by E. A. Copen
Guy shielded his eyes. “Damn, warn a guy next time, would you?”
“Just do the ritual so we can get this over with. I’d like to go home while I’ve still got a home to go back to.” I thought of the state of the North Pole. It was probably overrun by creatures by now, which meant it was only a matter of time before those same creatures spread into the rest of the world.
Guy extended his hand, palm down, and the desolate landscape answered. Rocks floated to him from nowhere, piling on top of each other to form a stand. He took the book from inside his jacket pocket.
As soon as I saw the book, I felt Mask clawing at my insides again. I cried out in pain, clutched my stomach, and took two steps back.
Guy gave me a worried look.
“Hurry!” I shouted and went to my knees.
He opened the book and started flipping through it, looking for the right page.
My hand moved away from my stomach all on its own, formed a fist, and punched me in the face. Dazed, I tried to hold my fist back, but Mask took control of my other arm too and started pummeling me with both. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. I fell to the ground and strained to get him back under control, but it was no use.
Laughter echoed in my head. “Control me? Please!”
A lance of pain struck my head. I screamed and gritted my teeth as his claws ripped through my mind. He stretched inside of me as if I were a suit and he was trying me on in a dressing room. There was a flash of green light, and then I was in the passenger seat inside my own soul, watching as he piloted it all on his own.
Mask sat my body up, adjusted my clothes. “I suppose I should thank you for bringing me home, Voidwalker.”
Guy snorted and turned another page. “Don’t mention it.”
Mask stood. I stood. We stood, I suppose was the right way to put it. We were both still in there, but I had zero power to affect my environment. My limbs, my voice, he had it all. I had been relegated to a small corner of existence where all I could do was watch and scream at him to give me my damn soul back. I pounded on the walls of my new prison.
Mask rubbed his temples and hissed. “I’ll deal with you soon enough. I just need that book.” He took a step toward Guy.
Guy grabbed the book and backed away. “Over my dead carapace, assclown.”
“Assclown?” Mask smirked. “My, you’ve learned some colorful language, haven’t you?”
“Lazarus, I’m going to need you to repeat what I say!” he shouted, still backing away. “Loud and clear, as loud as you can!”
“Give me the book, Voidwalker!” Mask climbed over the pile of black rocks Guy had been using to hold the book.
“Throdog n'ghftog uh'enythnah ot Lw'shgorrog,” Guy chanted. “Y’uln ymg'bugahagl!”
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me! How in the hell was I supposed to repeat that? It was a nonsensical string of sounds and breaths. I didn’t even know if my mouth could form whatever language he was working in.
He repeated the phrase again.
I tried my best to replicate it.
“Ymg’bugahagl, not yum bagel!” Guy shouted at me. “Try again!”
Mask swiped at Guy, narrowly missing his chance to snatch the book.
I stumbled through the impossible phrase, shouting at the top of my lungs and pounding on the walls of my soul every few syllables. “Throdog—” Pound. “—n'ghftog—” Pound. “—uh'enythnah ot—” Cracks appeared in my vision. Maybe it was working. “Lw'shgorrog y’uln ymg'bugahagl!”
Guy’s back hit a wall.
“Nowhere to go now.” Mask hissed with laughter and dove after the book.
Guy tossed it into the darkness and ran the other way. Shit! How were we going to complete the spell without the book?
“One more line!” Guy shouted as he ran back to the stone pile. “Then it gets easier. Repeat, Lazarus! Ahe gotha ot thy nyth'drn ahf' kadishtu aimgr'luhh ot r'luh!”
All I could see in front of me was darkness, but I could feel Mask’s hands running along the stony ground, searching for the book, and hear him muttering, “Where is it? Where’d it go? When I get my hands on him, I’m going to rip his entrails out through his pores.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, not that it made a difference. Darkness was darkness. The physical effort, though, seemed to help me concentrate. “Ahe gotha ot thy nyth'drn ahf' kadishtu aimgr'luhh ot r'luh…”
“That’s it!” Guy shouted. “Now make the Voorish sign!”
