She yanked him forward, body-to-body, and met his eyes with hers, staring deep.
Rahel paused in the act of moving toward them. I shook the stars and explosions out of my head, trying to see what the hell was happening, and felt Lewis doing the impossible: pulling power in a place where power was locked off tight. Seacasket was a town in the aetheric equivalent of an airless, vacuum-sealed iron vault.
And he was ripping the vault door off its metaphorical hinges, as if it were nothing.
I’d never fully appreciated what Lewis was, and what he could do, until that moment. He wanted her to let him go, and she was either going to do it or be blasted into so many tiny pieces that even a Demon would have a hard time surviving it.
And then I realized why he was reacting so violently. Granted, he wouldn’t want her hands on him, but what he was doing was far, far beyond merely trying to get loose from her hold. No, he was fighting to save himself, because she was trying to take him over, the way she’d grabbed Cherise and Kevin and cored them out to insert her own will, power, and thoughts.
If she could do that to Lewis…
Rahel understood what was happening, but she didn’t act. Perhaps she couldn’t here in this place. The power that Lewis was pulling into himself, using as a shield, was absolutely stunning in its intensity, as if the entire Earth were rising up through him in his defense.
And still the Demon was eating right through.
There was a slipping sensation under my feet. I can’t describe it any more accurately; it wasn’t an earthquake, because the ground itself didn’t shift. Not a tremor. Not a shudder of any kind.
And yet, something moved.
“No,” Rahel breathed, stricken, and I saw her make some kind of decision.
She broke out of her paralysis, crossed the few steps, and grabbed E.T. by her shiny supernatural hair. For her part, my evil twin wasn’t going down easy; she snarled and twisted around to backhand Rahel, but she didn’t let go of Lewis to do it. His eyes were closed, his face unnaturally still, as if he were in tranquil meditation. I’d seen this before. I could almost remember…
When Rahel lunged for her again, my doppelgänger did something that blurred in this reality, blazed up in the aetheric, and slammed the heel of her palm into Rahel’s chest.
Her hand kept going deep into Rahel’s flesh and bone, and I saw a flood of what looked like blue sparks shoot down the Demon’s arm disappearing within Rahel’s body. Rahel’s mouth opened in a soundless scream, and I saw the shadowy presence of her on the aetheric turn smoke gray, then a poisonous shade of pale blue.
Could she possess Rahel?
As the Demon pulled her hand out of Rahel’s chest, a flood of tiny blue sparkles followed, foaming over Rahel’s body in a matter of seconds.
She convulsed and went down. It looked…Oh, God. It looked as if she were melting.
Lewis was still fighting, but whatever power he was using was dangerous in the extreme. I could feel that in the unsteady pitch and wave of the ground-no, not the ground, I realized, because the actual soil wasn’t moving. This was something else.
A stray metal button on the sidewalk rattled, rolled, and suddenly flew straight up in the air to impact a metal street sign. Which was bending as if an invisible wind were pulling at it.
Something was going badly wrong with the Earth’s magnetic field. Whatever power Lewis was using was unbalancing it, and although I had no idea what that meant, it just could not be good.
The other Wardens were converging on the spot, but nobody could do much-I saw Paul running to grab Lewis and bodychecked him on the way. “No!” I yelled. “She’ll take you! Don’t touch either one of them!”
“We can’t just stand here!” he screamed back at me. I heard the wail of police cars a few blocks over, and realized with a cold start that the rest of Seacasket, this Norman Rockwell town with a touch of the Gothic, would have just seen a bunch of strangers pile out of a van and some kind of fight. They couldn’t see or feel what was happening all around them, unless they knew where to look.
The Wardens knew, but we couldn’t act.
I felt a displacement of air, heard a faint pop, and looked around to see Venna standing there. She didn’t even glance toward me; she ran to Rahel, scooped her up, and vanished midstep. Taking her somewhere she could be helped, I hoped, but I couldn’t know.
“Now would be a really good time,” I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop me up.
I was going to have to make my miracles myself.
“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. “Hey, you. Bitch. You don’t really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever.”
She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently. Oh, man. It wasn’t just Lewis who was causing this.
It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “One tunnel into the void, coming up. Just back off and let him go.”
“Why should I?” she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. “This way he can’t act against me.”
“This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in half, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It’d be a shame to ruin it for everybody.”
She laughed. My laugh. “If you want him, I’ll trade,” she said. “Come here.”
The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn’t see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn’t a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I’d demand a lot of her attention.
And Lewis would break free.
“Don’t you do it,” Paul was muttering at me. “Don’t you fucking dare. I’ll kill you.”
“Line forms to the right.” I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.
The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.
I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.
The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.
Clearly Paul wasn’t taking any chances.
Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.
Oh.
That was mine. My memories. My lost experience. My past.
And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.
Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn’t need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time… My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.