by Voss Foster
I think they got it about the time I was five feet into the air. There was shouting I barely heard, and l certainly couldn't make out. I was putting all my focus into not falling off of the giant dragon.
A voice crackled into my ear, low and rumbling. "What am I doing?"
Dogar. Perfect. "Drop me inside the snake's skull. I'll do the rest."
"Inside?"
"You heard me."
No more from Dogar. We were a few yards out, but Swift wasn’t done. "This is suicide, Dash."
"Maybe." I slid a magazine free and changed it out so the rifle was ready. "Sir? Try to get me out if you can."
Dogar's wings flared out as we approached. He perched on the edge of the forming skull and dipped his neck down low. His voice grumbled in my ear again. "You're sure?"
"No." But I scrabbled as fast as I could and slammed straight down…into gray matter. "Go on home before you get sucked in."
Dogar flapped and little shards of bone broke away where the skull had grown around his talons. I slid down the still-forming brain and into fluid that burned and reeked like antifreeze, even through the gas mask. My right leg was already fucked up, and dipping myself in whatever this acidic brain fluid was didn't help me stand up straight or move or any of that.
I fumbled the rifle into my grip, but not before something else splashed down. I saw a dark smudge in my peripheral vision and turned toward it.
"Do you think this will stop us?" It was the same voice that had bellowed across Times Square. He took off the gas mask as I turned, and there was a gaunt, sunken-eyed ghoul staring back at me underneath a shock of white hair.
I nodded, putting on the best face I had. "Selenus." I had to move quickly if I was going to get this done. I leveled the rifle at the Jörmungandr's ever expanding brain and squeezed the trigger.
He deflected the bullets up and out of the shrinking opening in the top of the skull. As he moved his arm, I saw the tears in his clothing. He'd been the one I shot…yet here he was. Smiling away at me. "You know me. I'm impressed, human."
I didn't have many options. He was strong, and Jörmungandr had to be close to fully corporeal again at this point. Something had to lodge in its brain. Something big, if I couldn't shred the damn thing with bullets.
"We can suffocate here together, human. It's no bother to me." He shook his head. "Trapped together until we drown in cranial fluid."
"Oh, I think the poison will take us out first, don't you?" I fired another volley of bullets, this one straight between Selenus's legs.
He backed up.
And I had a plan.
A few more bullets toward his chest, which pushed him right. "At least you'll be dead, too. That's comforting to me." I tried to hide my stagger the best I could. Another volley. I needed him up against that brain.
"I'm glad you're comfortable with your species dying. So am I." He pointed straight up. "The skull is closing, and this fluid seems to be rising, human. How long until you choose to off yourself?"
I was now wading hip-deep, and any protection the poison-dampening gear might have provided me seemed to be absent. My legs were weakening, burning, dying.
I circled until Selenus was close to the blob of gray matter. This was my only shot. I forced myself forward, knowing I'd end up face-first in that poisonous fluid. Once I got close, I squeezed that trigger back and didn't let go until I heard bullets hit flesh. But it was dark, the skull finally sealing closed. Did I shoot them into the brain? Did I hit him non-lethally again? He seemed to be impossible to kill.
It didn't matter. I didn't release that trigger until the full magazine was spent. My trouble had gotten me shaky legs. I knew I couldn't take another step and expect anything but drowning. My heart tightened in my chest as I felt the liquid sear its way up to just below my rib cage.
With fumbling fingers, I flicked on the light attached to the rifle.
Selenus laid in the gray matter, halfway enveloped, but no longer moving, and scorch marks littered the inside of the skull where bullets had ricocheted or been deflected. And there were also a few chunks missing from the brain itself, floating by me in the poison ocean.
Did I just shoot out its self-control, or was that lethal? I wasn't a damn brain surgeon, and I sure as hell wasn't a herpetologist, so I couldn't tell.
My bad knee collapsed under my weight and I took a dive into the poison. But I did it. I did everything I could to stop the damn snake.
