by D. D. Miers
"I just don't want to be alone down here," I said, reaching for his hand. For a moment I felt his guilt before he pulled away. "I'm trapped in this void. I can't even control my own body. It's terrifying Cole."
"You'll be fine," Cole insisted, not looking at me. "I'll . . . I'll come back as soon as I can."
Just like that he was gone, blinked out of existence. And I was alone in the dark again. I sat down, wondering if I could cry here, and swiftly discovered that yes, I could.
Chapter 5
I didn't have any way to measure time, and anyway I wasn't sure it passed the same way in here that it did in the real world. Days and years could pass in a dream in just a few hours of sleep, and wasn’t this a weird, uncomfortably lucid dream, which I couldn’t control? Maybe I'd figure it out eventually if I was in here long enough. Oddly enough, that wasn't really reassuring.
I tried to sleep at some point to pass the time, though I wasn't tired. But there was a moment just as I was about to doze off when my consciousness almost dissolved like sugar in coffee, like I held onto a cliff by my fingertips, about to let go. I knew with certainty that if I let myself fall asleep here, I would never wake up again.
Which left me with a lot of time to kill.
Thinking was all I could really do, so I thought about Aethon and his plans. Titania said he wanted to murder death. Which didn't seem like something you could really do? But both she and Gilfaethwy seemed pretty sure he could pull it off. An end to death. What would that even mean? A world where nothing died. That sounded pretty good, honestly. Maybe we were on the wrong side? Although anything that led to the Seelie winning against the Unseelie seemed like it would have pretty disastrous consequences.
What would that mean for people who were terminally sick or horribly injured or old beyond the ability to take care of themselves? Or food? Did no death mean no human death or no death at all? Would we be able to kill plants, animals, insects? We wouldn't be able to starve to death, but would we still starve? Would we still be able to reproduce? The Earth could support something like a couple trillion humans before waste heat wrecked the atmosphere, if I remembered right. We could probably colonize other planets in the solar system before we hit maximum capacity. But could we same the same about, like, mosquitos? Or any of the hundreds of other plants and insects and animals that breed crazy-fast because they usually have short lifespans or aggressive predators?
What do we do about the uncontrollable population boom in rats and rabbits and bamboo and kudzu and white-tailed deer—jeez, their population was already out of control due to the killing of most of the North American wolves and hunting bans. They reproduced out of control, stripped forests to wasteland, started starving and inbreeding, getting mutated and diseased.
What about on a micro scale? What about cell death? What about viruses and bacteria? Jesus Christ, immortal plagues. If you infect a person who can't die with a virus, their immune system can't kill, what happens? Infinite immune response? Endless fever and chills and closed-off sinuses and throat and all of the other stupid unpleasant things the body does to fight infection. And since the virus can't be killed, it can just replicate unchecked in the body, hijacking cells but never killing them. Does the immune response just keep escalating until you're suffocating but can't die, every cell in your body replaced by a virus? I don't know enough about viruses to even contemplate the full consequences, but I know it would be bad.
With no death, can there be natural selection or evolution? Will we stagnate forever in a deathless hell?
Let me tell you, lying in a featureless black abyss for an immeasurable amount of potentially infinite time imagining all the horrible ways you can suffer without dying—it's not a great time.
I can't really understate my relief when Cole finally reappeared.
"You're back!" I shrieked, the moment he popped in. I threw my arms around him again and this time focused hard enough to make it stick, hugging him tightly. "I was afraid you were never coming back! I don't know how long it's been out there, but it felt like weeks in here—"
I was hit with a wave of his emotions and recent thoughts, most chiefly surprise at me jumping on him and a flicker of warmth and excitement, quickly drowned out by anxiety and a wash of images which left me chilled, pulling away from him.
"What happened?" I asked, still processing the scenes of destruction I'd just glimpsed.
"Aethon happened," Cole said grimly. "He's . . . pissed doesn't really do it justice. He got to the Curators before we did."
He took my hand, letting me see the destruction through his eyes.
