Magic Cries

by Miriam Greystone

  A second shot rang through the air.

  “NO!” Bea screamed helplessly. But the shot had gone wide, and seconds later the King and Malachai were collapsing on the ground.

  “It is a minor wound,” the King grunted, stretching out his wing so that he could see the ragged hole. “It will heal quickly, in the Moon Pool. But they are here.” He cursed quietly in a language Bea did not understand. “We are too late to avoid a confrontation.”

  “But they're going through the front way, right?” Bea asked.

  The King nodded grimly.

  “Then I can still beat them to it.”

  The King looked at her doubtfully, and Bea straightened up.

  “I can do it,” she insisted.

  The King nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I must go and summon the others. You and Malachai continue on, and I will return as soon as I can.”

  “No,” Bea said forcefully, and both the King and her angel froze, turning slowly to look at her. But Bea was looking only at the King.

  “You’re too weak to fly by yourself. I can do this on my own.”

  “You are sure?” The King asked, even as Malachai shook his head at her, his eyes pleading.

  “Yes. I would just ask one thing from you, in return for what I am doing.”

  Worry flashed across the King’s face. “What service can I do for you?” he asked, uncertainly.

  “Keep him safe,” Bea said, her voice breaking as she motioned toward her angel. “Take him with you. Keep him away from the danger. If I try to do this thing, even if I fail, I want your word that you'll still do everything in your power to protect him from harm.”

  The King stood, though Bea could tell the movement pained him.

  “You have my oath,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “It is well asked, and gladly given.”

  Bea nodded to him, and wordlessly she turned and lay a hand against Malachai's chest. He looked down at her. There were no words.

  “Go,” she said, backing away from them, but not quite able to look away. “Get out of here!”

  She saw the King reach out, placing a hand on Malachai's arm to keep him from following her. With a wrench of will, she forced herself to turn and charge up the mountainside. She did not look back again.

  She ran, though she was not well enough for running. Her body screamed and beat its fists in protest, punching awareness of pain against her consciousness again and again. Bea ignored it. She had decided to do this . . . she had laid in for this course. She fell once, and a jagged rock cut deep into her shoulder. She ignored it, paid no attention to the blood that seeped down her front, pushing herself up and forcing herself to run again.

  Soon she could see it, a dark cleft in the rock that looked like a doorway. She felt a wave of relief seep through her.

  It disappeared when she saw the man with the machine gun.

  He was huge and thick with muscles, his hair cropped close to his head in a military style. He held the machine gun in his hand, pointing it directly at Bea's chest. She stopped and stood, looking at him. She had never had a gun pointed at her before, and the man held it steadily, his finger wrapped around the trigger. He would not flinch at killing her, would hardly remember that he had done it.

  Bea felt no fear at all.

  “Who sends you?” he asked.

  Bea paused. This was the guard that the King had spoken of, but he had not told her that there would be questions.

  “I send myself,” she said quickly, hoping that she would get the answers right. “I am coming to get the cup, to destroy it before it can be used by others.”

  The man stared at her, evaluating her. He did not lower the gun.

  “And are you whole, and unbroken?” he asked.

  Bea laughed. She couldn't help it. She looked helplessly down at herself, at her bloodstained clothing, her thin, brittle limbs.

  “I am sick,” she said, “and dying. My breasts have been sliced off, my head shaved. I am in pain, and I am rushing toward a death I do not want. But, yes. I am whole. I am unbroken.”

  The man nodded.

  “I can hear your freedom in your voice,” he said, as he lowered his gun and stepped aside. “Go quickly, then. I cannot leave my post, not even to help you.”

  “Thank you,” Bea said, slipping past him quickly.

  She felt the closeness of the end now. Felt it pulling her, like a dream that calls you back when you aren't really quite awake.

  The passageway was dark and so narrow that Bea could feel the ceiling, hovering just a few inches above her head. The floor was paved with stones, but the wall and arcing ceiling were nothing but earth, wet and damp and fragrant.

