by Lee French
Chunks of granite shot up out of the ground in front of them, forcing all three to stop. Five slabs loomed in front of them. Grass sprang up, blades taller than Claire turning the ground into a jungle. Fat drops of water, each as big as a person, thundered from the sky. A giant raindrop hit Drew, knocking him to the ground with a grunt. Enion and Claire dodged the first liquid volley.
“It noticed we’re not being good and docile,” Claire said. She ran and leaped onto the rough side of the stone in front of her. Pulling herself up, she noticed the top had a smooth surface. She swung her leg up and rolled onto the slab to discover giant words carved into it.
Her father’s name. His birth and death dates. Clean, straight lines separating the two.
She turned and saw a giant version of her ten-year-old self standing under the umbrella held by her first social worker. To the side, a giant version of Drew’s nine-year-old self in the same position. The train painted on her little brother’s coffin sprang to life behind the giant Claire, puffing steam from its front chimney.
Lifted by his mist, Drew joined Claire atop the gravestone. Enion flapped to her side again.
“This is messed up,” Drew said.
“Yeah.” Claire glared at the train. “But a stone with a name on it isn’t going to stop me.”
“A train that big might.”
“We killed a cockroach bigger than Tariel.”
“Fight train!” Enion roared and readied to pounce.
Giant Claire and her giant social worker stepped aside. The blue and red cartoon train with yellow trim churned the earth as it sped toward the trio. Mud and grass spewed in a stream behind it. As it neared them, it grew until it could plow the stone over and squish the trio into goo under a single wheel.
Claire pointed for Enion to go right while she tackled Drew to the left. The rain picked up. A drop of water slammed into Claire, throwing her off the side of the stone. Drew caught them both with mist suspended between Mark’s stone and the next one. He flicked his hand and shot a thick, green cord at the train. The end caught on a ledge and he used it to carry them both up the train’s side.
“Do you think this is a distraction or a challenge to overcome?” He shouted.
“I don’t know!” As soon as she could, Claire jumped at the train and stabbed it with her dagger to make a handhold. Mud showered her, knocking her lower than she wanted to go. The blade cut through the metal with a shriek and her hand plunged inside the train. Her feet dangled inches above the surface of the wheel.
Drew clung to his rope, cringing against the flinging mud. “I can’t see!” He gagged as mud spattered in his mouth.
Though it cut her empty hand, Claire caught the edge of the hole she’d made. She swiped her dagger blindly inside the metal, slashing whatever she could reach. When that caused nothing, she stabbed at the outer metal to make the hole bigger. Bracing against it, she pulled herself up and shoved her head through the hole. The inside surprised her enough to lose her grip. She scrambled to catch herself again and hauled herself onto the black plastic of a basement she recognized.
Justin had rescued her from this foster home basement. Weak sunlight filtered in through fine mesh grates over the small windows. The boards overhead creaked as someone walked down the hall.
Claire figured it had a hatch in the right place, and she needed to smash through it. She wriggled around to stick her head out through the metal. “Enion!” Leaning out where the mud flew at her face, she reached out for Drew. She barely saw anything and worried her hand might be too slippery to get a grip on Drew.
Screeching metal announced Enion walking down the side, his claws punching holes with every step. Raindrops crashed into him, forcing him to pause over and over again.
Giving up on rescuing Drew herself, Claire withdrew into the hole and called out, “Get Drew. This way!”
Enion reached the hole and stuck his head through it. “Not like boy.”
“This isn’t the time,” Claire snapped. “We’re in this together. Bring him through here. Now.”
Her dragon huffed sparks. “No.”
For a moment, Claire could only stare at Enion. Then she wriggled to him, snagged a horn, and cranked his head around. “You listen to me. I don’t care what stupid problem you’ve got with Drew. I’ve known him a lot longer than you. He’s my blood-bound guardian. And he’s my—” She choked on a word she didn’t want to use, even though it applied. Probably. Death made everything complicated. They needed to talk. Or something. Later.