The library was flattened, not a wall left standing. The front counter was the only thing remotely recognizable. The bookshelves had been smashed into kindling. The books were gone, torn to shreds or buried. Loose pages fluttered in the dusty wind as Cole and Gwydion picked their way through the rubble, looking for some kind of explanation.
"There," Gwydion said, pointing toward the back of the building where the study room the Curators usually worked out had once stood. "I can feel magic there. Something hidden."
They hurried, and Gwydion waved a hand to dismiss whatever cloaking magic was present. He stepped back quickly, nearly colliding with Cole, as a body appeared.
I almost jerked away from Cole in horror as I recognized the man, lying curled up under a collapsed desk, clutching a cardboard box full of enchanted trinkets—things the Curators recovered which were too weak to even interest Gwydion. It was Henry, one of the Curators. He hadn't died from the building collapse. His skin was blackened with magical necrosis, which had shriveled him to almost nothing. I only recognized him by his jacket and the silvered remains of his mustache.
Gwydion closed his eyes and stepped away. I was surprised to see him so shaken by the death of a human. Cole couldn't stop staring, his knowledge of necromancy letting him know exactly what had happened, how long it had taken Henry to die, how much it must have hurt. Nausea washed over him and, watching, I felt the same.
"There's something else here," Gwydion said hoarsely and waved a hand, hiding Henry's body again until they could figure out what to do with it. This had only just happened. Emergency services were on the way. They couldn't be allowed to see what had happened to Henry or to take the box of lucky coins and mildly cursed knickknacks. Gwydion's focus shifted to a spot on the floor where Cole sensed residual magic.
"Uther," Gwydion said, a kind of frantic hope in his voice. He grabbed Cole and rapidly shaped a teleportation spell on the debris beneath them. Before Cole could do more than yelp, they dropped down through it into a dark space below.
"Uther?" Gwydion called, landing on his feet like a cat. Cole landed slightly less gracefully beside him.
"Here," a familiar voice said, and Gwydion pulled out the little light orb he'd used in the Dwarven Caverns, illuminating what appeared to be some kind of basement, though the door was bricked up and the entire room was dense with dust and cobwebs. In the center of the room, a heavyset woman huddled, holding an unconscious old man in a ridiculous robe. A tall black man sat with his arm around her. A young woman with red hair lied at their feet, bleeding from a head wound that had been messily bandaged with the tall man's shirt. It was the rest of the Curators.
"Daphne, Devon," Gwydion said, kneeling in front of them immediately. "What happened?"
Daphne sobbed. She looked like she'd been crying for a while, but she fought to get the words out anyway.
"Someone . . . something . . . attacked us. The whole library was coming down. Tasha tried to . . . to . . . and then she was just gone, erased, like she'd never been there. Uther tried to teleport us away, but he's never done more than one person before and . . . and . . . he doesn't think we know he can only teleport a few feet but we all knew . . . and then we were down here . . . the building the library was built over had a basement, but the city just closed it off . . . but Henry didn't make it. He tried to grab the artifacts and Uther collapsed as soon as we landed and started bleedin
g and I can't wake him up and Fiona hit her head and we could hear Henry screaming—"
If Devon hadn't stopped her, dragging her into a hug, I think I would have. She was white as bone and shaking, crying so hard her words became an unintelligible blur.
Cole and Gwydion teleported them out of the basement just in time for the first fire trucks to arrive, telling them to head to Julius's as soon as they could.
"Jesus," they heard one of the firefighter's say. "Is this more of that freak tornado that tore up the funeral home on Main Street?"
"I heard it got a couple of houses in town, too."
Cole and Gwydion exchanged a look and hurried off somewhere to teleport. The memory skipped ahead, showing me the flattened remains of my job and my apartment. My heart stopped as the memory jumped to my Aunt Persephona's house. I'd been staying there for the last week since all this started, and I'd become concerned my apartment was compromised. Little shattered pieces of my aunt's life lay scattered among the broken timbers, shattered drywall, and bits of roofing. There was a piece of wallpaper from the bathroom. There was the sofa Cole had slept on, and the vanity from the guest room I'd last shared with Ethan. Police and firemen picked their way through the ruins of the kitchen, crushing the broken shards of my aunt's good holiday china under their boots. The garden was under a collapsed wall and with it the hydrangea bushes I'd loved as a little girl.