I almost exploded with frustration. “I don’t even know what that means!”
“Middle finger! Raise it!”
That wasn’t going to be easy, considering I still didn’t have control over my arms and legs, let alone my hands. But maybe I could get control. I’d pounded a crack in the wall in front of me. All I had to do was tear it down, and maybe I could take back control of at least part of my body.
Here goes nothing. I backed up and took a running jump at the crack in the wall. My metaphysical body slammed into it and fell. Pain spread through me like wildfire, but the crack widened a bit. I stood, backed against the opposite wall, and ran at it again.
In hindsight, maybe flinging myself at the wall inside my soul wasn’t the best idea. By the fourth try, I was practically delirious, but the crack was almost a hole now.
“There!” Mask’s hands—my hands—closed around something hard, solid, and very bookish. He’d found the spellbook. I was out of time.
With a battle cry, I threw myself at the wall. This time, it shattered.
Suddenly, I wasn’t inside looking out, but back in my own head, and man, did I have a headache. I knew I wouldn’t have long, so I didn’t waste time.
“No!” Mask screamed as I forced him to drop the book.
In the dim light, I lifted my shaky hands in front of my face, just to make sure he’d see, and lifted two middle fingers.
The ground quaked. I fell and couldn’t summon enough coordination to get back up. A loud howl pierced the darkness; the orange fire flared bright, and the Nightlands were suddenly bright like day. We were in a valley surrounded by rocky hills. Gray clouds streaked across the sky.
A bloated form slid lazily through the clouds and into view. Six giant goat-like hooves hung from the bottom of whatever the thing was. The rest of it was composed of purple tentacles, lidless eyeballs, and snapping mouths. It floated sluggishly over distant hills and rock formations without seeming to care when it bumped into one. When it hit a thick arm of protruding rock and tumbled forward a little, I could see huge, curved horns in the mass of tentacles.
“What the hell is that?” I shouted to Guy as the thing bleated another ear-splitting howl.
He grabbed a rock and held it to the flame, setting it alight and tossing it close to me. “That is one of the Great Old Ones. We summoned her.”
“I thought you said the spell would split Mask from me!” I tried to scramble away from it. “Doesn’t Mask work for them?”
Guy didn’t answer me.
Why would he summon the frightening god Mask worked for? One of the gods whose sole goal was to break through into my world and destroy it? Why? Unless Guy was a traitor and he’d been working with Mask all along.
Guy came to stand beside me, waiting.
I gritted my teeth. “You traitor.”
Mask broke out into cackling, gasping laughter. “Oh, how rich! After all this time, all the warnings, you’re surprised he’s betrayed you now? You really are stupid.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Guy snapped.
The goat-tentacle monster hovered closer, stopping terrifyingly close.
Guy fell to one knee and bowed his head. “My Lady of the Wood.”
Mask suddenly regained control of my body and forced us to bow, a hand to my chest. “Goat Mother.”
The creature stared at us with its thousands of eyes, tentacles waving listlessly in the air. “Why have you come?” Her voice was surprisingly soothing to the ear but left a shiver running down my spine.
/> Mask stepped forward, grinning. “I’ve returned as promised with a way to open the door between this universe and the next. In a matter of hours, I will have conquered Earth in your name, and you may gaze upon the vanquished with your own eyes to demand their reverence.”
“Your Horribleness,” Guy said, rising. “Mask has betrayed you.”
The Goat Mother shifted to look at Guy.
“Preposterous!” Mask exclaimed. “If I had, why would I have worked so tirelessly to return here?”
Guy took another brave step forward. “You sent him to prepare the way for you. Instead, he conquered Faerie, and nearly conquered Earth in his own name. Earth knows nothing of you. You’re nothing more than a bad dream. It’s Mask they fear, not you.”
The Goat Mother turned back to Mask. “Is this true?”
Mask cleared his throat and pressed his fingers together. “You must understand how difficult it was to—”
“IS IT TRUE?” Her shout drove Mask to his knees.
