“And they call your realm civilized,” Ardie scoffs.
“Right? You are all so uptight in comparison. Except for the monsters. That we don’t have. Not in the same sense. We have plenty of awful and despicable people who are monstrous, but no werebeasts, zombies, or vampires, or vampire witches, no magical powers, but we’ve got plenty of A-holes.”
“A-holes?” Ardie asks confused.
“Anuses,” Nick smirks.
“By the great horn spoon!” Ardie shudders and we both laugh at him.
“Like bad, crappy people,” I explain.
“Crappy people?”
“Crap is feces,” Nick explains.
“Ugh!” Ardie says, a look of horror contorting his zombie face, while Werelion looks bewildered.
“It’s what we call people who suck.”
“Suck penises?”
“People who are mean or unkind or vicious in their behavior toward others,” I explain without swearing.
“Oh my, I see,” Ardie says, and Nick chuckles to himself.
“I love your bathroom talk,” Nick says and gives me a sweet kiss as we walk along between two mountains.
It’s almost like he said he loves me, but not so much. He loves swear words—it’s different. I won’t let it go to my head.
As we continue on through the mountains crossing difficult terrain, I notice my boots help me grip the rock beneath my feet just like it did when we crossed the ravine on the undead tree and I wonder if I could run right up the mountainside if I wished. We are walking on a narrow path between two steep tall mountains when I hear a hiss in the surrounding air, as if it is coming from far off in the distance.
“Do you hear that?”
Toto growls low and quiet, his nose in the air, sniffing.
“Something is coming,” Nick says.
“I’d say so,” Ardie agrees.
Werelion trembles in fear.
“Werelion, grab Toto please.” He picks Toto up and hugs him to his furry chest.
Without knowing what is coming our way, I am unsure what I should take out when I open my bag of weapons. A tall, black leather clad muscular man with pale skin and red eyes elevate over the ridge to our right.
“Vampires,” Nick says.
Of course. Gray clouds blanket the sky—it’s a gloomy day—so why wouldn’t the vampires be out day hunting. With a sigh, I take out two large silver stakes and drop the bag to my side.
“Ardie, take what you need,” I tell him.
“One bite from me and they’re dead for good,” Ardie says getting ready to fight.
Nick removes the two axes from his chest plate and my boots cover me with silver armor, only revealing my face. The vampire on the ridge hisses as he flies down toward us, followed by many more of his kind all wearing matching uniforms of black leather. While Nick and Ardie wait for them to get to us, I run up the side of the steep ravine as I thought perhaps I could, and it works. I stake one after the other, aiming right for their hearts every time. In succession, they drop and splat onto the rocks below.
As though gravity is a nonissue for me, I find I can kick and spin along the side of this mountain just as easily as I could on flat land. Stakes shoot out from the toes of the boots, from my knees, and from my elbows. Along with stakes in my hands, I destroy six at once, repelling from one cliff side to the other in the narrow space they descend upon us.
While Nick and Ardie combat the few that get by me, I flip, kick, spin, and stake the multitude of vampires diving from the ridges above. At least forty attack, and I get at least thirty myself. When I look down below, both Ardie and Nick fight about five remaining vampires between the two of them and Werelion cowers behind a rock holding Toto tight to his chest.
Parallel to the ground, I tear down the side of the mountain. When I come into the fray, I jump and land on my feet with ease. As Nick chops off the heads of his two, I charge in and take out two more while Ardie bites the neck of one, all five dropping dead for good. Vampire blood drips from Ardie’s mouth, and he spits, shuddering in disgust.
“Water might help,” I say, and he nods, so I hurry to my bag behind Werelion, grab the emerald bottle of water, and hand it to Ardie so he may rinse out his mouth. After uncapping it as fast as he can, he pours water in without touching it to his lips, swishes it around and spits.
As my armor shrinks back into my boots, Werelion comes over with Toto and puts him down on the ground beside me.
