by Jamie Hawke
And then it was gone and Riak was pushed away, thrust out and through one of the arched entrances.
I ran to Red’s side, knelt, and cradled her head. “Red, are you okay? Red!” Her eyes opened partially and she looked at me, groaning, as Pucky ran past, only to hit some sort of barrier that Riak had put up!
“They’re here with me,” Riak said, talking to some unseen person. A voice came through the other side, and then she replied, “No, they’re not going anywhere.”
She was at the entrance, less than a foot away from her sister, leering at us. With a dead stare, she slammed her hands together and the walls around us started to close. We sprinted toward the closest opening, but black smoke covered it and then it was moving faster. There was no way we’d make it.
“Go!” Pucky shouted, and an instant later Red’s cloak was flapping about, darting toward an entrance to our right, and she was gone.
Pucky reached out for me and time slowed, the two of us starting to fade out and we were even thrust across the room—but it was too slow. The exits were sealed.
“Dammit,” Red’s voice came from the other side. “Hang tight, I’ll find a way to get you out of there.”
“Do try and hurry,” Pucky said, clinging to me and glancing about as if there might be a door we simply hadn’t considered.
I leaned up against the wall, relieved to finally have a moment to catch my breath, even if it was in a trap where the agents would find us. I quickly applied my newest prana to speed and agility, having felt a lack in those areas against the knights. Plus, agility could always help in other ways, I noted privately as I saw the way Pucky was looking at me—apparently her comfort in this prison.
“You were something,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She leaned up against the wall next to me, but turned sideways and wrapped her arms around my waist. “For your level, and past experience? I mean, I’ve seen Protectors who’ve been at this for years who weren’t as brave as you.”
“What you call bravery, others would probably call stupidity.”
She chuckled. “If stupidity kills our enemies and saves the world? We need more stupid people.”
“Too easy, that one.”
She stared up at me with her green eyes, and I reached over, noticing an eyelash on her cheek. Taking it, I told her to make a wish and blow it, and when she had I leaned in and kissed her—a gentle, momentary kiss.
She closed her eyes for it and when I pulled back said, “Mmm, but that wasn’t my wish.”
“Damn,” I said with a laugh, “I was hoping it would’ve been. That would have been romantic as hell.”
“Nothing says romance like a pleasant kiss in an enemy dungeon.”
“Shut up,” I said, playfully. “What was the wish, then?”
“When we have some alone time, you’ll see.”
That got my attention. She leaned her head into me, resting it on my chest and running a hand along my abs. “Are you, I don’t know, enjoying this? Happy here?”
“Here as in this dungeon?”
“As in with me.”
“Yes to both,” I admitted. “I lived my whole life pretending to do all this stuff, thinking it was all make-believe, and now I’m here with the real, live characters from my fantasies and—”
“Fantasies?” She looked up at me.
“Not like that,” I said, “I meant, like I actually had daydreams about this kind of action stuff when I was younger.”
“You don’t fantasize about me?” She pouted.
“I do now, all the damn time.”
“I fantasize about you too,” she said. “I mean, hell, we barely know each other and in my mind we’ve already fucked at least a dozen times.”
If I’d been drinking something, you can bet it would’ve spewed forth right then. Instead, I gulped, squeezed her tight, and awkwardly said, “Wow.”
She laughed. “Wow? How many for you?”
“Honestly, how much would once for every second since we met be?”
“Mmm,” she pretended to count on her fingers, but then grabbed my ass, pulling me tight against her. Rubbing so that her body was tight against my crotch, she kissed my neck, sending chills through my body. “When we’re back from this,” she whispered in my ear, kissed me again, and then continued as her hand slid around to my front, “I’m going to ride you so hard you’ll be too exhausted to even want to fantasize about me for at least… five seconds or so.”
I giggled—yes, actually giggled—which made her giggle and then snort. Some might find such an effeminate giggle from me and then snort from her would ruin the moment, but not us. We were too wrapped up in each other for little things like that to be anything but endearing. I pulled her in for another passionate kiss.
“God, you two,” Red said, and we turned to see she’d managed to get one of the doors to vanish. “You can’t even last a couple of minutes without… all this, huh?”
“Guilty,” Pucky replied and grinned, slapping my ass. “You find her?”
“Nope, but…” Red motioned us on. “You’re going to want to see this.”
14
We started out of the octagon-shaped armory, but Pucky paused, eyes wide. “The chest wasn’t only enchanted to call her,” she pointed out, kneeling to grab something. When she stood, she was holding a badass rifle with glowing blue energy bars and a fancy scope—the type of weapon I had to guess had some magical element to it, because it certainly didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before other than in sci-fi games. It looked way too big for her, but she managed it with ease. “You know this is going to come in handy. Dibs.”
“Won’t they know you have it?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t they be freaking out more now, attacking?”
“Chests like that often spawn the item,” Red replied, eyeing the gun with some jealousy. “They must’ve thought it high security, or wouldn’t have attached… her,” she said it cautiously with a look toward Pucky. “But yeah, the chest would probably spawn an item at random, but only if we’d earned it. I’ve heard of these chests, but never seen one like it.”
