She skitters from the room like an animal on her hands and knees. And in that moment, I jump up and throw myself at the last dog, twisting and twisting to loosen it.
But before I can get it open, she’s back, pouncing on top of the well like a cat, her face a snarl of hate, the key clutched in her bloodstained fingers, my skin beneath her nails. I twist away but she grabs my hair, pulling me back, the key clattering to the ground once more as she slams my head against the side of the well. She may not have gained Twig’s power over darkness or Rock’s gift for nightmares since she hasn’t been able to drag them in here and dump them down the well like she did Brennan, but she seems to have taken on a supernatural strength, the agility and speed of a jaguar. Whatever magic she’s wrought down here in the rot hasn’t been for nothing.
My temple splits with pain and my mind reels. A deep gash beside my right eye spits blood down my face where tracks of red have already been carved by her nails. I sink to the floor, crawling, reaching for the key, but just as my fingers wrap around it, shelunges for my arm, clamping her teeth down, and it flies away, goes skittering toward the bricks.
“Uh-uh-uh, kitten. We mustn’t play with what isn’t ours.” She wipes her mouth and stands over me as I crawl away.
When I reach the wall and can go no farther, I turn over, look full into her ravaged face. Somewhere beyond this chamber, I hear the rattle of chains. Another of Levi’s ropes has snapped. If I could just get past her, I could hold him up, figure a way to free the chain around his neck. But she has me cornered.
She takes another step and stands over me, looking down with pity. “Maybe I’ll leave just enough blood in you to keep that heart beating, give the rest of you to her alive. See what that gets me. Although, I’ll be sad not to finish you off myself. I’ve been so looking forward to it.”
I want to tell her to stop, but my tongue isn’t working. Or maybe it’s my mind. I put my right hand out to hold her back, but it’s useless. I place my fingers to my temple, and they come away covered in blood. I may not be long for this fight. The Fathom brought me back once before. I don’t know if she can do it again.
“Now, now,” Arla coos. “Never you mind your pretty little head, it will all be over soon. For you anyway. And your boy toy. For me, it will just be the beginning. Because I won’t own the Fathom anymore, I’llbethe Fathom. Or may as well be, with all her power at my disposal.”
She turns to loosen the final dog its last few turns, believing already that she’s won.
“Don’t,” I scrape out, but she doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care. Arla with all the power of a primordial goddess, bent on rage and revenge, greed and infamy—it’s too terrible to imagine.
And then I see the key, glinting in the light.You have the key now, small one,the Fathom said to me in my dream.Try not to lose it.Suddenly it all fits together in my mind—the key, the spell, the blood, the binding. The way forward and the way back. I was the last to touch it, so maybe it will still work.
I summon all my strength as Arla tosses the dog aside, andreach out my left hand, using the same power I used to unlock the door in the pub basement, Brennan’s power. Only this time, I concentrate on drawing the object to me. At first, it only rattles against the floor, alerting her, but then it zips toward me, zinging into my grasp.
Her head swivels as it happens, too fast for her to understand or stop it.
As I rise up the wall, I see her eyes widen, the whites growing. Her fingers lift to stop me, but she’ll never close the space between us in time, because all I have to do is turn around.
With the key in my left hand, I stab the bit into the open bite wound of my right arm and drag to connect the punctures, blood rushing to the surface. Then, I swipe my arm across the wall, leaving a wide, wet stripe of red that crosses over line after line of slanting script and complex drawings, blotting out detail after detail, letter after letter.
Incomplete, the spell can’t hold her. Blood I drew myself, mymagicalbloodgiven, and the binding is undone.
Arla’s face sags against the bones as if it already knows what’s coming. Beneath our feet, the floor begins to rumble, growing louder and louder with each passing second. In one fell swoop, the bricks surrounding us crumble away, raining on our heads in a cloud of dust. I stumble over them and crash to the floor in time to see Levi’s last rope give.
He swings, dangling like a cloth doll, but I am already feeling the ability blast through me as I eye the ceiling pipe from which he hangs. I wrench at it with every ounce of power I have available to me before the Fathom breaks free of her cage. The water inside surges against the metal even as it grinds apart at the coupling, and in a second, he falls free, coughing and wheezing as I scramble to his side, a spray of water showering over us.
I jerk the chain from his neck and the ropes from his wrists and ankles, and turn to see Arla throw herself across the lid of the well as if she can hold retribution down with her own frail body. Her eyes meet mine across the room, and suddenly I see the girl inthem, small and hurting, used by those whose job it was to protect her. We both knew the pain of growing up in a world that couldn’t understand or appreciate us, that saw only something to be feared or something to be exploited. We grabbed at whatever we could to save ourselves. We did damage in our own desperate attempts to stay safe. I pushed my power down so others wouldn’t persecute me for it. She tried to grow hers beyond their reach.
I stretch my hand forward as if I can get to her, pull her to safety, set her free. But in that same moment, the well beneath her erupts in an explosion of stone and water and fire, a column of energy mutating before our eyes, elements braided together like an umbilical cord. The room goes deathly black, all light extinguished as if it never existed, as if the world has been raked back into the slumber from which it crawled. Everything drops away—Levi at my side, the corpses behind me, Arla’s pleading expression, all I’ve held or known or been since that terrible, fiery night so long ago. I am swallowed now as I was then, lost to the living. But this death is not soft or peaceful. It’s hard as flint and sharp to the touch. It gouges into me, pitiless, and I call to those I know and love who share this deathly space—my mother and grandmother, my father, my baby.
I’d think myself lost forever if not for the screams. They reach out to me from some wet, slapping place at the center of it all, where bones are ground to dust and flesh shrivels out of being. They get louder and louder until I realize they are right before me, until I can practically taste them, until I know them by name.Arla.
Between them, something else sounds against the dark. A steady beating that won’t let go. In a moment, I know it for my own heart pumping, though I’m reluctant to believe it. Even the sound of my breathing as it returns to me feels deceptive, impossible in this void.
The screaming stops and the blackness begins to shrink, to pull itself away from the walls, from clinging to our eyes and lashes, our throats and lips. The room comes back into focus, the blackgathering in starlit swirls over our heads, over the hole where the well used to be, over the ragged form of Arla’s lifeless, shredded body.
It condenses in an opaque cloud at the center of the room and barrels for the hole in the floor, shoving her body down with it, folding her in half as it surges out of view. It streams and streams, a current of night that seems like it might never end, until it finally does.
Levi and I are left breathless, panting, alone. But I feel instinctively that it’s not over.
I get to my feet just as the cracks emerge, radiating out from the well like a deranged star. Scrambling, I reach for Levi, snatch him up, and pull him away toward the gate and the tunnel. The floor suddenly shifts inward as we make our escape, everything rolling toward that hole in the ground. Twig’s and Rock’s bodies slide into it like Arla’s before them. We stumble but manage to get out before it buckles again. When I hear the building begin to fall, we are already pounding our way through the darkness toward the light, letting her eat the world as we leave it behind.
29SINKHOLE
Seattle still stands, I’m happy to report, even if Medusa is gone, reduced to a pile of rubble that caved in on itself, destabilizing the buildings next to it, which also fell in turn. We made our way out of the tunnel before we could be trapped by the landslide, blinking in the penetrating daylight, clinging to each other for support, his neck a ring of bruises, my face a field of scratches, our frail bodies in shock from all we witnessed, from being swallowed and then spewed out from the belly of the whale.
But alive—desperately, inconceivably, wondrously alive.
That was six weeks ago.
