen. “Do you keep food in a fridge?”
“No. Magic,” he said again, his words dripping with patience—patient sarcasm? Was there such a thing? He took a book down from a shelf over a smooth, black counter-top and laid it flat. “What do you want?”
I thumbed through the book, not a cookbook, but more of a menu. I pointed to things and as I did, they appeared on the counter, steaming hot when needed. “How, though?”
“This helps the visualization. The food isn’t taken from somewhere else and brought here. It’s created using magic.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re standing in a place between worlds. You routinely hop from world to world and you think this doesn’t make any sense?”
“I don’t think any of it makes sense, but it obviously works because here I am. I would just like to know how it works. For instance,” I said, flailing about for a fork before Tytan produced one for me. I stabbed a bit of roasted beef, thinly sliced. “I didn’t know about time belts. I didn’t know there were such things and now I find out they can be severed by the cages in the Reach. How?”
He leaned a hip against the counter and picked up a platter with fruits and vegetables on it. “It breaks the magic holding the person to their world. It cuts off all magic; thus, it cuts off their tie to the point in time they left their world. The cells are like Faraday cages, only instead of blocking electromagnetic fields, it blocks magic.”
“If I walked into one, would that sever my time belt?”
“If you walked into one and someone shut the door on you, yes. With the door open, you’d be fine.”
I wondered if I could beg my Scriven to do the rest of the work freeing the captives so I wouldn’t run the risk of accidentally screwing myself, time-wise. “What�
�s the time difference between here and Midia?”
“We move at the same time for Midia and Earth and all the worlds beyond. A minute on Midia equals a minute here. A minute on Earth equals a minute here.”
I rubbed my forehead, wondering if I should just stop asking questions. The answers often made my head hurt. “How is that possible? No,” I said. “Don’t answer. I’m just going to eat and pretend everything makes sense.” I popped the beef into my mouth before I could change my mind and groaned when the flavor exploded in my mouth.
Magic-made food was the bomb.
Jack and Nex wandered in as we seriously dug into our food. Jack’s eyes went wide at the variety and I wondered just what he’d been eating all this time in the Reach. Seeing the ease with which food could be produced, it answered my question about how so many prisoners had been kept fed. His expression as he tentatively tasted a bit of pork made me think he’d not been eating well despite the magic.
Ravana needed killing again. And again. And again.
“You’re looking bloodthirsty,” Nex said.
“Thanks.”
He beamed at me and floated over to the food-visualization book. “Perhaps we can find something more … bloody, for Jack.”
“Uh. Maybe it’s not a good idea to introduce him to the world of fleshcrawlers yet, Nex,” I said, glancing between Nex and Jack. Nex was the only fleshcrawler I would trust not to kill me, and I suspected that was only because he was a floating head now. Had he kept his body, I wasn’t entirely sure he would have allowed himself to befriend me.
Eaten me, sure.
“Unblooded fleshcrawlers wither and die,” he said.
“You called me an unblooded fleshcrawler,” I reminded him, the beef not as tasty at the thought I might shrivel up and die without drinking blood.
“You are also many other things. Jack is just fleshcrawler.”
I squinted at Jack. “Are you sure? He also looks human. Or at least witch.” I opened my Magic-eye and winced at the broken and jagged aura around him. It looked wrong, like a model airplane put together by a crazy person, aka Ravana. “There’s … geez. I think there’s chythraul in there. And,” I frowned, trying to place the orange threads spiked around his belly. “Skriven?”
Ty’s gaze sharpened. “Maybe he is our brother. Well, your brother and my brother. We’re not related,” he said, his voice even lower, almost a purr. “Don’t forget.”
“Whatevs, bro.” His irritation washed over me, and I mentally gave myself a point.
“It wasn’t Ravana,” he said after a minute. “Those are Gaius’ threads. See the hooks at the ends of them? The swirled design?” He pointed, guiding my vision with a touch of his magic to the spot where the patterns decorated the aura’s spikes. “Gaius. Ravana’s are sharp, pointy, and curved like fangs. Hers have skulls.”
I’d never looked closely at the strands that connected me to my Skriven, but I did so now and saw that mine were soft and rounded and had spiders on them. Oh, Neutria. I shut off my Magic-eye and rubbed my eyes. “I take it the magical Faraday cages cut off Originator magic. That’s how she trapped him. Threw him into a cage, or tricked him into it, and slammed the door shut.”
“Tricked him is the most likely answer.”
“She betrayed him,” Jack said quietly. “He was working on another like me. She offered to grab a subject, but she’d been grabbing the wrong kinds in order to get him to want to do it himself.” He pointed down. “Fleshcrawlers live here, too, in the black waters. She pulled them up through the well at the bottom of the Reach. What she didn’t tell Gaius was she’d been lining the well with the magic-blocking mesh for weeks. He was absorbed in his work; he didn’t have time to care what she was doing. He went down to grab a fleshcrawler. When he did, she slammed shut the cage and trapped him. His experiments became her experiments. His prisoners became hers. The Reach became hers.”
Oh shit. The Reach had been Gaius’? “Why hasn’t anyone missed him? Looked for him?”
