Mark of the Moon

by Beth Dranoff

  “Your back maps out where the worlds start, end and join together. Where you scatter your blood within that pattern affects whether you’re opening or sealing that link. Assuming the stories are correct,” said Anshell.

  “Not looking to take a blood bath today, thanks,” I muttered. “What do you need me to do to make this stop?”

  “This,” Anshell said, stepping forward and laying his hand on my shoulder blade.

  “And this,” Sam said, laying his hand on my other shoulder blade. Fire seared the veins and points on my back. Where had Jon gone?

  “And this,” said Celandra, laying a dry palm on my forehead. It smelled surprisingly of rosemary and mint and sage. My back curved forward into her embrace.

  A coolness started from the base of my spine and branched outwards in a web of counter-balancing ice. There. Jon’s hands spreading blessed relief up from my waist, along my hips, curling out to touch the points of fire sparked by Anshell and Sam and Celandra. I heard Sam’s whistled wonder as the area around us lit up with an eerie glow of blue flame.

  “No!” I could hear Alina’s screech of frustration even from this distance. Whatever we were doing here must be working. I craned my neck in the direction of the sound; saw an answering blue and orange glow from the other end of the beach. There was a winding snake of light twisting up into the darkness above, the shadowy reflection bouncing off the atmosphere around the moon. Twisted shapes tumbled down from the coiled life form above, down from dimensions unknown, creatures sounding of nails on metal sheets, screeching out their pain and hunger and lust for life consumed. They wanted to consume us, humans, humanoids, they were all of evil, all of desire. I could feel each and every one as they dropped from the hells above.

  From behind me I could hear Anshell’s voice, low, chanting. I smelled burning herbs mixed with something worse, something dead. Sam’s voice joined in. We were going to have to have a conversation after this was all done, Sam and I. Assuming we lived through the night of course.

  Then Sam and Anshell were both within the range of my sight. Hands clasped around each other’s forearms; another joined the circle. Claude. Awesome. And so my night was complete. I could feel Jon’s dry kiss on my hip, distracting me momentarily. Saw Claude’s answering glower before he stripped down and clasped arm to forearm with his pack mates. Felt it as Claude’s shift was yanked from within by the call of the moon above.

  Where was Celandra?

  As the chanting continued below, I felt the rush of wind and heard the sound of beating wings, up and up and up again. I could hear her cackling laughter, her shriek of joy as she ascended into the darkened heavens or hells above towards the door. Celandra seemed to grow, perhaps a trick of light or shadow, filling the sky with her presence. And then her mouth unhinged from its fastenings and dropped open.

  Wind inside me now. The pumping of my blood matching the tempo of her flight. Separate strands of energy weaving together into a glowing net with six points. I pushed against resistance I could not see, my will, my power versus whatever was out there. A moment when I thought maybe I wouldn’t be enough. My legs anchored by a suctioning vacuum of movement; then lightness as gravity gave way and the mouth of the portal boomed shut.

  This time I wasn’t imagining the cries of pain and frustration and death as the dragon ate the creatures that fell. Celandra didn’t catch all of the crawlies—many had fallen before. But as I watched through the bleary haze of my watering eyes, I saw her fly higher and higher until she reached the last creature to make it through, closest to the gate itself.

  And ate it.

  Chapter Forty-One

  An eerie silence fell. One, two...on three the yells and yowls of pack erupted and the sounds of slaughter started up.

  The entire beach, from what I could see at this distance, had begun to glow with that strange twilight-esque hum of blue that etches out a line in the sky, delineating the border between air and sand. I hoped it meant those frost demons were meeting a messy and somewhat violent demise—I’d rather not spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder wondering if me or someone I cared about was about to be turned into a large chunk of ice.

  Sam was there and then he was not, vanishing into a spin of snow and fur and leaping towards the sounds of battle. He tried to squeeze my shoulder as he passed, but it was part of the transition from man to cat and instead I narrowly escaped being scratched for the second time in a week by a Seven Moons pack member. Anshell didn’t even bother to say goodbye, whinnying as he flew over me in a spray of snow and stones towards those who looked to him to lead.

  I was not, as it turned out, one of those who followed well.

  My back was still burning, and tiredness spread like gasoline on a trail of spark and singe. So I sat. Crystalline layers beneath me crunched as my denim-covered ass compacted what was below. Bonus—my jeans acted as a solid barrier so the cold didn’t seep through right away. Better, though, was its proximity to my back. So weird, those prickles of heat where the rest of my anterior surface felt numb with chill. Everyone else was taking care of business, right? Alina had been defeated? I could take a moment to lie down?

  “You left me for this? A girl so lazy she would let others die for her while she takes a little nap?”

  “Claude.” Jon’s voice carried a warning unmistakable in its saturation of threat. “Isn’t there someplace you need to be?”

  “Like, for example,” I said from my now prone spot on the ground, eyes fluttering, “talking less shit about me and more getting off your own ass to back up your pack?”

  Claude growled before glaring at Jon and stalking off towards the fight. Like Sam and Anshell before him, he glided gracefully between forms—one moment man, the next he was cat. I wondered if I’d ever get used to that. Or be able to do it myself.