  She ran.

  Molly

  There was a moment of total silence.

  A hundred pairs of eyes . . . no, more . . . two hundred . . . more . . . in a single instant were all burning into Molly. The shock held them still. For one moment, the impossibility of her presence, the audacity of it, kept them from responding. And for that same instant, the sight of them held Molly utterly still.

  They barely looked human.

  Skin so pasty white that she knew with certainty that it had been years since any of them had seen the sun. Limbs emaciated, sticking like dry white bones out from inside clothing that billowed around them grotesquely. And their eyes . . . Molly stared into them like a person might stare into a bottomless pit.

  “My God,” she had just enough time to think, “what has happened to these people?”

  Then, as one, she saw them all reaching for their weapons. Hundreds of guns, one for each skeleton-like defender, began to rise to point right at her chest.

  Molly closed her eyes.

  Andrew had told her not to, had cautioned her to maintain eye contact with the guards . . . but she didn't care. Because when she closed her eyes, she could see Jake's face.

  She began to sing.

  The words she chose did not matter . . . she couldn’t really control so many at once. She could only hope to keep them still, to hold them in place. If it worked, Andrew would hurry around the room, subduing them one by one, as quickly as possible. If it didn't work, she'd find out when the first bullet hit.

  She closed her eyes, and suddenly Jake was smiling up at her from just in front of the stage. She looked down at him, and the music tumbled out of her. He understood every word. He nodded with the rhythm, his eyes melting with emotion that surged back and forth between them, the music an electric current in the air. She looked into his eyes, and there she saw herself reflected, exactly as she wished to be. She saw herself as a poet, an angel. She saw herself as powerful, her words a sword that held all the shadows at bay. She did not look around her, but she sang and sang. The sound echoed off the walls of the cave, echoing, multiplying the sound. It reverberated in the stone around them, making her eardrums quiver. It was so loud. She covered her ears, trying to hear the words from inside her head, rather than from outside. She finished one song and began another. Still, she did not look. She had not died yet and felt a small flare of relief, but quickly squelched it. No matter how many she held still . . . it would only take one shot to kill her.

  Time stopped. There was only darkness, and Jake's face, and music. At one point it occurred to Molly to wonder if she had died without realizing it and slipped into her own version of eternity. For a moment she almost opened her eyes to check, but then decided not to. She wasn't ready to know.

  When Andrew's hand came down on her shoulder, she stumbled from the impact, even though his touch was feather-light.

  “It's over!” he hurried to tell her, reaching out to support her when her knees gave out. “They're no threat to us now.”

  Cautiously, Molly opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was guns. All the guns that Andrew had stripped from the guards as they stood, immobile, and tossed aside. The second thing she saw was bodies. The cavern was full of them.

  “Are they . . .” she whispered.

  “No! Of course not!
” Andrew hurried to assure her. “Just tied up.”

  Molly stared at them. Hundreds of prone forms, lying with their hands bound behind them, still held immobile by the last fading echo of her song.

  “I couldn't have done it alone,” Molly admitted. “I couldn't have done more than hold them still.”

  No,” Andrew replied seriously, looking around him in awe. “I can hardly believe that you managed what you did.”

  A scream broke the silence. Two screams. A dozen. Suddenly the cavern echoed with an endless, horrible symphony of agony. One by one, as the guards awoke from the trance that Molly had pulled them into, they began to writhe, to roll back and forth, to moan deep, guttural cries of despair.

  “What's wrong with them?” Molly cried, covering her ears and ducking down, as though she could block the sound by getting closer to the ground. It was the loudest, most heart-breaking thing she had ever heard. “What did you do to them?”

  “Nothing!” Andrew yelled, straining to be audible over the horrible din. “It wasn't me. It's their bond, to their Singers! They realize that they've failed!” His eyes combed the room, but the revulsion that Molly felt was not mirrored in his eyes. His eyes were full of awe. “Just look at them!” he said with wonder.

