Milk & Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  We moved in a direction that I thought was away from the spot where I’d come through the wrinkle. But I couldn’t be sure, because I was pretty sure I’d walked in circles for a while the night before.

  Walt answered my questions about the landscape, animals, and dual suns as we walked. Perched on my shoulder, Mr. Slimy stayed quiet, only moving when a hapless bug ventured too close to his deadly tongue.

  The suns seemed to be following us, moving down the horizon at a pace that made me suspect we wouldn’t quite make it to the border before the twin orbs were gone.

  “How bright is your moon?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed a moon the previous night, when I’d fallen asleep beside the silver-watered pond, but I’d just assumed it was hidden by the big tree lumbering over my makeshift bed.

  “Moon?” He shook his head. “We call it fulldark for a reason.”

  Gnarled gnat knees! “You mean there’s no light at all?”

  “Not out here in the wilderness, no.”

  As we walked, the place of trees and ponds slowly transformed into a more desert-like space, with sandy soil and sinktraps that resembled the quicksand I was familiar with. I told Walt I’d seen quicksand before and he nodded.

  “Most of the sinktraps have bottoms,” he told me. “But sometimes the bottoms are inaccessible.”

  In other words, if you fell into one them, you’d probably die. Not reassuring.

  A loud caw, high overhead, had Walt wrenching his gaze upward. His shoulders tensed and he stopped, pointing toward a rocky crest not too far away. “In there, fast.”

  I saw a shallow indentation in the rock wall. “In there? Why?”

  Walt grabbed my arm and took off running. “Hurry!”

  We dove into the shallow cut in the wall just as several large shapes flew overhead, their shadows strangely humanoid as they skimmed across the light brown dirt.

  Except for the large, bat-like wings moving on either side of their bodies.

  My nose twitched under a smoky scent and magic prickled against my skin. “What…?”

  Walt lifted a hand to silence me, his gaze following the flight of the creatures overhead. They flew quickly past, silent except for the soft throb of wings on air. After a moment, he expelled a breath. “I don’t think they saw us.”

  “What were those things?” I asked as Walt left the indentation.

  I followed him out, my gaze scouring the sky for signs of the large, winged creatures.

  He started off again, quicker than before. “Unfortunately, Plex borders on the demonic dimension. Sometimes they fall into a shift, as you did. If it wasn’t for the warning by that Worc, they’d have probably gotten us.”

  My eyes went round. “Demons?”

  He nodded. “The worst kind. Thieves and scavengers. They are without resources when they find themselves stranded here and they have magic, which gives them an edge. They tend to just take whatever they want and not worry about the consequences. The Worc population has been hit especially hard. The Demons seem to consider them a delicacy.”

  I assumed Worcs were birds and that the crow-like caw I’d heard had been the warning he mentioned. “Plexians don’t have magic?” I thought sadly of my keeper magics, which had very little or zero use for me in the strange dimension.

  Walt shook his head. “Not traditional magics, no. Our gifts are based mostly on feats of engineering and the study of languages.”

  His words made me think of the Seer’s home. “Engineering such as creating a mountainous region inside the Seer’s home?”

  Walt frowned. “That is purely Seer magic. The Seers guide us in our engineering gifts, but they cannot share their magics.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, we’re losing even that small gift from them. They’ve been disappearing, one by one. There are only a very few left now.”

  “Is that why you’ve lost the ability to fix the dimensional wrinkle?”

  Walt quickly scanned the sky again before answering my question. “Plex is an integral part of the Universe. We were tasked Millennia ago with the job of keeping the dimensions from sliding. To accomplish this, our Seers were given massive amounts of power.” He slid me a gaze filled with meaning. “Power corrupts.”

  Yes, it did. “They went dark?”

  He frowned as if not understanding my reference.

  I tried again. “The Seers were more interested in benefitting from their power than they were in doing what the Universe tasked them with doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  Walt looked at me and blinked. “Go?”