All this talk of chests, yeah, my eyes wandered to her overly exposed chest, and she frowned, then laughed.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Huh?” Pucky asked, still looking at her gun. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Red replied, shaking her head and leading the way. “Quietly now, in case they’re still there.”
“They?” I hissed, but she just motioned me forward, crouching now. At the end of the hall, she revealed a hidden door to our right that led up some stairs. We paused at the top, and she indicated a crawl space.
“Had to get through here to make it back to you all,” Red explained. “And that’s when I saw them. I don’t think they’ve all been notified.”
We reached the edge of it and she pointed down. Scooting forward, I was able to see what she was referring to. Another room, this one more of a rectangle, with several dwarves, a couple of flying monkeys, and some Legends I didn’t recognize (but could tell were Legends because some of them had green skin, some had horns, and one even had a cat’s tail) in it.
They were gathered around a mummy, who was mumbling something I could barely hear, only catching on that they were discussing some major attack, one that would hurt both Myths and Normies alike.
So this wasn’t just some hideout or place to take prisoners, it was a rally point of sorts. The location to launch an attack from—and I had to assume there were others out there, to cause the sort of havoc they seemed to be discussing.
“They’re getting ready to make a move,” Pucky whispered. “We need to find out where.”
“Might be that Elisa’s heard something,” Red countered.
“A fucking storm is coming, I can tell you that much.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, nudging Red and indicating the far side of the wall. I hadn’t noticed a second before, but it seemed to be partially translucent black stone. I
t wasn’t the cool stone that caught my attention, but the very three-dimensional, very real but frozen forms of a woman and a man—neither were recognizable, but I could tell from looking at them that they were Myths. Even more so, I realized as I focused, that they had that glowing aura I’d first seen on Red and Pucky soon after my tests related to becoming the Protector.
“That’s two of them,” Red said, voice growling as she glanced around at the other walls, waiting… “Ironic that it would be those two, frozen.”
“Kai and Gerda,” Pucky explained upon seeing my confused expression. “Come on, you have to know the Snow Queen story, the Troll Mirror and all that?”
I frowned, confused. The only snow queen I knew about was from the movie Frozen, and this didn’t sound anything like what I remembered that being about.
“How about we rescue them, see if they know anything about Elisa, and then you read him bedtime stories over a nice, warm cup of shut the hell up?” Red said, winked at me, and then turned back to Pucky. “Ready to try out that rifle?”
“You bet your ass I am,” Pucky replied, pulling it up to aim.
“Do I need to cover my ears or something?” I asked.
“Just hope it’s not cursed and blows up in our faces. Otherwise, you’re good.”
I gulped, lying there watching and hoping I wasn’t about to die.
Pucky had the tip of her tongue out, pressed to her upper lip as she grinned like a child about to steal a slice of birthday cake. She pressed her hand to the glowing side, causing the rifle to charge up with a strange hissing sound, the back lighting up even more. Then, with a release like air out of a tire but faster and stronger, a blast of energy shot out and turned two of the dwarves into frogs.
“It’s an amplifier gun,” Red explained. “Shoots based on powers of Myths and Legends who’ve held it before.”
“And I can choose and select, once merging with it,” Pucky said, again placing her hand against its side. “Just have to get a feel for the damn thing.”
This time, as the enemy below was scurrying about to see where the shot came from, Pucky released a blast that froze three more into ice.
“At least we know one of its former owners,” Pucky said, preparing to fire again. “The Snow Queen herself—the chest must’ve been connected due to the presence of Gerda and Kai.” Another moment, and her eyes went wide, “Ooh, and I’ve got one more, it looks like…” she was about to fire to show us, when a winged monkey arrived right in front of us, screeching so that the others came flying up, our hiding spot exposed.
“Good,” Red said, knife at the ready and pulling herself toward the closest monkey. “I was getting sick of being cramped in here.”
She grabbed it by the wing as it tried to flee for help, but then the others below turned to fire on us as she rode it down, knife at its throat. The mummy growled up at us, reaching, but I held onto my amulet, prepared. Then it wasn’t the amulet, but me—I was thinking about Red and Pucky at my side, thinking about what a lucky guy I was, how insane all of this was but that I was loving it. And then the shadow was gone as if I’d shone a light in the room, though there was no light.
I crawled out of the lookout spot and dropped in to join the fight. One of the flying monkeys broke my fall, and I grabbed hold as its wings flapped, lowering us.
My first instinct was to push the little bastard away and charge the mummy, but two more of the winged monkeys came at me. There were still the frozen dwarves and the ones turned to frogs, and a glance around showed the mummy was making an escape. When one of the remaining dwarfs turned a gun on me, I wasn’t about to get shot so I pulled one of the monkeys into the line of fire. It went down, and then I was charging the dwarf, but too late.
These dwarves apparently had some sort of magic, because once he charged through the exit the mummy took, it was like an invisible wall went up.
