And Then There Were Dragons

by Alcy Leyva

  When I looked up, I followed his sightline to the man at the front of the ship.

  Begrudgingly, I pushed away from my post and leaned back into my twisted ostrich pose. As the strain on my body lessened, D asked, “All good, Grey?”

  I stood up straight. “All good.”

  As I dragged my feet toward Gaffrey Palls, my ex-roommate called after me.

  “Be gentle.”

  ****

  Palls sensed me as I got close and quickly brought the collar of his coat closer to his face. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he was up to standing there all by himself. The old me would have just blurted out what I wanted to ask to get it over with. It would have been brutal, but clean.

  Apparently, that wasn’t my style anymore.

  Palls spoke without turning around. “Looks like you got the hang of that hellfire. Ain’t got nothing else to teach you, lady. Unless you came for another reason.”

  “Yeah, Palls. I came here for a chit-chat about as much as you’re up here for the view,” I replied as a twelve-foot surge of gray bodies rolled nearby.

  When I got around to see his face, Palls’ cheeks were drawn. Only his eyes stood out in the low light. This is where I would have typically walked away. I didn’t stick my nose into anyone’s problems and Palls didn’t want to talk—that much was obvious—but I had to say something first.

  “I’m not an idiot, Palls. I’m hard-headed, but not an idiot.”

  “You’re also violent, temperamental, emotionally distant, vengeful…” Palls glanced over. “I’m naming your good traits, Grey, so don’t pull yourself into knots about it. Just finish what you have to say.”

  “As much as I hate your guts, I’m not going to ignore the fact I wouldn’t have made it this far without you. If you weren’t there from the beginning, Mason would have carved me up into cold cuts a million times by now.”

  “Your point?” Catching himself, Palls shook his head. “I mean, it’s fine. You can go back to hating me once this is all over, if it suits you.”

  I sighed. “You know, I’ve never heard you curse. Not once.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, and it’s fucking infuriating.”

  This made him laugh, but his eyes left the reality we were in. He slumped over and I caught him. Pulling back his coat collar showed the runes on the Bind were turning on, one by one.

  Using some leverage, I dug under the metal with my fingers and pried the collar off his neck with a violent jerk that also—and totally by accident—slammed him headfirst into the banister.

  “Ow!” Groggily, Palls rolled over as I dangled the device right in front of his eyes.

  “This isn’t going to help.”

  For the first time, I saw anger rise in Pall’s face. “Save the sermon. You leapt into one of my memories and you think you know anything? You don’t, okay? You don’t know me.”

  “Oh yeah?” I shot back, “so who’s Mel?”

  I knew I shouldn’t cross that line, but I did and regretted it instantly.

  Palls’ entire demeanor changed. I watched his hands in case he lashed out at me, but he just brought one to his face and did his best to hide behind it. “Who told you that name?”

  “You called her name out in the memory.”

  Palls snatched the Bind from my hand, but instead of bashing me with it, slammed it to the ground. Just when I thought this killed our conversation, Palls exhaled slowly.

  “She was my sister. She….” Shaking his head, he turned his back to me. “If you really must know, that memory you saw was just the beginning of the nightmare I’ve been living for almost seventy-five years. That’s what that thing did to me. It kept me alive while rotting away at me from the inside. Soon as I got back from the war, Mel was the one who took care of me. Mom was gone and my father, well, let’s just say he was as good as dead. So Mel picked up the pieces. Not uncommon for guys to come back from the war with more than a few screws loose. But of course, I also had that thing in me.”

  Picking the device up, Palls looked down at the Bind in his hand.

  I kept my distance, but knew I needed to ask, “What happened to her, Gaffrey?”

  The large man picked himself up and stared out across the Sea of the Corpses.

  “She was afraid of what was inside me. Don’t think she knew exactly what it was, but she could sense it. Mel was always good for that. The problem was the Shade was out to corrupt me, completely. It saw Mel as a threat.”

  “A threat?” My mind started to spin. I didn’t like where this was going.

  “Shades are going to corrupt your soul; there’s no way to fight it. But they can’t if you’re connected to people. Not fully. They need you alone. In a dark place inside your own head. That’s the soldier the Shade found on that battlefield. It found me alone and took advantage.”

  And that was it. The Shade that had taken over my body as a child had made two big mistakes. First, it didn’t think I could have been pre-packaged with my own anxieties and self-doubt. But also, the support system I had from birth—Mom and Dad and Petty; Hell, even Pops and Lady and Donaldson the Legendary Boy Scout—had added to clamping down on the Shade throughout my short life. I had been saved, not just by my will alone, but by the people who were there to support me.

  Palls sat back down and drew his legs close to his chest, quite a sight for a guy his size, and buried his head into his knees. He was emotional, breathing hard.

  “I lost her, Grey. I lost my sister.”

  His words sunk into my skin like nails. It was if his pain had leapt into me. Part of me wanted to back away and run, but the other part was drowning. My jaw was locked and my entire body felt clenched like it was caught in mid-seizure. Fighting through all of this, I managed to say, “It wasn’t your fault, Palls. It was the Shade.”