I didn't breathe until they saw my aunt standing by the curb, holding a cat carrier in one hand and Mort's leash in the other as she spoke to a police officer.
"Cole!" Aunt Percy said in surprise when she saw him, turning away from the officer and hurrying toward him at once. "You're all right! Where have you been? Where's Vexa? Where's Ethan? Who is this?"
She gave Gwydion a decidedly mistrustful look. The officer she'd been speaking to put away his clipboard and backed off.
"It's complicated," Cole said, eyeing the first responders still all around them.
"It's complicated?" Aunt Persephona repeated incredulously. "You disappeared for two weeks without so much as a phone call, you reappear right after my home has been/destroyed and all you can tell me is that it's complicated?"
"Two weeks?" Cole repeated, wide-eyed.
"I did warn you about the issues with relative time in the Other Lands," Gwydion murmured by way of explanation.
"You could have given me a heads-up that we'd been gone half a fucking month, though!" Cole snapped. Able to feel his emotions, I knew he was not angry, but shocked and stressed.
"Where is Vexa?" Aunt Persephona demanded, interrupting before they could argue anymore.
"She's safe," Cole reassured her quickly. "She's . . . alive."
"Why did you say it like that?" Aunt Percy asked, pale.
"The point is she's going to be fine," Cole said, flustered. "She's at Julius's bar. We should take you there, too."
"But, my house—"
"It's gone, ma'am," Gwydion said respectfully. "And you are in danger. Aethon has already killed today. And if he finds you here alive, I am certain he will kill again."
Cole let the memory fade as he and Gwydion waited for Aunt Percy to finish with the police and her insurance company, helped her salvage some of her clothes and valuables that weren't buried too deeply, then brought her to the bar.
"Apparently she wasn't home when Aethon attacked," Cole explained as he let go of my hand. "She didn't even see it. Got there the same time the cops did. She's safe and staying here at the bar for now."
A bark made us both jump, and I looked down as a big black wolfhound collided with my legs out of nowhere, tail wagging furiously.
"Mort?" I asked in confusion, trying to maintain my balance, an effort made more difficult as the dog jumped up, tall enough to put his paws on my shoulders. I fended off his kisses with a slightly bemused laugh. "How in the hell—?"
"Don't ask me," Cole said. "Julius said the connection he made so I could talk to you would only work for me. That's why none of the others have come to see you. Are you sure it's really your dog?"
I frowned at Mort, trying to feel his magic, unsure if it would work considering that I couldn't reach my own magic in here. But there it was. I barely even had to try before the familiar feeling of Mort's energy washed over me. It was, technically, my own energy, which I'd poured into Mort when I resurrected him to defend me from the werewolf breaking into my apartment . . . that werewolf being Ethan. But there were no stitches on Mort's taxidermy corpse nor persistent smell of death. In here, Mort looked just as he had when alive, save for the blue glow to his eyes. I ruffled his ears and he panted happily, tongue lolling
"I'm pretty sure it's him," I said with a shrug, still patting him. "I don't know how he got here, either. And there's no ghost stuff when I touch him. I mean, no blue tingles, no transfer of emotions or memories."
"It's always one more weird thing with that dog," Cole said, shaking his head. "His partial resurrection thing was weird enough. Now he can, like, brain hop without assistance?"