  And then we were alone, Jon and I. I allowed myself to relax just a tiny bit more and lean back until my pain was numbed by the chill of the ground below.

  “Comfortable?” Jon’s voice pierced the fog of my perceptions.

  “Yeah,” I said. My eyes were still closed.

  “Planning to get up and help out?” Was Jon laughing at me?

  “Eventually,” I said.

  “Good,” said a new voice. Alina. “Immortalis factus est immobile faciunt illud alibi,” she said, and suddenly I could no longer sense Jon. “We have much to discuss, you and I.”

  * * *

  Crap. Where was Jon?

  I felt a hand displace the air on its way towards my face; a hand attached to a man.

  I allowed Ezra to pull me up to a standing position. On the way, I scooped up the rest of my clothing. If I had to meet my untimely death, I preferred to do it wearing more rather than less.

  “Dana,” he said, inclining his head towards me in greeting.

  I nodded in reply. Wary. “I’d say it was a pleasure to see you, Ezra,” I said, “but we both know that would be a lie.”

  If I’d hurt his feelings, he didn’t show it.

  “That’s too bad,” he replied with a flash of surprisingly white teeth for a man of his apparent age. “I’m always happy to see you.”

  “The prodigal student returned to sprawl at the feet of her master?”

  “Has a nice sound to it, you at my feet looking up at me adoringly,” he said. “But we both know that’s not you. Unless forced.” His voice raised hopefully. “Are you going to fight back so we can do a bit of forcing? It was so much fun the last time.” Ezra’s voice had taken on that sing-song edge of childlike insanity again.

  “As you can tell,” Alina interjected, “your old friend Ezra would very much like to play with you a while before we skin you alive.” Oh crap. “We only need your blood; the skin bit is a bonus, because I want to make what remains of your life extremely painful for all the nuisance you’ve caused us.�
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  “Sorry?” It seemed like the right thing to say at the time.

  “Sorry indeed,” Alina replied. If I looked directly at her, would I turn to stone? Or was that a nightmare from some other fairy tale? “First you interrupt our summoning of me, and co-opt one of my willing minions into becoming less than fully behind our cause. Then you split my friend Ezra’s attention when he should be keeping his eye on the ball: me. And now, on what should be my magnificent day of door opening and souls awakening, what do you do? You team up with those furry imbeciles and get in the way of my day. My big day. The one where I get what I want, and all of you suffer and, with any luck, die. But did I get what I wanted? Hmm?” Alina looked at me as though asking for a response.

  I opted to oblige. What can I say—even I have my moments of conviviality. Seemed prudent when dealing with what I was assuming was a demon, particularly one who was threatening to carve me up for fun. “I’m going to go with...um...no?” I raised my eyebrows and tried to push the corners of my mouth into something approximating a helpful, nonthreatening smile. I suspect it came out looking more like a rictus grin.

  “She’s going to blow!” Ezra clapped his hands in glee and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. There may have been humming.

  “Charming,” I said, turning to address her royal evilness. “Truth?”

  “More like a dare,” she replied. The great Alina joked? Who knew she had it in her? “Keep pushing and you’ll find out.”

  “Come on,” I said, dropping the little innocent me act. “We both know there’s nothing I can say to make this situation any better than it is. You want me for something. I want to be nowhere near you for whatever that something is. Nothing changes the fact that you need me, and I’m not going to enjoy helping you.”

  “Clickety-clack she’s headed for the rack!” Ezra’s giggling was bordering on maniacal. I wondered whether I should introduce him to Celandra; at the rate he was going into sing-song land, they’d probably get along. Had to believe I’d get through this sufficiently to facilitate such an improbable introduction. To think anything else would mean it was over, and it didn’t feel over. Not yet. Not while my skin still hummed with power and my back pricked with heat.

  “Indeed,” Alina replied with a smile that likely glued cockroaches to the spot, then pinned them with thumbtacks to watch them squirm. I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that cockroaches theoretically could survive a nuclear winter. But since I was not a cockroach—didn’t even particularly like them, really—the whole self-soothing in the face of danger thing wasn’t very effective.

  Okay, maybe my mind was skittering and scuttling around like one.

  Crazy mentor, crazy demon, a whole lot of fighting and nobody at my back. Again.

  Assuming I got through all of this, I was thinking maybe it might be time to update my self-defense skills. Until then, I was going to have to improvise with a little game of Let’s Pretend.

  “Let’s pretend, for a moment, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  Alina raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow in response.

  “Pretend?” She smiled slowly, languorously. “I can pretend we’re pretending.”

  “Whatever,” I replied. Apparently I’d managed the whole ball of confusion look better than I’d anticipated. Cool. “Didn’t you say I needed to consent? How can I consent if you’ve skinned me and I can’t shape the words to say ‘yes’?” I took a deep breath, then another. Trying not to scream at the thought of becoming a skinless pulpy mass of blood and flesh. Focus, Dana.

  “Continue,” Alina said.

  “What is it exactly about my skin, my back, that is so important to you?”

