Bloodback

by Darby Harn

  “You forget who you’re talking to,” I say, because this always goes so well for me. “I defeated The Interdictor. I defeated Evander Blackwood. You don’t know my power, Siski.”

  Siski snorts. You don’t know, Star Walker. Fire of Great Deer burns in wolves. Fire of Blood Stream. Sky. Earth. Energy of stars burns in you. Energy of world. But you not use it. You not obey yourself. What you are. What you come from. You hunter. You killer. You devour light. But you try to make it.

  Coils of energy spring past my concentration; they twist in on themselves as I catch them, leaving me tangled in magenta knots. I might look like an electric ball of twine, but I’m in control. I’m always in control.

  “I’m not The Ever. I’m Kitsie.”

  Twin suns flare inside the snaking cave. I tell you. You alien. To lead pack is to sacrifice self.

  “What have you sacrificed, Siski? You’ve killed your own to keep your kind trapped in the state they are.”

  These attacks have gone on decades. Has it been Siski all along? Are the wolves like this, or is it just her?

  Only me, she says. Pups born with my curse. I spare them.

  “Kind of you,” I say.

  Siski sacrifice children. Mate. Siski gives all.

  I probe the cave for something metal. I don’t want to hurt or kill Siski. I don’t want a war. What did Vidette tell Piller when he said the same thing about Great Power?

  You already fighting a war.

  “Don’t make me do this,” I say.

  Star Walker like Lamar. Soft. You help weak. You make light of dark. Warmth of cold. You make roads of woods. Give city back to man. So I let you hunt ‘killer.’ I run you, like small thing you are. I run you tired. And now I catch you.

  I ease out of the cave, to the ledge overlooking the cavity in the pen. “You haven’t caught me yet.”

  Siski’s eyes burn out. I whirl around, remembering too late the wolf can project her image and I crash into the snow-topped mounds of dead leaves below. The pen rattles with Siski’s anger. She leaps into the pen, and I see her as she truly is. Old. Scarred. Patchy gray fur barely disguises yellow skin, rotting from the inside out.

  God.

  I fire a beam of energy and my arm bends back against my will. The shot arcs upwards, evaporating a hole in the snow-heavy clouds. I try again, but the projection deforms in the air, a cloud shredded in high winds. Mental force trumps cosmic will and I crash across the pen.

  A plaster rock wrenches off the ground and slams into me. Another strikes me from behind. She’s too fast. Too strong. I grab onto something, anything, metal to wield against her.

  Everything metal in the pen crumples like dead flowers.

  Get up. Get out. Get high and blast the whole zoo. I try to fly away. I crater back into the pen like a rag doll. Tons of shredded plaster and bent metal land on top of me.

  I push my way out. “Abi…”

  Siski huffs. After I finish you, I finish her.

  I release my stranglehold on the Myriad. Tendrils of famished energy lash out of my chest, through the claw marks in my jacket at Siski. All of them bend backwards, like trees in a summer storm. Siski sits back, a bored expression on her face as I rise unwillingly back into the air.

  Fine.

  You want to fight a monster, Siski? Fight a monster. I can become other beings. People. Animals. Creatures far more terrifying than the wolf. Ask The Interdictor. I close my eyes. Summon the Moimadon, as I did in my battle with him and nothing happens. It’s like a gear is stuck. My thoughts.

  Stuck.

  I am in your thoughts, Siski says, and throws me against the wall of the pen, again and again, before dragging me across the cold, filthy ground to her paws. My arms bend behind my back, all my light cocooned inside Siski’s mental cage. Light bleeds off me into the wolf’s fur. Siski glows. She revivifies.

  “This… isn’t… your… power,” I say.

  Was never yours, Siski says and connections of thought and feeling remain intact just long enough for me to see the Myriad tear out of my chest between the wolf’s crooked teeth.

  Twelve

  ba-dumm

  Thought webs to feeling and at first, I’m only aware. A sense of being apart. Outside myself. All systems normal, then. The rest of me fills in, and I sit up. Siski must have knocked me out. Where is she? Where am I? I can’t see anything. I reach for the zipper of my jacket. My jacket’s gone. Clothes. The Myriad doesn’t shine behind my ribs. I’m not quite me, though. My skin has the color of a burnt out light bulb.

  ba-DUMM

  The sky is the same. Dark. Empty of stars. Only a moon curled like a bear claw, soaked in blood. I left normal behind a long time ago, but I always try and keep it in the rearview.