When Mask didn’t answer, Guy staggered to his feet. “Allow me to show you.”
“What?” Mask protested, also rising. “You can’t! You weren’t there!”
Guy smirked. “Wasn’t I?”
He lifted his hands as if he were holding a ball and twisted them. Images raced by the same way they had while we were in the void, but this time they weren’t images of me. Mask walked through a smoky portal into Faerie, somewhere in Shadow. He lifted his arms, and familiar black vines rushed up from the ground to choke the life out of the land.
In the next image, he was in the Winter court, those same vines digging into Noelle, the former Winter Queen, pumping her full of him as he took over her mind. He did the same to Lord Braes in the High Court, and the High Queen, then Sir Foxglove when he picked up one of the five stones.
I had to watch as Mask’s infected people roamed the streets of New Orleans, attacking the innocent. I saw him crawl into one of my soul shards like an inchworm, watched him grow like a coffee stain on my soul even as I reclaimed it.
“I have seen enough,” boomed the voice of the Goat Mother.
“I did it for you!” Mask fell to his knees, hands clasped, pleading. “I swear, all I’ve done was for you!”
“No one told you to take Faerie. No one told you to attack,” said the Goat Mother. “Only to watch. Learn. Prepare the way. You have disobeyed and must be punished.”
“No!” Mask staggered to his feet, turned, and tried to run.
Something hooked into his back—my back—and held us in place. Pain seared the muscles of my shoulders as Mask forced me to strain against whatever was holding us. Flesh and bone tore, giving way under the strain. The more it tore, however, the less pain I was in, and the more control I gained over my body. I flexed my hands, checking to make sure they were my own again.
The Goat Mother was pulling Mask out of me.
Although it hurt like hell, I strained forward, letting her pull him out even faster, ripping him through my skin. Mask screamed. I wept at the pain and clenched my teeth so hard I thought they would break.
Finally, Mask popped free of my body. I fell forward, resting my head on the cold ground while Mask screamed and pleaded behind me, his voice growing quieter and quieter. Judging from the sound of chomping teeth and writhing body parts, the Goat Mother wasn’t just giving him a slap on the wrists. I didn’t want to see what she was doing to him, or hear it. The sound alone would haunt me for the rest of my days. I tried to cover my ears, but I couldn’t block it out. It was as if it was happening inside my own mind.
Then, it was over. I pushed up from the ground and spun to look at her. Would punishing Mask be enough to sate her, or would she want to take out her frustration on me as well?
But Guy stood between the Goat Mother and me, his extra tentacle arms extended like a protective shield, fists clenched. “I brought you the traitor, as arranged.”
The Goat Mother said nothing.
“Will you abide by our agreement and withdraw your forces from the border?”
She dipped her head slightly. “We will abide.”
“Will you release us?”
“You are free, you and the human. Go and do not return.”
Guy nodded and knelt to collect the book. He lifted it with a smirk before tucking it away in his jacket. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm. “We’d better get while the getting is good.”
I cast a confused glance behind me. “That’s it? But I thought…”
“You thought I was working with him.” He sped up. “I told you before, I’m an independent.”
“Then what was all this? Why not just tell me?”
“That I was trying to prevent a war between the Great Old Ones and the Old Gods? Didn’t I tell you that from the start?”
I supposed he had, although he could’ve mentioned his whole plan was to get the Flying Spaghetti Monster to pull Mask out.
“There’s no way to remove him once he burrows in that deep,” Guy whispered, leaning in. “No easy way, anyway, like I said. Short of blowing out your brains, the only solution I knew of was for him to leave on his own, which wasn’t going to happen. I figured maybe his master could forcibly remove him.”
I stopped. “You gambled my life and all of reality on a maybe?”
Guy opened his mouth, but the Goat Mother interrupted our chat.
“With our liaison gone, how will we communicate with the outside?” she asked.
Guy shrugged. “Not my problem. Maybe he’ll behave himself when you shit him out in ten thousand years.”
