The sound of flies filled the air. Sweat ran down my neck. This creature was far larger than the one I’d faced in the woods.
There was a pouch of salt in my trouser pocket. Making no sudden movements, I drew it into my palm and looped the golden string over two of my fingers, showing it to the creature. I didn’t know how much it could understand, but it might sense what was inside.
The Buzzer stretched its neck with a wet clicking sound, then shook its head so fast it blurred. It sank its blunt fingers into the earth, freezing it, and crawled towards us.
I tried to focus on the auras of the other three. They registered like bad signals on my radar. The Buzzer was turning the æther to a dense, congealed mass, incapable of supporting spirits. Clots surrounded it, like blobs of oil in water. Nick tried to make a spool, but the spirits pulled against him so violently that he had to let them go.
There was no strength left in my knees. My vision shorted out for a moment. If I didn’t do something, we’d all go into spirit shock. I waited for the creature to get a few feet closer before I tipped a handful of salt into my hand and hurled it. It collided with the Buzzer with a sizzling burst of smoke, making a sound like a firecracker.
When it opened its mouth, showing its abyssal throat, a terrible scream emerged from inside it. Not just one scream, but a thousand tortured cries, moans and sobs, all held in one mouth. The sound pulled up every hair on my body and chilled the blood beneath my skin.
“Run,” I shouted.
We pounded through the trees, down the steep incline, toward the bottom of the hill and the car. Branches slashed at my face and snared in my hair. Ice skidded under my boots. I pulled frantically on the golden cord, blinking away the darkness in my vision. Warden might be our only chance to live. The ground seemed to pull at my ankles, dragging my limbs and eyelids downward. So tired. I kept going. Just stop. I kept going. When we reached another clearing, Zeke’s knees gave way. He fell as if his bones had disappeared.
Nick went down next. I staggered to a stop and grabbed his shoulders, trying to pull him back up, but my arms were running water and I collapsed beside him, shuddering. My aura constricted, flinching away from the creature, shortening my link to the æther. Suddenly I couldn’t feel Zeke, who was farthest away. With a blink, he vanished from my perception.
Stop I need it stop stop it’s like dying can’t breathe can’t breathe stop
My aura was like a vital organ squeezed in a fist, hampering its function. My eyes watered with the effort of staying conscious. Spirit shock was creeping up on me. My fingers were tipped with gray, my nails with a sickly white. I could breathe, but I was drowning. I could see, but I was blind.
Can’t focus stop can’t think stop stop
Eliza was ahead of us, a few feet away from Nick. She pushed herself up on her arms, gasping out curses, but the heels of her hands were slipping on ice and she couldn’t seem to get back to her feet. I couldn’t feel her dreamscape or her aura. Half-blind, I opened the pouch of salt again.
“Circle,” I wheezed at Nick.
That noise erupted again, the screams of the damned in a rotting cavern of mouth. Gritting his teeth, Nick dragged Eliza toward him, his strength doubled by adrenaline.
“Give me the salt!”
I thrust it into his hands. The Buzzer loped toward us, blurring with the darkness, white eyes and shadow and raw-boned rage. Too fast. Nick’s hands were shaking.
“Zeke!” His voice was hoarse. “Zeke! ”
The creature was too close, bearing down on Zeke’s shivering body. I hurled my spirit across the clearing.
When I collided with the dreamscape, it was just like it had been in Sheol I: a blistering point of impact, sending sparks through my spirit. A force was festering in this dreamscape, deep within the innards of its mind. With all the effort I could muster, I cut through its first line of defence, into its hadal zone.
The pain was catastrophic.
My spirit fell into what felt like a quagmire. I was on fire, a tongue of fire, burning inside out. This was no dreamscape.
This was a nightmare.
The hadal zone of this creature was excruciatingly dark, but I could just about see what my dream-form was standing in: a rotten mass of dead tissue. Blood bubbled through a slick of melted flesh. The sludge gripped my ankles and pulled me down, down, down until I’d sunk up to my waist in it. A skeletal hand gripped my nape, bending my body toward it. I threw my weight backward, trying to escape, to fly back to my body, but it was too late. Layers of decay closed over my head.