  “Now you are being foolish,” she replied. “You know more than you say. I will let you proceed because I am curious; life is long and offers so few real surprises. Anymore. But do not test my patience. You know why your skin is important.”

  “Okay, then let’s look at this a different way,” I conceded without explicitly accepting her words as truth. Two could play at this game. “We live in a digital age. Couldn’t you just take a picture and be done with it?”

  Alina started laughing at that, so hard that tears ran down her face. Ezra too.

  That worried me. When Ezra found something amusing, it had a tendency to result either in pain for me or imprisonment for someone I cared about.

  Finally: “No,” she said, wiping the frozen tears from her cheeks with the back of her sparkly hand. “There needs to be actual skin involved. And blood. And why am I telling you this again?”

  “So basically,” I said, “it’s me specifically.”

  “Yuppy yuppy you’re the guppy!” Ezra was too damned cheerful.

  Alina glared at him. Ezra subsided somewhat, but I could hear him continuing to mutter under his breath.

  “It matters not,” she said, reaching out to pick me up by my throat. She started shaking me around like a sock monkey in the jaws of a puppy. I couldn’t have stopped her even if I’d tried. Instead I saw spots with black around the edges of my vision and wondered if this was it for me. My consent would become moot within the next breathless sixty seconds or so. “Even though you and yours managed to block the door—and slammed it in my face—I am no longer alone on this side of things. There are others who managed to make it through. Who, even now, are leaving this place to gather in wait for the next door to open.”

  “So you’re good then,” I managed to choke out, struggling with the need for air and trying to calm the panic banging its ineffectual fists against the inside of my chest.

  “Not quite,” she replied. With the hand not wrapped around my throat, Alina pressed her fore and index finger against my forehead.

  The beach vanished, the night was gone, and we were alone.

  * * *

  More to the point, I was. Alone. In a cell consisting of ice and wool and a steaming pot of what appeared to be hot water. At least I could breathe again. An assortment of tea bags, herbal and otherwise, were arranged in a random yet strangely organized pattern. Cubes of sugar, stacked in perfectly symmetrical rows into a pyramid of crystalline brown, sat on a plate to the side of the pot. Two cups with saucers and teaspoons lay waiting.

  I knew I should be worried. And I was, somewhere inside, somewhere below the numbing familiarity of waking up in a strange place alone with no discernible escape path. At least this time there was herbal tea. I reached out to rummage around, hoping for something chai-like.

  * * *

  From one blink to the next I had company. Again? Or had I simply not noticed?

  I reached out with a strength of mind and purpose I hadn’t realized I had until that moment. Touched Alina’s cheek. Above the bone, the pronounced line that cast hollows and shadows below. Resisted—but only just—the urge to trace that line, that darkness, to those lips of cherry-red sweetness.

  She burned with chill and I gasped and pulled away.

  “You are such a child,” she said, tsk-tsking me. I noticed she didn’t touch my hands though.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Again. I missed it the first time.” I felt as though my words were very far away, and I had trouble hearing myself through the rushing whoosh of air between my ears where my brain was supposed to be. “Tell me why. Why you need me since the door has already opened and shut. Since you have an army rising even as your minions are being slaughtered.” Alina growled a bit at that. Ezra merely giggled.

  “Because,” she bit out.

  I tried not to linger on the points of her teeth, on those things I knew from recent memory that sharp edges could bring forth. Where was Jon? I tried not to wonder where he’d gone so suddenly, and why, and how. What that might mean.

  When had Claude scratched me? Had it only been seven days ago? When had Sam and I interrupted Alina’s sacrif
icial calling? Six days. Only six days ago. I thought about that a moment. Sam and I had interrupted the calling ceremony. And yet, here she was, in front of me as though the summoning ritual had been completed. And yet, she’d already been ensconced in Ezra’s office as his assistant—not a newbie but one who had been there long enough to assume control and engender his trust in her competence. Six days—even six days like the last ones had been—did not logically add up to that.

  So either Alina had been there before the summoning ritual, or she had shown up about a week ago as a result of it all and found a way to take over. Which meant the individual sharing this space with me was wearing a skin—the skin of Cybele, Ezra’s grad student assistant.

  And what about Ezra? I’d seen sides of him over the last few days I’d never thought would be aimed at me. Never mind the whole potential father-speak coming from his mouth at odd times. I’d seen evidence of potentially three separate personalities in one with him. Schizophrenic delusions? Maybe. Or maybe the human I’d known as Ezra was just a skin too.

  The last week’s worth of days, hours, minutes and seconds shutter-clicked across my consciousness, dragging each momentary image into stark dissimilitude. Contrast and sameness. I wondered if this was my life—my new life—flashing before my open eyes before I died. I wondered why there were no images of my life before now. As though I did not exist before what I was now.

  Well that was a first. A voice in my head not mine. “Come on, girl. Snap out of it.” Anshell? “Look around so you can tell us where you are, where they have you now.”

  I looked around but saw only bare white walls. A window covered with bars above; through it, the full moon. Pulsating almost. But cold, so cold. I didn’t think it would help me.