by Oxford, Rain
“Pay attention,” Dylan said.
I was about to say that I was paying quite a lot of attention when I realized he was talking about the snakes. All of said snakes had left the woman’s side and now surrounded us.
Dylan raised an energy shield around us powerful enough to see, as it normally was anymore. One of the bigger snakes reared up until its head was even with ours, then it hissed and licked the air with a forked tongue. One of the smaller snakes tried to strike the shield, receiving a massive shock. As the brave snake withered in pain, the other snakes retreated just a little.
“Can you move the shield so we can make it to the door?” I asked.
“I have no idea. Let’s try. The snakes had better move, though.” Before he could even try to move the shield, it flickered. “Oh, god.”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
The shield flickered again and the snake who was poised in front took the opportunity to strike. I barely saw the creature move, but Dylan was at least a little prepared. As it struck for his face, it sank its fangs in Dylan’s arm, which he had put up in time. The snake retreated just as quickly, in time to avoid the shield flickering back to life. It hissed again and its fangs dripped with clear liquid.
The woman said something in their language and the snakes cleared a path, not to her but to the doorway behind her. The shield collapsed for good this time. “She told them to lock us up,” Dylan said. “Can you growl at them or something?” he asked, holding his arm at the wound.
I shook my head. “Rojan’s gone, and he’s the one that growls. I think I might manage to incapacitate them with laughter.”
The snake in front of us, that had struck Dylan, shifted into a man. He was a fair amount bigger in both height and body mass, and he appeared to be just as fast as he was in snake form. His voice was deep, but had a hiss to it as he demanded we move. Of course, I couldn’t understand his words, but the meaning was evident.
When neither of us moved, the man got behind us and shoved me towards the door. As we walked slowly, snakes backed out of the way, but struck at us if we stepped too close. Dylan stumbled and I caught him before he fell. He started gasping for air.
When we got to the door, Dylan fell against it. I kneeled in front of him to try and keep the snakes from converging on him. “How long was I healing the world?” he asked me.
Talk about out of the dark. “What are you on about? Why are you gasping?”
“Those snakes are venomous. I need to heal or it will cause cardiac arrest. How long?”
“Seven minutes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.” There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “Why did your shield flicker?” I asked.
“This world is still damaged. It’s resisting my magic somehow… I think it’s afraid. It responds like a dog that was abused by its owner.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he exhaled a strange burst of energy. Then his breathing evened out and he climbed back to his feet. “We have thirteen minutes.”
“Thirteen minutes to do what?”
“Thirteen minutes to live.” That was all he said before opening the door and going through it. I glared at the snakes before following.
This room was smaller than the first and five metal cages took up the majority of the space. The cages were barely tall enough to stand up in and were raised just a little off of the ground. They all contained a small water basin and a cot.
The shifter behind us demanded something and Dylan entered the first cage we came to, plopping down on the small cot. I entered, but stood near the door to discourage them from following. The man shut the door to the cage and I heard a few clicks. They left quickly after that.
Dylan groaned, sweating profusely. “What can I do to help?” I asked.
“I need to heal, but I don’t know how to heal myself. I’m going to pass out, don’t panic. I’m trying to call to Earth for help.”
“Don’t you dare die,” I said. He shut his eyes for just a second before he yelled and clutched his head. “What’s happening?” I asked. I asked that question way too many times since we arrived on this weird world.
“Earth’s trying to help me,” he said in obvious pain. “So is Duran, Vaigda, Malta, and Dios.”
He started to fall off the cot, so I moved to push him back on, but jerked my hand back when I got an electrical shock. Even without my dragon senses, I could feel the energy inside and around him going nuts. Finally, the overload caused him to pass out and other than some involuntary jerking, he was calm.
I checked him repeatedly for breathing and a pulse. Fortunately, as soon as he lost consciousness, the energy started to gradually calm down. After a few minutes, which seemed like hours, the woman entered the room. She studied us as Dylan started to stir, and her eyes widened in shock. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
I grabbed his arm and saw there were no marks in his skin. “How do you feel?”
“Like the time I was stung by a box jellyfish and the time I was bitten by the copperhead all rolled into one. Fantastic. But the venom is out of me. Or at least it’s not working anymore. I just wasn’t prepared for the magic of five different worlds flooding my system.”
The woman demanded something, but kept her distance from the cage. “What is she saying?” I asked.
“She is asking how I survived,” he said. Then he spoke to her in her language. She looked startled at his words and frowned at me.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that my brother, you, is an extremely powerful dragon who can heal anyone.”
“And why did you tell her that?”
“I’m not sure yet.” I stared at him until he looked away and shrugged. “Guardian instincts. They are really strong right now. It was either that, or tell them I am an android… which, now that I think about it… I should have.”
When the woman started talking again, he listened. Her voice had lost its edge.
“She wants you to go with her,” he said, lying back slowly. If he was still this weak, it would be really difficult for us to escape anytime soon.
