It’s people.Every one of those is a person.Except those, they’re… other things?Maybe?
A swift, painless internal tug, a sensation of dream-falling arrested just before striking the ground, and Liv stiffened.Erik’s arm was an iron bar around her waist, and they were moving again.Overlapping rings of force poured through the Sons, and she felt Daniel in the distance like thunder on the plains during a road trip the summer after her senior year in high school, outracing a storm on arrow-straight roads reaching for the horizon.
How did the otherliraistand it?Her inner vision expanded with breathtaking force, sonar rings meeting and melding, dead spots where the Sons fell upon pieces of pulsating, clawedwrongness.She felt the patches of bloodthirsty corruption, the breath in the Sons’ lungs, foxfire edging their crystalline knives and the broadswords Fathers carried, the Youngers choosing their shots carefully while a cloak of silence ate the bark of bullets.
More than knife, sword, or firearm, warm golden power with rainbow-dappled edges raced through the Sons, multiplying as it leapt from man to man, striking a nest of tentacled horrors in the basement of an apartment building, falling on the backs of lean pale hounds with their rows of sharkteeth dripping rank diseased foam, blaze-blinding the crimson-bunched eyes of scuttling horrors bearing only the vaguest relation to arachnids despite their jointed legs and pinch-waisted thoraxes.Those eyes popped and oozed under the light’s assault while the things screeched and the Sons fell upon them, wading through thin stinking ichor, cleaning nest after nest.
There’s so many, she thought, and the consciousness of being in different places at once, pulled and pushed in a thousand directions, would have been terrifying if she’d had any way of struggling against it.
It went on and on.Battles fought in corners, in blind trash-choked alleys, under deserted highway bridges, on quiet streets between trim, closed-up homes, on the roofs of apartment buildings.
All that time, not a single mortal gaze was attracted.A knife-cold wind poured through concrete gulches, stinging Liv’s cheeks, and she sagged in Erik’s arms.
She hadn’t even realized he was holding her; the motion was jarring, disrupting her trance.For a moment the giant, pounding-surf roar of the city’s mortal minds poured through her, a butterfly transfixed on a pin.
Liv bent in half, retching.Erik’s hand was flat against her back, warm and sure.The cold vanished, and so did the terrifying sensation of fragmenting, herselfsplintered into thousands of blinking, breathing, fighting pieces.
“Easy,” Erik said.There was an odd chiming sound, a muffled thumping.“Easy, beautiful.Just breathe.”
The thumping was her pulse, high and wild.The chiming was metal against something sharp; they were moving again, acceleration pressing against her midsection.Someone yelled—it was Robert, a short coughing cry she shouldn’t have been able to recognize except she’d beeninhim a few moments before, a stringed instrument’s long wavering tone passing through an amplifier’s hollow throat.
More sounds—crunching, wet gristle-snapping, liquid spraying.The sense of absolute, sickmakingwrongnesscrested; the monsters were close.
And it was pretty likely they were pissed, too.
“They’re behind us,” Dakshi snapped.“Call everyone back!”
“She might not be able to.”Robert gasped at the end of the sentence.“But they’re on their way, they’ll feel her distress.Well?”
Yeah, distress isn’t the word for this.Liv struggled to breathe, shuddering.The monsters had found them, and everything in her screamedget out of here, get away, the blind imperative to run denied by heavy arms trapping her.
“They’re closing in,” Erik said.“Move.Movenow.”
The world turned over, wind rushing past her ears.Thumping receded, her heart finally deciding to go about its business without alerting her to each squeeze.Liv coughed, her throat scorch-hot as Robert’s, the rest of her aching dully in every fiber.
There you are.A cold lipless voice squirmed under the skin of the world, reaching for the small struggling spark that was her invisible, barely conscious self.Little thief.Did you think to take my Sons from me?
She had wondered how they knew the Mad God’s name.Now Liv Stellack knew it too, and she began to scream like a small animal in an iron trap, bleeding to death while the hunter watched.
And while he stared, helaughed.
The Infinite Wisdom
“They went right for her.”Dakshi hissed as his fingers probed a bloody slice on his upper arm.Normally a Son’s flesh expelled anything foreign—gravel, toxins, bullets, fragments—but you could help it along with a squeeze or two, especially if you didn’t want the thick tarry venom from hair-thingholadarts to eat at skin and muscle until neutralized by the mark.“I hate those bristly little fucks.”
Robert’s eyes were half-closed; his ribs made small creaking sounds as they popped back into place, slivers of bone easing back together.The Father sucked in a harsh breath, blinked, and the faraway quality of his gaze said how much it hurt.The pain didn’t come from the bone itself, but its sleeve of richly vascularized tissue; Erik hated having his ribs broken.
It was oddly familiar—a Younger bitching, a Father too pained and wary to let more than a sigh escape, and an Elder caught in the middle, the fulcrum making the whole machine stable.“Thegholawere riding theleng-spiders.”He shook his head, almost shivering as cleansing sorcery crackled down his arms and legs.“Never seen that before.”At least, not in this world.
“They come from the same place.”Dakshi glanced at the bedroom door.Liv was sedated; she hadn’t stopped screaming until Sara pushed the plunger of a hypodermic, dispensing a few cc’s of welcome oblivion alirai’s body wouldn’t burn off as a matter of course.“But I haven’t seen them do this before either.”
“It’s as if they can tell she’s unsealed.”Robert finally straightened, and his shredded, blood-stiffened shirt flapped.“I wouldn’t care to do that again.”
That makes you sane.Or at least, close to it.Erik made a noncommittal noise; the bedroom door opened and Sara stepped out, the edge of her long multicolored broomstick skirt fluttering on a purely personal breeze.Two Elders from her personal trios flanked their Dreamer, the brunet tall and lean, the blond almost Erik’s size.
“She’s resting,” theliraisaid, and every Son in the room snapped to attention.“You’re the Elder she came in with?”
“Yes, ma—my lady.”He corrected himself midway, since this was an older temple and the traditional ways were absolutely clinging to life.Erik was about to add his name and numerator, too, since he didn’t know what the hell else to do when aliraiaddressed him directly.
