by K Childs
It was time to talk like my job and reputation were on the line.
“I have been looking for a dragon. A reptile in a human suit, by all accounts. A huge creature of greed, filled with a rage against any who slight it. This beast has killed three people.” I took up Alston’s glass of brandy and took a long swallow, pausing. “At first I believed that the attack was aimed at Lord Howard. He is the King’s Eye. A man of great power and influence in the kingdom. This dragon is an opportunistic killer, however. Lord Howard died solely for being between the beast and its prey.” I pointed at the Duke. “Our charming Duke Montagu.”
“Does this flummery have an end?” The Duchess hissed.
“Flummery, it is not, Your Grace! Last night, without realizing it, you gave me the evidence I needed to uncover the beast.” I smacked the stick against the table, making everyone jump.
The end of the shock-stick sizzled. No one seemed to know that was a bad thing, so I continued.
“I have fought this creature three times now. Each time it retreated, I thought, arrogantly, due to my efforts. No, I would never catch you in the Dreamscape. The place where I am strongest has been used as my greatest weakness, in this case.”
Ben was still not here. Stalling, I placed my next barb for Alston.
“I have had too many motives from all of you. Lord Alston, the Duke ruined. By reporting your indiscretion to the Crown, you’ve lost more than just financially, but you’ve also lost face. A man who was your best friend had betrayed you. You have the traits of the beast I have read about: patience to set a plan in motion that might take days, weeks to bring the Duke’s death. You have a knowledge of Tenebrology, Oneirology and you are greedy. You have motive, means and opportunity, sir.”
Alston looked drawn-out, white as a sheet. His mouth moved but no sound came out.
“Ian?” Darrien’s voice was shocked.
“It wasn’t him.” I waved the Duke’s concern away. “At first, I thought that Charlotte’s death was a coincidence, poor timing. However, now I know that the only coincidental death was that of Lord Howard. Charlotte and Lady Winchester were murdered deliberately. And Lord Alston had nothing to gain from either of those two deaths. They knew nothing about his crimes.”
“Neither could Lady Innsford be our culprit. Mary might be the dragon’s next victim, for she has gotten close to you, Darrien, and it is women catching your eye that have suffered at the beast’s ire.”
I turned now to the Duchess, facing her from the other end of the table. She regarded me with cool dispassion. “This left me with only one woman who had means, motive and opportunity. A cold, reptilian matriarch who is willing to kill her own son if he will not obey her. A woman willing to kill, yes; an unkind, calculating monster.”
Darrien was now staring at his mother, aghast.
She took a long sip of her wine, raising an eyebrow at me.
“When you manhandled me yesterday, you showed me a scar on your palm. You said I had done you a favour. At first nothing came to mind. Then I remembered my second fight with the dragon in the Cardigan Castle Dreamscape.”
I slid my eyes across the table to the Duke, he was visibly confused. “The beast went after someone, dragging them into the Dreamscape. I had no way of knowing who that sleeper was. I woke them from a nightmare by stabbing them with a dagger.” I mimed the action itself. “But Her Grace could not be the person I woke, as Mary was injured the next day and Her Grace showed no injury.”
Darrien looked ill.
Ben was taking too long.
“An hour ago, I remembered what else had happened that night. And I remembered that Her Grace is an Animancer. Of course she showed no wounds the next day—she had healed them. But I had stabbed something, someone else that evening.”
“And I began to think. The Beast was never trying to kill Darrien. It was killing those who stood in his way. The dragon knocked aside my protections in moments—what little resistance would an untrained mind stand against it? He had been fighting it for days. Bah! The dragon dragged me into a Dreamscape while I was awake. How pitiful power of will must seem to a beast of such raw Ether. Darrien was never going to be killed by his assailant.”
“He is the dragon?” The Duchess’ tone was disbelieving.
“It seems like the only conclusion, does it not? You yourself told me that your bloodlines were pure. You hold more magic than mere Animancy. Darrien knew the plan to trap the beast. Darrien had no intention of marrying his fiancée; she stood in his way. You, his mother, were also controlling his life—why not destroy you too?”
“No! That isn’t right!” Darrien slammed his fist against the table. “I’m a healer, not a killer!”
“But you’ve killed before, during the War. You know how, don’t you?” I pushed.
“That was during war! I loved Elizabeth like a sister!”
The fear, the tension in the room was palpable.
My hands trembled.
I was out of delaying tactics.
“Darrien, tell me you didn’t kill those women?” Ian looked horrified.
The Duchess had also lost her amusement.
“Of course I bloody didn’t!” Darrien howled.
“He can’t be… not Elizabeth,” Mary was crying.
I went to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “No, he can’t be.”
She gazed at me through her tears, her eyes large and her mouth trembling.
“Because we both know the truth, Mary.”
The rising shouts from the table stopped. The raw confusion, the shock, it narrowed on the two of us.
“You saw him in the Dreamscape, running away from you, into the arms of another woman. You knew what he was like, so you killed her. Lord Howard saw you, didn’t he? You killed him as well. That first night in Cardigan you were after Her Grace; she said you would never marry him as long as Elizabeth was around. I stopped you, so you decided to get rid of me and your rival. You killed Elizabeth and tried to frame me.”
