by Jen Ponce
Jasper pulled up on one side of me, Tytan the other. I glanced at each one. Both were sporting wounds on their faces. I rolled my eyes and then focused on the queen’s sinewy back. She didn’t walk but she didn’t slither either. I wasn’t sure how she was moving but it was graceful, fast, and looked more efficient than my stumbling. Translucent white roots tripped me, and bony-fingered branches snagged my hair. I cursed each time and batted at myself, certain some bug or snake had taken the opportunity to fall on top of me.
Home.
“Yeah. Where’ve you been?”
“I was held up by yon prick.”
I waved a dismissive hand at Jasper. “Not you.” In my own head this time, I said, ‘Where have you been?”
Watching.
That made me feel safer, knowing Neutria was keeping an eye out. The fleshcrawler queen stopped at the edge of a large, milky lake, its waters lapping at the anemic trees. Concentric circles spread outward from the liquid dripping from the trees overhead.
“Here is the entrance to my kingdom. I will give you the Gift and we will proceed. They will stay behind.” She nodded toward my companions.
“Will they be safe here?” Okay, they were all pretty capable of taking care of themselves but I had to ask.
“They are safe. This is the last vestige of protection from your predecessor, this lake and beach. The other barriers have fallen and even now there are those who are sniffing at my borders.” She opened her mouth and bit down hard on her own arm. Blood welled from the wound and stained the water.
My stomach rolled.
“Come. Drink. I will say the words and grant you the Gift.”
Seriously, what was with the blood? Nobody could think of another liquid that would work as well? Like Diet Coke or something? I walked forward, shaking off Jasper’s hand on my arm. He needed to get a grip. Tytan didn’t stop me. Of course, I wasn’t sure how much Tytan really cared, either. He and Neutria, killers at heart and both my friends. How messed up was that?
I’d had the queen’s blood before. Last time her blood had given me a shit-load of strength. It’d been fun while it lasted. How was this different? She’d said then that I wasn’t worthy of the gift.
“Drink.” She held up her arm, long, ropy muscles covered in leech-skin.
Would she kill me if I barfed on her? Probably. I walked closer, feeling the menace in her stance, in her coiled strength. In her predator’s teeth. Before I could chicken out, I clasped her arm, shut my eyes, and put my mouth to suck. Her blood sweetened until I was convinced I was drinking Diet Coke. Had she plucked that thought from my mind or was my brain protecting me from the truth?
The queen’s webbed hand pressed on my head and she spoke a few, screeching words that made my head ache. Then my neck exploded in pain and I went to my knees. I wanted to pull away but her hand was still there and she was much stronger than I. The pain didn’t last but my neck spasmed and rippled, crawling with tingling feet and stinging barbs until I wanted to scream.
Couldn’t, though. Mouth full.
Just when I contemplated biting her, she pulled her hand free and took her arm away. I smacked my lips―not really of my own free will―and smeared the rest over my face as I tried to wipe the warm mess of it away.
“Devany?”
I held up my hand. “I’m okay.”
“She hurt you.”
The horror and anger in Jasper’s voice made my heart sink. I reached up and touched my tender flesh, jerking away only to palpate my skin. Three long, fleshy slices excised my neck. I checked the other side. Ditto. “What did you do to me?”
“Gills,” Tytan said. “Fantastic.”
The queen looked pleased. Even the bloodthirsty monster wasn’t immune to his smile. Good, made me feel better. “Gills? That’s the gift?” How the hell was I supposed to explain gills to the kids? To my coworkers? To anyone?
Oh shit. Coworkers. I’d forgotten to call in and let them know I’d be out of the office for a while. Shit. “Tytan? Would you do me a favor?”
“Does it involve me and you being naked?”
I huffed a breath. “Would you get a hold of my brother and ask him to call my work? Please?”
“All this before you and you’re worried about your job.”
“Yes I am.”
“As you wish.”
“Thank you.” I nodded to the queen. “I’m ready, I guess. How are we getting to your kingdom? Boat?”
