Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  I reach for my watch, but too late. The white shape plows into Bert, knocking him against a wall.

  Bert doesn’t put up a fight. The glowing shape that swims in the air pins him in place, and he lets it. I get the impression of iridescent scales, a lashing tail, claws pinning him to the wall.

  “Holy shit,” I breathe.

  It’s a dragon.

  The luminous dragon gazes at Bert with eyes so pale I’m sure they’ve never seen sunlight, like some creature trapped at the lightless bottom of the ocean. It has tendrils—whiskers—drifting around its face, like jellyfish tentacles. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, as if it’s made of glass.

  “Lotus Dragon!” it says in a voice that sounds like a woman’s.

  It leans forward and licks Bert on the side of the face. It’s then that I realize that the growling isn’t really growling.

  It’s purring.

  The dragon winds its tail around Bert’s leg and wraps its arms around his neck. Bert looks awkwardly over her shoulder at us, and I think he’s blushing underneath those green scales.

  “Raz, Carl, this is...Bai Yin.”

  The dragon turns her head toward us, mildly interested. She disentangles from Bert and slithers down toward us. Her body’s easily fifteen feet long, her spine shifting in undulations, supported by four clawed feet. Scales shine and reflect light from within her body, like photographs of jellyfish I’ve seen in textbooks. Bioluminescence. I wonder if she’s poisonous. She sniffs at me, her nostrils flaring.

  “Hi,” I croak.

  “Charmed.” She cocks her head at Bert.

  “So, um...you guys know each other?” Carl’s trying to sound all casual.

  “Lotus Flower and I are old friends.” She shifts her glance to Bert slyly.

  Erf. I don’t want to know any more.

  Bert smoothly interrupts, “Bai Yin is the guardian of one of the places where our dimension and other worlds intersect.”

  “Bai Yin guards the gate to hell?” I squeak, and then immediately think I’m insulting her.

  Bai Yin looks down at her claws the way a woman might gaze at a fresh manicure. They’re silvery and translucent enough to show blood vessels and light pulsing beneath. And they’re long and really sharp-looking. “In a manner of speaking. It’s a job.”

  Carl turns on his heel, taking in this passage that seems like it’s been dug beneath the ground. It smells like earth. Water trickles through plumbing pipes above us. “Who knew that there was...a whole ’nother world beneath the Chinese restaurant.”

  Bai Yin snickers. “It serves mutual purposes. The restaurant gets a good deal on what it wants from other dimensions.”

  I look askance. “What does that mean?”

  Bert chortles. “Heh. The Mu Shu Pork isn’t pork.”

  My forehead wrinkles. I now seem to recall that’s one of the things Bert never gets off the buffet. “Uh...what is it?”

  “Let’s just say it’s harvested from...other realms. And leave it at that.”

  Carl looks bewildered. His face hardens in resolve. “I don’t care. That’s damn good Mu Shu.”

  Bai Yin smiles. I think she’s smiling, because I can see all her teeth. “Surely it’s not the buffet that brings you here?”

  Bert sighs. “Sadly, no. We need to use the door.”

  “Ah.” Bai Yin’s whiskers droop slightly. I’m sure she was hoping Bert was here to see her. “This way.”

  Carl elbows Bert. “Bring her some damn flowers sometime, will you?”

  I pull the flower out of my jacket and give it to Bert. He stares at it in his tiny little T-rex hand.

  Tail dragging behind her, the dragon drifts to a door at the end of the tunnel.

  I guess I was expecting something like Dante’s gate to hell, with carved figures in panoramic agony. But this door’s nothing like that. It’s industrial steel, like the doors on commercial freezers, all nicked and scuffed and dented. It’s covered with fridge magnets—bits of kitsch. There’s one in the shape of the Statue of Liberty and a few plastic cats. A Superman magnet holds what looks like a grocery list in Chinese. A slew of poetry magnets has been arranged to say:

  Many worlds in one

  The universe on the head of a pin

  Get a ticket to ride

  Bring back more Mu Shu

  There are some dents on the bottom where it looks like it’s been kicked closed. And, more disturbingly, some that flex outward, like there’s something on the other side that’s trying to get into our world. I suppress a shiver.