  “I couldn’t protect her.” Enraged, Palls let both his arms go up in black hellfire, but the flames were small compared to when I first saw them, and that could only mean one thing: as a Warden, Gaffrey Palls was too far from his Circle to mean much anymore. Noticing this as well, he let the dark tongues extinguish and re-covered his face with his hands.

  “That thing kept me alive this entire time. By the time I stepped into your apartment, I was gone, a shell of a human being. You’ve seen them rot away at people before?”

  “Yeah.” Not that I wanted to remember them, but all the Shades had warped the minds and bodies of the people they had taken over. Almost instantly.

  “Shades feed on your vices,” Palls explained. “They bastardize and mutate your body. The Shade in me kept me alive to consume the others—a power play. But even when my body was no longer mine, I never gave up hope. You asked why I was coming down here with you? The truth is that I know a thing or two about losing a little sister. But also, I wanted to look for her myself. I wanted to make sure she didn’t end up down here because of me.”

  I sighed. “And there’s no sign of her?”

  “None.” Palls turned the metal collar in his hand, again and again. “And I guess I should be happy about that, but part of me just wants to see her again, you know?” Finding a smile, Palls added, “Guess I can’t have both.”

  I leaned back against the railing. “You don’t need to keep reliving that pain. Now—and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this—but I’m starting to realize that maybe dying and ending up in Hell is the perfect way to restart your life.”

  Palls scoffed but I didn’t let him off the hook yet.

  “So you fucked up. Who hasn’t? I mean, sure, our two fuck ups led to the sort-of-end of the world. So what? You’ve fought for your sister. You’ve looked for her. You’ve risked everything. And if she’s not down here, what will you do next? Life doesn’t end, even in the afterlife.”

  Palls took a moment to sit with what I said, and in many ways so did I. Was
this the same ideal I was chasing? Was I really able to shake off the chains of the old Grey—the ultimate fuckup? Could I save my sister?

  Palls held up the collar as the three runes turned off one by one by one. “You know, you kind of remind me of her. Loudmouth. Hot-headed.”

  “Well then I hope I never meet her,” I replied honestly.

  The man grunted an approval. Before he walked away, Palls launched the Bind as far as he could and it vanished behind a swell of bodies.

  I watched him leave and felt odd about the whole conversation. It all had been so fast I couldn’t believe what had happened. The walls built between Palls and I had just caved in, and for the first time, we saw each other as the people we once were—or at least the people we could have been if our lives hadn’t been wrecked by Shades. I can’t say I ever imagined giving Gaffrey Palls a pep talk, let alone one that helped me deal with my anxieties as well. I guess the afterlife makes people do crazy things.

  I spoke into the open air and turned back to the sea. “Things could be worse.”

  “It sure can be,” a sing-songy voice replied out of nowhere and I nearly fell over myself in my attempts to get away.

  Standing in the air not five feet from the edge of our ship was a familiar threat. She wore the same oversized black coat I had seen her in before. Her purple hair waved back and forth as if caught in an invisible stream.

  The Fury unzipped the coat she was wearing and let it fall onto the bodies below. She must have been eight feet tall. Her face was flat and snake-like with yellow diamond patterns on her cheek. She wore a feathered boa and black thigh high boots. Her body was made of layered golden scales that made her hide look more like armor than flesh.

  She reached out with her black claws and hissed. “Time to go, Amanda Grey.”

  As she spoke, a forked tongue at least a foot long hung down around her chest.

  The others came running, Palls leading the charge, but the Fury looked unimpressed.

  A fiery chain flew from the back end of the ship and bound itself around the Fury’s neck. She let out a faint “Erk” and drifted to the side. Tracing the chain back, I could see red ember binds shooting from D’s hands. Glowing with dark energy, he began reeling in the flying Fury closer to the ship.

  “You’re up, Palls!”

  “Got her!”

  With a hefty shoulder charge, Gaffrey Palls busted down the railing and cleared the gap to where the Fury floated. But, even bound, she took a step forward and spun in place, the back of her elbow connecting with him so hard it caused sparks to fly. The blow knocked him out of the air and sent him crashing into one of the masts.

  As she reached up to free herself from the chains, she began screaming, “It burns! It burns!” But then, with an expression of pure boredom, the creature flicked at the chain and it snapped like cheap tape as she added, “or not.”

  Hovering closer to my face, the Fury smiled, revealing four rows of sharp teeth. “I would say to come with me and I would let everyone live, but I have absolutely zero intention of living up to that promise.”

  She gestured slowly to the ocean and the sea of bodies stopped swaying. One by one, the corpses stood, turned to face the ship, and began stacking themselves against the sides as they began climbing up the ship by the thousands.

  In an instant, the corpses were on board, shambling toward us. So many boarded us in such a short time that the ship broke in half under their weight. The back end snapped off and rolled backward, leaving the front end tumbling with all of us trying to find our footing.

  Just as I turned to blast away the incoming horde, something struck me in the throat and I collapsed. The Fury laughed as she grabbed me by the wrist and took flight.