She answered by taking my hand and yanking me into the water. I screamed and my mouth filled with the nasty, rotten liquid. I thrashed, trying to yank my hand free but she continued swimming downward. My eyes were screwed shut but when my lungs were on the verge of exploding I opened them. I could see.
Then I could breathe. Not in the conventional sense, but I had oxygen. The things on my neck rippled as I sucked in water through my mouth and expelled it through my gills. My motherfucking gills.
My host kept pulling me downward. Now that I was sure I wasn’t dying, I could see we were swimming toward a large, underground city. Not a city like on Earth, but a city nonetheless. There were fleshcrawlers everywhere. How did they sustain themselves down here? Didn’t they need blood to survive? I knew they fed on the local wildlife but surely this sheer number of predators would deplete the food supply in under a year.
The deeper we got, the more jazzed I felt, my body humming with power. I also became aware of a melody played in low, deep bass. It suffused the fleshcrawler’s domain and reminded me of the music I’d heard in the Slip. I wanted to ask her if she could hear the music but I had no idea how I would talk with a mouth and lungs full of water.
“Talk in your mind. Down here we speak through the Source.”
Great. Yet more people in my head. “Through the Source?”
“It’s all around you now.” She tugged me into the maw of a cave, stalactites and stalagmites at the entrance making it look like the slavering mouth of a monster. Inside it was black as Ravana’s heart and I worried she would let go of my hand and leave me here to flounder. My panic grew and I tightened my fingers in case her grip eased.
I couldn’t even take deep breaths—the intake and expulsion of water unsatisfying and not relaxing at all. “Are we there yet?” I asked, taking a page out of my kids’ book.
She didn’t answer, just kept towing me behind her and to my relief I saw a glow ahead. Tiny lights lit up the black like stars being revealed as clouds parted and soon the glow was bright enough for me to see that the tunnel we’d been in had expanded into a large cavern. Some of the lights darted about, sitting in the bellies of transparent fish. Other lights sparked and pulsed at the walls, even more swirled and danced on the ceiling of the cave.
Our forward momentum slowed and we treaded water over a cave floor waving with seaweed. She pushed my stomach, expelling the trapped air inside me. I sank to the bottom and she followed suit. Her beauty was bolder here. No longer a trouty, fish-out-of-water white but a opalescent, glittering ivory. “We come to renew the pact created by the one called Ravana of the Skriven.”
I nodded, the slow motion agreement making me smile. My hair swirled and moved like sea-snakes. I wanted to sing a song from The Little Mermaid but figured the queen would get mad at me and rip off my face. Or something. “I am glad to renew the pact. It helps us both.”
“Of course.” Her predator’s smile made me nervous. Fish out of water? Human in the water.
“Can I see my souls?”
She nodded, indicated I should follow her and swam to the far side of the cavern. It took me a while longer and I did it with far less grace but I joined her eventually, my gills working like crazy. She put her hand on the middle of a giant round door and it spiraled open with a low, grinding sound. Inside, I saw rows and rows of souls, standing like sea anemones in tall, brown grass that swayed and bent around them.
“How do they survive here?”
“They are in a state of suspended animation. The witcher grass feeds them and t
heir dreams feed the witcher grass.” She looked proud of herself. I kept my feelings to myself—at least, I hope I did. My mind was throwing references to the Matrix at me and I told it to shut up.
“Thank you.”
She waved her hand and the door irised shut. She swam back to the center of the room and I followed, wondering not for the first time, why Ariel would’ve ever given up the sea for legs. Teenagers and their dumb ideas. If it weren’t for the fleshcrawlers, this whole breathing under water thing would have been a blast.
She threw back her head and opened her mouth, an unhinging that creeped me out, and screeched. The sound held power and I could feel the magic pouring from her, washing outward through the murky depths. In minutes, more fleshcrawlers swam into the caves and surrounded us both.
More soulless, black gazes and sharp teeth. ‘The better to eat you with, my dear,’ my mind gibbered before Neutria tamped down hard on my fear.