“Why would I do that? Is she threatening you?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you.”
“Then you don’t think I’m crazy?” he asked.
I didn’t hesitate. “Of course I trust you,” I repeated, not answering his second question. He didn’t want to hear the answer.
He pushed me towards the door and I almost missed the energy flowing into me. He was faking his weakness. “Go with her. I’ll be fine here.”
There was a small clicking sound before the door opened. The woman backed up just enough to let me slip by. She closed the cage and stepped aside, indicating I go first. I really didn’t want this woman at my back. After demanding I go repeatedly and receiving a blank stare, she gave up and went first, giving me a nice view for my stubbornness. Apparently I didn’t get that behavior from Rojan.
I was led through several more doors until we arrived at a room which smelled strongly of herbs and antiseptic. Beds cluttered the room in neat rows. Bowls of medicines and trays of surgical supplies were strewn around carelessly as if they were in the middle of an unpredicted war, but only one bed was occupied. Lying on it was a young boy who couldn’t have been older than five.
“How is he?” the woman asked the only other person in the room. The man was middle aged and looked to be under an unendurable amount of pressure. I was so distracted by the miserable sight of the child that it took me a minute to realize I understood what the woman said. I heard it in their language, but I knew what the words meant.
“Damn you, Dylan. You should have asked me before sharing your powers!” Dylan and I used to go into the forests of Shomodii to test the distance of our telepathic link. Across the lands, there was no way, but he would definitely hear me from across this building.
“Stop whining.”
The man sighed and wiped his hand down his face. “He ha
s hours left if he is lucky. Who’s this?” he asked.
“One of the two intruders. When I went to check on them, the one that was bitten was recovering. He said that this man was a healer. I see no other explanation for such a recovery.”
The man studied me, but I was paying attention to the little child. His heartbeat was too slow and he had lost a lot of blood. “Can you get him to shift? He cannot heal if he doesn’t shift,” the man said to me.
“He knows only some weird foreign tongue,” the woman interrupted.
“How can he help us if he cannot even understand us? What is his beast?”
“I don’t know. He seems to not have one. He protects the other one; maybe we can use threats to make him help us.”
I was ignoring them by this time, as I was close enough to the little boy to put my hand on his head. His eyes opened, revealing stone grey irises that were not completely circular. I could feel his pain, not like it was a part of me, but as an observer. He didn’t fight me as I scanned him with my energy. His body was broken in numerous places and he was bleeding inside and out in too many places. With physical tools, it would be impossible to stop all of the wounds in time to save his life, but with magic…
Something else brushed against my energy, not out of threat or curiosity, but out of desperation. There was another soul inside this boy, trapped and suffering for the both of them. This smaller being, as young as the boy, wanted to help him. It was his beast.
I guess that it was no different than Rojan was for me, except this beast was not ancient or wise. Dylan’s magic stirred inside me like my absent fire had before. I released it exactly as I would my fire with the deep intention to free the beast inside him.
Before the energy had finished flowing out of me, the little boy was shifting into a tiny snake with scales that matched the color of his eyes. The woman and man were going on and on about how the boy would live now because he shifted. I wanted to yell at them that if they had taken better care of him, he never would have been injured, but I kept my tongue, turned, and walked back to Dylan. I found him standing outside the cage, looking through the window on the far side of the room.
“Did they let you out?”
“Of course not. I picked the lock. I just wanted to check out where we were. Better get back in,” he said. He went right back into the cage and shut it. There was another clicking sound just as the door opened. The woman was back and looked startled to see Dylan standing at attention.
“You seemed to have recovered.”
“And you brought my brother back. Now, your charge bit me and my brother helped you. I think you owe us,” he said in their language. “How much time did I spend healing this world?” he asked me.
“Why do you keep asking me that? I’ve told you five times now that it took ten minutes.”
The woman looked suspicious. “What do you want from me that you cannot get from your magic?”
“Information. Answer just one of my questions and you will have been useful. There’s a cloud in the forest that hates the light. A cloud of darkness.” He spoke quietly as if telling a ghost story, as if speaking too loudly would draw the darkness to us. The woman’s eyes filled with fear. “Ah, you know it, then,” he said with a smirk.
“It is a creature of death. It cannot be killed and has terrorized the people of this world for hundreds of years.”
“But it is dark outside, and there are people walking about.”
“Our pack has learned; the creature of death only attacks those who shun magic. While most packs fear and ban magic and us for using it, not one user of magic has ever been attacked.”
“It attacked us, and we use magic constantly. Question two: The red books. I have seen them everywhere. They just look like history books.”
“Everyone has a copy of our history. Where are you two from that you know so little?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We are not from this world. I can only speak your language because of magic. So tell me, every person of this world is a shifter of some kind?” he asked. She just gaped at him until he rolled his eyes. “You answered two of my questions. Let Mordon in here and then be on your way,” he said dismissively, sounding a little like Rojan.