At least I would die a hero.
The fluid washed over my face…then back off. Back on. Back off. It was sloshing. It was moving.
The snake was falling with me inside of it.
As I realized that, I tumbled. Even with the gas mask on, I took in the fluid, tasted it on my lips. Not a lot…but drinking poison was never good.
The flashlight beam illuminated a patch of ivory skull just a second before I cracked my head against it.
Chapter Seventeen
I woke up to a quiet, indistinct murmuring.
I woke up to hearing.
I woke up.
Just as soon as I realized that, my eyes popped open into bright white. Sterile. Some place that smelled of disinfectants and latex and...it was a doctor's office.
“Jesus, you scared me.” Casey leaned over me, his face haggard, eyes ringed with darkness and redness. He wasn't wearing any sparkles on his cheeks. He smiled wearily at me. “I didn't think you were going to make it back to us.”
I swallowed to try and wet my throat, but that did all of jack shit. “Water?” I didn't sound like a multiple pack a day smoker like I had when I was exposed to poison gas, but I still sounded about two steps away from death's door. Tiny little baby steps at that.
“Let's get you sat up and then you can have some water.”
He slipped his arms under my back and slowly raised me to sitting, then he went to the sink and filled what looked suspiciously like a glass beaker.
“You weren't testing poison in that were you?”
“Of course not. It's a urine sample cup.”
I nodded and drank, forcing myself to go slowly instead of slamming the whole thing back like I wanted to. It was the sweetest, coolest water I'd ever drank. I drained it over a five-minute span, then finally tried speaking again. My voice sounded considerably closer to…my voice. “Any updates while I was out?"
Casey locked eyes with me and grinned. “You did it.”
I did it. I did it. "Jörmungandr?"
"Dead as a doornail." He nodded and went back to his ministrations, bending and unbending my knee. "What exactly happened down here, anyway?"
"One of them blew up my kneecap."
"Ah. And you must have gotten some triage done in the field." He sighed and stopped his maneuvering. "You're actually lucky that poison got in there. It ate away at some of the tissue that got put together wrong and I was able to fix it properly. Mostly properly. There's only so much to be done for an injury like that." He sighed. "But it's manageable. You'll probably have some issues when it rains, though."
I let the rest of that go. I didn't want to think about having a manageable lifelong injury at the moment. "Well no offense, but I'd rather have skipped the poison altogether in spite of that."
"I don't blame you. It did a number on you."
"What? I barely drank any of it."
He rolled his eyes. “Well since you're not supposed to drink any of it, I'd say that's still bad."
I was out. I was intact. The snake was dead. "What about the others? They were down there fighting and—"
“Four agents died, and there are a few more who are going to be doing desk duty while they heal up. Gutt was in…he was in pretty bad shape by the time I got to him. Magical overload sickness. But if I couldn’t fix that, I wouldn't have any place being the OPA medic in the first place." He walked around behind me and rubbed his hands from my shoulders down to my back. “It doesn't look like there's any structural damage I missed, and your organs are…okay. Does it hurt anywhere?"
>
"It hurts everywhere, but I'll take it over dead." I wasn't dead. The realization kept socking me in the jaw. I'd made it out. "Selenus was in there. How did that all turn out?"
"You'd have to ask Swift. I just got some basic updates." He pulled a rather large pill bottle out of a drawer and handed it over. "Lucky you, you're on scrubbers for another month, and I want to see you once a week to make sure everything's healing properly. And keep an eye on your knee."
I slowly got to my feet, doing my best to hide how much everything just fucking ached, or the way my leg didn't want to support me. Even without looking at myself in a mirror, I could tell my best wasn't very good. But pain meant I was alive. Alive was much preferable to the other option. "Once a week? You're sure you're not just trying to get me on a date?"
"A date this early? What good would that do me with you in your current state? Straight and fully functional, at least I can convince you to give me a try. Straight and nearly dead?" He shook his head and thrust the pill bottle into my hand. "Go on and see Swift. They're all waiting for you."