Mary blinked crocodile tears from her eyelashes. A deep sigh escaped her lips. “What gave me away?”
I hit the wall hard.
My back made a small crunching noise, and pain laced down my left and right sides. The table ended on its side with the force of the blow.
All the air in my lungs fled and I forgot how to draw it back in.
Half the table rained around me; a fork jabbed into my stomach, wine spilled down my thighs and turkey in a thick cream gravy splashed through my hair and face.
I fell to the ground, a plate breaking over my head when I bounced a little from the impact. Like a rag-doll.
The room exploded with noise and action. Someone screamed, Darrien was shouting, until the deafening roar of a monster drowned it all.
The windows shook in their casement. The chandelier cracked and the air itself seemed to tremble with fear.
Terror caught itself in my gut, hard and unforgiving. Lord Alston was pinned under the upturned table and his face was porcelain-white with fear.
My body was numb to the pain and I lay stunned and dazed, helpless on the ground, seeing Ether pouring from Mary’s very skin. The demure Lady vanished into a horned, snarling behemoth, slowly filling the dining room. The chairs splintered and cracked. Scales flowed over her flesh, muscle and flesh melted smoothly into black, obsidian scales, like a fish, catching the glint of candlelight and claws as big as daggers.
I got to my feet too slowly, and the beast’s tail sent me flying into the other wall.
I didn’t feel the impact this time.
A table went flying through the front window, tearing down the curtains with it and revealing the night to our macabre
dinner party.
I couldn’t breathe, suffocating under her aura and the lack of air making it into my lungs. I managed to get a hand up to my chest and I smacked it against my breast. The pain cut through to my lungs and I drew in a small, tiny lungful of air.
Breathing hurt. It hurt a lot more than I wanted it to. My lungs had seized and finally un-clasped. I coughed, choked and spluttered.
Constable Marcus fell through the open doorway, forced back from the growing monster. A claw sliced through the wood and him, rending flesh and bone with equal impunity.
I didn’t have time to worry about my constable.
Blood sprayed against the wall and he was crushed a second later.
The Duchess ended up through the front window—the lace curtains were torn and strained like a bridal veil around her body.
I couldn’t see Darrien.
The Ether was so thick it warped around the ceiling. The London Dreamscape flickered and Mary’s true body lashed through it.
There were two of her: one in dreams, and the other here in the physical world. Her physical body stilled, moving slowly, but still moving. Dear God, I’d never seen someone in both the physical and the Dreamscape simultaneously.
I didn’t know where Ben was.
The Ether swelled and I closed my eyes.
The Dreamscape was a roiling mess here—a cave rolled open under my feet and I found myself sliding through a dark passage.
Gravity reversed itself without warning.
I fell onto the ceiling, clawing at rocks, but the cave yawned, twisting into a tunnel. From it, Mary’s shadow roared.
Claws reached from that endless dark and closed around my shoes, wrenching me from the ceiling and pulling me into a falling eternity.
We were not in the parts of London I knew. The Dreamscape moved and changed, sometimes on its own, sometimes because a dragon decided it.
She had been toying with me the whole time I had been fighting her in this place.
I was just a mortal in the land of nameless things, and Mary was by far closer to those than I was.
The sky was black and twirled into a vortex over our heads. The ground was grey, faceless stone, smooth, damp, ancient.
I felt moisture in the air and smelled smoke.
I screamed, letting fear take me for a few terrifying seconds before my training kicked in and I remembered this was the Dreamscape.
Wings exploded from my back, flapping furiously.
The tunnel fell away. Mary manipulated the Dreamscape
itself.
Ether, roiling with an emerald green, washed the walls of a castle. Tendrils of shadow wrapped around my ankles and dragged me through the air.
I conjured a sword laced with silver and sliced away at the darkness. For every shadow I cut down, two more sprouted, and the furious flap of the wings became a struggle before the strength of my construction failed me.
I cut and cut, furious and rightly terrified.
While I was slicing through one grasping black shadow, another caught me, and I struggled to try and tear myself free. Claws cut into the base of the wings on my back, grabbed my ankle. A claw caught around my thigh. Another yanked me to the left while I was trying to cut one on my right.
I found myself dragged down, pinned against the rock by the grasping shades.
Mary stepped into the centre courtyard. “Do you like it?”
She looked different here.
Gone was the timid, shy woman I had befriended on the dirigible. Gone was her demure smile and in its place, she had become a darker, taller being. Her dress here was a long flowing funeral gown, clinging to her shapely body. The long sleeves melted into her hands which ended in five large talons.
“What is this place?” I wrenched at the grasping trap as it closed around me. It was like writhing in quicksand.
“It’s my ancestral home.” She touched the black stone walls, her fingers stroking along the outline of something liquid in the construct. “This is the last such castle in the whole of Britain.”
It was made out of pure Ether, as much as she was.
There was a strange, sinister beauty to the place.
Gone was the scared, sad, foolish young woman. She looked confident, powerful. Here, she was the master, the King of Kings. I was nothing but a fly to her.