  I can’t see a bleeding thing now.

  BA-DUMM

  What is that sound? I head in the direction I think it’s coming from, but I have nothing to orient me. The dark begins to lose its uniformity. Stars twinkle just off the ground. Blue. Brown. Gray. Eyes burn within the gelatin spirits of rabbits, squirrels, dogs and cats floating low and sleepy like old balloons. None of them move. They just stare, as I pass.

  ba-dumm

  Lattices of rib cages break the surface. Broken shards of rabbit skulls crunch beneath my feet. Loose teeth stud the ground. Cleft jawbones. Vines of antlers. Farther on, mounds of bones form a kind of graveyard. The mounds organize around a central one, towering above the rest. I stand before it, staring into the hollow eyes of countless wolf pups.

  I’ve been eaten.

  Brilliant. I don’t think I’ll be blasting my way out of this one. But where am I? What is this place?

  ba-DUMM

  That sound. That constant drum, must be Siski’s heart, beating strong and true on the energy she’s just stolen. What did Jonah do? Should have paid more attention in Sunday school. Hyaline birds constellate around me. My hand passes through them, their matter stretching like chewing gum, until they form back into their shape and their place, fixed in the strange dark. I’m not in her belly. This is something else.

  Something more.

  I’ve lost the Myriad, but not my sense. Energy bristles all around me. An electric hum prickles the air. Becks of fire vein through the dark beyond. There must be a tree ahead, its branches burning but the dark dissolves in fire and I find myself before a giant deer, with antlers of flames.

  ba-DUMM

  I’ve got two settings. Usually, I have something quick to say, or nothing at all. This right here, is a solid nothing at all. I just stare, captivated by his ethereal power and beauty. His skin glows like cat’s eyes in the dark. And I know this is the Great Deer, even if I don’t know how I know.

  I know he knows me.

  Am I dead? I don’t know if I say it or think it. Thought escapes me. I don’t fear. For once, that’s true. I’m scared of what will happen to the people I love now, but all my life I’ve been a bundle of wire and cords and conduit that never connected to anything. That I feared never would. Death would be as detached as life. It would be nothing. Now I’m here, empty of my light but illuminated in the fire of something much greater.

  BA-DUMM

  I touch his nose. “What is this? Where are we?”

  The Great Deer looks off in the distance. In the cold blood of the moon, I can just make out a red trail across the dark desert. The river. Blood pools beyond. The lake. Stuck spirits flutter on the ground, like the heads of wild flowers. Spirits of birds twist in knots garlanding the sky. Behind me, a dense mass of souls in the shape of the alien ship rests in a crater in the ground. Everything sinks toward it. I move, and I’m on this slope. The ground elastic, like a trampoline mat.

  “The animals are stuck,” I say. “But I can move. How?”

  The Great Deer turns, and walks away. Wait. Where are you going? I follow. The ground grades beneath me, but we’re headed in the opposite direction of the ship. Something else depresses the world, or whatever this is. Something massive. Dark.

  ba
-dumm

  Mounds collapse on the edge of a pit, filled with snow-covered leaves. On the other side, a cave burrows into plastered rock. The deer’s antlers illuminate the mouth of the cave.

  “Where are we going?” I say.

  The Great Deer enters the cave. I follow, uncertain and driven, as always. Brown paint flakes off the walls of the cave, revealing a soft, pink tissue. Part of me expects to find the drawings Lamar had left in the pen in the zoo, but there’s nothing but scarring. His crown of burning antlers fades in the distance. The cave goes dark, and I don’t know where I am.

  ba-DUMM

  I claw ahead, my fingers sinking into a warm mush that feels a bit like the inside of my cheek. Blood oozes out of the wall, drowning me in crimson and I lose my footing. I slick into the mush, swallowed deeper, faster into utter confusion.