  Molly looked.

  Just a few feet from her a man lay on his stomach. He was muscular or had been once, though now his arms looked brittle. He was middle-aged, his brown hair streaked with gray and stained from the thick dust that covered the cavern floor. He stared up at Molly, but his eyes didn't really see her. Molly watched, frozen, as tears filled the eyes of this big man who was old enough to be her father. His body began to shake, and then he began to sob great, unguarded sobs. Sobs that ought to belong to a child. Tears ran down his face and then, suddenly, he roared in despair and began to beat his forehead against the stone floor. Molly screamed as the rock beneath him turned red. He lifted his head and howled, and the sound belonged to a wounded animal. Not a man.

  “Come on,” Andrew urged, grabbing her hand and pulling her through the writhing figures, toward an opening at the back of the cavern.

  “We can't leave them like this!” Molly cried. “We have to help them!”

  “Nothing we can do,” Andrew said firmly, his fingers tightening around her wrist. “This is who they are. They are bound too tightly with their Singers.” He glanced back, and the horror in Molly's eyes finally registered. “Don't worry about it!” he said firmly. “They'll be fine.”

  He pulled her down into a narrow, dark hallway. Their path turned, and the sound was muffled. But Molly could still hear them. She wondered if she would hear them, in her dreams, for the rest of her life. Andrew was ahead of her now, his eagerness pressing him forward even as Molly's feet dragged to a stop.

  “We've done it!” Molly could hear him muttering to himself. “Holy shit! I can't believe we've done it.” But there was no room in Molly's mind for victory.

  Suddenly, she understood.

  The hallway suddenly gave way to a large opening. A room carved from stone, a pedestal set in its center. A small fire burned in the corner, and orange-gray fire bathed the stone goblet in swatches of shadow and light.

  “There it is.” Andrew's voice was strangled with wonder. “It's really ours.” He set his flashlight down on the floor and began to walk toward it.

  “This . . . this is the cure you promised me?” Molly said, her voice a little more than a whisper. But something about it made Andrew stop and turn to her, staring. She met his gaze sadly. “You really thought I would want that? That I would want to do that . . . to Jake?” She shook her head in disbelief. “How could you think that?”

  “You want him healed,” Andrew said. “Now you can make him better.”

  “This wouldn't make him better, Andrew. It would take away who he is! This would wipe him away. You saw those people. You saw their eyes! They aren't there anymore . . . they aren't themselves. Why would I want to do that to someone I loved?”

  Andrew’s face flushed. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about,” he said. “I know what we just saw was upsetting, but it won't always be like that. Those people out there . . . they are usually happy. Blissful. They have a kind of peace of mind that we can't even imagine.”

  “Did that look like peace of mind to you?” Molly's voice grew louder. “This is wrong, Andrew. This is a power that we aren't meant to have. If we use it on the people we love, we'll just destroy them. And ourselves.” She reached out, as though to put her hand on his shoulder. “We can’t do this. We have to stop.”

  Andrew raised his eyebrows. “This isn't your decision, Molly,” he said. “If you've decided you don't want to drink from the goblet, then you're a fool, but I won't force you. But you don't decide for me.”

  He turned away from her and took a step toward the goblet.

  “Stop, Andrew.”

  Andrew froze without turning around.

  “Don't make me challenge you, Andrew. Please. Just walk away with me now. This doesn't have to turn into a fight.”

  Andrew snorted. “You're afraid of losing,” he said, an unfamiliar sneer in his voice.

  “No,” Molly said, sadly. “Not anymore.”