That left his friends for the slaughter, but he’d gambled that we weren’t the type. He was right. Or so I thought. As I turned to see what our next move would be, the blast from Pucky’s rifle hit the monkey nearby, turning it, too, into a frog.
Another had a shotgun aimed at Red, so when the last blast from the rifle hit, it was with more malice—but it only sent a brilliant burst of light that caused him to stumble and look around in confusion.
Red made her move, taking him out, but waved the Ichor over to me. The red light came to me, making me feel refreshed, though I could sense it wasn’t as strong as before. I wondered if it would still work in the same sense of upgrading, but for now was too stricken with the chaos we’d caused.
“Damn,” I said, looking at what we’d done.
“Make no mistake,” Red said, going for the exit the mummy had taken. “They are the enemy, and would do far worse to any of us.”
“You can’t go through there,” I noted, and she stopped short, holding her hand against the invisible wall to confirm it.
“The question is, then,” Pucky said, moving over to the wall that seemed to trap the two Myths, “how do we break them free, and then ourselves?”
“For them, it has to be a curse,” Red replied. “And the witch who cast it isn’t likely far off.”
“Jack, now might be a good time to let yourself slip slightly,” Red said.
“What?” Pucky asked, turning on her. “He’s not bait!”
“Whoa, bait?” I scrunched my nose, not liking the sound of that.
“You can’t do it,” Red said to her. “Not with your sister so close. But we have to reach into the darkness, see what’s dwelling here.”
“And you can’t?” I asked.
Pucky scoffed. “Red here’s Miss Pure. Never been touched by the darkness.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Sure, until moments like these when it’s all too convenient to let the new guy risk his life.”
“Risking my life, though… isn’t that what we’ve been doing this whole time?” As neither could argue against that, I said, “Tell me what to do.”
“Like you did back there, with the thoughts that pushed the darkness away,” Pucky said. “I sensed it from you—and you’ll be able to sense it in others too, in time.”
“To get this straight, I’m going to basically go negative, full-on dark… and what? Some witch will hopefully show up?”
“Pretty much.”
“Damn.” I ran a hand through my hair, shrugged, and said, “I’m not even sure what would get my mind dark.”
“Parents are happy and alive?” Red asked.
“Yes, but if they weren’t I wouldn’t like this game.”
She waved it off. “Gotta go deep. Come on.”
“Anything bad ever happen to you?” Pucky asked. “I mean, really… really bad.”
I frowned, trying to think, but shook my head. “Not me, per se. But… Okay, I think I got it.”
They both looked at me expectantly but forget that, I wasn’t about to open up like this in front of them. As intimate as we were getting, we’d still really just met.
Closing my eyes, I thought back to my youth and the days spent at Ocean Shores with my cousin, where we’d find driftwood or go out onto the water and float around when the waves were tame enough. I still remembered her face and the way she’d laugh, the corners of her eyes crinkling up, and the way she’d stick out her tongue slightly when she was having a really good time.
And then the time we couldn’t make it back, how we’d swum as hard as we could, calling out encouragement to each other. I remembered how we’d been going backwards, pulled by the tide, still too young to know that swimming at an angle was the key. How she’d almost drowned, but a man rescued her, performed CPR and saved her. I focused on the feeling of how great it felt to see her alive, how her life had been such a blessing after that.
I focused on that feeling, so that when I turned my thoughts to the day I’d found out she took her own life it would hurt that much more. It might not have been exactly a dark place as much as sad
, but if there was one thing I’d ever been good at in life it was putting myself in other people’s shoes. What had those moments been like for her, so dire, leading up to that moment when she chose to throw away the blessing of life? Her second chance, gone… on her twentieth birthday.
My rage at that moment, the darkness of going through such pain that she’d even consider such an action, all built up in me. I embraced it. For the first time, I allowed myself to get mad at her—how dare she do that to everyone who loved her? How dare she be so fucking selfish!
And then my arms were shaking, my breathing heavy, and I sensed Pucky there, feeding me with negativity but also acting as a buffer, prepared in case I went too far.
Then… another presence.
It was unlike anything I’d ever felt. Like all my anger was mud but had suddenly been turned to sharp, jagged stones, cutting through me and tearing flesh, eating away at every molecule of my being, my soul even, until Pucky was shouting for me to come back and her spiritual hands were gripping my heart, holding me in place.
I felt certain I’d simply explode, but I pushed it aside, focusing again on the love I had for my cousin, the forgiveness.
A deep breath sounded in front of me. When I opened my eyes, I wished I hadn’t. There she was, wretched yet beautiful, bent and twisted yet stunning and proud. A woman with white hair flowing back and away from me, her shadow connected to me as she was pushed back and away. Pinkish-red eyes stared at me with fury.
“I haven’t finished feasting on you, boy,” she said, her voice a slow hiss. “Come into my embrace. Join me, so that we may become one.”
She spread her arms, and for a second the shadow in me wanted to go to her, but it lost out. Instead I scoffed, brandished my blade, and said, “I think this is the part where we kill you.” Glancing over at the ladies, I said, “Right? Yeah?”