We are not prey.
I clenched my hands. Right.
Queen Anyang turned her eyes on me. “My council. They wanted to see the human turned chythraul, witch, and Skriven.”
I was on display like a cake in the baker’s window. Did that make the fleshcrawlers little kids, grubby fingers pressed against the glass as they drooled?
We are not prey.
‘I know. I got it. Sorry.’
The queen tipped her head, a raptor studying her next meal. “Shall we begin?”
Was now the time to confess I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing? Or should I fake it and hope for the best? If I were watching this as a show on TV I would’ve been shouting the answer at the character. Being immersed in the mess gave me a limited perspective.
She didn’t seem to mind my silence. She began screeching, her eyes closed, swaying like a cobra. I caught myself swaying with her and made myself stand still. Was I supposed to be doing something right now? Or did I need to wait my turn to do whatever it was I needed to do?
The power increased exponentially until the water around me vibrated. I shut my eyes and touched the heart with my mind, picturing it beating like a real heart, sucking in and pushing out Source with every muscular contraction. When I opened my eyes, I had to blink at the glare. Light shone from my body, driving back the council members as they shrank away from the glow. “Oops. Sorry.” I willed it to go away but it didn’t.
“You dare insult me in my own realm?” the queen said, her words sharp and poisonous. She’d flung her arm up to shield her eyes, as had the other council members.
“I’m not meaning to, I swear.” Stop, stupid light. Instead it shone even brighter, driving the queen back too. “Really. I’m not doing this. Not on purpose.”
“I will drain your body of blood.”
Holy shit. Could I make a hook down here? I shut my eyes again and focused on making a doorway. Instead a whomp of sound drove me backward in the water until I fetched up against a wall, my head banging with a ringing thump. I opened my eyes.
Shit, shit, shit. The fleshcrawlers were floating, unmoving in the water. Dead? I swam forward inch by inch until I reached the closest one. Blood trailed in a spiral from its nose. I poked it with my finger―the fleshcrawler, not the blood―but it didn’t move. Went to another, and another. None of them moved but I wasn’t sure if they were stunned or dead.
The queen had a halo of blood around her bald pate, her black eyes open and staring. She looked dead to me.
Quadruple shit.
A hissing behind me. I flailed into a turn. One of the council members moved, stretched, groaned. My heart thudded, and I wished I were on land so that I could at least throw a punch. “Are you all right?”
More hissing. I shrank back as, one by one, the fleshcrawlers regained their senses. My helpful mind sent me pictures of bloody water and piranha teeth. One of them charged at me, its teeth bared. I shoved my arm out, as if that would hold the thing back and to my surprise it stopped. And smiled. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes. Our queen said you were weak but you incapacitated all of us in one blow. Clever.”
Well, hell yeah it was. Because that’s exactly what I intended to do. Right. “Thanks.”
The queen twitched. The fleshcrawler who had talked to me hissed again and I realized she was laughing—sort of. Queen Anyang blinked away the corpse-stare and focused on me. Somehow I didn’t think she’d find this amusing but she wasn’t stupid. All of her councilors were laughing so she couldn’t just rip my head off and not get some censure from them.
Be tough. “We cool?”
She hissed. Hers wasn’t laughter. More like that sarcastic noise bad guys made right before they shot you in the heart. “You have power.”
“Yes.” And don’t you forget it.
Behind me, one of the fleshcrawlers screeched. The queen answered. Then she waved an imperious hand, her eyes always on mine. If I blinked, would she kill me?
Before I could find out, one of the fleshcrawlers swam between us. The one who had talked to me. She flashed me a grin full of teeth and I gave her a nod in return. She’d saved me from the staring contest, though I wasn’t sure why.
Two more fleshcrawlers swam in carrying a glowing rock between them. Yellow light suffused the water around it but it was the power radiating from it that made me want to hug it close and absorb it all for myself.
I restrained myself after seeing the reverence the fleshcrawlers paid the rock. “The Source will fuel our ritual. This will aim it, guide it, direct it into place.”
