He kills the hybrid beast with one quick punch. It’s a deceptively soft-looking punch, thrown casually. But the destruction it causes is immense.
“If you touch her,” the man says. His accent is like nothing I’ve ever heard. It’s a Tower of Babel accent, all accents that exist or have ever existed fighting inside one man’s voice. “I will kill you.”
He scans over the werewolf and the zombie and the bear with black eyes. No, not black. Just a blue so dark they appear black.
The werewolf growls and charges.
What happens next is so fast I barely see it. The man ducks and weaves toward the wolf as though in a dance, his movements a blur. He punches the wolf in the neck and uses the force to pin it to the wall. The wolf’s throat is crushed and when the man takes his fist away—stained with blood from where I stabbed it—the wolf slumps to the ground. Then he jumps up, five, six feet into the air, and brings his knee down on the bear’s head. There’s a pop and the bear flops aside. The man rolls after the landing, leaps over the bear’s corpse, and punches Mrs. Gateway so hard her head is thrown from her body, smacking with a wet slap into the wall.
All this in less than a few seconds.
Then he approaches me. His chest doesn’t heave. He shows no sign of being tired.
He looks into my eyes and I look back into his. His face is strong-featured. His chin has a pinkie-finger-sized dimple in the middle. His jawline is well-defined. His eyes are steady, the irises just barely visible in the blackness.
“You,” he says, looking me up and down. “It’s really you . . .” He shakes his head. “The spell. The ward. Stand still for a second, please.”
I’m too shocked to do anything else anyway. Seconds ago, I thought I was going to die. I accepted it. Now I’m alive . . .
“I have to touch the Other,” he says, as though that means anything.
He waves his hand over me and begins muttering words I don’t recognize. As he chants, his skin glows purple like his whole body is bruised. Then he lowers his hand and the purple dissipates. He didn’t seem tired before, but he does now. Not exhausted, but his breathing comes quicker.
“They can’t scent you now,” he says. “We need to get you out of here.”
“Good,” I say, snapping back to reality. Whatever reality means anymore. The question of who this man is and what he just did and how werewolves and zombies are real can wait for later. I need to get to Casey. “Can you help me get to the school? My niece is there and I . . .” Don’t think it, I tell myself. Don’t you dare think it! “. . . I just want to make sure she’s safe.”
“No, out,” he says. “Out of town. Out of America. Somewhere safe.”
Without waiting for a response, he takes my hand. His hand is no larger than any other man’s, but when he touches me, I feel as if I am gripped by a giant. The strength of him is staggering; I can tell that just by the way he holds me. He tugs me gently but firmly after him.
“I can’t leave,” I say. I make to pull my hand away, but he doesn’t even break his stride. “Hello!” I snap. “I can’t leave. I have to get to the school.”
He pulls me to my car.
“This is yours.” It is not a question. “Do you have the keys? I can move fast, but there are problems with carrying a human. Whiplash.”
“Wait,” I say. I look into his face. “Listen to me. Please. Just listen.”
He flinches. “I’ll always listen to you,” he says.
What does that mean? I wonder.
“Well, good,” I say. Somewhere down the street, a shot is fired. It resounds through the air and something grunts. A four-legged beast springs past the mouth of the alleyway.
“But first you have to listen to me,” he says, voice implacable. He goes on before I have a chance to interrupt. “You are the Woman of Starlight. I have lived eight-thousand lifetimes, all of them waiting for you. You hold magical power inside of you capable of destroying this world and the Other. All the universes. You are the focal point of magic, the point at which all magic converges. You are the most dangerous person in the world and whatever you say will have no bearing on my decision to get you out of here.” All throughout his speech, he talks with the distant, detached voice of a man long-wearied with the world. But on the last three words he grits his teeth and his voice gets louder.
I flinch back, but not very far; he’s still holding onto my hand.
I don’t hear what he says, not really. And I certainly don’t understand it. “Listen to me,” I say. “I have a niece whose parents are dead. Do you get that? She has no other family. Do you really think I’m just going to leave her here?”