A shimmer broke her attention and her control lapsed for a brief second.
I slammed my sword across the shadows binding me and tore my way free, scratches and cloth ripping across my skin.
Standing and facing her with my sword level, I said, “Mary, give yourself up. You don’t need to die.”
She chuckled. “You can’t kill me in the Dreamscape. No, right now, you are helpless.”
My sword cracked.
I ran at her, swinging it with all the grace I possessed in this place.
She caught the blade and grabbed my shoulder, slamming me into the side of the wall. “You stupid, meddling buffoon! If you had just gone with the Duchess’ explanation, I wouldn’t have had to kill Lisa, nor any of the others in that room.”
Each word was punctuated with a rough smash of my head into the stone.
The shimmering was cracks, forming along the edges of the Dreamscape. Something was happening in the waking world. I hoped it was Ben.
I tasted copper in my mouth. My vision blurred with the explosion of stars and the crack of pain lacing down my neck and spine.
I swung wildly.
A talon stabbed through my hand, pinning my right hand down.
I screamed.
“I tried to scare you off, but you wouldn’t leave him alone!” She smacked me, and my skin on my cheek split with the impact. Blood and pain blossomed. “You wouldn’t leave him alone!”
Another claw pinned my other hand to the wall.
I had been tossed around and battered like a rag-doll for the last two days. Running for my life, contending with thugs, my body was as twisted, torn up and beaten black and blue as it was going to get.
I was trapped. “You know he doesn’t love you, Mary!”
She wailed, it was a noise full of anguish. “He will. I’ll take his dreams every night until he loves me. You could have left him alone! Elizabeth’s death is on your head! You think he would fall for some low-born girl like you?”
The talons around my left hand slashed. She was going to torture me to death, slowly, in her fortress.
“Think about it, Mary! This is going to kill you too. You can’t focus on keeping me in here and fight off the others. You’re helpless right now.”
She snarled. “I’m aware of my limitations, Rose.”
She released my slashed arm and talons raked across my face, slicing into my eyes.
The world went red, and then dark. I couldn’t see. My vision vanished.
I bellowed, blasting at her with raw Ether. She let go of me and I sank to my knees, clutching at my ruined face.
Suddenly alone in the darkness, I held my face together while blood filled up my hands.
“Mary! You can’t force him to love you. Killing me, killing his mother, it won’t change anything between the two of you.”
A small sob escaped her mouth. “It would have been fine if you hadn’t meddled!”
Pain raked down my chest and gut, following an unnatural feeling of numbness spreading through my stomach.
I screamed, I drew the last of my energy into a long, silver spear and lashed out where she’d been standing.
I felt the blade connect, tearing into flesh and drawing a roar from her.
I fell to my knees, waiting for a final blow.
I was dying. As much here as I would be in the dining room in the real world.
Marcus had been gutted. Ben was going to have to face her alone.
I could feel my own innards in one hand, my torn bleeding face in the other. I fell to my side, holding them against my stomach—trying to keep my guts in.
Hot liquid spilled around me. The world was too warm.
I expected to die in the cold.
I lay still, a sense of finality falling around me. Perhaps time had been slowed, or perhaps Mary was watching, savouring her small victory where she could.<
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I could hear a roaring sound in the distance. The Ether swirled in eddies and tempests one moment to the next.
I lay in the dark and imagined the colours of the world as tiny bubbles of light soaring around me in a moat and lighting up the dusk.
I imagined Darrien’s voice—a challenging tone as he drew a thumb down a blade and challenged a beast.
I imagined him fighting, screaming at me to just hold on.
My mind fell away into the maelstrom of Ether.
I woke up and didn’t know what day it was. I didn’t recognise the bed or the ceiling above me. I saw it through a thin cotton wrap.
The cotton sheets were a dark chocolate under a deep blue bedspread. Lavish. The walls had old gold brocade fading into a crème tiered wallpaper. The ceiling had a fleur-de-lis trimming around the edges.
The thin slice of cotton gauze over my eyes painted a faint haze over everything, fluttering in a faint, light breeze.
“Rose?” Darrien’s voice cut through my reverie.
He was sitting beside me, hands covering mine.
His clothing looked rumpled, his face drawn and grey. The Duke of Cardigan had seen better days.
I didn’t move. Waking had come with a realization of exactly how much pain my body was in. I made a small noise as the light in the room flooded my eyes. Pain blossomed into a migraine, skipping from headache right to the worst of it.
Darrien brought water to my cracked, parched lips and helped me to sit slightly, sliding a pillow under my head.
My chest felt like it was made from jagged glass.
After a few minutes and more water, I covered my eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Seven days.”
Not my record, but it explained why everything hurt. I had never been so deep in the Dreamscape before. I’d heard that you could get lost in there—when splits in the Ether formed, the kind of splits like a whole castle—but I’d never thought I’d be one of those people.
My stomach turned and I lurched out of the bed. “Bathroom?”
He didn’t ask me anything, just helped me up and to the door.
I lumbered on unsteady, unready feet and slammed the door behind me.