  BA-DUMM

  Pressure squeezes me from all directions. It’s the same kind of impersonal, deliberate pressure the Myriad gripped me with when I woke the device. I’m being absorbed.

  Consumed.

  I fight back, not that my resistance has any form. There’s less and less of me, my arms, my legs, my hair indistinguishable from the red gloom I’m fizzing into. There’s nothing to hold on to. Branches and bones and baby animals disintegrate in the same warm bath of acid I do, all draining toward the same doom. I don’t want this. I want to go back. I want to live.

  Abi.

  I crater into gummy earth. Ok. Dirt cakes my hands as I crawl through the remains of dug-up graves. Claw marks rake winter-brown grass. Some stones in Break Pointe Pines date back to before the Civil War, eroded of detail and spotted in the decay of limestone. The oldest plots in the cemetery border the famous trees it was named after, and make for easy scavenging. I lean against the old birch tree far back in the cemetery, its roots so big and thick they vein out of the ground to catch the aging headstones before they tip over. I’m tipped over.

  Focus. Keep it together. Abi. Think of Abi.

  Children hang in the air, like paper lanterns. God. I cover my mouth, even as I leave the phantom security of the tree to get a closer look. Incandescent spirits of people tether on invisible lines over their graves, captured as the birds and rabbits were. Siski had eaten them, too. She dug their bodies up out of their rest, and somehow gleaned enough latent energy from them to justify doing it a dozen times or more. Her need wasn’t simply the vital energy of life, but energy itself, never lost or destroyed, always converting, even in decay.

  ba-dumm

  Anger propels me through the cemetery, from one desecrated grave to another. Years Siski has foraged off the dead, making due when the hunt produced nothing else. Her victims stick in her throat like undigested bones, but these aren’t the souls of the dead; they’re shadows. Shades of energy. Residue of the consumed, but not their essence. That’s why they can’t move. None of the animals or people Siski killed have any agency within the psychic realm their energy feeds.

  Why do I?

  Abi’s voice rustles through the pines. Good question.

  I turn around, and around, searching for her. Abi?

  Through here.

  A large headstone lists at the tree line. No name or dates mark the stone. My hand phases through the stone.

  You’re in there?

  There’s room, Abi says.

  I crawl on all fours into the stone, the open mouth of a small, dark cave. Strands of immobile spiders decorate the tunnel, dark and narrow until it expands into a large cave of glistening black stone. Angled walls drip with spray from an anxious sea pounding constantly just outside.

  ba-dumm

  This is different. Abi?

  ba-DUMM

  The only light comes from the vellum shade of Abi, floating just off the stony floor behind me.

  BA-DUMM

  Yeah, it’s pretty messed up, she says.

  My hands sweep through her. Baby…

  It’s ok. I’m ok.

  You’re not really here.

  Not really. Part of me is. Enough to know I’m only part. Abi’s lips bunch. Though that begs some questions.

  But why are you here?

  I got eaten. Well. Half eaten.

  I mean, why are you here? In this cave? This isn’t part of Break Pointe. That’s an ocean out there, not the lake.

  Abi shrugs. I don’t know. All of this is pretty trippy. Did you see the deer? The deer is pretty cool.

  What is this place?

  It’s a psychic energy field, she says. You know like those galaxies that have big giant jets streaming out of them?

  From the black holes at the center, I say.

  Exactly. There’s so much material getting devoured the black hole can’t consume it all, so it gets shot out at like the speed of light or something and that’s what all this is. Siski is off the charts powerful, but she can’t digest all the energy she eats. So the excess gets thrown out in this field.

  The field must be of some scale or dimension that telepaths like Dr. Piller have never perceived it. It could be masked. Background radiation. Radio static. Magnetic interference.

  But why is the Great Deer here? It’s a myth.

  Abi shrugs. Your guess is as good as mine.

  Why am I here? Maybe I’m too much. Siski wouldn’t be the first girl to think so. If she consumed my energy – the energy of the Myriad – then that must mean there’s still a Kitsie, separate from The Ever. I’ve been afraid my identity persisted only as these shades do within Siski, as a ghost of indigestion.

  I’m still me?

  You’re pretty consistently you, Abi says.

  But I’m not The Ever?