****
No air, no thought, no pain, no brain.
Evanescence.
Dissolution.
The loop of endless nothing, nothing, nothing.
In the void, there was one last inkling of thought: that this was hell. The absence of æther, of anything at all. This was what we feared, we voyants. Not death, but non-existence. The total destruction of spirit and self. Faces slipped away. In here there was no Nick and no Warden and no Eliza and no Jaxon and no Liss and everything was fading and Paige was going, going . . .
****
My silver cord tightened, like a harness, and unearthed my dream-form from the rot. I surfaced in the terrible dreamscape, gasping for air that didn’t exist, beating at the hands that grasped me. Voices screamed in languages I didn’t understand. They wouldn’t let me go. I was going to die in here, inside the Buzzer’s dreamscape. Not sinking and suffocating. I broke a putrid arm in two, and with a last wrench, the cord threw me back across the æther, into my own body.
My lids lifted.
I took a breath.
The salt circle was sealed. Nick dropped the empty pouch and collapsed on his side as if he’d been shot.
The æther rippled, creating a kind of ethereal barrier around us, like the fences that had held us in the penal colony. The creature reeled back as though the salt had transformed to molten lava, throwing out more of its strange static. Was that an aura, horribly corrupted? It let out one last death-howl before it lumbered away, leaving its darkness to hang like smoke in the æther.
The four of us lay beneath the frozen branches of the trees. “Zeke,” Nick choked out, shaking him with one hand.
I couldn’t so much as turn my head. Eliza was closest to me. Her eyes were glassy with shock, her lips almost as dark as mine.
For a while, I lay on the ground, my body racked with twitches. My pulse was feeble, my hearing muffled. There was a long period of darkness and silence before footsteps came through the leaves. A silhouette stood over us, just beyond the circle. The next thing I made out was a low female voice: “Dreamwalker. Hearken to me.”
Then a word I didn’t understand, a Gloss word. Something else was calling me back. The golden cord wrenched—the strongest pull I’d ever felt from it—and my eyes opened.
“Are you injured?” The voice belonged to Pleione Sualocin. “Speak to me, or I can offer no cure.”
“Aura,” I said, but my voice sounded faint even to my own ears. Still, Pleione heard me. She took a vial of amaranth, and with a gloved finger, placed a single drop below my nose. As I breathed the ambrosial smell deep into my lungs, my aura began to regenerate. I rolled over and retched. Pain collided with the front of my skull and pulsed outward in ripples.
Pleione got back to her feet. She was dressed as a denizen again, with her long black curls swept to one side of her neck. “The Emite is gone, but it will return in time. Nashira has placed a high price on your life, dreamwalker.”
I couldn’t stop shaking. “Is she ever going to show her face?”
“She will not dirty her hands.” She wiped her blade with a cloth, staining it with what looked like oil. “Get up.”
The edges of my vision were blurred, but I forced myself back to my feet. I hated how weak these sarx-creatures made me, how useless my years on the street seemed when I faced them. It made me realize that I’d only ever been a scrapper, not a true fighter. On the edge of the clearing, Eliza
was curled against a tree trunk, her hands over her ears. I made toward her.
“Paige!”
The panic in Nick’s voice set my heart thumping. I ran to where he was crouched at the base of another tree. Zeke was lying in his lap, unconscious.
“What happened?” I knelt beside him, jolting another bolt of pain into my eye.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Nick’s hands, usually so steady, were shaking. “What do we do? Paige, please—you must know how to help him . . .”
“Shh. Don’t worry. There were plenty of voyants in the colony who’d been bitten or scratched,” I said, but he didn’t stop trembling. “We’ll get help from the Rephaim. You don’t know how to—”
“We have to do something, Paige, now!”
His voice cracked. I squeezed his shoulder. “Pleione,” I shouted across the clearing. “Errai!”
Errai ignored me, but Pleione came back for us. Kneeling, she held one gloved hand to Zeke’s forehead, the other to his cheek. “Quickly, dreamwalker,” she said. “You must bear him to a safer place than this.”