  “It’s not really much of a door,” she explains. “It’s actually a place where the universes fold out into each other. An intersection point. The door is just there to help extra-dimensional entities visualize a point in space. You’re not really going anywhere, just moving vertically to another plane of existing space. I suspect that this leads out into the men’s room upstairs in contiguous space.”

  “Is that why I always get that creepy feeling of being watched in the men’s room?” I blurt.

  “Yeah,” Carl agrees. “It feels...haunted.”

  Bai Yin laughs. “That’s a sure sign that you’re in thin, overlapping space. Or in the presence of perverts.” Bai Yin reaches for the handle of the door. There are no locks, but I guess the dragon is probably sufficient to keep everyone on their side. “Long trip or short trip, gentlemen?”

  “Hopefully a short trip.” Bert grimaces.

  Bai Yin nods. “Knock three times when you want to come back.”

  She opens the door. There’s no light and no sound beyond it.

  Bert hands her the flower before we step through. My last sight in this world is Bai Yin cupping the wilted flower in her claws like a treasure, inhaling as if she can smell the sunshine it took to grow it. Her eyes are half-closed in bliss, and she looks like a carving in quartz, like something unreal that really shouldn’t exist at all. Not in our world or any other.

  “WELCOME TO HELL. WHAT any particle physicist would give his right eye to see.”

  I have the sense of stepping over a threshold. My stomach bottoms out like it does on a roller coaster as I walk through the door. I squeeze my eyes shut, and slowly open them at the sound of Bert’s voice.

  It’s dark. Lights pierce the dark, blue lights, over which thick shadows swarm and leaves rustle. It’s hot. Steam seeps through my clothes. The landscape is dotted with black rock, shiny obsidian that reflects the blue light.

  Bert sighs. “Home sweet home.”

  Something loud buzzes overhead, like a helicopter. Instinctively, I duck.

  Bert lunges up. He grasps a flying creature the size of a cat. With a start, I realize it’s a giant moth. Its pale green wings flap and twitch like a kite caught in a hurricane. Bert brings the insect to his mouth and takes a bit out of it. Green fluid runs over his chin, and the moth squirms.

  “Ugh!” I recoil, backing into Carl.

  Bert’s eyes are half-closed in bliss. “Jesus, I missed this. The locusts in your plane have nothing on these guys.” A wing crumples into his mouth with a sound like potato chips crinkling.

  “Bert...what the fuck?”

  Bert gazes at us with slitted eyes. “Look. This is a reality in which that meteor never hit earth. Dinosaurs never died out. Some stuff got big.”

  I turn slowly on my heel. Cicadas drone in the distance, deafening. The shadows around the blue lights are giant moths and other insects, drawn to the light. Shapes of lizard-like creatures pluck them out of the air. I can only make out silhouettes from this distance. Some look like Bert, while others have strange fronds and dorsal shapes that writhe in the light.

  I suppress a shudder. “So you guys...evolved to create giant bugcatchers?”

  A feathery antenna twitches over the edge of Bert’s lip. His tongue coaxes it back into his mouth. The moth is gone, but he rubs his distended gut. “Give us some credit for technology. See that red line on the horizon?”

  Carl shades his eyes with his hand. “Yeah?�
�

  It’s red and it glows, with spires of some kind of metal over it, like scaffolding.

  “That’s a lava river. From a volcano we woke up. Harnessed for geothermal energy.” Bert grins. “Keeps the cold-blooded critters nice and toasty.”

  “Wow. I guess...it never occurred to me.”

  “What didn’t?”

  “That you guys would have a civilization.”

  Bert snorts. “Look, we don’t have a lot of the bullshit you have. Like reality TV and cellphones and plastic surgery. But we’ve had sixty-five million years to grow opposable thumbs. Don’t underestimate that, mammal.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “How ’bout you shut up and we find the girl?”

  “Yeah. That sounds like a better plan.”

  “C’mon.”

  Bert stalks off into the steamy black vegetation. The plants sling droplets of water back at us, and I try not to flinch. The water tastes like iron, and sweat slides down my neck. I scurry to keep up, to keep Bert’s slithering tail in sight. He moves differently here, his head down and spine undulating beneath his scales. It’s as if he’s unconsciously dropped all pretense of being human.