  “Offffff-weeeeee-gooooooo,” she sang as a fiery portal opened above our heads. We flew toward it in a flash. This, coupled with the fact one of my hands was caught in her grasp and the other was busy nursing the neck she almost broke, left me with no options to fight back.

  I felt my stomach seize up. Like I had downed too many drinks, my abdominal muscles contracted all at once. My lungs and hips suddenly became heavy with a pressure that felt like I had swallowed a bowling ball for dinner. It felt like said bowling ball was rising up, crushing my guts, stuffing itself up my sore throat.

  Without warning, a thick stream of black fire flew from my lips. It splattered out some fifty feet as I did my very best impression of a human blowtorch. Laced with a bevy of projectile vomit lava chunks, the flames caught the Fury’s legs and torso and she went up like kindling.

  The Fury howled and we both fell about twenty feet right onto the tilting ship. I landed hard on my side, but at least it was one big splat. The Fury hit one of the masts, corkscrewed, and then smashed the banister with her head as she fell.

  I coughed and ash rose like ghosts from my tongue, but the fire from my stomach went out. I couldn’t see anyone. Cain, Palls, D—I couldn’t be sure if they were still fighting somewhere on the ship or if the dead had already torn them apart.

  Nearby, the Old God screamed as the black flames ate away at her slowly. She was now just a torso without a lower half, yet she was still coming for me, using her claws to drag herself in my direction.

  “I cannot … dieee …” Her eyes were wide with panic and hatred. Her waving hair was a swaying bonfire now. Then, after muttering one single word, her entire body blackened into dust.

  Her last word stayed with me as the entire ship, bursting at the seams with naked flesh, finally buckled under the weight of the corpses and we were all pitched overboard.

  The Fury had called me a Dragon.

  CHAPTER 22

  The next thing I knew, I opened my eyes and saw nothing but a black hole painted into a perfect gray backdrop. From out of this perfect circle, three voices bickered.

  “Is she dead,” asked voice one.

  “Everything here is dead,” replied voice two sarcastically.

  Voice three barked at the one who came before her. “I believe she wasn’t asking for your philosophical bullshit. Is she dead or not?”

  “How am I supposed to know? Should I check for a pulse? Breathing?”

  There was a clatter and one voice let out a hearty, “Ah-ha!”

  “Ah-ha!” the other two rejoined.

  There was a long pause and then a black bird-like claw came into view and hovered some five feet from my face. As soon as it opened, a stone struck me right on my forehead.

  Jolting up, I screamed and cursed, trying to grab the nearest person to punch the hell out of them. What I found instead was a thickly pleated dress that looked made of shiny black feathers. There was gold trim around the wrists and shoulders, giving the wearer of the dress an air of nobility.

  The illusion was lost when I saw the thing wearing it had the head of a crow.

  “Look at that. You’re not dead. Someone cut a cake,” she cooed to the other two crow ladies standing behind her and then hobbled off at an extremely slow pace.

  The black hole was not a hole at all, but a sun of pure darkness burning in the cloudless sky overhead. There was nothing around me for miles in every direction. No ship. No bodies. No Furies and no friends. Only three crow ladies hoisting tiny baskets in the crooks of their thin arms. The land was flat and barren in every direction, with endless drought as far as the eye could see.

  “Are you coming or what?” one of them shouted at me.

  I had no idea how to answer, so I just got up and followed.

  The three crow crones walked. Okay, maybe calling it “walking” was generous. The steps they took underneath their long dresses were so slow I could have run fourteen figure eights around them before the three of them completed a yard. They marched at least four feet apart from each other at all times, but always in a single file. I walked behind them, but their choppy pace was agonizing. While it was painstaking to travel t
hat slow, the three of them had absolutely nothing to say, making the trek feel like someone was slowly removing a splinter over the course of a week.

  The major problem was there didn’t seem to be a destination. Or a point, a reason, a fate, a foreseeable lunch break … nothing! Just teeny steps, black rocks in baskets, and emptiness.

  Finally, after what felt like ages, one of the crow crones stopped and faced me. She cocked her head to one side and then the next. Then she exclaimed, “Oh, you’re still here?”

  It took every ounce of my being not to snap my fingers at her. Instead, I slapped my hand down and pinned it to my leg. “You… you told me to—”

  “Hold this,” she demanded and thrust her basket into my hand. The weight of it nearly broke me in half as I keeled over and hit the ground. This tiny wicker basket with its five or six little black stones had made a soft crater around it in the dirt and was nearly impossible to pick up.

  Dusting myself off, the crow crone bobbed her head from side to side as if looking for something. The other three had done the same. Cupping a hand over my eyes, I took a good look around. I couldn’t see or hear anything, and from what I could tell, the dark sun hadn’t moved from its position above us this entire journey.

  “Where are we headed?”

  The other two crows crones looked back when I spoke. “You’re still here?”

  “We should keep moving if we’re going to make it on time,” the closest one to me commanded.

  “Make it where?” I asked.

  Annoyed, she scooped up the basket as easily as if it weighed nothing and threw it onto her arm. “We’re headed to Pandaemonium, of course.”