Nick’s face crumpled. He framed Zeke’s face between his palms, murmuring to him.
Eliza had been close to unconsciousness, but when she looked up and saw Pleione crouched nearby, she screamed as though she’d seen her own death. I ran to her and clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Still think it’s a flux flash?”
She shook her head.
When I sensed Warden again, I stood, pulling Eliza up with me. He pushed through the foliage, his eyes scorching like torches. He took it all in: the salt circle, the wounded human.
“There are no others.” He walked through the clearing. “What are you doing here, Paige?”
Eliza swallowed. “We were talking,” I said. How sad that something so normal could sound so stupid, so thoughtless.
“I see.” He walked past us. “There is a decapitated corpse beside the cold spot.”
“It was a rhabdomancer.” A sharp pain in my side made it diffi- cult to talk. Or breathe, for that matter. “He must have followed us from the market.”
“A thrall of the Sargas,” Pleione said to Warden. “Paid to ensure that she failed to attend the scrimmage, perhaps.”
“I think not. It is unlikely that they know a great deal about the syndicate’s workings. In any case, they seem to want Paige alive.” He paused. “The cold spot must be sealed, or more of them will come through. Where is the nearest safe house, Paige?”
I glanced at Eliza. “Any ideas?”
“One.” She wiped her upper lip with a shaking hand. “Someone needs to get the car.”
“You go, medium.” Pleione nodded toward the trees. “Make haste.”
The color left Eliza’s cheeks. “What if there are more of those things?”
“Then run, very fast, and try not to succumb to death too swiftly.”
The remaining color seeped from her face. I pressed my revolver into her hand, along with what was left of the salt. She groaned, took a deep breath, and took off into the trees.
Behind me, Warden kept watch. In the circle, Nick eased Zeke’s head into his lap and stroked his hair, talking to him in Swedish. Pleione and Errai stood guard on either side of the clearing.
We waited.
****
Nick’s nerves were frayed by the time Eliza returned. We drove back to I-4, leaving the Rephaim to stand guard around the cold spot, and got out of the car. As we ran down a cobblestoned alley, dimly lit by gas lamps and flanked on both sides by shops with bay windows, I glanced at Eliza. She was riffling through her pockets, breathing hard.
“Goodwin’s Court?”
“We’re going to Leon’s,” she bit out.
“Who?”
“Leon Wax. The screever. You know him.”
Vaguely, in the way most people in the syndicate knew of each other. Leon Wax was a good friend of Jaxon’s, a specialist in producing fake paperwork for voyants: travel papers, birth certificates, proof of Scion background, anything that made it easier to put blind spots in our government’s eyes. He was the one who had forged documents for Zeke and Nadine, stating that they were legal settlers in case they should ever be stopped on the street. Like many amaurotic traders with syndicate links, he lived in a tumbledown dwelling in this tiny lane.
The front of the little shop was painted black, with a variety of dusty objects cluttering the shelves beyond the window. Snuffers, trick candles, matchboxes, candlesticks made of silver and brass, even an old metal candle clock. Silver letters spelled out WAX AND CANDLE, the legal face of Leon’s trade. The bay window looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks.
Eliza pulled a key from her pocket and opened the door. Why she had a key for Leon Wax’s chandlery, I had no idea. Nick carried Zeke down the steps and into the tiny living room, where we laid him on the couch and lowered his head on to a cushion. I pushed at a light switch, to no avail.
“Eliza?”
“Leon doesn’t believe in electric lighting.” Eliza snatched a box of matches from an alcove. “Put some coal in the grate.”
For Nick’s sake, I didn’t argue. I shucked Wynn’s heavy coat and threw it over the banister, revealing the dried blood and filth on my clothes. Eliza stared.
“Paige—”
“It’s not mine.” I took the matches. “Cutmouth.”
The wait for help was agonizing. Nick refused to leave Zeke’s side, and every few minutes he tried to coax water past his lips. I ran up to the bedrooms to get blankets while Eliza lit every candle in the house.
Warden came through the door just as I got back downstairs, my arms full of crocheted blankets. Without a word, I led him into the living room. A coal fire glowed in the hearth, giving Zeke’s skin a misleading warmth. Nick held his wrist in one hand, measuring his pulse.