I nodded and stopped just long enough to check myself out in the mirror. My hair was basically all gone, I was scarred and puffy…and I was dressed in more secondhand clothing. I swallowed hard and focused on the thing that didn't terrify the living shit out of me. "You got me a shirt without horses. Appreciate it."
And I walked out on that note. I had to remind myself that I'd made it. That even if I looked like shit, it could have been worse. Even if moving was agony, I was still here when I had no right to have survived a stunt like that.
I just had to keep reminding myself.
I walked through the doors into the tight quarters of the main OPA office. I made it all of two steps before Gutt rose and lumbered his way toward me. He had bandages strewn over his body, but they didn't seem to impede his movement or hurt him at all. He clapped a massive hand down on my shoulder way too hard, but spoke softly. “You had everyone worried, Dash.”
“Hell, if you think they were worried, try being me. I buried myself alive inside a giant poisonous snake brain with a terrorist.”
There was that smile. All teeth and ferocity and...Gutt. “Come along then, everyone's in the briefing room. They'd all like to hear exactly what happened.”
“Well I have to admit, it's a pretty badass story.” Gutt was fine. I was able to actually relax a tiny bit. “I hope no one minds me wearing this.”
“If they do, I'll eat them.”
“Thanks.” I reached as close to his shoulder as I could and patted him on the back. “I mean it. For a lot of things. You put a lot on the line yesterday, and you put a hell of a lot more trust in me than I deserved.”
“Well it was either trust you, or trust the harbinger serpent of Ragnarok. The choice was pretty clear.”
In the briefing room, everyone sat around the kidney-shaped table. I didn't make a big deal about entering, just took the empty seat next to Bancroft. “So I take it we have a new case to look at?”
After a couple beats of silence, Swift leaned forward. "Dash, you broke every applicable piece of FBI protocol I can be bothered to think of. You put yourself in harm's way, not to mention Dogar, without any sort of direct approval. You took on a suicide mission." His face split open into a big, all-encompassing grin. "That is exactly why I wanted you here. You are an insane son of a bitch, and that came through for us when it counted.”
Okay. I wasn't in a bad place. Thank god. “I work for an FBI office that handles elves and pixies and fairies and centaurs and shit. If I wasn't insane already, I would go insane. Not the bad kind of insane, where I turn all my police and FBI training against innocent civilians, just useful insanity." I cast a glance to King. She had more scars for sure, and somehow had lost a chunk of scalp. “Why do you look like hell?”
“Why do you smell like death?”
I shrugged and kept up on looking around at everyone. Kimmy and Bancroft were mostly silent. Bancroft smiled at me, and Kimmy didn't glare daggers at me. I was officially getting the royal treatment. “So, what kind of paperwork do I have to fill out on this?”
“Oh, a whole stack of it.” Swift nodded slowly. “Lucky for you, a helpful little band of ne'er-do-wells already did all the reports for you. You just need to sign off on them.”
“Normally I'd insist on reading anything that I was going to sign, but since you already have me contracted for the OPA I'm not sure how much more you can take from me.”
Swift steepled his fingers. "So you're planning to stay on with us?"
And for the first time, I didn't have to think about the question, mull it over. More than I'd ever gotten anywhere else in the FBI, or even in the NYPD, I was actually a hero today. Here, I got to make a difference. "You don't leap inside a giant snake head to fight a terrorist if you're not committed, sir."
His grin somehow got wider. "Well good, because I already got you a desk set up and everything. Would have been a shame to let that twenty dollars in office supplies go to waste."
"Glad I was worth twenty dollars."
Swift shrugged. "Saving the human race is normally only a tenner around here, but since it was your first time…"
I leaned back in my seat and stared up at the ceiling. “It doesn't quite feel real. It doesn't seem like this should be over. Is Central Park cleaned up? No innocent families are going to be running around and getting caught in any residual poison or…weird magical traps or something?”