“I mean, I care about him. A lot. He’s my best friend. For a lot of my life, he was my only friend. So you get your silver butt down there and you get Drew into this hole, and you do it now, because we’re not doing any of this without him.” Tossing his head back out of the hole, she met his glare with one of her own.
Enion looked away first and disappeared with another spark-filled huff. Claire noticed she’d held her breath while waiting for her dragon to accept or refuse. Except she didn’t have to breathe. Dead things only needed memories.
Before she could depress herself, Claire wiped mud off her face and scrambled to her feet. Hunched over in the low-ceiling space, she hurried to the hatch. She shoved her dagger into the space between the hatch and floor and wiggled it around the full square. Halfway, she hit resistance and put all the force she could muster behind the blade. She tried punching the dagger through the wood, but it slid to the side and didn’t even cause a shallow scrape.
“Boy,” Enion growled from the hole. He shoved Drew through.
Drew coughed and sputtered on the dirt. “Thanks, I think. My glasses are covered in mud. I can’t see anything.”
“Great. I think there’s a padlock on this hatch, but I can’t cut through it or the ceiling for some reason.” Claire saw Enion flash and become tiny. He flew through the basement and landed at her feet with a tiny puff of dirt. Even though she couldn’t make out his small features, she knew he sulked from the petulant way he dropped his butt to the ground.
“Metaphysical space, metaphysical rules.” Drew flicked his hand aside, flinging mud away. “Which seems to mean the rules are uneven, at best.” While trying to clean his glasses on his shirt, he directed a stream of mist at the hatch. The silvery mist drifted through the cracks. “Physics applies until it doesn’t, magic works until it doesn’t. I guess there’s a kind of continuity, but it’s opaque to me.”
“It’s still all about my will conflicting with someone else’s. I don’t know who that someone else is, though. Could be the whole Earth, in which case I’m not surprised it can win when it really wants to.”
Drew shrugged and peered through his glasses. Brown streaks still marred them. He tried more cleaning. “I suppose. We might be fighting Iulia’s will, though. That doesn’t seem so bad.”
“I wonder if she thought we’d never figure out what she’s up to until too late? Or if she’s just confident enough to believe we can’t stop her.”
“Probably both.”
The lock clicked. Claire pushed the hatch up and discovered something heavy held it down. She shifted and shoved her shoulder at it with her knees, knocking the heavy thing aside and tossing the hatch open on its hinges. Standing at her full height put her head and shoulders above floor level.
She’d toppled her own rolling suitcase. “I hate these metaphysical things. Hate them. They’re always trying to mess with me by dredging up stuff I don’t want to deal with in the middle of trying to get things done. Do you remember this foster father?” Claire hopped up to sit on the edge then stand in the hallway.
“We only left this house seven weeks ago. Of course I remember him. He didn’t like anyone eating without him there to watch.” Drew stood in the hatchway and took Claire’s help to climb out.
“You greedy little bastards,” the foster father boomed, making the house rumble. “If I don’t watch, you’ll eat everything.” He stomped into the hallway, his beer belly rippling underneath his stretched white tank top. The keys for the locks on t
he cupboards and fridge, clipped to his belt loop, jangled with every step.
Claire snorted and pointed her dagger at him. “I’m not afraid of you. Not anymore. Especially not when stabbing you won’t kill a real person.”
“And I’m really not afraid of you,” Drew said with a snarl. Mist shot out of his outstretched hand and slammed into the man’s belly. Heat emanated from the jet, building until Claire thought her clothes might catch fire from proximity.
The foster father staggered back, screaming. A copy of him stomped into sight behind Claire and Drew. Then another copy appeared in the nearby doorway.
“Okay, fine. This might take a little more exercise than we thought.” Claire raised her dagger and ran at the nearest one. He had no weapons. She ducked under a slow swing and sliced her blade across his belly. Fuzzy, stuffed unicorns fell out of his stomach. Not expecting this, Claire stepped backward until she reached Drew.
Drew spewed scalding steam at the foster father behind them. The original one, now reduced to a skeleton, danced with a coat rack, ballroom style.
“Is it trying to confuse us to death?” Claire checked through the hatch and saw Enion still sitting in the basement. “Enion, stop sulking and get up here. We need to find a way out.”
