New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance
Page 20
She gulped down her caramel macchiato and glanced at John over her coffee cup. He was just sitting there, watching her, understanding she was thinking things over, and letting her make up her mind without pushing her one way or another. And she saw that he was confident that, given time, she would pick him over Mark. That confidence kinda pissed her off, but it also kinda made her even more interested in him.
If she actually went through with it, she’d be throwing away the best thing that had ever happened to her, in the hopes she might find something better. And if she stayed with Mark, a part of her would always feel she’d settled for less than she might have gotten. Her cold and calculating side would always be there, whispering in her ear.
And there was something else to consider: what would Mark do if she dumped him for John? He’d lost literally all but one of his friends along the way. If she turned her back on him, he’d be more alone than he’d ever been before. She might end up turning him into a villain, a monster.
Somebody’s got a real high opinion of herself, her brain chimed in. Mark’s a big boy. He can handle this. And if he can’t, that means he was too fucked in the head to begin with.
Cold and calculating. Christine hated that part of herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said; the silence had stretched well into awkward territory.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” he said; he didn’t sound bitter or disappointed, and Christine knew that if she told him she couldn’t hang out with him anymore, he’d walk away, sad and disappointed but willing to wait, or to move on. The disappointment wouldn’t help his still frail ego one bit, but he was also a big boy, right? Turning him down wasn’t going to kill anybody, right?
“Life is just complicated,” she said lamely. Hey, if she was like Kestrel she’d just ask the guys to go into an ongoing threesome; everybody could screw everybody, all bacchanalia all the time. Her mind conjured a brief image of Mark and John – oh, you dirty girl.
Except she wasn’t Kestrel. She couldn’t do any of that, even if the guys agreed, which didn’t seem likely.
“Life is just too darn complicated,” she repeated.
“I know, and I have no right to complicate it even further,” he said. “I want to be your friend, Christine. I owe you a great deal. And you are under a lot of stress. I’d have to be a miserable bastard to try and take advantage of it.”
“You can’t help what you feel. And I can’t help picking it up.” She paused. “But I love Mark. And I will never do anything that hurts him.” There. Decision made.
John was hurt by it, a lot more than she’d expected. “I can’t help what I feel, but I can control what I do,” John said. He sighed. “I think for now we probably should steer away from each other.”
She found herself nodding. Both of them would keep getting hurt if they socialized; they really couldn’t be friends under the circumstances, much as they wanted to. “Yes, I suppose that’s the way to go.”
They stood up and went their separate ways.
She second-guessed herself plenty, of course.
* * *
Christine sat alone in the apartment for the first time in a while. Mark was still in New York, doing interviews, and wouldn’t get back until the next morning. Not having him around left her feeling weirdly hollow inside. She missed the warmth of his feelings towards her. Was the becoming psychically codependent or something? That didn’t sound healthy.
Nothing about this relationship is healthy.
Yeah, I know, psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est, yadda yadda, empathy influencing my mood, yadda, I’m an immature tramp who jumped into bed with the psycho killer, and turned down the hunkiest hunk o’man in the planet, yadda. Heard it all before, brain.
Doesn’t make it any less true.
Whatever.
She ran the dishwasher, so Mark wouldn’t have to do the dishes when he got back, and got online to do some more Hyperpedia reading in between watching the latest YouTube cat videos. A quiet night by herself might be just what she needed.
Mark’s voice, coming through their psychic link. They hadn’t been using it much lately, partly because they spent more than enough time together as it was; it hadn’t even occurred to her that they might chat that way tonight. As soon as Mark made the connection, though, she knew this wasn’t a social call. Mark was in pain. He was angry. Worst of all, he was scared.
The connection cut off. Christine could only hope it was because he was too busy to keep it up.
She had to get there, now. Two choices. She went for the obvious one first, and used her implant to make a call.
Uncle Adam picked up right away. “I need you here, now!” she shouted as soon as he answered.
A moment later, he emerged from the shadowy portal he’d created in her living room. “What’s wrong?”
“Mark’s in trouble. Take me to New York, right now!”
“We probably should alert the rest of the Legion first. Assemble a team and…”
“Now!”
He hesitated, and she completely lost it. “Listen to me! I’m not waiting! You teleport me to New York right this second or I’ll figure out another way, and I’ll never forgive you for this! Take me there this instant, or when I reach the Source the first thing I’ll do is depower your worthless ass! Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Uncle Adam wasn’t happy about it, but he finally did as he was told.
He took her hand, and a few moments later they were floating high above New York City. At that range, she could sense Mark’s location. “There!” She pointed towards the water.
Another jump, and they were at the scene of the fight. A tall figure wearing the Lurker costume was dragging Mark out of the water and using some form of psychokinetic tidal force to tear him apart.
No fucking way.