  What is this costing him? He was deferential to Hoodie—submissive—before. I wonder if Bert’s gonna try to talk his way out of this, or whether he’ll really be ready to fight for us. I just have to trust that his bond with us is greater than the reptoid hierarchy. Whatever it is.

  Bert stops short, and I nearly collide with him and Carl with me. “Get off my tail,” he growls. I try to comply. He points through an opening in the curtain of leaves. “There.”

  My gaze follows where he’s pointing. Steam roils in darkness. There’s a bubbling and popping sound—shit, it’s boiling mud. A scaffolding path of wooden planks and rope spiders over it, leading to the black mouth of a cave. The exhalation of steam sounds like something breathing. The whole thing stinks like sulfur.

  “She’s in there?” Carl whispers.

  “It smells like it,” Bert says.

  “Dude, how can you tell?” My eyes are beginning to water even from this distance.

  Bert looks over his shoulder at me. “In case I haven’t told you guys this before, you smell like meat. There aren’t a whole lotta mammals left in our world. So, unless someone’s found a nice big pig, I think your girl’s down that way.”

  Carl wrinkles his nose and self-consciously sniffs at his armpits. “We stink?”

  “Like bacon. Sort of.”

  I grab Carl’s sleeve. “C’mon.” I keep picturing Bert with that moth and not wanting to think about what kind of meat Lily is.

  I lunge onto the rickety walkway. It sways under my step, but I push forward. Bert’s behind me, pistols glinting in the dim light. I clutch the rope railings, when I really want to clutch the watch on my wrist. I take a few mincing steps before deciding to run across, get it over with. Hot mud bubbles hiss, and I wince as scalding mud splashes against my pant leg.

  The mouth of the cave is barely above the surface of the mud. Bert charges ahead of me, peering into the darkness with his peculiar golden eyes. He nods, motioning Carl and me forward into the humid darkness.

  The exhalation of steam and air scrapes past me. I hold my sleeve against my nose, trying ineffectually to block out the smell of sulfur. There’s some light here—phosphorescent algae gleams on the walls. It offers a cold, surreal glow, like the kind of dim gleam let off by the glow-in-the-dark stars I used to stick on my walls as a kid.

  Something moves ahead. A figure. It’s pale and facing away from me, flickering softly like a mobile or a crystal dangling from a chandelier. The wan light catches on sparkles, on its dress.

  I run forward. “Lily!”

  Bert shouts for me to stay back.

  I reach for Lily, grabbing her clammy arm. I realize that she’s suspended by her arms from the ceiling. She spins against me, dead weight, not resisting, like a side of beef on a hook.

  And I recoil in horror.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lily is dead weight against me. Her body sags against mine, unmoving except for a shallow breath shaking the beads on her dress. Her eyes are closed. She doesn’t seem alive. Her skin is coated with blood, lukewarm against the palms of my hands.

  But the dress is alive.

  The beads seethe under my hands, and it’s not just a trick of the weak light. It feels like insects crawling underneath my fingers. Threads are pulling, popping, and beads fall to the floor with tiny plinks and droplets of blood. The mass of it is roiling. It’s digging into her flesh with pale rootlike tendrils.

  “What’s happening to her?” Carl cries out.

  Bert’s silver pistols are raised. “It’s a parasite. It’s killing her. And this...this is a trap.”

  I reach up for the neckline of the dress. My fingers snarl in a mass of curling threads and wormlike feelers. I pull as hard as I can.

  Stitches pop, and something shrieks. I think it’s the roots, pulling out of Lily’s skin. Even though the shriek comes from her mouth, it’s not her voice. It sounds like thousands of voices howling.

  It’s not her. I’ve gotta get this dress off her. Blood splashes back in my face, and I concentrate on pulling this second skin from her, like the husk of some terrible milkweed pod. It comes away with a sound like parchment tearing, the little fingers of threads still reaching out toward the swath of Lily’s pale and bloody flesh.

  I fling the dress away from me. It rattles when I cast it on the muddy floor, writhing. I pull off my jacket, wrap it around Lily. I figure out where her hands are bound, suspended from the ceiling by some kind of hook. I pull her down, wrapping her up against my chest. She’s not moving, but still breathing.