He looks at me for a long time, his eyes searching my face. “What is your name?” he says.
“Lila,” I say. “And what is yours?”
“Tooth,” he says. “My name is Tooth.”
“So . . .” I shift from foot to foot. I keep imagining what might be happening to Casey. I see her on her back, bleeding from her smiling mouth. I see her cheeky grin wrenched from her head. A thousand other horrors fill my mind and all of them make me sick. “Will you help me?” I say. “Just . . . please.”
“Save the girl?” His jaws clench and indecision flits across his face. “You don’t understand what you ask, Lila, Woman of Starlight. Inside of you is all the magic in the world. Look up at the night’s sky at all the stars and imagine them one-billion times over and you will have some idea of the power inside of you. I have lived through wars and plague and famines waiting for this moment. I won’t let you go now.”
I’m taken aback by his words. Not just the meaning of them, but the way he says them. The way he speaks . . . it’s like I know him. I feel something within me. Not my heart or my gut or my instincts, but something else, something I have never felt before. It’s like a match has been struck and the light is shining on my insides. The light flickers—in Tooth’s direction.
The warmth spreads throughout me. What did he say? The Woman of Starlight? Is that what I feel inside of me? Ridiculous, and yet I am talking to a vampire-toothed man and five minutes ago I stabbed a werewolf with a TV wall bracket, so maybe ridiculous has just gone flying out the window. I look at him and it’s like I can read him. I find myself wondering if I’ve ever met him before, but I would’ve remembered. No, it’s more like something inside of me recognizes something inside of him. I’m curious, but time is ticking and I don’t have time for curiosity.
I touch his face as naturally as I would touch my own. His skin is hot. I am not embarrassed by the gesture, not self-conscious in the least. I find I do not struggle to believe that we are connected in some way. Otherwise, touching a strange man so intimately would feel odd. But this doesn’t.
“Tooth,” I say. I realize I like the taste of his name. “Please. Listen to me. Casey means everything to me. More than everything. I’m not just the only family she has left. She’s the only family I have left.”
He places his hand upon mine, sucking in a ragged breath.
Chapter Eight
Tooth
The touch of the Woman of Starlight is like coming home after journeying across a tempestuous sea.
I press her hand closer to my face, desperate to feel the touch of her. The touch I have dreamt of from my first breath. The touch the all-father thrust into my mind before I was thrown from the Other. I have dreamt of this touch longer than any man has dreamt of anything.
Never once, in all that dreaming, did I imagine I would do anything other than get her to safety as soon as possible. I would not waste time finding other humans. I wouldn’t stop to consult her. I would take her forcibly if I had to. That is what I told myself. The power within her is more important than one little girl. I know this. I feel it inside of her, like a flame. It reaches out: a clawing hand of starlight, flickering inside of her and desperate to be released. I would like to kiss her, but I kill the idea. Kissing her may trigger it. Kissing her may trigger an apocalypse; I do not know what effect it will have.
>
“Tooth,” she says, staring into my eyes.
When she says my name, I know I am lost to her. I have told myself for millennia that I would steal her away. But in all my yearning, in all my dreaming, in the great sweep of history which culminates here, now, with Lila, I never guessed how her beauty and strength would cripple me. Her lips are lips which beg to be kissed, her shoulders are shoulders which beg to be caressed, and her body . . . Something inside of me trembles.
“She is a little girl. She is scared. I can’t leave her. I just can’t—”Her eyes go wide and her hand drops from my face. Her eyes flit over my shoulder.
“Ooh, what is this, then?” The voice comes from behind me.
I spin as the witch prances toward us. Some witches—who call themselves Fides from the Latin de fide—like to dress the part. They wear the long pointy hats and the billowing black dresses and, somehow, they grow warts on their noses. I still don’t know how they manage it. Potions, oils? This witch is a Fide, leaning on her broomstick like a staff.