She blasted the fake Lurker, a precise beam of kinetic force that didn’t touch Mark. The cloaked figure’s dark energy shield collapsed and her beam punched clear through his chest, sending him flying off in an explosion of blackened blood. Adam rushed towards his evil twin. That was going to be rough, but at the moment all Christine cared about was that Mark was badly hurt. She scooped him out of the water with a telekinetic grab – he was sinking like a rock –and brought him to her.
Her Christine-vision showed her he was healing rapidly, maybe too rapidly. His body still couldn’t handle the energy levels he was calling forth, despite the gradual toughening treatments she’d been giving him. She guessed it was better than dying outright, however.
“Mark?” He was getting there. She needed to go help Adam, but she didn’t want to drop Mark in the water, either.
His featureless head moved; he was awake. A moment later fear and shock erupted from him. “Watch out!” he shouted.
Mr. Night swooped down on her. Claws surrounded by Outsider energy tore through her shield and the aura beneath, and the flesh beneath that. Christine screamed in pain. The giant’s attack knocked Mark away from her arms, and dragged her into the dark waters below.
Sweet Christine, how I longed for this. Let me enter your flesh with my flesh, let me taste your blood, feel your innocence ebb away with your last heartbeat. I have you now, now and forever.
The reedy, hateful voice burned through her mind and soul, sapped her strength. They sank deeper into the water as he clawed at her and sent waves of purple-black energy rippling into her, drowning out her power, drowning her. She tapped into the Source, but the new infusion was only enough to avoid being killed outright; she had nothing left to strike back at him. Mark was still semiconscious; he couldn’t help her, and out in the distance he could feel Adam’s pain and terror as he fought the Outsider-corrupted Lurker. Nobody could help her. She was on her own, being destroyed from inside and out. Nobody would save her.
Why do you nee
d someone to save you? Save your own damn self!
She had to channel more of the Source into her. It was hard. She instinctively tried to breathe and ended up aspirating some filthy river water. She coughed. The giant’s claws ripped into her arms, her chest, her face. It was happening too fast.
It doesn’t matter. You can’t drown. Any damage he inflicts, you can heal. Just call out to the Source. That’s all that matters.
Her inner voice was cold and calculating, yes, but it spoke the truth. She ignored the wracking coughs, ignored the talons that tore through her ribs and into her lungs. Only one thing mattered, and that was the only thing she thought about: the Word, Power. Christine still didn’t know its full meaning, but she understood enough to use it as a conduit, to pour astronomical amounts of energy into her body, a cleansing force to set against the intruding, unwelcome corruption from the Outside. She became heat and light, and heard Mr. Night’s cry of anguish when she became literally too hot to handle.
Burn, fucker, she hissed at him.
You will die tonight, he replied. I’ve been given all the power I need, I and your undead father. We will get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.
You really need to update your pop culture references, old man, she snarled back.
He was posturing. She was channeling so much power into the struggle that the water around them started to boil just from the residual heat emanating from them. Her wounds healed; the process was nauseatingly painful but, by now, familiar enough to endure.
Mr. Night didn’t have many human emotions, but he could feel fear. He let go off her. Both his hands had been burned to the bone. One arm hung uselessly down by his side.
It’s my turn now, she told him, and he tried to run from her.
He teleported away, but didn’t get very far; he didn’t have enough power left to jump more than a few hundred feet at a time. She flew up in close pursuit. He wasn’t going to get away this time, no way no how. She emerged from the lake in a cloud of steam, her aura blazing and turning night into day. Later, she was told she’d shined so brightly people in the tri-state area had been temporarily blinded just by looking in her direction from miles away.
In the light she made, she saw Uncle Adam struck down by the evil Lurker. She’d seen him before, in her nightmares. This was the thing that had hovered behind her, dead and still deadly, a zombie Outsider made of everything bad and insane in her father’s soul. It made a gesture, and the same crushing and rending force that had taken down Mark smashed Uncle Adam and sent his unmoving form tumbling into the water.
She hit him again, but this time he used his shield of Outsider energy to skillfully deflect the blast.
“Christine.” His voice reeked of the grave, of dead things crawling up from beneath the earth. “I am here for you, Christine. Daughter of mine.”
It was worse than Mr. Night’s mental attack. Sheer unreasoning terror washed over her. All she wanted to do was fly away as fast as she could. Only that cold calculating part of her kept her from doing just that; that part understood that running would do no good, would only show her vulnerable back to a being who could close any distance with but a thought.
If flight wasn’t possible, all she could do was fight.
She let her actions speak for her. Her next blast was just a feint. While he deflected it, she sent two planes of force at him and squished him between them, just like she’d done to Baba Yaga. His body imploded, crushed between the two flat telekinetic walls that now were only an inch or so apart. Nothing should have survived that, but she could still feel her father’s mangled soul in there, something so horrible that it was eroding her sanity just by existing.
Something else was needed. Fire. Fire was a cleansing force.