  “We’re fucked,” Carl announces.

  I look up. “We gotta get her out of here.”

  “That’s not looking real likely.”

  We aren’t alone. Shadows roil around the perimeter of the room. It’s like the puppet show in firelight we once did in the back alley with a fire we set in a trash can—I can make out wings, tails, claws, and teeth. Bert tracks them with the pistols in his hands, coat swirling around his ankles. He looks like a fucking anime character. Carl’s got his fists up before him, his back to Bert. One hand slowly reaches toward his ring.

  “You owe me blood.”

  A shadow rises up from the floor, from the bubbling mud. It’s still and sullen. It has teeth, several rows of them. The hood from the sweatshirt has slipped from his head. His eyes are white, white as halogen headlights, and his skin is like the smooth sculpture of a basilisk we got into the shop one time, stretched over a square and primitive head. It’s mottled gray, like a shark’s.

  “Hoodie,” I breathe.

  He extends one claw toward Lily. “That’s mine. Part of the bargain.”

  “No,” I say. My mouth is dry. “You can’t have her.”

  His lips peel back on even more teeth. “Then I shall take all the blood you’ve brought me tonight.”

  The shadows converge, creatures draining out of the walls and lifting out of the mud, splashing with scalding droplets. They’re reptilian and also other—creatures with claws and horns and membranes connecting hands and feet like wings. They hiss, like the hissing cockroaches from Madagascar that my biology teacher ordered for us one semester.

  I reach for my watch. I’m breathing quickly, knowing I can only use it once. Once—and I need to make it count.

  A reptoid leans down before me. He’s covered in leathery scales and spots, like a spilled pot of ink. His eyes are slitted. There’s no human emotion in them. Nothing like what I see in Bert’s.

  I reach down into the hot mud. It scalds my hands, but I fling it up, up into the snake man’s face.

  He recoils. I lunge forward, flailing at him with both fists. I’m a shitty fighter, so I don’t expect it to actually work.

  But it seems to be driving him back. His tongue flicks out of his mouth, and he scrambles down in the mud. I kick
him, struggling to find purchase in the slop.

  A gunshot rings out to my right. A shadowy lizard falls. I can’t see Bert, only tails and glowing eyes—and there are a lot more of them than there are of us.

  Something heavy slams me to the mud. I can taste it, hot and gritty as bad oatmeal. Feet slam into my ribs, knocking the wind out of me. I dig in the mush for my watch, but I can’t get a grip on it to turn the stem...not while my head is being kicked hard enough to see stars.

  “Enough.”

  A voice rings above the gunshots, and the hissing, and the mud fizzling.

  It’s a voice I think I recognize, but I can’t tell over the pounding in my head. I turn over, wheezing.

  A figure stands in the mouth of the cave. It’s a small figure, wearing a white hooded cloak. With my eyes tearing, I can’t tell who it is.

  It advances, brandishing a sword that glimmers. It’s not reflecting light—it’s shining with its own glow, yellow as sunshine. “Let them go,” the figure says. It turns its head, and a long, dark curling ponytail moves over its shoulder. The figure is a woman.

  I squint hard at it.

  “Mom?” I whisper.

  It can’t be. But it is.

  My mother walks forward in the mud, the goo staining the laces of her boots. Her white cloak glistens. Her gaze flickers around the room: at Carl, who’s prone on the ground with a reptile man frozen in the act of trying to bend his arm back at an impossible angle. At Bert, who’s surrounded by what looks like a group of five snakes with vestigial legs, looking like he’s in the process of trying to stuff gunpowder into one of his pistols. And at me, swimming in the mud like a frog. Her gaze lingers on me.

  Her blue gaze moves past me to Hoodie, who crouches on a rock, above us, watching the fray.

  “You heard me,” she says.

  Hoodie tips his head at an impossible angle. I don’t think he has neck bones. “No, Traveler. I will not give them up. They owe me blood.”

  “I will give it to you. Yours.”

  The sunlight-sword in my mother’s hand flashes out, sliding through a nearby reptoid as if he’s made of butter. He collapses to the mud in pieces, perfectly cauterized, like lunch meat.