“Is this her?” the Fide says. “Is this the one? The one we felt? Strange, but I don’t feel her now.”
I stand between Lila and the Fide. “Walk away,” I say, looking the witch in the eye. “Now.”
“And you’re Tooth!” She giggles, an odd sound from a throat as creased and leathery as hers. “I’m ever so sorry to interrupt. Were you having a nice little moment?”
I click my neck from side to side. “Leave,” I say. “I won’t ask you again.”
“You have no idea who I am, do you?”
When I don’t respond, she goes on: “I am the Wicked Witch of the Hurricane. I am responsible for every hurricane which has happened over the last ten years.” She juts her chin proudly.
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I was in Antarctica. Are we fighting, then?”
The Fide moves with the speed of a vampire, throwing her broomstick at the wall. It shatters, wood and straw flying. My eyes flit to it—a distraction. She launches herself into the air and spins at me in a blurring torpedo. I watch her for an eighth of a second. Dimly, I hear Lila scream. But she’s the Woman of Starlight and it will take more than a witch, even a Wicked Witch, to get to her. I judge the speed of the torpedo and then throw my head down in a one-hundredth of a second window. Too late, I miss. Too early, I miss. But I am not too late or too early.
The witch stops when my teeth bury in her skull. Her magic fades and she sags to the floor. I press my hand against her head and dislodge my teeth. Then I take a rag from my shirt pocket and wipe them clean. I cough. She tastes awful, magic gone mad. I spit on the floor and turn back to Lila.
She’s backed against the car. Does she fear me? I think. I shouldn’t let that bother me. I have been feared all my life. I have been revered, too. But fear always underpins it. But she is the Woman of Starlight.
I take a step toward her. She ducks her head, as though I am going to hit her.
“I will never hurt you,” I say. “I will never let anything hurt you.”
“You . . . you . . . bit her.”
“She was going to kill us both.”
She keeps looking at me with that same stricken expression. With a jolt inside of me, I realize that having her look at me like that is worse than anything I have ever felt.
“Don’t fear me,” I say. For the first time in thousands of lifetimes, my tone is uncertain. Just take her, a voice whispers. Just get her out of here and figure this out later. But if I take her, her fear of me will only get worse, won’t it? I step forward and take her hand. She doesn’t fight. Whether that’s because she’s too scared or too numb, I don’t know. I press her hand against my cheek, just like we were before the Wicked Witch interrupted us.
“We will get your sister,” I say. “We will get her and then we will leave.”
She bites back fear, setting her jaw in determination. She rubs my cheek with her fingers. Sparks—not the mere sparks of poets, but true, starlight-powered sparks, the Other glistening between us invisibly as we touch—tingle over my skin. I see she feels it too. She draws in a surprised breath.
“What was that?” she asks, taking her hand away.
“That was the Other,” I say. “That was the entire universe circling around us.”
She watches me for a moment, and then shakes her head.
“We need to go,” she says. “Now. We’ve wasted too much time already.”
Chapter Nine
Lila
I feel as though time has both sped up and slowed down.
The werewolf and the rest of the madness, the arrival of Tooth . . . it can only have been six or seven minutes. As I reverse out of the alleyway, I see that I’m right. It’s ten past three o’clock. Less than ten minutes and my world is shattered. I am the Woman of Starlight. I have the Other inside of me. The universe circulates around me. I don’t know what any of it means. But I can’t deny that when I touch Tooth, there’s something there. Not just the feeling a woman gets when she touches a man. There’s something beyond that, something I’ve never felt before. It’s like when we touch some unseen force shimmers between us.
But I am a realist and the reality is the world has turned to mayhem around me.
When Mom and Dad got so drunk they couldn’t walk, I turned to Isaac and we dealt with it. We cleaned the house and we made the dinner and we got on with it. When they died, we made the preparations. When Isaac and his wife died, it was the same. I mourned, but it did not destroy me. If I am one thing, it is a woman who can deal with things as they come, one step at a time. And that’s how I’ll take this. One step at a time. And step one is to get Casey.