  “I presume they left Plex somehow. Maybe they went somewhere they could barter with their magics.”

  He shrugged. I got the impression he didn’t want to talk about the missing Seers.

  Thinking of Hobs and Wicked, I said, “I need to find my friends before I go back.”

  He nodded. “There is one at the border who can help with that.”

  I glanced up at the quickly darkening sky. “How much farther?”

  Walt opened his mouth to respond, but never got the chance.

  An enormous winged shape dropped silently from the sky and clamped two black-skinned hands with long, curved claws over his shoulders.

  The thirty-foot-wide wings pounded the air and the Demon lifted away from the ground, more quickly than I could have imagined carrying that much weight.

  “Walt!” I reached for his quickly ascending leg, getting my hands on a bony ankle before he was out of range, and struggled to hold on as the Demon’s wings pounded the air hard and slow, the movement easily taking him up another foot even with my added weight.

  When I still held on, the nasty creature shot forward, ramming me into a spiky tree hard enough to knock me senseless.

  I grunted in pain and lost my grip on Walt, falling the rest of the way to the ground.

  I struggled to rise, my limbs wobbly and weak. Walt! I stared up into the dim light, seeing my new friend’s pale face looking resigned and unhappy.

  “Fight, Walt!” I screamed. “Don’t just hang there!” My voice throbbed with rage. I would have felt guilty about yelling at a man who was clearly helpless and no doubt in agony, but if he didn’t fight, he was going to die.

  Then I had more immediate problems to deal with. A shadow dropped toward me, and I heard the soughing of enormous wings on the air.

  I glanced up just in time to see a wide black face, red eyes, and a cold smile showing square white teeth. The golden hair curving from a center part around a pair of curved black horns looked strange on the Demon, as did the shapely curves of an obviously female creature.

  As she plunged out of the sky, claws bent in anticipation of grabbing me, I realized Mr. Slimy had fallen off my shoulder when I’d slammed into the tree.

  I couldn’t lose him there.

  Panic flaring, I dove under the small tree I’d fallen against, hoping the spiky branches would be enough to slow the Demon down.

  And they would have if the thing hadn’t landed a few feet away and come at me on foot.

  I scurried around the tree, keeping the trunk between me and the monster as I searched frantically for the frog. “Slimy! Talk to me. Where are you?”

  “That bug’s too big for me to eat, Naida,” Slimy said in a perfectly reasonable voice. “I’d prefer something a bit more my size.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “That makes two of us.” I found him hopping around near a dusty rock, apparently looking for dinner. Nothing got between the frog and his dinner. I could respect that about him. I would have really loved a handful of egg rolls right about then.

  Warm air blew over me as I grabbed Slimy. The whispery sound of feathers brushing against flesh told me the creature had folded her wings. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she trilled in a husky falsetto that was just wrong.

  Cradling the frog in both hands, I backtracked rapidly as the Demon stalked me. I was reluctant to turn my back on her to take off running.
I was pretty sure she’d catch me quickly anyway, and I didn’t relish the idea of claws digging into my back. I’d had nightmares about that whole “claws in the back” thing when I was a kid. I have no idea why. But I did. And the two-inch-long curved claws on the tips of the demon’s scaled fingers looked like just the kind of thing to give me new nightmares.

  “I have nothing for you. I’m stranded here just like you are,” I told the monster in a bid to create a connection that might save my life.

  I might as well have saved my breath.

  The Demon’s smile widened. “I don’t know about that. It looks to me like you’re holding dinner in your hands.”

  I looked down at Slimy and then back up at her, my mouth falling open in outrage. “You can’t eat Mr. Slimy. He’s a magical frog.”

  The demon stopped, her scary red gaze widening. “Magical? How?”

  “He talks.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “Can he make himself bigger?”

  “No.”

  “Can he clone himself?”

  “No. He just talks.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind if my food talks to me on the way down.” The Demon moved and she was suddenly on top of me, her hands shoving me backward as her wings came up. “I’ll just take my talking dinner now.”