Partial resurrection was a way to put it. Most things necromancers resurrect or reanimate are still very much dead, piloted by the necromancer's will and a kind of autopilot making them mechanically repeat instinctive behaviors from when they were alive, like eating or walking. Humans sometimes get weirder behaviors, like typing at a keyboard or rocking a baby. Things they did so much when they were alive that the muscle memory stays even after the soul is gone. The simpler an animal, the more instinctive and limited its natural behaviors, the more naturally they behave when resurrected. But dogs are fairly complex, behaviorally. They do a lot more learning and problem solving than a lot of humans give them credit for. So when resurrected, they don't behave much like normal dogs. Mort, on the other hand, had pretty much always just acted like a live dog, despite having been a couple months decomposed when I rezzed him.
There was such a thing as True Resurrection—bringing something back completely from the dead, soul and all. But it was rare, incredibly difficult, definitely beyond my skills, and most importantly anyone who looked closely at good old Mort could tell he was definitely still dead. I'd sewed him up and reconstructed him as well as a mortician could, but he was still a dead dog. I'd taken out his organs and replaced them with potpourri sachets. He was definitely not a case of True Resurrection. What exactly he was a case of, I couldn't tell you.
"Maybe he can be here because I put so much of my energy into him when I rezzed him?" I suggested. "He's still full of my magic. So, we're connected and stuff. I mean, if I wanted to I could even control him like a normal zombie, I think. He's so alive, it just seems mean to try."
Cole rolled his eyes. "At least you won't be alone in here anymore," he said.
"I'd still really like the company if you're willing to stay a while," I said, worried he was about to leave again. Mort dropped back down to all fours to sit beside me and give Cole his best puppy-dog eyes.
"There's a lot going on up there," Cole said with a guilty frown. I did my best imitation of Mort's puppy-dog eyes. "Fine. I can stay a little while longer."
"Good," I said, relieved, and sat down, patting the infinite darkness beside me. "Because there's something that's bothering me. Where was Ethan in those memories?"
Chapter 6
Cole had been about to sit down and hesitated.
"There's more bad news," he said finally.
"What happened?" I asked, blood pressure skyrocketing instantly. "Is he okay?"
"He's fine!" Cole said quickly. "He's fine. He just can't leave the bar."
He sat down the rest of the way as I tried to get my heartbeat under control. The guilt rolled off of Cole, even without touching him. Mort lay down beside me, his big shaggy head on my knee.
"It's my fault," he said after a moment, his expression drawn with shame. "When I forced him to change in the Undercity, I dumped too much negative energy into him. He's hit his limit. The protections on Julius's bar are the only thing keeping the curse from changing him perman
ently. If he leaves he could have a day, maybe. Maybe minutes. We don't know."
My heart sank down into the abyss around us. Pain lanced my chest. I thought we had a year before this happened. A year to look for solutions, a way to break the curse, or at least help Ethan work through the self-loathing that had caused it. Now all at once our time was up. Mort licked my hand like he was trying to reassure me and I stroked his ears, the softness soothing.
"It's not your fault," I said quietly, seeing Cole’s distress. "We would have all died if you hadn't done something."
"Ethan could have transformed on his own," Cole argued.
"He never would have stood a chance and you know it," I replied. "Besides, it's . . . at least half my fault. The curse wouldn't have been that close to taking over to begin with if I hadn't used my powers on him first."
"To save his life," Cole pointed out. "You healed him. I intentionally pushed his curse forward to make him change. I should have thought of something else. There were other options—"
"It's done," I said, stopping him. I reached out to touch his knee, trying not to read his feelings even as I let him feel mine. I wanted him to see there wasn't any anger in me, that I didn't blame him. I tried not to let him see how much I blamed myself. We both knew this was out of our control. "We can't change what happened. We just have to do our best to work with what's in front of us."
"Julius is making sure he stays in the bar," Cole said, not pulling away but not reacting to my touch, either. "He's determined to do anything he can to help get you out of this coma, even if it gets him killed."
"Sounds about right," I said with a sigh. "Please don't let him do anything stupid. Tell him I said he's got to wait right there until I wake up. Tell him that's an order."
Cole snorted.
"Should I tell him to sit and roll over too?" Cole asked with a sideways look.
"He'd probably appreciate it if you told him he was a good boy," I shot back, grinning.