I turn down the quieter end of Main Street. I look in the rearview mirror and see a woman wearing a long ocean-blue dress standing in the middle of the road. She swirls her hands above her head and fire hydrants explode in a shower of water, gushing up and then spitting down like rain. All around her, animals and zombies roam the streets. People panic, sprinting in every direction. I see the sheriff duck behind an overturned table in the café, a shotgun in his hand. Behind him more townsfolk fire off shots.
“Lila,” Tooth says. “Drive before they start on us.”
“Yeah,” I grunt, screeching away from Main Street.
I turn a corner, speed down a deserted side alley, and finally onto a dirt track which leads in a roundabout way to the school.
“After this, we leave,” Tooth says. A field extends to our left and the town is hidden from view by a row of tall brown-leaved trees to our right. “No questions. No debates.”
I swallow. “And then what?” Glancing at the field, I see people entering the borders of the town. Some of them wear strange, ornate clothing, patterned robes and dresses. Others are clad in punk-like gear, metal and chains and earrings and nose rings. They look at the car but they don’t chase us. They don’t know who I am, I remember. Tooth shielded me. One of them throws his head back and screams into the sky. The scream chases us until we are out of view. A battle cry, I think. A declaration of war.
“And then we get you and your sister out of here,” he says. “Far away.” He grips the dashboard.
“You’re nervous,” I note.
“Yes,” he says, surprise in his voice, “I am. The Horde are coming in full force now and I may have to touch the Other to fend them off. Casting the spell on you tired me a little. If I have to touch the Other, I will be even more tired, and—”
“They’ll kill you?” I say, shocked at how worried that makes me. I’ve only just met this man and the idea of losing him weighs heavily on my chest.
“Worse,” he replies. “They’ll kill you. They can’t kill me. Nothing can.”
He’s not a man. He’s a . . . “What are you?” I ask.
“I’m a demi-god,” he says.
“And what am I?”
“The Woman of Starlight.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means I have to get you out of here.” He pauses, and th
en says: “The Horde can’t kill me. I am immortal. But if I have to touch the Other to fight them off, I will be tired and they may get to you.”
“If that happens, will I be able to leave?” A cruel question, perhaps, but I need to keep Casey safe.
“No. There’s a magical barrier around the town. Without me to guide you through it, you’ll be trapped.”
“Then we better hurry.”
I press down on the pedal until it touches the floor. The car judders forward, flying clear of the field and the trees and joining the road to the school. The houses of the Spring’s mini-suburb come into view. I’m relieved to see families standing on the porch, looking in the direction of the town. If the bloodshed hasn’t spread this far yet, it might not have reached the school.
“None of this makes any sense to me,” I say.
The families under the eaves of their houses watch as the car speeds past. I see Mr. Montgomery, in his slacks and mud-crusted boots, walk out of his front door with a double-barreled shotgun cracked over his forearm. In his other hand he holds a carton of shells. I think of the carnage back in the town proper and wonder how effective a double-barreled will be.
“I don’t expect it to,” Tooth says. His voice is strained. “The Horde will spread from the town center soon. Or maybe some of them are approaching from other directions. They might already be on the school.”
“Then we have to move.”
But the old Ford won’t go any faster. It was Isaac’s, his first ever car, and he gave it to me a few weeks before he died. The faster we drive, the wider the arcs of Casey’s angel carving, swinging from the rear-view mirror. Like a pendulum counting down the time she has left.
Then, finally, we come within view of the school. It’s a squat, grey building set in the middle of vast stretches of concrete: the road, the car parks, the playground, the asphalt soccer fields. The big double doors to the school are bolted closed. Faces squeeze against the doors, looking out with panic. A moment later the faces disappear as the children and teachers leap back. A tongue of fire swirls toward the doors.
Tooth: An Alpha Like No Other (A Song of Starlight Book 1) Page 3