In the corner, Eliza recoiled from the towering, lamp-eyed stranger. Warden paid her no attention.
“Where is the bite?”
“Left side,” I said.
Zeke’s shirt was slick with dark blood. With tight lips, Nick peeled it away from the wound, which Warden examined for some time. My stomach was strong, but the spread of the marks—from Zeke’s upper chest to the lower half of his waist—was more than enough to turn it. The punctures looked deep, and the skin surrounding it was a milky gray, but the blood had already clotted.
“He will be all right,” he concluded. “There is no need for treatment.”
“What?” Nick sounded strangled. “Look at him!”
“Unless his bloodstream has been altered, he will recover. Does he drink alcohol or use recreational drugs?”
“No.”
“Then he is immune.” Warden fixed a hard gaze on Nick. “His condition may appear grave, Dr. Nygård, but his body and dream-scape will fight the pollution. Bathe the wounds in saline and sew them. Let him sleep. Those are the only remedies he needs.”
With a weak groan, Nick sank into an armchair with his face in his hands. All of us looked at Zeke. His breathing was shallow, his cheeks were tinged with grey, and his fingertips looked as if he’d dipped them in soot, but he didn’t look as if he was getting any worse.
“It isn’t fair.” Nick sounded exhausted. “He needs a proper hospital.”
“Yes, and we all know what the prognosis would be then,” I said. “Nitrogen asphyxiation.”
“Paige!” Eliza scolded.
“He does not need a hospital,” Warden said. “He will recover of his own accord—and in any case, no Scion hospital would understand his symptoms. Keep him warm and hydrated.”
There was silence for a long time, scattered with the crackle in the hearth. “Should we tell Nadine?” I said to the others.
“No. She’d lose her mind over this.” Eliza finally got up from the chair. “I’ll get you all some fresh clothes. You can sleep here tonight. Leon’s away until tomorrow.” She cleared her throat, looked a long way up at Warden. “Do you . . . want to stay, too?”
�
��I will not stay long,” Warden said.
“The attic’s free, if you want it.”
“Thank you. I will consider it.”
When she was gone, the space felt even smaller. With a glance at Warden, I sidled into the hallway.
In the utility room, I turned on the boiler, dug an empty jam jar from the back of a dusty cupboard, and filled it with water and salt. My knees were close to giving way. Had it really been this morning that I’d found Chat reading The Rephaite Revelation? It seemed like weeks ago.
As I stirred the solution, I tried to get a handle on my breathing. Zeke was fine this time, but without the penal colony, more Emim would appear in the citadel before long.
I shoved the thought aside. Nick needed me now. I took a few rolls of gauze and a suture kit from the cupboard and went straight back to the living room, where he’d moved to a footstool beside the low fire. Zeke’s hand was wrapped in his. I sat down on the floor beside him and curled an arm around my knees. The heat of the fire didn’t reach my core, but it was enough to warm my fingers.
“Did I ever tell you about my sister?” he said hoarsely.
“You’ve mentioned her.”
Only once. Karolina Nygård, a voyant whose gift had never had a chance to surface.
“I keep remembering how she looked.” His voice was dull. “When I found them in the forest.”
“Don’t.” I turned his cheek, so he had to look at me. “Zeke isn’t going to die. I promise. Warden knows what he’s talking about.”
I shouldn’t make these promises. After all, I hadn’t saved Seb or Liss from their fates.
“Scion can’t take anyone else from me. This is their fault,” he murmured. “They were spineless. They gave in when they could have fought the Rephaim with everything they had. Maybe they were afraid at the beginning. Now they’re thriving off the system they’ve created. If you become Underqueen,” he said, “I’m leaving Scion. I’ll take everything I can and destroy them with it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll do it anyway. Jaxon doesn’t need my blood money to waste on his cigars.” It was rare to see Nick’s face so cold. “I joined them because I wanted to learn everything I could about the enemy. I’ve learned enough, Paige. I’ve seen enough. All I want to do now is bring them down.”
The Mime Order Page 37