Gutt shook his head. “Once Jörmungandr was killed, I got in contact with the Kingdoms. They sent in scrubber teams to clean up Central Park, as well as the other attack sites. It'll take a while, but they're very thorough."
"Selenus? He was in there with me…did he die?"
"He died," said Swift. "Suffocated on some stray brain cells."
So far so good. "And Casey said there were four agents dead?"
“Better than anyone had any reason to expect, greenhorn.” King didn't look at me as she spoke, staring into the corner instead. “You need to learn to let good enough be good enough. I'm terrible at it, but you don't want to end up like me. I'm too bitter.”
“Oh, don't be hard on yourself. You're just bitter enough.” I reached all the way across the table and laid my hand on hers. "But you still look like shit."
"Just what a girl likes to hear."
I turned my attention back to Swift. “So what time am I coming in tomorrow?”
“Far as I'm concerned, whenever the hell you want. You've got yourself a one-day reprieve. And if you're done here, you should get some damn rest.”
“Good, because I need to leave now. I have something I want to check on.”
Or more appropriately, someone.
Chapter Eighteen
I knocked a couple times on the apartment door. After a few seconds, a broad-hipped, broad-chested Hispanic woman opened the door. No security chain or anything like that, but there was a very noticeable five-iron sitting well within her reach. “Can I help you?”
I pulled out my badge and ID. “I'm Agent Rourke. I called you about your nephew?”
She nodded. “Of course. I heard about everything in Central Park.”
“It's all taken care of now.” I sighed. I'd never done anything like this before, but it just didn't feel right to leave it sitting in the way it was. “Is Oscar here?”
“Yeah, he's just right in the living room. Did you want to come in?”
“If it's not too much trouble. It'll only be for a few minutes. Just wanted to check on him.” She moved aside and I walked in, trying to hide my limp. I thought it was getting better, but better wasn't much.
When I saw him before, he looked dead. Sure, talking and breathing and all that good shit, but he looked dead. Now he was scarred and bandaged and a little thin and pale, but certainly not dead. Just very, very sick.
He looked a little bit like I did right now.
He grinned wide and bright as soon as he saw me. “Dash.”
“Hey. You�
�re looking pretty good. And you remembered me.”
“Yeah, those FBI doctors managed to fix me up pretty well. Said I'll pretty much always have the scars, but it's one heck of a story to tell.” He nodded at me. “I heard this is all over?”
“It sure looks like it's all over. We got most of the terrorists, and we managed to put a good stop in their plans. Chances are they won't be back, and if they are it'll be a long time from now, without the poison gas.” I didn't even bother to sit. I mostly just wanted to see him, prove to myself that the kid actually made it through this whole mess. That somebody other than me or King actually made it through. “You back in school yet?”
“Next week. And yet I still have to do all the homework so I can stay caught up.”
“If your aunt wasn't standing right behind me, I'd tell you that homework is for nerds. But since she is, you should definitely do it. Stay in school, don't do drugs, yada yada yada.”
He chuckled and snorted, and a glance over my shoulder showed that even Gigi was smiling at that. Lucky for me, because I wasn't happy at the prospect of showing up and telling Casey I got my brand new body beaten with a golf club.
I clapped my hands against my sides. “Well, I really just wanted to see how you were doing. And you look like you're doing really well.”
He cast his gaze down, and I knew there was a not very fun question coming. That was the official not very fun question look. “So the people who did this to my parents are gone?”
“We won't know for sure who we got exactly until everyone's been interrogated and processed through. But we managed to arrest twenty of them, and a bunch more died in the Times Square attack. And nobody will ever be able to produce the poison that did this again." I nodded slowly at Oscar until he finally looked up, and then I locked eyes with him. “I'm sorry about your family.”
“I know. I am too.” He got up off the couch, walked over, and extended his hand. “Thank you for saving me.”
I took it, careful not to squeeze too hard in case there was still damage to either one of us. “Do me a favor and live a nice long happy life so it doesn't go to waste.”