Nice going, Zippo, Mark teased her from the memories of one wonderful and magical night.
Zippo she would be. Christine used the self-heating exercise that had once set her on fire, poured her power into it, and when the heat became fire, she sent it exploding out of her and into the mangled body struggling to reform itself. The fire became superheated plasma and consumed the thing masquerading as her father.
Impossibly, it endured. “Christine!” The shout emerged from a burning form that had been crushed and now had become something that bore no resemblance to anything human. “You can’t kill me, little girl! I will heal! I will touch you, Christine! You will feel my touch!”
The thing moved through the fire, floating toward her. She pushed back, and it became a race between the fire destroying it, and it reaching Christine with its dreadful touch. She didn’t think that touch would be survivable: he had put all of his power into one of his Words: Rend. When he touched her, she would end up spaghettified as if she’d gotten too close to a black hole, and not even her defenses would get her alive through that.
She heard Mark’s mental cry but couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but use all her power to keep her undead father at bay. Something – two somethings – collided explosively behind her, and her empathy told her the story. Mr. Night had returned and tried to blindside her. Mark had recovered enough to smash into him.
she promised, even though she had a dreadful feeling she was lying to him as well as to herself. The burning mass that had once been a walking corpse kept moving forward, even though not a molecule of his form remained intact; she was fighting an entity of pure will, a ghost of hatred and madness, and it kept coming, unrelenting, unstoppable.
That was it. Will. Emotions. That thing was Outsider energy poured into a human matrix, not just physically but mentally, spiritually even; she was beginning to realize that there were things in this universe that could only be described in spiritual terms.
That’s nice. Less thinking, more doing, Dark.
The creature had been her father once. She reached out to it and did what she’d been most scared of: make contact with it, not just see it with her full senses, but let it see her.
It was worse than painful. It was disgusting, defiling; her father’s soul had been warped by entities so alien you had to call them evil simply because their mere existence negated your own. For the Outsiders to live, the universe had to die. Survival was the ultimate arbiter of morality, since non-existence was void of ethics or meaning, and within that framework, the Outsiders were the most evil things out there. The dead thing crawling through fire and force for the privilege of seeing her die hated her and the universe, and the only sane response was to hate it back.
Problem was, Outsiders thrived on hatred. She didn’t think she could overcome the entity using its own primary emotion.
All you need is love, as the song went. Clearly not true, but the wisdom from the Fab Four might be just true enough here.
Christine was an empath, but maybe she could also project emotions. It turned out to be easier than she thought. She’d already established a conduit with the entity. She used it to pour memories into it. Visions of her father, of those precious handful of times where he’d been more than a vague concept in her life. The first time she’d seen him, the first awkward hug. The visits and the stories that had often been the high points of those years when he’d come to visit. The sadness she’d felt the last time he’d dropped by. The joy of their reunion in Dreamland, when he’d been sane and untainted. Her conversations with Uncle Adam, who was and yet wasn’t her father, but had enough love for her to still be family.
The emotions were affecting the creature. They burned it on a different level than the fire she was still projecting onto it. Moreover, parts of his mind and soul were beginning to respond to those feelings. Because it was made in the image of Damon Trent, the entity had left backdoors she could exploit; her memories were awakening its own, infecting it like
viruses in a computer program, tearing it apart.
It wasn’t enough.
Sadly, terribly, the love she’d felt for her father had never been as strong as it would have been if he’d been a real father to her, and not just a random visitor. The creature wasn’t crumbling fast enough. So she tried other things: her love for her mother, for Mark, memories of joy and warmth, times when she’d felt things were all right, when things had been so good she’d wished they’d lasted forever. She used those memories to awaken more emotions, and sent them tumbling into the murderous ghost inching toward her.
It was too much for it – for him. For a fatal moment, it stopped being a construct of energies from beyond reality shaped like the soul of a man, and became a ghost of that man, a ghost that understood love and cherished this universe.
Such contradictions could not survive being brought together.
She felt the change, felt a moment of joy mixed with regret exploding from within him, and tears ran down her eyes as something like a human hand took shape and waved goodbye to her before the entity collapsed into a point in space and disappeared so thoroughly even her memories of it felt somewhat vague and dreamlike.
The feeling of loss remained painfully real, however, for that thing had been her father for a moment, and now he was dead and gone.
Christine wanted to cry and mourn, but Mark was fighting behind her.
Fighting, and dying.
Chapter Fourteen
Face-Off
New York City, New York, May 22, 2013
I’d gotten my ass kicked too many times already, and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.
Whatever the Evil Lurker had done to me had been almost fatal. I’d felt like a small piece of butter spread over a big chunk of bread, to misquote the classics. I healed up, though, and came out of the water ready to get some payback.
Mr. Night had joined the fight, still using Medved’s massive body as his sock puppet, and he was about to tear into Christine from behind.