I nodded like I knew what the hell she was talking about. Oh, I could guess, I mean, I wasn’t stupid. It’s just that “in theory” and “in real life” were so different that one lived on the South Pole and played with penguins and the other had Santa as its neighbor.
They settled the rock on a curved pedestal I hadn’t noticed before, hidden as it was by the waving seaweed. The queen chanted in her screeching voice, the noise rising and falling like any other language, though I couldn’t pick out anything that sounded like an actual word. Since I didn’t know what to do, I dropped my gaze to my shoes, wary of closing my eyes again.
‘Okay,’ I told myself. ‘Focus on a giant bubble of protection around this whole swamp. Huge, giant bubble. Impenetrable. Inviolate. The creatures living in the swamp can enter and leave but nothing foreign can enter. No witches, no Skriven, nothing but the creatures indigenous to the swamp.’ I formed it in my head, picturing a giant, gleaming bowl of magic over the whole swamp, curving down into the planet to make a complete sphere that encompassed everything in the queen’s realm.
The screeching continued but from a distance, as I continued working on my imaginary protection bubble. I had no idea how large to make it since I’d only seen a tiny part of the swamp so I tried to imagine it being attached to the smell of rotted flesh. Surely that smell didn’t extend all over the rest of Midia.
The sound in the room changed. The voice went silent. When I raised my eyes, the queen was staring at me. The council, too. She bared her teeth at me. “What have you done?”
‘I don’t know,’ didn’t sound like a good answer, so I said, “Protection. For the swamp.”
“Yes. I feel it.”
Pride tipped up the corners of my mouth. I did it. Yes.
“We didn’t want protection. We wanted to fade from the memories of those on this planet who want to harm us.”
Oh. “So? Protection will work.”
“The witches will see it and be attracted to it. That’s not what we wanted.” Her voice hummed with anger and made me want to swim away from her. “We wanted to Fade!”
“I’m sorry, I’ll try again.” People and their picky shit. Protection, invisibility. Did she ever say she wanted to be invisible? No. No she didn’t.
“It’s too late.” She pointed down at the rock. It had split into four pieces and wasn’t yellow anymore.
“Can’t we use another one?”
“We don’t have another one.” She
began screeching at the council. Some of them hissed, some screeched back. I had a feeling they were discussing my death and I wondered if I would be able to do the light thing again and stun them long enough to get away.
Yeah, probably not.
The noise stopped. The queen’s dead eyes fixed on mine. “Despite my objections, the council has voted your act was not one of deliberate malice. Therefore we will allow you to live. However, if you are not able to Fade us within a year, we will release your souls into the hands of any Skriven who comes looking for them. For even they will be able to sense the protection around the swamp and wonder why it’s here. Then there will be those who hammer away at the circle. If they manage to break it, then too will we release your souls.”
“You didn’t tell me what you wanted. I just want that on the record. You said you and Ravana had a pact. You never told me what it consisted of or how she’d extended her protection.” I made a point of looking at each council member, not knowing if they understood me. “If you keep me in the dark, you can’t expect me to give you the results you wanted.” I was going to have to have that engraved on my gravestone. Story of my life.
The first council member who’d woken and laughed, screeched. The queen screeched back, looking none too happy. To me, Queen Anyang said, “One year.”
What had the other fleshcrawler said? That one looked at me and smiled. I tried to return it but my stomach hurt and a heavy cloak of doom had settled around my shoulders.
The queen left, swimming away without a look back. The others left, flitting away into the gloom until I was alone with the laughing one. We studied each other and then she swam at me, her hand wrapping itself around my arm before she began to swim upward.
“I’m Nephele.”
“Devany.”
My ears popped as we moved through the water. Nephele greeted a few of the passerby as we swam, not through the dark tunnel Queen Anyang brought me through but higher, via another opening near the top of the cavern.
“My queen is angry. But do not let this frighten you. She has been angry since losing our king.”
Nex. “I like him.”
She gave me a look of surprise. “You know him?”