Ty gave me another of those looks like I should know the answer. “Originators don’t care about other Originators unless there’s something in it for them. Same with Skriven. Nobody cares.”
“That’s just stupid.”
“Except you.”
He said it so quietly, I almost didn’t catch it. “Yeah.”
Jack inched closer to a jar on the edge of the cabinet, a jar I hadn’t seen before. When he grabbed it, I turned to stare and then lunged for it. “No!”
He hissed at me—hissed! Then he sagged and held the thing out to me.
“Who the hell made the blood?” I glared at Nex. “Seriously?”
“He needs to feed,” he said without apology.
Now I knew how Nex fed himself too. Somehow, knowing he could conjure himself blood martinis made me a little queasy. It had been a little less creepy thinking he just survived on air. It was possible. He was a floating head with dangling innards, after all. I eyed him. “When you drink, does it just run right through you onto the floor.”
Nex sniffed. “I can’t help it.”
Ew.
“Sorry. I just … What will happen if Jack drinks this? Will he get all crazy?”
“He will start the adjustments to his body. His fangs will grow in, his gills will too. His fingers and toes will web, and he’ll grow a second, clear set of eyelids. He will yearn for the waters of his home …” Nex sighed. “As I do yearn.”
“I’m sorry, Nex.”
He made a wiggling motion with his head, sending his guts dancing with an unnerving whisper of sound. “It is the bargain I made, and I do not regret it as I found a friend.”
I smiled, touched. “Thanks, Nex.”
“He will not last more than a month or two more. Then his body will begin to eat itself from the inside out. He was made to be a fleshcrawler, for all he has chythraul inside him. He needs blood, Devany.”
Muttering under my breath, I held the red liquid out to Jack, who stared at me like a whipped dog. “Take it.”
“You will hit me if I do.”
“No. I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“That’s always what she said before she hurt me.” He had bitten his lip hard enough to bleed but didn’t seem aware of the blood trickling down his chin. “She would bait me and then beat me. Always. And I fell for it over and over again. I was stupid. Stupid!” He hit himself in the head, hard. I thunked the jar onto the counter and went to him, grabbing his arms before he could harm himself again.
“Jack, Ravana is gone. Dead. She can’t hurt you anymore because I killed her. Hear me? Jack, Ravana is dead and you’re safe.” I eased my grip, not wanting him to feel trapped, not wanting to hurt him either. “Deep breath in and another one out. You’re here with me right now in Tytan’s kitchen and you’re safe. You’re with friends. Ravana is dead and you are safe.” Grounding sometimes worked for survivors triggered by smells or sounds or certain words. I hoped it would work for him and it seemed to—his panicked breathing slowed a bit and his shoulders eased down from where he’d had them hunched up by his ears. “You’re here, right now, and you’re safe.”
“I’m safe.” He blinked, looking at me—really looking at me—and then at Ty and Nex in turn. “Safe.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed at his face, pausing when he felt the warm wet blood on his chin. “Oh.”
“It’s all right. Here, I’ll get you a tissue.” I started to flounder about the kitchen to find one, but Ty had it covered. He held out the tissue and Jack took it from him tentatively.
“Thank you.”
Ty nodded.
When he was done wiping himself off, he heaved a sigh. “I’ve never felt safe.”
That broke my heart. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because you deserve better. Better than Ravana.”
He shook his head. “No. I helped her. I was like her. I was bad.”
“Jack,” I started.
“No. Just ask him.
Ask him. I helped her hurt him.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to look around at Tytan. But I did. His jaw was tight, but there wasn’t any hate or revenge in his gaze. He said, “You did help her. Did you have a choice?”
Jack was shaking, not a lot, but enough it made him look like a little boy.
“We were both her victims and don’t convince yourself otherwise.” Tytan vanished before any of us could respond.
CHAPTER FOUR
My mind kept picking at Jack and Tytan as I worked on releasing Ravana’s prisoners. Some of them I couldn’t release because their people had long since died—one poor woman had been taken in the 1800s. I had no idea what to do with her, so I took her to Vasili’s hut. He was, as always, so very happy to see me. I could see the joy in his scowl.
“What do you want?”
I waved at the woman, who wasn’t even shocked at the sight of Vasili. She’d been in Ravana’s clutches too long to be shocked by any of the Skriven she encountered. “I need to get her back home.”
“So take her.”
Apparently, the good will he’d had for me had vanished. Or maybe I’d caught him on a bad day. “You okay?”
His scowl deepened.
Okay. “She was born in 1791 and Ravana took her in 1833. I thought you might know a way to get her back to her time.”
There was a pot of boiling water on a small burner. Vasili ripped at a poor plant, shredding the leaves off it and throwing it into a mortar. “Maybe I do.”
I raised my eyebrows, waiting, but no other information was forthcoming. “Vasili, what’s wrong?”
The plant was now stripped of its leaves and he tossed it to the floor. “They’re shunning me.” His head dropped, his hands propped on the table in front of him. “They won’t sell to me or buy from me. They say they are forbidden to even talk to me. Because of you.”