The Goat Mother shivered. “We would like to inquire about your services, Mr. Smith.”
He laughed and snapped his fingers. A black door appeared in front of us. “Sweetheart, you can’t afford me.” Guy opened the door.
I reached for the doorknob, but Guy grabbed me by the collar and held me back.
He held up a finger. “One thing before you go through. Sometimes, moving through the Void makes time a little…funny. Reality tends to fold on itself, and you don’t always wind up exactly where you started, although it’s somewhere close by.”
“So I won’t wind up fifty years in the future or back in the Triassic?”
He shrugged, opened the door for me, and held it. “Probably not.”
Somehow, I didn’t find that at all reassuring. Yet, if there was even a chance I could go back and be with Emma, give her the happily ever after she deserved after all she’d been through, I had to take it. Anything was better than spending an eternity not knowing.
I took a deep breath, nodded, and walked through the door with my head held high.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Lazarus! Wake up!”
Light flooded into the dark room and pooled on my face. I winced and lifted a hand to shield my eyes from it. “What the hell?” My voice was muddled and groggy as if I were waking from a long sleep. I blinked away the exhaustion as Emma jumped onto the bed, smiling. “Emma? What’re you doing here? I thought… What about the Maws and Klaus? What happened at the North Pole?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Sounded like you were having one hell of a dream. No wonder I couldn’t get you up. I figured I’d let you sleep in. It is Christmas, after all.”
“Christmas?” I grabbed for my phone on the bedside table and sat up. Sure enough, the date displayed on the screen was December 25th.
She leaned in and kissed my forehead. “I’ve got the coffee brewing and breakfast on the stove, so I can’t crawl in bed with you, even if I wanted to.” She slid off the side of the bed and shrugged on her big fluffy pink bathrobe. “I’ll be in the kitchen waiting for you. Don’t take too long, or I’ll have to eat all the sausage myself. I’m starving.” She shuffled out of the room.
I sat in the bed, staring after her. How could it be Christmas? Was all of that a dream? That couldn’t be true. It’d been way too real to be a dream. Guy had said sometimes reality and time got funny on the way back. Maybe I’d gotten dumped ba
ck in time a little bit? But did that mean Mask was still inside me and I’d have to go through that all over again, or did I just get a free do-over?
I threw the covers aside and rushed to the bathroom to look in the mirror. My own reflection stared back at me, five o’clock shadow and all. I ran a hand over the scruff of my cheeks, waiting for Mask’s tentacle head to appear, but it didn’t. Either it really was all a dream, or our plan had worked, and I’d gotten dumped a few days back in time.
My phone buzzed. I plodded back to the bedroom to pick it up. There were a series of new messages from a private number. I opened my messages.
Don’t freak out.
It was real. She won’t remember any of it.
Of course, that means you’ll have to get married all over again, but I think you’ll manage.
Do me a favor. Enjoy Hawaii for me.
Guy. There was no doubt in my mind. If I ever saw him again, I’d have to thank him for his help. He hadn’t given me the chance earlier.
I put on my slippers and wandered down the hall to the kitchen, where I found Emma putting the finishing touches on coffee and breakfast.
“Bless you, woman,” I muttered as she handed me a warm cup.
She waited expectantly for me to sit down. I figured she’d sit across from me and we’d talk over breakfast like usual, but she stayed standing, one hand behind her back.
I put the coffee down after a single sip. “What’s wrong?”
The shadow of a smile touched her lips, and she glanced down. “I know we said we weren’t going to get anything for each other this year because of the wedding, but…” She lifted a small box wrapped in green paper. It had one of her famous handmade golden bows because, of course, it did. That was Emma for you.
“Oh, Emma. You shouldn’t have.”
“I know.” She slid it across the table to me. “That’s why I did.”
I tore the wrapping paper away carefully while she watched, eyes sparkling with excitement. She leaned on her hand, waiting patiently as I dug through some confetti that had been shoved in there. At the very bottom of the box, I found a folded piece of paper. I gave her a questioning glance.