The stuffed unicorns wiggled their legs and righted themselves. They marched down the hallway, falling into regimental lines. Claire slapped a hand on Drew’s shoulder and led him toward the dancing skeleton while he kept attacking the third man.
Drew sucked in a breath and the heat died away. Claire checked behind and saw the end of the foster father’s skin peeling back to reveal a silver dragon inside. The dragon opened its mouth and Claire knew what came next.
“Fire! Run!” She hauled Drew along as she sprinted for the front door. Fire exploded behind her, setting the walls and floor on fire. They slammed into the door, forcing it open, and she saw Enion flapping as hard as he could to stay inside the mist shield Drew held in place to protect them.
Enion sailed over Claire’s head and flashed into his large form. He shoved Claire and Drew aside and blew his own fiery breath at the front door. Not wanting to see a house on fire, Claire scanned their new surroundings. They’d burst into an industrial tile hallway lined with lockers and red doors.
“Great. High school. This is exactly where I want to be. Not.”
Drew used a jet of mist to shut the door before the man-turned-dragon could reach it. “Unless a lot more time has passed than I think, I should be in Calculus right now. But not at this school.”
Patting Enion, Claire picked a direction. “I think this is Lincoln. I went here Freshman year.” She ran down the hall, rounded a corner, and, to her surprise, encountered nothing threatening. Her flight took her into the gym, which she thought had the closest outside door.
Four men waited for them. Her father’s Phasm drifted back and forth in front of the outer door. Justin, Avery, and Djembe, all in their armor and holding their swords unsheathed, stood in a loose group. Each had a badge on his chest, bearing the Lincoln Cardinal in black and red. All four looked up when the trio entered the room.
“Four against three hardly seems fair,” Claire said.
A black cloud laced with red veins puffed into sight and dispersed, leaving behind Kurt in the prime of his life, wearing silver plate armor and drawing his sword. Seeing him again reminded Claire of who Kay resembled when she saw him in that ghost dominance battle. She should have realized he’d appear the same as his creator.
“Not what I meant,” Claire muttered.
“Maybe—” Drew’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “Maybe don’t say anything else?”
“Fight Justin this time?”
Claire nodded at Enion. “It’s not really Justin, so yes. None of them are who they look like. They’re just memories. They’ll act like we think they act, not like they really act. If that makes sense.”
Drew gulped. “You should know that the stuffed unicorns are still marching on us.”
“This is getting a little excessive.” Claire saw the unicorn phalanx in the hall behind them. In another circumstance, she would’ve sacrificed a lot to have that many copies of her favorite childhood toy. “We need to divide and conquer.”
“I don’t have much left. I’ve been using power left and right, and there’s no way to replenish here.”
Claire blinked at him. “We’re standing next to a giant node fed by huge ley lines.”
Drew opened his mouth and shut it, then spun mist around the three of them, creating a circular wall ten feet high. “I can’t access anything from here. More importantly, I’m not sure we can beat our memories of these five men. And a platoon of unicorns. There must be another option besides fighting.”
“I’d like that too, but I don’t see anything else.”
“Up?” Enion pointed at the rafters.
Claire frowned. “I have a feeling they’re guarding Iulia’s working. That means we have to get past them, not just around them. If we punch through the roof, I’m pretty sure we’re going into some other landscape and these guys will show up there. Knights became the kind of men they were for a reason. Stuff like this needs an assault to defeat, not negotiation or sneaking.”
Djembe appeared over the mist wall in the middle of an impossible leap. Enion breathed fire at him. Drew and Claire ducked away from his spoiled landing. As Justin and Avery leaped over the mist, the wall closed across the top, blocking them out. Claire rushed Djembe before he could recover and sent him sprawling. Her dagger scraped up his armor without hurting him.
Drew groaned as a sword sliced through his mist, cutting a hole in the wall. The fog disappeared. Justin helped Djembe to his feet and four of the five men closed in. Enion breathed flames on the incoming unicorns, setting them on fire. The stuffed toys filled the hall with high-pitched screams of terror, black smoke, and the smell of burning plastic.