  She reached for Slimy and I panicked. Without thinking, I shot her with a beam of keeper magics.

  The silvery light flared outward, a pulsating beam as wide as my arm, and smacked into her. But instead of pulling her to me as my magics generally did, the energy shoved her away. Hard. Hard enough to send her flying thirty yards to smack up against a large, jagged rock.

  The demon crumpled to the ground and collapsed, seemingly unconscious. I didn’t wait around to see if she was. I took off running in the direction the Demon had taken Walt. I could barely see them in the distant sky, and it was getting dark fast.

  I ran faster, using my energy to give me speed. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, if I didn’t find my friend before morning, there wouldn’t be anything left of him to find.

  11

  Beneath the dual sky…

  It was so dark. I’d lost sight of Walt and the demon what felt like an hour since. I’d been reduced to stumbling along blindly, hoping I was keeping the same trajectory I’d had before I’d been blinded by the complete and disorienting blackness.

  I walked with my hands stretched out in front of me, my ears tuned toward any sound that would mean the return of the Demons or any other source of danger or trouble that might be wandering around out there with me.

  When one of my feet slipped deeply into a sink trap, I managed to wrench it free and fling myself away from the trap before I fell into it. The experience left me shaken, and I moved more slowly after that, stretching out a foot and feeling ahead of me with every step to make sure I was on solid ground.

  It was a slow, tedious process.

  My ankle twisted under me and I fell to my knees as agony speared my leg and foot. I was caught in something. From what I could tell by feeling with my fingers, it was a wide crevice in the hard earth. Jerking as hard as I could in an attempt to free my foot, I almost lost the frog, who’d been dozing on my shoulder. My foot came free and I barely caught Slimy before he flew off my shoulder. My heart pounded with fear and frustration. If I lost him in the extreme dark, I’d never find him again until morning. And I wasn’t sure I could wait until morning to move forward.

  The sense of urgency I’d been feeling since being sucked through the wrinkle had grown to a constant, nerve-stripping demand over the last few hours.

  It was as if my inner clock was trying to tell me I was running out of time. But I didn’t need a clock to tell me that. I’d slept one night in Plex. I was moving through a second night.

  There couldn’t be many hours more before Madeline would be forced to close the breach with my friends and me on the wrong side.

  A low rumble filled the air. Static electricity bit my skin like a thousand hungry flies. As I lifted my head in sudden fear, thunder rolled across the sky, and lightning flared in horizontal shafts, showing a thick bank of iron-gray clouds in the sky I couldn’t otherwise see.

  Just what I needed, a thunder and lightning storm.

  As I had the thought, I remembered the storm at Farmer Blue’s place. A sense of bittersweet nostalgia swept through me. I’d thought I was miserable then.

  My current situation illustrated how wonderful my life had been.

  I’d been home. I’d had a job. And I’d had all my friends.

  Even if those derfs had left me to do that job alone.

  I sighed, dropping wearily onto my back on the sandy soil.

  The scent of ozone swept past on a moist breeze. I should try to find shelter.

  It was frustrating not to be able to see where I was going. I could be standing right next to a house and have no idea.

  Sighing again, fully immersed in my self-pity party, I shoved to my knees and then to my feet, reaching up to adjust Slimy on my shoulder.

  He made an “mmpff” sound and shifted slightly, going back to sleep. I was pretty sure I’d heard a soft, croaking snore a few minutes back.

  The thought made me smile. At least Slimy was getting some sleep.

  I started forward again, almost immediately slamming my toes against a rock. “Arrrghhh!” I screamed, my hand flying up and energy dancing in my palm before I even realized what I’d done.

  Well, der! I had a built-in flashlight under my skin. With a relieved smile, I sent energy into my hand and built the silvery power until it illuminated the space around me.

  Then I refocused my attention ahead, planning to get my bearings and start off again.