  Something in the air snapped, and suddenly Andrew was on top of her, and the small stone room filled up with shouts and screams and wordless grunts. Their voices echoed against the walls of the cave, and blended with the screams that still sounded just down the corridor, and a sound . . . like a gunshot, that came from somewhere outside. But as Andrew yelled down at her, Molly found that something inside her had changed. She mourned for him as she overcame him, but overcoming him was not hard. The place inside her where her voice lived was no longer far below the surface; it smoldered inside her, ready and eager to burst into flame. Her throat burned as she yelled back at Andrew, her voice cutting across his, drowning him out, stunning him with its force. She saw the agony in his eyes as he realized what was happening, as his eyes turned toward the goblet, so close, but suddenly forever out of reach.

  There was a snap when it happened, a tremor in the air.

  She felt the moment when her will broke through, sensed the fissure somewhere deep inside his core. For a split second everything was in slow motion: the pain that lit up Andrew's face, the way his eyes rolled back and his knees gave out. Then, suddenly, it was over. Andrew lay unconscious on the ground, and the only sound was the echo of the screams that still reverberated on the cavern's walls.

  Molly averted her eyes from Andrew's prone form as she stepped around him and picked up the goblet. It was strange to hold it, bizarre to think of what it could do. Its thinly carved green stone glinted, and it felt so light, so fragile in her hand.

  The moment that she touched it, the goblet filled with red liquid, the surface of it glimmering strangely.

  At first, Molly thought that the simple pressure of her fingers would be enough to break it into bits. She lifted the goblet high above her head and threw it full force against the cave's stone wall.

  With a thick thud that did not at all match its delicate appearance, the goblet clanged against the ground. Unharmed.

  “Dammit!” Molly cursed quietly. She picked it up and threw it again. And again.

  Not a chip in the stone, not a dent in the cup's untroubled face.

  Molly began to sweat. What if she couldn't get rid of it? She smashed the cup against the pedestal it had come from. Nothing helped.

  “You can't destroy it that way.”

  Molly's heart stuttered. She spun around, to find a pale, thin face emerging from the dark.

  Bea

  “You can't destroy it that way.”

  Bea stepped out of the shadows and into the room. The woman froze.

  They stared at each other. Somehow, this woman seemed familiar to Bea, as though she had seen her before, hundreds of times, in a crowd, so that seeing her now wasn't really a surprise. It felt expected that the woman would push a strand of hair out of her eyes and sa
y in a strained voice, “Who are you?”

  “It won't work,” Bea said again. “It can't just be broken.”

  “What do I do with it, then?” the woman said, as though to herself, holding the cup out and away from her body. Distancing herself from it. She glanced at the door apprehensively, and Bea understood that she was not alone and that she was afraid of whoever might be coming.

  “Give it to me.” Bea stepped forward and held out her hand. “That's what I've come for.”

  The woman took a distrustful step back. “Tell me how,” she said. “I'll do it.”

  “Listen to my voice.” Bea was beginning to grow anxious. “I'm not . . .” Bea found she had no words for what she was trying to say, “I'm not like you are. I can't use the cup for myself. Do you believe me?”

  The woman nodded, slowly.

  “Then give it to me.” Bea held out her hand. “It has to be me.”

  “Why?” The woman hesitated, her hand still tight around the goblet. “Why can't I do it?”

  “Because,” Bea snapped, exasperated, “I'm the one who's supposed to die today.”

  The woman looked at Bea. Her face paled, as understanding sunk in.

  “Give it to me,” Bea said steadily, and Molly walked over and put the goblet in her hand.

  They looked at each other steadily for a long moment. Bea saw no pity in the woman's eyes, only admiration. Somehow that made her feel glad.

  She nodded in wordless thanks, and then spun around and fled toward the passageway, leaving the strangely familiar woman behind her.

  She had just entered the darkness when she heard an explosion of sound behind her.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” a man's voice roared, echoing in the tiny passageway. “What have you done to Andrew?”

  “It's gone, Troy,” the woman's voice answered. “Help me carry Andrew. We've got to just turn around and get out.”

  Bea could hear feet crunching over stone.

  “Two of those dammed Watchers sailed by just now,” the man was saying. “I took a shot at them . . . damn near took one of them down.”