With Drew retreating, Claire picked the closest man and attacked. Avery batted her knife aside with his sword and pulled a gun out of his armored trenchcoat pocket. She kicked his knee. He stumbled and fired the gun. The deafening roar made Claire cringe, but he’d missed her. She needed to get her hands on that gun.
Since she didn’t see Djembe, Kurt, Drew, or Enion in her narrow band of focus, Claire assumed they faced each other. Those odds favored her team, she thought. Justin slashed his sword at her, cutting fabric off her skirt while she bounced to the side. These two men deserved her full attention. And whatever dirty tricks she could think of.
“This is my demesne.”
Avery laughed, reminding her of the corrupt cop who’d beaten her and left her to rot in a jail cell.
“This is for your own good, Claire.” This version of Justin came from her memories of him as a corrupt Knight. But she didn’t have many memories of that, because he spent so little time that way. Besides, even under Kurt’s influence, he never wanted to hurt her.
“Not really a true Justin, is he? Maybe because this is my demesne. Not yours. I own this space. This is my memory. I was a Cardinal for a year, not you.” With all her heart, Claire imagined what she needed from this gymnasium. She rushed Avery in mid-guffaw, timing her leap at his gut with her pointed desire for the floor to buckle under him.
As she landed on the already-falling Avery, Justin punched her in the hip. She still stabbed Avery, but she hit the floor and slid across the polished wood. And left her dagger behind in Avery’s dissolving corpse. The knife clattered to the floor. Unarmed and isolated, she rolled to her feet.
Drew screamed.
Distracted, Claire missed seeing Justin’s next attack until too late.
Chapter 29
Drew
While Claire attracted Justin and Avery, Enion leaped at Djembe. Both fights moved away from Drew. He faced Kurt, the last person he wanted to deal with. Drew had never met the real Kurt, but he knew plenty about Kurt’s Phasm. The man could fight. Toe-to-toe, Drew stood no chance at all.
“Use th
e witch stuff in case he can counter my stuff.”
Drew nodded and backed up as Kurt advanced. He raised a hand and reached for the power he knew he held within. Bands of energy flew to wrap around Kurt. Except they didn’t. They passed through him and clashed with each other. Drew hit the wall behind him and slid along it.
“It’s like he’s not there.”
Kay gulped. “Keep him distracted and out of reach until Claire can fight him? She beat him once, she can beat him again.”
In desperation, Drew pushed out a mist snake. He slid along the wall while it slithered. Kurt slashed the snake in half, grabbed the head and tossed it, and kicked the tail aside. The snake parts dissolved as they skittered across the floor.
“You were a waste of effort,” Kurt spat. “I don’t even know why I bothered lying to Justin to get him to bring you to me. Nothing more than some stupid teenage boy.”
Though terror made Drew’s hands tremble, he raised his chin. “You ruined my life,” he spat. “And I helped Claire destroy you. So yeah, you made a mistake. A big mistake.”
“Mention Emmy.”
“Your Emmy would be ashamed if she knew what you’ve become.” Based upon everything Justin, Kurt, and Kay had said, Drew knew that should make Kurt pause. If this thing acted based upon his and Claire’s memories of Kurt, then Emmy’s name should also affect it.
“Don’t you bring her into this, boy. You aren’t fit to clean her boots.” Kurt rushed him.
Trying to lurch to the side, Drew hit the corner. Kurt thrust his sword through Drew’s gut. It hit the wall behind him with a wet, meaty thunk. Drew stared at the blade. He didn’t understand.
Kurt threw a punch at Drew’s chest. Instead of hitting him, his fist sank into Drew’s body. As with the sword, Drew felt nothing but compression. Two weights pressed against him, holding him in place.
Kay shrieked in panic.
“This doesn’t belong to you. It’s mine.” Kurt pulled his arm out in a slow, smooth drag.
Drew looked down and watched. His arms refused to work. He saw Kurt’s fist emerge from his chest, holding a piece of something silvery. Kay’s screams shifted from his head to his ears.