The woman did open the cage in order to let me in, then locked it. When she walked out, I looked at Dylan. “You have the potential to be very clever, when you are not being unwise.”
“Sometimes wisdom is knowing the right thing to say, but for me, it usually is knowing when to shut up. We have to hurry. We have ten minutes left.”
“Ten minutes to do what?” I asked.
“Ten minutes to live. I already said that.”
“What? You said thirteen minutes a while ago. That was when you were dying of the snake bite. We aren’t dying.”
“No, we are perfectly healthy and fine and we’re not dying. We’ll be fine for nine and a half minutes and then we’ll be dead.”
“But it was thirteen minutes fifteen minutes ago.”
“No, that wasn’t fifteen minutes ago. It’s been three minutes since I was dying of the snake bite,” he insisted. I stared at him. “Don’t complain to me, it felt like fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t. Something is wrong with time and we have to find the way out. There’s a pattern, there’s got to be a pattern. What’s the pattern? Those books, the history books.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know yet. I can’t see it. I saw it, but what did I see?” He gasped and fell back, barely making it to the bed.
I could feel his energy go wild, but he didn’t appear to be in pain, so I just waited.
“Another world. A world I don’t know is reaching out to me through my magic. Edward healed the world with my energy.”
“The little girl must have given him the pentagram,” I said.
The energy settled down quickly and he breathed easier. The door opened and I sighed, really just wanting everyone to leave us alone until I could get a straight answer from Dylan about this “ten minutes to live” thing.
This time it was a young girl who came in. She was about ten and overly thin. Her hair was ginger and tied back and her skin had a translucent paleness to it as if she had never seen the sun. She came straight to the cage and stood there, as if unsure what to say. Dylan got up and crouched in front of her.
“Do you need help?” he asked gently. She looked like she wanted to run away, but nodded instead. “Are you injured?” She shook her head. “Sick?” She shook her head again.
“Hungry,” she whispered.
“We have no food,” I said.
She glanced at me and then back at Dylan. “I cannot drink from the snakes,” she said. As she spoke, I could see two little fangs scraping against her lips. “Their blood is cold. There have been no visitors for days and I am so hungry.”
“I thought everyone here was a shifter,” Dylan said, backing away just a step.
She shook her head. “Everyone here is a beast. Most are shifters.”
“But you are a vampire,” he said. Dylan had told me about vampires before, and I certainly didn’t want to be this close to one. “My magic can do anything,” he said gently. He reached out with his magic and though it went into her, she didn’t look affected.
“You cannot heal hunger,” she said. She sat down, clearly too weak to remain standing. I wanted to believe it was a ruse, but she was so thin.
“I have not yet come against anything that doesn’t respond to my magic.” He turned to me. “How long was---”
I rolled my eyes. “Twelve minutes. For the seventh time, you spent twelve minutes trying unsuccessfully to heal this planet.”
“You don’t have to be so harsh about it. Isn’t twelve minutes a long time?” he asked. “Why didn’t you interfere?”
I frowned as I remembered him trying to heal the world. I remembered that I was worried over how long it was taking, but I was constantly watching his energy and he seemed to be doing fine the whole time. I never felt the need to in
terrupt, though maybe I should have. It hadn’t taken him so long to heal the other worlds, except for Duran.
While I was busy recalling the event, Dylan had gotten the cage open. I realized what he was doing in time to pull him back. “Don’t you dare!”
“Are you really going to let a little girl starve to death?”
“She’s not a little girl; she’s a vertically challenged vampire.”
“She’s a starving vertically challenged vampire. I can help her and if she tries to take too much, you can get her off me.”
“Absolutely not!”
“What if Sammy turned out to be a vampire? Would you want someone to let him starve?” he asked.
“Sammy would never be a vampire. And if he were, he would deserve any meal he wanted and no one would have the right to refuse him.”
“She is someone’s little girl. She is someone’s Sammy.”
“It’s a trap.”
“You know it isn’t. Even I know that,” he said. He looked me right in the eyes and I sighed. This was absolutely ridiculous, but I knew that look. He was a Guardian, unable to refuse anyone help at any cost. I had to hope that if Rojan were here, he would be able to stop Dylan.
The stupid man offered his arm to the girl. She held it firmly and was about to sink her little fangs into his skin when a flash of light filled the room.
* * *
We were back in the wolf village. This time, it looked even more desolate. It was still dark, but I didn’t feel the presence of any lurking monster… on the other hand, I was without Rojan, so maybe there was something there and I just couldn’t sense it.
“Something doesn’t make sense. Let’s go poke at it,” Dylan said, walking off towards one of the houses.
“I think you’re banging your head against an open door. So, it doesn’t bother you that we just appeared here when you were about to save that girl?” I asked. The sky cracked with thunder and it was becoming very cloudy. All we needed was to add rain to our problems.