“Dorothy, that was like nothing I have ever seen. How did you do that?” Werelion asks in awe.
“The boots grip what’s under me, so I thought I might try, and it worked.”
“If I had boots like those, I would never be afraid.” Dreamy and wistful, he swoons at the thought of the boots being his. If the Wizard doesn’t want them, maybe I can give them to him.
“It helps in the fear department,” I say with a light chuckle.
“You are lucky they did what you hoped. It would have been idiotic to attempt had it not,” Nick says.
“But it did, so it wasn’t,” I say as his lips press together—it’s clear he’s annoyed, “and I realize you believe you could have killed them all on your own, but I have an advantage. Please accept I have a lot to offer in these situations.”
With a tick of his jaw, he charges ahead across the rocky terrain. That diva attitude of his has to go.
“Only me, always me, only I can fight, meh meh meh. Sexist jerk face,” I mutter, just as annoyed as Nick.
Frustration niggles away at me as I pick up my bag of weapons, return the stakes, and close it up. Nick is already far ahead, forcing us all to rush to catch up with him.
“Screw him,” I say as I hoist my bags onto my back and follow with Ardie, Werelion, and Toto at my back. Long strides and a brisk pace has me at his side in minutes, but when I fall into step with him, he ignores me, looking straight ahead.
“Please, Nick. Does it have to be like this every time we come up against something now?”
“Now?”
“Before, you didn’t treat me like I was some innocent, fragile flower of a girl. We fought together. I’m not a different person just because we hooked up,” I say, and he still looks straight ahead as his jaw ticks.
“Did I say you were a different person? No, I said the opposite—you never fought a day before you arrived here.”
“Fine, but—”
“And because of this, you should not be so proud, and once in a while defer to those of us who have fought like this every day for many years.”
“Fine,” I huff and charge up ahead of him this time.
Screw him. This fighting monsters thing is something I excel at. Yeah, so I’m new at this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m faster, capable of so much, and I am protected while I do it. If I didn’t have the boots, there’s no question I’d hang back, but I do, so he can kiss my butt. Fine, he has years of experience, but we don’t have time to talk strategy when fifty some odd vampires fill the sky and dive at you. If I go with my gut, things seem to work out well enough. At least so far. But I also can’t deny he’s right—I have no experience and rush head first into every battle we face. When I don’t take his opinion into consideration, it might seem like I’m saying I don’t trust him or I don’t care what he thinks.
“We should find a place to camp for the night, a cave if possible. Soon it will be dark,” Nick says as he charges past me.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” I say.
“Keep your eyes open, Dorothy. Look for a cave,” he says, not wanting to discuss it as he passes me by.
Enough of his male chauvinistic crap! With the terrain we were on, he would have had a lot of trouble fighting off all those vampires himself. Now he wants me to cower with the Werelion even though I can fight bad guys too? No way. He can forget it.
This time, I charge past him and keep going. As I navigate between two mountains with about five feet between them, I come to a bend where the rocks curve around
a corner. When I walk around it, it’s as though I’ve walked into winter. Snow covers everything for miles ahead. At my feet is a clear divide where the dry rock ends and the snow begins. As I look out at what’s before us, Nick walks up alongside me and assesses the landscape.
“Good job racing ahead of everyone. Now we must either go back or traverse this through the night. Here is the coat you forgot to pack,” he says as he unclips the heavy coat from his pack and hands it to me. With narrowed eyes, I snatch it, take off my pack, and put on the coat. When he lifts my pack to help me, I snatch that away from him too before I put it on myself.
“Back off, Nick. If you don’t want to give the impression that we need to haul ass through these mountains, maybe you shouldn’t run away from me like your damn pants caught fire, you ass hat.”
“Ass hat?”
“Yeah, ass hat.”
“Ugh, you drive me to madness!” he bursts.
“Same here!”