  That door opens both ways.

  You’re suddenly very sure about me.

  I’ve always been sure about you, Kitsie. But I can read your thoughts now. Which, wow. You think about sex. A lot.

  I bite my lip. You can read my thoughts?

  That’s literally all we are right now. But on topic, you’re as much The Ever as you are your mom. Her mom. All the people that flow through your veins. They all inform you, but they’re not you. We’re our own people. We make our own lives.

  I want to be more than I am, I say.

  You are. You always have been. The Ever was a mindless thing, gobbling up the universe for who knows what. Siski is just following her instincts. Her hunger. You have strength. That’s why you survived The Ever, Kit. It’s why you’re here now. It’s why you stood up to Blackwood. You have spirit, more than anything. You have the strongest spirit of anyone I know.

  My hands clench shut. All I want is to touch her; to hold her; to love her, the way she deserves.

  Abi smiles. I knew it.

  I open my hand over Abi’s heart. I wish you could know.

  I do. I know you. Maybe you don’t want to hear it. Maybe you think you can’t be known. But I know you. Abi’s hand ghosts through mine. You’re afraid of your heart. Your power. You’re afraid of being a monster who feeds off the energy of others. You’re afraid of being like The Ever. Siski. Your mother.

  Waves smash against the rock, shaking the cave. Loose rock cracks away from the walls, shattering on the floor like glass. I turn away from Abi, wishing I could be a shade, gossamer and still, unthinking or unfeeling in my dissolution.

  You don’t really want to be unfeeling, do you?

  My hands claw at my shuttered heart. Sometimes.

  But then what would the world be like? Abi says. What would Break Pointe be right now, if you didn’t care? Where would I be, if you didn’t open your heart to me, even just a little? I’d be right here, Kit. I’d be trapped in this cave, alone.

  I turn back to her. I don’t understand.

  Abi sinks to the floor, clouded with fog and spray. We’re all light and shadow. You can’t deny one or the other. Don’t deny the world your love. Your light. Don’t deny me.

  All my life, I’ve struggled to see out of the cave I existed in with Ma, devoid of light but churning with vicious, trapped energy. Th
e only way to survive was to starve that power, and hope my hunger drove it into hibernation. My transformation forced me to acknowledge the truth of my existence, but the truth is, I’ve been doing what I always do. Avoiding the problem. Burying myself in work. Focusing on other people’s problems. Becoming someone else. But I’m me. I’m more, than instinct. A monster. Monsters destroy. They mangle. They throw away the bones. Everything keeps in me.

  Everyone.

  Magenta light erupts in the cave. Heat lightning streams through my skin. The Myriad dawns in my chest. Everything is figurative here. The real thing is either in Siski’s belly, or she’s swatting it around her cave like some kind of toy.

  Abi snorts. Teach her not to play with her food.

  Currents of energy erupt from the Myriad, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, into Abi’s wraithlike skin, through the phantom stone, into the fabric of this energy field that I’m somehow part of.

  How do I get out?

  Energy. I’m part of this energy. The psychic energy field extends across the city, a web stranded between life and death. It tracks back to its source, Siski, in the lair of the wolves. I open my heart. I have to be careful, so I don’t acquire the whole thing. Focus. Flow, like the blood stream, through all this death back to life. Electromagnetic barriers pry open like clenched jaws and my fingers stick on sharp fangs. I push, fight, and edge out of Siski’s maw until at last I’m free.

  Thirteen

  Blood and spit steam off my lambent body as I crawl across the floor of the wolf den. Good thing I don’t sleep much. All this is pure nightmare fuel. Siski gasps in pain next to me, jaw wrenched open like it can’t close. The giant wolf gags, and hacks out the gauzy spirit of a rabbit.

  That door opens both ways.

  My delight bounds away with the rabbit, disappearing as quickly as it manifests. More follow. Squirrels. Birds. Deer stampede out of the cave and Siski spits, expelling the last of all those stubborn spirits she couldn’t digest. Shock furrows the eyes of the other wolves of the pack as Lamar’s spirit illuminates the awful truth. Lamar casts a withering gaze on Siski, and then fades from view along with the other spirits.