  And found myself looking at a creature with enormous pale blue eyes, spidery fingers that clutched the air in front of it, and enormous feet and ears.

  I screamed.

  And threw myself at him. “Hobs! I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. How’d you find me?”

  “We followed your magic,” the hobgoblin told me, squeezing me back in a hug even harder than I was squeezing him. “I’m so happy to see you, Miss.”

  His words sifted through my ecstatic brain. We…he’d said we!

  “Meow.” A soft, warm body hit my ankles and my bones vibrated under a ferocious purr.

  “Wicked!” I screamed, grabbing him up and burying my face in his fur. He smelled like sunlight and dust and home.

  Claws scrabbled at my shirt, and I realized my movement had dislodged the frog. “Man going down! Man going down!” Slimy screamed.

  Wicked reached over and planted a paw on the frog, holding him against my shoulder before he could slip away.

  “Ouch, watch those claws, feline…mmmfff!”

  I giggled as Wicked licked the frog right on the lips. And then grimaced. “You’re going to get boils or warts or something, Mr. Wicked.”

  The frog looked outraged, his voice filled with disgust. “How many times do we need to have this conversation? That’s all fairy tale stuff. Frogs don’t give people warts or any other disgusting skin conditions.”

  Wicked’s tail snapped the air and he fixed me with a glowing orange gaze that provided enough light to clearly see the frog’s disgust.

  In fact, I realized, since my energy had fallen away in my excitement to see them, he’d been illuminating the area all by himself. The sigil on his chest was also glowing, and the combination of the two was giving off a pretty good light.

  Wicked and his littermates had been bred to be powerful witch familiars. They each had a potent magical sigil to call, and Wicked’s was a soul star sigil, a silver star inside a circle that was smaller than the points of the star. The sigils had been meant for use in dark, oily magic, but they worked just as well to amplify good magic and had been useful more than once when my friends and I had been up against a force that was too powerful for us to handle alone.

  “You called your sigil without a circle or spell?”

/>   “This place is not magic,” Hobs told me. Apropos of what, I didn’t know.

  “I know, Walt told me…” My voice faded away as I remembered Walt was in danger.

  “Who is Walt?” Hobs asked, cocking his oversized head.

  “A friend. And we need to help him. Demons have him.”

  Hobs looked worried. “Miss, the void is closing. If we don’t leave this place soon, we’ll have to stay here.”

  Despair filled my chest. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

  Hobs frowned. “This place isn’t magic…”

  Impatience strummed against my last nerve. “I know that, Hobs. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “…but it works as a magic mirror,” the hobgoblin went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “It reflects magic back and makes it stronger.”

  I thought about what he’d said and realized I understood. “My keeper magics put a Demon on her boohind and knocked her clean out.”

  Hobs nodded. “Yes. But you need to be careful, the mirror image of your magic is more powerful, but it’s also unpredictable.”

  He was right. My keeper magics usually drew things to me. But in Plex, it had flung something away. There could be other surprises. “I’ll keep that in mind. But why are you mentioning this?”

  Hobs opened his mouth and then hesitated, closing it again. He held up a finger and then…disappeared. He reappeared a blink later with a goat in his arms.

  My mouth fell open. “Is that…?”

  Hobs said, “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

  And the goat fell over, legs straight out from her body and bobbing slightly on the air.

  “Adelaide? Where’d you find her?”

  “She was just inside the breach when we came through. I took her back.”

  “You took her back?”

  Hobbs nodded, folding his hands in front of him as the goat meandered away, nibbling on the unfriendly looking scruff embedded in the sandy dirt.

  I stared at him for a long moment, thinking about everyone mentioning Hobs when we spoke about the wrinkle. Then it hit me. “You can dimension skip.” Hobgoblins can pop into a different dimension when they’re threatened and hiding or just because they want to. Generally, they don’t have the power to carry much with them when they skip, but… “The mirroring magic let you carry her through the breach?”