“Try not to shout. We don’t want to cause an avalanche,” Ardie says as he passes us and heads into the wintery scene where a picturesque flurry sprinkles snow kissed rocks only three feet ahead, and beyond the rocks is a wider area blanketed with pure white glittering snow for miles. With a huff, I stomp off after Ardie, and when I look back, Werelion carries Toto and Nick follows, so I turn to the sea of white before me.
What we can do to survive the night?
Survive… That’s it!
“Ardie,” I say as I walk up next to him, “look out for a good spot to settle for the night. Someplace not too windy with no banks of snow hanging overhead.”
“Good thinking, Dorothy.”
Survivalist stuff was Billy’s obsession. We’d watch survivalist TV shows together and he would poke holes in everything the host would say. On one episode of the show we always watched together, the guy got stuck in the snow. Billy hated the way he handled it and made it a point to force me to learn the right way to survive a situation just like this one. At the time I was so annoyed—I never thought I’d be in a situation like this. Guess I was wrong.
“What about there?” Ardie says and points to the perfect place to camp.
“Good work. It’s just what we need.”
We head over to the spot he selected and Nick and Werelion follow with Toto.
“This is where you want to stop?” Nick says, ready to reveal why this is a terrible place to camp for the night.
“It’s the perfect spot. It’s not windy like everywhere else—that’s important—and this side of the mountain doesn’t have snow banks that could fall and bury us overhead.”
“If we want to survive the night, we cannot camp here. We need to find a cave to sleep in.”
“This is perfect. Trust me. Now, I could do this without magic, but it’ll be a lot quicker if I do, and way cooler, so here goes,” I say as I raise my hands in front of me, not sure how to approach this.
“What are you doing?” Nick asks.
“Blowing your mind. Just give me a second.”
Focus my energy. Close my eyes. Take a deep breath.
The most amazing snow cave I could imagine enters my mind’s eye as the magical rainbow simmers inside me. Icy blue and lavender light pours from my palms in an arch as flickering flashes of rainbow glint in the mist forming a beautiful structure of ice and snow with all the features I envisioned. Once that’s complete, I turn and build a magical fire pit about twenty feet away.
“What is that?” Ardie breathes, astonished.
“It’s a snow cave. Or an igloo like structure.”
“We will freeze in that,” Nick says.
“No, we won’t. The entrance is lower than the floor on the inside, so the cold air will gather at the entrance while inside stays warm, or warmer anyhow. What we should worry about is an avalanche, but this is a safe spot in that regard. The biggest concern after that would be suffocation, but I added some small holes in the ceiling so air will circulate. It will make things a touch colder, but we can put a snowball over the holes until we go to sleep.”
“How do you know to do this? Is Kansas freezing?” Werelion asks.
“My ex-boyfriend was into survivalist stuff. You know, extreme situations and how to survive them in the wild and what not,” I say, and tell them all about the snow cave tutorial he gave me.
“Perhaps it pays to listen to people when they might know more than you on a subject,” Nick says, and charges into the igloo—the igloo I built with magic that looks like an ice palace, thank you. A little gratitude wouldn’t kill him.
Werelion, Ardie, and I head inside and it’s just as amazing as I pictured it with fifteen foot high ceilings for Werelion to fit with ease, beds made of packed snow, elevated above the floor to help with heat, benches along the walls, and glittering balls of pale yellow magic to light the space without the extreme heat of fire. Even I’m amazed I did this. The boots didn’t make me do that either. I did that. Yeah, it’s magic on loan, but I still did that, and I’m proud.
“This is perfect,” Ardie says.
“It’s not done yet. We need to insulate the floor, lay out the camping pads we brought.”
“What about the tents?”
“We only need the sleeping bags in here. The tents would add extra insulation, but if insulating the floor means we can’t use them with the tents, it’s far more important to insulate the floor.”
While Nick sets up the tents on top of the beds, we lay out the camping pads on the floor, and when we finish lining the floor with the pads, Ardie goes into the trunk Werelion’s been carrying, takes out our dinners, and we go out to the magic fire pit I conjured to sit and eat.
