“Magic.” I growled the word out through gritted teeth and got up to my knees. “Fire.”
The ground was a blank canvas. I sketched out a circle in my own blood, reaching into the well of power that I had been without for so long. I was brimming with it, spilling over with cold heat. Dirt swirled around my hand as I focused on it, and then looked up in sudden wonder as I felt – and somehow, saw – the matrix of the air and earth resolve in space. I wasn’t just looking at the Weeders as they fought, leaping and clawing, striking and falling. I could see everything, the field of atoms and energy vibrating, exchanging, decaying, flaring. It passed in a moment as I grasped the components given to me by will, and in a moment of Promethean awe, smashed them together. It was kavannah. The intention of my heart was to stop this thing. “Aysh!”
The bug reared, about to stab through Jenner’s back as she scrabbled to run, and then it blew back in a sudden explosion of fire and friction. It slammed into the semi, sending the vehicle tumbling to the side. The cargo tray followed more slowly, toppling as the insect, burning and thrashing on its hard back, kicked its legs out and screeched. The big cats were on it in an instant, raking and snarling, ignoring the flames as they tore ichor from its belly and pulled it to the ground.
The Deacon. Where was The Deacon? I snarled with effort as I got back up and began to lurch towards the line of black cars. I could see the Wrath’ree – it was three times the size it had been after it had pulled itself from my body, and it was decimating the ranks of The Deacon’s men. Two of them saw me weaving towards them. They turned their guns on me and emptied their clips against the shield I spun with a slash of my hand. Bullets sparked away off the blue matrix, then red as I focused on the word I’d used to flip the bug. The blue turned to red. The men screamed as they burned.
I heard a cougar’s scream of warning from behind and turned to see Mason’s bulk soaring towards me, paws outstretched. He was more glass than flesh, his head pushed to the side by spears of crystal, every wound bristling with bloody glass. With a shout, I slammed the knife up into his breastbone as he took me to ground. He reared up over my body, claws extended.
Jenner broke for me with a bellow, hindquarters not quite as fast as her forelimbs. I saw her as I twisted back, trying to drag myself away, as the insectoid DOG brought down a leg in its death throes. We were no longer slowed, but it seemed to take forever. The dull crack of her spine, the gape of shock, the agonized struggling as the insect pulled her off the ground like she weighed nothing and threw her back and forth, impaled on the thrashing limb.
“Chet!” I roared the command of my easiest spell, my fastest spell, and shoved the shield up and forwards. “Jenner!”
Mason’s claws screeched over the shield of energy, slipping across. He regathered for another blow, but a lean figure sprung in from the side. Angkor, bloodied and battered, his lip and forehead split, swung the fire axe we’d taken from the safehouse and buried it deep into Mason’s flank. The tiger was so screwed up with overgrown Yen that it couldn’t even roar; it reared up and twisted in pain as Angkor hauled the axe back and chopped into his neck and shoulder. Whatever it hit shattered: the blade and Angkor’s arms oozed with honey, which he wiped across the head as he dodged the crippled animal’s paws and spines. When Mason got close to me, I pulled the knife out of his body and stabbed whatever came to hand. With the two of us working together, glass broke free and the structure began to collapse. Mason tottered to one side with a moan before falling to struggle and kick on the ground.
“That sick rapist motherfucker is getting away!” Angkor snarled, whirling with the axe in hand. He was exhausted, his hair plastered to his face and clumped with sweat.
“Jenner,” I wheezed. No matter how I tried to focus, the pain was coming back. Kutkha was there to hold my metaphysical hand, but his cool, calming presence could only steer the course as gravity began to press me down with insistent hands. “Children. On the truck.”
Angkor went to his knees beside me, dropping the axe with a clatter. He stared into my eyes: his own were a very dark, very intense gray. It was an unusual color to see in an Asian face. I watched interestedly as his pupils grew larger and the rest of his face receded towards a great height, framed by light that grew more and more intense. The pain in my stomach was fading into white noise, a tingling and throbbing instead of wracking, burning fire. The oily, acid taste in my mouth was gone. I had been tired for so long now… months and months. Kutkha was right, again. It felt like sinking into a deep bed; a deep, quiet darkness.
“Hey! GODdammit, Alexi! You can’t die!” His voice rang out from far away. It had a pleasant mouthfeel, blue and silver and green, but I couldn’t see him anymore. “Alexi!”
Alexi… lexi… exi…
Angkor’s voice echoed on, stretching out forever.
Somehow, I remembered this feeling… the oceanic expansion, an inescapable pressure dragging me backwards, faster and faster until the darkness turned to pure light and sound. The words faded into a heartbeat larger than the sum total of all the planets in my solar system, of all the galaxies in the Milky Way. It was GOD, the YESbeast, the Mystery. The Star of Stars, which could only say one thing.
…LoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYouLoveYou…
Chapter 41
We were drawn through the interstitial ocean towards a bright core, as close and distant as the Sun. Kutkha was my caul, an elegant, winged form that encapsulated my awareness as we soared through what had to be the cellular fluid of GOD’s mass. Every second of every moment, I was wracked by memory that was not my own. Rapidly cycling flickers of imagery, voices, faces… hands and whispers, the flick of a lighter, Zarya’s eyes, bright and blue as the Earth from space.
After a timeless space, the feeling of distance and motion contracted. Kutkha plunged through a prismatic haze like a blue-black arrow, through a sky of dancing color and light until he broke through the clouds into a white sky over a white forest, a land of pure Glass.
To my surprise, I saw myself standing on the rise of a small hill. I was hairless and pale, toned and aesthetic in a way that my body had never been. A long sarong of sheer fabric fell from my waist to the soft white loam beneath my feet. My bare palms and forehead were pressed to the trunk of a tree that looked like pink coral, stretching out with an arc of branches that shivered with pleasure in the soft, warm wind. Many of the thinner branches were wrapped lovingly around this man’s back and shoulders and thighs, this Me-Not-Me.
Suddenly, he lifted his head and turned it, nostrils flaring. His eyes were my eyes, silver-white and colorless. The branches of the tree withdrew from him just as my awareness collided with his and then rebounded away, faster than light, faster than-
I heaved a deep breath.
White floor, white tiles, blue uniforms, murmuring voices. The world spun; I tried to get up, to run from The Deacon and Mason and get to Jenner before she died. My body, wracked with pain, was pushed back down by several pairs of hands.
“DOG!” I tried to speak. It came out as a gargle around something in my throat.
“Put him down! He’s going to pull the tube out!”
Heat flushed up my arm, pounded in my head, and I forgot about the tube, forgot about the DOG and The Deacon. I fell back down to the hospital bed, and slept.