As warm as a fire, perhaps warmer, magic doesn’t scare Ardie the way real fire does, so he sits close. When Nick finishes setting up the tents inside the igloo, he walks over to us at the magic fire pit and sits beside Werelion. The tension in the air is palpable. Nobody speaks, and we eat in uncomfortable silence until Werelion breaks it.
“What you saw when you went into the hollow flabbergasts me. Do you think it’s real? Is that our future?”
“It was more likely an illusion than not,” Nick says.
“Why must it be an illusion?” Ardie asks.
“Did I say it must be? No, I said it was likely and illusion because it is. Oz is not powerful enough to kill the Vampire Witch himself, yet he can send Dorothy and me through space, outside of the cosmos, to see… Whatever that was—”
“The multiverse,” I interject.
“The what?” Ardie asks.
“The multiverse. It means multiple universes. We saw thousands upon thousands of encapsulated universes moving like a kaleidoscope in a flower of life pattern. It was surreal and mind-blowing and why couldn’t it be real?”
“I didn’t say it couldn’t be real. I said it was probable it was not.”
“You think it’s real?” Werelion asks me.
“Yeah, I do,” I say.
“So you think we live in an egg?” Nick asks with a smirk and a raised brow, being a total jerk face.
“An egg?” Ardie asks with perplexed scrunched brows.
“Yes, Dorothy thinks the white space we were in is like the white of an egg, and the bubbles that hold the realms are the yoke.”
“It was just a thought, an idea. I don’t know what it was.”
“If it is an egg, I shudder to think of what it will birth,” Nick says with a snort.
“Why shudder?” Ardie asks.
“If the realms are the yoke, and within the realms so much evil exists, what do you think the thing that comes of it will be like?”
“Maybe that’s our job,” I suggest. “Maybe we’re supposed to heal that evil somehow.”
“Our job? The four of us?” Nick challenges.
“Everyone. Everyone who is good. Maybe it’s everyone’s job to make things better, to shine our light on the darkness.”
“So everything will be gray like Kansas?” Nick retorts.
“Not
all light is pure white. Light comes in colors too.”
“So does darkness,” Werelion adds.
“That’s true,” I agree. “You know it’s funny. In my realm, people believe so deeply in things they cannot see—they fight wars over it, hate each other over it—but in a place where magic is everywhere and a person can turn into a zombie or a vampire or an animal, here you can see the answers to the great questions with your eyes, have a witness to support what you saw so you know you’re not crazy, and you still don’t believe. It’s so different from where I’m from.”
“In your realm, people hate each other over things they cannot see?” Werelion asks, confusion drawing his brows together.
“Yes. No one knows the answers, but the questions have plagued us from the beginning. How did we get here? Why are we here? What else is out there? What’s the purpose of it all? In my realm, a long time ago, people answered those unanswerable questions and formed groups based on those answers. The people who believe their group knows the correct answer put their faith in that answer and live their lives by it. But some of those people believe in their answers so much, they hate people who don’t believe what they believe.”
“How sad,” Werelion says, and I couldn’t agree more.
“Yeah, very sad.”
“Do any of them have the right answer?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen that pattern before though, in my realm, so I don’t think everyone is so far off or anything, but is what they think it is what it is? Who knows?”
“Uh,” Ardie says, trying to compute what I just said and failing.
“You have seen the pattern before?” Nick asks.
“Yes. It’s called the Flower of Life. It is a symbol from something we call Sacred Geometry, and I only know that because I had a tray in my house when I was growing up with the pattern. My mom put crystals on it. She was into all that spiritual stuff. Once, I was messing with it, and my dad stopped me and explained what it was, what it meant.”
“What does it mean?” Ardie asks.
“The Flower of Life is a symbol of creation. We’re all made of the same stuff, formed the same way. It unifies us, those building blocks, that blueprint we share.”
Dorothy In the Land of Monsters Page 33
